Well, of course I forgive you! I must simply be mindful of your limitations, and set my expectations accordingly.
Irrelevant, that was 40 years ago. We are talking about what is going on politically right now.
Fine, you found one guy. As opposed to such behavior being pretty much the norm among the Right.
A national campaign of terror, like the one against abortion isn’t a “lone individual action”.
Hahaha. Touhe.
Someone remind me, who’s the chair of the Black Clad Anarchists Committing Vandalism Caucus in the House these days?
The lengths to which the “Loyal” Opposition must go to find a self-absolving tu quoque are sufficiently illustrative in themselves.
Just for the historical record, here’s what Teddy Roosevelt had to say after his own shooting in 1912:
The moral code of humanity has changed so much in 40 years?
My point was that 40years ago, when the left was the purveyor not just of harsh rhetoric but ACTUAL VIOLENCE, I don’t remember the same level of outrage from the left as what we’re seeing now against the right’s harsh rhetoric.
How is that point vitiated by the forty year gap?
Again, and again, and again, what on earth? Does the Left speak with some monolithic voice? Your implication above might be termed the Der Trihs trap: rather than addressing people as individuals, you lump them into a category based on political affiliations and then paint them with a ridiculously absurd brush.
There’s no percentage in playing this “haha, gotcha ya!” game of Who Wants to Be a Hypocrite. So what if every leftist everywhere is a hypocrite? That has zero bearing on the issue of whether the harsh rhetoric in today’s politics is useful.
Think about the implications of what you’re saying.
A) “I don’t remember the same level of outrage from the left as we’re seeing” in regards to 40 years ago. Is this just based off your memory? How old were you then? How well would you accurately recall the political sentiment of the average person at the time? How unlikely is your actual memory of such things actually reflects what you experienced at the time and isn’t filtered by your obviously and hugely biased lens looking back at it?
B) Even if we grant that, which certainly is not reasonable based on your 40 year old biased memories - if you were even old enough to be a politically savvy adult at the time - so what? Are you trying to say that because there wasn’t enough backlash against the extremist leftists 40 years ago, then we shouldn’t criticize what’s going on today? Now that both sides are guilty, are we forever barred from criticizing bad or destructive behaviors?
C) Even if we grant what you say is true, we have no control over the past. We can’t go back in time and reject the leftist extremists. I’m 29. Am I guilty and a hypocrite for not rejecting every over the top something a lefty said in 1962?
D) Even if it’s true, that the leftist extremist groups weren’t nearly universally rejected by the mainstream, did the weatherman have a serious chance of running the democratic party and join their presidential ticket? Even if we take what you say as true, it’s still not equivelant.
Really, all of this “but your guys did something similar at one time!” argument is bullshit. You know your side fucked up, and instead of manning up and saying “yep, I can’t support what they’re doing here” you do the weasel thing by trying to deflect attention from the valid criticisms. It’s still bullshit. Even if you’re right about your charges of hypocrisy, which I’m being very generous by assuming for the sake of argument, you’re still wrong. Past wrongs do not justify future wrongs from the other side.
They were interesting times. In the Chinese sense of the phrase, a sublime curse. The tension hung in the air like a thin cloud of toxic gas, you could only just barely smell it, but it was everywhere. But yeah, because it was about serious shit, it was about war, and lies about war. And race, and lies about race. Damn serious.
What is this nasty bit of theater about? Health insurance. Actuarial tables. Whether a gay guy can wear a uniform while he types at his keyboard. Please.
Over these desperate issues, we mutter darkly about “2nd Amendment solutions”? For these we rend our garments and set our shit on fire?
Great post, SenorBeef. I look forward to the response.
No. You – and you’re far from alone here – miscast the thrust of the “your side did it too” comment.
Here’s an analogy.
Let’s imagine a wrestling league, with on-going competitions between Abe and Baker. In the first match, Abe consistently hits Baker with a chair when the ref’s back is turned.
Baker’s fans express outrage. “That’s against the rules! It’s outright criminal, in fact!” Abe’s fans do not rebuke his behavior.
The next time Abe and Baker meet, Baker uses one of the folding tables near ringside to lay out Abe. Abe’s fans now go beserk, infuriated that Baker used an object to win. Baker’s fans retort that Abe did it first.
The issue is not that the use of objects is wrong. The issue is that the fans on one side present their argument as, “Use of objects is wrong,” which of course the neutral observer will agree with.
But that’s not their actual argument. Their actual belief is, “Use of objects is wrong when the other guy does it, but not when my guy does it.”
So, too, here. Your attempt is to convince the neutral observer that there’s a problem with strong, acerbic, violent rhetoric. But I contend that’s not it. I think it’s only when the Right uses this tactic do you flinch.
You say in response, “Hey, that’s not true. I’m under 30, and trust me, had I been old enough to comment on the war protest bombings, I would have!”
But even then, I’m not so sure. We’ve seen more recent violence from folks that are fairly described as left-wing – how about the global trade protests in Seattle, where windows are broken and streets rendered unusuable by protestors against the WTO in Seattle, in Geneva. Three seconds of searching found a Youtube video.
Again: not simply hinting at violence, here. These weren’t coy uses of targets on a map. These were not references to a Constitutional right to bear arms in a semi-threatening context. These were people smashing windows of buildings in an effort to influence political policy.
And these type of events are why I don’t believe you. Because if you were sincere about your belief that hints of violence had no place in the formulation of political policy I have to believe you might have noticed shit like this going on and said something.
It’s this lack that makes me believe that your condemnation is not violence. It’s violence used for an end you don’t like. I think your dislike for violence is real, but considerably muted when it’s used by your side.
And it offends me to hear the pious denunciaton of violent rhetoric under those circumstances.
Now a caveat.
I could well be wrong about you. I don’t know – maybe you WERE more outraged about the actual violence used by protesters. Probably you were. When I say “you” above, I’m not so much talking about you, SenorBeef, as I am using the pronoun in its indefinite sense. You, personally, may be as purely consistent as the powdered snow.
But you can hardly deny that what I’m describing is the general reaction from the opinion-makers on the Left.
To make your analogy more apt it is not Baker who “returns the favor” (so to speak) to Abe that is the issue. It is the Ref who bashes Abe with the folding table.
In the past it was protesters, largely young adults, behaving poorly.
Currently it is those in power who are misbehaving. Point to congresscritters on the left, back in the day, who were misbehaving in a comparable manner (not to mention a former VP candidate). Point to those on the left, in the past, who had nationally syndicated radio shows. Point to those on the left, in the past, who had their own television programs on a major news network. Point to those on the left who, in the past, had numerous best selling books decrying the evil of the other side.
It’d be one thing if it was just some fringe lunatics. Every side has them.
It is another when the very people in power, the people making our laws and reporting the news are the ones advocating bashing the other side with a table.
Oh, and if you really want to with the, “But he hit me first,” style of argument then I’ll raise you the Red Scare/McCarthyism of the '40s-'50s.
Far more frightening than anything the left ever did.
Really disappointed by the response, although not particularly surprised.
The righties on Fox engage in the same type of rhetoric that McCarthy every day. The concept that leftys want to destroy the US is so wrong… It is stupid mantra but it excites the viewers. They are emotionally attached to the message.
What is the payoff for a lefty to ruin the country?
The right wing has raised the level of acceptable aggressive talk and behavior. The level of discourse has been changed to allow a forum for people like Rush and Beck to air horrible distortions daily. They are entertainers costuming themselves as political pundits. But they appeal to some crazies and fire them up. Tea baggers holding insulting signs of Obama with a Hitler moustache is not designed to make participants warm and fuzzy.
Palin works up the same people. her speeches scare them into thinking Obama is trying to take over the world and bring a socialist government to America. She identifies them as enemies, not just politicians. Her appeal is emotional.
Until proven otherwise, Palin is not responsible for Giffords shooting. I have not heard the shooters logic yet, but I suspect he thinks he was doing America a service. The jury is out on him.
There are all sorts of problems with this analogy. The two big ones are that it presents both sides as monolithic entities, and also that there’s no room for degree of violation. This isn’t just nitpicking, these are very substantial to the issue at hand.
By presenting each side as one wrestler, it suggests any act that either side takes is equally important. But the sides in this case are huge, varied entities of millions of people who range from extreme to moderate and nuanced.
But if you treat them as monolithic entities, you end up saying “Yeah? Ok, so Sarah Palin said this, but some leftie bloggers said something equally as outrageous 8 years ago!” as if just pointing to some random bloggers/conspiracy theorists/assholes on the other side is a valid counter to outrageous behavior by the defacto leader of your party and vice presidential candidate.
The other issue is the degree of violation. And by that I mean - obviously, not all bad arguments, lies, or misdeeds are on an equal level. On threads where people ask why, even before anyone know anything about Obama - in 2007 when his campaign was just getting ramped up - did people throw outrageously hateful things at him? People were calling for him to be killed, that he was a secret muslim, etc. etc. even before he’d said or done anything really.
To which people counter: Well, people said bad stuff about Bush too! But usually they’re referencing stuff like anti-war protestors. Even if you think the Iraq war was a peachy idea - certainly you can recognize that when people called Bush an imperialist, they’re actually referring to things he’d actually done. The KILL THAT COMMUNIST MUSLIM from day 1 was never based on an actual valid reaction to anything Obama had said or done. But people who take the apologist stance “oh both sides are the same” will declare imperialist slurs against Bush as equal violation as secret kenyan muslim communist sleeper cell agent slurs against Obama.
Or to give aother example, Godix gave Keith Olbermann as the example of the left’s Glenn Beck. To him, there’s a left opinionated pundit, and a right opinionated pundit - therefore all sides are equal. It doesn’t matter that Beck is a fucking nut who lies constantly and riles up the crazies whereas Olbermann is nothing like that (in my limited experience with him, anyway). So long as you can generally point to someone on the left that’s remotely similar in some way, you invoke the “all sides are equally guilty” defense.
Look at it this way, because this is the core issue: The idea that both sides are always equally guilty is an ideological position that’s not amenable to facts. It is an integral assumption, and an inherent cognitive bias. Once someone has accepted this position, they do not weigh the evidence of one side against the other to make a nuanced value decision on their merits, they simply handwave away any criticism of their side whatsoever as “both sides are just as bad”
Views that are not amenable to facts are essentially worthless. There’s nothing the republican party could do to cause it’s apologists to say “Oh, ok, they’ve gone too far, now they are more guilty than the other side of this issue”. Having your views not amenable to facts makes you a true believer - you shape the evidence to fit your idea rather than evaluating the evidence. This makes you as rigid as any conspiracy theorist/religious nut/etc.
This is also the rigid view and cognitive bias that has lead to people being completely unable to see, or unable to admit they see, the massively obvious radicalization in the republican position over the last 3-4 years. The idea that nothing has changed or that someone couldn’t honestly see it is so wildly absurd to me that I have a very difficult time taking it as an honest, serious position.
So, given that you accept the idea that both sides are equally guilty, when someone points out a wrong done by someone in your political tribe, you don’t even try to evaluate whether or not it’s actually wrong. You simply immediately rush to try to find some counter-example, no matter how tenuous, of the other side acting in remotely the same way, so then you can declare the other side hypocrites and implictly declare that the charges against your side are rendered irrelevant. This view is not only useless, but dangerous - once you’re enough of a true believer, your side could start having official policies of puppy rape and mandatory lead in the water and you’d try to find something bad the other side did at some point in the past to declare all sides equally guilty again.
I didn’t actually say that. I asked if I was being held guilty for something that happened before I was even born, and therefore all my criticsms of things that are actually happened now could be handwaved away.
I don’t know enough about that time period, and about what was done by them, to condemn it. It’s not something I’ve learned much about. So I don’t comment on it. The issue of the radicalization of the republican party is something I’m interested in and have opinions about.
And with this, you establish ridiculous standards for me. If I don’t read, and participate in, and roundly condemn every single thread on the boards in which anyone advocates or does violence, then clearly I’m not ideologically consistent like I claim!
The reality is that some subjects will interest me, and some won’t. I’ll know a lot about some, and not about others. I’m not going to participate in every thread and subject, and I can’t denounce every action that I may or may not even know about.
By doing this, you are essentially saying that if you can find any thread ever about inciting or commiting violence, where I haven’t made some explicit denouncement in, then I’m a hypocrite and can’t have any credibility on the issues where I do choose to participate. This is obviously bullshit and simply another disengenuous tactic on your part to relieve the pressure of the cognitive dissonance you feel due to your true believer partisan support of your side combined with things they do that you know on some level are wrong.
This isn’t a necesary conclusion, actually. For instance, perhaps I do support violence in some instances and not others in a way that does not correlate with political affiliation. Maybe I support the idea of people who are oppressed violently uprising, but not about political assassination over fucking health care reform and blatant lies. Your positions make too many assumptions and leave no room for nuance.
If your links were less absurdly tenuous, you might have a point. If I criticized republicans for lying about health care reform and calling for violence, but then approved of democrats lying about, say, global warming and calling for violence, that might be legitimate hypocrisy. But we’re back to the ideological position that all sides are equally guilty - you will offer up any counter-example no matter how much of a stretch, because that’s essentially what you have to do to satisfy that ideological position. So if you can’t find anything to declare hypocrisy over that’s roughly equal, you’ll keep broadening the net until you can figure something out. This is how you end up with absurd positions like “your opinion on violence happening right now is invalid because you haven’t gone back and specifically denounced every instance of violence throughout history, even the ones you don’t know anything about!”
Is there any direction the republican party could take that would cause you to denounce it rather than trying to find some vague, tenuous counter-example of the left? What facts would change your view on the issue of both sides always being equally guilty?
Not even close. The real terror visited by the left was winning elections. Since America is firmly center-right, this could only have been accomplished by underhanded means. First, of course, is the iron grip of the liberal media. Secondly, voter fraud, as funded by the child prostitution income of ACORN. And, of course, a campaign of terror and intimidation applied nationwide by a couple of black guys, one of whom was carrying a stick.
Were it not for the civic virtue of some of our major corporations and their willingness to pour their stockholder’s money into the political process, there’s no telling how much damage the left might have done. And K Street lobbyists, of course, that band of firm advocates for the public, who work miracles with a few paltry billions in campaign donations.
Just lately, the left has been bent on our destruction by forcing millions of uninsured people into socialized health care, the same sort of ghastly tyranny so very many others groan beneath, the poisoned apple that keeps the doctor away, forever.
That America is not utterly crushed beneath the Birkenstock jackboot of liberalism can only be credited to these, the few, the brave, the rich. We should gather outside their gated communities and sing their praises while keeping a respectful distance.
Just to clarify something quickly, I acknowledge that things aren’t equal. The party not in power tends to be the worse one of the time. So yes, the rabid right wing are currently spewing more vitrol than the wacko left wing. During Bush’s era it was reversed, the right wing was toned down and the left wing was spewing vitrol. During Clinton is was the right again. During the first Bush & Reagan it was the left. Before that is beyond my personal memory. Olbermann isn’t as bad as Beck is. Beck is pretty extreme even for a wacko fringe element. However, Olberman is still pretty bad.
Which is the second clarification I wanted to mention. The point, really, isn’t that both sides are equal. The point is both sides are bad. Period. It doesn’t matter if if Olberman is an exact equal for Beck or not. It just matters that Olberman is bad. Beck may be like being up to your neck in shit, and olbermann may be like being up to your chest in shit. Who cares about the difference? We’re covered in their shit either way.
I believe that, by and far, both Democrats and Republicans honestly want what is best for the country. Neither want to destroy it, kill people, starve old folks, steal our children’s future, or whatever demonizing talking point is popular at the moment. The people I respect are one who discuss politics with an understanding of ‘my opponent has an idea he believes will help people. He’s not evil, but he is wrong and here’s why…’
But that’s not what I’m seeing around here. What I’m seeing is, basically, ‘Those conservatives are sooooo evil and us liberals are soooooo angelic…’ And that doesn’t fly with me. A discussion on incivility or hateful rhetoric that is targeted at only one side is, in and of itself, an example of incivility and hateful rhetoric.
You actually seem to acknowledge all of this within your post. Then you end by asking how far the republicans have to go. Attacking republicans for not being civil isn’t going to fix the problem. Attacking republicans, and only republicans, for not being civil actually is a part of the problem. If extreme rhetoric is what the concern is, then the problem is daily kos, palin, media matters, beck, olbermann, violent protesters, limbaugh, second amendment remedies, lining a republican against the wall and shooting him, and - based on threads like this - the straight dope.
Then I submit that you’re seeing what you want to see. 'Cause what I’ve been reading here- and elsewhere- is more akin to, “Those conservatives are pretty bad, and us liberals… well, we’re not as bad.” There have been multiple admissions that liberals have done bad things. Those bad things, however, are vastly outweighed by the bad things that conservatives have done.
And one side, by the way, is saying that “it’s not so bad, and the other side does it too, and therefore no, we don’t actually need more civility”. I’ll leave identifying which party is doing that as an exercise for the alert reader.