He mentions the Oklahoma City bombings. I think we can add to those: James von Brunn, Richard Poplawski, and Andrew Joseph Stack.
(via sarahlee310)
Guy Fawkes was a religious terrorist. He was not a freedom fighter. He wanted to overthrow a Protestant monarchy to replace it with a Catholic monarchy. Not exactly a freedom fighter.
V in V for Vendetta was a morally ambiguous terrorist did terrible things in the service of his goals. V’s iconography does not need to be embraced and replicated without thought or reflection.
“People should not fear their government. Government should fear their people.” is a line that comes very close to the paranoid and violent rhetoric that comes out of the sovereign citizen and militia movements, not to mention the far more mainstream NRA and Tea Party.
People complaining about the Wall Street protesters lacking an agenda are clearly not paying any fucking attention. Look at the pictures. Visit the website. Read the news about them. Hang out in their chatroom or follow their Twitter. Just pay attention. Pretending like they’re just a bunch of spoiled bored hippies plays right into Wall Street’s hand. And it’s intellectually lazy.
I have a lot of thoughts on Ratigan’s “Money out of Politics” amendment, but I’m tired. However, Matthew Yglesias’ rebuttal was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. “WE NEED THINK TANKS TO FIGURE OUT WHAT WE HAVE TO DO” is just… if you can’t see the democratic process being subverted there, then quit writing about politics.
People forget (or never even know about) these things because ~anti-Semitism is over.~
His murderers will be eligible for parole; the police that had a hand in his death by refusing to believe he was a victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime were naturally not punished at all.
what haunts me most about it is how the police treated his family…they’re nearly as guilty as his murderers.
(via galesofnovember)
My state didn’t change because if most of us went any lower, we would simply have to die.
RICK PERRY TEXAS MIRACLE. LET’S ALL EMULATE WHAT HE DID TO TEXAS.
oh hey look everyone it’s one of the girls’ RACIST PROFILE PHOTOCaption: Students Kritz Eliza and Taylor Matzen, dressed as American Indians, participate during a bake sale led by the Berkeley College Republicans Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011, at the University of California campus in Berkeley, Calif. The Berkeley College Republicans have scheduled a bake sale where the price of a cookie or a brownie depends on your gender and the color of your skin. The price of a baked good costs $2 for white people, $1.50 if you’re Asian, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans. Women get a discount of 25 cents. From SFgate.com
Wow. White girls in headdresses, participating in the bake sale. Are they trying to get free cookies or what? This is the insensitivity supported by the UC Berkeley Campus Republicans and their bake sale. From the article:
The Republican students said offering more expensive pastries to white students and less expensive ones to students of other ethnicities illustrated the injustice of any division by race. A few feet away from the bake sale, opposing groups held a “Conscious Cupcakes” giveaway, handing out their own treats for free. And around midday, hundreds of people dressed in black laid down in Sproul Plaza, silently demonstrating their support of SB185.
This comes from the opposition to a bill that would allow California’s universities to consider race and ethnicity as one of many factors, like extra-curriculars, in college admissions. The bill would still ban admission based entirely on race or ethnicity.
<sarcasm> Here’s something more honest: How about you still charge the white guy $2.00 for the cookie, give him $3 to buy it, and then let him punch the Native American students in order to steal their cookies, screaming “MANIFEST DESTINY, ASSHOLES!” triumphantly? After that, how about the African-American students are forced to clean up after the bake sale, as the Campus Republicans sip mint juleps and supervise? Is that more honest? </sarcasm>
I don’t support throwing the baked goods at them, nor screaming obscenities. I do absolutely love the steps taken by the Harry Potter student group, selling “enchanted Costco muffins,” for “Two galleons to pure bloods” and “Eight sickles to muggles.”
*gasp* I’m so fucking shocked! But, you know, not.
hahahaha of course. And in shameless self-promotion: http://opprobrium1.tumblr.com/post/10753431749/republicans-tone-deaf-and-bad-at-reasoning-as-usual MY OWN THOUGHTS ON THE MATTER. These people are terrible.
So some college-aged Republicans are having an affirmative action bake sale. This event might make sense of price structure was inverted or if the Republicans had women and racial minorities run lengthy obstacle courses and be treated like shit when they finally got to the bake sale, while white people could just walk in and receive excellent customer service. Also the police don’t shoot at white people just for being there. But then their event would have some bearing on reality, and a firm grasp of reality is not a valuable asset for Republican activists.
I am sure, for their next stunt, College Republicans will ask all those liberal students if they would be in favor of redistribution of GPA, and if not, why be in favor of any kind of just or fair system of taxation? They will ask this and, fever-bright eyes all but shouting QED IVORY TOWER COMMUNIST, triumphantly retreat to their caves and bridges.
That this is an extremely stupid question to ask would be obvious to anyone with a tenuous grasp on critical thinking. Is GPA unlimited now, like wealth? Can I, through hard work my freshman year, earn 10,000 GPAs that I can apply to later grades? Can I coast through college because of that really strong academic year? Can I bring GPAs to college that my parents gave me? This raises so many interesting questions about the education system!
Conversely, is my possible income restricted to an arbitrarily low amount now? Will one bad earning period result in a retroactive average decline of my entire income and wealth up to that point? Can I never save money and always work hard continually until I die? Well, that sounds like something the Republicans would want anyway.
And, for the record, I would donate spare GPAs if I had extra. But GPA isn’t money, or income, or anything that can reasonably be compared to a progressive or regressive system of taxation. Or any system of taxation. The reasoning is almost as horrible as the idea they’re trying to express. Sadly, such intellectually bankrupt ideas have not been laughed out of mainstream discourse. Maybe if we had some kind of redistribution of GPA in schools, we would have a citizenry better at reasoning!
Frank Gaffney, for those who are not acquainted with his terribleness, is one of the leading voices in the uneblievably bigoted anti-sharia movement. And apparently his group of evil shitheads released an anti-shariah pledge for all the Republican candidates to sign.None of them have! So that’s good. But what made me laugh was how badly-written it is. I mean O get that whipping up a lot of shrieking hysteria about a laughably non-existent threat is a lot of work, but you would think someone so pro-American (and likely PRO-ENGLISH) would at least take the time to write a minimally competent screed. But, alas. Here is where you can read the whole thing, but I feel like nit picking from the safety of Tumblr. I am a cowardly, cowardly liberal. Also the name of that organization creeps me the fuck out.
1. Pretty sure that is not how you use a colon. There is a missing comma between reliable and effective. The phrase “especially as the likes of the Iranian and North Korean regimes obtain ever-longer-range nuclear-armed ballistic missiles” is just horrible stylistically. You don’t need to pile adjectives on like that.
2. I am having trouble parsing this but I think you can suss out that he thinks we shouldn’t spend too much or too little on the military. Well, fine, but you lose points for a confusing first sentence and for being so vague as to have said nothing at all. Paraphrase of point 2: we should do the right thing
3. Transnationalist in scare quotes, hahaha. International or multilateral would work much better and not make you sound like a paranoid lunatic. The subject of the first sentence is not clear. Is it admirers of foreign judicial rulings, etc who seek to “alter or even supplant the US Constitution”, or is it admirers of judicial rulings IN ADDITION TO international treaties, etc that are trying to fuck up America? Please be more clear. And mention the Bilderburg Group.
4. Something must be wrong with your CSS because italics shouldn’t take caps lock out of your header. YOUR WEBSITE CODING ALSO SUCKS. Tactical does not need to be in scare quotes because the distinction between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons has been well known for decades and isn’t some geopolitical term d’art.
5. Amazing word salad. That is not how therefore is used. Finally, I believe that a strategic error of the first order ipso facto must be repudiated, unless you hate America, so what is that last sentence doing?
6. Mostly fine but you are rocking a misplaced modifier in that last sentence.
7. O don’t see anything wrong, gold star! well, except for the core idea expressed, but we are talking about mechanics here.
8. “Employ terrorism as weapons” WRONG.
9. That whole thing is really hard to parse, please rewrite for clarity
10. Mostly fine, but did you know that when writing on the internet, or basically on a computer, you don’t need to put two spaces after a period? It violates many major style guides! According to my HTML sleuthing, this was a deliberate stylistic choice (albeit one made inconsistently), as the source code features a space and then the code for yet another space. So deliberately retro! I feel like a crazy person put their typewriter ramblings on my computer screen.
11. A portrayal of American history is the necessity of safeguarding freedom? I don’t think that’s what a portrayal of history is. That might be a theme the portrayal expresses, or a lesson to be learned from the portrayal, but the necessity of safeguarding freedom is not history because it isn’t a fucking event.
12. YOUR STYLE SHEET IS FUCKED UP AGAIN, YOU ARE BAD. First sentence has some pronoun errors - it should be “and those of its allies” since the antecedent is America, not we. “NATO alliance” is redundant. Also that first principle isn’t in the constitution so where is that coming from man?
Pursuant to Muphry’s Law, I am sure that there are errors in this piece too. And that’s fine. Except that Frank Gaffney is a well-known national figure who has appeared on national TV, heads a national organization with probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in its yearly budget. It has paid employees! Meanwhile, I typed this while watching old episodes of Roseanne on Netflix and drinking a beer.
Finally, Frank Gaffney is a huge asshole, rank bigot, and terrible human being. Ripping on him for pretty much anything is fun, and I make no apologies.
Did you CATCH this? The anti-Government Governor took time off from his busy campaign schedule to ask for AID for his home state of Texas, from FEMA, a Government Organization that he would shut DOWN if he were President! Ah, the irony!
I’m just shocked he isn’t being raked over the coals for attending debates and campaigning while his state, facing the worst drought in its history, burns to the fucking ground. Who needs a governor when half of your state is declared a disaster area? Not Texas!
Well, Sheriff Joe Arpaio went and did it. He’s using taxpayer’s dollars to investigate a settled question, and it’s difficult to argue racism is not playing a part. From ThinkProgress:
The lawman is… willing to use official resources to pursue the bogus conspiracy theory. As birther website WorldNetDaily gleefully reported:
Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told WND he has assigned a five-member “Cold Case Posse” to investigate the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The decision, he says, is simply a matter of doing his duty.
Arpaio’s investigation comes in response to a complaint filed by the Surprise, Arizona Tea Party, which alleges that Obama may be using a forged birth certificate…
The Cold Case Posse is an officially-sponsored all-volunteer group of people with skills and backgrounds that make them qualified to investigate cases. The group has been inactive in recent months due to “budgetary limitations within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office,” but apparently a wild goose chase looking into the veracity of the president’s birth certificate is an appropriate use of funds.
Arpaio is, of course, claiming that politics did not come into play regarding his decision. He’s just doing his duty. So why does he consider it his duty to cater to the Tea Party versus not misappropriating taxpayer dollars? Turns out there’s a lot Arpaio considers his duty that’s outside the bounds of common sense. Here’s a short list:
- Shredding documents in a civil rights lawsuit, resulting in payment of $94,000 to plaintiff’s attorneys
- Racially profiling people, with the resulting lawsuit costing $200,000+
- Using political clout to order the arrests of journalists
- Violating the civil rights of inmates and refusing to cooperate with court orders and the DOJ on the matter (and yes, he was sued again over this)
- Advocating for the deployment of US troops into Mexico
- Blasting inmates with Christmas carols, even though he’s been sued six times over this
- Advocating for checking “dirty” immigrants “like fruits and vegetables” because they “bring in diseases”
- Expanding a “citizen posse” program into allowing armed citizens to hunt down undocumented immigrants, and allowing Neo-Nazis “to have his back”
- Profiling people based on “clothing, speech, certain conduct”
- Misspending $99.5 million on “immigration patrols” and on pursuing opponents of his policies
- Misspending $50 million on training trips for deputies to Disneyland and fishing resorts, plus spying on political opponents via his ‘anti-corruption’ unit
Sadly, this will probably look good to the insane racists who would elect an insane racist like Joe Arpaio in the first place.
