So having a mob of ‘militia’ take over a town there isn’t just a criminal act, it’s a cowardly act. They picked a quiet little place which is probably mostly conservative, but conservative in an old-fashioned way that says you leave your neighbor along, and they found themselves a target that is far away from anyone else who might tell them “no”.

I know the kind of people who committed this criminal invasion, too. They also come from small isolated places, the kind where there aren’t many people to talk to, except a few family and friends. They work all day at something mindless and get out of the habit of thinking; they get together with their buddies, or their father, or their grandfather, and they start bouncing their resentments and theories and lonely thoughts off of one another, and there’s no check against reality — it all just reverberates back and forth and gets fed now and then by talk radio and pretty soon they’ve got a goddamned mythos that ennobles them as heroes of the land and the government as their enemy. It’s the only enemy they’ve got. It’s pretty empty out there on the edges of the Palouse. The struggle is against loneliness and low wages and hard work and a future of low prospects, and there isn’t much heroic about fighting those. It’s hard to get your ego fed raging against a hay-baler or that danged bitter wind.

The worst of them are little angry men who get a rush from carrying a gun. And they egg each other on over some little bit of news that frustrates them, and soon enough a gang of idiots are carrying out an act of armed sedition. Nothing too dangerous, it’s not like they rushed a National Guard armory, where they might have gotten shot and where the government might have felt compelled to act fast. Nope, they picked their target with a complete lack of courage.

They took over the headquarters of a regional bird sanctuary, and terrorized the nearby small town. You really can’t get much more picayune than that.

Read the rest here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/01/03/the-goober-militia/