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Brooklyn

Brooklyn responds, unimpressed, to Chelsea bombing

How we react to terrorism defines its value. Those in the Brooklyn tech scene who took to Twitter yesterday were unfazed.

The view from a Bushwick rooftop. (Photo by Tyler Woods)

Yesterday a longtime member of the Brooklyn tech scene, Rob Spectre, posted a long blog entry on his site which gave voice to the feelings many others shared on social media.
“This is just poor craftsmanship, man,” Spectre wrote. “Two of my friends who live on the very block you blew up called me back the following morning indicating that they were finding a quiet moment during brunch to return the concerned communication from their loved ones. Congratulations asshat. You disrupted breakfast.”
Though his tone veers into flippancy at times in his post, the feeling was shared by many.
Seth Porges, a man-about-town and the king of Brooklyn Airbnb, who was in Chelsea, tweeted about the difference between the panicked tone of national media and the relative calm of the locals.


Charlie O’Donnell, founder of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, took to Twitter to retweet those voicing the same message.


This morning, he followed up with his own.
https://twitter.com/ceonyc/status/777895723035754496
We want to note that the Chelsea bombing is not a tech story and did not take place in Brooklyn. We don’t want at all to localize a tragedy for clicks — although no one was killed plenty of people were injured. And if any number of things had happened differently people certainly would have been killed. In this case, all 29 of the people admitted to the hospital were released by this morning.
We’re writing this because it was a major event in our community and reporting about how people are affected by or respond to major events does fall under the beat of community reporting. New York is no stranger to terrorism, and the United States has been at war with terror for 15 years now. But there’s really only one thing people can do to fight against terrorism, and it’s to be not terrorized. If we’re not scared, it doesn’t work. Sure, it will still injure and kill people, no small price in its own right, but the true impact of terrorism is the effect it has not on the few or dozen it maims or kills but on the millions around the country and world who fear it.
So with that said, the best tweet, by far, was this one:

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