Amy Bishop was a biology professor at University of Alabama at Huntsville. She was also a virulent Obama supporter, a leftist, and had lost her tenure battle.
A few days ago she shot and killed three professors, and injured three others, before she either ran out of ammunition or her gun jammed.
It turns out that twenty years ago she pumped her brother full of hot lead in Boston, and killed him, after an argument. She was exonerated without a trial, after her well-placed mother called an authority, who had Amy Bishop released. All police records pertaining to the case are missing.
Bishop was apparently quite a distant person. After she shot the six in the faculty meeting, she calmly called her husband, asking him to pick her up.
The Bishops have four children.
All the facts aren't in yet, and the case remains shrouded in mystery. The relevant facts seem to be that
a. Bishop was denied tenure
b. She has a record of using guns to settle disputes
(b1) -- she did not possess a permit for the gun
c. She was emotionally distant
d. She was an avid Obama supporter
e. She was a serious scientist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, and a relatively impressive track record in her field.
Lately there has been an uptick in the universities with regard to violence. Virginia Tech lost thirty students and a prof or three after an enraged student slaughtered them. This student then turned his gun on himself. A year later another student chopped off a student's head at the same university. We have 6000 colleges and universities in this country, and they are mostly thought to be oases of calm and civility when compared to the postal environment, or the business environment. Is there something we can do to hasten the exit of faculty and students who are loose cannons? Will the phrase, "Going postal," become a new phrase, like, "Enacting tenure loss"?
What criteria are needed to identify a potentially violent classmate or professor?
Are there now for some reason more of these on campuses? In our society? Bishop was apparently an ardent Obama supporter. She was not a conservative, who was ousted by liberals. She shot women (including a member of the support staff) in her cold and contained fury. She then calmly called her husband, who claims that from the tone of her voice he had no idea of the havoc she had wreaked.
In order to clarify the narrative, we need to know -- did she shoot indiscriminately at the people in the meeting, or was there a pattern of people she specifically chose to eliminate? Did anyone close to her know that she was about to commit this crime? Did she make any notes beforehand, that could be discovered on her computer or in her private notebooks? What is Bishop's own narrative?
Is there anything that could have been done? Should someone with a violent history and a tenure denial be invited to meetings, or should the meetings be held privately?
Right at this moment, the details are still too fuzzy for me to be able to put this into a coherent narrative. The only pattern I see is that violence appears to be erupting on a more regular basis. Now that faculty members are counted among the violent, it seems that we must think about the issues.
Naturally, people are a bit upset when they are denied tenure. But the point is to write a few hundred more job letters, and get back in where you can, or find employment elsewhere, and to think of the future. What good does it serve to use violence in this manner? Bishop not only checkmated herself, but comes off as a kind of Red Queen, way off to the far left, and unable to handle the cognitive dissonance between her own apparent self-esteem, and the lack of esteem in which she was held by other faculty members.
Personally, I think the problem is that the left looks the other way when they have problems within their own ranks. No one was willing to oust Edwards. No one was willing to oust Charles Manson. Stalin rose rapidly through the ranks. Amy Bishop should have found herself sequestered after she blew her brother away with a shotgun. A Democrat from Massachusetts let her go without any police inquiry.
The new multicultural understanding is that all violence is committed by straight white men. So they are stunned when a Cho emerges, or when an Amy Bishop goes berserk, since it's not part of their theory. The left has yet to understand the murders of Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or the show trials of the East Bloc, to say nothing of the vigilante bombings of the Weathermen, or the cruelty of the Black Panthers. Rather than projecting lawlessness on to others, we should assess the lawlessness of our own group, and ask ourselves what's wrong with us.
28 comments:
Kirby,
Identifying Bishop with Obama is really over the top. There are violent people of all political persuasions, and indeed the right with its bombings of abortion clinics, let alone the Murrah building, has killed far more than the left in this country.
Here is the form of your argument: "X did something horrible, X liked the politician Y, therefore Y is implicated in this horrible thing." I don't think this is a reasonable form, and I think it shows terrible logic. But if you find this form compelling, I'd be happy to provide some other values of X and Y.
Stu, this was not my logic at all. Slow down a bit.
My logic was rather -- many people think that folks who identify with Obama are supernaturally groovy. Therefore, when one of their own goes postal, they have no understanding for it, no theory that supports the data, and therefore they might think it hasn't happened. This is apparently what Amy Bishop herself is suffering from. She is perfect, because she's an Obama-supporter, and therefore she couldn't have done what she did.
I'm not implicating Obama. He's not responsible for Amy Bishop, or for any of the other millions who supported him, however ardently or fervently they maintained that support.
I hope this derails your train of logic, as it doesn't follow the course of my argument.
Again, I am not implicating the president.
But if we are to begin to tally the numbers of leftist kooks versus rightist kooks in this country, and if we are to include Black Panther, Weathermen, anarchist bombers, and so on, under the title of leftist killers, and then include the 8 or 9 abortion clinic killers, I think the scale would be much heavier on the left side.
You can quantify it for us if you like, but use real data, and I think you'll be surprised.
If you add in the unborn children and people who've lost their minds at the end of life, of course it's no contest, but I will grant you that these are not legally alive persons at this juncture, even though they do have hearts that beat.
Counting up purely political assassinations, I do believe the left is far ahead in the numbers race.
If we count only presidential assassinations (not attempts, but successful assassinations), we would have to count Oswald as a red, McKinley's assassin as to the left, Garfield's assassin as to the left, and Lincoln's assassin?
I don't know where to put him, since at the time the South was not part of the Union, but it was the Democrats who were on the side of the Southern Secession.
Even with your most creative book-keeping, I think you are going to find yourself on the wrong side of the ledger.
If you think now of the world over the last century, and think of the left atrocities within communist countries, you are again going to find yourself on the wrong side of the ledger in terms of internal genocides.
But there's a point at which I will tend toward an agreement -- centrists tend to be more balanced than either the far left or the far right.
This blog in spite of its acrimony supports dialogue between all groups. Which makes us a de facto centrist blog.
But between the far left and the far right, I think the center left has a harder time understanding the violence of its fringe, and confronting that violence.
At any rate, the terrible logic is yours.
I did not implicate Obama, but only indicated that those who support Obama, may also be capable of atrocities.
YES WE CAN (murder). This is what I want the left to see about themselves.
Kirby,
I don't see Amy Bishop as in any way representative of the left. No more than I think Timothy McVeigh was representative of the right. Both are/were pathological people, and both had political identities.
If you want me to denounce her, fine, I'm happy to do so. One of the people she killed was her department chair. I've been in the position of having to tell people they're not getting tenure. I'll admit that my first thought when I heard that the shooting was at a faculty meeting was that someone didn't get tenure.
My logic was rather -- many people think that folks who identify with Obama are supernaturally groovy.
I'll grant you a point, but generalize it a bit. I think that whenever there is a group that identifies itself as an agent of change, an agent for the establishment of justice, etc., there is a tendency to view group membership as the attribute whose significance trumps all other attributes. I think you'd find (and I'd hope you'd admit) that there's a similar dynamic on the teabagger side, too.
Therefore, when one of their own goes postal, they have no understanding for it, no theory that supports the data, and therefore they might think it hasn't happened. This is apparently what Amy Bishop herself is suffering from. She is perfect, because she's an Obama-supporter, and therefore she couldn't have done what she did.
I don't see people on the left saying that Bishop couldn't have done it. From the sounds of things, it's clear she did. But I also don't hear people on the left trying to make the case that what she did was justified. On the other hand, a fair number of people (including some I respect on this blog) argued that what Roeder did was excuseable.
I'm not implicating Obama. He's not responsible for Amy Bishop, or for any of the other millions who supported him, however ardently or fervently they maintained that support.
Thank you for saying so.
But if we are to begin to tally the numbers of leftist kooks versus rightist kooks in this country, and if we are to include Black Panther, Weathermen, anarchist bombers, and so on, under the title of leftist killers, and then include the 8 or 9 abortion clinic killers, I think the scale would be much heavier on the left side.
McVeigh and the KKK? That's a heavy burden on your side. Look, I'm not claiming that they're representative of the right, only that they're a part of it. Much the same as I'd say that the Weatherman aren't representative of the left, but they were a part of it. The Black Panthers don't really fit right or left -- they were really separatists.
If we count only presidential assassinations (not attempts, but successful assassinations), we would have to count Oswald as a red, McKinley's assassin as to the left, Garfield's assassin as to the left, and Lincoln's assassin?
I don't know where to put him, since at the time the South was not part of the Union, but it was the Democrats who were on the side of the Southern Secession.
Yeah, but the Democrats were the right of their day, the Republicans the left, although it's always a bit iffy trying to project our particularly alignments back into the past. Also, Oswald was more complicated. McKinley and Garfield I'll grant.
If you think now of the world over the last century, and think of the left atrocities within communist countries, you are again going to find yourself on the wrong side of the ledger in terms of internal genocides.
If I get to count Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, that ledger's going to be a lot closer.
But there's a point at which I will tend toward an agreement -- centrists tend to be more balanced than either the far left or the far right.
Yup.
I don't count her as REPRESENTATIVE of the left, only that she saw herself as holding Obamanian ideals, however she configured those to herself.
We don't yet know how she thinks. A family member said she was a far left demagogue of some kind, and that's been iterated a number of times by people who knew her.
The KKK was predominantly a Democratic organization in its heyday.
I believe that the Panthers DID VOTE, and that they got a number of figures in on the Democratic ticket. I would have to check that.
Curiously, Eldridge Cleaver dropped out of the far left and re-emerged as a candidate for the Republicans, but I don't think he won a seat.
Hitler did kill about 7 million Jews. That's bad. But Mao's estimate is more in the 80 million range (at least ten times more).
Of course he was operating a larger country, so we might have to think about percentage of population as opposed to absolute numbers.
But then we'd have to figure in Pol Pot. He killed almost half his population, according to some estimates.
And then again with Hitler we'd have to wonder whether he's to the left or to the right.
I put him to the left on the basis of the term "socialism" which wa spart of his insane nationalism.
That's another whole argument.
I'm not sure where to put Mussolini either. He had traces of all kinds of things going on. And oddly, he was the only dictator of the period to like avant-garde art. For some reason, he actually appreciated the avant-garde. The so-called Futurists were avant-garde artists who broke to totalitarian Italy's side. At least one avant-garde poet from America (Ezra Pound) also found himself aligned with Mussolini.
Notice that Pound didn't go to Berlin. He would not have been welcomed there.
Many of these places have their own slants and histories that can't be shoehorned into the Democratic or Republican party narratives.
I would not put Bishop's killings into the Democratic party narrative. That is, it was not ordained from the top, by OBama, or by any other member of the current government.
I think it's one thing we can still be proud of. As far as I know, neither party has ever taken out a contract on the other party, or on members of the other party.
Let us pray that this is one country in the world where that one condition remains true.
Because if that ever begins, God help us.
Kirby,
I'd like to suggest that viewing Stalin and Mao as leftists is unhelpful. Both were primarily nationalists. Likewise, I think that identifying Hilter and Mussolini as rightist is unhelpful. Likewise McVeigh.
Roeder, I'm not so sure of. He was a lot closer to mainline Republicanism. I'll grant a somewhat symmetric case w.r.t. the Weatherman.
As for the KKK, they are clearly reactionary -- it's just been that the party most identified with reactionary elements changed. My people were Republicans back in the day when being a Republican meant a progressive stands on civil rights, education, etc.
Getting back to something you said earlier, I think that the center has been a source of strength for this country, and I see danger in the increased polarization that has taken place. Still, in all, I think that violence has been the exception rather than the rule (with the notable exception of slave/civil rights), and that we're all better served by corporately denouncing violence on all sides.
This is, in a way, why I see my participation in this dialog as being important. We have our religion in common. I think we both need to find ways for our shared faith to transcend our political differences.
the right with its bombings of abortion clinics, let alone the Murrah building, has killed far more than the left in this country.
ORLY?
Stu,
"Teabagger." Really? You think that's okay? Or are you unaware that it's a slur?
Last week I wrote to a journalist at the local newspaper who had used the slur in a column and asked her whether or not she really wanted to portray herself in that kind of light. She admitted that she had used the word thoughtlessly and regretted it.
I'd like to suggest that viewing Stalin and Mao as leftists is unhelpful.
Wow.
It's unhelpful to your attempt to paint progressivism as anything but evil, that's for sure.
I mean on the right we, unfortunately, have Hitler, but you've got Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and several more.
WB,
"Teabagger." Really? You think that's okay? Or are you unaware that it's a slur?
As a general rule, I believe that people should be referred to by the names they themselves have chosen. For example, "African-American." "Liberal." "Conservative."
I'll note that the teabaggers chose this name for themselves, before they were aware that it had other associations. It may be a slur, but it is their own slur. They need to own it, and move on. Have a little teabagger pride, man! In the meantime, the teabaggers feel content to throw around so many slurs of their own at me and mine that a little tit-for-tat seems justified.
On this blog, I've been called a communist, a tool of the devil (just today!), an antinomian, a pelagian, and worse. The authenticity of my commitment to Christ is routinely questioned, never defended. This seems to be viewed as acceptable discourse when it is directed at me. WB, I have a lot of respect for you. But this thin-skinned victimization is unbecoming, especially in light of the tacit acceptance by you and everyone else of verbal bad behavior from the right on this blog.
What we might agree on is that all one-party states are automatically evil.
As soon as one party arrogates to itself all the good, and to the other party all the evil, it in turn becomes automatically evil, esp. if it outlaws the other party, or parties.
Or demonizes them to the extent that it might in some way manifest as a genocidal attack on the other party. Even the wish for all other parties to disappear is evil.
In the same way we could characterize the wish for other denominations to disappear, or for all other ethnic groups to disappear, etc., as evil.
We live in a pluralistical world, and we ought to deal with that fairly, allowing all others who are willing to live in a pluralistical world to express themselves, and to vote for the parties of their choice, and to assemble according to their wishes.
What can be said of Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and others, is that they wished to exterminate all opposition.
Any attempt to do that should be considered wrong.
What's right is the first amendment right to freedom of speech for all, and to freedom of religious expression.
What the first amendment doesn't cover is "fighting words" according to OW Holmes, as well as libelous assaults on another's integrity (one can make claims, but one has to actually believe them, I think, is the criterion).
I think likewise we should avoid fighting words (words which would make an ordinary person so incensed that they would have to break the relationship off, or punch the other person -- things that for instance demeaned another person's mom, for example), and we should also avoid lying about each other's positions.
But I think a beginning will be to allow other positions, and other parties, and other viewpoints.
Far right and far left tend to not do that.
Centrists tend to allow for a common place for people of various factions to peacefully assemble.
Part of this is that the center is a place that respects all people as rational, and able to attempt to be decent. That's the foundation of America, people, and I'm holding to it.
It's not just Madison's starting principle, but it remains my own.
That said, I am somewhat suspicious of anyone who pretends to be innocent. Deer, for instance, with their poker faces, while they ramble through the suburbs knowingly infecting children with Lyme.
For shame, poker-faced mammalians!
Kirby:
I think it's odd to expunge communist totalitarians like Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. from the ranks of the left, or, for that matter, Hitler or Japanese imperialists from the racist, extreme nationalist right.
Another detail about Bishop has emerged: when at Harvard, she apparently was questioned after two wired pipe bombs were sent to one of her mentoring professors (Rosenberg was his name, I believe) with whom she had quarreled, but she apparently was left uncharged.
stu:
I was struck by your comment that
"a fair number of people (including some I respect on this blog) argued that what Roeder did was excuseable [sic]." Since I don't recall anyone here excusing his crime, perhaps you might refresh my memory in order to support your claim.
I do think that extremist ideologies (or religious fanaticism) on occasion play an important role in tipping certain miscreants like Bishop toward inhuman hatred, inhumane violence, and terrorism, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of this so far in her case. Hard-left radicals at US universities usually content themselves with excusing or praising communist or other hard-left regimes, disparaging American patriotism (a la Howard Zinn), or harrassing the few conservatives who dare set foot in "their" campuses.
Jacques, I think the only person who had qualified support for the anti-abortion killer Roeder was JH, who is generally on the left side of the scale.
I'm not willing to expunge those you name from the left.
It's harder for me to understand where Hitler or Hirohito were coming from. Hitler had at least one foot in socialism, but it was a racially based socialism.
Goebbels' early novel Michael was openly socialist, and had sympathy for the miners.
While the left wants communism, and wants to destroy independent industry, I'm not sure what the right wants, really.
Do we have a coherent right wing in this country?
When people say the left, they mean communism.
I think the opposite of this is just private enterprise, but how is that the right?
I think it's the center -- or what Coolidge called The Business of America is Business.
Is that necessarily rightist?
Is Smith to the right?
I'm for Adam Smith, and Locke, and to some extent Wesson, but I don't see those things as necessarily to the right.
I do see the left as wanting to destroy private enterprise, and in favor of control of speech, and writing.
I don't see the right as being along those lines whatsoever.
Hannity just wants private enterprise.
A lot of other people who aren't competitive or are lazy want the government to bail out their lifestyles. The center wants everyone to have a work ethic and to get paid not according to their need, but according to their ability and their work ethic, and to some extent, according to luck.
but I don't see that as some kind of far right.
I think the far right is a fiction.
The far left is a genuine faction who want to cannibalize private industry, and tell everybody else what they can think.
JADL,
I think it's odd to expunge communist totalitarians like Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. from the ranks of the left, or, for that matter, Hitler or Japanese imperialists from the racist, extreme nationalist right.
My point here, and I hope you'll consider it fairly, is that the extremist, violent extremes are in fact closer to one another than either is to the center. Neither the extremely left nor the extreme right sees a point in compromise. Each prefers a dictatorship of the likeminded to the uncertainties of democratic institutions. I would throw them both into the same trashbin. At the end of the day, I'm not sure how you distinguish the Stalins from the Hitlers on the basis of what they did. The only distinction seems to be the particular political philosophy they used to justify their dictatorship, a justification that most who hold that philosophy would have emphatically rejected.
Since I don't recall anyone here excusing his crime, perhaps you might refresh my memory in order to support your claim.
Go back and read the thread. I believe you'll find such excuse. I'd rather not look for more exemplars.
George Tiller Shooting Condemned
Kirby:
Yes, I'll agree that there's a far left here--communists, radicals, every fifth American humanities prof--but what, pray tell, comprises the "far" right? Patriots? Free-market advocates? Traditional believers? Supporters of Israel? How far is "far"?--Far enough to get them harrassed at college campuses, I guess. Perhaps stu could tell us. . . .
I'd agree with Stu that Stalin and Hitler were more or less on the same page, but again, I'd place them both on the left.
I do think there is a central area characterized by acceptance of debate, freedom of speech, ability to represent oneself and others in print, freedom of association.
Neither Hitler nor Stalin nor what I know of Hirohito wanted that (didn't Obama bow to the Japanese emperor, indicating kinship and fidelity to his principles of monocultural states?), I'm not sure that we should allow totalitarians into the polity, and that's perhaps itself totalitarian.
If not Hitlerites, why should communist Stalinists (which includes Trotskyites) be permitted to register and vote?
Since they want the same thing.
I'm getting the picture that Amy Bishop was extremely far to the left. How far? What exactly did she say that upset her colleagues and her family members?
Let's use her as the model of what we don't want to the left, while we use Roedel as the model of what we don't want to the right (perhaps there is a far right that is totalitarian in their Christianity -- and thus abrogates laws -- in the way that the Baptists did in Haiti -- but I find this more acceptable since I basically am down with their principles, and with the golden rule -- I suppose I'll have to agree it's wrong even if it also wipes out Tubman and John Brown).
I think John Brown is increasingly acceptable. I saw an amazing exhibit of his life at the New York Historical Society last week as an adjunct to the Lincolnin New York Exhibit.
That was a seismic shift, was it not?
Law can shift.
Slavery was acceptable in the south, until Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation and followed up with the amendment. I forget which one it was. Can't keep them straight after about the first two.
I think it was the thirteenth or the eighteenth.
Not sure when quite it was passed. Right after the Civil War.
What I really liked was the way we mostly made up with the south and honored them, tipping our hat to their military ability, and their basic decency, although I personally think Andersonville was a bit shabby. Even the Nazis treated our prisoners better.
But I'll skip past that since GM is the only southerner on the blog and don't want to outgun him here numerically.
But on the other hand maybe some confederate allies will show up and say that Sherman's March was at least as bad as Andersonville.
I'd have to quantify it.
Lee seems to have been a pretty good fellow.
He was no Lincoln, but he wasn't bad like Hitler or Stalin or that crummy multicultural Hirohito. Didn't Obama bow to a descendent of Hirohito? Lee was ok, though. He was an ok gent.
Thank goodness the two sides had quite decent leaders in the end.
Perhaps bishop being fromt he north had issues with southerners, or something, and wanted to continue the Civil War. Hopefully we'll get more of the puzzle filled in as the interrogations commence.
Maybe all you can do with such people is treat them with kindness but make sure they can't get out of the asylum. I just don't know.
It takes a very squirrelly person to shoot all those people and then call the hubby calmly.
Kirby, JADL,
I'd agree with Stu that Stalin and Hitler were more or less on the same page, but again, I'd place them both on the left.
I find myself slightly bemused to be of the opinion that JADL has by far the more reasonable position here :-). We either embrace our villians on both sides, or reject them. There is something to be said for both. By embracing our villians, we admit that advocacy can feed on itself, and become something dark and dangerous. By rejecting our villians (and yours), we act to detoxify the debate, and argue that the center, strained as it is, can still hold. But I see no virtue in one side saying that we reject our villians, but require you to embrace yours.
didn't Obama bow to the Japanese emperor, indicating kinship and fidelity to his principles of monocultural states?
Actually, respect in the man's own house. And Obama wasn't the first President to bow to the emperor, nor will he be the last.
I think John Brown is increasingly acceptable.
Gee, now you're really waving the red flag in front of GM. John Brown was guilty of murder in Kansas (as well as a victim, having had his son murdered by pro-slavery ruffians), and would have been guilty of mass murder in Virginia had he realized his ambition of instigating a slave uprising. Certainly, his actions contributed the conflagration that followed, although it is more than merely arguable that matters had already progressed to a point where a peaceable resolution was no longer acheivable.
There comes a point when you have to say, however much we might praise his goal of emancipation, his means were so wrong as to require condemnation.
Last year the faculty shootout was at the University of Georgia in Athens. Primary victim was a female biology prof. Looks like payback to me. Is marksmanship part of the biology curriculum?
Stu,
You may try to justify it if you like. That's your decision. But you're tarring yourself by the use of it.
The phrase “Amy Bishop Was Obsessed with Obama” can be read two ways:
1) This woman thought positively of him and wished him no harm
…but infinitely more likely since she clearly had violent tendencies toward people who held some type of authority…
2) She was negatively obsessed. Like the three people she killed the other day (who happen to be people of color) the Pres. probably is/was on her Crazy-Town Hit List.
Amy Bishop killed 3 people – pretty much all the minority faculty at UAHuntsville. Dr. Podila was from India, Dr. Adriel Johnson and Dr. Maria Davis were African American. Interesting theory, if someone decides to translate "obsessed" as she "worshipped" the first African American president.
Anyway, this politicized discussion is distracting people with craziness – why aren't there more posts which mourn the loss of these three doctors (scientists)? And don't forget to show concerns for the three other people she clipped and/or seriously wounded...a Mexican American, and two Anglo Americans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/16alabama.html
These details of race weren't released in the original accounts. It was apparently a round table, and she hit six in a row when her gun jammed, and a woman who was about to buy the farm jumped up and pushed Ms. Bishop out the door.
At that point, the shooting stopped.
We still don't know anything much about the people who were shot.
Now allegations surrounding her brother's death, and a pipe bomb that was sent to a Harvard faculty member have surfaced.
And there will no doubt be more details as time goes on.
What appears to be clear is that when she was hired there were rumors, but no one dared to look further into the matter. Citing privacy issues, there was the sense that no one wanted to look further into Ms. Bishop's past.
That's a hard call. I'm more than ever willing to look more deeply into the notion of invasive research because although you may risk one person's privacy, the lives of others are also at stake. In this case, this department will NEVER recover from this particular hire. This will haunt the survivors for as long as they live.
Hitler is firmly on the Right for the 900th time. Read Shirer's book again and, for the 80th time, he promised the German Industrialists that he would break up the German Unions. He fought Bolsheviks in the streets and lefties were the first people he turned on, not the Jews. You cannot call the left "communist" and then call Hitler a leftist.
You can't say Hitler killed 7 million people. You seem to forget he started a major war in Europe. At minimum you have to count the 6 million Germans that also perished in the war. The USSR lost 26 million. Yugoslavia lost over a million as well. I would argue that he is responsible for many deaths in the Middle East due to his actions which led to sentiment for the Jews and the establishment of Israel; it never would have passed the UN without the Holocaust.
This blog is fascinating. It's like watching a horrible traffic accidence, only one that takes place every day in slow motion over and over again.
First off, Kirby, your list of relevant facts is purposefully incendiary. There is little evidence that Bishop was some left-wing ideologue. There's no evidence, apart from a single anonymous reference on RateMyProfessor.com, that she ever brought her politics to school with her. (And the same anonymous source says she was hot, so the author's already a doofus.) You have no idea how she voted in the election. And her politics have nothing to do with her violence.
And yes, let's tally the violence of the left and the right. And let's, for the sake of fairness, accept Kirby's definition of The Center: "I do think there is a central area characterized by acceptance of debate, freedom of speech, ability to represent oneself and others in print, freedom of association."
Well, Kirby, then neraly every society on the earth from, say, 2000 BC to 1800 AD would be far to the right of this, would be conservative in the oldest sense of the term.
But of course, that's a nonsense argument. As is the argument from Hitler or Mao or Stalin. One person unjustly killed is no better or worse than one million people unjustly killed. As William James wrote, if the perfect happiness of all were to rest on the utter abjection of one, then the entire society is foul.
If the best defense of your own culture is "Well, at least we're not that other culture," well then, that's sad.
Hey, Tom's back!
Hey Tom!
Yes, Hitler is on the Right. He used the tools of the Left, however--populism, rabble-rousing, rampant nationalism, etc.
You seem to forget he started a major war in Europe.
Well, um, maybe.
First there's evidence Germany would have stopped the war at several points (after they won their goals, obviously but still).
Also, you can't go counting opposing side dead in a war unless you want to start painting with a very broad and very bloody brush.
'Course that's one of the many reasons I'm all up on the "all war is sin" camp, but most folks here, right or left, seem all about war.
The Boston Herald quotes a family member as to her aberrant left-politics, even for the Massachusetts crowd she was considered a bit much:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100215oddball_protrait_emerges_suspects_family_pals_offer_clues/srvc=home&position=0
I have to credit Ann Althouse for ferreting this out, but it's what made me think the evidence was more widespread.
I read althouse for a lot of my breaking news.
My side has killed fewer people than your side, and I get to define which side is mine and which side is yours.
Nanny nanny boo boo!
Get over it y'all, and talk about something less irrelevant for a bit, eh?
Happy Mardi Gras! Sad the party's over:-( NOLA is a lovely town.
All y'alls needs to stop pretending that things which are true of all peoples and parties are somehow only true of a certain party when it is convenient for your attacks.
Gaggle.
I think Hitler is very hard to call. Goebbels was clearly a socialist.
They may have wanted to break all opposition to their rule, and to the extent that labor unions did that, they broke them. But Stalin also imprisoned lots and lots of workers simply on the basis that he couldn't count on their loyalty.
He advertised for Finnish workers to come and join the great revolution and they would show up, and he would shoot them in the thousands, and take the tools they had brought.
Wanting all power in one set of hands is a kind of monopolistic rule going back to the aristocracies.
This seems sinister, and thus left, to me. However, it is not clear to me that the so-called left and the so-called right are not identical on this topic.
I am supporting a center where people can all talk.
I have the feeling that Amy Bishop wasn't for that, and wanted to shut quite a number of people up.
I mean, actions speak louder than words, but if you pay attention to what her own family said about her, you have to wonder.
The great problem for open societies is how to regard those who want to shut them down.
Do they have the right to speak? So far, we do say yes. But it doesn't mean that we give them tenure. And if someone gets really mean, tenure itself can be revoked.
There are limits to speech I think which happen when we abrogate others' rights.
This is a very fine line, and one that is difficult to discern. I don't know if the tenure decision UA Huntsville broke only on gender lines. Two of the tenured faculty that were killed were women, and both of them were people of color.
I'll wait to find out how violent Bishop's diagonal moves were against those who didn't share her opinions, but I'll wager a nickle -- from her shooting her brother and the pipe bomb and now this -- that she didn't brook opposition lightly.
And she seemed to want a one-party system. Always watch out for these folks. They's bad:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100215oddball_protrait_emerges_suspects_family_pals_offer_clues/srvc=home&position=0
News story broke yesterday about how Amy Bishop beat the crap out of a mother near Boston when the mother got a child seat for her own child and wouldn't give it up for Bishop's baby.
The husband claims he never saw this side of Bishop's character. Love is blind, they say, but I think he has to be lying his face off?
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