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Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

(www.nytimes.com)
623 points franzb | 3 comments | 14 Nov 15 00:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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po1nter ◴[14 Nov 15 00:34 UTC] No.10563599[source]▶
According to iTele there are now 118 dead.

Edit: Now it's up to 140. What a sad day :(

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toyg ◴[14 Nov 15 00:42 UTC] No.10563630[source]▶
Reworded to avoid offence (hopefully): deaths are not irrelevant, but their exact precise number is irrelevant. What matters is the scale of the security failure, compounded by the fact that they suffered a similar one less than a year ago and they were currently on high-alert (because they've only just started bombing Syria).

The knowledge that a network could carry out such a widespread and well-coordinated attack without being preempted, in a situation of maximum alert, will heavy on the minds of any French citizen regardless of whether victims were 118 or 119. Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective. That is a huge problem.

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hyperliner ◴[14 Nov 15 00:46 UTC] No.10563652[source]▶
Not all craziness is preventable by a security system.
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toyg ◴[14 Nov 15 00:54 UTC] No.10563685[source]▶
That might be the case, but this particular strain of craziness was well-publicised and even experienced less than a year ago in the same place. One would expect some antibodies would have been developed by now, especially considering that French foreign policy is not getting any softer.
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1. buserror ◴[14 Nov 15 01:27 UTC] No.10563871{3}[source]▶
The problem is that the 'foreign' policy is irrelevant. The 'foreign' policy is made to appear the state is 'doing something' while MOST of the problem has been in the country for many, many years. Most of the problem is that the youngsters of immigrant stock have not been integrated, and have nothing else to do than turn to crime and/or religion, so are just RIPE for radicalism...

And there's little the state can do about THAT. they can't send war planes to the banlieus -- it's a lot easier to play tough and send warplanes somewhere else, ignoring the local problem of the ghethos.

And I don't have a proposal to make it all better either. It was an unsolvable problem already in france when I grew up there, and there's very little that can be done that hasn't been tried already.

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2. toyg ◴[14 Nov 15 01:46 UTC] No.10563948[source]▶
Of course craziness can explode in many ways, but denying that foreign policy is a huge trigger is just disingenuous. How many suicide bombers have you seen in Canada or Sweden? And they have a huge migrant population, larger than France in percentage terms, with various degrees of (non-)integration. But they don't set other countries on fire nor they usually bomb anyone, so they don't get hit by paramilitary networks.
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3. buserror ◴[14 Nov 15 02:20 UTC] No.10564096[source]▶
Fair enough; I think I should have said that it's not 'only' foreign policy that matters, it's part fo the factors of course. You can play with thought policies when you are not already crowded with a population of people who feel they are being dealt (rightly, or wrongly, or perceived, or real) the wrong hand.

The real sad thing is that it puts a lot of other people in the wrong sort of focus, all the people who ARE integrated, who made the efforts, who overcame the hurdles of segregation and racism; these are the 'visible' people who'll get in trouble in the next few weeks/months in the daily lives, and perhaps make them wonder if it was such a good idea to identify and 'join' a population that is just angry and looking for a soft target.