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NYTimes Connects Tea Party to the Racist Right

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techstepgenr8tion
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19 Feb 2010, 9:58 pm

Vexcalibur wrote:
Easy: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt118670.html

Some are with the racist right, the others are sheple trying to look cool and not figuring out what they are really doing.

It sounds more like some people just can't grasp the towering intellectual superiority of egalitarianism at all costs through their unenlightened hoi peloi mullets.


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19 Feb 2010, 11:09 pm

Unorthodox wrote:
Ted Kaczynski shared a lot of viewpoints with the radical left, are they all potential Unabombers now?

Wikipedia wrote:
Industrial Society and Its Future begins with Kaczynski's assertion that "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."[36] The first sections of the text are devoted to psychological analysis of various groups—primarily leftists and scientists—and of the psychological consequences for the individual of life within the "industrial-technological system".[36] The later sections speculate about the future evolution of this system, argue that it will inevitably lead to the end of human freedom, call for a "revolution against technology", and attempt to indicate how that might be accomplished.
...
In his opening and closing sections, Kaczynski addresses Leftism as a movement and analyzes the psychology of leftists, arguing that they are "True Believers in Eric Hoffer's sense" who participate in a powerful social movement to compensate for their lack of personal power. He further claims that leftism as a movement is led by a particular minority of leftists whom he calls "oversocialized"

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodore_Kaczynski&oldid=345041870

The "populist" anger where people feel the need to defend themselves violently against a government they perceive as foreign is exactly what The New York Times article was talking about, and Joe Stack was one of these instances of right-wing animosity blowing up. In the recent past, we had the shooting at the Holocaust Museum and the guy in Kansas who killed a doctor who provided abortions. The last time a Democrat was president, we had Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, and militiamen out in Idaho and Montana.



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19 Feb 2010, 11:12 pm

NeantHumain wrote:
Unorthodox wrote:
Ted Kaczynski shared a lot of viewpoints with the radical left, are they all potential Unabombers now?

Wikipedia wrote:
Industrial Society and Its Future begins with Kaczynski's assertion that "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."[36] The first sections of the text are devoted to psychological analysis of various groups—primarily leftists and scientists—and of the psychological consequences for the individual of life within the "industrial-technological system".[36] The later sections speculate about the future evolution of this system, argue that it will inevitably lead to the end of human freedom, call for a "revolution against technology", and attempt to indicate how that might be accomplished.
...
In his opening and closing sections, Kaczynski addresses Leftism as a movement and analyzes the psychology of leftists, arguing that they are "True Believers in Eric Hoffer's sense" who participate in a powerful social movement to compensate for their lack of personal power. He further claims that leftism as a movement is led by a particular minority of leftists whom he calls "oversocialized"

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodore_Kaczynski&oldid=345041870

The "populist" anger where people feel the need to defend themselves violently against a government they perceive as foreign is exactly what The New York Times article was talking about, and Joe Stack was one of these instances of right-wing animosity blowing up. In the recent past, we had the shooting at the Holocaust Museum and the guy in Kansas who killed a doctor who provided abortions. The last time a Democrat was president, we had Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, and militiamen out in Idaho and Montana.


Like all extremist reactionary movements, though, the militia movement is somewhat syncretic - being that its at the end of the spectrum where extreme right curves to meet extreme left.



NeantHumain
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19 Feb 2010, 11:33 pm

Master_Pedant wrote:
Like all extremist reactionary movements, though, the militia movement is somewhat syncretic - being that its at the end of the spectrum where extreme right curves to meet extreme left.

I would disagree that extreme left and extreme right are more or less the same. There are obvious similarities between Stalinism and Nazism despite their mutual animosity—their both being totalitarian—but far-left ideas need not be heavily authoritarian: I'm actually partial at least to the ideal of libertarian socialism. How the far left and the far right really diverge depends on how you define the terms, but I would not consider a concern for freedom (at least not a democratic freedom) to be a concept of the Right; I would say privilege defines the right (the monarchy, then the nobility, then the slaveholder, then the capitalist class); the Left, in contrast, is the social-political force pushing against the trend to the concentration of power. Obviously overthrowing an absolutist monarchy only to replace it with a totalitarian state that forces its ideas of progress on an unwilling working and peasant class isn't really much progress.



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19 Feb 2010, 11:46 pm

NeantHumain wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodore_Kaczynski&oldid=345041870

The "populist" anger where people feel the need to defend themselves violently against a government they perceive as foreign is exactly what The New York Times article was talking about, and Joe Stack was one of these instances of right-wing animosity blowing up. In the recent past, we had the shooting at the Holocaust Museum and the guy in Kansas who killed a doctor who provided abortions. The last time a Democrat was president, we had Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, and militiamen out in Idaho and Montana.


Did you read your own Wikipedia link about the Unabomber? He started long before Clinton was elected, and was at heart a militant environmentalist/Luddite, hardly right wing sentiments.

So now you're changing tunes, first we're told that the NYT article was a "damning indictment" of the Tea Party's racism, now the main thrust of the article was that they have some of the same ideas as people who have acted violently in the past... I think you need to make up your mind, the rest of us are starting to get sick from the moving goal posts.