Bingo. And basically, just defending his “client”. At the moment, he’s admitted his client’s guilt, and is now trying to “appeal to the jury” by trying to find mitigating circumstances to reduce the length of the sentence. It’s what he does.
…you are a smart person Bricker. You could start by reading my posts. The first step is to “define outrage.” Then provide a “measure for outrage”. And if you can’t do that: then no you can’t argue your fucking thesis. And this thread proves that point: because you have failed to convince a single person in this thread that your thesis is valid.
I’ve already told you that you are free to discuss whatever the fuck you like here. Nobody has stopped you from suggesting that the outrage arises here from partisan leanings.
But you have failed to make your case. And you’ve failed miserably. I think that everybody in this thread agrees that Miller-Young should have been fired. But the stakes are not the fucking same and I know that you know this. Miller-Young represents Feminist Studies at the University of California. Gianforte now represents the people of Alabama. I’ve watched the Miller-Young video and it in no-way compares to the Gianforte audio. Even if outrage were measurable, I would argue that a discrepancy between the levels of outrage is entirely appropriate here because the specifics of each incident is entirely different and so are the stakes. Gianforte is in the position to make changes that will affect not only the people of Alabama, but also the people of the United States. Miller-Young is not and will never be in that position. She teaches feminism for fucks sakes. These incidents are not comparable.
Montana. 
:: UP YOURS ::
…thanks for the correction. 
Why should he ? Andrew Jackson fought (possibly) dozens of them on the White House lawn, and I’d like to see you tell him he ought to resign !
I don’t think it’s possible to define, in a quantifiable way, “outrage.” I’m not even sure by what units outrage can be measured.
But because I can’t, you’re telling me that I can’t argue that people are reacting to incidents like these based on political affiliation?
OK, please stay with me here.
Let’s imagine – JUST AS A HYPOTHETICAL – that next year Al Franken gets pissed at Sean Hannity and actually does body-slam him after Hannity runs a story claiming the AHCA actually improved insurance coverage, yelling, “Maybe NOW you’ll see how important medical coverage is!”
AGAIN, I am in NO WAY saying that is likely to happen. It’s a hypothetical, intended to explore what you’re saying. OK?
So, let’s further imagine that the majority of posters here opine that Hannity deserved it, that Hannity’s reporting was harmful to Americans, and basically that Hannity is a dick.
IF that happened, I still could not quantify “outrage.”
But are you saying I still couldn’t argue that response to a physical assault was based on political affiliation, and not the merits?
No, no – that’s not quite the case. The objection hasn’t been that my evidence is unconvincing. It’s that “outrage” can’t be measured, and that pre-social-media public reaction cannot be compared to post-social-media reaction. In other words, you’ve not said that my examples are unconvincing, but that they are INVALID.
I don’t know that to be true. In the thread on her actions, there were plenty of posts that called her actions trivial, or suggested that the action was negligible, or otherwise minimized it.
I can’t quantify outrage, but I can see it wasn’t there in those posts.
Yes, yes, absolutely true. But what kind of changes do you fear he’ll make?
Isn’t it fair to say you fear the changes he’ll make based on his status as a conservative billionaire creationist Republican, much more than his status as a misdemeant body-slammer?
What kinds of changes do you worry about from him? Federal amnesty for street fighting? Or support for the AHCA and permanent cuts for Planned Parenthood?
See my point?
As I said, it is also not a good idea to continue to act as if your “examples” are still valid. There is really no good evidence that what Franklen did was a body slam. He was also for practical reasons assisting the authorities. That may had been indeed foolish, but any charges against him should had been possible if he had indeed approached a heckler that had not shown already moves to prevent being taken out of the premises or resisting arrest.
Again, not my problem if you want to continue to foolishly repeat items that most likely did not take place.
The paragraph you quote refers to Gianforte’s status as a body-slammer. You can tell this because I said: “Isn’t it fair to say you fear the changes he’ll make based on his status as a conservative billionaire creationist Republican, much more than his status as a misdemeant body-slammer?”
Gianforte is the conservative billionaire creationist Republican, and the body-slammer.
Ok, my mistake there. Of course, the follow up is that you are tacitly acknowledging that using the Franken cases as a counter was really dumb.
And before I forget, I did not want to deal with the rest of your post, but yes, being a creationist means that he is also against science in general, and that includes also climate science. Yes, how he will vote on many issues can cause a lot of harm.
Nothing in my post makes such an admission.
Yes, I absolutely believe that this is a major source of the opposition to Gianforte.
But this doesn’t go away if Gianforte had chosen to glare harshly at Jacobs instead of physically attacking him. Right?
And that’s my point: the outrage against Gianforte is based on things like his creationism, not so much on his WWE impersonation.
…I’m not telling you that at all. Read my posts. You can argue whatever you fucking like.
I’m telling you though that unless you can measure outrage in some sort of quantifiable way then there is no way you can prove your thesis. And you can’t. You are just an angry bitter man shaking your fist into the wind. I suppose you are using the pit as designed: being a ranty mcranter.
Nah, I don’t think I will. I find hypotheticals boring.
If your hypothetical were to happen I think that there would be rioting on the streets. I think that the hatred of Al Franken would rise to unthinkable levels. The left would write editorials denouncing him we would have a 17 page thread in the pit where everybody on the left will call Al Franken rude names. The outrage would be at unthinkable levels. The left would demand Al Franken apologise, and if he didn’t then the left would all vote for Donald Trump in a mass protest.
So if your hypothetical were to happen, I think you would see the biggest ever explosion of outrage ever from the left. Franken would be forced to resign, the Democrat leadership would all fall on their swords, Obama would come out of retirement just so that he could resign again, JFK would rise from the dead just to tell Al Franken that he has been a naughty naughty boy.
As I said: I don’t like hypotheticals…don’t expect me to place nice with them.
Yes it fucking is. I literally said to you “You can discuss it all you fucking like.” And you can. So it is quite the case, thank you very much.
Nope. One (of several) objections that I have are that the incidents you have cited are not comparable, and they are not.
I said “nobody has stopped you from suggesting that the outrage arises here from partisan leanings”. What the fuck does what you said have to do with what I said? You can keep on suggesting whatever the fuck you like here.
What I said was true. **That **thread is not **this **thread. I said “I think that everybody in **this **thread agrees that Miller-Young should have been fired.” If you don’t think that sentence is true, then you should be citing people from this thread, not some other fucking thread.
And I’ve explained to you why the levels of outrage wouldn’t be comparable anyway. I watched the Miller-Young assault and it was the typical “stop touching me!” assault: still unacceptable, but order of magnitude different from a body slam followed by a succession of punches to the face. And there is nothing really at stake with Miller-Young. People are genuinely scared that they will loose access to healthcare if the ACHA passes: and if they do loose access to healthcare then they will die. Millions of people are in that boat. The stakes are different: the level of outrage is different. That isn’t the result of hypocrisy: that is simply to be expected.
Well duh. Isn’t that what I said in an earlier post?
No I don’t see your point, and you essentially just confirmed mine. The questions that the reporter asked was about his support for AHCA in light of the CBO, and as I’ve already told you part of the outrage over this incident was that not only did he not answer this question prior to the election, he still hasn’t answered the fucking question.
You are looking at this incident in a vacuum: focusing only on the assault. But it isn’t only the assault that has caused the “outrage.” You aren’t this stupid. Why are you acting so stupid?
But now it seems you’re confirming what I am arguing: that the severity of the reaction to this assault is grounded in the political positions taken by the assaulter.
I’m not acting stupid – I am trying to get you to explicitly say what you seem to be only willing to hint at.
Unless the “stupid” is to hint that: (a) yes, it’s political, and (b) it’s stupid for you, Bricker, to expect anyone to actually admit it, but connect the gawddam dots!
Is that it?
…your thesis was “that the outrage associated with this incident is grounded mainly in the political party of the malefactor”.
I’ve bolded the points that you have changed in your thesis. Has your thesis changed?
What the fuck is it do you think I’m hinting at? I’m not hiding anything from you at all. I’m not playing games with you. I don’t have some secret agenda. It is pretty obvious your debate strategy is to trick me into contradicting myself. But the thing is your debate tactics suck. They aren’t going to work on me.
What the fuck are you going on about now?
Its stupid to compare this incident with the 3 that you have because apart from extremely superficial commonalities they are not similar events at all. And to continue to do that when virtually everybody in this thread has pointed this out to you is just plain stupid.
And now you think I’m “hinting” at something. Does anyone else following along in the thread think I’m hiding something? Can you be explicit and tell me what you think I’m hinting at?
The thing is, it’s not a binary system. While there may be posters who have actually said that any violence whatsoever is unacceptable, if they have said that, then they, IMHO, are mistaken. (Not going back through the thread, but I don’t think anyone said so in such unconditional terms. If they did, they are in the minority, and you don’t need to worry about them being an important part of the conversation, and as I said, I feel that that is mistaken if they did, so have no interest in defending such a statement.)
IMHO, violence is acceptable in 3 circumstances.
-
Defense against someone else who has initiated violence.
-
As part of a legitimate mandate to maintain order against those who would refuse to allow order.
-
As a response to oppression.
The Franken incident fell under 2. Security had a legitimate mandate to use appropriate levels of force up to violence to remove the trespassing heckler (FTR, I have no problem with hecklers showing up at speeches or rallies, as long as they speak their piece, and allow themselves to be escorted out, that’s civil disobedience, maybe illegal occasionally, but, IMHO, ethically fine.), Franken helped out. It still makes me question his judgment a bit that he thought it was a good idea to get involved, but it does not make me question his ethics.
This congressional candidate did not use violence for any of the ends that I find acceptable, so he shows not just poor judgement, but poor ethics. If he is willing to use violence to avoid an annoyance that comes along with the job that he is seeking, then I do not feel that he can be trusted to behave ethically when he is given more power.
And it is a sliding scale. I don’t know that I have ever actually sat down to give it specific metrics, but candidates get or lose points in my mind, and the candidate with the most points over a certain threshold gets my vote.
There are things that can add to or detract from those points, and most of them are based on the candidate, and not just their politics, but their personality and ethics as well.
And finally, we get to the point… In my mind, his actions were worth quite a number of demerits to his score. A large enough number that even if I agreed with him on most policies, I would still not want him representing me. That does not mean that I would necessarily vote for his opponent, but it would certainly mean that I could not support this candidate with my vote. There are no number of policies or positions that he could be in agreement with me for me to find his behavior acceptable enough to actively wish him to represent me.
So, throwing out arbitrary numbers, in a scoring system in which any particular policy or position is worth 5-10 points, his action is worth at least -150. From your comments, I take it your metric is different, and that you would only assign maybe somewhere between -25 to -50 points for his action, enough to question your vote, but not enough to forbid it.
:rolleyes:
That roll eyes is there because in a single statement you only showed all how your hability to do logic has been shot by ideology.
That statement of yours then logically means that my post #347 is 100% relevant again, like I said there, it is not my problem that you continue to accept the stupid spin the right wing gave to the Franken incidents when there is evidence that there was no body slamming from Franken.
:rolleyes::rolleyes:
Double one because you are really just defending a crank magnet. The first roll-eyes is for that, if you are Republican and a creationist you are already putting a sign on you that fighting ignorance is the least of your qualities.What I found is that Gianforte is the worst kind of creationist, young earth creationists not only deny evolution but also geology and history as well. (And there goes a lot of funding for science away)
The second point (or roll eyes) is to point out for the thousandth time to you that we on the left are not a hive mind. Personally speaking I was not aware until yesterday of his Young earth creationism. A poster in this thread is what pointed out that Gianforte was a creationist. I then used just my educated experience and deduced that Gianforte was almost for sure a climate change denier. And as I found also yesterday, Gianforte is also a certified climate change denier.
Meaning that my opposition to him was based all along on what a jerk he demonstrated to be by body-slamming a reporter. The qualification as a jerk did go double for him and many other Republicans because part of the defense used to justify his actions was that the reporter did deserve it. That is really slouching towards fascism.
So, besides the crank magnetism many Republicans are relying on, a big reason why most Republicans nowadays do not deserve to gain power nowadays.
Your point about the outrage against Gianforte being based mainly on things like his creationism is not only simple, but wrong and dumb.
Not substantively. I think “political party” is a reasonable proxy for “political positions taken,” and “outrage” a reasonable way to describe the severity of the reactions.
I think you’re hinting that it’s obvious that a billionaire creationist Republican is going to get more shit here for whatever he does than a banjo-playing Democrat.
And I think you’re hinting that it’s stupid of me to expect otherwise.
And I think you’re hinting that it’s stupid of me to expect a frank admission of that truth.
And, GIGO, rest assured I am not a creationist. This is another favorite tactic: I must be “defending” Gianforte because I agree with him.
As it happens, I do agree with him on more than a few of his positions. But not creationism.
But you knew from the beginning he was a Republican – right?
GOP candidate Greg Gianforte has financial ties to US-sanctioned Russian companies
Oh, he just has some index funds with Russian stocks. Everyone has those, right? No big deal, right?
How many of you have a quarter million dollars invested in funds that track the Russian economy? Of course, he’s worth more than 65 million bux, so I guess it’s just pocket change to this man of the people. Just a regular guy. With stocks in companies that have been sanctioned by the US government.
But in today’s world, we’re not allowed to ask him about that. He might get violent. Which is OK, because if a Democrat got violent with a reporter, there would be hypocrisy. And that’s what this thread is about.
I’m happy to dump on the guy for assaulting the reporter. That pings a good 7 or 8 (out of 10) on my outrage meter. For having 0.38% of his net worth invested in a Russia-based index fund? Doesn’t even register 0.38 on my outrage meter.