Terrorism & Me, or, Why I Love the Balaclava

[_______________Orion]

But the fact is, that the fincancial industry, the press, and holywood, are largely, not completely, controlled by jews.

The term stereotype initially referred to a printing stamp which was used to make multiple copies from a single model or mold. The journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann adopted the term in his 1922 book Public Opinion as a means of describing the way society set about categorizing people--"stamping" human beings with a set of characteristics. Stereotypes are attempts to claim that each individual human being in a certain group shares a set of common qualities. Since an individual is different from all other individuals by definition, stereotypes are a logical impossibility.

[BoomDoom]

Originally posted by Brad, STL/MO
Do you have any idea how much it weirds me out that nobody is flaming me for supporting Earth First!?

Why bother? You're a left wing zealot that can't be reasoned with. All zealots are like that, no matter which side they're from. The enviro terrorist groups are as dangereous as any other and take laws into their own hands that they shouldn't. Deep down they know this but they do it any way because they think they're fighting for a cause.

Nothing anyone says will change their or your minds. Why bother?

[cryos1999]

Originally posted by Brad, STL/MO
Do you have any idea how much it weirds me out that nobody is flaming me for supporting Earth First!?

HEHEHEHE ya beat me to it.

[Brad, STL/MO]

Originally posted by BoomDoom
... The enviro terrorist groups ... take laws into their own hands that they shouldn't. ...

Except that I don't believe in taking the law into your own hands. I hold the principle of rule of law as sacred.

What I said above was that I supported taking the law into your own hands if massive, irreplaceable, permanent damage is being done by someone else who has put themselves above or beyond the law, and the law is trying to stop them but is powerless.

Item in yesterday's local news: Despite a decade now of remediation efforts, they still have to evacuate people from their homes in the Roxana, Illinois area every time it rains heavily. Why? Because the refineries up there, mostly Shell, decided decades ago that it didn't matter what toxic chemicals they spilled into the ground. Sure, if they got caught, they'd have to pay a fine. It was cheaper to bribe inspectors and pay the fines than to stop the spills - especially in the Reagan administration, where letting companies bribe the EPA inspectors' bosses to suppress reports was almost official executive branch policy.

By the end of the Reagan/Bush years, the soil in that area was flammable. No, really. Dig up a cubic foot of dirt out of your garden. Drop a match into the bucket. Watch the dirt burn for several minutes. (I saw someone do this, live, on the news one night.) The soil was basically soaked in gasoline ... and benzene, which is even worse.

Kids live there. They play outside. In the benzene. It was absolutely illegal for them to poison those kids. But there was no way to bring the people who were responsible to justice.

Which was the condition that area was in when I joined Earth First!. Which is why, while they were being distracted by the dioxin cleanup in Times Beach, Missouri, I was advocating that the blockade tactics from Redwood Summer be used to shut down the refineries, and if that turned out to be too hazardous, difficult, or ineffective, graduating from there to sabotage of Shell assets to make the refinery unprofitable to operate.

I was ignored, for reasons stated above.

Eventually the Clinton administration mandated a cleanup, using tax dollars. They've been working on it now for almost ten years. And there is still so much benzene in the soil that whenever the water table rises, it floods benzene gas and gasoline fumes into peoples' houses.

If we had used violence to stop that, I don't think it would have qualified as bad terrorism. I would have called it counter-terrorism.

[BoomDoom]

Originally posted by Brad, STL/MO
If we had used violence to stop that, I don't think it would have qualified as bad terrorism. I would have called it counter-terrorism.

As i said, you're a zealot, and zealot's can't be reasoned with. No system works the way that we all want it to, they never have and they never will. It sux, but we have to work to change the system within the rules. For instance, I hate the way welfare works in this country. I feel it is brokem and has remained so for decades. Although i'm not entirly against the concept of welfare I deplore the system as it is. Does that give me license to shoot people that i feel to be welfare exploiters? No, it doesn't. I am however allowed to report abusers and hope the system catches them.

Anways, i'm trying to change the mind of a zealot, and I really shouldn't waste my time. Go ahead and perform your "good" terrorism, there's nothing i can say to stop you.

[Brad, STL/MO]

Umm ... welfare exploiters (who are mostly a Republican myth, they're scarce as hen's teeth) aren't killing or crippling children and paying small fines to get away with it, like Shell still is in Roxana, Illinois, and Doe Run still is in Herculaneum, Missouri.

Big difference.

Shell pays fines amounting to less than a day's profit at the refinery rather than stop pouring toxic chemicals onto the ground and into the groundwater. It's cheaper than changing their processes or installing better safety and environmental equipment, so they're going to keep doing it. Which means that they're knowingly and intentionally causing cancer for hundreds of people in the three nearest towns, and paying small fines.

And if I snuck over their some night and monkey-wrenched their equipment to shut them down, even briefly, would it be me that was the terrorist? Which one of us is killing civilians?

Doe Run pays even smaller fines, on the rare occasions they can't bribe their way out of it, for air pollution violations that have contaminated an entire town with lead. Then to make it worse, when they lost their rail link because the local rail line went under, they took to transporting finely ground lead dust in open-topped dump trucks through residential neighborhoods, while children were playing. As a direct consequence of their refusal to comply with air quality regulations or to take even minimal precautions to protect human life, literally hundreds of children are going to grow up retarded, the ones who live at all. Now they're in big trouble, by their standards. The fines, and moving costs for the families, and medical costs imposed on them via lawsuits, and legal fees ... will probably cost them a couple of months' profit. (Which they get to use as a tax deduction.) So to make that money back, they'll run the smelter even faster, with even fewer safety precautions, and try to get away with crippling or killing dozens more children. Because as long as they pay their fines when they get caught, there's nothing illegal about operating a hazardous, sub-standard lead smelter in a residential suburb of a major city.

And if I sneak in there some night when it's empty of people and truck-bomb the place out of existence, which I've thought more than once about doing over the last 20 years, then I'm the terrorist? Which one of us is killing civilians?

The Monsanto plant that makes the Roundup herbicide has a long history of illegally dumping toxic wastes into the Mississippi River, stuff that's causing cancer by getting into the drinking water from southern Missouri all the way down to New Orleans. They pay tiny little fines every couple of years, and every time claim it's an accident, even though plenty of former employees have come forward and told the world that they were doing it on purpose, cheating on their EPA inspections, and bribing EPA management when that fails.

A half-dozen Greenpeacers in a motorized rubber raft tried to plug their outflow pipe with concrete. Had they succeeded and had it shut down the plant, it would have hurt nobody, cost money only to the killers (and their customers, I guess), and quite possibly saved dozens of lives. But they were the terrorists? Well, that's what was said on the news.

In the case of the Redwood Summer protests and the Headwaters Forest protests, Earth First!ers didn't hurt a single person, or destroy a single piece of property. They just put their bodies on the line to shut down logging roads, using only their bodies - and absolutely stunningly brilliant state-of-the-art road blocking techniques, that still haven't been improved upon. (And didn't even damage the road, doing it.)

Of course, this hasn't stopped the FBI from labelling them as terrorists, because Earth First! has not absolutely ruled out the prospect of vigilante property damage, if needed, to defend irreplacable environmental resources from people who are illegally destroying them. Given that both sides are doing property damage, but one is damaging public property and the other is only damaging the criminal's property, the only difference between them I see is that the ones who aren't making money off of it (and therefore don't make large campaign contributions to the Republicans) are the ones that get called "terrorists."

By the way, what's your definition of "zealot," and how does it apply to me and not you?

(Added a few minutes later.) Good ghod, that was a good question. I just checked the web page link in your signature. I'M a zealot? The political opinions on that web page are significantly to the right of Pat "der Fuhrer" Buchannan! I've known right-wing racist survivalist militiamen whose political opinions (and style of discourse) were more moderate than yours. And you're calling me a zealot?

I repeat, what makes me a zealot and not you?

[BoomDoom]

Listen, while you think destroying trees and mining a tundra are the greatest sins in the world i tend to think that destroying the economy so some bleeding hearts can feel better about giving a helping hand to people that don't want to improve themselves is an even greater sin. I will not argue with you that the earth needs to be preserved, although you're obviously willing to to pay a much higher price then i am for, what i believe to be in most cases, dimishing returns. And you're thinking of exploiters in the wrong sense. I don't mean the peope that are on welfare and drive BMW's, there's not a lot of them. I mean the people that live on it forever. Just the people that get on, stay on, and never work to get off of it. Not sadistic people mind you, just lazy and unmotivated folks that were down on their luck and choose not to even bother getting back into the game. That system is broken, but sabotage and violence won't fix the system.

For instance. The moral right thinks abortion is the greatest sin in the world and it should not be allowed to exist. To this end they have camped out abortion clinics, set them on fire, and killed doctors. They are not solving anything. If they wanted to really make a difference they would simply work within the system to try to affect change, It is wrong for them to justify murder by saying they are preventing an even greater evil to occur. First, they typically don't prevent anything, second they bring the wrong kind of attention to the matter, and third they're breaking the law in order to stop lawful activities.

I imagine you'll agree with me on all that. So what makes violence to stop a tree from getting cut down acceptable? That you're right about the envirnment needing protection but the anti-abortionists are wrong about "babies" (i use the term looslely, the science is very sticky) needing the same kind of protection.

And, I'd like to point out I am not really any further to the right then Pat Buccanan. I a fiscal conservative, and do not get muddeled in the muck of the moral right. I do not agree with conservatives that want to return to "family values", a christian nation, or the moral authority. I do prefer order to chaos, and for the free market to thrive. I do not buy into any one political agenda.

[BoomDoom]

You know what's amazing about terrorists? How universally stupid they seem to be when they plan things.

I mention this because of today's attack on a Israeli school. Hamas claims its in response to an attack that claimed the lives of 9 Palestinian children so in return they'll kill Israeli children.

What they never seem to understand that violence is the worest possible thing they could do. And not just Palestinians, all terrorists.

You see, terrorism is the response to some kind of government regulation, oppression, displacement, whatever. In this case its the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. For the earth first people its for tragedies in the envirnment (some real some imagined). What they don't get is that they would win if they didn't employ violence.

Its well established that the media in this country sways to the left. I don't mean this in an evil way, just simply that most reporters basically feel the same way about a cause as the people actually fighitng for it. The media wants to help the envirnment just as much as earth first and wants to help the Palestinians too. The problem is, they can't help these people because they do things that are blantantly wrong and evil.

If the palestinians arranged a peacfull protest (100,000 unarmed palestinians marching accross the desert) the media would cover it, being sure to mention the herroism involved. Europe and the Middle East would leverage enourmeous pressure against Israel, and the United States would be forced to back that play (since then the only people doing wrong would be Israel). The Palastinians could have won at any time, but chose not to by using force.

Same for earth first. You keep menitoning the area where the soil is on fire and etc (i'm notlooking back to get the description right, you know what i'm talking about). The press lives for that kind of thing. They want nothing more then to put that on TV and show to everyone what big business is doing wrong and what the right wing is doing to protect them (which i don't believe is true in all instances, although certainly more then i think is appropriate).

Organizations with causes need to learn how to fight for their causes. Not with guns and violence, but with words. The trick is to appear to be morally right and everyone else is morally wrong, and to put that front and center on TV. If an unarmed Palestinian was beaten to death by an Israeli MP during a peacful protest Palestine would be its own state the next day.

The pen is mightier then the sword, and the video camera is mightier then the gun.