Is this an original analogy, or did you read the same rightwing editorial I read? Because it’s a lousy analogy.
In one case, someone wrote a novel. Nothing in the novel said that any real person was a bad person.
In the other case, someone selectively edited videotapes of a real person representing a real person. They did so in a way that made it appear that said organization was engaged in insanely terrible behavior.
You know the Blood Libel? The story that Jews kidnap Christian children, murder them, bake their blood into Matzoh, and eat it as part of their dark rituals? The story that’s incited pogroms and mob violence in different historical contexts? If you’re looking for an analogy to PMC’s videos (in which they claim that Planned Parenthood is murdering children and selling their body parts to fund their operations), I can suggest an analogy more apt than Catcher in the fucking Rye.
Edit: There’s another important difference. If we want to stop nutjobs from riffing off novels, authors have to stop writing novels. If we want nutjobs to stop riffing off variants of blood libel, we need to stop libelling people with said variants. One of these, only one of these is something worth doing.
I’m making no policy recommendations right now, so no, you don’t understand me at all. We need to be able to recognize what’s actually going on before we get into figuring out what changes we make. If we can’t even acknowledge the role of poisonous lies in inciting violence like this, how can we possibly judge what actions we should take?
Let’s determine what’s happened, and why; then we figure out what to do. Let’s not let fear of potential actions distort our view of the truth.
You, among others, in this thread already seem pretty confident you know what happened and why. Despite any weaseling in your last post, it is also clear what you consider the solution to be. You just don’t want to come out and say that you want to stifle PMC. It doesn’t fit in with your image of yourself as A Good Person.
It’s nice that you’ve accused me of weaseling and all, but once again you’re unwilling to confront the issue of what happened. You’ve questioned my evidence, then you’ve questioned my motives, and then when I refuse to lay down and expose my belly and admit the nefarious motives you’ve imagined for me, you’ve come out and made your dumb accusations.
But you still won’t talk about what actually happened. You still won’t talk about the obvious chain of events here, in which PMC told a bunch of lies akin to blood libel, the Republican Party’s presidential candidates and Fox News kept repeating those lies, and lo and behold a terrible asshole ran with the blood libel, and blood flowed.
Why are you so unwilling to talk about the actual chain of events? Why must you instead turn to your stupid attempts at shrinkage?
I think people should be sued and condemned for knowingly making false accusations and libel. If you count that as “muzzling” then you are partially right. Not sure where you got the part about “which you disagree”.
Personally, I want to treat them the same way we would treat a radicalized imam who inspired a terrorist. Part of that would be to publicly condemn and shame them like you are seeing in this thread.
Presumably, you would not condemn an imam for using misinformation and demagoguery to inspire his flock to violence. I assume this will be your stance the next time there is a ‘lone wolf’ terrorist attack that is tied to a Muslim, that you will, to use your words, “comfortable blaming him and his personal demons for what took place. I am not quite so comfortable with trying to tie him to people whose politics I don’t like based on his having parroted a phrase they used.” Do I have your position correctly?
You are free to search my posts for my ever having condemned an imam or, indeed, commented on Islam at all. To the best of my recollection, I have never done so.
You will have to find some other gotcha-ya to prove the hypocrisy of which you are sure I am guilty.
I’m sincerely asking if you would blame a radical imam if someone was inspired by his ranting to go out and commit violence in the name of Islam. Also, would you blame the Black Lives Movement if someone was inspired by their rhetoric to commit violence against a police officer?
I don’t give a crap what Scumpup would or would not do in that case. I don’t give a crap about whether he’s a hypocrite. His argumentative approach here–trying to keep people from discussing what actually happened by spinning fantasies about their true, sinister motives–is contemptible.
If an imam used misinformation to inspire people to violence, there are various reasonable responses to that. Refusing to acknowledge the imam’s actions, and impugning the motives of anyone who dares to talk about what the imam did and how it affected events, is not among those reasonable responses.
You’ve been here long enough to know that I can’t prevent anybody from discussing anything, even if I wanted to do so. Put the victim card away. You can’t play it here.
OTOH, you can’t prevent me from noting that you’re part of the group entirely too loud and confident about the shooter’s motivations and ties to groups of which you disapprove. Your motives aren’t sinister. You don’t rise to the level of sinister. It is no more than common and grubby political opportunism.
Oh, I didn’t say you could. Your attempts to hijack aren’t particularly persuasive.
Of course I can’t prevent you from spouting whatever nonsense you’d like to spout. The best I can do is to stop responding to the nonsense, which is where I’m going with this. Unless you care to address the actual thread instead of engaging in puerile ad hominems, I have nothing else to say to you.
There are seven types of speech that the US Supreme Court has determined NOT to be protected by the US Constitution and its Amendments.
If someone got on TV and said, “Buy my product or service and you will have many interactions with attractive persons of your preferred gender,” and the govt said, “Hey, you cannot say that, because it’s not true!” would you consider that restricting an advertiser’s “free speech”? Of course not!
In the same manner, if someone defames a person or organization by spreading lies about that person or org, that is NOT protected speech, so telling them that they cannot say that in no way limits their right to free expression, because THEY DO NOT HAVE THAT RIGHT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
In this case, not only did the PMC libel PP, they delivered a “go ahead” signal to all the unbalanced people with guns to actually DO something. That is called “inciting violence”, and it is another case of speech NOT protected by the Constitution.
The right is shameless. Again today I caught Limbaugh on the radio, repeating that bullshit about, “where is the blame on Planned Parenthood? They’re the one’s chopping up babies and selling the parts for a profit!” Or words close to that – on his radio show this afternoon.
Usually I listen to him for some recreational outrage on my lunch break, but that really steamed my beanie.