Bourke Street Part Deux

But isn’t it expecting too much of those communities to reform those who choose to opt out of the norms of a community and of the community itself?

Again we are talking about somebody who believes a long dead paedophile warlord is going to gift them a life in paradise with a harem of virgins. Selling this incident as a win for the cause suddenly isn’t that much a task. Anything that brings up the name ISIS is a win for them at this stage, they even claim incidents that were completely thwarted.

The Lindt cafe guy had more than minor offences in his past, didn’t he? Had a history of domestic violence… and I thought I read that he was suspected of killing his wife.
It seems to me that history of domestic violence is a common denominator with people who carry out these types of assaults - more than any idiological extremism. Yes

Yeah…I know what you’re saying.
I think you’re imagining some sort of drone that probably doesn’t exist.
I don’t think any…Arabian muslims are looking at this Somalian guy who couldn’t blow up a car and thinking, now there’s a guy who was guided by Allah.

And then you have the Chechnya widows, who seemed to be driven by revenge for what the Russians had done. I don’t place their suicide mission in the category of mental illness.

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Yeah I’ll cop that. Don’t think I’m too far on the wrong side of things with what I’ve posted though. I guess that’s debatable. Want to debate?

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Not to mention you get 5 seconds of incapacitation. 5 seconds isn’t a lot of time to do anything,

I live in hope that some journalists will do some digging as to how the responsible agents arrived at the decision that this is now defined as a terrorist act.
But I suppose such questioning is off limits on security grounds.

I’m genuinely interested to know what you’re basing this on?

And do you mean in a modern context, or are you saying that there has never in history been a person who has killed in the name of their God, and them not be mentally ill?

I think you’re drastically underrating the power of belief, and what it can get people to do. Not saying mental illness has nothing to do with it, it clearly did in this guy’s case, but it’s a much more complicated issue than just that.

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I think he’s saying that in the sense of “normal”, anyone who kills in the scenario he paints is clearly mentally ill. And that’s true, imo. Balanced people don’t do such things, and by extension such people are mentally effed up. But it’s not the same as a more clinical ‘mentally ill’ such as schizophrenia. And either way, mentally ill and terrorism are not mutually exclusive. The first does not invalidate the second.

Imo, on what we know, this one qualifies as “terrorism” if it must be labelled. The history, the connections, the method, the apparent intention, the Allahu Akbar chant etc etc. But it’s really a moot point. The bloke was just a murderous ■■■■■■■■ who managed to kill a grandpa, and for whom the broader Muslim community had little ability to control. That’s the extent of it.

And I agree with Wim. Isis claiming this - even if they were the theoretical inspiration- just makes them look even more pathetic than they already are.

“She’s the last of the Trolley Interceptors”.

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You could always shoot them in that 5 seconds…

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Ok, good post, which I mostly agree on. But how far do you take that? Is every single person who commits even a violent act (not even murder) mentally unbalanced? That’s a lot of people, and I guess everybody could be classed as a bit ‘unbalanced’ to some degree, by some people.

I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t think that:

  • The guy who kills people because he hears voices in his head saying he should, and
  • The guy who kills people because he suffered a trauma as a child, and
  • The guy who kills people under a genuine belief he is furthering a cause and will be rewarded in the afterlife for it,

Are the same problem.

Same end result, of course. Which is murder, and I agree with what you say above about labels essentially being moot, and especially in this case.

This guy is a muderer.

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To everybody here more than likely but to the people they’re targeting, I’m not so sure.

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And I thought those inconsiderate dicks who took trolleys out onto the streets (and left them there) where just lazy inconsiderate dicks, when instead they were anti-terrorism fighters. I may have to reassess my opinion of them. Maybe.

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Looks like the shopping trolley will supersede John Howard’s anti-terrorism fridge magnet.

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A trolley in the hand is greater than a magnet on the fridge.

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That trolley looks like a Coles one, luckily it wasn’t an Aldi trolley, because if it was an Aldi one that guy’s not getting his $2 back.

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