You think hanging and burning effigies is a recent development? That’s been going on for centuries, and it’s pretty common all around the world.
Ah…so, what you seem to be saying here is that only the raw numbers count in making comparisons. Correct? So…that would mean that the comparison between FDR and, say, Stalin are simply ‘wildly exaggerated’. Not because the deaths FDR was responsible happened mainly in combat and not in gulag’s or folks posing for gun fire while standing against a wall, but simply because Stalin was responsible for 10’s of millions of deaths while FDR was only responsible for a few hundred thousand or a million, tops? Right?
-XT
What is the purpose of the “smiley”? Are you actually kidding, or leaving yourself a trap-door to escape if confronted with the obuse inanity of your post?
No, I won’t hold your hand and identify which pixels show Nazi comparisons, calls for death, etc. If you maintain you can’t see them, I believe you. Rather supports my guess about your geographical proximity to reality, though.
Your claim is that such images from “left wing” demonstrators have been pervasive over the last 10 years and that similar images from the right are not, and indeed are gosh darn hard to find.
That thesis is, in a word, bunk. In a less polite word, it’s bullshit. I know it and you know it, but you’re expecting polite demurral and the provision of citations to which you can respond “well, I said I’m not surprised that some loonies on both sides would do these things…” and simply restate your assertion.
But the bullshit nature of your argument remains. You are not, in fact, seeking proof of the assertion that right wing images of death and hatred exist in plenitude; it is impossible that you could be aware of US politics at a high enough level to have participated in these threads without already knowing the truth of that. What you’re pursuing is the same false equivalence conservative apologists, lazy tv pundits and naive little wannabe cynics have been trying to assert since Newt Gingrich was an active congressman.
All of which is tangential to the meta argument of the thread (whether stridency and hate are appropriate tactics in support of a political viewpoint and in response to vitriol from the opposite “side”).
You should actually be arguing in favor of the OP’s no-good very-bad stinker of a proposal; BrainGlutton would like to make your “lefties are rabid hate spewers” fantasies come true. Of course, this would tend to drown the merely dishonest bullshit argumentation in a cacaphony of bile, but I’m sure you’d adapt.
IOW, your answer is ‘no’…you either don’t see them either or don’t feel like taking the time to support your argument better.
Well, you have yet to demonstrate convincingly a counter. Your kaleidoscope of images shows a gamut of things, none of which looked to me to be on par with the two cites of images I showed you (a quick glance looked like the most offensive images were Confederate Flags, which, granted are pretty offensive…but not on par with Nazi flags). Of course, I freely acknowledged that I won’t be surprise if there ARE such images from crazy assed right wingers.
I find it interesting that you will take the time to link to the definition of ‘bullshit’ while not wanting to take the time to parse out offensive images from your pictures cite to show images on par with those I’ve shown. I mean, since I have no doubt that such images from the right towards the left actually exist, I find it curious why you wouldn’t, well, show them, and instead resort to this sort of ‘horseshit’ (I will leave it up to you to look up the definition of that one, if you so chose).
No…I wasn’t seeking such images, since I know they exist. I find it hilarious you call me a ‘conservative apologist’ while, well, demonstrating the exact opposite trait in abundance. Or, to spell it out, and since we are obviously getting nasty with the bullshit labels, a ‘liberal apologist’. And while I freely acknowledge I’m militantly lazy, it’s pretty funny that asking you to parse your own cite to demonstrate whatever fucking point you THINK you are making results in a link to a Wiki article on the definition of ‘bullshit’ instead. I mean, you can’t get that level of humor on TV these days!
Yeah, it is, but I note with humor that you indulged in it anyway. And then threw in ‘meta’, for good measure.
Well, you would think so, but then this is because you have the delusion I’m a right wing conservative, and that I want to see the left wing loonies take over and shoot themselves in the crank. The trouble is, that’s YOUR delusion, and the reality is a bit different than your knee jerking world view. I have zero desire to see either the right OR left wing loonies gain the upper hand (even if it means further discrediting both sides to the center), and I think that the last thing we need is for either side to further up the vitriolic rhetoric. Personally, I’m a ‘pox on both your houses’ kind of guy, and I think that both the left and right wing loonies are, well, fucking crazy assholes who we’d all be better off doing without. Obviously YMMV and probably does.
-XT
It was a derisive smiley meant to convey something along the lines of ‘at least my bullshit (see xenophon41 for cite of exact definition) over the top strawman was actually a joke…unlike your own, which you cleverly thought to slip by all of us poor cow pokes who just fell off the turnip truck yesterday’.
Sorry, but our access to smileys are pretty limited, so I had to work with what was available. I’ll be happy to translate more fully for you in the future, if you like.
-XT
Sam said righties never did that. He has now retracted that statement.
More on this below, but I’m not wasting time pulling the specific images which support my argument. We both know they’re there. A more specific search would pull up more specific images, but I kept the search terms very generic to prove the point: they are easy to find.
More bullshit. You “won’t be surprise” [sic] because you already know they exist as you just admitted. This does nothing but walk us toward your desired false equivalence between “loony left” and the American right wing.
But you want me to spend time providing images you’ve already stipulated.
See above. I find it interesting you keep hammering that poor nail.
Your ability to understand others’ arguments is on par with your observational powers. I’ve never called you a conservative apologist. If you’d like to claim that label, that’s fine with me. Odds are it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Keep working on your observational skills. That’s not an article on the definition of ‘bullshit’.
Nope. I had you pegged for one of the ‘naive little wannabe cynics’ I listed, who want to be seen as above the political fray and therefore better than we partisan cranks. You should be aware of two things though: One, you are taking right wing positions (or at least echoing their idiocy). Two, whether you want to own your leftwing-violent-messaging-is-pervasive-beyond-what-the-rightwing-does argument or not, it owns you in this thread. You cannot make such an argument and pretend to be above the fray.
I’ve now officially had enough of the obsessive quote parsing. Engage in more if you want, but my next reply will skip it.
So…leaving aside the fact that you don’t want to actually support whatever non-argument you are making, I’m a ‘naive little wannabe cynics’ for pointing out that both left and right wingers use over the top rhetoric and violent (and stupid) comparisons? And that what America needs is not MORE ridiculous and over the top rhetoric and vitriol from either the left or right? And that, in fact, both of the loony factions of left and right need to be muzzled, after we collectively wipe the foam from their muzzles? Well…you know, I’m good with that then. No problem.
Well, you got me there. I didn’t actually click on your link, just moused over it. By clicking on it, it is indeed not simply the definition of ‘bullshit’…and it REALLY makes your argument the well crafted thing of beauty it is. Yeah…that added so much to the thread that I’m ashamed I didn’t click on your link and bask in warm glow of that contribution.
Good idea. At least if you are going to parse what I write, give me more than one liners to work with as counters. Or, better yet, we could both back away from the thread slowly before one of us gets a Mod warning, since, frankly, this thread isn’t worth getting warned over. If you want to believe that what America REALLY needs is (more) LW vitriol to go with the current over the top RW vitriol, then, well, that’s your prerogative. More power to you, and all that. I hope it works out for you and your brethren and sistren. Maybe if you just scream louder than the Right you will finally make us centrist ‘naive little wannabe cynics’ hear you and see the light.
:eek: (<—holding breath icon…learn it, love it, live it)
-XT
Yeah, I got that, but what puzzles and exasperates me is that anyone would be upset or shocked by the hanging or burning of effigies. Offended, maybe, if it’s an effigy of someone you admire or support, but acting as if it’s something shocking and unheard of is a bit over the top. People have been burning and hanging public figures in effigy all over the world for an awfully long time. I’m not even sure when or how the practice began and wouldn’t be surprised if it went back to prehistoric times.* The point is that this is an accepted, nearly universal longstanding form of political expression which is seldom or never taken as a literal call to murder, and to react to the custom today as if it were somehow beyond the pale seems aggravatingly disingenuous. Hell, football coaches have been burned in effigy.
And anyway, this is far from the first time that American politics has gone through a period of overheated rhetoric and absurd, extreme accusations. Politics is a blood sport and frequently brings out the worst in people. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
*Come to think of it, is it possible that burning, hanging and beheading effigies could in some way spring from the same psychological impulse that motivates sympathetic magic such as voodoo dolls ?
Where is this place Effigy, anyway? Apparently nobody escapes it alive to tell the rest of the world about it.
You will have to ask Sam, as I was neither shocked nor upset.
Everybody is acting like a photo of some conservative somewhere hanging someone in effigy completely negates Sam’s comment. In a country of 300 million people I would think it’s possible to find just about anyone behaving in any way possible, regardless of their politics or moral beliefs. But Sam’s point remains that the vast majority of the time when you find enraged activists thowing rocks at police cars or (or in the past, chanting “Fuck You, LBJ” and taking over college administration buildings) and otherwise being distructive and hateful, it’s lefties who are the miscreants. For whatever reason lefties are just more inclined to get hepped up and outraged over things, and so they generally think the worst of their opponents. Liberals by and large hate conservatives for opposing entitlement programs and championing free enterprise, and the base that hatred upon the supposition that conservatives are selfish, that they don’t care about anyone else, that they would be perfectly happy to see people dying in the streets and so forth. Liberals also are very much persuaded as to their intellectual superiority over conservatives and that creates even more hatred, “If it wasn’t for those stupid, backward, narrow-minded conservatives we could…(whatever, take your pick).”
But you generally don’t find the converse among conservatives. Conservatives don’t tend to think that liberals are stupid, or that they are guided by selfish motives, or that they want to see people suffer. In other words, conservatives tend not to assign evil or negative character traits to liberals, rather they tend to think liberals are impulsive and short-sighted and that because they are prone to seek solutions to problems that in the long run do more damage than good.
So it naturally follows that liberals are going to be more strident and hateful in their approach to conservatives and conservative philosophy than conservatives are of liberals and their philosophies.
But it appears the tide is beginning to turn. You can only be called hateful names and have your beliefs and standards ridiculed for so long until you begin to fight back. In my opinion Rush Limbaugh was in the vanguard of this newfound combativeness starting to come from the conservative sector, followed by Fox and their assorted personalities, then by Sarah Palin and the rise of the Tea Party.
And the results are beginning to get ugly. When you have only one side being hateful and calling names and ridiculing the other, then not much happens (or at least not in the way of violence). But when you have two sides hating, insulting and ridiculing each other, that’s when things can really get ugly. And it’s my belief that we are approaching that point now.
And it’s also my belief that with liberals making up only twenty percent of the population, if war breaks out (figurative or literal) you guys are gonna lose.
So you might want to think twice before you decide to ramp up the type of behavior that has brought us to this point to begin with. The uglier and more hateful you get, the stronger and more aggressive the right becomes. Are you sure you really want that?
Only because when the police do it, they don’t use rocks and when others on the Right burn school buses, it is treated as an aberration.
The Right tends to use authority to vent their spleen and the Left tends to revolt against authority. There are numerous examples of people on the Right using violence against authority and people on the Left employing authority to suppress others, but the trend is in the other direction, so images tend to be easier to find of the Left behaving violently as rioters and the Right behaving violently as authority figures and the violence of protestors and authority takes different forms.
Yeah, that makes sense. I never thought of it that way before.
-XT
Well, the police aren’t the general population, are they?
You keep bringing up relatively small groups of people, like cops and politicians, and attributing the behavior of a few of them to conservatives in general. What I’m talking about are general attitudes of the country’s liberal population as a whole vs. the attitudes and behavior of the country’s conservative population as a whole. My impression is that if you scratch the average liberal as he goes about his daily business you’ll find that he has a very negative, disparaging and even insulting view of conservatives as people, and that if you scratch the average conservative as he goes about his daily business you’ll find that he thinks liberals are pie-in-the-sky dreamers and idealists with unworkable or ultimately harmful ideas. This is quite a difference in perception, and it creates quite a difference in the amount of ire generated toward the people on the other side.
And the numbers of students that actually threw stones in the 60s or idiots who actually riot at economic conferences number in the tens–hardly as many as the number of police on a single large city.
I am not attributing anything to “conservatives in general.” I am pointing out that your claim that all the nastiness originated on the Left is myopia or wishful thinking. As I already pointed out, I have lived and worked among people on the Right since before I started college and your claims about the attitudes of “average liberals” have a very close parallel to the views I observe among “average conservatives.” You claim that those on the Right think that “liberals are pie-in-the-sky dreamers and idealists with unworkable or ultimately harmful ideas,” but to me they have also expressed the notions that “liberals” are traitors who would never defend our country, immoral people desirous of engaging in deviant sexual practices or promoting the imagined “gay agenda” and destroying marriage, dishonest people who want to subvert our language and our society, thieves who want to rob poor hardworking people on the Right, and so on. Now, perhaps your associates on the Right, aware of your own personal rectitude, refrain from giving voice to all these ideas while in your presence, but I have listened to enough rants over the last few decades to know that they are ideas in which many people on the Right indulge themselves with great frequency.
Go back and look at Gingrich’s list of epithets. Thinking people on both sides reject such language, but people on both sides who prefer to engage their emotions rather than their brains are quite willing to say terrible things about other people, regardless on which side of any political line they may stand.
No, but they’ve all had large, angry crowds of lefties cheering them on. And how many times have conservatives reacted angrily and concertedly to prevent liberal speakers from talking at their universities? And what about the behavior of conservatives generally at rallies and demonstrations? Why can’t an equally miniscule number of conservatives be found throwing rocks, smashing police cars and taking over university offices?
Oh, wait! It’s because they have cops beating up people on their behalf! What was I thinking?
And speaking of cops, what do you mean by this:
Is it really your contention that every big city cop beats up liberals behind closed doors on behalf of the right?
Well, you may very well be right in that people tend to hide their normal behavior when I’m around. People, even my close friends, tend to hide certain aspects of their behavior from me, behavior I eventually find out about from other, mutual friends who don’t realize they’ve revealed something I didn’t know. 
But still, don’t the complaints you list tend to support what I’ve said before - that conservatives tend to criticize liberals’ behavior rather than their inferior qualities as human beings? “Immoral,” “tratorious,” “engaging in deviant sexual practices,” etc. all go to liberal behavior, not to their intrinsic qualities as human beings. (I confess I don’t believe I’ve ever heard someone on the right call anyone on the liberal side ‘dishonest’ for favoring entitlement programs. What I hear said is that they people not to work, or not to solve their own problems, or that they make people dependent upon government and therefore less free. And often there’s a side order of complaints about the encroachment of government upon all our lives. But again, I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call liberals dishonest for this reason…or any others, aside from verbal trickery on the part of liberal activists. But even then the criticism is levelled at a subset of liberals, and not about them in general as a character flaw.
I agree. But then again I have to bring you back to the nature of the things that get said. It’s one thing to say that the other side has bad ideas, that what they want will never work, or even that they’re lazy slobs who want everyone else to provide for them. But it’s another entirely to call people on the other side evil, selfish, hateful, uncaring, and desirious of human suffering. Again we get back to “bad things/bad people.”
And then there’s another interesting little tidbit for you to consider: All the political trouble these days is being caused by the left. Either the left is upsetting the right by what it’s trying to accomplish, or it’s upsetting the right by claiming all its members are stupid, selfish and evil.
So if you guys would just chill, there wouldn’t be a problem.
Of course this will never happen because you fancy yourselves the savior of humanity.
I read an interesting article recently on the fundamental difference between concervatives and liberals and it rang fairly true to me. The jist of it was that at their core, conservatives are optimists and liberals are pessimists. That conservatives look around at the world and see what is good and try to hold on to and make the most of them, and liberals focus on the things that are wrong in the world and agitate to change them. So on the one hand you have a group of people who fear that the other side, in its attempts to upset the apple cart, is gonna screw things up and ruin everything that is good. And on the other hand you have a group of people who don’t care about the apple cart, or what is good about it, if upsetting the apple cart will correct the things they don’t like.
So on the one hand you have a group of agitators and rabble-rousers out to change things and not particularly concerned about the consequences, and on the other you have a group who just wants things left alone so they can make the best of them without things getting worse.
So, objectively speaking, which side do you think is going to be actively causing all the trouble? And which side is going to be making things worse by adopting the attitude that the other side is comprised mostly of morons and idiots who are selfish, uncaring and evil to boot?
And which side is eventually going to get fed up with all that and start fighting back? And how do you expect things to go once that point is reached?
I predict that things will begin to get pretty damn ugly. In fact, I think they already are.
But by all means, ramp up the insulting rhetoric. Get in people’s faces and really make them hate you. Yeah, that’s a good plan. And then when the other side starts fighting back and things get even uglier, those of you on the left, in your typical fashion, will be making posts to the Straight Dope wondering how things ever got this way. And then of course you’ll blame the other side.
George Will has often said just the opposite, as in his recommendation of John Derbyshire’s book We Are Doomed.
I think at their core, conservatives are absolutely terrified of anything that isn’t just like them: Muslims, crime, Black presidents, weird food, cities, foreigners, long hair, the list goes on and on.