Presidential town hall and gun show

[prog]

Boy do I have a bad feeling about this.

This is probably the first time I really have to ask what usually strikes me as a lame question: can you imagine what would have happened if anyone pulled this shit around our previous president?

Comments

[radtea]

The comments are an interesting read, particularly the discussion of whether or not this is consistent with Alinsky's "Rules For Radicals".

The thing I find interesting about the discussion is that the presumed "liberal" who is claiming that carrying guns is inconsistent with Alinski's position has apparently suffered the exact same kind of failure in his or her ability to use abstractions that we've seen so much of in right-wing nutjobs in the past eight years: they are arguing that because Alinski doesn't say, "Carry guns" that carrying guns is inconsistent with their position, even though Alinski does say, "Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat."

To anyone who still has a rudimentary capacity for dealing effectively with abstractions, the concrete tactic of carrying guns in this way is clearly consistent with Alinski's position, as they are clearly an intimidation tactic by the right wing of the Party to try to regain ascendancy in the public eye and mind.

The right wing of the Party is made entirely of cowards who run scared or lash out psychotically when the threat of violence looms, so it is natural that if they wished "to cause confusion, fear, retreat" they would use implicit threats of violence to achieve that end (part of the right wingnut mythology is that everyone else is a bigger coward than they are, so of course they can't imagine psychotic lashing out as a response.)

[pseudomanitou]

Interesting.

But what I wonder is -- if someone had reacted to the right-wing protesters violently, what would have been the result?

And if the armed protesters had opened fire, for any reason, what would be the public outcome?

[radtea]

Despite the unity at the top of the Party, the Proles are divided into two tribes, so if by the "public outcome" you mean the Prole outcome, you have to consider the independent reactions of the two tribes separately.

The Right Tribe would have claimed that the Left were hypocrites and that it proved the need to keep and bear arms.

The Left Tribe would try to blame the gun-carriers for their own victimization.

The Party would use the violence as an excuse to further crack down on domestic freedoms in Amerika.

[Note: I believe all this "for analytical purposes only". I go through my days trying to make sense of the incoherent mess that is the modern United States, the rich, heavily armed psychopath of the international community, and trying to make sense of it in purely Orwellian terms is a kind of literary exercise, although also depressingly plausible.]