Is The Skin Color Of Our Terrorists Important?

(UPDATE 4/19: Read below)
Yes.

Because if anything it gives us the right to tell the racist morons - most often the shrieking fear-mongers on the Far Right - jumping to conclusions about the Boston attack and the Ricin Mail attack that they are SO VERY GODDAMN WRONG.

Lessee... in the last 20 years or so, our terror attacks/mass murders have been for the most part - I'd say 92 percent of the time - committed by Angry White Guys lashing out at any the best convenient targets - innocent people who had nothing to do with those Angry White Guys being angry.

I'm with Sirota on this:

...This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes.
Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.
“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise. “White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”
Because of these undeniable and pervasive double standards, the specific identity of the Boston Marathon bomber (or bombers) is not some minor detail — it will almost certainly dictate what kind of governmental, political and societal response we see in the coming weeks. That means regardless of your particular party affiliation, if you care about everything from stopping war to reducing the defense budget to protecting civil liberties to passing immigration reform, you should hope the bomber was a white domestic terrorist. Why? Because only in that case will privilege work to prevent the Boston attack from potentially undermining progress on those other issues.
To know that’s true is to simply consider how America reacts to different kinds of terrorism.
Though FBI data show fewer terrorist plots involving Muslims than terrorist plots involving non-Muslims, America has mobilized a full-on war effort exclusively against the prospect of Islamic terrorism. Indeed, the moniker “War on Terrorism” has come to specifically mean “War on Islamic Terrorism,” involving everything from new laws like the Patriot Act, to a new torture regime, to new federal agencies like the Transportation Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security, to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to mass surveillance of Muslim communities.
By contrast, even though America has seen a consistent barrage of attacks from domestic non-Islamic terrorists, the privilege and double standards baked into our national security ideologies means those attacks have resulted in no systemic action of the scope marshaled against foreign terrorists. In fact, it has been quite the opposite — according to Darryl Johnson, the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, the conservative movement backlash to merely reporting the rising threat of such domestic terrorism resulted in DHS seriously curtailing its initiatives against that particular threat... 

We have a terrorist organization in the United States.  It's called Angry White Guys.  It is not a rock band.  It's a loose coalition of Anglo-European descended males feeling privileged and authorized to hate and hurt anybody they want.  And they attack sometimes solo, sometimes in teams, using such methods as shooting up malls and schools and movie theaters, or driving armored bulldozers through a town, or piloting planes into the nearest IRS building, or killing corrections supervisors and court prosecutors, or blowing up federal office buildings in Oklahoma City.  And worse of all they tend to blend in, except for when their neighbors and co-workers get interviewed after the rampaging and they all say "Well, there was always something off about that guy..."

And don't worry: I don't fit the profile for Angry White Guy.  Oh, sure, I'm of Anglo-Irish-Germanic descent... and male... and over 40... and sexually frustrated... and occasionally railing against the oligarchy that's killing our jobs market... and... and...  why are you on the phone to the FBI?!  Wait!  Relax!  I'm trying to tell you I'm UNITARIAN!  I don't fit the full profile!  I'm clean, I SWEAR...

Here's the Update: Law enforcement released the photos of the two guys - White Ballcap and Black Ballcap - and within the next 12 hours located them on the MIT campus, they tried robbing a 7-11 gas station, got involved in a shootout with grenades getting thrown about, the Black Ballcap guy got shot and died from the wounds, and right now (6:52 am EDT) White Ballcap is on the loose in one of the outlying towns of Boston (apparently not a "suburb", they hate being called "suburbs" to Boston).  The two suspects were/are apparently brothers and foreigners on student visas - although not sure yet if they were MIT students.  Current report has them as Chechnyans where there's an ongoing insurgency after Russia re-took control after a second civil war there in 2009.  As there's a Islamic influence in the Chechen fighting, we're gonna get hit with the Evil Mooslums crap some more...  I still stand by my Angry White Guy rant, though.  And considering, like I said, that the wingnuts are gonna go crazy about these bombers possibly being Sunni Chechens still proves Sirota's point: when it's foreign ethnics, the entire ethnicity (or their religion) gets blamed, but when it's an Angry White Guy ohhhh it's just an individual the whole group doesn't deserve blame.

Read more ...

Off-Topic: Summer Movies

When there's a mash-up of trailer clips put to a hard-rocking Fall Out Boy song, it makes you wanna go see all of them even the crappy ones you know are gonna suck:

Okay, the Iron Man and Star Trek and Pacific Rim and Man of Steel and Wolverine ones are no-brainers for me and I'm kinda thinking Kick-Ass as well, but I was planning on avoiding Oblivion and Lone Ranger and World War Z and Fast/Furious.  But now: I can't!  Damn you, video mixer guy...!

Read more ...

In Boston

Tragedy on the streets of Boston today, echoing across the nation and the globe.

Why this happens, we've already figured out: there's a small group of assh-les on the planet either working in unison or individually who want to make themselves feel powerful by killing innocent people who have nothing to do with why said assh-les are truly powerless.

The trick is figuring out the How we can stop this madness from happening again.  Welcome to the sad truth of the eternal struggle of good people to stop evil from flourishing.

Take care of you and yours tonight, all.

Read more ...

Presidential Character: Week Fourteen, A Dark Time For the Republic

One ongoing argument among historians is the Great Man vs Social Forces debate.  The argument goes like this: history is shaped by individuals (sometimes heroic sometimes villainous) - think Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Napoleon, Churchill, FDR, Hitler, the Beatles, and maybe even Vince Lombardi - who rise up out of various societies to lead them into a newer age of prosperity or improvement.  Or history has been a slow continuous wave of events within societies that influence those leaders when they rise to some authority and they are merely puppets of historical inevitability.

I find to my philosophical truth - I'd like to think the facts bear it out - that it's a combination of forces: that yes societies of influence trend a certain way but that it takes a Great Man (now increasingly also Woman) to make sure history plays out the way it ought to.  The will of the masses funneled through the will of a great leader at the right time.  Have the wrong leader at the wrong time, you get Charles I of England making a mess of things or worse a Hitler taking the worst impulses of the masses and directing them into dark madness.  Get the right leader at the moment of crisis where societal trends conflict, you get a Saladin or a George Washington.

Sometimes you get a muddle: the historical flow of society is going in one direction but you get someone who fails to or refuses to recognize the moment at hand.  Say for an example a growing majority of a nation's population recognizing the inherent injustice of an economic system based on slavery existing in a nation priding itself on liberty and fairness, rubbing against an ever-shrinking group of political and economic elites who thrive on that slave economy yet refusing to moderate their stance in the face of growing opposition.

Into this comes the example of Franklin Pierce.  Our fourteenth President was one of the more successful politicians of the day: had never lost an election, was politically ambitious - to the horror of his wife who hated Washington DC - and got himself elected President in 1852.

This was not a good time in United States history.  The forces at conflict ever since the founding - between state and federal authority, between agrarian and industrial economies, between geographic regions - had settled on a final decisive issue: slavery.  By 1852 what had meant to be a dying institution by the Founders - they limited slavery's expansion and some had expressed the belief the institution was too expensive to endure - was still alive (thanks to cotton) and kicking... and by kicking I mean "the slave-owner oligarchy wanted to expand slavery west of the Mississippi and north of the Missouri line as much as possible."

The abolition movement had up until the 1840s been a vocal but small minority even among Northerners who for the most part preferred a status quo, no-rocking-the-boat social order.  But the Mexican-American War under Polk - viewed by more Northerners as an land grab for slaveowners - and the Compromise of 1850 forcing average civilians by pain of fine (and prison!) to help round up fugitive slaves - viewed by more Northerners as rife for abuse of kidnapping free-born Blacks - created more boat-rocking... just now by the increasingly arrogant (and fearful) Southerners, forcing a reaction out of their fellow Americans they weren't expecting.

This was a time crying for leadership: someone who could temper the angers of both sides and find resolution, or at worst pick a side and fight the good fight.  A moderating figure who could revisit the Founders' intent of manumission or gradual emancipation to where Southerners could still make money on the cotton industry but at least with a freed, reasonably paid employee base.  (This does, of course, overlook the growing racial hostility of Southern Whites... and growing racial FEARS of Southern Whites.  Then again, there's not wrong with trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature.)

Pierce was not the leader we needed: whatever skills he had as a politician did not match the mood of the time.  While Pierce's Democratic Party was still intact compared to the fractured Whigs, the Dems were themselves dividing along North and South interests and making it harder to get any legislation done.  Making it worse was the one major bit of legislation that did pass during that time: the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  Argued along the lines of "Popular Sovereignty" it officially ended the legal limitations of slavery into territories, making it possible for two territories from the Louisiana Purchase - Kansas and Nebraska - to be either Free or Slave State based on the territorial residents when they petition for statehood.  If Pierce, who signed off on the Act, thought this would placate the abolitionists or slave-owners he was dead wrong.  It brought out their worst instincts to compete for the new territories, which led to violence.

He wanted to rule akin to the righteousness of Polk, but instead he looked to be treading water.  He was a man who could make many friends - his Cabinet was the only one to stay intact his short tenure, the only administration to ever do so - but was unable to convert such friendship into action on the national stage.

From all of this I can glean a Presidential character: Pierce was a Passive-Positive.  He showed some Uncompromising traits - his steadfast implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act, for example - and his political ambition bordered on being an Active, but his personal Affability is one of his primary traits and that is the signature trait of a Pass-Pos.

One could argue that Pierce wasn't so much an Uncompromising figure as it was his political party, dominated by Southerners and pro-slavery leaders, creating the environment of arrogance and refusal to compromise that Pierce found himself as President.  Pass-Pos leaders need (not a want, a genuine need) to be liked, meaning they behave and support actions according to what their circle of friends accept.  And Pierce was surrounded by politicians who either profited from slavery or profited from the status quo.  As a result he couldn't conceive past that small circle just how the rest of the nation was tilting against slavery, and his reacting against that made the situation worse.  I would also argue Pierce isn't the only Passive-Positive in our nation's history to be stuck in this kind of environment... but that would be another review of Presidential Character yet to come.

When Pierce left the White House by 1856, he was a hated figure, having added to the accelerated historical trend in our nation's history towards civil war.  If he could find solace in anything - and if you read up on his post-Presidential life, he didn't find much solace in anything at all - it would have been the fact his successor is rated much worse than Pierce by most historians...

Next Week: Not a Know-Nothing but certainly a Do-Nothing.

Read more ...

Presidential Character: Week Thirteen, It's Millard Fillmore, B-tches!

I can't recuse myself from writing about this next guy, even though I wrote a favorable review of the bibliographic reference Millard Fillmore: A Bibliography by John Crawford for the Summer 2003 edition of Reference and User Services Quarterly and thus I have a more... forgiving view of Millard Fillmore's tenure as replacement President upon Zachary Taylor's passing.

Although I can't forgive much.  Fillmore is the one who signed the odious bills that formed the Compromise of 1850.

In Fillmore's defense, his Active-Positive worldview made him do it.

The Compromise was the one thing standing against the serious threats of secession and civil war.  The results of the Mexican-American War had angered up Northerner abolitionists: the sudden population boom of California filling up with Free-State backers - threatening the possibility that all those new Western territories could turn anti-slavery - had angered up Southerners.  Fearing disunion, key Senators - Clay, Webster and Calhoun (that bastard) - offered up a series of bills that would attempt to placate both sides by letting California go Free but also requiring federal marshals to arrest any suspected runaway slaves and ship them South under a Fugitive Slave Act.

Fillmore's predecessor Zachary Taylor would have none of it.  He didn't want compromise and he didn't want Southern states ignoring federal authority.  If Taylor hadn't died, our nation could well have fought its civil war in 1850, not 1860.

Instead it fell to Fillmore, a long-time political figure from New York.  In many ways the polar opposite of Taylor: Where Taylor was a novice politician, Fillmore was experienced.  Where Taylor was Uncompromising (the trait of an Active-Negative), Fillmore was open to the idea of Compromise due to his days as Congressman.

To Fillmore, the Compromise package was a present solution to what he viewed as a current problem, so he signed off on all the Compromise bills Congress sent him.  In his mind, the passage of that compromise would settle passions and let things go back to a status-quo.

In one respect he was right: the Compromise did settle passions.  Abolitionists up North found it particularly frustrating to get more people to join them in protest, because most of the citizenry - North AND South - simply didn't want to fight.

But in every other way, Fillmore was very much wrong, and again the sin of an A-P President - the failure to see the consequences of their actions - made itself plain within a few years.  That Compromise settled passions only for the issues - the disposition of California and New Mexico - of that moment.  Newer issues would arise - such as the disposition of Kansas and Nebraska - that brought those passions back.  And Fillmore failed to recognize how much of a poison pill that Fugitive Slave Act would be to abolitionists who feared it would - and did - create abuse where slave-owners would claim legitimate freedmen - so easy to "identify" from their skin color - as slaves, in effect kidnapping innocent Blacks.  Worse, it forced people upon pain of a $1000 fine (back then a steep price) to join any effort to round up Blacks.  At the time (1850) most Northerners didn't care much for it: but once the Act was being enforced - and people getting prosecuted for it - the outrage grew.

And that was the Northerners.  The Southern slave-owning politicians also refused to let the Compromise settle their passions.  They wanted to end the Missouri Compromise and get the chance to spread slavery everywhere they could (even into Free states).  Rather than tread lightly on the use of the Fugitive Slave Act, they quickly abused it by doing nothing to stop slave-owners from claiming any and all Blacks within view as "escaped slaves" (easier to commit when there was no penalty of false affidavits).

Fillmore didn't get his wish about cooling passions.  By the time was facing an election cycle to stand as his own candidate, he was hated well enough within the Whigs to force a deadlocked convention and denied him a chance to run for his own administration.  Fillmore was still able to push a platform upholding his Compromise, which hurt the eventual candidate Winfield Scott's campaign.  The slavery issue shattered the Whigs that season, the pieces of the party floating for a banner until the anti-slavery Republicans formed 4 years later.

Fillmore's Active tendencies pushed him to run again for office in 1856 for another Third Party - the Know-Nothings - but won little.  As such, his foreign policy successes - forcing a trade mission on isolationist Japan that actually profited both nations in the long term, dealing with Great Britain over a potential conflict regarding the UK's hold in the hemisphere, and avoiding an international incident involving Hungary - get overlooked.

Unfortunately, the foreign policies successes get overlooked for a very good reason: his domestic policies kept the United States marching relentlessly towards an unforgiving war.

Next week: Quite honestly the unhappiest person to ever sit in the White House.

Read more ...

And What Does All That Money Buy?

Just to get you up-to-date about an election cycle that's still half-a-year away.  Rick "All I Need Are Rich Friends" Scott may be down in the polls but he's raking in record contribution funds:

Scott's political machine, Let's Get to Work, raised a whopping $4.6 million in the first three months of 2013, raking in cash at the rate of $50,000 every day while chasing a goal of up to $100 million to fund his 2014 re-election campaign.  It's an unheard of sum even in Florida politics, where money has always been critical.
Individual checks of $10,000 or more flood Scott's campaign daily, many from businesses and individuals with a heavy stake in legislation, from Blue Cross Blue Shield to U.S. Sugar to an array of law firms with rosters of lobbying clients at the Capitol...

So you see, it doesn't matter to Rick "What Part of Medicare Fraud Will Voters Forget Again in 2014" Scott if he's polling about as popular as Marlins' owner Jeff Loria in Miami/Dade (which is about as popular as bird flu).  All that matters is that there's a ton of deep-pocket corporations and financial entities plugging in enough money for Scott to buy every TV ad spot, enough radio air time, enough campaigners to swamp every voter in Florida into thinking he's the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan.

...Governors typically raise money for their political parties between elections, but Scott is the first Florida governor to keep his personal campaign apparatus permanently up and running...

Dear Florida voters: please try to recognize that anyone getting campaign support from Donald Trump isn't working in the best interests of the state of Florida.  At all.  EVER.

...Driving Scott's need to stockpile millions is the expected candidacy of Crist, a Republican-turned-Democrat who has a big lead over Scott in early polling and who is known as a highly effective fundraiser.
Scott can accept checks in unlimited amounts because his campaign fund is an electioneering communications organization, or ECO, that's not subject to the $500 contribution limit that typically applies to candidates. The only limitation on activities by Let's Get to Work is that it can't "expressly advocate" Scott's re-election by using words such as "vote for" or "elect."
Edwards, a Treasure Island businessman and entertainment mogul who operates St. Petersburg's Mahaffey Theater, recently wrote Scott's campaign its largest single check, for $500,000. That's nearly as much as the $600,000 Edwards paid last year to erect a vertical gateway sign on Interstate 275 in St. Petersburg...

And what do you think all that money is buying?  This isn't campaign fundraising: this is legalized bribery.  The ultimate quid pro quo racket, because they don't even need to hide it anymore.

While the current polling shows Crist thumping Scott in a 2014 match-up with numbers at 50 - 34 (at 34 percent he's bound to be losing even Republican voters), never underestimate Money's power to buy enough negative ad time and buy enough bullsh-t for the media to consume to get those numbers in favor of Scott.  I'm terrified of the possibility that there's enough money to create an ad that has Scott hugging rabbits and painting rainbows and getting enough out-of-state actors to smile while standing next to him, rather than in-state residents being forcibly prevented from punching him in the nose.

The only solution is to defeat Rick "HE'S A CROOK" Scott.  Make all those millions of dollars get wasted for nothing.  Stop making elections about those who can raise the most money and make it about those who honestly will do the right things in office.

Saying it now: Vote Crist for Governor.  Don't Vote for Scott.  For the love of GOD do NOT VOTE Republican.  Not for the next ten generations.

Read more ...

You Might Notice

Just in time for April Fools Day, a change in the patterns.

This blog was originally started up to throw out amendment and reform ideas, but quickly devolved into personal rantings about the sorry state of political affairs in A) Florida B) the United States C) Iran, Libya and other places in the Middle East, and D) Massive Multiplayer games (DAMN YOU NCSOFT! BRING ME BACK MY CITY OF HEROES).

So, ergo ipso, I changed the blog title to something more relevant.

Just not Wartenblog.  Okay.  Just... no.

So, what will be this blog's stated goals and objectives?

1) Post about the craziness in Florida
2) Rail about the craziness in the United States political forum
3) Mock the Far Right Wingnuts
4) Eat cheese
5) Profit!

Some things that will continue on are the weekly reviews of Presidential Character - so far the one I did on James Monroe has been massively popular - and my occasional forays into biased humor and snarkery.

Welcome to Post 400.  It gets easier from here.

Read more ...