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ubermenzch
Joined: 09 Jun 2008
Location: bundang, south korea
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 Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 3:28 am Post subject: if things get worse, what shape will protest take |
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if the economic crisis gets worse (and it seems likely to, despite the momentary pause), it would seem fitting that the american people protest and generally make noise, if only to show contempt for the incompetence of those who got them in this mess. but there is the problem of, if a mass protest movement does form, what character it will take, and whether people will choose a non-traditional way to protest which we have not seen much of before in the states. it's often the louder, more extreme minority which bullies its way to the forefront in these situations, and defines a "movement". this article gives us cause to worry.
http://www.slate.com/id/2215826/
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PITTSBURGH�On Saturday, hours after Richard Poplawski is alleged to have gunned down three police officers called to evict him from his mother's house, experts on extremism began trying to unravel his mind. Getting into his head was surprisingly easy, thanks to the Web. Understanding what they found there was not.
These experts found a MySpace account in which 22-year-old Poplawski wrote of his experiments in self-mutilation. They then matched common screen names from that account with another, then on to Stormfront, a neo-Nazi chat site that has become the Grand Central Station of the white supremacist movement, where conspiracy theorists and Jew-baiters change trains in their journey down the road to Valhalla.
In workmanlike prose, Poplawski explored the idea that the economy faced imminent collapse. His words: "I also don't think there is too much debate about the eventuality of a collapse of economic and social order in this country. All signs seem to point to a once great nation in the midst its last gasp, suffocating under the weight [of] fiscal irresponsibility. Poisoned by design by the moral decadence that is a direct byproduct of item 1.
Fairly dry words�not too different from what we've been reading in newspaper columns for a few months now. But here's "item 1": "The federal government, mainstream media, and banking system in these United States are strongly under the influence of�if not completely controlled by�Zionist interest."
In another post, he offered a vivid narrative of chasing down a pair of "groids" who had swiped his mother's car. Elsewhere he wrote with schoolboy torment about losing his girlfriend, who he is sure took up with some black guy just to spite him. By the end of his run, he had changed his online name from "RichP" to "Braced for Fate." These revelations traced what seemed a rather common trajectory for many an extremist: inner turmoil here, a conspiracy theory there, and, voila!, out comes Timothy McVeigh.
Yet one of the finds by Jake Bialer, a political-science student at Reed College, remains intriguingly unfathomed. Checking a site called Stumbleupon, Bialer was able to find Poplawski's last few links from MySpace. They were, in turn, a page on "how to reprogram your subconscious," a Meyer-Briggs personality test, and a psychotherapy chart.
For someone presumably certain about Jewish conspiracies and his own racial adequacy, Poplawski seemed possessed of the notion that something curious was going on inside his noggin. It was almost as if he were looking for the Great Reset Button.
There is much already known about Richard Poplawski, but still more to be understood. He kept up a friendship with Aaron Vire, a black man, yet despised race-mixing. Some described him as almost maddeningly polite. He loved dogs, say his friends, yet during the year he spent in Florida, a neighbor who entrusted her dog to his care ended up calling the police. She suspected some sort of foul play when it vanished.
Twenty-five years ago, when Pittsburgh's economy was going to rust and flinders, desperate men who had played by the rules and lost everything to a market too complex to be understood climbed this city's bridges and jumped. A generation later, with the economy vaporizing amid revelations of incompetence, greed, and corruption on Wall Street and elsewhere, we see the corollary. One generation turned its violence inward. We have to wonder if the next is turning its outward.
One of the places to which Poplawski turned, according to his best friend, Edward Perkovic, was Alex Jones. In the realm of conspiracy, Jones defies the traditional left-right paradigm. When I described his site as "far right" in an article recently, I was inundated with indignant e-mails. Jones might have made his chops with documentaries about the Waco siege, but he views himself as a libertarian, not a right-winger.
His site, Infowars, where Perkovic says Poplawski sought his news, is a pastiche of links to reports from far and wide, all seemingly driven by the need to get a real story Jones doesn't think is being told. In that sense, it seems almost apolitical. In another, it's about finding the hidden "other" that is running the show.
"All it is is mainstream links to government documents calling for one-world government," Jones said of his site.
Indeed, Jones, whose latest documentary is The Obama Deception, says of his movie: "It's not about left or right. It's about one-world government." Trace these fears of one-world government back to their ur-texts and you will find, for instance, that the Trilateral Commission theories so popular among the right a decade ago had their start in a report on "suppressed news stories" by a left-leaning group called "Project Censored" (motto: "The news that didn't make the News").
Jones is into what we can only politely describe as an alternate interpretation of what exists around us. The 9/11 attacks were an inside job. The airplane contrails overhead are a giant biomedical experiment. Even a sponsor ad, read by Jones, sounds ominous: "Have you ever thought about what's in your shampoo, soaps, and detergent?"
Jones advocates saving and storing food, something Poplawski wrote of doing. Poplawski was not 100 percent with Jones on all things�he seemed to dislike the fact that Jones doesn't bait Jews and perseverate on race. What Poplawski seemed to find in Jones was a bridge from the near-mainstream to a level of paranoid obsession in search of an explanation for his life's failures. For that, one does not need an ideology, just an inclination.
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 6:03 am Post subject: |
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The opposition is getting increasingly hysterical, but I don't see that leading anywhere except possibly more random unfocused violence. They are increasingly isolated from the mainstream of society.
People are angry, but don't know what to do with their anger. They have no alternative to offer to the present system. 'No' is not a political philosophy. The Tea Bag things next week are not the start of anything serious (I don't think) since they just object to a return to the tax rates of 2001. Ninty-five % are getting a tax cut--they are not going to be open to arguments about 'socialist tax increases'.
Mostly we're just in for a period of loud-mouth whining amplified by the internet, punctuated with random spurts of violence fueled by the nutty Right's victimization complex. |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 6:23 am Post subject: |
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| �Government doesn�t work. It doesn�t keep our streets safe and it doesn�t educate our children. Government is good at only one thing: It breaks your legs, hands you a pair of crutches, and says, �See, without us you wouldn�t be able to walk.�� |
� Harry Browne, Libertarian |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 6:27 am Post subject: |
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Mr. on,
How does that quote relate to the topic of this thread? I don't get it.
PS: Kuros keeps trying to convince me there are non-nutty Libertarians. Do you concur? |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 6:34 am Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
Mr. on,
How does that quote relate to the topic of this thread? I don't get it.
PS: Kuros keeps trying to convince me there are non-nutty Libertarians. Do you concur? |
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The other day, I had breakfast with the founder and operator of a dispensary that pays $100,000 a month in taxes. She was telling me how Betty Yee of the California Franchise Tax Board was telling the DEA to back off. I asked if the $100 million in taxes being paid annually by licensed dispensaries, on the backs of sick people, might not be better spent buying us, I mean electing, a Governor and Attorney General. She had no answer.
Whatever short terms gains appeasers think they might be winning, they betray us all by cooperating with an unconstitutional rogue government.
Appeasement doesn�t work, not when you are in a cultural war with real bullets and the biggest Gulag in the world.
Freedom works. Free choice, free markets and free minds, that is what we can place our trust in, everything else is the road to Hell. |
- Steve Kubby, libertarian
The point, Yata, is that there are other things going on right now besides the single atavistic, fascist-socialist party of FDR and Obama, that controls America and that you support, and the communistic-Repubilcan opposition in congress.
The people are not part of either of these ruling factions. When they become rootless they go in a variety of directions. Some will lash out and become violent. It is all a response to the failed socialist dogma that has ruled America since 1913. |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:00 am Post subject: |
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| �This country is a one-party country. Half of that party is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn�t make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians.� |
� Hugh Downs, former long-time host of ABC's 20/20 |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:11 am Post subject: |
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| and the communistic-Repubilcan opposition in congress |
That's kind of an amusing accusation to make. Have you ever said it to a real live Republican in person? Somehow, I think not.
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| Some will lash out and become violent. It is all a response to.... |
Loony crackpot ideas. |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:18 am Post subject: |
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