FFS

[cinema_babe]

Some prosecutor needs to step up to the plate and begin charging anyone who maintains anything called a "Hit List" or anything that even vaguely seems to allude to the injury or killing of a person or people with murder or conspiracy.

Come down on them with the wrath Judgment Day; no mercy. Sell all of their assets and half of their joint asses if they have a spouse/partner and give that money to the surviving victims and the survivors of the dead.

And start with Sarah Palin.

The freedom to disagree with someone is a guaranteed right. As is the freedom to be offensive, rude, disparaging, petty, mean, ignorant and a whole host of other unpleasant manifestations of human behavior. However, the right to effectively paint a bulls eye on your opponents' is as good as taking the gun into your hands and pulling the trigger or setting off the bomb. It's depriving people who might disagree with you of *their* First Amendment right through the use of fear and it is not only murder

It's fucking Un-American.

Comments

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Sarah Palin and others have directly advocated physical violence, using firearms, as a means of "solving" the problem of losing an election.

Where has Palin done that? The bullseye map thing really isn't what you're saying, no matter how much bad taste it was. Angle's talk of "Second Amendment remedies" talk was far worse than anything I know of that Palin said, but even that's a borderline case, because she wasn't actually advocating that people do that in the circumstances we live in.

Even advocating the eventual violent overthrow of the government is not illegal, and nor should it be, IMO, so long as one doesn't say that now is the time and get specific about how it should be done. and Angle didn't even go as far as saying that we would necessarily reach a point where such a course would be desirable.

I do think both Palin and Angle bear some moral responsibility. But I think things have to be much more clear cut before you want the government saying whose speech will be subject to penalties and what speech will not.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

"If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies....I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out." Those were Sharron Angle's words, uttered in a nearby state during the last election, a few short months ago. Of course, Angle identified Harry Reid as a direct target, not Gabrielle Gifford, but can you really say that Gifford's re-election is not a sign that Congress "kept going the way it was?" That's substantially worse than bad taste, and it's rather more immediate than advocating an "eventual overthrow of government." Furthermore, Angle directly identified herself as part of the group responsible for these "second amendment remedies." She was, in fact, advocating exactly such actions, in exactly the conditions that we actually live in. Personally, I'm tired of extending the benefit of the doubt to persons that advocate armed government takeovers because they lose an election, and then define themselves as "real Americans" thereby. The threat of violence as a means of coercion should not have a place in the American political system, full stop.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I was unaware of the second part of that quote. I mostly agree with you about Angle, then. It is still ambiguous, as the "taking out" is most plausibly referring to her own electoral campaign against the same Harry Reid, Majority Leader. She was saying that her race to of overriding importance. But to use that phraseology in the same sentence that she alludes to shooting politicians in general is at least skirting the line of legality.

But Palin is not Angle. And it sure looks to me that interpreting the targets in any way other than clearly intended symbolically is blinding ourselves to a clear truth in the name of demonizing someone we already have very good reason to despise and some reason to fear, but not to label an accomplice to murder.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Placing a crosshairs target on one's enemy is, functionally speaking, the prelude to levying direct and violent action, with the firearm being the primary tool used to levy this violent action. Symbolically, the crosshairs target is also used to indicate that a person has been targeted for direct action as an enemy. This is not an ambiguous rhetorical device or a cutesy symbol included in Powerpoint, and it's a symbolic device familiar to anyone that's ever watched a film about a sniper, an assassin, the army, and so on. It has quite a clear and specific meaning. I find it quite difficult to consider that the crosshairs target has a symbolic place in civilized political discourse, or that it could be used incidentally by someone who claims to be an ardent hunter and second amendment supporter. If Palin did not, as you claim, know how that would be interpreted, she is dumber than a box of rocks and really needs to fire her PR manager.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

See http://caffeinatedthoughts.com/2011/01/regarding-giffords-gunman-being-crazy-is-not-an-ideology especially the latter of the Democratic examples.

As the poster (whose politics I probably disagree with much more than I agree) says, "Both sides utilize this type of rhetoric, and every rationale person should understand that the only violence they want done to those targeted are at the polls – not literally."

I'm not saying that the violent rhetoric is harmless. It isn't. And Angle, as you showed, really was inciting, even if she only meant to excite in a non-violent way.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

No, sorry. I'm going to absolutely and categorically reject the "both sides" argument. It's not "both sides."

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

What's not both sides. Some things are and some aren't. Using target graphics demonstrably is. The way our language works is that examples from extreme situations, usually physical violence and sex, become analogs used to represent other situations. That happened with targeting and pictures of bullseyes decades ago. And is used by both sides.

The actual inciting rhetoric, OTOH, is not coming from both sides to anything anywhere approaching the same degree. What the right is doing is shameful and destructive of democracy. There are examples on the far left and the blogosphere that could be found to make it seem like it's a 'both sides' thing, but as a true face of the movements, it is not.