Sex, Lies, and Social Media

by Kim Van Sickler

This month I'm veering in a new direction with this bloghop. Insecure readers. 


http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

ISIS recruiters are preying on our insecure, idealistic, rudderless youth.

The last thing they care about is honesty. They will say anything to recruit gullible people. And they know the place to spin their web is social media.

Take, for instance, these Q & As with ISIS recruiters on ask.com, designed to show how ISIS is misunderstood because their members are really just like us, except with a dash more romance.

Submitted question: What is your favorite dessert?
ISIS recruiter's answer: Hot apple pie with ice cream on top.

Submitted question: How do you maintain your beard?
ISIS recruiter's answer: Shampoo, scented oils, and a comb.

Submitted question: Have u ever fallen in love?
ISIS recruiter's answer: The day I fell in love with Islam.

ISIS illustrates the sad fact that if you tweet and post enough BS, some people will believe.

It's hard enough to imagine ISIS recruits naive boys and men to fight for them: 20,000 foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq since last summer. 4,000 of those fighters come from Europe, 100 from the US.

But what is beyond belief is that ISIS is able to reach isolated, bored young women and convince them, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, they will be doing a noble and adventurous thing by giving up everything they know to become a part of the glorious Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria. Current estimates are at least 550 girls/women have been enticed through this rhetoric.

Last week three affluent and well-educated teenage girls from Britain disappeared into Turkey and are believed to have been smuggled into Syria to connect with ISIS.

Three British teenagers who disappeared last week on their way to join ISIS.

In October 2014, three teenage girls from Denver were apprehended on their way to ISIS.

Hundreds of women from western countries have made it to ISIS. They have married ISIS fighters and some even fight alongside their husbands.

But the reality is far different from the promises, as two Austrian teenagers, who are married to ISIS fighters and reportedly pregnant and desperate to come home have discovered.

According to a recent United Nations report, here is the reality: ISIS confines women to their homes. Detailed rules determine what women wear, who they socialize with and where they work. Girls older than ten must be fully covered. Girls as young as 13 are forced to marry ISIS soldiers. Girls who aren't recruited are routinely captured and forced into sex slavery. Females are not allowed to consort with men outside of their immediate family. Women who break the rules are lashed, or for more serious infringements, stoned to death.

It's a deadly mistake to trust everything you read. We've got insecure readers looking for fulfillment. And very secure writers reaching out to tell them exactly what they yearn to hear.

Blogging about blogging

by Rich Wallace

It took e-mail quite a while to win me over. What was the big deal? My preference was always to type a letter (or better yet, hand-write one in a dark room by candlelight), drop it in the mailbox, and in ten or twenty days, if you’re lucky, you might get a response.

And instant messaging? That was for the young jet-setters! Not me.

When my sons went away to college, I found instant messaging was the best possible way to keep in touch on a near-daily basis. (A couple of days ago my sister, Lynda, gently told me that no one says “instant messaging” anymore. It’s “texting.”)

And I didn’t used to think blogging would amount to anything much. Now I blog in four places, read lots of other people’s blogs, and find it both an interesting and creative thing to do.

I blog on my own website (which is being totally overhauled and will be geared primarily to the kids who read my books); on Goodreads (where I have at least two readers who remind me when I’ve been remiss and haven’t posted anything for a few weeks); here, where I share the forum with several great people, most of whom post a lot more frequently than I do; and starting last week, on a site called Active Happiness (activehappiness.com), which I helped create with my sister, Lynda, and my wife, Sandra. We each blog there, we do a (usually) hilarious three-way conversational blog, and we offer lots of other stuff about the science and realities of being happy and staying that way. I hope you’ll visit us there.

The immediacy of blogging and social media took a little getting used to for me, and in recent weeks it has distracted me from the fiction writing that is my bread and butter. I do nearly all of my writing at the computer, but my best ideas have always come while walking by the beach or in the woods, jotting down scattered notes on an index card. The world is moving quickly. It won’t stop to let me off, but I do find myself longing for an oasis. I know my next novel won’t get under way until I find the time to do that.