Crazy Akhmed's bomb shoppeThe 60s are remembered for hippies. The 80s are remembered for money. The 2000s have either Paris Hilton or terrorism, and I really hope that it won't be Paris. The news of the last few days has been filled with stories about a series of failed car-bomb attacks in London and Glasgow. No one saw September 11 coming (without sounding sadistic, I am still in awe of the scale and co-ordination of that attack), so how was this one foiled? Jack Bauer? Go go gadget car-bomb defuser? No...
The work experience terrorist kid left his phone behind in the to-be-exploded car. His phone, with all his fundamentalist nutjob buddies in the address book. I can't stress this stupidity enough, he left his phone behind in the car. The bomb car. But wait, it gets better. Phones were found in two cars! Two! They left their phones behind twice! All this story needs now is DCI Meadows from The Bill giving a smirk and quipping 'that was a bad call'.
Whenever I leave my phone behind somewhere, I run around like a panicky grandmother trying to remember where I left it. If I were in a terrorist cell, the one thing that I would make sure of is that I didn't leave evidence at the scene that tied MYSELF AND EVERY SINGLE MEMBER OF MY GROUP to a mass murder.
Terrorism falls into two camps. There's the forceful, agenda-driven type (e.g. Hamas, the IRA) and then there's the showboaty stuff that's designed to highlight the righteousness of organisation itself, like Al-Qaeda or the Ku Klux Klan. I don't know which camp these idiots were trying to fall into. Somehow I don't think that terrorists are always the cunning scourge that we're lead to believe. They're criminals, and criminals come in both ingenious and stupid flavours.
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I fucking love the poetic justice in this. One thing that's always annoyed the fuck out of me is the fact that religious idiots have rejected the use of reason and logic for faith, yet every gadget they use every day, from their car to their phone to their toothbrush, every medicine that keeps them alive, every piece of mathematically engineered architecture they walk in and out of and go home to, has all come from applied reason and and the philosophy of science - that which they purportedly reject. It's like claiming to be a vegetarian but still eating at Macdonalds every day and somehow being unaware of the massive hypocrisy.
Nothing in the Koran will eventually lead you to observe at your world in such a way that you will come up with thte concept of atoms, theorize about the observable effects of magnetism and realize it's link to electricity, and eventually, develop battery chemistries and integrated circuits and produce a product like a mobile phone. Nothing that makes life better has ever come from religious belief - it's all come from science and the application of reason. So why do all these motherfuckers celebrate ignorance?! How can they accept the fruits of science ever single day, from when they turn on a light switch in the morning to when they microwave their dinner in the evening and still advocate their ridiculous beliefs over reason? It's only FITTING that these morons should be taken out by technology.
Christopher Hitchens? is that you?
That is really really shallow reasoning. Islamist bombers aren't illiterate goat herders from Whereveritisistan. Nor are they the wretched of the earth as Syriana tried to convince us. Some of the 9/11 Hijackers had training in <i>western universities<i/>, and not in comparitive theology either. The idiots who left their mobile phones lying around are doctors, and though I'm not one of those who believe Al Queada is some kind all powerful organisation it's worth noting the proponderence of engineers and doctors in their ranks.
Islamists don't actually reject technology, or the scientific method or research, and contrary to the triumphalist crowing of the last post its not as if this is hypocritical.
Two computers talking or a mobile phone or spaceships to Mars does not challange the idea that God Alone is the basis of all things. It challenges superstition sure, it challenges the idea of an anthromorphic conception of a deity, one seen in terms of plaster saints and agressive miracle making sure. What it does not do is undercut a more abstract idea of godhead, one that has laid down physical and legal laws and expects to be obeyed. And it's this god that Islamists believe in, a god of engineers and industrial chemists, not of holy water magic charms and evil spirits.
OK, it seems that the phones were meant to trigger the bombs, which is fair enough. It still extremely stupid to leave an incriminating SIM card in the phone though.
By the way, nice avatar Mat.
A little late, but anyway....
The fact that a lot (if not most) islamist terrorists are doctors and engineers only adds to the hypocrisy in my view. And of course no, they don't reject scientific method and reasoning... when it suits them - they won't apply it to their religion however. I completely reject your declaration that some idea of an "initializing god" sits fine alongside a scientific outlook - as Dawkins pointed out in the God Delusion, any entity responsible for the creation or birth of any other complex entity, must at least be as complex as that which it creates, which is statistically entirely improbable when you're talking about the universe, even if you could actually pin down what the fuck you were talking about in such a god (Which you never can in the case of deities, initializing or interventionist, abstract or anthropomorphic. The more vague the details, the better, for the religious). This is entirely despite the fact that the concept of a god is entirely foreign to the natural and physical world and there's no observable evidence to even warrant beginning to theorize in that direction in the first place - unfortunately we've been lumped with the idea from the dark ages and people are now trying to mash it into fitting with science - or mashing science into fitting with it - instead of turfing the idea as they should.
I wasn't talking about islamists in specific in my last post, i was referring to religious people in general. I would also doubt very highly that every islamist, especially fundamentalist terrorist islamists, hold an "initializing" type view of god as you say. I very much doubt the Koran has very much to say on the subjects of Plank-era physics and the big Bang. Religions are not rational. They are the enemy of reason and all the religious (of any stripe) are hypocrites to some extent in a society so aided by science and it's methods.
Btw, was not familiar with Christopher Hitchens, but a quick scan of his wiki entry tells me i don't think i would be insulted to be thrown in with the likes of him, probably the contrary. And yeah, cool avatar - is it an alternative tentacles logo, that label the great Jello Biafra created back in the day? It looks familiar... And Nick, was Crazy Akhmed a character in a Discworld book?
Haha! I was close:
"...Achmed the Mad, who apparently preferred to be called Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches, (a parody of H.P. Lovecraft's mad Arab Abdul Alhazred) after drinking too much Klatchian Coffee. Achmed is also the author of Achmed The I Just Get These Headache's Book of Humorous Cat Stories, the writing of which was said to have driven him mad in the first place."
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