Exactly. That’s what half the people in this thread aren’t getting.
As far as I’m concerned, you have to be nuts to shoot someone in the head. So by John Mace’s standards, no one could ever be accountable for inciting violence, because those who engage in it are crazy. That’s some catch, that Catch-22.
This is like blaming rap music for rape.
Regards,
Shodan
Can you quote the post where I said that? I’ll give you a few tries, and then I’ll quote the post where I specifically said they could be. OK?
Well, I take what you’re saying, but I read through his gibberish and found no discernable political thread to grasp. In fact I was unable to discern evidence of sufficiently functional machinery to contain any semblance of a coherent political ideology. We’re not talking about a Tim McVeigh league of nuts; we’re talking about full-on paranoid schizophrenia. This guy will sail through an insanity defense.
When someone is this far around the bend that they think the government is employing mind control by manipulating English grammar, the phrase “political motivation” really ceases to have any meaningful interpretation. I’d like to see less making of subtle threats of violence, of course, but I’m not about to say everyone needs to watch what they say because paranoid schizophrenics may do something bad. They can just as easily flip out over a toilet paper commercial.
And since it doesn’t have to be someone’s fault, it may as well be the Right’s fault.
At least , that’s what I’m getting form the lefty asswipes masquerading as human beings populating this so-called “fighting ignorance” [del]message board[/del] propaganda machine.
ExTank, you know better than this. This isn’t the Pit.
This thread is slightly more civil than the one in the Pit, but not by much. It might be possible to discuss this issue in a civil way at some point. I don’t think that’s possible barely 24 hours after the shooting, when the emotions are raw and not that much is known about the motives of the shooter. I’m locking this thread. Feel free to continue discussing this in the Pit thread.
After being asked to reconsider, I am reopening this thread. As noted above, personal comments and insults don’t belong in this forum. To wit:
This kind of commentary is not appropriate for GD. Save it for the Pit.
This is pushing it, and a few of your other posts are borderline junior-modding. Please dial it back.
There are enough relevant and on-topic posts that I think we can discuss this topic rationally. I’ll start handling out warnings if there are more comments like the ones quoted above, however.
Wow. Anyone not on “the right” is a martyred priest. (Putting aside that the congresswoman was prob. as close to the right as the left). Did not expect to see outright claims to near-divinity/sainthood from self-identified liberals, but why not?
The underlying idea is stupider than that, as targeted political assassination has, if it were a policy of “the right,” proven remarkably, colossally, inefficient in eliminating leftist politicians in a targeted way. Other than Ray, I can’t think of a single instance in which an identifiably “right wing” person succeeded in eliminating a person of the Left. No, I’ll be generous and include Rudolph and the Slepian guy. Three over the last hundred years? Wow, what a dumb policy. But I forgot – in addition to being enemies of the priestly liberals, the right wingers are also “stupid.” Covering all our bases with one go here.
As far as the topic goes, I’ll offer this: I think we can differentiate between martial figures of speech, and comments that depict the political opposition as a threat that could or should be opposed by violent means. Some of the figures of speech are crass and stupid and they encourage people to look at politics as a fight rather than part of government, but I don’t think they lead to violence. The “Second Amendment Remedies/death panel/blood of tyrants” stuff is another story. The comments about Second Amendment Remedies and death panels weren’t figures of speech; they were intended to be statements of fact. If your strategy to get votes involves telling people the government is trying to kill them, it’s not a surprise if someone in that group tries to kill someone. It’s self defense from their point of view.
It’s too soon to tell if any of that is relevant to what happened in Arizona. We don’t know very much about the shooter’s background and we don’t know anything about his motivations other than the fact that he wanted to kill Gabrielle Giffords. The stuff he posted on the internet is mostly insane.
While I don’t agree with **GIGO **on this, you really did a great job of misinterpreting his analogy, and then taking that misinterpretation literally.
No, he didn’t lump everyone “not on the right” together, and no, he didn’t literally mean they were martyred priest.
My favorite from the teahadists is “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” - Thomas Jefferson.
You’re right about it not being reasonably construed as a figure of speech.
It’s not too soon to tell if it lowers inhibitions against anyone going ahead with actions inspired by such “warnings” - even the inhibitions found in the residual sanity of a schizophrenic.
Nope.
amounts to an affirmative proposition that gun rights advocates have, as a principal motivation, the goal of arming crazies who will then go on to eliminate the political opponents of “some in the right.” I rightly called bullshit on that because it’s a bullshit argument and comports not at all with reality.
Putting aside some allowance for hyperbole (Becket), he made an affirmative proposition, which I presume he meant seriously, that was not, in fact, capable of being taken seriously. Just to take one example, any group of “some on the right” politically powerful enough to enshrine easy availability of guns to empower lone gunmen to (presumably reliably?) identify and eliminate the “correct” leftist enemies (how likely is that when most lone gunmen are mentally unstable? Oh, I get it – most on the right are not only stoopid but also mentally unstable?), is also more than sufficiently politically powerful to eliminate/deny influence to those leftist enemies DIRECTLY.
Hint: not a lot of actual historical right wing regimes gained access to the levers of power by liberalizing gun availability and just leaving it to the populace to run with it.
If he didn’t mean it seriously, he shouldn’t have said it – not my job to assume he’s joking when he makes an affirmative proposition in a debate.
If you have made statements contradicted the position I assigned to you, I’m big enough to admit I missed them (no need to play the 3 tries game). So my revised statement reads as follows:
You are wrongly claiming that the phrase “some on the right” in some magical, (to you), manner equates to “gun rights advocates.” You are simply wrong in what you claim was posted and so your conclusion is false.
First, the statement is clearly directed toward a limited number of people on the political Right, (my guess would be Palin, Beck, and similar people already noted in the thread). Second, it says nothing, at all, about “gun rights advocates,” (unless, in your imagined world, the only “gun rights advocates” are a limited number of people on the political Right).
You misread the statement (twice) and have overreacted to it.
The depth of analysis on that rebuttal is astounding.
Cisco: Are you seriously saying that anyone arguing in this thread thinks that no one can incite others to violence? Charles Mason easily comes to mind. If you are talking about people not participating in this thread, well, it’s hard to argue against some anonymous person whose reasoning we have no access to.
Yeah, that line of hiscaused the Civil War. 
That’s the road that posts like this are going down:
Also see:
and:
Now it’s time for you to answer a question. Do you seriously believe that if I created a hit list (joking or not; metaphorical or not), posted it all over the internet, and someone on that list was shortly thereafter shot in the head, that I would not be investigated? Because it is going to be very difficult to take anything else you say seriously if you double down on that stance.
Can you spare a guy an “n”? 
None of those quotes says that it’s impossible to incite others to violence. At the most, they make an analogy about Palin and the many sources of violent imagery in our everyday culture.
As for your hypothetical, I’ll say no, unless there is something else that more directly links you to the murder. The internet is a vast, vast space, my young Padua. If the cops chased down every would be rabble rouser on the intertubes, they would be doing nothing else.
You are still having trouble with your "n"s–as well as confusing “u” for “aw.”