Remember there have already been two Democratic candidates withdraw from races this year because of death threats, leaving their Repub. opponents in office unopposed. It’s like the threat of filibuster, you don’t actually have to use it, just threaten to do so. If there are 100 determined people out there who decide that no Democrat will take office in congress, and each tries to assassinate or intimidate a candidate or office holder, what do you think would happen? How many assassinations or threats per year should we allow before we consider our democracy subverted?
You just prefer to reiterate that unseemly notion each time you’re questioned about it. This suggests, to me anyway, that it is a bit of an alpha-vengeance thing you can’t seem to help.
This isn’t hypothetical. We’ve had people shot before this man was shot. What are you talking about? It’s not an if.
Does anyone not believe the shooters of the past have been more than just a little on the crazy side, believing that yes, they could …(fill in the blank)…by killing said person?
For the most part doesn’t crazy explain the shooter more than ideology?
Sorry I’m not questioning whether such political violence exists or has. I’m questioning the assumption that our democratic system will just continue to work normally if political assassination or credible threats become more common.
One GOP member getting shot today does not mean the system is collapsing anymore than when Gifford was shot, or any of the dozen or times they stopped an Obama assassination. You’re acting like suddenly, like suddenly the system is in danger… why? Because it was an old white man this time instead of a woman, instead of the black president. Every single day there are some extremists in a country with millions of guns who might make the wrong decision. Political people are assassinated in other countries, and that does not mean suddenly we rethink our democratic system.
The way you stated things it was if suddenly one day we had millions of guns and no extremists and one baseball field later we should panic. We have a history of some of our polarizing political figures being murdered, and that is a risk they all take together. That’s one reason why it makes no sense for them to get up their and demonize and dehumanize each other like they do.
I’m highlighting the difference between things which are legislated, and our personal desires.
For instance, I may not like someone, but simply having a law which legalized persecution of them would be bad, because it would likely lead to persecution of other people who I didn’t think deserved it.
That’s where you are now, and I agree. But in your earlier post, which you admitted was very honest but not very nice, you posited the notion that maybe Scalise deserved to die. I think similar thoughts and may be tempted to articulate them and I imagine we’re not alone. But I don’t think we should go there, even if we’re smart enough to phrase those dark feelings in an intellectual, socially acceptable framework. It’s like a Pandora’s Box I want decent QT3 folk to not even flirt with opening.
Remembering Michelle Obama’s advice, I’m worried that when they go low, we might give in to the temptation to go low. Sometimes low feels like the only way to fight low because it’s immediate and viscerally gratifying. The high road takes much longer but decency and truth has a way of prevailing in the long run. Right? RIGHT?!?!
Yeah, I’m not sure that’s really different from what I just said though.
It depends on what you mean by “deserve”. Legally? No. But in terms of raw karma, perhaps. He acts in such a way as to harm millions of people. And he does it for money.
I’m not obligated to feel saddened by his predicament. A bad thing happened to a bad person.
It’s not something we should ensure happens, like we do with law and punishment. It’s more like a happy coincidence.
If someone walked up and shot a Nazi as he was saluting Hitler in front of a synagogue while holding a sign with pictures of Holocaust victims on it, it would still be wrong. I wouldn’t shed a tear for the dead Nazi though.
Funding for the high road has been diverted to a tax break for cops who ruthlessly murder black people on camera and get away with it.
We asked the Nazis once to stop killing people they don’t like but in the end… we had to go to war and kick their ass.
The issue isn’t about extremism here. When extremism is the problem, you already know the majority is not the problem. The real issue is when the majority of the population no longer believes in the system they are supposed to participate in… then you have a problem that will require reform, violence or otherwise. We’re not there yet, not even close.
Sure, I get the idea. But this GOP baseball game shooting was quite different than that.
Maybe I haven’t made it clear what I mean. It’s not about the sympathetic feeling or the lack of the sympathetic feeling, it’s about the expression of that absence of feeling to others. Especially publicly, like here on a forum. I question the motives for doing so because I think some small part of that is in service of a base instinct for revenge. ‘Serves him right.’ I caught a whiff of that in the articles floating around facebook the next day, mainly about gun legislation.
I realize I’m kind of talking to myself and working out my own inner conundrum here, but… 'tis the season of my discontent. Trump is leading the nation into a hellscape of nastiness (but, O, the ratings!) and I’m just doing my utmost to prevent folks I know and love from following him down into that sewer.
Some of it (not for everyone, or all the time, of course) is also that voice in the back of the head that’s saying, “Hey, this is kinda messed up. Are you sure you’re not going wacko? Do other people feel this way? How do they feel about the fact that I feel this way?” That is, this entire conversation is people working through complicated and conflicting feelings. That’s a good thing.
Yeah, ya gotta vent.
Speaking of which, my wife and teenage daughter just blew up at each other for a circumstance that, from my perspective, was completely nobody’s fault. Just unfortunate miscommunication. And yet their first instinct is to yell and blame each other. I know it’s easier to point fingers than accept responsibility but is it really all that difficult? Am I walking the Earth cursed with reason and maturity??
My train of thought here is that conflict in the Morton House and conflict in the White House and conflict in the House and in the Senate and in Hanamura, Eichenwalde, and Watchpoint Gibraltar are all jumbled together in my mind. People fighting because it’s easier than working together. Most discouraging, Donald!
I hear that on the news all of the time. Both sides are at fault. Both sides just need to work together. It doesn’t matter who is to blame.
Well, they aren’t equally at fault and they shouldn’t just work together for the sake of working together if it means compromising what Democrats are supposed to stand for. Not to mention whenever someone says something like "don’t assign blame’ it is ALWAYS talking to democrats when republicans do something bad.
You should be worrying more about whether our democratic system will just continue to work normally with the Russians tabulating our election results.
It is a refrain I have seen often in the last few years that the nation has taken the social and cultural direction it has over the last 40 years because the republicans were always willing to negotiate and compromise. And with each of those the world turned further left. That is why the right wing believes that there should be no more compromise.
Last 40 years? Try the last 40 thousand.
Culture progresses. That’s how humans work.
What kind of terrible cultural changes have happened in the last 40 years that make anything worse?