It is perfectly legal to burn any book in the USA. And, you have to demonstrate actual harm--not insult or offense--to prove that burning a Koran should be illegal. Fact is: If you remove the simpering, crying and protesting from Muslims, and examine claims of "actual harm", you will find none. No person is responsible for the immaturity of others, no matter how offended they are. In a free society, you don't have a "freedom from offense/insult", because that would negate any other freedoms as ANY action could then be deemed "offensive." ~String
Which one? The original Klan was something of an insurgency movement. The Klan of the early 20th Century was a conservative movement, similar in some ways to the Tea Bag Party, that came about as a reaction to social and economic change. It was rather violent, though. Crimes by its higher-ranking members eventually resulted in a loss in their credibility. The Klan of the mid- to late-20th Century seems to be more of a criminal gang than anything else.
Agreed. Let them show the world what assholes they are, and they'll dig their own graves without any help.
So, in your tolerance you want to impose on others what they're supposed to think and believe in? What a terrible thoughtcrime it is to think that someone is less worthy than you when it comes to freely express his opinion! We should call the Thought Police!
As long as they aren't harming anyone, they can easily be ignored. There are a few clans members where I grew up and they could say whatever they wanted as long as they didn't harass us we could just roll our eyes and go about our day. People can think whatever they want and in fact I'm glad they can because that means that I can.
Because stamping out groups whose ideas we don't like would itself be purely reactionary and a hindrance to the progress of American society. Nope.
Actually allowing people to do whatever they want can take away everyone's freedom as no one will be given the chance to be free amid violence. Think of it as people progressively taking away from each others' freedom as they influence each other more and more. I've already said over and over it's more than an insult.
We just jail the few who do violence. The rest of us don't lose any freedoms, then. But sensible people considered the comment, and decided that it was less than an insult, instead.
The Klan has gone underground. The days of operating in a overt manner has proven to be counterproductive. According the leaders of the White Suprmeicist movement, Don Black and David Duke, the KKK/White Nationalists, have already inflatrated many high level positions in our Government. Just how high, and how many if any, remains a mystery. Recently, it was brought to light that Arizona's State-Senate-Majority-Leader Chuck Grey follows S-T-O-R-M-F-R-O-N-T on Twitter. Which doesn't surpise me in the least. http://gawker.com/5529952/arizona-republican-leader-follows-white-supremacist Now Imagine the outcry If Barack Obama or Maxine Waters was following the Black Panthers on Twitter.
You are right. But how does "letting people do whatever they want" equate to allowing people to burn whatever book they want? Moreover, who said that they can do whatever they want? I clearly state that we have laws, unfortunately some of the strictest laws on earth (you know, the kind that carry a death penalty). But you also have some of the strongest freedoms on earth (like, the right to burn a book in your own yard). Get it? That's obsurd. If this is true, then we'd have to ban every group that teaches a "unique" or "we're better" philosophy. Islam and Christianity--as a whole--would be banned, since both groups teach that that they are the one true religion. Being a part of a racist, culturalist group that hates everybody else is a fundamental right. . . if an annoying one. To pick and chose which groups have the right to exist is but a few steps away from banning legitimate ones. It's why we don't empower our government to ban them. We depend on the openness of society to shine spotlights on them. It's much more effective. If you hang a "no fishing" sign on a lake, that's step one in getting people to go there and start fishing. Ban the KKK and Americans will join up just to spite the government. I've clearly asked you, over and over, how is it more of an insult? You have to prove that. Because, that's all it is. It squarely fits the definition. It is an act, done on private property with private property and in the pretense of those who agree with the act. No call for harm or destruction is made. It's an act of protest. It's incumbent upon you to define how it's more. Just because the group being "offended" has decided that--to them--it's "more than an insult" doesn't mean that it's actually more than an insult. Saying something is true, and demonstrating it, is two very different things. I can say that the group "www.godhatesfags.com" (Wesboro Baptist Church) is "more than offending me". I can say that they are trying to influence the USA to ban then kill all gays, which is "more than insult" and while I may be true, the fact is, the WBC isn't calling for direct harm: they are trying to start a political movement. Even though it's hateful, they have the right to have their little group of morons, no matter what I think. ~String
Look people, you seem to wear your damn ignorance on your sleeves. There were three different Klans. One was prevalent during the late 1800s. It was really a sort of vigilante/insurgency movement and didn't really have any central organization. In some states, one of them being North Carolina, the Klan actually targeted more white people than black (I don't know about other states). Although the original Klan's violence toward the black people was inexcusable by any reasonable standard of moral reasoning, it wasn't their central purpose. They were motivated primarily by a political agenda. It should also be noted that the Republicans had made legally questionable power grabs during Reconstruction, by the way. The rash of violence in 1874 was probably fueled heavily by the Panic of 1873, where the American economy took a major dive due to overinvestment in the rail industry. Now most of us who have been paying attention realize that it is necessary sometimes to rein in speculation markets, but this fact of economics doesn't seem to have registered yet with the GOP. The second Klan was actually a far-right organization that was based on opposing liberal causes in general. They didn't just oppose the integration of black people, but they were also anti-communist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic. However, I don't think they were especially homophobic for the time period. Murdering people was socially acceptable and even encouraged during the time period as long as your victims were considered to be perverts. Although I feel resentful toward the second Klan, I honestly don't feel a whole lot more strongly about them than I do about the Tea Bag Party. All I think of the Teabaggers is pretty much that they are a bunch of annoying malcontents led by crooked politicians who are offering them nothing but a scapegoat and hollow promises. Now, it was actually the third Klan that had as its central purpose to oppose the Civil Rights Movement. That's the Klan that most people are familiar with, and it's probably what most people are talking about here. If that is the one that we are discussing, yes, I can honestly say that I hate them dearly enough to make an exception to the idea of "freedom of speech." There is such a thing as taking an idea too far. I'm not so much of a moonbat that I believe in the idea that all of us can get along nicely and just be at peace with other people's ideas, no matter how much they suck. In some cases, we really are justified in telling people to shut the fuck up. I'm with the Canadians on this one, folks. But the point is that there is a difference. The organizations had very different natures, and they were established amidst very different socio-political landscapes. All of them were essentially far-right political organizations, but the similarities between them start to get fuzzy after that. The reason that it's important to keep your details in order, though, is that it lends justification to people who really are racist when the people who speak out against it come across as being ignorant of their history. It's because of that kind of bullshit that, when I tell people, "my views tend to be politically liberal," sometimes it feels like I am saying, "I eat my own feces." Get educated, or shut the fuck up.
No, they didn't. They were the same political faction of people, generations of the same families even, in the same regions of the country, with the same basic culture and organization and very similar agendas, right down through all those changing circumstances. And the Tea Party is just the latest manifestation of this essential, bedrock feature of American political life and cultural environment.
I concur. The Freedom of Speech is so important as to far, far, far outweigh the right not to have your feelings hurt. I instantly recognized these Muslims protests against qur'an burning as the same as Christians trying to tell non-Christians not to "take the Lord's name in vain". We hear "Jesus Christ!" and "Christ!" and "Jeez!" and even "Jesus [f-in'] H Christ!" everywhere — almost 24/7 — if your listen hard enough. It's even common in many of our movies. But, because the Muslim ranks include enough wackos to constitute a real threat to Americans, both home and abroad, several heads of state, including President Obama, were involved, and the wannabe qur'an burner was convinced not to burn anything. This coercion is probably what rankles many Americans over this issue — that simpering, crying and protesting wannabe terrorists have effectively bombed America all over again. It was 9-11 redux. And that's the take away from this for Americans — that many Muslims are abhorrent, wannabe terrorists. It's time for them to grow up and join the 21st century.
The KKK is on the rise! They're taking over the Tea Party, and they're all Truthers. Like Ahmadinejad. They might even want to do something unseemly to our first black president! I think some of those people may have been talking about "NWO" and "911 was an inside job" too. They're not just racists. They're Truther racists. Of course, most Truthers, by nature, are.
@iceaura Your ignorance shows every time we interact, and I am starting to think you're just stupid. The original Klan did not have any central organization, and many of its leaders were former Confederate generals. The South spent years trying to restore the status quo following the end of the war. For example, President Johnson, who took office after Lincolns assassination, made several attempts to skirt around the anti-slavery laws, with some success actually. It wasn't until the Radicals overwhelmingly took Congress that they had enough votes to override his veto power. Where the first Klan was a military and political insurgency of sorts, the second Klan was a completely different organism. In fact, the people who founded the second KKK actually got the idea from "The Birth of a Nation." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0004972/ From a historical perspective, the film was very interesting, and Wilson--who generally tried to play the political center on race issues--gave some highly positive remarks on it. In fact, it was actually a fairly good film, but the problem with it was the timing of its arrival. It was 1915, and World War I had broken out in Europe just the previous year. At the time, there was a lot of anxiety in the US over whether or not we should throw our own weight into the war. It was really a hot issue. Anyway, that and a lot of other shit was hitting the fan during that time period. The Bolsheviks were just rising to power, for example. Anyway, conservative malcontents during the time period seized upon the Klan as a source of identity, and they created a much more organized version of the Klan than actually existed during the 1800s. They used the front to oppose just about anything that seemed to threaten the status quo, whether it was blacks getting a chance to vote or the prospect of communism coming to the US. They hated Jews, and they hated immigrants. And it was very prominent in much of the Northeast, you stupid bitch, which is why it's so ignorant for you to proclaim that they were the same group of people as the original Klan. However, the Klan actually held a pretty huge portion of the vote. A pretty large chunk of the American voting population considered themselves to be members, and membership would not decline until years later, when various crimes by some key leaders resulted in a decline in its popularity. The Klan that was born later, in the 1950s, mainly constituted random violence against black families. They bore the name of the KKK and imitated them in a lot of ways, but they had about as much in common with the KKK as a bunch of dumbass black youths in New York wearing blue Fila shirts have in common with the original CRIP gang (which actually started out as an honest effort to control crime in destitute portions of LA, and it's not the fault of its founders they became so corrupted). Look, frigid one, I just gave you a more detailed run-down of the history of the Klan, among other things, than you would get at some of the finest universities in the USA, so why don't you try doing something in return other than spouting the same tired claptrap?
Yeah, dude, I see where you are coming from, but there is a line that can be crossed where I have a lot of trouble sympathizing with someone on this issue. If someone in our government wants to hang a Klansman out to dry, I am perfectly willing to look the other way. And, on the Quran-burning, I think that the stupid fuss Muslims make over the slightest offense to their dumbass religion is evidence that you can take the concept of religious tolerance too fucking far. It is pissing off enough when Christians, who at least have the excuse of being in the majority, act like they are at the center of the universe and God's bullhorn to the world. I don't take it from them, and I'll be damned if I'll take it from a Muslim.
So far, you have located Klan terrorism especially against - as you call them - "colored people" - in the late 1800s, the early 1900s, and the 1950s. You have located them in the Old Confederacy, spreading to the Northeast, and included the anti-Jew, anti-Communist, homophobic, and straight criminal aspects that stretch down through the decades. You have likened a couple of their generations to the Tea Party, my main point. One more generation getting us into the '80s, and a brief mention of the West and Midwest, and the observation that we are talking about a common political faction in the US - the same faction, generation after generation, manifested today in the Republican base as exemplified by the Tea Party - and we'll be in substantial agreement. Comrade!
