In the news

#youaintnomuslimbruv

The Sun make up a story about a journalist travelling across Europe from Turkey without a passport and getting train from Croatia to Paris.

Croatian government respond excellently by posting an unredacted scan of his passport taken at Zagreb airport for his flight to Paris.

Ha!

I eagerly await their 'corrections and clarifications' hidden in a tiny box at the bottom of p.49.

Sorry to all the gullible dickheads, we made the whole thing up. Like most of the shit we publish.

Their correction / clarification was to totally remove the article from the website.

That may be the case, but I've not seen anything suggesting he was mentally ill. (I might have missed something).

Nativity scenes under Christmas trees seems to be popular, so me and and my little boy have been getting into the festive spirit in Paris today...

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I eagerly await their 'corrections and clarifications' hidden in a tiny box at the bottom of p.94.

Fixed.

Also good:

"I am glad when the police quickly finds liars like these, so-called professional journalists, and catch them lying about hiding in a toilet where they belong, together with the newspapers which employ them", Croatian Interior Minister Ranko Ostojić wrote on Facebook.

There's a copy of the original Sun story here:
https://archive.is/2f6Nf

Attacking people with a knife seems to show they're at least not mentally well. Although the mental illness excuse is only allowed for white people I think.

Maajid Nawaz of the anti-extremist group Quilliam speaks eloquently here on the action in Syria.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06rfr0b/question-time-03122015

He makes the point very well IMHO. Particularly that we shouldn't polarise the debate along left/right lines.

Oh, that tube sign's fake.

Attacking people with a knife seems to show they're at least not mentally well. Although the mental illness excuse is only allowed for white people I think.

There's a risk of stigmatising people with mental illness as prone to violence, which is an inaccurate portrayal. However, if an offence was a direct result of the perpetrator's mental illness, then they get dealt with under Part 4 of the Mental Health Act. This usually involves compulsory treatment in secure psychiatric hospital, followed by very long term community supervision. It is very far from 'an excuse'.

Yes, it's in one of those 'handwriting' fonts.

Pretty poor effort, especially as LU didn't, in fact, say that.

It is very far from 'an excuse'.

I think that what snotters is referring to is the media trend that assumes that Generic Brown People kill others because they are innately violent or extremist, and that white people are assumed to kill others because they have transient mental health issues but are otherwise good eggs. Mental health issues could happen to any one of us (so long as you're white, natch!), and killing people can be partially excused by the media using "mental illness" as a proxy for whiteness. That narrative is a privilege that's rarely afforded to non-white killers.

e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/06/18/call-the-charleston-church-shooting-what-it-is-terrorism/

Well, it's difficult to make an ironic joke about that sort of thing without being misunderstood. The issue is toxic, with countless crap 70s TV dramas written by people who had run out of interesting ideas having firmly ingrained the issue in popular expectation (not the only cause, news reporting also has a lot to answer for). When there is something people don't understand, such as random violence, they often try to find easy explanations.

While I'm no statistician, I'm with a school of thought that there is very little evidence that violence by mentally ill people is more prevalent than by people without such diagnoses. It just tends to be documented better (for instance, a lot of domestic violence goes unrecorded) and there is also a very general question about the actual causes of violence even in mentally ill people, e.g. people may have been violent before they became mentally ill. In fact, I believe that quite a lot of mental illness can be interpreted as conditions in which the affected person is actively trying to avoid committing acts of violence against others. But it's a hugely complex topic.

Yeah, I was kinda saying what bothwell said, I'm well aware there is a broad spectrum of mental illness and almost none of it leads to acts violence. I think labeling stuff like this as either terrorism or the acts of the mentally ill isn't helpful or correct in most cases. Although I maintain that to attack someone with such violence for whatever reason means that you're probably not a well adjusted member of society.

Maybe fake but well intentioned, unlike the Sun article

I wouldn't be surprised if in this case there was an attempt to push the 'mentally ill' angle. It wouldn't be great for the government to have a clear-cut case of terrorism based on the attacks in Syria immediately after they voted on intervention to make us safer.

Disappointed by Clegg

Surely not?

I thought he was such a principled, honest man

Despite screwing up on various things (promises on University fees) the Lib Dems were a moderating influence on the last Government. It would have been a fuck of a lot worse earlier had it been a Tory majority in 2010.

It has been argued (not by me, I don't have a clue) that the Lib Dems' presence in government blunted the edge of opposition and that Cameron wouldn't have won the last election had he embarked, in the last Parliament, on an unfettered programme of what they're currently trying on. I can certainly see how the Lib Dems were carefully moved to the edge of electoral oblivion.

and that Cameron wouldn't have won the last election had he embarked, in the last Parliament, on an unfettered programme of what they're currently trying on.

Isn't that what I said?

"It would have been a fuck of a lot worse earlier had it been a Tory majority in 2010."

No--I was reporting the argument (again, not my view) that the Lib Dems were a good cover for Cameron to still run a very unjust Government and that had he acted alone in the last Parliament protest would have been more focused and he wouldn't have got re-elected, i.e. his time would have been significantly shorter.