Diagnosing Jared Lee Loughner for Political Gain
Posted on January 10, 2011 in Accountability Campaign 2010 Civic Responsibility Hatred Stigma Violence
They’re doing it all over again: jumping to the conclusion that Jared Lee Loughner is mentally ill because he is violent. Tea Party minions have been ordered via email to label him as a “liberal lunatic”. Keith Olbermann labeled him a “disturbed person”. I have yet to see a psychiatric report on him, but I have heard plenty of people state with the authority that comes from watching Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street that he is a “paranoid schizophrenic”.
You know me: I live with bipolar disorder. It is there every hour of my day, stilled by [[carbamazepine]] and [[lamotrigine]]. So you know I have a stake in this. Others I know with the disorder also are concerned about the publicity. If they’re new to the diagnosis, they may fear beyond reason that they might go insane like Loughner did. If they’ve known for some time, they are taking a silent breath and saying “Here we go again.” Here comes the need for secrecy, for hiding their illness from the world. Some will not attend support groups out of fear of being seen and others will come, distraught from the fear of what Society will do with them. There are those out there who will say that we have to find the Jared Lee Loughners before they hurt another and that means throwing out the advances of the last fifty years and reopening the mental hospitals. These are reckless times and our fear is not unfounded.
Slate ran an excellent article, cautioning its readers and newsmen not to jump to the conclusion that Loughner is “mentally ill”. In part the article says:
A 2009 analysis of nearly 20,000 individuals concluded that increased risk of violence was associated with drug and alcohol problems, regardless of whether the person had schizophrenia. Two similar analyses on bipolar patients showed, along similar lines, that the risk of violent crime is fractionally increased by the illness, while it goes up substantially among those who are dependent on intoxicating substances. In other words, it’s likely that some of the people in your local bar are at greater risk of committing murder than your average person with mental illness.
Of course, like the rest of the population, some people with mental illness do become violent, and some may be riskier when they’re experiencing delusions and hallucinations. But these infrequent cases do not make “schizophrenia” or “bipolar” a helpful general-purpose explanation for criminal behavior. If that doesn’t make sense to you, here’s an analogy: Soccer hooligans are much more likely to be violent when they attend a match, but if you tell me that your friend has gone to a soccer match, I’ll know nothing about how violent a person he is. Similarly, if you tell me your friend punched someone, the fact that he goes to soccer matches tells me nothing about what caused the confrontation. This puts recent speculation about the Arizona suspect in a distinctly different light: If you found evidence on the Web that Jared Lee Loughner or some other suspected killer was obsessed with soccer or football or hockey and suggested it might be an explanation for his crime, you’d be laughed at. But do the same with “schizophrenia” and people nod in solemn agreement. This is despite the fact that your chance of being murdered by a stranger with schizophrenia is so vanishingly small that a recent study of four Western countries put the figure at one in 14.3 million. To put it in perspective, statistics show you are about three times more likely to be killed by a lightning strike.
It’s the usual case of the media and politicians finding the explanation for the Saturday’s horror in Tuscon everywhere except in themselves. We need confront the media for its violent imagery and its pandering to the worst in American society. We must stand up to demogogues who employ violent rhetoric, saying “Enough of this talk of Second Amendment remedies and hit lists of liberal politicians. Tone it down. Cool it. The buck stops with you.”
Lightning probably did not strike in Arizona, but hatred did.
Executing Christiana Green
Posted on January 10, 2011 in Hatred Liberty Propaganda
“It’s ok. Christina Taylor Green was probably going to end up a leftwing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as ‘they’ say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly.”–Tina King (teabagger on Sarah Palin’s FB page)
The preceding is protected under the free speech clause of the 1st Amendment. It means that I cannot ask my government to put Tina King or Sarah Palin in jail for being vipers. But there’s something they can’t do, either. They can’t ask the government to protect them from my free speech right to call on others to condemn them for their barbarism. They would like us to think that they can proceed without receiving criticism, but they are wrong. They may say that when their First Amendment right fails to move — yea even irritates — others, they can fall back on threats to employ the Second Amendment, but nothing excuses murder or the threat of murder.
This blog article is also protected under the First Amendment. Just as I am not obligated under the terms of the Bill of Rights to allow missionaries to force their way through my front door and deliver their spiel, so, too, am I not required to sit silent when the Tea Baggers make our country foolish. I have the right to deliver scorn, to point to the hypocrisy of a movement that on one hand thinks that a underdeveloped fetus must be preserved at any cost, but which celebrates the death of a nine year old who had done no one any harm. I can say that we’ve had enough violent rhetoric, that it is time to stop it and to get on with civil discussions about the way our country is headed.
What Tina King has said about Christina Taylor Green reeks worse than the bio-waste of any abortion and if Sarah Palin doesn’t go past deleting it — if she does not repudiate it, she has demonstrated that she should not command any respect from the Republicans or any other American. And if the Republicans don’t start using their power of example to police this, they do not deserve our confidence as voters, they do not deserve the peace of statesmanship but only the severe criticism due to demagogues.
Listen to Keith Olbermann
Posted on January 9, 2011 in Terrorism Violence
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Laughner and His Cloud of Unknowing
Posted on January 8, 2011 in Accountability Civic Responsibility Propaganda Scoundrels Terrorism Violence
Laughner may be as crazy as a fox.
Where I am now is that there is the usual cloud of unknowing that follows an event like this. Some say it was the Left, some say it was the Right. I reacted as I did because I have seen time and again threats to kill progressives, liberals and moderates here on the Web. Now I have to say that I don’t know what we have in this person.
Laughner loves Mein Kampf. Paradoxically, he’s listed “The Communist Manifesto” as a favorite book ((Anyone who has read Mein Kampf knows that Hitler calls for the elimination of Communists as part of his program)) , too, along with Alice in Wonderland and Fahrenheit 451. He is a gold standard enthusiast. He thinks the government is controlling us through our grammar (shades of accusations of political correctness?). He may be mentally ill.
In this Internet-powered world, it is the first step of news agencies to look for what the person was saying online. I suggest it is possible that Laughner understands this all too well and wrote his Myspace and Youtube descriptions with a mind to confusing the issue. No true Leftist believes in Mein Kampf. It is only the Right wing that insists this is true, so I believe Laughner could be trying to confound us.
I do not condone eliminationalist rhetoric regardless of the source. We have heard a lot of it from the Right here in America. That led me and countless others to rage against Sarah Palin. She is still in the wrong for posting her “target sights” hit piece.
Rachel Maddow wisely says to wait for the truth. I didn’t, but neither has World Net Daily. In the meantime, it is fitting that we mourn the lives of those who were killed in the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gifford.
Rhetoric of violence has no place in American society. We must repeat this so that all hear it.
The Death Squads Arrive
Posted on January 8, 2011 in Accountability Civic Responsibility Hatred Scoundrels Terrorism Violence
Keith Olbermann wrote on his Facebook page: There is not one liberal page that I have visited that doesn’t have several people on it from the opposing side, that says, SHOOT them all. Get rid of them, “WE want our country back” I’m incensed and so angry as I listen to the horror of this story unfold. John Boehner, go screw yourself, you are a part of the problem, not the solution.
John Boehner is “horrified” by what was done to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. He had better do better than that. Boehner rode the wave of hate to get where he is today and if he is to have any credibility, he should denounce those who call for killing progressives and liberals.
I honestly do not believe Boehner believes in death squads. He merely used the Tea Party and the John Birch Society to win an election. I do not believe Rupert Murdoch — who said he likes Democrats because their administrations make for better news — wanted this, but Glenn Beck is another matter I believe. No matter how much Boehner and Beck cry, they cannot escape responsibility as long as they do not recognize their own role in this. Witness, too, the Koch Brothers. Witness, as well, everyone who won’t see the Obama birth certificate in front of them like the woman who cried out in the House of Representatives just a few days ago.
Death squads have come to America. Progressives, liberals and moderates, it is time to rise like you have never risen before. It is time to rescue the land we love. Not in our nation!
Cheap Love
Posted on January 4, 2011 in Agnosticism Morals & Ethics
As an agnostic, I can allow myself to trolley back and forth between atheist and religious thinkers. I’ve been reading a biography of [amazonify]1595551387::text::::Dietrich Bonhoeffer[/amazonify], paying special attention to the notion of “cheap” versus “costly” grace.
Just as in the years before Hitler’s rise, we see a lot of cheap grace in our Christian community. All you have to do is say “Jesus has saved me” and you can go on being the same person you always were. You can continue to be selfish; vote for right-wing candidates; hate women and minorities of all stripes; and generally live a life against the principles of Christ because God loves everyone and it doesn’t matter what you do. You bought a Bible, said you were saved, and so you are.
Costly grace is based on the Epistle of James where it is said that it is your works that count the most. You won’t worship the rich as the epitomes of Christian life in the world, you won’t turn your back on the poor and the sick, you won’t twist the words of and declaim against those attempting to build a compassionate society. Costly grace entails sacrifices including being less than wealthy, being seen as unheroic by a society obsessed with violence, and working in your spare time to help others.
I think a fine example of cheap grace is the line “I don’t like what {group x} does, but I still love them.” Yes, just sit back in your easy chair and insist on your love. It’s easy to come by: you just say that it is so. But how many people in America “love” the poor and then vote for politicians who raise taxes on the underclass and solve their health problems by incarcerating them? How many people say that because of their Bible they can’t allow homosexuals to marry, but they still “love” them?
The Bible tells us to do many things, but Biblidolators love to overlook the stuff that it downright vile and barbaric when it comes to their own lives and impose the worst on others. How many of them apply the repeated Biblical mandates against greed to their own lives? I think one of the functions of the űber-rich for middle class Americans is to give themselves the feeling that they are poor — even though by the standards of most of the rest of the world they are wallowing in specie. “Blessed are us,” they say and “blessed are those who allow a little to trickle down to us.” The rich are, to us, idols.
But cheap grace and the cheap love that comes from it allows them to say “I’m on my path, so I can be forgiven for what I do. I’ll get into heaven without any effort on the greed front.” So they go on despising the poor, Muslims, homosexuals, women confident that no matter how egregious and unChristian the spirit of their actions, they can just call it love and be forgiven.
God help them if there is a God. God help the rest of us whether or not there is one.
Republican Christmas
Posted on December 19, 2010 in Class Compassion Scoundrels
As rain mists on the street outside my Southern California condo, I reflect on the blinders pulled over the eyes of the American people by the Republicans in Congress. While many blame Obama for the mess we are in legislatively, I put the burden on Harry Reid and the authors of the current filibuster rule in the Senate. If it had not been for this, we would have a Public Option, the Dream Act, and who knows what else? But Harry got cocky with his 60 senator majority, never remembering that while the Republicans can hold together a bloc, the Party of the Big Tent has many philosophical rifts. Too often we saw Democrats such as [[Max Baucus]], [[Ben Nelson]], [[Blanche Lincoln]], and [[Christopher Lieberman]] join the filibuster to defeat progress. If there had not been so much maneuvering, Congress might have pushed through middle class tax relief without giving in to the Republicans’ demand for millionaire welfare.
And can you believe it? In the last days of this Congress, the Republicans cried that they did not want to decide matters any further “out of respect for Christmas”. What kind of Christ is this? A Christ who won’t pay his taxes, who hates the poor, wants the rich to hold onto all their money, and holds aloft the spear of war. Fundamentalists have prepared this field for many years with their adroit cafeteria Christianity which finds every possible exemption — in their eyes — to living the life of Christ. Bah humbug if Christmas is about denying the unemployed benefits, increasing taxes on the poorest among us, and giving more to those who have no want except power and greed.
Respect for the vestiges of the Saturnalia in Christmas is what the Republicans are on about — the big stuffed turkeys and the cushy firesides inside glowing mansions. If Christ was born among us today and they got wind of it, they’d be at the manger to deny the validity of his birth certificate. What they most fear is a reversal of their legitimacy — they use Christ to make greed a sacrament. They can’t stand a world in which his actual words define what it means to be good.
Glenn Beck’s Big Government Claims a Victim
Posted on December 16, 2010 in Equality Liberals & Progressives Violence
You can count on me when there is a bizarre incident involving a person who is obviously mentally ill. Many people like to hear that when a fellow marches into a local school board, spray paints a V in a circle ((Reference to the series V?)), and then, after proclaiming that he is going to die this day, opens fire on the chairman before being taken down by a security guard. that this was nothing more than mental illness, that the man was clearly delusional, and we have nothing to worry about ((Another video is here.))
My experience bears out that whatever the mad do reflects on the culture we are living in. The man in this scenario had two issues on his mind: that his wife had been fired by the school board for undisclosed reasons and that there was a new half cent sales tax that his family would have to be paying at a time when they could not afford it. He spoke of the schools being gutted before this tax was levied. What was the real story?
I hazard that his wife lost her job in a budgetary cutback. He mentioned that she just lost her unemployment insurance, so it sounds like things are tight. The whole idea of a sales tax was a slap in the face. His wife, who is now without an income, must pay this extra burden on her grocery bill. So Mr. Clay A. Duke takes his case to the people who are causing all the woe in his eyes. He shoots and is himself shot.
What was this tax revolt business? We might ask whose martyr is he, anyways? If he’s just a nut, we can shake him out to the air, but there’s a depression going on and the poor have just been made to bear a tax increase while the wealthy who aren’t spending any money to get this economy going are getting a continuance of the tax cut that never produced any results just in case it does. Mr. Duke might have woken up and, on hearing the news of the loss of his wife’s unemployment benefits, picked up his handgun to get a little justice down in Panama City, Florida. He took a gun to a school board, mind you, because he thought that they — as the most accessible arm of the government that he knew about — had caused his problems. Taxes, he thought, the new taxes are going to kill him. The school board chief makes a weak argument for the equitableness of sales taxes as compared to property taxes, but the fool should know never to argue with a man with a gun. When it comes out, he weakly whines “Please don’t do that!” but Duke does it and in less than thirty seconds, ends up dead on the floor, the victim of a school cop.
Glenn Beck might, if he dared, pick this up as an example of a citizen hurt by Big Government — and he would be right, but the Big Government that drove Mr. Duke to madness is the kind that preys on the working class. That kind of Big Government must be given unlimited power, in Beck’s book. This madman might well be forgotten in a year’s time because he was no Tea Bagger with a liberal in his sights, but an ordinary guy who just couldn’t understand why his world was falling apart around him.
Lately, I have witnessed more statements of unrest, attesting to the feeling that fascism has taken hold of America since the November election. Give any one of these a gun and a violent psychosis and you could have Mr. Duke ((One writes “What did they do with these parasites the world over?? I say let’s do like the french! Off with their heads. How long will we tolerate this until? the specter is haunting these people.”)) . There are only a few steps from the righteous rage of the Left to Mr. Duke. It would be best for Obama and his new-found friends on the Right not to test that.
Rude and Barbaric
Posted on December 15, 2010 in Culture Wars Hatred Propaganda
Many of us are paralyzed into non-thinking when someone invokes “freedom of speech” or “freedom of religion” as the reason why they believe as they do. When you translate this, it means “I can say what I want and you can’t criticize it.” It’s a common rejoinder from the Right — especially racists — and from extremist believers aka Fundamentalists among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. When the American public buys into this, it leads us to a place where only the corrupt and vile can speak.
The First Amendment was never meant to operate so. And I think free speech is closer to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said about ethics: ethics aren’t there to excuse what we do but to make us reach for something better. When we let the racist or the fundamentalist go unchallenged because “it’s his opinion and he can think what he wants” we let society down. We allow it to fester in fraudulency and evil. It is our duty to say to people who voice ugliness that they are ugly. We have these rights to make a better America, a better world. And part of that means using our voices to confront wrong.
If a Muslim cleric says apostates must be executed, we have a right to say “Well, that is just barbaric.” If a skinhead says he has a right to hate foreigners, we have a right to say “That is backwards and bad.” They scream that it is their free speech right, but they cannot silence us with their insistences that they can say anything — and do anything — they want without us challenging them because of free speech. That alone deserves admonishment. They live in America and they cannot put a stopper on their fellow citizens.
They are rude and barbaric. And I think they realize it, but don’t want to admit it.
Obama’s Blunder
Posted on December 7, 2010 in Accountability Campaign 2010 Class
Obama has been a disappointment lately. He has not yet figured out the importance of not alienating his progressive base. California governor Jerry Brown understood this when he faced defeat after the passage of Proposition 13. But instead of calling his true followers idiots as the President seems inclined to do, he appealed to a populist notion: the voters have said that they want a change in how property taxes are assessed.
He won the election handily that fall despite the fact that he was up against the “unbeatable” Everelle Younger. His followers stayed behind him and many who supported 13 joined the procession. Never once did Brown belittle those who had knocked on doors to put him in office. Here is Obama’s big mistake.
How might he better handle things? He might simply say this: The voters want to give the Bush tax cuts another try. So in exchange for unemployment benefits, we’re going to give it to them. Then when things fall apart, he can say “We went the Republican way and the Republican Way has failed. It is time to apply some real economics to pull our country out of debt and to put people back to work.”
But for some reason, his advisers are adverse to giving progressives a little credit for understanding the complexities of economics or clout in determining who gets to be president.
My only question is “Jerry Brown? Won’t you run?”
Twain, Gould, and Mammonism; Strickland
Posted on December 2, 2010 in Accountability Class Reading
I’m deep in Mark Twain’s Autobiography, a curious document which consists of his dictated remembrances, newspaper clippings, and a biography written by his second child, Susy. It does not follow any sort of neat line, but jumps about like a carnival ride landing here in his lecture circuit days, there in his boyhood, and here in his opinions of the current day. One passage that I have just read speaks to our time:
Jay Gould had just then reversed the commercial morals of the United States. He put a blight upon them from which they have never recovered, and from which they will not recover for as much as a century to come. Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it. They had respected men of means before his day, but along with this respect was joined the respect due to the character and industry which had accumulated it. But Jay Gould taught the entire nation to make a god of money and the man, no matter how the money might have been acquired. In my youth there was nothing resembling a worship of money or of its possessor, in our region. And in our region no well-to-do man was ever charged with having acquired his money by shady methods.
The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days. Its message is “Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it in prodigious abundance. Get ir dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must.”
How true! A new American feudalism arises before our eyes and it has bought the traditional check against its progress, the media. Ted Strickland, who was recently narrowly defeated as Ohio’s governor, thinks part of the problem is that the Democrats have failed to speak about these conditions in language which voters understand.
Instead of embracing populism, they have retreated into intellectual elitism.
Strickland says:
“I think it has to do with a sort of intellectual elitism that considers that kind of talk is somehow lacking in sophistication. I’m not sure where it comes from. But I think it’s there. There’s an unwillingness to draw a line in the sand.”
This intellectual elitist concurs with Strickland’s assessment. As the governor asks “How many times do you have to be, you know, slapped in the face?”
It’s class warfare and my class needs better generals.
The Fall of America
Posted on December 1, 2010 in Civic Responsibility Disasters
Former Reagan Budget Chief David Stockman said it right: the Republicans are obsessed by a “theology of tax cuts“. Stockman says a correction in the form of higher taxes for the wealthy is necessary after “a thirty year binge that wasn’t sustainable”. The issue is solvency. The only thing the Koch Brothers — sons of a man who openly supplied Texas oil to Hitler — seem to want is the destruction of America.
So let me say these things:
- Anyone who wants to continue the tax breaks for millionaires isn’t thinking about the country and his fellow Americans.
- If the Republicans get their way, the country is going down the toilet and you and I are going with it.
- If anyone starts talking about California seceding from the Union, let them feel free to add my name to the list. My country is about my neighbors. I shall not tolerate people who do not think about them when formulating policies that are bringing us the economic security of Somalia.
It is not Obama who is driving me here, but the Tea Party whose leader has now declared that voting should be limited to people with property.
Mark me a true patriot.
