Explosion And Deaths At Ariana Grande Concert

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The forum software doesn't post how I would like.

You mean it's buggy?

On the ground in the North of England, about 20 miles away from the explosion and most of the following police raids.

Just because left wing nuts have called this a false flag operation doesn't preclude that right wing nuts also hadn't said the same thing. I hadn't heard about those particular loony lefties, till now.

CBC:
Ariana Grande plans to hold benefit concert in Manchester. Singer wants to raise money for victims of the attack at her May 22 concert

Historical perspective:
The Greek culture the West holds as it's foundation was actually a mix-mash of competing cultures circa 500 b.c., right before the Classical Greek Era (namely Athens and it's league), Greek pottery was a modification of Etruscan pottery and Persian art, Kouros statues that paved the way for free standing classical Greek statues were borrowed from the Egyptians, and even their mythology has it's origins in proto-Thracian culture. The Greeks didn't invent these things, cultural exchange brought these things to Greece and they modified them into something better. Innovation doesn't just happen on it's own, it takes outside challenges to drive that innovation. Even Adam Smith accepted this as an argument for capitalism.

Take the Romans, they were a backwards almost barbarian culture until they had 200 years of influence from the Greeks of Syracuse, after which point they learned and adapted, borrowing much of Greek culture and merging it with their own. The early Roman legion that people feared so much was merely a modified version of the Greek phalanx, not to mention their architecture and art were clones of the Greeks, and their superb engineering wouldn't have been possible without Greek and Egyptian maths.

The Dark Ages in Europe were a terrible time for innovation, virtually nothing was written, the countries were isolationist and clannish, that lack of mixing created a system where innovation barely moved forward, if at all, it could be argued the previous Roman engineering and art was superior to the Dark Age culture that followed. Then voila, Constantinople fell, a trove of ancient Greco-Roman knowledge crossed the Mediterranean sea to Italy and the Renaissance was born which paved the way for the Enlightenment, and thus much of the advances of today.

That's what cultural exchange does: moves things forward.

Now, let's look at the consequences of not answering that challenge. Each one of those cultures I mentioned before also reached a high point where they were the dominant force in their region. The Greeks after Alexander, the four league period, saw the rest of the world as barbaric and inferior, they contracted their trade to the Greek sphere, they cut off ties with their distance city-states (Syracuse being a prime example), within 200 years of Alexander the Greeks had been out innovated and out maneuvered by the 'barbaric' Romans whom rapidly consumed land and ideas from across the Mediterranean. Likewise the height of Rome lasted nearly 500 years, but starting with the tetrachy period under Diocletian Rome slowly started to disintegrate, much can be said for the corruption of that period, but also of note is that they restricted travel to and from their vassal states since the economy was weak and it was easy to blame the foreigners for the problems. Until that point Rome was a vibrant city that had everything from Nubians to a few Indian travelers, not to mention Romans. As those new ideas stopped Rome suffocated itself. Again, within 200 years of this time period the Gothic tribes in Southern and Western Germany had learned from the Romans, especially militarily, fused it with their own and created forces the Romans just couldn't adapt to.

Another example is Egypt, perhaps the ancient culture most notorious for it's lack of change. Starting ~1000 B.C. Egypt was rattled by a series of attacks from the Sea People, while they repulsed those attacks, they also closed down trade in the region fearing their trade had enticed the Sea People to attack. Within 100 years the Phoenicians had taken over that trade, and encompassed Egypt on all sides, and the Egyptians were forced to be a pseudo-vassal state: autonomous, but always at the whim of what the Phoenicians wanted to do. Eventually Persia arose, and crushed Egypt in a war that took merely a month (according to Persian sources, so that's highly debatable). The Persians came at the Egyptians with bronze weaponry they couldn't match (a metal the Egyptians knew about and had used in their past, but didn't have the resources to create anymore because again, they gave up international trade). After the Persians were defeated by Alexander, it got even worse for the Egyptians since the Greeks decided to take away autonomous rule and replaced pharaohs and aristocracy with Greek rulers. The downward spiral continued when Rome came along and eventually deposed the Greek pharaohs, not to mention the entire religion and culture in the place. Such is the cost of isolationism.

It's not that a culture is inherently wrong or good enough or any such value judgement, it's that things change whether you pay attention to them or not. If you bury your head in the sand and ignore cultural exchange you run a very high risk of your culture be consumed by another culture that's adapted to those around them and borrowed ideas from others. Evolution happens whether we like it or not, best to be proactive on that front as opposed to reactive.

...Bow does this " Manchester false flag " narrative go ? Who would stand to gain from such a f-f ? We know what ISIS and their like might wish to advance through the bombing , but what other group , by either a loony left or rabid right storyline , could gain from the bombing ?

I see we are going down this well trodden path
The British empire had no compunction expanding and millions of its own emigrating and settling in other people's lands getting rich and prosperous from their slave labor. When those same "colonial subjects" want to visit "mother Britain" they get told they should not set foot in "jolly old" England.

The people killed by the Islamist bomber:


And how did he pay for trips to Libya for training, and for his bomb-making equipment, etc.? Why, with taxpayer-funded student loans, of course!

The Manchester suicide bomber used taxpayer-funded student loans and benefits to bankroll the terror plot, police believe.

Salman Abedi is understood to have received thousands of pounds in state funding in the run up to Monday’s atrocity even while he was overseas receiving bomb-making training.

Police are investigating Abedi’s finances, including how he paid for frequent trips to Libya where he is thought to have been taught to make bombs at a jihadist training camp....

Abedi’s finances are a major ‘theme’ of the police inquiry amid growing alarm over the ease with which jihadists are able to manipulate Britain’s welfare and student loans system to secure financing.

One former detective said jihadists were enrolling on university courses to collect the student loans “often with no intention of turning up”.

Abedi was given at least £7,000 from the taxpayer-funded Student Loans Company after beginning a business administration degree at Salford University in October 2015.

It is thought he received a further £7,000 in the 2016 academic year even though by then he had already dropped out of the course.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05 ... -benefits/

So that means we should be taught a lesson and lean back and let others ruin our culture, that we had to build too?

That makes sense. Thanks for explaining that to me.

It makes sense with trade, but what about say, the amount of immigrants that take up our council housing stock in England, for instance? When the current residents need it. That and the men who disrespect women, I've encountered a few of them. Some of them really do view us as if we're objects. That kind of culture doesn't bring anything to any country.

Yeah, I should clarify, I'm not for open borders by any means, I'm all for thorough vetting, and people that move to a new culture should be aware of that culture and willing to adapt. But thing with adaption, is it's not cloning, the culture and knowledge immigrants bring doesn't just get washed away, it adapts and fuses, meaning there's some remnants the immigrant will bring from their own culture, even if they do go both feet in merging with their new culture. Cultural exchange isn't easy, it's actually very hard, ask any body builder how to gain muscle and they'll tell you "if it's too easy, you're not going to gain anything" that principle applies to virtually any area.

As for negative influence, you're correct they can exert those too. The Romans solved this by strictly enforcing Roman law, meaning if a certain practice was beyond cultural, but illegal, the Romans had no problems enforcing that through their legal system (in a very brutal manner usually). We have a problem with the SJW side of the left in this case, where they use cultural reductivism, basically arguing that all practices are inherently the same and therefore any culture can't be inferior or superior to another (the far-right has their own reductivism, whereby one aspect of a culture is bad or inferior therefore it's all inferior). The problem with the SJW side of the coin is that it prevents a native culture from exerting it's core tenants over immigrants coming in, SJW will ignore things like women's rights in the west when an immigrant can't follow the western way. This is a core tenant, it's a foundational part of our societies, the current system requires them for stability, these are the types of cultural exchanges the Romans would have enforced by law, vigorously. Yet, with reductivism we're hampered to do so and thus it works as a virus, slowly spreading. But say, style of dress, food palettes, and art, and science these are things that aren't foundational to a society and thus are appropriate modes of cultural exchange for a new culture to influence an old. Basically we've become dumb as a species, it either has to be A or B, we can't see or refuse to see nuance anymore.

Oh, God----the first thing I thought-of, when reading that, was "I wonder if they're doing that scam, HERE?"; they probably ARE.

The first thing that I thought-of when I looked at those pics, was that two of the girls on the first row (3rd and 4th pics, from the left) look so similar, and that they remind me of Lindsay Lohan. It's all SOOOOO disturbing / sad----one of the pictures, is captioned: "The happiest she had ever been".....

I understand no country deserves to be "over-run" with migrants so I'm not advocating the UK (or Australia) open borders

I think common sense can prevail with a few simple provisos
1) if you are an English speaking qualified migrant who can fill a recognised employment gap then this should be a priority. We already do this with nurses in Australia where the number of nursing graduates Vs placements means Australian hospitals have no choice but to recruit foreign nurses to fill the shorfall
2) If you are in physical danger in your own country then come in through the normal channels via refugee programs

I have no problem allowing people (of any background) living in our society while their refugee claims are being processed

As for the apparent comment from yourself and Jacoby that foreign migrants somehow threaten local culture is nonsense. Britain has an old cultural roots beyond beer and football and if locals are too ignorant to know their own culture then that's hardly the fault of a new migrant

I am colossally offended that this selfish sack of sh- would believe that callously sending death-shards of bolts and nuts slicing and embedding through the skin of these attendees would somehow open my eyes to the fact that the west murders masses of people through their meddling and manipulating of events elsewhere. I constantly research and grieve and feel incredibly for any human that is harmed. I have so many pictures bookmarked of bombing aftermaths and the brutality of conflicts to ensure I never lose sight of how cruel the world can be if you are in a different place, I know damn well this is an everyday occurrence in many locations and merely surviving through another day is an achievement in them. However, someone once said an eye for an eye leaves the world blind, not that such a nugget of wisdom would resonate with the closed mind of one of these wastes of air. This moronic entity was a sadistic savage, Trump is correct in calling them a bunch of thinly camouflaged Losers, makes my blood boil this character abedi was able to come and go like a skulking scheming cat flitting in and out of our society, gutless worm, their whole cult can go back to the stone age or preferably just be gathered up, rolled into a steaming ball of raw sewage and sent down the drain which descends into the bowels of a volcano, let them take their rancid message to the appropriate audience of a bunch of molten writhing mindless mirth!

Most people in this country don't want to do anything. Our government is cutting services left and right on its own people, yet anyone I've spoken to who opposes them - complains and sends you news articles and hates you if you don't like being bombarded with how awful it is. Yet you send them a petition to get something done and they ignore it.

People in this country like complaining more than anything. Most of them don't want to take action. It's this weird reason of, "I don't want to be as bad as them". So complaining how awful it is and "spreading the word" to already like-minded individuals is somehow taking action? Or shaming particular MPs, as if the MP is going to go, "Oh NO, this person hates me! I'd better go and do the right thing! Isn't it amazing when people point out the blatently obvious to you, and it just opens your eyes?"