Trends of the week

The joke’s on you,Seth and James

MANILA, Philippines - Sony Pictures, recently victimized by a major hacking that unleashed a buffet table of juicy inside info on which the media has been feasting, has pulled its $44 million comedy, The Interview. The film depicts a fictional plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and stars buddies Seth Rogen (also co-writer and co-director) and James Franco — the two Hollywood stars who have the fortitude (and weed supply) to actually risk getting terrorist threats just to make a stupid comedy. But now, the threats have come and they could be real, in which case it shouldn’t be worth the risk, or a joke, in which case it would even be way more ironically hilarious than the movie could possibly be. Either way, it’s bad for the both of them.

World turns its worried eyes on Sydney

The hostage crisis in Sydney this week was quelled after 16 tense hours, but it may live on in our memory as the first high-profile siege to be heavily influenced by social media. The self-proclaimed Muslim cleric who apparently had a history of madness (and who should not be named in this space in the interest of not further contributing to whatever sick form of immortality he was seeking) made his demands known through the hostages’ social media accounts. Bystanders tweeted information, some of it false, like how the flag being held up by hostages was that of the Islamic State. This, of course, runs counter to police procedure, which is predicated upon controlling the situation by controlling information. Unfortunately, we now live in an age where information is everywhere, instant, and volatile. It is no longer completely up to the authorities. But if the public wants to share in their erstwhile exclusive access, then so should it share in their erstwhile exclusive responsibility.

Maybe the terrorists haven’t won

The Taliban’s massacre of schoolchildren and teachers in Peshawar, Pakistan was the kind of tragedy that is so revolting and depressing that it becomes impossible to form any perspective that can even so much as graze optimism. So when Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Taliban shooting victim Malala Yousafzai issued a statement that ended with the words “but we will never be defeated,” a massive rethinking was in order.

They say the spirit of the righteous can never be broken and Malala is obviously a testament to this. But if extremists really believe that they are doing God’s work, then they too must think that they are righteous, however twisted that claim may seem to the rest of the world. The difference of course is that Malala isn’t really on the other side of an armed conflict — she never has and never will kill innocent people. But she is on the other side of an ideology, one that persists despite 9/11 and many other terrorist attacks in the past decade and a half. And even after this school massacre, it’s reasonable to think that libertarianism and modernity will carry on because no civilization in history has ever successfully reversed the natural course of human progress, and it’s probably safe to assume that a bunch of barbaric sickos with suicide bombs won’t be able to buck this trend.

What Malala said got me thinking: what if this “war” is a million times more frustrating to fundamentalists than it is to the rest of the civilized world? What if the post-9/11 sentiment that “the terrorists have won” turns out to be inaccurate? If you continue to cling to and fight for an ideology that remains surrounded and overwhelmed by its antithesis, virtually unaffected and never thrown off course despite all the painstakingly-crafted atrocities you continue to commit, then how can you even be close to “winning?” What if this whole endeavor seems impossibly Sisyphean on the inside after all?

What if the Taliban and ISIS were simply the losers that they actually appear to be?

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