Comments Elsewhere: Rejecting Parallelism

In response to Scott Kaufman's post obliterating right-wing complaints about the Tucson memorial, someone wrote that the complainers were stupid. I replied

It’s not intelligence, exactly, that’s the issue. I think it’s the lack of a moral compass or sense of guilt which allows them to use any and all means, including outright falsehoods, against their percieved enemies, and allows them to hypocritically do the same things their percieved enemies did (or vice versa, to accuse their opponents of wrongdoing for things which they themselves did). It’s a sheer instrumentality in which there is nothing but tactics.

They don’t even have an internalized sense of shame anymore, though they can still, at times, be shamed into some restraint if the right leverage is applied.

I realized later, that my comment here was the start of that thought.

At least they still have some shame. They don’t feel guilt anymore, we know that. But if we can still shame them, we have leverage.

Back at LGM, one of the right-wing trolls tried to play the "both sides" gambit.

I’ll admit to having my own political preferences, even some biases, but I’ve spent a long time training to look at evidence rather than guessing or making stuff up. The situation isn’t parallel anymore. The sides aren’t equal, or equivalent. I don’t see how “pox on both houses” can be anything more than a reflexive twitch or defensive crouch.