I’m watching the BBC’s live news stream. I just noticed that the volume setting on their application goes up to 11.
I hope it’s not so horribly wrong to mention this… I don’t think it is. Because IMO an injection of mild humor can provide a brief and very mild respite to such terrible news.
Reports say 100 dead. 
In the realm of a hundred people confirmed to have been killed in the attack at the Bataclan, per France 24.
Numbers are coming in at 100 dead in the theatre.
So sad:( I imagine most of these people were younger?
Its one louder, innit. (The volume control on BBC video/audio has gone to 11 for as long as web volume sliders have been a thing)
According to the Agence France-Press, police say that casualties in the theater are around 100 people.
Islamic extremists aren’t content to coexist. At some point the backlash will be ugly. If nationalists come to power how are those who are perceived to have facilitated the growth of Islam in Europe going to be considered? Next few years are going to be interesting times.
French TV (TF1) now reporting that there were at least seven separate attacks on the east side of Paris, mostly in the general area of the canal St. Martin. No update on the Bataclan hostage situation as yet.
This looks bad, but maybe on the low end of similar attacks. If you discount the ME and Africa, or discount Breivik, you got the Madrid bombings, the Bali bombings, the Beslan school siege, and the Moscow theater attack, all of which killed a couple hundred. Looks like the French authorities took them out before it got real ugly (knocks on wood).
Religious idealism gone mad. This is not new for sects of Islam.
Damn, BBC is saying 100 dead too. Before the storming, they were saying 100 hostages. I was hoping maybe they had made a mistake was confusing the death toll with the hostage numbers, but I guess not. 
I expect the death toll here is going to rise as things get sorted out. Hope I’m wrong.
BBC is saying unconfirmed, and they stress unconfirmed, the The Jungle is one fire. That’s the camp at Calais. If confirmed, they think it could be a revenge attack.
It’s not new, period - and while I can agree that aspects of Islam (or at least aspects of the religious tradition in certain areas of the world) contribute to the development of these radicals, Europe has seen this sort of violence before, if not on an entirely similar scale.
Before Islamic terrorism, there were communist and nationalist terrorists, and before them, anarchists. It’s not as if Europe doesn’t have a long and dreary history of radical attacks on innocent civilians even if you discount Islamic terrorism entirely.
It’s going to be a wake up call for many. It’s time to realize business as usual isn’t working. We can’t just hope radical Islamists will just quietly go away any longer. Leaders have to find a solution to confront and crush radicalism in whatever form it takes. Closing the borders is a logical first step. I don’t know what changes can be made but this steadily growing wave of world wide terror must stop.
Scratch that. It seems now that someone’s been spreading old photos of a fire at The Jungle that occurred in then past and claiming it’s a revenge attack now.
Just hope BBC hasn’t given anyone any ideas.
For the moment I am really, really glad that my (American, Jewish, working for the U.S. Embassy) and his (American, Jewish) wife and their two little kids had to leave Paris before all this happened, though I wish it weren’t for the reason that they did leave (health-related).
I think violence should be a last resort. But when things like this happen, I think civilised countries might consider going Machiavellian on the terrorists. Putin might be the one to do it, since a Russian airliner was apparently bombed and terrorist groups have said they plan to strike in Russia itself. France sank a Greenpeace ship in 1981. I wouldn’t be surprised if terrorists started turning up dead. They may have finally gone too far.
But Islamic terrorists are just worse in several ways. Firstly, they’re striking today, which means that the fear they elicit is massively amplified by social media. Secondly, it’s much harder to discourage them because they have no fear of death. Indeed, it’s easy to argue that, for them, being killed is largely the point. Thirdly, there is absolutely no reasoning with them whatsoever. What they want is either (a) completely antithetical to the values of civilised society, (b) entirely religious in nature, or (c) both. We can’t even take the wind out of their sails with the most modest of compromises.
Some day, one of those motherfuckers is going to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. When (not if, but when) they do, they’ll have no compunction about using it in such away as to maximise civilian casualties. Just think. Our entire world might unravel because of what a bunch of God-boggled primitives believe about a shitty book full of life-destroying gibberish written 1,400 years ago. Could anything be more ridiculous?
The calls for boots-on-the-ground war and some kind of racial/religious discrimination/genocide seem almost inevitable, even on this side of the Atlantic. I can only hope that cooler heads prevail.