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    1. corbynista2029 on

      I do not enjoy the framing of loners as “terrorists”. The definition of who is a terrorist is already pretty broad, but now Starmer wants to remove the “political motivation” from its definition. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to anyone by branding “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom” as terrorists. They are boys and men that need the right kind of support to get on with their lives, not people who have an innate desire for inevitable violence.

    2. EdmundTheInsulter on

      Talk about a sort of knee jerk action. I don’t see that an attack created by psychosis is terrorism. Maybe with the tragic onset of his symptoms he needed to be in a unit. His parents had stopped one attack and the authorities were involved.

      Anyway he’s hinting at restricting all sorts of stuff, so more farewell to unregulated internet without purchasing a workaround which may end up being banned.

    3. bluecheese2040 on

      Doesn’t seem to need a new definition…he was referred numerous times…the police knew about him…what’s needed are resources and effort from the police (who seem more interested in policing social media tbh) to do their jobs.

      Changing the definition seems like changing the definition is playing around the edges

    4. I don’t like that we don’t designate people like the Southport killer a terrorist because he wasn’t in contact with a known organisation. He was still inspired by the ideology and acted on it. He’s a terrorist.
      You can be a lone actor. You don’t have to be a member of an organisation to be a terrorist in my eyes. This type of thing only pushes people into the arms of Reform.

    5. I’m sorry Keir, but choosing to phrase it this way is fucking careless. Why fuel those mutant curtain twitchers out there who think anybody is strange who keeps to themselves and doesn’t conform to their expectations?

    6. Cynical_Classicist on

      OK, but why are they loners? I don’t like how this is framed. Lonely young men are vulnerable to brainwashing by extremists online and so on. And there is the threat of how it is framed.

    7. I would agree that our society needs to change so that people are more connected and supported.

      A society where people feel valued and loved will be an inherently safer and more just society.

      Loneliness has terrible individual and social consequences and we need to do more to see each other.

    8. It is much easier to designate somebody as a terrorist as it relinquishes all responsibility from the Government.

      If however you label somebody as having severe psychological mental health issues then a lot of questions that the Government doesn’t want to answer get asked.

      Questions like why didn’t the person get the medical and psychological help and support they obviously needed when they were younger?

      How did someone who had such severe mental health issues slip through the system?

      When someone is classed as being mentally unstable and dangerous whose responsibility is it ensure that they do not harm themselves and others?

      The list goes on…

      When you look into Axel Rudakubana history there were plenty of major red flags that he was a deeply troubled individual.

      At the age 13 he was expelled from his High School after calling ChildLine and threatening to bring a knife to lessons and attack bullies.

      He then brought a knife into School and attempted to attack the person who was bullying him and had to be held back by a number of pupils and a teacher.

      He was sent to a specialist educational unit including a college where sources claim he only attended ‘two or three times’.

      Rudakubana was branded ‘generational evil’ by professionals who tried to work with the troubled teenager after his expulsion from school over his obsession with genocidal killers and bloody dictators.

      He also attacked a pupil with a hockey stick breaking the pupils wrist.

      Rudakubana was not a terrorist. He was a deeply troubled teenage boy who had severe mental health issues and was ultimately failed by the state but that isn’t popular so here we are.

    9. You can see them spinning up the narrative in real time that this is all the fault of social media and we need tighter laws on posting. 

      No questions about immigration policy needed, it’s all Elon Musk’s fault. 

    10. AnalThermometer on

      You can’t conflate “misfits” with someone who exhibited a desire to kill children. Expanding terrorism law to “misfits” sounds like exactly the type of dragnet warned about when terror legislation came in.

      This could be dimwit phrasing on Keir’s part but the way it reads to me sounds like an excuse to beef up Online Safety Laws yet again and crack down on things like auditing. 

    11. We were told the day after the attack that this definitely wasn’t terrorism, now we find it is terrorism, as soon as the government have found a more acceptable category on which to pin blame.

      I think it’s crazy to start talking about ‘loners’ as if that is a category similar to Islamism, where the tactics to reduce violence are likely to be in any way comparable.

    12. Forsaken-Director683 on

      What is it with this double standards of generalising?

      Call out the ideology and behaviour of certain groups and instead of discussing real issues, it’s met with “not all are like that! You can’t tar an entire group with the same brush” Some even arrested and sentenced for expressing their views on related matters.

      Yet do it the other way and it’s acceptable, even by our own government?

      You see it here on Reddit where the people who supposedly care about “minorities and humanity” going all in on incels and the like. What a clever idea, to shun those already feeling shunned, because you believe they are dangerous. Of course nothing bad will happen now that they care even less about you.

      It just causes divide and creates the issues they supposedly care to resolve.

      “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he therefore become a monster” – Friedrich Nietzsche

    13. >loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online

      I’ve just referred rUK to Prevent.

    14. Hollywood-is-DOA on

      It’s funny how he was saying he wasn’t a terrorist when it happened. I don’t accept the responses I got yesterday. If I plan to poison people on mass or even go into a school and take people’s life’s, then I am a terrorist.

    15. ResponsibilityRare10 on

      However much you try to bend words to mean things they’re not – this simply wasn’t terrorism. 

    16. “Every society has the criminals it deserves.”

      A concerted effort to build community by normal people is how we counterract the alienation of the fucking crap world we live in, and the loneliness and mental illness that comes from it.

      Politicians won’t sort it; they’re too busy working to support the elites responsible for the aforementioned crap world.

    17. And I doubt Labour will commit actual funds towards combating loneliness and other detrimental societal factors that cause people to develop antisocial thinking.