Teh Stupid . . . It Burns, It Burns!! by KTK

OK, so we have here an idiotic lawsuit on absurdly lame legal grounds. So what? This nudnick deserves to get spanked by the judge, and then we move on.

But, as usual, Conservative Reading Comprehension Disorder sets in, and the wingers get themselves all in a panic over shit they don’t understand.

The background:

The controversy began on the morning of Nov. 4 [2008], when Rieseberg was in his yard removing political signs that were planted there without his permission . . . . While Rieseberg pulled the signs . . . Russman walked past with his leashed dog and began yelling, “What are you doing? You can’t do that. Who do you think you are?”

Rieseberg responded by asking, “Who the (F-) are you?” . . .

At that point, [Rieseberg's attorney] wrote, Russman “forced his business card onto” Rieseberg, “who was taken back believing Russman was attempting to solicit him as a client”. After reading the card, Rieseberg said, “Ryan Russman, you are a (F-ing expletive)” . . .

Police reports indicate Russman immediately phoned police to say he felt threatened. A statement by Russman filed with the court says he was “quite nervous and frightened and believed he was about to strike me.” According to a statement by witness Debbie Orloff, she was riding her bicycle in the area when she saw Rieseberg holding a pile of Democratic political signs, standing in “a menacing posture” and yelling at Russman.

In a motion to the court, [local police] Chief Murphy said Rieseberg’s “language combined with physical gestures and in the context of the incident shows that the (F-) word is used to provoke physical violence.”

“His use of the language,” Murphy wrote, was “not an exercise in free speech.”

OK – quick quiz: (1) What happened? (2) What’s it all about? (3) Why is this a court case? (Don’t peek! Think first!)

Answers: (1) One guy used harsh language and physical gestures while talking to another guy, who is an asshole. (2) The asshole accused the first guy of threatening him, by way of menacing gestures and “fighting words”. (3) “Fighting words” is a long-established exception to the right of free speech, prohibiting openly provoking violence (similar to the prohibition on “incitement to riot”). The police chief apparently agreed that this was a case that falls into that category, and therefore the words and gestures constituted “disorderly conduct”, which is a perfectly ordinary misdemeanor that has nothing to do with the First Amendment. There will be a trial which hinges on the factual question whether this case really is one of fighting words (the accuser thinks so, the defendant says no), not whether or not you are allowed to use fighting words (you’re not).

To be sure, the “fighting words” claim is a little odd in this case, in the sense that “fighting words” are usually understood to be expressions that provoke the other person into committing violence – like insulting their mother or something – not words that constitute a threat of violence. Sounds to me like the police chief doesn’t quite understand the doctrine – but it probably doesn’t matter, because the DA doesn’t need that doctrine to prove what essentially amounts to a very minor form of assault. It also seems to me that the criminal charges are bogus as well, as it appears that all the asshole had to do was walk away (or, alternatively, butt out in the first place), which suggests he couldn’t have been in very much danger, and didn’t try very hard to get out of it. But that’s for the jury to decide.

Overall, a pretty simple case, and a pretty pointless one. As the defendant’s lawyer pointed out, beautifully: “No ordinary person would have been provoked into violence under the circumstances . . . . Ryan Russman is not an ordinary person in that an ordinary person would not have placed his nose in other people’s business without expecting that behavior to provoke a response.”

So you’d figure that even the wingers could process this one without stumbling, right? And you’d be absurdly optimistic, because we know there’s no mental error too trivial for that bunch to stumble into.

Jules Crittenden:

It’s kind of hard to tell from this Portsmouth Herald article. But it sounds like your right to remove signs other people have planted without authority on your property, and to do so without interference from busybodies, and to express yourself when those things have transpired, is in jeopardy in the Live Free or Die State. . . .

The property owner is due in Portsmouth District Court Tuesday, Feb. 17, to see whether, his property having been trespassed upon by someone else’s political demonstration, his personal business intruded upon by some busybody lawyer and his tranquility disturbed by same, his free-speech right to tell said lawyer off will now be trampled upon. Kind of sounds like the defendant was the one who was provoked. On the other hand, maybe the local constabulary knows something we don’t know. Like I said, a little hard to tell from this report.

It’s very likely hard for Jules Crittenden to tell, from that article, but it shouldn’t be for “any ordinary person” (a somewhat rare commodity in this case, it seems).

The article he refers to, twice, explicitly states in its first two sentences that “a judge will be asked to decide if the F-bombs were free speech or fighting words”, and that the defendant “is charged with class A misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct and criminal threatening”. Which kind of sounds to me like the case is about whether certain terms constitute “fighting words”, and that the legal issue is disroderly conduct and criminal threatening (not “your right to remove signs other people have planted on your property” or “to express yourself” in some way that doesn’t encourage illegal acts and has not always been prohibited even under the First Amendment). It also has nothing to do with trampling the defendant’s “free speech right to tell somebody off”, at least any more than it has already been trampled by the longstanding proviso that you can’t goad someone into violence. I can’t see how hard that is to tell from the article, given that it’s written into the article.

Crittenden also manages to infer that this case should be of great interest to liberals especially, because of some sort survey he claims shows that they swear more than conservatives. I would think that it’s of little interest to liberals because, although (a) we’re more committed to free speech than conservatives, at the same time (b) we understand what free speech really is, and (c) we can read, thus (d) we understand that this isn’t actually a free speech case. But whatever . . .

This strikes me as yet another example (number approximately 1 Billion and counting . . .) of the cluelessly clumsy and unsubtle way conservatives deal with any issue of political principle. A guy was arrested for using (supposedly) threatening language . . . so that’s a First Amendment issue. The government funds healthcare for a fraction of American citizens . . . so we’re a socialist country. Some people oppose an unnecessary war ginned up on lies and falsehoods . . . so they’re traitors. Progressive taxation is . . . class warfare. Firearms sales regulations are . . . gun-grabbing.

Conservative political discourse is invariably conducted with bizarre broad-brush stereotypes that are so undiscerning you often can’t even identify what issue is under discussion. (Crittenden here can’t even identify the issue he himself is worked up about.) It is often pointed out how conservatives tend to talk about their own controversial positions in code words – “states’ rights” for legalized discrimination; “heritage” for slavery; “security” for privacy invasion – but what is strange is how much more often they use code words to refer to ordinary concepts that are not controversial. They can’t just talk about things, let alone defend their own positions using ordinary language and logic. (Remember how Bush started calling the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party”; name-calling is literally a political strategy for the right wing.) You would think that if they actually meant what they said, it would be easy to change their positions by simply pointing out to them, calmly and factually, that the things they say are false: checking the convicted-felon database to be sure it is legal for you to buy a gun is not “gun grabbing” any more than checking IDs in a bar is “beer grabbing”; the government doesn’t actually own or administer the healthcare system, and the vast majority of citizens have private insurance or none at all, so Medicare is not really “socialized medicine” any more than AFDC is “socialized childrearing”; opponents to the war did not actively fight against US troops in Iraq, or give “aid and comfort” to the resistance, so that opposition is not “treason” any more than it was during the Vietnam War, WWII, the Korean War, WWI, the Spanish-American War, and so on (all of which were met with organized opposition). But factual correction has no impact on conservatives’ beliefs, or even their arguments – because the terms and concepts they use to explain what they think they mean bear little substantive relationship to what those issues are actually about.

This would be the jumping-off point for a difficult and probably rather repulsive investigation into the abnormal psychology of conservativsm, but I’ll stop here just to point out: political debate with wingers is so unsatisfying only partly because they know so little about the issues; part of the problem is also that they inherently reduce them to such simplistic codes and categories, prompting such simplistic and stereotyped responses, that meaningful discussion is neither possible nor, apparently, intended.