QuakerOats;1868184 wrote:And, I will add, the reason we are having this discussion is because liberals want to be able outlaw certain speech. They want to decide whether certain speech ('orders') should be squelched and punishable, and that is dangerously wrong. They think if they can tie 'aggression' to speech, they can call speech aggression, i.e. unlawful violence, and they can eliminate it. I see where there is headed, maybe many do not.

This is paranoia.

I agree that there are those who seem to wish to make any speech which vilifies or offends someone illegal by painting it as aggression.

However, that doesn't require us to say that it's all or nothing. Again, that's a false dichotomy.

An order to murder is different than saying someone doesn't deserve to live. One is an imperative (a command), and the other is a declarative (a fact claim). It's rather easy to delineate between them, and I'd argue that a pretty clear line can be drawn between imperative statements toward violence and declarative statements of conviction.

Some physical acts of violence are not aggression. Hitting someone on the football field or in the boxing ring, for example, are both violent, but neither is an act of aggression, because they're within the rules of the sport on which both participants agree.

So, if some physical acts can be aggression while others are not, why is it so hard to avoid a dichotomy when it comes to speech?

"paranoia" ...... not so much








http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/08/22/dinesh-dsouza-democrats-big-lies-about-white-supremacy.html

B I N G O

O-Trap;1868188 wrote: So, if some physical acts can be aggression while others are not, why is it so hard to avoid a dichotomy when it comes to speech?

Because speech, by itself, never justifies an act of self-defense. Speech, by itself, cannot be an act of aggression, with respect to violent self-defense. This is the view held by the law, and the courts. If I say "I'm going to kill you", that by itself is not enough for you to take an action of self-defense.

Speech is not assault. You cannot assault someone simply because of something they said, no matter what they said. It is other factors/context which present a credible threat behind the speech that would justify a pre-emptive physical act of defense.

QuakerOats;1868189 wrote:"paranoia" ...... not so much








http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/08/22/dinesh-dsouza-democrats-big-lies-about-white-supremacy.html

B I N G O

A column by the guy who said 9/11 was the fault of liberals in America...great source.

QuakerOats;1868189 wrote:


http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/08/22/dinesh-dsouza-democrats-big-lies-about-white-supremacy.html

B I N G O

That is one fucked up full of boiler plate bullshit, shoddy historical research, and political bullshit article.
I've seen this dude quoted a few times and cited recently, man, he is a total tool and bullshit artist. If that is a guy you read, now your posts make even more sense.
I feel dumber now reading that piece of shit.

Par for the course. :laugh:

QuakerOats;1868189 wrote:"paranoia" ...... not so much








http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/08/22/dinesh-dsouza-democrats-big-lies-about-white-supremacy.html

B I N G O

Who was saying anything about white supremacy? White supremacy ideology, while vile, is all declarative. Technically, all ideology itself (including those evil, evil Muslims) is declarative.

gut;1868192 wrote:Because speech, by itself, never justifies an act of self-defense. Speech, by itself, cannot be an act of aggression, with respect to violent self-defense. This is the view held by the law, and the courts. If I say "I'm going to kill you", that by itself is not enough for you to take an action of self-defense.

Speech is not assault. You cannot assault someone simply because of something they said, no matter what they said. It is other factors/context which present a credible threat behind the speech that would justify a pre-emptive physical act of defense.

I don't actually disagree with most of the sentiment you've laid out here. Without context, no spoken word holds power.

Then again, no action, if not within the context of another person, holds such power either. To grab something rather Pauline, if I swing my fists to beat the air, I've assaulted nobody. The same action in a different context results in assault.

For the record, there are indeed circumstances in which "I'm going to kill you" can be used as grounds to justify a defense. A case of battered woman defense in which the theoretical victim has grounds to believe that the words were motivated by intent to carry them out might be one such example.

Inasmuch as we're talking about removing all context, I agree, but again, I think that's true of virtually every action. A word muttered to nobody results in no victim, to be sure. But a gun fired at nobody and a fist swung at nobody result in no victime, as well.

Dr Winston O'Boogie;1868194 wrote:A column by the guy who said 9/11 was the fault of liberals in America...great source.

Par for the course here, attack the messenger.

Feel free to actually refute the points that are incorrect, in your eyes.

ptown_trojans_1;1868195 wrote:That is one fucked up full of boiler plate bullshit, shoddy historical research, and political bullshit article.
I've seen this dude quoted a few times and cited recently, man, he is a total tool and bullshit artist. If that is a guy you read, now your posts make even more sense.
I feel dumber now reading that piece of shit.

Feel free to weigh in with your refutations.

QuakerOats;1868198 wrote:Par for the course here, attack the messenger.

Feel free to actually refute the points that are incorrect, in your eyes.

You're the master of attacking the messenger.

Hypocrisy, look it up.

O-Trap;1868197 wrote: Then again, no action, if not within the context of another person, holds such power either. To grab something rather Pauline, if I swing my fists to beat the air, I've assaulted nobody. The same action in a different context results in assault.

For the record, there are indeed circumstances in which "I'm going to kill you" can be used as grounds to justify a defense. A case of battered woman defense in which the theoretical victim has grounds to believe that the words were motivated by intent to carry them out might be one such example.

Assault is defined by physically touching someone. It's rather unambiguous.

As for the battered woman, yes, circumstance. Words are just words and by themselves never justify self-defense. Firing a gun is not an act of aggression, but pointing a gun at someone is. Words are never acts of aggression. The battered woman syndrome doesn't really even require any sort of provocative aggression - the basis of that defense is the entire perspective is different from a reasonable, rational person.

I don't care to argue the semantics of aggression. What touched all of this off was the claim by some Antifa people that they are acting in self-defense when assaulting someone for what they say. That is simply unjustifiable.

QuakerOats;1868199 wrote:Feel free to weigh in with your refutations.

Sigh, too long to list in detail.
His history of the Civil War is too simplistic. His view that the modern D party is just the same as the party of the south is not the same. His argument that the D party during the civil war and the run up to the civil war is not factual. There was no real national democratic party, it was split into 2 or 3. The Party has changed dramatically over time, yet he blows right past that and just equates the two.
His Lee argument makes no fucking sense as even Lee himself contradicts postwar what the guy said in the article.

A reading of the million actual history books could easily fix all his errors.

His assumption that the people at the rally would be Ds makes no sense at all as he does not provide any evidence to the fact and completely ignores the voting movements of the 1980s and 1990s where the south moved largely from D to R, thanks to Reagan, the religious right, and many other factors.
He also uses bullshit boiler plate language like leftist and media types that are lazy and require no thought or provide nuance to the discussion.

Those are right off the top of my head.

Larger point, again I cannot stand lazy boiler plate articles like this. They are lazy and do us a disservice by putting everything into left v. right terms, when in reality, shit is more complicated that BS labels.

Automatik;1868200 wrote:You're the master of attacking the messenger.

Hypocrisy, look it up.

His hypocrisy doesn't make him wrong.

QuakerOats;1868198 wrote:Par for the course here, attack the messenger.

Feel free to actually refute the points that are incorrect, in your eyes.

He's a messenger? For whom?

His column is typical revisionist history of the South not being to blame for slavery. Political parties of 1860 hardly resemble themselves today, so that too is bunk. Robert E. Lee - the great man who opposed slavery and hoped for its end (even though he owned some), and opposed secession led men into battle on its behalf, battle which caused hundreds of thousands of lives. The Lost Cause story, what a horrible lie that is. That is like saying that Germany bears little responsibility for the Holocaust since most German citizens "didn't even operate the ovens".

Automatik;1868200 wrote:You're the master of attacking the messenger.

Hypocrisy, look it up.

I generally attempt to go after the substance of the matter; the policy. Hopefully it comes across that way.

gut;1868201 wrote:Assault is defined by physically touching someone. It's rather unambiguous.

Naturally. I wasn't intending to suggest otherwise. If it came across that way, I apologize for the lack of clarity.

My point in that statement was that virtually every activity that is deemed criminal is only such because of the context in which the actions take place.

gut;1868201 wrote:As for the battered woman, yes, circumstance. Words are just words and by themselves never justify self-defense.

Courts have disagreed with this regarding such cases. Also, this would indicate that, were Hitler to have taken a stroll in one of the camps, all the while ordering troops to kill various prisoners, there would have been no moral justification for a prisoner to attempt to silence the Fuhrer.

gut;1868201 wrote:Firing a gun is not an act of aggression, but pointing a gun at someone is. Words are never acts of aggression.

I would contend that there is a rather apt parallel.

Firing a gun is not an act of aggression. Firing it at a person intentionally is.

In the same way, saying, "Execute the Gingers, NOW!" in the mirror while getting ready for work is not aggression. However, I would argue that it is if the command is being given to subordinates in a hierarchical structure, at the very least.

gut;1868201 wrote:The battered woman syndrome doesn't really even require any sort of provocative aggression - the basis of that defense is the entire perspective is different from a reasonable, rational person.

I'm not sure what the last part of this means. I may just not be reading it correctly.

gut;1868201 wrote:I don't care to argue the semantics of aggression. What touched all of this off was the claim by some Antifa people that they are acting in self-defense when assaulting someone for what they say. That is simply unjustifiable.

I agree. The individuals using that as a defense are being intentionally dense. The speech they're calling out isn't an imperative statement or in any way prescriptive.

However, we took out bin Laden and assessed him as a criminal for acts he order, and not acts he carried out (just as an example).

QuakerOats;1868198 wrote:Par for the course here, attack the messenger.

Feel free to actually refute the points that are incorrect, in your eyes.

What was pointed out, though, speaks to the credibility of the writing.

Rest assured, that's not necessarily sufficient to say the piece doesn't make a point. It does, however, cast doubt on why someone should perceive the piece as making a point without essentially checking the piece for accuracy.

We took him out because he was the team leader of the force that committed the aggression.

QuakerOats;1868212 wrote:We took him out because he was the team leader of the force that committed the aggression.

What if they had gone rogue? Acted without his instruction? Acted not only without his sanction, but without his knowledge?

I'm not saying they did, mind you. But what if they had? Your statement remains intact. Is the team leader an aggressor without knowledge, just for being the team lead?

It would seem odd to say that someone could be an aggressor without knowledge of the event, but that the same person would NOT be the aggressor because of the command.

O-Trap;1868209 wrote:However, we took out bin Laden and assessed him as a criminal for acts he order, and not acts he carried out (just as an example).

What should we do about the Missouri representive who called for Trump's assassination?

Take her out

Charge her for a hate crime

Arrest her for aggressive speak

Act like she didn't say it

Give her a pass because she is a liberal democrat

Applaud her for taking a stand

Erect a monument in her honor for standing up to white supremacy

QuakerOats;1868214 wrote:What should we do about the Missouri representive who called for Trump's assassination?

Take her out

Charge her for a hate crime

Arrest her for aggressive speak

Act like she didn't say it

Give her a pass because she is a liberal democrat

Applaud her for taking a stand

Erect a monument in her honor for standing up to white supremacy

To my knowledge, she made a declarative statement.

"I hope Trump is assassinated."

That's a fact claim about her own desires, as vile as they are. It's not a command.

What did ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC have to say about it?

Are there protesters interrupting her town halls; will they be marching in her district ...........

QuakerOats;1868221 wrote:What did ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC have to say about it?

Are there protesters interrupting her town halls; will they be marching in her district ...........

What DID they have to say? I don't have a lot of faith in our media as a whole, as I think everything is spun to suit an audience for the purpose of perpetuating viewership, not necessarily delivering a Joe Friday-esque "just the facts, ma'am" approach.

As for protesters, what point are you trying to make with that? How does that have anything to do with whether or not what she said is aggression?

QuakerOats;1868214 wrote:What should we do about the Missouri representive who called for Trump's assassination?

Take her out

Charge her for a hate crime

Arrest her for aggressive speak

Act like she didn't say it

Give her a pass because she is a liberal democrat

Applaud her for taking a stand

Erect a monument in her honor for standing up to white supremacy

I'd say leave it at her being made to resign. That was it for Charles Wasko (West York, Pa. mayor who FB'd a meme suggesting that Obama be lynched last year).

ptown_trojans_1;1868195 wrote:That is one fucked up full of boiler plate bullshit, shoddy historical research, and political bullshit article.
I've seen this dude quoted a few times and cited recently, man, he is a total tool and bullshit artist. If that is a guy you read, now your posts make even more sense.
I feel dumber now reading that piece of shit.

Still smarter than Reza Aslan. Did you see their debate?