Thinking about this attack more, one thing that seems to have been overlooked by a lot of people in this thread (and the one from yesterday that was locked) is that the overwhelming driver behind attacks like this might not be religion or culture but gender/sex. While not down religious lines, there's one big parallel between the Southport attack and the Arena bomb: they were both carried out by young men targeting events predominantly attended by women and children (or, in the case of the Ariana gig, gays as well).
Whenever attacks like these are carried out, regardless of the reason, how many of them are carried out by women?
Even the other week, the nutter who killed John Hunt's family - he was ex-Army and definitely didn't suffer from the "cultural problems" alluded to in this thread by the likes of
@Worsleyweb et al. But he was a rage-filled man with a sexist grudge and crossbow. Last night, 99% of the rioters, men. The Paris attacks, men. 9/11, men. 7/7, men. The Madrid train bombing, men. The Cumbria and Plymouth shootings, men. Every mass shooting you hear about in America has a male perpetrator. The Presidents threatening nuclear wars, men.
Never mind Muslims, maybe something needs to be done about men. I suggest we shut men out of society until we can figure out what radicalises them and get to the root of the problem. Otherwise it might be best to move us all to the Arctic until things calm down. All the big players who stir up hate in response to the attacks, men. Farage, Yaxley-Lennon, Tate. The person arrested for wielding a knife in Southport near the vigil, a man. What is about men that makes us think a violent destiny is the answer to whatever question we have?
Edit - For the slightly hard of reading among us: the last paragraph is not serious. What I was doing there, as everyone in this thread now understands - just in case there's a Worsleyweb or Halfmist reading this - is I was using an exaggerated form of the rhetoric and implied values of Islamaphobes in order to satirise the rhetoric and implied values of Islamaphobes. And it is a shame to have to type out this addendum to explain that, but hopefully it will save the moderators a long, tedious night of cleaning up this thread when we've all calmed down.
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