How ‘Experts’ Are Used in News
Charlie Brooker’s take on how news ‘experts’ are doing little more than guessing, which is more or less what we could do, in the Guardian:
I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.
Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won’t identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like “madman”, “monster”, or “maniac” won’t do, either. There’s a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media’s going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic; a nothing.
On Friday night’s news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to…
Is Anders Behring Breivik A Dominionist?
Leah L. Burton writes on PoliticusUSA:
In regards to Dominionist linkages to the bloody slaughter in Norway, here are our findings so far:
a) In particular, with a video manifesto (which has been linked on YouTube until it was pulled there, and which has since shown up on LiveLeak) the shooter makes some very specific references that show he has familiarity with, and probably shares terminology with (if not overtly sharing intel with) “Christian patriot” militia groups in the US (including material that has been posted on racist and far right-wing forums in the US, use of particular catch phrases associated with the “Christian Patriot” movement in the US, and others). I’ve just spent nine hours typing up an extensive analysis of the video; he is clearly connected with religious-nationalist groups in Europe and in the US. The degree of references to material originating in the US, in fact, indicate he has…
The Blue Eyes Of Terror Challenge The World To Respond
Move over Osama bin Laden—I know you already have had in the physical sense —because you now have an emulator who borrows your tactics and inverts your ideology.
Anders Behring Breivik, is Norway’s candidate for the new world’s top living evil-doer and terror supremo having admitted to killing 93 young people and blowing up buildings in Oslo.
While Bin Laden castigated crusaders, Breivik salutes them in a 1518 page manifesto of madness. And his lawyer has rationalized his murder spree in a similar way to those who defended Al Qaeda as defending Islam.
The two are almost carbon copies. The Norwegian posted videos on You Tube while Bin Laden relied on TV communiqués.
One was killing in the name of Islam, the other in the name of Christianity.
Foreign Policy reports, ”Breivik’s lawyer said that his client admitted to the killings, but rejected ‘criminal responsibility.’” He described Breivik as being motivated to carry out the…
