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/
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.
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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.