All I can say is that my prayers are with those who died in this atrocity and with their loved ones. I have had it with terrorists and with those who appease them. We are at War.

"...a fragile treasure a city is."

Dude, remember WWII? how many years of constant bombing by Germnay?

This is an awful event, but London is /not/ fragile. Hell, in the long run it might even be good for the country--struggle usually is good for the sould.

I share your sympathies about London, but I have to say that these people are not former humans. They are very much humans.

One of the things that has made me a conservative is my reading of what humans are capable of, there for all all to see in the historical record. I do not make this observation in the spirit of some asshat exculpatory whiner, who thinks s/he can find the source of their pathology in some deprivation or abuse. Saying that they are human, like us, excuses them nothing. That, rather, is my point.

So I try to watch myself, but I certainly keep an eye out for other humans, like those.

I agree with EssEm--the jihadist is within the range of human emotion and behavior. It's important to remember that because, if we're not careful, we could become them.

For instance, how many otherwise sane and decent people have thought, if only for a moment, that it would be easier to simply nuke the Middle East out of existance?

I know it's crossed my mind. But it's a path I won't pursue. We're better than them not because we can't act like them, but because we choose not to.

Petro, if your intention was to annoy me, you’ve succeeded.

Cities can absorb tremendous punishment, true. Which doesn’t mean that they’re not fragile. Not at all. A more accurate statement would be that cities often heal quickly when damaged, which is not the same thing at all. I would also like to point out that what grows back isn’t necessarily as nice as what was lost, a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by a Londoner of my acquaintance. He lived through the Nazi bombings as a young boy, and yes, I actually HAD heard of the blitz before your thoughtful reminder.

Good for the country? How? The ability to endure hardship is extremely virtuous in my opinion, and the British have shown more than their share of it. But the hardship itself, as such, can make no such claim.

Do you mean that we will now see stiffened resolve, steeled will, and a helpful restoration of flagging zeal on the part of our allies? Because if you mean that, I would say that even if your sense of realpolitik is correct, gentler persuasion would still have been preferable.

Or perhaps you mean it in the romantic Rupert Brooke sense, that combat purifies and regenerates a people, scouring away decadence. That we should regard these acts of violence as morally improving, and our newly martial selves "as swimmers, into cleanness leaping.”

I would disagree with that, if so.

Struggle is good for the soul? I suppose so. But I'm pretty sure that indiscriminate mass murder isn't. Thanks for cheering me up.

Byrd, EssEm, you are entirely right. I stand corrected.

Within the bounds of observed human behavior we find such glories as pyramids of severed heads a hundred feet high, desultory non-ritual cannibalism, torture and mutilation as public entertainment, non-elective clitoral excision, etc. If human is as human does, then a little random mass murder is surely no bar to membership in the club.

In my own defense, I would point out that I'm announcing my own personal prejudices here, and not the laws of nature. "In my book" people can and do choose to be less than human with a fair degree of regularity. From this perspective, mine, history is jam-packed with the doings of vile, sub-human bastards.

Now, I don't think the London bombers are biologically inferior, or genetically deficient, racially sub-human, whatever. What they've done is an option open to all of us. Luckily for civilization, most people choose otherwise, or we wouldn't have gotten as far as we have.

Luckily, I'm an optimist, though it's harder on some days than others. Sometimes I just get cranky.

I wasn't trying to annoy you.

I don't believe that cities (in the sense being discussed here) are fragile at all, and aside from specific historical buildings. London, Berlin, Paris, Dresden, Petersburg/Leningrad/Stalingrad have all been damaged pretty badly and come back.

Wars happen, things get blown up, people die.

I (obviously) don't know london before the blitz, nor afterwords, so will only say that the summers of my youth were warmer, brighter and had a lot less weeds in them than the summers of my middle age. And this has nothing to with growing up in the mid-west and moving to San Francisco either.

As to it being good for the country--It's not (just) the idea of adversity building strength and character as much as it is that I've been reading a bit of Theodore Dalrymple (among others) and have the perspective that England (and the rest of Western Europe, but I care less about them) is even more sick than our country. Sometimes it takes a shock to the system to get people to wake up.

We're in a three way war for Western Civilization (Yeah, "It'd be nice if there was some". Of course /he/ didn't get his head cut off), on one side we've got the people who built and triggered these bombs. On in the middle are people like myself (and from I've read you), and on the other side are people like the BBC:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1121048976775&apage=1

And all I was saying was that /maybe/ that this will wake up a sufficient number of people and they're realize that wandering around the streets carrying "Bush Lied" signs printed by ANSWER makes them a part of the problem, and that the Islamists won't spare them when the time comes.