political foo: Be afraid!

[alpharaposa]

DHS warns about more extremists!

Now, instead of looking like they're targeting opponents, they seem to be just flailing around. This is either massive incompetence, or a way to reinforce an "us vs them" feeling that separates the rulers from the ruled.

Hard to tell which, honestly.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The fool Obama put in charge of the DHS (I forget her name) is desperately trying to avoid facing up to the reality that the main terrorist threat to America comes from Muslim jihadists. The amazing thing is that, by now, she must have read the intelligence reports, so it's possible that what we're seeing is a full-fledged nervous breakdown owing to severe cognitive dissidence.

The silver lining here is that this level of incompetence is going to trigger massive popular discontent with the Democrats by 2010: unless the Republicans run very inept campaigns, we should take back the House, and be looking at impeachment proceedings in 2011-12.

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

cognitive dissidence

What an interesting and strangely appropriate malapropism!

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

LOL!!

I of course meant "cognitive dissonance," but the typo actually works too! :)

[zeeth_kyrah]

The main terrorist threat to Americans comes from people who bomb medical clinics. Mostly lower-class white males with extreme religious views and/or repressive social views.

Sure, those medical clinics are primarily providers of abortion, but the ends do not justify the means.

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

Which, statistically, is like saying that the main accident threat to Americans is being struck by lightning: only a tiny number of people are killed by it every year, and usually only those who go where the threat is.

In terms of volume of attacks, I would bet it's environmentalist and animal rights extremists who do the most damage.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Number of attacks, or dollars lost to damage and work stoppage? Those are two different measures.

In any case, I doubt that many environmentalists and animal rights extremists have deliberately attempted to harm a human, aside from unmarked spiked trees (which cause chainsaw chains to break and damages the blades -- and a flying chain full of sharp metal teeth can easily maim or kill).

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The main terrorist threat to Americans comes from people who bomb medical clinics. Mostly lower-class white males with extreme religious views and/or repressive social views.

ROFLMAO!!!

Um, just how many thousand Americans do you imagine have been killed in abortion clinic bombings?

[zeeth_kyrah]

I believe that several hundred have been killed or injured over the many years, but I don't have a solid reference for that. It's a rather persistent threat which occurs on a fairly regular basis, unlike the single event we call 9/11. Now, stopping high-cost single events is a good idea, and I don't deny that hunting down Middle-Eastern terrorists may have helped prevent externally-sourced terror events. But the people that most Americans should fear are the Americans who preach murder and fear inside their own country.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

believe that several hundred have been killed or injured over the many years ...

Nope.

A total of seven people, in America, have been murdered by anti-abortion ... do you want me to say "terrorists" or that stomch-churning euphemism, militants? Possibly eight, if you add in the doubtful case of George Patterson.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#Murders)

The article also lists various other crimes committed by the anti-abortion terrorists, both in America and abroad.

So we're talking about two orders of magnitude less deaths than those inflicted at 9-11. In fact, the whole death toll is around the same as those inflicted by one of the lesser Muslim terrorists attacks, post 9-11, such as the DC Sniper incident.

Even if you toss in the Oklahoma City Bombing, which had nothing to do with abortion, that only killed 168 people, which is less than 1/10 of those murdered on 9-11. So your basic theory

... the people that most Americans should fear are the Americans who preach murder and fear inside their own country.

fails the reality test, if by this you mean American-on-American terrorism.

(if you expanded this to include open racists in general, such as Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan, you might have more of a point, but then you'd be condemning clearly legal behavior).

[zeeth_kyrah]

Okay. Let's expand this, then, not to people who preach hate, but who act on it.

Transgender death stats, as drawn from the Google cache (.doc viewed as HTML) = 288 domestic deaths recorded as of 1970.

If we go to the FBI's office of Uniform Crime Reporting, in 2007 alone, "2,025 law enforcement agencies reported 7,624 hate crime incidents involving 9,006 offenses."

Going to the victims table:
Crimes against persons

In 2007, 5,408 victims of hate crimes were victims of crimes against persons. Regarding these victims and the crimes committed against them:

* 9 persons were murdered, and 2 were forcibly raped.
* 47.4 percent of the victims were intimidated.
* 31.1 percent were victims of simple assault.
* 20.6 percent were victims of aggravated assault.
* Less than one percent (0.6) were victims of other types of offenses, which are collected only in the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

(Based on Table 2.)

...

Well. You're right. Abortion clinic bombers don't, in general, seem to kill people; they just destroy property and intimidate lawful practitioners and recipients of a procedure where nobody gets off lightly. It's the practitioners of hate crimes we should be worried about.

...oh, wait. THAT'S WHO THESE PAPERS HAVE BEEN WARNING US ABOUT! They even noted that sometimes a person who isn't a member of the warned-against groups may commit a hate crime.

Now, even given that "Nationwide, an estimated 1,408,337 violent crimes occurred in 2007", one might be inclined to see this as a "drop in the bucket". However, hate crimes are often seen as justified by their practitioners, even when confronted with evidence of wrongness; it's just seen as further justification for the crime and the hate. This egregious self-justification is often part of the extremist view. And I should note, these numbers do not include everyone with "extremist" views. Just those who act on their hate, and are reported to the law enforcement agencies from which the UCR gathers statistics.

I would also note that gangs and other drug-dealing organizations typically engage in harassment and violence which is terroristic in nature, primarily to maintain docility in the face of their practices and protect their turf. No, they don't charge in with IEDs (most of the time; car and storefront bombings are not unknown), but gangs in particular do tend to practice violence as a solution for practically everything.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously if you add up all violent crimes committed by all groups other than radical Muslims it's going to exceed the amount committed in America by the Terrorists in this war. The fact remains that radical Muslim terrorism, and in particular Al Qaeda, has been far deadlier than any other single radical cause or group.

[zeeth_kyrah]

The subject was domestic terrorism. If you want to go international, I can go to a few human-rights watchdog agencies' websites and collect data for the incidents we know about, with the understanding that many more have never been reported. And that would just be hate crimes, religiously motivated murders, and crimes of intimidation and abuse by governments against their citizens and by one culture against another. Those numbers wouldn't count the "official" terrorists, I rather suspect, but they certainly don't reduce the amount of hate and fear in this world.

[collinsmom.livejournal.com]

I read the document and you know what? I fit in a couple of categories.

In order to gain power, Hitler targeted a group of the German population as radicals who were trying to destroy the German society. By giving the people specific groups to attack he managed to gain dictatorial power and overthrow the election process that elected him in the first place.

Another thing that I found in the document that bothers me is the last page gives a phone number and email address to report activity of said groups. That reminds me of the book 1984 in which people were encouraged to report people who were trying to destroy the government. One person that was taken in for indoctrination said that he didn't even know he was a radical but he must be because his children turned him in.

What are our children going to be raised to believe if Obama gets his government sponsored youth organizations to tell them what to believe?

[zeeth_kyrah]

You know, folks on the left were saying this about folks on the right two years ago. It's all politics and fear.

Learn who is telling you to be afraid. They are the ones to hate.

[collinsmom.livejournal.com]

If you read the report,it also targets PETA and environmentalists. So it's not only the right wing people noted.

[zeeth_kyrah]

PETA is unsafe for animals at any speed; their initial animal-rights campaign has degenerated, and they've been taken over by people who believe in expediency over dedication (and thus are willing to destroy the animals they putatively "save").

And some environmentalist extremists are dangerous, and do dangerous things which sometimes injure or kill loggers or others against whom they act. Ergo, domestic terror.

And who says these people aren't right wing? They are, however, extremists. Extremism is the target, not political spectrum. It's just that groups in particular areas on said spectrum (more like a 4D bell curve) happen to gather together and find the bravado to do things that hurt other people. But they all end up in the "Extremist" end of "Extremism vs Moderation".