On Thursday, zeFrank completely nailed my feelings on the current cultural and political response to the recent thwarting of the terrorist plot to ‘splode lots of planes, with lots of people on them, and the subsequent mayhem caused.
To hear the genius at work, click here. If you’ve never heard him before, persevere… his delivery may disorientate you to begin with, but that’s because he’s smarter than you.
(He follows it up with a cutely self-conscious diss of himself on Friday’s show, and addresses similar issues in a very insightful riff on the American threat measurement system here.)
The always enjoyable, often ascerbic Pigdogfucker covered similar ground this week, here and here, but for me, zeFrank really gets to the point most concisely.
Josh Ellis (another very smart man that I don’t always agree with, but more often do)Â sheds light on related terrorist-based craziness here.
J, my housemate, has been following the ins and outs of what’s been released about the investigation, in the news and on a couple of the related plane-porn forums he reads, and he and I are both amazed at how uncharacteristically bad and speculative early BBC coverage of the situation has been, and conversely, how much better the New York Times website reported on the story.
I don’t really have much to add on the subject, because I am shamed by my inability to collate the data through the spin the way J does, beyond that I spotted the use of the term “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” a few times in the coverage, and couldn’t help but wonder which planet the speaker had been living on for the last few years. Couching everything that happens in this sort of language is deliberately upping the emotional currency of situations that are already emotional enough, and to my mind completely fucking irresponsible. But, uh… zeFrank kind of deals with that issue better and more concisely than I just have.
