I’m certainly sorry you were subjected to this, but do I really need to point out that Mr. Clinton was not the President when this happened, and that neither the Secret Service nor any other arm of the Government was responsible for your mistreatment? The First Amendment guarantees that the Government won’t interfere with your free speech - it doesn’t apply to actions by non-Governmental goons, reprehensible as those actions may be.
My bad. Gomen nasai.
{insults responding to the totally gratuitous “fartwit” removed after my anger cooled}
Grrrrrr…
-did I claim that nothing like this had ever happened before?
-did I claim that December was wrong?
No, and no. I did not say “that never happened”. I did not say “Clinton is perfect”. I did not say “you are a liar”. I simply asked him for a cite. He bought up a hypothetical past incident. I asked him for evidence that it occurred.
I will point out, by the way, that the cite provided by Larry Mudd is only somewhat relevant, as it covers actions at the national conventions of both parties, which is a very different situation from the situation described in the OP.
If someone would like to find evidence that during the Clinton presidency, the secret service and local police arrested people in crowds solely for the content of their expressed political beliefs, more power to you. But no one yet has.
Larry Mudd, at least Americans are still free to eat the dessert of their choice at political events.
Heh heh saoirse… Amen to that.
Anyone in the dark over that cryptic comment can check this thread on the subject.
MaxTheVool wrote:
Do you have any idea how wrong that is?
Nobody does because no cite has been provided that a “similar practice was followed by Clinton”
“practice” referring to “According to this column, people have been arrested for holding up critical signs outside the “free speech zone”. People with pro-Bush signs were left alone.”
An incident cannot be both past and hypothetical.
Ah, just nitpicking his choice of words then.
And anyway, why can’t it be past and hypothetical?
I know it’s not the OED but Dictionary.com doesn’t seem to rule out the possibility, based on its definition of hypothetical.
Merriam webster references the word Conjectural which s based on conjecture, whose meaning are given as:
1 obsolete a : interpretation of omens b : SUPPOSITION
2 a : inference from defective or presumptive evidence b : a conclusion deduced by surmise or guesswork c : a proposition (as in mathematics) before it has been proved or disproved.
Atarian queried:
Because a hypothetical event has never happened, whereas a past event has. A and Not A cannot coexist in any possible world.
Try reading those dictionary definitions.
A hypothetical event can be one that is merely conjectured, without evidence as to it’s reality/truth. Why that event cannot be conjectured to have happened in the past escapes me.
Reading is not enough without comprehension. You are attempting to stretch the mathematical definition of the word into a political context.
It is like trying to interpret the phrase “I’m forced to conclude A” by calling upon the physics definition of force and analyzing how the mass times the acceleration led me to the conclusion.
Nope. I am not trying to stretch a mathematical definition.
I wasn’t even aware that there is one. What is it by the way?
I am simply using the dictionary definitions.
If you want to rely on mathematical definitions of words, can you enlighten us as to the mathematical definitions of fartwit and amnesiatic please?
Good lord. You aren’t even reading your own posts.
Stop staring at me. Eat your checkers.
I don’t appreciate being patronised; it is rude and uncalled for. Anyway…
Do you mean that the bit you accused me of not reading is the mathematical definition? If so, OK, point taken. How about addressing the rest of my points.
An event in the past can be considered hypothetical (ie. it is conjectured to have occured) if it is not known yet whether it occured or not. Once it has been demonstrated that it did occur, it is no longer hypothetical (it has been proved) if it cannot be so demonstrated it is still hypothetical since it could be demonstrated at a later date when we have more information available to us.
Need I point out that Mr. Clinton was a presidential candidate at the time, and entitled to Secret Service protection. Or that said Secret Service is completely in charge of security at campaign rallies?
If you’ll insist, I’ll leave the Secret Service out of this, and accuse, with justification, a future President of suppressing free speech. Said future President supported and encouraged violence and the threat of violence to suppress dissent.
Sorry, Early Out, your assertions don’t make it look any prettier.
Er, I think this is a matter of sentence parsing.
There can be a hypothetical past event. That is an event, hypotheized, that would, if it were true, have happened in the past.
There can also be a past hypothetical event. That would be an event that, in the past, had been hypotheized about.
There could also be an unknown past event, an event that is not known to be true, that would have happened in the past.
Right?
What would they do if someone had a sign saying “George Bush is articulate and fair-minded. No, really.”?
Would you have to prove you weren’t being sarcastic? Or just that you plausibly might not have been being sarcastic?
That would be the greatest protest sign of all time, Shade.
Really?! That’s quite a stretch. Are you asserting that, before the rally, Clinton met with some union supporters, and got them all pumped up to go out and beat up on some protesters? I’m sure I was paying attention at the time, but I don’t remember that ever making the headlines.
In any event, I’ll say it again, for clarity: What happened to you was shameful. It should not have happened in a country that values freedom of expression. But it had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the First Amendment. Even if Clinton had done what you’ve accused him of (and I don’t buy it for a second), it would still not have anything to do with the First Amendment. There was no governmental action involved.