The Gaming Den

Psychic Robot wrote:I don't. But, in Politics As Usual in America, everyone jumps at the chance to exploit tragedies for political gain. How unfortunate.

Not every suicide bomber in the Middle East is a member of al-Qaeda, but we regard them as being part of the same general political entity because they - for the most part - share the same personal and political goals. We call them Islamic Terrorists and condemn their actions accordingly. I see no reason to treat this circumstance any differently. Stack may have never attended a Tea Party, joined the Tea Party movement, and might have even disagreed with the secondary political goals of most Tea Party members, but by laying down his life to protest taxation in America, he has definitively demonstrated his commitment to their goals, and the two shall forever be intertwined in the eyes of those that are not part of the Tea Party movement.

In general, it is a good idea to remember that PR is always wrong. His political views are forged by basically a giant Golden Mean Fallacy, where he assumes that everything Rush Limbaugh says is half right, and thus thinks he is being reasonable when he believes that there is "some truth" to the idea that global warming is a pagan hoax designed to destroy America, and that Obama's healthcare reforms are going to create "death panels" to round up elderly and exterminate them. He thinks that both Rush Limbaugh and the people who dismiss him utterly as being a delusional crank case are ideologues and that putting himself squarely between those two points of view makes part of a rational center.

Which of course it doesn't. It makes him a delusional right wing crank case who is merely not as crazy as some of Glenn Beck's best and brightest.

As to the "No True Scotsman" going around about the IRS attack. Let's count the ways:

• Favored Healthcare Reform (but not government healthcare)
• Quoted from Communist Manifesto
• Disliked Organized Religion
• Disliked George Bush

The fact is, Tea Party people do this shit, all the time. Yes, it doesn't fit with the entire Republican narrative, and yes it doesn't make any fucking sense, but if Joe Stack had read his manifesto at the Tea Party Convention, it would have received applause.

His rhetoric is totally indistinguishable from the "normal" rambling diatribes that come out of the TEA party brownshirts every day. And if you can't see that, it's because you are willfully pretending that the TEA baggers are more coherent and pro-social than they are.

-Username17

It sounds like he was a Silicon Valley Libertarian, which is pretty much optimistically anti-government control in every way. Sometimes in a way which us United Statesians would call Conservative, other times in a way that we would call Liberal. Like all good Silicon Valley Libertarians, he believes that the ultimate result of his politics would be some sort of Libertarian Corporate Community Utopia, which is completely irrational. But it doesn't make him a Republican or] a Teabagger.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:It sounds like he was a Silicon Valley Libertarian, which is pretty much optimistically anti-government control in every way. Sometimes in a way which us United Statesians would call Conservative, other times in a way that we would call Liberal. Like all good Silicon Valley Libertarians, he believes that the ultimate result of his politics would be some sort of Libertarian Corporate Community Utopia, which is completely irrational. But it doesn't make him a Republican or] a Teabagger.

I don't know if it makes him a Republican, but it certainly does make him a Tea Bagger. There's a whole Silicon Valley Libertarian wing of the Teabagging movement. It doesn't make any sense, but none of the other wings of that movement make any sense either.

Remember: you got Sarah Palin, right? She is a crazy fringe Christian (she fights witchcraft!), and so is her buddy Glenn Beck (he believes that the Garden of Eden was in Mississippi and that Jesus preached the special secret gospels to Native Americans). But look at how many of the Teabaggers are Randites. Randroids are hard atheists.

Similarly, some of them are pro-corporation and some are anti-corporation. Some are pro-war and others are 2-way isolationists. It's all very fractious. There are really only three points that they agree upon:

• The Government collecting money from people in the form of taxes is bad.
• The Government spending money on "programs" is bad.
• The country is sliding down into an authoritarian communist fascist negro hitler obamanation and that drastic, potentially violent action is called for to wake America up so that Real Americans can reclaim their great nation.

So yeah. He hits the center points and everything else is well in range for established factions within the Teaparty. He was a teabagger to the core, and this is exactly the kind of direct action that they have been calling for the entire time. That it turns out to be as ugly and pointless as their fiercest detractors had predicted will not actually show them the error of their ways. They are going to just mentally compartmentalize this event with a simple No True Scotsman gambit and continue to call for armed insurgency against the Obamanation.

"Keep your Government hands off of my Medicare!"

-Username17