[Hong Wu]

It is not any more trolling than your own claim that libertarians are not responsible for any deaths when in fact the US ideology is in fact libertarian and the word "freedom" itself has been used to justify all the US invasions of the past 40-60 years. At best you can say that what the US has is not proper libertarian as per your own standards but you will only be engaging on semantic acrobatics equal to the communists doing the same with the soviet union.

By Greek standards, sure. By American standards, if an American says they are a Libertarian, it definitely means something different than typical American policy.

[annatar1914]

I can't really understand the appeal of these types of movements, personally. It's hardly a surprise that a lot of these activists don't seem to be very successful finding themselves a woman or making families.

Political activity, especially political activity of an extreme Ideology, is a substitute for life for some unfortunates. I think it is an attempt to fill a spiritual void.

[annatar1914]

That's just a well established historical fact and as a doctrinaire babbitt dink I dogmatically reject all facts that don't comport with the establishment paradigm.

Yep, one need only Google ''P-2'' (Propaganda-Duo, the Fascist Masonic lodge in Italy) and ''Operation Gladio'' to come up with some pretty interesting results.

But people in this modern age have a habit of quickly losing any historical lessons they might have learned before.

[Victoribus Spolia]

it never occurs to them they could do it in a more civilised way.

Well, if by more civilized you mean voluntary, I would probably not call such a thing taxes. I would call it a service charge.

[Pants-of-dog]

WWII is one of the more extreme historical events, culminating at one point in "total war". Hence, it's decidedly not a good way to prove that majority support for atrocities and genocides is something to come by "easily" as you claim. And as I explained already, none of your recent examples is evidence for majority support either. You even mentioned "battle rape" as if the fact that it happened proves that majorities cheered it on.

Do you see anyone being tried for this?

A US politician recently called out some US functionary for having participated in war crimes incouding massacres of whole villages. He is still working for the government. No one apparently cares.

Just like no one is held accountable for shock and awe campaigns, black sites, and all the other human rights abuses that we know that western governments are guilty of.

No. It indicates a desire to have control over and check who comes into the country, especially with respect to potential terrorists.

The conflation of Muslims with potential terrorists is a good example of Islamophobia.

Again, the fact that the west is at war with some Muslim majority countries doesn't mean it is waging a war against Muslims as a group.

Yes, and as I said, the fact that the west is not waging a war against Muslims as a group doesn't mean it is not at war with some Muslim majority countries.

It isn't. If your contention is that the US should do more to prevent its allies from committing atrocities, then say that rather than claiming the US itself has targeted civilians.

The US deliberately targets civilians.

In a shock and awe campaign, the US knows it cannot avoid civilain attacks and does so anyway.

In the Saudi war, the US must have known that the Saudis were going to use US weapons and did nothing.

She was berated for calling statements by a Muslim member of congress antisemitic, which is apparently the kind of "Islamophobia" that makes her responsible for the NZ terror attack.

This is a new argument about this person who is completely irrelevant.

[Sivad]

Yeah, well, if western majorities were so genocidal and keen to attack civilians, or if there was really mainstream Islamophobia in the western world, we wouldn't have a problem with Islamic terrorists in the first place.

The genocide claim is idiotic but there is no question that majorities in the West do support military actions that kill civilians in Muslim countries by the hundreds of thousands and that all of those actions were sold on ridiculously transparent lies that anyone could see through if they weren't blinded by mass bigotry toward Muslim societies.

and abroad we would have little need for precision warfare and special ops.

Precision warfare my ass, the West has leveled entire countries. And the dirty war death squads, double tap drone strikes, and the proxy armies of rabid terrorist jihadis aren't like a form of humanitarian restraint, they're just the most cost effective, politically expedient way of maintaining dominance. The majority in the West doesn't give a fuck about civilian causalities in the Muslim world, they just don't like all the blood and treasure they have to expend to keep the Muslim world in its place.

The fact you think that this is evidence for majority support in western countries for genocide and attacks on civilian, when it's more likely evidence for the opposite, would be hilarious, if it weren't so utterly ignorant.

Decades of mass carnage is my evidence, all you got is obtuse denial.

[Rich]

The conflation of Muslims with potential terrorists is a good example of Islamophobia.

The conflation of Muslims with potential terrorists is a good example of Islamorealists. When you see a psychotic, lying, thieving, parasitic, 7th century, fascist, totalitarian, paedophile rapist terrorist as the most noble human that ever lived its going to lead to problems.

What is is it about leftie liberals. They just don't seem to able to get. Mohammad was not Jesus. He was not Buddha. He was not Lao-Tsu. i'm no fanboi of Joseph Smith, but he wasn't Joseph Smith. Mohammad was akin to Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. And like Mohammad a lot of perfectly nice, decent ordinary people worshipped the ground they walked on. Like Mohammadi, millions upon, millions of people saw Hitler, Stalin and Mao as idealised saviour figures. Do you think every person in the NSDAP or the CPSU were monsters? Of course not but the inevitable results of their beliefs were monstrous. Ideas matter! Beliefs matter!

I must give a personal thank-you to you @Pants-of-dog, it was your post that inspired the term "Islamorealist".

[Verv]

Well, I do not think that economic issues are actually that desperate. The whole developing world lives with more economic desperation and yet they do not engage in genocide any more than the west.

Nor was the average German actually threatened by Jews.

The same could be said of the Belgians when they genocided the Congolese: they were not significantly more desperate than others or threatened.

The whole world actively engages in mass slaughter and genocide.

But you did bring up an interesting point... The Germans were discomforted by a relative loss in living standards, it seems, but I do not know enough about the dire straits of the economy in the 1920s. Were Germans starving to death? Or were these just Germans living in intense poverty relative to people who were used to European standards?

Were the Indonesians who massacred Chinese living on the brink of death before they did their pogrom... or were they just relatively much poorer, and that bothered them..?

It's an interesting distinction and I am not sure what to make of it.

Fortunately, it just isn't that relevant to this thread.

[SolarCross]

What is is it about leftie liberals. They just don't seem to able to get. Mohammad was not Jesus. He was not Buddha. He was not Lao-Tsu. i'm no fanboi of Joseph Smith, but he wasn't Joseph Smith. Mohammad was akin to Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao.

It may be that the reason they like Mighty Mo so much is exactly because he reminds them of Stalin and Mao.

[blackjack21]

Its media is all over mosque-shootings and school shootings, but the everyday massacres that its wars have caused and continue to cause in Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc... are hidden from eyeballs so we won't learn the right lessons about power and violence.

One of the interesting aspects of this attack is the desperate efforts of state actors to suppress footage of the attack. In the US, that means quashing the first amendment. In the quasi-British Empire it means reminding Kiwis and Aussies that they don't actually have any constitutional freedom of speech.

After Blocking Zero Hedge And Others, NZ Telcos Demand Big-Tech Censorship Surge To "Protect Consumers"

Less than a week after Facebook 'mistakenly' banned us for two days with no explanation following several reports which were critical of the social media giant, we learned that Zero Hedge has now been banned in New Zealand and Australia, despite the fact that we never hosted video footage of the Christchurch attack. We were not contacted prior to the censorship. Instead, we have received a steady flood of people noting that the site is unavailable in the two countries unless a VPN is used.

The racism of Western nation's foreign policies kills thousands of times more innocent people than this one single person did. ANd our media will make sure we don't realize this by... concentrating on the character defects of one single person, rather than the systemic defects of late capitalism.

Well, they really do a terrible job of covering the wars. That is for sure. However, people seem to know about the wars, at least generally. They don't get good daily updates from the so-called mainstream media. However, the establishment seems to be doing its level best to make this story die after they were ready to go forward with a "white supremacist" spin on things.

This like saying that if YOU don't sell drugs to middle school kids, someone else will, and that person will be even nastier than you are.

It's a way of justifying horrible, anti-social behavior by evoking the specter of "people even worse than we are."

Kind of like the state giving methodone to heroin addicts?

You mean that Arabs and Muslims might take back some of what we've stolen from them during our last few centuries of genocidal wars?

Do you mean like crude oil, or Spain?

The whole world actively engages in mass slaughter and genocide.

Probably the most active genocide in the world today is against Arab Christians. Nobody cares. So I find the establishment freaking out over the troll killer of NZ kind of peculiar.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Do you see anyone being tried for this? A US politician recently called out some US functionary for having participated in war crimes incouding massacres of whole villages. He is still working for the government. No one apparently cares. Just like no one is held accountable for shock and awe campaigns, black sites, and all the other human rights abuses that we know that western governments are guilty of.

I think they call your way of arguing "motte and bailey". If you cannot show that it's easy to get western people to support genocide (obviously the more outrageous of your two claims) and attacks on civilians, you should man up and retract.

The conflation of Muslims with potential terrorists is a good example of Islamophobia.

This would be relevant - albeit also wrong - if there had been a Muslim ban. There wasn't.

Yes, and as I said, the fact that the west is not waging a war against Muslims as a group doesn't mean it is not at war with some Muslim majority countries.

As long as we are clear that the west is not waging a war against Muslims.

The US deliberately targets civilians. In a shock and awe campaign, the US knows it cannot avoid civilain attacks and does so anyway. In the Saudi war, the US must have known that the Saudis were going to use US weapons and did nothing.

There's no deliberate targeting of civilians by the US, much less majority support for it in western countries.

This is a new argument about this person who is completely irrelevant.

Very typical for you to call the original topic of conversation, into which you injected yourself, irrelevant.

The genocide claim is idiotic but there is no question that majorities in the West do support military actions that kill civilians in Muslim countries by the hundreds of thousands and that all of those actions were sold on ridiculously transparent lies that anyone could see through if they weren't blinded by mass bigotry toward Muslim societies.

Precision warfare my ass, the West has leveled entire countries. And the dirty war death squads, double tap drone strikes, and the proxy armies of rabid terrorist jihadis aren't like a form of humanitarian restraint, they're just the most cost effective, politically expedient way of maintaining dominance. The majority in the West doesn't give a fuck about civilian causalities in the Muslim world, they just don't like all the blood and treasure they have to expend to keep the Muslim world in its place.

Decades of mass carnage is my evidence, all you got is obtuse denial.

I'd suggest you get a room with @Pants-of-dog to complain that the western public doesn't care enough, since that seems to be what both of you actually mean. Just leave me out of your hyperbolic claims that westerners cheer on genocide and massacres of civilians.

[Sivad]

Just leave me out of your hyperbolic claims that westerners cheer on genocide and massacres of civilians.

Nothing hyperbolic about it, just go look at the opinion polls on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They've all had majority support.

[B0ycey]

I think the plethora of communists on this board (who also call themselves Stalinists) would beg to differ. How many times do the likes of @Potemkin and @Decky have to correct you until you'll get it right?

I beg to differ. Neither Pote or Decky ever challenged me when I described Stalin as a tyrant. And TIG, a true Marxist who was extremely educated in Marxism never gave Stalin any praise FYI. But I will give you a chance to explain how Stalin achieved Communism in a state that itself never described itself as such within another thread as this is not on topic. Have you not thought that the SU might have known what they were more than two Internet users and a crackpot in Pennsylvania? Oh and please don't insult your intelligence with this orthodox Marxism bollocks.

By contrast, name two libertarians on here that are currently active that believe the USA is consistent with libertarian philosophy. You won't find any.

The US themselves describe itself as a Libertarian state and stuck a green lady in NYC harbour to celebrate such a value. Although from my recollection your idea of what Libertarian means stems down to tax being theft and not much more. But even if you want to play semantic aerobics, it still doesn't change the fact that if you want to say the US are not true Libertarians due to them not fulfilling 100% of your definition of the NAP, then it must also be true no Communist state has committed violence due to not fulfilling 100% of Marx philosophy - Noemons point.

But, @SolarCross is ultimately right about taxes, taxation is not voluntary if both parties involved in the exchange did not explicitly consent and I would LOVE to see you apply your very loose idea of "implicit consent" to sexual relations and see how far that gets you.

I care not for your silly ideas. I generally ignore you now and let PoD deal with you instead. But the mere fact you are happy to take payment in a state IOU - a state you don't want to part of its social contract I might add - is evidence enough that you are happy to accept its financial rules FYI.

[annatar1914]

@Victoribus Spolia

I think the plethora of communists on this board (who also call themselves Stalinists) would beg to differ. How many times do the likes of @Potemkin and @Decky have to correct you until you'll get it right? Stalinism is a school of communism that believes itself consistent with Marx, the worst parts of the SU were LITERALLY during Stalin and that is the predominant school of marxist thought today among orthodox marxists. That is, they would say Stalin's programs were generally justifiable.

Well, as much as I appreciate people like Potemkin, and indeed am not still a believer in modern Capitalism, I am no longer any kind of Socialist either, so I can't support it. Socialism/Communism is in actual fact very much represented by Stalin, who correctly saw and carried out the ideological consequences of Marxist-Leninism.

By contrast, name two libertarians on here that are currently active that believe the USA is consistent with libertarian philosophy. You won't find any.

This is of course why your analogy is an entirely false one, the comparison doesn't hold up. Actual libertarians are very critical of the U.S., whereas actual communists often support both the SU and even Stalin himself.

It is however my friend, a place that was founded on Libertarian principles, and is congenial enough to libertarianism and its' offshoots that they can still exist there.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Nothing hyperbolic about it

No only hyperbolic but also baseless.

[Sivad]

No only hyperbolic but also baseless.

Now you're just flailing. Not only do the majorities support these wars initially, they support them well after the shock and awe campaigns have mangled tens of thousands of civilians and the counter-insurgency terror squads have gone door to door dragging innocent people away from their families and hauling them off to torture chambers by the thousands. The public's support for war only wanes as the costs go up for them, if mass carnage was cheap they'd happily let it go on forever.

[Sivad]

And if you look at just conservatives, support for carnage is at like 80 - 90 percent. With conservatives it's hardcore tribalistic bigotry.

[ness31]

Jacinda Ardern has banned all semi automatic/assault type weapons and paraphernalia that can be bought to make guns ‘deadlier’.

Gunman 1. Regular Joe. 0

[Pants-of-dog]

I think they call your way of arguing "motte and bailey". If you cannot show that it's easy to get western people to support genocide (obviously the more outrageous of your two claims) and attacks on civilians, you should man up and retract.

Since you ignored most of my other examples, I will wait for you to address them before I decide to retract anything.

This would be relevant - albeit also wrong - if there had been a Muslim ban. There wasn't.

No one argued that there was a Muslim ban.

You asked for a pn example of widespread Islamophobia. The support for the idea of the ban is evidence of widespread Islamophobia.

As long as we are clear that the west is not waging a war against Muslims.

Again, we are waging war against Muslims.

We are not doing it because they are Muslim, but we are still waging war on Muslims.

We are not doing it to all Muslims, but we are still waging war on Muslims.

There's no deliberate targeting of civilians by the US, much less majority support for it in western countries.

I provided examples. If you wish to ignore examples and then repeat your argument that has been disproved by the examples, feel free.

Very typical for you to call the original topic of conversation, into which you injected yourself, irrelevant.

It is irrelevant to me.

I'd suggest you get a room with @Pants-of-dog to complain that the western public doesn't care enough, since that seems to be what both of you actually mean. Just leave me out of your hyperbolic claims that westerners cheer on genocide and massacres of civilians.

US officials have been known to be involved in massacres.

Elliott Abrams, for example, was a high ranking official in the State Department when Reagan was supporting right wing dictatorships and death squads in Central America.

It is known that he was aware of these groups killing civilians en masse and not only continued to supply weapons and other supoort to them.

He still works for the US government.

How is that not open acceptance and support of massacres?

[blackjack21]

Again, we are waging war against Muslims.

We are not doing it because they are Muslim, but we are still waging war on Muslims.

We are not doing it to all Muslims, but we are still waging war on Muslims.

This is just stupid. If you aren't doing it because they are Muslim and you aren't doing it to all Muslims, it is not accurately described as a war on Muslims. By the way, why are immigrants to Canada waging a war on Muslims anyway?

The support for the idea of the ban is evidence of widespread Islamophobia.

There are people who would have a rational basis to be afraid of Islam: for example, homosexuals. There are homosexuals dispersed throughout our geography. So we could say that Islamophobia is widespread. However, there are not that many homosexuals. It follows that there are not that many Islamophobes either.

How is that not open acceptance and support of massacres?

You need to understand the law of principal and agent. If they didn't order the "massacres" as you call them, they do not accept responsiblity for them.

Anyway folks, it seems the "white supremacist" narrative collapsed before it started. Realclearpolitics has two stories on New Zealand in their sidebar column today:
New Zealand to Ban Military-Style Semiautomatic Guns, Jacinda Ardern Says
Funerals for victims of New Zealand mosque attacks begin

A father and son who fled the civil war in Syria for “the safest country in the world” were buried before hundreds of mourners Wednesday, the first funerals for victims of shootings at two mosques in New Zealand that horrified a nation known for being welcoming and diverse.

Hrmmm... I've never thought of New Zealand as diverse. At any rate, this is the natural outcome of multiculturalism. This is what happens in the multicultural areas of the world, and it's what will happen throughout the West now that it has decided to ignore history and embrace and create the worst possible situation for trying to ensure domestic tranquility.