Author Topic: Humanity: Good News, Bad News  (Read 110677 times)

Lord J Esq

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #915 on: January 08, 2011, 03:35:55 pm »
Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat in Arizona, was shot and likely killed at a public event today, along with several members of her staff.

I'm going to wait for more developments on this before I draw any conclusions, but I fervently hope it was "merely" a senseless aggravated murder, because if it was an assassination then the conservative movement in this country has just change the course of American politics--decisively for the worse.

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/08/132764367/congresswoman-shot-in-arizona

Boo the Gentleman Caller

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #916 on: January 08, 2011, 04:22:35 pm »
Oh man... That's the first I'd heard of this. Sad that such things have happened.

skylark

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #917 on: January 08, 2011, 10:19:22 pm »
God dammit...

Just god dammit...

I'd make another comment, but...

tushantin

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #918 on: January 09, 2011, 02:42:35 pm »
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/01/09/mother-youngest-shooting-victim-describes-girl-bright-vivacious/
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The mother of a 9-year-old girl gunned down in Saturday’s shooting rampage outside an Arizona grocery store described her grief as “beyond words,” saying her daughter was a beautiful and intelligent child who was interested in government.

Christina-Taylor Green had just been elected to the student council at her elementary school and went to the "Congress on Your Corner" event outside a Tucson Safeway on Saturday to meet Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. The meet-and-greet turned tragic when the third-grader -- along with five others -- was killed in a spray of bullets.

....why? WHY?!?!

Trebuchet

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #919 on: January 09, 2011, 03:21:29 pm »
The man was insane, and the had no political background. He had been writing insane things on the internet about discriminating against people who didn't understand the english language, or something similar, and was a former mental patient.

Boo the Gentleman Caller

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #920 on: January 09, 2011, 03:54:53 pm »
I'm wondering how the dude got a gun. Not that it's incredibly difficult...

Mr Bekkler

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #921 on: January 09, 2011, 04:23:10 pm »
Apparently the little girl was born on 9-11-01. On the news her father said she was "born in tragedy and died in tragedy."

Lord J Esq

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #922 on: January 09, 2011, 06:56:54 pm »
He got a gun because it's particularly easy to do that in Arizona, even for America.

Looks like this guy really is a right-winger: not "mainstream" fringe stuff like the Tea Party, but the honest-to-goodness frontier. His YouTube videos reveal that he is very mentally ill, and layered on top of that are comments he made to the effect that abortions are terrorism and the government is unconstitutional. For good measure, he was affiliated with a white supremacy group.

The details are still sketchy, but it's looking likelier and likelier that he became a living exponent of the invective of the right wing. I anticipate that our traditional media will refuse to treat this likelihood without a false equivalence of "but it's just as bad on the left," so it looks like this incident may have no lasting repercussion on our political discourse unless the Republicans themselves decide to temper their rhetoric.

And the day Rush Limbaugh does that is the day somebody's got a gun pointed to his head. Oh, hypothetical irony...seldom appropriate, yet never wrong.

Trebuchet

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #923 on: January 09, 2011, 11:07:39 pm »
I hate that an insane man gunning down innocent people has to become fuel for the petty political machine.

tushantin

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #924 on: January 10, 2011, 01:30:31 am »
I hate that an insane man gunning down innocent people has to become fuel for the petty political machine.
HE WANTS THE KICK IN THE FUCKING CURB!!


Lord J Esq

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #925 on: January 10, 2011, 03:00:10 am »
I hate that an insane man gunning down innocent people has to become fuel for the petty political machine.

Yeah...you don't know what you're talking about. Have you followed this story at all?

Truthordeal

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #926 on: January 10, 2011, 10:56:09 am »
I hate that an insane man gunning down innocent people has to become fuel for the petty political machine.

Yeah...you don't know what you're talking about. Have you followed this story at all?

Possibly not, but I have. My Winter Term professor sent us all an original article on the event, and I've been following it since then. The news seems to point to lunacy as the culprit rather than any political stance. Rather than spend an amount of time debating this, I'll leave one of the blog/articles here: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/the-violence-in-arizona/

Quote
But the perpetrator, one Jared Lee Loughner, appears to be a garden-variety American crazy:  paranoid, alienated, and with schizophrenic tendencies.  While there were political overtones in some of his writings and videos, I don’t see any smoking gun connecting him to the Tea Party; and there’s no evidence yet that he was motivated more by right-wing politics than simple lunacy.

Quote
So before we start pinning all this on the Tea Party, let’s get the facts.  I hate the Tea Party and their platform as much as anyone, and I despise their “let’s-get-them” rhetoric that uses the language of shooting and targets when referring to liberals. But they may not be much of a causal factor in this case.

I don't want to speak for him, but I believe Trebuchet is disgruntled at people using this to bash the Tea Party, despite them having no part in this. I believe their rhetoric will tone down a bit after this, though, which is good.

Trebuchet

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #927 on: January 10, 2011, 11:49:34 am »
Yes, my opinion is similar to that blogger's - completely my fault for not making that clear. Indeed, I hate the tea party as much as anyone - but I feel that there weren't any political motives in this killing, just lunacy. This may be wishful thinking on my part.

However, I admit freely that I likely misunderstood some part of this story.


Thought

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #928 on: January 10, 2011, 12:14:39 pm »
I am curious; if the shooter had been playing Call of Duty non-stop for the past few years, rather than being exposed to violent political rhetoric, would you be likewise willing to primarily blame video game makers? Admittedly, I have been unable to follow this story closely, but the general circumstances that surround Loughner seem, likewise, generally similar to other such shooters with the exact form of media in question being switched.

Lord J Esq

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Re: Humanity: Good News, Bad News
« Reply #929 on: January 12, 2011, 03:37:58 am »
My Winter Term professor sent us all an original article on the event, and I've been following it since then. The news seems to point to lunacy as the culprit rather than any political stance. Rather than spend an amount of time debating this, I'll leave one of the blog/articles here: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/the-violence-in-arizona/

Quote
But the perpetrator, one Jared Lee Loughner, appears to be a garden-variety American crazy:  paranoid, alienated, and with schizophrenic tendencies.  While there were political overtones in some of his writings and videos, I don’t see any smoking gun connecting him to the Tea Party; and there’s no evidence yet that he was motivated more by right-wing politics than simple lunacy.

That source is misleading. It isn't in dispute that the terrorist was influenced by right-wing political ideas. Not leftist or centrist stuff. You don't hear the left condemning abortion, or questioning the inherent legitimacy of the federal government, or advocating the gold standard. Indeed, the only people who talk about that kind of stuff are right-wingers. And those sentiments are mixed in with other stuff that isn't political, but the parts which are political speak strongly to the cultural sickness of mainstream conservatism.

I think I've said this already. It's not that those conservative bits made him a murderer, but they gave a murderous outlet to his mental illness. That's why he targeted a congressperson specifically. You can't call it apolitical, and you can't deny its conservative background.

I believe Trebuchet is disgruntled at people using this to bash the Tea Party, despite them having no part in this. I believe their rhetoric will tone down a bit after this, though, which is good.

It's impossible to say yet whether the Tea Party was involved, given their dominance in conservative circles at present. I can only hope they tone it down, but I think it'll take more than a mere terrorist attack to get them to change their tune. I think only threats and suffocation will work on them. People need to stop taking that kind of "Let's kill them!" rhetoric seriously. It's dangerous even in the hands of the wise and the just; in the hands of mooks it is a continuous disaster.

~~~
I am curious; if the shooter had been playing Call of Duty non-stop for the past few years, rather than being exposed to violent political rhetoric, would you be likewise willing to primarily blame video game makers? Admittedly, I have been unable to follow this story closely, but the general circumstances that surround Loughner seem, likewise, generally similar to other such shooters with the exact form of media in question being switched.

The crucial distinction here, Thought--and thank you for asking me this rhetorical question so that we might highlight the point, as it is worth making, as you no doubt already knew--is that politics is concerned with the highest levels of institutional power in a country. A violent artwork which occasionally guides deranged behavior in the mentally disturbed is not the same as a violent political philosophy which occasionally guides the same. This is because, no matter how many people fail to appreciate the point, politics directly affects each of our everyday lives. Art's effect is only indirect at best, and often not present at all. Politics' proximity to our own freedoms and range-of-lifestyles obligates a higher standard of responsibility. The Tea Party has been particularly thoughtless with its choice of language, framing, and imagery. The right-wing media has been particularly negligent in its deliberate blurring of conservative ideology with news reporting. The religious apparatus in America has been particularly irresponsible with its pairing of deity images and political positions.

I may eventually find myself supporting some stricter controls on mass media (like video games), once my philosophy gives that subject full treatment. In the meantime, however, I hold to the tentative policy that political figures (and public figures generally) are obliged by virtue of their proximity to the levels of social power to be more responsible than artists, who are obliged to nothing more than, perhaps, to provoke the thought that comes with experience.