So the Unabomber of the Obama era (or should that be the Tea Party era?), Joe Stack, flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. And there’s a rant on the intertubes to justify his deed.
But, it’s not terrorism, apparently.
raving black lunatic asks a series of questions, including but not limited to this one:
How can you fly a plane into a building out of spite, and have folks call it “suicide by plane?” That’s like calling it “suicide by portable chest bomb.”
Though for a truly bizarre discussion, you might want to consult Australia’s own Catallaxy Files.
Long time no see, delightful Kim. Of course it isn’t terrorism when it’s a whitey.
This reminds me of discussion I’ve been reading on another forum about the FBI’s final report on the Anthrax mailings from a few years ago.
Just got back from Catallaxy’s thread….
I think there is a discussion to be had about the limits of legitimate protest and political violence.
Christ. Do we look as insane to them I wonder?
This was a very tribal “payback” type event, and about as pointless.
I just read the first comment in the post equating Joe Stack’s act with the foundation of the US and decided that reading any further would serve no purpose. My head hurts just from that idiocy.
Hell, now, he weren’t no terrist. He was a good ol’ boy got dang riled up crazy by the goddam Fedrul revenuer types.
@1 – Hi, patrickg! I’ve been in the U S of A!
Welcome back, Kim. I’d thought you were out of it.
Very funny discussion at Catallaxy.
Agree with Steve @3. On the other hand, I don’t view this at terrorism at all. Joe Stack (at least as far as I have read) was not part of any co-ordinated campaign of violence against the IRS. He seems to have been just some nutter who lost the plot completely. Of course, there’s probably an argument that at least some of the so-called “terrorist” attacks that have occurred during the last five years fall into the same category…
Gotta watch out for these software engineer types.
I said a while back that Scott Roeder’s murder of George Tiller was terrorism. He was part of a movement seeking political change, he saw violence as a means to that change, and he targeted civilians. I think that’s pretty cut and dried.
Timothy McVeigh was too nutty even for most all survivalists, but he had at least one accomplice and a political aim. He wanted to overthrow the government, and hoped to inspire others to do the same. Terrorism fits.
However, a lone crank with a specific personal grievance isn’t a movement. Brenda Ann Spencer wanted to liven up her Mondays, but her cause didn’t attract popular support.
Stack’s (less spittle-flecked than I expected) rant has something to please every extremist. From anti-taxation full circle to anti-capitalism. It’s illustrative of what happens when you focus exclusively on the things you hate instead of love. It doesn’t seem as though he had any ambition of changing policies, just avenging them – his cause died with his tantrum.
IMNSHO this seems more of a classic (attempted) mass murder motivated by sheer spite, as in this case.
I promise to make an extra effort not to fester at the idiotic 40kmh school limits on Springvale Road tomorrow morning.
The “embedded software consultant” career profile is a worry. Having worked on and off in this industry for thirty years I can tell you that IT self-selects obsessive cranky types prone to tantrums. Not me of course, and I’d have proof if only those corrupt bureaucrats hadn’t covered it up, but I’ll make them pay!
I kid. I kid.
seriously, you had me at the title.
Thank you for the link to Raving Black Lunatic
I’m sure our libertarian friend here would be as calm about the live reenactment of great American Exceptionalist Foundation Myths if it was an indigenous radical or black militant killing US government employees for land rights, a mule and 40 acres, etc.
What with the US of A being a consequence of the largest land grabs and most important slave trade in history. Gotta respect that glorious tapestry of history, can’t start getting all judgmental when patriots want to bring it all to life (caveat: please don’t kill anyone, glorious reenactors).
Good to read your stuff again Kim.But keep away from Catallaxy. It’s bad for your health.
Sepia Mutiny was quick off the mark on this as well.
http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/006108.html
Welcome back, Kim.
I’d argue that terrorism requires a sustained campaign – Unabomber for example was a lone white whacko like Stack but by mailing his bombs out he was creating an atmosphere of terror that I don’t think lone suicide bombers can create, being one-offs.
Joe Stack has a lot more in common with Amy Bishop and Nidal Malik Hussein and that dude who blew up the insurance office in Darwin than say Ted Kasczynski or The Weathermen.
Catallaxy: proof that it is possible to type without opposable thumbs.
The catch-cry of the Revolution was “No taxation without representation.”
The catch-cry of the Revolutions was not “No taxation.”
Catallaxy: interpreting the world two wors at a time.
Software engineers wouldn’t make a bomb. That’s hardware, and you cannot restore hardware from a backup tape when the latest mod blows up. The plane was just off-the-shelf kit.
Now a TRUE software engineer would have done a software mod on the plane, programming it to fly to the chosen point without being in it, or, got just as much catharsis from doing it in a simulation. (In line with the joke “How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None – it’s a hardware problem. How many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None – you can emulate everything in software”.)
But I’ll admit, I can sort of see the point of the Catallaxy discussion if they were highlighting the irony of the act – which might point to the reasons it ISN’T viewed as a terrorist act in the US – labelling this idiot a terrorist would mean that the US was founded by terrorism. (Of course, the real hypocrisy comes with things like the King David Hotel bombing as part of a movement to create a state.)
I’m seeing a disturbing similarity between the Catallaxy post and Gore Vidal on McVeigh. Truly the world has gone mad.
just joining the chorus – yay, you’re back!
Sadly, huge swathes of the American Left have always been suckered by the US frontier mythos and it’s glorification of violence, much more than the Australian Left and our local (admittedly somewhat milquetoast) variant. Here it’s just anachronistic background colour, e.g. the legacy of the 1890s. There it’s someone like Vidal sincerely believing McVeigh to be like the noble warriors who took up arms against the Tyrant King George/Lincoln/the gilded age robber barons. Sure, he’s alone in pursuing the cause of that particular murderer, but he ties it all to a version of populist history, and to great dramatic effect.
Because in America might-makes-right has been always been very attractive to plenty of progressives. Not just in an organised way, like the Weathermen or the IWW. Hunter S Thompson didn’t have a terrorist manifesto, but that didn’t stop him from spending his final decades living as a psychotic would-be cop killer, for instance.
Ok. So some of those apprehended for having an intent to commit terrorist acts have been ‘loners’ who aren’t members of any organised group, but have been ‘radicalised’ by reading stuff on the intertubes. But this guy is a ‘lone nut’, despite having presumably read oodles of wingnuttery on the intertubes?
@19 – isn’t Gore Vidal more of an old style small r republican? Sort of a Jeffersonian Democrat? While there’s a lot of overlap between his critique of American foreign policy, and say, Noam Chomsky’s (to cite someone who can be identified as an American leftie), he starts from a position where Truman was the evil genius who continued war era collectivism and destroyed the remnants of ‘small owner democracy’, etc. So, while I really abhor what he had to say about McVeigh, I think he’s probably closer in spirit to the American libertarians than the US left.
This thread really needs Daggett.
“This was a very tribal “payback” type event”
SaTP.
I’d disagree. This has nothing to do with “payback”or tribalism.
Tribal “payback” is a complicated system of law and justice that exists among some tribal communities. It is part of a culture and is specific to that culture. In the same way that mediation in some disputes is part of ours.
The Tea Baggers are not a tribe, far from it, and there is no definite law that the IRS broke to inspire “payback”. Nor is there an option to negotiate another form of compensation in place of the violent payback.
Frankly your comment is as racist as the attitude that means no one is calling this a terrorist attack.
White man commits violent act. SaTP can’t even frame this act in his head without reference to some archetypal “black savagery”.
Until the Catallaxy mob denounce this terrorist in exactly the correct words and tone then they are in league with terrorists and can be shouted down with cries of “terrorist!” at any and all junctures.
Just to give the mental right the same treatment they meted out to everyone 2001-8.
Also I demand to see their birth certificates.
wow. I just read that thread at Catallaxy. I think severing with LP was a signal psychic moment for CL – marking his decline in outright barking insanity. He sounds like a slavering racist psychopath, baying for Palestinian blood.
You know….sometimes I find the nets disturbing.
IMO Vidal is more Bryanite than Jeffersonian, as he realises that the pure agrarian utopia thing is too remote from contemporary America. I suppose that confronts us with the fact that the PPs gave America Mother Jones and the FDA on the one hand, and the Scopes monkey trial & Prohibition on t’other.
Though I think I should clarify what I wrote above to say that the ‘huge swathes of the American Left’ and ‘plenty of progressives’ I refer to normally don’t believe in doing actual harm—it’s just that I believe too many US progressives accept the normality of latent violence in the American psyche. Michael Moore’s confessions in ‘Bowling for Columbine’ about his younger gun-nut days is an even better example of that than the madness of Doctor Thompson.
And in pop culture there are plenty of Leftwingers who celebrate this violence. Vidal himself wrote something which has always struck me as explaining why Hollywood is what it is, even after undergoing the influence of world cinema and auteurism:
`I ran into the Wise Hack not long ago–in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Where else? He is now very old, very rich: he owns a lot of Encino. Although he will no longer watch a movie made after 1945, he still keeps an eye on “the product.” He knows all the deals. “One funny thing,” he said, wheezing from emphysema–not asthma. “You know, all these hotshot young directors they got now? Well, every last one of them is a fat sissy who likes guns. And every last one of them has those thick glasses and the asthma.” But before I could get him to give me the essential data, as Mrs. Wharton used to say, he had been swept into the Polo Lounge by the former managing editor of Liberty.
I must say that I thought of the Wise Hack’s gnomic words as I read Mr. McCullough’s account of TR’s asthma attacks…’
“Fat sissies who like guns”? TR, the Left’s favourite Republican? Howard Dean saying he wants to appeal to rednecks with Confederate flags in the back of their pickups? Gore Vidal celebrating both Billy the Kid and Tim McVeigh? It all kind of blurs in together for me.
Thanks for fleshing out Vidal’s political leanings Nick and Mark. I had written it down to a combustible mix of his own anti government feelings and the thrilling and vanity inflating experience of corresponding with an infamous inmate.
TR is Teddy Roosevelt?
Good to have you back, Kim.
I know it’s a backward theocracy and all that – but surely they got the internet by now?
@25 –
Fair comment, Nickws, though it’s the same tradition, really.
@26 – it may be that too, su! And yep, TR = Teddy Roosevelt.
He’s probably part of this pack of nutters.
http://www.northbynorthwestern.com/2010/02/69073/why-you-shouldnt-care-about-the-tea-party/
CL used to be part of LP? That’s disturbing.
He used to comment here, sg. He was never an LP blogger.
@27 – I didn’t think you would want to read all about Obama and stuff!
If you think there’s discussion to be had about a someone who kills government employees with his privately owned plane over a tax problem then, well …
Craig Mc
a lone crank with a specific personal grievance isn’t a movement
If they’re an accordion player looking for a death metal band, yes. But personally I think Mr Stack rocked up at a jazz bar with his clarinet.
Terrorism requires anticipation. This was straight out attempted murder without warning. There is more terrorism in a person, more usually a man, who murders his/her whole family (because it is usually a climax of previous events) than there was in this taxation office event. To be terrorism there needs to be the probability of multiple events.
For balance, I worked for a while with a guy whose wife took herself and the 3 kids for a drive one day and drove head long into a solid wall at speed. They all survived, but with sad injuries. That was not terrorism either, it was mental distress triggered by post natal depression.
Coincidentally, in 1966 Austin Texas was the location of the first of the famous mass shootings in the United States, perpetrated by Charles Whitman, a man with issues and a brain tumour.
He killed several people with a high-powered rifle.
More interesting was the contribution of a prototypical wingnut shockjock. He announced to his gun-toting audience that the University of Texas had been taken over by Communists. Predictably, said gun enthusiasts rushed to the campus and started taking pot shots at the tower in the belief that they were the front line in global struggle.
Were these loonies organised? Yes and no.
Were these loonies terrorists? Probably.
Craig Mc
a lone crank with a specific personal grievance isn’t a movement
Let me add to Anthony’s reply – if you’ve followed the utterances and slogans of the Teabagger movement over the last few months, you’d certainly have noticed them digging up old quotations from US history to rave about the responsibility of the loyal subject to overthrow a tyrannical government – paraphrasing here – but the anti-taxation Right certainly has made “overthrow the government” noises from time to time, as well as their enabling supporters such as cartoonist Chris Muir, shock jocks and the like. If these kind of statements had been made by Middle Eastern immigrants, rather than permed and check-panted white oldsters and their prematurely aged young, I’m sure they would not have got the free pass that they have hitherto.
I’m surprised Dave Neiwert/ Orcinus hasn’t written anything about this, but he seems to be busy and probably away from the computer (unless he posted since I last looked last night Aust daylight saving time.)
I sure hope that the shockjock went to jail. Therein, though, is the US’s confused history with the Minutemen, a one off time in history when a tactic of individual effort protecting the nation, with a 200 year hangover of self defence paranoia.
A view not shared by the police officer who confronted the mass killer. In his memoirs the officer spoke highly of the civilians who engaged in return fire, and stated that the numbers killed would have been much higher had the killer not be subject to suppressing fire.
But then, what would the cop on the scene know? Turns out those public spirited citizens, who put themselves within range of the killer, and were credited as lifesavers, were really loonies, probably terrorists.
Many of the Austin police were loonies too — racist loonies at that.
But then again, racist hick bigots do tend to stick up for each other.
I think we’re all reaching for a dichotomy that doesn’t exist, Leinad.
Were our own homegrown quasi-radicalised loners Martin Bryant and Julian Knight terrorists? They certainly pre-planned their acts, and certainly inspired terror. How about the deranged Henry O’Farrell who shot Prince Alfred at Balmoral beach? How about the Comancheros and Bandidos in Crystal St Leichhardt—how different are they except in scale and competence to outfits like the Mara Salvatrucha or the Mexican Zetas? Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine? Whatever happened to the original justifications for terror, and how did it ever get applied to acts of violence by individuals against the State rather than the reverse?
The whole argument is just an illustration of the poverty of the “terrorism” trope to explain political and other large-scale violence.
Liam #41 ‘Whatever happened to the original justifications for terror, and how did it ever get applied to acts of violence by individuals against the State rather than the reverse?’
The word terror in not enough to encompass all the varieties of terror. Each individual act is part of a sequence which at one stage is anti-state terror: as with the Deir Yassin Massacre of 1948 undertaken by two extremist, underground, paramilitary groups, the Irgun (Etzel) and Lehi or the Stern Gang, both aligned with the right-wing revisionist Zionist movement. At a later point the same terrorist movement engages in state terror, as described in the recent piece on Israeli women soldiers. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/israels-women-soldiers-share-stories-of-hate-and-despair-20100216-o5or.html
Joe Stack’s actions may become the first of many such actions leading to the US civil war of 2010-?? and introduction of new regime based on a rule of terror by a white supremacist minority over an increasingly populous non-white resistance. Both sides will call themselves freedom fighters and the other side terrorists.
International relations academics with a bent for criminology got a hold of the word and its modern definition, I guess.
It takes a brave man to say that small scale nonstate actors can’t be terrorists or do terrorism, that that’s reserved for Leviathon (forgetting about that crazy man in Texas & exactly what he was for a moment).
Those first two paras should be blockquoted.
My gravatar?
Well yeah, but that’s not what I’m saying.
I’m just saying that when we’re evaluating someone’s or a group’s motivation, it’s very difficult to draw a line between personal and political grievances, calling one criminal and the other terrorist. As if card-carrying terrorists like Al Qaeda or the Al-Aqsa Martyrs weren’t partly motivated by the personal cachet, or as if the tragic cases who phone bomb threats through to the Family Court about their custody hearings weren’t partly motivated by toxic gender politics.
I’d agree that we shouldn’t trust international relations or criminology academics with important terms from political science, though.
Tyro, I’ve always said that the Catallaxy mob have been objectively pro-torture.
And this has what exactly to do with a sniper firing onto city streets, and citizens returning fire? Hindering a sniper is now a “racist”, “hick” and “loonie” act?
A police officer who advances to the sniper’s position, and physically confronts him is courageous, admirable, exemplary and many other things.
But to Katz he’s a racist loonie hick bigot. Katz sure got some insight.
Could be that was the only motivation for Officer Ramiro Martinez to confront sniper Charles Whitman.
The following is, of course, trite:
Nevertheless, it does seem relevant when discussing what qualifies as terrorism and what doesn’t.
The wikipedia article on the difficulties of defining terrorism provides entertainment.
Since this incident involves a US citizen within the USA, perhaps the US definitions of what is and isn’t terrorism should apply.
According to the US National Counterterrorism Center a terrorist act is one that is: “premeditated; perpetrated by a subnational or clandestine agent; politically motivated, potentially including religious, philosophical, or culturally symbolic motivations; violent; and perpetrated against a noncombatant target.”
The USA PATRIOT Act states that domestic terrorism acts: “(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended— (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”
The FBI’s Terrorist Research and Analytical Centre (in 1994) defined domestic terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence, committed by a group(s) of two or more individuals, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
Three definitions in, and we’re already in trouble. The NCTC says this was terrorism, the FBI (if the definition still stands) says it doesn’t qualify since it doesn’t involve enough people.
The PATRIOT Act, well, clause A and C would be beyond dispute. Does the act satisfy clause B?
Depends on how you argue it – it would seem the act was certainly a reaction to the policies (or actions) of their government, or at least the IRS (or at least Stacks interpretation of their actions).
His manifesto indicates that he hopes that by adding to the body count that the citizen will rise in revolt against their government. That counts as incitement, I guess. Intented to intimidate or coerce?
It’s beyond me. Do we need to apply any other lables apart from “indiscriminate murder-suicide”? Would it have been different if he’d used the more pedestrian method of walking into the office with his firearm of choice? Yet another walk-in shooter?
How would this being a “terrorist act” make it better or worse?
He’s no hero and no martyr, and this won’t make anyone revolt against anything. Just another failed schmuck.
Yay.
I condemned the terrorist attack outright – as I would under almost every conceivable circumstance.
If an example of me “baying for Palestinian blood” can be produced, I invite famous Israel hater Lefty E to point it out.
The other interesting thing to remember about anti-IRS loony Stack is that he was a far left, anti-Bush, anti-Catholic oddball.*
Think Lefty E or Katz without the pilot’s licence.
*To be differentiated from mass murdering socialist, Amy Bishop, who was also a devotee of the man Harry Reid likes to call a “light-skinned Negro.”
SATP has never heard of vigilante-ism, even though he may well have drunk it in in his mother’s milk.
Obtuse as ever he cannot perceive the difference between a police officer risking his life to restore law and order and an ignorant pack of goons who pepper a public building in the misapprehension that they are fighting commies.
I could ask SATP what he thinks about the shock jock who provoked this orgy of gunfire.
But I won’t.
Better to have the sniper shoot unhampered into the streets than to have “Vigilantism”.
Does Katz think the “vigilantes” were taking on the wrong sniper?
To see an obtuse person Katz, you would have to look in the mirror.
It is not obtuse to see citizens assisting the police as exactly that.
Or is your problem with some down-to-home reality with the fact that some of the citizens may have believed they were shooting at a “communist”?
And killing a (communist) sniper is a problem, how?
SATP,
Killing anyone is a problem.
Do we look as insane to them I wonder?
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Yes. It’s called
the religious wars never went awaypolitical debate. Why is the discussion bizarre exactly? I haven’t read anyone actually endorsing it. A lot of people here may be sympathetic with political violence inn furtherance of other ends. Or may not..
I’m a little tired of people labeling those with a different world view insane. It happens all over the place and it’s so childish. Best argument for an absolute monarchy there is.
An absolute monarchy, that’s insane!
Well I’m getting a bit sick of idiots who justify violence against innocents because it happens to fit their world view.
The following quotations picked at random from the thread in question exhibit at least an unhinged mindset:
Earth to SATP. Whitman wasn’t a communist. In fact, he had right wing views.
Katz, You mentioned that some of those attending to help handle the sniper believed they were responding to a communist threat?
Now that “racism” “bigotry” “hick” and “loonie” have been demolished you don’t have much remaining from your list of sins committed by the Austin public/police.
“Communist Hating” is about the only possible crime committed by those who put themselves in harm’s way to hamper the efforts an an urban sniper. (Oh, except they were “vigilantes”. In “Katzworld” one must allow snipers to go about their business unhampered).
Keep digging Katz.
So what, Katz? What on Earth is the relevance of Whitman’s politics, or the politics of the courageous citizens who returned fire on him?
Who cares whether some of those citizens may have thought they were responding to some kind of communist attack? Does it make what they did any less heroic? Any less commendable? Not in my book.
“Vigilante-ism” may be a bad thing, in general, but there is nothing wrong with ordinary citizens fighting back against an armed criminal on a murder spree.
How do you know? Got any evidence for that nasty gratuitous little piece of defamation? Or are all Southerners just presumed to be racists?
And why does “anti-communist” = racist? I guess that must make JFK and LBJ racists, since they were two of the leading anti-communists of their generation.
Yup, it was they taxes, dangnammit!
The comm’nist gummint stealing our money to give it to them feeloadin’ polecat Haitians.
Now, let’s go and find the rest of those secret Soviet divisons hidden in Montana…
McVeigh all over again, contrarian flat earth “patriots”.
How can I put this more simply for SATP?
Whitman … was … not … a … communist.
If the shock jock had announced that the John Birch Society had taken over the U of Texas to save America from the pinkos harboured therein, which way would those gun totin’ yokels have fired?
Trap shuts SATP.
Katz, read for comprehension. You stated that civilians making an armed response to a perceived (check definition of: perceived) communist threat, were “loonies”.
Please produce some supporting evidence for your claim.
It hurts you to be so resoundingly exposed as wrong & bigoted on so many counts in what should have been one simple comment.
Don’t feel you have to respond, the hole only gets deeper.
I suspected at least one of you right wing pavlovians would ask that question.
Here’s the answer
This was going on in Austin Texas contemporaneous with the Whitman incident.
Case closed.
Katz declares the case closed, after presenting something totally unrelated to the original comment.
Warped ain’t the word for it.
In Katzworld: Rightwing = bad, Leftwing = good? (About as bigoted as one can get)
No, case not closed. In response to a question about the personnel of the Austin PD being “racist loonies”, you give me an article about the UT campus police.
Fail. They’re two different organisations. Unless all Texans are part of a hive mind, you’ll have to do better.
Oh, and while you’re at it, could you also give me a source for the anti-communist radio “shock jock” that sparked this whole line of argument? I’ve read about the Whitman case before, and I’ve been googling now, but I just can’t find any reference to it …
OK, bored now. Can we get back to the topic sometime soon?
Just to be clear, my comment @ 3.20 was directed to Katz.
Apologies to everyone else on this thread for the giant derail from the topic, but you know who started it …
FWIW, I have no argument with the proposition that right-wing white guys are as potentially capable as anyone else of committing terrorism. Does Stack qualify? Well, depends on which definition you use, as Mr Eulenspiegel has carefully outlined above.
Well I’m getting a bit sick of idiots who justify violence against innocents because it happens to fit their world view.
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Well good. Did anyone?
.
The following quotations picked at random from the thread in question exhibit at least an unhinged mindset
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Sensationalized quote outta context. Do you work for Rupert?
yes Adrien you’re right. I should have mentioned the context of a bunch or extreme right morons justifying act of murder/terrorism because you know it was against the evil govermin and you know taxation is theft etc etc, while a few valiant souls try patiently to point out the error of their ways.
Jason Soon’s probably glad he retreated from Catallaxy, and left it to the taxpayer funded Sinclair, author of the first choice quote.
I’d agree with that Leinad, but the steaming pile of dung in the corner, the burning question: how would the MSM have framed it, had that person been a Muslim?
yes Adrien you’re right. I should have mentioned the context of a bunch or extreme right morons justifying act of murder/terrorism because you know it was against the evil govermin and you know taxation is theft etc etc, while a few valiant souls try patiently to point out the error of their ways.
.
Well that’s reasonable discourse worthy of Castiglione. It’s not that there’s no basis in which to detect sympathy with this guy. But it’s a stretch to declare thereby an endorsement. I have the same problem with people who declare all socialists to be advocates of mass murder. Yet it must be acknowledged that Mao was a hero for the Western Left in the 60s. And after they should’ve learned their lesson.
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It’s the result of the religious war political culture in which we’re all immersed. There’s the line – those on this side are the good guys. Whatever they do.
@63.
You obviously don’ tknow much about the US of the 1960s. Police forces of all stripes, but even more so in the South, were racist by current standards, indeed evn by objective standards. If you like have a read of Nixonland it should open your eyes a bit.
Well, thank you for the reading suggestion, Patrickb. Just to clarify: I wasn’t saying there was no racism in 1960s Texas. I was just reacting to lazy sweeping generalisations that all Texan law enforcement personnel back then must have been racists. Just as not every 1930s German was a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semite, I’m sure not every 1960s Texan was a white-hooded KKKer.
As noted, the political views of Texas police authorities are a bit tangential to the topic of this thread. It would be nice to return to the topic.
I would modestly observe that it is not OT to point out a severe deficit in comprehension and/or logical capacity in a commenter. After all, comprehension and logic are sine qua non qualities for acceptable comments on this august blog.
Thus:
Me
Paulus
Paulus, that dictionary of yours that defines “many” as “all” is doing you no good at all.
Locate it. (It’ll be labelled “Dikshunery”). Discard it.
There’s a good chap. I’m sure the quality of comment on this blog will start to show marked improvement.
An American view.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/02/23/87393/commentary-austin-pilot-joe-stack.html
To follow on from Peter Kemp @ #68.
The MSM would frame it in accordance with what appears to be the functional definition of terrorism i.e. that terrorism is an act of (political/religious) violence by Them against Us.
That is, in the common pejorative use of the word.
Them seems to include such exciting entities as non-white people and Muslims.
Us seems to include such entities as the citizens (and/or allies) of the USA that don’t qualify as Them.
Violence by Us on Them is not called terrorism, neither is violence by Them on Them.
The way to disprove the hypothesis is show that the MSM condemns as terrorism act of violence by Them against Them, or by Us against Them as frequently as it condemns acts of violence by Them against Us.
Police forces of all stripes, but even more so in the South, were racist by current standards, indeed evn by objective standards.
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The only Martin Amis novel I really like, says: All police are racist. Whatever race you were a member of before you became police changes when you do. You join a different race, a race called Police.
The way to disprove the hypothesis is show that the MSM condemns as terrorism act of violence by Them against Them, or by Us against Them as frequently as it condemns acts of violence by Them against Us.
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Doesn’t that pre-empt a conclusion? The standard defintion of terrorism, which is not adopted by the US govt for telling reason, is that it is the use of violence on non-combatants for political ends. Almost all countries do that.
We’ll see how fulsomely the MSM will praise the Iranian regime for its recent capture of terrorist and US client Abdolmalek Rigi
.
A jihad on big government! That’s not terrorism for the tea party and apologists.
Oh, and heh @ CL. There’s nothing Catholic about your hatred for the dispossessed. Oh, and sounding off like Birdy will only make people dismiss you. Waste of everyone’s time.
What’s all this guff I keep hearing about an “act of terrierism” in Texas? Terriers are just dogs, they don’t have any belief systems — so it stands to reason there’s no such thing as ‘terrierism’. Besides, dogs can’t fly airplanes! And even if they could, terriers would just be too small! I mean sure, if dogs could fly planes, maybe a Dalmatian or a sheepdog could do it, but a terrier’s little paws would never reach the controls! Maybe Marmaduke could commit a so-called “act of terrierism,” but Marmaduke isn’t a terrier, so… Eh? What’s that? Ooooh, well that’s different then.
Never mind.
p.s. — welcome back, Tim!!
Just in case any of you were wondering whether this thread would make a good artifact to be displayed in the Museum of Stupid…………………………………………..it would.
Or exploding undies or indeed exploding shirt tails, a plot first discovered by Major Dennis Bloodnock.
“My god, he’s attacked a government office”
“Yes, it’s a tradition among drowning men.”