Sure, but it probably wasn't larger than 9/11.

This is probably true, which is why I wasn't really responding to you or Smarty.

Before this goes any further (and it most likely will) remember a comment by Smarty was what started it.

What I was actually get was the fact that an act of terrorism can be good or it can be bad and the use of "terrorism" as a negative slur is conservative bullshit designed to prevent change.
I was referring to the American revolution where most modern Americans (if perhaps not Smarty- both sides were pretty equal in the being fucks category and there is no real reason to support either one though if it comes down to it Britain were actually slightly less fucks than the USA in the 19th century) would agree with the acts of the revolutionaries but they were undeniably terrorists.

E: Like I could have gone with an act of terrorism by America itself- which are generally a lot larger than 9/11 if you count poor and foreign people as 1 each- but they are pretty much done on other people soil.

E2: And another thing, I'm sick of people using Britain's colonial record as a stick to stop all debate. It's lazy and unhelpful. Sure they murdered billions but that was mostly due to their sheer scale tghan anything else. The vast majority of people they replaced were worse rulers than them and murdered more of their own people, took more from their own people and left their own people with less power and less opportunity than the British masters. Their is a tendency to see pre-colonial people as like a bunch of Rossuean noble savages but a lot of the time they were replaced beady little pissants and while they could be equally as exploitative, though not as much as you might imagine, they often improved life for the average person through trade, developing economies and access to wider world. In some places they were ruinously destructive and made life much worse but in some places they made life much better- on the whole they were a monstrous empire but you really have to look at the particulars of individual cases and a lot of the the most pasisonate accounts against the british were butthurt native richies. This is just a pet peeve of mine, it reeks of what is labelled "Orientalism" where all the old accounts of China, India, Japan etc just placed them in little stereotypical bubbles of what we expected them to be like.

This is a fair point. Honestly, I can't bring myself to endorse acts of terrorism regardless of justification, because I hate violence in all forms, but the way in which terrorism is used by American society is definitely in service to conservative values and maintaining the status quo. You're more likely to be labeled a "potential terrorist" for having books about anarchy than you are for BLOWING UP A GODDAMN ABORTION CLINIC. There's also a definite racism in the way the words are used.

I don't think saying Britain's empire was terrible necessarily equates to praise for anybody in particular.

Meanwhile in Sweden, the racist party is pulling ahead in the polls of six of the established parties in government, behind only the two main parties. This is the result of their two years of hard work being part of the government and contributing absolutely nothing.

But anyway, I blame this surge in hate of foreigners in our country largely on GW Bush. To a certain segment of the populationuneducated dumbasses he made it cool to hate brown people, and we're still seeing the effects of that.

What will Obama's legacy be, you think? If I'm being charitable I could compare him to Olof Palme, without the being mysteriously murdered part anyway. An advocate of peaceful foreign relations and champion of social justice through education. . .well that may be a little too charitable. But he has to have something more going for him than "the first black president", right?

If he signs the Grand Bargain?

I expect him to increase resentment against him.

http://beingliberal.tumblr.com/post/...-bargain-offer

I think the major qualifier here is "single largest," in which case no single act of terrorism (not counting actual full-scale military engagements) by the American revolutionaries comes close to a 3k kill count.

The whole statement was pretty clear and concise, dude.

Terrorism is using acts of violence against civilian targets in order to get them to do what you want, though. I'm sure there were terroristic acts on both sides in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 but defining the entire rebellion as a terrorist act is bogus unless you have the broadest definition of terrorism as possible. You could argue any act of war is terrorism but that would be an incredibly nebulous definition that reduces the word "terrorism" to pointlessness.