Scrutable

nezumi wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 15, 2021 11:41 pm

This is not the place for an argument about bigotry. The motivation does matter but speculation gets us nowhere. The police will be on it like rats on sh.t. For once

But yeah, a man is dead and someone did it for a reason that has its own internal logic, I for one am happy to wait and see. In the meantime, why do MPs have less security at work than a shop clerk?

Or a GP surgery. If I recall there were several attacks recently and a rise in abuse.

https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/break ... ice-staff/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-n ... e-58765359

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2316

The atrocity was assessed by senior counter-terrorism officials as being linked to a jihadist ideology because of developments in the investigation after the suspect was arrested, the Guardian understands.

These include statements the suspect allegedly made after police detained him.

On Saturday specialist counter-terrorism lawyers with expertise in bringing terrorist prosecutions were discussing the investigation with detectives from Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command, who are leading the investigation.

The Guardian has revealed the suspect, aged 25, was previously known to the Prevent scheme, the official programme to stop radicalisation. His involvement was short, according to multiple sources. He has no known previous terrorist involvement.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... or-killing

It sounds like there was a bit more to it than just being a brown person.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 15, 2021 11:55 pm

I've been trying to work out of I think it's bigoted to assume the motivation was Islam after you find out the subject is a Muslim. I can't figure out mentally how the Bayes equation shakes out once you have that piece of information.

You might find that easier if people in this thread hadn't screwed up the conditional probabilities, referring to p(murderer | muslim) instead of p(muslim | murderer). Likewise mentally ill. Or male.

We can say that the motivations for murdering an MP are very likely to be different from those for murdering an arbitrary person, so several other posts in this thread are bunk. Given that an MP has been murdered, and knowing nothing else about the individual responsible, there are (at least) four obviously plausible broad motivations:
- personal reasons;
- political reasons;
- islamist terrorism;
- person having severe mental problems.

But speculation about a particular case is unhelpful.

Why did you exclude Neo-Nazi terrorism from your list?

That's where the problem always is, including Islamic terrorism on these lists but never "white person terrorism".

White person is "political reasons". It's only terrorism when it's Muslims.

(I know that's not what you meant, Sciolus - I'm punking you.)

By the time I saw this story it was already widely reported that the attacker was non-white and probably Muslim, and I did think "yikes, could well be an Islamist." Had reports emphasised the attacker's whiteness, I'm not sure I'd have thought "yikes, could well be about Brexit or lockdown" or whatever counts for "political reasons" to attack an MP that aren't terrorism.

But to get back to Sciolus's point about Bayes' theorem, I was indeed already explicitly thinking about the probability of Islamist | Muslim, perhaps compared to "political reasons / terrorist" | white person. (I know there are plenty of white Muslims, but I'm thinking about prejudiced responses to news reports based on assumptions about people's ethnicity and heritage.)

lpm wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:20 pm

Why did you exclude Neo-Nazi terrorism from your list?

That's where the problem always is, including Islamic terrorism on these lists but never "white person terrorism".

I didn't because Amess was a pretty right-wing Conservative so it seems unlikely in this case. But I should have done because I was trying to be abstract and not focus on the specifics of this individual case. Fair cop.

My immediate thought was left wing terrorism or some anti vax or Q craziness. Political language in the past few years has been full of traitor, surrender, enemy of the people, Tory Scum.

The actual politics of an MP isn't relevant to somebody trapped in a Qanon fantasy world.

I didn't think left wing terrorism because we don't have extremist left wing groups in the same way we have right wing extremists, and in any case Amess wasn't a member of the loony wing of the Tory party (he supported Brexit but wasn't ERG level extremist on it), he was anti fox hunting, and all things considered mostly in the rational wing of the Tory Party.

I have to admit though my initial mind did go more towards Q or the far-right or anti-vaxxers/anti-lockdown as an initial thought, seeing they're the ones in the last year or two (as lpm said) who've been the one loud and aggressive and using terms like traitor.

CF

Not everything right wingers think is wrong. If a Muslim stabs someone, especially someone relatively prominent like an MP, it’s natural to think Islamist terrorism is the reason. It might not be, of course, and I’ll revise my opinion if shown wrong, but I’m not going to get all hand wringy about thinking “Islamist terrorism” on some very basic facts. I would just as easily jump to a conclusion of right wing terrorism given the appropriate basic info.

Interesting background here

https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/f ... els-amess/

PeteB wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 19, 2021 8:07 am

Interesting background here

https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/f ... els-amess/

That was an interesting read.

But he liked animals so he was OK apparently.