Jim Ridgeway Succumbs to Hyper-Conflation Disease.

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

James Ridgeway, formerly almost-intellectually-honest "leftie" columnist and film-maker.

Well, home after a long day and the second thing I see is this piece of hyper-conflationist crap from Jim Ridgeway entitled "Town Halls and the Resurgence of the Radical Right: How the GOP is fueling extremist paranoia."

Geeze-a-pete. Ridgeway, though a "leftie," used to be almost-intellectually-honest back in the 90s. I know because he interviewed me for an article that appeared in the May, 1997 issue of George Magazine about the private investigation into the Oklahoma City Bombing.

I guess I'd lost touch with Ridgeway almost as much as he's lost touch with reality over the years. I'm not going to reprint even a line of this conflationist crap here. If you want to read it go to the link. It's strictly hyper-conflationary Southern Preposterous Lie Center "Brown Scare" excrement.

Looking back to his last article in Mother Jones here, he says among other things:

"The militia movement, too, was an outgrowth of the posse movement."

And that, as Ridgeway understood at least in large part back in the 90s, was and is a damned lie.

Well, anyway, as I wrote in this comment to his article at Mother Jones, I guess this kind of conflationist stupidity can be expected as the rough beast, its time come round again, slouches now toward Washington, D.C. to be born.

Mike
III

Jim Ridgeway Succumbs to Hyper-Conflation Disease.

Submitted by Mike Vanderboegh on August 29, 2009 - 9:35pm.

Jim, give me a call, I can help you seek treatment for your hyper-conflation disease. You used to be more perceptive to the complexeties of reality, such as your May 1997 George Magazine article on the private investigation of the Oklahoma City Bombing.

Now, however, you seem to have bought into the Brown Scare notions of the Southern Preposterous Lie Center's "Narrative of 1995." (See Professor Robert Churchill's To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face, Univ. of Michigan Prss, 2009.)

Ironic, isn't it? SPLC has long embraced the Three Letter Agencies, with whom they have a identity of interest -- monetary interest -- going so far as to offer political cover to the ATF in the wake of the Good O' Boys Roundup scandal. Surely you remember when Alabama militiamen brought back photo and video evidence of the ATF's racist get-togethers in Tennessee, where they infamously issued "Nigger Hunting Licenses" and depicted, by means of "entertainment" in a skit the "birth of the black race" by removing a black baby doll from a watermelon. Oh, yeah, great stuff. And the SPLC went all the way down the line in a story in the NYT for a bunch of armed racist thugs acting under color of law because they had an incestuous symbiotic relationship with them.

Why is it, that when the Dems are in power, the FBI, ATF, and even CIA can do no wrong as far as the "left" is concerned but when the GOP is in power thy can do no right? At least the constitutional militias denounced Dubya's ill-named "PATRIOT Act." Indeed, Dubya in our eyes did almost nothing right. We understood, as did the Founders after the Alien and Sedition Act crisis, that you never pass a law that you aren't willing to see your own worst enemy enforce upon you.

Now the Obamanoids are going to enforce it not only on us but upon the likes of John Ashcroft. Delicious irony. He's got it coming.

But Jim, I thought I knew you better. I guess it is only to be expected in the run-up to the final breakdown of the country, that more and more people start looking at their opponents as cartoonish cardboard cut-outs consistent with their own world view rather than real people who are not "right wing nuts" but people who have genuine concerns about the distribution of more and more power to an over-reaching federal regime. This is a means of achieving psychological distance necessary to the final act of killing each other.

The most dangerous thing you can do -- and I mean do to yourself -- is to think of your fantasies about your enemies as fact. That has been a precursor to every civil war in the history of mankind. Only by treating each other as fellow Americans and human beings with genuine concerns can we perhaps back away from the brink of this violent showdown that is looming over whose world view will dominate the future of the country.

Write more about factual complexities, Jim, and less about cartoon images, and you will have fulfilled the mission statement of the Jim Ridgeway I knew in the 90s. Don't, and you're nothing more than a collectivist hack flogging the rest of the people toward the precipice. And the disaster will be total and mutual.

You know from experience that my anti-racist and anti-Nazi bona fides are better than SPLC's, and you also know that unlike them, I'm not trying to sell anything.

I'm just trying to avoid a civil war by getting people to understand that one is possible.

Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.
sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com