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Eliminationist Rhetoric
I complain about the way the Right speaks of the left.
Then I see things like this:
That, my friends is one of a line of products (coffee mugs to baseball caps, hoodies and softball shirts) all sporting the same thing. I look at that, and wonder where the idea that such a thing is acceptable to wear in public might come from. It's right up there with Liberal Hunting Permits
For more on that, see this piece of Orcinus.
People will defend this, say it's meant as a joke (never mind that when the tables are turned and someone on the Left tries to make a point in the same vein, and obviously; to me at least, in a satiric vein, the people who were saying Liberals ought to be strung up like, "strange fruit," are all of a sudden calling out the FBI (Dean Esmay which was a response to this. The contextual post of Sadly No can be seen here)
But it isn't, it's part and parcel of an environment of active hatred. One person, maybe a whack-job. A lot of people, might be a group of whack jobs, but when the people they are attacking make up a large group, and the people who have bully pulpits are some of those who do the inciting, and those who claim this is the fruit of a few bad apples don't take those bad apples to task, in fact continue to pay them large sums of money and give them access to the airwaves... then I must assume that, at the very least they don't care if one group is actively inciting another to go out and abuse the other. I might even be justified in thinking they wanted such a thing to happen.
Perhaps they think it will intimidate the oppostition. Perhaps they actually want (as Coulter said) some liberal to be killed, so the rest of us will know it can happen and shut up.
For a list of those who've said such things, and the things they've said (and this politicians in office, former politicians, religious leaders, pundits and and the like. These are names. People who can't really be brushed under the rug with, "nobody listens to them," because people do; and in the millions. Some of the people who listen to them think them worth electing as Representatives and Senators (one of my favorites, if that's the right word) is Phil Grahm saying, "We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." and not in some back room, but in an interview with Mother Jones.
Or this gem from John Derbyshire, "Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past - I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble - recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an 'enemy of the people.' The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished 'to the ninth degree': that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."
- National Review, 02-15-01
For more, go to Paperweight's Fair Shot
Then I see things like this:
That, my friends is one of a line of products (coffee mugs to baseball caps, hoodies and softball shirts) all sporting the same thing. I look at that, and wonder where the idea that such a thing is acceptable to wear in public might come from. It's right up there with Liberal Hunting Permits
For more on that, see this piece of Orcinus.
People will defend this, say it's meant as a joke (never mind that when the tables are turned and someone on the Left tries to make a point in the same vein, and obviously; to me at least, in a satiric vein, the people who were saying Liberals ought to be strung up like, "strange fruit," are all of a sudden calling out the FBI (Dean Esmay which was a response to this. The contextual post of Sadly No can be seen here)
But it isn't, it's part and parcel of an environment of active hatred. One person, maybe a whack-job. A lot of people, might be a group of whack jobs, but when the people they are attacking make up a large group, and the people who have bully pulpits are some of those who do the inciting, and those who claim this is the fruit of a few bad apples don't take those bad apples to task, in fact continue to pay them large sums of money and give them access to the airwaves... then I must assume that, at the very least they don't care if one group is actively inciting another to go out and abuse the other. I might even be justified in thinking they wanted such a thing to happen.
Perhaps they think it will intimidate the oppostition. Perhaps they actually want (as Coulter said) some liberal to be killed, so the rest of us will know it can happen and shut up.
For a list of those who've said such things, and the things they've said (and this politicians in office, former politicians, religious leaders, pundits and and the like. These are names. People who can't really be brushed under the rug with, "nobody listens to them," because people do; and in the millions. Some of the people who listen to them think them worth electing as Representatives and Senators (one of my favorites, if that's the right word) is Phil Grahm saying, "We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." and not in some back room, but in an interview with Mother Jones.
Or this gem from John Derbyshire, "Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past - I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble - recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an 'enemy of the people.' The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished 'to the ninth degree': that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."
- National Review, 02-15-01
For more, go to Paperweight's Fair Shot
no subject
Lets take the first example you gave.
For a given group of people what they can do to others without social repurcussion varies, and it varies in relation to the understandings of the greater polity they live in.
Anglo-Saxons (like most Germanic people) had no legal problem with someone killing someone else out of hand, so long as the killer paid the price for the loss (with lesser costs if the damage wasn't fatal).
But if they killed someone in secret, hiding that they had done it, that was murder, and if discovered the murderer was an outlaw, and there was no price to be paid for killing him.
In Iceland it was rude, but not wrong, to kill a man's slave because one was angered with him.
In the South it was perfectly in keeping with the social contract (both of them) to abuse blacks for being, "uppity." If they go too uppity one could arrange to have them lynched. The greater social contract of the Nation was, nominally, against it.
It happens that at least once the larger social contract led to the Supreme Court taking initial jurisdiction of a criminal case (the only time it has ever done so) because they ordered a stay, pending appeal, of a conviction for rape.
Without the greater contract, things like lynching, and other demonizations of "the other" have nothing, other than the brute force of people acting in concert, to prevent it.
Look at the lifestyles in the high valley of New Guinea, where warfare was endemic, and no one dared travel outside the bounds of the land controlled by thier tribe, and perhaps the lands of friendly neighbors. To cross the whole valley was inconceivable.
TK