AOC offended Team Mitch gets gropey

TragicMonkey said:
If you tape a photo of that person to the punching bag you're a step closer to punching them than you were before adding the photo, though.
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Not sure if you're being serious. I don't think imagining that person and putting a photo makes any difference. You're still imagining the same act.
 
Belz... said:
Not sure if you're being serious. I don't think imagining that person and putting a photo makes any difference. You're still imagining the same act.
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But with the photo you've actually done work and exerted effort to make the fantasy slightly more real than before.
 
TragicMonkey said:
But with the photo you've actually done work and exerted effort to make the fantasy slightly more real than before.
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I don't know. A punching bag with a picture stuck to it doesn't really look more real than me imagining the bag as that person.

I think we're just looking for reasons to make what these teens did much worse than it really was.
 
I’m gonna have to agree with those who think that doing violence to an effigy of someone is far, far more worrying than, and not fundamentally similar to, doing generic fantasy violence. The only time it doesn’t bother me is if it’s explicitly tongue in cheek and the target is expressly comfortable with the situation. I’ll also give a ‘historical tradition’ pass to burning-in-effigy though that does also skeeve me out.

In the early days of flash games there were a lot of ‘beat up x celebrity’ ones, and those also bothered me a lot, in a way that generically violent games do not.
 
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Belz... said:
I don't know. A punching bag with a picture stuck to it doesn't really look more real than me imagining the bag as that person.
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You see two people punching two punching bags. One has a photo of Justin Bieber taped to it. Can you guess anything about the attitudes of either punchers towards any given human being? Or is it a complete mystery, you have no way of drawing any evidence of how either person feels about anyone?

I think we're just looking for reasons to make what these teens did much worse than it really was.
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I'm not interested in that. I'm just pointing out that it's not a binary state: I loathe this person and want to hurt them for real versus I am totally indifferent to them and would never do anything. There's a wide range between those extremes, and the point where you assail images of a person is between those two ends.
 
Belz... said:
I don't know. A punching bag with a picture stuck to it doesn't really look more real than me imagining the bag as that person.
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Not more real than a plain punching bag plus your imagination:

91CN30K-j%2BL._SX425_.jpg


Hanging in effigy is a thing.

Also,
 
I'm guessing these teenagers should probably be called the Senate Janissary Brigade.

Why? Well, no young women anywhere near them in the photo and after that their chances of getting a date any time soon dropped quite a bit.
 
TragicMonkey said:
You see two people punching two punching bags. One has a photo of Justin Bieber taped to it. Can you guess anything about the attitudes of either punchers towards any given human being? Or is it a complete mystery, you have no way of drawing any evidence of how either person feels about anyone?
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The latter more than the former. I wouldn't assume that they have criminal intent towards a singer.

carlitos said:
Not more real than a plain punching bag plus your imagination:
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Indeed. Cartoon Trump included.

Hanging in effigy is a thing.
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Context matters. The mere act of pretending to do something is not enough.
 
Lithrael said:
I’m gonna have to agree with those who think that doing violence to an effigy of someone is far, far more worrying than, and not fundamentally similar to, doing generic fantasy violence.
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OK. But did you notice they weren't actually doing violence to an effigy? They were pretending to do violence to an effigy. The effigy was not damaged in any way. Had it been a real person, the real person would not have been physically harmed either.
 
Belz... said:
The latter more than the former. I wouldn't assume that they have criminal intent towards a singer.
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Okay, now there are three people. One punches a punching bag. The second punches a cardboard cutout of Justin Bieber. The third has 34,000 photos of Justin Bieber pinned up in his attic, some of which he took himself, all of which have had the eyes cut out. Now if you had to guess which, if any of these people, might be considered even the tiniest bit of a potential danger to Justin Bieber, would you answer "it's unknowable"?
 
Belz... said:
The latter more than the former. I wouldn't assume that they have criminal intent towards a singer.
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You weren't asked about "criminal intent;" you were asked "Can you guess anything about the attitudes of either punchers towards any given human being?"
 
wareyin said:
What's the fundamental difference between hanging someone in effigy and strangling a representation of that person?
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I've read more than once on this forum that hanging effigies have a historical significance and meaning. Is that wrong?

TragicMonkey said:
Okay, now there are three people. One punches a punching bag. The second punches a cardboard cutout of Justin Bieber. The third has 34,000 photos of Justin Bieber pinned up in his attic, some of which he took himself, all of which have had the eyes cut out. Now if you had to guess which, if any of these people, might be considered even the tiniest bit of a potential danger to Justin Bieber, would you answer "it's unknowable"?
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Ah, now you've established obsession, which translates into intent.

carlitos said:
You weren't asked about "criminal intent;" you were asked "Can you guess anything about the attitudes of either punchers towards any given human being?"
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Since we're talking about the likelihood of these people acting on their fantasy, I think we can call those attitudes criminal intent.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Okay, now there are three people. One punches a punching bag. The second punches a cardboard cutout of Justin Bieber. The third has 34,000 photos of Justin Bieber pinned up in his attic, some of which he took himself, all of which have had the eyes cut out. Now if you had to guess which, if any of these people, might be considered even the tiniest bit of a potential danger to Justin Bieber, would you answer "it's unknowable"?
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I'd say the one with the thousands of pictures with cut out eyes.

But these kids didn't do anything equivalent to that third guy. They're like your second guy, not your third guy. But not even that, since they didn't even punch (or choke) the cutout.
 
Ziggurat said:
I'd say the one with the thousands of pictures with cut out eyes.

But these kids didn't do anything equivalent to that third guy. They're like your second guy, not your third guy. But not even that, since they didn't even punch (or choke) the cutout.
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Oh, I agree. What they did was way closer to the Nothing extreme on the scale than it is to the Actual Harm end. I just wanted to establish that it wasn't equal to the Nothing end.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Oh, I agree. What they did was way closer to the Nothing extreme on the scale than it is to the Actual Harm end. I just wanted to establish that it wasn't equal to the Nothing end.
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I agree. It was in bad taste, and it was especially foolish to post it online. Don't rile the bees*.

I'm not sure if you're even in disagreement on this part, but I think the people who should be dressing them down for it are their parents and their church, not the nation as a whole.


* When I was a kid, they had these PSA's on TV called "Bits and Pieces" with sock puppets of a horse and a bulldog. The bulldog would always do something foolish that the horse advised him not to do, and it would always come back to bite him on the ass (stuff like don't "borrow" without asking). Some of them are available on YouTube, but the "don't rile the bees" one, which was the most memorable for me, is sadly not. I think you can figure out the basic plot from the moral.
 
Lithrael said:
I’m gonna have to agree with those who think that doing violence to an effigy of someone is far, far more worrying than, and not fundamentally similar to, doing generic fantasy violence. The only time it doesn’t bother me is if it’s explicitly tongue in cheek and the target is expressly comfortable with the situation. I’ll also give a ‘historical tradition’ pass to burning-in-effigy though that does also skeeve me out.

In the early days of flash games there were a lot of ‘beat up x celebrity’ ones, and those also bothered me a lot, in a way that generically violent games do not.
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Absolutely, it's different when you personalize it. I was never very much into FPS games, but it didn't bother me blasting humanoid icons. It also didn't bother me to personalize the icons when I played a private online game with workmates since it was just a "friendly competition" using imaginary violence. When you personalize an icon as an enemy, however, it becomes a revenge fantasy. (Okay, maybe that was true for some workmates, too.)
 
TragicMonkey said:
Oh, I agree. What they did was way closer to the Nothing extreme on the scale than it is to the Actual Harm end. I just wanted to establish that it wasn't equal to the Nothing end.
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I want to stress that I don't think it was equal to nothing as well. I just don't think there's any reason to worry about these teens. It doesn't rise to the level of "uh oh. These guys might assault her at some point!"
 
TragicMonkey said:
If images didn't enhance imagination the internet would be much less busy.
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There's a great line by Edward Albee in the Zoo Story that I've always been rather fond of. I think it pertains to all sorts of modern variations of fantasy, although it was written to be addressed to a more analog age....

Jerry: “What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you’re a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you’re older. It’s that when you’re a kid you use the cards as a substitute for real experience, and when you’re older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.”
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We now return you to your normal bickering.
 
Ziggurat said:
OK. But did you notice they weren't actually doing violence to an effigy? They were pretending to do violence to an effigy.
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Oh, yeah the OP incident is more obnoxious than anything, and the only worrying part is the standard ‘these guys thought putting it publicly online was a great idea at the time and wouldn’t be terrible optics for their political affiliates’ aka where are these people’s sense of judgements at, and how little encouragement people seem to need to do things like mock-strangle the political opposition etc. (the Trump punching bag is also a thing I wish did not exist).

I was more voicing an opinion against Belz...’ position.
 
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