Posts by Gervais Laird
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So what are they getting all exercised about?
From this side of the ditch it looks like a group of people have been arrested on firearms charges. Serious charges like possession of illegal firearms always take some time to get to defended hearings in a court of law. Have there been other charges laid that could be perceived to include some sort of erosion of civil liberties that the protestors are so agitated about? The voice of the extreme left on this is so muddled, its hard to get a handle on what's going on or what they're even complaining about.
My one concern from that TV3 video is wtf with the mullets! We didn't know any better but the kids of today don't have that excuse...
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"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."
Funny how one of the key people who tried to cover up My Lai is also the same bloke who waved a vial of white powder around at the UN in order to mislead the world about ficticious WMDs which got us into this mess... And to think that bloke was considered a moderate in the US administration at the time...
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I don't think stoicism in the face of this sort of event has much to do with nationalities. Its more about the fact that dwellers of big cities don't tend to freak out about these sorts of things. There's too many other things to get exercised about in your daily life. At least that's been my experience having lived in two very large cities through major "terrorist" incidents. New Yorkers after 9/11 didn't in my experience go through any form of collective nervous breakdown and nor did Londoners after any of the many or varied incidents that I experienced there.
And hey Che - long time mate! Check your email. I've sent one using the tab on the .
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The thing I remember most about 7/7 was the masses of people streaming up Upper Street in Islington from the city and sitting and drinking and spilling out of all the pubs into the sun on a beautiful summer's day trying to work out what had just happened down the hill at Kings Cross.
There's so many people and so many things going on in London around you every day that your brain simply blocks out a lot of it to keep you sane. I had to catch the tube home from White City where I worked at the time for the Beeb to Islington on the other side of the city after the following attempted bombings, and while it was a bit spooky, if I wanted to get home I had to catch the tube so I simply did it. The armed police and helicopters circling overhead just became a part of life, the same as the inevitable stinky commuters sharing the overheated ram packed carriage with you.
I've lived in London on and off through the IRA bombings of the mid 90s and early 2000, through the panic after 9/11 and the most recent round of bombings and attempted bombings. I know my work colleagues and mates back in London will just be carrying on as normal. To be fair to the Americans too, I lived in NYC straight after 9/11 having moved there from London. New Yorkers were remarkably stoic after 9/11 while the rest of the country had its nervous breakdown over the whole event. If you live with something, it becomes a part of your reality and you simply deal with it. That's just how it is if you live in London these days too. The odds of getting run over by a bus are higher than being a casualty in a terrorist incident, so if you want to be able to leave your house, you simply can't worry too much about it.