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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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They don’t seem to have been targeted because of their race, there just aren’t many people walking around Nottingham at 4am on a weekday other than students (which two victims were) and janitors/cleaners (which the other victim was). More information could come out, I suppose.

Interestingly, though the apparent perpetrator is a West African migrant from Guinea-Bissau, he wasn’t a refugee or asylum seeker. He had completed a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Nottingham, which is fifth (after Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and Manchester) in the UK for that subject, apparently, and was looking for a software engineer / data scientist job. So he doesn’t really fit the typical profile of male migrants who go on a rampage, although he does arguably fit the older trope of the engineering student turned terrorist.

Guinea-Bissau is ~45-60% Muslim depending on source, likely due to significant syncretic practice of aspects of Islam and native West African folk religion in rural areas. There are “concerns” about extremism but compared to much of the rest of West Africa it’s a relatively tolerant country. It’s possible he was radicalized in Britain, of course.

This reminds me of Jihadi John, honestly.

He was merely a lowly sysadmin, though.

There is no such thing as a "lowly" sysadmin. Root access is root access.

Power you don't use to elevate yourself does not elevate you.

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