GroovyCarrot wrote:
Can you seriously say that if you were challenged by police pointing guns at you you would try to run away rather than just standing and surrendering? I would have thought that's a fairly standard response to that kind of situation, wherever you come from...
AFAK (and as far as the Metropolitan Police's statements are concerned) the policemen weren't in uniforms. Also, there seems to be a policy of not warning "suspect terrorists" - as they might pull the triger when they hear 'Police! Stop!'. It's not like a terrorist would care if he/she is going to be shot for not complying, and as the current police rationale goes you're better off shooting without warning. And the man who was shot was already lying on the floor.
Tahrey1043 wrote:a discussion of that sort of thing this afternoon led to the realisation that such methods of dealing with terrorists could easily be thwarted by the kind of reverse trigger so employed in terminator 2 and various other sci fi scenarios..... its also the "speed" bus-bomb principle
Precisely. A reverse-trigger thing could make the terrorists even encourage such Police action. I mean, they're suicidal anyway.
pettsy wrote:i know this is a serious discussion, but i had to laugh at that little bit :Laughing:
Hehe well that has been suggested in some media reports (that his, hmm, "extra wheight" was mistaken for a bomb-belt), and the guy's photo is all over the news. One extra reason for Brazilians to justify their fitness and plastic surgery obssessions then.
Tahrey1043 wrote:I'd be interested to see the brazilian angle on all of this once it fully crosses the atlantic - given some of the differences you can see in british and american reporting by flicking cable channels to CNN or Fox from News24 and Sky (or indeed, as SkyPlus now allows for no easily explanable reason, to Al-Jazeera to get the arabic perspective) there may be some interesting changes in angle. Any good websites that would have english language feed or be fairly understandable to a web-robot translator?
TV news have shown the man's family in a small town about 300km from where I live, they were poor and the man lived in a São Paulo shanty town for years before emigrating (which might explain his reaction to being chased by armed men).
The press is showing cases of Brazilians and South Americans in general who have met tragic ends in exile (Mexicans, Brazilians, Argentines who have drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande into the U.S., Brazilian jews who died in terror attacks in Israel, that sort of thing).
As the Brazilian press is completely right-wing (think about a country where every newspaper and TV station belongs to Rupert Murdoch's soulmantes) they're also criticizing the government for "not reacting strongly enough"/"not solving the case"/"not being able to ressucitate the man" (well they really try to throw anything at Lula, not matter how ridiculous it may sound).
I've just got back from my girlfriend's town - it was her birthday yesterday and the conversations at the party basically dealt with the shooting and violence in general, with some xenophobic comments here and there, which was very nice as you might imagine - so I haven't had the time to check anything but the BBC's Brasil pages and BBCnews.com itself (my main source for all my comments here).
It's 01:47 now, I'll check the major newspapers here and PM you (Tahrey) the links. Robot translations don't work very well with Portuguese but still that's better than nothing... There seems to be a "Brazilian Times" or something like that - an English-language newspaper covering Brazil - but I'm not sure if this could offer a truly Brazilian angle.
I should just add that the comments page on the BBC website shows some people saying that the terrorists are to be blamed for this tragedy, not the police. While this may ultimately be true
**, life and death matters should never be as simple as that. If the threat of terrorism justifies abandoning the western institutional framework by allowing stressed-out policemen to trial, convict and execute an innocent man while literally "on the run" - while both were running in fact - then we're all heading for a kind of society that's not so different from a facist-extremist islamist's dream.
Of course, I live in country where the police have been shooting first and asking questions later, indiscriminately. Then again, as my mother-in-law pointed out yesterday, "we're not bombing other countries to make them follow suit". Ours is a situation no-one is proud of, and we've been fighting this and other problems for years now (well since we've been allowed to fight again, which was barely 20 years ago).
Maybe the problem is not the (sad) fact in itself, but what the world public opinion make of it. If people start thinking that the shooting of an innocent man is OK or necessary or an "unfortunate accident" (which it most certainly wasn't), then we're all in serious trouble.
** I'm EXTREMELY skeptical about that, people don't just blow themselves up for "God" or no reason or because they don't like some foreign country's political system as Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair seem to imply. However, Latin Americans are all too aware that innocent people DO die or get tortured when a foreing government doesn't like
the idea of a particular political system in a country, and can count on that country's corrupt political elite to "do what's necessary to protect democracy" (military dictatorship-style democracy that is).
Not every religious zealot is willing to die for their cause. It could be argued though that zealots tend to be rather, hmm, "liberal" on the whole matter of loss of life on the perceived "other side". You can interpret that however you want.[/i]
