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Armed "Militia", Bundy Brothers, Take Over Federal Building in Rural Oregon

Started by Pasta Chick, January 03, 2016, 05:40:21 PM

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Ecurb Noselrub

Quote from: Pasta Chick on January 29, 2016, 12:34:38 AM

I'm surprised this has gone on as long as it has.

I think they didn't want them to become martyrs.  Now they just look like little fools, except for the one who looks like a corpse.   He was the guy under the blue tarp a couple of weeks ago - maybe that was prophetic.

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on January 29, 2016, 12:40:19 AM
Quote from: Pasta Chick on January 29, 2016, 12:34:38 AM

I'm surprised this has gone on as long as it has.

I think they didn't want them to become martyrs.  Now they just look like little fools, except for the one who looks like a corpse.   He was the guy under the blue tarp a couple of weeks ago - maybe that was prophetic.

Was he the one complaining he'd lost his main source of income when his foster kids were taken away?
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Biggus Dickus

Here is a link to recently released FBI footage showing the roadblock and subsequent fatal shooting of one of the terrorists. There is no sound, and the video is shot from a helicopter, shot from some distance it's not necessarily graphic in detail.

Clearly shows the man exiting the vehicle, and then after putting his hands in the air later reaching down to his side, where it was later revealed he had a pistol in his coat pocket.

LINK
"Some people just need a high-five. In the face. With a chair."

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Bruno de la Pole on January 29, 2016, 01:54:39 PM
Clearly shows the man exiting the vehicle, and then after putting his hands in the air later reaching down to his side, where it was later revealed he had a pistol in his coat pocket.

I remember thinking it looked like suicide by cop when I first saw it.

In the meantime, here's an interesting article on the stand-off and masculinity: What The Malheur Occupation Teaches Us About Masculinity

QuoteTo feel powerless is to fail at masculinity. To be regulated, constrained, fined and jailed is to face challenges to masculinity. And often when men don't feel like "real men," they have to dominate something or someone to reassert their masculinity. In other words, "real men" are not dominated; they dominate. And so, to re-establish their masculinity, these men took up weapons, threatened federal agents, and destroyed federal property. Apparently, running around with guns and keeping the feds at bay made them feel tough; they felt like real men.

Of course, their sense of masculinity was also propped up by their intersecting white privilege and its attendant sense of entitlement. As white men they expect that ownership, power and success are their birthright. They expect to be heard. They believe that they have the right to demand what they want, even if it is over the law and over the wishes of the people of the region.

They demanded that federal lands be returned to "the people." But by "the people" they meant themselves and other white people like them. They certainly didn't mean the Burns Paiute whose land the refuge originally was and who asked them to leave. They didn't mean the people who live in Burns; they also asked the occupiers to leave. They didn't even mean the vast diverse majority of Americans who are free to enjoy the opportunities afforded by the refuge. Somehow, all of these other Americans are not "the people."

I was a bit surprised at how deep I had to get into the comments before the defensive, angry comments cropped up, and even then they weren't the majority.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Davin on February 03, 2016, 08:37:07 PM
Sure looks like all their guns did a lot of good.

Yeah, I get the impression the guns turned out to be a bit of a disappointment to the "militia".
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Biggus Dickus

"Some people just need a high-five. In the face. With a chair."

Davin

QuoteThe reporter asked if he believed it was better to be dead "than in a cell."

"Absolutely," Finicum replied.

They illegally occupied a government building armed with weapons.

They kept saying they would shoot officers.

He reached for a gun, and was shot.

I don't want people to be shot dead, but I can't blame the cops for that shooting.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Recusant

Now that the delusional wannabes have left the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the think-pieces and stock-taking can proceed. "Can we make sense of the Malheur mess?" | High Country News

QuoteIt is tempting to use the venerable Santayana quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but it doesn't fit here. Ammon Bundy (I did not meet him during my visit to the refuge) may or may not know the history of land use in the West, but there will be no repeating the free-grazing era of the late 19th century. Not in the fastest-growing developed nation on earth, on a planet that will soon play host to nine or 10 billion human beings. Nothing will be free. What the militants are asking for is almost exactly what more mainstream political leaders like Utah state Rep. Rob Bishop or the American Lands Council, now headed by Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder, say they want, too. The Malheur occupation, with the incessant press coverage in its early weeks, was the soapbox for disseminating payloads of misinformation about America's public lands, about their management, about how and why we have them. Every soundbite was delivered to further the goal of privatization.

The Bundys and the militants who follow and support them are the agents of their own destruction.

Should these adherents to the land transfer movement succeed and have the public lands given or sold to the states, some version of the State of Deseret will almost certainly flourish. Such a place already exists, of course: the Deseret Ranches, owned by the Church of Latter Day Saints, 235,000 acres in Utah and 678,000 acres in Florida (2 percent of Florida's landmass). The LDS corporation would certainly be prepared to make some very large purchases of what is now public land, but it is highly unlikely that any of the Bundy family, or any of Finicum's many children, would be grazing their cows there. Smaller operators cannot own lands that do not put enough pounds on cows to pay property taxes. It is unlikely that any of the current crop of smallholder ranchers anywhere in the West will be able to bid for productive land against the Church; or against families like the Wilks of Texas, who have so far bought over 300,000 acres of austere grazing land north of the Missouri Breaks in Montana; or the Koch family, whose ranch holdings comprise about 460,000 acres (including almost a quarter million acres in Montana); or Ted Turner, who has some 2 million acres across the US; or Stan Kroenke, who two years ago purchased the 165,000-acre Broken O Ranch in Montana and has just bought the 510,000 acre W.T. Waggoner Ranch in Texas.

Buyers, in a world packed and competitive beyond the imaginations of those who set aside these unclaimed and abandoned lands as forest reserves and public grazing lands in the early 1900s, are now everywhere, planet-wide. As Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory, when he was president of the American Lands Council, famously said of privatizing federal lands, "It's like having your hands on the lever of a modern-day Louisiana Purchase."

When that lever is pulled, and it will be, unless a majority of Americans know enough about what is at stake to oppose it, we will live through the transformation of our country. Federal water rights that underpin entire agricultural economies, and that are critical to some of the last family farms and ranches in America, will be in play. Few Americans, even those in the cities of the east who know nothing about these lands, will be untouched in some way by the transformation. Once the precedent for divesting federal lands is well-set, the eastern public lands, most of them far more valuable than those in the West, will go on the international auction block. The unique American experiment in balancing the public freedom and good with private interests will be forever shattered, while a new kind of inequality soars, not just inequality of economics and economic opportunity, but of life experience, the chance to experience liberty itself. The understanding that we all share something valuable in common – the vast American landscape, yawning to all horizons and breathtakingly beautiful – will be further broken. These linked notions of liberty and unity and the commons have been obstacles to would-be American oligarchs and plutocrats from the very founding of our nation, which is why they have been systematically attacked since the Gilded Age of the 1890s.

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Ecurb Noselrub

Quote from: BooksCatsEtc on February 03, 2016, 11:47:36 PM
Quote from: Davin on February 03, 2016, 08:37:07 PM
Sure looks like all their guns did a lot of good.

Yeah, I get the impression the guns turned out to be a bit of a disappointment to the "militia".

They were nothing like David Koresh's Branch Davidians in Waco. Those guys were serious. The Oregon bunch were like pretend militia, and then their mothers called them for dinner.

Recusant

Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on February 14, 2016, 05:38:57 AMThey were nothing like David Koresh's Branch Davidians in Waco.

This part I agree with. The Branch Davidians were a religious cult, while the Bad Luck Bunch's motivations were almost entirely political.

Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on February 14, 2016, 05:38:57 AMThose guys were serious. The Oregon bunch were like pretend militia, and then their mothers called them for dinner.

Not so much this. When the core group was arrested (and one freedom-loving zealot got himself killed) they were en route to a meeting which was part of an attempt to spread their proto-"movement" to other sites. They were ambitious, and thought they would be the seed of a much more wide-spread and formidable opposition to the federal government. Things could have gone much differently if the feds had tried to come in with guns blazing--I don't doubt that if that approach had been taken, the outcome would have been reminiscent of the Waco incident.

I don't have any respect for those people, but I do think they were ready and willing to shoot it out if they'd been given that opportunity.

Also, I understand why you call them "the Oregon bunch," but pretty near all of them were from out of state. While Oregon has its share of far right dipshits, it appears that Malheur wasn't the hill they were prepared to die on.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

Meanwhile, back at the refuge: "After the Oregon standoff, a new occupation begins -- this time it's the birds" | Los Angeles Times

QuoteThe same day four final holdouts ended the armed occupation of a remote wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon, a new occupation was just getting underway.

According to two decades' worth of federal data, Feb. 11 is, on average, the earliest date migrating tundra swans begin appearing at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, exiting the Pacific Flyway to rest in the vast wetlands of the high desert oasis.

Northern pintails have probably already arrived. Red-winged blackbirds, too. This weekend, expect snow geese, then killdeer and sandhill cranes. They will keep coming deep into May – fresh wing beats descending unarmed and unintimidated.

"The animals don't care who claims to have occupied this refuge," said Kieran Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "They're coming and they need it as their home."

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Davin

Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on February 14, 2016, 05:38:57 AM
Quote from: BooksCatsEtc on February 03, 2016, 11:47:36 PM
Quote from: Davin on February 03, 2016, 08:37:07 PM
Sure looks like all their guns did a lot of good.

Yeah, I get the impression the guns turned out to be a bit of a disappointment to the "militia".

They were nothing like David Koresh's Branch Davidians in Waco. Those guys were serious. The Oregon bunch were like pretend militia, and then their mothers called them for dinner.
Guns didn't do them much good either. Both incidents demonstrate the futility of getting armed conflict with the government, which should show that the, "We need our guns to protect us from an oppressive government!" is bullshit.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Recusant

Agreed. The "Second Amendment Remedies" talk and assorted other chest-thumping braggadocio these folks engage in is pure claptrap, and has been ever since at least the American Civil War, if not the Whiskey Rebellion. That doesn't stop the true believers from clinging to their illusions. However, I think that for a lot of them, their stockpiles of arms and ammunition are primarily for dealing with the apocalypse that they're sure is just about to sweep over the United States. Their watchword is "prep and pray."
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Davin

Quote from: Recusant on February 15, 2016, 06:50:11 PM
Agreed. The "Second Amendment Remedies" talk and assorted other chest-thumping braggadocio these folks engage in is pure claptrap, and has been ever since at least the American Civil War, if not the Whiskey Rebellion. That doesn't stop the true believers from clinging to their illusions. However, I think that for a lot of them, their stockpiles of arms and ammunition are primarily for dealing with the apocalypse that they're sure is just about to sweep over the United States. Their watchword is "prep and pray."
They may be right, considering how well Trump is doing.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.