By saying I disagree with him? That is insulting him? Again, like I just said, if Deck Knight-or anyone else for that matter-found what I said insulting, I apologize. That was not the point of my post.
Please, could we move this topic away from pointless bickering and use this thread to just reflect on what happened last weekend.
I have no problems with people who disagree with me. Zero. I get along with huge swaths of people on the site who disagree with my politics. Hopefully you will be one of them.
What I don't like is those people who can never get over themselves. People whose worldview requires me and the party I ostensibly support to be a scurrilous villian in order to justify their own worldview. This is incredibly topical because it is the primary fuel for the "heated rhetoric." So please excuse what could be called bickering below:
jrrrrr said:
King advocated non-violence as his most sacred philosophical principle. You are advocating threatening political figures with guns because they are liberals.
Lie. I have not for a single moment advocated violence against anyone in this or any other thread.
King fought to end racial segregation. You believe that businesses deserve the right to discriminate.
This one is too stupid and vile to merit a response.
King fought for equality and tolerance. You have explicitly stated that homosexuals are a "societal cancer" and that they do not deserve the same rights afforded to their heterosexual counterparts.
Yet another lie which I have corrected you and others on multiple occasions. I oppose gay marriage because I believe every child deserves a mother and a father and no other arrangement deserves societal endorsement because of the inexorable decay in both societal boundaries and religious liberty that follows, but I don't care where or how frequently you have relations with your mates. I know you aren't going to absorb that concept this time either, but I'll keep correcting you until you realize opposition to homosexual marrige is not equivalent to opposition to homosexual persons.
You may believe holding such a position is impossible. I do not. You are the only one willing to ascribe moral inferiority to the holder of the opposite view though. This ascription of moral inferiority is part and parcel to the heated rhetoric that is supposed to be toned down.
King fought for labor rights of the lower and middle classes. You...well, you don't.
Yet another lie. I bet you can't even qualify what you mean by "labor rights," you just want me to be your polar opposite for no other reason that your own self-serving need to be morally superior and make a big angry post. I have an inkling you mean to insinuate I support child labor and sweatshops, but if that's the case this is too stupid and vile to deserve a response too.
King thought that blacks deserved compensation for being wronged historically. I've never seen you post directly on this but I think it's safe to assume you don't agree with him.
At last, something which may be somewhat accurate. I do not believe reparations is a legitimate resolution to address the wrongs of slavery (how many dollars is slavery worth per black person anyhow?), which may or may not put me in King's camp on that. Then again I also live in the context of 2010, not the context of the 1960's. Either way morality is not binary based on absolute agreement with King's positions on a given issue.
King's main opposition to the Vietnam War was because it took resources away from social welfare programs. You are pro-war and anti-social welfare.
I am not pro-war jrrrr, yet another lie you have repeated to yourself in your crusade to convince yourself I am the anti-Martin Luther King Jr. I hold reserved views of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan insofar as I believe the threat of Islamic terrorism and its state sponsors is real and specifically as I believe I can relate to Muslims as a fellow religious person whose religious leaders have done a great disservice to their followers. The problem is at least two-pronged, and again, to tie this back into the topic, talking about serious national security threats that stem primarily from one strain of radical religious thought is not in and of itself "heated rhetoric."
As far as social welfare, my belief is that the safety net as it exists is currently exploited far too often because adequate protections against fraud are not in place. It ceases being social welfare once it becomes a generational condition. At that point it becomes a degenerative lifestyle enabled by the government.
I imagine Martin Luther King Jr. would also say that charity begins at home, with your neighbors and family, not at the welfare office. Like the Republican Party of his time and today.
You can sit here and tell me what party he voted for all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that his views and philosophy are vastly different than the current GOP rhetoric. I find it hilarious that you are trying to say "stop associating this violent person with Republicans!" and then go on to say "start associating this great person with Republicans!". The cognitive dissonance in your posts impresses me.
No jrrrr, your cognitive dissonance impresses me. You may sit at your computer and lie about me in ugly, insulting, and destructive ways as often as you like. Here's a new quote you can post up ad infinitum: Your attitude is a cancer jrrrrr. Despite your idols, you are not peaceful. You are not tolerant. You are a bloviating bully who wails when you are called to account until the person who attempted to correct your ridiculous, over-the-top behavior finally relents. The worst thing I have ever done is stepped too far out on a limb in the content of my posts, and I have attempted to change and grow past that, however imperfectly. I was banned for my bad posting at one point and have been trying to get better with time, again, imperfectly. You however are unchanged, you flit in and out of ideas of ragequatting again and again, and I hope this time no one is dumb enough to give you the power to vandalize the site on your way out again.
Don't play moralizer with me, and don't lie about what I believe in. I have a better handle on that than you ever will. This is supposed to be a new forum, not a place for you to dredge up every Cong grievance we've ever had and tote your signature bad attitude around with you.
I think evan has done a fantastic job moderating this thread (including reigning in me), and even if my post is deleted for going too far off topic or being too personal, I am glad that he had the patience to at least give this topic time to develop. I want a forum to be a fun place to post on issues serious and nonserious, and I want to be able to use slightly more snark than I have deleted in the past. I will make my best attempt to give a measured response in a forum threads, and maybe that will come across, and maybe it will not, and maybe I will fail. In any event you are the target of my treatise jrrrr because you have rejected your chance to start anew and instead want to fan our old flames. I have no interest in doing this, I simply want to correct your innacuracies and move on.
Finally, I didn't even say anything like "start associating MLK Jr. with Republicans." I simply corrected the notion MLK Jr. was opposed to Republican policies based on his actual party affiliation when he was alive. I somehow doubt jrrrr that Martin Luther King Jr. would approve of the generational welfare culture and the gangster culture that permeates Democrat-run, primarily minority inner cities. The black family has been decimated by the sexual revolution and "social welfare." Black children are slaughtered disproportionaitely by abortion, the very act of which would probably cause King to break down in tears. I don't know where King would be today politically, but when he was alive he was a Republican, and when he was alive Democratic leaders tried to tap his phones, made racial epithets against him and other black leaders, and every other thing part and parcel to the segregationist Democratic Party of the time. Bringing up these historical facts is not heated rhetoric either. Facts are vital to debate, no matter how incendiary they might be to one ideology's assumptions or another's
RE: FlareBlitz:
As I don't want to get into a huge quotefest again (and jrrrr got that this round), I'll try and get back to basics and cool this down a bit. I apologize if I was a bit too harsh.
As I stated in my earlier post, the Republican party is indeed infamous for its fringe psychotic gun nuts (key word there being "fringe"). Directing gun metaphors when you know your base has people that will take them seriously is a very bad idea. It's like when someone posts on a forum about how they're planning on killing themselves and someone else posts "hahaha yeah go ahead and set up a webcam too lolololol". 99.99% of the time nothing bad will happen, but that does not mean it's a good idea!
Both parties are infamous for armed nuts at the fringes supposedly susceptible to inspiration by gun metaphors (again, Obama's bring a gun to a knife fight quote.) Your qualification of "fringe" is entirely meaningless. Both party fringes engage in political violence which anyone could argue is spurned on by the rhetoric of those sides. "Second Amendment remedies" on the right has its doppleganger in "kill the pigs" on the left. The problem is that while you and I both agree the rhetoric should be toned down in the abstract, you have the kind of latent partisanship that inflates every statement made by the other side to be tantamount to a call for murder and violent mayhem. Ghandi and King were not doormats. In their time what they did caused a great deal of social strife and mayhem, yet it was entirely nonviolent. Ghandi probably knew the British soldiers were going to react violently to his protest. Does that put him on the level of Rush Limbaugh, knowingly advocating his people to engage a peaceful activity that, in the dream scenario, leads to violence in the opposition that discredits what he considered an unjust power over India? If the British soldiers never attacked the Indian protestors, there would never have been a backlash against British rule, or not one large enough to excise them in any event.
As opposed to squelching heated rhetoric, my belief is that if you let people keep talking they will inevitably discredit themselves, or say something so out there as to ostracize even their friends. Letting people run their mouths is the fastest way to weed these people out, and the potential violence from the content of the rhetoric is a minimal threat compared to allowing them to keep their beliefs in the dark until they get some actual momentum. I'm more than willing to live up to my own standard of course, I'm certain I've lost many a person.
As it relates to these murders specifically, Loughner was a deranged individual who, from the accounts of his friends, did not take in any news or political opinions whatsoever. The new concern for "heated rhetoric" is a pathetic straw attempt to keep bringing up the old demons of Fox News or Talk Radio or every other tired scapegoat. None of those things influenced Loughner, the catalyst for this new discussion on heated rhetoric.
