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samcol---what's happened, really, is that the right is struggling to get back ahead of the news cycles on this that's all. that anything critical of far right language was going to be rejected by both the people who invest in that language and the machinery that produces it seemed obvious. personally, i think it follows from the underlying structure of far right politics, which is rooted in identity. so that validity of any of the claims made within that discourse isn't really open to debate, nor is the rhetoric for that matter because investment in it is a way to express one's personality more than it is a way to articulate a view of the world as an analytic problem. this one of the things that makes this discourse anti-democratic, really: it's not falsifiable, not part of a debate in any traditionally democratic sense of the term. rather it's a weapon.
and that's different from the language being used by any other political form in the united states. the conservative media apparatus is a dangerous thing.
what matters to the strategists on the right is being able to define the framing. they lost control of it almost immediately with the shootings on saturday. that loss of control did not rely on any causal argument that linked the gun fantasy-laden rhetoric of american neo-fascism directly to the shooting---from the beginning the argument was rather "this tragedy occurred in a poisonous political context. that poison is the responsability of the right."
since then, conservative media actors have struggled to reframe things---first as some kind of cause-effect argument, which is wasn't.
this sets up tedious lines of counter like those which otto has been working, which in turn presuppose the usual rightwing false equivalences and red-baiting....but that's too lame and stupid to bother with---and besides the whole thing sits on a bait-and-switch as to what the argument is that's being countered. so otto and people like him are just making shit up while complaining about shit being made up. go figure
the other line is that behind the superficial human tragedy of 6 people being killed and 19 wounded, some critically, there's another---the victimization of american neo-fascism itself.
this is unbelievably crass as a counter-argument, but it appears to have given poor conservatives who see in the loss of control of news cycles yet another instance of their martyrdom some solace---because what matters in the counter is that conservative identity as the Eternal Victim is reinforced. so it's asserted, made continuous across this.
no matter that it trivializes the tragedy in tucson. those people were Outsiders anyway. and We All Feel Badly blah blah blah. but really, conservatives are the victim here.
you find that line of argument appealing you can have it.
i think it's beneath contempt.
but hey, whatever helps you manage news cycles.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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