| shavenferret said: The people that take this seriously are just bored and don't have anything of substance to discuss. And I believe that not everything a politician says should be taken seriously, especially by someone who turns spectacle into an art form.  This is the very definition of the slippery slop fallacy, chicken little kind of stuff.  I'd sooner beleive the kind of thing in the attached gif than trump wanting to annex another nation by force or pressure: |
I didn't say anything about this being taken seriously.
For a lot of people it doesn't matter. If a coworker makes a threat towards you, it doesn't matter if it was intended to be a joke or not. For a lot of people, that's just not something to joke about.
The whole "he's just joking" argument is just garbage. You can throw it at literally anything. You can argue literally anything is a joke until something actually materializes. That lonely guy at school was just kidding about shooting up the school. You can dismiss anything bad.
Personally I would happily give someone more leniency if they were deserving of that. If my best friend who would never hurt a fly made a terrible joke, I can understand it was intended as a joke. Trump has lost any kind of leniency he would have had. You can't keep dismissing the things that he's said, while he's literally doing a lot of these things.
In a lot of cases, one person's joke is someone else's reality. There are evil politicians out there. Just like I am not going to give leniency to a bully who makes more threats, I am not giving politicians that level of trust. Even if they have no intent on acting out those deeds, someone else very well might think it's an idea.
Frankly, I'm exhausted at people treating politics like a joke. These things affect people's livelihoods, and their actual lives.
I don't view Elon Musk as a potential violent threat, the way I view Donald Trump. But I still want him to shut up; this rhetoric is still hurting people.
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