How did we get to: "I disagree with you, so you should be executed?"

[MineralMan]

I don't get it, actually. I disagree with people 100 times a day. Never once have I wanted to kill someone or have someone killed because I disagreed with that person.

Because, when we get to that point, discussions are useless. Arguments are useless. Civilization is useless.

It seems like most of the death threat postings come from the right here in this country, but that's not a universal thing, really. Threatening people with death if they disagree with you is pretty much a universal thing, at least for people who don't think much about anything.

Are wishes like that just overstatement and hyperbole? Even so, if you can say it out loud, you have the potential to do it, it seems to me. They're not just overstatement and hyperbole, though. Every day, people lose their lives for nothing more than a gesture or even just a "wrong" look. Road rage, shooting people for "dissing" the shooter, killing someone (or trying to) because you don't think they should be where they are. That's the news these days.

People disagree with me. I disagree with people. Shrug. So what?

Overreacting like that is just really freaking stupid. Everyone should stop doing that.

[Ferrets are Cool]

1. "Never once have I wanted to kill someone or have someone killed because I disagreed with that

person".

Because you are not a repug.

[MineralMan]

3. No, I'm not. However the left has done its share of

killing people for disagreeing, too. Every ideology has resorted to such violence at one time or another.

[ChoppinBroccoli]

2. I've Long Had A Theory That The First Step Down This Road...........

............began with a guy named Rush Limbaugh. In the '80s, he was on everyone's radio, and he effectively turned politics into sports. He encouraged people to pick sides, to pick a "team," and then ride with "my team" right or wrong, do or die. There could be no middle ground. Either you loved America or you hated America. And the definition of "America" was whatever he told them it was. It signaled the end of civil discourse in this country. Because not only were liberals wrong or misguided or mistaken, they were evil and out to murder your children. And how can there be any compromise with that?

[Aristus]

5. That's it right there.

Forty years of right-wing hate radio.

It's taken its toll. You have an entire generation of angry white men who have never known life without hate radio validating their idiotic resentments.

[MineralMan]

9. Radio has just amplified it. It has always been there.

Lynch mobs. Anarchists throwing bombs into buildings. Communists killing the aristocrats. Kings killing peasants.

Humans can be incredibly stupid, and all too often are.

[MineralMan]

7. Not really. There have always been people like that.

People who want to destroy everyone who disagrees with them. History is full of people like that, I'm afraid.

It's also full of people who don't feel that way, but they don't stand out, because they don't want to kill everyone they disagree with.

It's a delicate balance, actually.

[ChoppinBroccoli]

12. But The Difference Is He Was Beamed Into Everyone's Home

If you turned on your AM radio during the day, chances are you heard him. I was in high school when he hit my local AM station. And my dad, a lifelong Democrat in a family that had been Democrats for GENERATIONS (there are old stories of my family sitting around the dining room table talking about "that bastard Taft" ), listened to him every day, started repeating his talking points, and turned Conservative for a number of years. Only in the last few years of his life did he return to the fold (and it happened after I had gotten an education and learned the intricacies of policy and was able to explain to him why Republican policies were harmful). I was able to turn him just in time for him to vote for Obama twice before he died.

My point being that the availability of Rush Limbaugh's brainwashing, and the effectiveness of it, was what made him so much more dangerous than those who came before him. And based on my own personal experience, his appearance on the radio marked a clear line of demarcation between civil discourse and what we have now.

I would also say that Limbaugh's popularity opened the door for Fox News, which hastened the brainwashing.

[dpibel]

19. So it was a trick question?

Hard for me to see "how did we get to a point" as anything but, "It didn't used to be this way, now it is."

Now that people have answered your question, you're saying, "It was always this way."

Not clear to me how that works.

[MineralMan]

20. Sorry, but I can't help if it's not clear to you.

Not a trick question at all.

[Ferrets are Cool]

10. Ding, ding. We have a winna!!

[2naSalit]

16. He replaced...

That Farm Report guy that was annoying to listen to him fumble through his copy. Can't recall his name, which indicates I may have fully recovered!

Uh, I remembered, Paul Harvey. That guy, Flush Rimjob replaced him back then, they were all that was on the radio when crossing middle America away from cities.

[dv421]

4. Two Words

Newt Gingerich

He was the start of the no compromise philosophy the seditionist party is using now.

[pandr32]

6. Hello!

You seem to be relatively new around here.

[MineralMan]

8. No, not really.

Newt Gingrich was just one in a long line.

[PatSeg]

11. Yes, such people have been with us always

They just get more attention these days and that attention feeds and enables them.

[MineralMan]

13. So it seems.

More's the pity.

[jalan48]

14. It's a statement about where our country is politically. First you dehumanize the opposition

then you can silence/jail/kill them. If you have ever attended a civil rights march or ant-war protest this kind of Fascist behavior was evident from some in the crowd. It's been building and expanding since I first saw it in the 60's. We had a chance to move in the right direction but the election of Reagan changed our history for the worse IMHO.

[Ocelot II]

15. That phenomenon has existed pretty much forever

in different civilizations since the beginning of recorded time and probably before then. It was what powerful people did to people who said things that threatened their power, or what people who wanted to take power did to people who opposed them, if they could get away with it. Rulers routinely executed those who spoke against them, as did religious leaders claiming some form of heresy, which really meant that the "heretics" were opposing the power the clergy held. We have the Spanish Inquisition (which nobody expects, except that of course we do in another form), the Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber in 16th-century England, Hitler, Stalin, the Salem witch trials, the Taliban, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un and Putin (whose opponents seem to have a habit of carelessly falling from windows) and on and on.

Death and threats of death as the result of expressions of opposition have been more the rule than the exception throughout history. We've thought it couldn't happen here - and so far it's been only threats from right-wing tv gum-flappers and political loons. But some people could find a way to justify defenestrating political opponents if they had enough power to get away with it.

[ForgedCrank]

17. I believe this thought

should be extended beyond the word execution.
We see it all day, all over. People want their ideological opponents destroyed, some even concocting clever ways to do it. Destroy lives, careers, scorched earth campaigns against other humans for having a thought or a belief that they disagree with, and often suggesting using government powers to do it. It is the very definition of tyrannical.
I would guess these types have always been with us, but today they have more reach and appear louder than in the past due to public internet vehicles that they use to spread their message.
I do try to speak out against it, but am most often harassed and belittled for my efforts. It is my opinion that each of us should be always looking inward as the primary method of correcting the massive division that we are all suffering today.

[Beausoleil]

18. It's the simplistic, good/evil way of looking at the world

Most folks who believe in an ideology have to defend it. But how do you defend the illogical, the indefensible?

You can't, so you kill the messenger, so to speak.

If I don't understand you and my ideology prevents me from discussing things logically because I have already decided you are wrong, I have to kill you to win the argument. There is only good and evil, you know.

Also, if you disagree with me, you are not just wrong, you are evil and probably a pedophile. Therefore I am justified. And patriotic.

[Gaugamela]

21. Inherent in the idea of privilege is the the right to use violence to defend it.

Anytime privilege is challenged privilege will hit back with overwhelming force. Think of the civil rights movement in the 60s, the suffragette movement, the labor struggles since the late 19th century, or the occasional woman on the internet who criticizes sexism in the gaming culture or the tech industry. Throughout history any person or group who systematically questioned the privileged class would be tortured to death in the public square.

It seems to me that in the current moment the vast majority of death threats come from people on the right who feel their privilege is under threat. The people who show up at school board meetings shouting about CRT either don't know what it is, or do and they don't care: somewhere in their brainstem they are defending their aggrieved sense of privilege.

It seems to me that right vs. left is no longer fundamentally about distribution of wealth (as it was through much of the 20th century), but is now about authoritarianism (i.e. privilege) vs. democracy and equality.

As for revolutions or violence against unjust regimes, sometimes they're justified. I certainly wouldn't condemn the actions of the European resistance during WWII, and frankly I think Somoza and Ceausescu both got what they deserved. Traditionally, one would be considered a rightwing dictator and the other a leftwing dictator, but they were both defending privilege.

[MineralMan]

22. That's an interesting way of looking at it.

I like your thinking on this.

[sanatanadharma]

23. Decades of "Liberal Hunting Licences

Sorry, I got called away for too long and forgot all my brilliant analysis of the situation society now finds itself.
Simply put, to little understanding of "commonwealth" and too much coveting of selfish-wealth.

Oh, and too much tolerance of, using Hobbes' words, 'nasty, mean, brutish and short' of morality people.

[IcyPeas]

24. And yet they call the left "radical" /nt

[William769]

25. That feeling has always been there

It's just never spoken aloud by the other side until now.