I Learn New British Slang!

Daniel Davies, talking about whether websites which recruit people to jihad should be shut down or kept open as traps for stupid wannabe terrorists:

So, conclusions? Well, given that this has basically been introduced as an "economist's approach" to the question, the fact that it started off with a breezy piece of cynical contrarianism then oversimplified massively and waffled around the most important question by talking unspecifically about unobservable factors, ought to clue you up to the likelihood that it's not going to end in a useful conclusion. I still think that the Lyrical Terrrorists of this world are most likely the representative recruits to jihadism from blogs and message boards. I also still think that this kind of recruit is likely to be a massive liability to the jihadis (and therefore an asset to us). They'll consist partly of Walter Mitty gobshites who will be useful as flaming radioactive beacons to the intelligence services, partly of bottle-merchants who will collapse missions at crucial stages and partly of politicians and narcissists who will divert vast amounts of jihadi energy into pointless internal feuding.

First of all, read the "Lyrical Terrorists" link. It very starkly illustrates the difference between U.S. and U.K. laws on freedom of expression. The short version is, in the U.K. it's a crime to download things like "The Al Qaeda Manual" from the web. In the U.S., it is expressive activity that would be almost unqualifiedly protected by the Constitution.

Second, the words I learned:

Gobshite - 1. Loud-mouthed person who talks a lot, but nothing with any value - as in shite coming out of their gob. 2. liam gallagher.

Bottle Merchant - Male prostitute specializing in anal copulation, usually as the receiver.

Comments

[dsquared]

good God! You learn something new every day.

"Bottle and glass" = "arse" is Cockney rhyming slang, but I was using "bottle merchants" not so much in the literal sense that Urbandictionary has it there, but "those who are prone to losing their bottle" (to "lose one's bottle", to "bottle out" = "to lose one's nerve", literally "to shit oneself"). I'm quite pleased with the connotation of male prostitution though as it makes the overall post ruder. cheers, dd.

[Mithras]

And ruder is almost always funnier.

On the substantive point, not only should these websites be allowed to exist, the police and intelligence services should set up some of their own, identify the shitheads most likely to enlist, and follow them around, both online and otherwise.

[dsquared]

This is actually done - it's even done so often that they have a name for the practice - "pseudogangs". Some people think that as much as half of militant Loyalist political groups in the 1980s and 90s in Northern Ireland were pseudogangs of one sort or another.