first up against the wall: in which america lionizes a terrorist
Dear news blogosphere:
Joseph Andrew Stack III was not a madman. He was not a liberal. He was not a conservative. He was not a Marxist. He was not a teabagger. He was, if his suicide note is any indication, a sane, rational, educated human being, disillusioned with the left and the right and everyone in between, who burned down his own home after ( Read more... )
Joseph Andrew Stack III was not a madman. He was not a liberal. He was not a conservative. He was not a Marxist. He was not a teabagger. He was, if his suicide note is any indication, a sane, rational, educated human being, disillusioned with the left and the right and everyone in between, who burned down his own home after ( Read more... )
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The dude is a terrorist.
If it walks like a terrorist, quacks like a terrorist, and flies a plane into a building hoping this actions will ten adavnce forward its ideological goals like a du... er, terrorist...
You know what i can't wrap my head around? The dude wrote out a manifesto in which he bawled about being oh so very poverty-stricken and oppressed.
In which he mentioned his new piano. And then he set fire to his $230,000 house. After which climbed into his private plane.
WTF.
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There's been some speculation that the plane was a loan (he seems to have been a software contractor for the aeronautics industry?) and the mortgage on his $230,000 house was one of the major debts he complains about, but yeah, seriously. $230,000 houses aren't generally subprimes, so he's not going to get a mortgage if he doesn't already have a decent amount of dough, and I can't imagine the kind of credit a person would need to be even considered for a loan on a light aircraft. The guy rails and rails about how America is screwing over the middle class but he doesn't seem really clear on where the middle class is. (The American social classes, at any rate, are little more than a convenient political fiction anyway--a Marxist three-class model describes our actual socioeconomic makeup rather poorly.)
It is also sad, as some of the few sane voices on the Internet have pointed out, that this man valued his money over his life.
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It's not Joe and Jane Sixpack that torch their house and their family, borrow a plane and throw it at the IRS to explode themselves in a fireball of lunatic retribution. This dude might have had the same worries as the rest of us, but if We Were All Joe Stack, we'd all have done this already.
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His name is Robert Paulson! His name is Robert Paulson!
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Yeah, uh, they've been kinda busy. In the back. With their dogs. :-p
But more seriously, it's easy for people to post vague anonymous threatening notes on the web when they get all riled up over the news while listening to the other aforementioned Robert Paulson chanting. And I'm sure the few nutjobs speaking out publicly have their own agendas. I'm not convinced that anyone in the future who does something similar wouldn't have done so anyway. This response isn't a call for jihad/crusade so much as a massive outcry of frustration. While the government makes a good scapegoat (all the more so since it is partially responsible for the economic situation), terrorism usually springs from hatred, not frustration.
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