The Giffords shooting and mere words
I’ve got a new article up at PJ entitled, “Politics and the schizophrenic’s language: do mere words have the power to ignite acts such as Saturday’s shooting?”
Comment here, comment there, comment wherever you wish.
“do mere words have the power to ignite acts such as Saturday’s shooting?”
We’ll find out. The left is intentionally placing a “target” on Sarah Palin’s back. I’m positive they’re hoping their false accusations spur one of their drones to do the unthinkable.
I sincerely hope Palin sees all the accusatory language aimed at her as a threat and has taken appropriate measures.
“do mere words have the power to ignite acts such as Saturday’s shooting?”
As someone else has pointed out, buying into this idea means that you believe that people are only stimulus-response robots.
Therefore, if you accept this idea, either:
1) you yourself are just such a robot as well, in which case it’s more than fair to ask whose stimuli YOU are responding to, or
2) you believe that you are not a person per se, but a different (implication: superior) type of being.
We already know which one the Left believes.
Krauthammer says the killer sounds like a schizophrenic. Dr. Krauthammer is a psychiatrist.
I was listening to Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio program, in which he and his guest agreed that despite imagery and rhetoric, no one actually wishes his/her political adversaries to be dead.
You know what? — I beg to differ. But first, as much contempt as there was for President Clinton, and there was quite a bit, it seems to me his adversaries wanted his ideas and his moral values repudiated, but not him dead. Ditto for Vice President Gore, when he became the High Priest of the religion of Global Warming. Ditto for Senator Kerry: the Swift Boaters wanted to see him exposed, not dead [aside: why was it ^always^ assumed that Kerry was telling the truth, but not the dozens of honorable veterans, men at whose side he served? — never mind]. I’m honestly not aware of people who actually want President Obama ^dead^, though they’re surely out there on the fringe; just utterly repudiated and neutered.
Now: my perception is that many of those who hated Bush and/or Cheney wanted him ^dead^. And they’re not just fringe. They’re tolerated (if not celebrated) by the mainstream. Witness the hangings in effigy and placards depicting them dead. Witness the utterly vile rhetoric and placards from the left.* Ditto for Clarence Thomas, for example — was it Julianne Malveaux who wished him dead from clogged arteries?
What we’re seeing is a classic case of projection. Many left-oriented people genuinely wish for their adversaries’ death, and so they naturally assume that the same applies to their right-oriented counterparts. And so they project onto Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and other convenient right-oriented boogeypersons their murderous hatred-laced thoughts. What we’re witnessing is a peek into the hearts of (far too) many left-wingers.
Not pretty. Both depressing and frightening, in fact.
* if you need a reminder, here’s one example:
http://michellemalkin.com/2011/01/10/the-progressive-climate-of-hate-an-illustrated-primer-2000-2010/
Here’s the post i mentioned above:
http://noisyroom.net/blog/2011/01/10/getting-it-backwards/
In an almost novelistic detail relevant to this discussion, some people who knew Loughner say that he became fixated on Gifford after he met her in 2007, asked her a question, and was dissatisfied with her answer. The question was something like this, according to his friends: “What is government if words have no meaning?”
Neo, with all due respect, and I think a lot is due you, I personally wish we would just not go there. I would much prefer that sensible people with an audience would cut off the braying jackasses when try to make political rhetoric an issue, by forcing them to deal with the facts.
I just read a piece at Pajamas Media by Benjamin Kerstein, in which he parallels his own mental illness, and illness driven behavior, to Loughner’s behavior–and apparent illness.
There is one big difference. By choice, or because of intervention, Kerstein was diagnosed, and is medicated. He pretty obviously feels that if that were not the the case, his own bizzarre behavior could have produced a very bad result.
It appears, by the absence of evidence otherwise, that Loughner was never diagnosed, nor treated, despite increasingly bizarre and threatening behavior.
Krauthammer is cited above. I heard him last night state that in his opinion Loughner lives in a fabricated reality, that bears no resemblance to the actual world.
If Dr Krauthammer is correct, political speech was irrelevant to him; and irrelevant to his actions.
The “political tone” may, or may not, be a problem; and it is certainly debatable as to who is most responsible for the current tone. But, it should not be connected to Loughner. Now that sufficient facts have emerged to understand what was actually going on, convoluted attempts to make that connection should be met with justified contempt.
Well stated, M J R! Well stated. There is no equivalence between liberals and conservatives regarding the issue of wishing their opponents dead.
And their is no equivalence in the slander.
Just this morning, here is what I heard:
From CBS interviewing a survivor who stated “[Loughner] was vigorously exercising his second amendment rights.”
From Hillary Clinton: These “extremists.” She used the word three times in one short paragraph.
From a local TV station: Loughner was anti-government.
The governing elite intends to smear the tea party just like the Muslim Brotherhood smears Israel. However, it’s not working. According to a poll, 57% disapproved to 32% approving the politicization of the event.
Just read the Pajamas article and it is great! The tone is just right! Not too passionate and bringing forth fact and history and credible comment to a devastating conclusion: political hay was to be made.
Oldflyer: but that is exactly my point–that political speech was irrelevant here. I make the further point that it almost always is irrelevant to political assassins. Did you actually read my piece?
it seems to me his adversaries wanted his ideas and his moral values repudiated, but not him dead
Of course. A living politician, defeated and possibly humiliated is a victory. Creating a martyr for the cause? not so much.
By the way, can anyone rid me of this troublesome bishop?
Perhaps I’m insensitive to the tone of the piece but I just wish Loughner had been shot dead. In that way we wouldn’t need to go through what is destined to be an agonizing unraveling of his mental state and motivations for the next 20 years.
Hong: his death would not have prevented that in the least. It would have just made it easier for people to fabricate anything they wanted about him, and also fueled conspiracy theories a la Ruby and Oswald..
Loughner’s rampage was a rampage of one; Dutnik’s rampage is a rampage seeking growth and legitimacy. Dutnik’s slander and defamations should be used by every teacher and educator as a teachable moment along with the following quiz suppled by American Thinker.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/01/right_wing_hate_speech_quiz.html
Neo, I thought this was a wonderful esay on the subject. Your tone of serious appraisal of this horrendous act and the attempt by the dems to use it for political purposes, was spot on. It elevated the discussion from what we see in the MSM and made the point about whether political rhetoric can motivate someone who is mentally disturbed in a very cogent fashion.
Mjr- well said and I completely agree. I still vividly recall having a conversation with one of my liberal friends back in the late Bush years, and this ordinarily articulate and thoughtful guy suddenly blurted out that he earnestly hoped for the assassination of Bush, and thought it would be a great blessing for the country and the world (yes, I pointed out that Darth Cheney would then be President – his response? “Him too, of course.” And he meant it).
I remember my shock still. I realized at that moment that there was a completely unbridgeable moral gulf between me and him, and I also knew that if he thought that way, then many people on the left did as well.
The left gets away with their hypocrisy and projection for a lot of reasons, and among them is the fact that they have the privilege of masking their malevolence behind what Richard Weaver called “God words” – the words that ring deep in the modern, decadent soul with the sound of some thing worthy of reverence. James Billington wrote somewhere in his brilliant book “Fire In The Minds of Men” that, during the French Revolution, the radical journalists had managed to susbstitute the “body of a purified language” for the body of the king as the focal point for national unity, and to set their own Fourth Estate up where the First used to reside.
That game may be wearing thin by now, but the left still has a lot of the old tricks up its sleeve, and the God Word game still allows them to pass the “compassion” test every time.
When was the last time we saw a leftist assassin or terrorist connected to leftism in permanent, lasting way in the public mind?
As far as I know, never.
Aren’t facts great!
Loughner was, if anything, a left-wing political:
http://volokh.com/2011/01/10/jared-loughners-anti-war-views/
The hate and slander and incendiary rhetoric belongs to the left:
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/01/the-face-of-hate.html
The media’s spin didn’t work:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028116.php
Meanwhile, our Feds continue to buy up billions in bonds. This is the real story:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/forget_about_economic_recovery.html
I believe we are heading into a time of great testing and purifying. And just like God gave to Joseph a dream which allowed Egypt to prepare for the famine, so He is telling all who will listen of the coming time. It will be hard but those who prepare will survive and prosper. From having been in the Army, I can tell you, a little bit of preparation goes a long way. Prior planning prevents poor performance.
Loughner’s views on that ATS website is chilling and often incoherent. Here’s somethings said by one of the commenters:
‘I have maybe made a mistake is my assessment of your avatar, because for that to be the case, you’d have to be at least somewhat rational, but I think youre frankly schizophrenic, and no that’s not an amateur opinion and not intended as an uninformed or insulting remark, you clearly make no sense and are unable to communicate. I really do care.
Seek help before you hurt yourself or others or start taking your medications again, please. Maybe, it’d be better for some there be an infinite source of haldol or cogentin then fiat currency.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread591520/pg2#pid9192915
Just watched Patrick Leahy talking about the power of rhetoric to move people to madness. His delivery seemed to put the lie to every word he uttered. Maybe that was his intent, though, just to make sure he didn’t drive someone over the edge.
Neo, your question reminded me of my youth in the magic decade (the six-zero’s). I recall that adults regularly complained to the yoots that the lyrics of their music was having an evil effect. The response, as I recall, was always that mere words were harmless.
I agree and disagree at the same time. You can conduct an experiment if you like (and speak German). Go watch a video of Hitler working a crowd. I doubt you will be moved in spite of the fact that his German audience is ecstatic. Even if words have the power to motivate, and I think they can, they must land on fertile ground.
Where this killer was concerned, I’ll go with the good Doctor Krauthammer–there wasn’t anybody at home.
“” I realized at that moment that there was a completely unbridgeable moral gulf between me and him””
Kolnai
I’ve experienced similar. It strikes me as being an inversion of morality, as weird as that seems. Because having slight variations or ideas on morality doesn’t explain liberals being 180 degrees wrong on almost every important issue. And for some reason they think it’s you and i with the skewed morals. When in fact we’re probably very closely aligned with the ideas of morality of a JFK or Hubert Humphrey, both prominent liberals just 2 generations ago.
SteveH, when I think of how “upside” down things have become, I think of the word “satanic.” It may be unbalanced of me; I’m not sure. Perhaps I’ll leave that determination to the individuals described in the quite awesome, hilarious, and hilariously sad essay below:
http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/english/articles/080612jb_en.html
A quote to tempt the circling doves:
There is no greater arrogance than demanding that a human being sacrifice his conscience, his intelligence, and even his capacity of sense perception on the altar of the absurd. “In the end, who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes,” Groucho Marx used to ask. When the joke is transformed into reality, humor becomes a satanic farce.
For those speaking of “projection”, I am reminded of a long debate on Facebook with several people. The debate centered around “judging” and was religious in nature and mostly quiet civil. On one side you had the “religiously tolerant” side who were all but saying one Christian cannot recognize sin in a fellow Christian, lest he “judge”. The other side, which I was on, argued that was a misunderstanding of “judge not” and offered counter scriptural arguments with the repeated observation we are “all sinners”-and “judge not” is not an excuse to say sin is not sin. Finally one fellow, from the other side, chimed in to say, and I paraphrase from memory, “We have to get rid of this idea if we disprove of someones actions we love them.” Later I realized this was an unintentional mirror of this guys heart-he was admitting he did not love those whose lifestyle he disagreed with. I thought later , since he was trying to argue with religious sounding language, that i should have pointed out to him that if Christian missionaries try to convert Muslims , by his own standard that means they hate the muslims-or the apostle Paul, who was persecuted for spreading Christianity, by this man’s standard, must have hated those he was trying to convert.
Yes, its projection, not truth.
I found this related comment (from last June), while googling around this evening at the philosophyforum.com site, and which seems (to me) to clearly illustrate the nature of the bitterly personalized cognitive disconnect which reflects very common left-wing thinking, their actually somewhat common preoccupation with “language” as a theme, and simply being challenged (as in any “political” disagreement); it is epidemic historically at the left. Hence the ability to use this incident to launch a brazenly hypocritical and misrepresented political attack against (targeting) their perceived right-wing political opposition:
“3 of 3 people found this post helpful
Posted Jun 24, 2010 – 10:39 PM:
Words have always been used for good and ill alike. It depends on who is talking.
Orwell was prescient in many ways. During the last 20 to 30 years, the right wing has been waging a concerted effort to devalue some of the words of the left (a process called pejoration) and to boost the value of their own terminology (a process called amelioration). As a consequence, it has become much more difficult for progressives (even that is a devalued term) to employ their traditional vocabulary. The ‘political center’ has been shifted quite a ways to the right of where the middle used to be. ‘Liberal’ is now a slur meaning extremist and far left, even though ‘liberal’ now occupies the area formerly held by moderate republicans of 40 years ago, say. ‘Socialist’ is about as linguistically acceptable as the word ‘ass hole’ and so forth. Unions have become one of those troublesome “special interest groups” and corporations are now counted as ‘persons’ thanks to the right wing of the Supreme Court. Those dirty unions are getting in the way of an honest corporation (a person) making an honest buck, and similar bullshit.
Language isn’t magic. It takes more than clever editing to manipulate people. But it is, never the less, a very useful skill. The left would do well to get much better at the language game.”
Perhaps one might (try to) rationalize that both left and right have been equally culpable, but the sheer body count of strictly neutral, civilian political victims during the twentieth century – victims of very common left-wing, politically dogmatic campaigns, from Stalin and Hitler to Cambodia, Maoist China and North Korea – for any simply perceived (or contrived) “political” disagreement, belies that assumption. The so-called “right-wing” may not be pristine as a stereotyped group, but their sheer numbers of victims pale by comparison.
Mr. Loughner’s preoccupations weren’t exclusively a manifestation of his mental illness, he was clearly influenced, even inculcated by the steady drum beat of the casually virulent Bush-hater left-wing patter prevalent for over a decade; as well as his favorite music when he was smoking; Anti-Flag (http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2011/01/08/jared-loughners-how-to-mind-controller-video/).
Note, from (tonite’s) Wikipedia, in reference to Bill Ayers: “Larry Grathwohl, an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated The Weather Underground, claimed that Ayers wanted to overthrow the United States government. In an interview in January 2009, Grathwohl stated that:
“The thing the most bone chilling thing Bill Ayers said to me was that after the revolution succeeded and the government was overthrown, they believed they would have to eliminate 25 million Americans who would not conform to the new order.”[59]
How is that related? The level of hypocrisy exhibited by the Democrats, concerning this incident, and their accusations of Sarah Palin, in particular, of fomenting violence is simply outrageous. If Sarah Palin is somehow an appropriately culpable subject for the left media, William Ayers, Barak (“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,”) Obama’s good friend, as well as left-wing genocidal advocate and icon of their “progressive” movement, is also certainly relevant.
If the Tucson killings are, indeed, more complex than Mr. Loughner’s personal mental illness, and there is any serious group culpability for this incident, it clearly belongs at the left. Mrs. Giffords wasn’t just any Democrat, she was sympathetic to the Arizona alien invasion issue, Jewish, and a staunch supporter of Israel at a time when the Democrats have all but betrayed Israel over even basic issues concerning Jerusalem. The left-wing on “campus” haven’t been kind to Jewish students openly loyal to Israel, to say the least… This is all clearly related to the “progressive’s” insidious power agenda. We should know by now how the “blame game” is played.
Perhaps I’m too cynical, but the incredible outburst of fingerpointing from the left seems contrived to me. It makes no rational sense to do this within hours of the tragedy even if you believed this nonsense. Perhaps this egregious outburst was staged to create great controversy so the president can come and appear to be the moderate healer of the nation! Sorry my cynicism is showing.
Professional psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer nailed it best:
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/11/AR2011011106068.html
The obsession the left has with language manipulation seems to me to come from their recognition of inferior numbers to win at the game of politics without it. So they seek to change the rules of what it even means to “win” or at the very least confuse the rules for all players involved.
Plus they seem to be on a mission to find the holy grail of reliably faked sincerity through language manipulation. Barak Obama’s candidacy was nothing if not the latest tactics in this field deployed with rather marked success against a nieve and uninformed electorate.
But i think it turns out their swallowing of their own faked sincerity has left them more clueless every day as to what sincerity even looks and feels like to an average American. On some level they know this and are in full fledged panic mode that their gamble to deploy these tactics not only just worked short term, but dug them a massive hole it may take generations to climb out of.
Palin released a statement decrying the partisan rancor being used to politicize this tragedy. She doesn’t specifically name the left or anybody in the liberal media but the reaction, so far from them, is predictably lame.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/137411-clyburn-palin-intellectually-not-to-be-able-to-understand-whats-going-on-here
For those who are familiar with English gematria, the system of assigning numbers to letters, if you enter Sarah L. Palin, which is her full name with the middle initial, you will get the numeric value of 666. Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden in English gematria have a numeric value of 660, which is the approximate number of the beast. But only Sarah L. Palin has the numeric value of 666, which is the biblical number of the beast.
For those who don’t understand, Google — English gematria. I have included two separate links to two separate English gematria calculators below for you to see it first hand for yourself. See it and heed its meaning. I had always foreseen this since the 2008 election campaign. Now I proved it for everyone to see.
But wait, what do we have in store for the future? Here it is below so look into these words in the English gematria calculators in the links also –
American beast = 666
Lady of evil = 666
A martial law = 666
Anarchy U.S.A. = 666
http://prophecy.landmarkbiblebaptist.net/count.html
http://real-world-news.org/numerics/english-gematria.html
According to Hebrew gematria, the system of assigning numbers to letters, the name Sarah Palin, without the middle initial, also has a numeric value of 666.
The name “Sarah” in Hebrew is spelled:
Sarah = שרה
Shin = 300
Resh = 200
He = 5
The name “Palin” in Hebrew is spelled:
Palin = פ×לין
Pe = 80
Aleph = 1
Lamed = 30
Nun = 50
Total = 666
×”×× ×˜×™×›×¨×™×¡×˜×•×¡ יעלו ×‘×©× ×ª 2012. ר×ו הוזהרת×