Thoughts on Extremism and 24/7 News Part One

It seems odd to me that comparatively minor groups of people are able to manipulate the public psyche as much as they do. There are two groups of people that meet the criteria that I want to discuss.

The first, the subject of this post, is what I would describe as folk that would have been marginalised in a pre-digital world. The second is the 24/7 nature of News, or more to the point, the derivatives of that cycle that are it's bastard children, commentary. The third post will try to pull these two threads together.

So, first things first.

Do you know your BDSM from your BMSD? Do you know who or what Al Majaharoun were? Or how Islam4UK appear to be their new facade? Do you know what the EDL actually stands for? Or what the heck, in terms of absolute positioning, makes the AFL any different from the EDL?

Do you know whether the Euston Manifesto was a claim that liberal intervention in Iraq was entirely justified, or whether it was a request for a plinth for William Stanier FRS who built some rather intersting steam locomotives for the LMS. (And if the latter half of that sentence means you are going, what? You should read the first half again.)

This is, if you like, a journey to the Tir Nan Og of British politics, to a land that sure ain't Kansas.

But, it is an interesting journey into a developing field of exclusives of one sort or another, with a few honourable exceptions.

I am going to try to explain how a flight trip though this miasma left me less sure, less certain than I ever did before.

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The playground, the climbing frame if you like, for all of this marginal political growth is directly traceable back to this lunatic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ramzi_Yousef.gif

And then, of course we had 9/11 and 7/7 and Madrid. Not to mention, because Western media don't seem to see it as the same thing, Mumbai.

And the folk that did these things - and for lack of doubt, these evil fuckers - are supposed to be embraced into a general world conflict between Muslims and the rest of us?

And yet, the arguement between Muslims is now an enormous civil war. The people who committed the crimes against New York, London, Madrid and Mumbai now perpetrate them by killing Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan, not to mention Iraq. For the fundamentalists are killers in the name of Allah. And they kill Muslims, almost now exclusively, that disagree with them. I, for one see them not as Nazis, which is the standardised insult for them. I see them as Pol Pot wannabes.

However, leaving my views aside, there are always people that know better than me.

Here is another little groupiscule, another minor member of the body politic, that seems to find it difficult to condemn the murder of fellow Muslims. They are the brain dead mob, and mob it is, that is led by Anjem Choudary:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/137481/-British-soldiers-are-going-to-hell-

Who exactly is feeding on whom?

So, my question is this?

Why should anyone, you or me or anyone else, care about any of these media inflated nonentities? Why should we care if one idiot says that tommorrow it would be a vast improvement if we became a fascist state or another lunatic said, come tommorrow, said it would be really cool to be part of the caliphate?

I'd suggest to you, dear reader, that neither is a realistic option. It's called democracy, and it is all we have got.