The Glade 4.0

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Murderer convicted, and I call that good. *shrug*

Sometimes, people choose to take a stand even knowing the personal cost to themselves. He chose to act, and he gets to pay for that choice. The only one who can decide if it was worth it is Scott Roeder.

Who is Scott Roeder? Why is he a terrorist?

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

He's the guy that killed that abortion doctor, IIRC in a church. Calling him a terrorist is a serious stretch, mostly relying on guilt-by-association to tie him to various groups.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah another bad guy behind bars. Go go American Justice system.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

In other news, morons complain about getting the verdict they wanted in order to pretend anyone with opposing views is a terrorist.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yes, because that's what's happening here. Terrorism is as it does. This man walked into a church and gunned someone down in the name of his political ideology. He is a terrorist. The people he worked with and was supprted by, up to the moment of the verdict, were also terrorists. They burned buildings, bombed clinics, murdered workers, and in general attempted to alter the law via the very same tactics that Tim McVeigh used, or that the people with funny names that get branded as terrorists use. He didn't do it for money. He didn't do it for jealousy. He didn't do it for revenge. He didn't do it to keep someone silent. He did it to inflict his religious ideology on others via violence. He is a terrorist.

His conviction will likely spur more people, like minded, to acts of terrorism and violence. Just because he's white and christian doesn't mean he's not a terrorist.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

How do you inflict religious ideology on somebody by killing them? Doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose?

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The Dude abides.

Through fear. Yes, it is often self defeating. Suicide bombers don't do a lot for Islam's reputation, or Al Qaeda's mission. That doesn't stop them from doing it. What it does is two fold - scares the population into doing things that would normally be against their character (PATRIOT act, for example), and drums up others, like minded, to do more violence in the name of their cause.

Scott Roeder is a hero to people like the ones who supported him outside the courthouse. He's a martyr to their sick little cause. And like any suicide bomber, or like Tim McVeigh, or the Christmas Bomber, this guys ideologically motivated violence inspires others.

He is a terrorist. He is a white, christian, American terrorist, but a terrorist none the less.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I think Screeling's question pertains more to the idea that you can't proselytize the dead.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Assassin fits as well.

When you like you can stretch meanings of terms to include those you want to pillory or praise.

Yes, we do have home grown terrorists, Timothy McVeigh and his crew qualify. Does Scott Roeder qualify? I'm not so sure, though I am sure he is an assassin and a murderer. I doubt he planned and performed the execution solely by himself, though I also doubt it was a large conspiracy - more like a small group of morons talking about how someone ought to take care of this guy.

This is nothing new in this country. Among the more famous names, William C. Quantrill and John Brown were both terrorists. If you look through history you find terror with many faces, for many causes, right here in America.

By calling him out and trying to make political value out of the trial, conviction and soon to be sentencing of Scott Roeder, you give him more publicity, more attention, and probably more gratification and sense of purpose.

Like any griefer, he should be ignored except for his eventual banning from this earth.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Call him a terrorist all you want, Montegue. He does not view himself that way; terrorism was not the goal, aim, or etc, etc. For him, the situation was simple. Dr. Tiller was killing children, and sometimes in a quite horrific way. By killing Tiller, he would be preventing Tiller from killing more children. It's no more complex than that, no matter how hard you scream "terrorism!"

I do not defend his actions in the least, I simply understand them. He considers what he did to be the moral equivalent of shooting a person that is attempting murder in an alley and thus saving the would-be murder victim. What Roeder did was wrong, wrong, wrong, and he should pay for it. He committed a murder, and nothing more.

You, on the other hand, are just as guilty of using Dr. Tiller's death to fuel your own radicalism, as Scott Roeder is.

Which has nothing to do with this case.



Except that he isn't. A terrorist is politically motivated. This guy did what he did because he's nuts and thought he was defending someone else from assault. He was not trying to send a political message of "ban abortion or there will be more bombings". It's notable that the people opposed to him are the ones making this claim; it's a blatant play to make anyone opposed to abortion suspect as a possible terrorist.

Motivating others to do the same thing doesn't make one a terrorist either; many criminals have copycats. Does that make Charles Manson a terrorist all of a sudden?

This is really jsut about you wanting someone to be a "white Christian American terrorist" because you think that if you can somehow show just one example of such, that somehow demonstrates that white Christian America is just the same as and just as prone to such violence as poor uneducated Muslims in third-world countries who produce them by the thousands.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Scott Roeder is politically motivated. He may also be personally motivated, but he is politically motivated. Do you honestly think every suicide bomber in Iraq is politically motivated? Is every single Al Qaeda footsoldier merely politically motivated? Of course not.

His violence is in direct response to a political situation he finds to be unacceptable - the legal practice of abortion. He's no less a zealot than the people who bombed the towers. His motives are based in extremist religion, just like the people that blew up the towers. His act was violent in nature, and he felt justified in that act.

DE, you and others are trying to sidestep the reality that a white, christian American can be a terrorist. The only difference between this guy and a plane hijacker is a question of scale.

Bery - so, self identification is the key to what makes a terrorist? Well, then KSM was just a holy warrior bringing justice to the devil Americans, in your view?

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

No they're not. They're sidestepping it in this case because it doesn't apply. You were the one who made it about him being white, Christian and American. You made it such so you could try to point out that such a scenario (White, Christian, American terrorist) was possible. But no one argued it's not possible.

Your proactive pursuit of such a conversation where it's not that germane, pertinent or even peripherally related speaks volumes about you, your motivations and your character.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

It doesn't matter what internal motivations you can ascribe to him. He isn't externally expressing those. He isn't making any attempt to change the system through violence.



That's nice. Has nothing to do with him being a terrorist.



And the fact that they were trying to make a political change int he way the U.S. works. He wasn't. He saw himself as doing the same thing a regular citizen might do if he had a handgun and discovered someone robbing a store at gunpoint. He felt what he did was justified under the current system.

Whether white Christian Americans can be terrorists isn't the point. Obviously they can. McVeigh was a white American terrorist; his motivations were clearly to affect the political system of the country. That doesn't mean that every white Christian American who commits a crime is a terrorist just becuase you think it's cool to slap that label on them.

In fact I don't see what him being white has to do with it at all. There are plenty of blacks and hispanics opposed to abortion as well. This is just you trying to slip in an unrelated qualifier.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You and I both know this guy was trying to change how politics in the US works by putting a gun to an abortion doctors head, in *church*, and pulling the trigger. You have a habit of deluding yourself into believing the most amazing crap sometimes, DE.

This guy was a terrorist. If he had a funny name and worshiped Allah, you wouldn't hesitate to call him a terrorist.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Actually, Charles Manson, in addition to being a nutcase freak, was a terrorist. He was and is a white supremacist. Now he is just another criminally insane murderer housed by the State. His plan was to make the murders look like they had been done by blacks to set off an apocalyptic race war. He was trying to inspire terror and would have kept going if he hadn't have been caught.

He is at Corcoran State Prison now and not scheduled for another parole hearing until 2012, if he lives that long. It won't be granted.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I can't speak for anyone else but me, but this is incorrect. He'd still be a murderer who thought he was saving the lives of the unborn.

Micheal - And so, too, is Scott Roeder. His viewpoint is extreme, and he took that extreme political view, found a focus of it, and then shot that person in the head.

Furthermore, Scott Roeder did not act in a vacuum. He was part of a growing extremist movement on the right in this country. The people that have supported him outside the courthouse are a laundry list of convicted abortion clinic terrorists. They include bombers, arsonists, and other violent protesters.

If Scott Roeder was named something Arabic sounding, and if he had shot a deploying soldier because his family was being killed in Afghanistan, he would be immediately classified as a terrorist.

But this guy's name is Scott. And he killed a liberal abortionist. And he's a Christian. So clearly, he isn't a terrorist.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Your definition of terrorist is much more inclusive than mine, and your assumption of everyone else's racism is increasingly used for what looks to be dramatic effect.

Then again, one of my personal heroes in the battle against the evil empire, Michael Collins, was a terrorist. I just don't see the nut case Scott Roeder in the same league. The idiots claiming to be terrorists in the middle east aren't worthy of the name either. Most of the Islamic 'terrorists' are idiot pawns caught up in the fight and totally owned by the true terrorists, the ones that do the planning and prolong the fight.

Being a terrorist isn't about the one strike, it is about the long fight and continuing to strike terror into the hearts and minds of the enemy. Being a terrorist is taking the long view, walking the long road, taking the small victories and living to fight another day. You don't sacrifice yourself in the name of the cause, you manipulate inconsequential pawns to take the fall, the bullet, the long drop. Dying as a martyr is a romantic belief you give to others, and only do yourself when you didn't plan well enough.

So few people understand that.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

This applies to people in this thread as well.

Wow, dude. Its threads like this that really make me question your sanity. Do you have to take like ten showers a day because such a large part of the population professes to be Christian and you're afraid it will rub off on you?

I'd also like to know where you get those awesome mind-reading powers. I mean crap! You KNOW what Diamondeye is thinking. Dayum!

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The Dude abides.

I am without other explaination as to why the Christmas Bomber qualified as a terrorist, and Scott Roeder does not. Or why the guy that shot up fort hood qualified as a terrorist, but Scott Roeder does not.



Why? He's ideologically motivated, he's violent, he is willing to use violence to enforce his ideology on others, taking their life and liberty away in the name of his own political outlook. Do you imagine that the hardcore terrorists do not feel morally justified in what they do? Do you think that Osama Bin Laden doesn't think of himself as a hero? That his devoted followers do not do the same?

It's entirely a matter of perspective. And yes, I do believe we have been trained to think that "terrorist" only applies to brown people with funny names. We can see evidence of that all over this board. Every time there is a story about violent islamic extremism, people can't trip over themselves fast enough to say "religion of peace!" and "turn the sandbox into a glass parking lot!" and other such crap. But the second violent religious extremism comes in the form of a white, Christian, American, it's suddenly just some random nutjob.




No, they are terrorists, too.



You are talking about the difference between an enduring ideology and an individual actor. The actor is still the terrorist, even if the ideology lives on. And if you think that the violent opposition to abortion rights is not a long fight involving a history of brutal violence, you are sorely mistaken.

He doesn't have to be a terrorist mastermind to be a terrorist. He just has to kill someone in the name of his ideology.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I would proffer that Monte is more afraid of Teh christian rubbing off on him than he suggests that everyone else is afraid of Teh Gayz. In this way, he can divert away from his own xenophobia and narrowmindedness and project it on everyone else.

It's actually an old social strategy, though one lacking in subtlety.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones