[Fluffy]

I haven't followed the news as much as I wanted so don't take me very seriously, but when I hear that the whole city has closed just because of 2 idiots I feel like the terrorist have won.

[kenberg]

 Fluffy, on 2013-April-20, 02:11, said:

I haven't followed the news as much as I wanted so don't take me very seriously, but when I hear that the whole city has closed just because of 2 idiots I feel like the terrorist have won.

The short answer to this is that you could ask the people of Boston if they feel that it was worth the inconvenience for the result.

A longer answer: There will always be a damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect to dealing with such acts. People died, others lost legs and arms, families have been destroyed. We are supposed to do something about that, Doing something has it's blowback, not the least of which is that it gives a couple of nobodies instanf fame, if fame is the right word. The lyrics from Sprinsteen's Nebraska come to mind:

I can't say that
I am sorry
for the things that
we had done
just for a little while sir
me and her we
had us some fun

There is evil in this world, it has to be dealt with

[y66]

Posted by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker

Quote

The incomparable A. J. Liebling wrote once that there are three kinds of journalists: the reporter, who says what he’s seen; the interpretive reporter, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he’s seen; and the expert, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he hasn’t seen. The first two—reporters and interpretive reporters—have been largely undermined by economics and incuriosity. But the third category never stops growing. We are now a nation of experts, with millions of people who know the meaning of everything that they haven’t actually experienced.

There are still paradoxes and ironies, surprising heroes and unexpected goats in the new reign. Sometimes the professional experts really are undone by the amateurs. Waking up at six-thirty on Friday morning and hearing what had happened in the night, I followed my own generational instincts, honed on Vietnam and Watergate and the Gulf War, and turned on the television to see the usual stern-jawed “terrorism experts” being stern, scary, and obviously not knowing what the hell they were talking about. Within an hour, with the help of my eighteen-year-old, who insisted on turning from television toward the Web, we had the Tsarnaev brothers’ names, school history, wrestling involvement, vKontakte (Russian Facebook) pages, YouTube videos, and boxing photos.

And we already had a glimpse of how this might be a tragedy of assimilation and its discontents. A well-liked student at a good public school, a Golden Gloves boxer—somehow they had transformed their souls in ways that made it possible for them to casually drop devices meant to rip human flesh apart next to an eight-year-old boy and his family. Of course, the pseudo-expertise of the official experts was more than matched by the pseudo-expertise of the amateurs. The night before, the attempt to hang this thing on a poor—and still missing—Indian-American student at Brown, had been crazy, not to mention libelous, not to mention heartbreaking to his family.

However the details turn out, this is certainly a tragic story about America far more than it is a tale about the exotic elsewhere. Whatever had happened, it had happened here. Surprises surely await us as we go on, but an intuitive scenario—in which an older brother who had struggled with the promise and disillusion of American life and turned to extremist Islam for comfort, dominated and seduced a younger brother not born or made for violence—seemed plausible. But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism” alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists.

And it was an American story, too, in what could only be called a hysterical and insular overreaction that allowed it to become the sole national narrative. I happened to be in London on 7/7—a far more deadly and frightening terrorist attack—and by 7 P.M. on that horrible day, with the terrorists still at large (they were dead already, but no one knew that) the red double-decker buses were rolling and the traffic was turning and life, though hardly normal, was determinedly going on. The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace.

The toxic combination of round-the-clock cable television—does anyone now recall the killer of Gianni Versace, who claimed exactly the same kind of attention then as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did today?—and an already exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism turned a horrible story of maiming and death and cruelty into a national epic of fear. What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige.

Experts tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen; poets and novelists tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen, either, but have somehow managed to fully imagine. Maybe the literature of terrorism, from Conrad to Updike (and let us not forget Tolstoy, fascinated by the Chechens) can now throw a little light on how apparently likable kids become cold-hearted killers. Acts of imagination are different from acts of projection: one kind terrifies; the other clarifies.

[Scarabin]

I would not criticize the authorities for shutting down Boston, when terrorists strike at the heart of the empire you need quick resolution.

The New Yorker excerpt suggests we might find an explanation of the refugee's ingratitude in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

[Mbodell]

 barmar, on 2013-April-18, 10:55, said:

This morning they held a public, inter-faith memorial ceremony in Boston, which the Obamas participated in. When I heard about this, I got to worrying that someone might perform an attack like this as the preamble to an assassination attempt -- the President is sure to attend a vigil like this, and it will be prepared hastily.
But maybe I've just watched too many TV crime dramas with convoluted plots.

I agree. I thought of it from the very first night, wouldn't this be the type of plot where the assassination of a president is set up by an act like this that basically guarantees that the president will be in Boston to either speak at some service or see some of the wounded or both. Thankfully that sort of fiction is not real life.

 Cyberyeti, on 2013-April-18, 13:48, said:

I liked George Bush Snr's strategy, the fear of two words meant nobody would assassinate him ... President Quayle.

As much as that was a joke at the time, obviously most of the people who would assissinate a president wouldn't be stopped by a vice president, even one that most people don't respect. It isn't like the people who plan to assassinate a president are rationally choosing the VP over the POTUS (excepting some JFK conspiracy theories).

 Fluffy, on 2013-April-20, 02:11, said:

I haven't followed the news as much as I wanted so don't take me very seriously, but when I hear that the whole city has closed just because of 2 idiots I feel like the terrorist have won.

Yeah, there was a facebook picture that made the rounds talking about the juxtaposition that shutting down a city to find one suspect is not too much of a burden, but even considering a vote on having a 5 minute background check to purchase a gun is something that the Senate can't agree to do.

[ArtK78]

 y66, on 2013-April-20, 16:30, said:

Posted by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker

I read this post last night. At first, the argument made by Gopnik made some sense - the fact that a major American city would be shut down by the acts of two individuals did seem like an overreaction. But the more that I thought about it, the more that I felt that the author was insulting the city of Boston and its reaction to the situation.

Here we have two individuals who have already killed 3 and injured over a hundred individuals with their terroristic acts Monday, followed by the cold blooded murder of an MIT security guard, the shooting of a transit officer, a car jacking at gunpoint, a car chase featuring munitions being thrown out of their car at police, and a full fledged fire fight with law enforcement. Then, after one of the brothers was killed, the other escaped to parts unknown. Given the facts that existed as of Friday morning, the measures taken by Boston and surrounding areas seems perfectly rational to me. To criticize these actions by comparing them to the reaction of London after the 7/7 bombing in a disparaging manner is insulting.

Good for London in that it was able to maintain some semblance of normalcy during the hunt for its terrorists. But the situations were not the same. And the result - the capture of the remaining Boston suspect - was surely aided by the measures taken to secure the area while the search was underway.

No doubt that other pundits will criticize the measures taken by Boston and surrounding areas in shutting down the city while the suspect was at large. But you probably won't find too much criticism in Boston.

[Winstonm]

It seemed to me that Boston was not hiding due to fear but cooperating with law enforcement's request to stay inside.

[blackshoe]

 Mbodell, on 2013-April-21, 01:27, said:

I thought of it from the very first night, wouldn't this be the type of plot where the assassination of a president is set up by an act like this that basically guarantees that the president will be in Boston to either speak at some service or see some of the wounded or both. Thankfully that sort of fiction is not real life.

I'm no fan of Obama, and I'm not on, much less in charge of, his security detail, but even so I would not bet on that last assumption. If we can think of it, surely so can people who want to assassinate the President.

[barmar]

I didn't think that the shutdown was a "reaction", but a deliberate part of the investigation. Shutting down public transit and Amtrak would make it harder for the perpetrators to escape the area before they were identified. And lots of people in the city would get in the way of investigators.

We weren't cowering in fear, we were allowing law enforcement to do their job.

[Cyberyeti]

 Mbodell, on 2013-April-21, 01:27, said:

(re president Quayle)

As much as that was a joke at the time, obviously most of the people who would assissinate a president wouldn't be stopped by a vice president, even one that most people don't respect. It isn't like the people who plan to assassinate a president are rationally choosing the VP over the POTUS (excepting some JFK conspiracy theories).

No but it sure as hell incentivised his bodyguards and anybody charged with keeping him safe.

[Scarabin]

In comparing London and Boston's reactions to terrorism, we should bear in mind that in London the terrorists were already dead, and the security forces killed an innocent bystander. Consider what might have resulted if the Boston firefights had occurred in crowded streets.

[cherdano]

The argument comparing Boston and London is just ridiculous. In fact, we know pretty exactly how the Boston security forces would have reacted in a comparable situation - based on how they reacted on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday and on Thursday.

(That doesn't mean you can't make the case asking everyone to remain at home was an overreaction. Wouldn't it have been enough to shut down Watertown? I don't know.)

[billw55]

 barmar, on 2013-April-21, 13:07, said:

Shutting down public transit and Amtrak would make it harder for the perpetrators to escape the area before they were identified.

As it turns out, they were not making any effort to escape until they were identified. This baffled me: they had almost three days, they could have been anywhere in the world, but there they sat still in Boston.

[Scarabin]

My point is that imo it's better to inconvenience people by closing down a city than to risk killing innocent bystanders.

[PassedOut]

 billw55, on 2013-April-22, 06:38, said:

As it turns out, they were not making any effort to escape until they were identified. This baffled me: they had almost three days, they could have been anywhere in the world, but there they sat still in Boston.

As Boston reeled, younger bombing suspect partied

Quote

A student at the school told The Boston Globe that she saw Tsarnaev at a party Wednesday night that was attended by some of his friends from intramural soccer.

"He was just relaxed," she said, asking the paper not to print her name.

Don't know what the older brother was doing...

[kenberg]

 billw55, on 2013-April-22, 06:38, said:

As it turns out, they were not making any effort to escape until they were identified. This baffled me: they had almost three days, they could have been anywhere in the world, but there they sat still in Boston.

I think others have observed that if they had any brains they wouldn't be doing what they were doing in the first place. These guys obviously left reality behind a long time ago.

I am no expert on psychology but I am fairly serious about the above. I imagine most of us have known cases where someone gets so wrapped up in something that he just don't think straight about what happens next. Or he doesn't care. Or something like that.

I hope that it is clear I in no way advocate any sort of sympathy for them. I don't. But their actions, from the beginning, were not only cruel and immoral they also were brain dead stupid.

[billw55]

Yes Ken, perhaps they are just a few cards short of a deck.

I also consider the possibility that they were involved in an organization, and that their handlers told them to stay put if they were able the leave the scene unhindered.

It seems likely that the surviving bomber is being questioned on this possibility. "Questioned" being a wide ranging term in this context.

[barmar]

They didn't even make an attempt to escape when they were identified. The FBI published crude pictures of the suspects Thursday afternoon, although we didn't yet know their names. That night, they caused a disturbance at MIT, which resulted in the shooting of the MIT Campus Police officer followed by the car chase, firefight, and manhunt. By that time the authorities seemed to know who they were.

[billw55]

 barmar, on 2013-April-22, 10:38, said:

They didn't even make an attempt to escape when they were identified. The FBI published crude pictures of the suspects Thursday afternoon, although we didn't yet know their names. That night, they caused a disturbance at MIT, which resulted in the shooting of the MIT Campus Police officer followed by the car chase, firefight, and manhunt. By that time the authorities seemed to know who they were.

I had assumed they panicked when their pictures were published, but I guess that is not certain.

[kenberg]

For example, at least so I understand, they hijacked a Mercedes, had the driver withdraw cash from an ATM, then let him go. He called the police and identified the car that they were driving (his). Now I am really glad that they let him go but by this time they had quite a bit of death on their hands. I suppose they could kill anonymous people in the bombing, and an authority figure like a cop close up, but maybe they had trouble shooting a guy close up that they had spoken with. Or something. It's really pretty hopeless trying to understand their actions. I could not, simply could not, do what they did and neither could most other people. So I conclude that somehow they are seriously effed up, if you will excuse the psychiatric technical jargon.

Going back to Springsteen's Nebraska:

You want to know why, I did what I did
Sir I guess there's just a meaness in this world.

Hardly satisfying but there may not be anything better. Their uncle describes them as a couple of losers. Also hardly a description that is up to the task, but what else?