Do they have the tendrils, or do we?
I’ve been thinking for a while that nerd culture - SF fandom, gaming fandom, comics fandom, hacker culture - are taking over the world. Traditional nerd passtimes (big fantasy novels, comics) are now major smash movie hits. Computer games are a major business. Important politicians (Al Gore, Newt Gingrich) are SF enthusiasts.
So I was reading (thanks to Jim Henley) this essay about Al Qaeda by Marc Sageman (fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, former CIA case officer in Afghanistan, now a forensic psychiatrist), and noticed this profile of Al Qaeda’s membership:
[... T]hree quarters of my sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority-90 percent-came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that’s usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.
Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.
Sound familiar? How about these:
At the time they joined jihad, the terrorists were not very religious. [...]
Eighty percent were, in some way, totally excluded from the society they lived in. Sixty-eight percent either had preexisting friendships with people already in the jihad or were part of a group of friends who collectively joined the jihad together [...]
There is no recruitment, really. In my sample, I have found no case of a recruiter. They’re all volunteers.
And then there’s China Miéville’s speculation that the name Al Qaeda comes from Asimov’s Foundation books.
Makes you wonder what Claude Degler might have wrought in some parallel universe.
So I was reading (thanks to Jim Henley) this essay about Al Qaeda by Marc Sageman (fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, former CIA case officer in Afghanistan, now a forensic psychiatrist), and noticed this profile of Al Qaeda’s membership:
[... T]hree quarters of my sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority-90 percent-came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that’s usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.
Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.
Sound familiar? How about these:
At the time they joined jihad, the terrorists were not very religious. [...]
Eighty percent were, in some way, totally excluded from the society they lived in. Sixty-eight percent either had preexisting friendships with people already in the jihad or were part of a group of friends who collectively joined the jihad together [...]
There is no recruitment, really. In my sample, I have found no case of a recruiter. They’re all volunteers.
And then there’s China Miéville’s speculation that the name Al Qaeda comes from Asimov’s Foundation books.
Makes you wonder what Claude Degler might have wrought in some parallel universe.