House Majority Whip shot at congressional baseball field

[Benton]

(06-15-2017, 10:38 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: What does need to come of this terrible event is an acknowledgement, from both sides, that things have gone too far.  I've said before that it's generally the party out of power that engages in the fiercest rhetoric.  I think Trump took this to eleven.  Trump certainly took things too far on the campaign trail, e.g. offering to pay the legal bills of anyone who beat up a protester.  The response from the left was to go to fifteen.  I've mentioned before that anyone not heavily criticizing Trump's every move is immediately branded a Trump supporter by many (most?) left leaning people.  There's a refusal to even see the possibility of a middle ground and it's pushing people to the extremes.  Extreme thinking is eventually, for some, going to lead to extreme action.  We see it with Antifa, we saw it at Trump rallies in CA and we just saw the worst example of it yesterday.

It's got to stop and it needs to stop at the top.  Maxine Waters, Gillibrand, etc. need to tone down the extreme rhetoric and hopefully that will trickle down to celebrities, which will trickle down and so forth.  If things stay as is I predict a dark outcome.

Agreed, but the problem is, Trump showed it worked. Be hateful. Advocate violence. Mock your foes and those not in the majority. Go to that extreme, and you win.

He ran up until the very end on a platform calling for extremism. It's fair to ask those who oppose those views not to advocate the same things, but it's also understandable why they wouldn't want to. Doing so presumably loses more ground in Congress and — in three years — the White House. Representation and policy making shrink for one side, those concerned will do what has been shown to be effective.

We've moved to a culture where being a good person isn't regarded or worth as much as being the winner. 

(06-15-2017, 11:57 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: The problem is that there has been an increased polarization in our government (which is funny to me, given how we don't have many real liberals in the bunch thanks to neo-liberalism) and that polarization is just a reflection of society as a whole. This isn't new, but is has been compounding for a couple of decades now. I've said before, the division in Congress has not been this wide since the antebellum Congress.

I don't know what it is going to take, but when we come out the other side it could be something different than we have known before. The 14th Amendment drastically changed how our government institutions and it was a result of the divisiveness that existed pre-war.

Any significant change is likely a long way off. It will take some major displacement before most people's way of life is effected. People will continue to gravitate in one direction or another as their interests (jobs, housing costs, ability to rear children, etc.) are threatened.