I liked Amanda Marcotte’s recent analogy:
Holding the right responsible for their paranoid, incendiary, violent rhetoric reminds me strongly of trying to put a cat in its carrier. You know it has to be done, but you really don’t want to do it. The cat is going to lash out. She’s going to hide under the bed. She’s going to hiss and scream. She’s going to grab the sides of the carrier as you push her in, in a pathetic final bid not to go the carrier. But you have the fight anyway, because you can’t just renege on your responsibilities the second they become a problem.
Matt Bors also has a good post:
And that’s where we are at. You can’t talk about the issues underneath this without being accused of “politicizing” it. The shooter is crazy and incoherent enough that we can all comfortably write him off as a “lone nut,” America’s favorite term to absolve us from looking at any of the societal problems that causes this type of behavior–or, god forbid, the tools he used to kill so many so fast. Unless the shooter fits into the binary mold of a mainstream liberal or conservative, we are content to pretend his behavior took place in a vacuum. “A lone nut! you’ll get those.”
There’s also a refreshingly nuanced take on my latest cartoon over at Comic Strip of the Day:
There are a number of cartoons about the Tucson shootings, ranging from “weepers,” which serve the important purpose of informing people that death is sad, to those suggesting a direct, specific correlation between the rhetoric and the action, as if the right wing had purposefully delivered a detailed “to do” list into the hands of the shooter. I haven’t seen many that managed to make a persuasive point, but I would count this as one…
As for countering her examples, feel free, but I want to see something more persuasive than the time Obama explained his planned debating style with a flippant reference to Sean Connery’s advice to Kevin Costner in “The Untouchables,” or a DNC map that used traditional archery-style bull’s-eyes to show the areas in which they planned special efforts. Don’t waste my time unless you have specific examples of times nationally-known progressives used rhetoric about “refreshing the tree of liberty” or “reloading” or encouraged people to bring firearms to political rallies.
Predictably, I’ve been accused by others of not looking at the oh-so-incendiary rhetoric of the left, but tell me: when is the last time you heard a “mainstream” progressive pundit talk about killing ATF agents?
It’s pointless to have this conversation. When your side does it, it’s the President being “flippant” or they’re “archery targets” (the purpose of archery being the delivery of love, I presume) or what have you. When my side does it, it’s part of the right-wing hate machine, Sarah Palin is a mass murderer, etc.
I can’t recall a progressive talking about killing ATF agents. On the other hand, I can think of a progressive calling for Congressmen and their families to be dragged from their homes and killed by the mob (Alec Baldwin, not all that many years ago). Oh, but he was probably being “flippant” or “ironic” or some other word meaning that it doesn’t really count. Well, guess what, when Republicans have gun-shooting fundraisers, they’re being “flippant” too.
Can’t we just condemn calls to violence, and violence itself, and not worry about what label the caller has on them?
If anyone should be dragged from their homes and beaten, it’s a certain element of society called “Joe Vigilante”.
Alec Baldwin is a progressive? Okay. But if I didn’t know he was a progressive, does he have the stature and platform of Palin, the Junky, Savage, etc.? Is his odious call to violence the same as Palin’s or Savage’s various calls to violence?
I tend to agree that we should all just condemn violence and violent rhetoric, but it’s a hard conversation to have when the side whose leaders have been using very violent rhetoric for years want to equate that with violent rhetoric from various non-leaders of their opponents.
Has the left used violent rhetoric in the last decade? I’m sure that there are progressives and Dems who have. Is it anywhere close to the amount coming from the right over the same period? No.
If we can’t condemn violent rhetoric from the right without a response of, “The left has done it, too!” then you’re not willing to condemn violent rhetoric from your leaders and I don’t need to hear your defense of that rhetoric.
Jake Squid:
“Has the left used violent rhetoric in the last decade? I’m sure that there are progressives and Dems who have. Is it anywhere close to the amount coming from the right over the same period? No.”
You have no support for that second statement. How can you quantify the amount (much less compare them)? And, remember, Bush was the president for most of that decade. I bet the left was worse in their rhetoric. if a movie were done about the hypothetical assassination of Obama, it would be racist; when it was done of Bush, it was some artistic conception of an alternate future (Blah Blah Blah).
Even more so, the Left is worse in its violence! Do you remember the ’08 Republican National Convention? Do you remember the riots and bomb plots? Heck, the left even caused problems at the Democratic National Convention, if I recall correctly. They riot at any kind of economic summit (was the last one in Seattle?). You have them rioting all over Europe right now because they can’t retire until they are 62 (France), or their college tuition is going up (England), or the government bankrupted the country and can’t give them hand-outs anymore (Greece).
Oh, and don’t forget the union riots of the past.
When was the last time a group on the right engaged in rioting. Heck, apart from the Tea Party, the right barely protests or organizes for anything. The left has protest groups for everything (PETA, NOW, Code Pink, unions, GLBT issues, ELF, ALF, GreenPeace). And, some of them are violent.
-Jut
Sam L., who’s “Joe Vigilante”?
I see. So when the left uses rhetoric about treating political discourse like a knife fight and bringing a gun to it it’s to be dismissed as “flippant”. And the distinction between an archery and a rifle scope’s bullseye is significant, but the difference between a surveyor’s crosshairs and a rifle scope’s crosshairs isn’t? Of course, there is a difference. Nobody ever got shot with a surveying instrument, but hundreds of thousands of people have been killed over the centuries with a bow and arrow. Ever seen or used a hunting bow? One of those can put an arrow right through you and thousands of animals are killed each year with them.
How about Democratic Congressman Harry Mitchell putting his Republican opponent J. D. Hayworth’s face and chest in actual rifle scope crosshairs in a campaign video and calling for him to be targeted?
As to the dismissal of this guy as “crazy,” Josh Marshall made a good analogy on Olbermann’s show: when we have an epidemic, it’s the weak and old that get sick first, but it’s because of something in the environment. When the political environment is toxic, it will be the crazies who take things far enough to act on them, but that still doesn’t mean that their action is independent of that environmental background.
I just watched the video, and no reasonable person could interpret that as a call to kill ATF agents. He’s saying that they’re beginning to have a case about the UN taking over, not that they’re beginning to have a case for killing ATF agents, which should be obvious from the fact that the issues he was talking about have nothing whatsoever to do with the ATF.
Ditto Palin’s crosshairs map. Crosshairs are commonly used as a sign of targeting something in any of a number of senses that have nothing to do with shooting a gun at it. Take a look at this. Let me know how many pages of results you have to go through to find a reference to literally shooting someone. I gave up after five pages.
This game of combing through everything everyone on the right says to find something that could potentially be interpreted as violent or racist if you squint and look at it at just the right angle in just the right light is getting tiresome.
Oh, and Mother Jones is reporting that Loughner held a personal grudge against Giffords because she didn’t answer a nonsensical question he asked her at a public appearance in 2007.
That 2006 ad? Inexcusable and beneath contempt. That’s why people at the time were pointing out that There is a thin line between legitimate campaign imagery and hate speech. Placing your opponent’s head in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle crosses that line. (Unless, of course, you’re Sarah Palin, in which case you try to retcon those crosshairs as “surveyor’s marks.”)
Not that I expect you to actually give a shit. Because the whatabouttery is not “Yes, our side has done these things. And they are wrong. But you, too, need to shun people on your side who say them.” It’s about minimizing, excusing and denying violent rhetoric by finding a counterexample (credible or not) and pretending they cancel each other out.
That’s what’s tiresome: hearing the pretense that if you strip away the context and sorta squint just right, only a progressive /eyeroll could possibly be concerned about violent rhetoric, like Sharron Angle winning over 40% of the popular vote after urging Nevadans to use “Second Amendment remedies” if conservatives didn’t win more seats. Or that Rush Limbaugh, who happily advocates violence against liberals, is someone the national Republican party doesn’t dare anger. Or that Ann Coulter has any standing among conservatives whatsoever.
“When the political environment is toxic, it will be the crazies who take things far enough to act on them”
Insane people are more likely to be vitims of violent crime than to commit it, as discussed. Are they less likely to commit violent crime than th enormal population? I don’t know.
Are they more likely? I still don’t know.
Is it probably unfortunate to call them “the crazies?” Yes.
You know, the left has constantly been calling right-wing European politicians fascists and compared them to the Nazis since at least the early 2000s. Will we be seeing calls for holding them responsible for the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, who was killed for his anti-immigration views, although the press tried mightily to downplay that as a motive for months after the shooting.
And note how even today, even mainstream outlets like the Christian Science Monitor, when talking about Fortuyn’s assassination, only talk about his rhetoric, not about the slurs against him:
The Netherlands in 2002 and 2005 witnessed the killing of politicians Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh in the context of an often lurid anti-Islam rhetoric promoted by those individuals.
Sorry. That first paragraph should have ended in a question mark.
Is that the same Amanda Marcotte who wrote this:
I get the strong impression from this video that the maker did not intend the audience to walk away thinking that it would probably be best to just kill whitey. Nonetheless, that’s the message he managed to communicate.
Now, she didn’t actually advocate violence, but she certainly seems to suggest that deciding to “kill whitey” is a reasonable reaction to seeing a racist ad.
I was going to respond to RonF, but:
(1) Mythago said it better.
and
(2) Do you actually, seriously believe that Sarah “Don’t Retreat, RELOAD” Palin intended those markings as surveying symbols?
Glaivester @13:
That’s one of the most illiterate or most intentionally misinterpreted statements that I’ve seen for a long, long time. Maybe ever. How you get to your conclusion from the quote is simply unimaginable. I mean, I get that you’re trying to pin violent speech on a leftist and all, but that intention doesn’t lead from Amanda’s post (nor your quote of her) to your, may I say dadaist? conclusion.
Did you miss the next paragraph in which Amanda wrote:
Which could be taken to be criticizing violent rhetoric with a lot less conspiracy inference than you committed to formulate your comment.
RonF
Not a Newsradio fan, then?
The AV Club forums would have laughed.
No, I didn’t miss the next paragraph.
Which could be taken to be criticizing violent rhetoric
No, it couldn’t. Nothing in that paragraph criticized violent rhetoric. It criticized the ad for promoting racism, not for being violent, as the ad never advocated or even mentioned violence.
with a lot less conspiracy inference than you committed to formulate your comment.
There is no conspiracy, and I did not mean to imply that I actually think that she would condone violence against “whitey.” My point is that if someone of a different political persuasion had made a similar facetious suggestion, I think that there would have been a lot more outrage.
For example, if someone opposed to carbon regulation had said something to the effect that the recent granting of authority to the EPA to regulate carbon emissions, independent of new legislation, is going to send the message that the only way to stop carbon pricing is through violence or threats against the EPA, I doubt that there would be much hair-splitting over whether or not the violence or threats were actually being encouraged.
Sam L. – A show, I should point out, that was ruined by a shooting.
By the way, remember that “listen to your heart” is just an expression. Don’t tear it out and hold it up to your ear, no matter what the man in the radio says.
Jake:
You are correct. It would be unfair to accuse Marcotte of promoting violence against whites based on that quote. It’s a shame that your capacity for that sort of nuanced interpretation just up and disappears when it comes to people who aren’t on your team.
Joe @14: During the campaign, Palin referred to those symbols as “bullseyes” when she was disparaging Democrats for suggesting that she could possibly have meant a call to violence by using them. (And of course, unlike Angle, she wasn’t honestly hoping somebody would shoot her opponents; she was simply wink-wink-nudge-nudging her base, which gets off on eliminationist fantasy.)
But now, post-shooting, she doesn’t even have the character to come out herself and say “I took them down because it may have seemed insensitive; but I have never and would never advocate violence as a political solution.” You know, similar to what many Republican leaders are now saying. Instead she’s sent out her mouthpiece to lie that they were never crosshairs in the first place – they were ‘surveyor’s marks’.
D Aristophenes has a post over at Sadly. No which, while I’m not sure I agree with everything, has what I think is the best comment in the entire discussion:
Though one thing you mightn’t dial back is the fact that so many people’s first instinct was to assume in the initial hours of learning that a Democratic congressperson had been shot that Tea Party rage was the likeliest factor behind the crime. That is also a real thing, though it may in this case have proven to be wrong — and it ought to give Tea Partiers pause when they ponder why so many of their fellow Americans thought on first blush so poorly of them upon hearing of this terrible crime and initially measuring who might be culpable of it.
That is what the the current right-wing whinge-fest (and, just to pick on her, Sarah Palin’s own deafening silence) so willfully ignores — that the vindication of specific innocence in this particular incident does not mean that the larger questions about the debased tenor of our current national dialogue do not have merit in their own right.
Sam, I still have no idea what you’re talking about.
Here’s plenty more examples of people on the left using both text and imagery to call for the death of a Republican politician – in this case, President Bush. Warning: there’s unaccountably a couple of soft-porn images in there. I did a Google search on “Kill Bush”, I have no idea why those came up.
The above search showed only a couple of images of crosshairs on President Bush’s face, but also showed a number of pictures of Bush with either a gun pointed to his head or with a fatal head wound (and one combining crosshairs with a knife stabbed into him), and numerous hand-lettered signs, stencils and even a T-shirt and carry bag that were for sale calling for his death. A similar search for “kill obama” showed 3 pictures of him with crosshairs on his head. One needs more context because around the crosshairs is shown what looks like an old-style camera lens diaphragm, so it might be a camera (or not …). Of the other two, one is the cover of the Roswell Beacon (which I’ve never heard of) calling attention to an article inside entitled “White Fright – Local Law Enforcement Braces for Obama Backlash”(so it seems to be sensationalizing their article rather than calling for President Obama’s death) and the other is from the National Socialist Party, who I hope nobody pretends is accepted by anyone as part of any rational political discourse. There are NO handlettered (or otherwise) signs calling for any harm to come to him – I guess they missed all those signs as the “violent Tea Party” rallies, eh? And no T-shirts or carry bags.
Do I think those were surveyor’s crosshairs on Sarah Palin’s map? Oh, hell no. They sure bring rifle scope crosshairs to my mind. Of course, I’ve never looked through a surveying scope and I’ve looked through a couple of rifle scopes. I think it’s bullshit for Palin to say otherwise, or for her or any of her supporters to think than the general public will look at those and say “Surveyors’ crosshairs”. But targeting a district on a map is not putting crosshairs on an actual person. I’m not going to condemn it – or the Democratic map equivalent – because I don’t see either one as a call to violence.
Hm. I thought I’d made that clear, but it doesn’t show above, so perhaps it was in another thread. Let me be clear, then. I think that putting crosshairs on an image of a person’s face crosses the line regardless of whose face it is. Anyone who does that has left the realm of what I personally view as responsible political discourse. I bring up the examples I do not from a viewpoint of “You do it so we can do it” but to call bullshit on what I see as either an absurd presupposition of moral superiority by the left or as cynical political opportunism.
On one hand people pretend that a map put together by Sarah Palin with crosshairs on it is evidence of violent intent on her part and that she’s contributing to a political environment that encourages violence. On the other hand the same people say that a DNC map with bullseyes on it is insignificant because they’re archery bulleyes. That’s not me saying that one justifies or cancels out the other. That is people trying to minimize an act by their partisans to give them room to smear opposing partisans. That’s not something I’m doing.
RonF, are we now digging into “let’s see what a bunch of bloggers said about that”? Because if so, I’m not sure that Amp’s bandwidth could handle all the violent rhetoric and imagery from Free Republic.
Targeting a district is not, in a vacuum, violence. What about when you list the names of each candidate in that district you are ‘targeting’? What about when one of the ‘targets’ expresses her concern that such ‘targeting’ may be interpreted by some people as a call to violence – you know, perhaps because she lives in that district and sees that it is a lot more polarized and angry than Wasilla, Alaska? What about when the response to that is eye-rolling at those silly Democrats rather than a firm, clear statement that nobody in their right mind would call for violence?
What you see as ‘moral superiority’ is a very self-serving view. We’re not talking about whether a Democrat or a Republican has ever used violent imagery, or whether liberal or conservative Internet posters have ever said “so-and-so ought to be shot”. Thos things are not in question.
What is in question is that there is a very high level acceptance right now among conservatives – including Republicans – for violent imagery and eliminationist fantasies directed at political opponents that isn’t mirrored among liberals. There is no Democratic Glenn Beck. Michael Moore is an asshole, but he did not, to my knowledge, suggest that liberals exercise “Second Amendment remedies” if McCain or Angle won office. The Democratic party does not have a national talk-show host who regularly yuks it up about how liberals need to die, such that they are terrified of doing anything to incur that talk-show host’s displeasure. Ann Coulter has finally been rejected by even such people as David Horowitz, but she still has a seat at the GOP table; she is not a marginalized embarassment like David Duke.
So if your only reaction is “Oh yeah? Well you liberals are not so special!” instead of an urgent desire to clean house, well, go ahead and wallow.
Bear – I object to a lot of right-wing rhetoric but, given that there seems so far to be no particular evidence to link it to the shooting, attempting to use an unrelated and morally despicable incident to kickstart such a conversation (however worthy such a conversation in itself) seems like one of the worst ways of going about it. It makes those doing so look dishonest, and immediately both puts their opponents on the defensive and sidetracks the argument into discussions not of the rhetoric, but of what relevance the incident in question has.
Suppose, say, a drunk driver in a Prius had just killed a 5-year-old. Would you really feel better-disposed to have a rational discussion on energy policy with someone who said “In the light of this tragic death, we should seriously discuss the question of whether attempts to limit carbon emissions will destroy America” than with someone who objected to cap-and-trade without implying any connection to the death?
Jebedee @24: Your analogy makes no sense and really has nothing to do with what you’re objecting to.
If, instead, the person in your example said “Shouldn’t we be re-opening the subject of whether beer companies ought to be allowed to advertise?” or “This should lead us to take a second look at Prohibition,” that would be in some way related to the tragedy. Even if such people were incorrect in attributing causation – the drunk driver never saw a Bud Lite ad in his life, he was a minor and bought the booze illegally anyway – they are trying to discuss what they see as problems causally related to the incident.
The accurate part of your post is that people who were using violent rhetoric, or at least finding it appropriate, are going to be on the defensive. You presuppose that in the absence of a tragedy, they would be any more willing to have a thoughtful conversation about the implications of their words. I don’t know where you get that notion.
mythago – the subset of people who aren’t willing to have a thoughtful conversation under any circumstances seem unlikely to be persuaded by any such conversation, so as far as they’re concerned, wouldn’t the whole exercise be a waste of time? Presumably any benefits from a conversation arise with those who are more thoughtful, and I expect among those are many who would respond a lot better if it isn’t irrelevantly coupled to a tragic death. There’s a reason “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!” is a widely-mocked phrase.
As for the analogy, it would perhaps been better if I’d said that it didn’t immediately come to light that the driver was drunk. But I think the beer advertising one works fine as well, (except that establishing the presence or absence of any causal link would be much harder than it potentially is in the Jeffords case). If people try to justify a conversation based on a causal connection which later becomes widely known to be absent, they look at best foolish and at worst mendacious, and people generally lying somewhere between saintly rationality and immovable partisanship, I think it does devalue the conversation in the eyes of some who might otherwise respond to it. Better to forego the cheap “ripped from the headlines” kick (at least until you’re sure of your facts) and not risk the embarassment.
Sorry, “Jeffords” should of course be “Giffords”.
(Sorry, one last followup). To elaborate on the case of those who are uninterested in a thoughtful conversation and who have a public platform, the hope is presumably not to persuade them of your argument, but to force them to respond to it (and look bad if they can’t). But connecting the argument to a death gives them the perfect dodge; they’re not going to address your criticisms because they’re too outraged at the dubious link you’re proposing. Which I think will resonate to some degree with the less partisan who still find the link shaky at best.
Jebedee @26: I don’t think anybody is talking about a private conversation with people who won’t listen. In open public discourse, lots of people are listening. The people whose only reaction is “My side is never wrong” won’t listen, but they are not the only people around.
And no, I don’t agree with your dire predictions, which frankly come across as more of a warning than a summation: “Don’t you dare talking about that ‘reload’ joke or you’ll plunge into obscurity!” We have a level of national discourse where hinting (with various degrees of subtlety) that physically harming politicians and political enemies is admirable and, for a certain segment, gets votes; it doesn’t put one outside of electability forever, as it should. We have an incident where somebody shot a politician he disagreed with – and, new evidence suggests, considered a political enemy. Is it really so outrageous to you that people suggest that perhaps the latter should prompt discussion of the former?
And do you think anybody who is concerned about the level of political discourse cares about threats of “we’ll think you’re just playing politics!” from the same political crowd that thought shoot-a-liberal is not only funny but admirable?
mythago – not “outrageous” but ill-judged and prone to backfire. Consider three scenarios for the Giffords shooting.
1. Very quickly (which would of course be unusual, but not impossible), it comes to light (perhaps the shooter shouted something, or left a note) that the shooter is a die-hard rightwing partisan, inflamed and motivated by the rhetoric of Palin and others.
2. Very quickly, it comes to light that the shooter had a personal dispute with Giffords over money, and there’s no political motive at all.
3. The actual scenario. Motives are initially unclear, but over time have appeared unlikely to be strongly connected to rightwing rhetoric.
I would have no problem would linking the incident to a proposed conversation in case 1. I suggest (you may disagree) that it would not be appropriate to try to make such a link (not the same as saying it would inappropiate to have the conversation) in case 2 and (I may be overestimating pundits here) people wouldn’t generally try to do so.
Consequently, when either case 1 or case 2 (or somewhere in between) is a possibility then no, I don’t think people should be making the link. Because to do so is to accept that you may be bringing up something completely irrelevant (and which there’s a reasonable chance you will soon know to be completely irrelevant) but doing it anyway. I think this looks opportunist in any case, and foolish if the facts go against you. And I think many reasonable people are less inclined to listen to those they perceive as opportunist and/or foolish (this, rather than “fear of threats” is the risk). Which harms any subsequent conversation. I agree with you that winning ove the “lurkers” rather than the blowhards should be the goal, I just think that this approach harms that goal.
And what’s the downside of refraining until you know the facts? It doesn’t stop you from having the conversation. It doesn’t even stop you from making the link, if it’s relevant. It just denies you any impact you might have from making a premature connection. Given that such a connection may be wholly imaginary, I don’t see it as an unwarranted sacrifice.
(will be unable to reply to any followups until this evening).
Mythago, I check in on Free Republic about once a day. Their structure is such that a lot of topics spin by so you get to see things you might not have noticed or seen covered elsewhere. It’s quite true that there’s an unfavorable signal/noise ratio at time, and there are some ugly people among the posters. I comment a lot less there than I do here. Very often I don’t read the comments, just the posting. But even there I’ve never seen anyone say stuff along the lines of “We need to kill Obama”. The mods generally delete overt calls for violent acts.
The thing that the rush to pin this on supposed violent imagery from the right seems to forget is that so far we don’t have any understanding of what motivated the shooter. We know that the primary target was a Democratic Congresswoman, but that’s it. We do not know that Jared Loughner’s motivation had anything at all to do with Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or Bozo the Clown. All this controversy is sheer speculation and guesswork, but it’s being presented as if there were known links. There aren’t, and it’s political chicanery to pretend that we can assign responsibility for this to anyone’s statements, maps, or anything else.
What I don’t understand is why people seem to make the jump from “he is not a die hard conservative/ tea party member/ Glenn Beck fanboy” to “therefore, there is noway he was influenced by the current violent, eliminationist rhetoric”.
He is 22 years old. That means that from the beginning of his teens, he has lived in a political climate that is extremely charged with violent rhetoric. And over the last couple years, he grew up in a world where popular politians and media figures are advocating for violence, for “second amendment solutions”. He was presented, repeatedly, with the idea that violence is an appropriate answer to political or ideological differences. Maybe the people who said this weren’t thinking of the kind of disagreements that matter to him. Maybe he disagreed with some of their other ideas. But this is still a message he was given. This is the culture he grew up with. And he is a human being, which means that what happened around him influenced him in some way.
Can we point at one statement and say “here, this one directly caused him to become an assasin”? Of course not. But acts of violence- just like all other human actions- do not happen in a void. And when a culture encourages violence, it would be irresponsible not to ask where those ideas are comming from, and how to change it. Because that is one of the many dangers of promoting violence as the answer- people may decide to listen,and they may decide that violence is the answer to all kinds of problems that the original speaker might have not even been thinking about.
Well, laurin, the problem is that there’s no evidence for your main premise that he’s been exposed to and was influenced by any of that. I watch the news on TV almost every night and read at least one newspaper every day. But I’ve never listened to Glenn Beck, I’ve only heard Rush Limbaugh a couple of times, etc., etc. While there are some notable examples of commentators who have made allusions to violence the vast majority of people in fact never heard them. You seem to think that this is inescapable. I put more attention into staying informed than almost all of my acquaintances and friends and neither I nor them pay any attention to that nonsense (I’ve asked).
Take radio. Rush Limbaugh apparently has 14 million listeners a week. That means that every week 316 million or so Americans don’t hear what he said. And he tops the ratings list. TV I should think is something similar.
Plus, apparently this person spent very little time listening to TV or radio. He was lost in his own mind. The concept that American society is awash in violent right-wing imagery and that it has both a broad and deep influence over people just doesn’t hold up to examination. The dominant outside influence on him seems to be that back in 2007 he asked Rep. Giffords an incoherent question and she blew him off and he got obsessed with her – well before the Tea Party movement became active and before anyone outside of Alaska ever heard of Sarah Palin.
I messed up the [/a] in the above post somehow (it should be after “week.” in the 2nd paragraph).
[Fixed! –Amp]
Ron, I don’t listen to the radio at all, and I rarely watch TV; I’ve never been particularly political to begin with, and I have developed some medical problems that have led me to be pretty far removed from society for the past couple of years. I’ve been so disengaged with political discourse the past few years that (as came up earlier on this thread) I’d never even heard about this “Liberal Fascism” meme that apparently has been batted around and discussed ad nauseum for some time now. And I’m 44, which means that I’m automatically, simply by virtue of my age, less attuned to the contemporary zeitgeist than any 22-year-old is likely to be.
And yet, even I was aware of the exceptional violence of the current political discourse, that it’s become popular to trot out good old Jefferson and his tree of liberty quotation, and that guns are very often lately being presented as the logical solution to political decisions with which one disagrees. It’s a cultural atmosphere so pervasive that even a middle-aged hermit like myself could not avoid being exposed to it.
A healthy, active 22-year-old who takes enough of an interest in politics not only to attend political events, but also to raise his hand and ask questions of politicians at public Q&A sessions? One who pays enough attention to know which bills have been passed in Congress and when, and to have personal opinions about them? (Loughner’s friend claimed he didn’t talk about Giffords all that much, but only brought up her name when she had signed onto bills that he found “particularly stupid.”) One who is very concerned about government control of the populace through grammar?
I promise you: no matter how disordered that 22-year-old’s thinking might be, he is breathing in the political atmosphere. This claim that he was somehow insulated from it by virtue of his irrational beliefs just doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m not insulated from it, and I barely ever even leave the house! Loughner could have been wearing all the tin foil hats in the world, and he still would not have been insulated from it. That’s just the way that culture works.
All of which shows he was keeping up with the news. But there’s plenty of people providing that kind of information that aren’t breathing fire and smoke when they do so. Being aware that such folks are out there is one thing. Listening to them and being influenced by them is quite another.
I’m not sure you’re making a very compelling argument there, Ron. Stating that there are people providing the information without the fire and smoke doesn’t indicate that those who are invested in violence and vitriol aren’t influencing those around them.
The argument seems to be that a) there are people in radio and TV providing information and also making extremist remarks, b) a person who performed violent acts seems to have known some of that information and thus c) the person who performed the violent acts was influenced by their extremist remarks. But it’s fallacious. There are plenty of other places that said person could have gotten that information, said person never referenced the extremist remarks and there’s no evidence that said person ever listened to those remarks or even ever heard of them. Claiming that there’s an all-pervasive atmosphere of right-wing violent political imagery that the shooter MUST have heard of and that it MUST have influenced him just doesn’t hold up to examination.
Elkins:
And I’m 44, which means that I’m automatically, simply by virtue of my age, less attuned to the contemporary zeitgeist than any 22-year-old is likely to be.
I talk to young people a lot and while those of us in our 40’s and 50’s are less attuned to popular culture than those younger, we are generally more attuned to politics. Go ask a 22-year-old acquaintance who their State and Federal representatives are. Ask them what the DREAM Act proposed. Ask them what the principles expressed by the Tea Party are. The odds are they’ll either not know or get them wrong. True, they are probably more likely than you to know what Jon Stewart said last night. But a lot of them won’t, and I rather doubt they’ll have a clue what any political commentator on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC or any of the rest have been saying lately.
Really, still arguing?
RonF, the shooter supposedly asked Giffords, “What is government if words have no meaning?” Which seems to this Robert Anton Wilson fan like a straightforward question pointing towards the right-libertarian answer of ‘violence’. On YouTube he took this further and said, “The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” apparently. But sure, the probability of the shooter following right-wing rhetoric seems less than the expected probability we derived from the theory of “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” and Double High personalities. What conclusion do you draw from this? Do you think that it requires a large adjustment to the priors, or in other words, that the theory beforehand almost completely ruled out a mentally ill shooter with no political affiliation? This claim seems untenable. Even PZ Myers wrote something like, “his primary affiliation was ‘crazy'”. Do you think we end up with a probability of future right-wing violence adjusted down close to the chance of left-wing violence? That seems awfully dubious to me as well. Read the link if you haven’t already.
I admit it took at least a minute to find the following quotes on an older page at Free Republic: