Stand there. My thoughts on yesterday’s tragic events, and the predictable reactions to them.
[Update a few minutes later]
“You can almost hear the disappointment on the left that he was a pot head rather than a Tea Partyer.”
“Almost hear” it? Hell, it’s palpable.
[Update later morning]
Two sicknesses on display on Arizona.
[Update a few minutes later]
A colossal failure of journalism. In other words, business as usual.
[Update a couple minutes later]
In defense of inflamed rhetoric:
For as long as I’ve been alive, crosshairs and bull’s-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such “inflammatory” words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill. I’ve listened to, read—and even written!—vicious attacks on government without reaching for my gun. I’ve even gotten angry, for goodness’ sake, without coming close to assassinating a politician or a judge.
From what I can tell, I’m not an outlier. Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.
Well, actually, it may make politicians somewhat safer, but I’m not sure that the safety of politicians should be the highest priority goal. Partly because infantilizing and neutering us is what it’s all about for many politicians and their media enablers.
The meme is already shifting from the shooter being a “right wing teabagger” to “yeah, he may be a left wing lunatic, but it was the right wing teabaggers who created created the vitriol.” The left will not let the facts get in their way.
Nope, it’s all about delegitimizing the opposition. It’s the Stalinist way.
Diverse? Nice use of irony there.
The right-wing Teabaggers created the vitriol?
Who said this and when did they say it?
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”
I also think they said to get in their face and argue and that both quotes predate the Tea Party movement.
So which side heated-up the rhetoric first?
Oh, so you guys already have it all figured out. Just admit that you’re going to believe whatever you want regardless of facts, since you already “know” that McVeigh was a liberal, Hitler was a leftist, etc.
since you already “know” that McVeigh was a liberal, Hitler was a leftist, etc.
Can you please provide a citation to support that notion that anyone “knows,” or even claims, that McVeigh was a liberal? Mr. Moron?
M Puckett: go read the comments to most any news article on the incident.
LGF (as usual) takes the cake when it comes to delusional responses. They bemoan the idiocy and conclusion-jumping on the right for assuming that someone whose favorite books include The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf and such could ever in any way possibly be a leftist whatsoever. They ignore the testimony of the left-leaning friend who described Laughner as a leftist, liberal, and radical. But they seize on his being a gold-bug as irrefutable, all-you-need proof that the guy was a right-winger, encouraged to violence by incendiary tea party rhetoric, and ultimately triggered to kill by the Queen of Diamonds-like “target” map on Sarah Palin’s website.
All while ignoring the fact that the guy was obsessed with mind control and exhibited other signs of being a schizophrenic.
“Hitler was a leftist”
head of the national socialist workers party
FTFY, teabaggee.
There are some people who see every event in the world through their own political prism. Every good thing that happens anywhere is seen as support of their side and every bad thing is the fault of their opposition.
I think those people are political whores and they’re even less reputable than the other type of prostitute.
I don’t think the guy is a schizo. He is an Anarchist and holds their political philosophy. I know plenty of these people and they are totally sane in every other aspect of life except political philosophy.
He wasn’t talking about returning to the gold standard, he was talking about creating a new currency. He also wanted to create a new language. He wanted to create a new society.
I am disappointed that people in the media, who have surely read his writing and watched his videos, continue to try and link him to Palin and the Tea Party.
Actually, my impression, Wo, reading some of this disconnected rambling, is that he does indeed show some classical schizophrenic, or at least psychotic, symptoms. He sounds afflicted with both an inability to complete his thoughts — which would perhaps be associated with his antisocial inability to correctly predict the consequences of his actions — and strong visual hallucinations.
Anyway, clearly he lacks a competent prefrontal cortex, which is the bit of the normal brain that prevents impulses born in, say, inflammatory rhetoric from crossing over to actual actions.
It’s not unlikely, I think, that most violent criminals have similar problems. What’s a little interesting about this is that a technology like fMRI promises, sooner or later, to allow the identification of such dysfunction before, in principal, something like this happens. What will we do then?
Anyway, without doubt, anyone reading politics or sociology into this is stupid, nuts, dishonest, or all three. This problem was clearly personal.
What’s important is that he wasn’t a New Space advocate. It would be horrible for the space community’s petty squabbling to ever come to violence.
Sometimes when you try and make the case that he was an anarchist-communist in the same form as the Black Banner organization early last century and not a “right-winger”, you just get told that you “your sources are garbage”.
http://nasaengineer.com/?p=1981#comments
Well, that didn’t take long.
The big hype now is that he was connected to American Renaissance (whatever that is), a group which seems to be a white supremacist organization. Out of all of the positions they espouse, the one the Christian Science Monitor puts in its headline is “anti-immigrant.” Don’t think too much people. Just see that, and freely associate it with “illegal immigration” as an issue, and this guy will forever be associated with the political “right.”
American Renaissance, which denies any connection between itself and Jared Loughner, is also described as anti-Semitic. Wouldn’t that link him to the political left?
It’s so confusing….
Good grief, how any reasonable person can think this fellow’s brain was operating sufficiently well to draw up personal plans based on political philosophy is beyond me. The guy was incapable of holding still through a 60-minute community-college algebra class! I’m guessing he had a hard time making dinner without the voices and bright lights making him lose track of whether he’d already added the cheese mix to the macaroni. The fact that he memorized and repeated certain media phrases or political slogans is as devoid of deeper meaning as a parrot saying “Polly want a cracker.”
@MfK: SPLC, of the confiscated-ranches-for-illegals fame, is behind that trial balloon. The Anti-Defamation League is calling BS.
You know? Give them something to really get worked up about. If you can carry in your jurisdiction, do so loudly and proudly this week.
Its interesting how much fuss folks are making because Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto was on his list while ignoring books like Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World and We The Living which are about rebels fighting against the “perfect” Utopian socialist state. Perhaps this generation of reporters is not familiar with those works anymore.
Personally I plan to wait until the investigation is finished before classifying him as anything more that a nut.
Thanks for that helpful link, Alan. Now I’ll know not to bother reading that site.
I expect tragedies. Most don’t it seems and are unprepared for how to react.
OTOH, those that react predictably are usually so heinous.
The problem is how to deal with these bastards. Their heinous actions work.
The guy with the gun is simple. Prosecute to the fullest extent. It’s how to deal with the circus that follows with their false accusations and false solutions.
It’s entirely predictable that they will smear the next time having learned nothing this time.
It entirely predictable they will try to silence the people they smear.
They will be effective. How does liberty survive?
Why this is Obama’s fault.
The suspects’s full reading list:
“I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of Oz, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.”
Am I the only one skeptical about whether or not he actually read all this stuff?
I can imagine someone liking Mein Kampf because they think it teaches them unsavory truths about the American Right. That seems to jive with what we already know about Loughner.
Maybe he liked the covers. Or just the names.
Am I the only one skeptical about whether or not he actually read all this stuff?
I’m not skeptical at all. There is no way that animal read even one page of any of that. Carl’s point about sitting still in a high-school level algebra class is perfect. Jonah has some thoughts on it here.
Carl is right – that’s heavy stuff, and reading-for-content doesn’t look like our shooter’s “A” game.