Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeeMassive | Hacker News Reader

This is what I told my progressives friends 4 years ago that Biden's push to extend the definitions of signs of domestic terrorism to "radical traditional Christians groups" was going to backfire and be reciprocated in probably worse and more morally wrong policies to them.

View on HN

Nothing changes the underlying asymmetry that one side is fighting to be welcoming of the unfamiliar while the other side is fighting to remain in fear of it. The latter will always spiral downward, giving in to it is a non-starter.

Lots of bad things were done in the name of empathy. Colonialism is an example. Those "uncivilized" people "needed" European civilization and the effort was encourage as charity by the Church.

An American hospital today will test delivering mothers for drugs without their consent and, if they test positive, confiscate the baby.

> Lots of bad things were done in the name of empathy

nothing relevant or on topic tho

My point exactly. Just because one side displays "empathy" is irrelevant to the outcome.

Does "radical traditional Christian groups" include the ones bombing abortion clinics and killing doctors?

It's almost always a radicalized individual who does these things. If you want to extend the net to the people who radicalized them, you can but you should be aware that also works to the people who radicalized the Kirk shooter, the the would be Trump assassins (mostly the alive one, the dead one just seems like a nut) and Mangione.

Bombings and other political violence are already illegal.

Are we going to classify every single variations of the political beliefs of every domestic terrorists even if they are shared by millions of others law abiding citizens?

Ignoring what is "morally wrong", is it proper to blame Trump for doing the same thing that his predecessor did, with the only distinction being in the (completely legal) beliefs themselves?

Yes.

One may argue that tit-for-tat is appropriate, but generous-tit-for-tat is better.

Ah, yes, the old "don't do _that_, then the Republicans will do it too" -- as if this administration has been in any way constrained by the limits of any previous administration.

I'd ask for a citation of what Biden/Biden's admin actually did, but the Trump folks have been so busy disappearing things that the policy that I think you're referring to is now gone from the WhiteHouse.gov site and doesn't seem to be available via Internet Archive either.

Once again, in harmony, and louder for the people in the back: the both-sidesism is utterly misguided, plays into the Trump camp's hands, and just entirely fails to recognize just how not-normal and dangerous things are right now and they are just getting worse by the day.

I spoke too soon, I think that IA is having some intermittent problems, but I was finally able to get to Biden's "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrororism" here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210617103741/https://www.white...

At least in the broad-strokes PDF I see no mention of "radical Christian" anything. If there's some citation, I'd be curious to see it if it can still be found and if it mentions specific groups.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-internal-memo-warns-against-2...

So. What you called “Biden’s push” is, in fact, an internal FBI memo from one field office that it’s unlikely Biden even heard of, much less read or endorsed? Misrepresent much?

This is pure victim blaming.

If the victim handed a weapon over to the past perpetrator of offences of the victim's free will, unprompted, is it really victim blaming to attribute the perpetrator's state of being able to reoffend 100% to the perp?

Alternatively, consider the world in which the claim that it is victim blaming is 100% true. Such a world, where large parts of the U.S. are focusing their attention on righting grievances instead of anything else, is a world where the U.S. is too distracted by actual civil war to avoid suffering conquest by foreign powers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com