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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Smith who wrote (153763)	1/10/2011 11:55:54 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542910

This guy was supposedly obsessed with government mind control and liked the communist manifesto. I don't find this helpful. Also unhelpful, but more relevant, are more recent events. For instance, only this past fall, in a college class he went off on a rant about a woman's short story or poem (forget which) in which she talked about a woman's right to an abortion. That's, of course, in our present odd configuration, a rightie thing. But of more relevance, political stuff clearly agitated him. And those are the sorts that are most affected by the "eliminationist" language. I agree with Krugman on this one, that language doesn't come from the left right now, at least not the overwhelming bulk of it. False equivalences just take us further from addressing it.

To: Paul Smith who wrote (153763)	1/10/2011 12:02:33 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 542910

<<<This guy was supposedly obsessed with government mind control and liked the communist manifesto. I guess that is political demonization, or perhaps it is just general insanity. He also has some kind of occult shrine in his backyard.>>> Is this paragraph intended to disturb the order or arrangement of logical discourse ?<ggg>.

To: Paul Smith who wrote (153763)	1/10/2011 1:26:15 PM
From: Katelew	Respond to of 542910

All kinds of people are targeted by the criminally insane. Think all the victims of the Son of Sam. Sometimes the people who are targeted are also celebrities or political figures. Think of Reagan and Lennon. Which category gets the most coverage? Celebrities and pols, of course, so the public tends to read all kinds of motives into the situation. Having said that, I think that with politicians, it's natural, fitting and proper that an investigation would occur to discover if a political hate group was behind it. This needs to be done. Discussion of the climate of political discourse is OK, too. What chapped me was the rush to judgment on Saturday right after the shooting and the efforts yesterday, all day, to demonize the right when the connection between angry political verbiage and the mind of this particular shooter has not been made and looked increasingly tenuous. To me, this shooter fits the profile of a possible insanity at work. It's rather common for paranoid schizophrenics to obsess over the government. Their disintegrating mind frequently frames their own situation as being targeted by a conspiracy or a mind control effort of some kind. Or sometimes poisoned by something the govt. is doing to the food or the water. Their out of control, disintegrating minds see themselves as targeted.....and targeted by something more powerful than they. Hence, they retaliate against authority figures...government, teachers, sometimes their own parents. This kind of mental disintegration into paranoia is a process, and the person can be quite able to articulate, converse, read, and plan along the way. Being able to plan the assasination attempt doesn't say anything about whether or not a person is criminally insane. And they can be quite clever about it. They're insane, not retarded. The fact that schizophrenia tends to manifest itself most frequently between the ages of 18 and 25 and more in males also contributes to the profile of this shooter.