Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Paul Holmes' nocturnal emission for Bullet Barbie
What a nincompoop that man is. His adolescent yearnings for Palin are right up there with the Business Roundtable's Roger Kerr panting after Deborah Coddington across parliament's lawns.
But more worrying is the simplistic wittering he brings to the public platforms we still for some reason grace him with. Like this gem:
The right were able to hammer [Obama] for being an elite, isolated intellectual, I suppose the kind of person I regard suspiciously here who listens to National Radio and reads the Listener and believes we should never mine the conservation estate. They see him as really left wing, if not a socialist, the kind of person, actually, for whom National Radio is designed. He needs to lighten up.
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Salon editor Joan Walsh considers the influence of rhetoric.
But while we wait to learn the motivation behind Saturday's shooting, which killed six, including federal Judge John Roll, nine-year old Christine Taylor Green and Gabe Zimmerman, Giffords' community outreach director, is it really controversial to suggest that the overheated anti-government rhetoric of the last two years, with its often violent imagery, ought to be toned down? Really?
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Hard News: Behaving badly at the bottom…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I know of no suppressions in this case that have been imposed in the face of defence opposition.
But the whole suppression process has been.. suppressed, hasn't it - except two clauses.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
so influenced by a map with a set of targets on it
I believe you'll find it's the associated exhortations from leading figures including silly Palin, and things like the "bring your gun" election campaign meeting in that particular place.
political violence in the US isn't at all new
True . There's a longstanding theme of distrust of and potential armed resistance against government enshrined in their constitution's 2nd amendment, whipped up by the NRA and driving previous domestic terrorism like Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma and (probably) the anthrax scare that mysteriously faded from public view without anyone being brought to justice. The real terrorists in the US are more likely to be drinking bourbon than wearing a turban.
It's all a bit different than what such a map would mean here.
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Hard News: Behaving badly at the bottom…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The suppression of the reasons for the decision is at the request of the defendants.
Are we allowed to know/say that?
Without having seen the suppressed material, I guess this fact might suggest that there is some reasoning in the decision that could affect the reputation of the defendants?
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Still, it's a nice distraction tactic
Reducing it to the actions of a deranged loner avoids the bigger picture all too nicely - but no one acts in a vacuum.
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Oh, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting a couple of months back examined some of Faux News' hateful efforts to stir up their base.
Bill O'Reilly's recent "joke" about decapitating Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was only the latest example of a demented Fox News culture that permits on-air personalities to fantasize about assassination and other forms of violence against those deemed enemies of the station, its personalities or their worldview.
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Couple of relevant articles about the Arizona tragedy:
James Fallows in the Atlantic on the Cloudy Logic of 'Political' Shootings
So the train of logic is:
1) anything that can be called an "assassination" is inherently political;
2) very often the "politics" are obscure, personal, or reflecting mental disorders rather than "normal" political disagreements. But now a further step,
3) the political tone of an era can have some bearing on violent events. The Jonestown/Ryan and Fromme/Ford shootings had no detectable source in deeper political disagreements of that era. But the anti-JFK hate-rhetoric in Dallas before his visit was so intense that for decades people debated whether the city was somehow "responsible" for the killing. (Even given that Lee Harvey Oswald was an outlier in all ways.)That's the further political ramification here. We don't know why the Tucson killer did what he did. If he is like Sirhan, we'll never "understand." But we know that it has been a time of extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery, including SarahPac's famous bulls-eye map of 20 Congressional targets to be removed -- including Rep. Giffords. It is legitimate to discuss whether there is a connection between that tone and actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be. At a minimum, it will be harder for anyone to talk -- on rallies, on cable TV, in ads -- about "eliminating" opponents, or to bring rifles to political meetings, or to say "don't retreat, reload."
and Vaughan Bell on Slate about Mental illness as an explanation for violence
Shortly after Jared Lee Loughner had been identified as the alleged shooter of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, online sleuths turned up pages of rambling text and videos he had created. A wave of amateur diagnoses soon followed, most of which concluded that Loughner was not so much a political extremist as a man suffering from "paranoid schizophrenia."
For many, the investigation will stop there. No need to explore personal motives, out-of-control grievances or distorted political anger. The mere mention of mental illness is explanation enough. This presumed link between psychiatric disorders and violence has become so entrenched in the public consciousness that the entire weight of the medical evidence is unable to shift it. Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don't expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I know I'm not supposed to laugh at that yet, but..
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More from Horizon political poll, this time the emotional responses that candidates evoke.