Right. This is from the Democratic Platform, 2008:
Now, again by all accounts, this guy had a fear that his gun or guns would be taken away. So by what you’re saying, the Democratic Party is to blame.
Right?
I trust you can grasp how absurd you’re sounding.
Funny you should mention that. Via Olbermann here’s Glenn blaming video games (Grand Theft Auto in particular) and more specifically television for increases in the murder rate (starts at ~1).
If they found a copy of GTA in this guy’s home previous incarnations of Mr. Beck would have had no problems connecting this act to that game.
I believe Glenn is “hoist with his own petard” here.
CMC fnord!
Osama bin Laden is not responsible for 9/11. He is completely innocent. After all, it wasn’t him flying those planes. And he’s not responsible for any of the violence since then, either. Nope.
I say this not because I think Beck planned or masterminded these murders, but because I want to point out there isn’t always a bright line between “criminally culpable and bears at least a tiny measure of legal or moral responsibility” and “innocent catalyzing factor.”
Look, I don’t think Beck is responsible for the actions of a lone nutjob. No way. There’s millions of people out there, and some of them are deeply flawed. You never know which ones they are, or what trigger is gonna set 'em off: a TV show, a comic book, a video game, a newspaper column, a book, a photo, a movie, a picture of a celebrity, a real-life incident or accident … but sure as shit, something is going to set off those time bombs sooner or later.
I do find it fascinating that it is the generally conservative right who all these years have been crowing about protecting the family from Janet Jackson’s tits, from violent video games, protect the children from horrible Batman and Robin, save us from the word “ass” on television, redistributing movies on DVD suitably re-cut for “family values”, who want to strip Harry Potter books out of the library because it’s got witchcraft in it, who suddenly apparently believe Beck is in no way responsible for the shit he spews on national television.
Now, I don’t have evidence that it is these same groups who said “OMG Harry Potter” and “OMG a nipple” and “OMG I saw somebody’s butt on NYPD Blue” and “Beck is a blameless and holy creature.” There is a danger of lumping conservatives into an all-encompassing, homogenous lump of often contradictory positions. I do hate it when Dopers and pundits say “I heard some guy say X, and I figure he’s liberal, so I’m going to complain about all liberals everywhere as if they too support position X.”
All I’m gonna say is this: get these people on record. Anybody who defends Beck as being entirely free of responsibility for his words has forfeited the right to complain about the need for responsibility in other media. You can’t have it both ways.
No, I’m not sounding absurd. Please cite anywhere that the Democrats said they would take away anyone’s guns. Please cite that the 1994 AWB took away anyone’s guns, or any proposed resurrection of it has said it would take away anyone’s guns?
The two parties are pretty much equal on the “won’t somebody please think of the children” bandwagon. Democrats don’t give a crap about Harry Potter, but Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman, to name two, are outspoken critics of deadly entertainment.
One of the people you named is not a Democrat.
What agenda do you think GTA is advancing, such that it is equivalent to a right wing mouthpiece fomenting unrest?
The first ban re-classified several shotguns as destructive devices. Those gun owners who owned them and lived in states where DD’s were not permitted for civilian ownership had their property legislated away. They were forced to destroy them or sell to out of state interests. On 9/12/94 I could own one. On 9/13/94, I could not.
Sorry, I missed an “attempted”.
I seriously don’t think you can hold the man responsible for actions he was not advocating. Beck did not at any time say anything even remotely close to “kill cops when they come to your house.” Frankly, I think responsibility for speech influencing others should be kept to a bare minimum and only in cases of a specific action being advocated.
Like I said, rather than attempt to gather all the “conservatives” into one heap of contradictory beliefs, I’ll be interested to see which position individual people take on this. Do Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman each think Beck’s responsible for what he says? If so, that would be laudably consistent.
Beck?
He’s a loser, baby, so…
I won’t type any more for fear of implicating myself!
That’s irrelevant nitpicking. Lieberman is a registered Democrat, part of the Democratic caucus, even holding at least one committee chairmanship, and votes with the Democrats on most issues. The fact that he hasn’t been a elected to the Senate on the Democratic ticket since 2006 doesn’t matter in this case. He WAS elected on that ticket in 1988, 1994, and 2000, and during that third term - probably earlier, too - he made comments specifically criticizing GTA.
Are you of the opinion that none of that counts because of what’s hapened in the last two to three years?
None, but the reasoning being employed is similar.
I’m of the opinion that it’s more like “consistently stupid.”
We set the bar on speech crime very high, and for good reason. We are well aware that men will seek to silence an unpleasant voice for flimsy reasons, if permitted, so we go to great lengths to keep the definitions of illegal speech as narrow as humanly possible.
But this places the burden of responsibility back on us, as it should be. Does Mr. Beck have reason to believe that his inflamatory speech is having an unintended consequence? I daresay he does. Having such good reason, is he therefore obliged to throttle back on the rhetorical hysteria? Yes.
Unless, of course, he sincerely believes that Obama is Mussolini Lite, and he must rouse the people to action by any means necessary. I very much doubt that, but I cannot peer into the squirming miasma of his mind, I can only judge by the tentacled, squamous horrors that issue forth.
No argument here. But at least consistent stupidity has the virtue of looking like there’s a thought process, which means you can engage the person in debate. Inconsistent stupidity just looks like hypocrisy.
Although Foster had the decency to be quite distressed by the whole thing and spent some time removed from public life - in part because she was in college, in part because this really disturbed her.
I’m going to third Rand on this one. Nuts are going to find the media to reinforce their beliefs, especially so in the day of the internet and 200+ tv channels.
I think the real question is why does the demagoguery of these “commentators” find such an eager audience? The Becks of the world wouldn’t be out there if people didn’t want to have their own viewpoints reinforced.
I thought the reason we educated people is so they can make critical decisions about the information they’re presented?
Yup, he’s not informing and coincidentally raising the level of fear, he’s raising the level of anger. Only a fool sees that as less than a hostile act on the part of Beck.
No. And he’s not responsible if you go and blow your life savings on raingear either.
No. And he’s not responsible if you go all eco-terrorist and bomb an oil refinery either.
No, And he’s not responsible if you bust into a mosque and shoot a bunch of muslims either.
No. And he’s not responsible if you refuse to get a flu shot, and then get sick either.
Yes it is, if you are talking about an individual person. Becuase it’s all in the eye of the beholder. No matter what you say or do, people will perceive it differently, based upon their own ideas, thoughts and experiences.
Now, if a multitude of people, all with different thoughts, ideas, and experiences, all take the same action based on information you disseminate, then I think you could argue that you bear some culpability, becuase the sole commonality between them would be your disseminated information.
But if one person in 6 million takes an action that the 5,999,999 people didn’t, based on your information, I think it’s safe to say that it was their own thoughts, ideas, and experiences that influenced their course of action, not you.
I agree that the democratic party policy example is absurd. I also agree that Glenn Beck is not morally responsible for this lone nut.
But I don’t think this is as clear cut as you make it out to be. The answer to “If Glenn Beck says things that will raise the level of fear in his audience, is he responsible if their level of fear is raised?” is definitely true in certain circumstances, just none that have actually happened yet. If Glenn Beck “raised the level of fear in his audience” by yelling “fire!” while his audience was in a crowded theater, it isn’t unreasonable to hold him responsible for the ensuing stampede. The question is, at what point does it cross over from being “absurd to suggest he is responsible” (the lone nut scenario) to “patently obvious that he is responsible” (the “fire” scenario)?
I don’t know the precise answer to this question. If a commentator said “the current administration is a tyranny, Hitler youths will rise up and reeducate your children, rise up and attack the government with force” I personally believe the commentator would be responsible for the ensuing mayhem. But what if they left out that last bit? They technically haven’t called for violence. On the other hand, any reasonable person could predict that violence would be the likely outcome - after all, it would be perfectly reasonable to resist a government that was truly tyrannical! Is the commentator completely off the hook? I’m not sure they are ethically, although I do not know how you would create a legal framework that could capture this without being easily abused.
Given that I have not done extensive research into finding examples of crossing this line from either end of the political spectrum, nor am I inclined to spend a lot of time doing this, I will happily give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume no one has crossed it yet. But in the abstract it is not obvious to me at all that “raising the level of fear in their audience” is always ethically neutral.