Discussion
Just noting that "terrorist" has become so over-used and diluted that today it's a generic bad word, much as "communist" was in the 1950s, that denotes dislike on the part of the speaker.
Unless there are corpses and/or the potential for explosions and bullets, it's not terrorism.
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:codfx2epdduamfycuyi5fjpb/post/3mc5skkro3c2g
And if one wants to be pedantic, terrorism requires a political motivation. Blowing up the bank vault doesn't qualify, no matter how many people die in the process.
@cstross
An essential ingredient of terrorism is, unsurprisingly, #terror.
Mild-annoyance-ists exist, and various laws probably cover them, but I cannot be terrified by for instance the application of cold #soup to a thing or person, nor a grammatical demand that un- or most specified actions be taken in or over some geographical area.
"ance" may be redundant. I expect there is a better #German word.
@cstross My personal linguistic gripe is ”war on”. Reagan’s war on drugs was a very expensive failure. Interestingly LBJ’s war on poverty was half successful, half failure.
I would say that actual war is a serious enterprise only to be undertaken in response to extreme circumstances. So don’t call other stuff “war”, and in the US only undertake war with approval from Congress with a full declaration of war. And don’t play games calling such things “Special Military Operation“.
@michaelormsby Reagan's war on drugs was actually started a decade earlier by Nixon, and it was basically a pretext for a war on hippies (pot) and the black community (cocaine).
@cstross Terrorism is just the name we give to cheap violence, the improvised explosive devices, the car stuffed with home made explosives. If you have to stitch the explosives into your waistcoat and buy a bus ticket, then you are a terrorist. But if one has access to the latest Apache gunships, bunker busting bombs, cruise missiles, drones and satellite guided weaponry, then you don't get called a terrorist.
@cstross and if you ask a chud who calls something communist, socialist, or terrorism to define the term, invariably they fail. I strongly feel you'd get the same from a late 1930s Nazi asked to define "Jewish".
@cstross I'm not thrilled that two useful tools for analyzing news/opinion nowadays is a combination of "count corpses" and "are they trying to get me to ignore some corpses?" The third useful tool is of course "is it bullshit?"
My personal lithmus test for what consitutes terrorism is that it has to a) involve the use of violence or the threat of violence, b) directed against civilian targets, c) for the purpose of effecting political change.
It's not a precise definition (one can quibble a lot about what does or does not count as a civilian target, for example) but to me it seems to cover the gist of it.
@cstross there is a Wolverine line: "terrorist is what the big army calls the small army".
Not sure i completely agree. But.
Even if there *are* corpses, it probably isn't terrorism. Just plain "murder" will serve in most cases.
@cstross agreed, except I wouldn't constrain "communist" to the 50s.
@cstross The way the word is used, it should mean "does not accept the status quo and expresses as wish to change it", but practically, it means "does not defer to the status I think I should have" more than it means "does not accept the status quo".
I could wish that "fear makes you stupid" was more widely axiomatic.
