That has to be the single most amusing phrase ever to appear unironically in the Paper of Record: Twitter terrorism. And, of course, the authority cited for this menacing trend is that ubiquitous sham community calling itself “terrorism experts,” which exists to provide theImage by istock by selimaksan (with permission) imprimatur of scholarly Seriousness on every last bit of inane fear-mongering hysteria. That cottage industry (like the government’s demands for greater power and Endless War) remains vibrant only if Terrorism does (that is, Terrorism by Muslims: a propagandistic redundancy). Thus, with Osama bin Laden dead, a full decade elapsed since the last successful Terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and the original Al Qaeda group rendered inoperable, these experts are now warning the nation about lurking sleeper tweets.
In the past, the power of politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people . . . Politicians were seen simply as managers of public life. But now they have discovered a new role that restores their apparent authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us . . . from nightmares.
Because we have bought the nightmares, we have bought endless warmongering at a price of $2 Billion/week in Afghanistan alone:
The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. Central to that legacy has been Washington’s decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft. With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. War is U.S.
Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
Way back in in the late 90s, there was the Y2K scare. One of the self styled “experts” of that nonsense was an executive at Thomas=-Nelson publishers in the Nashville area.
His expertise?
According to the dust jacket, the author “has worked with computers since 1982. A part time programming enthusiast, he is fluent in Pascal and three dialects of BASIC”.
For anyone who doesn’t recall the hype, a near panic was started by doom sayers proclaiming that, due to the common practice of committing the century in the year part of dates, at the stroke of midnight December 31, 1999, as the clock on computers everywhere rolled over to the new century, all electronic technology would simply stop working and plunge the industrial nations into a new, chaotic preindustrial age.
Soon it seemed the media was filled with these experts, usually quoting their peers as proof of their ideas. My friends and relatives would often ask why I wasn’t worried. They knew I had many years experience as a programmer, but seemed to think I knew less than management types who had never written a driver module, worked in assembly language or even had any formal training in software development and debugging.
Maybe some people will rather prepare for the worst case, no matter how unlikely, than to listen to reason.
“I’m currently conducting interviews as a follow-up to the rather acrimonious debate that erupted this week from my argument that “terrorism expertise” is not an actual discipline, but rather (like the term “terrorism” itself) just another instrument for legitimizing the violence of the U.S. and its allies, delegitimizing the violence of their Muslim adversaries, and dressing up state propaganda with the veneer of academic neutrality (for an example of how this works, see this New York Times article this morning on the different approaches taken by the U.S. and French governments to “fighting terrorism,” by which the article exclusively means: Muslims).”
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Way back in in the late 90s, there was the Y2K scare. One of the self styled “experts” of that nonsense was an executive at Thomas=-Nelson publishers in the Nashville area.
His expertise?
According to the dust jacket, the author “has worked with computers since 1982. A part time programming enthusiast, he is fluent in Pascal and three dialects of BASIC”.
For anyone who doesn’t recall the hype, a near panic was started by doom sayers proclaiming that, due to the common practice of committing the century in the year part of dates, at the stroke of midnight December 31, 1999, as the clock on computers everywhere rolled over to the new century, all electronic technology would simply stop working and plunge the industrial nations into a new, chaotic preindustrial age.
Soon it seemed the media was filled with these experts, usually quoting their peers as proof of their ideas. My friends and relatives would often ask why I wasn’t worried. They knew I had many years experience as a programmer, but seemed to think I knew less than management types who had never written a driver module, worked in assembly language or even had any formal training in software development and debugging.
Maybe some people will rather prepare for the worst case, no matter how unlikely, than to listen to reason.
Niklaus: I remember the hype quite clearly. Planes were supposed to fall out of the sky and pandemonium was supposed to result.
“I’m currently conducting interviews as a follow-up to the rather acrimonious debate that erupted this week from my argument that “terrorism expertise” is not an actual discipline, but rather (like the term “terrorism” itself) just another instrument for legitimizing the violence of the U.S. and its allies, delegitimizing the violence of their Muslim adversaries, and dressing up state propaganda with the veneer of academic neutrality (for an example of how this works, see this New York Times article this morning on the different approaches taken by the U.S. and French governments to “fighting terrorism,” by which the article exclusively means: Muslims).”
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/tongue_cutting_at_al_jazeera/singleton/