Monday, May 12, 2008
“explosion in the Castlederg area of County Tyrone”
According to a BBC report[new BBC NI link]
Reports are coming in of an explosion in the Castlederg area of County Tyrone. There are no further details at present.
I’ll update when details emerge. There was an earlier hoax alert in south Belfast. More from the BBC report - “It is thought that one person may have been injured. It is also believed a vehicle is being examined in relation to the incident.” Update from the BBC report, “It is understood that an off-duty police officer has been injured in the under-car booby trap explosion. It is believed he suffered serious leg injuries, but they are not thought to be life-threatening.”
Pete Baker @ 09:21 PM
Can Susan not see my point? Can she not answer for herself? And can you accept that a portion of that 3% find their way into the crown forces? .........for the reasons you give.
Posted by on May 13, 2008 @ 09:08 PMPancho’s Horse: ‘I think that the police officer’s religion has no relevance BUT they are paid servants of the British Crown...’
Does this make SF MLA’s ‘legitimate targets’ too?
Posted by on May 13, 2008 @ 11:40 PMbut it does seem that off-duty Catholic officers (otherwise known as “crown forces” to the drama queens among us) are the targets lately
The strategy behind that is that too many Catholic cops might mean a police force which has the sort of levels of acceptance among republicans in NI normal for most countries, which would remove a major source of friction between republicans and the state, which would only delay the inevitable socialist revolution to drive the Brits and Jaffas into the sea. Things have to get better before they get worse. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
Oh, and Catholic cops are ‘traitors’, so one can justify a level of brutality towards them that would not be acceptable if directed towards others.
Hasta la victoria siempre, comrades.
Posted by on May 13, 2008 @ 11:42 PM“And can you accept that a portion of that 3% find their way into the crown forces?” - Pancho’s Horse
I sure do accept it. Bloody Sunday being a good example of it, along with hundreds of other examples. However, I doubt that many joined the RUC to kill or harass taigs (probably not even 0.5%) whereas 100% joined the Provos to kill and harass the other social group.
Posted by on May 14, 2008 @ 12:02 AMEh, have the Real IRA, or any of the dissident groups, identified themselves as socialists? I believe not. They are old-fashioned nationalists. It amazes me that people who know better still continue with the red-baiting stuff when the real issues are sectarianism and nationalism bordering on fascism.
Posted by on May 14, 2008 @ 12:03 AMDave, I am curious as to where you get your figures from...3% of this 0.5% of that..,but I digress.
You could have a point about people joining the peelers for reasons other than sticking it to taigs- perhaps one of the highest rates of pay and bonuses of any police force in the world at the time may have been a factor,with anything else being a bonus - i.e.torturing taigs ( whether you doubt it or not )
How do you equate the British Army as a social group +the udr and the ruc?Posted by on May 14, 2008 @ 08:52 AMPablo: You could have a point about people joining the peelers for reasons other than sticking it to taigs
Given the vast disparity of casualties between the casualties caused *to* the police/army/UDR and *by* the police/army/UDR, surely anyone motivated as you suggest would join some other organisation instead?
Posted by on May 14, 2008 @ 12:32 PM........and what happened to that policeman should not have happened for the simple reason that it is pointless. If 30 years has shown us anything,surely it has shown us that.But neither me nor mine will spend any time in the crown forces as hired guns for HMG. I fail to see the relevance of the burns unit. Was that a threat?
Posted by Pancho’s Horse on May 13, 2008 @ 08:52 PM
I’ve tried, pancho’s horse, but I don’t understand how you could fail to see the “relevance” of the burns unit to a discussion of the morality of a car bombing. Explosion + petrol = fire. However fiercely we might debate almost anything else, I’m certain all posters on this thread, very much including you, are grateful that at least the injured man was pulled from his vehicle by a passerby moments before it burst into flames. But as up until your 8:52 PM post you were expending posting energy condemning Martin McGuinness but not the car bomb, for clarity’s sake I wanted to know your explicit position on the attack on the off-duty policeman. Thank you for providing it.
Nor am I sure how I could threaten you even if I wanted to, which I surely don’t—direct my telekinetic superpowers to make some swirly smoke come out of your keyboard? I recommended a few days “on the burns unit”—note, “on it,” not “in it,’ e.g., as a care-giver—because identifying the injured only as a member of the “crown forces” seems to me a way of artificially distancing the reality of a wounded man in a hospital bed.
You state that the police remain only “crown forces” in 2008, and that you and yours will have no part in policing. What then do you and yours propose to do about the reality of crime, and just as importantly the reality of crime victims, a disproportionate number of whom are very young, very old, and/or impoverished? I assume, no doubt rightly, you would share my repugnance at going back to the old days of kneecapping, when a shot behind the kneecap was considered almost only a “warning,” while firing directly into a kneecap means the victims will still be driven to hydrotherapies, etc., etc. twenty years on.
What then is to be done? If you do not want to support efforts to build a policing force representative and responsive to the whole of the population, who should come to the aid of crime victims? Who should punish criminals?
Posted by on May 14, 2008 @ 03:52 PM‘Given the vast disparity of casualties between the casualties caused *to* the police/army/UDR and *by* the police/army/UDR, surely anyone motivated as you suggest would join some other organisation instead?’
Reader,For a good number of them they had the best of both worlds when one considers that dual membership of the UDR/UDA was perfectly legal and acceptable until well into the troubles.Remember also that large amounts of RUC and british army intelligence documents regularly found their way to the UDA/UVF which were often cited by them as being a basis for killing many catholcs.
Posted by on May 14, 2008 @ 04:35 PMThank you, Susan, for your wide-ranging reply. Most of it I agree with. My original point was that it is hypocrical to condemn attacks on the crown forces now when it was OK 30 years ago. Let he who wishes join the band of paid crown servants (MLAs included)but I will keep my head down until a non colonial system of government is in existence here. I have labelled no-one as a legitimate target nor do I wish to experience the pain of a victim. I accept that a police force is nesessary. I do not accept the right of the british government to be in control of MY country in any way.
Posted by on May 14, 2008 @ 04:44 PMI would advise any young person who has an overwhelming desire to join the police, to go to Templemore. Hope the young fella makes a speedy recovery.
Posted by on May 14, 2008 @ 05:30 PMTuigim, tá mé leat, Pancho. “I have labelled no-one as a legitimate target nor do I wish to experience the pain of a victim.” Well said. Where there is agreement on that there is a way forward.
Posted by on May 14, 2008 @ 05:30 PM“Dave, I am curious as to where you get your figures from...3% of this 0.5% of that..” - Pablo
Well, officially, psychopathy and sociopathy are considered obsolete terms by the WHO, being reclassified as ICD-10 category of mental and behavioural disorders - and even then, there are others who will dispute that a personality can even be disordered, so your guess is as good as mine. Those who still use the term vary in their estimates of what percentage of the population are psychopaths, with figures between 1% and 5% being bandied about (sans stats or universal diagnostic criteria), e.g. Dr. Martha Stout puts the figure at 4% and Dr. Robert Hare puts it at 1%. There is an assumption on my part that the figures for psychopaths in one jurisdiction will be representative of all jurisdictions. It’s possible that is not the case, and that the Yanks are crazier than the Irish or, indeed, vice versa.
“How do you equate the British Army as a social group +the udr and the ruc?” - Pablo
All of them are British - the same equation that Sinn Fein/IRA used when attacking them.
“I do not accept the right of the british government to be in control of MY country in any way."- Pancho’s Horse
Neither do I on a moral level, actually. The valid claim to the territory lies with those who are Irish. But folks have shifted from the validity of self-determination as set out in Article 1, and have agreed to the legitimacy of British sovereignty in Northern Ireland, conceding (erroneously) that the valid claim lies with those who are British. Grandiosely renaming the Unionist Veto (over Irish self-determination) as the Principle of Consent means that the Irish people within Northern Ireland renounced their right to self-determination; and the Irish government followed suit by renouncing its claim to the territory of behalf of Irish people. So, that’s the legal situation even if the Irish in Northern Ireland were hoodwinked into renouncing their claim, believing that they were actually consolidating it (because Sinn Fein told a few porkies to them in order to get their bums into ministerial seats). It’s now a question of how you manage to get from that dismal situation into a united Ireland where Irish self-determination is restored when the GFA mandates the opposite. I haven’t a clue how that can be done.
Posted by on May 15, 2008 @ 04:34 AMLet me see if I can make this point less obscure: A sovereign territorial nation state is the expedient entity in which a peoples exercise their right to self-determination. There can only be one valid claim to self-determination within a territory – two valid claims mandate two separate sovereign territorial nation states. So, in cases where a particular territory is disputed, one group must renounce its claim to self-determination (or be defeated in that claim). As the Irish people conceded the territory to the other claimant, they conceded that they did not have the valid claim to self-determination.
Posted by on May 15, 2008 @ 04:50 AM“There can only be one valid claim to self-determination within a territory”
Perhaps successful a better word than valid.
Posted by on May 15, 2008 @ 05:35 AM
