Militant commander accidentally blows up dozens of trainee suicide bombers

boing
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In a larger sense we are all indoctrinated into something, whether it is money or religion or even intellectual pursuits.

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The one in one hundred thousand chance actually hit.

Because stalwart security loses to wild eyed fanaticism…every once in a while.

Now we spend umpteen thousand Billions of your treasure to insure that unpredictable random acts of evil Will Never Happen Again.

Who…won?

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Why has this usage of “militant” been allowed to creep into journalism over the past decade? Why is even BoingBoing perpetuating this usage?

If it is part of a dedicated fighting force in service to a government, it’s a soldier. If it is part of an irregular fighting force in service to a government, it’s a militia member. If it fights for pay, it’s a mercenary (and absolutely not a “security contractor”). If it employs violence against civilian targets as political leverage, it is a terrorist. If it fights to overthrown an extant government, it is a revolutionary (and distinct from a “rebel”).

Each of these words has a specific meaning, and is applied in certain scenarios. The modern usage of “militant” does not - it is a nonsense word, vaguely evoking the actual dictionary definition, but failing to provide any sort of meaning or context. It is the equivalent of calling the Vietnam War a “police action” - it allows to speaker to refer euphemistically to something they’d be embarrassed to actually properly name.

Calling the members of foreign enemy fighting forces “soldiers” would place them on the same conceptual and linguistic ground as the soldiers in our own fighting forces. Thus, in an effort to artificially suggest a non-existant distinction between the two, politicians and journalists instead employ a made up word with no real meaning as a double standard.

When we promote our politics via gunfire and bombs, we speak of “soldiers” and “troops” and “heroes”. When they promote their politics via gunfire and bombs, we call them “militants” and “combatants” and “belligerants”.

How we choose to speak of our enemies tells us about ourselves. If we wish to be honset with ourselves, we must not hold double standards - we must apply our language equally to those whom fit the definitions, whether we agree with them or not.

But it seems once more we’ve been all too eager to fall back into old, bad habits - to regress to the idiocy of our forefathers stretching back thousands of years.

Ours is the one true god! Theirs is a false god!
Ours are the chosen people! Theirs are the spawn of evil!
Ours is the right way! Theirs is the wrong way!
Our men with guns are heroes! Their men with guns are murderers!

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Waj: We’ll blow something up.
Omar: What we gonna blow up Waj?
Waj: Internet.

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I just want to say that this
“suicide bombers – and those who exploit them – may not be very bright at all.”
could be easily paraphrased to
“soldiers – and those who exploit them – may not be very bright at all.”

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“Terrorists who blow up only themselves are merely amusing and not at all terrible.”—George W. Harper in “Build an Atom Bomb and Wake up the Neighborhood” in Analog

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That is what happens when they allow “Achmed the Dead Terrorist” to teach another class. They never learn.

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I know many people who would claim this statement is full of baloney.

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From what I have heard it is the Muslim equivalent of dead people sitting on clouds playing harps.

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own goal. The IRA killed plenty of their own folks with similar escapades :

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Both statements are true. What’s your point? Any person of a large group may not be very bright. I’d expect very bright people are above the 50th percentile in intelligence by definition, so it’s probably fair to say most suicide bombers and soldiers aren’t very bright.

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so a bunch suicide bombers all end up in a room in heaven together and they are sitting around waiting for their virgins to arrive, until it dawns on them there are no doors and 73 of them there…doh.

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33

Maybe a discount coupon for a free massage.

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Mastermind’s another word that comes up all the time…
You keep hearing about these terrorists masterminds that get killed in the middle east…
Terrorist masterminds.
Mastermind is sort of a lofty way to describe what these guys do, don’t ya think?
They’re not masterminds…
“OK, you take bomb, right? And you put in your backpack. And you get on bus and you blow yourself up. Alright?”
“Why do I have to blow myself up? Why can’t I just -”
“Who’s the fucking mastermind here, me or you?”

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What? I don’t get it…

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Dan Ing’s SOFT TARGETS is highly relevant here. Reminding the public of the ineptitude of terrorists is the best thing the media can do to make them irrelevant.

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“[T]he reality is that people who are willing to be suicide bombers – and those who exploit them – may not be very bright at all.”

This is true, but not a wise thing to count upon, as 9/11 pretty convincingly proved. All it takes is one with a clue.

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Who the fuck considers suicide bombers as hundred foot supermen? Really? I always thought they were sad-ass losers who were taught they were going to heaven to fuck virgins or something. I seriously can’t concieve of anything sadder than someone who would commit suicide just to kill random people.

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41

Not just that, but the American government also uses the term militant to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone”, unless they have explicit intelligence that they are not. It allows them to hide civilian deaths, pretend that their drone policies are very effective, and propagandise against the citizens of these countries and pretend that the people living there are all very dangerous.

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