Monthly Archive: October 2016

How to cope with English pronunciation

One of the aspects of English as a language is the totally irregular and exception-ridden relationship between how words are written and how they are pronounced.
Worse still, many pronunciations are context-dependent, which puzzles and infuriates everybody – both English speakers and people learning English as a second or subsequent language.
The divergences have a lot to do with the haphazard way in which Middle English evolved as a language and then on to Modern English between 1400 and 1700. The major event in English pronunciation changes, the Great Vowel Shift, occurred during the early days of the printing press, but the major part of the change occurred before the invention of moveable type. So, while the population was busy altering pronunciation, the way the words were written did not change.
Also playing a part is the high percentage of loan words in English from other languages, mainly due to the number of invasions and conquests by other countries.
English is nominally a Germanic language, but the high proportion of loan words, idioms and phrases from other languages makes it a true “mongrel” language.
Here is an attempt to explain (sort of) some of the oddities and rules in English.

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The Return of King Coal? – the Myth and the reality

One of the enduring issues in the current Presidential campaign has been resentment in the old coal-mining areas of the USA against the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton in particular, concerning the decline of the coal mining industry in the broad region of the USA known as Appalachia.
Coal mining in Appalachia began in the 19th century. Some limited mining took place before the Civil War, but the real expansion occurred after the Civil War and into the early 20th Century as industrialization spread throughout the USA, increasing demand for coal for iron and steel manufacture. During that period, coal mining involved mostly extracting coal from seams underground using drift mine and deep mining techniques. The work was labor-intensive, dirty, and very dangerous. Fatalities and injuries were numerous.
By the middle of the 20th century, mining companies began transitioning from deep mining to what became known as strip (or open-top) mining, where the strata above the coal seams is stripped, dug or blown away, and the coal is then scooped up by gigantic bucket cranes. Strip or open-top mining is cheaper, and it requires fewer workers. However, the above-ground environmental damage is enormous. There are numerous hills in Appalachia which have been planed off down almost to ground level, destroyed to dig up their coal seams.
Exploitation of a coalfield is analagous to fruit-picking. The most lucrative seams, thickest and easiest to mine, are extracted first. Then progressively less accessible seams are slowly exploited. Eventually, most of the easily recoverable coal has been removed, the cost of extracting remaining coal rises steeply, and the coalfield slowly becomes unprofitable. This is a classic pattern, seen in numerous coalfields in the world.
In Appalachia, these events have been occurring for decades, part of the natural process of exploitation of what is a non-renewable resource (hanging around 100+ million years for new seams to be formed is not an option). Most of the easy-to-extract coal in Appalachia was mined decades ago.
However, there are two other factors that also entered the equation.
The first variable was the opening of open-cast mines in the Western states, specifically the Powder River basin in Wyoming. The world’s largest open-cast coal mine is in Wyoming, extracting coal 365 days a year.
The second variable is the overall price of coal. The trend for the last 5 years has been downwards. Coal as an energy source is dirty relative to other natural energy sources like natural gas, and is horribly dirty compared to wind and hydro-electric power. Demand for coal in China has declined due to the slowdown in the Chinese economy, and current market prices are around $40 per short ton for coal delivered from mines. This is not good for Appalachia, where extraction costs have reached that amount. By contrast, coal from Powder River Basin in Wyoming has an extraction cost of less than $10 per short ton. However, even in Wyoming, where deep coal seams are close to the surface and easily extractable, there are coal reserves that may never be mined due to the long-term decline in coal prices.
You don’t need to be a math genius to realize why Appalachian coal extraction is declining. Actually, it is worse than that. A number of coal companies have closed down or filed for bankruptcy. They cannot compete in a saturated low-price world market with coal from Appalachia at its current extraction costs.
Many of the companies also have future obligations for environmental restoration, clean-up and worker’s pensions that they are manouvering to minimize or shed. This is one example of corporate chicanery to allow coal mining companies to walk away from pension and other worker benefit committments. This kind of behavior is part of the reason that the coal industry was nationalized after World War II in the UK. Coal corporations proved to be poor stewards of worker welfare and the environment.
The overall combinations of low coal prices, cheaper open-cast coal sources in the Western USA, and gradual exhaustion of Appalachian coal reserves are not reversible by governments. Quite simply, the extraction of coal in Appalachia in most cases is not economically viable.
If coal prices were to double again, it might be viable, but the long term viability will still decline as coal reserves are gradually exhausted.
As the number of coal mines shrinks, local economies of scale such as transport infrastructure, suppliers etc. will also disappear, pushing extraction costs up further. We saw this in the UK in the 1980s as coal mines closed in coalfields. The cost of running the remaining mines rose rapidly, as the economies of scale disappeared, which accelerated closures until all of the mines disappeared. The closed mines across Appalachia will not be re-opening unless there is a dramatic increase in world coal prices.
Coal-mining areas always become unhealthily dependent on employment and trickle-down from the mines. Young men without the means or the ability to pursue a college education always need a reliable source of employment, and coal mining has historically been fairly well-paid compared to other laboring occupations (the “danger money” aspect). So when those mines close, the economies of the areas always suffer badly. The result is high male unemployment, which in turn triggers all manner of social and family problems. Many of the displaced miners are poorly suited for other occupations. (Despite what some politicians and sociologists think, only a small percentage of former coal miners are budding business entrepreneurs).
The obvious response, tried in the UK and Europe for a while, is to provide price or cash subsidies to keep mines open. However, governments that have tried to subsidize coal mining to keep employment in a region always end up deciding to not pick up the tab after a while. The numbers involved are large, and they start to look awkward. So the mines slowly close anyway, communities crater, social discontent rises, and government is blamed by the resentful local communities.
Some attempts over the years have been made to create replacement industries in Appalachia. The challenge is that the most obvious replacement, manufacturing, is also going offshore, and computerization and robotization is also reducing the number of manufacturing jobs associated with that industry sector. New-wave industries such as solar power offer more potential.
In the USA, the EPA is a favorite target of local and regional resentments, since coal mining companies have become adept at pointing the finger at government, claiming that it loads the coal mining companies with costs. Well, sure it does, if you consider requiring a coal company to, you know, put the top back on a mountain that it blasted away to dig out coal to be “unnecessary costs”. Ditto the idea that retired workers who in many cases have chronic health issues from mining in dangerous conditions should get a reasonable pension. Personally think that this is a minimum requirement for responsible stewardship. But that’s just me.
When Donald Trump swans into coal-producing districts in Appalachia and promises to bring mines back, my first instinct is to ask “How the hell is he going to do this? with mirrors?“. His appeal, to communities that are still struggling with social and economic problems caused by lack of enough local employment, is an emotionally powerful for people feeling that government has abandoned them.
Trump is playing off the perception, promulgated by her opponents, that Hillary Clinton does not care about the economic plight of Appalachia. The memes being passed around are mostly bullshit, but they have resonated with resentful populations in the region.
Trump’s claims, as usual, have no plan behind them. This is probably because there is no viable economic case for re-opening any coal mining operation in Appalachia. The region’s time has come and gone as a coal producing region.
But can the government no subsidize coal mining? Sure it can be done. One thing that is obvious if you look at the history of government is that the land exerts a powerful emotional attraction for both communities and politicians, The entire corn ethanol program is nothing more than a multi-billion dollar boondoggle for the farming industry, shepherded into law by Senator Bob Dole. (Once again the GOP gave the lie to its grand claims to be the party of small government). The US expends a lot of money annually on farming subsidies, again shepherded into law by coalitions of Federal and state level politicians. Jobs are an important electoral weapon. The fact that there has been no concerted wide-ranging effort to address the economic blight of Appalachia is interesting, especially since the region’s political map shows mostly Republican representation at Federal, state and local level. So when people blame the Democratic party for being tone-deaf to Appalachia, I always ask what the Republican politicians have been doing to improve the economies of the communities. The answer is usually some combination of crickets and blaming “government regulations”.
However, unlike Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has actually articulated a plan for the region. It is far from clear how viable or useful the plan will be, and whether it can even be implemented will depend on post-election dynamics. However, it is superficially better than the pie-in-the-sky dreams that if government simply writes a blank check for coal companies, that jobs will magically re-appear. There is as much likelihood of that latter series of events as there is of pigs flying over my rooftop.

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Donald Trump, bullying pathologies and approval oxygen

This article in the Dallas Observer is an interesting examination of how the clear bullying side of Donald Trump relates not only to the pathology of people who behave like bullies, but also feeds off the approval of observers and participants in group rituals.
This is not a new discovery for me. As a person who was bullied in high school, I learned very quickly that bullies can become revered figures amongst peer groups. Their bad behavior is actually lauded as evidence of “toughness”. So when Donald Trump’s audiences cheered his excoriation of the media, or laughed at his mocking of a reporter’s disability, I immediately recognized the baying hounds of the mob, egging him on.
You see it in other contexts also. The NFL, the closest we have to a modern gladiatorial spectacle, is full of incidents of great skill, athleticism, bravery, fortitude – and grown men attempting to flatten opponents into the turf so that they end up being helped (or in some cases, carted) off the field.
No matter how everybody stands around looking concerned or worried after a player almost has his head knocked off, and is being attended to on the field, you can see, hear and feel the elemental “YEAH! RIGHT ON!” by crowd members when the player’s opponent delivers The Big Hit. You also get to see the victorious player strutting around briefly (being careful most of the time to stay within the taunting rules of course) celebrating the hit and being high-fived by players and coaches. Yep, that is also a microcosm time-slice of that same elemental, primitive group bonding, as Victorious Bully pre-emptively flattens Would-be Rival Bully.
Those howls of outrage from fans when it is suggested that perhaps the NFL should try to make itself less like a collision sport and more like a contact sport? You know, the people accusing the game of going “soft”, and accusing proponents of player safety of being “pussies” or “wimps”? Yep, those are probably some of the same people that brandish fanwear over their heads and make hammer-in-the-ground motions every time Their Guy flattens The Other Guy.
Going back to the Observer article…one of the interesting aspects of bullying pathology is also on display when you look at Donald Trump. Whenever he finds himself in a situation where he is denied uncritical instant approval for an action that is all about bullying or strutting dominance requiring approval, he suddenly collapses inward. He still tries to look macho and threatening, but the inner child-mouse suddenly appears. Suddenly Big Macho Donald looks like Silly Man With a Big Mouth and Small Dick Donald.
There are many reasons why Donald Trump has done badly in the debates (like the fact that he apparently regards preparation as something for pussies), but the main issue he has, I believe, is that the format simply does not allow him the opportunity to start bullying his opponents like he can when he has a pulpit, nobody else competing for attention, and 10,000 people cheering him on. Instead of being able to excoriate enemies and engage in tantrums, he is limited to interruptions of “WRONG!” or “what a nasty woman”, actions that lack any immediate impact because his opponent is talking, and which tend to transmit the signal to non-invested watchers, “hello, I am a dick”.
Bullies, like many insecure people, seek approval above all else. If they are denied it, it is like denying normal people oxygen. The threatening, the strutting, the triumphalism…all of those fall away, revealing a desperate, ridiculous person.

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Friday Round Up

1. Political certitude demonstrations
One observation that I have committed to memory in this election cycle is that there is a direct correlation between the willingness of people on social media to proclaim their worldview and political allegiances, and the extent to which they are unwilling to engage in good-faith discussions about those subjects. Many Twitter users for example proclaim their worldviews on their Twitter bio. It is then easy (and disappointing) to see that their tweets mostly comprise blatant examples of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and (in many cases) the use of interaction techniques such as insults and ad hominems.
I always worry about people whose bio begins with a long list of the components of their worldview, because that is a pretty good indicator that interactions with these people are likely to be one combination of a waste of time, or toxic. People who only peripherally refer to their convictions seem to be a lot more open to discussion and debate.

2. Charlie Stross on growing older and the perils of “adulting”
A good blog post from Charlie on his 52nd birthday.

3. The arguments against tactical voting
This posting at Bleeding Heart Libertarians explains some of the perils and issues with tactical voting. I have never been a fan of the “lesser of two evils” approach, because it ends up legitimizing poor choices overall. We ended up with two major parties who are unresponsive to electors and poor at strategy partly because of tactical voting.
One of the responses/arguments against voting your real preference is what I term the Ralph Nader Argument, the claim that George W Bush ended up winning the 2000 election (or being handed it by a non-interventionist SCOTUS, depending on your point of view) because a number of electors actually voted positively for Nader instead of adopting the “lesser of two evils” approach and voting for Al Gore. I am not sure if the result would have been any different if all of the Nader voters had voted for Gore (and do we know that they would have all voted for Gore?).
The bigger underlying issue with elections in the USA, which has been the subject of books, is that below state level, the entire district boundaries system is a dysfunctional gerrymandered mess, and many races in some states are not contested, with entrenched incumbents who have the job until they die or retire.

5. The nastiness of Donald Trump and the post-election impact
This article about the GOP’s problem over Donald Trump behaving like a narcissistic jerk correctly points out that even if Trump runs away after the election, the GOP still has the problem of what to do next. As many people have noted, Donald Trump is not the result of some momentary aberration on the part of GOP supporters. He is the final end-game result of over 40 years of the GOP deliberately appealing to nativist and regressive people. What really happened in this electoral cycle is that Donald Trump, either because he does not know how to, or (more likely) he doesn’t care to, dropped any pretence of not appealing to nativists and racists and began explicitly to appeal to them, sometimes indirectly, sometimes openly.
My experience of watching political parties in the UK who suffer major electoral reverses is that it can take up to 15 years for a party to re-orient itself and become capable of winning at a national level again. After the Labour Party lost the 1979 election to the Conservative Party, it did not win a General Election until 1996. In the meantime, the party engaged in years of in-fighting, as reformers tussled with people who were in denial that the party’s policies were outmoded and unappealing. Likewise, the Conservative Party, after losing the 1996 General Election, also engaged in fratricide and went through 3 leaders before it was able to win under David Cameron.
The approach that the GOP takes will depend on how down-ballot races perform. If the GOP emerges after November 8th without control of the Senate, and the House, then the pressure for a policy and positioning re-think from donors and moderates will be immense. However, the Tea-Party centric base who mostly supported Donald Trump will probably double down and insist that there is nothing wrong with the policies, they just needed to be sold better by a committed leadership, not the snakes-in-the-grass current weasels. This is a classic sort of argument between reformers and regressives that always takes place after a major defeat. In the short term the regressives often win, but then a further bad defeat is likely, that then emboldens the reformers to make their vision stick, and the regressives are defeated, although not without a lot of light heat and sound.

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Tweets of the Day

Somebody started the hashtag #TrumpBookReport to imagine how Donald Trump would review the classic works of literature. Here are some of the entries.

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Wednesday Round-up

1. “Make America Great Again” and various fallacies and dystopian fantasies
I have only two questions when I read the slogan “Make America Great Again”.
1. When did America stop being great?
2. What things do you think need to be made Great again or for the first time?
When I look at some of the classical measures of greatness, the USA seems to be doing pretty well.
GDP.
Military Spending
Unemployment rates
The interesting thing is, when I ask the above two questions, I never get a coherent answer. I often get crickets, or much huffing and puffing.
My tentative conclusion is that this is not about “Make America Great Again”.
That’s not what the people wearing the caps or the t-shirts are saying.
What they are really saying is “make me feel better about the USA again because right now it is not working for me”.
Which is fine, but that makes the slogan into yet another piece of meaningless word salad, a blank canvas on which any sentiment can be projected.
It may also be an example of people invested in The Golden Age fallacy. After all, as Steve Martin once joked, “Ronald Reagan wants to return the United States to the country it once was. An Arctic tundra covered with ice and snow”.
The problem with the past is that people tend to adopt one of two positions, sometimes concurrently. They remember the bad stuff, in an attempt to dramatize their youth (I need a dollar for every time I heard “You don’t know how lucky you are today” when growing up). Then, sometimes almost simultaneously, you hear statements like “I like the old days, when people respected each other/adults/the law/authority”. What that slogan often signifies, by the way, is a desire to stamp out dissent. “Respect my authority” is a not a message that is rooted in mutual respect and discussion and resolution of differences. It is a demand for unquestioning obedience, usually issued by the insecure or dictators.
This, folks, is not coherent, objective thought you are hearing in those contexts when people peddle variants of the Golden Age fallacy. It is incoherent inconsistent memory recall as people try to make sense of life changes and world changes. The reality is that this is the safest time ever to be a human in the Western world. However, to hear the dystopian fantasty-peddlers, you would think that it is not even safe to get out of bed.
So, I wait for the adherents and fans of the slogan “Make America Great Again” to tell me exactly what needs to happen to Make America Great Again. And I sit here ready to eviscerate any suggestions that involve the imposition of authoritarian ideas on a country that, at its hear, damn well needs to respect some fundamental libertarian principles if it is to stand any chance of making it to adulthood in country terms.

2. Why is satire dying?
This Guardian article attempts to answer the question.
One thought that is not really surfaced in the article is that originally 15-20 years ago, the gap between reality and satire was much clearer. The political climate was much more polite, with a focus on policy and less on personality and muck-raking. So when The Onion published this parody article about Pat Buchanan’s attitude towards gay people in 1992, it was clearly satire.
Today, with political leaders actually suggesting publicly that gay people should be jailed, and religious leaders calling for gay people to be exterminated, this article would be regarded as truth by many readers.


3. The SCANDAL VIDEOS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY! (Yes, that’s how excited GOP partisans shout)

Project Veritas, the investigative organization fronted by underground provocateur James O’Keefe, has snapped into action this week, publishing videos that it claims prove that the Democratic Party is engaging in electoral fraud.
Based on actions taken by the DNC since yesterday, it seems that at least one of the videos shows behavior by DNC employees that was unacceptable.
The main challenge, as Snopes points out in this detail summary, is that the track record of James O’Keefe is rife with distortion, selective and out of context editing of video evidence and law-breaking. Whenever the unedited videos surface, they always prove to have been deceptively edited. As Snopes also points out, there is a “Gish Gallop” element to the way that the video evidence is presented. The aim seems to be to overwhelm the viewer with closely-spaced, absolute sounding allegations. When I see that presentation style, I always have one hand on my bullshit detector.
Everybody needs to understand that Project Veritas is a deeply partisan organization that almost exclusively focusses on claimed misdeeds and malfeasance by the Democratic Party. That, plus the timing of these video releases in the run-up to the last debate, should tell you a lot about motives. In the meantime, some experts should review the videos for signs of editing and other forms of message manipulation.
For a comprehensive list of the various attempted stunts and stings of Project Veritas since 2009, see here.
And here is an article from the Detroit Free Press showing that when it comes to voter impersonation, O’Keefe would rather pretend to do it and then claim after the fact “Look! I could have done it!” than actually do it, and open himself up to being charged with a felony and possibly jailed. Whatever else he may be, James O’Keefe has no intention of going to jail for his cause.

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So you polled your Facebook friends about their preferences? I see…

Folks, if you think that passing a posting around on Facebook to your friends asking them to state their political preference is a poll…
Well, fine.
It is a poll. It is, however, unlikely to meet any established criteria for validity of any useful poll based on selection criteria.
Polling does not consist of asking your buddies what they think about an issue and reporting the results as statistically valid and therefore reflective of a wider reality. It’s a lot more scientifically and statistically rigorous than that.
To start with, polls randomly select people in an identified population. There may be some clear selection criteria (if you are asking women about beauty products, by definition you probably won’t be including men in your sample population), but the idea is that the overall sample should be random within the population that meets the selection criteria.
There is also the matter of sample size. As any statistician can explain, the margin of error in an analysis of this type is inversely related to sample size. A sample size of 50 has a much larger margin of error than a sample size of 5000.
In an election, anybody who is registered to vote can potentially vote, so any poll designed to determine likely voting preferences needs to sample all registered voters within a population. Your Facebook friends list does not meet that criterion, since it is reflective of self-selection and is therefore not random. I have never met anybody who chose real-life or online friends at random.
Of course I know what is really going on here. You are engaging in an exercise of in-group validation, a massive “we’re all the Right Ones” group hug. Which is fine. Just don’t make me laugh by dressing it up in pseudo-scientific wrapping-and-bow bullcrap by somehow claiming that it proves stuff that it clearly doesn’t.
Claiming “me and my friends held a Facebook poll and it shows that Trump is winning among my friends by a landslide” may be a correct statement. “me and my friends held a Facebook poll that proves that Trump is winning by a landslide” is not a correct statement.

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Today’s Round-up

1. You want to rig an election? Don’t listen to Donald Trump for ideas
As this article makes clear, there is election rigging going on in the modern USA. It’s just not being done in the cartoonish way that Donald Trump claims.

2. The subtle (and not-so-subtle) eliminationist rhetoric of Trump supporters
At a Donald Trump rally, a male supporter, deploying a level of semantic weaselling, since he understands the legal consequences of making direct threats, hinted very unmistakeably to the media in an interview that Hillary Clinton should be eliminated if she wins the Presidential election.
This is not an aberration. I have seen numerous similar comments on Twitter and in other online forums. There are a lot of people whose approach to opposition is to want to eliminate that opposition. For the groups on the authoritarian fringe who are, in many cases, armed to the teeth and itching to start the Second American Revolution, assassination is a perfectly reasonable approach.
Here’s another pile of ranting from a long-standing member of the crazy fringe, Jim Stachowiak. He seems to harbor every toxic resentment and animus known to man.

3. The “Hammond Ranch land sold by Hillary Clinton to Russian uranium company” conspiracy theory
The idea that the mineral rights of the land under the Hammond Ranch and the Malheur Wildlife Refuge had been sold to Russian or Chinese interests at the behest of Hillary Clinton is a claim that has gained credence amongst the anti-government pseudo-revolutionary fringe.
The main problem is that, like most ideas and claims, it started from a few disconnected facts and was then expanded into a grand conspiracy theory.

4. This is Spinal Tap – you starred in it – whaddaymean you want royalties?
This lawsuit, filed by one of the co-creators of “This is Spinal Tap”, could, if it actually goes to court, lift the lid on all manner of murky accounting practices by which media conglomerates magically convert highly profitable products into break-even products, in order to avoid paying creators royalties.

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The rise of eliminationism as a political philosophy

Unless you are wilfully ignorant, you will have noticed the increase in the level of toxicity in political and societal rhetoric this election season. We have a candidate for the GOP nomination who is openly claiming that the system is being rigged against him, has threatened the media with all manner of cocakanmie consequences, because they have been faithfully reporting on his toxic stew of conspiracy theorizing, mean-spirited ranting against opponents, and bizarre and constantly-shifting policy ideas. He also finds mocking disabled people at rallies to be an amusing diversion, and regards the ability to grope, fondle, and verbally harrass women in his employ or in his physical space to be some sort of base entitlement.
The trend towards eliminationist rhetoric against real or imagined opponents is being encouraged by other elected representatives, and some cases, elected law enforcement officers. As is normal, the justification for the promulgation of these ideas is Patriotism. Being a Patriot is now being treated as an entitlement card to propose and take part in all kinds of unconstitutional legal and extra-legal actions.
When self-identified leaders of the “Real American Patriot” communities hear these kinds of pronouncements from elected representatives, and people they perceive as sympathetic authority figures, the impact of the messages is amplified. They can (and will) conclude that the authorities are secretly on their side, and that they are therefore going to be indulged in their actions.
The level of eliminationist rhetoric has snowballed this year, with people openly proposing violent action against perceived enemies on a wide variety of online forums.
More dangerously, people are now moving beyond idle boastful talk in online forums, and have been planning actions.
The sort of pathology that many of these people are imbued with can be seen very clearly from his extract from the Criminal Complaint against Curtis Allen, Patrick Stein and Gavin Wright, arrested last week in Kansas City for conspiring to bomb Somali refugee locations:


The complain contains a mind-boggling series of reports of meetings where eliminationist actions were quite openly discussed:

…While they were discussing these plans, WRIGHT pulled up Google Maps on the computer at his
business and began dropping pins on the map at these various locations using the label
“cockroaches.” Prior to the meeting WRIGHT researched guides for making explosives and
printed off a substantial number of pages of this material. The group brainstormed various
methods of attack, including murder, kidnapping, rape, and arson. They decided to pick a
specific target at their next meeting. At one point, ALLEN stated: “We’re going to talk about
killing people and going to prison for life. Less than sixty days, maybe forty days until
something major happens. We need to be preemptive before something happens.” STEIN
responded: “The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.” At another point in the conversation,
STEIN said: “If you’re a Muslim I’m going to enjoy shooting you in the head.” Then he told the
group, “When we go on operations there’s no leaving anyone behind, even if it’s a one-year old,
I’m serious. I guarantee if I go on a mission those little fuckers are going bye-bye.”

These types of discussions are in no way unique or remarkable, based on my watching websites since 2008. The nativist lunatic fringe has convinced themselves and each other that these kinds of murderous actions are right, good and necessary to protect the purity of the USA. Here is a Google Search on another individual, Jim Stachiowak. As you can see, his worldview regards opening fire on BLM activists as perfectly acceptable.

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