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A God Damned Separate Thread For Your Conversation About The Fringe
joshofalltrades
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
The Tea Party!
The Left Wing Fringe!
I had a lot more trouble finding images of crazy people on the left, so if you have something you want in the OP, please link it! (Funny story: searching for things like "crazy Democrats" and "left wing fringe" comes up with pictures of Palin, Bachmann, et al.)
This thread is to head off discussion in the Congress thread which has derailed actual, y'know, discussion of Congress.
Personally I feel like the right wing fringe is far more dangerous, because it is largely accepted by conservatives and actually has political power, as seen earlier this year during the shutdown debacle.
Let's talk about the craziest parts of both parties!
joshofalltrades on
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That question pretty much sums up the equivalence debate to me.
It completely shifted the narrative of public policy discourse. It hasn't resulted in any actual policy yet, but we're not going to get anything resulting in actual policy until we take the House.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
No, it didn't - not permanently, anyway. Which, in the end, is the measuring stick.
Even then, he was a lone nut, and the folks in Lincoln (the town closest to Ted's Shack O' Crazy) were shocked.
Compare to Eric Rudolph, who received material support from the right wing community in evading capture - "Run Eric Run" was a real thing.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/182667/what-happened-in-waco-during-the-1993-siege/p1
And while not completely on this topic, there's some points brought up in there about the Right wing media's reaction to the event that basically cover the same point that was being made in the Congress thread about the way the right-wing violent fringe is supported and abetted by the right-wing political sphere in the US through it's rhetoric.
We're back to where things were ante OWS policy wise. So yes, that's pretty much a failure. If you want to succeed at changing things, those changes need to stick.
Once again, look at what happened with the two fringe threat assessment reports in 09.
Left wing: little criticism of the report, seen as a valid review of the potential threat.
Right wing: attacked viciously as an attack on the political right wing.
WHY DO LIBERALS WANT TO HARM THE INNOCENT?
It shifted the narrative of a brief time, failed to motivate any particular numbers to do anything substantial, and then faded into memory and irrelevancy once it got cold out.
It was pathetic and ultimately irrelevant, and it's something that should be remembered for being pathetic and ultimately irrelevant. People need to remember things that actually worked to affect change and to remember only to avoid the complete wastes of time and enthusiasm those things which didn't work.
Disengaging with the political process and being largely incoherent is perhaps something to be avoided in the future.
Ultimately, the best you should be expecting from something like OWS is an unofficial party conference for the left wing fringe. You get a bit of networking and swapping ideas and come back with a few exagerrated tales of the "Battle of Wall Street" to impress girls at parties.
The point for OWS was to change the system. They failed horribly since they had no "leaders" and vague message about the 99% and how everybody in the organization disagreed about what their goal was. Weren't their Libertarians involved, as well? So it wasn't pure left wing ideologically. The whole group was horribly structured from top to bottom.
Agreed.
Uh
Actually, it didn't.
Alternately phrased: a considerably lamer Netroots Nation.
My point is that it's a category error to call it an organization. It was more like a polite lynch mob that didn't have the stomach to actually build some gallows and were still undecided on who they should be stringing up and in what order.
It should be called a disorganization - which, coincidentally, is the collective noun for hippies.
I'm not sure where people who succumb to terrible science should fall in the spectrum.
I host a podcast about movies.
I probably should not.
That it took off in the way that it did is a miracle, and I will always remember that Oakland cops trod on the American flag to kick a marine while he was down. It's not the start. The start was our being disappointed in Obama not opening up the death camps and ushering in a thousand years of socialist darkness.
God
It was like everyone in the OWS crowd was afraid of the word "politics"
Here are some choice bits from his manifesto:
I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen more eco-terrorism, really.
Eco-terrorism has never really been a thing; it's mostly another fictitious right-wing bogeyman (one that's occasionally co-opted by a media circus that desperately wants to look the part of non-partisan but finds that they have to really squint to see any fangs on the left-hand side). There's ALF, of course, but ALF is neither about the environment or anything particularly 'left wing'.
Without access to Google or Wikipedia, most people can't name a single act of eco-terrorism that's occurred ever, much less one that's occurred in a relevant time frame.
Greenpeace is, in essence, the poster child for fringe activities / beliefs on the left. Here is what I would argue is the height of their extremism - the publication of anti-nuclear material & lobbying for anti-nuclear legislation.
Note that, for the most part, this is a matter of opinions expressed. There are a few lies on that webpage, like the claim that the civilian nuclear industry somehow leads to increased weapons proliferation (it does not), but the majority of their articles are ideological opinions : not claims of certainty, not threats, etc.
Anyone who wants to compare that with people that shoot & kill abortion doctors during church service, all the while being cheered-on and lionized by allies in the mainstream media, is absolutely insane.
I only brought up one guy. And said it was the only one I could think of. Although I am honestly surprised that eco-terrorism doesn't really happen much.
Where is that second image from, with the 'We support our troops when they shoot their officers' banner? I can't find a source for it; plenty of Google hits leading to Red State or Free Republic where left wing peace protesters are blamed, but I don't see any context or attribution. Was that in response to the Ft Hood mass murder? Who actually flew the banner?
Meh they've engaged in actual actions which could be classified as harmful, though a lot of the time mostly for them, and illegal. They locked down pumps with chain-locks a while back here and also dude there's a bunch of them locked up in Russia.
I'm not actually of the belief they are as worse as right wing nuts, in fact I support some of their actions, but I also think it's silly to think their "extremism" is only publishing wrong opinions. They do go for activist actions that are more than just protests. That Russia incident did involve them trying to illegally board an oil-platform.
Also if we go international there have been plenty of left-wing extremist engaged in shit that can easily be labelled terrorism.
I dunno about Jenny McCarthy but a lot of the anti-vaccine crowd is on the left wing.
Everything you've said here also describes the Tea Party's situation. The difference is that they decided to put the fear of god into their politicians. Turns out that when you do that, you get better politicians. (Where better means more aligned to your views.)
The largest overlap is the general conspiracy nut crowd, which touches on both sides of the spectrum.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
In the end OWS was just a massive example of the kind of individualized activism that seeks to change the world without getting its hands dirty. In the end, individuals cannot effect systems, even when there are a large number of individuals. No matter how much I recycle I'm not going to stop global warming, no matter how much I talk on facebook about how bad working conditions are in walmart people are still going to shop on black friday. It seems like people are realizing this and are organizing more and more into organizations nowadays but we need to be a decade out to fully say whether OWS affected anything (even with its failure).
*And while people attack OWS for not advocating specific policies I kinda get why they did. For a group like that to advocate specific policies drags them down into technocratic bean counting over whether an X% increase in financial taxes 'really helps', and moreover they'd be doing the technocratic bean counting against mainstream groups who are far better at doing that.
I heard at least some Occupy protestors wanted to the government to do something to get rid of everyone's student loan debt because it would help the economy or something; that sounds radical (if true; I'm not sure).
That was sort of their thing, pretty clearly, I don't know where the vague thing comes from.
Like, they had documents and statements and things but I'm guessing that wasn't as interesting to report on as "lol hippies"
But that is probably as far as you get as a 'fringe' left organised organisation influencing policy. Compare that to the frightful impact of the Tea Party in the US, who have just about made governance in the US impossible. And let's not forget that the right actually has media coordination, which includes politicians directly. Talking points get handed down and coordinated from the Capitol to Fox and News Radio. I don't think it's a stretch to argue that the right fringe owns the right wing of politics, while the left fringe flails and complains on websites about not being taken seriously.