Christian militia lulz!

[sabotabby]

nihilistic_kid posted a picture. Compare these portraits to English portraits of drunkards in the Edwardian era. Also, their website must be seen to be believed. If I didn't think I'd get in trouble for it, I'd totally show it to my students when I try (in vain, I might add) to teach them why you shouldn't tile a background image and then put red type over it.

It's amusing to poke fun of them, but expect to see more of this sort of thing. American political culture has been steeping in a higher-than-usual amount of crazy for some time now, and it's just beginning to come to a head.

Comments

Re: Christian militia lulz!

[rojonoir.livejournal.com]

I'm saying we can argue about varying amounts of damage, but it would be pointless and subjective. Regardless, by any measure, Timothy McVeigh and his friends did far more financial damage in 1995 than probably the whole history of left-wing violence in the U.S. And if we're going to count hard-to-measure indirect expenses, we need to count the impact on Oklahoma's multi-billion dollar per-year tourism industry in the aftermath of the bombing. (again, leaving aside those pesky bodies)

And why focus on 15 year old violence vs. right now? Well, it took 3 years from the moment Clinton was elected for the right-wing militia movement to really pick up steam, culminating in the Oklahoma City bomb, but preceded by steady rapid escalation and growth of right-wing violence. Look at the stats for anti-abortion murders. Nothing for years, then from 1993 to 1998, there were nine murders, and then nothing again until 2009. It's no coincidence that the murders took place during a time of heated and violent rhetoric from relatively mainstream conservatives opposing democratic presidents.

I'm sure it takes a while to organize a right-wing terrorist group to the point of being able to kill 168 people and cause hundreds of millions of dollars of destruction. Obama's only been in office a year. Even in light of current right-wing violence, Republican politicians are refusing to back away from inflammatory and violent speech. Give it a couple more years and we'll see.

As for the freedom rides, it was a test. A test to see if black people could exercise their right to register to vote. I'm not sure why you're more concerned about "routine" violence. That would seem to be apolitical, random violence as opposed to violence intended to keep blacks from being equal citizens. And, really, the political violence was "routine", though it tended to greatly increase when blacks were closer to achieving their goal (which generally was just to be able to vote, remember).

Sure, some lefist academics condone violence by people with little power. And most right-wing academics condone violence by people with a lot of power. Though both tended to support the violent riots in Iran recently.

"Arguing that this implies that right-wingers are in general bigots and left-wingers are generally nice is left as an exercise for the propagandist."

Whether they're bigots or not, right-wingers want a system where the powerful stay powerful and the powerless stay powerless. That doesn't sound very "nice" to me.

Thank you for the music

[db-en.livejournal.com]

The factoid about anti-abortion murders is interesting too, thanks. As for the rest, I could argue with some of it, but frankly, I am quite satisfied with the responses that I got from you and terry_terrible by now. t_t convinced me that one of the examples used by conservatives to support claims of leftie "terrorism" was not appropriate. Your wikipedia links, along with other things, made me admit that my original argument all but lay in ruins, and that I was quite convinved that as far as acts of exercizing terror on civilians was concerned, right-wing extremists were more dangerous in America than their left-wing brothers. I'm happy now. With your factual knowledge you have solved the problem that sabotabby did not want, or perhaps could not, solve - namely, that of my ignorance in some areas of American politics and history. I thank you for taking the time to do so, and apologize in a way for the time it took you. See, the reaction I usually get in heavily politically-oriented blogs (of both orientations) for asking questions and voicing doubts is sneering, name-calling and skewing of my words or their intent. And that's when I get any reaction at all. You did little by way of expressing either of the above, so you were rather refreshing to talk to.

That I don't tend to buy simplistic arguments as the one in the final paragraph of your comment above is not really relevant to this discussion.