Now we know how ISIS persuades jihadi recruits to go on suicide missions. Anything to relieve the boredom.

No Itunes!

Get it?

I just don't understand why anyone could worry that militant Islam is a persuasion poised to encroach on Western Civ. Our worst farts smell better than their richest gardens... Who else could be attracted away from the modern west besides socially and sexually incompetent young men? Does anyone notice that it's never empty-nest housewives, or partner-track attorneys?

Every generation produces assholes, even in modernity. For all we know, it's good for a small number of these children-of-divorce-style punks to go over there now and then, as an example to the rest of their demographic cohort.

There is no shortage of socially and sexually incompetent young men. It took 21 of them to take down the WTC and kill 3000 people. The Nazis and the Communists didn't look like, and weren't much when they started either.

We should air drop them some iPods.

You know, the special 'splodey battery kind. Jihadis die of ennui, 'splodey iPod batteries, but mostly 'splodey iPod batteries.

But take a look at the 9/11 hijackers bios. I see several wanna be lawyers, some engineers, and some guys who were sent along presumably as muscle. They had experience fighting in either Bosnia, or Chechnya, or both instead of university before being recruited for that last job.

As I recall, the current head of al queda is a physician. These are not necessarily poor, disposed, or poorly educated people.

I was concerned that survivors of al queda in Iraq branch would learn from the lessons taught by the US military and improve upon the train wreck that was lead by al-Zarqawi until he assumed room temperature. ISIS seems to be proof of that particular pudding.

Now we'll see if they can govern. If they can, then we will have a serious problem.

In a way this is hilarious. Everyone wants to be a hero, but they are finding out the truth that soldiers have known throughout history -- someone's gotta dig the latrines.

"See, I did join the army, but I joined a different army. I joined the one with the condos and the private rooms." ~ Goldie Hawn (Private Benjamin)

I think jihad is the Muslim version of a pretty girl or artsy guy going to Hollywood and thinking they can make it because they're SPECIAL.

Little do they know the game is rigged, it ain't that fun, and you gotta do boring menial shit like the rest of us.

(It's not just awkward men that go, it's awkward girls too)

Every day, for many years, I've promised myself that this will be the day when I don't pick a fight with someone here for shortsightedness and/or for declining to take the point.

And every day, I break that promise.

Now, this is Wednesday, after an important holiday weekend for my family; and California still glooms, with almost spiritual poignance, under a thicket of winterly rain clouds... They spill their essence loudly onto the thirstless streets of the city outside my window as I type. And the promise has been made.

…Doesn't matter. This is just another day, bitches:

> There is no shortage of socially and
> sexually incompetent young men.

What point are you trying to make?

That we need to worry that such men will become a force we can't deal with? We were going to have to deal with those men anyway; Most will wash out of the army or careers in fast food, moving briskly thence to alcoholism. The whole world produces young guys like that, but most are still too smart to imagine that Islam could fulfill their needs. The vast majority fail no less readily in the Jihad, as these have.

> I see several wanna be lawyers,
> some engineers, and some guys
> who were sent along presumably
> as muscle.

A "wanna be lawyer" in Saudi Arabia is an almost unspeakably pitiful animal. For decades, Saudi Arabia has spoken of itself as if it were a modern nation, even as its (oil-sourced) incomes have fallen from nearly the highest in the world to typical poverty, now distributed across a much larger population. (And not just larger by headcount.)

For the last twenty or thirty years, they've been drunk on American media. A child watching "L.A. Law" on television in Riyadh would have absorbed fantasies of independence, audacity and AGENCY... The ability to make changes in his own life and in the lives of others.

Of course, no such thing happens in Saudi Arabia. (This article describes the patterns of authority and incompetence seen throughout the culture.)

He grows up, realizes it can never happen, and that he's never going to get laid, either. So when he joins Al Qaeda on a suicide mission, that's what he tells them on their admissions "paperwork": 'Yeah, I wanted to a lawyer.'

These men were never going to be competent. Whatever culture they grow into will be largely inconsequential. They don't do law, they don't to logistics, they don't do food or industry or education and finance. Occasionally they can sneak up on an airline hostess and slit her throat, but they can never build their lives into something attractive to anyone who's tasted real freedom... Even if only by dropping out of college after an earnest effort.

> It's not just awkward men that
> go, it's awkward girls too

Yeah, but it doesn't matter. There are a lot fewer of them. (Name three: It'll take a half-hour of Googling.) They'll usually fall into lives to sexual servitude and babymaking for arrogant assholes. In other words —as with the latrine-scrubbing boys— their lives will be pretty much what they'd have been if they'd stayed at home to scrape through their years in the West's industrial scruff.

If young women fly off to join Al Qaeda, they'll not be taking any meaningful skills from Western life to offer as entry fees. And if they did, what difference would it make? Would they be put in command of some attack unit?

Of course not, Purp... They're women.