“Don’t fight hate with hate” is an example of subtle gaslighting where our legitimate hurt and anger at the injustices we suffer is being equated to the bigotry and abuses of our oppressors. Being angry doesn’t mean you are being hateful, it means you love yourself enough to get upset at your own mistreatment.
The law considers it assault. The asshole that had the punch coming had made verbal threats to a waitress and shoved an elderly man.
The man that started this was clearly out of control.
I meant victims of the modern day Liberals who are acting just like Robespierre, according to our cephalopodic friend.
JohnT I feel like you haven’t read all of MethidmanTMA’s posts in this thread. You are advocating standing up proudly for what you believe in. He seems to be gleefully anticipating civil war.
Nah. I just don’t think we should hesitate or reserve judgement about who is clearly the good guy vs bad guy when it’s very obvious from the context. I certainly won’t suffer those who equivocate or insist on blurring the distinction.
It really isn’t.
Others might say he ended it.
No, I’ve read them. And while I may not agree with the tone, it seems to me that in other epochs in recent Western history where the nature of communications dramatically changes (Printing press>Protestant Reformation, High Speed Press>Newspapers>WW1, Internet>???), vast wars swept the West as we fought through the implications of this change. For example, the printing press itself created issues that weren’t fully resolved until the Peace of Westphalia, by which time Christendom was irretrievably broken.
And now we have the internet, the single greatest vector of mental disorders mankind has ever seen. And it’s being used to shatter everything. America. America’s political parties. The hegemony of the West. Corporate America.
Our sanity.
We literally have people advocating for our extermination. We had a President of the United States who decided not to fight a pandemic because, at the time of his decision, it was a ‘blue state’ problem. We have just went through a summer where hundreds of thousands, millions, erupted with rage about a vaccine they would’ve taken had Donald Trump remained President, thereby extending a pandemic to the tune of 100,000+ excess deaths… and we’re still losing over 1,000 a day to COVID.
They are trying to kill us. I see this in the news every day. Advocating gun training and defending yourself, both physically and verbally, is common sense in this man’s America, because until we come to grips as to what connectivity is doing to our mental health, something nobody even seems to be interested in, there will always be a problem of ‘the crazies’, no matter what their ideological or religious affiliation.
It took Europe 200 years to work through the implications of the press, how it impacted truth and reality. We don’t have 200 years, not with nuclear weapons, not with one party engaged in a significant alternate reality reinforced by the internet itself.
Sure, so charge him with assault. I got no problem with that.
I thought it was a middle aged man. Anyway, it was an escalation.
Yep, and it’s not always a great idea to escalate a situation with an unhinged individual.
One could say the same about BLM, but there are those who have their doubts on that.
Anyway, there was clearly a bad guy here. I don’t know that I would automatically assume that the one who escalated the situation is a good guy.
YMMV, but I don’t see shoving as a fight. It’s an invitation to a fight, a provocation, sure, but not a fight in and of itself. It may legally be chargeable, but that doesn’t mean that it justifies an escalation in violence.
As I said, charge him with assault, let him spend a bit of time enjoying our justice system. It will be harder to charge him with assault now.
He was fortunate in that regard. Guy could have been more physically capable, or worse, had a gun. That could have easily turned into a mass shooting. Wouldn’t be the first time that a fight turns deadly.
Like I said, that’s an anecdote. If we start escalating fights with all right wing idiots, people are going to start getting killed.
OTOH, if the guy had pulled out a gun and shot anti-mask dude, then he probably would be able to claim defense of self and others.
I tend to agree that these things too often devolve into abject lose-lose situations, but …
I don’t think the actions of hoodie-puncher-man weaken the assault and battery charge potential against anti-mask-man. They just … strengthen the possibility of similar charges against hoodie-puncher-man 
Semi-related aside: my username comes from my belief that the USA will eventually devolve into a place where the Constitution, rule of law, and facts no longer matter, and the people with the guns call the shots (pun quite intended).
A) I hope to god you’re wrong.
B) at issue here has that the violet extremes are removing our ability to have civil disagreements *online and in the media *
Because, man, in my day to day, I don’t tend to see it. I DO see the need to tell people “I like you, we get along…we should probably change subjects so that we can continue getting along.”
And the third option: be aware there are influences that are INTENTIONALLY exacerbating the situation for reasons that have nothing to do with your political preferences. They WANT you angry, and violent, and scared.
While I don’t quite share your pessimism over the inevitable fall of civilization, I will point out it is not the people with the guns who will call the shots, it is the people who are able to organize the people with the guns who will call the shots.
In the End Times scenario, lots of people who have guns are going to find out the hard way that a gun doesn’t offer any form of protection. It is other people who provide protection.
As a white straight male, you probably don’t see it. If your only disagreement is whether people who are not white straight males should be treated as human beings and citizens with the same rights as white straight males, then it’s easy to change the subject.
If you are not a straight white male, then whether or not you are treated as a human being and citizen with the same rights as white straight males is something that you are subject to, and not something that you can ask them to politely change.
Yeah, that sums up Fox, OAN, pretty much all the AM airwaves, as well as most right wing politicians.
Nope. Not buying it. You are not dismissing my experiences with that straw man.
To do so paves over the path we need for people to get along. The situation has been recognized and we need to move past it. You do not get past racial bias by saying “except for those people over there”.
Band name!
I’m not dismissing your experiences. I am explaining your admitted lack of experiences. No strawman here.
When someone says they “don’t tend to see it.” either they aren’t around it, or they turn a blind eye to it. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
There are some people out there who will never get along with those they think to be different or other. They will continue to harrass, humiliate, dehumanize, and denigrate them.
If in order for you to get along with them, you have to turn a blind eye to the harm they do to your fellow citizens, and “change the subject”, then you are enabling their hatred.
“The situation”? Which situation is this?
Talk about strawman! How does that relate to anything that I said?
You don’t get past racial bias by implicitly accepting it either.
So. I’m going to make two statements you can agree or disagree with:
- Neither of us are going to say anything that’s going to have the other slap their forehead and exclaim “You’re right!”
- We’re debating different topics.
I got offended at the ‘White CIS Male’ and responded accordingly…even after saying: "[we] are removing our ability to have civil disagreements *online and in the media *
So, with that on the table…there’s no way to adequately convey my experiences and it’s trivially easy for you to throw down the ‘White Straight Male’ card.
And then this isn’t discourse (on what you’re afraid of the other side…in this case, mouthbreathing faith-based koolaid drinking Trump Loving Republicans)…it’s you and I going round and round on something that can’t be resolved to either of our satisfaction.
Forgive me if ‘Your just a White Straight Male’ in this thread doesn’t feel like you’re painting with too broad a brush.
You’re only going to get one side of the story since there aren’t many conservatives here, but yes I"m afraid of the other side for a wide range of very valid reasons
- They’re trying to destroy democracy with voter suppression, gerrymandering, letting partisan legislatures overturn elections, etc.
- They’re so angry over living in a multicultural society that they’re becoming ok with domestic terrorism to suppress movements for equality. We’re basically looking at the genesis of Jim crow in the south, where establishment and extrajudicial oppression and terrorism is used to fight back against multiculturalism. There is an active war on democracy from the right.
- Law enforcement can’t be trusted to take this seriously. Due to institutional and personal biases in favor of conservatism and social hierarchies like white supremacy that pervade law enforcement, they’re probably going to ignore the issue or if they do deal with it, hand out lenient sentences (like the capital insurgents who are getting a few months in jail at worst).
- They’ve never stopped trying to destroy the social safety net or the ability to earn a living wage.
- GOP politicians who obviously know better are appealing to the most ignorant, stupid and dangerous voters in their ranks to further their own careers. There are almost no spines on the right’s politicians.
- They live in a post fact world where they are endlessly victims, its election fraud anytime they lose, and they can just invent facts to suit their narrative and genuinely believe them.
I know conservatives are afraid of us but honestly their reasons are mostly made up from what I’ve seen.
- The left is going to take all our guns (nope).
- The left is going to collapse the economy (if anything, it tends to do better under the left)
- The left wants to make the US communist (we can’t even get centrist legislation passed).
A lot of it is just projection. The right is scared that as they become the minority, they’ll start being treated the same way they treat minorities. They’re scared when white christians are the legislative minority, they’ll be treated hte way they treat non-whites, non-christians, feminists, etc.
It sucks beecause the media doesn’t want to admit that America isn’t as evolved as we say we are. We’re still a nation that is deeply divided by race (and to a lesser degree religion) and all this pushback against democracy and human rights is at root a pushback against multiculturalism.
Like others, I used to put bumper stickers on my car years ago. I don’t do that now, because I don’t want it vandalized.
One of the guys in that business networking group reached out to me on Facebook. It, uh, did not go well:
Note to Spoons; I’m not trying to reply to you directly, the “snip/quote” function doesn’t seem to be working for me so I had to reply and edit out the last couple of paragraphs of your post.
To the OP, yes, I fear the “other side”. I live in Idaho, I’m afraid to voice my political leanings with stickers or yard signs, I own guns and support and believe in the right to do so, but where I used to own them to exercise my right to do so, and to spend a fun afternoon plinking targets at the range, I now own them out of fear that I or my kids and grandkids may (will?) need to defend ourselves from our neighbors some day