Update at 1:05 PM EDT
The Guardian is reporting that the explosive found in the truck was an inactive grenade and that the guns were fake rifles.
——————————
Not really an update, but in case anyone is interested, here is the link to the pdf of Galula’s Pacification of Algeria.
Update at 10:05 PM EDT
Here’s the link to President Hollande’s Press Conference/Statement with English translation.
Update at 9:50 PM EDT
The Guardian is reporting that French TV Station BFM and the local newspaper Nice-Matin have reported out that the attacker was a 31 year old resident of Nice who is a dual French-Tunisian national. An ID card was found in the truck.
Update at 8:50 PM EDT
France 24, via their twitter feed, is now reporting that the death toll is up to 77.
—————————–
Updated at 8:25 PM EDT
According to France 24’s twitter feed, explosives and heavy weapons were found inside the truck. And the death toll is now at 73.
——————————-
A currently unidentified man drove a truck into the crowd in Nice, France celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade de Anglais. The current estimate is that 60 are dead and many more are wounded. It is being reported that the driver emerged from the truck and started shooting.
Given that today is Bastille Day there is speculation that this is an act of terrorism, but the information reported out is unclear at this point. Rather than jump to conclusions, and as is always the case as details are sketchy right now and will change over the next 24 to 48 hours, I’ll update as appropriate.
Here’s France 24’s English language live feed:
debbie
It’s horrible seeing how many little children are there.
Baud
Thanks, Adam.
Comrade Mary
I made the mistake of clicking on a Vine that I was warned was horrendously graphic. I still watched the whole thing. It was horrendously graphic and i did no one any good by looking at it. I hope everyone in Nice stays safe.
Corner Stone
God dammit, MSM. Stop blur framing all the fucking video.
chopper
man, this fucking day.
debbie
@Corner Stone:
Do you know what the purpose of that is? It’s definitely an annoyance.
Mike in NC
Waiting for tasteless and/or bombastic statement from Drumpf in 3, 2, 1…
Comrade Mary
@Corner Stone: Blur framing of dead bodies? As noted above, it’s nightmare fuel. Unblurred video is out there if you really want to see it.
Comrade Mary
@debbie: Or are you guys talking about blur framing around vertical video? In which case, yeah, annoying, I guess.
Baud
Why is France such a major target?
Corner Stone
@Comrade Mary: No, not injured people or things we may be better off not seeing without a warning. Just straight 30% clear video and 1/3 on left and 1/3 on right getting blurred for no good damn reason.
Iowa Old Lady
NPR said the truck was the size of an 18 wheeler. God, how horrible.
Klown
Probably some radical Amish.
Corner Stone
@debbie: I’ve heard excuses about mobile video and feeds not HD quality but it’s bullshit. It is a conscious decision by the networks to do this shit all the time.
Major Major Major Major
Ughhhhhh, that’s all I can really say.
Elizabelle
Very sad. But we all have to be out and about. Cannot surrender the public sphere.
Poor France. Do they have more ambitious terrorists, or just more of them?
scav
@Comrade Mary: I rather assumed it was just a cheap and dirty way of dealing with format / resolution issues.
Typical that the one dedicated thread on the subject wanders off into nonsense details. Self-defense mechanism almost. Merde alors.
NotMax
Sorry, don’t do violence voyeurism.
Will read reports as credible data emerges.
JPL
Trump has delayed the announcement for VP, because of the terrorist attack in Nice.
I blame Obama.
Corner Stone
@scav: What else would you like to discuss?
Baud
@Iowa Old Lady: I didn’t think they had 18 wheelers in Europe. How’d one get so close to a large crowd anyway? And it was just one guy? Very strange.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
I think they have more home-grown terrorists because they have a relatively large Muslim population that is being actively discriminated against. A lot of that discrimination is economic rather than religious- though there is some obvious religious discrimination- but it seems that enough of the people radicalized by it choose Islamism as their outlet to cause an obvious terror problem.
geg6
@NotMax:
Same here.
Why hello...
@Mike in NC:
He says he is not announcing his VP because of it. So bizarre. So sad for France. Terrorism sucks, and we respond just the way they want us too, so it is effective.
MomSense
No no no. Does anyone know on which end of Prom. des Anglais this happened?
JPL
Jim, Foolish Literalist, down below, mentioned that he heard Richard Clarke mention an attack of this short.
chopper
@Why hello…:
well, let’s face it, trump is pissed that his big announcement got cockblocked by the news agencies. he’d like some sort of mulligan and he’ll use whatever excuse he can wrangle.
-ly Ballou
@Why hello…: Doesn’t want to share the news cycle, I reckon.
debbie
@Corner Stone:
I’ve assumed it was because the producer wanted to control what the viewer focused on, but I always end up trying to figure out what’s going on in the blurry bits instead.
JPL
Metro news is saying presumably only one man. That’s the first time, I had to use the translate on google.
link to metro news
Yellowdog
@MomSense: I saw a map that showed it starting on the east end
MomSense
@Baud:
There is an airport at one end. As you go closer to the center of Nice you find beaches, hotels, and shops.
hovercraft
@Baud:
Despite their claims of equality they have done a terrible job of integrating their citizens from their former colonies. Second and third generations are crowded into ghettos with little chances for advancement, there is major discrimination in the employment opportunities. Many of these people grow up resenting their own country because of their plight. The rise of white nationalism has accelerated these resentments with the government making concessions to the right wing, like the niqab ban, this has also bred resentment. It’s more complicated, but that is the crib version.
Betty Cracker
It’s a shame these sick, twisted fucks don’t turn their rage and hate inward and just blow their own goddamned brains out instead of killing a bunch of innocent people.
Trollhattan
@Iowa Old Lady:
There are pics of the truck, which as beast as I can tell is a single-chassis delivery truck, not a cab and trailer rig. Big, nevertheless.
Davis X. Machina
Everyone’s got to swap out their Turkish-flag avatar backgrounds to the tricolour.
(I mean, we did all have them up after the Istanbul airport bombing/shooting…)
scav
@Corner Stone: Touchy? It was more an observation (You’ll notice I was contributing to same) touched off more by wondering why people seemed more busy announcing there was an attack on other threads than commenting here.
and of course there are large trucks in France. If nothing else, where else would all the teeming hordes of refugees hide when invading England?
debbie
@Elizabelle: @Elizabelle:
i believe I heard Hollande was just about to end the terrorist alert.
JPL
@Betty Cracker: Trump is twisted and filled with hate.. just sayin
Hal
I’m already seeing posts from conservative friends on Facebook that this wouldn’t have happened if we had a real leader in the white house. Can someone please tell me how Obama or any other president is going to stop someone driving a truck, on a promenade, in Nice into a crowd of people.
Here we go again with the the same bullshit reactions that the United States is the Justice League International and is somehow going to stop all terrorism everywhere with our guns and Donald Trump.
Jane2
@Mike in NC: He’s going to delay the announcement of his vp pick because it’s all about him and nothing can be swallowed up by actual news.
Trollhattan
@debbie:
IIUC he did earlier in the day.
hovercraft
@JPL:
I know I’m a terrible person, but the cynic in me thinks that the delay is because he wants to wait for the spotlight to be fully on him, not because of any sympathy for the victims. See I’m terrible, I won’t give him the benefit of the doubt.
JPL
@debbie: That was earlier. It was suppose to end July 26.
According to metro news.. and I am not fluent in French, so take that with a grain of salt.
MomSense
@Yellowdog:
Oh no. The Hotel Negresco is on Prom. Des Anglais. It was in a Bond movie I believe. The big streets converge near there.
debbie
@Trollhattan: @JPL:
Okay, thanks. Half-listening at work has its pitfalls.
Timurid
@MomSense:
This video supposedly shows the truck right before it started its run (nothing graphic here; the truck starts to speed up just as the camera loses sight of it). I’m not sure if there’s anything in there that someone familiar with the area could use as a landmark
Mary G
Well, the NRA will be all over this – “look, they have gun control in France and the terrorists used a truck! If there had been a good guy in the crowd , he (it’s always a man) could have shot out the tires:”
So much tragedy, so much derp. What an awful lot of depressing things are going on in 2016.
Corner Stone
@hovercraft:
That’s 100% why he delayed. It sure as fuck isn’t about decorum or polite society.
He does not want to get swallowed by oncoming events and updates. Don’t backoff that, he needs every bit of free and earned media off this convention because it’s going to be a shitshow.
JPL
@hovercraft: Duh.. It also gives him more time to blame Hillary and Obama.
My first reaction is that Pence arrived in NYC, and he said what have I done.
scav
@hovercraft: Along with the SOP corpse at every funeral motivation, he also gets more media hits for his announcement this way. Reported when he delays in addition as well as the Report of the timing for his official announcement and then the Report on the announcement.
Corner Stone
That bullshit vertical blurring is not sparing us from deaths or unbelievable damage. There’s no reason for it.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Corner Stone: Cellphone video recorded in the upright orientation doesn’t scale correctly for horizontal video. They blowup the vertical resolution to fill the screen, then do the blur thing on the sides to fill in the blank space. I’d rather they just left black bars, but apparently that’s a mortal sin or something.
JPL
@debbie: I’m reading a twitter feed in french. lol
Last tweet was 73 morts.. I know what that means, unfortunately.
hovercraft
@Hal:
Stop asking stupid questions, if we had a strong president terrorists the world over would stop conducting attacks all over the world because they would know that said president would track them down and kill them. Yes I know many are suicide bombers and the like, but again stop using logic. When we had a strong president all terrorist activity stopped around the world. Drump is tough and he will end terrorism forever.
MomSense
@Timurid:
I’ll look. I spent many, many happy days on those beaches and traipsing through the streets there. A friend had an apartment in a cheap area but we would take the bus and go to the beach and museums.
Misterpuff
@Why hello…: Mike Pence was this close to the Veep nomination, if it wasn’t for them damn terrarists. Drumpf changes his mind and picks Christie ’cause they’ll be The Tough Guy ticket or at least the Bully Boy ticket. Murica, you need some Tough Guys to protect youse, if you get my drift!
Trollhattan
@Mary G:
Somehow the NRA turns everything into a call for more of same. Will add this bit from The Guardian:
It would seem somebody had access to guns, alright.
JPL
@hovercraft: Yup and all eighteen wheelers will be outlawed. Only pickup trucks will be allowed to deliver. Good news for Ford tuff trucks, I guess.
Okay, I don’t know my pick-up trucks, so don’t laugh.
JPL
@Trollhattan: My twitter feed is saying that there is no proof that he used them though. Interesting that he didn’t use them, but his truck instead.
I guess there were rumors about hostages, but that is not true.
MomSense
@Timurid:
I can’t tell for sure but I am guessing it is near Boulevard Gambetta. Some of the major streets that run from the train station side of town (away from the beach) and perpendicular to Prom des Anglais are Gambetta, Rivoli, Philippe. Those are in the prime tourist area.
ETA For clarity, the train station is not on the beach. It is inland but probably no more than a 15 minute walk at a normal pace from the station down to the beach.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mary G:The French are #5 in gun ownership in the world in terms of number of guns and #12 in rate of gun ownership. Source.
Steeplejack (phone)
Just a reminder that France 24 news is on many people’s cable systems on the MHz channel (6:00-9:00 p.m. here in NoVA).
Iowa Old Lady
Slavery is the US’s original sin, and colonialism is France’s.
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
With the convention on Monday, he will have to share the spotlight, even if he waits. The media now has two stories to fill their airwaves, if it’s Pence who is as exciting as a brown paper bag, they will spilt their coverage between the two stories.
@JPL:
He gets to enjoy the big city from his hotel room and think about how his life is going to change for the next 4 months before his political future fades to black.
As for blaming the weak president and his handmaiden of incompetence they are responsible for all the worlds woes.
JMG
My best guess, which doesn’t mean a good guess, is that if the truck contained arms, it might have been waved at by a cop and the driver decided to go for broke, much as the Brussels airport attackers did.
JPL
@Steeplejack (phone): I can pick up france 24 on my antenna.
debbie
@JPL:
Impressive! I can’t trust my high school French more than to tell someone their pencil is on the table.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Many years ago I read an article by Clarke predicting soft target attacks against crowds more like this one, or like Orlando, than the kind of high profile, grand spectacle attacks like 9/11, or against government/military targets
@Hal: You could ask them why the 7/11 attacks in London and the Madrid attack happened when we had leaderly leadership in the White House and tens of thousands of troops fighting them “there” so we didn’t have to fight them “here”
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Corner Stone: It’s just the same video echoed on each side. Watch when there’s something easy to pick out like a person in a white suit. You’ll be able to identify the person in the blurred areas.
It’s a stupid thing to do because it leaves people convinced that they’re hiding something. They’re not; the clear center area is clearly the same aspect ratio as aa cell phone.
JPL
@debbie: Most of it is easy unfortunately. Now there are 74 morts.
This was an earlier tweet Des enfants parmi les victimes
It’s really sad, but we need to be aware of situations when we are in a crowd.
Peale
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: was the video taken on a phone? If that’s the case, someone at the TV station is blurring it to fit the aspect ratio of a TV.
Omnes Omnibus
Fuck the news. I am going to go watch a movie.
Botsplainer, Neoliberal Corporatist Shill
@Betty Cracker:
The goal is to inspire a policy of reprisal and expulsion.
Patricia Kayden
@Steeplejack (phone): Just turned my tv to France24. This is awful.
MomSense
It could be closer to the opera. There is a mural for the Jazz Festival.
Chris
@hovercraft:
Let me put it like this: France has roughly the same attitude towards race that America does towards class, which is to say, just refuse to acknowledge it and pretend it doesn’t exist.
The result is, predictably, that pretending it’s not real doesn’t make it so.
slag
@Omnes Omnibus: You could watch the Obama town hall: https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/communities-and-policing. Might be interesting.
MomSense
@Omnes Omnibus:
Fuck the fucking news. Merde.
Julie
@Peale: That’s exactly why this is done, especially if the video was taken with the phone being held vertically.
slag
Damn. Naked link moderation. Still?
D58826
@Corner Stone: We can’t keep putting the campaign on hold after every terrorist attack. You can’t make the announcement in a more low keyed way. Even Katy Tur of MSNBC is saying this lets Trump string it out for a few more days.
JMG
Botsplainer, I don’t think these people have political goals. It’s blind nihilist rage given a cloak of alleged religion. Needless to say, many Muslim French citizens are among the dead and wounded.
Ian
@Baud:
Algeria. That’s the short version. The longer one is 180 years of history.
D58826
Well Tweety thinks the Pence choice is a winner for Trump because it provides Trump with an ‘anchor’ in Tweety’s words. I’d like to contribute to buying an anchor for old little hands.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Peale: Yeah. Every time this happens, someone starts bitching that the news is blurring part of the video to hide something, and several people jump in to explain what’s really going on.
BBC just shows one with a running man in a blue shirt, and you could clearly see him running both in the center and in the left blurred area.
MomSense
Fuck I do think it’s near Gambetta. I just saw pictures of the Negresco lobby set up as a field hospital.
dmsilev
@D58826:
I object to your use of those two words in close proximity to each other.
Major Major Major Major
@dmsilev: what if I’m talking about the cartoon character? Sometimes it thinks a certain thing.
Emma
@D58826: I’d buy one for Tweety!
D58826
@dmsilev: should have said ‘thinks’ :-)
tybee
@Klown:
Unitarian Jihad
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: Several reasons. Some of it is left over legacy stuff. They have a sizable population of French citizens who are of Arab and/or Muslim descent from when they were a colonial power. A lot of these folks are very well integrated into French society, but some aren’t. And the third, fourth, fifth, etc generations within these demographics have been ripe for recruitment. This is because France also has a well organized, well financed – including by Putin, and active neo-Nationalist/neo-Fascist movement. The polite face of which is the Front National led by the Le Pens. The activities of France’s far right provides fodder that extremists use to recruit and radicalize.
What is interesting right now is that France has been under a state of emergency since the November attacks. It is set to expire, and according to Hollande will expire, on 28 July. So they were on high alert.
Marc
@Roger Moore: I think that blaming the French for mass murders inflicted on them is incredibly insulting and wrong-headed. I’m trying hard not to say things that I’ll regret, but fanatical Islamists seem cheerfully capable of inflicted mass murder across the globe regardless of whether the country in question is Western or not.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: They have them. Often they’re soft sided instead of hard sided.
Major Major Major Major
@Marc: I would say the proximate cause of the attack was probably the attacker wanting to kill a lot of people.
Adam L Silverman
@MomSense: Started at one end and the guy drove straight through
to the otheras far as he could.MomSense
They are showing video of rescue vehicles screaming down Rue de Rivoli. On Bastille Day those streets must have been packed with families going to see the fireworks.
Major Major Major Major
“It was reported that the attack lasted for two kilometers”
Guardian
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: The State of Emergency is set to expire on 28 July. Hollande has already announced that it will expire on schedule otherwise France will cease to be a republic.
MomSense
@Adam L Silverman:
He was driving from the airport end toward Rivoli. It looked like the truck sped up near Gambetta.
Adam L Silverman
@JPL: Here’s France 24’s English language twitter feed.
The Golux
This is so sad. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Nice; it’s such a delightful city. Fuck terrorism.
JPL
@Major Major Major Major: I saw that earlier.. Amazing.
JPL
77 dead.
Adam L Silverman
@Iowa Old Lady: I thought bidets were #1 and colonialism is second.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Its always a combination of how motive, means, and opportunity line up against ends, ways, and means.
scav
@Adam L Silverman: On the upside, reading the French feed after first confusing me about why they were going on about parquets being seized (not quite seeing how seizing wooden floors, however elaborate, helped the situation), enlarged my functional, if vague, vocabulary for government entities.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: Bidets are definitely #2.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: I was wondering if someone would go there. So to speak…
? Martin
@Marc: No, but it deserves considering about why they chose France instead of, say, Germany. The reasoning may not comport with anything that is actually happening in France (see the ongoing perception that white male Christians are the most persecuted class in the US) but I think it benefits the French and everyone else to at least openly explore why they are being targeted.
Now, the reasoning almost certainly doesn’t deserve respect (these are people willing to kill innocents, after all) but it may help the country understand how to protect the public in the future.
LanceThruster
Bad things are bad.
:(
Major Major Major Major
@? Martin: I like the way you put that. Though I still think it bears repeating that the people committing these acts bear the full responsibility, in the end.
JPL
78 dead.
Feathers
@Baud: Watch the movie The Battle of Algiers. It’s a 1966 Italian neorealist film about the French-Algerian war filmed in Algiers a few years after Algerian independence, involving many actual participants. It’s an amazing film, one of the classics of world cinema, and often used in teaching about urban guerrilla warfare. It also shows what a shitty colonial power France was. I worked for an economist looking at emerging markets. One of the variables was always whose colony a country had been. Former French colonies did the worst. Except for maybe Belgium, but thankfully they didn’t have many colonies. In the US, we focus on British colonialism, but former British colonies are actually in great shape compared to their French counterparts.
Another issue is that the education system is much more egalitarian than the job market. So people work hard in school and then become massively underemployed, while their ethnically French peers move into the middle class. Pretending that education will fix employment (and racial) problems is a dangerous game.
Edited to fix first round of editing.
JPL
Trump blamed Hillary for the attacks.
OT.. No Tebow at the convention. Now I’m not going to watch.
? Martin
I have to comment that when I read the headline about this event somewhere, it was directly adjacent an article ‘Are self-driving cars safe?’ We’re not very good at measuring risks that we’ve already internalized.
Adam L Silverman
@JPL: No Tebow???? Aux Armes Citoyenes!!!!!!!
Feathers
@? Martin: Germany had very few colonies. Their Muslim population is made up of guest workers from Turkey, who are now in their second generation. Problems, but not the same sense of conflicts which have lasted for generations. Of course, there is the theory that Germany’s expansionist plans within Europe were driven by the fear that they had missed out on the 19th century colonial land rush and thus needed to expand the homeland.
JPL
@Adam L Silverman: That didn’t surprise me as much as Trump blaming Hillary for the Nice attack.
pseudonymous in nc
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Or attacks outside airport security cordons like Istanbul and Brussels. Or attacks at malls. Things that aren’t meant to project symbolic value, to ‘strike at the heart’ of an abstract state entity as the Bin Laden-orchestrated attacks did, but instead aim to kill dozens at a time and leave scar tissue across democracies.
Adam L Silverman
@JPL: It surprises you that Trump would do so? That part wasn’t surprising. Honestly, given Tebow’s publicly avowed, and one would assume privately espoused, religious beliefs, I kind of found the whole thing a bit far fetched.
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: I wrote that article. Published in Security Journal in 2005. It was based on work I had been asked to do by giving a key note and running an inservice at Disney University for corporate security folks on anti and counter-terrorism for corporate security.
Chris
@pseudonymous in nc:
Yep. I figured out at some point after 9/11 that if the jihadists really wanted to do the most damage, it wouldn’t be with big attacks on things like the Twin Towers but a whole bunch of “little” attacks on nondescript locations with a lot of people, just to hammer home the point that “yes, this COULD be you.” And unfortunately, I’m seeing more and more of that.
? Martin
@Chris: There’s an (admittedly gruesome) economic question here which is ‘can you find enough willing martyrs to sustain such a campaign against smallish random targets?’. Historically, I think the answer was ‘no’ (Adam can probably correct me here) and the focus was then on large, high profile events, but now it seems to happening with enough frequency to suggest something has changed, probably due to the ability to recruit globally through social media.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: I thought there was going to be a whole lot of that in the United States in the years just after 9/11, though. And there really wasn’t. There was Anthrax Boy, and a whole lot of people trying to copycat him or getting worried about spilled foot powder.
Matt McIrvin
@? Martin: Some of it is taking the natural background rate of people out to commit random mass murder (which in the United States is fairly high, lower elsewhere I guess) and getting them to brand their attacks after your movement.
Matt McIrvin
@? Martin:
Well, you could imagine some technically adept attacker pwning a lot of self-driving cars and making a thousand of them all plow through crowds at the same time.
NotMax
@Feathers
Must see cinema.
When Algeria became independent, France was so miffed that they essentially went into “If we have to leave, we’re taking everything with us” mode, to the point that they removed all the phones from the walls and desks of government buildings and public facilities and shipped them back to France.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: Not if the cars are made right.
RandomMonster
@Feathers:
Drang nach Osten, Lebensraum, etc.
raven
The film Indigènes (Days of Glory) tells the story of an Algerian infantry unit fighting for France in WWII. Some of the soldiers stay in France after the war and, when Algeria gained independence, their pensions were revoked. Nice shit.
raven
@NotMax: They dug up their dead in Indochina.
eclare
@? Martin: Could it be other countries have better security? After the November attacks, there was a great deal of reporting about how Belgium’s security among all of the different agencies there was the equivalent of a sieve. I have no idea, just wanted to ask the question.
Adam L Silverman
@? Martin: @Matt McIrvin: The question is how much overlap between the groups you’ve identified: those willing to commit mass murder and those willing to do it for group X or cause Y. Even then there is still a finite number. Some of that is the result of geography. It does IS or AQ or insert name of group here no good if they can recruit sufficient personnel to undertake an attack if those personnel are not in a location where undertaking the attack will provide real strategic effects. For all that Syria and Iraq have large areas where government doesn’t penetrate right now, you’ll notice there is still a limit on the number of terrorist attacks (versus more conventional fighting to expand and consolidate control over territory) that are actually carried out. Similar for Somalia. Much of Somalia is between a failing state and a non-governed space, and yet even here al Shabab can only do the number of attacks they’re currently doing. And other than the occasional incursion into Kenya or elsewhere in HOA they haven’t managed to increase the amounts.
Even in France, which is clearly being targeted, they’ve only committed one to two attacks a year. Considering how many people are out everyday on the Promenade de Anglais or France’s other major tourist and commercial areas, they still are not able to increase the number of attacks.
RedDirtGirl
Oh, Christ on a cracker. I am sick to my stomach! What a fucked up world this is!!!!!!!!!
schrodinger's cat
@Feathers:
This is like saying that cancer is better than Ebola. They may be in better shape compared to their French counterparts but not if you compare with what would have happened had they not been colonized at all.
The areas of India which were under the British rule the longest ( Bihar and Bengal, almost 200 years) are in much worse shape than the parts that were under British rule for 100 years or less.
? Martin
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, but there’s a coefficient of desperation there which can scale that up or down. If you have a particularly disgruntled group, you have a greater opportunity to achieve that. Ghettos have always been a place to recruit for that reason. Inequality (in its various forms) doesn’t help.
I don’t know French politics well enough, but the presence of Le Pen suggests that they probably have a bigger problem there to deal with.
Adam L Silverman
@eclare: France does excellent internal security. They have been under a formal State of Emergency since the November attacks. The simple reality is the terrorists only have to get lucky once, the security and intel services and the police have to get lucky every time.
mike in dc
Do you think terror attacks on nuclear-armed states are an incredibly risky move for ISIS/ISIL, since they are actually controlling territory and have a “capital”(Raqqah)? Not all nuclear-armed states use the same calculus that the US does.
? Martin
@Matt McIrvin: Sure, but that’s not the risk being considered by the public. That’s more of a 3 laws question (which is perfectly valid).
That’s actually a question of who do you think will be able to make a more secure car – a tech company or an automaker? (to anyone in tech, that’s a rhetorical question).
Adam L Silverman
@schrodinger’s cat: If this were an academic paper you’ve just set up a law of diminishing return/rong side of the bell curve explanation. Basically we can conclude that there is a correlation between no more than 100 years of British colonial occupation and doing better and that the closer one gets to, or past, 200 years of British colonial occupation the worse you do.
With the right looking snazzy data tables I might be able to get that published!
Adam L Silverman
@mike in dc: Unless/until they start attacking North Korea, I’m not too worried.
mike in dc
@Adam L Silverman:
I could see that. On the other hand, I can see someone in a defense position arguing “but what if it’s just a few kilotons?”
eclare
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks, will be interesting to see the background of the terrorist, assuming news is correct that there is only one. Have to think he may have had help, though.
J R in WV
In 1991 we traveled with an older Frenchman who had fought in the war with Algerian independence fighters, and during that trip Bush the first started the bombing against Saddam and his military and industrial infrastructure.
Our only news source was Radio France, and Soic (captain of the small boat we were on) translated as best as he could. His wartime experience colored his opinions, as the Algerians killed, captured and tortured his military comrades; it was that kind of war, no Geneva rules. It was interesting and enlightening to get to know his personal history.
We got home before the attacks that drove the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait, so we got to see that on an old B&W TV on over-the-air news broadcasts and News Specials.
So in some ways today’s events aren’t a surprise, except that it was today; there will almost certainly be many more.
Adam L Silverman
@eclare: The EU has a gun smuggling network problem. They have for some time. If they can crack that, they will make real progress.
Adam L Silverman
@mike in dc: No one (realistically) in the US, or Britain, or India. or Pakistan, or the PRC, or Russia, of France, or Israel is going to nuke Raqqa.
? Martin
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, I agree. It’s little comfort when you can’t identify yourself as ‘I don’t look like those dead people, therefore I’m probably safe’ but I get the sense that they are trying to give the illusion of momentum with pretty limited resources.
One of the games my dad and I played immediately after 9/11 was to dream up ways to commit terrorist attacks. That we could dream up hundreds of approaches and yet none of them were taking place gave us a bit of comfort. There simply weren’t hoardes of terrorists out there. There were countless opportunities going unfulfilled meaning there was nobody there with the intent do to it.
At the end of the day, ISIS has lost one truly dedicated fighter and gained what? Sure, they have advanced their agenda, but they’ve achieved no ability to be more effective in the future. 9/11 could never repeat, because the moment the plane is hijacked the passengers would crash the plane. We know how this ends now. Hell we changed how we defend ourselves within an hour on 9/11. One phone call to flight 93 and the passengers knew what to do.
These events are infuriating, but I can’t help but see them as ultimately self-defeating.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Hm.
Jamestown first settled: 1607.
Surrender at Yorktown: 1783.
NotMax
@NotMax
Pure typo. 1781, not 1783.
(No edit function.)
Feathers
@schrodinger’s cat: Being Irish, I do not disagree. Looking at the research, I remember thinking it was all pretty fucked up.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: @NotMax: I rest my case!
Anne Laurie
@Elizabelle:
France has a multi-generational problem with Arabic-speaking immigrants/refugees going back to the days of the Algerian revolution. There’s whole neighborhoods (ban-lieues) where a small group of would-be terrorists are less likely to be visible to law enforcement, to put it as delicately as possible. And the French establishment — again, to be mealy-mouthed — has perhaps not done everything possible to discourage Islamicists, from a pointless insistence on banning headscarves in public schools to a covert policy of ignoring ‘Arab’ violence against Jewish neighborhoods.
We’re Americans, perhaps we’re going to over-interpret, but there seems to have been a whole lot of official “as long as it’s only Those People, in Those Neighborhoods” that’s coming back to bite all the least powerful victims.
mike in dc
France is going on a war footing. Gendarmerie mobilized to guard checkpoints and protect local communities.
Adam L Silverman
@? Martin: It is important to remember, and easy too if you’re not somewhere being targeted, that IS is losing on the ground in Iraq and Syria. You notice how IS hasn’t come out and claimed this one yet? They may or some other group will. But if IS had any inkling this was going to happen they’d have already put out the press release. They didn’t know it was coming because the leadership is focused on not getting killed as they have their lines (borders) adjusted for them in Iraq and Syria.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Seem to recall seeing reports that most of their public relations cadres had already been relocated to Africa.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: I think they’re in Libya. But they’re not going to take credit until someone higher up gives them the go ahead. And those folks are in Raqqa or Mosul.
schrodinger's cat
@Adam L Silverman: Are you serious, about writing a paper?
The British won their first major military victory in India in Bengal it was under direct British rule since mid 18th century. Bangladesh is probably among the poorest countries in the world. Maharashtra was among the last to fall (early 19th century) is the state with the highest GDP in India. Coincidence? I think not.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Just curious if you ever found time to wade through the report on the hospital bombing in Afghanistan.
Still surprised at how many military careers got slammed headfirst by that into an impenetrable wall; expected more euphemisms and weaseling CYA language..
Adam L Silverman
@schrodinger’s cat: I was kidding. Should have used the sarc tags //.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: I haven’t. I’m sorry. Send me the link offline and I’ll try to get through it. Every time I turn around something strange happens and I get farther behind.
schrodinger's cat
@Adam L Silverman: I thought so too, was just confirming my hunch!
Adam L Silverman
@schrodinger’s cat: I’m not even sure where it would/could be submitted.
Anne Laurie
@Matt McIrvin: Not gonna defend Tom Nichols’ conservativism, but IMO he’s not wrong about “lost boys” looking for a larger brand:
The French terrorists that we’ve heard about seem to be of the same stamp — sad loners with personality problems who use JIHAD!!! as a large shell for their tiny personal grievances.
MomSense
I think I just heard that there are more than 30 children in critical condition. This is just so horrible.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Dunno if still have a working link (it kept moving around for a while). You probably have better sources leading to a less redacted version.
Major Major Major Major
@Anne Laurie: hashtag terrorism, somebody here called it.
pseudonymous in nc
@Adam L Silverman: I will look that article up. I can tell you that when I was first stuck in the security snake at ATL in 2002 or 2003, I thought about the carnage that a grenade might do — the Atrium area was designed to be unscreened with concourse-based checks — and spent much of the 00s expecting soft-target attacks within the US. Of course, domestic mass shootings occupied some of that space.
MomSense
@Major Major Major Major:
I think it was Mnem.
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: Is the email you use to post here an actual email address? If so I can just email you a pdf.
Major Major Major Major
We are “at war”, according to both presidential candidates and the French foreign minister. With what, they all seem to disagree.
schrodinger's cat
@Adam L Silverman: Not Physical Review, that’s fur shure. An econ journal, perhaps.
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’m curious to know more about how we’re measuring this. “Former British colonies” includes Burma, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. That’s a hell of a lot of messes, not that it lets any of their competitors off the hook, mind you.
NotMax
@schrodinger’s cat
Journal of Speculative History.
JOSH.
(If there isn’t one, there damn well ought to be!)
Mike G
Yes, that makes sense, Obama is responsible for stopping someone driving a truck in France, but Bush was not responsible for failing to secure the airspace of the continental US on 9/11.
Perhaps if Obama continued reading a children’s book for seven minutes on being told the news he’d be praised by the rightards for his manly “resolve”.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: oh my god, that would be amazing.
pseudonymous in nc
@Major Major Major Major: One of the conversations that I’ve been having of late with my internet-techie friends (who’ve mostly been doing online stuff since the mid-90s) is how you’re never really alone now with your particular set of circumstances and (sometimes inchoate) beliefs, no matter where you are or what you believe.
That’s a boon in so many places — think of that piece earlier in the year on how gay kids and other young people in small remote towns benefit from being connected to a community much larger than their geographical limits. But it also creates expansive orthodoxies that police for heresies.
One strand of the conversation is that this incredible capability to communicate also exposes its limits. In early modern history, literacy and the capacity to publish or communicate privately was typically a means of access to power and social elevation. Now, you can be smart and eloquent and nobody listens, or the people who do listen and provide encouragement are fuckers.
(That predates the internet, but it was more geographically constrained. I remember stories from Northern Ireland about how the paramilitaries made the most of young men with no job, no prospects, too much fucking time on their hands, not enough money to get on the next ferry out, not in a position to refuse.)
pseudonymous in nc
@Adam L Silverman: yep, it’s a real account: more of a smoulderer than a burner. Much appreciated.
Major Major Major Major
@pseudonymous in nc: I think that’s definitely true (I studied among other things the social impacts of information literacy in school). And the culprit is almost always a young man with nothing better to do. But finding things for them to do (jobs & premarital sex seem to be the big two) can only go so far
You can’t hold the larger cultural context unaccountable though. Those Irish boys weren’t running off and waging Jihad, and these second- and third- generation Middle Eastern immigrants/citizens aren’t going around bombing Herrods. There is a tendency to go all No True Scotsman whenever something like this happens and say the culprit wasn’t “really” Muslim, I haven’t seen it on this thread (maybe a little with some of the ‘colonialism did this’ comments) but it happens and bothers me ? these people have agency, these are choices they’ve made.
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: On its way.
Omnes Omnibus
@Major Major Major Major:
Who does the military seek as recruits?
Chris
@Anne Laurie:
Again, this needs to be emphasized: France’s approach to race is largely to pretend it doesn’t exist and assume that if it just refuses to acknowledge it, it’ll go away, or at least that that’s the way it can do the least harm. The government is forbidden from even collecting any statistics related to race – the U.S. census would be straight-up illegal over there.
It’s understandable: a lot of that comes from the legacy of Vichy and the Nazi occupation, which makes anything that even hints at classifying people by race repellent to many policymakers and citizens. Everybody is citoyen francais, first, last, and always, and the law should treat them all as such and nothing more or less – period. Which is fine, except that when polls reveal strongly entrenched prejudices in the population all the same, it’s kind of obvious that there’s a major problem that’s being ignored.
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: Close, but that’s poor young men with nothing better to do.
schrodinger's cat
@NotMax: Where is the speculation in what I have stated? I have stated facts, you may argue with conclusions I have drawn.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: That’s their own damn fault but Niall Ferguson and the like will gloat about India, Ghana etc.
NotMax
@Chris
Predates WW2. For example, Josephine Baker found societal acceptance and professional success in France she was denied in America.
Chris
@Adam L Silverman:
Seems to me like the two are only vaguely related at this point. Even if Daesh could be crushed, in Syraq, North Africa, and wherever, people like the Nice and Orlando bombers are products of their own communities and their own societies and we’ll still be getting more of them.
NotMax
@schrodinger’s cat
Need it be pointed out that correlation is not causation?
Adam L Silverman
@Chris: That’s why I keep writing and saying “you can’t kill and idea”.
schrodinger's cat
@NotMax: I am not going to argue with you about statistics. British rule was exploitative and harsh. Period.
NotMax
@schrodinger’s cat
While you’re moving the goalposts, could you get me an ice cold lemonade?
Chris
@Major Major Major Major:
I don’t agree with all of it, but I think a lot of that is simply justified pushback against the tendency to essentialize the entire culture and hold it responsible, if not as blatantly as Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen do it, then with the more passive-aggressive whining of “what about all those others? Why aren’t they denouncing The Bad Ones, why aren’t they fighting The Bad Ones? Seems to me that…” or by insistence that there’s something uniquely rotten in Islam.
The war with the OAS did not involve a wholesale crackdown on the entire French right wing, the war with Action Directe did not involve a wholesale crackdown on the entire French left wing, the war with the FLNC did not involve a wholesale crackdown on the entire Corsican population. Or much in the way of calls for such a wholesale crackdown, which is what we’re seeing more and more of now. Or any notion that right wingers, left wingers, or Corsicans were somehow uniquely prone to and responsible for terrorism. Or accusations that anyone from those communities who wasn’t personally punching out The Bad Ones on national television was shady and probably a sympathizer and at least a fellow traveler as opposed to a regular guy just minding his own business like most people. Or a ton of hand-wringing about “political correctness” and how if only we were willing to take the gloves off and go after those entire broader communities, everything would work out. The treatment of the broader community in the case of Muslim terrorists stands out in recent history, and the pushback against it is warranted, even if it sometimes overcompensates.
schrodinger's cat
@NotMax: You can get your own damned lemonade.
schrodinger's cat
@NotMax: The British bled Bengal dry from 1757 to 1947 and now Bangladesh is the one of the poorest countries in the world. You can do your own research about how much exactly that was in today’s dollars.
pseudonymous in nc
@Major Major Major Major: oh, I agree, and that kind of essentialist reading demeans and potentially threatens all the people who get on with living their lives as best as they can. I also think that modern democratic states have sunk considerable resources into what might be called the “young male arsehole” problem, and even that’s not enough.
Major Major Major Major
@Chris: I think you’re describing a well-meaning sort of liberal middle ground there in your first paragraph, but there’s also a strain on the left that says that, essentially, all of the brown man’s ills are the result of colonialism. It’s just as offensive a personal negation as its counterpoint “Islam is evil” on the right. It’s more prevalent than you might think, especially the sort of Trotsky Lite version you see in a lot of bog-standard American liberals. It’s the “what’s the matter with Kansas” economic hypothesis–the culture wars/jihad are just a symptom of late capitalism/colonialism.
And it’s EVERYWHERE ugh maybe it’s just my friends and the fact I live in the Bay Area.
NotMax
@schrodinger’s cat
Let it go. Other than words you, by implication, put in my mouth, have I in any way defended colonization, British or otherwise?
pseudonymous in nc
@Chris:
Even further than that: you can point to the Third Republic’s systematic anti-clericalism, clearing the churches out of the schools and then enshrining state secularism in 1905. There’s an argument that laïcité is enforced with theocratic strictness when messier legacy fudges (like Canada’s provincial funding of denominational schools) seem less conducive to a sense of civic intolerance.
Chris
@Major Major Major Major:
Well, then I’m not sure I disagree, although as you point out with WTMWK, this isn’t really specific to jihadism or Muslims – the same exact arguments are made by the same people with regards to pissed-off white assholes. I think it’s partly a need to make sense of things (as if every action needed a rational motive or goal, despite that not being how human beings work) and partly about maintaining the illusion of control – if they’re going after us because we did something wrong to them, then all we need to do is figure out that something and set it right, and then the whole problem will go away!
As far as the specific point “they’re not real Muslims,” though, that, I think, is mostly just the pushback against the tendency to essentialize all Muslims and make this specifically about Islam, overcorrecting in the other direction.
(And also a tendency to listen to the POV of “The Moderates,” who understandably do not consider them “real Muslims,” much the same way that you see those bumper stickers that say “the religious right is neither.”)
Crouchback
@Mike G: Ironically, Obama has done more long term to fight this kind of terrorism than Bush ever did. A lot of the funding of radical Islamist groups comes from our dear Saudi friends. They stay in power by staying friendly with hard core fundamentalists – not that anything like that ever happens in the US. Obama was pretty unusual among the elites in not liking Saudi Arabia and has worked to reduce their power long term. Once the Saudi oil money dries up I suspect a lot of the radical Islam in Europe will as well. Kind of like the hard core conservative establishment trying to get by without Koch money.
Major Major Major Major
@Chris: alright, I think we can agree on the last two graphs. As regards the Thomas Frank view of the world though, you don’t see, just a little bit, the reverse side of white supremacy there? Everything must be caused by white people, even the bad things, so let’s make up reasons why?
Crouchback
@Betty Cracker: They usually do. Check the numbers for suicide by gun. It is far more common than mass killings, by a couple orders of magnitude. Thing is every now and then you get some asshole who decides he needs to kill a bunch of other people before ending it all. For obvious reasons, the mass killings get a lot more attention than the suicides.
Chris
@Major Major Major Major:
No. Because as bringing up the Thomas Frank example suggests, it’s not a white/nonwhite thing. We make the same excuses for white people.
(Bedtime, but will recheck in the morning).
Major Major Major Major
@Chris: I guess I was including ‘capitalism’ in ‘white people’, there. Good point. Duh. Never mind that last part…
Aleta
Thanks for the Rand C. document on the Pacification, Adam. Such a beautiful word, suggesting anything but.
The weapons in the truck make me wonder if it was enroute to delivery somewhere else, but that route had to be aborted, and the backup plan took place. If so something equally horrible was avoided and at least the money spent on all that weaponry is gone now. Hope they can trace the weapons to the source and the source’s connections and routes.
Adam L Silverman
@Aleta: You’re welcome. To paraphrase: “we go to war with the euphemisms we have, not the euphemisms we want.”
Anne Laurie
@Major Major Major Major:
If only we could lock them all in a room with the “there is no ‘real’ racism, there is only CLASS WARFARE” Jacobinists. Both parties would be happy arguing with (past) each other, and the rest of us could keep trying to patch up the cracks…
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Bidets are your idea of a sin?
SgrAstar
@? Martin: martin, don’t you think they chose France because they were French? These guys- the Bataclan shooters, the Nice truck driver, the Orlando shooter- they’re all locals. That makes Trump’s insistence on going to war even more ludicrous. Who’s he gonna fight? Kinda reminds me of GWB. Steady heads just have to prevail this time around.
Adam L Silverman
The Guardian is reporting that the explosive found in the truck was an inactive grenade and that the guns were fake rifles.
And I’m going to bed. This concludes this evening’s/morning’s updates.
mike in dc
Newt was on Fox suggesting we should deport Muslim-Americans “who believe in sharia law”. Um, what? Stated that broadly, that’s akin to deporting Jews who keep kosher. I assume this is a Hail Mary pitch to become Trump’s veep.
Dog Dawg Damn
@Anne Laurie:
Sounds familiar. I suppose the question is whether our species is going to let itself be controlled by small men with petty grievances and a penchant for violence, and if not, how to best mitigate their power. This will test our democratic experiment.
PurpleGirl
@Feathers: When I lived on 37th St in Astoria I used a different car service than I use now in Woodside. One of the drivers I often had was from Algeria and he told me he went to the Sorbonnne. But when he couldn’t get a better job in France he came to the US. He made more driving a car than he could make in France. I liked talking with him as he drove me to work. (There was Greek driver who said I reminded him of his daughter. He was interesting to talk with him also.)
Vhh
@? Martin: Unemployment and cost of living are much higher in France than Germany, so people at the bottom, in the South most of them of N African origin, are excluded and alienated.