No, I’d say that attempted hijacking is both (i) a violation of criminal law and (ii) an action that endangers human life. Certainly once they got in a car on the way to the airport with boxcutters on their persons, they were terrorists. Almost certainly once they got together and conspired to commit those acts, they…

You can do something so badly that you fail to do it. Maybe they really intended to “use violence and threats to intimidate or coerce,” but they haven’t actually committed any violence except in the broadest most grasping sense of the term, their threats are laughable, they haven’t intimidated anyone and they haven’t…

I’d say you probably need to at least be near someone in order to “endanger human life.” Or maybe near like a dam or water supply or something. I’m just going off the words of the statute: this is not terrorism. This is also not terrorism in the colloquial sense, because they haven’t actually hurt anyone or done…

Okay, should that kind of speech really constitute “terrorism” and make one liable for felony prosecution? Is that really a rule you want to set and see applied to all actors that the government—controlled by whomever might be in power at any given point—sees fit?

So in other words it was and is unoccupied, and so they didn’t endanger human life. The law doesn’t say “break the law,” it specifies the kind of illegality that is an element of terrorism.

No, I’m supporting the right set of rules, even when applied to white men. I’m not going to support fascism and police brutality for all just because it exists for some.

I think we basically agree here. I don’t know why Cliven Bundy wasn’t prosecuted after his little tantrum, and I hope that these guys are. But prosecution for this kind of crime should not be a national news affair. It should be a summons delivered by a process server or U.S. Marshal or whoever usually delivers these…

Agree to disagree on that. I honestly think that a lot of people in this country would need the irony of what’s going on pointed out for them. To give you an example, I recently watched one of the Spider Man movies (not my choice). It was the second one with Andrew Garfield. In the movie, Harry Osbourne inherits his…

I don’t know, maybe they’re felony charges, I don’t really want to spend the evening reviewing title 18 to see what you could charge these guys with, but I know that federal penalties (and the distinction between misdemeanor and felony is mostly about the penalty that attaches) can sometimes seem way out of wack to…

No, it’s pretty clearly not “endangering human life.” Beside that, is the speech itself an “act [that is] a violation of the criminal laws”? Because prong (A) is conjunctive: you need all the elements.

No, they’re not. They’re trespassers, and probably some other things, and need to be treated as such. Hypothetical violence is not violence. Consider the precedent that you’re setting by calling this terrorism.

I don’t think a lot of people realize how ridiculous this is. The news media certainly don’t seem to, or at least don’t seem interested in playing up how dumb it is. To the extent this is viewed as “American patriots defy government and seize land stolen from honest ranchers by treehuggers and bureaucrats,” the idiots…

Every time someone calls these high school civics D minus students “terrorists,” George Orwell rolls over in his grave.

I skimmed that pretty quickly, but it looks like they’re not breaking any laws and haven’t been prosecuted or arrested, to which I say “okay.” I’m not sure what that has to do with this, other than that you think it will expose some hypocrisy on my part, though for the life of me I can’t imagine what.

I’m not saying “let them off the hook, their own stupidity is punishment enough.” I’m saying “don’t escalate a confrontation with a bunch of armed imbeciles who have placed themselves far enough away from normal people that they pose no physical threat.” These idiots are already asking for food and water. They’re…

They are not the audience. The rest of the country is the audience. These men are a great example of what makes a lot of this whole movement literally ridiculous, as in “inspiring laughter.” They’ve seized an unmanned building in a little-known nature preserve and are holding it against non-existent forces to fight…

Where in that sequence of events did they endanger human life? The building was empty. There were no humans there to endanger. Are they “endangering human life” by announcing that they won’t leave a place they have no right to be?

I’d say it’s a stretch that squatting in an unoccupied government building in the middle of nowhere is an act “dangerous to human life.” Stop trying to newspeak this into terrorism. For the life of me I can’t figure out why my compatriots on the left are so intent on joining the right in perverting language and…

Oh my god, 292 square miles of Oregon? That’s nearly 0.3% of the area of the state! The federal government is crowding ranchers right out of the dang range with that kind of sprawling seizure of, uh, apparently mostly freshwater marsh. Jesus it’s like performance art at this point.

The solution to disproportionate responses by the government to persons of color is not to call for disproportionate responses by the government to white people. It’s to stop disproportionate responses against persons of color.