It’s ironic how someone who constantly talks about political correctness like it’s a disease constantly uses made up terms to dance around what he really wants to say. I can’t stand bigots, but I hate people who won’t just come out and own their bigotry more.
Um, you don’t. Not like you say. People who are raised right can see where others might stray and need re-direction. You just need to give them a kick in the right direction. And you are welcome to follow. Those who might see the light also need direction.
I agree entirely:
I agree entirely: The Global Warming Doomsayers like **GIGObuster **really do need to understand clearly that readers and listeners can hang on their words.
Their strident alarmism, comparing their scientific opposition to Hitler and constant comparisons to Holocaust deniers is indeed going to provoke more guys like James Lee thanks to the nefarious propaganda against climate scientists and the politicians that are smart enough to listen to them.
So, **GIGObuster **. Since you have claimed that you think that comparing scientists with Nazis will provoke people like Lee, and since you claim that you see this as a bad thing, do you agree to stop?
Do you agree, henceforth, to stop comparing skeptical scientists to Holocaust deniers in every single post you make on the subject?
Don’t bother to answer dude. We all know the answer. You are only “alarmed” by inciting people like Lee when they attack your own side. You have have shown repeatedly and consistently on these boards that you personally and vicariously no problem using inflammatory rhetoric like “Denier” and “Fascist” against climate scientists and the politicians that are smart enough to listen to them.
A such your position is grossly hypocritical. The fact that you would use the deaths of 70 innocent children to try to shame others into not using the same tactics against you is simply disgusting. :mad:
From the rest of Scandinavia. The party, often classified as right-wing populist, which comparable parties get 13% in Denmark, 6% in Sweden, it gets 23% of the vote in Norway. Some times it has been polled towards 30%. Norway is ruled by a left wing coalition which is led by the Labour party, itself more to the left that Social Democratic parties of Denmark/Sweden, but in the coalition is also the Socialist Left Party, which includes the reformed Communists. It’s probably the most radical left government of Western Europe at the moment, or of the whole of Europe. A Swedish minister famously characterized Norway as the last Soviet state.
The bickering about political correctness I have witnessed with regard to the Norwegian terrorist, has mainly been with regard to the word “terrorist.” I.e. that people have complained of a double standard, in that he was not called a terrorist in the media, whereas Islamic terrorists supposedly were. If you want to do away with all the silly synonyms like gunmen, militants, insurgents, dissidents and what not, you have invented over the years to avoid saying the dreaded word “terrorist,” then thumbs up from here. In any case, it is mostly the Anglo-Saxon media that approach the word “terrorist” as if it has cooties. Here’s a good one from the Guardian: “Mumbai gunmen demand release of Islamist militants.” Good job Guardian. Around here, and I believe most of the continental European press, the press never was a problem with calling terrorists for terrorists. And indeed the Norwegian scum terrorist is called just that in the press. A terrorist. As they did in 9/11, Madrid Bombings, London Bombings, Mumbai, etc.
Here’s Wikipedia on Stoltenbergs second term in office (the present one):
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Since the government’s formation, key political issues such as Norwegian military participation in the current war in Afghanistan, petroleum activities in the Barents Sea, LGBT rights, immigration and the quality of standard education have been greatly debated by the public. Following Stoltenberg’s re-election in 2009, the government has put further restrictions on immigration matters due to ongoing threats of terrorism, centralised and re-organised health care and public hospitals, dealt with the ongoing global recession and championed for environmentalist policies through private and corporate taxation.[15]
[/QUOTE]
Sounds like par for the course wrt to scandinavian social-democrats. Plausibly “radical” from a US conservative viewpoint, but wouldn’t pass the smell test in Scandinavia, I’d venture.
What is the most “radical” left-wing policy that has been enacted by these radicals? I’m sure those in the audience that live far from Scandinavia would appreciate you illustrating your point with more than adjectives…
In 1999. While Norway was governed by a Center-Right coalition with a Prime Minister from the Christian Democratic Party. In frustration over failed negotiations about merging and privatizing the telecom companies owned by the Norwegian and Swedish state, respectively. Off the record to a TV journalist when he thought the camera was turned off. Huge scandal, the deal fell through, he apologized.
Dropping this kind of b-llshit that would generously be called misleading, but more aptly, outright dishonest - is it any wonder that most on the immigration/muslim-critical right enjoy close to zero credibility? What do you have to say to your defense, Rune?
I guess that if you belong on the far right wing of European politics, the Norwegian government may seem “extremist socialist”. However, I believe that no-one on the moderate right, center/right, center, liberal, moderate left or far left of European politics would see much rationality in such a characterization.
And, FYI: The Norwegian Socialist Left Party consists mainly of what we often call “sofaradikalere” (translates loosely as “lounge radicals”). The party was founded by people of the left wing of our Labor party in 1975. Calling them “reformed communists” is about as appropriate as calling any of the labor/social democratic parties in Europe “reformed communists” because of the revolutionary rhetorics of the labor movements before WW1.
<Sherlock>
DO your research!
</Sherlock>
This is all quite confused. The fight over “insurgent” vs “terrorist” was wrt the Iraqi insurgency and their use of e.g. suicide bombings in the aftermath of op Iraqi Freedom. The question at hand was whether the insurgency at large should be called an insurgency or “homicide bombing terrorists” or whatever FoxNews/Rush/Pam Geller were pitching at the moment.
No one but perhaps some nut on a loony fringe somewhere has ever tried to call Al Qaeda terrorism or the Mumbai bombings an “insurgency”. Claiming that that represents a mainstream leftish position is making a straw-man.
“Militants” are well, militants. That is, violent extremists that aren’t referred to in the context of a terrorist attack. The terms mean different things: you can be a militant without having committed an act of terror, and as long as you don’t you remain a militant.
“Gunman” is both more general and more specific than “terrorist”. E.g. “in the Mumbai terror attacks, several gunmen entered the Taj Mahal hotel, the Leopold Bar and started shooting people”. IOW, the perpetrators of the Mumbai strikes were not either terrorists or gunmen - they were both.
And the same goes for Breivik: he is both a terrorist, a gunman, and a (homocide) bomber.
All clear now?
In reference to the question in the thread title, the answer is that we do prevent atrocities like this… all the time.
In Europe these events are vanishingly rare - almost once-in-a-generation occurances for most nations, and once a decade in those most affected. Now and again they pop up - David Copeland, John Ausonius, Franz Fuchs - but have limited scope, and while devastating for individuals directly affected they have little wider impact on overall society.
Even when you add non-political spree killers to the picture - Thomas Hamilton, Michael Ryan, Tristan van der Vlis, Tim Kretschmer, Derrick Bird - they are still isolated events when viewed against the 750 million people who live in Europe.
We have a society which educates and integrates people so that most of us don’t go around starting “race wars”, plus a health and social security system which does a good job in catching ill or disturbed people before they go off the deep end. And we have a police and justice system which often catches people before they act, or stops them quickly once they’ve started.
Hard cases make bad law - nutters like Breivik will use whatever ideology they can find to support their delusions, so using his acts to question the entire foundatin of Western society is a pointless exercise.
TL/DR version: attacks like this are very rare, so it’s daft to extrapolate too much from them.
You try to be rational, realize that more people are dying of starvation in Kenya or will die today in the roads of Europe in the nex few hours, and stop dramatizing the acts of a random nutjob.
You can’t. Shitty things will always happen. Crazy people will always have crazy ideas.
Facts of life, I’m afraid.
Hmmm, yes, because it has only been people on the right who have ever committed such acts.:rolleyes:
Quit dancing around it, Raleigh: The surest way to prevent this from happening again is for Norwegians/Scandinavians/Europeans who think like you to stop thinking like you. And there are plenty of other good reasons for them/you to do so anyway. Your politics are the problem, they are not any part of the solution. That’s your politics, not immigration, and certainly not “Cultural Marxism,” that is the problem. Understand that? You can be sure the rest of the world does.
That is true. An they also have Congressional support for such acts.
I didn’t say or even imply that, don’t distort what I say. And no, it isn’t true that “the left is as bad as the right” which of course is probably your next planned bit of cookie-cutter rhetoric.
Correct. Because as we established in that other thread that you ran away from, the Left is far worse than the Right.
Well said. ** RR** has blood on his hands & he’s trying to deflect the blame.
It isn’t working.
:rolleyes: Yeah, right. The Right is and always has been pretty much uniformly evil. It has always fought against virtually anything good, and for evil; it has been the defender of slavery, torture, the legalized rape of wives, racism, homophobia, religious oppression, plutocracy, and on and on. The Left is sometimes in the wrong; the Right is virtually always in the wrong.
To be fair, there is a way to credibly criticize immigration by mentioning cultural effects of it as well. The argument can be made, and is in fact often made, that very open immigration policies lead to people with incompatible cultural values immigrating to liberal Western countries. People with entrenched misogyny, or homophobia for example, or perhaps anti-Semitism as well as I believe is the argument usually made by Chen. (Well, it’s what remains when we remove the more objectionable parts of his posts. ;))
Pretty much nobody is in favour of uncontrolled immigration with no effort at all to integrate immigrants. It’s just a question of which immigrants a country should target, which quotas should it establish, and how should it go about with integrationist policies. This said, you’re right that if RaleighRally continues with his claims of conspiracies and “cultural Marxism” he’ll have a seriously hard time getting respect.
Step back a moment, remember that there are at least two kinds, social conservatives and economic conservatives. The difference is that economic conservatives are not always wrong, and social conservatives are not always dishonest.
Economic conservatives have some good sound arguments, but never seem to mean them as stated – it’s always the established business interests and class interests that they’re really serving. (Genuine economic libertarians are far more honest, but far less important.)
Social conservatives are always wrong about everything that distinguishes them as a group, but at least they sincerely believe what they say (regardless of how strictly they practice it themselves), and you always know where you stand with them. I dunno how it’s this latter group that always seems to have the “hypocrite” reputation, that really belongs to the bizcons.