This report was e-mailed to me yesterday. Brave Republicans roughing-up a 9-year-old. Sensible Republicans tolerating Nazis and skinheads in their midst.
Such a nice, reliable, unbiased, objective, no doubt about it, has to be true source. I recognize that I could never find a source as trustworthy and beyond reproach that has similiar stories with the labels reversed.
How could I ever dissent?
In a mood of humility and graciousness, I bow to your wisdom on the violence of conservatives.
Don’t you use biased or partisan sources too? That “Teamster violence” link–isn’t it part of a website belonging to “Free Republic”, which is one of the pro-Bush organizations picketing in Westwood every Saturday?
I didn’t see anyone post a Gore assasination thread. I don’t know if you missed it, since it got yanked, and not just closed.
But one of our esteemed liberals was trying to postulate the odds of a Bush assasination. Of course, they needed a whole new thread for this.
And about FreeRepublic.com…
Notice I recomended that you plug the name into a search engine to get independent sources if you so desired. There are also court records and convictions in that case, so you can’t just dismiss it because of it’s affiliation. I also did not cite FreeRepublic.com. You brought it up, so I guess you are familiar with the case.
Any comment on the union beating they got?
Back in 1776 the United States had a fairly militant band of liberals. A liberal named John Brown violently opposed slavery in 19th century America and didn’t mind using violence to prove his point. In Germany during the 1920’s a liberal named Adolf Hitler worked to unite Germany into a force that would change the world.
I’m going to start this paragraph by telling everyone not to get their panties in a wad about Hitler being a liberal. I included two examples of good liberalism and one example of bad. It isn’t meant to imply that most liberals in the states are like Hitler.
Liberalism is a concept that changes over time. At one time certain ideas are radically different then the status quo. At some point those ideas become the status quo and therefore conservative. Something to chew on, no?
Sometimes liberalism is good. Sometimes conservatism is good. Change isn’t always good and the status quo isn’t always good. And I really hate the label of liberal and conservative because they tell me little about someone’s position on any given issue.
Well, that’s all I’ve got to say about that for now. Y’all take care and have a nice day.
Marc
It really matters on where you are at. If you are the minority (i.e. Gay rights in Alabama) then your usually more on the calm side. If you have the numbers (WTO) most times it’s more likely your side will be more violent.
This is just from some observations I have noticed.
**
[hijack (I apologize now)]
Did you even read the whole message there. I did put that I don’t condone it. Remember what Craig Killborn did? It was the same thing w/o math. I already admitted it was inapproprite and would appriciate it if you stopped acting “holier than thou” and just dropped the topic.
BTW I’m a Libertarian.
[/hijack (Re-apologize for the hijack)]
Actually I got to disagree with this. Several examples… Russia 1917… The bolsheviks had a clear majority. They were relatively non-violent. The whites, a minority, were extremely violent becasue they were against the majority…
The Right wing nazi’s, were violent when a minority, and also violent when a majority. Same can be said for Chile, and many other countries… Likewise the Sandinistas wre relatively non-violent when in a minority, and majority… And then you have the shining path, very violent and a minority.
When people are in the minority, they often resort to violence… Unless they happen to be socialist. When people are in the majority, they can be confident in not using violence, unless they gained power through violent actions, in which case they must continue, to keep fear in place.
I wouldn’t call the Shining path or the RCP socilaist. They are Maoist.
In summary both right wingers and left wingers can be violent,
I think you have your terms confused here. Liberalism does not mean pro-change, and conservatism does not mean anti-change. Admittedly, the terms are often wildly misused in American political debate.
As for Hitler, he found the liberal Western democracies (his term) to be decadent and weak, and held them in contempt. Similarly, his hatred for communism is well-documented. His economic policies were autarky and corporatism, the two major components of facist economic theory. His primary ideology was nationalism/racialism. The guy was on the right-wing. Unless you want to completely change the right-wing/left-wing nomenclature, ya can’t be calling him a liberal.
Sua
oldscratch claims:
Of what, sociopathic nutcases?
Shame on you for repeating Stalinist propaganda.
Compared to who, the armies of Tamerlane?
Shame on you for repeating Stalinist propaganda.
A shining example of a blindly partisan debate, if ever I saw one.
First of all, re the WTO “riots”-- I am in Seattle. I was downtown. I was not a protester, I was in the middle of things while at work (and going to and from), but I saw the burning dumpsters, I smelled the tear gas, I faced the lines of heavily armed police while trying to get to my office. The perception that what happened in Seattle was a “riot” is completely, totally, mistaken. The vast majority of you were not here, and base your conclusion on what you saw on TV or read in the newspapers. I was here. I saw it with my own eyes, not on Nightline or in Newsweek. Believe me when I tell you that what happened was an escalating spiral of misunderstandings and overreactions, and has little to do with the “Battle in Seattle” sound-bite version fomented by the media. The police were ill-prepared and went completely overboard in their attempt to control something they could have planned for if they’d been paying attention. The violence was perpetrated by a few hundred unaffiliated anarchic opportunists, gang members, and the like, not the 50,000 people who were making a political statement. The combination of these factors and more created the unfortunate result you all saw paraded across the nightly news, but it was not, repeat, not a riot. So stop calling it that; if you do, you’re wrong, and now, I hope, you know better.
Now, on to my main point:
Cool, objective observation demonstrates that neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on violence. Go back to the early years of this century, and study the early years of the nascent labor union movement. These days the unions are largely apolitical, affiliating themselves more with Democrats primarily out of pragmatic expedience, but early union activists would certainly have placed themselves on the left. Most of them were nonviolent (e.g. sit-down strikes were very effective), but some factions had no problem breaking machines or blowing up train tracks to obstruct ownership. Of course, then the owners sent in the Pinkertons to indiscriminately club all the strikers.
Today’s left-wing extremists engage in various other questionable tactics. We’ve heard about trees being spiked by Earth Firsters or whomever; the resulting chainsaw kickback is highly dangerous to loggers. To be fair, this practice was nowhere near as widespread or common as the media coverage would have us believe, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was actively done for at least a brief period. And someone else mentioned PETA; some of their members (though not necessarily the organization itself) think it’s okay to send death threats to animal researchers, not to mention breaking into their laboratories to vandalize equipment and “liberate the voiceless victims.”
Now, I’m a dedicated left-winger. When zigaretten claims the NRA has been “working for gun safety for 120 years,” while simultaneously opposing safety locks and other measures that seem eminently reasonable to me, I have to counter that his assertion is at best a debatable proposition. Yet, at the same time, I recognize it to be a difference in opinion. And further, I know I speak for many people in my philosophical neighborhood when I say the environmentalist and animal-rights tactics above are reprehensible (or at best misguided). Similarly, when freedom2 says “liberals tend to embrace all sorts of radicals like Farrakan and Sharpton,” I wonder which liberals he’s talked to; most people in the American left regard them as little better than crackpots. All I’m after is a little intellectual honesty in the debate, from both sides.
Also, I think SuaSponte makes an excellent point when he observes the swinging pendulum of power. At the moment, American society has been shifting away from traditional right-wing positions on certain narrow social questions (abortion, gun safety, the environment), even while shifting to the right on others (taxes, military spending). (Common observation: “Right-wing” is a misnomer on some of these. For example, conservative non-interference would suggest a hands-off approach to abortion rights as with all personal liberties. The Libertarian platform says government has no role in this individual decision, but the Republicans don’t, which seems contradictory. That’s a discussion for another thread, though; I just wanted to point it out to clarify that my thinking hasn’t been clouded by popular but inaccurate misconceptions of “left” and “right.”) Because of their perceived loss (which seems, from my point of view, to be “progress,” but then I’m an intellectual and a mudblood, so what do you expect?), at the moment, they’re the ones who are lashing out to protect their way of life.
The bottom line, for me, is this: Just as I and other “moderate” leftists dismiss Farrakhan as a loon and condemn tree-spikers and their ilk, I would hope my counterparts on the right are equally quick to disparage those who bomb abortion clinics, beat up children at peaceful political demonstrations, and use their elected office to read insanely hate-filled diatribes into the Congressional record after midnight (e.g. Bob Dornan). I refuse to be defined by those who carry my philosophy to an irrational extreme, and it is my fervent hope that those on the other side are equally responsible.
I apologize for the crummy writing… <sigh>
Um, since when is an armed rebellion “non-violent”, even “relatively”? Whether the Sandinistas were right or wrong doesn’t change the fact that they took up arms, and used them, against Somoza.
To paraphrase Akatsukami, shame on you for spouting Sandinista propoganda.
Sua
And a lot of other good things. IIRC, he also reformed American college football, as apparently too many players were dying on the field. It was all part of his “vigorous physical activity” lifestyle, which we can see Reagan echo years later. And not vigorous like yoga, but manly vigorous, like chopping wood.
I’d go with “The Gipper”, the name of a (college football player) character he’d played once in a movie. IIRC, The Knute Rockne Story, Knute Rockne being another right wing hero.
I’m talking here primarily about post-WW2 American political divisions and the use they make of material from outside that timespan. The left wing has been strongly against pretty much every American use of force since Vietnam. I doubt the military (or its associated industrial base) has failed to notice this.
Maybe you should. It’s an exemplar of the idea that European-Americans are right, and everybody else is wrong. The progress of whites across America is portrayed as a positive episode in history. Cowboys (as often portrayed) were the “muscle” of the movement, cleaning out the bad Indians so the peaceful settlers could move on.
To get back to the OP, the heroes and favorite stories of a movement reveal the inner attitudes of the movement. The heroes of the contemporary American right wing (John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, the cowboy, Schwarzkopf) tend to be people who used force get their way. IMHO, the next question is: Given that a group’s heroes used force to solve their problems, what does that say about the group’s attitude to the use of force to solve its own problems?
Akatsukami: Hey now! Leave me out of this 
.
Whoops! Sorry.
For the record, let me note that, to the best of my knowledge there is no connection between Timur-i-lenk, bloodythirsty Mongol sultan known to the West as “Tamerlane”, and the well-informed SDMB poster self-styled Tamerlane, who has not, as far as I know, so much as threatened to add a single person’s skull to a pyramid of same.