Russell Square stabbings: Man arrested on suspicion of murder

I seriously think we need to build our own ADX Florence to house jihadi inmates - the modern day variant of the oubliette. Just reading about the current inmates made me realise I'd forgotten about some of these scumbags.
 
neil_g said:
indeed. "mental health" is a massive blanket description of a plethora of a varying degree of conditions.
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Yes, but isn't that stating the bleedingly obvious? Just like "health issues" as a blanket description can then be drilled down into a gazillion different conditions.

In other news: chocolate melts when heat is applied.
 
Richdog said:
Can you please link me to the research you are speaking of?
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here are a couple of articles

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...errorists-actually-terrorists-or-mentally-ill

www.psychologytoday.com said:
As political actors, terrorists are rational actors: their actions are instrumental, they believe that they constitute efficient means for the achievement of their political goal. Political activity is motivated by sets of deeply held beliefs, or ideology, which shapes the particular acts. These beliefs are deeply held because they define the actors’ personal identity, the political goal therefore becoming their personal goal. This adds to the rationality of terrorists: all rational action is based on ideas, all rational actors first think and then act. In the past there was a talk about “psychological abnormalities” of terrorists, but it was concluded that they are no more abnormal than people serving in regular armies. Violent emotions, such as fighting spirit, rage, hatred, the desire to hurt the enemy, are very likely to accompany close combat, but they are no more the source of terrorist activities than they are of military battles between the two armies. Instead, such emotions are provoked by the ideas motivating terrorism in the first place and by the very fact of engagement in them. Terrorist organizations, such as Al Qaeda, claim that their war against the West is the holy war of Islam—jihad—and that their goal is the imposition of the sharia law on the infidels. Thus, fundamentalist, or radical, Islam is considered the motivating ideology behind terrorism today.
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http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/855849

www.medscape.com/ said:
When people behave in an extreme and violent manner, it is tempting to assume that they must be "crazy" or "mentally ill." So when we view the violent atrocities of groups like the Islamic State ("ISIS"), we may imagine that the perpetrators are "psychotic" or severely disturbed. But there is little evidence to support this notion, and most research on terrorism doesn't point to severe mental illness as a significant causal factor.
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For academic papers there is an overview of the literature here:

for example:

https://www.surrey.ac.uk/politics/r...mmeracademy/instructors /The Terrost mind.pdf

The Terrost Mind said:
In regard to Axis I clinical disorders among terrorists, very little research has been
done involving comprehensive psychiatric examination, and no properly controlled
research is found in the open literature. However, the conclusion-at least on the basis
of uncontrolled empirical psychological studies of left-wing German militants, members
of the Algerian Front de Lib6ration Nationale (FLN), members of the Provisional
Irish Republican Army (PIRA), and Hezbollah-has been that terrorists do not usually
exhibit what we refer to as Axis I or even Axis II psychiatric disorders (Crenshaw
1981; Jager, Schmidtchen, and Stillwold 1981; Heskin 1984; Merari 1998). German
psychiatrist Wilfred Rasch (1979) examined eleven terrorist suspects, including members
of the Baader-Meinhof group, and reported on a Federal Police study of another
forty persons wanted as terrorists, finding no evidence of mental illness in any respondent.
Post, Sprinzak, and Denny (2003; also see Post and Gold 2002) also found no
Axis I disorders on psychiatric evaluations of twenty-one secular and fourteen radical
Islamic Middle Eastern terrorists. As criminologist Franco Ferracuti (1982) suggested
more than two decades ago, and as has been supported by subsequent reports (Reich
1998; Silke 1998; Horgan 2003), while terrorist groups are sometimes led by insane
individuals, and while a few terrorist acts might be attributed to unequivocally insane
persons, terrorists rarely meet psychiatric criteria for insanity.
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I think, so far, this view:

Richdog said:
Yes I would class everyone who orchestrates mass murder, with terrorism (idealogical or otherwise) and the killing of innocents as a goal, as suffering from some form of mental illness. Without any reservation.
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has no basis and is, as I already pointed out, naive.

Note I'm not denying that some terrorists do have mental illnesses, especially 'lone wolf' types (and quite frequently recent converts) but to make the above claim for *all* is very silly.

Richdog said:
I already take perspectives into account, as I stated in my post. I still fully stand by the view that any terrorist or mass murderers willing to kill innocents in the name of an idealogy or cause has mental health issues to X degree.
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Why? Other than arbitrary legal definitions of a state are they necessarily radically different from soldiers fighting in war? You've not posted anything to differentiate them all certainly not to the point where you can make that claim for all of them. And you've had examples of conventional military forces carrying out mass killings, such as atomic bombings. Are we to assume that all Nazis also suffered from metal illness and perhaps the majority of Soviet troops in WW2... maybe most of the Bosnian Serb forces were mentally ill too in the 90s? Not to mention most men in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Rwanda.

It is very naive to blindly diagnoses 'mental illness' for *all* mass murderers.
 
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How's someone a Norwegian man of Somali origin. Surely he's just Somalian who happens to live in Norway, except when he's busy murdering people over here?
 
Jono said:
How's someone a Norwegian man of Somali origin. Surely he's just Somalian who happens to live in Norway, except when he's busy murdering people over here?
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Because western suicidal doctrine dictates that we must hand out nationalities to anyone and everyone e.g. after they've lived in that country for a few years.
 
Richdog said:
Yes, but isn't that stating the bleedingly obvious? Just like "health issues" as a blanket description can then be drilled down into a gazillion different conditions.
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my point is that classing all people who commit atrocities such as this as having health issues is not correct.

mental health issues such as PTSD or schizophrenia may indeed trigger violent outbursts, but thats not to say that all mass murders (for example) have those or similar issues.
 
Glaucus said:
So true, is blown all out of proportion and we've had threads, saying things like worst attack attack ever and this is the end and similar stuff.
yet, we actually live in a time that is well down on terrorist attacks.
a bit of perspective is needed for some people in these threads.

<snip>
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Agreed. Not only are they terrorists, but they're not very good at it :p
 
Richdog said:
That was a very tough decision taken during a world war with the aim of making an entire government/country surrender before countless more lives were lost, it was not terrorism. There IS a difference, however subtle the distinction may be and also taking into account depending on the angle you approach it from.
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Actually it was exactly terrorism!

The fact that when Governments do it, it isn't generally defined as such, is a semantic distinction, not a practical one!

(Actually, there were many reasons that the USA dropped the Bombs, Most were technical and political. Military came well down the list, The USA could easily have just blockaded Japan and starved them out. No invasion was necessary. They were on the verge of surrendering anyway. It was a bit of a damn close run thing that the USA had the chance to drop the bombs before the Japs surrendered on them! One of the reasons for the urgency of the project indeed.)

Interestingly, Breivics action wasn't terrorism. It was an act of attempted assassination (Of an organisation) Like with the IRA Brighton Bombing.

Which is a different thing altogether.

(Though, interestingly, both the media and the authorities went to a great deal of effort to play this aspect of it down at the time, I wonder why??)
 
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Orionaut said:
Actually it was exactly terrorism!

The fact that when Governments do it, it isn't generally defined as such, is a semantic distinction, not a practical one!

(Actually, there were many reasons that the USA dropped the Bombs, Most were technical and political. Military came well down the list, The USA could easily have just blockaded Japan and starved them out. No invasion was necessary. They were on the verge of surrendering anyway. It was a bit of a damn close run thing that the USA had the chance to drop the bombs before the Japs surrendered on them! One of the reasons for the urgency of the project indeed.)
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Correction: Japan wanted to surrender with the term that their Emperor was preserved. The US wanted total and unconditional surrender. There is also a religious element to the bombs being dropped, their cities of choice were particularly interesting especially when other areas could have been chosen.
 
Dis86 said:
Precisely. Which ties in with my final statement that you don't understand the difference between rational and irrational.
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Do some maths and work out the percentage of the planets Muslims that are carrying out terror attacks. That should help you work out whether blaming the entire religion is rational or irrational.
 
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