Quote (thesnipa @ Jul 12 2019 11:21am)

what on earth does that have to do with treason tho? thats a consequence of modern political rhetoric and social media.

100% of people in congress who aren't hermits have gotten death threats, regardless of their mundane positions.

Democrats run an ad with fake dog caged children or Obama era detention center photos. AOC retweets them all as does Pelosi. thats the kind of shit the leads to softball practice attacks.

people who think Trump is the driving force behind political division in the USA need their head checked. go arrest Zuckerberg, he's the culprit. he's Frankenstein, yet the monster gets all the vilification. what do people expect? trump leaves in 2024 and the country reverts to a happy place? we've got another 50+ years of this or more, if we're lucky. we're in the slalom hill. the learning curve. like in limitless when he takes the pill and its too overwhelming, then he normalizes. we're all hearing each other, and thats a huge problem. all the divisions were always there, they were just contained.

my advice is to focus on the big stuff, like trump literally saying "get him out of here, rough him up" at a rally. if we're in a place where "omg he said treason, omg omg" being literal violence we're at peak hyperbole.

Quote (IceMage @ Jul 12 2019 10:26am)

I already explained it above. When you group journalists or political adversaries into the same categories as Al Qaeda or Aldrich Ames, it creates an environment where killing journalists or Democrats is a legitimate use of collective self-defense.

Quote (thesnipa @ Jul 12 2019 11:31am)

legitimate to fucking whackos?

so we're now at the point where people who are mentally insane can make abstract connections using flippant language and the people who used the flippant language are responsible?

no one is going out and shooting anyone that doesnt have a serious mental problem. unless im actually talking to Scaly and war on the streets is happening.

seems like you want shit on the wall to stick to trump. but inside the shit is a rock like a dirty snowball from the class bully.

Quote (IceMage @ Jul 12 2019 10:42am)

Uhh... we live in a country that elected a reality show star as president. The most successful news shows in the country talk about coups and other weird, reckless ideas. So I don't know what's hard to understand about criticizing the most powerful guy in the country for deepening the divide and grouping fellow Americans into the same categories as people who we shoot or put to death.

Also... how deranged do you have to be to connect the label "enemy of America" with someone who should be killed? Not very. We use that label for plenty of people who everyone agrees we should kill.

Quote (Voyaging @ 18 Jul 2015 08:26)

I'm seriously so sick of hearing about Trump already; he's a fringe candidate who stands no chance at getting the nomination. He's this year's Ron Paul (gets tons of attention on the internet but loses by a landslide).

Quote (thesnipa @ Jul 12 2019 11:46am)

So in your head its bad, but in reality we've had like 1 political shooting/attack since Trump took office.

it's bad in my head too, and i expected far more political violence from 2016-2020. but here we are in reality where rhetoric is barbaric, death threats are abound, and the world turns on.

i can connect all kinds of things, 7 degrees of kevin bacon. that doesnt mean the two people know each other in reality.

Quote (Goomshill @ Jul 12 2019 11:56am)

Hey icemage lets back up a few pages

Does someone saying "Abortion is murder" automatically mean that they are saying women who have abortions should be hung from the neck until dead?

Quote (IceMage @ Jul 12 2019 11:08am)

Yes, only in IceMage's head is it bad when the president groups journalists in with America's enemies. And who would ever dare to suggest being an enemy of America could result in bodily harm?

Quote

Who is saying it?

If it's Trump, apparently we have to apply a totally different standard to his rhetoric. He's not really saying abortion is murder, he's just engaging in hyperbole, and his words have no effect on the national discourse. If an abortion clinic got shot up a week after he said it, it would be liberal propaganda to talk about the connection.

Quote (IceMage @ Jul 12 2019 11:08am)

Who is saying it?

Quote (Goomshill @ Jul 12 2019 12:36pm)

Its the reason Kevin Williamson got fired from The Atlantic after only a mooch.
The very point of that language has been a political topic and that was just one example of it.

There are many people who believe fetuses are human life, and killing them is thus murder. And murderers get the death penalty.
When you abstract away that many layers, how can you logically distance abortion from the death penalty? If abortion is to be treated as murder, then its only fitting that women who abort babies should get the rope.
Personally I find it an important logical argument to make, because working backwards from 'the death penalty for abortion' you can demonstrate to pro-lifers why they need to either accept abhorrent extremism or disavow absolutism

Its a lesson in context, nuance and the limitations of labels. People can believe that fetuses are human life and abortion is "murder" without thinking that it should merit the death penalty, or even necessarily any penalty at all- because of the unique circumstances of it that separate it from an act of violence between two independent human bodies.