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Goaldeje
The Legend
Heh heh. Thanks for that Sarge. God bless you for cutting through.
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Goaldeje
The Legend
Oh, and Al? I just read your changed post above. The long diatribe against all things Obama. Would you like me to make a list of the ways W. and the Right screwed up things before Obama came to office? It ain't pretty, buddy. Both sides are EQUALLY useless.
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I think you are missing my point then. If this thread is proof of anything, it's that disproportionate outrage over this issue is not exclusive to one side of the aisle. I refer to your wall of text in your next post as Exhibit A.
'They started it' shouldn't really fly amongst adults, should it?
It's not a core dilemma for ME, Al. At this point it's not a left/right issue, because as you concede both sides do this sort of thing. At this point civility, good taste and toned down rhetoric has to start somewhere else. And to quote Michael Jackson, I'm starting with the man in the mirror.
If, as you concede, both sides do it, it's not purposefully engineered. Unless you want to blame both sides. And if it is purposefully engineered by both sides, those who immediately turn to shock and anger are doing exactly what they are supposed to.
fansince62
Guest
1) you'll observe that I have been temperate in my exchanges with you. that's one of the objectives...right?
2) disproportionate is your value laden term.
3) my undisputed "wall of text" serves to illustrate WHY so many are reacting. the facile notion in play here that "well...all sides do it" at one level is gospel truth. at another level it ignores the deeper currents in play. the reaction to the politics surrounding events in AZ have roots in behaviors that go back long before this past weekend.
the logic of your last bullet doesn't follow at all. and shock and anger is not an inappropriate reaction. as though folks like myself can't think independently about what they see going on...or reflect on experiences they have had in their own lives. or experience visceral emotional responses.
apologies Henry...you are a fine person, mightily intelligent and confident in who you are and what you believe in. but we are all getting caught up in social currents that run much deeper and..in some ways...deterministically...than you and I as individuals can fathom or control. there is a battle going on....has been going on since early in the last century (escalating since the 1960s).....and one inevitably has to chose sides based on core beliefs/values or be swept along like so much driftwood.
we are slowly coming to understand the fine print behind "Transformation". change management...to borrow a term from an engineering discipline...has not been executed very adeptly.
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What's your point, you dumb bastard?
Really? You don't think using this shooting as a rallying cry to push through gun control legislation is a disproportionate response to this incident? Perhaps you are correct. Would 'inappropriate' be better?
No need to put 'wall of text' in quotes. It's an accepted term.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wall of text
And it's 'undisputed' because if I took the twenty-seven hours required to parse through all that and discuss each on a point-by-point basis I'd end up writing a novel, which would only be tangentially relevant to this discussion and, quite frankly, a humongous waste of time.
What are you saying here? That liberals are following some sort of 'shock and outrage' playbook? That those people can't think independently about what they see going on? Or reflect on experiences they have had in their own lives?
Nah, you couldn't be saying that.
Oddly, 'experiences they have had in their own lives' explains perfectly why the 'leftist' in the original post in this thread reacted to this tragedy the way she did. Her big issue is gun control because her family was gunned down 20 years ago. But I guess it makes more sense to accuse her of being part of some huge liberal propaganda machine, right?
That's only true if you let it be true. Our leaders will only take that approach so long as it works for them. 'You are with us or against us' is not historically how this country has worked. The only other time it's been that black and white we ended up in a civil war. I'd rather not see that happen again. I'd rather see us get back to a place where compromise is the grease that moves the American engine forward. That enabled a staunch conservative like Reagan to work with a liberal congress and steer us into a decade of prosperity. Or a liberal like Clinton work with a conservative congress and maintain that prosperity to such a degree that we could begin to practice some fiscal responsibility within our government. In my opinion, we will not be the great nation our potential allows us to be so long as half of us continue to see the other half of us as The Bad Guys.
Ironically Giffords, of all people, understood this. Perhaps rather than sniping at each other, we should start following her lead.
fansince62
Guest
What's your point, you dumb bastard?
Really? You don't think using this shooting as a rallying cry to push through gun control legislation is a disproportionate response to this incident? Perhaps you are correct. Would 'inappropriate' be better?
No need to put 'wall of text' in quotes. It's an accepted term.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wall of text
And it's 'undisputed' because if I took the twenty-seven hours required to parse through all that and discuss each on a point-by-point basis I'd end up writing a novel, which would only be tangentially relevant to this discussion and, quite frankly, a humongous waste of time.
What are you saying here? That liberals are following some sort of 'shock and outrage' playbook? That those people can't think independently about what they see going on? Or reflect on experiences they have had in their own lives?
Nah, you couldn't be saying that.
Oddly, 'experiences they have had in their own lives' explains perfectly why the 'leftist' in the original post in this thread reacted to this tragedy the way she did. Her big issue is gun control because her family was gunned down 20 years ago. But I guess it makes more sense to accuse her of being part of some huge liberal propaganda machine, right?
That's only true if you let it be true. Our leaders will only take that approach so long as it works for them. 'You are with us or against us' is not historically how this country has worked. The only other time it's been that black and white we ended up in a civil war. I'd rather not see that happen again. I'd rather see us get back to a place where compromise is the grease that moves the American engine forward. That enabled a staunch conservative like Reagan to work with a liberal congress and steer us into a decade of prosperity. Or a liberal like Clinton work with a conservative congress and maintain that prosperity to such a degree that we could begin to practice some fiscal responsibility within our government. In my opinion, we will not be the great nation our potential allows us to be so long as half of us continue to see the other half of us as The Bad Guys.
Ironically Giffords, of all people, understood this. Perhaps rather than sniping at each other, we should start following her lead.
1) I get it. you support gun control legislation. you are not alone in knowing someone who has fallen to violent crime. you might live in a neighborhood like mine, nice upper middle class digs, where there have been 3 robberies in the last year and a half....one at gun point....another..in one instance...in which a mother and her young children were followed home from the airport and robbed (at gunpoint) on their doorsteps.
2) I noted early on in this thread that I support a more robust background investigation process. I have visited several gun shows at which the armament up for sale was alarming. common ground there. but I'm danged if myself and others will be deprived of the right to protect ourselves (as delineated in the second amendment0....either directly or covertly through pricing mechanisms.
3) One man's context context is another man's waste of time. It's a free country!
4) No...I'm saying that one can observe how power is actually being used. Once can see the discrepancies between intentions and actions. what others might call "reality".
5) I'm at a different point from you in my consciousness of what is going on. not saying you are wrong...only that we are seeing things differently. I travel a huge volume of blogs, Internet reservoirs, magazines, essays, film, etc., on all sides of the political spectrum. speak to a lot of people including close friends who also range across the political spectrum. It is my sense that the dynamic is approaching a crescendo...the divisions run too deep. the tectonic plates on what this country is and where it is headed are rubbing one another very precariously. I do not know how the process plays out from here. I do know that this is the time to achieve personal clarity on what one believes in...that it is exceedingly difficult to parse through all the noise to grasp at the truth...that one (per previous) has to stake him/herself to a position. it's happening to us whether we like it or not.
as for Giffords...neither of us know what she believed in as a matter of core philosophy.
I, for one, am not collaborating until I see "change I can believe in".
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And this is where we fundametally disagree. And this is probably why I end up having this same discussion with you every time a political thread pops up.
I do not accept that it's time to ride the wave of discord and hope my side wins. I'll fight that until this country breaks into pieces.
Starting with you.
I'm basing that on this specific bit of information that just came out.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.co...d-to-tone-our-rhetoric-and-partisanship-down/
Emphasis mine. I think she gets it.
And noting that does not make one a 'collaborator.'
The message I want to take away from this tragedy is not that the daily KOS said this, or that Sarah Palin used that graphic or whatever ... it's that we almost lost someone in our government who understands the value to communication and cooperation, something that is a very rare commodity these days. Something we should be thankful we didn't lose on Sunday, and something we should stop taking for granted.
You all can keep pointing fingers and shouting if you want. I'm really done with that.
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Goaldeje
The Legend
The problem Henry, is that both sides want us all to believe they are diametrically opposed, and suffer from irreconcilable differences. AND, everyone around us, in America, is on one side or the other. And those of us who are somewhere in between, which very well be the true majority, are left out in the cold until it comes time to court our votes. Not that I'm bitter.
Your post is brilliant, and I think is a truer representation of where most of America is ideologically. Getting sicker and sicker every day listening to the bull ****.
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Your post is brilliant, and I think is a truer representation of where most of America is ideologically. Getting sicker and sicker every day listening to the bull ****.
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fansince62
Guest
And this is where we fundametally disagree. And this is probably why I end up having this same discussion with you every time a political thread pops up.
I do not accept that it's time to ride the wave of discord and hope my side wins. I'll fight that until this country breaks into pieces.
Starting with you.
I'm basing that on this specific bit of information that just came out.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.co...d-to-tone-our-rhetoric-and-partisanship-down/
Emphasis mine. I think she gets it.
And noting that does not make one a 'collaborator.'
The message I want to take away from this tragedy is not that the daily KOS said this, or that Sarah Palin used that graphic or whatever ... it's that we almost lost someone in our government who understands the value to communication and cooperation, something that is a very rare commodity these days. Something we should be thankful we didn't lose on Sunday, and something we should stop taking for granted.
You all can keep pointing fingers and shouting if you want. I'm really done with that.
reasonable people can disagree!....
you are redirecting my thought process down a track it was never intended to ride. I'm not arguing for some superficial "because it feels good to oppose" pov. I can't be more clear than to state that in my mind fundamental principles and values are at stake. Again, what has flowed out of events in AZ highlights these more fundamental currents.
communication and cooperation? sounds nice. something everyone wants. kinda like nice silverware on the table. But those are not end states in and of themselves. they are mechanisms that presumably lead to a more amicable resolution. but they don't DECIDE the issues for you. and, in my mind, the issues in play are so fundamental and the edge of the cliff so near.....the heat comes from the absolutely critical importance of what is at stake Henry. that is why there is a Tea Party, why there is a moveon.org........at some point you reach the unmovable rock.
so....how then.....does our society get to resolution? what is the anvil on which the give and take of communication and cooperation get hammered on? where...for these matters that are core...is the right path to walk for fundamental issues of sexuality, war, societal obligations, government control over behavior, etc.? I understand your sentiment. I understand what is at stake. Part of me also understands that communication and cooperation can work, and has worked in multiple venues, unless you wake up one day and discover that everything you hold sacred and inviolable has been lost while you were busy communicating.
it's about negotiation. give and take. willingness to compromise in a manner that serves the real and competing interests behind all of this. how is this done when the goals..and apparently the values...are not held in common? that's what I see these days. the Right and the Left have reached that unmovable rock...IMO. there isn't one America. there are multiple Americas. heck, the country can't even get through a day's reading of the Constitution without profound arguments over whether that document is a mutable expression of prevailing social mores or a universal declaration of principles of government and rights of the individual vis the State.
to get to the core of the matter: why should there be trust? all sides to this conversation are gonna have to ante up on that one.
fansince62
Guest
The problem Henry, is that both sides want us all to believe they are diametrically opposed, and suffer from irreconcilable differences. AND, everyone around us, in America, is on one side or the other. And those of us who are somewhere in between, which very well be the true majority, are left out in the cold until it comes time to court our votes. Not that I'm bitter.
Your post is brilliant, and I think is a truer representation of where most of America is ideologically. Getting sicker and sicker every day listening to the bull ****.
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if that's where they are...it's not how they vote.
Goaldie...tell me this.....are we better off today than we were 40 years ago? from my side of the fence..the answer is "don't know". certainly, and specifically, equality before the law and opportunity for Black Americans is unequivocably better. On the other hand, the mile I walked to elementary school as a child? can't do that anymore for fear of one's child's picture eventually adorning the side of a milk carton. can't walk alone in major metropolitan cities any longer. statistics for many communities (e.g., Black youth prison populations) have exploded radically. can't do a whole lot of things now that used to be akin to breathing air. seems to me...after the many years I have lived...that "progress" has brought a lot of good things...and a lot of bad things. maybe it's time to pause the progressive hampster wheel and figure out why so much has gone awry...what worked....and why. problem is others have just the opposite pov......that change/progress need to be accelerated. how do you get to closure on these fundamentally divergent world views? cuz that's exactly what is going on right now.
and...as long as we have to go down this path...ok.....you're getting sicker and sicker of this BS. What's your solution for these fundamental issues of right and wrong?
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Goaldeje
The Legend
Fair questions, Al. I am not sure you can have the necessary social progress of women's lib and civil rights without some of the evils we see now. To answer your first question, yes, we unequivocally better off now than we were then, we just aren't nearly as far enough along as we need to be. As for why things have gone awry? You are going to have to be a little more, ummm, specific in that. If you are talking about not being able to allow my children to walk to school, well, my answer is going to be different than if you are questioning the black youth prison populations.
Getting back to the thread topic, and answering your last question, I guess the first thing I would suggest would be not trying to assign the labels of right and wrong to either party, neither of which is worthy of the first, or as bad all the time as the second. Both sides have screwed things up royally, plenty of blame to go around. I would love to see both sides come together to mourn this tragedy, and perhaps in the spirit of bi-partisanship that Congresswoman Gifford seemed to espouse on some things, try to help our country get better.
Instead though, we are stuck with cretins who politicize this monstrosity of an event, and then other cretins who decry those cretins for being offensive, which is ironic because they politicized another event and were criticized by the first set of cretins for doing so...
Vicious, stupid circle.
Getting back to the thread topic, and answering your last question, I guess the first thing I would suggest would be not trying to assign the labels of right and wrong to either party, neither of which is worthy of the first, or as bad all the time as the second. Both sides have screwed things up royally, plenty of blame to go around. I would love to see both sides come together to mourn this tragedy, and perhaps in the spirit of bi-partisanship that Congresswoman Gifford seemed to espouse on some things, try to help our country get better.
Instead though, we are stuck with cretins who politicize this monstrosity of an event, and then other cretins who decry those cretins for being offensive, which is ironic because they politicized another event and were criticized by the first set of cretins for doing so...
Vicious, stupid circle.
There's an easy place to start Al:
We start by not sweating the small stuff. We start by not playing 'gotcha' about stuff that doesn't freaking matter. We don't take every single event and try and figure out how we can blame the other side. Yes, that goes for leftists too. And yes, that applies to this particular issue. People of good conscience should look at this event and, like Boone, say 'sometimes people are just crazy.' And that should be the end of it. If we have differences, they don't need to come out here.
Oddly, John Stewart went off about this the other night and was surprisingly poignant.
Right and left will NEVER agree on everything in this country. That's been true since Jefferson and Hamilton. The trick is not learning how to agree. It's learning how to disagree. I think our leaders have forgotten how to do it. We should find THAT unacceptable.
You get it. "Reasonable people can disagree." Of course they can. We just have to insist that the reasonable ones are the ones we choose to represent us.
Elephant
The Commissioner
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Well, since Paul Kruggman, Keith Olberman and others of that ilk began spewing their venomous blame within hours of the tragedy, I would say they are the reason we are where we are now in this discourse. They are not at fault for the shooting and they are not at fault for the entire political situation we face. But they are at fault for using this incident for their personal agendas.
I don't care much what anyone else is doing anywhere else! What the above mentioned are doing now is disgusting! I equate them to the Westboro cretins in this situation, advancing their agenda in light of tragic circumstances!
Look, I agree. There is blame enough to go around for the current affairs of our political spectrum. What these individuals have done is nothing like I have seen in recent memory.
You can harken back to the politicization of 9/11 as support for, "It goes both ways.". I would suggest you use the Ft. Hood incident as a more recent and parallel act than 9/11. You have more of a point if you use that incident as support for your assertions. I won't get into the Ft. Hood incident nor the 9/11 politicization.
I am simply going to suggest this incident shows many on the left are either making ridiculous claims about the responsibility for the action Loughner took and the supporters are subscribing to their nonsense! It is vile!
And yes! There are those on the right who do the same so please don't throw that back into the equation. Right here, right now, it is about the incident in Arizona, not what happened a year ago. It is not really about left and right. It is more about the actions of the above mentioned and they just happen to be on the left.
Goaldeje
The Legend
El, agree completely. My point with this is that some on the Right have claimed the way the Left has politicized things is worse somehow than anything the Right has done. Not seeing it personally. Besides which, does this give the Right carte blanche now to act like morons when the opportunity presents itself?
Shldnt we be better than this? On ALL sides?
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Shldnt we be better than this? On ALL sides?
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Don't disagree with most of that, El.
I do disagree that they encompass 'all the leftists' or even necessarily 'many on the left'. They are just idiots saying idiotic things, and we should recognize them as such.
Just as I find most conservatives willing and able to engage in honest debate claim that the likes of Limbaugh and Beck do not represent them, I say the same about the leftist wingnuts and myself.
Actually, John Stewart speaks for me on this one. I think this may be the first time because he's usually not this serious:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-10-2011/arizona-shootings-reaction
That's where I see 'the left' today. Not crazy Olberman or Krugman.
I do disagree that they encompass 'all the leftists' or even necessarily 'many on the left'. They are just idiots saying idiotic things, and we should recognize them as such.
Just as I find most conservatives willing and able to engage in honest debate claim that the likes of Limbaugh and Beck do not represent them, I say the same about the leftist wingnuts and myself.
Actually, John Stewart speaks for me on this one. I think this may be the first time because he's usually not this serious:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-10-2011/arizona-shootings-reaction
That's where I see 'the left' today. Not crazy Olberman or Krugman.
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That's just unreal, Mike.
So for the sake of fostering bi-partisan togetherness, I figured I'd post what I think is a very positive reactionary law to this tragedy.
http://www.kvoa.com/news/state-senate-passes-law-barring-protests-at-funerals/
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Phelps.
So for the sake of fostering bi-partisan togetherness, I figured I'd post what I think is a very positive reactionary law to this tragedy.
http://www.kvoa.com/news/state-senate-passes-law-barring-protests-at-funerals/
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Phelps.
Alaskan
The 1st Round Pick
The problem is that Krugman is a Princeton professor, has a Nobel Prize and is a NY Times columnist. Olberman is Olberman but Krugman is supposed to be better than that.
Alaskan
The 1st Round Pick
Of course the WBC will file a suit to stop enforcement of the law. The judge should refuse to issue an injunction to stop enforcement but sincerely promise to issue a ruling in a month or two.
Sarge
Guest
Back in the good ol days, someone would have seen these freaks spit on the sidewalk, and they would have resisted arrest and fallen down on the way to the cop car..................several times
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