I promptly put up a post about the Brussels attacks, but I didn’t say anything about the Ankara attacks. I have excuses: when Turks are attacked by terrorists, my various social network feeds don’t start screaming in panic when Muslims die. But it’s all part of the same phenomenon, our intrinsic tribalism, in which we all reinforce each other in our belief that our people, defined narrowly in a way that excludes much of humanity, are important, and those other people are nobody important. And, unfortunately, as a very privileged American, we have a tendency to not look very far past our own noses.
I don’t know what to do about it, either. If I weep every time someone somewhere within the great mass of humanity commits an evil against another someone in the great mass of humanity, I’d drown in my own tears. So we struggle.
One small thing we’ve done here on FtB is to try and enlist diverse writers, so that maybe as a whole we can fill in the gaps in our individual humanity. And I’m also trying to be more aware and conscious of the entirety of the human experience. But I’ll fail and continue to fail.
That’s no excuse to not try, though.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett
What would be interesting to know, if this is a western/ 1st world type thing; or does this happen elsewhere in a similar manner? Like I mean in east asia or central africa.
schini, #2
It happens elsewhere too. It’s a human thing.
I wouldn’t beat yourself up about it. The US and Europe clearly share more social interaction and news/media analysis of each others main events. It is only natural that living in a particular region results in a certain set of knowledge about the world, and the perspective this results in.
mclarenm23@4
Yeah, it’s natural but that doesn’t mean it’s right or that we should not try to do better.
Lots of bad things are “natural” – racism for instance. I was raised in a casually racist society and traces of that are still within me, and occasionally they come out. I don’t say to myself “that’s natural” but “whoa there, let’s see if we can do better next time” along with an apology to someone if appropriate. After 72 years I am still struggling with that heritage within me.
PZ is struggling too, and in public, and I admire him for admitting it and trying to do better.
What Ed said @5. Well said, PZ.
These ISIS-connected attacks after fucking terrible, in Turkey, in Belgium, in Paris, and in San Bernardino. It is good to be reminded that the victims of ISIS brutality are not just Europeans, but other Muslims as well.
I’d also assume that while part of it is cultural and is comparable to the Paris/Beirut/Baghdad, there’s also the fact that the Western media doesn’t give as much of a shit about Kurdish terrorists as what it assumes are Islamic ones. One of them generates money and gets readers, and the other one simply doesn’t, because the Islamic terrorist narrative is pretty firmly implanted, where as most people don’t even know who the Kurds are.
Either way, kudos for owning up to your own bias.
Almost 30 years ago I used to get off the minibus near the Turkish bombing, get a hot simit for breakfast, and cross over the overpass to get to the academy where I was teaching. I have a lot of fond memories of Ankara and Turkey in general and so the bombings there hit home.
All of which is to say that my personal antenna are more attuned to the bombings in Turkey, but that hardly makes me a better person. PZ, thanks for recognizing your bias; you’re a good role model.
@lemurcatta,
My bolding; just a reminder that those are not mutually exclusive categories.
this post illustrates something that has bothered me for some time.
I live in sothern california an area that has all of my life time had an extraordinary amount of media connections, Many radio and tv channels.
What gets in the “news” is decided by someone while it is possible for any individual story to be objective the story itself is chosen for “editorial reasons” some car crash story does not tell you anything about all car crashes in general how many occurred where they were the safety of any of the cars involved time of day or conditions , Sticking a camera and a mic in some victims face and demanding them to tell us how they feel and what they know tells us essentially nothing new or important at all. It is completely arbitrary. same thing goes with any other type of story including this one and how it is covered. in all the world there was only event like this today? No there were 2 one in Turkey. In all the planet in all the countries only 2 today. What is the frequency and distribution of this stuff any way.
We have the ability to see patterns even when they are not there, How can I trust what the media tells me when it is so arbitrary and incomplete?
There is probably too much going on to cover all of it anyway, It appears that people are imagining patterns from this incomplete information and are acting on it.
uncle frogy
PZ,
Thank you for posting about Ankara
From the preamble in the linked story:
Sometimes I feel like I must read different news than other people, because I have a hard time figuring out how anyone that actually reads it could have missed hearing about both of these bombings. Now, I don’t think mainstream media gave them the attention they deserve, and have a huge blind spot about this. They were certainly not given the level of coverage given today, where the BBC changes their website format, uses big full width images and increases font sizes, and covers it live. But the same time, the stories on Ankara were hardly hidden on pages like the CBC, or BBC, and many other news outlets. Maybe not on many American news pages? Or do many people rely on TV for news, which is awful and low density?
Social media can be a great way to find out about some stories, but depending on the composition of ones contacts, it might be a pretty narrow set of stories, with pretty giant gaps.
Kurdish separatists are also responsible for other suicide bombings in Turkey, so it isn’t just ISIS.
Travis,
I knew about Ankara, and there were articles in our papers. But that was one or maybe two articles per attack. About Brussels? There’s already dozens, there’s analyses, there’s opinion pieces, there’s a controversy regarding one of our right-wingers tweeting about how these attack before Easter show that nothing is sacred to some people, but hat “our” god will protect us because eh rose from the dead. (regrading that last bit: too bad he didn’t protect the very people whose deaths prompted her to write that piece of bullshit)
I lean towards the it’s a human thing. This is wholly subjective on my part but I had some extra sadness after the church shooting in South Carolina. I live in the Milwaukee Metro area so things hit close to home when that guy shot up people at a Sikh Temple. After the South Carolina shooting I saw a lot of heartache and pain that seemed above and beyond the pain and heartache displayed after the Sikh shooting. I was saddened that my fellow Americans seemed more heartbroken over the deaths of Christians than they were over the deaths of Sikhs.
(This popped into the my head after seeing Nikki Haley in tears. I realize that there is the happening in her state versus my state orientation but I still could not recall any non-Sikhs shedding tears for the Sikh lives lost that day.)
Thank you, PZ.
Beatrice
Same here, online news is afire with all kinds of tragic retellings, all designed to play on people’s emotions and prejudices. It’s quite disgusting. The bombings in Ankara got I think a total of three articles over two days.
I understand that one can’t pay attention to EVERYthing. But at the same time, it’s important to analyze what we DO choose to pay attention to (or find ourselves paying attention to). I’m not a great person for looking at all the issues, but because of the proximity of these attacks (in a time-sense), the difference in reaction is just so stark.
To reiterate, thanks for this, PZ.
#9, good catch. What I mean to convey is most ISIS victims are other Muslims in non-European countries such as Iraq and Syria (and ‘non-western’ countries such as Turkey). I have heard anecdotes that some of the victims of Paris were European Muslims, so there is that as well.
Meanwhile, the US bombs hospitals and cities all the fucking time. I don’t think any of it’s OK, whether it’s delivered by hand, by car, or via high-tech aircraft or drones. WTF is authoritarians’ thing with trying to shape social policy by application of high explosive!? It seems it is always thus.
And let’s not forget the French response for Paris was to … launch airstrikes against Raqqa. Because, de-escalation (waves hands).. I’m scared by this kind of shit; it energizes Trump’s base and gives him more opportunity to say inflammatory stupid shit(tm) to the media. Please, Belgians, don’t do collective punishment by bombing people in ISIS-controlled territory (who’d like as not rather live in Belgium!) to show how angry you are!!!
It’s not “war crimes” it’s that “war is a crime.”
I was waiting to see if it was ISIS or the Kurds who responsible for the Ankara bombings. It seems that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party was fingered but who knows what is true with the Turkish government since they clamped down on journalists covering the bombing.
Instead of picking one victim over another I decided not to react to terrorist bombings outside my country. I’m still concerned but I choose not to create a “celebration” of the event.
Beatrice, I agree the coverage is anemic, especially compared to Brussels today. While BBC News did better than 1-2 articles, having at least 15 of them, and a few analysis articles, they likely surpassed that on Brussels within an hour or two. The whole front page is taken over by Brussels, analysis it, related videos, etc.
I wanted to add:
As others have mentioned, I get it to a point.
European countries have different connection to each other than to Turkey, different coverage is expected. But not this different.
I had been depending on Al Jazeera America for a lot of my global (non-white, European) news and I’m really sad that they are closing down.
Does anyone have good recommendations for alternatives to Al Jazeera?
PZ: “I don’t know what to do about it, either.”
That’s OK, nobody else does either. We can’t carry the entire world on our shoulders, but we can at least be honest about it. For me, Belgium is closer to home than Turkey. So for that reason alone I care more. Just as I would care more if I knew any of the victims. I’m not saying it’s any better or worse, just closer to home.
And while Brussels has gotten more attention in the news, I haven’t spent much more time reading about it. I’m keeping half an eye on the rough details and death toll, nothing more. Watching the horrors that happened won’t help, it just makes me more numb. I know that the immigrants in Europe will ultimately be held responsible, and it’s exactly what IS wants. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
Not to derail the thread, but our illustrious former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, died of cancer. Half expected it to show up on this site, for some reason.
congenital cynic @24
And this related to the bombings in Ankara and/or Brussels how?
There’s an ‘Interesting Stuff’ thread, if you’d bother to look around a bit.
@PZ
Something the atheist community does not do enough of and that we tend to do here more often, question and understand how the tribalism, group-think and group psychology works in general independent of appeals to the supernatural.
I’ve asked the question before, what is religion independent of appeals to the supernatural? Religion is ubiquitous and has been useful to our species and it’s a natural phenomena worthy of study. When it gets studied the related topics tend to be social organization, social rules, teaching in a social context, social control and dominance, social conflict and more stuff that is very very social in nature. Things that many atheists don’t seem to want to consider for reasons that often seem politically convenient. How religious of them.
All that applies to us no matter how many atheists point at dictionaries. When I look on Facebook and in other places devoted to atheism I see shallow criticisms and mockery and focus on specific manifestations of phenomena that also occur in our community. Fallacious reasoning, political behavior, struggles for dominance, arguments over what is appropriate or outrageous social behavior, attempts to control sex and gender, black and white characterizations of groups of people used as tools in communication, creating strong social bonds and meaning that resist change from out-groups, narrative driven social activity and meaning and more. That’s not religious unless we are also religious.
I’m putting in my application today. How long is too long? Neurodiversity, social conflict and disentangling religion from social phenomena cover a lot of ground and I have a lot to say.
cadfile@19,
An offshoot of the PKK, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), has admitted carrying out the Ankara bombings of February and 13th March, although Daesh appears to have been responsible for the most recent (19th March) bombing in Istanbul. It’s also worth noting the state terrorism the Turkish government has been carrying out against Kurds, both in Turkey itself and in Syria. That does not of course excuse the Ankara bombings, but it was the Turkish state which restarted the armed conflict with Kurdish forces, not vice versa – apparently as a response to the government of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) losing its absolute majority in June 2015 elections and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a party supporting Kurdish rights (although not by any means exclusively Kurdish) passing the 10% threshold to gain seats in Parliament. It worked at least partially: in a second election in November, the governing party regained its majority, although the HDP held onto some seats. Opposition parties alleged ballot rigging.
Add to the recent terrorism that Turkey has a moderately religious fascist wannabe in power, and is descending into yet another civil war with the Kurds.
Turkey has a moderately religious fascist wannabe in power, and is descending into yet another civil war with the Kurds
Is also in/heading for a water war with everyone who depends on the Tigris and Euphrates, and is a nuclear-armed NATO vassal.
I read about the attacks in Ankara some days ago. It’s worth checking the BBC site now and then. The US media has given up on foreign coverage, and its domestic coverage is no great shakes either. Social media isn’t going to give a clue unless you are part of some special interest circle.
If you’ve been following things, you’d know that Turkey has long quietly supported ISIS. Men and materiel flowed into northern Iraq through Turkey, and Turkey served as the ISIS middleman in selling oil to pay for things. Turkey has a long history with various regional groups, and not just the Armenians and Greeks, but also the Kurds and whoever was living along the coast south of Turkey before everything there got a Turkish name. Turkey was an imperial power into the early 20th century.
The Turks loathe the Kurds, and the feeling is mutual. The Turks would do anything to prevent the Kurds from establishing their own state, though the Kurds had a de facto state back in the 90s under Clinton’s no-fly policy. Turkey has an indigenous Kurdish population that has not been treated all that well, and the Turks fear that they might lose the province if there is a Kurdish state on their border. Given that there is a multi-sided shooting war going on in the region, the attacks on Ankara were no surprise. The popular media isn’t going to cover all this stuff very well since most of the attacks and counterattacks don’t leave enough persons-of-media-interest dead. An urban attack gets coverage, perhaps because some reporters may have been to Ankara.
Some decades back I met some guys from the Turkish FAA, and their take on the situation was simple. Turkey was surrounded by sharks. I had to agree with them. The sharks weren’t biting back then, but they sure are biting now.
Leslee #22:
Al Jazeera America may close, but there is still Al Jazeera English. You can watch it live on their website and on Youtube.
I have been wondering about the same thing and felt likewise guilty of tribalism. But then I started wondering if that is the only explanation. Maybe it is also that we have an unconscious expectation of these kinds of things in so-called developing countries, even highly industrialized and modern ones like Turkey. When something like this happens in modern, peaceful settings that we normally also see ourselves in, we are shocked, because our empathy kicks in due to the familiarity of the situation. But of course, it ought to kick in no matter what.
Suicide bombing in Lahore:
Suicide bomber targeting Christians kills 65, mostly women and children, in Pakistan park
Beatrice
You link is borked.
Here’s another story: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/03/deadly-blast-hits-pakistan-lahore-160327143110195.html
Ups, haven’t checked after I posted. But numerobis covered it.