The fact of the matter is that all extremist groups have been observed, not merely for the last few months or even years, but for decades, in order to assess the degree of threat each group might - or might not - pose. Yes, there were abuses of this process, the most notable being J. Edgar Hoover's actions regarding Martin Luther King, however, I've not seen that there has been *any* consistent policy of "shying away from" groups of one or another political ideology - what matters is whether a group poses a threat to the populace and/or members of the Government. One of the *fastest* ways to gain the immediate attention of the FBI (and most likely the Secret Service as well) is to make public threats against the President's life or well-being. This has been the case for as long as there was any government organization dedicated to the security of the President and the People.
So, why should anyone really care if extemists complain about this attention? Frankly, attention, ANY sort of attention, is precisely what many of them want, and the majority are satisfied with having their conspiracy theories "proven" by such attention. That is not opinion; that is fact. For a small minority, however, violent action remains the main goal, and this small minority is the threat that warrants investigation.
The only thing the mystifies me is, Why do the media outlets feel so compelled to air the irrational paranoia of people who refuse to accept that there are consequences for actions such as threatening the life of ANY President, or such as committing or even promoting public violence? If someone commits a robbery, and is arrested and tried, that’s considered Justice. If your neighbor threatens to kill you, that is a crime and he can be arrested and tried for it, and the is considered Justice. So why do people imagine they can threaten the life of a duly-elected President or other member of the government, or threaten to harm random members of the general populace, and be permitted to do whatever their free-floating anger desires, yet have a free pass to do so, merely because they claim these threats, or violent actions against individuals, are "political protest"? The plain fact is that some crimes are simply that: crimes. We have the Right to Freedom of Association and Freedom of Assembly, and to engage in peaceful political protest. But threats, beatings, destruction of property, and other personal crimes are simply that: crimes.
Contrary to the claims of Maggie Gallagher, polygamy is not about "an attempt to secure stable mother-father families for children" - it is for the *production* of children, but beyond that, what it is primarily attempting to do has little else to do with children, and everything to do with the desires of the adults and, more specifically, their sectarian culture. Religious sects always emphasizes the *production* of children - but once those children are produced, the main focus of religion becomes, not safety, not security, not self-fulfillment or personal growth, but *obedience* to the patriarchy.
As for "traditional" marriage: If a relatively tiny proportion of the population can in *ANY* way "destroy" it, then the fact of the matter is that "traditional" marriage was/is already on its death-bed and cannot be resuscitated by Gallagher's hysterics about "making babies to preserve the culture" (which sounds to me like "code" for *white* society, since her speeches imply she is not in favor of adopting Asian, African, or Middle-Eastern children...).
Further more, if marriage is, as Gallagher and her acolytes claim, ALL (i.e., only) about *producing* children, then the inevitable extension of that is: once those children reach the "traditional" age of adulthood, these marriages should be dissolved - as should any childless marriage; and *any* people unable to have children should be prohibited from getting married. This would of course include such "lifestyles" as Genetic Mosaicism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_mosaicism) and Intersexuality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex) - which, given Gallagher's sectarian so-called "logic", must, contrary to any and all known biological science, also be "a lifestyle choice" because "God does not make junk".
Like other obsessive paranoid narcissists, however, Gallagher is incapable of following through to the consequences of her, and her followers', own so-called "reasoning". Given that men still generally have shorter lifespans than women, one wonders what she and her cabal plan to do about "single people in nursing homes" - perhaps follow the ancient "tradition" of "send the wife into the afterlife along with her husband"?
If "traditional" marriage is "in danger", it is because
1) too many people are pressured to marry at too young and age;
2) absurd romanticized pap about "white knights" and "riding off into the sunset" continue to supercede real and practical information about things like how to budget, how to share finances, and how to maintain one's own personhood within a relationship;
3) women are still too often treated as subservient to the husband, and too many "traditional" marriages are not any different at all from the Koranic implication that a woman is worth 1/2 of a man;
4) there are still far too many loveless marriages;
5) and several other well-documented stresses within "traditional" marriage that lead to things like the 50%+ divorce rate, sd well as battered spouses and children.
It is NOT "under threat" because a rather small minority of people wish to practice their civil Constitutional right to enter into the contract known as marriage. Just as it is not "under threat" because, in addition to priests, pastors, rabbis, and so on, *the State* also grants people such as Justices of the Peace, in some rare cases Notary Publics, and so on, to pronounce closure of the contract - which must also be registered with City Hall in order to be considered legal. This is why even a religious representative says: "By the power invested in me by the state of [insert state name], I now pronounce you..." In other words, marriage is a legal contract, and the Constitution grants equal rights to all citizens under the law - most especially concerning contract law. Again, Gallagher and her ilk invoke the Constitution in the same selective way that they invoke the Bible: when it suits *their own* purposes - meaning, their own egocentrism.
The things that are wrong in "traditional" marriage will NOT simply disappear even if the agents provocateur of intolerance and hatred *did* manage to prevent gay marriage (or fulfill their end-goal of wiping out all GLBT people...) If anything, that sort of obsessive narcissism, funneled into hatred of anyone and anything that is not an exact clone of the narcissist, and leading to a compulsion to control others to force them to be "appropriately" compliant, *is* one of the problems in "traditional" marriage. Were this not the case, Gallagher and her ilk would spend more time addressing the psychoemotional, physical, and even sexual abuse that, distressingly to the rest of us, is not all that uncommon in the much-vaunted and supposedly-perfect "traditional" marriage and family. At elast some of those who have endured, and survived, such abuse consider this deliberate oversight to be, at best, disgusting and serving nothing but their own narrow-minded obsession.
During the Cold War, it was common for the Soviet Union to promote its Collectivist ideology by recruiting people, using both money and any personal dissatisfaction with Capitalism, who would write articles, produce films, talk with friends, family, and neighbors, and otherwise spread news and talk that had a pro-Soviet slant. This is something that all nations do, to varying extents; it's a way of promoting their own national interests. What was remarkable about the Soviet efforts was not only the extent in terms of the number of recruits, but also the vast sums of money expended to both pay individuals and support various activities such as publishing, protests, and so on.
At this point in time, the world of communications has exploded - within seconds, we can text someone in Germany, email someone in India, have a live 'net meeting' with colleagues in NY, AK, and Singapore. One part of this immense, and increasing, world of communications includes what are called "social media", including personalized websites on hosts like MySpace and FaceBook, to "instant message"-type services such as Twitter. The benefit of this communication is that it makes full censorship almost impossible, such that oppressive governments can no longer murder hundreds to thousands of people while keeping such actions out of the sight of the world.
Another benefit is that information flows freely, giving people even in remote areas access to vast stores of news and knowledge. One of the disadvantages of this instant communication is that, as has been noted by many, there is also an increase of "noise", of mere opinion that is passed off as fact, of massaged information, and of plain everyday errors. One thing that has received very little attention, however, is something that harkens back to the days of the Soviet "agents provocateur", the people who were tasked with not only spreading deliberately-inaccurate nformation ("disinformation"), but also, with fomenting dissent. The connection between massive oil revenues flowing into previously-undeveloped areas, and the export of terrorists by some of these areas, is well-documents, and easily found (with references) in Thomas Friedman's "Hot, Flat, and Crowded". What has not been documented, at least as far as this writer has seen, is whether a connection exists between terrorist groups, and the use of fake IDs on social media to spread dissent and chaos in Western nations.
This probably sounds bizarre and paranoid to the average citizen, who still has trouble comprehending how someone can blow himself up in a schoolyard for the sake of an ideology of hatred; bit would be useful to note, however, that devotees of such a radical ideology would have no moral compunctions about assuming a false Western-sounding ID and function as an 'agent provocateur', posing as either a "left-winger" or a "right-winger", and use the completely-unregulated social media to spread dissent. One of the strengths, in fact, of committed ideologues is that they often will look upon attempted cash payment as an insult; this characteristic was noted, and used, by Soviet spymasters during the Cold War, and it would be a mistake to assume that other anti-Western groups learned nothing from that history.
So, the next time you receive a message from someone proposing the overthrow of a duly-elected and law-abiding Western government, instead of first assuming that you need to reject, hate, discriminate against, or otherwise be "enemies" of whatever group to which the writer/speaker claims to belong, stop for a moment and ask yourself, Is this really showing me that my fellow citizens are my enemies, or is this someone using a false ID and typing inflammatory rubbish from the bowels of a hidden cave in some desolate hinterland? ALthough Western nations have their fair share of dissatisfied citizens, it just might be possible that some people are using the destructive lessons of the past to fan a few sparks into a fire.
While reading Thomas Friedman's book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" with CNN on in the background, it struck me that I've heard a number of reporters repeat teh phrase: "The campaign is over, and now it's time to govern."Not to put too fine a point on it, but, as the saying goes, "What planet are they from?"; the election campaign is over, but the campaign to maintain electoral support never ends.This is very closely tied in with the necessity to "green" America for the following reason: given that it is both well-known, and well-documented, that terrorism is funded by oil revenues (often called "petrodollars", I cannot comprehend why we, the American people, are not being provuided with public-service messages clearly and simply illustrating not only teh facts recarding that funding, but also, the fact that, when the CAFE standards were eliminated in the 1980's, that alone directly led to the US wasting as much oil as optimistic estimates say is located beneath ANWAR. In our rush to absolve ourselves of any and all responsibility, we as a people and government have long deluded ourselves that buying gas-guzzling SUVs and energy-wasting homes was a matter of "freedom", when it has, in fact, been the major vehicle for funding attempts to eliminate our true freedom.President Obama has ntoed that we have an economic struggle ahead of us, and he has intimated that energy-independence is both an economic issue and a national security issue. I do not think, however, that either aspect has at all been sufficiently communicated to the populace, not by a long shot. Perhaps we have become so sensitized to the mere mention of the word "propaganda" that we've allowed small minds to convince us the airwaves belong exclusively to commercial advertising (with snippets of programing squeezed in-between to keep us watchign the advertising). If this is so, then some improtant lessons from history have been either ignored, or deliberately swept under the proverbial carpet. I think it is not merely a "good idea", but rather, imperative that the oil-terrorism connection be communicated to the American people, and to all people in the West. The potential tyranny of energy has been well-illoustrated by Russia's having plunged Europeans into an icebath, so to speak, by cutting off the flow of natural gas. We, as a people, must either return to the realization that it is not the size of one's car or the square-footage of one's home that gives life value and makes it worth living; to reject that realization will mean that, by pursuing the Madison Avenue illusion of freedom as "purchasing choice", we will sell our true freedom to petrofascists.
I've been giving a lot of thought to the Republican schism, and have been skimming a few resources looking for posible lessons to be found in the Republicna party schism of the late 1870's (and early 1880') that led to the party being split into three factions: 1) the liberal reformers, 2) the "Stalwarts", and 2) the "half-breeds". I haven't quite decided, because the circumstances of the post-Civil War era were so different from today's corcumstances.
But one thing did chill me - with the thought of Rush Limbaugh now the de facto head of the "real Republicans" (the sector paralleling the old "Stalwarts") in the back of my mind, I came across the fact that, in 1881, it was a disgruntled Stalwart who assissinated President Garfield in 1881.
Now, like most Americans, I'm hoping and praying that the far-less-than-ideal Stimulus Bill, drafted, it unfortunately seems, without the input of such brilliant thinkkers as Paul Krugman and pragmatic thinkers such as Sheila Behr or Jim Cramer, will indeed get the economy moving and get America back on her feet. Given the increasing rancour, however, of those who like to call themselves the "real Republicans" (not the so-called "RINOs"), as represented by de facto head of the Party, Rush Limbaugh (Mr. Steele evidently being chairman in name only), I am increasinly fearful for the safety of President Obama and perhaps even Vice President Biden.
My fear had begun as a vague gel of uneasiness, but began to solidify when I took note of Sen. Pete Sessions citing the Taliban as a model of "political insurgency" to be emulated by the Republican Party, and admonishing the Party to cease thinking of itself as participants in a legislative process and instead become a Taliban-like insurgency.
Perhaps my understanding of these issues is implistic, however, when I swore that oath to "protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic", I never for one moment thought that this oath extended to belonging to a group that had the express intent of promoting the deliberate disruption national affairs and due legislative process. Again, I am not a political or Constitutional scholar, but this seems to tread uncomfortably close, if not to treason, than to at least a blatant breach of that oath. My gut reaction is that it illustrates an utter disdain for Constitutional process, and for us Citizens that this process is supposed to both heed, and help, illustrates a descent from party ideology, to cultist fanaticism - the very sort of self-aggrandizing and self-righteous fanaticism that led to the assination of President Garfield.
I know that I am not alone in my fear - I've heard many people express it, albeit in differnt words. We have always known that there are both leftist-fringe, and rightist-finge, elements in our nation, and they do have the right to freely express their rview. But a dangerous amount of encouragement was given, through nods and winks, through silence and chuckles and half-smiles, in response to the words of hatered and violence, encouragement given by those who erroneously believed they could hold the dragon by the tail and use it to propell them into positions of power. But the voters have denied them that power, and by so doing, have left that roused minority, a small but generally well-armed minority, with nowhere to roar; and so, we see an increasing level of hatred and violence in the rhetoric of those who only love representatvie Democracy, and the Constitution, when they can make both serve their own needs and desires and agendas.
Currently, this remains, for the most part, an issue of freedom of speech. But at wat point does free speech becomes a voiced threat? I wonder whther the extremist Stalwart could have been nipped in the proverbial bud back in 1881, and I hope and pray that similar impulses can be diffused now. Given the world situation, I fear taht a repeat of the 1881 action would not only be a tragedy, but would ignite the nation, and perhaps beyond, achieving what the Taliban, and al-Qaida, could not.
God willing, I am merely being paranoid...at least that's easily remedied with medication.
Yes, that word is "centrist". In many ways, I'm told, I have somewhat "conservative" views: I believe in hard work, in "being all you can be" to be a bit hokey. In my view, we are all created equal, but we are not equivalent, meaning, we are not all identical. We have different abilities, and different levels of abilities. Some of us are extremely gifted in one or more ways; others of us have "only" the gift of strong hands, or for some, the ability to endure crushing labor for the sake of a dream, a hope for a better future, if not for ourselves, than for our children.
Now, for the sake of honesty, I need to note that, no, I was not blessed with children. But that does not preclude my understanding the love, and the dreams, that people have for, invest in, their children.
I mention that to make a specific point, that being: compassion. Or, more specifically, the fact that one person does not have to be "exactly like" another in order to have compassion for that other.
To be honest, I despise labels and pidgeonholes. I have no idea what "liberal" or "conservative" really mean, what constitutes their substance. The definitions seem to be largely a matter of viewpoint, which therefore also means, ratehr arbitrary. At what point does "conservative" come to mean "recidivist", "back to the days of the robber barons"? At what point does "liberal" come to mean "everyone has a right to your efforts but you"?
I don't know the answers to those philosophical questions. What I do know - or at least *think* I know - is that, although I do have the right of ownership of the fruits of my labors, I also realize that a necessary component of survival is *compassion*. Setting aside the moral and philosophical aspects of this issue, if we have no compassion for the downtrodden, for the hungry, they will eventually fulfill their needs by force - the history of revolutions has shown time and time again that, if the well-off sit on high and drone "if they've no bread, let them eat cake", said drones are likely to find themselves becoming well-acquainted with the business end of a pitchfork, symbolically speaking - or perhaps in actuality.
I hear people *say* they "feel sorry" for others, but in order for the human race to survive its own exploding population, compassion must, to at least some degree, be reified, translated into action, given substance. It doesn't do to punish the lackadaisical mother, by allowing her children to be abused and hungry, and eventually driven into the hard arms of violent gangs.
Hope lies in the reification of compassion. Not is us each building bunkers and collecting weaponry and canned goods, but in building bridges, building a different futrue, both on this earth and in space. Hagar the Horrible politics ("I got MINE!") might feel satisfying for the moment, but it is destructive in the long run, if only because we'll run out of space (if we already haven't) to build that many mini-fortresses, and if they begin to overrun farmland and pastureland and watersheds, it will all become moot, because that desruction will destroy ALL of us. And possibly most other species as well.
And so, this somewhat-misanthropic, somewhat-crotchety introvert sits here and cites compassion. Not because it's the warm-fuzzy, cute, naively-idealistic thing to do, but because, in the end, it's necessary to the survival of our species. And mroe to the point, I sit HERE, practicing my samizdat in this space, because the politics of fear and selfishness cannot open its eyes widely enough to see that fact.
