I'm not sure how possible it is to catch up at all if the posts have to correlate with the dates of the assignments, but here's a word on "Terrorists"

The difference between freedom fighters and terrorists is, theoretically, that terrorists fight by wreaking havoc among the civilian population as much as they partake in straightforward military conflict. Now, the term "terrorist" is often applied to honest revolutionaries these days, so the word's definition has been a little obscured. I don't think the American Revolutionaries favored taking and murdering civilian hostages, just as I think there are certain terrorist groups out there whose ultimate goal is the downfall of non-Islamic western civilization. (That doesn't make the term "Islamofascist" any less completely retarded). The line's getting awfully blurry between the two, though. I guess that's how it works when you're a global superpower: everybody opposed to you ends up being perceived as a threat to your supremacy one way or another, and you end up fighting back with semantic b.s. like this, with full-blown military invasions, with "Freedom Fries," etc. To tie this into the Pogues discussion in my next post: if the Birmingham Pub bombings were in fact perpetrated by Irish nationalists (or any sort of political activists), that is terrorism. It's an attack on the civilian population to make a political point, which might irritate the British government enough to have arrested and imprisoned six innocent men "for being Irish at the wrong place and at the wrong time," to quote Shane MacGowan. But it won't lead to the establishment of a unified Irish nation. Haphazard tactics like that give the Cause--whatever cause you're fighting for--a bad name. Remember the Weathermen, back in the 60s and 70s? Okay, technically I don't remember them, but I've become aware over the last several years that they existed. The whole thing just seems embarrassing in retrospect: a handful of kids with guns, weed, and a pipe dream of violently overthrowing the government. They went further than your average dreadlocked college student with a Che Guevara t-shirt (I'm surprised those still exist considering how stereotypical it is), but their most significant accomplishment was freeing Tim Leary from prison. The revolution may not be televised, but it also almost certainly will not revolve around Timothy fucking Leary, okay? The point being this: if you can't achieve change by working within the system--and I can accept that, with the system proving as resistant to positive change as anything really can be--then at least think things through better. Don't kill civilians; it just damages your public image and makes it so that the government can't possibly acquiesce to your goals for P.R.'s sake.

Non-related:
I haven't had many chances at all to use the computer at home during the last week or so; my extended family's been in town for a funeral, some of them staying in the room with my family's computers. Not that that changes the fact that I screwed up to begin with by constantly forgetting about this whole blog all semester, of course.