Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2: Chewing over the News
537 Responses
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HORansome, in reply to
To be fair, Rich, you haven't ended up as a dustman yet. The prophecy might still come true.
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recordari, in reply to
Then we should probably start having a go at Sacha and Lucy for being condescending, too, right?
What about the rest of us? Are we not condescending enough? I'm getting damn sick of being invisible round here. Don't know why I bother.
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BenWilson, in reply to
I'm getting damn sick of being invisible round here. Don't know why I bother.
You're not invisible to me. You're just too likable to have a go at :-)
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As I said then, and to repeat, all those articles, and others, were published within hours of the shooting occurring. All of them laid the blame squarely, and to the exclusion of all other factors, at the door of the tea party and it’s rhetoric.
Again, this is just not true. If we refer to the articles you cited earlier (having already disposed entirely of your claims about this thread) we find:
Neither the Tea Party nor Obama created these divisions.
One anti-Obama campaigner carried a placard saying, "It is time to water the tree of liberty"– a reference to Thomas Jefferson's famous quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." It's the same quote Timothy McVeigh was wearing on his T-shirt when he was arrested for bombing the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
The connection between this rhetoric and Saturday's events are not causal but contextual.
In other words, even the very articles you are claiming as evidence for this historical amnesia admit and highlight previous American political violence. I mean, really, I hate to say it, but none of your factual claims seem to stand up under scrutiny.
(By the way, do you really not get why allegations that people are just using this as an excuse to take their hobby horses out for a canter are pretty offensive?)
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The upcoming Alien invasion may see those yanks using their guns after all... http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jan/10/earth-close-encounter-aliens-extraterrestrials
"Evolution on alien worlds, he said, is likely to be Darwinian in nature. Morris argues that life anywhere else in the universe will therefore probably have important similarities with life on Earth – especially if it comes from Earth-like worlds that have similar biological molecules to ours. That means ET might resemble us, warts and all, with our tendencies towards violence and exploitation."
The Royal Society scientists must know more than we do about this and for them to go public is actually a bit scary. Almost as freaky as these guys last year: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8028499/Aliens-are-sabotaging-British-and-US-nuclear-missiles-US-military-pilots-claim.html
Then there was the NORAD officer's prediction that UFO's would appear on mass around major cities on October 13th... and apparently they did: http://news.exopoliticsinstitute.org/index.php/archives/632
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/06/china-ufo-sighting-video_n_753179.html
The NWO and even Mama Grizzly must be worried. Imagine if she became US president and got the job of communicating with them on our behalf. HELP! The upside would be "Conventional wisdom suggests that terrestrial religion would collapse if the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) were confirmed". Imagine all of the resources freed up by the collapse of religion. But then 93% of all scientists are atheists according to Bill Mahers Religulous film, so maybe all of this is a case of wishful thinking. Loughner's news does however pale by comparison I thought. -
Russell Brown, in reply to
As I said then, and to repeat, all those articles, and others, were published within hours of the shooting occurring. All of them laid the blame squarely, and to the exclusion of all other factors, at the door of the tea party and it’s rhetoric.
Speaking for myself, I'm quite aware of the relatively recent history. I was reading up on Tim McVeigh and Eric Rudolph yesterday, and decided that Lougher was more McVeigh than Lynette Fromme -- and not so much like Eric Rudolph, who was a "pro-life" Christian terrorist. Loughner seem even more disturbed than McVeigh, and less coherently political, but his ranting touches on some of the same themes.
But the Tea Party is important here -- even though Loughner clearly isn't a Teabagger. They've mainstreamed the kind of ideas and language that until recently were very marginal. The US has had elected representatives talking about using bullets -- or in the case of Michelle Bachmann, hinting coyly about "Second Amendment solutions" to the Obama administration. Then there's all the loony gold standard and constitutional talk.
It appears from those timelines, though, that only the stupidity of the individuals involved has prevented political murder by actual tea party types.
To take one example, after healthcare reform was passed this year, these dickheads couldn't even get the right address:Federal and local authorities are investigating a severed gas line at the home of U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello’s brother, discovered the day after Tea Party activists posted the address online so opponents could “drop by” and “express their thanks” for Perriello’s vote in favor of health care reform.
Cutting a propane gas line at a family home could have killed someone quite easily. I doubt they're so stupid that they didn't know that.
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recordari, in reply to
You're just too likable to have a go at :-)
Likeable!!! (with an 'e') I'm officially sulking. ;-)
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Islander, in reply to
The View From Number 80 (a sceptic's site I reccommend if you dont already know it) has some salutary corrections to this stuff.
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
I think I saw a few of those aliens shopping in Porirua Pak and Save.
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BenWilson, in reply to
How do you know I didn't miss a 'c' instead?
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
But the Tea Party is important here -- even though Loughner clearly isn't a Teabagger. They've mainstreamed the kind of ideas and language that until recently were very marginal. The US has had elected representatives talking about using bullets -- or in the case of Michelle Bachmann, hinting coyly about "Second Amendment solutions" to the Obama administration. Then there's all the loony gold standard and constitutional talk.
That's a core point. As per that link I posted up-thread, the number of threats against US senators has doubled in 2010.
There is an ugliness near the centre of the US political discourse (if it can now be called that) which I've never seen before - Nixon's rantings, which were not intentionally public, were nothing next to the words on the hustings and in the media of some of the now elected members of the layers of US government and their advocates. Witness the calls to hunt down and kill Julian Assange.
Henry Rollins thinks we need to give the pundits (mostly unelected) less air and treat them with the contempt they deserve.:
I saw Glenn Beck in action last summer at his Restore Honor Rally. His speech sucked and his audience looked ancient and out-of-shape. Rush Limbaugh makes money getting simpleminded people to feel good about their intellectually undernourished brain spasms. He’s very good at it, and I scarcely believe a fraction of what he says. Sarah Palin embarrasses herself almost immediately upon opening her mouth to speak or upon moving her fingers to send messages to her dull flock. I just don’t believe these people can really motivate anyone to do anything except misspell words on the signs they take to their corny rallies and vote for candidates who will immediately screw them upon entering office. Past that, I don’t think much gets done.
I could be completely wrong here, but I think there is a much harder-core element in American society that doesn’t listen to these pundits, doesn’t care who is president, and has nothing but contempt and hatred for government in general. I don’t believe it mattered to Timothy McVeigh who was president or who his congressional representative was when he blew up the Murrah Building in 1995.
I think his argument fails because there is a Fox news and because it does have a huge audience of the people he so despises who do listen to these buffoons. And in November 2010 they were seemingly motivated in some places by Palin and others to at least vote. There seems to be no evidence that they were directly motivated to do otherwise despite the big talk.
And mostly I think the likes of Beck and Limbaugh despise their audience more than anyone - they are, like Murdoch, using their viewers and listeners to enrich themselves and do so with contempt. O'Reilly I'm not so sure - he does think the tides are proof of an almighty.
That said, I mostly agree with that last paragraph. The McVeigh elements, the random nutters (who often form groups of like-minded nutters) exist beyond any discourse. However, stuff like:
November 9, 2010—U.S. Representative-Elect Allen West of Florida's 22nd Congressional District hires conservative radio talk show host Joyce Kaufman as his Chief of Staff. On July 3, Kaufman told a crowd of Tea Party supporters, “I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendments rights was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don’t work, bullets will."
indicate to me that the lines are increasingly blurred.
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recordari, in reply to
How do you know I didn't miss a 'c' instead?
In that case I'd be skulking, not sulking. 'k?
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Sacha, in reply to
Witness the calls to hunt down and kill Julian Assange.
quite
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Sacha, in reply to
often licked, never beaten
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'often licked, never beaten'
whoa, Frosty Boy!
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
I saw Glenn Beck in action last summer at his Restore Honor Rally. His speech sucked and his audience looked ancient and out-of-shape.
That Henry Rollins eh. If Beck’s audience had been ancient yet buffed ’n toned he’d have been bound to have cut them a little slack.
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Mark Ames, love or hate him, makes an observation I've not seen elsewhere in pointing out that Loughner’s crime joins two American traditions together.
Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, Arizona, has been variously described as an “assassination” and a “shooting rampage”—but which one is it?
This may seem like a semantic quibble, but what occurred in that Safeway supermarket appears to be an entirely new type of American murder: a hybrid of political assassination, of the sort that plagued America in the 1960s and 70s, and a “going postal” rampage massacre, of the kind that first appeared in the mid- to late-1980s, with the rise of Reaganomics inequalities and the deterioration of workplace culture.
I studied countless rampage massacres for my book Going Postal, and this is the first instance I can think of in which the shooter—in this case, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner—carried out anything like a hybrid assassination-rampage: first, a planned, targeted assassination of a high-profile political figure, followed immediately by a seemingly indiscriminate shooting rampage. The first part of this hybrid assassination-rampage left a U.S. Congresswoman, Gabby Giffords, in critical condition with a serious head wound; the second part, the rampage, left six dead and another 13 wounded.
These two types of murders have little in common. In America, at least, the assassin is concerned about only one thing: taking out his target. While others may get shot in the confusion, political assassins never, to my knowledge, stick around after accomplishing their primary task just so they can keep murdering others indiscriminately.
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Some interesting related articles:
How the Giffords Tragedy Made Me Anti-Anti-Anti Political Hate Speech.
Frum puts sights, sorry, target, on marijuana.
A commenter said elsewhere: “after realizing that gun violence could even affect him, King took a long, hard look inside himself, reassessed a few of his beliefs, and decided that something had to be done to protect… himself.”
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Jon Stewart, for once, seems lost for words about it all, before surmising "it would be really nice if the ramblings of crazy people didn’t actually represent how we talk to one another on TV."
Interesting viewing and ends on a nice, almost life-affirming note, too.
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Danielle, in reply to
Although... I am getting a bit sick of his 'plague on both your houses' false equivalency bullshit. One side IS significantly more crazypants than the other. It's so strained on his part, the insistence that they're both the same.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
“it would be really nice if the ramblings of crazy people didn’t actually represent how we talk to one another on TV.”
I’ve watching that clip a dozen times and finally figured out what really really annoys me about Stewart there.
Nobody asked him one very simple question: “Dude, ever watch you own fucking show?”
Seriously, the whole raison d’être of The Daily Show/Colbert Report is to turn those “crazy people” into an elaborate and breathtakingly cynical gag. Would it be entirely unfair to say Stewart and Colbert need American political discourse to be a toxic waste dump, even if they can't quite admit it to themselves?
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And here’s a really perfect way to sum up how totally fraked the American right has been about the Giffords shooting: I can say PAT BUCHANAN is the grown-up in the room with a straight face.
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I don’t think I am really; I think saying : you (or some people, or whatever) are using this to get their hobby horses out, is in fact quite offensive*.
I have no hobby horse. I just think that the conclusion that these events are in any way strongly linked to Palin's maps, some NRA morons turning up at rallies, tea party rhetoric, etc is a stretch without concrete evidence.
I also find the use of people who aren't even the ground yet to score political points lacking in class. No doubt there will be lots more about this guy and why he did what he did, would it hurt to wait for that before blaming people across the political aisle?
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There is an ugliness near the centre of the US political discourse (if it can now be called that) which I’ve never seen before – Nixon’s rantings, which were not intentionally public, were nothing next to the words on the hustings and in the media of some of the now elected members of the layers of US government and their advocates. Witness the calls to hunt down and kill Julian Assange.
What you're seeing at present pales in comparison to the 'dialogue' that took place in the 1950s and 60s around Civil Rights issues. Frequent bombings, shootings, lynchings followed open threats to do so, which often wasn't punished and was even endorsed by local authorities. Birmingham, Selma, the freedom riders etc.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
What you’re seeing at present pales in comparison to the ‘dialogue’ that took place in the 1950s and 60s around Civil Rights issues. Frequent bombings, shootings, lynchings followed open threats to do so, which often wasn’t punished and was even endorsed by local authorities. Birmingham, Selma, the freedom riders etc.
Absolutely true, but it's also true that the violence of those years was explicitly racial (and racist). Americans have lots of practice at dealing wth - and laying aside - that sort of violence. This is new if only because it falls very much outside that frame of reference (whatever issues some people have with Obama aside.)
I have no hobby horse. I just think that the conclusion that these events are in any way strongly linked to Palin’s maps, some NRA morons turning up at rallies, tea party rhetoric, etc is a stretch without concrete evidence.
I think the argument for a few pages has been that whatever Loughner's reasoning turns out to have been, the whole thing has illustrated explicitly the problems with that sort of rhetoric.
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