Yesterday I surveyed the media landscape and found the weekend’s most obnoxious theme: That Jared Lee Loughner, the apprehended suspect killer in Saturday’s Tucson massacre, was somehow spurred to commit his gruesome shooting spree by the “inflamed rhetoric” of today’s protest politics. I titled my effort “Killer Apprehended, Vitriol’s to Blame.” Hans Bader had a better title for his Washington Examiner contribution: “Shootings obscure America’s generally bland and timid political culture.”
Yes, bland, he wrote.
“My French relatives regularly denounce their country’s leaders in far more heated and pungent terms than Americans like Sarah Palin do. Founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were attacked far more vitriolically in the media than recent presidents like Obama and Bush were.…” He notes that today’s left-leaners have become so timid as to become “stiflingly conformist.”
In Slate, Jack Shafer pointed out that “Any call to cool ‘inflammatory’ speech is a call to police all speech, and I can’t think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power.” David Weigel, also in Slate, turned his gaze on a politician actually writing legislation to “shut down” uncool speech, noting that “[t]here’s no evidence — none — that violent pictures or words inspired the violence in Arizona.”
So, what motivated Loughner? A Mother Jones exclusive sketches the young man’s fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and … meaning. But neither Loughner’s philosophical nihilism nor his will to annihilate fit well with any purely political narrative.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “The Nihilist as the Vilest”
That won’t stop the progressive/dhimmocrasts from trying to use it to advance an agenda to limit liberty.
“Unless you have good reason for breaking the window, probably you shouldn’t do that. Unless it’s you know, a big part of your strategy.” Francis Scott Piven (co-author with Cloward who designed way to collapse the American free market republic)
the 1961 Checkoslovakian plan to move to socialism (sort of similar to Soros’s plan to collapse countries’ economy)
1. Have a solution
2. Move people into power who can implement the solution
3. Exploit problems or create them if there are not adequate ones
4. Overwhelm/collapse a system (like the financial system)
5. Encourage rioting and strife
6. People under enough stress will call out for solution (use the media to exagerate this)
7. Impement it (see #1)
Fear is the path to the dark side.
Fear leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering. — -Yoda.
http://dissembler.blogtownhall.com
There are laws on the books in Arizona already that create a means for educators & others to require a mental evaluation be undertaken when an individual exhibits behavior that others consider threatening and/or dangerous.
Once again, laws on the books were not enforced to protect the public. No amount of new gun laws will fix the very real fact that public officials failed. And calls for speech limitations or infringement as I call it, are as despicable as it gets. Such calls are political opportunism and they reek of dangerous minds seeking control over a society. A free society.
Such calls must be met with not just skepticism, but with outright rejection by the people. Because such laws are called for by people seeking an advantage over all others. It is despotism rearing its sick head just as it has historically happened. Hitler did it, Stalin did it, Pol Pot did it, Castro did it, Chavez is currently doing it, and now Rep. Clyburn (No. 3 in the House) is proposing or suggesting it.
How dare they. These are the same people who have come out assigning this man to the political right, when in fact his actions were those of an unstable man. His actions looked more leftist than rightist!
I grow sick of those who would infringe on my individual freedoms under the guise they are protecting me or the public. Their plans have nothing to do with our protection & everything to do with silencing speech since talk radio has been effective as has the internet. They fear that truth will continue to be exposed and truth will cost them their political power!
Politicians’ calls for suppression of speech or gun rights are utterly inapt as a cure for one man’s paranoid schizophrenia. They do show, however, just how depraved those politicians and their flacks are.
[…] The Nihilist as the Vilest […]
Well said Kenneth, depraved indeed!