Electronic cigarette sparks overreaction

[Stash]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-18728303

I guess the terrorists really have won. Someone sees a fake cigarette being filled, sees smoke/vapour and assumes the bus they are travelling on is about to explode. Will we ever get back to the point where you might just consider pointing out that there is smoke coming out of your bag, instead of adding 1+1 together and assuming the worst.

[loosechange]

I almost enjoyed the tin-foil hat suggestions that it was a false flag "exercise" as a response test.

My word, what a response though! Fun couple of months ahead in London.

[MrZigster]

As someone who catches a bus for a two hour journey to work, my immediate thoughts when I first heard that this bus had been stopped because of "someone seen pouring something into something else + vapour" was: Hmmm. Probably just someone eating something then. Whoever phoned this in doesn't get out much and/or is a tiny bit over paranoid. Possibly a Police Officer then.

Then I read that it was Megabus. Them and Eurolines really are the Ryanair and Easyjet of bus travel (imho, not necessarily this websites). I have a fairly good working relationship with Megabus drivers (our paths cross) and I can't wait to get back to greet the first one I see with the word "Bang!" On leave 'till Tuesday though. It'll be an old joke by then.

Insert:

It's just occured to me that Megabus and Eurolines are mere codenames for Stagecoach's and National Express's European excursion arms. I think.

End Insert

But, joking aside. Did the fuzz have any other option but to react in the manner that they did? Given that your average Civil Servant these days has had all discretion and the option to use common sense taken away from them and everything has to be done by the manual? Or, leading on from what loosechange said, once the call was made, why shouldn't the fuzz treat it as an exercise? It's good training? It was probably one blokes decision to make (whoever's Brigade Chief that day, and it probably was a bloke, and they probably phoned a shout like that up the ladder for discussion until it possibly got to someone who passed the buck and said "You decide").

Just thinking aloud, as it were.

[5co77ie]

I almost enjoyed the tin-foil hat suggestions that it was a false flag "exercise" as a response test.

My word, what a response though! Fun couple of months ahead in London.

[guypjfreak]

me and the wife were have bets on wot it could be [after it became obvious it was a false alarm ]i had a flask of tea my wife had pot noodles but an electric cig lol lol ive never seen one DO they give of loads of smoke ??

mad tho to watch i would have thought they could of worked out wot had happened quicker than they did

[windy_miller]

I don't understand what pouring a liquid into a bag has to do with electronic cigarettes?

[LondonTom]

What I don't get about this all, why does everyone need a gun pointed at them? Surely it's only the person with the smoke coming from them? Surely an hour after the bus had been stopped, if it had been a bomb it would already have gone off? if it was the smoke that alerted everyone?

[Spartacus Mars]

Home-made bombs can smoulder and then go off or not, like the shoe bomber all smoke but no fire (except almost).

Also as this was happening the police were arresting people in West Midlands and Yorkshire in a large-scale terrorist snare. Explains why they went all-out when they get a public-transport alert nearby.

I'd love to think all terrorism was false-flag pretence by the security forces to keep us scared and submissive, but they really are out there... be it the likes of David Copeland, the white guy trying to nail-bomb blacks and gays, or Jawad Akbar and his half-dozen mates who reckoned bombing Ministry of Sound would not be criticised because the people attending it were "slags" (probably true in many cases, but hardly a reason to let-loose six hundred kilograms of explosives on them).

Edited July 6, 2012 by Spartacus Mars

[eFestivals]

I'd love to think all terrorism was false-flag pretence by the security forces to keep us scared and submissive, but they really are out there...

they're really out there - but definitely-mostly rank amateurs - and it's perhaps even the case that the old bill need all the current powers they've got to keep sweeping them up (tho I doubt it). But....

The threat is far lower than we get told. We've been told for the last few years that an attack is "likely". The fact that there has not been an attack in that time gets to prove it's unlikely.

It's probably the case that the IRA hit the UK mainland far more often back in the day, and yet there was not all of the same panic whipped up around it.

[Rufus Gwertigan]

they're really out there - but definitely-mostly rank amateurs - and it's perhaps even the case that the old bill need all the current powers they've got to keep sweeping them up (tho I doubt it). But....

The threat is far lower than we get told. We've been told for the last few years that an attack is "likely". The fact that there has not been an attack in that time gets to prove it's unlikely.

It's probably the case that the IRA hit the UK mainland far more often back in the day, and yet there was not all of the same panic whipped up around it.

[loosechange]

I remember reading a general saying that the IRA were civilised terrorists in the fact that they gave warnings.

[loosechange]

they're really out there - but definitely-mostly rank amateurs

[Spartacus Mars]

The threat is far lower than we get told. We've been told for the last few years that an attack is "likely". The fact that there has not been an attack in that time gets to prove it's unlikely.

[Spartacus Mars]

Of course they were, like in 1992 when they'd put a bomb in the evacuation muster point in Cavendish Square primed to go off after the bomb had gone off in the John Lewis on Oxford Street?

[eFestivals]

Except again a large number of terrorist attacks have been interrupted in the mean-time. Conventional explosives, chemical weapons, targets of soldiers, of planes, of airports, of cars, of night-clubs.

Your point would be perfectly valid if there had not been an attack nor had any attempts at attack been made. But there have been many attempts at attack, and of collecting material for bomb-making.

That the police are zealous in preventing half a dozen more 7/7-level bombings is not the same thing as there being no risk.

I didn't say "no risk".

I said that the fact that there has not been a successful attack for many years gets to prove that an attack is not "likely", as we're told by the govt it is.

[The Nal]

I remember reading a general saying that the IRA were civilised terrorists in the fact that they gave warnings.

[Spartacus Mars]

THE NAL, would you say the same of Mandela and the ANC?

They fought apartheid.

But they also murdered black and Asian people (including based on rumours), they indiscriminately spread land-mines over the countryside, and bombed commuters. Mandela himself, from his prison cell, even "signed-off" the worst commuter bombing in South African history.

[eFestivals]

Some fights are just and can only be taken on with violence - as the ANC got to prove.

And I have difficulty seeing 'the Irish problem' in much of a different way. Amongst other things at its (re)start in the 60s it was a fight for the democratic rights that were being denied them, and the need for a system of democracy which removed the sectarian discrimination that they'd have been (and was) via a system that operates in the rest of the UK. That of course doesn't get to mean that every action was justified.

Ultimately I think the IRA got to show that their fight was just by the fact that they've now put down their arms and given up that fight, having got a reasonable and workable system of democracy in place - and that would have been unlikely to happen without their armed campaign.

(there's other sub-issues around all of that of course, which includes the continuing paramilitary-driven criminality which still happens on both sides of 'the divide' in NI).

[Spartacus Mars]

Some fights are just and can only be taken on with violence - as the ANC got to prove.

[eFestivals]

You're either justified to murder innocent commuters to protest government violence, or you're not.

Ultimately, I do.

For example, I'm of the opinion that the civilian deaths caused in stopping Hitler in WW2 were justified to stop Hitler. That doesn't mean that I welcomed or wanted those civilians deaths, just to be clear.

At the end of the day, the opinions of everyone on issues like this are shaped by what they feel is justified within a set of circumstances.

At a simple level what is justified might be worked out by adding up the deaths that didn't happen as a result of all the actions which had to be taken to stop 'something bad', but there's more to it all than that - no one should be expected to be live a suppressed life just because fighting against it causes collateral damage. You or I do not have the right to say someone is not allowed to fight back.

Edited July 12, 2012 by eFestivals

[Spartacus Mars]

Aye, Hitler and the South Africans are soft targets for modern Western morality though.

The real question is are you equally arguing massacring a few dozen civilians in London is a price well worth paying to avoid a repeat of the Iraq invasion?

And if not, why not?

[eFestivals]

Aye, Hitler and the South Africans are soft targets for modern Western morality though.

The real question is are you equally arguing massacring a few dozen civilians in London is a price well worth paying to avoid a repeat of the Iraq invasion?

And if not, why not?

I don't have time to get into this today.

But there's no "equally". Each situation is assessed on its situation - you do it no differently to me, tho you might draw the line in a different place.

[feral chile]

once you accept that violence is justified in some cases, you lose the right to condemn it in cases where the perpetrators also feel justified in using violence, where you might disagree with their cause.

Edited July 13, 2012 by feral chile

[Spartacus Mars]

But there's no "equally". Each situation is assessed on its situation - you do it no differently to me, tho you might draw the line in a different place.

[eFestivals]

But this now needs defining.

Is racial vote disenfranchisement and a state-murder rate of low hundreds a year so much more worse than no racial disenfranchisement and the murder of a million humans that the former can justify the indiscriminate mass-murder of civilians and the second cannot?

the ones able to define that the best are the ones in that situation.

I'm not going to be telling them from my ivory tower that they should passively accept repression because them fighting against it upsets my liberal sensitivities.