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An unknown assassin has attempted to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. One person is dead. President Trump is unharmed. The disposition of the assassin is unknown.
Naturally, they are celebrating the assassination attempt on Reddit. The leftists completely lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like; they obviously want society to break down completely.
The majority of everyone from the political center rightward was celebrating the repeated assassinations of Iranian leadership a month ago too, so I don't think the other camp gets to claim the moral high ground here.
(...and either way, denouncing assassination attempts against anyone whose job significantly involves dealing out death seems rather comical, in the "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!" way.)
edit: Please stop with the arguments-as-soldiers responses. I shot down a bad argument; just because you agree with the thesis (that leftists are uniquely bad for celebrating assassination attempts on Trump), this is not sufficient grounds to stake your disagreement, unless you can specifically defend the argument (that it is so because they started celebrating the deaths of "people they don't like").
Come on now.
I can call for the assassination of Hitler during WWII and refuse the call for my neighbor Fred and be entirely moral and consistent.
The gap between Democratically elected Trump and a bunch of Authoritarian monsters who just finished killing tens of thousands of their own population and we are effectively at war with.....it's not quite as bad as Fred and Hitler but it is still significant.
However, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to think of Trump, the Iranian leadership, Obama and the PM of Denmark as more similar to each other in category than any of them is to your neighbour Fred, either.
Iran holds elections. You may dispute whether the criteria that determine who is even allowed to run, or the details of how the elections are executed, are such that they morally qualify as "democratic", but people can and do dispute the same things about the US.
Either way, the parent poster's criterion for being "lost completely" was "celebrating the deaths of people they don't like", not "celebrating the deaths of democratically elected leaders" or "celebrating the deaths of objectively good people" or even "celebrating the deaths of their countrymen" (for the last one, I think the reactions to Floyd could be cited as an example, anyway; even or especially this forum had no shortage of "the world is better off for his death and I'm tired of pretending otherwise" posting).
Since you asked for clarification: “they don’t like” clearly means “Trump” here, since it was Trump who this person was trying to kill. Trump is a democratically elected leader; he is president because, in 2024, the majority of the voters wanted him to be president again. Trump has not killed thousands of protesters; even if the two people killed in anti-ICE protests was somehow killed because of Trump, that is nowhere near the 30,000 or so people massacred in Iran for protesting this year. There is a world of difference between not liking someone because of their politics and committing mass murder of peaceful protesters and other crimes against humanity.
For the record, I am opposed to the war in Iran for the same reason I opposed the second war in Iraq (in retrospect, Desert Storm was needed to stop Hussein from terrorizing the entire Middle East) and the war in Afghanistan: It would seem that people in Middle Eastern countries want to have oppressive authoritarian regimes. It’s telling that 2011’s “Arab Spring” did not result in sustained free democratic countries.
I don't think that was unclear to me.
Your original post said, "leftists completely lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don't like". Is it too much of a leap to read an implied "non-leftists are better, since they don't celebrate the deaths of people they don't like" into this? The alternative is that leftists were the last ones who hadn't "lost you", and now everyone has "lost you"/you are done with humanity or at least both major political blocks in the US.
To this, I objected that rightists have already clearly celebrated the deaths of people they don't like, so if "celebrating the deaths of people they don't like" is the criterion you could only reasonably be in the second class (and in that case, does it make sense to make it a partisan thing at all?). This objection is not overturned by any argument that the rightist dislike of their targets is more justified than the leftist dislike of theirs. You did not discuss whether leftist dislike of Trump might be justified, and did not even write anything like "...lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don't like for flimsy reasons".
I will not respond to you further until you answer this question someone else has already asked you:
I was seriously considering just not answering, in order to not humour what looks like a rhetorical strategy of asking tangential questions meant to discredit the other party's character to the audience rather than reacting to a counterpoint that they made to your argument. This would probably not be good for the discussion. So, sure, the answer: yes, I think that is basically true, at least with respect to the Republican party under Trump. Why does this matter? I think it is off topic, and if you insist on invoking the moral qualities of Iranian leaders in defense of your original post I think it starts entering the territory of Motte-and-Bailey argumentation as I argued in my response to @Amadan.
If you are just willing to step back from your original claim and concede that "celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like" is not a vice that is novel or unique to leftists in your political landscape, I will be perfectly satisfied. If you replace it with something more specific, like "leftists have lost me when it has become mainstream among them to cheer for assassination attempts against our own country's elected leader", I would even agree with the sentiment! I just feel the need to stand in defense of the high-decoupling principles that originally made this community work. You shouldn't be able to get away with imprecision that just so happens to make your thesis less defensible but sound better as a rallying cry.
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I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that both sides might consider the other more of a threat for matters that concern them than some Iranian mullah is
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Hitler was elected too, so what?
If anything that's another argument for my position, no? "Democratically elected" is not the distinguishing factor that determines who would celebrate a leader's death/assassination.
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