Maybe not definitively but my money is on fucking nuts.
I don’t believe we have. But it doesn’t follow that because Kennedy and Reagan were shot in time of unheightened rhetoric (though I’ve seen some evidence that there was intense anti-Kennedy sentiment in Dallas at that time), heightened rhetoric doesn’t have some responsibility for this incident.
Info is out that Loughner scared people in his junior college. They wrote they had a nut case who could be dangerous. The J.C. probably did not have sufficient mental health facilities or trained professionals to deal with him.
He left a note at home saying he was going to assassinate Giffords. So it was even premeditated.
Yet a nut like him could go buy an automatic weapon.
He was a fan of right wing rhetoric. You can not say Paliin’s re-load, and targeting were at all responsible. But you also can not declare it was not a factor . Hopefully the court case will shed light on it.
Politicians apparently see a connection and are calling for tamping down on the rhetoric.
Does this include message boards, blogs, talk radio, etc.?
To my mind, the last should be done regardless.
Myself, from what I’ve read the fellow seems nutty as a fruitcake and had allegedly had a personal grudge against Giffords dating back several years … which doesn’t change the fact that the exaggerated violent rhetoric of Palin and her ilk is a bad thing. “Surveyor’s marks” indeed!
I myself am leaning towards the view that the two are quite unrelated. However, Palin still deserves contempt for using the rhetoric in the first place … and double contempt for outrageously lying about it after.
All the hand-wringing about violence and divisiveness rings pretty hollow when people are really asking thinking “Pleeeeease let him have motivations that let me slur my political enemies!”
Expect no accountability on the part of people presumptively making extreme attacks on said enemies, once his less-spinnable motivations are brought to light.
Perhaps posters in this thread might want to comment on this: Journalists urged caution after Ft. Hood, now race to blame Palin after Arizona shootings Seems a bit odd.
Can you please leave this type of remark out of this thread? I see no posts here expressing eagerness to slur political enemies or making extreme attacks based on presumed motivations.
Was there any evidence (yet) that Loughner even had any real clue about the actual policy provisions Giffords held?
One of the OP’s premise’s was that Giffords was selected.
I was wondering if she was selected merely because she was a politician (the closest one Loughner could reach).
Rig for rage, then, I guess.
Capital punishment is wrong, always and everywhere. Even if he were provably sane, I’d refuse to consent to his execution.
Some of the news links posted earlier (and pretty easily findable on line) show that Loughner may have been interested in Giffords as far back as 2007, and that he definitely did some planning to assassinate her. As others have demonstrated, his political thinking seems to be very disorganized and not rational, so you can’t really say this was ideological activism, or based on any recognizable political position.
According to one article I read, he seems to have deliberately targeted her because she was dismissive of his (ranting) on their meeting a few years ago.
In short, a personal grudge no doubt magnified by his mental problems.
I think this guy was just crazy as hell.
You also can not declare that a Martian implant in his brain was not a factor. What exactly are you getting at other than hoping some right-wing ideology caused him to do this?
Well his friends referred to him as a left-wing nut-job but I’d prefer to think he was just a nut job. If it wasn’t the Safeway crowd (obviously not connected to the primary target) he would have shot up a professor from the college that evicted him plus a bunch of unrelated students. If it wasn’t a gun it would have been a homemade bomb.
Crazy doesn’t have an explanation.
Actually not really. Adolf Hitler and his book were not a call for a return to Kaiserine monarchy and much of Hitler’s policies after he gained power has enormous discontinuity with not just the Weimar Republic but with the Kaiserreich especially his anti-Semitism (the Second Reich did not have pogroms, or any official discrimination against Jews and even the anti-Semites did not want to kill all the Jews). He was perhaps a revolutionary of the right or a nationalist revolutionary but he was definately a revolutionary.
And that is part of the issue - folks who believe they have had The Revelation that the rest of us don’t, may set out to overthrow The System but do not always go for some well thought-out existing alternative, but rather come up with their own crazy one, or just they just know they need to overthrow The System and they’ll figure out the details later.
Or The System is just manipulating their grammar and they need to kill someone because she does not get it.
So he probably peppered his ramblings with language from his various sources plus some of his own creative ideas, to match the mishmash buffet of conspiracies from left and right he fed upon. That may be also why his schoolmates say he first sounded like a left-wing nutjob: relative to what is mainstream in that community, irrational revolutionary ramblings may have contained “left wing”-sounding language; just as when I read that he was writing about the gold standard, that pressed my “right wing” button. Seeing the greater picture, we have just someone with no real coherent ideology beyond that The System is doing him wrong and he must hit back at it.
Martians don’t exist, at least not in present day. Hence, your statement is falsifiable.
Venus, on the other hand…do we really know who lurks beneath those impenetrable clouds of 900F sulfuric acid?? I’d rather not think about it. :eek:
I think you hit the nail on the head.