One thing that I have found especially amusing this election season is the Rev. Wight-Obama "scandal." What is especially ironic is that Wight was defending a theory of blowback in foreign relations (!), ie: "America's chickens have come home to roost," and other stuff to that effect. And people are freaking out about it! If it was so funny, it would be sad!
Market anarchist, Linux geek, aspiring Perl hacker, and student of the neo-Aristotelians, the classical individualist anarchists, and the Austrian school.
He went beyond saying that 9/11 is a result of foreign policy! He was minimizing the attacks and implying the victims deserved it, which is incredibly collectivist.
"It was fair for innocent American civillians to die because their govervnment has done evil things!"
Don't allow leftists to play games with definitions! Some of the libertarian-leaning leftists at this forum will try to redefine "left-wing" back to its original defition (Third Estate, limited government, free-markets, laissez-faire reforms, etc.). Fine! We non-leftists can't stop them from using their own personal definitions; they can use whatever labels they want to describe any concept they want.However, they have the audacity to then use their personal definition of "left-wing" (remember, the original definition, which is no longer valid) to prove that modern leftists are more libertarian than modern rightists! They will say that libertarianism is "inherently leftist" (again, using the original, no longer valid definition), and use that to insist that we should prefer and side with modern leftists over modern rightists.
Question their motives.
I didn't realize that he had said that. All that I heard was a few of the sound-bites. Did he really say "It was fair for innocent American civilians to die because their government has done evil things"?
Also, most of the complaints I have heard about it was that he was blaming the government's actions at all, a kind of "How dare he say that what we did help bring this on!" (I'm using the collectivist "we" in this case, because the sort of people that say this are the sort of people that equate government with society as a whole.)
wombatron: I didn't realize that he had said that. All that I heard was a few of the sound-bites. Did he really say "It was fair for innocent American civilians to die because their government has done evil things"?
During that sermon (given while the 9/11 fires were still burning), he minimized the attacks by listing all of the evil things that our government has done which resulted in more deaths. Then, by saying "America's chickens have come home to roost", he personifies the entire nation and implies the attacks were justified.
Basically, he's like most standard leftists.
In order to combat rightists' irrational justification for bad American foreign policy, leftists end up displaying irrational justification for any event or policy that is anti-American.
***EDIT: clarity, wow that sucked***
I see... and I guess it's another setback for the blowback theory. It would be better if he didn't conflate "America" with "America's current government," but I guess that is a bit much to expect.