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Tribalism and as Dave Roberts points out in this excellent essay the blame lies largely in one directionNealithi wrote: ↑Fri Sep 14, 2018 1:38 pm I will apologize in advance for my language. I am sorry but I do not feel I can express myself clearer than this.
What the HELL happened to this country!?
For the love of GOD, we used to be better than this horseshit!
It is not alright to throw shoes, pull knives, or fucking shoot our representatives.
DAMNIT.
I am sorry. But this makes no sense to me. I do not like our sitting President. I don't currently like either party as they have both decided to sit at extremes in their rhetoric. But how can this unacceptable behavior just be bubbling up like this?
Back in November 2009, as the Obama backlash was just gathering steam, Rush Limbaugh devoted a segment of his radio program to “Climategate.”
That was the episode in which a climate research institute was hacked and the private emails of scientists were leaked. Conservative media sifted through the emails, stripping individual sentences and phrases out of context and spinning them to look sinister, as though scientists were coordinating and manipulating results. Mainstream media dutifully covered the “controversy.”
No fewer than five separate investigations later cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing, but by then, for a large class of right-wing media consumers, it was already settled history, part of shared lore.
It pushed Limbaugh to new rhetorical heights.
“What this fraud, what the uncovering of this hoax, exposes,” he said, “is the corruption that exists between government and academia and science and the media. Science has been corrupted. We know the media has been corrupted for a long time. Academia has been corrupted. None of what they do is real. It’s all lies!”
Nothing happened to America. It's just the periodic bubbling of hotheads who are upset and want to make a point. It's not as if assassination isn't something unheard of. About 7 years ago, somebody tried to kill Giffords; conflating either side with either of these assassinations is foolish.
That's actually a perfect analogy. It's bubbling up now, but the pot has been slowly heating up for decades.
Really? The Gabby Giffords shooting wasTGLS wrote: ↑Fri Sep 14, 2018 2:40 pmNothing happened to America. It's just the periodic bubbling of hotheads who are upset and want to make a point. It's not as if assassination isn't something unheard of. About 7 years ago, somebody tried to kill Giffords; conflating either side with either of these assassinations is foolish.
Senator Giffords was who I was referring to as being shot recently. But I have to admire her doctor.TGLS wrote: ↑Fri Sep 14, 2018 2:40 pmNothing happened to America. It's just the periodic bubbling of hotheads who are upset and want to make a point. It's not as if assassination isn't something unheard of. About 7 years ago, somebody tried to kill Giffords; conflating either side with either of these assassinations is foolish.
At the time, there was a lot of people who were blaming the Tea Party and the Republicans for the shooting with their wild rhetoric. I agree with both points, but both have faded because of the verdict of history. Here's another way to think about it. If the guy who shot Reagan instead shot Obama, I bet Democrats would blame racism and Republican rhetoric. If he shot Trump, Republicans would blame Democrat rhetoric and SJWs. People are using violence of wingnuts for soundbites these days.LittleRaven wrote: ↑Fri Sep 14, 2018 3:31 pm Really? The Gabby Giffords shooting was
- Not partisan as far as we can tell. Jared Lee Loughner had no particular beef with Democrats as a whole, at most he simply had some generalized anti-government sentiments. His fixation on Gabby doesn't appear to have been particularly motivated by politics, but it's hard to tell, since he's completely nuts. Like, seriously. He suffers from acute paranoid schizophrenia. His worldview is cracked beyond repair.
- Seemingly an isolated incident. We went years without a similar attack either before or after.
By contrast, it's barely been a year since the last time someone explicitly set out to kill Republican lawmakers. I'm not sure Gabby is an entirely appropriate comparison.