Posted 1:51 PM by Angie Schultz

Come See the Violence Inherent in the System!

My! Everyone's becoming so violent these days! First, Jane Galt thinks you should beat the shit out of people who dare to disagree with you. If your friend says, "I'd rather have Chinese than Italian tonight," she tells us, you are perfectly within your rights to bash their skulls in with whatever comes to hand.

Her bellicose ways have single-handedly created such a poisonous atmoblogsphere that even sensitive new age guy and primary caregiver James Lileks is advocating violence:

If a man in a crowd grabs your child from your arms, you do not wonder what brought him to this moment, or petition the city council for a resolution requiring him to hand over the skeletons of his previous victims. You stab him in the eyeball with your car keys.

How horrid! How would you know he meant to do harm to your child, hmmm? Perhaps he saw that a safe was going to fall on you from above, and ripped the child out of your arms to protect her. In any case, you most certainly should not take any action whatever, but wait for the police to arrive and begin their investigation. To do anything so beastly as to go pre-emptively poking out random eyes with your SUV keys would be just as bad as assuming that, in a violent protest, a person holding a rock and bearing down on a plate glass window means to smash that window! And in any case, you may certainly not use violence to prevent what you wildly assume will be greater violence.

Why, what if some third person saw a father take a child from its mother's arms, and, because of Lileks's words, ran up and poked the father's eyes out with a 2x4, hmmm? I'm absolutely sure, although I haven't Clue One about the law or pretty much anything else, that Lileks would be guilty of murder! He should stop and think before he writes!

And another frothing right-winger to add to our armoured parade of mindless violence is Meryl Yourish, who says right out that anyone even remotely critical of Israel should just die already.

Well. What can one say? Surely "anti-Semites" have as much right to their views as anyone else in this country! It's only if they turn their opinions into harmful actions that they should be stopped by duly constituted authority using only proportionate, non-lethal force. Of course, sometimes the authority might come too late, but that's the price you pay for the moral satisfaction of being a peace-loving person.

But all this talk of violent anti-Semites or protesters is just a right-wing wet dream, isn't it? I mean, you've never personally seen anyone gassed just because they were Jewish, have you? Of course not. No one does that, just as nobody ever comes to a peace protest intending vandalism.

Of course, it's no shock that Ms. Yourish's former fiance (and suspected Jew) "Tom Paine" would second her violent emotion.

But this angry, hateful spirit has now infected the previously lamb-gentle Juan Gato, who says, of completely peaceful and non-confrontational Seattle protesters, It's time to break out the spiked cluebat of malice. See what those warmongers have done!

The constant chants of hate in these blogs is just a symptom of a larger movement nationwide. Marchers may find that they are forced to defend themselves from right-wingers who attack innocent peaceful protesters for no reason at all. Then there will be chaos, and it will be the haters who are to blame!