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Comment by y0ned4 | Hacker News Reader

You don't block an entire tram line just because there are pickpockets on board some trams The "solutions" implemented here in Italy are not solutions, but abominations imho

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This thread is meandering into Russian examples of government malfeasance which is cool but does everyone know about Operation Gladio in Italy itself?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

Nah you fill it up with poison gas because you don’t negotiate with terrorists.

If anyone misses the reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis

Or the apartment bombings debacle, where the GRU and FSB launched false flag bombing attacks against it's own citizens. Several of them were arrested by police planting bombs. At one point a Duma representative denounced 'breaking news' of an attack by 'terrorists' in a specific location 3 days before it actually happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombing...

This is widely regarded as putin's move to consolidate power.

Justifying oppression through manufactured foreign threats. Still works just as well as it ever has.

Not to mention generating exodi from Venezuela and Syria just so that your puppet candidates in the US and the EU can rally against the "invasion" of refugees.

Letting in a large amount of people to enter a country without the necessary visas, technically is an invasion. Otherwise what's the point of country borders and border enforcement? If strangers could come and go in your house as they please without your permission, that's illegal as well and you'd call the police.

Pretty sure this had nothing to do with trains or negotiating with terrorists. A closer comparison would be a recent event during which a military prevented kidnappings by killing the people who could be taken as hostages.

> a military prevented kidnappings by killing the people who could be taken as hostages.

which events are you talking about?

"Ryazan sugar" is worth a search by itself.

What the fuck

It was pretty fucked up for the government to not coordinate an antidote with hospitals, but other than that, can anybody really be sure that another approach would have resulted in fewer hostage casualties? The terrorists had the whole place rigged with bombs. Considering the circumstance I think the gas was a pretty good idea with a poor followup.

There is a pretty convincing argument made that a less violent foreign policy would have made the terrorist act significantly less likely to happen in the first place.

E.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Dagestan_(1999) and the following bombing of Chechnya.

Sure, I buy that. But the guys tasked with responding to that hostage crisis couldn't go back in time and fix Russia's [domestic] policy. They had to deal with the situation they were given.

Both the military "Alpha Group" and "Vympel" were active combatants in both the first and second Chechen wars, they are branches of FSB, which were indeed responsible for the Russian presence in Chechnya since 2001.

Point being, the persons in charge of the the gas and raid in the theatre were also the guys in charge of tactics used in Chechnya.

That may be the case, but nevertheless when they were dealt with the hostage crisis, going back in time and correcting the policy decisions which precipitated it was not among their list of options.

(And were the commanders on the ground that week actually in decision making positions during the Chechen conflict? 'Following orders' doesn't excuse their participation, but it seems unlikely they personally were ever in a position to stop the conflict.)

It's less work for sharers of links to remove m. from their URLs than it is for everyone on a desktop to do so.

It was not a terrible approach, the use of "poison gas" is a bit of a misnomer. They weren't dousing the theatre with chlorine and melting everyone's lungs for example. It was not deadly poison gas, it was "get high" poison gas. That unintentionally made some people get so high that they died in a state of euphoric bliss.

The gas, high speculated but nobody 100% sure, is thought to be basically super-fentanyl. Fentanyl itself is like hyper powerful heroin, and this stuff was hyper powerful fentanyl. But not fatal per se, certainly intended not.

So all this hubbub about the theatre gas isn't so bad. Per capita if you just walk down the sidewalk in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, you would be exposed to more fentanyl fumes than you would have in that theatre. In the tenderloin residents talk wistfully of the the theatre gassing with superfentanyl, wishing they could have partaken in that bliss. If they had taken a good dozen people off the tenderloin and sent them to the theatre they easily would have smoked it up with between 100 and 1000x times the concentration of opioid fumes.

Yeah, maybe you're right. Excluding the "less violent foreign policy" sibling comment that is also correct, given that the situation had already started, I guess gas isn't a terrible way to handle the situation.

Really terrible about not coordinating with the EMTs, though. They could have saved hundreds of people if they'd just carried Narcan.

This isn't a good analogy because the people being pickpocketed and the people on the trams are the same people.

A better analogy is blocking the tram line because it interferes with some guy's antiquated business model.

That is not an useful analogy, because as far as government is concerned, you just made an argument in favour.

Well, yes, but whether the government should be propping up antiquated business models is the question. The government needs to work for the people, not the oligarchs. There might very well be an argument that government should "stop the tram" because it's interfering with another business that is good for the people. But copyright has long been for the oligarchs, not the people.

So police should not close entire co-consignment flea market if a stall is found selling drugs there?

Correct. A single stall is a single stall.

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