Input Junkie

Just to nitpick.... He may not have known this person was a judge.

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milimod.livejournal.com

As much as I'd love, any day of the week, to see Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck grow up and shut up until they can say something constructive, I don't honestly believe that Loughner's actions would have been much different without their contributions. I believe Loughner has been headed in that direction for many years and there were simply no checks or balances working to counter him. I don't even think it was his "dysfunctional family," as they have been promptly described in the media. I think it was classic organic psychosis -- chemical imbalance, whatever you want to call it. It was inside of Loughner, eating away at his cognition like acid, and events conspired to bring him to that shopping center with a gun on Saturday morning. In a better world than what we have at the moment, he'd be confined to a facility where he could be diagnosed, treated and kept from hurting himself or others. He may get diagnosed; he'll be shut away probably for the rest of his life if he doesn't get the death penalty and therefore will no longer be a danger to the general populace. But his life as he's known it is now over. The toxic political discourse may quiet down a bit -- we can only hope -- but there will still always be people who cannot think rationally and will mistake innocent people for the "demons" that haunt them. I'm 100% in favor of gun control, but never forget the epidemic of stabbings that we've seen in China this year. At least 21 have been killed and over 90 injured by knives, hammers and cleavers. There have been crazy people as long as there have been people. The world we live in is doing little or nothing to alleviate this problem.

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The quotes I've seen say that he was deeply suspicious of government, and if you combine that with the Tea Party rhetoric that government is bad, and liberals are pro-repressive government, and liberals are traitors to the American way of life, then you end up with an endpoint of "so anyone who is at a liberal political gathering is an enemy of real Americans". Add that to his thwarted desire to join the Army (presumably to be a hero by killing enemies of real Americans), and you get Loughner killing as many people as he can manage at a Democratic politician's gathering.

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There's a wide insurrectionist streak in the American left, too. I was in college in the late 1960s and early 1970s; I remember everything from merely disruptive protests to SCUM and the Weather Underground and the killing of Malcolm X by members of the Nation of Islam.

So far as this particular killer has any traceable political outlook, it seems to have been more leftist, at least a few years ago and according to the young woman who knew him then. But I think the more obvious explanation is that he was not even a political terrorist, but a psychotic; any ideological content in his beliefs was picked up at random. No political movement or faction is immune to paranoid hangers-on.

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kiya

This post is interesting as a set of rhetorical influences. (Linked from a locked post, or I'd link you to the discussion there.)

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Do we have evidence that he was even a hanger-on to either major faction? Giffords' opponent, Kelly, said they had never heard of him.

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womzilla.livejournal.com

There's a report of him acting out in one of his college classes (last year?) at a female student who read a poem out loud about having an abortion; IIRC, he called her a "terrorist".

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Apparently he had quite a personal vendetta against Giffords. In 2007 he attended at least one Giffords rally -- and formed a personal grudge against her when she snubbed his insane question.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/jared-lee-loughner-friend-voicemail-phone-message

"[Loughner] told me that Giffords opened up the floor for questions [in 2007] and he asked a question. The question was, 'What is government if words have no meaning?'" He said, 'Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question.' Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her."

Giffords' answer, whatever it was, didn't satisfy Loughner. "He said, 'Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question,' and I told him, 'Dude, no one's going to answer that,'" Tierney recalls. "Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her."
[....]
Tierney notes that Loughner did not display any specific political or ideological bent: "It wasn't like he was in a certain party or went to rallies...It's not like he'd go on political rants."

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How do we get to the idea that Loughner was a leftist?

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The news reports I've seen don't support that. But that was kind of my point; the phrasing "any ideological content" was meant to convey that I didn't claim to know if he had an ideological position, or what it was if he did. The evidence that's coming out now looks increasingly as if he didn't.

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Here's a version of the news story about Caitie Parker. You'll have to decide for yourself how much evidential value to assign it. I think that an anecdotal account of things seen several years ago doesn't count for a lot, even if you trust the witness; but it seems to be stronger evidentially than the purely speculative interpretation of him as a rightist, at least at this point.

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nancylebov.livejournal.com

It's hard for me to believe, but it's been two generations since the sixties.

Maybe it's just a matter of where I hang out, but I see a lot more "tear it down violently" in the contemporary right than the contemporary left. I do see left wingers who think the current economic system is simply unworkable, but they seem to be resigned though angry about the system not doing what they think is necessary and not envisioning going outside the system to make what they want happen.

The only left-wing drasticism I'm seeing is among fringe environmentalists-- that one got violent with the Unibomber, but very few people seem to go in for it.

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Did you see the "No Pressure" video from that environmental group in the UK? They weren't exactly fringe; they were pretty mainstream, with funding from several large corporate sponsors. I'm sure they didn't mean their images of the exploding heads of schoolchildren who didn't endorse their smiling teacher's call for reducing their families' carbon footprints to be taken literally, any more than Palin meant that Democrats should be shot; but in exactly the same spirit as for the criticisms of Palin, you can take them as normalizing the idea that people who don't follow green values deserve to die.

Then there was Barack Obama's speech about "If they bring a knife, we bring a gun." Sounds like violent rhetoric to me.

You can find violent rhetoric and violent imagery anywhere in the political spectrum. There's just a natural tendency to say that when your people use them, everyone knows that's not what they actually mean, while interpreting the other group's exactly similar rhetoric literally as a threat.

But I don't think "these people use violent imagery" is enough of a peg to hang a conviction for inciting murder on. Even if this particular murderer had actually been shown to have any attachment whatever to right-wing ideas, it still wouldn't count as making people who express those ideas as guilty of murder. I'm not even seeing "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" here.

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sethg

It’s not just “violent rhetoric and violent imagery”. Take a look at some of the quotes here.

I don’t think people who say this kind of stuff should be censored or arrested, but I do think they should feel ashamed of themselves.

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Shrug. If you want to play that game, the right wing can play it just as well.

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sethg

Yes, one can find random people who identify as Democrats or liberals or leftists, on the Net or at rallies, directing eliminationist rhetoric at Republicans.

The Republicans and conservatives doing this in the other direction are not random. They include talk-show hosts with millions of listeners; best-selling authors; members of Congress; and one former half-term governor who is on the short list for the 2012 Presidential nomination.

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jim-p.livejournal.com

I admit that I am not a psychological professional, but my father-in-law was and we had many fascinating conversations on the subject. Based on the descriptions I've heard from his friends and classmates and the disjointedness of his writings, I'd have to say that he's a full-blown schizophrenic. Early 20s is about the time that the condition comes into full bloom... someone might be mostly-normal but a bit "odd" during childhood and adolescence, then in the 20s the fuse finally blows and they're living in their own reality which has nothing to do with ours.

In other words, don't try to come up with any "rationale" for what he did... there isn't any.

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So you do not consider "If they bring a knife, we bring a gun" to be eliminationist rhetoric? It strikes me that Palin's map with targets is at least as obviously metaphorical. And I don't think you can call Barack Obama a random person who identifies as a Democrat.

My basic view is that (a) both the left and the right are evil and eager to get in power and abuse it, but (b) their use of this sort of rhetoric really IS rhetoric and (c) people who take one side's rhetoric more seriously than the other do so either to gain political advantage, or because they've fallen into in-group/out-group dualism (or mote/beam, in the classical metaphor). I don't identify with either side, and I don't see that big a difference.

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I don't think it's a question of whether he was a Jesse Kelly supporter, or a Tea Party fanatic, or a dittohead, or any other sort of active rightwing follower.

The issue is that it's not an isolated handful of instances where the *mainstream* of the Republican Party and Tea Party have been engaging in a concerted effort to rouse the country into viewing liberals as traitors that ought to be shot, equating liberals to terrorists, and whipping up hatred of terrorists.

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Even schizophrenics have some logical-to-them rationale, pieced together from their personal experience.

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Do you have any remote trace of evidence that this had anything to do with this particular murderer's motives and choices? Because I haven't seen any.

And, frankly, I haven't seen that much evidence for the right-wing hysteria you point to. The Republicans and the Tea Party did not achieve massive electoral success in November because the whole country adheres to the far right; they achieved it because a huge part of the country massively rejected the Democratic Party's policy directions and style of governing. I was one of those people: I voted for Obama in 2008, but in 2010 I said "Won't get fooled again"—I voted for a mix of Republicans and Libertarians, only one Democrat (and not for a national office), and abstained on some elections. If your model is that tens of millions of Americans voted for a black Democrat in 2008 but magically turned into angry racists in two years, I find that a really strange theory.

And I really haven't seen the horrors you describe. I've followed the Tea Party news, and really, I've seen a singular lack of violent incidents at their rallies. And I'm confident that the news media were eager for any such news and would have broadcast it far and wide. Instead we had stories about their being "threatening" or "angry" or about their racist slogans. By and large they've been working within the system, getting their candidates elected. Now we have a murder spree by a psychotic with no discernible adherence to any ideology anyone else recognizes, and the news media were desperately eager to link him to the Tea Party, before there was the slightest evidence to support this. It looks to me like a classic moral panic.

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I pretty much agree with you. I favor liberal causes, but there's a level of liberal rhetoric which seems to me even worse than the conservatives'.

Gun metaphors or knife fight metaphors are ... equally metaphorical. But the liberals go on to another level of invective which seems not metaphorical at all, but serious assessment of fundamental character, accusing their opponents of bigotry, hatred, etc. For example Howard Dean explaining that the Tea Party movement is “the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity.”

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I don't know where you are, nor anything about you personally.

But I have spent altogether too much time in the last 5 years with people who are now Tea Party stalwarts, and I have heard their dinner conversations when they felt they were among likeminded people.

You may not have witnessed violent incidents personally. Do you believe that this means that there have been none?

This country has been ideologically polarized on the right for the last 10 years and more, and heading further and further to the right.

I'm done.

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It's kind of weird to see a reading list that includes We the Living, 1984, The Communist Manifesto, and My Struggle being listed as evidence of an individual vs. the state mentality (Orwell was a Trotskyite and a lifelong leftist after all) or of a generalized "smash the state" attitude (about the furthest thing imaginable from what Hitler advocated). In fact I could hardly think of any four works that have less in common ideologically.

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