Posts by Neil Morrison
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I'll sumarise my views and move on.
1. I think the rush by the US liberal comentariat to link Palin to Lougher was ill-judged as there was no evidence and as of this moment there is still no evidence and mounting evidence for a very different scenario. Not that Palin doesn't deserve to be pinged, but ping her for something real.
2. The maps. Not a good idea to criticise others for something one has already done. I really don't find these arguments about crosshairs vs bullseyes all that convincing.
3. If people are going to argue that some one will not understand that the crosshair is a metaphor and they will then go and shoot someone then that should be argued on the basis of what we know of how the mind works. People just do not "go crazy" in some sort of random way.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Good grief.
If someone's thinking is so concrete that they mistake a symbol for the real thing (the crosshairs symbol) then they will not be able to make a distinction between the map and what the map represents, ie they won't know its a symbol.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
"Nutter"? "wacko"?
I still don't know who you're talkng about. The inablity to think in an abstract manner is known as concrete thinking. It can result from some forms of mental illness, if you could give some examples of people with a mental illness taking such symbols literally and acting out on that please do.
One problem with that is the map is also a symbol, I haven't heard of any outbreak of people shooting maps.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
so you have a counter example?
I was using concrete thinking in its technical sense.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Good to see you are so in the mind of every nutter out there on the periphery
Are you refering to people with a mental illness in general or do you have in mind a particlar cognitive dysfunction that would lead to such concrete thinking?
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One of them positions you as the shooter
the other positions someone as a target.
They're both being used in a metaphorical sense to identify a target. No one takes these signs literally in this sort of context.
Palin's map wasn't a great target for countering her rhetoric since similar DLC graphics could be easily found. That's not to argue for any sort of equivalence in the overall styles of rhetoric, just that this was not a good example.
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Maybe he doesn't fit into the left-right spectrum. He was an atheist, didn't object to flag burning and into 9/11 conspiracies.
I’m going to ask for the psychiatric diagnosis to be left to people who are qualified and in a position to make it.
Evidence is coming out about his state of mind and his motivations. It may not be the full picture yet but when people are trying to draw conclusions about politics it's probably the best place to start.
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It does in fact turn out that Loughner had held a grudge against Giffords
for a number of years. A grudge more to do with his sense of personal aggrievement than any political issue.A grudge going back to 2007.
Plus his very high opinion of himself:
Loughner sometimes approached strangers and would say "weird" things, Tierney recalls. "He would do it because he thought people were below him and he knew they wouldn't know what he was talking about."
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It's is probably worth waiting for the facts to come out before making judgements about the political implications.
The guy got chucked out of school in Oct, bought the gun in Nov. He seemed to have a very high opinion of his intellectual abilitities - a view not shared by others.
He had had pervious contact with Giffords in 2007.
His focus on her may not have been poltical at all.
There are people on the left and right trying to argue that they guy is right wing or left wing. A bit of a sick game.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Ever thought about reading a link before posting a response?
apologies, I got that wrong.