GOING TO WARP SPEED
JOSH BROWN @ THE REFORMED BROKER HAS A THOUGHT-PROVOKING PIECE UP on the new recruitment of terrorists via social networks. It's well-worth reading:
There is a new terror movement on the other side of the world that is crowdsourcing social misfits from every corner of the globe, recruiting via interactive marketing and social media in a manner befitting a Fortune 500 company rolling out a new product. Just yesterday, terrorists were sneaking video cassettes of their rants to the mainstream media via elaborate networks of shadowy operatives and untraceable handoffs in the dark. Today they’re uploading videos of murder directly to Youtube, on Google-owned servers. They’re posting selfies to Instagram, propaganda to Facebook and keeping the world updated about their exploits on Twitter. They’re branding and thought-leadering. They’re communicating with the White House over the World Wide Web. They’re doing what a top-flight consultant might recommend to Tide detergent or TIME Magazine – “Join the conversation!”
None of this would have been possible just a short time ago. Osama’s gang could never have taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times, even if they’d paid in cash. The reach they’d have gotten by doing so, by today’s standards, would be quaint. In 2014, a millennial terrorist (yes, that’s what they are) with a laptop and a modicum of social media savvy could easily amplify a message like that by several orders of magnitude without even getting out of bed.
Obama doesn’t have a strategy. How can he? In 2003, we wondered what could possibly be worse than Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad? Now you know. Syria has a population of 22 million and an estimated 10 million of them are classified as refugees. Mass murderers now control a territory with a landmass the size of Great Britain. Overnight.
There’s a burgeoning realization that what we’re watching is a region-wide, religious civil war – something that has to be fought out, with oceans of blood an inevitability rather than merely a bad option. There are no options for us, we can’t help. It’s 1300 years in the making, even if the Western intervention in Iraq sped it up. “Let the animals kill each other,” is a common refrain in bars and coffee shops across America
JOSH'S FULL POST and a look below at warp speed....
There’s a burgeoning realization that what we’re watching is a region-wide, religious civil war – something that has to be fought out, with oceans of blood an inevitability rather than merely a bad option. There are no options for us, we can’t help. It’s 1300 years in the making, even if the Western intervention in Iraq sped it up. “Let the animals kill each other,” is a common refrain in bars and coffee shops across America
JOSH'S FULL POST and a look below at warp speed....
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