Something that's been aggravating the hell out of me lately is the subtle difference between an 'online journal' and a 'bulletin board'. For some reasons there is this belief that posting acres of drivel for people to 'discuss' is equivalent to posting a log.
If you're essentially consolidating news stories then you're not really creating a journal, what you're doing is providing an RSS with commentary. A sometimes inane commentary.
Look at this guy for example. Way back in December I was travelling up to Auckland to sponge some free food, and gave Dean a lift. The poor dude was stuck in a bus stop to shelter him from the pouring rain, and just needed a hand. In return he shared a story about an insane American crusader in Pakistan, and it was the highlight of my trip along the island. It's a shame I just haven't had the time to get to you all yet.
Essentially it involves a guy who may have seen the Blues Brothers one too many times and was out to kill Osama with this big feck-off sabre. Dean reckons the Middle East is littered with these guys.
Like I say, online journal.
Then we have our old friend David Farrar. If you really need a wee trip into the wonders of idiocy on the interweb I suggest you delve into the comments to this bulletin. In this bulletin and associated comments we have both the best and worst of the interweb all wrapped into one.
We have people making outrageous comments with no substance. People exposing their prejudices and being pulled up for it. People telling outright lies and being exposed. And people constantly confusing the really serious events of places overseas with dinner parties in Grey Lynn.
I know you're all busy people, and many of you won't have time to really get into the stuff being said there, but here's a small taste of the reasoning going on to provide you with an example
I googled the following string "death penalty" + "USA" + "support for", and opened the first link, here. I checked out the site and found this graph.
What this tells me is that 43% of people in the USA support the death penalty. So with a population of 296 million that's a total of 128 million people who are willing to line up and stick a needle in an ethnic, mentally ill or stupid mans arm.
Even worse, there are an estimated 224 million Christians in the US. Now, seen as all Christians read the Bible they must logically follow the old maxim 'an eye for an eye', and any effort to try and stop all these slavering, bloodthirsty murders from not throwing the switch on the electric chair will fail.
You see, Americans are just like that. It's in their culture you see. All those years of growing up watching cowboy films (except the gay ones), and listening to gangsta rap has just made this culture where they like to see people getting killed. Pretty soon anyone who so much as looks at anyone wrong will be next on the chopping block.
Are you starting to get pissed off? Smell bullshit? Fair enough. None of these assumptions or 'facts' are true.
So why do I rant? Because this crap about suicide bombers shits me.
People, let me introduce you to a little friend of mine. It's called a Fuel Air Explosive. Essentially it's dropped from a plane and descends while releasing a large amount of aerosol. When it gets near the ground the bomb ignites, virtually vaporising everything over a given distance. Play the animation, it's very instructive.
Too expensive or flashy for you? Then how about this one. It's called an AK47 and the world is littered with these things. This is my favourite bit.
With the 5.45mm bullet, the tumbling produced a maximum wound expansion twice at 10 and 40cm of depth. With the 7.62mm bullet, the maximum wound expansion occurred at approximately 30 and 40 cm. 40cm is the average thickness of a human trunk.
Lovely. A gun that can shoot the average person in half on an average day.
If the million rifles in Mozambique are too far away for you, you can always buy one in Christchurch for about two grand.
You know who mostly gets killed by these things? Not soliders. Ordinary people like you and me.
The opinion that there is something about suicide bombings that makes it any worse than pointing a rifle at someone, pulling a trigger and leaving a 40cm cavity in their torso is to my mind both naïve and stupid.
Look, at present we have 39% of the American population in support of the decision to invade Iraq. But do think that all 115 million people support any action that would result in the killing of civilians? Because that, by it's very definition is what war means. And these aren't extremists, they're just a cross-section of Americans who believe in an idea.
War has never resulted in anything else, at any time in human history, and anyone who tells you any differently is either a liar or a fool. And many people think we're in a war with Islam. Too many. Do you think they're lying to themselves, or you, about civilian deaths?