What's in the news?

[gaggedLouise]

You know, guys, maybe we should change the subject...

*sagenods* Hmm yeah. :)

[TheVillain]

Yeah, probably for the best.

[Sara Nilsson]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-40947448

Lebanon's parliament has scrapped a law under which a rapist could be exempt from punishment if he married his victim, state media report.

Yes!! Good job.

[Trigon]

The national park service in Georgia has done the right thing, it seems, and has denied the KKK a permit to burn a cross on top of Stone Mountain Park: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/kkk-permit-denied-cross-burning-stone-mountain-georgia

It should be worth noting that this site was bore witness to the second founding of the KKK over a century ago.

[Lustful Bride]

Cancer cases related to 9-11 still plague people today :(

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fdny-father-and-son-die-of-9-11-linked-cancer-a-year-apart/ar-AAqcT6G?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=HPCOMMDHP15

Police, Fire, and Medical who were there or near Ground Zero continue to show signs of sickness due to their exposure during the collapse. Even now they still bust their asses trying to help as many people as they can before moving on. We are blessed to have heroes such as them. 

[Trigon]

A list of Confederate statues and monuments that have been torn down or removed to date, especially in the wake of the violence at Charlottesville: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/16/us/confederate-monuments-removed.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

[AmberStarfire]

Another possible terrorist attack, this time in Barcelona:
http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/barcelona-truck-crash-sees-several-people-injured-along-iconic-las-ramblas-tourist-hotspot/news-story/c3ba93d25d044d1ede2329433c2ee386

[gaggedLouise]

Another possible terrorist attack, this time in Barcelona:
http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/barcelona-truck-crash-sees-several-people-injured-along-iconic-las-ramblas-tourist-hotspot/news-story/c3ba93d25d044d1ede2329433c2ee386

Yep. Thirteen dead, at least fifty wounded, some very seriously, and...drumroll..IS have claimed to be behind it. Which sounds likely, too. This cowardly act has their trademarks all over it. 

[Lustful Bride]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/barcelona-van-attack-kills-13-in-agonizing-repeat-for-europe/ar-AAqfNGh?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=HPCOMMDHP15

Update on Barcelona. So far a total of 5 terrorists dead, after they engaged in battle with police, several of the hostiles were wearing bombbelts, thankfully they were stopped. 

[WindFish]

Canada is not immune to the alt-right and Nazi sympathizers, unfortunately, and Rebel Media is one of their mouthpieces. Andrew Scheer, the leader of the Opposition and the federal Conservative Party, has finally distanced himself from it.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/andrew-scheer-rebel-interviews-1.4251070

This seems like too little too late. I wonder how long this will last, considering up until now the Conservatives had a cozy relationship with them.

[gaggedLouise]

Trump pulls out an old, and almost certainly false, story about general Pershing putting down a muslim rebel movement in the southern Philippines by shooting his prisoners with bullets soaked in pig's blood, implying that tortrure and ethnic/religious humiliation is the best way to establish law and order.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/346995-trump-resurrects-pigs-blood-myth-after-barcelona-attack

The source for his story seems to be a 1939 Gary Cooper film. Apart from that it's an urban legend.

Alos, it's by no means true that Pershin g managed to put and end to the insurgency in Mindanao. It kept going for many years. These days, the movement goes under the name of MILF - Moro islamic Liberation Front. 

[AmberStarfire]

Multiple people stabbed in Finland, including a woman with a baby:
http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/turku-finland-stabbing-multiple-people-stabbed-as-police-shoot-suspect/news-story/72403b9db4e32713ad6eb3cbf58e0f16

(What the hell is wrong with people?)

[gaggedLouise]

Multiple people stabbed in Finland, including a woman with a baby:
http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/turku-finland-stabbing-multiple-people-stabbed-as-police-shoot-suspect/news-story/72403b9db4e32713ad6eb3cbf58e0f16

(What the hell is wrong with people?)

Just saw it too, this is very creepy. And Finland is so close that up until 1809 it was part of Sweden (many people in the Åbo region still are native speakers of Swedish).

[AmberStarfire]

Yeah it is. :( I just read there's another one in Germany too:
http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/one-dead-after-stabbing-attack-in-germany/news-story/34d95a807ad8f4b772fd6bc21c4caa4b

I'm in Europe too (Ireland).

[RedRose]

It's sadly becoming the new normal... As is rampant racism and hatred in reaction... I just want to avoid all humans.

[DelightfullyMAD]

It's sadly becoming the new normal... As is rampant racism and hatred in reaction... I just want to avoid all humans.

Misanthropy has a lot to offer these days.  I've been one for quite some time, even though I wish and wish that I be proven wrong.  Reality, unfortunately, seems to like to smack us in the face every now and then and remind us that, despite our veneer of civility, we are still basically just monkeys with silly hats and nuclear weapons.  Hard to fight millions and millions of years of base instinct it seems.

[TheVillain]

I like to think that it's not really new, it's just more obvious now.

[DelightfullyMAD]

I like to think that it's not really new, it's just more obvious now.

Meh, it comes and goes, periods of relative calm, followed by periods of extreme crap.  History is loaded with events like this, actually, it's just hard for us finite humans to really care about most of it until we are right in the middle of it.  Then we think "Oh my God, this is horrible!  Nothing like this has ever happened before!" when in reality this kind of crap happens all the time.

Hell, not to downplay what happened in Charlottesville, but that was actually pretty small scale compared to some other stuff in the past.  Now, Charlottesville may very well just be the first skirmish, so to speak, so best we stay vigilant, but there have definitely been far worse events than that.

I myself wonder if there may be some weird, underlying cause for things like this.  It almost makes me wonder if humanity almost has periods of self-destructive urges as some sort of deep, instinctive drive to cull it's own population.  Kind of interesting to think about.

[Oniya]

I seem to remember some anecdote involving rats - and when over-crowding reached a certain threshold, the rats became increasingly more aggressive towards each other.  I'm just not sure if I remember it from a scientific article or a near-apocalyptic sci-fi story.

EDIT:  Found a reference that points towards an actual experiment:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

There is a lot of controversy over how well it applies to humans, though.

[Lustful Bride]

Meh, it comes and goes, periods of relative calm, followed by periods of extreme crap.  History is loaded with events like this, actually, it's just hard for us finite humans to really care about most of it until we are right in the middle of it.  Then we think "Oh my God, this is horrible!  Nothing like this has ever happened before!" when in reality this kind of crap happens all the time.

Hell, not to downplay what happened in Charlottesville, but that was actually pretty small scale compared to some other stuff in the past.  Now, Charlottesville may very well just be the first skirmish, so to speak, so best we stay vigilant, but there have definitely been far worse events than that.

I myself wonder if there may be some weird, underlying cause for things like this.  It almost makes me wonder if humanity almost has periods of self-destructive urges as some sort of deep, instinctive drive to cull it's own population.  Kind of interesting to think about.

Kind of Lovecraftian even....hmmm...of course! The King in Yellow is behind all of this!

But seriously, I just think we grow too complacent and allow problems and problematic groups to grow and fester like cancerous tumors. The by the time we take action it is already too late for preventative measures.

[DelightfullyMAD]

I seem to remember some anecdote involving rats - and when over-crowding reached a certain threshold, the rats became increasingly more aggressive towards each other.  I'm just not sure if I remember it from a scientific article or a near-apocalyptic sci-fi story.

That definitely rings a bell for me as well.  I will readily admit that I have no scientific basis for my hypothesis on this, this is just me musing, but it does seem like it would be at least feasible.  If nothing else, increasing population density would cause a number of factors which could contribute to this; increasing lack of empathy for each other due to increasing population and thus a decrease in social cohesion, greater competition for space and resources, etc.  It probably isn't something so silly as humans having a 'suicide switch' in our brains which activates when our population grows too large.  Actually... wasn't that basically the plot of The Happening?  I feel dirty now...

Kind of Lovecraftian even....hmmm...of course! The King in Yellow is behind all of this!

But seriously, I just think we grow too complacent and allow problems and problematic groups to grow and fester like cancerous tumors. The by the time we take action it is already too late for preventative measures.

This is also a possibility.  One of the issues is that we are all too keen on fighting against problamatic groups, but we never really care about understanding the underlying cause which causes such groups to form in the first place.  It's all well and good to oppose ideologies like the Nazis, but if we don't bother to try and understand and deal with what actually drove people into the ideology in the first place, then we'll just end up trimming the weeds rather than removing the root.

Problematic ideologies and groups form because people become desperate and want something to belong to.  Certain individuals are able to easily prey upon such feelings of disenfranchisement, insecurity, and marginalization, and it doesn't take much effort to then whip such people up into a mob.  Even if we stamp out things like Nazism and make such a thing illegal, that isn't going to make it go away until we actually address the issues which caused it to happen in the first place.  After all, such people can still organize under other banners or in other ways.  This is why I get really irritated when people try to counter racism with racism of their own, it just feeds into itself.  As corny as it sounds, understanding and empathy is the key, even if the road is difficult, but when has doing the right thing ever been easy?

Oh, and I would say that crap like this is more Nyarlathotep's work rather than the King in Yellow.  He loves doing crap like this

[Oniya]

It's apparently made it into a number of novels and such - including Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.  I linked to an article about some actual research ('Behavioral sink' is the term for the phenomenon, and there is some debate on how well it applies to humans).

[DelightfullyMAD]

It's apparently made it into a number of novels and such - including Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.  I linked to an article about some actual research ('Behavioral sink' is the term for the phenomenon, and there is some debate on how well it applies to humans).

Yeah, I remember that book.  It's been years since I read it, and even longer since I've seen the movie.

Also, good catch on the research.  I knew I'd read something about this sort of phenomenon someplace, so it will be interesting to sit down and read through it a bit.  I don't think it would apply to humans to the same degree as rats, at least not yet since we aren't that overpopulated (well, except for places like Hong-Kong and the like), but I would be very surprised if it wasn't a factor at all.

[Lilias]

Goodnight, good sir.

Veteran entertainer Sir Bruce Forsyth dead at 89

[DelightfullyMAD]

Goodnight, good sir.

Veteran entertainer Sir Bruce Forsyth dead at 89

*Puts on hat so that it can be taken off* Rest in peace good man.  Rest in peace.