Ohhhh Noes, There Are Fatwas on Facebook!

Ohhhh Noes, There Are Fatwas on Facebook!

War-mongering health-care privatization advocate Niall Ferguson is the sort of person who gets to take to the pages of Newsweek to declare himself appalled that people use the Internet for bad things! “The clash of civilizations would have been easy for the West to win if it had simply pitted the ideas and institutions of the 21st century against those of the seventh. No such luck. In the new mash of civilizations, our most dangerous foes are the Islamists who understand how to post fatwas on Facebook, email the holy Quran, and tweet the call to jihad.”

This is the second most-mockable thing I’ve read in the last 30 days.

Since you asked, this excerpt from Bill James’ Solid Fool’s Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom is still the dumbest thing I’ve read all year. It’s like Malcolm Gladwell Lite, minus the decent research and with a more advanced understanding of how to set up an unreasonable comparison that actually makes no sense.