MaliA wrote:
Mimi wrote:
MaliA wrote:
There's a kernel of a point in that article where he says of the assaults (physical, verbal) against politicians, against him, and how it's often waved away as "a joke", "only a milkshake" and so on.
I think the number of people abused by those who absorb the poisonous ideology spewed by Farage more than balances that out, TBH.
In a similar theme in the Tenacious D comments:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/comme ... l-violenceQuote:
This isn’t just about whether people were offended or whether there might be a penalty for making a tasteless joke. When it comes to normalising and casualising extreme and violent responses to political disagreement, the old lines are blurring alarmingly. And that isn’t funny at all.
In his work The Second Coming, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote of fearing anarchy being loosed and innocence drowned. “Things fall apart,” he wrote. “The centre cannot hold.”
The real test of democratic civility is not being glad that our friends or favourites dodged an assassin’s bullet. It’s being glad our political enemies did.
I do agree with that, and I do agree (in theory) that we shouldn’t be throwing milkshakes at politicians, because it’s a slippery slope from that to tomatoes, to stones, to bricks, but what I meant in my comment is that far more people have been physically and verbally abused by the followers of Farage than all of the ‘attacks’ on Farage put together.
These people deal in a rhetoric that is in its very nature violent and abusive, and then are surprised when they find violence and abuse at their door.