Freddie Starr was the subject of one of the best known British tabloid newspaper headlines. On 13 March 1986 The Sun carried as its main headline: FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER. According to the text of the story, Starr had been staying at the home of Vince McCaffrey and his 23-year-old girlfriend Lea La Salle in Birchwood, Cheshire, when the alleged incident took place. Starr was claimed to have returned home from a performance at a Manchester nightclub in the early hours of the morning and demanded that La Salle make him a sandwich. When she refused, he went into the kitchen and put her pet hamster Supersonic between two slices of bread and proceeded to eat it.
Freddie Starr gives his side of the story in his 2001 autobiographyUnwrapped . He says that the only time that he ever stayed at Vince McCaffrey’s house was in 1979 and that the incident was a complete fabrication. Starr writes in the book: “I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal”. The man behind the hamster story was the British publicistMax Clifford. When asked in a television interview with Esther Rantzen some years later whether Starr really had eaten a hamster, his reply was “Of course not”. Clifford was unapologetic, insisting that the story had given a huge boost to Starr’s career. In May 2006 the BBC nominated “FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER” as one of the most familiar British newspaper headlines over the last century.[7] Starr’s frustration at being linked perpetually to the hamster story was expressed in a newspaper interview, when he commented: “I’m fed up of people shouting out ‘Did you eat that hamster, Freddie?’ Now I say, give me £1 and I’ll tell you. Then if they give me £1, I say ‘No’ and walk away.” Starr says that the story came about after he made an offhand joke about eating a hamster in a sandwich.[8]
Image search for weaponized Hamster was very entertaining. I almost went with the hamster ball with mounted guns but found this image to be more timeless.
“The young mouse’s eyes snapped open, clear and bright. He swung the ancient sword high and struck at the giant adder.
He struck for Redwall!
He struck against evil!
He struck for Martin!
He struck for Log-a-Log and his shrews!
He struck for dead Guosim!
He struck as Methuselah would have wanted him to!
He struck against Cluny the Scourge and tyranny!
He struck out against Captain Snow’s ridicule!
He struck for the world of light and freedom!
He struck until his paws ached and the sword fell from them!”
People ask me why I’m not worried about the specter of global terrorism and this is why.
The thing about chemical weapons that I think people miss, especially bunglesome wannabe terrorists, is that they’re rarely more effective or dangerous than conventional explosives, pound for pound, but also carry a lot more risk to the operator, and a greater chance of getting caught. I know this and I didn’t go to “terrorist school.” I just happened to do some back of napkin calculations for a blog post on chemical warfare. I might have been a freshman bio major at the time…like I genuinely knew fuck-all about the physics and chemistry of it. These people are rarely masterminds. As evidenced by doing things like posting IS propaganda and ordering ricin like you would from Amazon.
But then, a detailed discussion how terribly effective for a terrorist purpose and how easy to obtain chemical weapons really are seems not appropriate, to say the least.
It however might boil down to my Western Central European perspective. Firearms and explosives are not that easy to get here, and the horror of the first world war resonates even after more than 100 years.
The central theme is that lone-wolf style IS attacks grab headlines, but that the kinds of people who conduct these attacks are usually not very numerous, competent, or threatening because of the same reasons that they tend to be attracted to IS. Part of what I’m hinting at without saying it is the lack of necessity for sweeping anti-terror legislation that is usually justified by this sort of thing.
But in essence, yes, I’m saying they could be more effective and intelligent, but that’s not the thrust of my point here. I’m saying they’re usually bad at what they do for reasons relating to their cause, and this is also part of the reason why we don’t need to implement new draconian laws on the relatively rare occasions these people do get it together to pull something off.
To break it down: you are saying only dumbasses are asinine enough to think terrorism is a worthwhile pastime. Hope this sums it up.
I don’t fully agree on your assessment, since even intelligent people can feel disenfranchised.
Broadly speaking, intelligent and even educated people can live in circumstances which make them prone to indoctrination. And these circumstances don’t even have to be completely life-threatening or unbearable.
However, I would agree that the best thing against terrorism is a broad, diverse and qualitative education, based on humanistic principles.
It’s much, much harder to brain-wash those can question themselves, and others. Critical thinking is important.
My take is slightly more complicated that “intelligent people can’t feel disenfranchised” but I didn’t want to write more on the subject because I think it’s complicated, and reflects my thinking, but not careful considered research done by anyone.
My take on it is that smarter people figure out how to get to a place like Syria to join ranks. Alternatively, they become recruiters. It’s more about selection bias in the current geopolitical climate. When I said the issues were systemic, I meant that in a deeper way than just, “smart people don’t become disaffected” but rather “smart people become disaffected in ways that might be more harmful but which accidentally conspire to lower the overall threat of lone-wolves in western countries.” The causes of global terrorism and armed proxy wars in the Middle East are currently intertwined in ways that may create counter-intuitive outcomes, like less terrorism in the Western hemisphere, and coupled with the successful suppression of IS this has resulted in a global decline in terror attacks. Of course, we also have to couple the decline in fractional terrorism (only stuff brown people do) with an increase in terrorism (stuff white people do + stuff brown people do) because these are linked by a variety of phenomena like right-wing radicalization of members of the armed forces. But as far as I know, no one runs the numbers like that.
Obviously, I’m no terror expert like Sebastian Gorka*, but when I do think about it lately, this is how I tend to think of it.
