We're all rightwingers now. Now move along libs

[barracuda]

you are being excessively strategy/label-minded barracuda. you are asking for people to withhold statements of fact if and when they do not align with the goals of your favoured movement, or when they aid opponents. this is not particularly rigorous, as it puts the success of the movement before the speaking of truth. bad road to go down.

I'm not asking anyone to withhold facts. I'm seeking a context for those facts which doesn't help David Vitter's next senate race. But I'm perfectly willing to admit to hyperbole as an aid toward introducing a different point of view into the thread.

This is what we get from a moderator here?

Apparently.

Personally, I'm left of liberal, but I'm still pretty pissed that it's illegal for me to carry a gun in my home town.

That may change soon, you never know. It's a local issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._Chicago

[justdrew]

well, there's a long history of questions about the SPLC. and I'm not sure they're provably much more than an organization which exists to raise funds to support the continuation of the organization at this point. Didn't they grow out of Daniel Sheehan (an earlier sheehan ion the news) and his 'christic institute'? Danny is currently giving very un-credible UFO talks at conventions as far as I can tell.

Anyway, I don't think the OP at alternet is anything to get too wound up about, it's a very standard piece, pushed out a few times a year though a variety of different channels.

and these ARE a list of the top ten conspiracy occupying the minds of right wingers.

that DOESN'T mean there's no grains of truth to some of them. The bread the 'rightwing' bake from those grains IS bad.

[justdrew]

I met a marine the other day, who I happened to run into again today at a plant store and he wants to take me "shooting". I told him I don't want to and that I utterly hate guns. But he says I'll like it and he's a nice guy. I had to fully defend him from some clueless leftwing bitch who was berating him for being in the military -- that's how we met. He fully had the eminem look of "I'm about to kill you" and you're hurting my feelings look, so I had to step in.

You make friends where you make them. . .

listen, stay the fuck away from that marine, and don't go playing with guns with him either, ok. did you know the "clueless leftwing bitch" before or did she just show up to play her role? I just don't trust that scenario.

seriously 82_28, be careful...

this post from yesterday:

But it is we who will eventually go to jail for even holding an opinion. That's the magic and glory of it all.

Keep your eye on the pea peeps. People who intuit shit aren't fucking long for this world unless Jesus decides to come back. When Jesus comes back it will not be an anti-abortion, pro and yet anti war message he brings. It will be something far more serious. The fucking fascists know we are in their midst and they in ours. It will be in High Definition.

I literally am waiting for the word from Jesus.

There are a lot of military types who don't buy jack shit about any of this. Everybody it seems has given up on America.

Which is and was probably the plan all along. Hollow this place out and then move along to the next conquest, which will be WW3.

combined with having just met a marine twice now and already he wants to take you out shooting. That's raising my eyebrow a bit.

but of course, I'm probably just being paranoid. Still, take care, beware...

... and just a wild guess hunch, but the marine wouldn't happen to be black by any chance?

[Laodicean]

The OP would be more accurate if the word "Patriot" was replaced with "Nationalist".

Cuda is right in regards to self-image. These people really do believe they're patriots. No they're not.

[freemason9]

Out of Nordic's context, cuda. Give yourself a time out.

ha ha, i knew it, i can smell right wing radicals a mile away

three main identifiers, though, when it gets to economics--

they hate liberals
they hate unions
they hate a group based upon racial identifiers

these lead to blatant fascism

fear and mistrust, fear and mistrust, fear and mistrust, fear and mistrust; these are the primary instruments used by fascists to claim a population and stir popular support. i'm just saying.

how many do you qualify for? be honest

peace

[Nordic]

Out of Nordic's context, cuda. Give yourself a time out.

ha ha, i knew it, i can smell right wing radicals a mile away

three main identifiers, though, when it gets to economics--

they hate liberals
they hate unions
they hate a group based upon racial identifiers

these lead to blatant fascism

fear and mistrust, fear and mistrust, fear and mistrust, fear and mistrust; these are the primary instruments used by fascists to claim a population and stir popular support. i'm just saying.

how many do you qualify for? be honest

peace

Are you under the delusion that you're talking about me?

I love unions. I'm in one. Without it I'd have no health care and neither would my family.

I love liberals when they know what the fuck is actually going on. Cindy Sheehan comes to mind. She's the real deal, not the fake variety.

I have no idea what your last statement is about.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I hate The Liberals.

Pack of conservative, right wing, turd munchers.

HAARP didn't cause floods in Pakistan, but it's still a real installation and there's a similar one in Pine Gap.

I don't think Pine Gap is that similar.

You may be thinking of the facility at Exemouth, NW Cape in Western Australia.

I dunno if Pine Gap has the necessary power sources, tho there are rumours it has secret nuclear reactors. Dunno how plausible that is.

[stefano]

Then prepare to be astonished, because this forum has any number of Ron Paul supporters, "jews control the media" advocates, rabid gun control opponents, NWO, etc. Welcome to the picnic.

If you mean on this forum then you're in the same company, aren't you, your dedication to orthodoxy notwithstanding? I was a Ron Paul supporter, because he was right about the major issue, imperial war, while Obama and McCain were wrong. Paul was wrong about immigration, corporate legislation and a whole host of other things, but compared to the wholesale murder of thousands and the destruction of countries that's a minor.

The right wing is never correct, because "right" and "left" denote statements of political opinion, not datapoints of factual information.

No, you're wrong. When the right wing (or the Communist Party of America or a gin drunk slumped on a barstool) says 'the bailouts were larcenous', it is correct.

I think I saw a thread here just yesterday in which HAARP was being blamed for the floods in Pakistan. I mean really - where do you go with that type of thinking? Politically, where does it take you?

Nowhere I want to be, and I think that's a stupid theory. But I do think that elements of the US government were involved in the 9/11 attacks. Now a definer of acceptable left-wing political opinion on Alternet tells me that both theories are characteristic of the radical right and if I hold either I am a paranoid member of that movement, just as you tell me that if I say gun confiscation is an infringement of someone's rights you will consider me in league with tea partiers. You and Zaitchik are both wrong, and frankly presumptuous.

If I stand in this conversation as some signpost of leftist gatekeeping, then I'm okay with that, though I think it's also a bit of useless shorthand.

It is shorthand, as much as any political label. I wouldn't call it useless, but it certainly doesn't resolve an argument. At best it's the start of a discussion, after which we can ask each other what we mean by right and left. I'm in favour of free health care and sanitation and inexpensive education for all, which I reckon would put me to the left of most people in the US. Unlike you I don't feel that this 'self-labelling' obliges me to reject out of tribal affiliation anything a right-winger says, on the occasions when such people say sensible things.

That's my issue here. The political landscape in the US has been broken up into red and blue supporters' outfits. Any member of either side is told he has to embrace all tenets of his team's credo or be rejected as a heretic, cross the floor and become a zealous convert to the other team. "I used to be a liberal" gets 8m hits on Google, "I used to be a conservative" 7m. There's no thinking involved, you post shit on forums like "the right wing is never correct" and read books entitled "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans". Meanwhile at election time the game is rigged so that neither team gets more than 55% of the vote, resulting in another four years of juvenile name-calling. If you participate in this charade you pretty much ensure nothing will ever change.

I prefer to look for a synthesis. I'm convinced that the divide between libertarian and authoritarian is more important than the one between right and left, and that's even more true in the US where the big parties actually represent right and just-a-little-less-right-but-not-too-much-we-know-which-side-our-bread-is-buttered-on-you-see. My favourite American commentators are Glenn Greenwald and Daniel Larison, one liberal and one conservative but both far more sane and human than the politicians of either party.

[compared2what?]

To the best of my knowledge, all ten of those concerns originated with and were promoted by various precincts of the extreme far right, so to that extent, it's not unreasonable for the writer to refer to them as "right-wing" conspiracy theories.

It's just superficial, dismissive and an obstacle to insightful and/or original political thought. Which is much, much worse.

Also, I really don't intend this in a prick-ish spirit, I swear, but I really don't think that it's even a little bit unreasonable to ask yourself whose water you might be carrying before you pick it up, politically speaking. I mean, the message you believe you're sending very well might not be the one that's being received. And it's not like tactical impact is a negligible in the political arena. Or not in realpolitik politics, anyway. You gotta educate both yourself and others as well as agitate and organize if you ever want to make any excruciatingly slowl progress. Which is just common sense and really not a value judgment of any kind at all.

Plus, just as a hypothetical, it actually would be politically problematic from a leftist perspective if those ten issues were either at or near the top of your agenda or roughly representative of it, insofar as they neither say nor explain anything about why and how most of the country is living in an ever-accelerating and politically perpetuated state of extreme economic insecurity (at best) or who benefits as a result, or what can be done about it; worker's rights; equal rights under the law generally; the separation of powers; the defunding of social welfare programs; the deterioration of the public school system; the erosion of the middle class; the devaluation of very basic civil liberties, such as, you know, the ones we used to have under the first and fourth amendments; or acting in the interests of promoting the greater good of the polity as a whole. Oh, or environmental preservation.

In short: Those particular ten pressing issues of the day pretty much overlook almost all of the bread-and-butter equality/justice/liberty/transparency-positive planks that make up your basic left-wing platform. With some adjustments for left-libertarians and anarchos, obviously. But whatever your tendency happens to be, if you're a person of the left, those pretty much are traditionally your values in one combo-platter form or another.

And yes, I do understand that they're generally anti-tyranny and anti-fascist. That's not inherently a right or left positio, or even inherently a free or fascist one. (I mean: Nobody actually comes right out and says they're running on a pro-fascist, pro-tyranny ticket, come on.)

Also....Well. To a certain extent, I guess you could also argue that they're all kinda latently, uninflectedly American-exceptionalist concerns. In fact, I think that I personally would argue that. At least as they're typically framed and discussed, none of those items does much to convey how absolutely intolerable we the people consider torture, indefinite detention without charges, or the commission of quasi-genocide via the prosecution of illegal wars, all of which are currently foreign-policy SOP.

But whatever.

The OP itself is just a mindless rehash of Hofstadter, really, if you ask me.

And I know, I know, I know that everyone here has already read it. But I'm linking anyway, basically because I don't see how the topic could actually be injured or diminished if its basis were broadened to include a piece of writing that's actually an inducement to thought and not just to feeling, right? Or, as the case may be, left?

[Blue]

Not that Agent Bob couldn't read every keystroke I'm typing now if he wanted to, but Disqus is making it incredibly easy for them.

I think it's Agent Mike.

That's an interesting find about the Disqus. I used to really like Alternet authors but this story's agenda is so blatent. I looked up other articles written by this guy Alexander Zaitchik. Looks like a lot of personality politics and sensationalism, you know like the History Channel.


5 Passages from the WikiLeaks "Afghan Diary" That Bring the Bizarre, Tragic Reality of War to Life
Posted on Aug 7, 2010, Source: AlterNet
From accounts of prison life to tales of drug smuggling, the Wikileaks memos bring the Afghan war home.

Glenn Beck's Disturbing Plans to Co-opt MLK's 'I Have a Dream' Speech
Posted on Jul 8, 2010, Source: AlterNet
Beck is making a grotesque attempt to co-opt the legacy of MLK. "We will reclaim the civil rights moment. We are on the right side of history."

How Glenn Beck Re-Invented Himself as a Crying Conservative
Posted on May 6, 2010, Source: Killing the Buddha
Glenn Beck's strange TV: Mormon masterpiece theater.

Thousands Rally in New York for Showdown with Wall St.
Posted on Apr 30, 2010, Source: AlterNet
Over 10,000 protesters gathered in New York's financial district to demand financial reform.

The Five Creepiest Moments of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference
Posted on Apr 12, 2010, Source: AlterNet
If anything can make you forget 3,500 Republicans chomping reindeer jerky, it's Sarah Palin screaming "Who dat!"

How Stanislav Grof Helped Launch the Dawn of a New Psychedelic Research Era
Posted on Apr 10, 2010, Source: AlterNet
The world of medicine may finally be ready to catch back up with psychedelic pioneers, whose work was rejected a half-century ago.

Obama and Dems Put a Stop to the Republicans' Kickback Cash Cow in the College Loan Industry
Posted on Mar 31, 2010, Source: AlterNet
For years, Sallie Mae fed on taxpayers to finance Republican campaigns and private golf courses for their executives. No more.

How the IRS Helps H&R Block Scam Taxpayers
Posted on Mar 17, 2010, Source: AlterNet

Tax preparation giants are making a killing on short-term, high-interest, fee-laden loans on tax returns.
Where Did David Brooks Get the Bizarre Idea That the Tea Party Crowd Resembles '60s Movements?
Posted on Mar 11, 2010, Source: AlterNet
The Tea Party that worships Sarah Palin and screams for Barack Obama's birth certificate doesn't merit comparison to positive social movements of the 1960s.

Glenn Beck Is Still Smearing Van Jones, Even After Jones Takes High Road Preaching 'Love' for Fox Host
Posted on Mar 4, 2010, Source: AlterNet
Six months after Gateway Pundit forced Jones' White House resignation over a 9/11 petition, Beck revives ridiculous red-baiting act.

The Weird World of Occult America -- How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
Posted on Jan 28, 2010, Source: Killing the Buddha
Author Mitch Horowitz's new book unleashes America's occult past.

Disney Apocalypse: Why 2012 Sucks
Posted on Nov 26, 2009, Source: Killing the Buddha
Even by the popsicle-stick standards of its genre, the disaster movie 2012 is so dumb you actually want everyone to die.

[vince]

[
I love liberals when they know what the fuck is actually going on. Cindy Sheehan comes to mind. She's the real deal, not the fake variety.

.

Jello Biafra, too... even though he's been kinda quiet lately.

[stefano]

It's just superficial, dismissive and an obstacle to insightful and/or original political thought. Which is much, much worse.

Well, exactly. Insightful political thought is what I'm all about, and for systemic reasons the people who identify as leftists in US discourse prefer to shut their eyes to events that I consider significant, when they feel that calling attention to these events could undermine their narrative. I refuse to go along with that.

those ten issues [...] neither say nor explain anything about [...] the separation of powers; the defunding of social welfare programs; [...] the devaluation of very basic civil liberties

I agree with this about seven of the ten, but definitely not about 9/11. The attacks were used as a pretext for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Patriot Act and a crackdown on civil liberties generally. The wars led to the current disastrous state of the US national accounts, and so indirectly to the arguments in favour of austerity measures (a cut in war spending being off the cards because of, you know, 9/11).

Two other conspiracies in the OP that I take quite seriously are FEMA camps and martial law (made possible by the terror of 9/11), because there are precedents for both and the legal justifications that Zaitchik talks about are in place. He doesn't mention the doctrine of executive impunity, which is part of the same authoritarian tendency. I know the tea partiers you so despise didn't care about the black people bussed to Utah after Katrina, but I do, and it's definitely not paranoid to fear that it will happen again.

So the ten issues in the OP aren't "either at or near the top of [my] agenda or roughly representative of it", but I fail to see why that means I should ignore them all. My bigger and more mainstream preoccupation, economics, increasingly shows signs of the kind of serious crisis that has facilitated the rise of authoritarian regimes over the last 150 years, and looking at the social and political factors that will contribute to that is necessary, if you want to think about the future at all.

how absolutely intolerable we the people consider torture, indefinite detention without charges, or the commission of quasi-genocide via the prosecution of illegal wars, all of which are currently foreign-policy SOP.

No. Two years ago 97% of you people, or the ones who bothered to vote, voted for quasi-genocide via the prosecution of illegal wars.

I really don't think that it's even a little bit unreasonable to ask yourself whose water you might be carrying before you pick it up, politically speaking. I mean, the message you believe you're sending very well might not be the one that's being received. [...] You gotta educate both yourself and others as well as agitate and organize if you ever want to make any excruciatingly slowl progress.

The two parts of this paragraph contradict each other for me; and if you can try and see why you might get where I'm coming from. I wholly agree with the bit I bolded. Education means pointing to actual events to try and show people what I see, and what I see is a shift toward authoritarianism that will get worse under worsening economic conditions. Parts of this shift are of concern to people I find distasteful, but that is incidental. They are also of concern to people I admire. Shutting up about them because an idiot might receive a message different to the one I'm sending is not something I'm prepared to do.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Shutting up about them because an idiot might receive a message different to the one I'm sending is not something I'm prepared to do.

Amen.

[Simulist]

While it's important to know what interests you might be "carrying water" for, it's far more important to ask, "Is what I'm saying true?"

We should continue to try and speak truthfully, even if this means we occasionally agree with our enemies.

[barracuda]

I was a Ron Paul supporter, because he was right about the major issue, imperial war, while Obama and McCain were wrong. Paul was wrong about immigration, corporate legislation and a whole host of other things, but compared to the wholesale murder of thousands and the destruction of countries that's a minor.

As I recall, Obama promised to bring the troops home and shut down Gitmo as well. I didn't believe him, either.

The right wing is never correct, because "right" and "left" denote statements of political opinion, not datapoints of factual information.

No, you're wrong. When the right wing (or the Communist Party of America or a gin drunk slumped on a barstool) says 'the bailouts were larcenous', it is correct.

Interesting. The right created the bailouts giving themselves access to all the money they could ever desire in order to buffer themselves from the consequences of their own conspiracy, but once all that is done, now they are correct? It's as if two men mugged and beat you in an alley, took all your money and then laughingly admonished you of the sinfulness of theft, whereupon, you sat down to nurse your bruises and thought to yourself, "hey, those guys really have a point there."

But I do think that elements of the US government were involved in the 9/11 attacks. Now a definer of acceptable left-wing political opinion on Alternet tells me that both theories are characteristic of the radical right and if I hold either I am a paranoid member of that movement, just as you tell me that if I say gun confiscation is an infringement of someone's rights you will consider me in league with tea partiers. You and Zaitchik are both wrong, and frankly presumptuous.

If you read the OP closely, you'll notice that the author identifies the 911 conspiracy as emblematic of both the far right and the far left, so I think we're safe with that one. However, certain elements of the conspiracy construct can be pretty reliably traced to their far right origins, and many of those elements I do have a problem with.

In a society as large as ours is, incidents of infringement of rights will and do occur. Those infringements are wrong, no doubt. I'm totally with you there. But pointing to the Katrina confiscations as somehow endemic of a conspiracy to disarm the populous is, as I think I have demonstrated, a classic right wing talking point.

Operator Kos wishes to open carry sidearms within the city limits of Oakland, California. I live only minutes from him, and travel to and within Oakland quite regularly, so I understand his concerns. And however counterproductive I think his solution to the issue of inner city Oakland violence might be, a pathway to allowing just such a recourse exists and is being availed of by citizenry in the Bay Area as we speak, e.g., Guy Montag Doe v. San Francisco Housing Authority. And as draconian as California gun law is considered by many...

there is no section of the California penal code that specifically prohibits open carry of an unloaded handgun (though possession may be restricted or prohibited in certain areas such as a State Park (CCR Title 14, Div.3, chap. 1, s 4313 (a), in a school zone (PC626.9) or federal properties like a Post Office or National Park (36 C.F.R. 2.4(a)).

Carrying a loaded magazine separate from the handgun is also not prohibited under the penal code.

If you mean on this forum then you're in the same company, aren't you, your dedication to orthodoxy notwithstanding?

Oh, yes. But realistically my pretensions to catholicism are completely derelict. I'm fully lapsed. In my defense, though, I have always sought out the company of wily lunatics. If there was a "Wily Lunatic Party", I would probably proselytize for them. Unless, of course they were actually crypto-fascists, like the democrats.

While it's important to know what interests you might be "carrying water" for, it's far more important to ask, "Is what I'm saying true?"

We should continue to try and speak truthfully, even if this means we occasionally agree with our enemies.

Fair enough. And yet if I could tell a lie that would end the killing, I would be sorely tempted to do just that.