Actually, saying that's it's incorrect might go too far, because as far as I know we still don't know much about his motivations. But to be a lone wolf in the technical sense, a person does need to be acting out of allegiance to a certain ideological or group, but without any material or operational guidance from that group. If Paddock's killing spree wasn't political or ideological, he's a mass murderer who acted alone, not a lone wolf in the strict sense.

That Intercept article is just terrible, ugh. He claims:



But, unless if USA Today edited something, they didn't, they quoted a sheriff's belief: 'Lombardo said Paddock was likely a "lone wolf" and that a motive for the shooting had not been determined.'

It really is just digging for the take of being all dramatic about "white terrorism", and they're also jumping the gun in the reverse direction. Really annoying, tbh.

As well, there are plenty of news articles about Muslims committing murders and being described as lone wolves. Like, the media isn't that bad, people.



I agree, lone wolves and terrorists are qualitatively different even if they're statistically associated.



Wait, how are we using the terms lone wolf and terrorist here? *



The only thing I found was that he was a Trump supporter, but there's no evidence of any particular fanatical beliefs. Of course no evidence isn't evidence of a lack of.

When I think of the word terrorist*, I imagine a person who's acting in the name of some ideology. For instance, spreading Islam or the guy who killed people at an abortion clinic because of far-right Christian propaganda stuff. Though, it's hard to know when to draw the line, because people who do this stuff are often alienated and radical, and it's questionable to what degree you can blame the ideology as the cause of the attack. In other words, people who are mentally ****ed-up enough to commit an attack are probably already estranged from society and more prone to wild, out-there beliefs, so they'll likely latch onto some kind of belief system, which only perpetuates the radicalization.

It's hard because to make a qualitative distinction is hard in many cases. So the NYC terrorist apparently read ISIS propaganda, had a bunch on his phone and so forth. But, as far as I'm aware, he never had contact with ISIS. So a person was radicalized by a radical group, and committed an attack we can agree is terrorism. But what about the guy who shot Mexicans in Walmart, who by all reports was extremely racist? Does his exposure to racist right-wing propaganda make him a terrorist in the name of white supremacy, if the NYC guys exposure to ISIS propaganda makes him a terrorist? It gets murky.

I don't really understand conservatives. Recently got into a bit of a debate with a friend of mine, I claimed the Civil War was primarily fought over slavery, and their position was something like "well, it's complicated, and something something state's rights." I didn't get into it too deeply but I cited the sourced which make it how primarily the Civil War was about slavery, and they said they didn't deny that slavery was an important factor but.. and I'm not really sure if they had a point, but they were adamant that you could expunge quite a few people from slavery, or they were trying to diminish its role.

Well, I asked them if they knew of sources or whatever else which would help paint the portrait of the Civil War having other major causes. I also submitted my evidence that it didn't, i.e. the declarations of secession and their deliberate text, the language of The Cornerstone Speech and its very obvious racism, and the general history of the U.S. preceding the Civil War such as the Missouri compromise and Bleeding Kansas, and how this fit in with Lincoln's election and the motivation for secession. They of course didn't know or have any evidence of their views or a counter-point to mine, because memes about history never seem to have any backing (never trust any one liner about history, including invading Russia in the winter, because they're basically all false).

The person didn't really have much of a response, other than trying to expunge Robert E. Lee of wrongdoing. Which I get, I mean, conservatives for decades have been quote mining and selectively interpreting his words to make him seem like a better person than he was. I mean, he owned and beat slaves, but he called his own actions evil, so I guess he was totally cool, right? Oh, right, he didn't go to war over slavery, he went to war because he was a Virginian. Right, that's clearly not a cherrypicked quote. I didn't press the point and ended the debate amicably before jabbing at Lee, but sheesh. Not that I have a personal vendetta against Robert E. Lee, the dude doesn't stand out as, like, particularly evil compared to how ****ty slaveowners in the South were during that era. But the thing I don't get is, conservatives in this America have a particular aversion from facing up to things like that. I don't know why a person would have such strong resistance to learning naked facts about an obvious history.

I agree it's murky, but maybe we can draw a tentative line. The ISIS terrorist wasn't only exposed to ISIS propaganda. He was also acting on behalf of the group. And after the attack, ISIS claimed the attack as one of theirs. That arrangement is precisely what makes him a lone wolf: he was acting on behalf of the organization, even though he didn't receive support from it.

But one can imagine a hypothetical Muslim who reads about various Islamic organizations, consumes their propaganda, and gets the ideas to carry out some act of violence. But the mere fact that that material led to his radicalization isn't sufficient to make him a terrorist. His act needs to be framed in some way that associate the act with an organization or cause. That's why suicide notes or text messages swearing allegiance to ISIS. They allow ISIS to claim that it's hit the US (or wherever), thus serving its PR and propanganda efforts.

I haven't looked at this white supremacist very closely, but I think the reason why what he did is a hate crime rather than a terrorist attack is because he didn't claim to be acting on behalf of any specific political cause. It doesn't matter that he read material from white nationalist or neo-Nazi websites (assuming that he did), because he wasn't acting on their behalf, or trying to advance their political agenda. The whole point of terrorism is that it's violence that is intended to serve some political purpose or promote some political cause. If it doesn't do that, it's not terrorism. It's just senseless violence.

Everybody know the one country you definitely don't invade ever, nonetheless in winter is Finland, anyway. Or at least Molotov learned that lesson!

Charitable, straightforward answer: it's more difficult to be a patriot and to celebrate your country if your country has an immoral past that is difficult to reckon with. Learning "naked facts" about history undermine the beliefs a patriotic person might want to believe about their country.

Ah. And when I talk about right-wing propaganda, well, just look at this:

What caused the Civil War?

It's apparently been effective, ****. Revisionism is effective.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7cga8p/exintelligence_chiefs_trump_is_being_played_by/dppzvbn/

Mega genius of all time Trump can't spot obvious flattery.

If everything about you is bad, then everything good that could be said about you would be false. No surprise therefore that Trump never got the opportunity to learn what flattery looks like.

Uncharitable, circumlocutory answer: They know. They just don't care.

I won't pretend to apologize for beating this drum again.

To be fair to those people, the Civil War wasn't really about slavery or States Rights. It was about protecting the wealth of rich southerners. Of course, that wealth was in the form of slaves, and they meant to protect it by expanding the use of slave labor, so yeah, it really was about slavery, but if you stop the discussion there you aren't going to learn anything.

Edit: Rich southerners were badly over-invested in low value add commodities exports. Cotton bubbled from about 1800 until the 1850s, generating significant wealth for the region despite its low productivity, which the rich reinvested into growing more of the same crops. Eventually this led to an overproduction crisis (capitalist crisis). The south had to import practically everything, so their total wealth, liquidity, consumption, and the lifestyles of rich southerners were all effectively pinned to global cotton prices. In other words, rich southerners were properly ****ed. The political arguments at the time may have literally concerned slavery, but the real issue was protecting the buying power of slave owners (maintaining cotton prices or increasing production). Many of the same issues would have been brought up even if the south had used free labor.

The lesson is that rich people are willing to drag their country to hell if they don't get their way.

True that:

I know I’ve said this before, probably in this thread, but I’ll say it again. I think a lot of the US’s cultural problems today come from the fact that the southern economic collapse was averted by the war rather than playing itself out. It makes people think of the antebellum period as some kind of romantic cultural high water mark instead of the kamikaze speculation cash grab it actually was.

The most ironic part about all of this? The Confederates were in favor of free trade. Hard. It was one of the top two issues, and arguably even beat out the expansion of slavery. I doubt that is a popular stance among most people who fly the traitor rag, if they’re even aware of it at all.

The issue that galvanized Republicans in the North was opposition to "Slave Power". Many northerners saw how the wealthiest amongst the slave owners in slave states were able to use their extraordinary wealth to change state constitutions and influence legislators in slave states to pass laws that gave them unfair advantages and thus enabled them to further consolidate their wealth at the expense of those who weren't fabulously wealthy (familiar?). While many white men in slave states could own slaves, the largest beneficiaries of slavery were the very small group of wealthiest slave owners, who owned far more slaves than the vast majority of people, and thus were able to grow their wealth at a much more rapid pace. Northerners were worried that, as slave-owning oligarchs became more and more wealthy, they would use their wealth to influence the federal government as they had done in slave states, and that that would eventually limit the economic opportunity of northerners. Many northerners saw the institution of slavery as an oligarchic institution. As they saw it, the need to fight slavery stemmed from the need to preserve democracy and equal economic opportunity against an increasingly powerful oligarchic class that wanted to subvert democracy. That threat of the oligarchic slave-owning class to everyone else was what they called "Slave Power", and opposition to Slave Power is what catapulted the Republican party to the presidency in 1860.

For that reason, I find a lot of this crying on social media that the civil war was fought over "slavery" to be misleading. Yes, the north was to a large extent united over its opposition to slavery against southern states that supported it. But the north didn't fight the war out of strong moral conviction that slavery was an evil institution that needed to be abolished. The dominant political voices in the north (Republicans, at least starting in late 1850s) weren't abolitionists who objected to slavery for moral reasons (although of course such people did exist), but people who opposed slavery out economic self-interest.

The North was generally anti-slavery, and Lincoln opposed slavery even on moral grounds, but that's not as a big a motivation for the North going to war as it's made out to be. However it was absolutely the reason for the South seceding.

Yeah. I really do think saying that the north was "anti-slavery" is somewhat misleading. There were many different angles on the issue in the north, which is to say that there were many reasons that people opposed slavery. And I think pointing that out isn't necessarily pointless nitpicking that stems from a merely antiquarian interest in history. I think it's actually quite relevant now, since our current public debates about the history of the lead-up to the Civil War interpret the history in a distorted way because the interpretations are rooted in self-interested myth-building.

Many on the left want to characterize the civil war as a war of ideas between two sides that fought over how to understand what American freedom is: the south, viewing freedom as based on the freedom to own slaves, and the north, as trying to abide by the declaration of independence's maxim that all men are created equal (by which they mean -- anachronistically -- the idea that whites and blacks should be treated equally, with equal political and civic rights).

That way of characterizing things is just not true, at least from the side of the North: Lincoln may have been opposed to slavery on moral grounds, but he did not identify as an abolitionist. He did not believe, as abolitionists did, that slaves should be freed immediately without compensation to their owners. His primary objective was not the emancipation of slaves, as much as it was restoring the integrity of the Union, and to do that he was very willing to make compromises with pro-slavery advocates. And, as I said before, the Republican party/Lincoln came into power in 1860 by promising to combat "Slave Power" (which, as I described in my previous post, meant that Republican voters in the north opposed slavery primarily out of economic self-interest, rather than because they had strong convictions about the exploitations and abuses of slavery).

In 2017, we're primarily using history at the service of our present day culture wars. Democrats/leftists/liberals want the north to symbolize American ideals (by which they mean, whatever are the current orthodoxies of the day are pertaining to racial equality, no matter how anachronistic it is to attribute those to the North in the middle of the 19th century), and the civil war they see as symbolizing the victory, in the past, of our ideals over the parochialism, chauvinism and moral turpitude that is embodied in Trump and Trumpism (which, anticipating triumph of the Democrats over Trumpism in the future, plays into the "arc of history" idea that moral injustices will inevitably be vanquished by "progress" -- something like, "we beat them before, and we'll do it again"). By making the connection, they're intending to tie our current debates to some of the central, defining conflicts that have divided and shaped our country since its inception. But just like discourse about lone wolves and terrorists, I find it all incredibly dishonest, and without much truth to it at all. Never mind that as Democrats/leftists/liberals weave these stories about that have little to do with real history in order to justify their own indignant self-righteousness at conservatives politically cynical uses of history, the single thing that they criticize the other side above all else is living in a world detached from fact. The idea seems to be that, it doesn't matter how crude your understanding of the origins of the civil war is, as long as you believe "the war was fought over slavery (whatever that means)", you're part of the tribe that has the correct interpretation of history.

Hypocrites!

I mean, I get it: there are many conservatives now who deny altogether that the primary goal of the South was to preserve slavery and expand it to new territories because they want to absolve the south of the abject moral failure that slavery was. They want to write it out of the history books, so to speak, to serve their current political interests. That's really, really bad: they're not just cynically distorting the truth. They're fabricating alternative facts in order to serve their political agenda. I just wish that the response of the left was to respond with truth, rather than vacuous slogans, a cheap sense of moral superiority and untruthfulness, which is just the reflexive way that the left behaves.

I think I might hate politics.

Pretty sure you’re supposed to

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/545738/

Wow

Is the most concerning point. When it comes to this:



Could be construed as Wikileaks just trying to manipulate Trump Jr into providing good material.

Still pretty damning though.

This is the kind of thing that makes me think we're all just caught in the undertow of a mob war between the Russian and American intelligence establishments.

"That's no election, it's Deep State Wars: The Phantom Menace"

Can somebody make one of these for Trump? I wonder which SW character he is. Jabba the Butt?

That's one fat Saddam

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/7cqez8/the_secret_correspondence_between_donald_trump_jr/

And Reddit goes ape****ttttt

Condi is ravishing, as always

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/03/us/rice-gadhafi/index.html

Reddit bores me

Except

For Neutral Politics baaaaaaabbbyyyyyy!!!

They might as well change the banner for the /r/politics to a Sanders photo.

If you guys watched that Adam Curtis documentary from like 50 pages back in this thread, you'd know that Gaddafi was just winging it.

Also I didn't read the CNN article but a quick glance at it almost makes me think it's something from the Onion. OTOH these lone kingdoms out in oil country really are stranger than fiction insofar as their quirks go.

Highlights:

That actually sounds totally like something Muammar would do.

https://onepeterfive.com/pope-communists-think-like-christians/

wtf I love the pope now:

That's pretty interesting, considering the atheist ideology of communism that conservatives are always warning us to watch out for.

Eminently plausible that this could be something that happens very, very soon.

In that case, it looks like it's about time again for a makeover

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/russian-interference-in-the-2016-election-a-cacophony-not-a-conspiracy

Honestly one of the best takes I've read on Russian meddling. Watching how this election has broken the brains of so many Americans - basically everything about the #resistance - is interesting, and most of it comes across as hysterical to me.

In fact, the last line - "In the aftermath, and following a perfectly symmetrical impulse, a great many Americans want to prove that the Russians elected Trump, and Americans did not." - really summarizes why they come across so loonie. The implication of *most* of what the resistance says is just denial that American politics fail and denial that Americans are dumb enough to vote Trump. It's sheer denial of the political reality - it encapsulates and reduces every problem with American politics down to one foreign influence.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/us/politics/jeff-sessions-crime.html?_r=0

Also, apparently missed this. Sessions, who was basically considered a lunatic by his colleagues, promised to stop looking after "troubled police departments" - troubled in what way? Ask yourself if this could mean something besides those with white supremacy issues.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/the-department-of-justice-stands-by-texass-voter-id-law/532980/

Not to mention Sessions defending GOP voter suppression tactics.

These aren't even complicated stories, but they don't gain nearly as much traction as "Sessions lied.. about Russia":



Point being that, conspiratorial thinking and grand Russian narratives easily displace people's awareness of how ****ing horrid Trump's government is going for Americans.

I guess part of it is that - the Russia thing lets people continue to be ****ing lazy. GOP working its ass off to keep black people from voting? That's a problem activism can solve. Putin employing an army of Twitter trolls to post rainbow pictures of Sanders on social media? That displaces the problem onto other people. It's all convenient, I mean, it is called the #resistance, after all.