terrorism

by 3 comments on "Rate limiters, communications data retention, and terrorists."

Here are two statements for you. This flow of refugees must mean that terrorists are flocking into Europe hidden among them. Therefore, we must pull in even more telecoms data in order to find the terrorists. They are linked by an extremely important and subtle assumption. What is it? Well, both statements concern a process…

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by 6 comments on "More questions on the Biryani Project."

Randy McDonald, and probably others, seem to have found the Afzal Amin piece baffling, so I thought I’d draft a brief explainer as follows. Afzal Amin, potential Tory MP and ex-army officer, tried to incite the EDL to stage a provocative demonstration in his heavily Muslim constituency during the campaign, while also inciting a group…

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by 1 comment on "Moazzam Begg, always in the paper, rarely reported."

Am I right in thinking that Moazzam Begg’s political role is getting more complicated, more important, and more impressive? Here’s a story. It kicks off with: British jihadi fighters desperate to return home from Syria and Iraq are being issued with death threats by the leadership of Islamic State (Isis), the Observer has learned. A…

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by 0 comments on "Demonise the availability entrepreneurs, an occasional series"

This post on Abou Djaffar‘s fine blog expresses something that the Woolwich murder made me feel. It was a perfect demonstration of the dreadful way availability entrepreneurs come out of the woodwork, the spirit of Why the Bombings Mean You Should Support My Politics, a text that looking back accurately predicted the tone of our…

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by 2 comments on "A very Blairite disaster"

So, the Kenyan Police counter-terrorism spokesman has this to say: “Kenya’s government arrested Michael Olemendis Ndemolajo. We handed him to British security agents in Kenya and he seems to have found his way to London and mutated to Michael Adebolajo,” a Kenyan counter-terrorism spokesman, Muthui Kariuki, told the Associated Press. He added: “The Kenyan government…

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by 0 comments on "Middle Eastern Links"

Back from MWC. Heavy cold. Browser queue jammed with stuff. I’m going to do a brief succession of link posts to clear up. (Happenings last week; huge Leveson revelations, James Murdoch out, King Mob abolished workfare, horse, Borisbus fiasco, debate on Daniel Morgan, even more Leveson..) This one deals with everyone’s favourite global geo-political region,…

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by 1 comment on "Reflections on a HOWTO"

I have been reading Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup d’état this weekend. It’s a fascinating document – the basic argument is that the October Revolution represented an exportable, universally applicable technology for taking control of the state, quite independent of ideological motivation or broader strategic situation. It was already fairly well-known at the time…

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by 1 comment on "we’re the muslimeen, creating a scene"

So, I went to see Chris Morris’s takfiri flick, Four Lions. Short review – it’s desperately, barkingly hilarious. Stupidly funny. It started with the snickering. The snickering led to giggling and the giggling led to batshit honking horselaughs all night long. Perhaps too funny – one of the markers of Chris Morris’s work is that…

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