It’s officially Christmas season, Blogtown! Let’s have some news.
The tree is up in Pioneer Courthouse Square, and there are plenty of other fun holiday family events happening over the next month.
The Oregon Ducks beat the Oregon State Beavers yesterday.
In yet another terrorist attack by an armed white male, three people were killed and nine others injured in a Friday shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood.
Black Lives Matter protesters marched through Lloyd Center on Friday in a show of solidarity against the violence in Chicago and Minnesota.
Cards Against Humanity made more than $54,000 selling absolutely nothing online yesterday.
Elsewhere across the country shoppers fought each other in the true spirit of Christmas.
Get outside this weekend. Sunny and warm weather is expected for much of Oregon:
Parts of the south aren’t having such great luck with the weather this weekend, as rain, ice, and flash flooding sweep through the states.
Investigators are reasonably sure there’s a secret hidden chamber in King Tut’s tomb. Neato.
Here’s a video of a woman fighting a child for a Black Friday deal. Merry Christmas!
Regarding the shooting in Colorado, what makes you define that as “terrorism”? I’m wondering if the word’s getting so diluted that it’s now applied to every wandering would-be murderer that has some malformed agenda in mind, stretched to include all hate crimes.
Looking at the current US legal definition (from the font of all precise wisdom, Wikipedia) terrorism is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” I think this clearly covers, say, the Minneapolis shootings by white power whackjobs, but not the Colorado incident.
Daesh uses the internet to inspire lone wolf attacks. Wingnuts inspired by right-wing rhetoric and lies to attack women’s health centers and doctors performing abortions fit “terrorist” by any pragmatic definition just as well.
Come to that, are you going to argue the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh weren’t terrorists?
I might argue that, perhaps — it’s been a while since I’ve thought about McVeigh and I’m not sure if he was operating as part of a larger group or was operating on his own, albeit inspired by such works as The Turner Diaries. For different reasons I’d argue that the 1983 Beirut Marine bombings were not an “act of terrorism” because the target was military, not civilian.
I’m *not* arguing that these acts aren’t vile or chilling or heinous or the like, merely that you start really diluting meanings if you say that everyone who got inspired to do terrible things by other people’s harebrained notions is thus a terrorist.
I *think* I get the intent, which is to point out that white guys can be terrorists too, and I agree completely with that. I’d say that the KKK fits the definition of a “subnational group” quite nicely, for example. In this instance, however, I think we’ve got a white dude with mental issues who, through the magic concoction of gun availability and poisonous rhetoric from a wide variety of sources, became a murderer — not a “terrorist” acting under direction of a particular movement.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants…
There’s also an entry for lone wolf terrorism on wikipedia, if you prefer that.
Thanks for the link. I’ll give it an in-depth later today. My surface skim noted the disclaimer on the first page but perhaps they note their references later. The wikipedia sources reference this document:
https://www.fbi.gov/sandiego/about-us/hist…
To me that suggests these lone wolves are still part of a group of white supremacists activists (in this case) but the actual acts are self-directed… but still, you’ve given me some stuff to ponder, so thanks for that.