Defending the hate...

[liberal N proud]

This from Slate:

In Defense of Inflamed Rhetoric
The awesome stupidity of the calls to tamp down political speech in the wake of the Giffords shooting.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Sunday, Jan. 9, 2011, at 12:24 PM ET

"Shooting Throws Spotlight on State of U.S. Political Rhetoric," reports CNN. "Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics," states the New York Times. Keith Olbermann clocked overtime on Saturday to deliver a commentary subtitled "The political rhetoric of the country must be changed to prevent acts of domestic terrorism." The home page of the Washington Post offered this headline to its story about the shooting: "Rampage Casts Grim Light on U.S. Political Discord."

The great miracle of American politics is that although it can tend toward the cutthroat and thuggish, it is almost devoid of genuine violence outside of a few scuffles and busted lips now and again. With the exception of Saturday's slaughter, I'd wager that in the last 30 years there have been more acts of physical violence in the stands at Philadelphia Eagles home games than in American politics.

Any call to cool "inflammatory" speech is a call to police all speech, and I can't think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power. As Jonathan Rauch wrote brilliantly in Harper's in 1995, "The vocabulary of hate is potentially as rich as your dictionary, and all you do by banning language used by cretins is to let them decide what the rest of us may say." Rauch added, "Trap the racists and anti-Semites, and you lay a trap for me too. Hunt for them with eradication in your mind, and you have brought dissent itself within your sights."

Our spirited political discourse, complete with name-calling, vilification—and, yes, violent imagery—is a good thing. Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private. The wicked direction the American debate often takes is not a sign of danger but of freedom. And I'll punch out the lights of anybody who tries to take it away from me.

http://www.slate.com/id/2280616/?GT1=38001

These people want to keep inciting the idiots. :nuke:

[Urban Prairie]

1. "Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private"

So in other words, Schafer is apparently just fine with Loughlin "unloading his fury" in public, in the form of his Glock, one trigger-pulled bullet at a time??

Too bad that he wasn't in the line of fire last Saturday, instead of that innocent 9 year old girl, along with the others that died or were wounded. Then his idiotic statement might have become his epitaph instead.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Note the straw man here.

He's conflating the deploring of violent rhetoric with imagined attempts to suppress or outlaw it.

He's pretending that saying you SHOULDN'T do something is equivalent to forbidding it.

You SHOULDN'T leave unloaded guns around, but it's not illegal. If someone is harmed, you will be liable for the result of your recklessness.

[EstimatedProphet]

3. There's a difference between criminalizing speech and allowing incitement to riot

Incitement to riot has been illegal for well over 100 years. It was found to be not protected under Amendment I - yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, and all that. What the right has been doing by continually demonizing the left as animals and monsters is incitement to riot.