6 thoughts on “Who’s hateful? Who’s violent?”

1. John,

   I don’t believe that the left is arguing that it is exclusively the right that uses anger and hate in their speeches. The left would argue that the right uses it more, has a media machine that reaches and subsequently influences more people, and has it rebroadcast more in less partisan news media.

   There is nothing close to the daily vitriol that spews forth from both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. They have media empires behind them that carry their messages all over the country and they reach millions upon millions of viewers/listeners (one could almost call them consumers, because the listener/viewer is essentially buying into a brand). This is a daily occurrence. Not even taking into account the myriad of local anger, hate, and paranoid radio broadcasters, there is nothing remotely equivalent on the left. Keith Olbermann, the person most frequently cited to balance the scales, is not similar either qualitatively or quantitatively in any sense.

   The dominance of Rush Limbaugh in the Republican party and the right wing as a whole cannot be denied. What he says is repeated in the right wing echo chamber and often times becomes not just guidelines, but policy. It is easy to find highly publicized instances of Republicans saying something that opposes Limbaugh or his rhetoric, but that individual is either forced to capitulate and walk back whatever it was they had said, or that person is ostracized by their party. Again, there is no one that has that kind of power or influence on the left over a substantial portion of its constituency, let alone a majority.

   In the interest of brevity, while we can agree that by no means is every person in the Tea Party violent or racist, there is overwhelming documentation, from signs and documented rhetoric at rallies, and written local party platforms, that these elements are represented in statistically significant numbers within the ‘movement’. There is no equivalent political movement on the left, either in size or in rhetoric. Fox News attempted to portray the handful of people in the New Black Panther party as being the same or worse than radical elements in the Tea Party. Four or five people using the word ‘cracker’ is in no way equivalent to the anti-black and anti-latino rhetoric coming from the right, either in the sheer number of people, thousands to one, or in the audience that receives these messages – prior to Fox News constantly regurgitating this story in order to promote the (false) equivalency of “well, the left does it too.”

   Let’s also relegate Taitz, the birthers, the secret mulsim-ers, and the Birchers to a minority status on the right. But their message still gets out and makes the round in less partisan new sources. One can’t find a similar number of cranks, crackpots, and outright delusional people whose message penetrates far enough into the national consciousness.

   Anti-government militia groups, the UN black helicopter/secret FEMA death camp crowd, are dangerous enough that they were singled out in recent government reports. The last time there was a similar ratcheting up of concern on the part of the government was, oddly enough, the last time the rhetoric heated up and was promulgated through the right wing noise machine was under the stewardship of the previous Democrat president. There is no equivalent rise in concern under Republican stewardship from ‘leftist’ militia groups.

   Sarah Palin? I’m fairly certain you don’t “Reload” surveyor’s sights. Not even a nice try on her part, but it helps to perpetuate the persecution complex and seeming underdog status – despite having a national venue in the for of Fox News to broadcast her nonsensical platform of hate, ignorance, and bigotry.

   Gun rhetoric? Sure, Dan Maes shot the cap and trade bill as a promotional stunt. However, does that stunt have anything to do with a person? Is it threatening violence toward anyone that does believe in Cap and Trade? Is it remotely equivalent to:

   http://shop.cafepress.com/liberal-hunting-permit

   Note there’s a whole page of products devoted to ‘hunting liberals,’ including a 10 pack of buttons with that slogan. I haven’t been able to find anything about hunting conservatives and merchandise While some people might consider this a joke, words matter. They are the basis of thought, and these thoughts shape out actions.

   At any rate, yes, there are people on the left that have and do use heated language. That in itself is not enough to establish parity. There is no equivalence in the prevalence of such language usage among self identified liberals, there are not top ranked google returns foer products outlining the ‘humor’ in hunting political opponents on the left, nor are there equivalent progenitors of hate speech on the left that produce the volume that comes from the right on a daily, almost hourly basis.

   Here’s an analogy that uses firearms; a single shot, twenty two caliber pistol is the same as a belt fed, 50 caliber machine gun because they both use bullets.

   There are degrees of difference and they matter as well.

   • The response you give here is the sort of response I keep getting: an effort to point out that the righties are more crazy, are more prone to this sort of behavior. There might be a tacit acknowledgement that “yeah, ok, our side isn’t blameless, but the other guys are worse!! See?!?”

     And this is a microcosm for the whole situation. Everyone’s out to say how everyone else is evil, everyone else is to blame, everyone else is worse.

     Where is taking responsibility for yourself? Where is working on improving yourself and not worrying about what the other guy is doing? Make yourself bigger and better by making yourself bigger and better, not by making the other guy smaller and worse.

2. Maybe the reason you keep getting the same sort of response is that what you posted has become the typical canard used to justify continuing with inflammatory rhetoric.from the people whose core message, whose number one priority is not to govern but to make sure that the current president remains a one term president. That’s not just some talk radio host that says that, that was directly from the mouth of Mitch McConnell. The “one side does it all day and everyday and the other side has these few folks that once in a while do the same thing” or the “both sides do it so meh” isn’t an argument, it’s an excuse to ignore the differences – differences that are both measurable (frequnecy) that are qualitatively; it’s not just that everything is bad, everything is socialist/communist/maoist/muslim/death paneled/job killing/anti-american – even Methodists, for the love of god. Some of the Tea Party was condemning Methodists for being socialists, hate america, and all sorts of things. Show something comparable – there isn’t. It’s not the same. It’s different. Different in a way that matters.

   About personal responsibility, I feel that it is directly related to our discussion. Free will, in my opinion, which is also the opinion of Immanuel Kant and others, is exercised by making rational decisions. The ability to think and choose is what sets us free. The corollary to this notion is that without information and knowledge one cannot be rational.

   If you don’t have access to accurate information you can’t make a rational, informed decision. You don’t have to ‘know’ everything, but what you ‘know’ had better be factual. Death panels – not a fact, an outright lie, yet they helped shape the health care debate. Now that the smoke is clear and the has been revealed – but no personal responsibility has been taken by the party, group leaders, and news medias that created and repeated this demonstrably false ‘argument, the support for what is actually contained in the health care bill continues to grow. We can argue about the necessity of the mandate, but that was hardly mentioned, it was the non-existent Death Panel that scared people and made them act against their own self interest. The could not take personal responsibility because they were both lied too and were called to action based on false information.

   If you get the impression that “Everyone’s out to say how everyone else is evil, everyone else is to blame, everyone else is worse” maybe it’s because there is a difference. From near the end of your original post, “So, a little late in bringing the rebuttal to the table … but only because I knew it’d be a waste of my time to Google for it… they could do the same, but they apparently have no interest in looking in the mirror to remove the log from their own eye.” Honestly ask yourself why there are so many media watchdog groups that provide not just opinion but information, in context (not in the Breitbart edited video fashion, mind you), outlining the daily shadings, falsehoods, and hate from very powerful few and see how that propagates itself in the blogsphere. Nolo contendere.

   I’m not trying to convince you to not be something of a libertarian and become a democrat, because everything they do is made of double rainbows, nor that all republican ideas are inherently built on hate or lies (*footnote). The real problem, and the crux of the issue that I’m taking with your post, is that from just this one post you draw an equivalence between comments made by a small number of people who have almost no media impact versus a much larger, much more vocal, and much more importantly more powerful group of people that set the debate and tone for their party as a whole and the nation as a whole as a result. It’s not the same thing.

   The people who listen to this filth have a responsibility to discern what is true and what is a lie, but as one recent study has shown – one which I saw posted on your fb account – people who tend to get their information from one particular news source are significantly misinformed. These people cannot be expected to behave and think responsibly if they don’t know what is true and what isn’t. This is why the both sides do it is a canard. It’s he said and they did versus she said and no one heard it or cared.

   Knowing this, one could argue that it is the personal responsibility of all members of a society to point out falsehoods in public discourse, from our news sources, and from talk radio and television, so that our fellow members of society can likewise make rational judgements based on fact and not fiction. No man is an island, etc.

   *Footnote – the mandate, in my opinion, and that of the CBO (which republicans love when it supports them and hate when it doesn’t ::http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/6/933842/-Boehner:-CBO-entitled-to-their-opinion :: ) is what makes the health care reform act work, and that was a republican idea, for just one example – which also, coincidently is also about taking personal responsibility, but that’s another argument altogether; that mandate which they supported not so long ago is now, to republican lawmakers, an anathema being used to attempt to repeal the whole of the health care legislation.

   • Perhaps I presented the above without enough context. I’ve been encountering people lately that feel “they are evil, my side is nothing but good and never ever does evil.” All I was attempting to do was demonstrate that no, your side can do evil as well.

     Is the doing of that evil “fair and balanced”? Well, depends how you interpret that statement, I guess. 🙂 But that’s not my intention: my intention is to say “your side” isn’t scott-free. That’s all, nothing more.

     So if what folks are out to do is point out the lies, the evil, the lack of responsibilty, or whatever… then point that out, period. Don’t just point out the faults of those you don’t like, point out the fault no matter who possesses the fault. I may not politically agree with Jon Stewart on everything, but I like the guy because he calls bullshit when he sees it, no matter who’s doing the bullshitting.

     As for your footnote hey… that’s a novel concept too. Instead of us all spending time tearing folks down, why not spend more time being positive, pointing out what’s good, showing where there’s, to borrow a phrase, common ground. Yes I agree, call bullshit, work to point out lies and spread Truth. But maybe if we built each other up a little more we wouldn’t be so quick to tear each other down.

3. I understand more now of what you were trying to say. While redundant at this point, I still assert that while both sides may do it, there are differences in the degree to which the respective sides use incendiary language and to ignore the differences is irresponsible. If some liberals seem to think that no liberal speakers use harsh rhetoric they would be wrong. To claim that conservatives are justified in using the same language because the other side does it is also wrong. It is also completely incorrect to say that both sides do so with the same frequency. It doesn’t, as you’ve said, spew from both sides quite heavily. The difference is something that can be measured.

   As for the point out when someone on your side does something wrong notion – I would argue that that is what makes democrats democrats. They’re a very fractious bunch when dealing with each other, which is why it’s difficult for them to get some, if any, legislation passed even when they hold a majority. On the other hand you can see a constant voting in lockstep with republicans over the last two years, and a costly government shutdown under another Democrat president. Furthermore, if anyone has the temerity to say something that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t like, they’re backtracking/reframing their statements within 24-48 hours. It’s something that even Fox News has pointed out on multiple occasions, while simultaneously giving the recalcitrant politician the opportunity to apologize for having a dissenting opinion.

   Where I completely agree with you is that is has to stop. With that in mind, I don’t think that you can help build each other up or even have a dialog if one side is constantly and loudly claiming that the other side is socialist/communist/maoist/kenyan/anti-american/secretly hates white people/etc. Is the counterpoint to that saying, “Hey, even though those words don’t mean what the majority of you folks who use them think they mean, we love America, too?” and let it continue? I don’t think that’s been working so well, since the Dems seem incapable of forming an information campaign attempting to educate the public on not only the meaning of those words, but how none of them are appropriate descriptions. Not enough so that you’d notice, other than having them repeatedly referred to as being “whiny” or “educated ruling elites” (as though somehow education makes someone less capable of making policy?) on top of everything else. I think that the onslaught is more one sided than you think. Maybe it’s just the frustration talking.

   Maybe that is why you hear more liberals that say something along the lines of my side is cleaner when you point out both sides do it? It’s hard to have a conversation with someone when they hate you before you even get to the table. It’s also hard to reach a level discourse if you vow to vote against ideas that your own side brings to the table. It’s not even just because both side do it. You can’t point out the benefits of hcr when people accuse you of wanting to kill their grandmother, or by calling it ‘job killing’ when the non partisan group used to justify one’s own plans dissents instead and says that a repeal would in fact cut jobs. If only this example was a thought experiment and not a real life one that affects the fate of 50 million Americans, but fact is fact, opinion is opinion, and conflating the two removes free will from the equation. Having studied some libertarian works, I understand that free will and choice are somewhat central to their ideology.

   • Ethan, I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. Remember, I’m not opposed to you, I’m off on the sidelines.

     I think the problem has arisen because we’ve all gotten way too angry, which like you said, leads to frustration. Thus, there’s an inability to mount a reasonable campaign to just educate because well, we’ve all grown so distrustful… we always look for a hidden agenda, and unfortunately usually one is found and that just drives the wedge deeper. I’m not sure what it’s going to take to repair things, but I do know we can’t make it happen overnight nor as any sort of sweeping movement.

     We can only change ourselves so…. start there.

     Given what today is, I’ll just leave with this statement from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from his famous speech:

     We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

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