On the 35th anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster, First Minister @HumzaYousaf has expressed sympathies to those who lost loved ones on board Pan Am Flight 103 and on the ground.
He also paid tribute to emergency workers and others who responded in the immediate aftermath. pic.twitter.com/k9pUOtP37k
— First Minister (@ScotGovFM) December 21, 2023
First Minister
@ScotGovFM
On the 35th anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster, First Minister @HumzaYousaf has expressed sympathies to those who lost loved ones on board Pan Am Flight 103 and on the ground.
The word “disaster” has its origins in astrology. It means “ill-starred”. But the people killed on 21st December 1988 were not killed by bad weather, human error, or an unfortunate conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. They were murdered.
Pan Am Flight 103 (PA103/PAA103) was a regularly scheduled Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via a stopover in London and another in New York City. The transatlantic leg of the route was operated by Clipper Maid of the Seas, a Boeing 747 registered N739PA. Shortly after 19:00 on 21 December 1988, while the aircraft was in flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, it was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew in what became known as the Lockerbie bombing.[1] Large sections of the aircraft crashed in a residential street in Lockerbie, killing 11 residents. With a total of 270 fatalities, it is the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom.
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In 2003, Gaddafi accepted Libya’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid compensation to the families of the victims, although he maintained that he had never given the order for the attack.
There is also a media campaign to distract attention from the responsibility of certain Islamic forces (individuals) for this atrocity – various television programmes where people (including relatives of the dead) are brought on to talk vaguely of the “dirty secrets” the Americans have, with lots of hints in such television programmes that the Americans really destroyed this aircraft.
The Americans did not destroy this aircraft, the Americans did not murder these people, individual supporters of Islam committed this atrocity.
One story/theory that i read long ago, was that the Lybians who did this were sub-contracted by the Iranian regime. If so, Gaddafi might have told the truth about this.
It’s not a terror attack, it’s a man-made disaster. It’s not a crime, it’s a tragedy. It’s not a homicide bomber, it’s a suicide bomber. It’s not a fuel-air explosive, it’s a thermobaric weapon. It’s not this word, it’s that word.
Goebbels would be amazed at how far we’ve come in the use of propaganda.
And, yet…
The symbol will become the object, eventually. Just as “moron”, “imbecile”, and “cretin” evolved to take on the pejorative meaning they have today. Not because of the word itself, but because of the reality of the object that the symbol represents.
This habit of the left to continually warp the meanings of things never works, in the end. Keep calling “terrorist attack” a disaster, and it’ll be Hey! Presto!! “disaster=terrorism”.
You can only obfuscate reality for so long. This was the reason that Confucius wrote the 13th Analect “On the Rectification of Names”, and why the leftoids try to do this so often, even though it’s a doomed effort, long-term. In that liminal space while the old word still means the old thing, they can confuse the issue while it hasn’t taken on its new meaning yet.
The whole thing is a perfect exemplar of the typical leftist cant; magic words, magical thinking, and it’s all inside their heads, where they think reality is wrought and resident. Leftism is a mental disorder typically defined by narcissism and an inability to recognize reality and causal links to effects.
The best way to fight this is to call things by their proper names, and to refuse to play along with their word games. Not to mention, pointing out their hypocrisy and lies.
I lost some family members of friends of mine on that flight. I don’t think any of them deserved what happened, and I’m still pretty sure that there were lies galore told by the “authorities” about the whole thing. Libya may or may not have been responsible, but I do know that someone was, and someone with really good tradecraft. I still think either “KGB” or “Stasi”.
Just like the Beirut barracks bombing had to have had “technical assistance”.
It’s not a fuel-air explosive, it’s a thermobaric weapon
Also goes the other way, WP is being termed a “chemical weapon”, masterfully putting it in the same scary league as sarin and novichok, in really it’s a simple incendiary and smoke munition.
Technically, any weapon is “chemical”, the RPGs used by Hamas are filled with more or less the same stuff.
Look at how they morphed “Weapon of Mass Destruction” in Iraq from “What they defined as such in the Desert Storm cease-fire” to “We didn’t find a working nuclear weapons production line churning out bombs…”
The real problem here is that the left is populated by what you could term “People of the Word” who rely on argument and language. They’re lawyers and philosophers, not engineers and mathematicians. They don’t live in the real world; they live in their heads, and they’ve been taught and conditioned that when they change the meanings of the words in their heads, reality automatically shifts to force an agreement with their ideas. Or, so their time in school has taught them.
There’s a lot of congruity between leftism and mental disease. You just don’t see that level of outright delusion and denial of reality with sane people, and anyone that could look at the events of October 7 and still say that Hamas are the good guys…?
Yeesh. Talk about a failure of critical thinking.
Kirk: there is a failure among the normals along this line as well.
They keep ceding the first critical point to the Loony Left, which makes it almost impossible to prevail in the following argument.
An example: how many people, even on the stalwart right, keep calling delusional men who think they can become women “she”, on newscasts and in debates? Even on the floor of the House or in a Congressional hearing. Once they concede that initial “she”, all the rest of the nonsense gets brought along with it.
There are many examples. How many people say silly shit like “n-word”, as though we are all children, despite there being no need to say the pejorative term at all, and despite the fact that almost everyone who would ostensibly be offended by the full term uses it themselves a hundred times a day?
Native American. Hate speech. Assault weapon. Reverse racism. Structural racism. Social justice. Living wages. Fair trade. Islamophobia. Transphobia. The problem of whiteness. Patriarchy.
On and on and on. The normals accept the terms the loonies provide, and then wonder why they can’t make progress in their arguments.
– George Orwell, 1984.
Today I learned that it’s not plagiarism, it’s duplicative language.
Kirk, re “disaster=terrorism”, along the same lines I bet a lot of people who don’t read past the headlines think the mass shooting in Prague was an islamist atrocity. In other words “mass shooting=jihadi attack”.
Snorri – whatever Islamic regime ordered this attack, or whether it was an independent Islamic group, the fact remains that it was an Islamic attack.
This is what the international establishment, including my dear friends “Central Office” in this country, does not like anyone say – hence, for example, the television programmes hinting about “the Americans and their dirty secrets”, anything, anything at all (blame the cat in the garden for the atrocity) rather than admit that it was an Islamic attack.
If Prime Minister Gladstone or Winston Churchill were still around, they would, most likely, be in prison for what they pointed out about the history of the last 14 centuries.
They did not dishonestly waffle about “misinterpretation”, “perversion”, “extremists”, “radicals”, and-so-on.
However, I continue to believe that the worst threat to the West is internal – the internal cultural, societal, decay that has been going on for a very long time indeed.
The establishment do not like to anyone to discuss that either – they either want people to be silent, or to pretend that the cultural, societal, decay is “social progress”.
Similarly in the UK the *Conservative* government replace “minimum wage” with “living wage”, and comitted to increasing the “living wage”.
“Living wage” is a *MEASUREMENT*, just like “outdoor temperature” or “amount of snow”. It is functionally a synonym for “cost of living”. You want the *living* wage to be as low as possible so that you can afford as much living as possible, just as you want as little snow on the roads as possible.
And, just as with “amount of snow”, it’s not something you control, either through legislation or otherwise. It’s a *MEASUREMENT* of the outside world.
Though, the Conservatives have kept their promise, the living wage, aka the cost of living has shot up in their time in power.
@Henry Cybulski:
This is where the biter gets bitten… Which I’d find sadly humorous, if it were funny. There is such a thing as polluting an argument past the point of it having any utility at all, which then shuts down discussion completely. This would be one.
It’s also why Confucius wrote the 13th Analect, and why people still read his works today. The language is important; that’s an absolute. The real problem here is that it only remains important insofar as it represents reality. You start munging around with the real meanings of symbols, changing the underlying object they identify? Then, you’ve got a certain window to act while the old symbolic meaning is still accurate in current parlance and usage. This is largely what the leftoid delusional types count on when they couch their arguments using these idiotically distorted usages.
The thing is, though, once you pass a certain point? People cease paying attention to anything you say, because you’ve blown your credibility with them. That’s where I’m at with most of the left, and I no longer even bother to entertain their arguments, automatically ascribing ill-intent and prevarication to anything they say. Which, again, means that the discussion is shut down.
They count on this, to get their policies through. They want you to be exhausted, dismissive, inattentive. Which is why I have to force myself to listen to the BS, in order to try and figure out what they’re trying next.
Personally? I’d just herd the lot of them into some Coventry, somewhere. A place they could only harm themselves in, and keep them away from sane people. And, sadly? I’ve concluded that they’re all mostly just nuts. I can’t recall the last time I ran into an honest and sane left-wing individual, in person. They’re all screeching weirdoes, shouting out madness. If I do ever encounter a sane one, again? I don’t think I’ll know how to react.
Wouldn’t it be nice if King County seceded and became is own weird little dysfunctional state?
But it won’t. And the weirdos control it, and therefore Olympia, and by extension they have outsized influence on how we live.
It’s getting around to that time when decent people will have to rediscover the moral imperative of violence in defence of freedom.
@Ferox,
Jeez, but there are a lot of Washingtonians on this site, for something based out of the UK… Just sayin’.
I wouldn’t worry about King County. At the rate they’re driving business out, they’re not going to be either an economic or a population powerhouse in this state for much longer. By about 2075, unless they pull their heads out? They are going to be a basket case akin to Detroit. If they’re lucky. If not, it’ll be a lot worse.
2075 is way past the end of my timeline.
Don’t give up, Ferox.
As one of those Washingtonians (you might have guessed from my username!), I wonder how many on this site are from the West side of the Cascades? None, I’m guessing.
Anyway, as for King County running things in WA, true. But it’s true everywhere…there are no “red” or “blue” states, just red and blue counties. Look at a red/blue county map of the US and you immediately see the domination by large metro areas. This is nothing new, everyone knows this, but I have a possibly useful solution:
Elect US Senators by county. Kind of like an electoral college for the States. You win the most counties, you win the State. Problem solved! Senate only, the House is still representation by population (sort of…after all the mucking about with district lines by the local pols!)
I’m sure I’m not the first to come up with this or with other solutions. But how do we go about getting serious about implementing them? Constitutional convention, right!?
Changing the Constitution is hard…NOT! It’s been done 27 times, 17 times since 1795. Out of the 17 Amendments since ratification and the Bill of Rights, 11 happened within 10 years of the last one (I’m a numbers guy, I plotted a rank order list of the years between each Amendment and the next). and it’s now been 52 years since the 27th Amendment…we are overdue!
A possibly relevant statistic in all this: few people alive now and politically active were alive and active when the last Amendment was ratified–most have never seen it happen!