Bombs went off in Boston

the_jazz - you may be right, but they still had the pictures by that point. :shrug:

Also, good job on the history here. While I'm aware of it, I think most people here are too isolated to understand how far back the Chechen/Russian fight goes.

I'm wondering if the younger brother was just confused. After being basically abandoned by everyone in his family, he struggled with what his brother may have been telling him and what he had lived here. Perhaps he was just going along with the one blood relation that stuck around. We may never really know.

 

there is obviously a strong circumstantial case. it would be good for there to be an actual trial, though, and a determination of guilt in that context. this even as there seems little possibility of a fair trail any time soon. but that's a legal matter.

there are obvious complexities to do with the relations that actually obtain between the "war on terror" nonsense and this particular case. these extend to a quite real question of whether this action can qualify as an "act of terrorism" at all, given the way it is currently defined. "adjudicating" that lay to some extent behind the new focus on the older brother's trip to dagestan and chechnya...but here again, the stories are curiously circumstantial/skeletal and are likely to remain that way given the whole dead-in-a-shootout thing that is the current situation of the older brother.

most of the folk i know--and myself---who have taken something of a distance from the explosion of stupid that followed the explosions a week ago appear (or are, in my case) motivated as much by disgust over the re-emergency of post-9/11 styles of racist hysteria, prodded by much of the mainstream press as by empathy with the people injured and killed and interest in some sort of resolution to the crime. there's also responses shaped by concerns/disgust over the whole war on terror itself, both in itself and in the ways it has been crossing with domestic policing for a while now---these questions are coming to an interesting head with the younger tsarnaev.

from a jurisdictional viewpoint, things are much simpler with tsarnaev dead.
from the viewpoint of whatever you imagine the american political process to be like---one that in this case would he shaped by a show trial---it's maybe better to see the problems that attend attempts to define and prosecute and demonstrate the guilt of tsarnaev alive.

it'd be good to see someone, somewhere, finally prosecuted in a conventional legal context on the basis of these policies that define the "war on terror" obama style. so far, they've been confined to military kangaroo courts when they've happened at all.

 

i totally agree with you on pretty much most of what you'v said except partly the last sentence.

personally, back in 2000 i was a massive supporter of the Chechen struggle for independance and id follow their struggle daily. i saw that they had a legitimate right to independance in a similar way East timor had a legitimate right to independance from indonesia. the rebels were fighting a war on their own turf against an aggressor who'd previously tried wiping them off the face of the earth in Stanlin, and it was fair game. Aslan Mashkhadov as interim leader did well to unite the Chechens, but were inflitrated by international jihadists, many who had come from across the arab world and many of whom were ex-afghan arabs who fought the against and helped defeat the soviets. The internationalization of the conflict by the arabs was an obvious sticking point since it brought exposure and funding to the region.

Where the tide turned was when they took the fight to moscow and took the theatre hostage which left a few hundred innocent people dead and then tried to justify their actions. That day they lost many supporters, including myself. You can never justify killing innocent people no matter who they are or whatever belief they have (or dont have).

as far as conspiracy theories go, they're just that. Theories. i cant see any, but willing to listen. The only connection im seeing between the boys and their homeland is a period the older brother spend back in southern russia where he may have been influenced by radicals. The younger kid i still see as someone who looked up to and followed in his brothers footsteps than someone who had planned something of this nature.

 

Lish

Perhaps I didn't flesh out the last sentence the way I needed to. You've certainly done a better job than I have (gee, not like that hasn't happened before). I was trying to merely say that after the infiltration by radicals and the acts perpetrated by them in Moscow, I think Russia has a right to any info we get out of the boy especially if it is found that his brother did in fact receive training from some of these groups. I personally don't hold Muslims accountable, I hold the individuals and the radical ideals responsible that exist in those small groups. I have to walk lightly here because I certainly can't claim to know a whole lot about the religion nor the social aspects that exist in these regions but radical groups are radical for a reason. It doesn't matter if it is a white guy celebrating the death of soldiers (Westborough Church), a libertarian group, dumb teabaggers or radical jihadists. It's all the same cloth to me.


Skipping over the 'war on terror' aspect of this (I just don't have the brain power at the moment) I don't see the harm in sharing the information between countries and administrations if it can be used to help deter future acts even if we know we can't stop all of them. I'm more and more convinced, like you, that the younger brother was simply following his brother due to the blood relationship but it isn't going to give me pause or sympathy for him.

 

I followed the entire situation throughout the week without making any emotional or irrational comments regarding the two brothers or what should be done next until everything was over. And I gathered most of my information through reddit and fark, which at times was disturbing because of the amount of information and pictures that I was able to see within an hour of the explosions and listening to a streaming of a Boston police scanner as they arrest the younger brother, and the autopsy photo of the eldest brother (Isn't it illegal for a hospital employee to post a picture of a dead body without first getting permission?).

I spoke to several individual who felt the youngest brother should have been executed by police instead of being arrested, which I found to be a rater hasty or emotional/irrational comment, which I understand because of what happened during the marathon, but I want to know the reasoning behind it.

Now that this situation has come to a semi-conclusion, I am willing to bet someone in the entertainment industry is going to make a movie out of this situation.

 

I have followed this vaguely at best. The headlines of the papers at work and an article or two on CNN have been have been enough for me.
I expect the first movie out in a year tops, and sooner than that for some kind of cable tv film that will have their own biased twist to it.

 

I had to make a massive detour yesterday after going to see a client b/c of a cooler left on the sidewalk. Paranoia is ok in one sense, but does it really take 2 hours to investigate a cooler? Jesus.

 

Boston Globe reported that a man in his 60s was cleared of any wrongdoing. Unfortunately for him, that was only after his poor timing led to lying on a sidewalk for hours being molested by robots.

I'm going by the simple spelling he used instead of taking the route the news people are going and trying to cram 35 consonants and 3 vowels into two syllables.

There's already a movie about bumbling terrorists bombing a marathon

 

it's been another kinda queasy-making day around boston. for me at least. lots of "outrage" on social media space about the fucking cover of rolling stone and almost all of it without the slightest indication that anyone had looked at the article. so i looked at it. now you can too:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: Jahar's World | Culture News | Rolling Stone

i am a good little consumer.

rolling stone has been largely irrelevant insofar as music is concerned for many many years. it's the sort of mag one finds in dentist's waiting rooms. people with smaller font. except for taibbi and william greider, both of whom are interesting political correspondents, there's not a whole lot of there there.

to say what i would have assumed obvious were it not for this queasy-making day seeing friends from around here racing about being all "outraged" and shit, the cover advertises rolling stone, which is itself an advertising vehicle that happens in this case to have an article that they thought might sell copies of the advertising vehicle called rolling stone. but much of the nonsense i have seen today about the cover by-passes the obvious and goes straight to some imaginary glamorization of this kid.

the photograph appeared on the front page of the ny times in may.
i don't recall all this net snippiness about it then.

remarkably stupid.

 

It's bullshit. I'm not fan of Rolling Stone. It used to be much more relevant before it became full of itself. I subscribed for years back when it actually covered mostly music. It kind of MTVed itself into something other than what it was. But putting this dope on the cover? How does that glamourize the bombing?

Back when it meant something to be on the cover of the Rolling Stone

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ux3-a9RE1Q

 

He's as much of a news figure as Charles Manson. Or Pol Pot, Stalin or Hitler, all of whom have been on the covers of American magazines. If I'm not mistaken, all of the 9/11 bombers were on the cover of Newsweek a couple of weeks later.

It's a news story by a magazine that writes about more than just music. He's relevant to the story they're publishing. People that are up in arms over it are being moronic and clearly didn't read the story (that said, neither did I). These are the American version of the folks that wanted to blow up a Danish newspaper a few years ago. All that's missing is the beards and robes.

 

The issue with Manson on the cover was its largest selling issue.

We've turned into a bunch of thin skinned pusses