[quote]biltritewave wrote:
john gullick is a moron with a (supposedly) long CV.
and btw…we are pulling out of saudi arabia…thats old news ass clown, the pentago announced it last year. [/quote]
My CV isn’t particularly long, I am in the process of building it though. And I haven’t particularly seen much withdrawel of US forces.
thats because you arent looking hard dumbass. look it up.
A good article covering the mood on london transport at the moment.
It’s a crowded train in central London, and I’m sitting opposite an Asian man carrying what looks like a large laptop bag.
Is it a coincidence that no one else is sitting near us? Is it an accident that he’s pushed out his corporate ID card so that it’s clearly visible over his jacket, hanging like the open page of a passport?
Public transport can be a world of unspoken signals and gestures - but am I right in thinking that he looks self-conscious, sometimes burying his face in his arms as though asleep?
When that woman getting into the carriage half-turned towards us and then moved away, was that a deliberate decision, or was it a random commuter choice? How would it feel to have someone literally turning their back on you?
Mind-games
I change Tube lines and in the next train I’m sitting close to a woman wearing Islamic dress. But this time, all the seats are filled around her, and the atmosphere feels relaxed.
As I got on the tube with my rucksack, a fellow passenger saw me, waited a second, then got up, to wait on the platform for the next train
Dev, London
What’s going on in the thoughts of passengers? What judgements are they making?
It’s a mind-game being played out all over the Tube network, and indeed on many trains and buses throughout the country. It’s performed in silence, with people unsure of their neighbours’ motives and guilty about their own feelings of suspicion.
Following the London bomb attacks, there have been stories swapped all over the capital of people switching seats because of “suspicious” passengers.
And targets of that suspicion have talked about their sense of frustration at the unsubtle attention of other travellers.
Even though people say little when they’re travelling, there’s plenty going on inside - fears of danger, changed routes, calculations to avoid risks, guilt at making stereotypical assumptions, anger at being unfairly distrusted.
Stopped carrying rucksacks
In the rather unreal atmosphere of familiar places facing unfamiliar threats, people are taking note of actions and appearances they wouldn’t usually see.
Hundreds of e-mails sent in to the BBC News website show how, in the uneasy mood on public transport, we’re thinking all kinds of unspoken thoughts.
Tube travellers are acutely aware of other passengers
There are flickers of bigotry and thinly-disguised racism, but there are also convincingly understated descriptions of people’s edginess - and examples of how it is changing people’s behaviour, including a number who say they have stopped taking Tube trains.
Marcus, who says his family are Greek-Cypriot, has devised a strategy to avoid “odd looks” on the Tube (which he attributes to his Mediterranean appearance).
To make himself seem non-threatening, he now wears a Make Poverty History wristband and makes a point of reading the Economist.
“Whilst this sounds ridiculous it does reassure people around me. Of course, the whole thing is ridiculous but these are ridiculous times we are living in,” he writes.
An Asian reader says fears about what people are thinking have stopped him carrying a rucksack.
“I do not take my rucksack to work anymore, which had my lunch and work shirt. I would rather wear a dirty shirt left at work than be looked at suspiciously. I also wear a T-shirt to work now, as I am afraid to wear too much, after the shooting,” he writes.
There are also people who have stopped wearing their MP3 players or iPods because of worries about trailing wires or not hearing orders from the police.
Empty seat
Being on the receiving end of such a hostile atmosphere has persuaded Leila, a white convert to Islam, to stop travelling by Tube altogether.
You can get very anxious situations arising - and in the extreme it could lead to violence
Psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon
“I sensed people’s fear of me because of my Muslim dress. Sometimes people even preferred to stand rather than sit by me, leaving an empty seat next to me.”
Hindu and Sikh readers have also written to say they have experienced the same sense of rejection.
“As I got on the tube with my rucksack, a fellow passenger saw me, waited a second then got up, to wait on the platform for the next train,” writes Dev.
Violence
This distrust between travellers is a phenomenon that feeds on itself, says psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon, from the north London-based consultancy, Fitzgibbon Associates.
Images of the Tube attacks have fuelled an atmosphere of suspicion
"You’ve got a strange effect here. Everybody’s awareness of a threat is raised - and everyone is looking round suspiciously. So they’re looking at each other - and what they observe is people looking at them suspiciously, which immediately raises their awareness that this person might be a threat.
“You can get very anxious situations arising - and in the extreme it could lead to violence.”
Mr Fitzgibbon says fear is a natural response to a threat - but the prolonged media coverage, and the way that people continue to talk about the bombings, can generate a response that is greater than the actual threat that exists.
And amid such fears, he says that people can tend to seek people more like themselves and to avoid those who are different.
Such a reaction, already witnessed by people sending in e-mails, would threaten what a worried reader described as the capital’s “multi-cultural mini-world”.
[quote]thabigdon24 wrote:
Zap: are you even going to entertain the idea that perhaps these terrorists are just mad about iraq and that stupid foreign policy could eventually have these misanthropic arabs bombin our place?[/quote]
Were they mad about Iraq when they killed the Marines in Lebanon? They were there as peacekeepers to stop civil war.
Were they mad about our invasion of Iraq when they tried to blow up The WTC in 1993?
Were they mad about Iraq when they blew up our embassies in Africa?
Were they mad about Iraq when they blew up the USS Cole?
Were they mad about Iraq on 9/11?
This situation existed long before the Iraq invasion.
In Jack Kerouacs “On the Road” he has a line in it that he feels like an Arab with a bomb strapped to his chest on his way to blow up NY.
Why would he write such a thing in the 1950’s? Perhaps because this conflict has been going on a loooong time.