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I don't think that's actually true. Weather Underground, for example, bombed the Capitol in 1971. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/02/a
by lambdaphagy 6y ago
I don't think that's actually true. Weather Underground, for example, bombed the Capitol in 1971. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/02/a-look-at-the-history-of-attacks-in-the-u-s-capitol-44-years-after-the-weather-underground-bombing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/02/a-...)
One of the group's leaders, Bill Ayers, lives unremorsefully in a tony neighborhood in Chicago where he went on to have an influential academic career, dedicating books to political assassins, and mentoring future presidents. This caused a minor kerfluffle when the details resurfaced to public light in 2008, but it was clearly, in the end, no obstacle to Obama's election.
One might raise a similar point about a figure like Oscar Lopez Rivera who, while he never bombed the Capitol, definitely did bomb about 100 other locations around the country and was rewarded for his efforts by an NYC ticker tape parade once he was released from prison. Lin Manuel Miranda's admiration for Rivera has hardly proved a stumbling block for his wildly successful career.
And that's just one end of the frequency-severity spectrum. Mobs break into the Capitol and interrupt proceedings with perhaps surprising regularity, as with the Kavanaugh hearings for example.
In any case, it seems that bombing the Capitol or doing widespread domestic terrorism is only selectively an impediment to a later life of comfort in the US.
- auslegung 6y agoI guess you didn't read my response, I said "Whenever people historically have stormed the capital building, everyone coordinates to ban them from their platforms." Your "rebuttal" lists no one who stormed The Capital Building (sorry should've put that in bigger letters)
- lambdaphagy 6y agoDoes bombing the Capitol strike you as a qualitatively lesser offense? I say they are both bad. What do you think?
- lambdaphagy 6y agoOr take the 1954 attack on the Capitol, in which Puerto Rican separatists opened fire from a balcony, wounding five members of Congress. That seems to me at least as bad as what happened yesterday. Did this discredit the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism and drive its supporters from public life? It would appear not: you can still be a celebrity with a successful career while voicing your support and admiration. I'm not asking you to say that what happened yesterday was good, because of course it wasn't. I'm asking you why you think that such events are so rare and universally condemned. In fact they seem to happen on a timescale of decades at most, probably less, and the public judgment of the perpetrators seems to correlate less with the objective severity of the act as with elite consensus opinion of the cause it promotes.
- auslegung 6y agoYou took my pithy hot take as a literal statement. So I took your statement quite literal