But even so, you’ll still have hostility in your own heart.
How many listeners does it take to be a concern? How many readers? I’m just curious since you think the talk only matters with regards to the number of listeners. Was Glenn Beck a concern when he was an AM oddity? How about his Headline news show? What kind of ratings does someone have to pull before they matter?
Apparently it’s not the talk at all that bothers you. Not even the content. It’s the market share.
No matter how much you wish it to be so, Der Trihs is not equivalent to Beck, Limbaugh, Palin (A Republican Vice President Candidate for Christ’s sake!)
You are comparing a poster on an obscure message board with a VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE from the Republican party.
No, I don’t thing that they are eqivalent. I’m just crazy that way
Oh, thank you for giving me a good laugh. If people don’t quite get SA’s and my inside joke, just go to any gun show and meet the militia. Half still live in Mom’s basement, most have subscriptions to Comic Book Guy Physique Weekly, and one, mayyybe two, have lifted more weight than a full plate from the buffet. Those two guys are the ones that all the others fawn over. It was really a pretty funny joke.
[QUOTE=The Second Stone]
And when they are right on a regular basis then we are living in interesting times. Personally I find DT less annoying and fanatic than you, xtisme, but both of you have perspectives that I value.
[/QUOTE]
I fully concede that I’m annoying as hell. But fanatic? You think I’m more fanatic than DT? Well…I don’t even know what to say to that.
-XT
The market share has a direct impact on how much it actually effects the world, so it makes sense to be more concerned with examples of speech which have a realistic chance of having an impact in the real world.
It’s kind of like comparing the theft of a paperclip to the theft of the Mona Lisa. Both are stealing, and both are wrong. But one is so trivial that we can basically ignore it, the other is going to make a lot of people unhappy and is worth taking serious measures to prevent.
Der Trihs is not on Twitter. :dubious:
You know, I’ve been meaning to 'fess up for a while, and this is as good a place as any.
I enjoy Der Trihs’ posts.
I don’t typically agree with them, but there’s kind of an elegant simplicity to them. (I mean “simplicity” in a positive way, not as an insult.) I mean, as a liberal I really wrestle with the question of how well-meaning conservatives can hold such (in my mind) utterly wrong-headed positions. But for Der Trihs, the explanation is crystal clear: They aren’t well-meaning. They’re evil.
I don’t actually believe that, but in a way it’d almost be a relief if I did. Like a religious person who after years of wrestling with the problem of why there is so much suffering in the world, finally gives up and concludes there is no God. And sure, people are still suffering, but at least he can focus on that and stop worrying about why God is being such a dick about it.
By the way, the post quoted in the OP was so clearly not trying to incite violence. He was just saying: “Conservatives won’t care about people getting shot unless it’s conservatives getting shot… because conservatives are evil.”
Try mentally inserting “because conservatives are evil” after all of Der Trihs posts, you’ll see it all makes sense.
I also enjoy Der Trihs’ posts and I often agree with them. I think American conservatism has a nasty vein of fear, racism and violence running through it and that the Republican party knowingly feeds that ugliness; when someone like Der Trihs calls them out on it, he is labeled a wild-eyed attention whore.
One is forced to admit however, that it is a position supported by evidence. Not a slam dunk argument, by any means, but a position that reasoning people can contemplate.
Plus, there’s Occam’s razor in favor of DT’s argument, elegance even.
I’m not comparing DT to any of them except to say that the crazy talk is the same. If you have a problem with the crazy, it’s best to stop feeding them at all.
And nobody has answered my question. When does the talk become a concern? Ball park it if you can’t give a solid number. Is it book sales? Ticket sales? Twitter followers?
No. He gets called out on it because he responds in kind. Fighting fire with fire. Good for burning houses down I suppose. Not good for demonstrating the capacity for reason. And “they started it” is just as lousy an excuse for that behavior as it was in elementary school.
Sure. If you already believe that every elected republican official and registered republican voter is a blood crazed sociopath, then it makes perfect sense. Easy to contemplate reasonably.
My only fear with Der Trihs is someone reading his stuff who is less fearful and has lower morals than he does. And, yes, since he’s less widely known, this risk is much smaller than that of someone like Sarah Palin.
That doesn’t mean I think that such rhetoric is useful or desirable. I think it’s at best going to be ignored by the opposition, and at worst it is going to cause them to be defensive, strengthening them. (Where Palin is on this, I’ll let you decide). The only time I can imagine it helping is when it is used to show how ridiculous the other side is being–and, even then, the intent needs to be obvious.
Personally, I think the constant ratcheting up by both sides have brought us to this thing and have empowered the nutters out there to take direct action. This shooting could just as easily have been a left wing nutball attacking a Republican. The rhetoric coming from each sides fringe is explosive enough that it’s only a matter of time before some crazy takes it seriously and acts on it. Right now, the rhetoric I’m hearing coming out of the Republican right is scary, and if they keep it up eventually something like what happened this weekend in Arizona is going to be the result.
The fact that nothing like this happened during the Bush administration has more to do with luck then anything, since the same kinds of over the top rhetoric was being spewed by the left wing fringe. I think the big difference is that the really scary stuff I recall from that period was coming from the fringe and maybe some of the base, not directly from prominent left wingers or Democrats. Today, the scary stuff I’m hearing is certainly coming from the fringe and base, but also coming from prominent conservatives and Republicans, which gives it more legitimacy. Cycle through another round, with the Republicans back in charge and controlling the presidency and we’ll have the left doing the same things. And the cycle will continue upwards until…BOOM. The freakin’ left and right wings come to direct blows and tear this country apart with their stupid, silly partisan bullshit.
That’s my take on it.
-XT
To be fair, in Starving Artist’s world, comments by politicians don’t inspire people to do bad things. It’s only song lyrics that cause those sorts of problems.
Thank you for this perfect summary. She didn’t call for a rebellion, she suggested that soon, armed people may need to take to the streets and start shooting up the place to fight off the evils of tyrannical government that passed laws some people like and other people don’t. It’s pretty sad that you think this is even a defensible comment. The response to the government passing you don’t like is activism, lobbying, and protest, not “you know, I’m just saying, but if the government passes any more laws we don’t like, we might need to start killing people. I’m not threatening anybody. I’m just saying, is all.”
I’m trying really hard to remember equally inflammatory commentary against Bush. Especially from people with access to mass media.
Pointing out that Bushlooked like a chimp, he’d started at least one unnecessary war & his fiscal policies were idiotic is not the same as calling for gun violence. Especially when those claims were essentially true.
You are kidding, right? The extent of the inflammatory rhetoric against Bush that you recall is that someone said he resembled a chimp?? 
Leaving aside your faulty memory, whether the accusations against him were right or wrong, it’s been a steady ramping up of rhetoric that has gotten us where we are today. I think it really started to escalate with Reagan (heck, maybe Carter), then Bush, but it went ballistic with Clinton and the counter reaction against Bush II and now Obama. If you haven’t noticed that this has been happening, and has been happening as both sides seem to try to one up the other with the heat and fury of their rhetoric, then all I can say is you haven’t been paying attention. I thought that the Bush II era rhetoric was as explosive as I’d seen it during my lifetime…until the current wave of counter heat and fury since Obama was elected and the Dems were in control of both houses. To me it’s rising to the danger level, like a pressure vessel in the red, and if folks on both sides don’t start to calm down and chill out we are going to see more and more of the nutball contingent on both sides blowing their tops in such spectacular ways. I fight with my dad (who is an ACTUAL freaking conservative) about this nearly every week, and have told him I think that right wing rhetoric has gotten completely out of hand and that something just like what happened this weekend was inevitable. He generally handwaves away my arguments, and I have no doubt that over cigars this weekend he will say that this guy was just a nut, and it has nothing to do with the rising levels of rhetoric and spew from the right. Bullshit. There are any number of ticking time bombs out there, and encouraging them to blow up is like playing catch with nitroglycerin…
-XT
Here is an short, probably incomplete list of people who should probably exercise some control, and try not to suggest how " the time may be coming when an armed revolution would become necessary in order to take the country back from a government that had begun deliberately defying the will of the (a minority of the people who did not vote for the party in power)"
This is simply my opinion. These folks should exercise some self-control, as it is clear that they can potentially reach millions of people, and are theoretically in a position where they are taken seriously:
-Running for State or Federal office on one of the two main party tickets.
-Elected to State or Federal office.
-Hired by a network or cable news show to give serious commentary on politics.
-Hosting a serious current events show on a major TV or Radio network.
(FTR, Palin reportedly has 1,504,790 Facebook fans and 116,715 Twitter followers. However, I don’t think that you can “ball park” a number in a social media site that means squat.)