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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: 0.056s | 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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sosborn ◴[14 Nov 15 00:53 UTC] No.10563681[source]▶
> Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective.

How can a country possibly prevent these things while still maintaining a free society?

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dragonwriter ◴[14 Nov 15 00:55 UTC] No.10563693[source]▶
> How can a country possibly prevent these things while still maintaining a free society?

You can't even prevent them when not being a free society. Its not like terrorism only occurs in free societies.

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RogtamBar[dead post] ◴[14 Nov 15 01:13 UTC] No.10563805[source]▶
This is bullshit and you know this.

There is very little chance of anyone successfully getting up to terrorism if society is

a) riddled with informers b) detaining people without charges is legal c) totalitarian ideology and political supremacy makes the establishment of parallel societies impossible. Border controls make importing terrorists next to impossible.

The former eastern Bloc had no terrorist incidents. Pulling them off would be harder, the state would cover it up, etc. Just like it had practically no mob.

It did have a great many terrorists, mostly in various training camps.

clock_tower ◴[14 Nov 15 02:22 UTC] No.10564107[source]▶
The Eastern Bloc had plenty of terrorism, as well as organized crime -- who do you think was supplying all those black markets?

Being a police state is one thing; being an _effective_ police state is something else, much harder (at least in the pre-computer era). In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...

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1. abalashov ◴[14 Nov 15 06:10 UTC] No.10564699[source]▶
Former Soviet national here...

In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...

What gives you that idea?

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2. clock_tower ◴[16 Nov 15 17:47 UTC] No.10575812[source]▶
Solzhenitsyn on Stalin, to be honest. _The First Circle_ is fiction, but I find it hard to imagine that he would have described Stalin as not caring about burglars unless that could be imagined of him...

Solzhenitsyn in general gives a sense that the USSR wanted to keep things more or less held together, but wasn't that concerned about people who fell between the cracks.

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3. abalashov ◴[21 Nov 15 06:41 UTC] No.10605942[source]▶
If you equate Stalin with "the USSR", you're wilfully excluding about 40 years of additional history--history that was very, very different after 1953, and certainly is not captured in gulag literature.

What do you know about crime in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years? (A whopping 29 years combined.)