- Sputnik International
World
Get the latest news from around the world, live coverage, off-beat stories, features and analysis.

US State Department Crowd Sources Fight Against ‘Violent Extremism’

© Flickr / Tom ArthurDepartment of State building
Department of State building - Sputnik International
Subscribe
The US State Department took to Twitter to ask social media users how best to defeat “violent extremism.” It wasn’t long before the responses garnered some snark and even a little trolling by a sitting US senator.

The State Department asked people to share their solutions following a three-day summit at the White House this week on Countering Violent Extremism. It's apparently such a tough issue that State has figured out that they simply don't have the brainpower to solve it themselves. So why not put it to net denizens?

The answer as to why that was probably not a great idea lies in the responses. One called it for what it is.

Some people were not happy to be asked to do someone else's job they're actually paying them for.

Not surprisingly, it opened up a Twitter tirade against the commander-in-chief.

Others were equally unhelpful to State, though many in the Department of Defense probably wish this was possible.

In that very vein, neo-con Senator Tom Cotton offered some suggestions.

However, all of Cotton's proposals really sifted down to one concept:  bomb, bomb… bomb, bomb IS.

One of Cotton's followers took it even further, apparently fine with the idea of killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people as collateral damage.

However, to be fair to the senator from Arkansas, he's fine with an invasion putting some boots on the ground as well.

Of course, the 37-year-old Army veteran was only married last year and doesn't have children who would be part of that invasion.

These are probably not the types of responses the State Department was looking for, but the strategy does beg the question:  What else can we crowd source? A result of recent budgets cuts, the IRS has fewer agents to process returns. Why not put those out to tweeters? "@IRS: Hey, anyone want to process this return for John Smith?"

The Secret Service has done such a notoriously bad job of protecting the White House, how about crowd sourcing for that? They could make a Facebook group event with calendars for caring citizens to show up at the gates at scheduled times to protect the president and his family.

Then there's the TSA. That one should be easy to recruit for:  "Come gawk at nude people on X-rays!"

Then there's the crowd sourcing for national defense.

Oh, wait. That's right. They already did that. That's why we now have the military industrial complex.

Newsfeed
0
To participate in the discussion
log in or register
loader
Chats
Заголовок открываемого материала