Revolutionaries are troubled heroes, but they are often enough the heroes of the story. Dictators and autocrats never are.

Economists are just making up random crap, can never prove anything, and South America shows that when they try to help people, death squads and dictatorship is the only result.

“So I think that liberals ought to refrain from using violent rhetoric entirely, as a matter of course–not even jokingly.”
So you think violent revolution is never justified? When will you be obtaining your British citizenship and vowing loyalty to the Monarch?

Bankers love this rhetorical question and serial killers wish they could get away with murder too!

The problem is that we have an economic system that’s been set up by, and for the benefit of, rich people. There’s nothing natural about it – some folks sat down and designed some rules to play by, and then effectively decreed that as holy economic writ.

We don’t have to stay with that system, but it’s hard to even bring up the point when everyone believes in their flat earth economic system as the only possible one.

Well put, Ms Grumpyface!

He said something like that?

Speaking from the point of view of a mathematician, I’m with HTML. It always gripes me to hear economists talking about laws and proof and all that, when I know that their proofs are full of holes and complete bullshit.

They’re acting as though they’re physicists ‘discovering’ natural laws, when in reality they’re just like some psychologists who make stuff up and then write a paper about it.

The problem is that we have an economic system that’s been set up by, and for the benefit of, rich people. There’s nothing natural about it – some folks sat down and designed some rules to play by, and then effectively decreed that as holy economic writ.

We don’t have to stay with that system, but it’s hard to even bring up the point when everyone believes in their flat earth economic system as the only possible one.

Sorry. Miss Grumpyface today.

The other couple of hundred times that violence solved injustice, well… just forget about that and let our overlords do whatever they want to us while the court gives them a pass for everything.

It’s just the “revolution” thing… y’know, you go over to ultra-right message boards and they talk quite seriously about “revolutions” and “putting people up against the wall” and that kind of shit — and yet a lot of people still think that extreme left-wingers are “just as” wacko as extreme right-wingers.

Well, I say fuck that.

So I think that liberals ought to refrain from using violent rhetoric entirely, as a matter of course–not even jokingly.

It just annoys me when I see the party of guns and intolerance trying to paint the left as a bunch of violent fanatics, based on comments like the one made in this article.

“The first people up against the wall should be the [whatever]” is a well-worn joke and I don’t see this as straying far from that. Besides, CHENEY DIDN’T GET THE JOB DONE.

What needs to happen is for actual regulations to be imposed that would prevent 30-1 leverage and liar loans and option ARMs and CDO squareds, and there’d be a central clearinghouse for CDS, etc. etc.

You can get all that stuff without pretending that the only reason all our wealth disappeared is because Wall Street Bankers stole it all.

Okay, that’s pretty funny.

It just annoys me when I see the party of guns and intolerance trying to paint the left as a bunch of violent fanatics, based on comments like the one made in this article.

Not everyone on the right is a violence-advocating nutcase, of course. But just about every violence-advocating nutcase is on the right. That should their cross to bear, alone. I mean, they’re a bunch of right-wing nationalists, by gum! Of COURSE they’re more into violence than the left. They’ve got the martial spirit, and they’ve got the freakin’ guns!

I mean, you can read the roll of right-wing hate groups, and what can they respond with?

Bill Ayers?

Rage Against the Machine?

Nonetheless, there’s a big push on the right to co-opt the left’s pro-tolerance rhetoric in order to paint liberals bunch of nefarious violent fascists (listen to them whine about anti-Mormon church vandalism, and it bugs the hell out of me.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/03/did_risk_team_look_at_cassanos_deals_aig_execs_off.php

When did I say they were? I said Mr. Mencken’s notions of agency/accountability were childish because he seems to believe that were it not for nefarious dealings on Wall Street there wouldn’t be a financial crisis.

I mean all sorts of bad practices were and still are rampant in the financial industry, and Obama’s been more slow than I’d like to correct them, but a LOT of what happened would have happened anyway. People’s houses weren’t worth as much as we thought they were. Anyone who sold a home in 2003-07 could easily be said to have enriched themselves from “fake profits.” It doesn’t mean they knew as much at the time.

Cheney-ing him in the face?

C-bagging.

I mean, of course you don’t actually want to shoot him, but I hate hearing that kind of talk coming from liberals.

Please do not give Wingnuts the ammunition they need to draw parallels between comments like that and the kind of stuff people say on the Hal Turner board. You know they jump at any chance to try to turn the tables and paint liberals as violent people.