i'd say an ‘attempted threat’ is when you go to a payphone so you can call somebody anonymously to threaten somebody, but then you realize you're out of change so you give up, or when you send somebody a threatening letter, but you get their address wrong, and since you didn't include a return address it just ends up in the dead letter file, or any other situation where you try to threaten somebody but bad luck or incompetence means that the threatening communication doesn't really happen.
So you agree it doesn't encompass the situation where you exhort others to terrorize another person, but get his address wrong so they accidentally attempt to kill his brother instead?
yeah. my point was that this is pretty clearly not it. maybe leaving the letter in the wrong mailbox is supposed to be the attempted threat? only it sounds like the gist of it got to the right guy anyway, so even that seems like a stretch.
If you, as a political statement, do something that a) might cause something to explode or crash into something else, or b) might kill somebody, YOU ARE A TERRORIST.
Could you modify this definition? If I accept it, then I'm never marching in a protest again, because anytime I walk on a street or a sidewalk I might cause something to crash into something else, or even kill somebody. I don't want that tiny tiny but ever-present risk to suddenly have much severer consequences if it happens while I'm walking to make a political statement.
Then I apologize for annoying you. It's misplaced anger on my part, since I myself had been annoyed today that a lot of news coverage of this has chosen to use the language "cut gas line", which while technically true conjures up a far more serious situation than "cut hose to a propane tank on a gas grill", which is what I thought the act actually consisted of.
But I was wrong; you prompted me to dig further, and this appears to have been an outdoor gas grill connected to a large tank supplying propane for the house, a much more serious situation and one completely worth the language the media's been using. (Well, a quick check at Fox News doesn't seem to show them using the more serious language, but go figure...)
I'm in particularly more worried about all of this shit, because now that I'm finally getting another job, it's in the actual government (and in one of the branches that is often a target for this pseudo-populist violence).
And I thought it was clear what the intent was -- entering a person's home and damaging property is a threat, no matter how dangerous it actually is -- and how that affects my definition.
Comments 11
Reply
Reply
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
Reply
a) might cause something to explode or crash into something else, or
b) might kill somebody,
YOU ARE A TERRORIST.
Could you modify this definition? If I accept it, then I'm never marching in a protest again, because anytime I walk on a street or a sidewalk I might cause something to crash into something else, or even kill somebody. I don't want that tiny tiny but ever-present risk to suddenly have much severer consequences if it happens while I'm walking to make a political statement.
Reply
I think you know perfectly well what I mean, and this isn't the sort of situation I'm in the mood to joke about.
Reply
It's misplaced anger on my part, since I myself had been annoyed today that a lot of news coverage of this has chosen to use the language "cut gas line", which while technically true conjures up a far more serious situation than "cut hose to a propane tank on a gas grill", which is what I thought the act actually consisted of.
But I was wrong; you prompted me to dig further, and this appears to have been an outdoor gas grill connected to a large tank supplying propane for the house, a much more serious situation and one completely worth the language the media's been using. (Well, a quick check at Fox News doesn't seem to show them using the more serious language, but go figure...)
Reply
And I thought it was clear what the intent was -- entering a person's home and damaging property is a threat, no matter how dangerous it actually is -- and how that affects my definition.
Reply
Leave a comment