Lol I think there was a Marxist hiding under my bed to get me the other night ;).

Such an easy boogie-man word to use.

Even scarier are those “cultural marxists.”

Here’s some fact-based information: https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/what_is_marxism.php

I'm calling baloney on the "fact-based information". That's not an objective source; that's a true believer being a cheerleader.

TBH I should have looked at the author more carefully - I thought the page was like the NYU equivalent of Stanford’s online encyclopedia of Philosophy, sort of an anodyne online primer.

Thanks for pointing that out.

However based on my understanding I will say that most is the article seems pretty on point as being a description of the basics of Marx / Marxist thought.

I’ll also throw in that I think this is the thought that should demand our attention:

> The most powerful nation in history cannot erase poverty, provide full employment, guarantee decent housing or an adequate diet or good health care to its people. Meanwhile, the rich get richer.

Don’t have to be Marxist to see that.

> Don’t have to be Marxist to see that.

No. And you can see the consequences that are plastered all over the evening news.

Whether Marx has the right solution is a different question. But the problem is real. (Myself, I'd be inclined to say that Germany has a better solution than either the US or Marx. But I've never lived and worked in that system, so I don't really know.)

And yeah I like the German social-democrat model too.

Also, big-ups to us for having a fairly civil conversation : ).

The Democratic Party and the left has its problems.

But “left wing extremism” isn’t on the top of the FBIs of list domestic terrorism threats.

Of course ideally we all should be working together.

But just like saying “all lives matter”, “working together” is often a way of denying historical truth and the flaws and struggles of our nation.

Hacker News is supposed to be fact-based, right?

IMHO folks should go do some googling about what political scientists - experts who work with reason, facts, are deep subject-matter experts and rational debate - have to say about the current functioning of the US political system.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2017/1...

They talk about tribalism but it’s nuanced. And it’s not a simple “both sides need to listen and work together.”

Sorry for the rant.

But yes, there have been plenty of left wing terrorists. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez I think is the most famous one (Carlos the Jackal). Plenty of other ones, but he'd be the... Timothy McVeigh mixed with Bin Laden of left wing terrorism.

That and citing Vox is like citing Fox News. No. They're different sides of the same coin.

That and political science isn't a real science. Even the stuff I might agree with, it's all so warped in bias, I want to vomit.

There’s no equivalent behavior at Vox of which I’m aware.

Fox News is literally a right wing propaganda machine. Vox may have a bias and you may disagree with it but it’s not regularly engaging in fear-mongering, untethered from any sense of journalistic ethics or responsibility.

Folks may not like hearing this but we all know this is true.

Plus the particular article I linked to has interviews with reputable folks (Harvard profs, etc) so if nothing else it’s a source of reasoned opinion.

Lastly, political science is obviously not a hard science but it’s filled with people who have spent their careers reading about history and politics and studying it so, there might be some signal in that noise there :).

Extremism (on either side) is absolutely on the top of the FBI's list of domestic terrorism threats.

This was from a hearing on August 4th;

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/us-attorney-erin-nealy-...

Watching what's been happening in Portland every night for ~90 days now, or even what's just happened in Kenosha, I would be surprised if it wasn't the top of the FBI's list.

;)

“In the deadliest attack on Latinos in American history, a 21-year-old white supremacist last August killed 22 people and injured 24 others at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. In April, another white extremist went on a shooting rampage at a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one worshipper and injuring three others.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.voanews.com/usa/2019-deadli...

And so on.

Dylan Roof in 2015 murdering nine people who were at church, because they were black.

The right-wing crazy guy who murdered Heather Hayer by driving into a crowd at a protest against neo-nazis in Charlottesville in 2017

And so on.

To compare terrible attacks like that to the riots (separate from the peaceful protests) which have occurred, and destroyed property, but not killed people, is ludicrous.

And let’s not forget that people didn’t go into the streets for the fun of it - no one was doing anything until the police killed a man in cold blood, because he was black, exemplifying the racist violence (and domestic terrorism - look at the 1921 Tulsa race massacre - a mob killed at least 36, sent at least 800 to the hospital, and burnt a part of the city to the ground, leaving ten thousand black people homeless - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre) which black folks have sadly faced for a long, long time now.

And which people are sick and tired of tolerating.

Certainly any ideology can produce violent extremists. But conservatism and the right in the US currently has a white-supremacist/far-right extremist problem which the left does not have right now.

Currently, its the far right and white supremacist ideologies which are producing domestic terrorists that attempt (or sadly, succeed) to kill people.

Currently, there’s not a US equivalent of the Baader-Meinhoff gang (german left wing domestic terrorists from the 60s/70s) of which I’m aware.

So I hope the FBI is spending the bulk of their domestic terrorism resources combating the groups which at this time pose the greatest threat to the lives of American citizens.

I think current events have the potential to spiral into something much more destabilizing and ultimately destructive on a cumulative basis, even if there are not headline grabbing individual mass shootings.

You never specified your other metrics ...