Ted Rall for December 06, 2010

Ba-dum-tsssss.

KILL all Republicans now.

pavlov, works for me.

Fortunately/unfortunately for me, I behave the same online as I do offline. You never know when some of the stuff you say online under what you believe is a guise of anonymity will catch up to you. And besides… I tend to use similar avatars and names across multiple sites.

^^^^^^^CA: You’re not well, are you?

People really speak their minds on the internet…is it such a bad thing?

When people lie about their opinions or sugar-coat them in real life, we don’t like that very much.

I’m with you Jade.

If you kill the Republicans, you’re still stuck with the Democrats. It is not so hard to freely express yourself on the Internet without being juvenile or nasty. All it takes is a rudimentary command of the English language.

When Shakespeare wrote “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”, he deliberately put the words into the mouths of an unthinking mob.

Just last night I was reading a passage in the novel “Death of the Adversary” where the narrator (an assimilated Jew in 1930’s Germany) recounts listening to some young Nazis (they don’t know he’s a Jew) brag about their desecration of a Jewish cemetery:

“I kept thinking of that old saying, how does it go…’Do unto…?’ Something like that.” “Yeah, my mother used to pound that into me when I was a kid, too. Who said it, anyway?” “Oh, I don’t think ANYBODY remembers where it’s from. It’s just one of those things people say.” “Christ, can you imagine if people actually LIVED that way? What a disaster THAT would be!”

RV,

Yes, fine but its acceptance in the vernacular is based on a misunderstanding of the context, and it pisses me off when people ascribe the sentiment to Shakespeare himself (although, even elsewhere, he seems to have had no great love for lawyers, one thing we DO know about him from historical records was that he was litigious).

By the way, the novel I mentioned above (by Hans Keilson; written shortly after the war but newly translated) has quite a bit to say (on both sides of the question) of just how seriously one should take the murmurings of an unthinking mob, and what sort of response is called for.

“When they came for the Republicans I did not speak, because I was not a Republican…”

“Eat the Rich” doesn’t bother me, because it’s clearly hyperbole, was written as hyperbole, and is invariably (so far as I’ve seen) used in full awareness of its hyperbolic nature (I’ve never seen anyone SERIOUSLY advocate cannibalism as a means of economic justice, not even Jonathan Swift).

(Besides, Motorhead ROCKS!)

But when you merely propose the “removal” of what you see as an undesireable group, you’ll surely find someone who’ll think it’s a good idea.

Are there any kweers in the theater tonight? Get ‘em up against the wall… There’s one in the spotlight, He don’t look right to me, Get him up against the wall… And that one looks Jewish, And that one’s a koon! Who let all this riff-raff into the room? There’s one smoking a joint! And another with spots! If I had my way, I’d have all of you SHOT!