Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts

14 June 2017

June

What is it about the month of June?

What comes readily to mind with June is when I feel really bluesy… like really. I'd thought about it and it has been recurring, but I haven't been able to trace the cause.

But this June, with the terrorist attacks, and anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre, and then the UPS murder-suicide-ish, the London building fire, the Virginia baseball game shooting, and any more things that have made major news in rapid succession… It's almost wow-ing if it weren't that the world has a lot more examples of thing that happen every second of every day.

We can't keep track of them all, but if it were possible I'd love to know if June has some kind of edge in the tragedies department.

02 September 2014

IS/Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL?

We've been hearing about them almost incessantly for the better part of the year. They'd seemingly started calling themselves the Arabic equivalent of ISIS, and then later "decided" to call themselves instead Islamic State, reasons in the news being they're exerting independence and individuality apart from Syria, the Levant, and Iraq.

Some media outfits, like Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera, and elements of the BBC, had followed suit and called them IS or "the Islamic State group", still acknowledging some still call them ISIS or ISIL. I've never quite understood concretely why some elect to call them one way or another.
American news outlets like CNN and Fox News still predominately call them ISIS, and I think it may be partly because the US government in general still calls them that as well.

Is it perhaps to deny them the "satisfaction" of hearing people address them with the name they wish people to call them? I wouldn't doubt that's a probability, but there hasn't seemed to be any discussion on that. It's also seemed there are some who had gotten so used to calling them ISIS, or ISIL, that they just continue calling them that since all of it is generally coterminous.

It reminds me of something else I'd brought up in the past about maps that showed Crimea as still part of Ukraine rather than, at the least, showing it as a disputed area that happened to have had a referendum deciding to cede themselves to Russia.

I believe they should do both, at the very least, much like Deutsche Welle has done ("the Islamic State, also called ISIS"). That seems to be the fairest thing in my view.