Welcome to the English language: quite standard for verbs to become nouns.
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I donât imagine you meant it that way, but this comparison is pretty unfair to Muslims. Both White Separatists and White Supremacists fall entirely within the the set of racist jerks. A fairer analogy is that not every fundamentalist Islamist is a an al-Qaeda supporter.
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Are you sure?
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The problem is anyone can feel terror over anything they want to.
The definition goes from being a working technical piece of jargon to being a meaningless blanket term that covers anything and everything. Large dogs become terrorists, because someone, somewhere is terrified of them. Thatâs clearly absurd.
So the fact that Iâm sticking with the definition that had been used academically and accepted professionally throughout the 20th century means Iâm making things up?
Methinks you are confused as to who is engaged in invention. You canât just pretend history doesnât exist, and then claim those are knowledgeable of it are liars and fabricators.
I think thatâs true in the 20th century, but I think that was part and parcel of government policy during reconstruction. I believe, before the end of reconstruction under Grant, I think that they had classified the KKK as such. So the radical republicans certainly saw them as terrorists. Of course, politically expidiency meant the end of that.
But clearly, white supremacists are terrorists. I donât know any other way to describe them.
Thatâs just incorrect. Timothy McVeigh cited the Turner Diaries as an inspiration. That screed is aimed at creating a revolution against an intergrated society. It was aimed at political change. William Pierce meant it to be political.
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How is wanting to overthrow the US and create a white supremacist society NOT political?
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They have a political goal, which is to ethnically cleanse particular places of people they deem other. They arenât violent for no reason, they are violent for a particular, specific, politically inflected reasons. that includes both âracial minoritiesâ, religious minorities (see the case of Leo Frank), and whites who other wise would be part of their group. The end is still a white, protestant society. Not violence for violence sake. If that were true, they wouldnât be white supremacists. Theyâd be pre-nazified skinheads at a soccer match in England.
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Hardly. You canât legitimately call everyone who terrorizes a terrorist because itâs ridiculously overbroad. The proprietor of a Halloween haunted house or carnival spook ride may instill terror in (or âterrorizeâ) the guests, but calling him a terrorist would spread the word out so thinly that it loses any useful meaning.
I donât think the point is to say that all people who terrorize are terrorists, but to say that this particular group of people are terrorists. whic they are. they employ terror for political ends.
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#notallterrorists
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So, I canât have an opinion on your comment? 
But I got what you were getting at, but there seems to be some general confusion in this thread about whether or not white supremacists are terrorist or have a political goal in mind. Iâd argue that clearly do, so they qualify as terrorists.
That being said, people do like to throw that term around quite a bit now a days, in ways that are clearly wrong. This just isnât one of them.
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My grandad was a Marine and fought against Germany in WWII, but he was a Royal Marine.
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Hardly. You canât legitimately call everyone who terrorizes a terrorist because itâs ridiculously overbroad. The proprietor of a Halloween haunted house or carnival spook ride may instill terror in (or âterrorizeâ) the guests, but calling him a terrorist would spread the word out so thinly that it loses any useful meaning.
What a lot of the more pedantic people on this bbs donât utilize very well is making assumptions based upon good faith. Why assume that @Michael_R_Smith would be so terribly dense as to assume that a proprietor of a haunted house should be labeled a terrorist?
Why not assume that @Michael_R_Smith is not an idiot and is not embracing esoteric, uncommon definitions and meanings behind words?
Why not assume good faith? It would save us all a lot of trite, pedantic, beside-the-point squabbling over basic semantics in these threads and save more space and time for matters of substance. Hell, we might even get some solid solutions to some problems worked out in these threads instead of bitter squabbles based upon assumptions of bad faith and stupidity.
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Iâm not assuming heâs an idiot. He asked a question, I tried to answer it. Maybe he was being sarcastic or something, in which case Iâm the idiot.
He asked a question
On top struggling with the assumption of good faith, you also seem to struggle with the concept of figures of speech. It was a rhetorical question in the form of a question that is asked in order to make a point.
@Michael_R_Smith wasnât really asking why canât we call the proprietor of a Halloween haunted house or carnival spook ride a legitimate form of terrorism. Then again, I assume good faith in @Michael_R_Smith instead of assuming heâs an idiot who would ever legitimize such things as acts of terrorism.
It could be the problem here, is not @Michael_R_Smith, not me⌠but you. Your past posts show youâre obviously very intelligent and have a lot more to offer this bbs than semantic arguments like this. In my opinion, I think youâd very much do us all a favor to avoid them and offer your usually more compelling conversations instead of wasting your intellect on this kind of stuff.
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There is no tolerance for this type of behavior in the military at all.
While there certainly have been some efforts to purge bad elements from the ranks, I wouldnât go so far as say there is no tolerance for it at all:
Evidence:
America did, without a doubt, almost single handily change the world for the better.
Thatâs a very nationalistic opinion not based upon facts. We are not even close to almost single-handedly changing the world and itâs incredibly insulting to other nations to suggest otherwise.
Hereâs just one example of many:
That said, you otherwise make a lot of very good points and I liked your post, but I do think youâre looking at some other things with an over-broad slant as well.
For example, you say that Boing Boing doesnât occasionaly credit our country with doing something good. That isnât accurate even if you didnât mean it in the literal sense. There are plenty of posts that imply that America has good qualities.
Boing Boing is thankfully not a nationalistic website constantly spewing jingoistic propaganda like most of our American news media does, but itâs certainly not an anti-American site either.
By reading most of your post, you obviously arenât satisfied with the status quo in general. However, I tend to think that most of those who do embrace the status quo and thump their chests that the USA is the greatest country in the world tend to be the worst kind of weak patriots and I hope that you would agree with that.
The United States is an ever evolving republic and needs self-reflection and constructive criticism to continue to evolve in positive ways. Thatâs how things like civil rights progress, for example. We first acknowledged the problem existed and then we worked on addressing it. Comparing how rotten other countries are to us doesnât accomplish anything but make us look (ironically) insecure in ourselves.
Everyone, including Americans, hates on America.
Trust me, if we hated America as much as you suggest we do⌠first of all, we wouldnât live here. Most of us love America and thatâs why we want to change it for the better. Youâre barking up the wrong tree in this regard. If I hated America, Iâd just give up on supporting things like this, vote in as much greater evil as I could to hasten its demise and congratulate the status quo on what a wonderful job itâs doing in destroying our country.
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I appreciate your comments, and I apologize especially for my remarks in reference to other nations.
Private Chenâs story, in reference to your link, is an example of one of the most challenging issues that military leaders can face. At itâs core, itâs a sad, and often overlooked example of what I believe is a limitation on a humans psyche.
When you live, work, exercise, and fraternize with a small group of people for an extended period of time, a situation often develops in which you start to lose sight of your individual differences. It is our natural inclination to project our own thoughts and values upon others, and what might seem to one person like âgood nature d ribbingâ, can, and understandably often is, perceived by the victim as targeted mistreatment. I wish Chen had spoken up. at best the situation could (and in my experience would) have been resolved, but, if not, we might at least have a stronger case against those who then would be clearly defined as his tormentors.
I am sensitive about this issue entirely due to to my close relationship with the organization. I have known, both closely and by association, soldiers who have attempted and succeed in completing suicide. There are many factors that account for an unusually large number of suicides in the military in relation to their civilian counterparts, some of which is, yes, atributed to mistreatment. Racism is uncommon, I never personally experienced it, the treatment of overweight soldiers in the military however is appaling and cruel. One factor you must consider is that recruits who enter the military often donât leave behind much, sometimes soldiers idealize military service and become disillusioned, and often they mature and begin to disagree with specific missions in which they participate.
All of the soldiers mentioned in the article misrepresented themselves with their applications, lied about symbolism associated with their tattoos, and daily downplayed their sentiments and/or allegiances. The articles only mentions soldiers who were discharged or jailed for said beliefs, and in keeping with their subject, would have been supported by instances by which discovery of racism was not punished.
In response to the white supremacists leader who sends his members into the army to receive combat training. For one, bullshit. By definition, the effectiveness of a soldier is determined not by his ability to execute a mission, but by his ability to train others to execute the same mission. Any soldier worth his salt could easily train others to execute the same. He should by now have a self generating system in play. He is piggybacking upon the military in an attempt to instill fear within you. He understands fear, it is the wellspring of hatred.
My âblindâ patriotism is another matter.
The unfortunate state of our nation is that we have been duped into dividing ourselves with the two party system by the small group of individuals that can afford the largest bullhorns. I happen to be a democrat. The foundation of my politics lies in the belief that the variance among people is largely over represented, and mostly based upon circumstance. Using what should rightly be described as our nations overabundance of resources I believe we have the ability to make a better world.
There is no doubt that this publication by which we love and frequent shares these viewpoints. We digress not in values, but in method. We, as a species, define ourselves not by our accomplishments, but by nit-picky and vain differences in others. We have built a world in which advances in communication, expression and environmental adaptation have afforded us the opportunity to transcend our differences, and yet the lexicon by which we define our world is hillbillies, thugs, wasps and worse.
Wake the fuck up people we have the opportunity to grasp a better world.
Just my rant, make a new friend today and whatnot.
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