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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31617 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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You are speaking in absolutes. I think he did defame but I disagree he’s completely intellectually and morally wrong in this case. The parents entered the fray when they decided to politicize anti gun messaging.

Do you think he was not completely incorrect intellectually when he claimed that the massacre never occurred and the parents are just actors whose children weren't murdered while attending elementary school? Or that he was not completely incorrect morally when he claimed that?

In absolute sense - No.

I don't think it's a good thing to try and argue this from a culture war perspective; parents of school shooting victims are perhaps simply always destined to go campaigning against guns. As someone who is pro-gun, I don't need Alex Jones on my side, I can simply try and argue from other angles why I think the Brady Campaign and so on are wrong without trying to undermine the tragedy they suffered. If anything, we are served better by people like Open Source Defense, Karl Kasarda, and so on than we are by Alex Jones. "Arguments as soldiers" is one thing, but Alex Jones's problem was taking that a bit too literally.

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On that note, I've often wondered why Michael Dukakis responded the bizarre way he did to the famous 1988 debate question on the death penalty, in which he was asked whether he'd want the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered. He responded technically with a dismissal of the concept, reiterating his long history of opposing capital punishment without actually answering the question. Personally, my response would have been:

There was an episode of West Wing in which the fictional President Bartlet was prepping for a debate and gave that same bumbling, technocratic answer to "What if your wife was raped and murdered?" and his aid Toby (Aaron Sorkin's mouthpiece) proceeds to rip into Michael Dukakis President Bartlet giving him basically a version of your speech.

(And then because West Wing was Aaron Sorkin's Democratic Party fan fiction, everyone laughs because it turns out they were pranking Toby, Bartlet just wanted to set him off, of course he'd never actually give such a terrible response in a debate!)

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