Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Short Follow Up On Trump’s Responsibility, If Any, For US Violence

R:

.... While in any case we don’t know what confluence of forces are at work ( eg is it just mental illness), Trump gave license to bigots so he has to be partially responsible . To me, it’s like the thin skull plaintiff, and we all have to be accountable for the choices we make and actions we take...

 Me in response:

.... What licence though?

Is it like Trudeau’s social licence?

Both the fake bomb guy and Bowers seem like nut jobs: the first guy is a juice head with a long rap sheet whose family said he was getting nuttier and nuttier; the second guy, from the little I know about him and what he did, just has to be a wack job. 

So let’s say they both are off their nuts for the sake of argument. 

It’s seems to me soft to say Trump figures in to, bears *some* responsibility for, what they did. I heard the same argument when that guy in Montreal killed all those women. We all, the argument went, bore responsibility for creating a toxic time, a culture, filled with the hatred and exploitation and suppression of women. I didn’t buy that then, and I don’t buy the argument now. It’s now like saying Sanders has some responsibility for the guy who shot Scalise and others: he was a Bernie Bro. The Ds were and are volatile too, lighting fuses: the Rs were attacking women, going to kill them even, by being anti abortion; they were going to kill countable numbers of people by rolling back the ACA; they were going to mire people in more harsh and killing poverty by their roll back of entitlement programs. I didn’t buy that either. So, for me, the softness to me is that it’s easy to say that Trump has some responsibility but it’s impossible to give that accusation any hard substance...




No comments:

Post a Comment