Knife attack in Sydney

[think positive]

If that's the case then how come the 'next State' doesn't have that level of gun crime?

Break down the demographics of the population.

Chicago is expensive, too many poor, too many homeless, history of corruption, too many gangs, and just too many people.

I really hope trump means it when he says they are looking at it, what I don’t get is how come they can’t track the death threats and do something about it.


And great post Stui on the subject

[David]

An interesting piece on the media reportage of this:

https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/08/15/me ... -stabbing/

Ney’s utterances were the focus of initial reporting, even as eyewitnesses described him asking to be shot by police, and footage showed him running straight at a moving car. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph went with the headline “Akbar attack(s) in Central Sydney” for an early online piece. The Australian’s rolling coverage described the incident as an “Allahu akbar knife frenzy”.

On Wednesday, the Oz’s headline described Ney’s “ideology of death”, and still led with his cry of Allahu akbar.

The easy dominance of the terror frame is sadly all too familiar according to Clarke Jones, a research fellow at the Australian National University’s School of Psychology.

“For people trying to explain it, [terrorism] is a comfortable fit for them. They want to box it into a particular explanation or particular corner,” he said. “The way the media has rallied around this incident in particular shows a desire to turn it into a terrorism event, and I think that is very unhelpful.”

[think positive]

Was he a muslim? Did he actually say it? Does he have a blog? Or was he just a ^&*^*% with a knife wanting to take others with him to his miserable end? I have plenty if sympathy for those with mental issues, until they take others with them

[David]

^ The latter, it seems. The suggestion is that the family are Cypriot Turks and not Muslim (which doesn't exclude the possibility of a later-life conversion, but it seems far more likely that he was just yelling a range of crazy stuff, including asking people to shoot him).

[think positive]

Interesting, lot of those according to my dad, one of the reasons we left Cypress and went back to England, too much agro between the Greeks and the Turks! I lived there for about 3 years. Too young to remember but the pics are amazing!

[thesoretoothsayer]

^ The latter, it seems. The suggestion is that the family are Cypriot Turks and not Muslim (which doesn't exclude the possibility of a later-life conversion, but it seems far more likely that he was just yelling a range of crazy stuff, including asking people to shoot him).

A man with a Turkish Cypriot background (99% muslim), who some sources claim either recently converted to (or rediscovered) islam (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... Islam.html) goes on a stabbing spree yelling "allahu akbar". It's also claimed that on being caught he had a usb referencing white-supremacist terror attacks in his pocket.

Given the evidence, some people might say this was an islamic revenge attack.
I don't say this. I believe, like you, this is a deranged, ill individual.

However, if he had run around Sydney stabbing people whilst yelling 'Heil Hitler" I wonder if you would've been so ready to accept mental illness as the cause of his crimes?

[stui magpie]

If you listen to the 7 video, he clearly yells Allah Akbar at least once, however from what I've read of comments from people who knew him, he was described as a non-practising Muslim. He didn't believe in god, of any kind.

he also said he had a bomb in his backpack and he did have a USB stick with stuff on it about the Christchurch murders.

In the face of it, unless proven otherwise, I believe he was a mentally ill man not an Islamic (or any other kind of ) terrorist who was yelling shit to try to goad cops into shooting him, but none were there so he ran from the guys with chairs.

If he was inspired in anyway by the stuff he had about mass killings, it was likely just to create a scene resulting in suicide by cop and kill a few along the way.

I do feel for the girl he killed. Young woman working as a sex worker to, it seems, fund a lifestyle. The girls who work out of rented luxury apartments and advertise on Locanto or similar sites, risk this kind of stuff daily which is in no way meant to imply she or others in any way deserved it. She didn't.

[Skids]

What this probably serves to illustrate is that proper gun laws in Australia mean that even when someone heads out into a public place determined to kill, they can't usually do too much damage because they don't generally have access to serious firepower. It is certainly a tragedy that one person was killed and another badly injured but an over-the-counter serious firearm would likely have made this a much more terrible incident.

Utter, blinkered thinking rubbish.

What this illustrates is the deplorable cost cutting to mental health services that privatising, money wasting and incompetent governments began in the late 1980's.

Instead, we've had the pandering of refugees and money grabbing social security leeches milking the countries wealth.

Forget our own; pensioners, mentally ill, homeless and veterans... There's bleeding hearts to appease.

[David]

However, if he had run around Sydney stabbing people whilst yelling 'Heil Hitler" I wonder if you would've been so ready to accept mental illness as the cause of his crimes?

I certainly would have (and I suspect most others would too). I don’t think many people are retrospectively trying to paint Charles Manson as a Nazi just because he carved a swastika into his head. There are plenty of cases of Nazi iconography and slogans being appropriated, particularly among younger people, purely for transgressive (but otherwise apolitical) purposes, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if this killer had uttered those words with his next breath.

On the flipside, it’s not like we’re jumping at shadows when we talk about politically motivated white supremacist shooters; most seem to be quite happy to explain their motivations to anyone who’s listening. But that doesn’t mean that we’re so desperate as to clutch at straws.

[think positive]

What this probably serves to illustrate is that proper gun laws in Australia mean that even when someone heads out into a public place determined to kill, they can't usually do too much damage because they don't generally have access to serious firepower. It is certainly a tragedy that one person was killed and another badly injured but an over-the-counter serious firearm would likely have made this a much more terrible incident.

Utter, blinkered thinking rubbish.

What this illustrates is the deplorable cost cutting to mental health services that privatising, money wasting and incompetent governments began in the late 1980's.

Instead, we've had the pandering of refugees and money grabbing social security leeches milking the countries wealth.

Forget our own; pensioners, mentally ill, homeless and veterans... There's bleeding hearts to appease.

Actually your both right.

[David]

^ Well, except for the false dichotomy between welfare and social spending. The Newstart rate hasn’t been raised in over two decades, while refugees subsist on even less (hyper-expensive offshore prison camps aside). Meanwhile, we get massive tax cuts for the rich, corporations not paying any tax at all, unnecessary defence spending and, as Skids mentions, privatisation of essential services. The diagnosis is correct, but blaming the poor is barking up the wrong tree.

[think positive]

Hedint blame the poor he said leaches, meaning people claiming benefits they don’t deserve, meaning the truly needy miss out, as he mentions below that.

The most important part that services have been massively cut for mental health, and he is right.

[Wokko]

Saying Newstart hasn't been raised is a furphy, there are a hell of a lot more people on welfare now than there was 20 years ago. Too many consider it their 'pay' and stay on it forever, even faking illnesses, particularly mental, to claim disability.

As for refugees, it's again not that they receive "More", it's that they receive it immediately and stay on welfare after being granted asylum. They also never go back, so we have another sector of generational welfare and the latest arrivals add extremely violent crimes like car jackings and home invasions to those costs, crimes that were pretty much unheard of 20 years ago.

[Pies4shaw]

Saying Newstart hasn't been raised is a furphy"

Except, of course, that the statement that Newstart hasn't been raised is completely true.

It should be a matter of national disgrace that we expect people who can't get jobs to live on so little.

I thought about starting a thread about Newstart last week, when I read that approximately 55,000 homeless and other vulnerable people had been kicked off Newstart in the preceding 12 months. That sort of heartlessness appalls me. I am surprised that people aren't taking to the streets over it.

[David]

The most important part that services have been massively cut for mental health, and he is right.

And I agree, but his explanation for why is totally wrong. Welfare cheats have very little to do with it. It’s all about how and where governments choose to allocate spending and how much of a revenue pool they have access to. There have been a lot of bad deliberate political choices along the line that have gotten us to this point.

As for refugees, it's again not that they receive "More", it's that they receive it immediately and stay on welfare after being granted asylum. They also never go back, so we have another sector of generational welfare and the latest arrivals add extremely violent crimes like car jackings and home invasions to those costs, crimes that were pretty much unheard of 20 years ago.

On the contrary, burglary rates have been steadily declining in Australia:

https://aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi495

While the rate of carjacking remains quite rare, with little indication as to whether it’s on the increase or decrease.

https://aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi351

Ultimately, the best way to prevent this kind of crime is through better social spending on infrastructure, welfare, support mechanisms etc. So it’s all circular in the end. If you keep people poor, you reap the rewards of higher crime rates, cycles of unemployment, increased healthcare costs, and so on. We’re spending too much on fixing the symptoms and not enough on preventing the illness. In that sense, poverty costs taxpayers big time.