US released report on Left Wing ExtremistsFollow

Huh. It seems that both reports were requested by the Bush administration but not completed until recently.

Hang on a sec, I need to manufacture some outrage...
































OMG BUSH CREATED A SPECIAL HOMELAND SECURITY REPORT SAYING THAT LEFTWING EXTREMISTS ARE GOING TO ATTACK AMERICA!!!! NEVER HAS ANYONE TARGETED ANYONE LIKE THIS BEFORE!!!! BUSH SAYS THAT PEOPLE WHO PROTEST ANIMAL TESTING ARE TERRORISTS AND IS TRYING TO SILENCE ANY OPPOSITION ON THE INTERNET BY WANRING ABOUT LEFTWING RADICAL EXTREMISTS LAUNCHING CYBERATTACKS AND BRINGING DOWN THE POWERGRID IN A CYBER-TERRORISM ISLAMO-NAXI MONSTERATTACKRWAR!!!!!!!!!!


Whew! All better now.

Evil Liberals and their War on Christmas ruining the economy!

Oh, please. You know who made it a big issue? The Right wingers who started screaming and hollering about it. The ones who made sure to whip themselves up into a lather and frenzy before they had any of their facts straight about it. The ones screaming that Napolitano needs to resign for daring to insult our brave and noble troops by insinuating that any of them might take part in some unsavory activities because... well, because she cited an FBI report from a year or so back breaking down how many soldiers or ex-soldiers are in these groups.

Those are the dipshits who made this a story. Hey, let's play the other side, shall we? It sure was coincidental that, a day before these little protests, the Right wing internet community just happened to stumble upon this scary fascist report from the Obama-Nation that jackbooted soldier-hating thugs are gonna-getcha if you dare have a bumpster sticker, huh? Veeerrrryyyy coincidental. Why, one might almost think that perhaps this manufactured outrage was to help drum up some anti-Obama news for their protests, huh? Hrrmm....

Boehner's *****, in the vernacular.

First of all, what is "Hai2u"?

Second, Jophiel, if referencing Dubya in a bad light, you must always spell it thusly: Boosh, as in "that evil Boosh" or "the warmongering Boosh." Ideally you'd throw in a gratuitious simian shot, as in, "the evil, warmongering chimp, Boosh."

After all, it's hard to take you seriously on your Bush hating unless you affect an outraged and vaguely Euro or Middle Eastern accent while decrying the egreigious excesses of his administration.

Just sayin'.

Totem

And if a Report was released from DHS labeling anyone who supported Roe v. Wade, or believed in social programs to help out poor and minority people as "Left Wing Extremists", you might be a bit upset yourself, don't you think?



They read the report. Have you?

Unlike the aforementioned report on Left Wing Extremism, which listed specific groups and acts which were to be monitored, this document names no groups and the acts are so broad as to include pretty much any and every single conservative political position. If you oppose abortion? You're an extremist. If you oppose higher taxes? Extremist. If you believe in tighter immigration restrictions? Extremist. If you're worried about the economy? Extremist. Oppose expanded social spending? Extremist. Support 2nd amendment rights? Extremist.

Heck. They pretty much went right down a list of conservative positions and stated that these were the danger signs to look for when identifying a group or individual as a potential right wing extremist.




Yeah. Cited that, and added a whole bunch of other stuff very very specific to post-election issues.



Lol. But the content of the report and the timing of it's release had *nothing* to do with anything?

So the liberals get to say anything they want at any point in time and if we don't respond, they get to be assumed to be correct, and if we do we're overreacting and creating the story? The story is the content of the report. And yeah. The timing of the release, just before planned tax day protests?


Even you aren't that naive Joph. If there's one thing the Left is incredibly good at, it's media manipulation.




Could be. Could have something to do with the report being published just one week earlier though. I have no idea of the exact process by which it filtered into the media. The best I can find is Hedgecock writing about it. And yeah. That was on April 14th. Do you think he knew about it ahead of time and choose that point to write his article? Or maybe that's just when he found out about it?



The more telling bits is how this has been reported across most of the media. The story is about the right wing people being upset about the report, and not about the report itself. Not surprising at all, since they apparently don't consider issues conservatives care about to be important, but the fact that they're upset *is* good news I guess. Ties nicely into the fears of right wing extremism I suppose...

Edited, Apr 16th 2009 2:04pm by gbaji

The more telling bits is how this has been reported across most of the media. The story is about the right wing people being upset about the report, and not about the report itself. Not surprising at all, since they apparently don't consider issues conservatives care about to be important, but the fact that they're upset *is* good news I guess. Ties nicely into the fears of right wing extremism I suppose...

Have I mentioned that nothing you've ever "supposed" or "suspected" or "thought was unusual" has ever turned out to be correct? I'd assume you realize this by now, but just in case...

You're totally going to get detained next time you fly. What has happened to America when our own government starts profiling white people. :lol:

In the absence of any other definition of "ice cream"? Yes. That's what you're not getting. They include no other definition of the term "rightwing extremism". None. There are no other more narrow meanings presented.

If you didn't know what ice cream was, and I said that ice cream could be broadly divided into chocolate and vanilla, you would most definitely assume that chocolate and vanilla were each different types of ice cream and not just flavor which ice cream could happen to be.


Let's try it with non-defined terms:

The set X consists of set Y and set Z.

Is set Z a part of X? yes.

Can Z exist outside of X? That is undefined. We haven't defined any set containing Z that *isn't* X, have we? We didn't say that only X can contain a set called Z, but barring any mention of any other, we can't assume differently. Certainly, if someone showed you set Z, you might make the assumption based on this information that it was likely a member of set X.


While you and I understand logic and proofs, the majority of the public does not. They most certainly will read that and conclude that this means that people who believe that state and local governments should have more authority than the federal government are right wing extremists.


Need I point to the recent thread in which someone called me a homophobe because I oppose gay marriage? I hold a conservative political position, so it's assumed that I must hold that position because for a specific reason. If the enlightened folks on this board can make that logical mistake so frequently, why assume that the public at large wont?

More like:

Set X has attributes Y and Z.

Does everything with Y and Z attributes belong in set X?

You failed Geometry, didn't you?

All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

Except it doesn't say they have the attributes. It says it "is" those two groups.

More correctly, it specifically says it "can be divided into <hate groups>, <anti government groups>".

All three are groups (or sets). It is thus saying that set X, consists of set Y plus set Z.



No. I didn't. It's important to look at the definitions given to see which things are subsets of other things before applying the rules.




Yes. But you have it backwards. The way that section is written, "rightwing extremism" is the "rectangles" group, which includes squares and rectangles, not the other way around. It gives no provision for those groups *not* being member groups of the larger group labeled "rightwing extremism".


The set called "rectangles" can be broadly divided into shapes containing 4 sides in which all side are the same length, and shapes containing 4 sides in which opposite sides are the same length, and all angles are 90 degrees.

Do you see how this is *exactly* the same format as the definition of "rightwing extremism"? In the same way, every single square is also a rectangle by the definition, and every group rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority is defined as "rightwing extremism".


Now. We can assume that they didn't actually mean that. We can assume that the set defined isn't the only set containing those other things. But there is *zero* language in the report to indicate this. That's the point. If they'd started with a definition of rightwing extremism that excluded lawful activities and then subdivided it into different types of rightwing extremist groups, you might have a point. But no where in the document do they do that. They simply use the term "rightwing extremism" and at the bottom of the page have a little bullet with the exact paragraph I quoted.

Sure looks like a definition to me. Now, maybe they intended to just clarify the types of rightwing extremism, and we can certainly hope that is true. But lacking an actual definition of the term as it's used in the document, we can't make that assumption. It's presented in a definition-like format, and is clearly meant to be substituted in for each use of the phrase in the document itself.

Edited, Apr 16th 2009 5:01pm by gbaji

If you know that the report will be leaked to the public at some point?

Are you seriously trying to argue that this wasn't written to the public to help them form their opinions? Wow. Naive...




And it took what? 7 days to be posted all over the internet?


Do you really think that anyone writing those reports doesn't know it'll end up in front of the public? That's part of the outrage Joph. The language in that report is far to vague to be of much if any use to actual law enforcement and security types. It names no organizations. It gives no specifics to follow. It seems to have only one purpose. And that is to alarm anyone in the general public who reads it and make them suspicious of any sort of "right wing" political group.

It was clearly written with the general public in mind. They hit far too many (practically all) of the conservative political positions for that to be accidental. If you want to help law enforcement define and deal with extremists, you don't write this report. If you want to increase the likelihood that any conservative objections to political actions taken by Obama and the Democrat controlled congress will be dismissed as "right wing nutters who might just be dangerous extremists", you write exactly this kind of report and make sure it gets leaked asap.


Let's not pretend that this is anything other than a way to dismiss conservative concerns about the direction of the current government Joph and marginalize those who express them. It's insulting to insist otherwise.