Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Sure you do. Of all the loathsome laws the law 'n urder sorts love, the ones that hold the drivers of getaway cars or lookouts as guilty of murder as the robbers who actually kill people are uniquely indefensible.
Under your reasoning, if I live in State A and vote for a moderate R for senate, I'm nevertheless racist because other R senate candidates from other states are racist. Your reasoning approaches the Scottish rules on scotch: Even a drop of another malt into a bottle of single malt renders the entire bottle an adulterated blend.
Your reasoning would also hold that one may never vote R under any circumstance until the R party removes all racists from its ranks. By extension, as many Southern Ds support racist policies, one cannot vote D either, as he'd be supporting a party infected by racists.
This purity contest becomes theater of the absurd pretty quickly.
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If you make common cause with a bunch of racists, it is fair to call you a racist unless you work pretty hard to distance yourself from and undo the effects of their racism. Just saying, I'm not a racist doesn't do the trick.
I agree that there is a problem with the felony-murder rule if you think that you signed up to commit tax fraud and then you find out that your co-conspirators are also knocking over a liquor store and -- whoops -- they killed a guy with a gun you didn't know they had.
But where a significant portion of the group is committed to violence, and you hint to them that you support them and keep putting them in roles where they get to act out -- you know they are going into the liquor store with a gun -- you don't get to say, well, I didn't mean for anyone to get shot. That's pretty much what you signed up for -- there's no playing innocent because you let someone else do the dirty work.
