Just like your comment that it was in reply to then. Glad we are in agreement.
We could obviously nitpick each others examples all month, and I don’t have a lot of interest in doing that. Let’s just say I disagree with the notion that Amy Bishop’s alleged shootings were in any way politically motivated.
Joe Stack, however, is a decent example - I’m not sure where to put his politics. Both Rep. Steve King and Noam Chomsky have said he made some good points in his suicide diatribe.
That is, to me, an overly specific parsing of their comments. If I say, “I slept with your wife,” I cannot later claim that I never said I had sex with your wife, but merely pointed out that as we are in the same time zone, we both were asleep at the same time.
But I’m happy to modify my original claim as follows:
BRICKER: But there were those few who, at the time, either out of rhetorical excess or honest conviction, said things that I took to mean *that ANY reference to bullets, shooting, targets, and the like was ill-conceived. The majority of people, I grant, had a more restrained view, and thus wouldn’t find this instance problematic. *
No.
We start out with the claim that right-wing commentators said that Breivik was correct.
Bu the more detailed claim is that Pat Buchanan said that Breivik was right in thinking that a large-scale conflict between Islam and Christian forces in Europe was inevitable.
I thus pointed out the difference between a right-wing commentator (or anyone!) saying Breivik was right about some specific factual claim or future prediction, and the more generalized “Breivik was right” statement, which might be heard to imply that Breivik was right to do what he did – shoot and kill people.
If you are still confused, let us return to the original claim:
Now we can clearly see the difference. I think the Oslo killer had a legitimate point about a future large-scale conflict in Europe involving Islamic practice and influence..
I do NOT think that the Oslo killer had a legitimate point in killing people.
Well, yes, you can. The general assumption of “slept with” is “had sex with”, and people would tend to assume it of you, but it would still be a perfectly correct interpretation - if poorly communicated. But knowing you to have a good understanding of words and culturally accepted euphemisms, i’d tend to assume you were being a bit of an ass if you later claimed you were innocent of ever suggesting the idea.
But that’s not what’s happening here. As i’ve said, the people you quote haven’t merely mentioned gun-related symbolism; they’ve explicitly identified that they disapprove of militant and violent gun-related symbolism. To continue your analogy, it would be like you saying “I slept in the same hotel as your wife”,; you’ve explicitly pointed out in your comment the circumstances, and it would be silly for me to claim than you meant, solely, that you were claiming to have had sex with her.
IOW; if you’re accusing me of parsing in too specific a manner, I suppose I must accuse you of parsing in too generalising a manner. You’re generalising a vital part of their posts; and doing so when the more specified quote itself indicates that the generalisation is flawed.
Accurate, but I still disagree with your assessment.
Edit: You appear to be having some issues with people generalising the statements of prominent right-wingers. As seems reasonable.
This still misses the point - engaging in Buchanan-style rhetoric in the Breivik case (“well, his methods were abhorrent, but after all he was RIGHT”) is inflammatory and repulsive.
Even when anti-abortion zealots gun down doctors, “mainstream” anti-abortion rights groups often dial back their own inflammatory rhetoric for a little while* (at least, they refrain from declaring that the killer “had a legitimate point”).
*but not always. After Dr. Barrett Slepian was murdered in his home by an anti-abortion sniper in Buffalo N.Y., the head of Operation Rescue couldn’t resist alleging that Slepian had murdered thousands of children.