Bond...James Bond wrote:Okay. So how long ago did you post these thoughts over on FAIR/MAD? And have these thoughts come true yet? Has there been multiple attacks by exmos on Mormons?
They were posted intermittently since about 2005-2006. I did not make specific predictions, I said I felt that the vitriol was excessive and overboard and that people who express themselves in this way seemed unstable and "could do violence" in real life at some
future stage. Two weeks ago I was confronted by a customer who used threatening language, but made no actual threats of physical violence. Physical violence does occur in my job. Workmates have been assaulted, and one was robbed recently, at knife point. We have an alarm button to press in such situations, and we have been told NOT to wait until actual violence occurs, but at any signs of untoward verbal aggression. You cannot predict accurately what a person will do, especially when they're drunk or under the influence of drugs. But
every driver knows when to activitate the alarm by the verbal expressions of the customer. They do not wait for actual violence. Get the hint? I have seen hateful expressions from some exmos, and I'll tell you straight up I wouldn't want to meet them personally. One on EMS did actually threaten physical violence against me, and although that was not possible since he was in America and I in Australia, I wouldn't want to meet this creep in real life. And I am not even a TBM. I think you know not, Bond. I've been around for quite sometime and I know what I'm talking about. These experiences have led me to be wary, and to write as I am.
Bond...James Bond wrote:Okay. What does that have to do with angry exmo speech today?
You may have missed Dan Peterson's post on the thread "Signs of Recovery", and this may help to understand where I am coming from as well (Fortunately he's far more articulate than I am. The bolded portions are my emphases):
While I can see something of a mob mentality in internet bulletin board behavior, I simply don't believe that a fractured group like an internet discussion board can be persuaded towards physical violence in the same way a crowd could. In other words, I simply don't believe an internet 'mob' would ever have the same power to move people to violence that an actual mob could exert. Hot air exhaled over cyberspace [is a] far different animal from a political movement like National Socialism.
Fortunately, I think you're right. I'm grateful for that. I'm thankful that most threats don't materialize. But that doesn't make such behavior wholly unproblematic, in my view.
In any event, cyber huffing and puffing isn't the only thing out there. Years ago, my friend Todd Compton attended a showing of The God Makers at a megachurch in Covina or West Covina, California. As he reported to me soon afterwards, he found the experience chilling. The speaker on the program, he said, was a masterful demagogue. There was a Mormon stake center just down the street, and, Todd told me, the man had the audience so aroused, and so completely in the palm of his hand, that, had the audience been invited to grab torches and raze the LDS chapel to the ground, Todd was convinced that at least some of them would have done it. He compared what he had seen to Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, and he was quite shaken. Years later, Brent Collette, then the director of the Berkeley LDS Institute, told me of attending a similar event in the Bay area, where the speaker portrayed Mormons as conspiring to establish a theocratic dictatorship in the United States. When an elderly woman sitting right in front of him said, rather loudly, to her husband, "This is just like the Nazis!" Brent leaned forward and said to her, "Yes, and I'm the Jew."
The social fabric is fragile. Again, I'm not paranoid. But I also don't dismiss public expressions of hatred and hostility against religious groups as inevitably meaningless or invariably harmless.
I don't expect Internet mobs to gather, either. But some of the "cyber expressions" reveal the potential for violence in real life situations, as noted above.