Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies at 87

[Bilge_Rat]

Despite its high sounding name, the "Southern Povery Law Center" is a left wing political organisation with a very dubious record of lying about data to achieve its political aims. They have been caught in many scandals where they were trying to label main stream conservative groups as "white nationalists" or " hate groups". They have no credibility whatsoever.

The myth that right wing groups are rising under Trump is just that, a myth, just like "Russia collusion".

[MaDef]

Originally Posted by skidman

Ah I see, two shootings are not good enough. Maybe you should talk to the victims' parents, partners and kids. That might change your mind. I never said "they're hiding under every other bed". Stop putting words in my mouth. But to state "I never met one, white nationalism does not pose a problem" is hardly a adequate way to address the matter.

You insist this is about numbers. It isn't. This is about people thinking: Sure, they are few, but there are enough of them to drive the car. I'll be in the back seat. Smiling.

Technically it was one shooting, and one vehicular killing/assault. You are also the one sitting 5,000 miles away and trying to convince me that racists groups are a systemic problem in the U.S., I'm telling you they are nowhere near as problematic as you seem to think.

You insist this is about numbers. It isn't. This is about people thinking: Sure, they are few, but there are enough of them to drive the car. I'll be in the back seat. Smiling.

You haven't taken the First Amendment of the Constitution into account. Just because you're allowed to say what's on your mind doesn't mean that we approve or agree with it, but it is your right to say what's on your mind (collective you, not you in particular), at least until the First Amendment is rescinded.

[Bilge_Rat]

Rabbis Condemn Southern Poverty Law Center, Call on Amazon Smile to Drop It

Prominent Jewish rabbis—including leaders in the Rabbinical Alliance of America and Young Israel—are urging Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to eject the Southern Poverty Law Center from the Amazon Smile program.

The Southern Poverty Law Center ostensibly strives to expose hate groups. It rightly identifies numerous groups, such as the KKK and the Nation of Islam, as hateful, but it also leverages its credibility to wrongly apply that label to others.

It targets groups engaged in countering ideological extremism, which deprives itself and others of valuable allies in the fight against white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and radical Islamism.

For that reason, a chorus of Jewish leaders are decrying the Southern Poverty Law Center as “uniquely detrimental and even dangerous to the Jewish community.”

Defamation is nothing new to the organization. In 2018, it paid $3.4 million and issued a public apology for calling Maajid Nawaz, executive director of the Quilliam Foundation, an “anti-Muslim extremist.” Nawaz is himself a Muslim who has devoted his life to fighting Islamism, white supremacy, and neo-Nazism. How shameful that the organization nearly derailed his worthy mission to eliminate such hate.

In the same publication, it called Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Policy Forum—one of the most reputable opponents of anti-Semitism—“anti-Muslim.”

Pipes warned that the Southern Poverty Law Center has strayed far from its mission of defeating racism.

“The SPLC has turned into a left-wing hatchet group, using its accumulated prestige to go after legitimate organizations and individuals. Along the way, ironically, SPLC itself acquired some of the reprehensible characteristics it was created to fight. The result is a hugely rich institution with a formidable reputation lacking a raison d’etre or even a moral conscience. It has become a parody of itself.”

https://www.heritage.org/civil-socie...-smile-drop-it

[Bilge_Rat]

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered

I’ll never forget the moment I learned we were on lockdown. It was Aug.15, 2012. My frustration mingled with fear. Trapped on the sixth floor, we knew someone had been shot. We knew we couldn’t leave yet. We knew little else.

While I was missing lunch, a crime scene played out in the office lobby below me. My coworker and friend Leo wasn’t armed, but he had played the quick-thinking and inadvertent hero, disarming a young man on a mission to kill me and as many of my colleagues as possible. The gunman had packed his backpack with ammo and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches — later admitting that he had planned to smear them on our lifeless faces as a political statement. Leo took a bullet in the arm but managed to hold the attacker until law enforcement arrived.

I wrote and edited for the Family Research Council, a public advocacy organization that promoted the principles I have cared about since childhood: protecting the family, promoting the dignity of every human life and advocating for religious liberty. It reads like a tagline, but it’s also just what I believed and the way I chose to match my career with my convictions.

Biology is not bigotry:My daughter thinks she's transgender. Her public school undermined my efforts to help her.

I never expected that everyone would celebrate or share my beliefs. But I did expect to be able to discuss and debate these differences without becoming a political target in an act of terrorism, the first conviction under Washington, D.C.’s 2002 Anti-Terrorism Act.

The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled us a 'hate group'
It was the type of violent incident that one could expect a group that purportedly monitors “hate,” like the Southern Poverty Law Center, to notice, research and decry. In fact, we were on the center’s radar but for all the wrong reasons. The assailant acknowledged later in FBI testimony that he had selected our office precisely because the SPLC had labeled my employer a “hate group.”

It has always been easier to smear people rather than wrestle with their ideas. It’s a bully who calls names and spreads lies rather than thoroughly reading a brief’s legal arguments or challenging the rationale underlying a policy proposal. The SPLC has chosen to take the easy path — to intimidate and mislead for raw political power and financial benefit.

For years, former employees revealed, local journalists reported and commentators have lamented: The Southern Poverty Law Center is not what it claims to be. Not a pure-hearted, clear-headed legal advocate for the vulnerable, but rather an obscenely wealthy marketing scheme. For years, the left-wing interest group has used its “hate group” list to promote the fiction that violent neo-Nazis and Christian nonprofits peacefully promoting orthodox beliefs about marriage and sex are indistinguishable. Sometimes, it has apologized to public figures it has smeared, and it recently paid out millions to settle a threatened defamation lawsuit.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...mn/2022301001/

[Bilge_Rat]

HOW THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER STARTED INVENTING "HATE GROUPS"

In the earliest days of the SPLC, the Alabama-based civil rights law firm did target truly racist and hateful groups, most famously the United Klans of America, which the SPLC devastated in a successful lawsuit it launched in 1984. The result was financial largesse. Money flowed into the SPLC, driven by Dees’s brilliance for direct-mail campaigning and the hope of white liberals that a strong SPLC would mean the end to racism and hatred in America.

But to keep the money flowing, the SPLC kept insisting hate groups and white supremacy were expanding. To do this, an ever-widening definition of hatred was required. The SPLC expanded its list of “hate groups” to include not just the shrinking numbers of vile KKK and neo-Nazi groups, but groups that were merely controversial and even harmless.

Pro-life and pro-family religious groups were targeted beginning in the 1990s. Following 9/11, national security organizations concerned with Islamic terrorism (including this author’s employer) were targeted. Immigration policy groups and religious freedom organizations all fell into the SPLC’s sights at the same time those issues became increasingly a focus for conservatives.

For its efforts the SPLC was richly rewarded, posting nearly half a billion dollars in assets, including more than $120 million in offshore accounts.

Things started unraveling Dees and the SPLC in 2018, when the organization was forced to settle with Maajidd Nawaz for more than $3 million. Nawaz, a liberal Muslim reformer, sued for defamation for being named to the SPLC’s “Hate List.”

More than 60 other conservative and Christian organizations targeted by the SPLC announced in 2019 that they too were considering lawsuits, and former SPLC staffer Bob Mosey publicly wrote in The New Yorker what many SPLC former staffers had quietly said for some time, “It was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/24...g-hate-groups/

[Catfish]

^ Sure. For anyone criticizing far right wing politics there will be (since Trump) a hundred right-wing media outlets trying to belittle the reason, call it fake news, trying to shout them down. And "The Federalist" lol

So the Southern Poverty Law Center is a "hate group"? I do not think so, but when "The Federalist" say so it must be true.
So they criticized the KKK? I take it some hate against this or the "Proud boys" or generally against racism would be in order.

[Bilge_Rat]

^strawman....

i.e. no one is defending the KKK

[skidman]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

07:42 AM Rabbis Condemn Southern Poverty Law Center, Call on Amazon Smile to Drop It

07:49 AM The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered

08:00 AM HOW THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER STARTED INVENTING "HATE GROUPS"

Rate of fire like a Gatling gun, very impressive. If I had known about your obsession with the SPLC, I would have chosen another way to make Texan White nationalists available to Neal. I thought the map was handy, cause TX is such a big state and I don't know where he's based (You know that old joke about the difference between Europeans and Americans, don't you: Europeans think 200 miles is a long drive. Americans think 200 years is a long time.).

[Bilge_Rat]

actually it is like shooting fish in a barrel.

The SPLC is such a discredited organisation, I'm surprised anyone would use it as a source.

[skidman]

Originally Posted by MaDef

Technically it was one shooting, and one vehicular killing/assault. You are also the one sitting 5,000 miles away and trying to convince me that racists groups are a systemic problem in the U.S., I'm telling you they are nowhere near as problematic as you seem to think.

How is it, you (collective you) are mostly discussing technical aspects (size of ammo clips, caliber of weapon used) after a mass murder has taken place? A mother who lost her son does not care if he died in a shooting or in a vehicular killing.

You are right, I'm sitting on the other side of the pond and I can understand the reflex from the US side "What does he know?" Take this into account: A lot of people from Europe are very much into US politics. Why is that? Because we think that changes happening in the American society can be seen as a forecast of what will happen to us later.

When evaluating the present political situation in your country, what is actually turning the balance? Things happening in your neighborhood, or the things on TV, in the papers, on the socials and the www? Of course my perspective is different from yours, but that's not because I'm 5000 miles away.

Do I believe racists groups are a systemic problem in the U.S.? No.

Do I think White nationalism and alt-right groups are a growing problem? Yes, because obviously the U.S. society slowly but surely moves from the center towards both extremes.

And whose fault is that? All the people's who make a living from inciting Joe Sixpack and Jane Doe. And a president's who has taken this principle to the next level.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by skidman

Rate of fire like a Gatling gun, very impressive. If I had known about your obsession with the SPLC, I would have chosen another way to make Texan White nationalists available to Neal.

You still haven't. I know there are some out here somewhere, come on over and help me search for them.

[August]

Originally Posted by skidman

I would have chosen another way to make Texan White nationalists available to Neal.

You're making them available to Neal? What for? Are you some kind of recruiter for white nationalists anonymous foreign guy?

[skidman]

Originally Posted by Onkel Neal

You still haven't. I know there are some out here somewhere, come on over and help me search for them.

Have you ever come across posters/stickers from the "Patriot Front"?

[skidman]

Originally Posted by August

You're making them available to Neal? What for?

Maybe he could find out about alt-right nationalism in his home state. The ADL (I know, another communist scum of the earth organization) lists more than 600 incidents involving white supremacy propaganda in TX in 2019/20. So there is a fair chance to get together. Unfortunately Neal always just misses them.

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by skidman

The ADL (I know, another communist scum of the earth organization)

exactly...

The Anti-Defamation league's sad slide into just another left wing pressure group

https://thefederalist.com/2017/07/28...ressure-group/

I always get a kick out of groups like the ADL trying to argue that Trump is an anti-semite when his daughter is jewish, his son-in-law and right hand man in the WH is jewish, his grand-children are jewish and he is the most pro-Israel President in a long time.