Apparently someone opened fire in Tucson, Arizona and shot at least 11 people. One was a Democratic congresswoman, and another was a federal judge named John Roll, appointed by George Bush (the elder). We don't yet know who was the target, or what the motive was, or the identity of the shooter (who is in custody, and is a young man). No surprises that it is a young man. Lots of speculation is flying because the Congresswoman was on Sarah Palin's hit list. However, John Roll had received death threats for allowing an illegal immigrant family to file a lawsuit against an Arizona rancher. So we don't know who the target was or what the motivation was. If the central target was Roll, I expect the controversy to die down. If it was the Democratic congresswoman, it will be headlines for months in certain quarters, and may cost Sarah Palin her chance at the presidency.
What's amazing about America is that we don't shoot each other more often. Reagan was shot (but lived) by Hinckley. When you get close to the notions Hinckley held -- he wanted to impress Jodi Foster -- it's impossible to put it into any kind of political calculus. Foster apparently hated Reagan, but she never asked anyone to shoot him. The madman that shot Garfield was angry he didn't get a job. When politicians get shot it's usually a madman. It was an anarchist who shot the president (McKinley) in Buffalo in 1896 (date?). Czolgosch thought McKinley had unfairly sided with big business, and killed him at the Buffalo World's Fair. And with JFK it was -- probably a Russian job, or had something to do with a fellow who was enamored with communism, or was mad about the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, or maybe it was the mob. We will probably never know, since Oswald was in turn shot by another figure, who was in turn shot by another.
Left and right use these assassinations to gain yardage with the independents by painting the other side as irresponsibly violent. I think this is in itself irresponsible, as no one should be shooting another person on the basis of their politics. It doesn't help your side. We shouldn't even use methods such as shunning. Two of the women on The View used shunning against Bill O'Reilly a few weeks back. That was dreadful. The idea is to keep open to other people, and to argue with them, but to do so in a civil manner. But this has never been very easy. In Athens, banishment was common. In the Congress leading up to the Civil War, a northern senator was beaten half to death by a southern senator (Preston). It's not at all uncommon for the first amendment to segue into the second amendment. This doesn't mean that either amendment is bad, or should be curtailed.
The right have guns, but generally use them responsibly. Palin's metaphor is only a metaphor. Of course there may be kooks who can't understand metaphors, but to what extent do we bear responsibility for kooks? Did the left hoist Hinckley on their shoulders after he was shot even though they hated Reagan? Did Jodi Foster thank Hinkley? Did the right think what John Chapman did to John Lennon was a good idea? Generally speaking, political shootings are squirrelly things done by squirrelly people. Nuts. Did feminists jump up and down when Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol? A few did, even a few national figures in NOW were excited, but they were reviled.
Some Americans point to John Brown as a responsible act, and argue that such actions are mandatory in certain circumstances. This is a difficult call, because usually when people act outside the law, even when they do so in the name of the Gospel, as Brown did, they are still overriding the separation of church and state on which our nation is founded. I don't think it should EVER be done.
There were those who equated "W." with Hitler. Even some of my close friends did it. I thought it was irresponsible, because Hitler (I think we will all agree) needed to be assassinated or silenced by any means necessary because there was no other process by which to get him out. The newspapers had been shut down. The churches had been shut down. It was a one-party state. NO American figure can be equated with Hitler and to do so is wrong, but also the circumstances in which it was done were so different. We can't equate our own robust democracy with the circumstances of Nazi Germany in which all dissidents were finding themselves in gas chambers or hanged or shot by firing squad. That's not happening here, (which is not to say that it couldn't).
Instead of opening fire on one another, we should keep talking with each other, as the details unravel. But whatever the details are, we have to see them in the context of our entire history, which, except for the Civil War, has been one in which talking (and especially listening) has been the method of our democracy. Even after the Civil War, Lincoln said we ought to help our fallen comrades up easy. We were not to continue to punish them, or hold them as demons. We were to respect them, and to help them up, as after a schoolyard brawl. We were to be one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
All that said, I'm not surprised this happened in Tucson. Law and order has broken down (and with it the perception of justice) along the Mexican border as violence and illegality spills over. There is the perception that the administration has sided with Mexican illegals over Arizonans. Words are heating up because there is no perception of freedom from disorder. Something has to be done to put the very notion of law and order back in place in that state and along the border generally. If individuals have to do it through vigilante justice, then it's the wild west all over again. Aside from the cartels, I can't see who that would serve. We need a wall, and we need a crackdown.
The Obama administration has to make it a top priority to put law and order back into this country, and especially along the border, where "illegality" has become a norm. Without legality as the norm, we have the perception of chaos. This administration may not have the vocabulary to do it. They tried to make the illegals legal, but lost it in a fair vote, and with the new congress, are unlikely to ever get a second chance. The Obama Administration may not be able to reconcile the patriarchal role of government with the matriarchal role of tolerance. If they can't do it, locals will attempt it. The result will be a loss of law and order itself, which is a loss for everyone.
156 comments:
You were right about the fact that this guy is crazy - His name is jared Lee Loughner, and here is his youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Classitup10
His videos aren't very much about politics - the most pertinent is probably something about the gold standard.
He talks about 'conscience dreaming,' creating your own currency, controlling minds through grammar, being the 'mind-controller.' Anyway, it's wacky stuff - obviously the work of an unhinged mind.
He also has some weird obsession with B.C.E. and A.D.E., and wondering when the beginning of time was? It's strange - he 'favorited' a video of a creepy guy burning an American flag that also has some weird statement about 'when did B.C.E. begin?'
I wonder if there's a strange little movement full of people who get confused by time and language and who have problems with B.C.E. and believe that they can make their own currency.
I think Palin's target-metaphor was in and of itself ill-advised and a poor choice of analogy. Perhaps offensive.
But I don't imagine that Loughner ever saw it... My bet is that he was a Ron Paul supporter, if anything - And I actually like Ron in a sense, but his outsider stances attract the crazies.
And your connection between this and the immigration issue is tenuous, and perhaps ill-advised, and hypocritical.
I kinda wish we had a psychologist at LS who could parse some of this out for us...
Kirby,
It's too early to be certain, but the early returns seem to best support the "kook" hypothesis. How else do you characterize someone who lists among their favorite books both the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf?
Time will tell, of course, but I still think the overblown rhetoric of the right has constributed to this, and I hope this will cause some long overdue reflection on the responsibility people have for the words they speak.
In the Brett YouTube piece what came across was the paranoia. That people were listening to him.
Hitler and Marx were also major paranoids, so perhaps that is the thread.
Probably everyone is paranoid to some degree, but when you start seeing patterns that aren't there and then thinking you have to do something about it, then you are moving from kook to menace.
Kooks can be fun.
Menaces are rarely fun.
How do you keep a kook from becoming a menace?
One thing is by trying to talk to them, I suppose. Lonely people who go kooky, often become a menace if something triggers their paranoia.
One thinks of Manson, or Hitler, for instance. He had some minor skills as a dancer and musician, and some skill as a motivational speaker.
Hitler had some skills as an artist, and was also a good motivational speaker, but then ...
well, I'm beginning to see patterns that may or may not be there. It's fun to get in the news and the new information on our kook. Likelihood is he's a loner without many deep relationships, who's been sounding weird for years, and nobody knew what to do.
It's sad that we had all these talented and productive people pay the price.
I think we will eventually develop a profile of the kook who's moving toward menace, and implement policites that preempt at least some of these disasters.
The worst part is when someone like this has enough skill as a motivational speaker to pull others into their vortex. OBL has that, for example.
This guy Loughton will have very few if any takers.
There is a lot of anger there along the border. Shootings are becoming almost commonplace there. Two days ago someone named Hernandez went off and shot a few people.
It's hard to track all these things and dangerous to put them into a clear pattern, but suffice it to say that when I saw this happened in Tucson, it definitely did not surprise me. That open border is driving people nuts.
Althouse has some tweets at the top of her blog from a woman named Cathie Parker who knew Loughton and claimed he was a leftwinger when she knew him two years ago.
However, I think the far right and the far left are indistinguishable. The only people with a clear identity who are thinking for themselves and are stable are people in the center.
Ok, that was fairly self-serving, but what the heck.
Take a look at the Tweets. Follow my link to Althouse on the far right side of the page, if you want to know how to get there.
McCain has put out a statement:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/mccain-giffords-shooter-is-a-disgrace-to-arizona-this-country-and-the-human-race.php
I don't think that Obama has spoken yet nor do I know if he even knows about it. I think he's on vacation somewhere.
I saw him in flipflops at some airport terminal a few days ago.
But reports coming in reveal the guy who did the shooting was around the bend, and that it probably wasn't just an assassination with a clear motive. After all he shot a Republican, a Democrat, and a bunch of other people, including a 9-year old girl.
This is more about lunacy than about the lunacy of any particular faction. No doubt we will all try to spin it into one of oiur favorite narratives, but that's just us being us.
Kirby,
I don't think that Obama has spoken yet nor do I know if he even knows about it. I think he's on vacation somewhere.
Your willingness to assume that people who you think ill of will behave badly speaks badly of you. Obama's first statement on the Gifford affair came out this morning, and if you had a bit of good will, you'd have bothered to check it out.
There's stupidity, and there's offensive stupidity. This is the later.
At once an anxious and mournful day. I pray the Congresswoman will live, though there are two victims to date who won't. At least the truly malignant personity who seems to have perpetrated this horror is in custody. I think the miscreant's name is Jared Lee Loughner.
Before anything emerged about the shooter's identity, I saw in various comments sections in major media outlets an outpouring of grief, hopes, and prayers for the victims and their families as well as of reckless speculation about the perpetrator (drug gang assassin, illegal alien, Tea Partier, right-winger, etc.) and of venomous accusations against political adversaries.
As we try to understand more of the facts, accounts, and circumstances of this terrible event, let's also try to restrain the itch to make collateral damage of our political adversaries over it.
I picked that bit up from comments made at Althouse.
The twitter connection is broken at one of her most recent comments.
Stu, you asked me to write about this, and you keep saying that this happened because of Palin's targeting this woman. We don't know who did what yet and when.
I also don't have a lot of time to follow all the events, and put this post up as a courtesy to you, as a few months ago I wrote about the Mosque for Brett. I can't help but think it's a trap to draw me on to your ground so that you can wail on me.
The fact is that I didn't have time to carefully research the details of the Mosque (I am doing a lot of research in cracks around family time, and don't have time to track down every little detail of every little or even major event).
I am pretty busy with family all day, so was just razzing you back with your comments on Palin as the true source of this, and how we on the right have to watch our rhetoric.
Rhetoric isn't dangerous if people are sane. If people aren't sane, then -- you get people like Cho, or like this new guy, whose name is Lougherty or something.
The main thing to realize about this event so far is that it's a nutcase behind it, and not the "other side" however we configure that.
One of the things I liked about the early Obama is how he said that left and right used every event as a method of pumping up suspicion about the other side, and he said he would try not to do that.
In a pinch, he has done it, as in Crowley-Gate, but he does try to stay out of being too loopy or becoming a menace (even though he hates Fox News, he still does try to talk to the right -- or at least he did until he was elected).
It's very easy to go for the jugular and call someone else stupid.
That's stupid.
But stupidity has no known boundaries and is a part of our fallen condition. It shall never cease.
We are all Pilate.
James, who is the other person who died? I know the judge, John Roll, died.
The congresswoman was hit in the head but is expected to pull through although NPR called her dead (have they issued an apology yet?). The gun was a semi-automatic Glock. I don't know much about guns. What kind of a wound would this kind of gun make?
I hope the little kid didn't die.
I'll try to check online again after eleven for more details. We're playing family games here -- snowbound. Remember Stratego? We're playing that, but it's a new version that has dragons instead of soldiers, but there's still a flag.
Re: Glock:
The gun doesn't make the wound, the bullet does.
It would depend on the sort of ammunition used.
Likely the shooter used hollow-points (what you use when you intend to kill things) which expand once they hit something (in this case, flesh) and leave large (intentionally fatal) exit wounds.
Sigh.
I wonder if this had been at a Republican rally there would have been folks with CCWs. . .
At any rate it is terrible and sad and the rhetoric on both sides is inflammatory but the only one to blame is the young man.
Kirby,
Stu, you asked me to write about this,
I did, thank and thanked you for doing so.
and you keep saying that this happened because of Palin's targeting this woman. We don't know who did what yet and when.
No. I've cited the right's demonization of it's opponents. Palin is a part of this, and her "target" ad was certainly ill advised, as I said, but there's no merit to "you keep saying" for something I said just once.
I can't help but think it's a trap to draw me on to your ground so that you can wail on me.
No. My argument with you is with your ill-informed, ill-willed slam of Obama, when it would have taken almost no effort to determine that he had spoken. You did reasonably well with the post itself.
James, who is the other person who died? I know the judge, John Roll, died.
Well, I'm not James. But reports are up to six dead, including a 9 year old child.
It's very easy to go for the jugular and call someone else stupid.
That's stupid.
Indeed. But let's all hope we don't find out how you react to ill-willed, ill-informed slams of leaders on your side on a day when one of your team is shot. But thanks for your sensitivity, anyway.
Kirby, I think a nine-year old also died in the shooting.
The little kid is one of the fatalities.
I have to agree with Stu regarding your comment about Obama. I'm not an Obamaphile, but still his statements were all over the news. Hard to miss. Maybe check in with CNN once in a while instead of relying on tweets from Althouse's followers.
WW
Now six deaths have been reported from the shooting.
President Barack Obama
"This morning, in an unspeakable tragedy, a number of Americans were shot in Tucson, Arizona, at a constituent meeting with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. And while we are continuing to receive information, we know that some have passed away, and that Representative Giffords is gravely wounded.
We do not yet have all the answers. What we do know is that such a senseless and terrible act of violence has no place in a free society. I ask all Americans to join me and Michelle in keeping Representative Giffords, the victims of this tragedy, and their families in our prayers."
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/08/leaders-react-to-shootings-in-arizona/#more-142346
I'm sorry about the Obama mistake.
The tweets over at Althouse also indicate the killer was a loner, very philosophical, as one person put it, who apparently knew him.
All this information is going to continue to morph. Apparently someone in the crowd was armed and did fire back. The police are looking for two other possible perps.
One of the Tweets said that they knew him and he was an angry liberal. But I think he was more likely screwed up -- with all kinds of cross currents in his thinking.
It's like the Cho killings in Virginia Tech. He could figure out how to kill as many as possible, he could write stories, but there was something seriously wrong in his thinking.
At any rate, I don't think this will be the event that finally touches off a shooting war between left and right in America. The kid was just plain screwed up, and he shot people on both sides.
Now CNN is reporting that the bullet went through Gifford's head, but she is talking, and is alert. Now they have to worry about swelling.
It's hard to deal with breaking news, because if all the facts aren't in, you have no idea how to call what's going on. My original hypothesis was a madman. Those tend to be the shooters in America.
In the Middle East, the shooters and bombers tend to be fanatics with a mission. But are they also basically and deep down just lunatics without much of a sense of what's really going on?
At least in our country the killers tend to be loners who are brooding about something. Few of them make much sense, or are prominent people.
John Wilkes Booth was different in that regard. A prominent actor from a prominent family, who could speak Latin. Most of our killers are embittered losers who are notable for their lack of recognition, their inability to get on in life. How many of these people are there in America?
Is it very rare, or is it rather common, and just requires a nudge?
I don't think there's a direct connection between Palin's targeting thing (which as a political metaphor is itself unsavory and offensive) and Loughner's actions.
He probably listens to Alex Jones and would vote for Ron Paul (the Gold Standard and being a constitutional 'originalist' are the only actual political statements I've seen from him).
And I like Ron Paul, and don't think he's to blame at all.
Loughner is.
Though I do think this can create an emotional response in us to realize that the way we DEMONize (literally) the opposing side is psychotic.
Hitler stashes on Bush.
Claiming Obama's a communist usurper.
Using violent rhetoric, and claiming that people on the other side are actively trying to destroy America is nefarious.
Obama has generally been pretty good about acknowledging the good intentions of the other side - (Boehner even stole his disagree without being disagreeable line).
But people who say 'George Bush is evil' and 'Obama is a communist born in Kenya' are pretty much just separated from Loughner by nothing more than a veneer of fear that they wouldn't want to cause the ruckus of killing someone in power.
But if you say George Bush is Evil, or Obama is like hitler and a communist usurper, you are pretty much saying you want to kill them, but you ain't got the balls.
'Cause if they are truly trying to destroy America, if they are really like Hitler or Stalin, then assassination of them (or the congresspeople with similar views) is a rational solution...It follows, however, from an unreasonable basic belief in the evil destructiveness of the other side.
Hopefully the end result of this will be an increase in the civility of our discourse...
Stu, I don't think I see this as a shooting on my side or your side. It's just a bunch of people got shot by a nut. The people now we hope will pull through. Some are on my side politically (the judge), and some on your side (the congresswoman), but they're all Americans, and there, there's only one side.
Even the killer is an American. It's just another weird set of events, not about sides. The reason I brought up OBama is that I wanted you to get sick of the sides taking. I don't think we should take sides in this.
One of the neat things about the leaders like Brewer and Obama is that they're not playing it to political advantage. McCain is sick at what happened, Brewer too, and Obama -- they're all calling this Congresswoman a friend. A real friend.
I hadn't ever heard of her before.
But I definitely don't see it as a victory for my side! Or a loss for my side.
I don't think it has anything to do with political discourse.
It's a nut with a gun. His viewpoint was all screwed up, and lacked any coherence.
It's in a sense a pointless tragedy.
John Wilkes Booth's shooting of Lincoln made sense. Czolgosch's shooting of McKinley had some coherence. Not sure about Garfield's assassin. It wasn't a move at least on a great political board, not chess.
This today was just someone who was angry who wrecked the game itself, rather like Cho. Don't know why he shot this particular woman (he seems to have gone for her eyewitnesses said and the rest were collateral damage). We'll probably get some testimony eventually but the man isn't talking right now, and wants a lawyer.
My guess is he's nuts, and there's nothing to be learned from this about politics or which side is worse than the other.
Obama is clearly very far to the left. Kloppenberg at Harvard who really likes Obama admits that "Obama is a man of the left." If you're a leftist, you're a Marxist. Or so I think. It's legal to be a MArxist. It's legal to be a Nazi, for that matter.
It's not legal to shoot people.
I'm not so sure that if you say someone is a Marxist it means you want to kill them.
It's also ok to be from Kenya.
Saying that someone is from Kenya doesn't mean you want to kill them.
Some of my close friends are MArxists. They are Marxists. Steven Shaviro at Wayne State says over and over on his blog that he's a Marxist. I think it's great.
It gives me someone to argue with.
Why would I want to kill someone I can argue with? I love arguing with people. What I couldn't stand are people around who think like me. If they thought like me, I'd have to change my mind so as to be able to argue with them.
Arguing is half the fun of being alive. It's ludic and ludicrous.
There is no point on the other hand in shooting someone else. It would just mean shooting a person with whom you could have had an interesting argument. So why would anyone do that?
Kirby,
I'm sorry about the Obama mistake.
Accepted.
Stu, I don't think I see this as a shooting on my side or your side. It's just a bunch of people got shot by a nut. The people now we hope will pull through. Some are on my side politically (the judge), and some on your side (the congresswoman),
The judge was targeted by the tea party for one of his decisions in an immigration case. Judges are supposed to be neutral, although clearly not all are. And it was clear that Giffords was the target.
but they're all Americans, and there, there's only one side.
Funny, the last time I heard something like this, it was Obama saying it.
I don't think it has anything to do with political discourse.
You're wrong. This nut was primed and aimed.
Stu, you may be right. There's a new theory that there are several coconspirators -- and that perhaps it was Tea Party inspired. The Pima County sheriff thinks it was caused by heated rhetoric. We don't know if this was true. The shooter has clammed up, but claimed to have acted alone.
Was it irrational?
In Taxi Driver, based on Hinkley's case, it was irrational. Maybe the kid was primed as you say.
But I don't see how you could know that.
Arizona is a border state and lots of people are very angry there that the president hasn't been very visible in terms of helping to correct the security situation with Mexico. Others claim that he has done more than Bush 2, for instance.
I think the heated war in the country between radicals and more conservative people does have serious consequences. If we turn to a socialist viewpoint, as Obama clearly wants us to, business is going to suffer. And our general prosperity and freedom will suffer.
We don't really know what happened in this specific situation yet. Was he a Cho, who shot Giffords for no real reason? He also shot a 9-year old girl (who just got elected to student council), and apparnetly killed her. This kid certainly had emotional problems.
Arizona has the right to carry concealed weapons (Wyoming and Alaska are the other two states that allow this).
Giffords was apparently a former Republican and a moderate in an area of Arizona that usually goes Republican.
I don't know. You could be right, but what does it mean? Why are the people so heated up? To some degree, a great number of people feel that they aren't being heard in this democracy.
Many people see Obama as a kind of new Lincoln. Lincoln did a kind of quantum leap, and angered many. Are we in the midst of another gigantic leap toward equality, and are people angry as they were in the Civil War? Is what we are going through another Civil War but so far without the actual shooting?
One of the problems of the less literate people is that they can't compete in courts of law or with words. They may instead turn to guns. I hope that is not what's happening.
As the Harvard and Ivy elite -- Obama and his supreme court nominees and others -- decide to take the country in new directions, they are leaving behind millions of people who believe differently -- whose source of authority is not Rorty and Nussbaum and James but instead Jesus as filtered through anti-abortion tracts, constitutionalist ideals, perhaps --
But we still need to be careful in terms of seeing this as a pattern, when we don't even know the facts.
What little we know says that the guy was himself a liberal. People who are nuts enough to do something like this usually themselves are dealing with shaky facts and a sketchy viewpoint.
When Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy, it had something to do with Israel. Squeaky Fromme popped Ford -- or tried -- trying to save a redwood tree or something.
These small groups have very odd understandings, with usually peculiar goals, that don't really add up.
Smarter people realize it make take fifty years to change something very small, and the only way to do it is to develop coalitions, and through long long long discussions.
Nuts think they can just change everything in an instant. That's wrong, and not only is the conclusion generally wrong, but all the steps leading up to it are faulty, too.
We have to be patient.
Kirby - you took my phrases and cut out the most objectionable adjectives.
If you equate a leader to Hitler or Stalin, you are creating a situation in which killing that person seems reasonable. If you claim someone is intent on destroying America, you are creating a situation in which killing that person seems reasonable.
'Communist usurper' is a phrase somewhat less cutting than those, but 'tis still pretty grim and an incitement to abject hatred.
It seems that, as a socially isolated sociopath, Loughner was angry at his place in life and wanted someone to blame.
He obviously thought that Gifford was part of that equation.
A political assassination is by its natural a political situation.
"If we turn to a socialist viewpoint, as Obama clearly wants us to."
please stop lying.
"this guy was a liberal."
Stop lying.
We know he was for the gold standard.
And called himself a 'constitutional originalist.'
These phrases/stances comes from the Ron Paul/Tea Party side of things.
Try again.
To clarify, I'm not saying he's a tea-party member, or a Ron Paul supporter.
Just that within 'what little we know' there is definitely evidence of other viewpoints beside 'liberal.'
The strongest would seem to lean toward Alex Jones and the 'patriot' movement.
To say that 'what little we know of him, he's a liberal' is wrong. And you know it. Thus, you must be lying.
Kirby,
I wrote:
You're wrong. This nut was primed and aimed.
You wrote:
Stu, you may be right. There's a new theory that there are several coconspirators -- and that perhaps it was Tea Party inspired. The Pima County sheriff thinks it was caused by heated rhetoric. We don't know if this was true. The shooter has clammed up, but claimed to have acted alone.
Was it irrational?
In Taxi Driver, based on Hinkley's case, it was irrational. Maybe the kid was primed as you say.
But I don't see how you could know that.
There's know, and there's know. This is Bayesian thinking. The shooting of a congressman/woman is a rare event. The wiki article on Jim Jones still claims Leo Ryan as the only congressman "murdered in the line of duty." Let's pray that doesn't require revision.
If a congressman/woman was a victim of a random robbery, that's one thing. Giffords was targeted: her assailant's goal was her life, not her wealth. If the congressman/woman was from a typical district, that would be one thing. Giffords is a "blue dog," a democrat representing a republican district, and someone who had just won a close election (< 4000 votes) against a tea party opponent in a very contentious race. And this took place within a political environment that involved not just one, but at least two distinct images of firearms targeting of Gifford specifically as a metaphor for political targeting (the oft-cited SarahPac ad, and a shooting range event by her opponent during the campaign, cited at the usual progressive sources). All of these facts, if accounted for in the analysis, affect the calculatioin of the a posteriori probability that the this was an attempted political assassination, i.e., that the weapon wasn't the gun in the hand of the nut, it was the nut in the hand of another.
If we make the probable inference that this was an attempted assasination, then our analysis should next turn to who is the likely targeter. There are three hypotheses currently in play. The first, and most probable is a member of Giffords' most visible recent bitter opposition, i.e., the tea party. The second is a neo-nazi group (Giffords is Jewish, and her shooter listed Mein Kampf among his favorite books, along with some general anti-religious statements). This seems unlikely, but not ridiculous. The third is a member of the extreme left, who targeted Giffords as a one of the more conservative members of the democratic caucus. This is even less unlikely, but again, not ridiculous. The problem with the "leftist" hypothesis is that targetting Giffords seems tremendously counter-productive from that perspective. Giffords is one of the more conservative members of the democratic party, but she represents a very conservative district, and it's hard to anyone more liberal winning there. If she doesn't survive, it's much more likely that her successor will be republican than democratic. And there's an absence of supporting rhetoric: leftists can't stop shooting off their mouths even when they're shooting off guns, and there's been none of that.
The right has sown the wind on this. It has proclaimed that both second amendment rights and its religion are under attack and at stake while Obama is president, despite zero evidence to either. It has claimed Obama is a communist or a socialist, invoking cold-war language and explicit claims of treason to describe him and his supporters, entirely without foundation. None of Obama's initiatives have been out of the US political mainstream, and it is a bald-faced lie to say otherwise. And it has used hyperbolic language, especially within the tea party movement, to encourage both a sense of victimization and a sense of outrage on the part its members. We saw the veil lifted a bit yesterday as to the consequences of this irresponsibility. The question is whether the right will continue as it has, or will it moderate itself.
Kirby:
I think issues like this tend to bring out the worst in you.
Trying to "make sense" of a situation about which we know little or nothing is a complete waste of time. Opportunistic attempts to position yourself with respect to the probable (unknown) political implications of a chaotic, anarchistic act like this are a complete waste of time.
My wife and I were driving in Oakland when we first heard the reports of the shooting on NPR. We were frustrated because they "held back" the facts and kept talking about irrelevancies, and then finally the police and FBI representatives were given a microphone. They in turn seemed unable or unwilling to tell us anything concrete about the incident, and spoke instead about their great experience in law enforcement, their intimate connection to and feeling for the victims, and then launched into a long sermon about "vitriol" and the atmosphere of hate which undoubtedly was the cause of the incident--but at this point, we knew so little about why the event might have happened, or even the factual data (who was killed, where it took place, etc.), that such speculations seemed completely irrational. My impression of the authorities in Tucson was of a collection of complete fools, literally out of control.
My predominant impression from this early response was of complete confusion, of a gratuitous, irresponsible attempt to seize the opportunity to make political points. Which is pretty much my feeling about your post, and much of what has been said here as well.
A woman who knew him -- I think her name was Caitlin Parker -- has been in the news, and given interviews. She said that the last time she knew, he was a liberal. But he's obviously also nuts, and not terribly literate.
I've been trying to piece together his logic in his MySpace comments and can't find any. "Conscience dreaming," is probably "Conscious dreaming," which is something like lying half-awake and reassembling your dreams until they go the way you want them to go.
Stu's Bayesian reasoning is fascinating, but I still think it leaves out many potential forks in the road. One is that the guy was nuts, and didn't have a clear rationale. The tragedy seems to have been compounded by the lack of security at the event. Even if someone had primed this man to shoot Giffords, which he did with his first shot, why then did he shoot the little girl, the judge and up to 8 others? Shooting the little girl can't be seen as a politically inspired act, unless he was upset that she had recently been elected to the student council (which is apparently why she was there -- a relative had brought her there to inspire her to dream big dreams).
The rhetoric of the right which has led to the legislative tsunami in the recent election is obviously something that the Democrats would like to tamp down on, because they don't like losing. So their spin on this is please don't target us, please don't target our seats, or our principles, our ideas.
While it's important not to do this in an extra-legal fashion, or to encourage neo-nutsis from doing so, the left also has to think about how it conspired in overturning the voices of Arizona in controlling their own border.
Arizona passed a law but Obama refused to honor it, and immediately filed an injunction to stop the law. Obama only honors laws that go the way he wants them to go. Or so it seems.
He smokes pot, he does crack. So what if they were illegal. He felt like doing it.
A left judge doesn't like a law against gay marriage? Well, it's overturned without listening to the voters.
If heated rhetoric finds a rabble that's willing to listen it's because they have a grievance.
Justice is complex, but at least part of it has to be based on the will of the majority. The left doesn't understand that, and at their worst, they simply argue that all power comes from the end of a gun.
If that's the case, that all power is simply power, then more than one group can play that game.
I don't personally want to play that game. I'd rather play the game of we speak, we vote, and the winners act, and then we vote again.
But if the left won't honor Bush as president, or if they won't honor laws that are passed, you can hardly expect the other side to do so. It takes two to tango.
While we spin this event, it's true that the right has become more violent in its rhetoric. But is there a reason behind this? I think there is.
Obama is a scofflaw, or one who thinks he is above any law that doesn't pertain to his own beliefs.
He sets the example for the nation. It's a terrible example.
You have to continually earn the consent of the governed. It's not like you get it, and you can then do anything the heck that you want.
We don't appoint a dictator for four years. We appoint a president. He presides. He is supposed to be the essence of law, and the essence of America.
He's instead driving the debt into the stratosphere, passing injunctions against laws, telling the CBO to lie, and is moving an enormous number of Americans toward rage. We don't understand what he was even doing while the Gulf burned last summer. And he's got the cover of seemingly the entire media, and still an enormous popular base among the left, who are quite ugly in their rhetoric and actions.
None of that excuses the idiot in Tucson.
To Curtis -- my initial instinct was to avoid this, as it was to avoid the mosque, since the facts weren't in. We're dealing with a situation in which tiny details will make people believe that their wildest theories are correct. The following day new details will make another scenario more likely. I wanted instead to post a piece about grading poems (which is what happens in creative writing classes).
But Stu urged me to get with it, and I did.
I think this kind of situation brings out the worst in everyone, including you.
It brings the scold and the self-righteousness to the fore. Because people are legitimately angry, and this compounded by fear. This was an act of domestic terrorism. In whose name or in what cause, is still unclear.
This guy could turn out to be another Cho, for all I know. That's my basic supposition.
People like this -- I'd include Cho, Manson, Squeaky Fromme, Czolgosch, Hinkley and Chapman in a small subset -- may seem to be political assassins, but can we really put Hinkley into the group of political assassins? Sure, he shot a president. But did he really have a coherent set of beliefs?
Even Oswald does not seem to have had a porch light.
My guess is that this guy didn't either.
And our attempts to turn this into a representation of Sarah Palin's politics -- a tiny metaphor that stands for everything she stands for, which in turn leads us to want to censor her, is in itself a censorious maneuver that should be censored.
John wilkes Booth -- on the other hand -- did have a clear set of ideas. They were heinous ideas, and probably few if any Americans would still hold those ideas (is there anyone who is still for slavery in this country?), but at one time in this country's history they were coherent theories -- a mishmash of states' rights, and the right to hold another person in bondage, based on the story of Ham in the old Testament.
There was some sense to it.
So far, there is no sense to this, and no sense in pinning it on Sarah Palin.
Yes, she used a gun target, but only metaphorically.
Everyone in the house and senate gets death threats apparently. This is evil, and disturbing. But none of our senators or politicians plot the death of others. Palin was one of the first to come out and express disgust.
A Republican congressman on TV last night said that his opponent had used crosshairs in his ads against him. It's a clear metaphor is all which hooks into our love of guns, and the freedom they bought us from the Brits.
The left wants to take them away from private individuals so that they hold all the power. But that's not how this country was set up.
It's a strange story -- and I think it's going to bring out the worst in us, but it will also spin out some of our best, perhaps.
Meanwhile, we all should hope the Congresswoman Giffords pulls through. I think all Americans on every side want that to be the case.
Kirby:
We may have come to a fork in the road, here.
"I think this kind of situation brings out the worst in everyone, including you."
Exactly what in my previous comment might construed as "the worst" in any sense whatsoever?
"Scold and self-righteousness"?
I think, on the contrary, that "self-righteousness" might more accurately be applied to your statements on the issue. Not mine.
Your perambulations so far seem wholly premature, speculative and--worst of all--completely opportunistic. We have been told next to nothing about the suspect (or suspects) in the incident. Nearly everything we've been told presently constitutes hearsay and rumor. We daren't draw any political imputations from the event until such time as the facts are made public and the investigation has had a chance to produce more reliable information.
"The rhetoric of the right which has led to the legislative tsunami in the recent election is obviously something that the Democrats would like to tamp down on, because they don't like losing. So their spin on this is please don't target us, please don't target our seats, or our principles, our ideas."
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with the event under consideration. It's nothing more than irresponsible muckraking.
"While it's important not to do this in an extra-legal fashion, or to encourage neo-nutsis from doing so, the left also has to think about how it conspired in overturning the voices of Arizona in controlling their own border."
We don't know anything about Loughner's motivations at this point--if indeed he had any rational reasons at all--and I object to your attempting to connect imaginary dots here.
"Arizona passed a law but Obama refused to honor it, and immediately filed an injunction to stop the law. Obama only honors laws that go the way he wants them to go. Or so it seems.
He smokes pot, he does crack. So what if they were illegal. He felt like doing it."
This kind of fear-mongering and demonization approaches the level of thinking which I find on Mr. Loughner's own YouTube page.
"A left judge doesn't like a law against gay marriage? Well, it's overturned without listening to the voters.
If heated rhetoric finds a rabble that's willing to listen it's because they have a grievance.
Justice is complex, but at least part of it has to be based on the will of the majority. The left doesn't understand that, and at their worst, they simply argue that all power comes from the end of a gun.
If that's the case, that all power is simply power, then more than one group can play that game."
Jesus Christ, Kirby, what has any of this rambling to do with Senator Gifford? It's one thing to conduct one of these harangues extempore, but to do so in the context of an event like this, while it's still unfolding, and while little is known about the causes and consequences, etc., is just totally reckless. I'm not posting any more commentary here, lest you be further encouraged to rant.
stu, it's most disappointing that you too should join the chorus of overheated "progressive" rhetoric in exploiting this tragic affair to make a general attack on the political right. Your injudicious remark that "[t]his nut was primed and aimed," emphatically ending one posting and likewise beginning another is perhaps the rhetorical piece de resistance of this sort.
In your reference to "usual progressive sources" I see you didn't include the "target list" that preceded the 2008 election and included Representative Giffords (with target image in margin) appearing on the "progressive" Daily Kos site. Some of the recent comments (since allegedly scrubbed by DK, but saved on "HillBuzz") are also pretty disturbing and personal in attacking Ms Giffords, who, one commenter says, is "dead to me."
(http://hillbuzz.org/2011/01/08/my-congresswoman-voted-against-nancy-pelosi-and-is-now-dead-to-me-eerie-daily-kos-hit-piece-on-gabrielle-giffords-just-two-days-before-assassination-attempt-on-her/)
Martial or combative imagery is common in political rhetoric (and biblical imagery as well). Who can forget, e.g., the campaigning President's remark about "our side" bringing a gun to a knife fight? Or your own in considering former Vice-President Cheney a yet unpunished war criminal? On the other hand, President Obama's short remarks on the shootings have shown to date exemplary compassion and restraint as well as a credit to his presidential office. I hope he'll continue to show by example sensible indifference to recrimination and exploitation of this tragic affair for political gain. Would that his "progressive" followers learn to do the same.
From what we know of the suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, he's a brooding, utterly self-absorbed, self-aggrandising, drug-abusing loner. To ascribe some exterior rather than ulterior "cause" for his violent tendencies and subsequent actions seems highly dubious, Baylesian analysis notwithstanding.
James brings up good points and raises some disturbing specters. We still don't know what "side" the young man was on, but the tendency to place him on the other side is natural. I still say that people like this are on neither side and are more dangerous to their "own" side in terms of how the events play out. Tea Party has mostly been very restrained and law-abiding, but the left desperately wants them to act out so as to condemn the movement and everything it stands for as irresponsibly violent.
I do think we all have the need to follow the case closely. That's fine with me.
Curtis wants us all to shut up, and just think aboiut the Congresswoman. But there is more at stake than just the one person. There are 11 people who were shot, and it definitely does act as a situation that impacts all of our understanding of America at this juncture. It's not an event that can simply be dismissed as an isolated event with no meaning.
But the meaning of it will probably be spun for a long time. We have a need to assign responsibility for it.
In the aftermath of the Cho shooting at VT there was this same kind of questioning. Ultimately, Cho did turn out to be sui generis, and yet, there is a subset of loners, with nutsy ideas, who appear to be the ones who end up creating these public disturbances.
It's as if they shrink and shrink and shrink from public space, as the Unabomber did, and then explode into the public space, taking many people with them.
This seems to be the model: shrink from the public and decide that everyone is an idiot, and then act on that rage.
Unabomber, Cho, the Manson group, and many others fit this model.
We still don't know about Oswald: whether he acted alone or whether there was a second shooter, but he was not exactly a well-rounded normal person.
Embittered loners who shrink from public space, and have an internal pressure having to do with brilliant they are compared to everyone else.
A profile should be established, and centers for these people to turn themselves in for help, should be established, too.
Is this somethjing that could happen to everyone, or just a few?
We need to help them before they act out.
Curtis, you seem to think your reaction is the only noble or legitimate one in response to the massacre. I think you're wrong. Therefore you think I am ignoble and illegitimate.
I think people will have many reactions, and that they are all legitimate, and it's noble to try to make sense of this seemingly senseless event.
As long as we still have the first amendment and not everything is run by NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO and its minions of censorious pricks (who inaccurately reported yesterday that Giffords was dead), the country is not yet reduced to a single viewpoint, as NPR would so much like (in the aftermath of their firing of Juan Williams this seems to be more and more the viewpoint on NPR).
It's ok for people to talk aboiut this and to talk about their worst fears and to bring in new details. It's ok.
We should just try to keep from assuming that our own viewpoint is the only legitimate or noble one, a viewpoint that Curtis has unfortunately adopted, as he generally does in crises like these.
Stu wrote:
"Obama's first statement on the Gifford affair came out this morning, and if you had a bit of good will, you'd have bothered to check it out."
Actually the timeline went like this: 10 am the program started.
10:10 the shooter shot Gifford, and others.
At 2:42 pm the president made a statement.
It's very hard to turn on this kind of news when I have a house full of children. I wasn't able to turn on the TV news all day until the children went to bed at 9:15 pm. I didn't want them to see what kind of world we live in.
They're all under ten, and neighbor kids were in and out.
I did do a little bit of internet searching between games I was playing with the kids.
I'm sorry I goofed up that detail. But still, I wasn't as bad as NPR. They claimed Giffords was dead. I doubt if anybody on the left would find that offensive, since NPR is their station.
Apparently she isn't dead. They've removed her skull at the hospital to relieve pressure, but she's able to respond when they remove the sedation. 95% of head shots result in a fatality. So, with any luck she's going to live.
Fox and others reported Giffords dead too.
NPR was the first to get it wrong:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-ashburn/rep-giffords-dead-before_b_806470.html
And this mislead all the others.
NPR, Fox, and others relied on unverified single sources, presumably within the Giffords staff, for the reports that she was dead. Undoubtedly those sources reported based on what they saw and believed. In the tension between "getting it first," and "getting it right," both made the same mistakes.
Yet I see in this your repeating of Fox talking points, and in this an attempt to deflect attention from the responsibility they and you hold for supercharged rhetoric. Just like the SarahPac people today saying "those weren't gunsights." It's not credible. This chicken has come to roost.
The body of a baby born on 9/11 has been laid at the altar of the rights' lies, along with that of a federal judge and several others. And the carnage would have been worse if a gay Giffords staffer, a college intern, hadn't tackled the shooter as he attempted to reload. Whether or not you can incorporate this into your world view, the nation will.
But I don't see Fox, or for that matter, you or James or Emmy or Picklesworth taking responsibility for the tea party rhetoric that anticipated and enabled this. Fortunately, the nation will remember.
The Herald Tribune says the shooter was a community college student taking a course in poetry when he was put on academic suspension pending a mental health evaluation. Are shrinks qualified to determine literary merit? What exactly is the aesthetic criteria for expulsion? Will his expulsion prove to have advanced his literary career? Does the shooter really need a lawyer? It might be more appropriate to provide him a literary agent who can broker the rights to his story?
Keep trying to make the puzzle parts fit, Stu.
Already the joking has begun with Craig's comment.
No one knows for certain what the kid believed. People who knew him said he was a liberal.
He read Marx and Hitler and other odd bits and pieces. My guess is he got some piece of news in his head and went to town. He wasn't a coherent person.
You're trying to make too much sense of this. Let's let the thing settle down for a week or two, and revisit it when more parts are in place.
I haven't actually had a lot of time to follow the case. We turn off the TV and the computer over the weekends to play with the kids. It's technically illegal to turn them on but sometimes I steal away and open them.
New stories will continually open, apparently, but I'd guess within two weeks we'll have some credible notions of what went on in his noggin. The Tea Party has been very restrained, but it doesn't mean that they have to shut up, as much as you'd like them to.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. -- Goldwater
The tea party has an immediate rhetorical problem: formulating, explaining, and convincing a skeptical American electorate that there is a meaningful definition of terrorist organization that does not automatically cover an organization that advocates the assassination as a means of effecting political change.
A meaningful first step would be to emphatically renounce violence, threats of violence, etc. This is a step that as far as I can determine they have not taken—the reactions seem to be (1) don't blame this on us, and (2) the shooter was a leftist anyway. The later is factually doubtful and irrelevant. Expect a drip, drop of damaging revelations over the next few days and weeks, and a rapidly closing window in which to ask.
Will the tea party renounce violence and threats of violence? I doubt they'll do it in time, but we'll see.
The only thing I can make out in his rambling mind was the term "conscience dreaming." He apparently thought that "conscious dreaming" was "conscience dreaming." "Conscious dreaming" is the same thing as "lucid dreaming." Surrealist film maker Alejandro Jodorowski was practicing this in the fifties. A Dutch psychiatrist named Frederick van Eeden (he knew WIlliam James and others) wrote about it. It's when you're dreaming but you're awake enough to guide the dream.
St. Augustine apparently referred to it (I went to Wikipedia to get a gloss).
Is St. Augustine responsible for the shooting?
Is the maker of the Glock handgun?
Is Safeway?
Is the state of Arizona?
Is the community college that threw Loughner out?
It would seem to me that they were all about as responsible as Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
The kid read Mein Kampf -- an insufferable book, but he couldn't even spell conscious dreaming, and misspelled it as conscience dreaming.
The kid's a fruitcake.
Arizona has very stringent laws apparently against claiming mental illness as a defense. So he's going to be dead quite soon, I think.
Meanwhile, we'll get more of his garbled story. Like Ted Bundy, he may try to indict some people as he goes, and try to keep his name in the headlines. I don't think anyone like this deserves to be taken seriously.
The Democrats just received shellacking in the vote count and want to call it murder. Poor losers, I guess, -- Glenn Reynolds in WSJ says they want to make the entire right accomplices in the murders in Arizona. I found this first at Althouse -- an amazingly effective piece of investigative psychology:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703667904576071913818696964.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Althouse is incredibly good at finding pieces like this. I don't know how she does it.
The Democrats just received shellacking in the vote count and want to call it murder. Poor losers, I guess, -- Glenn Reynolds in WSJ says they want to make the entire right accomplices in the murders in Arizona. I found this first at Althouse -- an amazingly effective piece of investigative psychology:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703667904576071913818696964.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Althouse is incredibly good at finding pieces like this. I don't know how she does it.
You've gone around the bend into pure pathology, Stu. Get a grip.
Kirby,
The online WSJ posts the next day's opinions at 5:00 p.m. pst, or 8:00 pm your time. All you need to do is check with with the WSJ site. The Glen Reynolds piece is good and already has 99 comments.
Better still was the editorial called "Murder in Tucson." Very reasoned.
Now on to a different subject.
For a variety of reasons, I moved my cat blog recently. Yours is the only non-cat site to post a link to mine. Would you mind updating the link? I wouldn't ask except that for some reason, I get a lot of hits referred over from your site. It's weird. And some weird things happen too. One day last August I had over 1000 hits referred from a posting you did in August of 2006 (referring to my review of Waiting For The Rapture).
So I would appreciate the update when you have somespare moments....although it sounds as if you have very few of those.
Cat Smrt at http://stonedfox.com
Thanks.
WW
I wish I could say I was joking. Expulsion from school with a requirement for mental health evaluation as a condition for readmission is an official act of a government entity. The assassination attempt makes him a public figure. If he complied with the demand for a mental health evaluation he has a history of mental health treatment. Confidentiality issues relating to doctor-patient privilege are likely to render ordinary criminal procedures problematic, even in wild west states like Arizona. Was the shooter capable of forming an intention with regard to the congresswoman if he was "hearing voices" in the form of "command" hallucinations? Lots of people read Mein Kampf without resorting to shooting lawmakers.
"Pitched past pitch of grief, more pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring."
Why was this fellow taking poetry classes? Was it a well-intentioned effort to gain some measure of control over his own anti-social impulses?
I can remember writing a term paper for a Chaucer course during the week John Lennon was shot. Martyrdom was integral to late medieval Christianity and Chaucer is laced with it. Mentally I found myself affirming the need for martyrdom and that affirmation was promptly echoed by a special news bulletin which broke during the broadcast of Monday Night Football. I experienced Lennon's murder as though I had shot him myself. I felt terribly guilty about it, rendering my term paper incomprehensible. The professor who read my paper took it quite personally. She found the idea that reading Chaucer in an institutional setting could be construed as operating a lethal weapon, a mechanism for channeling mental energy with the intensity of a laser beam, quite offensive and she never forgave me for it.
We watch Harry Potter flying around on a broomstick and consider it light entertainment. There is a magical element to both the spoken and the written word. Could tapping into medieval consciousness on an organized, officially sanctioned basis have occult metaphysical properties that modern or post-modern consciousness can't comprehend?
I think the question of whether or not the Tea Party has anything to answer for in this man's delusion-driven frenzied attack on the Congresswoman, her staff, a federal judge, and innocent bystanders isn't really a question. It's just as absurd as saying because his name contains the letters J, A, D, and L, Jacques must be a psychic spy who uses code hidden in foreign language texts to trigger sleeper cells.
Absolutely most redic, positively sil.
I think some people are missing a very important fact regarding the Tea Party. There is no leader, there is no hierarchy. There's no one in a position of responsibility who could apologize if a wrong could be proven (in contrast to the RNC or DNC or the NAACP or the WTF). But even more important is the guiding principle of the Tea Party, the shared belief in a republican (small r) form of government that is nimble, pared down, and responsive to the voting public. Someone who believes this would reject categorically and completely the use of violence to achieve political ends.
See, a man who would shoot a sitting congresswoman, and a dozen others, endangering numerous members of the public cannot, by definition, be a (small r) republican. He is at best an anarchist who believes all government is shit and should be taken down. At worst, he is a fascist (whether left or right) who believes that violence is a more appropriate means of settling points of difference than the electoral process.
A Tea Partier would not turn his back on the tradition of rule of law, the electoral process, and orderly transfer of power to defend those very principles.
In the Tea Party, we are all equals. No one speaks for us (except those who believe in our principles and happen to have the prominence to get their hands on a microphone). The Tea Party is the ultimate in the American democratic tradition. We don’t even need a ruling class telling us what to think. That’s the way the American experiment was meant to be conducted.
Therefore, since I cannot speak for all, I will speak for my small part.
I cried a little when I heard the news. I was disgusted and appalled at this man’s actions for the innocent lives he took and for the way he managed to add insult to injury by shitting on Arizonans’ right to choose their representatives in Washington. Whatever this man’s political opinions, I believe him to be a fascist, using violence to thwart the will of the people. For that, I spit on him, and those like him. It’s freaking un-American. This is what people do to each other in the cesspits of the world, where whoever has the strongest thugs decides who gets to live and who gets to die—but not in America.
I’m praying for the Congresswoman, for the souls of those lost, for those who might still recover physically and emotionally from the attack, and for Loughner as well. If any good can come from this, I hope it’s that people will remember that in a civilized society, violence is never the answer. A free society of free men and women need nothing more than a pen and a vote.
I know that this will not convince everyone, but at least one Tea Partier has spoken from the heart.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110110/ap_on_re_us/us_congresswoman_shot_gunman_11
Pretty good article - I seem to be right that he's a psycho version of Alex Jones...socially isolated conspiracy nut who thinks everyone else is a slave.
And he was into lucid dreaming - a good sign that he's detached from reality and looks to his 'dreamworld' for some sort of meaning...
I do think Stu's making a connection too directly where there might not be one -
I still fall down on the side of saying this should make us more sensitive to how our violence-tinged rhetoric is stupid/bad/offensive/etc.
But that specific violence-tinged rhetoric can not be blamed for the actions that Jared Lee took. At least not as of yet.
Emmy, it's helpful to get your viewpoint. I don't really know very much about the Tea Party. They have had some rallies around here but I don't really like crowds.
It's also helpful that Brett sees no connection between the Tea PArty and the shooting. I don't know who Alex - is. Is he a youth celebrity perhaps?
Aaron Belz a poet I know blames it all on the Language poets, here:
http://belz.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/assassin/
I think he's at least 99% in jest.
They had an amazing interview with Loughner's Pima Community clollege algebra teacher last night on Shepherd Smith's show on Fox. The teacher said he was afraid to write on the blackboard because he was scared that Loughner was going to open fire. He said that was his intuition about Loughner. He spent a lot of time getting Loughner out of the class (community colleges have open admissions so it's very difficult to remove students from a class or from campus). He managed it, which shows amazing insight and hard work on this guy's part. When he saw it in the news, he wasn't surprised.
I am not certain when Loughner was in his class, but I think it was a year ago or more. I didn't track down that detail. But it was a summer class, so it was at least six months ago. Which means that this wasn't a single incident eruption, focused on one person. Loughner has been ready to go for at least six months, if not years.
People who knew him, knew this.
There's just so little you can do until the shooting actually begins. The law says the perp has to actually break a law.
It's still quite early to say anything about the consequences or causes of this terrifying event, but a few things seem obvious to me:
Our gun ownership laws are far too lenient, and need to be much more restrictive. Handguns, particularly, need to be far less available to the general community. America's romance with gun ownership has nothing to do with the original meaning of the 2nd Amendment. The firearms' industry's influence over the government is far in excess of its value and importance as a commercial entity. Single round rifles are fine--the other shit needs to be withdrawn.
We don't know what influenced Loughner to take the law into his own hands, so there's no justification in condemning political extremists--at least, yet. But it does seem that the use of guns and targets and weaponry as metaphors for political action is, to say the least, an inappropriate application in political propaganda.
The Nazis were especially fond of using violent imagery in their hate propaganda.
Palin's ad is right in character--as a devoted hunter, and as one who likes to joke about violent interaction in an off-hand manner, Palin panders to her constituency in the gun lobby and the hunter factions in the red states.
Making a claim that Arizona is the "capital" of hatred and violence in the U.S. is absurd. This could have happened anywhere. There are plenty of nuts in every state in the Union, certainly enough to give one pause, in considering the likelihood that further violence is possible anywhere in the country. Having handguns easily available makes this much more likely, despite what arguments the gun folks may bring forward, i.e., "guns don't kill people, people do" etc.
Does political rhetoric ramped up to intense levels increase the probability of politically motivated crime? Amateurish speculation about this is worth very little. Perhaps it needs to be studied. It isn't at all obvious that someone like Loughner would be more likely to do something like this with, or without, implicit prompting from the media.
I think it sad that amid the mourning for the victims and their families and the ongoing investigation into the Tucson shootings that this terrible incident should provoke a kind of post-facto partisan election debate in the media, but it's bound to occur when those attacked directly or by insinuation answer their attackers.
Even the sheriff of Pima County, Arizona, Clarence Dupnik (D) seems addled to the point of making wholly unprofessional and partisan statements about the incident, citing the role of the rhetoric of "one party blocking another from making this a better country."
And since the cure for bad speech (however described by partisans) is more speech, I must counter stu's calls on Emmy and me to "[take] responsibility for the tea party rhetoric that anticipated and enabled this [incident]." And that stu has included Picklesworth (who hasn't to my knowledge commented for months here) in his accusations shows well how sweeping, reckless, and baseless are his charges. Equally astonishing is the insinuation that we might not "incorporate" a courageous act (I've no knowledge of particulars on this) on the part of a gay person in our "world view."
Michelle Malkin has up a "primer" on hate speech and violence from the left on her site; stu is welcome to peruse it if he could "incorporate" the views of an conservative Asian-American woman in his "world view."
Since stu's earlier set out some either/or possibilities about the tragic incident, this more pointed one from the WSJ Glenn Reynolds article seems apropos:
"To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the 'rhetoric' of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the 'rhetoric' and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?"
Alex Jones is at www.prisonplanet.com . www.infowars.com .
He's part of the 'patriot' movement, and views himself as one of the founders or forebears of the Tea Party ...
He thinks the like of Glenn Beck stole it from him.
He's got a national radio show and such, though is based in Austin and is a mini-celebrity. I used to watch him a lot during high-school when he was on the local cable access channel...
He's one of those guys who thinks everything has Meaning - that any attack is a false-flag operation used to control the masses (including 9/11).
OPEN YOUR EYES YOU SLAVE!!!
I think it is interesting, though, the way Loughner's got a sort of 'all is text, and text is meaningless' viewpoint that felt a bit familiar comin' from a poetry background...
Is Loughner what happens when somebody with aspbergers (he seems able to only take things literally) combines the left-wing crazy of Derrida with the right-wing crazy of the patriot movement?
Lots of people will try to use the incident to ram through things they already wanted. Gun control laws, for instance. Ironically, Judge Roll voted against the Brady Law, I think I heard on TV. Or I should say, ruled against.
The least that should probably happen is that there should be a police officer or two at such meetings with the public.
So perhaps there will be some positive outcomes from this mess.
It seems much of the MSM has leaped on this as an opportunity to denounce Sarah Palin. Katie Couric, who already derailed the last election when she went psycho on Palin in their interview, has now denounced Palin again as the true instigator of this attack.
You wonder how their legitimacy can survive such partisan takes.
NPR almost couldn't wait to declare the death so that finally they could point to the Tea Party as Nazi rabble.
But the conservative media has more than compensated and is making the left look very foolish for doing this. Today's WSJ editorial is just brilliant in this respect. The left doesn't read the right's media, so will walk right into this straight right and they will be the losers if they continue to try this approach.
The most fascinating thing I've heard is theinterview with the algebra professor at Pima Community College who said that he was terrified that Loughner was going to gun down his class. He worked very hard to get the student out of the class, and finally the campus administration forced him to either drop out or take a mental health evaluation. PEople outside of academia have no idea what an extraordinary step that was for a community college to take. It's HUGE. It's way more than what VT did about CHo. This algebra teacher is one of the true unsung heroes of this story.
Would that we had some way to interrupt people that everyone knows are psycho before they actually strike. That might lead to some issues, but it shoiuld be done.
It's not guns that kill people. IT's psychos.
How's this?
How could a guy who couldn't write an English sentence get accepted to an academic course in a community college?
Makes you wonder about academic standards, no?
WSJ has a comment from some of Louighner's friends that he was a Democrat who had attended Giffords' rallies before, and had asked her questions. He asked her what if language doesn't mean anything, and she had responded to him in Spanish. He was violently angry about this for some reason.
He had most angry statements about George Bush to some of his friends.
This guy isn't the tool the left was hoping he would be.
Kirby, perhaps my morning posting didn't get through. I'll try again:
I think it sad that amid the mourning for the victims and their families and the ongoing investigation into the Tucson shootings that this terrible incident should provoke a kind of post-facto partisan election debate in the media, but it's bound to occur when those attacked directly or by insinuation answer their attackers.
Even the sheriff of Pima County, Arizona, Clarence Dupnik (D) seems addled to the point of making wholly unprofessional and partisan statements about the incident, citing the role of the rhetoric of "one party blocking another from making this a better country."
And since the cure for bad speech (however described by partisans) is more speech, I must counter stu's calls on Emmy and me to "[take] responsibility for the tea party rhetoric that anticipated and enabled this [incident]." And that stu has included Picklesworth (who hasn't to my knowledge commented for months here) in his accusations shows well how sweeping, reckless, and baseless are his charges. Equally astonishing is the insinuation that we might not "incorporate" a courageous act (I've no knowledge of particulars on this) on the part of a gay person in our "world view."
Michelle Malkin has up a "primer" on hate speech and violence from the left on her site; stu is welcome to peruse it if he could "incorporate" the views of an conservative Asian-American woman in his "world view."
Since stu's earlier set out some either/or possibilities about the tragic incident, this more pointed one from the WSJ Glenn Reynolds article seems apropos:
"To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the 'rhetoric' of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the 'rhetoric' and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?"
Curtis, Community Colleges have open admissions. That's their number one reasonf or existence. anyone can go into them, and they are first-come first-served. So all you have to do is enroll.
They have no admissions standards whatsoever.
But here's the amazing thing. McGahan, if that's his name, was this student's algebra teacher in a summer course. This means you're getting the worst of the worst, the kids that couldn't pass the course during the regular season, sandwiched in with community residents, and some bright kids who are taking the course so as to not have to pay for it at the elite college from which they hope to graduate.
So it's very hard to get a student out of a class. At Portland Community College I had kids who mumbled under their breath and kids who were crazy (but not scarily so, just not functioning much) next to very very good students who could have been at an Ivy but didn't have money.
And you can't remove a student at a community college. It's close to impossible. But this teacher managed it by putting tons of heat on the administration. What a brave tough thing he did, and it probably saved some students at the college.
James -- your earlier post was in Spam for some reason. Apologies.
I think if you double-send something to yourself and to me for instance, for safe-keeping there is something in the receiving end here that notices multiple recipients and sends the comment to spam as a result.
I check in spam once a day or thereabouts, because I rarely find anything in there, but have been busy running around again today.
Thanks for your comment. I especially loved the ending.
"To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the 'rhetoric' of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the 'rhetoric' and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?"
Well, this is an either/or that doesn't hold up (they rarely do, since there are usually more than two reasons/choices with regard to anything in this universe).
My stance is that this incident should/hopefully will create an emotional resonance within the politicians and people of this country to realize that their violent/vicious/hyperbolic rhetoric is offensive and counterproductive.
I do think you can use that emotional/enlightening response of a moment like this as a way of pointing out the problems with our discourse.
This is different than 'scoring political points' or 'claiming a direct link.'
If they bring a knife, let's bring a spoon!
I'd love to be president so I could say things like that.
A spoon, yes, good one, Kirby . . .
I think my earlier point about contexts stands.
I'd prefer to wait for a full psychiatric work-up on Loughner before imputing any political motives to his actions. And even then, the likelihood is that his thinking is so skewed (and scattered) that we're not going to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions from it.
I think it's dangerous to make sweeping statements about the effect of strong language anywhere along the spectrum of opinion. If I want to make damning statements about Dubya, you should have the freedom to make the same derogatory swipes at Obama.
You should remember, Kirby, that I was never a big supporter of Obama. I was never persuaded by his hazy rhetoric during the campaign. And his promises have mostly turned out to be empty, as he's sold the progressives down the river. Who could blame them for being resentful.
Also, I think there's a certain chaotic aspect to party divisions. You have members of both parties who tend towards their counterparts across the aisle on many issues, but are forced out of party loyalty to take stands that simply follow the dogma of the party leaders. Many Republicans, for instance, are sympathetic on global warming issues, but whose hands are tied by their party's obligations to big business and the big polluters. Then, lots of Democrats stand with Republicans against rampant illegal immigration, but can't act on those beliefs, because it "violates their base" etc.
I've never liked Palin (except for her nice legs), so I don't need any excuses to dis her. And those attack ads are pretty extreme, whatever you believe their effect might be. In any even, it's early days with the shooting incident. It'll be interesting to see what develops.
Curtis, you are right that the two big parties more or less strait jacket their groups into fixed poses and their leaders, too, are strait-jacketed. Goldwater was saying in the 60s that the fundamentalists were going to take over the Republican party. Now it seems that Marxism has taken over the Democratic party.
No two people can agree on everything. Husband and wife agree on some things, but never all, still, they decided to marry, and have to struggle along. It's like the summer game where couples dress in one big shirt and stuff themselves into one pair of pants and race down and back with other couples.
PArties are doing the same thing only with millions and millions of members. They have leaders, and of course the whole thing is ridiculous, and is often run on fear. People run faster and better when fear is there.
We don't agree on all things by any means. If your central concern is that the country not go to the communists, you have to vote for the Republicans.
Whatever else you can be afraid of, they're not Marxists.
Marxists are the worst thing in human history: wolves in sheepskin.
It's true I tend to see them everywhere, sometimes even within my own family. Or, looking in the mirror, I sometimes worry that I too have become a communist. Even in the church when we share the chalice, I worry that this is the beginning of a long slide into Stalinist horror.
I'm with you, though: the young man was not a Nazi. He was a nutsy.
I don't think he even had as much coherence as Hinkley did when he thought Jodi Foster would love him for taking out President Reagan.
His neurons were misfiring far more rapidly than his gun. The whole thing was unfortunate.
I'm with you also that we have to find ways to sequester our mentally ill and care for them in secure settings where they will not hurt either themselves or others.
Putting those asylums back together will be a difficult but necessary task. I woiuld like to think OBama would get it started, but if it's him doing it, he would just start rounding up Palin supporters and have them cured by whatever means necessary. Health for him might be simply: will you vote for me in November.
And so might it be for everyone. I hold out hope for some kind of sanity, but I fear that the country is now almost beyond a cure.
Out of the next crop of wannabes the one I like best is Huckabee: he's got the best sense of humor and somehow I think that is what we need. In it, is often wisdom.
It's time to take a stand
Stu,
You pretty much undercut your credibility on this whole thread when you typed in your first comment,
Time will tell, of course, but I still think the overblown rhetoric of the right has constributed to this, and I hope this will cause some long overdue reflection on the responsibility people have for the words they speak."
Excoriating Kirby afterwards for making a catty remark about Obama was laughable after reading this.
Look, this is sad and awful. Period. Just leave it there.
When I was a grad student in English lit I had two summer work-study jobs where I was paid for working with diagnosed schizophrenics. The first was as a program assistant at a county hospital, helping a psychiatrist, a social worker and a secretary administer a program that provided experimental drug therapy for schizophrenics who became eligible by virtue of the number of their emergency room admissions. I assembled case histories by requesting and receiving records from all of their previous hospitalizations, greeted the participants on the days they were scheduled for individual or group therapy with the social worker or the psychiatrist, maintained attendance records, organized research files and generally herded crazy people who didn't know if they were getting something stronger than a thorazine or just a placebo sugar tablet.
The following summer I worked with schizophrenics in the clubhouse/day treatment modality, providing ongoing rehabilitation and occupational therapy services for members recently discharged from mental hospitals. I was on the Communications Unit. We put out a campus newspaper once a week and worked on social and verbal interaction with activities like cards, board games or doing crossword puzzles as a group enterprise. Members contributed articles for the newspaper and I functioned as a defacto assignment editor. I reported to a social worker who handled case management for all of the members on that unit and kept an eye out for those who might benefit from once a week five minute consultations with the psychiatrist to consider medication adjustments. Other units trained members for employment in maintenance, food service or work in job shops or thrift shops.
Socializing with schizophrenics for eight hours a day was stressful work, partly because a few of the members had histories of violent interactions. Occasional "decompensation" incidents could easily escalate to a point requiring intervention by mental health professionals. Many of the members lived in group homes that required attendance of day treatment programming as a condition of their subsidized living arrangements. The day often began with driving a minivan to three or four different group homes to collect enough club members to conduct business.
It's a big jump from day treatment to community college enrollment.
If you bring the knife, we will bring the spoon, fork and tea set.
WB,
When Sharon Angel threatened "second amendment remedies," what do you think she meant? I believe there is any interpretation other than what we just witnessed. Threatening a federal official (and that is what she did, specifically) is a felony. Yet, we've been in a regime in which "political speech" is entitled to extremely broad protection, which has resulted in political discourse that often consists of outright lies, or in Angle's case (and she is hardly unique) a free pass on a felony.
I think it is time to revoke that pass. Felonious speech is felonious speech. I can't just just get a few dozen people to sign a petition enabling me to run for dog catcher, and start publicly advocating the violent overthrow of the US government, nor the right to falsely shout "fire" in a crowded theater. I still favor broad protection, but there are boundaries that have been crossed, and if people don't get back within them, I'm all in favor of seeing criminal consequences for criminal speech.
Your beloved tea party is fueled and united by hate and anger. You may be a man of peace, and hate and anger may have nothing to do with your affiliation with it, but the tea party itself can no more renounce the threat of violence than it can endorse Obama -- to do so would be to lose its reason for existence, and the source of what power it has.
The events in Tucson were sad and awful. But they did not happen in a vacuum. Just "leaving it there" would be sinful. Are we responsible for ourselves as individuals? Of course. But it does not end there. We are also responsible for the communities and societies we organize and participate in.
You will be (or are? -- I don't know your current status) responsible for the leadership of a spiritual community. There is something here for you to learn. The use of thoughtless and inappropriate language within a community can tear it down. You will find it necessary to intervene -- to say, "that is not appropriate/true/helpful." Best to start working on the theoretical justifications before you have need.
i've been distant from the computer world these past few weeks only checking in now and again to see what's up
despite the lurid and disturbing topic i am once again edified by the arguments and insights from all sides here
craig provides contextual substance that is often overlooked
nobody has said much of anything about a cultural context
curtis mentions something very important about handguns and the law
are we a nation in need of handguns?
one must wonder
i lived in arizona off and on for about 2yrs
one image that stuck with me was the strange nostalgia for the wild west i lived about 20 miles from tombstone
every day they "re-enact" the famous gunfight there
i would go for walks along the san pedro river east of tucson and the day was filled with sounds of guns going off people playing with guns in the desert
i observed one day a pack of thugs walk down the aisle of a grocery store all tattooed and sweaty they had guns over their shoulders and they were obviously pretty intent on making their point
i did everything in my power to simply ignore them - i did not grant them the acknowledgment of being - not on their terms anyway
i met people who i swear wake up every morning dress up like 19th century loose guns in the west look at themselves in the mirror and say
'hey i'm a cowboy i get to be a cowboy today i get to dress up i get to wear a pistol on my hip i'm a real life cowboy"
AZ is a loose gun state
it is a context for madness
for conflict
for intense and ill-informed rhetoric
west of tucson there extends the
barry goldwater military games playground -- you want to reflect on the senseless nature of violence - that's a good place to go -- the desert scarred and parched with wargames detritus
maybe it is time for all of us to listen to james brady again
it would seem to me that our national discussion might benefit from some "re-imagining" of america
- OK we have this history we have these ideals we have this cultural ( and rather complicated) self awareness - but - can we collectively imagine a better place - can we be courageous enough to cast off notions that are both hypocritical and destructive of the common good
guns for any purpose other than hunting have no practical purpose in a civilized place...hmnh...how does this conclude?
it seems there's a rhythm now in our culture a working theme a reality tv show of crazed gun murder
craig though everyone skimmed over it has perhaps the most poignant social insight when he can state that a literary agent may be more the thing more than a lawyer or a priest
john wayne and charles bukowski meet in a bar....
jh
i learned more about the incident more about the ways of thinking of really brilliant minds and more about the process of civilized discourse in the past few days than i ever would have imagined
but imagination is the key
dare to imagine a much better place
a people not ruled by fear and inanity
the ludic doth need more presence in our halls of laww and jusstice
it's all make believe seriousness
and pretty actresses
i'm sure glad i was forcefed the classics glad that i spent time with the aenead glad i read shakespeare glad i tried to read milton glad i tried to read dante and boccaccio glad i sat through the tedium of poetry class
poetry failed in not teaching this young man some of the classics
he had no recourse to fathom the banality of his passions
if i had time i think i would go through all the youtube video links and see what i could understand from there
it does seem to me and i've said something like this before that i think we should take over the eastern approach to combat the martial art of global politics no guns just hand to hand warfare
maybe even a fighting ring in the basement of the whitehouse
take all the guns put them all in a huge vacation ocean liner and have all the guns travel around the seas protected now and again with helicopter military fire
a big floating armory that would float until it sank
here's an elk hunting story from montana real fast
they say the bull charge into some brush in a coullee up above on another road a truck was barrelling into range seeking the same animal the guy i know shot the elk from a knoll and set forth tto tag it and haul it to his truck
the other truck emerges on the scene and because the elk is not quite dead he claims he still has the right to make the kill and call it his my friend who shot the animal then engages in a fierce discussion both guys are holding guns at one point there is a threat of an asskicking somehow the thing dies down and the friend who shot the elk makes his way
but it was near to a shootout and i think maybe even hunting in this land is no longer a viable reason to be carrying guns - it seems too dangerous - my friend says there's no interest in the meat anymore it's all in the trophy the antlers etc
anyway
i am humbled by the clear stated ideas on this thread it is a great credit to kirby to entertain such elegant displays of good sense and coherent (not completely passionless) rhetoric...like i say...i've learned more than any newspaper any tv news station could provide
you want in depth
you want fair and balanced
i say
go to lutheran surrealism
get the low down
does prayer help at all in matters such as this one
or
is that too ludic
jh
Just wanted to thank JH for stopping in and giving us his take -- always a neat take seguing from gospel to moose antlers.
If you have enough guns around I suppose nuts will get one, and then we're in trouble, but it's still the nuts that cause the trouble.
Guns also beat the French and Indians, the British, the slavers, and Hitler and Hirohito. They're not all bad.
Although I personally would never own one.
I think prayer sends a bullet more surely into the heart of your enemy.
Wait, that was violent, let me retract...
Stu,
A tragedy happens and it only takes until the second paragraph before you're defaming your political opponents. I could get in the run around with you on this and we could cite examples and counter examples.
But I think it's better to say, knock it off. You make defamation sound erudite, but it's defamation nonetheless. It's contemptible.
Stu, I don't see how one person can decide what all others can or should say. It's like your arrogating to yourself the position of what speech is appropriate. You could say, "This is not helpful to me and my side when a member of the other party says something I don't like, and which appears to not support my candidate."
Because then you at least forthrightly put your agenda on the table.
That, I could understand.
But pretending that you speak in a position-free stance with nothing to gain is I think wrong.
If someone speaks in an angry or crazy way, they will usually lose the election. Angle had only to be moderate and sane and the election was hers. She went too far, and the voters spoke against her.
I think people can understand when someone is speaking in a violent way, and you don't need to preemptively denounce them.
Obama will also be ousted for his violent partisan rhetoric, although we have to wait patiently until 2012 for it to happen.
I don't think indpendents will forget his gun metaphors, or his talk about the Republicans as his enemies. It's disgraceful, but it will be punished by the electorate itself.
I don't think you have to make preemptive strikes against speech like this. People will get it.
Angle lost, remember? She lost because people don't like that kind of speech.
Palin is also susceptible to that kind of speech.
In general, we like light and upbeat people who are decent. Witches, for instance, are not going to get very far in the electoral process.
Demagogues like Wallace in calling for violence often bring violence on themselves. It's not the smartest move.
At any rate, I'm not with you on this, and I resent how the left keeps trying to play this event as another excuse to roll back the first and second amendment in favor of tighter controls for their side's communist (or call it communitarian) ideas.
stu, I think you've again pushed an indiscreet and easily misinterpreted reference--in this case by former senatorial candidate Ms Angle--to others (note) she spoke of who might seek "Second Amendment remedies" (and again note that she herself did not advocate violent overthrow of the government but ballot "remedies" in trying to defeat, or "take out" Senator Reid).
But as with former Vice-President Cheney (then the second-highest government official) and others
in--and out of government like Ms Angle, you think they should be arrested and have already judged them guilty. How many others do you think should be rounded up and incarcerated? How many conservative talk-show hosts and politicians might be included? Any on the left (though I remember how you bristled when I disparaged the once murderous terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn--btw, on the former's blog site I several years ago tangled with a regularly-posted blogger who advocated the immediate seizure and hanging of then President Bush and former Vice-President Cheney--that was before Ayers banned my comments)? And what penalties might you assign them, since you've already convicted them?
I think too that hatred and fear rather more drive the hysterical denunciations of Tea Partiers than I've seen evidenced at Tea Party events, where opposition to high taxes, intrusive government regulations, and erosion of constitutional liberties were foremost in consideration. Not sure where you derive your jaundiced hearsay opinions about the Tea Party). And as Kirby has said, I think ballot remedies sank Ms Angle's bid, perhaps partly due to her occasionally clumsy and indiscreet speech, which was of course foghorned about by major media outlets.
However, what is most unseemly is the orgy of recriminations against conservatives in general by partisan liberals and leftists in the wake of this tragic event in Tucson. But when I'm included in these base recriminations by you or others, "denuntiatus, respondebo" ("having been denounced, I shall respond").
Kirby, there's an interesting post on the lunatic Loughner's anti-war views on an academic's law blog site, here:
http://volokh.com/2011/01/10/jared-loughners-anti-war-views/
That's not to say there is any causal connection between Loughner's political views (if that's what one might call them) and his horrific actions. Unstable and violence-prone lunatics can always find a pretext, as Jim Lindgren, writer of the short article avers:
"My hope in exploring Loughner’s politics is to take the political argument off the table, not to turn it around. Unfortunately, I think that the likeliest way to get some people to back off their hateful and inflammatory rhetoric — blaming people who are not at fault — is if the people doing the finger pointing begin to realize that Loughner was more probably a mentally deranged left winger than a mentally deranged right winger. In either event, the derangement, not his political orientation, is the proximate and ultimate cause of his mass murders."
I remember in the first reports about the tragedy that claimed Loughner was a US Army Afghanistan vet (spurred on by Democratic State Senator Lopez's false claim that this was "likely"), but as pundits readied their copy about yet another violence-imbued war vet as casualty of "Bush's war") it turned out Loughner was rejected by the Army in 2008.
Sometimes people hold theories even when no facts fit, or even all the facts are aligned against them. Nothing could convince some feminists that a pre-patriarchal society in which perfect peace and love prevailed and which has no supporting evidence anywhere in the archeological record never existed. Likewise, Mormons hold that some Jewish tribe ended up in America, even though no Indian tribe has any trace of Hebraic language. You simply can't say anything against this in Mormon circles, or out you'll go. The global warming people will argue that whatever weather happens, it's still the fault of the car industry, and that therefore we should all start to bicycle to work, and pay huge sums for our sins to their green Czars who are in fact red to the bone. Some fundamentalists will hold that Darwin's wrong, no matter what you tell them or show them. I think whatever we tell the leftist loons at this point their theory that this is Sarah Palin's fault will not be budged. They are certain that violent words lead to violent actions, and see themselves as peaceful, as peaceful as death itself. Sarah Palin shot her rival, Giffords, which means she should be arrested, and put in the electric chair, and fried, for the good of Arizona.
And anyone who supports her to any degree should be incarcerated. If you've ever been to a Tea Party, or even have a tea set in your house, you should be arrested. The whole tea industry should be abolished. If you don't agree you should be put in a reeducation camp, made to drink coffee, and if you still want to vote Republican, then you should just have to go to Guantanamo for water boarding until you see things as the left does.
There are degrees of adamancy but when people start to hold a theory that they are certain verifies their world view, you simply can't shake it. It's probably just part of the human predicament that Swift satirized in the top enders and bottom enders who preferred to open their eggs at different ends.
We are all a batch of loonies, but the left has less of a chance to hear about it because almost the entire media is with them, and jumping up and down just as they do, on cue.
It reminds me of the funny dance the Iraqis usd to do jumping up and down and holding hands. I loved that dance.
Also try to remember that groupthink is particularly strong in academic bastions like the U. of Chicago (just a random example) and in places like San Francisco and Hollywood.
Where you have a large group of people who all think identically, it's especially difficult to get any cognitive dissonance in -- without being arrested for disturbing the peace.
Let's remember this and treat Stu as gently as we possibly can.
You never know. Maybe Sarah Palin somehow was sending thoughtwaves to Loughner and forced him to shoot Giffords and the federal judge and the nine year old girl and others. Should she be arrested on the likelihood of this possibility? All conservatives perhaps should be arrested, on the chance that they had something to do with this. Loughner complains about GRAMMAR as a key element to thought control, and who is more likely to insist on correct grammar? Hmmmm.
Kirby, I'm thankful you (and jh) have provided a little relief from this sometimes spirited exchange of views and commentaries on the alleged aetiology of the Tucson tragedy.
And if a CBS poll just out is accurate, 57% of those polled (including 56% of independents and a seven-point plurality of 49% of Democrats) eschew the view that this tragedy had anything to do with politics. I'd say that indicates the majority of Americans in this case are thinking sensibly.
There are reports that the FBI has seized papers from Loughner's home that may indicate he held some self-generated grudge against Representative Giffords for years, but I've seen no official confirmation of this as yet. And it may be difficult or impossible ever with any degree of probability to assign some pseudo-rational motive for his infamy even from his own words.
While I disagree with stu so far on this issue (et alia), I do respect his great intelligence and learning as well as his deep spiritual conviction he's so often shown us here. Peace be with him and with all of us as we try to grapple here with the world's sometimes bewildering events.
Leftists dream of a perfect peace, righties are generally more accepting of the flawed nature of humanity. Therefore it's more often the lefties who commit violence, I should think, because they are so mad when someone isn't perfectly peaceful. They feel justified in erasing those they consider less than perfect. Since righties consider everyone flawed and imperfect by nature, they are unlikely to attempt to correct others through erasure.
That's my sense of these things.
It's the left that has more often erased whole segments of the population, because they believe they can edit humanity down to some workable group, or else they try to sideline all the people who are unredeemable and put the perfect elite into the Party.
It's sort of a pain in the neck, but I think this explains the lack of a sense of humor on the left.
Stu is generally better than he now appears, and his recent behavior is a mystery and a worry, but it's a mystery and a worry that seems in line with the ratcheting up of the lefist cicadas in the MSM like Katie Couris. I think they would like to make the case the right is violent, and are leaping on this to make the case even though the facts don't fit their theory at all.
That said, Loughner is an unbelievable screwball. His mug shots look like Uncle Fester on speed. My guess is his grin is somewhere in the Moebius strip where far left and far right join in the place called far out where people like Manson, Cho, Solanas, and Dahmer meet in a set theory of their own.
WB, Kirby, JADL,
Some comments.
1. I'm hardly the only person who's first (second, and third...) reaction to the shooting on Saturday was, "OMG, they really did it!" This was all but universal, on the right as well as the left. Indeed, official communiqués from the tea party's publicity commisars didn't come until late afternoon, at which point the balance of probability had shifted decisively from "crazy tea party shooter" to just "crazy shooter." This bespeaks of a guilty conscience, but also practical realities. It's hard for a distributed terrorist organization to know what all of the cells are up to, after all, and I don't think anyone ever thought that this was an op cleared through the tea party central committee.
2. The vitrol from the tea party since Monday makes it clear that it recognizes an existential crisis in the an effort to increase accountability in political speech. This is certainly more damning that anything I've said.
3. If you guys take seriously the notion that there should be no regulation to political speech, then certainly there can be no objection to my claim that the tea party is the political and financial arm of a terrorist effort, and a hate group in its own right. This is protected political speech after all, and no gloves for you means no gloves for me. Now I don't think that every person affiliated with the tea party is a hater or a terrorist, any more than that every Irish-American who gave money for the widows and orphans to a Sinn Fein charity at a Boston pub was an IRA bomber. This isn't personal. Most terrorist fronts rely on a larger number of affiliated rubes as a basis for popular support and income.
All that we have here is a different of opinion, and one man's view (in this case mine) is as valid and protected as another's (in this case, yours). Or did I miss some nuance here?
4. I am not proposing new regulations or new penalties. So Kirby, I am not arguing that I should decide what is and is not acceptable speech—I'm arguing that existing laws regarding threats against federal officials be enforced, and yes, JADL, I think this applies equally to Angle and to anonymous commenters on blogs who advocated assassination of Bush and/or Cheney. As the saying goes, the law in its majesty applies equally to the rich and poor, or as in this case, to democrats and republicans, and I would have it no other way.
5. WB -- for a tea partier to talk of defamation is kind of pathetic. If you're going to dish it out, you have to be able to take it too. Call foul if you like. Maybe it will do you guys more good than it did us. But I wouldn't count on it.
(1 of 2)
(2 of 2...)
6. Kirby,
If someone speaks in an angry or crazy way, they will usually lose the election. Angle had only to be moderate and sane and the election was hers. She went too far, and the voters spoke against her.
An excellent insight, and one that is true enough in the long term, but not necessarily true in the short term. [Let me cite Hilter here, not to draw any analogies to contemporary politics, but as a universally accessible example of a someone who spoke in an angry and crazy way, yet who won a free election.] Angle was crazy enough to bring defeat on herself —quite an accomplishment in the political environment of last November. But she did so without rebuke from Beck, the tea party, etc. She was, from their perspective, a mainstream tea party candidate in whom they placed both hope and resources. Think about that.
6. JADL,
think you've again pushed an indiscreet and easily misinterpreted reference--in this case by former senatorial candidate Ms Angle--to others (note) she spoke of who might seek "Second Amendment remedies"
So you think that a threat is ok if it's delivered via the good cop/bad cop schtick? So you think what she was really saying was "Vote for me, or my friends will shoot the Senator?" And this is ok with you? And if it is, doesn't this put into Angle's mouth my thesis that the tea party has incorporated violent elements?
While I disagree with stu so far on this issue (et alia), I do respect his great intelligence and learning as well as his deep spiritual conviction he's so often shown us here. Peace be with him and with all of us as we try to grapple here with the world's sometimes bewildering events.
I truly appreciate this... And also with you, and indeed, all of you. These are trying times.
"lack of a sense of humor on the left."
Almost every comedian in America and Canada would like a word with you...
W.B. - you should hold Kirby up to the same standard.
I wonder how this all relates to Fort Hood and how That madman's beliefs were supposedly (or not) the cause of his murderousness.
And Kirby, groupthink is just as prevalent on the right as on the left.
Again, you only hang out in lefty areas, so I can see how you might have blinders into thinking that somehow those in Hollywood have greater group thinkness than those in College Station, Texas.
Yeee haw!
It's just kinda frustrating sometimes with you, Kirby, that so many of your negative views of the left are not specific to the left but are rather equally and/or moreso true on the right, but you happen to be real ignunt of righty areas of the country.
Anyway, I got an email from an old bald friend of mine who supported all of Jared Lee's viewpoints (he's an Alex Jonesish conspiracy theorist). A little creepy, but whatevs - the guy has anger management issues.
Have I said that I think Jared Lee is what happens when Derrida's 'All is Text' nonsense meets with Alex-Jones style conspiracy theory pseudolibertarian wackiness?
Cause I really think that's the heart of the matter in terms of the kid's worldview and how it interacted with his surroundings to create this evil...
again, www.infowars.com , www.prinsonplanet.com .
Just search around a little bit. You'll get a feel for the vibe.
Stu's attempt to place even the silence of the Tea Party as a sure sign of guilt is quite crazy: Obama didn't speak until 2:42 pm. Does this make him guilty because of his gun talk? Is that also a sure sign of guilt? Quite goofy.
I realize there is a right wing groupthink, Brett, but your nutty friend in Texas isn't the same as a prominent academic, or the head of a news station, like the NPR people or the Katie Couric cracks.
You see up to the highest levels in the left a kind of amazing group think.
Juan Williams says that NPR was like Pravda inside, and it was only after the recent firing that some people from inside the organization called him in a hushed whisper to tell him more details.
The universities are just as bad.
There are conservative universities that are more or less like that, too -- Liberty, and Bob Jones, but at least they're operating on their own dime.
NPR is taking our money to feed us their nonsense.
They should be completely defunded, as should the public television stations.
The groupthink and vitriol goes up the line on the conservative side too, Kirby.
If you don't agree with me, I guess I'll use some second-amendment solutions to learn ya.
stu, Kirby, Brett, jh, WB et al, a few comments:
stu, your last postings read in part like some test exercise in "extreme rhetoric about [alleged] extreme rhetoric" (check out Michael C Moynihan's article in "Reason" here: http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/11/the-extreme-rhetoric-about-ext), in part like some parody of spy melodramas like "24" or
"MI-5" (with the postings' talk of "terrorist organizations," "cells,"
"commissars," [bit Cold War that], "terrorist fronts," "ops," etc.), in yet other part like a fool's errand in guilt by association.
As presented, section 3 fails to distinguish sufficiently between the right to make a claim and the validity of that claim, not to more than mention its sophistic relativism.
If in section 4 you think use of military or combative metaphors in political campaigns (or religious revivals for that matter) constitutes an armed threat I think we've not prisons to hold the multitudes of every political stripe who've never been charged with any other crime that have invoked them. Today the Tea Party, tomorrow the Salvation Army.
In section 6 you wrongly claim Hitler won a free election, though you surely must know that he lost the presedential election in both rounds to Hindenburg. In any case, Angle's clumsy rhetorical excesses didn't serve her any better than did former Congressman Alan Grayson's. I'll concede Angle's rhetoric was excessive on the "Second Amendment remedies," but not that this proves Tea Party regulars support bullet "remedies" in the wake of ballot losses. Still, I'll consider your specific evidence that a Tea Party-backed armed insurrection has occurred in Nevada.
I remember when just in high school the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas how the media (e.g., Dan Rather at CBS) prematurely and shamelessly drowned itself in speculation about a likely right-wing coup, only to find out that the perpetrator was a left-wing extremist supporter of Castro and the USSR. They quickly retreated to a rear-guard action of claiming a generalised "climate,"
"atmosphere," or "air" of fear and hate of which all of us partake in some measure (but some more equally than others, namely JFK's more conservative political opponents). And now, sadly, again . . .
we should not take lightly kirby's ludic statement
'prayer sends the bullet more surely into the heart of ones enemy'
that may be a paraphrase
preach redemption and pass the ammunition
baptize with a bloody sword
jeezuss cheeryste kirby look what you've done
the west was conquered with vitriol from the christian pulpits
i must stop
i can't
inquisition
active theology
with a personal touch
now i'm done
let's all just go home
and be peaceful
OK
to live by the sword is to die by the sword
it applies to cultures as well as people
how many bullets zing out of gunbarrels each day in north america??? any estimates
jh
Kirby,
Stu's attempt to place even the silence of the Tea Party as a sure sign of guilt is quite crazy: Obama didn't speak until 2:42 pm. Does this make him guilty because of his gun talk? Is that also a sure sign of guilt? Quite goofy.
Let me dispute your timeline. I've been trying to find out exactly when Obama's first statement was made. I remember it as being in the morning.
I've found an article
Obama's Statement on the Shooting of Giffords and Others
That appears to be dated 12:23pm, one supposes EST, which is consistent with my recollection of a morning (CST) statement. Statements from leading congressmen came soon thereafter.
The first response I'm aware of from anyone claiming to represent the tea party specifically wasn't until evening on the 8th, sometime around 6pm CST. I can't preclude the possibility of an earlier statement, I can only say that I didn't hear it (despite spending most of saturday devouring any and all news on the shooting) until then. Unfortunately, attempts to search for this now are defeated by the mass of defensive statements that have come out since Monday.
Unfortunately, archive.org never got around to archiving the web pages on the Arizona Tea Party web site. Essentially every page on that site that mentions Giffords has been subject to post-shooting editing. History is being rewritten, even history that's just five days old.
Brett, if you really know someone who approves of this act, and is armed, and ready to go, you should tell on them.
Remember the commandment that says Thou shalt not kill. The positive corollary of this is that you have to protect others and help them keep their lives.
If more people had done this at Virginia Tech, we wouldn't have had that massacre.
At the very least I'd encourage the person to seek help, and to look in their heart with the help of a professional, to disarm themselves.
If any people are thinking about doing something horrific like this they have to remember the line from the Lord's Prayer -- lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
What's especially horrible about these things is that children are often injured. The girl -- Carolina Green is I think her name -- or all those kids at Oklahoma City.
Putting this on some other group is the worst of all rhetorical positions at this point. No American group sides with this killer. They couldn't be American if they did.
The attempt to use Inquisition devices -- if you speak you're guilty, if you're silent you're guilty, if you're late in speaking you're guilty, because you're guilty because I want you to be guilty, is probably the worst and most offensive outcome of this event.
It's hard to believe that Americans are willing to do this to their fellow Americans.
JADL,
As presented, section 3 fails to distinguish sufficiently between the right to make a claim and the validity of that claim, not to more than mention its sophistic relativism.
As I understood your argument, the validity of a claim is irrelevant to whether or not it can be introduced into political discourse. I'll note the birther conspiracy theory (which you once dabbled with), the Obama is a Muslim conspiracy theory, and the Obama is a communist conspiracy theory. Yet the evidentiary standards required to breath life into these claims are so low as to approach non-existent, whereas the bar to contradictory evidence seems to be infinitely high.
The tea party as terrorist organization is a meme that rests on evidence that is clearly superior to that of the birther conspiracy. The point here is that it seems to me to be intrinic to your position that there are no truly independent judges of validity (save perhaps the electorate itself), and therefore validity cannot be used as a test in regulating political speech.
Do I believe the tea party is a terrorist organization? In fact, no. But twist this ever so slightly... Do I believe that the tea party contains potentially terrorist? You bet. I'll grant that you could make the same claim about the democratic party, and it would be valid, too. Party affiliation is a self-association, and not the result of party vetting. But I sense a meaningful difference. The violent elements of the tea party are close to its DNA and core identity, whereas this is emphatically not the case with the democratic or mainstream republican party.
If in section 4 you think use of military or combative metaphors in political campaigns (or religious revivals for that matter) constitutes an armed threat I think we've not prisons to hold the multitudes of every political stripe
I acknowledge this, which is why I'm willing to favor reasonably broad protections for political speech. But I'd argue that even though there is a grey area where people of good will can differ as to whether a metaphor constitutes a threat, that in practice this area is actually pretty narrow, and that there are large swaths of political speech which clearly fall on the wrong side of that fuzzy grey boundary. And what is required here is not so much a rigorous enforcement of the law in every case, any more than you should expect a speeding ticket for driving 62 in a 55 zone, as it is the occasional serious whacking of someone who has clearly stepped way over the line as an example. These examples do almost as much good as a more rigorous enforcement in terms of limiting aggregate behavior, but less controversially. But I've not seen any such effort, and so political speech has been subject to progressive escalation.
This is not unlike the nude art vs. pornography question, either in form, or in answer.
In section 6 you wrongly claim Hitler won a free election, though you surely must know that he lost the presedential election in both rounds to Hindenburg.
I was referring to his election as Chancellor, but now that you raise the point, I see that this was in fact an appointed position, and not an elected one. My error. I concede the example, but I'm not yet prepared to concede the intended point. I'll just have to think a bit harder to come up with an example of a clearly crazy/angry person winning an election. After all, sometimes the electorate itself is crazy/angry. Milošević? de Gaulle? I'm trying to stay away from US examples, which makes it more difficult.
Anyway, like or not, (and clearly, I do) the shooting has accelerated a change in the political discourse that was already apparent post-election. We've seen the tea party play offense, now we're going to see if it can play defense. I know you don't see it that way, but then, denial and anger are the first steps in the grief process. Negotiation is up next.
Brett,
Kirby is a surrealist. His mode of communication is putting some little nugget in a wrapping of absurdity and hyperbole. Don't you imagine him laughing like a little school boy as he types? He's got a kind of naughty joie de vivre that doesn't demand to be taken too seriously.
Stu is completely different. Or I imagine him so. He reminds me a great deal of my brother in law who is very intense (and also a university professor, fwiw.) When Stu types I imagine him to be deadly serious.
Also, I am very concerned with justice in America. A grave injustice is being perpetrated by news organizations, pundits and politicians and Stu is joining in with that. I see no good will on his part in this. He has seen the enemy and apparently it's people like me. That is the way that I experience his comments at any rate. They offend my sense of justice. I don't really want to argue with Stu because he has no end of words and won't back down. I simply want to tell him in no uncertain terms that his behavior (not him) is abhorrent in this instance.
I'm with Picklesworth, not only on the subject of myself, but on Stu's earnestness in this matter. I've tried to talk with him privately about it, but he seems absolutely hell-bent on implicating the Tea Party, since it represents such an alarming tsunami of opinion that goes counter to his political interests.
The NY Times characterized the Tea Party as older than the average citizens, and better educated.
They make up about 25% of America. To try to damn them on the basis of their having a terrorist in their midst is like damning America altogether because we've had assassinations, or because some people are fat (leftists, of course, are phat).
When we talk about Obama we're talking about one person. We have evidence that he himself "sought out Marxist professors" because he told us so.
It isn't as if they were hiding under some recondite Bush. They were all over the place at Harvard. He would have had to look hard to find someone who wasn't a Marxist at Harvard, or who at least didn't have very strong notions that redistribution was the name of the game.
That would have required him to have a backbone and to think for himself, rather than to join the groupthink in terms of doing that jumping up and down dance that political people love to do (that dance has a name, you know, the wonderful one they do in Iraq).
How can you darn an entire 25% of the American population on the basis of the shooting of a nut in Tucson who apparently has never had anything to do with that group?
Darning and knitting together a conspiracy theory is very easy if you don't give a whit about evidence that might hold up in anything but a kangaroo court.
It's like saying that kangaroos jump up and down so they are probably Iraqis.
I understand the propulsion behind this. Democrats got handed their walking papers, and found this quite violent. but it was a legitimate election.
Those few Tea Partiers who went too far -- as Angle did -- found themselves outside of the calculus and are done. The Witch in Delaware herself found herself outgunned by the media, who couldn't help but use paint guns to smear her with diabolical insinuations. She isn't a practicing witch. At most she was a witchlet in high school. She dabbled in the craft, and probably had less to do with it than she had to do with a knitting group in Tucson.
What's being done to the Tea Party is what Stalin did to rightist elements in the Show Trials. It's a lot of hooey, but it could still turn out to be dangerous if anybody much will go for it.
I think it will boomerang (oops, a violent metaphor -- put me in the reeducation camp with the other 25% of Americans who are getting on in years and are overeducated).
stu, my point on your section 3 remarks was a simple one: you've certainly the right to claim the Tea Party is a terrorist organisation (as protected political speech), but at hazard is your credibility on that issue and your dubious ability to produce any scrap of sound evidence for its validity.
I've no recollection of "dabbling with" any such "birther" conspiracy theory about President Obama, so perhaps you might produce words I've supposedly written to that effect. Ditto for Obama as Muslim or communist conspiracies.
I think the operative word in your last speculations is "twist," which itself twisted a bit as a general characterisation, transmogrifies further into "smear."
As far as a Tea Party defence goes, they are under attack from certain segments of the liberal-left, though a number of prominent liberals and Ds have dismissed all blame-the-right-rhetoric claims by Paul Krugman and his hyper-partisan ilk. And the TP has been playing both offence and defence since their inception, notably against base and false charges (promoted by that they're just racists at bottom.
And finally, to date no evidence has come to light that the lunatic shooting suspect has been "primed and aimed" by Tea Party or talk radio rhetoric that you originally claimed on this thread.
stu, my point on your section 3 remarks was a simple one: you've certainly the right to claim the Tea Party is a terrorist organisation (as protected political speech), but at hazard is your credibility on that issue and your dubious ability to produce any scrap of sound evidence for its validity.
I've no recollection of "dabbling with" any such "birther" conspiracy theory about President Obama, so perhaps you might produce words I've supposedly written to that effect. Ditto for Obama as Muslim or communist conspiracies.
I think the operative word in your last speculations is "twist," which itself twisted a bit as a general characterisation, transmogrifies further into "smear."
As far as a Tea Party defence goes, they are under attack from certain segments of the liberal-left, though a number of prominent liberals and Ds have dismissed all blame-the-right-rhetoric claims by Paul Krugman and his hyper-partisan ilk. And the TP has been playing both offence and defence since their inception, notably against base and false charges (promoted by that they're just racists at bottom.
And finally, to date no evidence has come to light that the lunatic shooting suspect has been "primed and aimed" by Tea Party or talk radio rhetoric that you originally claimed on this thread.
WB,
Stu is completely different. Or I imagine him so. He reminds me a great deal of my brother in law who is very intense (and also a university professor, fwiw.) When Stu types I imagine him to be deadly serious.
If I might psychoanalyze myself, this is a bit off. First, as a teacher, I'm a John Madden character. Serious, sure. Intense, sure. But I enjoy what I'm doing, and I try to communicate that joy to my students. My classes, my one-to-one interactions with students and colleagues, are not somber, they're joyful. I lay claim to the classification of "exuberant introvert."
Second, I'm a logician by training, which means that when I see something that purports to be an argument, I'm love extracting its form, and feeding it back to the arguer with different suppositions and a very different conclusion. This is whats happening with the tea party as terrorist organization meme. I'm taking on tea party style, tea party standards of evidence, (tea party paranoia...), and feeding it back to you. Either it's fair, in which case you need to accept it for what it is; or it's unfair, in which case you need to accept that what (the collective) you've been doing is unfair too. Take your pick, I can deal with either. JADL criticizes this style as sophomoric, which is his privilege, but I don't believe that even he can argue that it's illogical.
Third, I am deadly serious about contention that the tea party has been especially unselective in the groups and ideologies that it has allied with, and this includes some that are unsavory, dangerous, or both. The analogy to Sinn Fein is intended to make that point. Yeah, there are a lot of libertarians who've gotten swept up in the tea party. My attitude towards libertarians is substantially more positive than my attitude towards the tea party as a whole. Admittedly they tend to be driven by ideology and are oddly blind to practice, but they are capable of rational though, and are mature enough to usually be found on the courteous side of the passion/anger boundary. But it simply is not credible that libertarians make up even a majority of the tea party movement—libertarians have rarely broken the 1% barrier in presidential elections, and I'd estimate tea party affiliation (whatever that means) nationally at something on the order of 15-20%, i.e., roughly half of the current republican total.
Finally, while I try myself to stay on the courteous side of the passion/anger boundary, the events of last Saturday were deeply shocking. Perhaps as shocking to me as the election of Obama was to the tea party. And in that there is perhaps a message to both of us. But in terms of the trajectory of this thread, I've moved along the grieving process myself, albeit a grief over loss of the belief that we can manage our political differences without violence. Not that I'm to the point of acceptance, but certainly that big gorge of anger is past.
The person I know wouldn't Actually go through with such a threat...
He has the ability to separate fantasy from reality, and can separate what one has an urge to do from what one should do.
Jared Lee lacked both of these.
As a socially isolated individual, Loughner found himself drawn to two streams of thought - one that could give him a sense of worth-through-superiority and would justify his outsiderness - (Alex-Jonesian conspiracy theories), and one that blurred the line between fantasy and reality (lucid-dreaming/all-istext).
This is a common approach among those who are unable to connect with others - they glom onto Reasons that they lack connection, and those Reasons are all the better if they can make them feel superior to the social groups that won't let them in. (I SEE THROUGH THE LIES better than anyone else. I am MORALLY SUPERIOR to the leaders that are in the know).
These tend to be extremes worldviews that paint mainstream leaders as evil and devious and mainstream proles as slaves and mindless.
The 'link' between this nutso and our actual political universe is that both sides paint the other side in this same way. But Jared Lee himself didn't belong to a 'side,' since he didn't know how to connect to any other humans, and so his isolation was not only from the other side, but from everybody.
I think the lesson that we can all learn from this - it is a lesson that we can all learn always, and which is not involved with the actual causation of the event, but things like this give it an emotional weight - is that it belies weakness and is unseemly to paint the leaders of the other side as evil and the followers of the other side as brainwashedmindlessslaves.
The other approach the socially isolated outsiders tend to take is that, in order to give themselves a sense of purpose/agency in their disconnected world, they question the nature of existence and blur the lines between fantasy and reality so that they can create a fantasy world where they find value, since their real-world is so lacking in it.
This is also very evident in what we've heard from Loughner, and is also generally what separates the socially-isolated-who-have-conspiracy-theories from those who go out and do real evil things like kill people.
I would advise all of us, however, to realize that we are being just a little bit Loughnerian when we knee-jerk call the other side's leaders Evil and its followers Slaves.
If we do this from the context of a side, as opposed to doing so from isolation, at least we have the 'support-system,' the connectedness, that keeps us from being psychos.
Still, it shows a great deal of weakness and insecurity to do so, dehumanizes the other side, and keeps our political discourse from being productive and respectful.
And WB - yes, Kirby is far more ludic than Stu, though it becomes difficult to find the lines sometimes between when he's being sincere and when he's being sensational for funsies.
In this instance, I don't think it was very becoming of him to (hyperbolically? Sincerely? Hard to say) blame the atmosphere in Arizona created by illegal immigration caused by Obama's lack of enforcement of the border...(The fact is that under Obama we've had far more deportations. Those on the left would probably be quick to point out that it may not be a changed nature of the realities on the ground in Arizona, but rather a heating up of the rhetoric and an amping up of scare-tactics...that is to blame for the heated atmosphere in 'Zona. Either way, that heated atmosphere, in my opinion, is not at all causal to the incident. It's hypocritical of Kirby to say 'you can't blame the tea-party's violent rhetoric! He's socially isolated and crazy!' out of one side of his mouth, and out of the other to say 'it's because of the border issue!' If he was 'joking' about the border issue, I guess the joke didn't play very well, and considering the topic of conversation, joking didn't seem too appropriate.
Brett, I will retract the border problems as having had anything to do with the shooting. That was part of my initial assessment, and it turns out in retrospect that this had no part in the shooter's psychological make-up, insofar as I know. He just doesn't seem to have been aware of much of anything.
Your other point that it is loners who have a hard time connecting with others that makes them the most dangerous is I think a valid point. your friend in Texas after all has you and presumably many others to reach out to, and to discuss things with, often from within a kind of tug of war viewpoint, but never with the intent to do anything more than blow steam.
That's fine, I think.
But using that as the model, the Tea Party with its gregarious character, uniting in assemblies across the nation in good fun (not using drugs, always cleaning up after themselves, and being invariably polite) would seem to argue against Stu's notion that they are a terrorist organization of secret cells.
On the contrary, they are out on the Public Square, gregariously congregating, talking with one another, and never committing anything but public speech, which is allowed, across the nation.
Did Angle go too far in at least one speech? Yes, she did, by all means. And she paid for it, because it was picked up by the MSM, and ballyhooed as evidence against the TP.
But I think we are now seeing that the TP by its very gregarious nature does not fall in line with what we know about the typical American political assassin, or those who act out in these mind-numbing ways: these are loners, and creeps, and often suffering from serious mental illness.
Manson is not afterall a paragon of mental health, nor is Chapman, nor Dahmer, nor Hinkley, or Czolgosch, or Squeaky Fromme, or what have you.
This guy Loughner takes the cake in this regard.
He's probably not been to any party in years, much less the Tea Party, which seems to live on gregariousness together over tea, complete with balloons, and many children present, and even dogs.
Terrorist outfits revel in secrecy. This is not the Tea Party at all. The Tea Party is a known if disorganized organization, which presents itself on street corners and parks, and is much like Giffords' own attempt to contact the public outside the Safeway.
It is Safe, and it is the American way.
What Loughner did? Universally reviled, with the sole exception of your friend in Texas (I've heard of no other American who accepts this stupid shooting as anything other than a monstrous mess.)
does your friend even approve of shooting the little girl?
How could this be acceptable to you?
If he accepts this shooting, including that of the little girl, he needs serious longterm care, in my view.
If on the other hand, he simply recognizes and assigns himself as agreeing with Loughner's ideas, I guess that's possible, though I myself have not been able to find anything like a coherent idea in Loughner's ramblings. He seems to me to be a paranoid schizophrenic (I'm not a psychiatrist, as you have noted, so this is a mere amateur's characterization of the man's mind), but he seems to have had relatively few real ideas.
Even his notion of conscience dreaming appears to have been misspelled and to have no connection to anything in the actual shooting.
He has some idea that GRAMMAR is holding us captive.
Did he mean grandma?
Is that why he shot the older woman?
At any rate, I thoroughly rescind any notion that this had anything to do with the border issues. All the facts weren't in. I was going on what bothers ME about Arizona.
But I think we should all separate our prevailing concerns from the objective situation on the ground (hint hint to Stu), in order to move the discussion forward to something resembling a consensus.
I was fairly impressed by your interventions in this debate, by the way, Brett. At some point I hope you will tell us about your new school.
Not now. In aday or two I want to write a post about GRADING creative work, and I hope you will let us know how that's done in Hollywood at the Screenwriter's Institute (I applied there as a young man but was rebuffed, so congratulations to you!).
I was unclear about the characters in my life I've been talking about (trying to maintain some anonymity with reference to them has made me a bit overly general and confusing)
One was an older guy who is a successful businessman near Dallas, Texas, who said that he could solve the nation's problems with one gun-shot (implying that he'd like to kill Obama).
He said it half-seriously, half in jest. Not that he would actually go through with it...but that he would if he could, maybe? I don't know - he's a very stable guy, but likes his guns and such...I view it as equivalent to the left's response when Cheney had a heart-attack that they kinda wouldn't mind if he died.
Then there's Another guy, who's not from Texas, who's in Rome, and he believes in conspiracy theories and such. He has anger management problems, that at least is true, and has an outsiderness to his nature. But he can separate reality from fantasy (at least in his own personal life), so I don't think he's a danger in terms of shooting people down or anything.
Like a lot of things, I think this is one of those instances wherein the rhetoric on the other side against you hits you emotionally, while the rhetoric on your side against the other just seems appropriate/true/kinda funny.
So devil-horns on Bush, or a photo of him with a bullet through the head, might seem like kinda a laughing matter to the left, and a grievous threat to the right.
Vice versa is also true, of course. The left equates Dick Cheney to Darth Vader without blinking an eye. The right calls me an obamaton and calls Obama a communist usurper and paints up Obama like a vampire.
Lame all the way 'round.
http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/jared-loughners-friend-tells-gma-he-did-not-watch-tv-he-disliked-the-news.php?ref=tn
Stu,
Whatever your grief or your process or your convictions, you have indulged in the very practice you deplore. Explain it any way you like, what you have said in this thread is contemptible. It is bearing false witness. You need to know that.
Brett, these are good points. I used to argue with gay activists in Seattle, and one told me that joking about killing gays in the high school locker room may have seemed like just pure nonsense to the people who indulged in it, but to them, it was terrifying.
We are always more aware of violence directed against us, and it strikes home more thoroughly.
I think Stu's problem with this incident is that he sees it as directed against him and his group.
I see it as directed against America, against all of us, against the idea of meeting in public, against the whole notion of Democracy.
Originally I thought it had something to do with the border.
That was my first take, since the border violence really bothers me and is something I think our president should focus on. (I think the earlier president should have, too, and the two before that).
I don't know why nothing is being done.
At any rate, the gay activists' point made sense to me especially when I was in Finland. I was in a big city (200,000 people, which is big in Finland) and all it took was twenty people who didn't like foreigners and it made it difficult to go downtown, or into a bar. It doesn't take many people to make an ugly situation.
That the whole MSM is after Sarah Palin and dogging her every step makes it amazing to me that she can go on in that climate. She's very tough. I would wilt. It's incredible what balls she has. I get the feeling that a great number of people on the left would really kill her if she became our leader.
I don't get that feeling with the right, but then, I am not targeted by them, and don't feel their heat. I'm in a fairly liberal location, although it votes Republican, they are liberal Republicans, and I feel no stress here. Others do I'm sure.
The one thing that even hinted of the border issue is that Lioughner asked Giffords a question and she responded in Spanish. This leads me to believe that when he asked the question, "What if words have no meaning?" that he mumbled the question, and she, trying to be diplomatic toward what she thought was a Mexican immigrant who was timid to speak English, spoke in Spanish.
Meaning he had mumbled.
I watched three hours on C-Span today of House talks directed at the event. Both sides agree that the kid had no agenda. The Ds tried to use it to push gun control and speech control, and the Rs tried to use their time to emphasize that they would never do such a thing to a Democrat, and they didn't condone it.
And that many of the Rs were personal friends with Giffords, and really loved her wit and charm.
Meanwhile, I heard on TV that she has 101% chance of recovery.
Isn't 101% chance impossible? How can you have more than a perfect chance at recovery? What if percentages are meaningless?
stu, I'm not sure what you mean when you say what "we" have been doing in rejecting your test claim (that the Tea Party as a whole may be characterised as terrorist) while engaging in the same sort of rhetorical style, standards of evidence, and "paranoia" as those who are accusing the Tea Party of instigating this Tucson tragedy.
It seems, though, one would have to agree with the premises that first, your characterisations of TP style, etc. were correct, and second, that "we" were indulging in the same unfair verbiage in our defence as those who are accusing us on offence of being what amounts to unindicted abettors of murder. Either/or propositions rarely succeed in elucidating events such as the Tucson tragedy. Nevertheless, I presented one to you in quoting Professor Reynolds that seemed to me closer to the truth about those who are decrying Tea Party rhetoric as a cause of the tragedy (for which to date lacks any sound evidence): either a vicious lie or a contemptible political ploy. I don't think you'd want to choose either. The same goes for your either/or proposition.
Likewise falters without clarification the comparison of the Tea Party to Sinn Fein, whose history goes back to 1905 and whose subsequent transformations are manifold. If you mean the armed wing of the Republican Sinn Fein that is on the US State Department terrorist organisation list, then any comparison to the Tea Party is ludicrous.
I trust your shock and dismay at the tragic event, but know that the shock and dismay belongs to the whole nation and not just to those of one political persuasion. While I think concrete security precautions for politicians and audiences at political events may be improved, I don't think further restrictions on currently lawful political speech are desirable or would be effective in any case without transforming our country into a shadow of the "land of the free."
stu, I'm not sure what you mean when you say what "we" have been doing in rejecting your test claim (that the Tea Party as a whole may be characterised as terrorist) while engaging in the same sort of rhetorical style, standards of evidence, and "paranoia" as those who are accusing the Tea Party of instigating this Tucson tragedy.
It seems, though, one would have to agree with the premises that first, your characterisations of TP style, etc. were correct, and second, that "we" were indulging in the same unfair verbiage in our defence as those who are accusing us on offence of being what amounts to unindicted abettors of murder. Either/or propositions rarely succeed in elucidating events such as the Tucson tragedy. Nevertheless, I presented one to you in quoting Professor Reynolds that seemed to me closer to the truth about those who are decrying Tea Party rhetoric as a cause of the tragedy (for which to date lacks any sound evidence): either a vicious lie or a contemptible political ploy. I don't think you'd want to choose either. The same goes for your either/or proposition.
Likewise falters without clarification the comparison of the Tea Party to Sinn Fein, whose history goes back to 1905 and whose subsequent transformations are manifold. If you mean the armed wing of the Republican Sinn Fein that is on the US State Department terrorist organisation list, then any comparison to the Tea Party is ludicrous.
I trust your shock and dismay at the tragic event, but know that the shock and dismay belongs to the whole nation and not just to those of one political persuasion. While I think concrete security precautions for politicians and audiences at political events may be improved, I don't think further restrictions on currently lawful political speech are desirable or would be effective in any case without transforming our country into a shadow of the "land of the free."
Electoral violence is largely taken for granted in the country where I live. A three figure body count is fairly typical in the month or two leading up to an election. Partisan journalists make much better targets than the politicians, whose first priority is maintaining a phalanx of skilled body guards. Journalists don't sign paychecks, so they're considered expendable.
They had a show about a popular boxer in the Philippines who has thrown his hat into the electoral circus there. He has about a dozen bodyguards, I think I read. He's considered to be like a god because he knocks all his opponents out.
Spanish systems are different. It seems that assassination is very popular in Spanish systems, because it is winner take all. They have no guarantees of freedom of speech (journalists get whacked if they try it), and there is no such thing as sharing political power, which is a Protestant concept, and is only understood within Protestant countries. All other countries suck by comparison at least in terms of that.
We have the notion that every person is entitled to vote their conscience and to speak their conscience. It's remarkable what Luther set up.
Leftists are in another spirit and want to change the Constitution which would protect these things and enshrines them. Many of them seem to want a one-party state. We're losing our PRotestant heritage, and all the beautiful things we once agreed upon because of the darned leftists.
There was a tradition of freedom among the Hug You Nots, I think, and others in the Catholic tradition. Luther was himself a Catholic.
How much freedom is there to go against what the Pope says, for instance?
The PRotestants have no Pope, but every person is considered equal in the eyes of God. Protestants put an enormous emphasis on individual conscience.
But we don't necessarily believe in conscience dreaming. It's not an idea that Luther would have recognized.
Obama went to Tucson and gave a speech. I actually liked the speech. He generally grates on my nerves and I can't stand the sight of him. But this time he did everything right. He focused on the dead, and on the living, and on the sacrifices we will have to make to make this country work. He told us not to blame others for what Loughner did, because it sews poisons in the wounds the country has received. He asked us to speak in a tone of healing. The whole speech is up over at Althouse's place. For the first time since he reared his weird head, I love the man. God bless him.
More like that, and I might vote for the fellow in two years.
WB,
Consider the following statements/concepts:
Obama was born in Kenya.
Obama is a Muslim.
Obama is a communist/socialist.
Obama has raised income taxes.
Death panels.
The Obama administration favors blacks over whites.
These are all lies, created out of whole cloth by members of the tea party, born in hatred, and intended to engender more of the same. And none of these counts as an unacceptable belief within the tea party.
Do a google image search for tea party signs:
The first to come up is a poster of Hitler, Obama, and Marx.
Some quotes from these signs:
IF you want to stop 1984, you need some 1776.
Obama's change: slavery for all Americans.
Obama's plan: white slavery
Barney just because you take it up the ass doesn't mean we need to.
I own a gun and I didn't bring it -- Yet!
Lie Lie Lie (with a picture of BHO)
Hey Hussein, Quit "Dixie Chickin" our nation. Go back to Kenya
Sieg Heil Herr Obama
Somewhere in Kenya a Village is Missing its Idiot
We came unarmed (this time)
Ram it down our throat, we'll shove it up your (picture of a donkey)
The American Taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's Ovens
Smash the Jewish State
You Vill Change! (with "Hope" Obama/Hitler mashup)
USSA (United Socialist States of America) Greatness is so Bourgeois
(picture of Obama and Hitler) Same shit different asshole
(Obama/Joker mashup) Socialism
"Cap" Congress and "Trade" Obama back to Kenya
ObamaCare (swastika) ObamaFascism
Hope & Change "Compassionate" Fascism
Impeach the Kenyan
And I can certainly remember others: the notorious "African Lion/Lyin' African," "The tree of liberty needs watering," etc.
These may not represent the tea party as you know it, but these are the sentiments of tea party members. I really can't say that I've seen anything like this venom coming out of the republican or democratic party. And yes, I mined the signs for some of the more offensive/extreme/colorful, and to a certain extent the Google ranking system may have "enriched" the proportion of quote-worthy signs in what it chose to show. But I'll note that I edited out the crudest and most offensive sign as being inappropriate for this blog, and even if the signal's been punched up a bit, there's still signal here.
So please forgive me if there's a bit of cognitive dissonance between what constitutes acceptable belief and language in the tea party to which you grant your allegience, and your judgment of my beliefs and language as "defamation," "contemptable," and "false witness." And if I've "indulged in the very practice I deplore," at least I'm not mired in it, and it can be reasonably expected that I will rise above it. Can the tea party?
Brother, I am tired and worn. They're shooting my peeps. And if we're immersed in an escalating political rhethoric that can only end with violence or reconsideration, don't you understand how disheartening the reaction of the tea party is? It's not necessary for the tea party to accept blame, but to reject reconsideration out of hand, with anger and further escalation? Where do you think this will end?
Full text is here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/12/remarks-president-barack-obama-memorial-service-victims-shooting-tucson
"And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud."
Stu - there are two separate questions:
1) Have some tea-partiers used extreme, unseemly, awful rhetoric?
2) Did tea-party rhetoric cause the shootings that happened in Arizona?
1) yes.
2) no.
You say
1) yes
2) yes
I know that at least Jon Stewart and president Obama and Brett Swanson disagree with you.
Now there's a third question:
Should those teapartiers who used extreme rhetoric take this event as an opportunity for introspection and decide to tone down the vitriol?
I think everyone here would also answer: yes. Are they doing so? Or planning to do so? I have no idea, really...I'm sure some are, some aren't...
The fourth question is this: Are teapartiers by their nature more extreme in their rhetoric than their analogs on the left?
That's a more complicated question, and I think the answer is: maybe, but probably not by much, and the only salient difference I might be able to see is that teaparty Political Leaders might tend to be measurably more extreme than their lefty analogs... (though that is not a statement I am standing by 100%).
I've had too many friends who said Bush was evil and wanted Cheney to die to believe that the left is all roses and peacesigns.
And what, pray tell, did you search for when you searched for lefty hatesigns?
Now, this is a self-selected website of lefty extremism...
But it seems analogous to your teaparty search...
http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=621
(scroll down for the photos)
stu, you've presented a quite an odious melange of vile epithets, and though not indulging in them yourself, you've still also presented a good helping of overheated rhetoric of your own in your postings. It's disingenuous to pretend you don't know of its equivalent on the other side. Again, bis, the conservative polemicist Michelle Malkin has a "primer" on the progressive "climate of hate" here:
http://michellemalkin.com/2011/01/10/the-progressive-climate-of-hate-an-illustrated-primer-2000-2010/
She also from time to time presents some of the hate mail she receives from the left, and while I won't disgrace Kirby's site by quoting it, trust that it's every bit as vile (misogynist, racist, obscene, etc.) as those examples you've quoted above.
I don't think any of us here are mired in the sort rubbish you've quoted above, nor are Tea Party supporters on the whole mired in it. And I'm not sure of your pronoun reference in "[t]hey're shooting my peeps." Are you?
What I've read of the President's speech yesterday is commendable and presidential, and while I'll still oppose most of his and his party's politics, on this occasion he's shown himself worthy of his office.
There were great things in Obama's speech last night: his discussion of evil was spot on. His discussion of the heroism of the men who put their bodies in the way of bullets to spare their wives. This was perfect: it was an emotionally brilliant speech. How he asked his side to stop playing the blame game. It was almost as if the entire speech was addressed to Stu, to just knock it off, as Picklesworth put it.
This was an important speech, and I think it brought the nation back together. I was proud to have him as our president, possibly for the first time since he took office.
He praised America. That in itself was a shock. I liked that his wife held the hand of Mr. Giffords. They were there for America. I won't forget that.
They showed that they weren't just selfish people out for themselves. They were helping to bring the community back to its senses. IT was all about God last night. Napolitano read from Isaiah. Obama quoted from Ecclesiastes. Many yesterday quoted St. Paul.
It was a great day for America. I loved it. I was moved.
Down deep, OBama is still American, and perhaps not a communist. Someone somewhere got through to him that his loyalty is to God and America, and to not to the red star.
Thank God.
I think the country is going to be ok. If he keeps talking like this, I might even switch back to being a Democrat.
Brett,
You make some good points. Let me respond. First, your questions.
1) Have some tea-partiers used extreme, unseemly, awful rhetoric?
Yes, clearly. Although I'd mitigate this in their favor somewhat by emphasizing some.
2) Did tea-party rhetoric cause the shootings that happened in Arizona?
You say no. I don't say yes, I say maybe. And I think that is a realistic answer. Tea Party rhetoric has pushed images of revolution, and strongly coupled the nonexistent threat that the democratic majorities would take away their weapons with a use-it or lose-it mentality. Loughner is crazy, but crazy people lived immersed in the same images and language as the rest of us. I don't think we can rule this in or out at this time.
3) Should those teapartiers who used extreme rhetoric take this event as an opportunity for introspection and decide to tone down the vitriol?
I'd say absolutely, and per my last comment, what I'm seeing (e.g., Sarah Palin and "blood libel," and similar sentiments from Tea Party contributors to this blog), is the opposite of introspection and toning down. Indeed, the message that they're trying to send is "we're the real victims here." Evidently, they really don't know shame.
This isn't to say that there haven't been Republican voices for calm and introspection. There have, and I'm grateful for them. I'll acknowledge specifically helpful and timely remarks by Boehner, McConnell, and McCain, and there were many others. They just haven't come from the Tea Party wing. If anyone can point to a statement by a recognized member of the Tea Party that the rhetoric in this country has gone too far, I would very much like to see it.
4) Are teapartiers by their nature more extreme in their rhetoric than their analogs on the left?
This is a good question. You point out some pretty appalling signs, and I'd certain disavow most of them. Be that as it may, the perception that I have is that the tea party is more extreme.
The argument raised by our friends on the right is that this reflects left-wing bias on the part of the main stream media, but I don't buy this, because most of what I know about the tea party (including all of the vile lies I mentioned before) have come to me via push coverage on Fox News. Thus, whatever the actual rate of violent speech, the perception that the right does more of this than the left seems to be a meme that the right itself is pushing. Am I wrong to see signal in this?
James, I thought one of the great things about OBama's speech is that he presented at least one of the victims -- a Republican -- honorably. She had come to get to know Gabby Giffords. Obama paid homage to her, as an American.
One of the most shameless things the Democrats did during this cycle is to use the atrocity as a convenient event for character assassination.
This compounded one assassination with another.
OBama rightly called off his dogs, and asked them to act less cynically, less dogmatically.
I think those who did this should feel sheepish.
President Obama acted honorably in this instance, showing that he's above mere partisan politics, and at least this once, is a true American.
If he continued on like that and dropped the class warfare rhetoric, I might seriously consider going back to the Democratic side.
I respect your side of things, too. And I think every good Democrat should respect Republicans and other lawful and law abiding groups, instead of using character assassination against them.
It's that kind of disgraceful antic that drove me from the party in the first place. It was way too shrill, partisan, unrelenting, and it seized the moral high road and said everyone else was a creep and a jerk, and so on.
I hate that aspect of the left.
I don't like it in the right, either.
I'm a centrist, and will ally with the party that is acting less animalistically and territorially, and more like grown-ups.
Obama acted like a grown-up last night. He clearly loves children and understands how they are different from us, and deserve our protection. I was simply sobbing when he spoke of poor Christina Green, dancing in rain puddles in heaven.
stu, I'll agree Sarah Palin's invocation of "blood libel" (an ages-old excuse for pogrom against Jews and now just as savagely invoked by Jew-hating jihadists) to counter the scurrilous charges against the Tea Party is reckless and wrong. But what "similar" statements have you read on this blog site, pray tell?
On the other hand, equally offensive is Paul Krugman's accusation against the right of using "eliminationist" rhetoric, a term up to now used to designate Nazi rhetoric that led to the Holocaust. What then can we say of a celebrated academic and left polemicist like Krugman when he can one-up an allegedly intellectually deficient politician in this sort of rhetoric?
Stu,
The long and the short of your argument is that you believe the narrative about a group that has been produced by its opponents.
Fine. If you want to be a part of a group that defames and libels and bears false witness against its neighbors, then so be it.
But you should know it. And so I am telling you in no uncertain terms.
WB,
The long and the short of your argument is that you believe the narrative about a group that has been produced by its opponents.
Actually, I take far more seriously what the group says about itself. It's not the liberal media, or some left-wing conspiracy that has pushed the birther conspiracy, or the notion that death panels were a part of the HCR legislation. It is/was the tea party, which is to say, candidates affiliated with the tea party and supported by it, or by Fox News through its regular opinion and "news" based programming.
And their opponents didn't write those signs that I cited from Google image search. And as much as I abhor some of the violent imagery/language in the signs that Brett found, I can't say that I recall homophobic, racist, or anti-semitic language or images among them. These things are all too easy to find on tea party signs.
And the famous "Tea Party Supports: Who They Are and What They Believe" poll was not written by tea party opponents, but rather by pollsters who (so far as I am aware) based their findings on what the Tea Party said about itself.
A minimal precondition for accusations of false witness is that the witness is, in fact, false. Tell me what you believe I've said that is false.
JADL,
It surprise me say so, but I've appreciated your contributions to this thread, even though I've been responded to but a few things. This one seems to require a response.
You write,
And I'm not sure of your pronoun reference in "[t]hey're shooting my peeps." Are you?
If by that, you're asking if I intended a specific reference, as in the tea party, the answer is emphatically no. The use of "they" was intended as an existential reference to avoid a passive construction. I.e., I could have written, "My peeps have been shot," but that's weak, and fails to convey anything like the sense of anguish and desecration that I feel. I don't believe that I've broken any new literary ground in doing so. Fair enough?
Stu, did President Obama's request to stop playing the blame game register at all with you?
I am sorry that you are unable to understand.
Kirby,
Stu, did President Obama's request to stop playing the blame game register at all with you?
1) My primary argument is that the rhetoric needs to come down, whether or not it is every implicated in this attack.
2) A secondary argument is that the tea party is largely responsible for the vitriolic rhetoric in the public area, and that it in particular needs to take responsibility for its words.
I do not believe that the shooting of Giffords was a tea party op, but I do believe that overheated rhetoric may have played a role, and moreover that if we don't find a way to ratchet it down, it will play a role in future violence.
This is not the blame game. I'm not saying "you guys did it."
WB,
I am sorry that you are unable to understand.
In other works, you don't believe that it is necessary to back up strong accusations like "false witness," "contemptable," and "defamation" with specifics.
stu, your clarification is welcome. Fair enough. And I do appreciate your choice to work through this event on LS, even though our exchanges have often been sharp. I'll also credit your past attempts to exemplify civility in debate here.
On the Tea Party, our views differ. As I've said, Emmy and I have attended three such events here in Michigan (I'm not a "member" and I'm not exactly sure what even constitutes membership) and saw nothing of the negative things you've laid before this group. That's not to say they can't be found (as can hateful speech and actions on the left), but I don't think hateful speech or actions characterise the movement.
I've lived through a number of assassinations and attempts before (e.g., JFK, his brother, Martin Luther King Jr, Representative Ryan, Presidents Ford, Reagan, Pope John Paul II, President G W Bush, now Representative Giffords). I'm hopeful we'll see none in future as well as no repeat of the ugly aftermath of the last, but I do fear we might.
WSJ had an article last night on how to buy and use a Glock. I thought that was very helpful, indeed, to anybody who wanted to commit a copycat atrocity.
The thing is that if 25% of the population is Tea Party, as it is often said, that's about 60 million people. In a population that vast, you're going to find some unsavory signs.
But the Tea Party has been around for what like two years?
and this is the first really bad thing that's been done, and the kid hasn't got any real relationship to the Tea Party, and no one in the tea Party has recognized his actions, and anyway he shot a Republican judge, and at least one of the older women was also a Republican.
Not sure if Christina Green was registered or had submitted a note of intent to either party.
How Stu thinks that telling us on a blog that reaches maybe 1000 people in a day is going to translate to a ratcheting down of the signs at Tea Parties is odd.
Remember Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.
--Reinhold Niebuhr
Niebuhr wrote that in the 50s I think I recall on the back of an envelope in church while worrying about the atomic bomb.
compared to atomic bombs, the attack in Tucson is small, and mild. But the main thing is to realize that there are many things we have no control over. We can't tell the rabble not to be a rabble.
we have to accept that there is only so much we can do. Obama reminded us to be good to our families, and to tell them we love them, and to be there for them.
We can do things like that.
Palin and Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and all the rabble rousers make a living off of rabble rousing and fall into the entertainment category along with rap stars, and pornographic stars, and crossword puzzle makers, and the punk rockers.
I think it's helpful to go back to Niebuhr's prayer when you feel the world is out of your control. It always has been. In the 13th century they had the plague. a quarter of the population died. they still built cathedrals.
In the 20th century hundreds of millions of people died in wars and famines. And yet a few poets made a few very good poems.
Things are really tough over in North Korea.
But there's only so much we can do to help.
If you have a brother who is an alcoholic, or a father who is an alcoholic, or into some kind of sin. You can't change them. Only they can change themselves.
Stu can scream at Sarah Palin until he is blue in the face. she'll just think he needs a doctor if she ever even hears him.
She'll go on being Sarah Palin.
Sharpton will go on being Sharpton.
Water a flower, paint a picture, call someone in the hospital who's sad, or join a quilting group, or start an ant farm, practice a magic trick, or go and walk in a rain puddle.
We are in the world but not of it.
Gabby Giffords read the 1st amendment as one of her last acts, and now the left wants to use the occasion of her shooting to make everybody speak like them. It's ironic.
The left has all these goofy ideas of how to make the world better.
Get rid of the first amendment. Get rid of the second amendment.
Make huge government bureaucracies.
Force everybody to buy into their notions, or face arrest and fines.
Then perfection arrives and it looks like North Korea.
Stu,
Justify yourself as you like. I am simply telling you something forthrightly, not that your political opinion is wrong, but that you have shown no charity to your fellow man. I am sure that you know the letter of Luther's explanation to the eighth commandment. I suggest that you consider its spirit. This is for your sake, not for mine.
We've stalled on this thread. That's fine. Althouse manages to push forward some of our thinking here. She writes that many prominent writers and rabbis have come to Sarah Palin's defense on the term "blood libel."
She also has some other notices. Attempts to argue that civility should be the name of the game really means censorship is the name of the game.
And some other very good calls.
Althouse is rather amazing.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/political-pundits-surprisingly-good-at-getting-ins,18817/
A video he made...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4roYh0fACQ
Something weird happened. One of the guys who had been shot by Loughner threatened to kill a member of the Tea Party, and is in custody. He went up to his face and said, "You're dead!"
Scary.
Brett, if the far left wants total control of speech and the economy, what does the moderate left want?
The far right wants zero control on the economy, I suppose -- total libertarian freedom. Would that be correct?
And the moderate right is willing to accept some control.
What does the moderate left want to control?
And to what degree?
The moderate left wants corporations that have the 'freedoms' of the individual to also have the responsibilities of the individual - that is, you do something that is harmful, you get fined/punished for it.
The moderate left believes in laws against littering, and believes that there should at least be regulations for corporations to not litter so damn much.
So lets say you do something that is predicted by science to be harmful and which 97% of scientists agree is harmful to humanity - that is something that should be dissuaded by regulation, or something you should pay for.
You also want corporations to be responsible to their employees for ensuring fair compensation for their labor so that it's not like we're in China or something (the left wants us to trade in such a way that it pushes other countries toward treating laborers more humanely, but the right fights against it).
You also believe in technological progress, and want the government to provide grants and support for those scientific initiatives that otherwise wouldn't create the immediate profits that the private sector would require, but which in the long-run strengthen the American economy.
You don't want the government to control the means of production, but you want the government to regulate the private sector... Tax harmful behavior, support beneficent behavior...Create a strong middle class so that you don't have the simple distinction between the poor laborers and the rich barons (which is what happens in a pure 'free market')- you create a healthy economy by having an economy set up so that your laborers are also consumers.
You also want to provide some equality of opportunity by giving healthcare to children and requiring adults to have health insurance,( because otherwise they have access to emergency medical care (and use it) without taking any personal responsibility for it...)
You find it weird that we pay more per capita on health care than the rest of the developed world, but have disgustingly high infant mortality rates and millions of our people don't have healthcare.
(of course, there are exceptions to this...if you have your own lil' society in America (like the Amish) and have a setup where you won't ever use the emergency medical services without paying for it...then you don't have to buy insurance...)
Apparently Garrison Keillor made fun of the left on NPR on today's show. Anyone who listens can fill me in. The retired pastor at my church told me about it after this morning's service.
I was told by two young Tea Party mavens that the Tea Party office in Atlanta received an envelope filled with white powder. FBI lab determined that it was foot powder.
Tomorrow is MLK day.
I really don't want to devolve into a shooting match between right and left. Among other things, kids are affected. Not only was a child killed last week, but many children lost their parents, or relatives.
We're probably all a bit exhausted from last week's heavy conversations, and deep soul-searching. I thought Palin's remarks were sound, and so did many others.
At any rate, I don't think Obama should use this last week for any more peremptory seizures of rights generally accorded to citizens.
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation." James Madison, quoted on p. 1 of Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges, by Robert Bork (AEI, 2003).
It's good to have James back, with his opinions on the army questions. I never served, and wasn't called. I never even had to register. I am basically a coward, and would hate to be in either the military or the police, but have enormous respect for the people in those outfits.
I'm with Zell Miller on that topic.
Oh, and I've read a lot of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, but am not on his side with respect to the Spanish Civil War. I would have been on the anarchist side in my 20s. Now, I don't know. the problem with the Spanish both there and in South America is that they don't seem to have middle positions.
James, I wonder what you think about gun control?
After this week, I have wondered if it would really hurt anybody to get at least automatic weapons off the shelves. Single shot repeaters like the ones they used at Lexington and Concord would be ok, but handguns and automatic ones seem to very available.
Do you think every undiagnosed schizophrenic should have access to them?
Just curious.
I know there are repsonsible people like you who can handle them, but what about all the nutcases like Loughner?
Shouldn't there be some kind of long testing period, with labs, checking in on the mental health of people who want automatic weapons? why does anybody want them anyway?
I owned a BB gun once and shot a chickadee and cried for three weeks. So I am not really the kind of person who wants a gun.
Do you think people have automatic weapons for reasons that indicate a sound psychological background?
Kirby, while I support the SCOTUS's decision that the 2nd Amendment applies to individuals and I've some shooting experience, I've never hunted and I don't currently own a firearm.
I think you might be referring to certain kinds of semi-automatic weapons ("assault weapons"), for automatics are generally banned for civilian use.
John Lott Jr is a sound scholar on gun rights and gun control legislation in general. One can see from the titles of several of his books, "More Guns, Less Crime" and "The Bias against Guns" that he finds restrictive or prohibitive gun legislation counter-productive in reducing criminal violence.
Not sure I would count Loughner as a criminal. Criminals have a motive of some kind.
Not sure what Loughner's motive was, or if he had a motive.
But wouldn't his Glock qualify as an automatic weapon?
It had a magazine with thirty shots, and you could fire them in less than a minute.
When I think of Madison squibbing the 2nd Amendment in the 1780 period, wouldn't he have been thinking of the kind of flintlock muskets that we associate with the Revolutionary War?
With one of those you might be able to kill one person, but you couldn't injure twenty in ten seconds.
I'm not sure of the terminology in which "automatic" would be included, but that seems pretty automatic. It apparently varies by state, and Arizona has almost no gun controls or checks on those who can purchase them.
Any Tom Dick or Jared seems to be able to get one. Can you refer me to a briefer source (three or four pages) on automatic weapons?
I can't read whole books right now. I have huge headaches partially caused by the horrors of this week.
Kirby, the Wiki pages on semi-automatic weapons v automatic ones will probably show the difference, but my understanding is that semi-automatics require recompression of the trigger mechanism for each round fired whereas automatics can deliver a full magazine or clip with one compression. Our M-16s could operate in both automatic and semi-automatic modes, though we trained with the much heavier wooden-stock M-14s.
Different states and localities have different laws about what kinds of weapons, bullets, etc. are legal as well as who may or may not purchase them or obtain a concealed carry permit.
It should be mentioned that demented miscreants like Loughner or fanatical terrorists like jihadis can also use explosives to effect their murderous ends.
The Unabomber could put bombs together but I doubt if Loughner could have put even so much as Tinkertoys together.
Most Americans would have no idea how to make a bomb, or a gun.
but if you can buy a gun in a store...
At any rate, I'm sure some judge somewhere is going to have judicial rule, so we might as well go back to discussing lighter and less responsible things, since voting doesn't really matter any more except when it comes to American Idol.
Voting matters, Kirby - of course you know this (there are many things you're up in arms (is that now an insensitive phrase?) about that are the direct result of the fact that people voted for Obama, and then he did some of the things he'd said he'd do).
The judicial branch has some power, and rightfully so - it's checks and balances, baby! Maybe a few individual judges every now and then on both sides get a bit 'activist,' but it's hardly the country-destroying epidemic that some on the right pretend it is.
It reminds me of their left-wing-media canard - something unbiased will say things that go against your position sometimes, and then being an illogical talk-radio host (or his follower), you will use unsound logic to claim that there is a vast conspiracy against your viewpoint..since you believe so strongly that your viewpiont is objectively right, there's no way your side won't be supported by the realities presented by a supposedly-objective viewpoint.
Well Proposition 8 was an enormous fight, and overturned by one gay judge. I don't know what to think of this.
It seems that voting doesn't matter. That judges will settle the big issues by spinning constitutional fabrications.
I think this will eventually lead to polygamous marriages of the kind that Nussbaum supports.
If marriage is the absolute center of society in Christian thought (the first and only superlapsarian order), then it's important to get it right. If it's only based on matriarchal desire, then the whole society comes crumbling down.
Rome will have won, after 2000 years, Nero will be back in the saddle. Not sure that's the best result, even if some judge wills it.
Some want to throw out not only voting but the Constitution itself. What's going to be left?
Judges.
we are already having a lot of trouble at the polls with Democrats almost invariably finding new boxes of votes, as many as they need to win.
Al Franken's findings of new votes was almost the joke that he is. I don't think he CAN lose a subsequent election, because of fraud.
Not sure this is going to keep us inside the first amendment, but seems almost designed to move citizens toward the second one, which I'd rather not, especially insofar as there are no controls on the kinds of guns we have access to.
We have to guard the perception of fairness.
Even Garrison Keillor is outraged apparently by the left's behavior of late.
That means the left is WAY OUT OF LINE, since he's virtually Pravda's top comedian.
Kirby, I don't get it. What does a marriage based on matriarchal desire look like? What is its opposite? A marriage based on patriarchal indifference? What's the opposite of desire?
Desire is part of it, I suppose, but what if the partner gets sick, or something? It's a marriage based on a promise, til death.
I'm not sure why we should imagine that the actions of a deranged Arizona teenager should occasion this kind of soul-searching. Do his thoughts and actions really have anything to tell us about our culture? The nasty remarks of a witless PTA mom like Sarah Palin certainly don't represent a significant contribution to any national political debates about governance or behavior in society. And yet we have these hand-wringing examinations of conscience, as if it all meant something profound and mysterious.
The Republicans, on the defensive, claim that guns aren't the real problem, that it's about mental health care. But it's the Republicans who have stood against adequate and responsible mental health care for decades at all levels of government.
Who in his right mind would advocate the availability of automatic weaponry of the type Loughner used for the general populace? The ONLY PURPOSE for such a weapon is the use to which Loughner put it--to kill as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible. It was the perfect expression of the utility of that weapon. There is no excuse for this in a civilized culture. Loughner was not a "criminal"--he was a confused community college drop-out. It would never have happened without the availability of automatic pistols. And yet our nation refuses to address the problem.
If there's anything mysterious or baffling about this event, it's our incredible reluctance to regulate weaponry. It's simply astonishing.
The day treatment/clubhouse facility where I did my work-study internship during the summer after my first year in grad school went belly-up by the time I finished my second year and the job I might have had working with schizophrenics was no longer available. I spent five years as a temporary employee for Eddie Bauer instead, then moved overseas.
Reagan's voodoo economics saw no benefit in preserving an agency that wasn't competitive and had no profit margin. All the agency did was reduce hospitalizations of schizophrenics and provide a way to monitor their mental status while keeping them occupied and intent on regaining some measure of autonomy.
The agency had attempted to become competitive by buying up obsolete equipment for its proposed job shop, the kind of equipment that companies like Kinko's had rendered obsolete. Collating, perforating, stapling and binding is menial, time-consuming work when office secretaries are stuck with the task of doing it by hand with whatever primitive machines are available in the office. If it's a big job it can be shopped out. Kinko's has machines that can do it in minutes or seconds, but if there's no urgency why not shop it to someone who will turn it around in hours or days?
Modest government subsidies could have made the job shop a viable option for the purpose of vocational rehabilitation. Instead it became the white elephant that collapsed the agency's floor.
One of my "reporters" was a fellow whose family owned a popular bakery chain. He'd been hospitalized after stabbing another member of his own family. The job shop wasn't yet open for business, but the machines were assembled and in place. I toured it with him. His story didn't call it a sweat shop. It didn't need to. His description of the machines was more than ample to get his point across.
CF:
Interesting take. I have only a few questions for you, because I really want to try to understand what you're getting at here.
You say: "it's the Republicans who have stood against adequate and responsible mental health care for decades at all levels of government."
A little question of an unclear antecedent here. Is this responsible mental health care for civilian citizens or is it for the people they hire to represent them in Congress and the Senate? If it's the former, I'd say you might want to back that up. If it's the latter, I'd agree with you. I think many in government could do with mental health screening, and many Republicans and even Tea Partiers would be inclined to agree with you, too.
You say: "The ONLY PURPOSE for such a weapon is the use to which Loughner put it--to kill as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible."
Actually, I can think of many purposes for such a weapon. On January 11, I had the pleasure of firing one such weapon--at a paper target! One could fire at a foam deer, paper targets, tin cans, empty kitty litter jugs, milk jugs, 2-liters, the broad-side of an (uninhabited) barn. At the top of my list, though, would have to be protection of my life or the lives of my family.
Glocks are lovely pieces of craftsmanship--nice to handle, and easy to use. As far as home and family protection devices go, you couldn't do much better.
You say: "It would never have happened without the availability of [semi] automatic pistols." Brackets, and correction, mine.
My dear gentleman, this would have happened if you took every Glock away from every law-abiding citizen in the country. This would have happened if you took every shotgun, rifle, box cutter, icicle, sharpened stick, candy cane, slingshot, butter knife, stapler, or pencil from every person in the country. Before there were guns, people hacked at each other with sharpened metal. Before that, they jabbed at each other with slivers of rock lashed to the end of a pole. Before that they used clubs and threw heavy stones. Violence doesn't stop because we outlaw it. It just doesn't. If we also outlaw the means of good, law abiding people preventing and deterring violence then we're doubly fecked.
You won't find a single person in this country advocating that any individual regardless of mental health status ought to have access to any weapon he can afford to purchase. Reasonable preventative measures are already in place. What do you recommend instead? Every prospective gun-owner must take counseling sessions? Sit down with a government-appointed psychologist and get a permission slip stamped? Undergo a 72-hour Psych evaluation at the hospital? Perhaps it would be safer to assume that everyone seeking to own a firearm is intending to murder someone since, as Curtis says, it's the only reason anyone would ever want to own a semi-automatic pistol. Perhaps we should then lock them up for their own safety and the safety of the community?
If the only purpose of a semi-automatic pistol is murder (even if it’s cloaked in legalistic flimflam like self-defense) then we'd be criminal if we didn't arrest everyone who owns one. To be consistent with your views, you would have to agree to this, Curtis. I don't believe even you are that blinkered.
Me: "If we also outlaw the means of good, law abiding people preventing and deterring violence then we're doubly fecked."
Obviously, I meant to prevent and to deter violence. Don't you just love it when you begin one sentence and end up writing another?
Emmy:
Since we aren't in the business of doing psych evaluations for every citizen, we must take the easy steps to see to it that weaponry such as bazookas, hand grenades, and--automatic repeating concealable hand-guns aren't generally available to the public.
In war, such weapons serve an acknowledged purpose. You want efficiency and force on the battlefield, and, under the Geneva conventions, you try to "fight fair" by not gassing and nuking populations, or torturing them once they've been captured.
But in peaceful circumstances, these kinds of weapons are toys too dangerous to permit in the general population. If automatic weapons aren't dangerous, then maybe nuclear weapons aren't either. Using your argument, it's really "people" who commit crimes and kill people, not weapons. But this argument falls apart. There are many kinds of weapons, but not all weapons have the same terrifying efficiency and power. Can we discriminate without being dumb? Loughner got his weapon because those guns are clearly available in Arizona, to almost anyone of age who wants one. Without such a weapon, Loughner was a dangerous guy, but with it, he was really a threat. If he had only been able to carry a rifle, he might have popped off two rounds before people scattered, but given his fire-power, anyone without 15 yards was at immediate risk.
Weaponry might seem fun and technologically attractive to you. Detonating devices are cool, too. But common sense tells us we don't play with certain kinds of toys--they're simply too dangerous.
The Right is saying Lougner should have been identified and locked up. Isn't that what you're suggesting with your sarcastic comment about "reasonable preventative measures" which are "already in place." Where were these measures when Loughner bought his pistol and shells?
Emmy, if you were at a mall and someone started shooting, would you defend the gun dealers who had sold the gun to the criminal, or the institutions which "failed to identify" a potentially dangerous mixed-up kid? Or both? Or neither?
There are reasonable safeguards, and there are unreasonable ones. Restricting certain kinds of weaponry while allowing others is a reasonable kind of discrimination. I say we bite the bullet and make those choices. Hunters can shoot dear and rabbits forever, but there's no excuse for letting guys like Loughner get repeating pistols.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47669.html
Now I see where Kirby gets his 'calls for civility are really calls for censorship' ideas...
Interesting article on the whole, anyhooch
Curtis Faville, re on your first posting on this thread:
Loughner isn't a "teen-ager" and the weapon he used was not an "automatic" weapon.
I have no idea what "nasty remarks" by the "witless" Sarah Palin you're referring to--perhaps you don't either, and you just picked up some orts of lib-left punditry retailing the bogus "crosshairs" or "right-wing rhetoric" calumnies.
Republicans differ on types of gun laws as well as mental health issues. Your sweeping charge that Rs are against "adequate and responsible mental health care" is of nugatory value, aside from the constitutional issues involved with both issues.
The possession or display of weapons have often prevented crimes from occurring as well as resulted in opportunities for murders or mayhem, as in the Tucson shootings. There are other uses for instruments of self-protection that can also be instruments of murderous crimes. Your "ONLY PURPOSE" claim is patently false.
Whether Loughner is a criminal or not will be up to the jury at his trial. I'm thankful you won't be on it. I expect his brief will argue innocence by reason of insanity, but I'm with the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz in rejecting in general this bogus defence.
Various levels of government already do of course regulate weaponry, as you acknowledge in your second posting. Perhaps you're referring to what some call "assault weapons," about which inaccuracies are rife (see here: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/254264/assault-weapons-and-truth-john-r-lott-jr).
Post a Comment