Merged Rep. Giffords Shot In Tucson

[Thunder]

I win.

PM me for my Paypal ID or other options for paying me the $20 that you now owe me.

that's cute, as clearly that was a typo. I clearly meant to say the "2nd Amendment", in my post that you linked to.

I see no reason to amend the 1st Amendment. But the 2nd Amendment? totally.

 

[Infoexcavator]

that's cute, as clearly that was a typo. I clearly meant to say the "2nd Amendment", in my post that you linked to.

I see no reason to amend the 1st Amendment. But the 2nd Amendment? totally.

Your bet is impossible to win, everything is clearly a typo...

 

[Cavemonster]

Your bet is impossible to win, everything is clearly a typo...

As funny as it would be to see thunder hoisted by his own quote, what he says is pretty clearly true from context. It is his quote, and he was in the process of talking about limiting guns, not speech.

However, even if it was typed erroneously, I think it still satisfies the conditions of the bet. The bet was about what can be seen in the thread.

 

[Thunder]

As funny as it would be to see thunder hoisted by his own quote, what he says is pretty clearly true from context. It is his quote, and he was in the process of talking about limiting guns, not speech.

However, even if it was typed erroneously, I think it still satisfies the conditions of the bet. The bet was about what can be seen in the thread.

Since I made the bet and made the offer, I get to set the terms.

No one called for the amending of the 1st Amendment...except as a typo.

 

[Vortigern99]

"1nd" or "2st" would be a typo.

"1st" for "2nd" is a mistake, an error of your thought processes, to which you must own up if you expect to maintain a degree of credibility on a board whose express purpose is in applying critical thought to any matter at hand.

 

[Thunder]

"1nd" or "2st" would be a typo.

"1st" for "2nd" is a mistake, an error of your thought processes, to which you must own up if you expect to maintain a degree of credibility on a board whose express purpose is in applying critical thought to any matter at hand.

typo, mistake, error, yada yada yada...

you get the point. I meant to say "2nd Amendment" but mistakenly wrote "1st Amendment".

we cool?

 

[GreyArea]

I've been following this thread (and the larger national argument) since Saturday, and I've noticed two things that seem to be missing. Here is one.

I think too many people are imagining two massive opposing political monoliths, when in reality there are several Left factions, several Right factions, and maybe even some adamantly Centrist factions. This is true even in the contemporary United States, which has an Overton Window much narrower than what is found in Western Europe.

Look, the leadership of the Democratic Party in Washington is not in bed with, for example, the Animal Liberation Front. And the latter probably considers the former completely useless and conservative. Yet they are both characterized as part of "The" Left. Meanwhile, the leadership of the Republican Party in Washington is not in bed with, for example, the National Alliance. The latter probably considers the former completely useless and liberal. Yet they are both characterized as part of "The" Right.

There are plenty of other cases where it's a mistake to see the political environment as having simply two large sides. The false dichotomy obscures significant differences in political perspective, policy goals, and preferred tactics "within" supposed "sides". There are actually dozens of sides, and some of the "neighbors" don't even talk to each other.

Recognizing these distinctions means that critics can't necessarily lump the "centrists" in with the "extremists", and thus people in the more-mainstream factions won't have to feel compelled to defend people they really have no allegiance to. This includes "defense" by tu quoque arguments. It's better to say that "Those aren't our people, and here are our differences with them," identifying some of those significant differences in analysis, policy goals, and accepted tactics. The more that people in the "normal" factions can consistently broadcast the message that they are not in league with the outliers, the harder it will be to use that broad brush. And with a track record of such clarity (in word and deed), even their political adversaries would find the distinctions credible.

Does this sound reasonable? (Perhaps too reasonable?)

 

[Spindrift]

Since I made the bet and made the offer, I get to set the terms.

No one called for the amending of the 1st Amendment...except as a typo.

So you just get to alter the conditions so you won't lose? Why did you bother.

 

[Thunder]

So you just get to alter the conditions so you won't lose? Why did you bother.

if someone makes an error and admits to it, I accept their mistake & theirt admission of it, as being an honest one.

so should you.

 

[Shalamar]

typo, mistake, error, yada yada yada...

you get the point. I meant to say "2nd Amendment" but mistakenly wrote "1st Amendment".

we cool?

Send him the money.

Then Bob can be 'thunderously' proud to have won the bet on a minor technicality.

 

[tyr_13]

Does this sound reasonable? (Perhaps too reasonable?)

It does. There are a lot of groups gaining money and power right now on promoting the unreasonable and unfortunately the 'left OR right' thing plays into human nature.

In these last four days on these boards I've been dismissed as both a 'Lefty' and being 'from the Right'. It's annoying.

EDIT: I'm getting to hate the two party system of the US.

 

[Darat]

...snip...

THere's a difference between mocking, insulting and attacking opponents and dehumanizing opponents.

I think we can all figure out the difference between "Onward Christian Soldiers" and Bin Laden's call for jihad. If we want to actually confront and deal with this problem, we need to stop playing stupid games and pretending like everything is the same. It isn't.

Well put.

 

[quadraginta]

typo, mistake, error, yada yada yada...

you get the point. I meant to say "2nd Amendment" but mistakenly wrote "1st Amendment".

we cool?

Are you saying that it is inappropriate to take responsibility for personal mistakes?

if someone makes an error and admits to it, I accept their mistake & theirt admission of it, as being an honest one.

so should you.

So accept your mistake. Put your big girl panties on. Take your lumps like a man. (How's that for mixing metaphors? )

You shot off your mouth. You screwed up. You got caught and called out on it. If you want to impress anyone with your integrity then you'll do an honest mea culpa and pay up.

Weaseling won't hack it.

 

[BenBurch]

Thunder, if I accidentally bet on Sea Weed at the track when I really meant to bet on Sea Biscuit, the track will not pay off on my ticket. Likewise if I ask for a ticket for Sea Weed, and the track gives me a ticket for Sea Biscuit, I win, and the track cannot recall it's error and fail to pay me.

Pay up.

 

[A Laughing Baby]

Also, Thunder, you know just as well as anyone else here that you would be jumping all over it if, say, a Holocaust-denier made a bet with you and lost on a technicality.

edit: not that that would be a bad thing. Holocaust-deniers suck. I'm just saying that you're asking to be held to a different standard after the fact.

 

[TraneWreck]

I followed the link in this very excellent blog post:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

It leads to this article that I highly recommend:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/b...r-the-bloody-shirt.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Because the best of America is so decent and cultivated, advanced and civilized beyond anything the world has previously offered, we tend to forget our history. Regardless of political affiliation, the people posting at this forum, especially, are educated and humane. It's easy to forget that such humanity is not shared by all 300,000,000 of our citizens:

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.

A pointed, organized campaign of political terrorism defined the last quarter of the 19th century and the legacy of its success dominated that society until the Civil Rights Movement, an event that is still only 50 years old.

When confronted with these acts of terrorism, they responded with the "bloody shirt":

The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it. The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.

Let me be clear: I realize that the conservative members of this forum do not support violence, I know most conservatives in this country are horrified by the thought of such terrorism, nothing I'm saying now or have said in this thread is directed at them.

The other side of that coin, however, is that such conservatives should not be trying to defend the extreme members of the right who do not share their humanity. The man who shot two members of a progressive church wrote this in his manifesto:

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the *********** liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.

There is a segment of the population defined by anti-government politics that is literally preparing to launch a war of terrorism against civilized society. That's what Dr. Tiller's murder was about, that's what the killings above were about. Instead of "waving the bloody shirt," we need to acknowledge that there is, right now, a virulent strain of anti-government political philosophy that, when combined with patriotic gun fantasies, is really, really dangerous, and certain pundits and politicians are inflaming that group for personal gain.

This doesn't mean republicans are wrong about the issues they argue, it doesn't even mean they have to stop calling us names, it does mean that they have to stop the demonization rhetoric (Tiller the Baby Killer).

 

[GreyArea]

It does.

Are your referring to the too reasonable part? Even so, I thought there would be a few people here who would agree.

EDIT: I'm getting to hate the two party system of the US.

I think that's a big factor, too.

If we had more of a multi-party system (and it is possible), this would highlight the distinctions within the two "sides". Purported bedfellows could actually run against each other, rather than alongside (which makes it seem that they think the same way).

And it would force public officials to find consensus since (probably) no one faction would consistently win majorities. Cooperation would be rewarded instead of a scramble for all the marbles. I think moderation would do well in such an environment.

 

[applecorped]

Of course.

But some people LACK the mental capacity for personal responsibility. It's mental illness.

If it's mental illness then you can't know what, if any, rhetoric someone would respond to, if at all. There has been nothing shown by anyone that in this case any political rhetoric contributed to this. This case is being used by people on both sides to bash their opponents. It's sad. I don't know that you know this as I won't presume that, but I hope you do.

 

[TraneWreck]

If it's mental illness then you can't know what, if any, rhetoric someone would respond to, if at all. There has been nothing shown by anyone that in this case any political rhetoric contributed to this. This case is being used by people on both sides to bash their opponents. It's sad. I don't know that you know this as I won't presume that, but I hope you do.

And there we have it, the bloody shirt.

 

[A Laughing Baby]

And there we have it, the bloody shirt.

Well, technically, complaining about the bloody shirt.