Locally, Riley ranting at Licking Calcutta. ("Riley's rants" being her term, to which I defer, while I actually do not view her referenced post as being ranting at all. Indeed, more rational than rant.)
Nationally, the effort aimed to "stop domestic terror," or at least to curb inflamatory speech that might motivate unstable people to actually do improper, criminal things.
I've noted Gary Gross as a GOP commentator worth reading from time to time, and he and I in emails have talked about how positions can be argued without getting inflamatory. I tend to be a bit more judgmentally derisive of idiocy than Gary is of positions he dislikes or disputes. There is that difference in style. One person who blogged in the past, Kyle Baker, had a sub-heading on his bannerline, "To root out idiocy in all its forms." Needless to say, he'd not succeeded at the point he dropped blogging.
That, folks, is a tall order. I only aim to point it out and now and then mock it.
But I have no illusions it will be close to rooted out in my lifetime. If ever. All evidence, so far, is it is vigorous, alive and well, and the daily modus operandi of many.
Curbing any violent tendencies arising from idiocy is needed; but rooting out idiocy, good luck on that.
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One thing I do remember from my time in Seattle, the Aryan Nation, headed by a Richard Butler, at the other end of the state on the Idaho border was broken up by a civil judgment obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center against its property by survivors of persons murdered and claiming in court that the Aryan hate-rhetoric caused identifiable unstable individuals to act instead of only imagining - and the jury awarded substantial damages in believing the charge proven.
But socking the wallet as a lesson after the violent act, rather than forestalling it, is clearly "second best" over the better run of events.
Moreover, an enclave of Aryan voices, the Klan, these are more easily connected to events than others - James Dobson's personal stake in setting off the Tiller killer, these ties are too distant, and there are too many as hateful of women's rights as Dobson - and Fox, how far does the First Amendment protect before money judgments for inciting riot can be attained - when, at least for now, there's only teabagging nonsense rather than riot?
To the extent The Stop Domestic Terror Campaign would suggest curbing prior speech, apart from allowing recovery of damages where causal connections can be made convincing to a jury, is a question loaded with worry, lest everyone's rights to think and speak freely is further compromised by demands for political correctness.
Read that Stop Domestic Terror Campaign presentation carefully for well-intentioned people should not join onto something that in the extreme can lessen liberties.
Be thankful you have the liberties the Constitution contains, and hope to see a time when a general moral imperative among people of the nation is such that it would include a recognition and articulation of a right to be free of hunger and to be fed, a right to shelter and decent clothing, and a right to basic medical care for every human, out of a true and not misdirected or partly-hateful and restrictive and ill-thought-out "respect for life." These things are moral rights and should be enacted into law as enforceable things every citizen, every resident, of the nation is accorded. And to give a finite world's resources the capability to make that goal achievable there must be a curb on overproducing people on the face of the earth, because there either will be a birth control of sustainable population levels, or a death control, imposed by nature, as the numbers on earth continue trending higher to unsustainable numbers while some for contorted reasons stand in the way of curbing and controlling the threat of overpopulation. Those are perhaps the most dangerous people of our time - those and ones profligately reproducing around the planet. Not that a birth control regime is imposed by armies or force of that kind, but by force of reason. By good sense. Instead of idiocies of creed.
revised Thanksgiving morning - 7:30 AM
