Posts by Keir Leslie
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Yeah, I don’t understand this. The major objection to a coalition of not-the-largest-party seems to be that it will be unpopular: but there’s a big difference between unpopular and unconstitutional.
I also don’t understand the issue with pre-announcing coalition preferences. It seems to me that (a) if you are willing to say before the election that you will work with x and only x, you are barely a separate party any more*, and (b) if you don’t trust a party to support the right grouping, you can always not vote for them, and if you do and then they stuff up, not vote for them at the next election.
Introducing constitutionality (or legitimacy) into it merely seems to complicate a matter which is primarily one of popularity.
* And apart from anything else, you well and truly fuck over your negotiating team.
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As I said then, and to repeat, all those articles, and others, were published within hours of the shooting occurring. All of them laid the blame squarely, and to the exclusion of all other factors, at the door of the tea party and it’s rhetoric.
Again, this is just not true. If we refer to the articles you cited earlier (having already disposed entirely of your claims about this thread) we find:
Neither the Tea Party nor Obama created these divisions.
One anti-Obama campaigner carried a placard saying, "It is time to water the tree of liberty"– a reference to Thomas Jefferson's famous quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." It's the same quote Timothy McVeigh was wearing on his T-shirt when he was arrested for bombing the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
The connection between this rhetoric and Saturday's events are not causal but contextual.
In other words, even the very articles you are claiming as evidence for this historical amnesia admit and highlight previous American political violence. I mean, really, I hate to say it, but none of your factual claims seem to stand up under scrutiny.
(By the way, do you really not get why allegations that people are just using this as an excuse to take their hobby horses out for a canter are pretty offensive?)
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I liked Yglesias' line: [o]n the list of problems typically experienced by the children of Yale Law School faculty “not successful enough” comes way below “has dysfunctional relationship with mother.”
(PS. Ms Chua's book World on Fire is actually pretty good. Somehow, sadly, I think the market for critiques of global capitalism is somewhat smaller than the market for batshit insane parenting books.)
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I would be very surprised if she hasn't; in fact I would be very surprised if she hasn't had them over this (which, it needn't be said, is utterly deplorable, and disgusting, and etc etc). There's a point in here about how women in public life are treated.
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Wow, you’re really reading a lot into some fairly normal level debate round here.
I don’t think I am really; I think saying : you (or some people, or whatever) are using this to get their hobby horses out, is in fact quite offensive*. The fact that Rich also asserted that he was the first to bring up the US’ history of political violence when, I would reckon, a third of the posts on the previous two pages discussed that exactly leaves me with very little charity.
* Especially given that Jessica Valenti, one of the writers Rich criticised, has in fact received death threats over her previous work. I would think it quite likely that seeing another woman in public life who has received death threats (and quite likely from some of the same kind of people) shot might lead you to quite a strong stance on such matters.
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Until I made my comment, no-one on here (to the best of my recollection) had even mentioned or implied that there might be a context ouside the last two-three years of teabaggery rhetoric. And no-one in the mainstream press had done so, either.
This is just wrong. If you look at page 6 alone of this thread prior to your comment you will see, in reverse chronological order, Lucy Stewart noting that US history of political violence amplified the impact of violent rhetoric, Sacha mentioning the Oklahoma City bombing, and Simon Grigg linking to a time line of political violence in the US.
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And, you know, the DNC doesn't go around saying `don't retreat reload'.
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I’m not saying there isn’t a link, and as more evidence emerges, it seems more and more likely that there is a link. But it also seems to me that more than a few people were quite happy to have a decent excuse to take their hobby horses out for a quick canter round the paddock.
Argh. This is exactly what I mean. It’s the knee-jerk moderatism of `how dare we imagine that a politically motivated assassination attempt might have been affected by high profile talk of politically motivated violence?’, coupled with the really quite offensive implication that we (or the dreaded `some people’) are using this in some kind of sly, underhanded way.
And a great many people aren’t even asserting any contextual link here; instead they are merely saying that this, after all, is what a second amendment solution looks like, and maybe that’s something to think about?
(The condescension lies in assuming that an adult human being in full possession of their faculties and speaking the English language would somehow be unaware of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Lincoln, the Oklahoma City bombing, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the militia movement in general, the KKK, etc.)
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While it doesn't help, blaming the rhetoric of the last 2-3 years seems a little...short-sighted? Short-memoried?
You know, this condescension is really annoying. The reason everyone took the Tea Party nonsense about Second Amendment solutions and so on seriously is precisely that we knew about America's history of violent politics. I am quite sure that many --- most ! --- of the people saying that Palin and the Tea Party ought have a long hard look at their rhetoric are quite knowledgeable about this stuff: the paranoid style in American politics, the campaigns of terror that met Reconstruction, the campaigns of terror that met the Civil Rights movements, the `militia' movement, and all the other resorts to the bullet that America has seen.
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Yes, Mr. Morrison, we have heard of the 1960s, when every left wing politician knew that every time they walked in public they put their lives in the hands of God. And we have also heard of the 1860s, when every decent politician knew that every time they walked in public they put their lives in the hands of God.
It is precisely this American propensity to violence that makes Palin's words so shameful, that makes her so disgusting. She (and her followers, and her allies) have been toying with the rhetoric of death, and now someone has died they wish to deny their words and refuse their responsibilities.