{"id":3487,"date":"2008-10-17T05:25:28","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T10:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3487"},"modified":"2008-10-16T17:28:59","modified_gmt":"2008-10-16T22:28:59","slug":"the-gathering-american-fascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3487","title":{"rendered":"The Gathering American Fascism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seeing this story – about a Maryland hotel in a heavily Democrat area<\/a>\u00a0being threatened with organized boycotts for displaying a pro-McCain\/Palin sign – is yet a further symptom of the most depressing factor in American political life; the notion that to waaaay too many people, dissent, dissonance and difference of opinion aren’t something to tolerate, much less understand, challenge and in the end celebrate; it’s something to suppress, squash and destroy.<\/p>\n

I don’t doubt for a moment that there are those on the right that do the same; I can imagine being a Democrat in Utah could be pretty dicey, especially if you run into any GOP operatives who take things waaaaay <\/em>to seriously.\u00a0 I say I don’t doubt it – because while I am sure it could happen, I have not actually heard of any such incidents any time recently.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the incident with the hotel ties in with events small (Ashwin Madia staffers’ spouses stealing lawn signs, and the vandalism of Republican lawn signs in Saint Paul which, in some years, has seemed downright systematic) to big (the Tic impetus to reinstate the “Fairness” doctrine, the Obama campaign’s threats against the broadcast licenses of TV stations that broadcast ads critical of the candidate) to weave\u00a0itself into a pattern of intolerance that is going to make politics very<\/em> difficult in coming years.<\/p>\n

But let’s leave all that aside for a moment.\u00a0 The real <\/em>question at hand here is…<\/p>\n

…how can the other guys find racism in what I’m writing here?<\/p>\n

Because it’s not bad enough to actively suppress your opponents’ speech; it’s much, much worse to set it up in your heads that everything they say is base, benighted and evil even before they say it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(I’ll await regular commenter “Penigma”‘s inevitable “Oh yeah, well, you do it worse”, which really only serves to prove my point anyway).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seeing this story – about a Maryland hotel in a heavily Democrat area\u00a0being threatened with organized boycotts for displaying a pro-McCain\/Palin sign – is yet a further symptom of the most depressing factor in American political life; the notion that to waaaay too many people, dissent, dissonance and difference of opinion aren’t something to tolerate, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}