Arizona Rep Gabrielle Giffords shot.

[Bela]

Learn to use Google and Wikipedia.

You stated you found that list on another forum, and I thought the least one could ask of you was to provide a link to the particular post or thread it came from.

It might do you some good to research topics before forming opinions on them. This is like your school work and while I know some people do school work for other people, I won't do your school work for you.

lol talk about rude or insulting

So who's trolling who?

The term violent has nothing to do with rhetoric.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/violent
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rhetoric

Violence is focused on the concept of physical actions. The incidence of sounds is not considered to be a physical action.

This is clutching at straws at best. I mean, of course the two words on their own don't mean the same thing. And violence is only physical? So if somebody writes in their blog about how they want to kill you, that text is vile, reprehensible, repulsive, but not violent. This is just semantics. And if this is the best argument you can throw at me, then I think we've gone as far as we can with this.

Rhetoric requires the expression of complete thoughts and the pictures of signs that you have posted do not express complete thoughts.

I have never referred to Sarah Palin's gun sights as usage of rhetoric, nor have I ever posted that graphic. You're saying that a person can't communicate a message with images, but only words. I don't buy into that.

http://xkcd.com/552/

I have maintained throughout this thread two things: (1) Only a case can be made for correlation between violent rhetoric and shootings which take place, (2) That even if no shootings had taken place, violent rhetoric is still reprehensible.

With everything I said, you have no evidence for this. It is like saying that violent video games make people mass murders. You have no basis to say that there was not some other underlying psychological issue that caused this. You also have no basis for saying that a guy who was completely apolitical was affected by the words of politicians he hated. If he had been affected by such words, he certainly chose a very poor target. Gabrielle Giffords he shot was a "Blue Dog Democrat"; she supported Republican policies within the Democratic Party and voted with Republicans on key issues.

I contest Jared Loughner's status as "apolitical." He had a wide variety of readings and "concerns" for our country, readings which included Mein Kampf (which despite this being used as a means of saying that Loughner was a liberal, recall that a fascist police state like that of Nazi Germany is actually an extreme form of conservatism). The "concerns" that Loughner has been cited as holding about our country included a dollar not backed by a gold standard and a fixation on individuals not using proper grammar. But if you concede that Loughner is more likely conservative than liberal, your argument then is why he picks a Blue Dog Democrat. The reason: It has been reported that Loughner had a fixation on Gabriel Giffords which goes back all the way to 2007, which would mean that Loughner's motivation does likely have little to do with the violent rhetoric that appears in this country, but at the same time accounts for why he chose the "target" that he did.

The question becomes why there is talk of the violent rhetoric used if it has nothing to do with Loughner (and personally I don't think Loughner really was influenced by the media). This does not, however, excuse the violent rhetoric that has been used nor does it absolve all of the other shootings which have taken place in the past two years of their correlation with violent rhetoric.

 

[Shining Arcanine]

You stated you found that list on another forum, and I thought the least one could ask of you was to provide a link to the particular post or thread it came from.

The purpose of posting the list was to force you to do some research in order to refute it, with the intention that you would discover that assassination is a fairly common event in US history and it has less to do with politics and more to do with visibility. Giving you a link to the page from which I copied the list would defeat the purpose. Had I done that, you would be able to psychologically justify not doing any research at all by knowledge of your ability to utilize me to do your research for you, no matter how inane or superficial it might be. Furthermore, the exact list is easily discoverable via Google to those who know how to use it, which is consistent with the idea that you are dodging the requirement that you do research in order to justify your ideas.

I contest Jared Loughner's status as "apolitical." He had a wide variety of readings and "concerns" for our country, readings which included Mein Kampf (which despite this being used as a means of saying that Loughner was a liberal, recall that a fascist police state like that of Nazi Germany is actually an extreme form of conservatism).

Nazi is a term invented by the US to describe members of the NSDAP in Germany. The proper translation of NSDAP into English is "National Socialist German Workers' Party". Apparently, some socialists are more socialist than others. ;)

I do not care what you think or what your conclusions are, but I do care that you are violating rules of logical reasoning. You are continually violating "correlation is not causation". You also are violating aspects of set theory by failing to recognize the potential for ambiguities in language. You are even relying upon others' attempts at revisionist history for the sole purpose of making points. Your consistent adulteration of logic is a displeasure to all familiar with logical reasoning and as an outsider, I see a person who is often in arguments because he invents arguments where they are none.

Learn another natural language (e.g. Latin), learn statistics (e.g. Calculus-based Statistics) and learn logic (e.g. Discrete Mathematics). You will be amazed at how well you will be able to express your thoughts and ideas if you do that.

By the way, here is something that I wish I could claim that I did intentionally, but I only realized it after I wrote it:

Just the other day I was asking about what someone did and the person thought I had inquired about an act that he performed, as opposed to his actual job. Having a decent education in Latin, I knew enough to have a conversation about why I was expecting to hear something along the lines of a job and why instead I was hearing something along the lines of some act that the person performed.

What is the gender of the person to whom I was speaking and what did that person do?

 

[Bela]

The purpose of posting the list was to force you to do some research in order to refute it, with the intention that you would discover that assassination is a fairly common event in US history and it has less to do with politics and more to do with visibility.

I know other shootings/assassinations have taken place in US history. Make no mistake: I am only saying that a case can be made that the recent shootings which have taken place over the past two years follow a pattern.

If a shooter's intentions are to make themselves or their beliefs known, they would be doing so with the idea in mind that they will be making a statement through their actions. It would be to make a public statement about a person's political positions, would it not? I disagree this and other shootings of individuals are not political in nature. People don't wake up one day and decide they want to shoot the President, or their congresswoman, or people in a church, or want to shoot everyone at the Tides Foundation, or want to shoot the medical director of an abortion clinic. I contest that they, of their own accord, decided that they would target individuals who all happen to be "liberals," and that this is just a wild coincidence.

What you are dealing with are not rational people. Rational people do not resort to violence as a means of dealing with their problems or making their political positions known to the world. That's what making political statements is all about.

Jared Loughner is not rational. I don't contest that. What I contest is why it follows that since he is not rational, his actions are not political. Jared Loughner called his actions "an assassination." It was very clear to him that it was political.

Irrational people tend to also not question what they hear. It seems that labeling Loughner and others as "irrational" or "crazy" only reinforces the possibility that they are susceptible to outside influences, not diminishes it.

You are continually violating "correlation is not causation".

Perhaps I'm cynical. Perhaps I believe that there exists a political movement which uses irrational, armed and dangerous people to their political ends of eliminating some of that movement's opposition in the form of scaring people who own guns into shooting people.

I have only been making that case as a possible theory for the state of politics in this country, one which I feel accounts for its recent history far more accurately than "all of these recent shootings of individuals labeled 'liberal' are wild coincidences."

You also are violating aspects of set theory by failing to recognize the potential for ambiguities in language.

There is no ambiguity in the statement "if ballots don't work, bullets will." Joyce Kaufman is talking about using guns and shooting people. There is no ambiguity in "People are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around?" Sharon Angle is talking about using guns and shooting people.

 

[OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire]

I think the guy was just crazy, he didn't seem to favor the Republicans or the tea party either, he just happened to shot Giffords because she didn't answer one of his question in a debate the way he wanted to...

 

[Captain Hobo.]

I hope she gets better so she can talk. She is on the rode to recovery.

 

[OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire]

She can say a few words is what I heard so she is on the road to recovery thank goodness :)

 

[Livewire]

She can say a few words is what I heard so she is on the road to recovery thank goodness :)

Apparently she has been moved into a rehabilitation facility as of this past week and is well on her way to recovery, so that's good. :)