In the midst of a rambling blog post arguing that a large terrorist attack on American soil before November “puts Trump in the White House for certain,” former Twitter activist Andrea Hardie makes a rather startling pronouncement: She would support nuking Mecca if she thought it would be an “effective” way to strike a blow against Islam.
No, really:
I don’t think Trump will nuke Mecca or anywhere else, for the simple reason that it won’t be effective. Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of lives and ended the war decisively, because it brought Japan to its knees. Nuking Mecca won’t bring the Islamic world to its knees – quite the opposite. Trump isn’t going to do it for that reason. If nuking Mecca stood a chance of being effective, I’d be fully in support of the measure.
Emphasis mine.
In addition to being the birthplace of Muhammad and the most sacred city for the world’s 1.57 billion Muslims, Mecca is home to roughly two million residents, and the number of people in the city “more than triple[s] every year during the hajj (“pilgrimage”) period,” as Wikipedia notes.
In other words, Ms. Hardie, better known on the Internet under her pseudonyms Janet Bloomfield and JudgyBitch, would support the murder of as many as six million people of a particular religious persuasion if she thought it would be an effective way to rid the world of that religion.
Six million, where have I heard that number before?
Despite being permabanned from Twitter, Hardie is still listed on A Voice for Men as the site’s “Director [of] Social Media,” and she was one of the speakers at last month’s International Conference on Men’s Issues in London, organized by AVFM and Mike Buchanan of the UK’s spectacularly unsuccessful Justice for Men and Boys party.
I’m not quite sure how murdering three million Muslim men and boys — in addition to another three million women and girls — would enhance the rights of men, or boys, or anyone.
@ sinkable john
No; but after a quick Google I really want to. It sounds intriguingly like a kid’s TV show from the 70s called “The Changes” (that scared the crap out of me). I wonder if it was a direct influence.
Re: dirty bombs
One would cause panic, but it’s the psychosocial effect that’s the real danger. For most designs, if you’re close enough for the ‘dirty’ bit to be a real worry then the ‘bomb’ bit has already killed you.
@pavlov’s house
Good post, thank you.
I’m not a Stalinist by any account, but you can’t ignore the Red Army’s contributions to endings the war.
As for the use of nuclear weapons, well, the ‘nuclear genie’ isn’t going back in the bottle. No one knew the devastating effects nuclear weapons would have. There are no winners. I support the decommissioning of Trident because it’s not only an obsolete Cold War relic, but I don’t think we should fight on those terms again.
The religious right are odd in that they are happy to vote for increases in the nuclear arsenal as they want their Armageddon. Plus, it’s a bit confusing that they are Pro Israel, as they see it as the home of God’s Chosen People ™ but are also rampant anti Semites who blame the Jews for Christ’s crucifixion. They believe in ‘replacement theology’ whereas the Jewish people are the ‘withered vine’ and the christians have taken their place in prophecy.
@ej
Do you believe that anybody actually landed on the moon? I know its a bit of an old chestnut, but the USA may well have faked the moon landing to basically reassure the public that they were winning against big bad Russia. Plus, a success meant more public support and more money which could be circumvented into the military budget rather than used for science.
I had a Barjavel phase when I was around 14, and read a lot of his novels then. I think my favorite was L’Enchanteur (The Wizard). Oh, and the guy lived in my town, which is probably its only redeeming quality (aside from beautiful public gardens and car traffic so lazy it’s basically the safest place in the country for pedestrians).
Re: bomb.That’s the thing, in the end it’s nothing more than a conventional explosive with some scare strapped to it. We already know they have conventional explosives. That’s a fear we’ve learned to live with. And the psychosocial effect is really a one time thing : as soon as people realize that the targeted area didn’t in fact turn into a barren wasteland of deadly and/or mutation-inducing radiations, well it’s back to business as usual. And it’s never gonna work again.
Additionally, they can’t even threaten to use a dirty bomb, that would be even more ineffective. People would start doing their homework and would realize that it’s all bark and about as much bite as your regular garden variety suicide bomber – except this one better have an appropriately shielded (and extremely conspicuous) container, otherwise he’s probably gonna keel over from all the radiation before the device can even be set to detonate. It’s pretty ironic that such a bomb would actually be more dangerous before detonation than after, and thus more dangerous to the people using it than the people targeted.
@Virgin Mary : don’t be ridiculous. The moon landing wasn’t faked.
@ohlmann
Ok, if you say so. But a lot f people think it was.
@ sinkable john
Some friends who have to consider that kind of thing pointed out that they’d inflicted more damage on themselves with the cigarettes they’d smoked during the meeting than if they’d actually set one off.
And yeah, the terrorists would probably do more harm to themselves just scraping the luminous paint off old alarm clocks or dismantling a second hand X-Ray machine than they would to their victims.
Heh, as an intellectual excercise I’ve just been pricing up a small yield fission device. Some interesting phone calls.
“No, I don’t need the whole tank, just the barrel”
It’s scary cheap. The dearest thing was a lathe with a hood, but someone has one they’d let me use. Good job U235 is hard to get.
@Alan
Didn’t they supposedly steal some fissile material about a year and a half ago ? I seem to remember it was “not enough to build a nuke, but enough for a dirty bomb”. That’s what I was referring to. Apparently just carrying the stuff around, out of its container, would kill the guy, but not much else.
If they have had what they need to make a dirty bomb for a year and a half, but nobody has heard from it ever since, it probably means they’ve realized that it was a pretty dumb idea in the first place.
@Mary
A lot of people, the smartest people, say the moon landing was faked. These people, they call up. They call up and say ‘this whole land on the moon thing, fake. All fake’ they say. Smart people, tremendous people, they call up and say this. ‘Fake’. Look at the flags, look at the shadows. Lyndon. Johnson. He fakes it to beat the Russians. Like the Russians. Good relationship with the Russians. All to beat the Russians. They faked it. Faked it
And scene. Your comment inspired me to write a bit of Trump… Not fan fiction. Hatefic? Sure, go with that. Anyway, couldn’t resist
This is very OT, but does anyone remember ‘cook my burrito’ tattooed swole guy from earlier this year?
He just popped up in a Taboola ad here XD XD
@Alan, @Sinkable John, sorry to interrupt – please carry on 😛
@Axe – I was just waiting, thinking, ‘where is Axe? I wonder what he’ll say?’
Thank you for not disappointing 😀
@Alan:
Don’t use uranium-235 for your hypothetical dirty bomb, use strontium-90. It’s more easily available, being a waste product of civilian reactors, and is far nastier.
Don’t use it in real life, of course.
@Virgin Mary:
Yes I do. There are two reasons why I believe that.
(As an aside, there is a common astrophysics joke that the moon landing was faked on a sound-stage on Mars.)
1) I’ve done the maths for what it would take to carry out that journey and it was entirely within the capabilities that people had at the time.
The science of space travel had been developed in the 1910s and 1920s by Tsolkiovsky and Hohmann, amongst others. They never went to space but they worked out the maths of it, which is what I learned in university and what I use when I play Kerbal Space Program.
The engineering of space travel isn’t hard, once you’re out of the atmosphere. Getting out of the atmosphere is the difficult part, which requires tremendous research into rocketry and high-altitude jet design. Fortunately this research had already been done by the 1960s, much of it during World War 2 for military purposes.
Once you have those two things solved, you’re good to go. There’s nothing mysterious about a Saturn-V rocket.
2) When the Apollo astronauts went up there they left various things on the moon, including a reflector. If you line a laser up just right then you can bounce it off the reflector and get the signal back about two and a half seconds later (as we’d expect, given the distance of the moon.)
One of my favourite pieces of conceptual art is a piece called Moon. It’s a recording of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which has been turned into an analog data signal and then bounced off the moon. When you hear it there’s a lot of noise in the signal, which is really cool once you realise that that’s actual moon noise. It manages to perfectly combine music and science, and comments wonderfully on the distinction between how humans think about the moon, and what it actually is.
Hello.
Bon anniversaire, Sinkable John.
—–
No ! No twin braids ! This woman is an insult to twin braids.
This fact apart, it is astounding how many persons with no clue or grasp on international geopolitic can profess in term of ludicrous “ideas”.
Well, it would be less a problem if they were not to broadcast them all around the web. After all, who never had “remake the world” while chatting with friends (especially if alcool is involved) ?
But saying that, and furthermore, being proud of it, it is maybe a fair lack of awareness. Unless, of course, if it some kind of nuptial parade to lure people with similar minds and way of thinking and thereafter engender a large family of Internet Trolls.
Have a nice day.
@ mish
Heh, it’s probably best you bring the topic back to more salient matters before John and I end up in Gitmo 🙂
Having said that….
@ John
There’s all sorts of rumours about ‘MUF’ (as I believe it’s called in the trade). The fact no-one has ever used such stuff makes me sceptical about the stories. Although it could be as Olhmann says and terrorists are just useless.
@ EJ
Yeah, that stuff is really nasty; but I’m old school so I was looking at an actual nuclear explosion (hypothetically in case anyone from Bude or Cheltenham is listening in)
Also, I only know the critical mass for U. You’re good at science and maths though, so…… 🙂
On the other hand, faking it, well that would’ve been an entirely different endeavor. I believe someone or other recently demonstrated that they didn’t have the technical means to pull that off. In other words, it was easier to go to the moon than to fake it.
UNLESS you fake the faking itself…
As an aside : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw
ETA : @Alan
I don’t really know, it’s just that the theft made the news at some point. To be fair, they probably didn’t have a clue as to what to do with it, or maybe just stealing it was the threat itself.
@occasional reader
Merci beaucoup 🙂
@ Virgin Mary
There was a lot of politics in the space race, but even at the time the Russians acknowledged the Amercians had got to the Moon (they were very sporting about it). The Apollo programme is very well documented. The original planning documents are wonderful in their 1960s optimism. They’re full of things like:
“To be built of a material (which will need to be invented) of the following specifications…”
To be fair, Mitchell & Webb are so good they deserve to be posted twice in one thread 😀
Regarding the moon landing – not only was it within the technology of the day, but I’ve also read things by people involved in films at the time, that it was not within film technology at the time to fake it
@Alan
Ninja’d your link !
@jefrir
Ninja’d your comment !
I’m on a roll.
An intriguing aspect of the moon landing technology is that the Gemini spacecraft (which were launched before Apollo) were more advanced than, and built after, the actual Apollo craft.
(There were good reasons for that)
ETA: @ John
Our own little space race and you beat me to it; how appropriate 🙂
@Mish
Blast! I’ve become predictable. Tho, in all honesty, that likely happened some months ago ?
@John
Love those conspiracy sketches. And you (and jefrir) are right about the faked film being harder than a faked rocket. It took another 7-8 years for A New Hope to come out. And even that was considered an additional few years ahead of its time
Take that, Britain.
Practice for Boris Johnson and his haircut’s fantasized Cold War vs Europe.
We can also have guitar stand-offs.
http://img.news.sina.com/world/p/2013/0326/U47P5029T2D575701F24DT20130327094527.jpg
@ axe
Eh? I thought it was “Long long ago”?
(I’ll get me coat)
Yes, the Apollo missions to the moon happened. I agree with the comments others have made in support of that.
But the accomplishments of the Apollo-Soyuz test mission is amazing in its own right. Even if not the most technically challenging of Apollo-era flights it was amazing in terms of the international cooperation.
@Alan
Off the floor, Mr Harmon!