I thought it was a crime to make death threats against the president. How can Shakespeare in the Park do it and get away with it?
This production needs to be shut down and the actors, writers and directors associated with it thrown in prison for advocating assassination of the elected leader of our country. It doesn’t matter who is president, you can’t do this.
If I were the president I would immediately file lawsuit and charge these people with making death threats. Free speech does not extent to making death threats, especially against the president. People are getting arrested for making comments to that effect on fakebook, how is it ok on a stage?
The radical regressive left is sick beyond imagination. It’s all in the open now, we see their evil for what it is. Speak up and do no tolerate it.
I agree. It is what happens at the end of each civilization.
Whoever thinks of this as acceptable or even good is … well, a barbarian in the literal sense.
Yes something is being purged, I think it is weakness before reality that is dying. These barbarian deluded theists of the “left” have simply collapsed into the back hole from which they came. They are an expression of what I want to (critically) call Nietzsche’s prioritizarion of the concept (really the feeling, the instinct for) self-preservation.
When their fantasy died on 11/8/16 they entered an alternate reality, one where they no longer exist qua entity, qua being. They know it to the extent they are capable of knowing anything, which isn’t much, but they cannot escape this fate. So what do they do? They fight for their own “will to power”, in this case the power of their ability (felt to them as a “right”) to live in fantasy. Literally this is La La Land, their preferred world.
Reality threw their Obozo-Clintonish world in the trash where it belongs, and now they are hell-bent on getting it back. The gates have closed and they are out in the darkness, outside the high fortress walls of truth; what do they do? They form mobs, vanish the individual, and start eating themselves in frenzied self-consumption declared as mob-virtue.
It isn’t merely that their will to power is weak, because it isn’t weak as such; it is that it is wrong, it offends aesthetic taste, which is to say there is a moral value here. I do not believe in Nietzsche anymore, after all his philosophy led to the postmodern deconstruction nonsense that killed Europe for philosophy, especially in France and Germany.
France and Germany… where “will to power” lives as radical lust of self-preservation AT ALL COSTS.
Nietzsche’s final concept, which he never reached: willing to power as self-preservation as immorality. He approached this thought, tried to reverse it, couldn’t, and then went insane. Now the world is insane right alongside him.
These are not death threats, and they are fully protected by the First Amendment. And the justification for their protection is well demonstrated by the fact that reactionary fearmongering in this case is in response to a play whose message is that one shouldn’t assassinate even unpopular leaders. Indeed, the ‘true threats’ doctrine that determines whether or not an alleged threat is protected speech was based on a much more direct statement that a person intended to assassinate the President, though there again it was not a ‘true threat’, but a hyperbolic expression of political disagreement (the case is Watts v. United States).
As to the rhetorical use of the words “now” in the title of this thread, there is a long history of artistic depictions of the murder or death of sitting Presidents. This isn’t new and it is comparatively tame. And the people who are outraged were almost certainly silent when Obama was depicted in the same play during his presidency.
The uproar is political, rhetorical, unprincipled nonsense.
People can’t say “house-nigger” but they can mock decapitate the president?
Tell yourself what ever you need to, boss.
[there is a near infinity of terms and manners that have been blocked from use in mass-media. But the most savage expression a civilization can produce, the visual representation of a gruesome murder of its elected leader, is somehow exempt from all that scrutiny. No, not a cell in my body buys that. It rather the gruesome act of open treason, and that’s all its intended to be.]
and this ties in with what Void has been saying, that Trump initiated a paradigm that left his opponents almost no choice but to become savages.
I would add that his opponents in turn had already become savages and this is why Trump was able to rise -
but the point is only more significant in that sense -
Trump rules in an age of havoc, of chaos and mayhem.
The instruction we may take from this is to either become even more ruthless, or to establish a calm in the midst of the storm.
Actually these would be consecutive steps.
we dont want to actually have a lot of this enforced but there needs to be a readiness to strike at the dumbness of ‘dont criticize what you dont understand’. A vigilance that marks ones own understanding as a hard won gift from endless rows of ancestors and wider human kinships.
We defend the work of past generations. To that end, fuck Bob Dylan and John Lennon.
Not to say they’re not geniuses, but certainly not of an ascending culture. They rather marked the point where it started to turn. The high point in a sense, the end point at least. The North Node.
Of course the cheering mob at these shows wants to see Trump die in reality. This is violence porn for their depravity, and only the depraved would defend it.
I don’t care who it is, president or not, if you ceremonially enact the violent graphic murder of a real human being then you should be in prison. This goes far beyond artistic license, it becomes incitement.
Maybe the right should start ceremonially enacting the violent murder of people on the left? No, the right isn’t that depraved, but it would serve as a highlight.
I think the only reason why it doesnt get punished is that it has too much high level backing, which is what makes it true treason, and different from Trumps nonetheless excessively dangerous quip about the 2nd amendment people. It’s a deliberate and persistent push for utterly savage thirst for the blood of an elected leader. It’s the most savage insurrection I think any culture has ever allowed itself. If the US survives this intact, it’ll come out of it very strong indeed. To this end, I think the savageness does indeed have to be met from our side, so as to forge a balance and reveal an aesthetics of a higher tension, a new will.
Legally, you can absolutely say that. The government may not prevent you from saying it or punish you for saying it, and it may not shut down this production or throw the actors, writers and directors associated with it in prison. The First Amendment prohibits both.
“[B]lock[ing] [a term] from use in mass-media” is different from prosecuting people who use that term. Private TV networks can prohibit whatever they want, and most prohibitions are in fact private. The FCC does prohibit certain “indecent” speech from broadcast airwaves, but to my knowledge that prohibition does not apply to any specific words, applies only to broadcasts (which are on public spectrum), and it hasn’t been challenged since the 70s, so it isn’t clear that the considerations that led to the prohibition would still be found relevant today. Still, the FCC’s threat does chill use of certain words, but there’s good reason to believe that networks would regulate themselves in similar ways; cable and satellite media is similarly restricted, even though the FCC’s ability to regulate indecency there is not proven. And many mainstream internet companies also censor their results in the same way: the New York times, for example, maintains editorial standards that seem to track the FCC’s conception of indecency. The point is that private companies have a strong incentive, regardless of government intervention, to conform to public expectation with respect to what’s ‘decent’ for publication.
The same can be said about the right’s adoption of left’s feigned outrage as a tactic for suppressing ideas they disagree with. The left’s strategy of “deplatforming” has left the right, if not with no choice not to, at least with a justification of the behavior and strong case that turnabout is fair play.
The reason it doesn’t get punished is because the Founding Fathers and subsequent Supreme Courts interpreting their words have decided that allowing even uncivil speech is worth it to prevent politically motivated persecutions – the latter being exactly what’s being called for here.
Jakob is absolutely right here, there is a larger context of condoning violence against Trump that simply isn’t present elsewhere. Creating and inciting such a climate is indeed treasonous.
Obama wasn’t being ritualistically murdered on a public stage every night. And if it had been occurring it wouldn’t get tacit backing of politics, media and popular culture.
The whole public versus private distinction is irrelevant here. The left is merely hiding behind legalese as an excuse when it suits them, which is precisely how they view free speech anyway, as nothing more than a means to other ends. If the end is the incitement of murder of a president they don’t like then of course that must be free speech. If it’s someone saying anything bad about Obama then of course that’s evil “hate speech”.
I love how the left loves these laws against “hate speech” while at the same time declaring the sacred right of free speech to simulate and glorify the violent murder of a president. What amusing hypocrisy.
From your link, "The US secret service is investigating an apparent effigy of Barack Obama hung from a storefront in Georgia. Local television news showed what appeared to be a black doll at the end of a noose on the main road in Plains, home of Jimmy Carter, the former Democratic president, Georgia governor and Nobel peace prize winner.
Witnesses said the doll bore a sign with Obama’s name. The effigy was quickly removed by the fire department after it was discovered on Saturday."
We have a doll hanging from a noose (on PRIVATE PROPERTY) being investigated by the secret service, but the enactment of violently murdering Trump (on PUBLIC PROPERTY) before cheering crowds doesn’t also need to be investigated by the secret service? You’re being a complete hypocrite here.
I don’t want Obama or anyone else being ceremonially murder-acted either. I am consistent. It is incitement to violence in either case and must remain illegal.
It sounds like the noose was hung anonymously on someone else’s private property. In that case, the intent behind the effigy is unknown, and an investigation would turn up additional facts (big ones, like who did it and why).
In the current case, the situation is completely known, the intent is clear, the message is clear, and it’s patently obvious that there is no true threat being made against Trump. There’s nothing to investigate.
But the article I mentioned was to contradict your assertion that the right doesn’t do this. It does, don’t you agree?
Your last sentence contradicts the logic you tried to used above it.
Also, your notion that the savage display of murderous hate, because it is in the open with public support, forms no threat to Trump, is as nonsensical as weve come to expect from the left.