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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Guiteau had been a Democrat when you needed to be a Democrat to be an effective lawyer in Tammany Hall era New York, but he was a Republican (and, indeed, at least in his own head a Garfield campaign activist) at the time he shot Garfield.

Czolgosz was an anarchist, which strongly suggests he wasn't a Democrat given that anarchists hated all non-anarchist political movements including other left-wing ones.

So you are 1 for 3 on basic accuracy here.

I'm at least two for three on basic accuracy as you yourself have conceded that Guiteau was a Democrat. The only point of of contention is on whether radical anarchists code more "right" than "left". For my part i think radical anarchists code more left-wing/progressive than they do right-wing or conservative. Would you like to argue otherwise?

For my part i think radical anarchists code more left-wing/progressive than they do right-wing or conservative. Would you like to argue otherwise?

You didn't say that the three Republican Presidents were shot by leftists (which would also have been wrong, as neither Booth nor Guiteau was a leftist), you said that they were shot by Democrats. Leftist~=Democrat doesn't isn't even mostly true until the New Deal (the capital-P Progressives preferred to work as a faction in the Republican party) and isn't consistently true until the Reagan administration.

This response is totally braindead. Guiteau had been a Democrat at one point, but then switched to being a Republican, which is what he was when he assassinated Garfield.

As for your dissembling about Czolgosz, it’s clear that you’ve moved the goalposts immediately upon being corrected. Your explicit claim was “Democrats”, not “left-wingers.” You explicitly made a partisan claim - linking the phenomenon to specific political parties - and are now flailing to make it look like you were making an ideological claim.

(A claim which still doesn’t make sense, because the policy-position split between Democrats and Republicans during the era when both Garfield and McKinley were shot does not at all map onto modern ideas of “left” versus “right”. Was Garfield to the left or to the right of Winfield Scott Hancock, his Democrat opponent in the 1880 election? Who knows? The question doesn’t make sense.)

You accuse me of being "braindead" but...

For my part i think radical anarchists code more left-wing/progressive than they do right-wing or conservative. Would you like to argue otherwise?

In no sense does this address any of the criticisms I’ve leveled against your post. Nobody has argued that Leon Czolgosz, anarcho-communist, was not left-wing. The problem is that, again, your original post called him a “Democrat”. That’s what you said. Not whatever you’re now pretending you said instead.

I think it does and that you are taking refuge in pedantics to avoid the plain truth of my statement.

Your statement isn’t true, though! Are you suggesting that John Wilkes Booth was a left-winger? If not, then your attempt to insinuate that all of the presidential assassins were left-wingers plainly fails. (And again, it fails doubly because Charles Guiteau had few if any identifiably “left-wing” beliefs.)

Or, if you want to instead claim, as you originally did, that all of the presidential assassins have been members of the Democratic Party, you are then stuck explaining why Leon Czolgosz had literally zero affiliation with the party and does not seem to have ever voted for them, as well as why Guiteau was not only a registered Republican but also an active campaigner for the Republican presidential candidate, who hoped to receive an appointed position in a Republican administration.

Overall, your post was a disjointed mess full of easily-refutable claims, and your attempts to rescue it have contained even more lies and dodging. There is no identifiable ideological or partisan pattern when it comes to the men who have successfully carried out executions of American presidents, and your attempt to conjure one out of thin air abjectly failed.

Are you suggesting that John Wilkes Booth was a left-winger?

I'm flat out saying that he was a Democrat and merely suggesting that he was a left-winger.

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