As with all groups obsessed with ridiculous notions of "purity", the "pure" group always gets smaller and the purges don't ever stop...

How fortuitous, I've stumbled across a story that might lend a little perspective here. Let's compare and contrast here.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/28/nation/la...

Perp: angry muslim teenager
Plot: Detonate bomb at Portland xmas tree lighting
Uncovered by: FBI, since they pretty much wrote the plan for him and his father who narked him off to the FBI in the first place.
Foiled by: FBI conning him into thinking they were providing a real bomb when it was actually just a fake prop

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2...

Perp: angry white supremacist
Plot: detonate bomb at march commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.Day
Uncovered by: sanitation workers who discovered the backpack containing the undetonated bomb
Foiled by: Murphy's Law, apparently, since it was a fully functional bomb packed with ball bearings and rat poison (anticoagulant).

It's real simple folks. There are more of the latter type of terrorist in this country. They've been terrorizing and killing people at a pretty regular pace for a long time now. The only thing that's been stopping them for a while now is just pure dumb luck and random chance. This was a really simple design that should have gone off and would have killed and maimed a lot of people. It wasn't a fake or a con job by the FBI. It wasn't some dope thinking he could drop a suspension bridge with a torch. It wasn't done by someone who sticks out like a sore thumb in our society and was all ready the target of endless scrutiny.

"Suggestion: being dismissive about the deadly threat posed by Islamic terrorists does not strengthen your position. In fact it seriously undermines your credibility. "

If, for credibility's sake, it is necessary to see a deadly threat in this continuing string of no-hope dopes the FBI has managed to trawl up over the past ten years, then I'm going to live with the fact that I have suspect credibility on the internet.

If the feds are going to keep telling us about the seriousness of the threat, THEIR credibility is going to remain suspect as long as all they can provide as proof of the threat is a collection of losers who can't find their way to terrorism without the FBI holding them by the hand and walking them there. If tenuous overseas contacts and radical beliefs are where the bar for "serious terrorist threat" has been lowered to, what about the people in this country who keep turning up with guns, ammo, explosives, chemical agents, biological agents and radioactive materials? Why isn't William Krar cooling his heels in Gitmo instead of doing a ten-stretch in regular old prison? Why is Eric Robert Rudolph being waterboarded on the off chance that he might have more information? Why are American muslim students and not "patriot militia" members finding GPS trackers under their cars? Why isn't there an investigation of where every single cent goes that's passed through the hands of Operation Rescue?

A bunch of people who weren't even from this country got lucky once and sucker punched us. Our law enforcement apparatus went full-on bat guano crazy into "THEY'RE ALL SUSPECTS UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE" and too many people have followed right along with it. Meanwhile we have domestic terrorists that have been racking up the body count for generations to the point where they STILL make 9/11 look like a convenience store robbery gone wrong and we can't even talk about their connections in this country or even call them terrorists without the Right baying for blood and the Democrats fearfully burying reports and firing people to try and appease them.

Look, I get it. Me and pretty much everybody I know and love are on the short list of People Who'd be Totally Boned if the fundamentalist muslims had their way. They don't like non-believers, they don''t like homosexuals, they don't like independent women and so on and so forth. The same people that the dominant christian factions in this country don't like. The same people who've been terrorized, assaulted, raped and murdered by people aligned with those same dominant christian factions in this country. The same people who've suffered all of that for generations before either you or I were born and before anyone in this country even knew to give a damn about muslims. Their fanatics are in near-total agreement with ours about what should be done with (and to) the rest of us. The only differences are small bits of dogma and the fact that one group of fanatics holds almost no power in this country and the other has enough power to make public policy and has been doing so for decades.

Plainly put, I'm not going to worry about the ridiculously long odds of being killed in a terrorist attack when I'm staring at the fact that the House of Representatives has successfully voted to defund Planned Parenthood. Both groups of fundamentalists are my enemies. I'm more concerned with the ones who are gaining ground, not the ones who can't even make it across the street without outside help.

And I'm damn sure not going to let the enemy that's gaining ground tell me that the other group is the bigger threat.

"I support each of those ideas just as much as I support investigating the influence of extremist ideas and groups in the American Muslim community. "

And those investigations will occur sometime around the Fifth of Never. Our law enforcement apparatus is currently far too involved dealing with the serious threat of muslim radicals. Like the guy who thought he could destroy the Brooklyn Bridge using a welding torch. Or the ones who planned to demolish the Sears Tower, but had to have the FBI buy them cameras to take pictures of the site, rent them cars to get them to and from the site and buy them fricking SHOES.

You know why those other investigations you're interested in are never going to happen, Apuleius? Because there's nothing to be gained for those who would order or run such investigations and everything to lose. Average white American does not want to hear about average white terrorists. They do not want their belief systems questioned. They do not want their views on sexuality questioned. They do not want to hear that the institution a good many of them have devoted their entire lives to has aided and abetted the systematic abuse of children for decades. They do not want to think about their tax dollars going to pay wanna-be crusader mercenary scum to kill brown people in other countries.

So what you're wanting is something that I'm pretty confident you're not going to see. I also get the feeling you all ready know you're not going to see any of it. I know you're trying to look all even-handed here and maybe you even think you are, but your five points up there are all talking about taking on some of the deepest dug-in power structures in this country. What's going on right now with this dog-and-pony show of King's is focusing a glaring spotlight on less than 1% of the population of this country and trying to make them cast a big scary shadow. Meanwhile a much larger percentage of the population has been associated with the vast majority of the terrorist actions in this country and we can't even TALK about it without getting screamed at and told that we're all commie pinko liberal reverse-racists.

This is part of why I read Wild Hunt. The unintentional comedy.

"I, as a natural born straight male (which seems, more and more, to be a minority which just lacks rock star power or any meaningful attention, especially around these parts"

Followed, of course, by...

"Jealous much? Need an oppressor, a bad guy, to give your life meaning? "

That's right kids. Your issues, your feelings of oppression are just jealousy and a way of validating your meaningless lives. Robin, however, is the truly oppressed. Just listen, he'll tell you. Every day he has to worry about the danger of someone assuming he's not straight because there's so many gay pagan guys out there and the horror of people trying to tell him what neopaganism is and should be when they're supposed to be listening to HIM tell THEM what neopaganism is and should be.

The additional funny here is Robin carping about the term "cis" and then later on railing about people being at war with reality because of how they choose to define themselves.

Robin, it's really not a secret that I don't like you. But sitting here reading you yammering on about how hard life is for you as a straight boring old pagan guy nobody supposedly listens to when the focus here is people who are vastly overrepresented as the victims of actual violence in proportion to their numbers among the population, well, it's like to make me puke. Nobody refers to straight boring old pagan guys as intrinsically mentally disordered self-mutilators. Nobody says straight boring old pagan guys are secret agents of the patriarchy out to infiltrate women's safe spaces. Nobody routinely portrays straight boring old pagan guys as deranged serial killers in popular fiction. We're not talking about the plight of poor special little unappreciated snowflake Robin Artisson. We're talking about people that are treated like garbage, like vermin, that are routinely victimized and murdered using horrific force for doing nothing more than following the dictates of their own spirits.

And I'd suggest that if you're feeling so marginalized, perhaps you should follow your own advice and create your own space where no one will question or criticize you again and where your only interaction will be the fawning adoration and deference you seem to be longing for. But my money says that it's more important to you to antagonize people who offend your easily-bruised sense of what neopagans should be and to play the vilified teller of truths.

I remember watching the prices on firearms, accessories and ammunition spike incredibly during the run-up to the election. AR magazines that originally sold for $15 bucks skyrocketed up to $40. Almost every ad on the online firearms auction site Gunbroker carried dire warnings to "buy one of these now, before Obama bans them!". They talked about how if he didn't get elected, the Scary Black People would riot in anger. Then when it looked like Obama would actually win, they'd riot in triumph. And when neither of those things occurred and no gun control legislation materialized, all this fear-mongering and profiteering was forgotten. I don't know if Obama himself could have anything to do with it, but I can tell you right now that a good part of the firearms industry turned a heck of a profit off scaring people. They understand that a large enough chunk of their customer base is motivated by fear. Can't say I'm surprised that they'd take advantage of it.

Which does a wonderful job of maintaining their homophobic, misogynistic, child-molester-protecting, greedy and power-hungry status quo, of course.

Sometimes Ratzinger just makes it really difficult to forget that he used to be a prefect in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Formerly known as the Inquisition.

"I might add that what leads to fascism in mass terms isn't everyone 'deciding' Let's Be Fascist, ...it's yielding to the temptation to blame the 'Other' for everything that's going on: it's more mainstream ways where racism, homophobia, and ideological fear of 'The Left' as if there were Bolsheviks all over the government if anyone doesn't toe the party lines. "

Indeed. Fascists don't call themselves fascists because fascism has been almost inextricably linked to one of the most horrific campaigns of brutality in human memory. So now it becomes an exercise in public relations and how to make the ideas of racial and "moral" purity, militarism, rabid nationalism and eventually the level of violence it's going to take to back up those ideas.

"One thing that was bloody clear for most of the white power thugs, and has always been clear when people appropriate Pagan and Heathen religious stuff, it's like, 'You know you're tools, right, and you'd be the first against the wall when your 'side' needs to purge, right?' "

The "pure" group never gets bigger. It always gets smaller. Only the people at the top of the "pure" group are indispensable; everyone else, there's always a way to redefine them as "impure" once they're no longer useful or they become a threat to the people running the show.

"It's where people start thinking things associated with it are 'acceptable,' and that doesn't usually wear a convenient uniform. It usually buys media and politicians, etc. "

Hence the problem with defining "fascist" as "wears snazzy black uniforms and speaks with a German accent". The white power thugs and their ilk are just the most obvious problem, but they are the ones that will most readily do violence so it doesn't bother me much if people are making it clear to them that they won't be able to do violence without it costing them dearly.

This is one of the problems of focusing the history of fascism mainly on the Nazis. Now unless someone shows up wearing an SS uniform while goose-stepping to the Horst Wessel Lied, you're not allowed to refer to them as fascist without the political correctness police of the Right screaming at you that you're trying to silence freedom of expression and that Leftists are the REAL Nazis because national SOCIALISM and shut up that's why. Either that or we get this "So if I had a second cousin twice removed who had a great grandfather who once sat at the same bar with a guy who was a private in the German army during WWII, I guess that makes me HITLER, right?" routine when nobody's making any such convoluted associations.

Lemme break this down for our thin-skinned traditionalists, "I'm not a racist, I'm just proud of my heritage" folks and people who seem to think "multiculturalism" is a code word for "destroy all traces of white European culture". If you're espousing the same core ideals as fascists, looking back on fascist figures from history with anything that looks like admiration or adorning yourselves in recognizably fascist trappings, chances are people are going to call you a fascist. Whining about it isn't going to change that, it's just going to make you look like a particularly whiny fascist.

Also, FYI, freedom of speech and expression doesn't mean freedom from criticism. You're free to espouse whatever you want. You don't need to apologize for anything if you don't feel like it. However, the rest of us are neither required nor inclined to remain silent in deference. Deal with it. Crying about the "thought police" because someone criticized you on the internet is not just laughable but it's an insult to anyone currently forced to live under regimes where the wrong post on the internet can get them arrested, imprisoned, tortured and murdered. You risk nothing besides harsh language, where those "anti-fascist thugs" you so deride are actually out in the real world where they run the risk of being either assaulted by police or tracked down and murdered by the fascists they oppose. Your own fantasies of persecution by the PC police are just as ridiculous as some anonymous would-be anti-fascist crank calling a venue host so they can feel like they're "part of the struggle".

Rose City Antifascists have been doing the good work of trying to keep boneheads from re-establishing the same foothold in the Portland area that they had when Mulugeta Seraw was murdered (among others). They're opposing ACTUAL thugs, people who believe in committing violence against others because of unimportant secondary genetic characteristics or because of consensual sexual activity. Do they use force sometimes? Absolutely. But when they do, they're not jumping out of a van on a dark street, brandishing baseball bats at a vastly outnumbered target who MIGHT be a Nazi because he's got a shaved head. No, they're out in broad daylight getting right in the face of people who proudly wear the SS lightning bolts and throw out Nazi salutes and "Heil Hitler" every five seconds. So you'll excuse me if the naked thuggery of Rose City Antifa doesn't exactly give me the vapors.