Mother Jones has an interview with Loughner classmate Bryce Tierney who says he’d been thinking about offing the “fake” Gifford for a long time. When he heard the news Tierney knew at once who the shooter was. Loughner recorded the progress of his thoughts in a “dream journal”, the touchstone for someone who believed that most people were asleep; and that only people like himself were fully awake. He told his friend, “life means nothing.” Shortly before he went on his rampage, Loughner left a message for Tierney. “Hey man, it’s Jared. Me and you had good times. Peace out. Later.”
Mugshot
Evidence is gradually emerging that Loughner was not a “Black Swan”, but the whitest of swans. The Washington Post has printed emails from his community college classmates expressing the fear that he would run amuck in class. His professors took him aside. Loughner had several run-ins with the law.
He had a skull-shrine at home.
Everyone saw something coming, yet no one took decisive action. Part of the problem may been the normalization of crazy behavior. When weird is cool and “conscious dreaming” evokes the Matrix and the movie Inception rather than the arrival of the funny farm wagon the line between madness and eccentricity gets a little blurred.
Things are always clearer in 20-20 hindsight, but are there any set of rules that can reliably anticipate the next wacko? Or is this kind of thing just an occupational hazard of the modern world?
Link to Wretchard’s novel “No Way In” print edition
Link to Wretchard’s novel “No Way In” Kindle Edition”
I don’t know of too many situations where the axiom ‘follow the money’ doesn’t apply. This is certainly one of them.
“are there any set of rules that can reliably anticipate the next wacko?”
No. Efforts to predict dangerousness have been futile, although it is possible to identify what factors mitigate and exacerbate risk for a given individual. Dangerousness is not a state of nature but is a contingency, as many an alcoholic will be happy to demonstrate if given the opportunity.
And this is why it is, nevertheless, possible to predict reliably that the moral relativism perpetrated by the left will produce more and more such dangerous acts until the big arbiter in the sky gives a tutorial on basic reality that even liberals can understand.
PREDICT the next wacko?
This guy was crawling around bleeding for years, and for whatever good or bad societal reasons, people just looked away.
I don’t know what kinds of therapy or drugs are available for his conditions, but it’s clear he didn’t get them.
Given the almost total incomprehension of the MSM even now this is all too believable.
He’s a victim in this tragedy, too.
Now, before y’all jump all over me, the awful sad truth is that, if we could give him a pill and fix him up tomorrow, and explain to him just what he has done – it might just still be the most appropriate thing to do, to treat him as if he had had full volition for his acts. The sad part is, fixing him doesn’t bring back his victims (I am barely suppressing the Tolkien quote(s) here), and justice must be served.
There will always exist the lone extremist, wanting to commit suicide by committing homicide first (duocide). The key is, keep them isolated so they only kill dozens at most, instead of letting them recruit an army of true-believers and kill millions. We can deal with the isolated Unibomber or Oklahoma City or Congressional assassin, but dealing with the duocidal Hitler or Osama bin Laden is much more difficult.
From his reading list, Loughner apparently finds hard determinism very attractive. The world-view of hard determinism is one of the six features common to all organized mass murders in the 20C, so perhaps the assassination attempt on the Congresswoman means we caught a young Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao in the making.
He looks familiar
Had them as students
Had them as their proud parents
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRbPWcLode0
are there any set of rules that can reliably anticipate the next wacko?
There are reports that people who had prior personal interaction with this person recognized he was unstable/wacky/dangerous. Certainly the picture we get from the mug shot seems rather easy to interpret; still, it might be presumed the most telling indicators for these concerned people went more than skin-deep. I’m not sure how the human ability to discern danger and recognize psychopathy in another converts to the formation of rules, but common sense says there should be some way to use them to not only anticipate but intervene to thwart the next wacko.
It’s now coming out that the sheriff who has been so eager to assign blame elsewhere may in fact himself bear a degree of responsibility for not intervening before the fact in light of prior warnings concerning this person: http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/01/10/did-sheriff-dupnik-drop-the-ball-on-loughner/
The facts will out, and we shall see.
Anyway, I think the most succinctly lucid comment yet on the matter is the one uttered today by Dennis Miller on his radio program: “I’m sick of being empathetic with madmen.”
Me too.
The Matrix was definitely fore in my thoughts when thinking of the rampage.
Society seems to want things both ways. We want to stress civil liberties but want to restrain the effects of civil liberties. We define deviance down but want to evade the effects of deviance set free.
Make it harder to obtain involuntary hospitalization for the mentally ill and you will generate more mentally ill homeless and more “crazies” walking the streets. Put people with crazy views into mental hospitals and many will decry the American Gulag.
I can’t stand the intellectual dishonesty of most of the commentariat.
are there any set of rules that can reliably anticipate the next wacko?
Loughner has gotten a lot of press attention because he went after public figures, but only a few days ago there was a killing spree in Puerto Rico: the perp invited relatives to his house for a get-together and then set them all on fire. Like Loughner’s, this is a case of warning signs ignored:
“. . . the 45-year-old unemployed furniture mover had prepared for the party by soaking the walls of his house with kerosene and placing kerosene containers in each corner of the dining room, according to Sgt. Frank Perez of the Arecibo Region Police Department’s homicide unit.
At about 4:30 p.m, the suspect set fire to the room and the people in it, Perez said. ‘There was no opportunity for anybody [to get out].’
Nearly all of those who died suffered burns over 80 percent of their bodies, he said. Though the suspect had no police record, relatives told police they had long had problems with him, Perez said. He said Sanchez Diaz had burned down a henhouse in the backyard of his brother’s home five years ago. . . .
Meanwhile, the suspect — who suffered slight burns that required no treatment — is being held in lieu of $1.5 million bond in a psychiatric correctional center.”
http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/01/07/puerto.rico.dinner.arson/index.html
On the other hand, nobody is asking about Sanchez Diaz’s political opinions since he only killed family members. Perhaps the Left will now call for kerosene control.
Wretchard is on to something here. To some extent we cannot catch the fish because it is swimming in a polluted sea. At one time if anyone exhibited aberrant behaviors they would be at least investigated. If rich they would be given a pass as eccentric, until they killed someone. If of more modest means a youth who imitated the appearance or behavior of the dysfunctional would be shamed, for having cruelly insulted the unfortunate. Now the rights of the douchebag hipster to explore themselves are deemed so sacred that no authority is permitted to challenge or identify those in need.
There are two and as I see it only two models that we can choose between. In one anyone who wants to can enter and all entities who are present, not sure I want to limit it to living or human, are equal but they are also all under the control of a totalitarian if benign government that keeps their tensions from exploding. In the other the government is kept under the control of a self selecting citizenry that is difficult but possible to enter and which controls or removes those who are not qualified to serve as citizens, due to foreign birth and illegal entry or some disability that would make one unqualified to serve as a full member of the community. Such a disability might be medical, such as psychosis or being feeble minded or it could be moral in the case of a felony record. Citizens get to vote, serve on juries and belong to the militia, eg keep and bare arms.
So the last words on public record from this violent madman before he committed mass random murder are ‘peace out’.
For over twenty years, every time I read the words ‘Peace’ in someone’s closing signature, it makes me uncomfortable. There is something sinister and threatening in that expression. The word ‘peace’ seems to actually be a threat.
Scratch a liberal, find a tyrant. Liberal Fascism is an accurate label.
Best regards, Peter Warner.
The wailing sheriff knew the family so well that he was able to correctly pronounce the perp’s name in Scott’s Irish: ‘Lockner.’
The perp had multiple run-ins with the Sheriff’s Department due to his insane behavior.
Perhaps it’s important to consider that it doesn’t appear that Loughner ever actually threatened anyone. I think one of the Professors even said that, he didn’t make threatening remarks, he just acted crazy and it scared people.
This goes on all the time, especially if you live in an urban environment. There are people hanging around the 7-11 near my work who act kind of creepy, a homeless guy came into the Wendys where I was having lunch the other day and started mumbling incoherent things to me. I don’t think he was saying anything threatening but it was a little scary. I’ve had neighbors that freaked me out with their weird behavior, geesh even a family member or two.
I’ve worked around people in an office environment who said or did things that alarmed the rest of us, never anything menacing towards any of us but just bizarre things that made you wonder, is this person going to go off someday?
Without a specific threat, without some sort of overt action, there is very little one can do. We don’t institutionalize or incarcerate people just because they’re creepy and strange and scary, even if they clearly seem to need help.
Well in the majority of states now the police are pretty helpless when it comes to the mentally ill. In 1996 California started the trend of closing mental institutions because they had patients who where there “involentary” and the institutions were labeled “snake pits.” Out patient treatment with the new anti-phsycotic drugs were going to be the answer. Also just think of the money that could be saved….for politicians’ perks.
The police can arrest a paranoid szcheophrenic….oops my bad, a bi-polar individual who comitts a felony, but they can’t put him into a situation where he is forced to take meds. Catch and release back to the streets is the norm. Dupnicky failed to even do a felony arrest. Those who won’t take or who aren’t prescribed medications mostly end up on the streets self medicating, commiting petty crimes, getting raped and beaten, aquiring a whole host of STD’s and other heath problems, but that’s OK they’ve got rights and non-profitable organizations living off.. er helping them. Mean while first responders have to take hepititus vaccine shots, make sure they have gloves, and access to non-contact CPR gear. In some neighboorhoods insect repellent is also advised. Then there are the few that don’t end up on the streets but get jobs in the media and politics.
11. Peter Warner
For over twenty years, every time I read the words ‘Peace’ in someone’s closing signature, it makes me uncomfortable. There is something sinister and threatening in that expression. The word ‘peace’ seems to actually be a threat.
I recall one formerly persistent troll who signed off each posting with “Peace.” The tone of his postings oscillated between sneering to hostile : anything but peaceful.
I live near the Los Angeles VA hospital, and for that reason among others there is no shortage of wack jobs, all you want, more than you want, walking the streets. Most are quiet. Some talk to themselves, others rant. About a year ago one ran up to me and threw a cup of – clean water, as it turned out – on me. The police have them fairly well trained, a real violent attack on a citizen is not tolerated, not even aggressive pan-handling.
I think anyone who has ridden city buses for more than a few times must have run into some marginal types eager to share their world view with you. The words don’t fit together, much less the sentences, much less the thoughts. It’s interesting, in its own way, there is often a hidden logic to their rants. But one doesn’t analyze it for political content.
It is therefore ironic in the extreme that the democraptic party has taken it as their position that poor Mr. Loughner was driven to mad violence by – Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell. Perhaps the liberals are just too accustomed to tossing word salad and pretending it’s a coherent position – I give you the 2,000 pages of Obamacare as a prime example, much less the idea that one should not read it before voting on it. Is Loughner crazier than that?
This guy was mad as a hatter but is he any more insane than the people running our economy? Everyone knows we are heading for a crackup owing to the ballooning deficits but the political and social dynamic doesn’t allow for a change of course. Lougher was in a slow motion train wreck and so are we as a society and nobody is going to reach for the brake.
In this case, it has been pointed out by Karl Denniger, Ace, and others that Mr Loughner made several death threats to many people including officials at his junior college and was never prosecuted by the Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. Yes, the same sheriff who loudly blamed the right for this attack. This could have been prevented if Sheriff Dupnik had done his job.
Okay, so a person acts crazy but doesn’t make any actual threats. And yet, the people who have contact with him can’t help but think one day he just might ‘go off’.
Would it be unreasonable to suggest this person shouldn’t be allowed to possess a handgun? I’m not anti-gun. I own guns. I know guns don’t kill people, people do. But by that very formulation, shouldn’t we restrict the people who have access to them to the responsible and sane?
Does making an argument in the affirmative make me anti-Second Amendment or just anti-nutter?
The Democratic operative who suggested that the Left should immediately pin these murders on the Republicans “like Clinton pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on anti-government wackos” is just one voice in the baying pack.
And predictably, the Republicans go into a defensive crouch, and deny and deny and deny that there’s a connection.
Result? all that the public hears is … incessant talk about The Connection. So the slander gets sealed in the minds of the inattentive.
We need to wheel about and attack the Leftists for slandering their opponents at every opportunity. Fix the conversation on what THEY are doing. Rhetoric 101, friends!
Thanks, Unsk. That makes my comment moot regarding this particular case. If the guy was making threats then obviously I say, “Sorry, Pal. No guns for you.”
And if the loudmouth sheriff knew this before the fact, then he’s got some splainin’ to do.
Perhaps it’s important to consider that it doesn’t appear that Loughner ever actually threatened anyone. I think one of the Professors even said that, he didn’t make threatening remarks, he just acted crazy and it scared people.
No he didn’t threaten anyone, though that won’t keep people from arguing that Sarah Palin or the local sherrif should have anticipated it. Gun control is itself an anticipatory argument, as is screening or monitoring.
The argument can be made that his parents and/or friends were in the best position to push the panic button. The problem with that is they are emotionally involved. Who wants to say, “here, lock my son up”.
Actually the father of the underwear bomber actually did that; and made the trip to the US embassy to warn them not to let his son within range of the USA. That nobody listened to him is a separate issue.
But back when society was more village-like, for want of a better term, people minded each other more. They knew when you were sick, physically or mentally, and other stuff besides. Nowadays that is less true. One of the prices that may have to be paid for privacy and the dissolution of community is that when you go nuts you are on your own. You face a cliff function with no gradient. One moment everybody’s humoring you. The next moment the SWAT team’s there.
Brian Levin over at Huffington Post makes the case for mental illness:
While it is still early, the most prominent emerging accomplice in this attack is for many also the least satisfying: mental illness. Unlike an actual human accomplice or a firm relational link to a political group or larger extremist organization, solitary mental distress deprives us, the secondary indirect victims, of the satisfaction of an additional clear and more imposing figure to direct our moral outrage.
That’s one way of putting it. Another is that I’m not yet convinced Loughner acted alone. My questions concern the gun, which I understand he purchased for personal use under his name. I have not seen when the purchase was made nor where. Was it from one of the many known dealers connected with the Narco traffic?
Much of this speculation is a continuation of the points raised by steveaz in the earlier thread. The head-scratching scenario that is emerging of isolated instability presaged by ambiguous borderline signals of a pending tip, may not be completely accurate. People like this are easily pushed, which I have to assume is one area of an extensive investigation to provide the context left void by Loughner’s refusal to cooperate with criminal authorities.
Brian Levin may be correct. Or else Oliver Stone gets to make another movie.
Lefties:
We of the right will accept your abject, groveling apologies now. Thank you.
“are there any set of rules that can reliably anticipate the next wacko?”
As other people have already said, for a single individual, the people who know him may be able to predict a violent action. For the population at large I don’t think it is possible to have a set of prediction rules simply because it seems to be all about probabilities and risk.
You could have a million insane people all of whom pose a risk on any given day depending on the circumstances they come across and their state of mind on that day. In a large group of people I expect that the things they experience and their state of mind act as if they are random events. Then triggers for some violent action would also behave as random events in the population of one million. If one knew the probabilities of trigger events and trigger states of mind, it may be statistically possible to say that of the one million people a certain number are likely to be dangerous on any given day. But you couldn’t name the individuals who might be dangerous on that day. The next day, statistically the same number of individuals might be prone to some violent act, but it would not be the same name list as the day before.
At least that’s how it seems to me. I know nothing about clinical psychology so I may be completely wrong.
There’s an article over at Jerry Pournelle’s from a former LEO who’s struggled with the problem of determinining who’s too crazy to be left walking around.
My guess is that we can never anticipate the future without constraining the present, perhaps unnecessarily. All the more reason then to minimize the custom of using each and every tragedy as a talking point against the ideological enemy. Those who would blame every contingency on the presence of choice, on the existence of an opposite point of view must in time argue that choice and opposition is itself illegitimate.
We live and we die. It happens to everyone sometime and we ought not imprison ourselves to such a degree that no harm, and therefore no chance of life, can come our way.
@ beverly (20) who wrote “The Democratic operative who suggested that the Left should immediately pin these murders on the Republicans “like Clinton pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on anti-government wackos” is just one voice in the baying pack.”
The more information that comes out, the more it seems that Mr. Loughner was very mentally ill. To the degree there are any political motivations to be assgigned, there’s a reasonably strong case to be made for Pinning the Tail on the Donkey.
23.; “But back when society was more village-like, for want of a better term, people minded each other more.”
I am reminded of the lightning rod; how does it work? One theory holds that lightning rods pulls excess charge from the air, preventing lightning in the first place. The other theory holds that lightning rods, by being closer to the clouds, give lightning a place to strike.
Think of murderous rampages as a lightning strike; swift, violent, and only predictable in a general sense. How can we identify and prevent such rampages in the future? My unprofessional instinct offers two suggestions.
First, drain the air. “She doesn’t understand the importance of grammar? What does she not get? That’s an interesting theory, is there some other way to express your thoughts?” When you see a neighbor struggling, don’t point and snicker; listen.
Second, direct the strike. When the insane among us seem implacable, disarm them for sure, imprison them when appropriate.
This goes back to what Wretchard said; we need that village. To help when possible, and to hinder when not.
As far as DEMS and MSM types playing up the Palin/Teaparty angle, let them have at it.
Much different circumstances, but for some reason this puts me in mind of Paul Wellstones funeral. Whrther you liked his politics or not, the guy had just died in a plane crash, and his family, friends, and supposed colleagues were in mourning.
But the DEMS couldn’t help but turn his eulogy into a campaign event, and seemd genuinely shocked when they were roundly criticized for it.
They were criticized for good reason – sometimes a tragedy is just that, and out of RESPECT for the dead and their families you don’t try to use it for political gain, at least not during the event.
Wellstone was a pawn in their game, nothing else, and it was crystal clear to anyone who was watching. The inherent ugliness of the Democratic party was on view for all to see.
The same dynamic is happening now, and when the dust clears the perpetrators of this fraud will look terrible, and lose still more of their fast diminishing credibility. Soon they’ll have to take a giant leap upward just to reach “beclowned” status. That’s a great result, so I hope they keep it up until they can’t anymore.
This type of basic dishonesty and political gamesmanship has a cunmulative effect on the credibility of the perpetrators, so I’m all for it.
W
are there any set of rules that can reliably anticipate the next wacko?
Yes, a single rule. You must discriminate.
Only profound stupidity makes us ignore one of humanity’s highest attributes – the ability to discriminate. After all, how many blog readers discriminate by reading our esteemed host’s blog first thing every morning.
Even better, we have a complete science devoted to optimal discrimination – it is called statistics.
Discrimination by statistics gives, of course, a probabilistic outcome. We used to call it playing the angles.
But refusing to play the angles (in this case the probability that Loughner was a murderous nutter) has left 6 people dead.
We must change the mind-set. Discrimination can be good as well as bad.
And here I think you have one pf the profound differences between Left and Right. The Left is right, but the Right is not so sure.
ADE
Scot @ #1,
the money trail leads right into court where a slick lawyer will take you to the cleaners for everything you own if you actually do anything to tarnish this young man’s reputation by trying to declare him dangerous.
No, it is much safer (and cheaper) to pretend nothing is wrong than to put yourself at risk by making a decision or something.
That’s the money trail that kept this wacko out on the streets.
I’m not sure of the veracity of this, but this article says there were numerous death threats and that a family member worked for the county where all this happened.
http://thechollajumps.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/jared-loughner-is-a-product-of-sheriff-dupniks-office/
#6 sirius “There are reports that people who had prior personal interaction with this person recognized he was unstable/wacky/dangerous.”
Same is true of the Virgina Tech shooter. People around him knew he was crazy, feared he was dangerous. He was reported to various authorities. No one did anything.
We don’t want to profile individuals who fly- so we scan everyone at the airport checkpoint. We don’t want to single out individuals just because they seem a little off- so we wait until they shoot twenty people.
Stricter gun control would not prevent someoene like Loughner from buying a machete.
Ten years ago a twenty year old kid here in my town attacked a random stranger at a gas station- hit him in the head with a hammer. The kid went to jail for three years. Two weeks after his release, he walked a couple blocks down the street from his parents’ house and slashed the throat of a seven year old boy. The killer was a nut; his voices told him to kill whitey, so he did. Do we blame Al Sharpton? The mental health and law enforcement professionals who knew this guy was psychotic and dangerous? Or his parents?
I’m a Christian but not a fundamentalist; yet I believe there are good arguments (Loughner’s mug shot, for example) for demonic possesion.
As a nation we had a large infrastructure of mental health institutions that did function. As with the present prison system there is always good with the bad, abuse and use etc. However, our boomers did away with that structure with their we are the world, I’d like to teach the world to sing thinking with small outpatient units that were noble in approach and nonfunctional in use. While I suspect that we originally built up those large mental health hospitals in response to traumatized vets from WWII and Korea we softend as a society and were aghast at conditions within the hospital/prisons for the mentally ill.
I agree that states need to rebuild these institutions simply because the are necessary and proper. Yes they will not be as pretty as Disney but they do good work. While the left will run nonstop showings of One who flew over the Cukoo’s Nest we as a society do need to revisit this model.
We may just need to go over our entire prison system/incarceration system while we are at it. Our prisons should be for the violent while we can create other structures for the con artists, minor drug dealers based more on retraining and education. It is all too familiar that our urban blacks are graduating from prison for more often than they are moving through the educational system. While we are doing this we can also re-create a multi tiered mental institution structure to deal with the variances of the degree of plain old craziness.
Had multiple people, from various aspects of Lochtner’s life made complaints perhaps we could have had a process where by each additional brush with the law he would have had further analysis.
This is the slippery slope that people could be incarcerated because enough people had “targeted” them but a system does need to be established. Friends in law enforcement are daily confronted by the deficiency in our present system that comes across a crazy that clearly needs a serious time-out but the only hammer in their box is prison. How to limit abuse of the system is a very important initial part of the process of rebuilding our prison system.
josh #16
“It is therefore ironic in the extreme that the democratic party has taken it as their position that poor Mr. Loughner was driven to mad violence by – Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell. Perhaps the liberals are just too accustomed to tossing word salad and pretending it’s a coherent position…”
It’s way worse than that, Josh.
Let’s look at the facts.
1. Since the late 1960′s there has been an attempt to demonize and dehumanize and even violently attack (Weather Underground etc.) the center/right and small “l” libertarianism using the bully pulpits of government, entertainment/news industries, and the education industry. One of those is completely taxpayer funded, the another largely so.
2. During the early years of this, the left had a virtual hegemony on the information stream, and could operate at will without fear of reprisal or even strong response (think Cronkite’s lie about losing Tet). They became accustomed to using strong and even violent imagery and according to the “rules” conservatives were essentially banned form doing the same. Any strident language by Republicans was deemed inappropriate, even if it was no different than their own in tone and tenor.
3. Ronald Reagan’s election gave a massive boost to the communication capabilities of the center/right. He was not timid and he inspired others to speak out. Without advocating violence, the right begins to use much more strident language and metaphor. The left responded by accusing the center/right of killing children and old people, and of being indistinguishable from Nazis and the KKK.
4. Bush I gets elected president. Seizing upon his timidity, the left reasserts itself, elects one of its own to the presidency, and tightens its grip on education and entertainment/news by blackballing moderates and conservatives. Institutions of higher learning are used to indoctrinate young people to hate anything Christian, white, heterosexual, male, and non-Marxist routinely using language that employs violent and dehumanizing imagery. The MSM and Democratic party finally give up all pretense of being disassociated entities and the proof is the response to OK City, where the Dems used the crime of an atheist anarchist to try and portray Newt Gingrish, Rush Limbaugh, Christians, and everyone not to the left of the political spectrum as being personally responsible in order to reelect Bill Clinton. In the era before the rise of talk radio, the internet, and penetration of FOX into the media market, this tactic is highly successful.
5. FOX news and talk radio and the internet finally break the hegemony that the left has over the information stream. This sets the left back mightily, and results in legislative gains for the center/right and finally the election of Bush II.
6. Bush II starts out his term under the cloud created by megalomaniac Al Gore refusing to concede the election in a grownup manner and (purposely) poisoning the well for the new president. Like his father, W is not all that confrontational and adopts what he calls “the new tone” of conciliation towards the left and some of their wish-list programs (No Child LEft Behind, for example). This, of course, does nothing to halt the endless stream of vitriol and hate pouring forth from Hollywood and NPR/CBS/NBC/ABC/PBS/CNN/NYT etc. – a hatred and level of invective-laden speech unmatched by FOX and the few existing center/right newspapers. Bush derangement syndrome prevails on practically the entire left. It becomes worse after 9/11 and expands to include the VP and anyone who is conservative politically or a devout Christian. However, this attack by the left is now becoming more toothless, because the internet and the blogosphere has effectively destroyed their ability to stifle information that undermines their agenda. This of course causes the left to become even more infuriated and use even more violent imagery, such as movies about assassinating W.
7. In 2006, a Dem congress is elected. This effectively creates gridlock. But the rhetoric heats up even further from the left. W, tired and never bold when it came to domestic fights, capitulates and refuses to use the bully pulpit to counter their extemist language. This emboldens them even further. It is during this time that Jared Loughner, a man who is an atheist, leftist, and a fan of the rising Barak Obama, decides that his U.S. rep is a “phony” leftist and starts plotting to take her out.
8. In 2008, Obama is elected, after a campaign in which he almost constantly used violent and military imagery to demonize his opponents both in the Democratic and Republican parties in ways which are not reciprocated. Sarah Palin in particular is the focus of violent and scatological language. Our Jared continues his descent into left wing and anarchist politics and philosophy.
9. Obama’s presidency immediately descends into incompetence and disaster. A group of center/right Americans becomes the Tea Party and in a nonviolent way meet to discuss a new agenda and find a way to set back the excesses and abject failures of the left’s attempts to turn the U.S. into a European-style social democracy. Obama’s ratings plummet and congressional losses for his party in the midterm elections are the worst in nearly a century. The response of the left – trained by decades of PC indoctrination in the academy and entertainment/news industries, is to accuse the Tea Party and Sarah Palin of being fascists, Nazis, etc. Because there are now, however, alternate information streams, those attempts are increasingly ineffective. So bad are the fortunes of the left that they openly, publicly wish for an event like OK City to “rescue” their man and their agenda. It is now clear that they had everything set – scripted even – to use any event at hand to try a repeat of OK City aftermath tactics.
10. Our left wing nutball shoots one of the most conservative Dems in the House, a Bush appointee conservative judge, a little girl, and a number of people, killing many and injuring others. The left, with its scripts and OK City narrative already prepped to be rolled out, pushes the “launch” button, and pounces before it can realize that it is one of their own. Yes. It turns out that the murderer was one of their own. Many of their leaders realize that they have jumped the shark. But the decision to backpedal, it is calculated, will make them even look worse. So they continue with a narrative that the Tea Parties and Sarah Palin are rsponsible.
I think that sums it up.
I recognize this kid now – it’s Syd from the original Toy Story movie, all grown up.
30. “This type of basic dishonesty and political gamesmanship has a cumulative effect on the credibility of the perpetrators, so I’m all for it.”
I agree with this wholeheartedly. If they insist on digging themselves into a deeper hole, so be it.
W @ 23: “One of the prices that may have to be paid for privacy and the dissolution of community is that when you go nuts you are on your own. You face a cliff function with no gradient. One moment everybody’s humoring you. The next moment the SWAT team’s there.”
Bingo. Your characteristic excellent insight and phrasing.
W @ 23
Actually the father of the underwear bomber actually did that; and made the trip to the US embassy to warn them not to let his son within range of the USA. That nobody listened to him is a separate issue.
Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was turned into the FBI by his brother. This after the brother read his essays in the NYT and recognized his writing.
This is another Columbine. Another Va Tech. Another Ft. Hood. People heard about the crime and knew who it was before they were told.
For some time now an effort has been underway to “define down deviancy.” I used to like to listen to the first 10 min of Dr. Laura’s radio program because she would advise us of the latest official insanity. One of the most recent was the assertion by the some psychiatrists that sex between adults and children was a good thing.
In the 60′s the Supreme Court said you could not lock up crazy people. That decision was allowed to stand because the Left was in the process of inverting societal norms.
On TV this morning a psychiatrist pointed that out that this guy was a mentally ill illegal drug user and that he did not lash out at Rush and Fox News but at authority figures. Sometime in the past some cop had pulled him over and he had been mad ever since.
You have to blame the Pima County Sheriff for not doing his job but feel for him too. He did not stop the crime but if he had tried a “Bush Doctrine” on the shooter beforehand the ACLU would have been all over him.
If this wacko shooter had an accomplice it has to be Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who in his own right is displaying some not to steady judgement. His name coud become a joke …”yeh the guy did a Dup-nik” meaning the person took a verbal dump before locating the toilet.
Also, anyone notice the similarity of Dup-nik to W.C Fields, notorious for his love of the devils brew?
I believe Baghdad Bob has resurfaced in Pima County.
Precisely because the Democrats/leftists are so lost in the ozone, it is important that those of us with at least some purchase in reality be clear about the non-political aspects of this.
First of all, I was summarizing a large body of research at the beginning of this thread when I said that the prediction of dangerousness is notoriously difficult.
Second, the system that we have in place, while cruel to the mentally ill (in the same way parents who refuse to get their child medical treatment in lieu of prayer are cruel), is actually quite reasonable as it balances individual rights and societal interests. The bag lady at the corner is supposed to be adjudicated so as no longer to be her own guardian, and we are readily able to hospitalize people against their will when there is sufficient concern that they are a danger to self or others. There, they can be treated and stabilized or hospitalized longer term in severe cases. The rule is that the least restrictive alternative must be used for treatment, and this is a good approach in the vast majority of cases. When that system fails, it is usually because of human error or sloth, and I don’t know how you get rid of that.
The big problem here and in many cases is that Paranoid Schizophrenics are, well, paranoid. They hide their symptoms and, especially after a couple of hospitalizations, learn what to say and not to say to avoid being hemmed in. The illness is usually well treated with medicines, but they don’t like to take them because it robs them of what they see as their specialness. This means that, once you stabilize them in the hospital, you have a chronic problem keeping them on the meds. A diligent family helps a lot, but even then, they are often very sneaky until the psychosis once again becomes florid. So you’re back to the problem of requiring tremendous diligence in some cases to keep them in treatment, and once they are outpatient there are a lot of cracks they can fall through.
What probably happened with Loughner is that his threats did not give the cops what they needed to lower the boom. Although it is very possible they dropped the ball, the threats are usually so vague and disorganized that, especially if the patient is cagey, there’s really nothing to pin them down with. So in some cases, you just end up with a socially isolated whack job who forces everyone to try to monitor them but mostly end up just keeping their fingers crossed that nothing horrible happens, which most of the time it doesn’t.
And the tragedy of the patient is no small matter. I was involved a couple of years back in a courtroom drama involving a young man whom I’d seen in the hospital a few years before he came back to a small Maine town and brutally murdered a female with whom he’d gone to high school. I was called in because in my earlier evaluation I’d said he looked like a serious risk, but a couple of years of treatment and relative stability and he managed to talk his doc into taking him off of his meds whereupon he resumed smoking weed and became psychotic. He stabbed the girl to death, tried to remove the baby that he was convinced she was carrying because he was afraid the fetus would expose him, and then went home and stabbed to death his father, by all accounts a fine man by whom he’d always been well treated, in his sleep.
I and many others, including the judge in the case, were disturbed when he was convicted of murder and the insanity plea was rejected by the jury. It was a very sad day to see this young man, now stable and completely aware of what he had done, sentenced to life in prison. I’m a big law and order guy, but I would have preferred life in a forensic psychiatric hospital.
Anyway, I thought people might benefit from know a bit more about how this kind of thing plays out on the ground and why generalized finger pointing in any direction is probably unwarranted.
Now, how he got a gun and how to get the boomer ethic of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll to stop making people crazy, those are different issues.
“This could have been prevented if Sheriff Dupnik had done his job.”
NO, it could have been put off. Unless you want life imprisonment for non-PC behavior. In which case Belmont Clubbers will get their own jail. Nutters are nutters. No way to prevent them or the harm they do. Jared needs to be tried, hung and buried. Then we move on to the next one.
You are looking for utopia and finding blame. All of it is just wasted energy. While you are spinning your wheels on a problem you cannot fix, what is happening to the problems you can affect?
It is disappointing to read the many comments above lamenting that nothing could have been done for this reason or that, and he had not threatened anyone.
Please read the link above posted by
#6. sirius
The perp had made multiple threats to multiple people, and this was known by the ass-covering jackass “sheriff”
Always, always, apply the test of:
Consider what harm a policy could do if it is misapplied, rather than what good it could do in the best of all possible worlds.
I do want to be-little the loss of those bereaved, or the injuries suffered by all there,
are those injuries and bereavements less than those suffered daily as a result of isolated homicides, road traffic accidents, cops in dog shooting, kitten stomping, I felt threatened “only one” mode?
I’m a Brit, I’ve seen rushed, botched gun bans hammered home in the aftermath of two events like this (the draft legislation for both bans had been drafted in 1973, but was considered too draconian, until a suitable atrocities came along), You guys need to be contacting your Congress Critters demanding cool headedness and moderation, and threatening them with electoral loss if they are stampeded.
Wretchard, please, be very careful with the “village” metaphor, here is how lefties understand it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Takes_a_Village.
Assylums are wide open for abuse, unless very strong checks and balances are in place.
A friend who worked in one in the 70s described one girl, who although she had some problems, refused to bow down to the system, and was repeatedly sent for ECT as punishment, until they finally killed her. After that my friend dropped his medical course and studied Physics instead.
Another friend, who is a psychiatrist describes some of her junior postings in institutions filled with old women, who’s only problem was institutionalization. They were typically committed for having teenage pregnancies, or boyfriends who were disapproved of.
Translate that into the present, and ask what lefties would have done to Belmont clubbers, if they could.
Acton is very clear about power corrupting. Institutional medical care confers huge powers and is wide open to corruption. potentially much worse than the ill it is meant to prevent.
Here’s a brief reminder of the British Equivalents: 1987 Michael Ryan, in Hungerford: Centrefire semi auto rifles banned. 1997, Thomas Hamilton in the infants school at Dunblane, All legally held pistols confiscated (I lost 2, the club I used to shoot at in the early 90s(Via Gellia Mill, near Matlock in Derbyshire) lost its business, no compensation, the bureaucrats argued that it was a “health & Safety measure – so no compensation to business, the owner (W. Parr) later took his own life as a direct result of the financial difficulties which that landed him.
To put the legislative effort in its context, Britain has around 3,000 deaths and 30,000 serious injuries on the roads each year.
Use of pistols in crime doubled between the 99 ban and 2009, Illegal drugs arrive by the ton and I would argue guns to defend the trade do to. We are Sooo much safer now that law abiding folks are disarmed and the criminals are not. I commented on it in more depth here http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/01/08/jared-lee-loughner/#comment-137509
Vicious Charges made by People Who Claim to be Criticizing Viciousness
Mainstream news organizations linked the attack to an offensive target map issued by Sarah Palin’s political action committee. The Huffington Post erupted, with former Senator Gary Hart flatly stating that the killings were the result of angry political rhetoric.
Keith Olbermann demanded a Palin repudiation and the founder of the Daily Kos wrote on Twitter: “Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin.” Others argued that the killing was fostered by a political climate of hate.
These accusations — that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl — are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky.
They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.
Yet such is the state of things.
We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leans toward political explanations.
We have a news media with a strong distaste for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to tarnish them.
We have a segmented news media, so there is nobody in most newsrooms to stand apart from the prevailing assumptions.
We have a news media market in which the rewards go to anybody who can stroke the audience’s pleasure buttons.
I have no love for Sarah Palin, and I like to think I’m committed to civil discourse.
But the political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible.
In Britain, the records of the procurator fiscal (Scottish state prosecutor) covering Thomas Hamilton (Murdered the 6 year olds in the school at Dunblane in 97) are under 100 year closure order.
I wonder what juicy stuff justifies that?
Given the number and types of this guy’s run-ins with various authorities, should any of them have been in a data base accessible by gun-purchase background check?
Me @ 45
“I do want to be-little the loss of those bereaved…”
Should read:
“I do NOT want to be-little the loss of those bereaved…”
Murphy’s law (and the deity of Unintended Consequences, or her assistant, Glitch, the godlett of eff-ups) at work
I am surprised in this case that before he went to do the deed the shooter did not kill his parents with whom he lived. Maybe because they allowed him to build the ‘shrine’.
ON VIDEO
Dupnik Boycotts SB-1070
Pima Co. Sheriff Dupnik has a history of left-wing hackery.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
To some extent the legal system and the education system have some culpability in this. I’m sure the police have had contact with his man more than once, he has an arrest record but no court appearance? The school expels him for concerns over him being a potential danger and did not think possibly the police should be notified? His mother works for the county, did she have any influence that kept him out of court? The Sheriff with his moaning and gnashing of teeth, were there reports of death threats from this man? How could he hide his actions and behavior from his parents? He lived there, may have has some strange “alter” in the back yard. No job? Where did he get money for a pistol?
What do I think? I think the schools all hide behind silly rules that are PC based. Bring a plastic butter knife to third grade and out you go. Riot over Military Recruiter on campus? well of it’s free speech. The parent are either dumb, self centered and more worried abut what people think that what might be right. Maybe willing to use influence to save their little baby from court. The Sheriff? Just one more political hack, willing to compromise the law when he thinks he has potential gain.
Could he have been stopped? Maybe, maybe not. Did anyone try and intervene? No this college failed, his parents failed, and the legal system possibly failed as well. Political correctness and “feeling” were the only winners here. Isn’t that wonderful.
The point is not to try to discriminate the people that is dangerous, but the people that is in need of psychiatric help and need to be forced to be helped.
Nut people need to be taken more seriously when they threat violence against others or behave in a way that is menacing. Simply as is, they have much less way to cope with stress or adapt to situations, so they are more probable to react in pathological ways and have a much lower threshold to act on their impulses.
Then, there must be an awareness that psychotic, schizophrenic, bipolar people never heal. They can recover, but their pathology is always there.
The last important point to remember is that in all of this we are talking about screening false positive and false negative.
The best way is to have a filter that catch up as much true positive as possible and the screen out the false positive without damaging them.
Josh said:
Yeah, and Hitler was a victim too.
What does a self-regulating society look like?
Jared Loughner’s murder spree is what you get when a society does not, cannot, or has ceased to, successfully self-regulate.
This has been discussed in other threads but bears repeating in this one. The more power the government assumes with regard to how citizens may deal with one another — what can or can’t be said, what can or can’t be done short of bodily or property harm, how “offensive” and “controversial” behavior is dealt with — that is to say, the more that gets kicked into the realm of “let the courts/cops/lawyers/social workers/schools/pols deal with it,” the less we, as citizens, are inclined to self-regulate. As individuals, and consequently as a society, we lose our “muscle memory,” as it were, for self-regulation.
To me, self-regulation, the instinct and bent and capacity for, is one of the historic hallmarks of being an American. If we lose this in critical mass, then we really are finished as a country, at least as one tied recognizably to the Constitutional Republic (that one was for you, Habu) our Founding Fathers envisioned.
I had a lunchroom debate-discussion with some co-workers the other week regarding (a) peanuts on planes, and (b) people in wheelchairs taking mass transit. My contention was that I thought we had gone too far to the side of accommodation, in wrong-headed fashion, to these types of situations.
Why on GGE (God’s Green Earth) is it incumbent upon 300 people to give up peanut snacks on an airplane (I’m not talking just not having peanuts handed out by the flight attendants, I’m talking about having peanuts that you, personally, brought on the plane confiscated from you by said flight attendants) just because there is the possibility that someone with a peanut allergy might be on board?
Shouldn’t the burden of action be the other way around? For the peanut-allergy sufferer to seek alternative transpo arrangements? Or for the Peanut-Allergy Sufferers of America to band together and lobby the airlines for specially designated legumeless flights?
Sure, this will restrict the schedules of the allergy sufferers, but this is neither a human rights nor a civil liberties issue here. Their Constitutional rights are not being violated by restriction of their travel choices, any more than their Constitutional rights are being violated by restriction of their out-of-home dining choices. (So are we going to ban peanuts from all restaurants, in deference to the possibility that there just might be a patron who is highly allergic?)
OTOH, having your pack of Planters taken from you, the one you bought with your own cashola and is therefore your private property … would that not be a violation of the Fourth Amendment?
okay, /sarc/
Kinda sorta.
What amazed me at our lunch discussion was that *every* *single* *one* of my co-workers came down on the side of, “Not having peanuts on an airplane isn’t a big deal for me, so I don’t mind.” IOW incognizant of the principle of the issue. That someone, somewhere in charge up there in a bureaucrat’s office has decided by fiat that 99.9% of the citizenry (those who fly commercial, at any rate) is now expected to DO THUS on a matter that is about neither human rights nor civil liberties. And that this capitulation takes place virtually uncommented on, and certainly without official debate.
The principle is about how we have handed off decisions on how to resolve these myriad tribulations of the human condition, of the daily interactions among citizens, to “the experts.” And that what too often, almost always, results, is both inane and insane.
Re: wheelchairs, anyone who rides public transit (which I do daily) is familiar with the mechanical ramps they now have on buses. On our local transit system, I witnessed firsthand an example of the inanity of our modern response. The bus driver failed to position the bus properly to the curb, so when he extended and lowered the mechanical ramp, it got stuck against the curb. So stuck that after 10-15 minutes of trying to fix it, he determined that the bus itself was stuck, and he had to call another one. The 30 people already on the bus, and the 10+ people waiting at the stop to get on, plus the 1 person in the wheelchair, therefore all had to wait for a rescue bus because we, American citizens, have been trained to NOT do the bleeding obvious: Manually wheel the wheelchaired person onto the freaking bus.
My hunch is that in any crowd of bystanders or bus riders in a situation like this, a not insubstantial number of them would be completely willing to pitch in and be the wheeler-on helper. You see how people react in emergencies, when there is no “official plan.” People help each other. (most, anyway)
And yet in the case of wheelchairs on buses, the official planners (driven by lawyers, as jd observed in #32), have beaten out of us this common humanitarian instinct to help a fellow human being, and to help with our own hands, when we are able to do so and we see a person in need. Instead we have all been trained to stand around like zombies and watch The Ramp do what we should be doing for one another. The wheelchaired person thus becomes a leper who Must Not Be Touched (for fear of mishaps and attendant lawsuits).
What does a self-regulating society look like?
A lot fewer layers.
A lot fewer official planners.
The people who were both the most knowledgeable about, and in the position to do something about (“do” in the pre-inane sense of an actual action verb) the threat posed by Jared Loughner, were/are NOT the official planners. Official planners never are. In the case of Loughner, as in every case, it is the family, friends, neighbors, classmates, teachers, coaches, pastors and principals who are the first line of defense that society has against the murderous nutters in our midst. But we have neutered this line of defense in our current culture.
The people who comprise the first line of defense have been trained to kick problems upstairs to the second (now the first) line of defense, the institutions — law enforcement, social services, hospitals, judges. Who never, ever know as much about the situation as those previous first-liners, nor are ever going to suffer personal repercussions from failure or bad decisions (as the previous first-liners do), and therefore will NEVER be as highly invested in doing the rightest thing with all possible speed.
Boots on the ground. Boots on the ground.
A self-regulating society is one in which every citizen knows he is expected to be, and is prepared to be, a first responder. First to himself. Then to the person next to him.
“Who is my neighbor?”
Maineman #42:
When I lived in California in the late 70’s a man there raped a 14 year old girl and then tried to murder her by cutting her arms off. She survived. He was caught and sent to prison.
20 years later he was released from prison and came to Tampa, Fl, where his arrival caused a degree of concern. With a few weeks he raped and murdered a woman and then committed suicide.
Okay, so maybe rape and attempted murder accompanied by severe mutilation of child does not deserve the death penalty by some people’s standards – although the child survived because of her own spunk, not any mercy on his part. BUT – this is a crime indicating severe mental problems and he should not ever have been treated either as a mental case who is ”cured” or the same as a guy who shot a 7/11 clerk in the leg during a robbery.
The alternative is vigilantism on a wide scale. He gets out of prison and we shoot him.
54. Interesting Connections…
Yeah, he was a victim of mental illness too, but out of about 60,000 schizophrenics in AZ, only his smiling, Hitler Loving Mug made the front page.
boo hoo
People: PLEASE READ #6 Sirus link:
The Sheriff was aware of multiple death threats!
…but, his enviro mom worked for the county.
Glad the Sheriff didn’t bother another liberal county employee.
The Left is at war with Common Sense, which is why it is not much in evidence in the approach to Mr. Loughner and his obvious problems.
They don’t trust ordinary people to “do the right thing” of their own volition (hence the tendency to describe their opponents as racist and misanthropes) . They believe any freedom of action will be abused. If the Left has enough power they will regulate people into doing the right thing (i.e. compel them). If the Left does not have enough power they will fool people into giving them enough power so that the Left can compel them to do the right thing.
Leftist understand the need for political spin to fool people. So when Candidate Obama talked of reinforcing in Afghanistan, they naturally assumed he was lying (a lie necessary to fool their fellow citizens). When he actually did what he promised they felt betrayed.
But in a movement based on spin, the best spinners make it to the top. It is natural that the spinners will not have much respect for the people being spun. They will naturally assume that their followers have deficiencies in “Judgment.” Lenin famously advised his acquaintances not to become patients of Leftist doctors since they were all quacks.
The leaders on the left do not trust the judgment of their followers who in turn don’t trust the judgment of their fellow citizens (while having excessive faith in their own judgment). In a sense, the leaders on the left have more respect for their opponents — who don’t fall for their line — then for their followers. Unfortunately, their opponents might have good judgment but they are the opposition so they have to be neutralized and destroyed.
So it all adds up to the need for enlightened regulation and control. You regulate and control your supporters because they are like children. You regulate and control your opponents because they will misuse their power by opposing you.
If you look at institutions dominated by the left, you’ll find they become constipated by hierarchy and regulation. There is a multiplication of minions in the system that aren’t allowed to do much but consult the minion above them. In education we see this in the form of “Zero tolerance.” This is an admission that the use of common sense and judgment at the lower levels is bigger threat than bringing a loaded gun to school (and perhaps it is — to the teetering education hierarchy).
So the instinct on the Left is to let everyone’s freak flag fly while they are acquiring and consolidating power — and then impose universal standards of behavior on everyone after they have done so. After a few more years of leftist rule, the fact that you are a sane person making a rational choice will be much less of a defense than you might first imagine. Sanity and rational choice is not the system’s friend.
On the subject of “Community Justice”
This piece of shit http://www.irishcentral.com/news/-Suspected-serial-killer-Larry-Murphy-has-relocated-to-Spain-102766159.html , kidnapped, raped and attempted to murder the daughter of an acquaintance of mine. I know the father, but not the girl.
Ironically for almost completely disarmed Ireland, it was two guys out lamping deer who disturbed the attempted murder, and, once they convinced her that they were trying to help, rescued the girl and reported the creep, whom they had recognized as he fled the scene.
As a thankyou for their good citizenship, they were prosecuted for deer poaching. The small country that Ireland is, I also know a couple of their former shooting pals.
The creep is out of prison and, it seems, living in Spain. Strange that women stopped disappearing while he was in prison…
#33- Latest on ChollaJump story. Allegation Mom worked for Pima County, Dad for Child Protective Services. If true, that’s pretty rich. Dupnik is an old fool.
The alternative is vigilantism on a wide scale. He gets out of prison and we shoot him.
Well, this is what happens when institutions fail. It’s called frontier justice.
In a strange fashion it seems like we are discussing Wretchard’s “Three Conjectures” scenario, only on a domestic security level. Failure to administer restraint X when it is possible leads to administering restraint 5X (five times the blood and treasure) when all hell breaks loose.
Government is necessary among men, so sayeth both the Declaration and the Constitution, and so I believeth as an American who subscribes to those documents … but government has its practical limitations. Meaning, in reality. IMO the Founders were quintessential clear-eyed realists in this regard. The repeated assertions in the Bill or Rights of what Congress “shall not” do were not merely driven by principle (rightly so, in my opinion) but by practicality, i.e. by the recognition that failure to observe those limitations would produce both both a government and a society far worse than the Constitutional vision.
A government trying to do everything, or darn near everything, is inevitably going to fail in doing the things it is obligated to do: to secure the unalienable rights (incl. life, liberty and property) of its citizens. Thus you get, for example, a federal government bending over backwards to fund school lunches (nod to SEIU cafeteria workers) while it neglects to keep thousands of Americans and resident friendlies from being incinerated in their offices and airliners by foreign attackers on 9/11.
I think what the Founders had in mind was more like a government of sheepdogs than a government of nannies.
But try telling that to people who want to be nannied. (Or who, in Megan McArdle’s words, “who have planned their lives around” being nannied.)
And who simultaneously deny that wolves exist.
What’s to be done?
I don’t know. That’s why I pray. A lot.
Doug #57, Trangbang #61:
I fear that in this case, like the Brentwood one with O.J, an armed citizen who interrupted the crime by shooting the killer before he could do much damage would have himself ended up in jail, treated as the real deranged nut, one who shot a poor helpless harmless head case or a beloved sports figure for no good reason.
Bogie wheel:
The norm in America was not that of “Shane” with a bunch of cowardly shopkeepers hiding behind the curtains but that of Flight 93 where John Q. Public becomes John Friggin’ Wayne.
Disappointing response, RWE. I don’t see the relevance of just any heinous crime to those committed as a result of severe mental illness. Besides, why can’t someone be sentenced to life in a mental hospital instead of jail? The finer points of what I was trying to convey appear not to have gotten across.
And Doug, the nature of the death threats is key, because without a specific threat against someone in particular, the police can’t act.
The problem we’re discussing here is how best to promote individual freedom in a complex world. It pays to remember that freedom is the opportunity to choose to do good (St. Augustine), not to do what you want or even what you think makes sense at the time — the leftist’s trap.
“Hang ‘em high” just doesn’t seem to me to be the good choice in deciding how to address dangerous mental illness. It sounds perilously like what the left is accusing conservatives of. And it’s exactly the kind of thinking that gets people hungering for a strong man to take charge as things deteriorate.
I’ve argued above that the current system of laws strikes a good balance between societal structure and individual rights with regard to potentially dangerous mental illness. In other words it embodies a conscious social choice to do the good. It is not a path to perfection, and maybe it can be made better in subtle ways, but the big problem here seems to be the basic flawed nature of man, not some major glitch in the social compact.
It seems to me that the focus should remain entirely on the insanity of the Democrats’ propaganda machine and how it clearly embodies the increasing desperation and rage of the left.
“And Doug, the nature of the death threats is key, because without a specific threat against someone in particular, the police can’t act.”
There were and they didn’t.
—
“Jared Loughner has been making death threats by phone to many people in Pima County including staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local bloggers. When Pima County Sheriff’s Office was informed, his deputies assured the victims that he was being well managed by the mental health system. It was also suggested that further pressing of charges would be unnecessary and probably cause more problems than it solved as Jared Loughner has a family member that works for Pima County.
Amy Loughner is a Natural Resource specialist for the Pima County Parks and Recreation.
—
This was not an act of politics. This was an act of a mentally disturbed young man hell bent on getting his 15 minutes of infamy.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department was aware of his violent nature and they failed to act appropriately. This tragedy leads right back to Sherriff Dupnik and all the spin in the world is not going to change that fact. ”
—
The Democrats’ propaganda machine and the Sheriff are one and the same.
RWE@56: BUT – this is a crime indicating severe mental problems and he should not ever have been treated either as a mental case who is ”cured” or the same as a guy who shot a 7/11 clerk in the leg during a robbery.
The grotesque anomalies in the sentencing code of this country’s legal system allegedly derive from the economic constraints of providing institutional care for criminals and the mentally ill, not to mention the sacrifices in level and quality of care that derive from the same argument, not to mention western society’s concern for the ‘innocent man.’ The cost of justice.
In any case, it appears that Loughner may slowly emerge from the grayer profile of a marginally functional individual with suboptimal social skill set to a more well defined community threat who was not properly contained by any of the institutions with mitigating responsibility. It appears.
In the meantime, I second bogie wheels’ point about self-regulation, one I have raised before in the context of business and industry, and suggest another and likely unpopular reminder about the importance of maintaining defensive postures in this world, such as behavioral adjustments leading to very selective relationships, as a way of self-regulating one’s exposure to threat. Ain’t foolproof but situational awareness helps. Ask any cop.
(No, that applies not to the Tucson episode except to note that the response behavior of the boomers likely saved multiple lives.)
I don’t know the topography of Pima County official offices…
But if they’re anything like my County…
Then Loughner’s mother ‘worked close buy’ (?) and was well known to the Sheriff: he correctly pronounced the family name which phonetically is Lockner.
This is the reason why spelling troubles were everywhere in the first hours. The family uses Scots-Irish pronunciation of a traditional spelling.
The kid had multiple ‘contacts’ with the Sheriff’s Office over his behavior.
So, after all of that, Clarence Dupnik grabs the microphone and spews his political rant.
Without a doubt HE’s the man most at fault.
TB68 #61
- so much for protection – several people killed and their son a murderer…
The art world (in all creative fields and beyond) in our society has a duty which can be described as erasing and redrawing the line that separates imagination and reality. The history of art can be seen as a recurring erasure and redrawing of the line between private fantasy and public external reality. In recent years, our creative worldview has been reluctant -or has been prevented by philosophical arcs- from redrawing this dividing line. This has been in development for some time, but we can illustrate it from Calvin and Hobbes to the Matrix, as a recent pop culture frame.
Add to this, the historically recent deinstitutionalization of mental health services, thanks to arguments (libertarian in origin?) that prevent us from identifying mentally troubled people and securing them into places where society can try feebly to place them on a better path in life. I’ve read that the blame for htis can be placed on the liberal left with the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but all of society has followed suit both left and right, this trend has been established worldwide in many nations divergent in political orientation.
Add to this, our current incapacity to understand the human mind and why it spins out into mental illness. We just don’t know enough yet. The mind is a mystery, a frontier we have barely begun to explore.
Freedom is what powers and motivates artists of all stripes, despite the deep postmodern legacy which eventually seeks to deny freedom, authorship and individuality. This contradiction persists and thrives in the sectors of our society which seeks the moniker of “avant-garde”, the totalitarian impulse coexists seamlessly with anarchism and libertinism.
Now we are struggling with these issues, as we do periodically with each successive domestic atrocity. How can we remain free and enlarge freedom even more so, while we struggle to to distinguish mental illness from extreme creativity and the freedom it demands? We need to be able and willing to redraw limiting lines between imagination and reality. These lines might be renegotiable because creativity must always be in flux, but we need our collective philosophical arc to land on a recognition that if we lose control of this boundary, if we cannot redraw the lines we erased, our civilization itself will spin out into madness.
61. trangbang68,
Your tax dollars at work.
60. Keith,
Is there no tradition of Jury Nullification in Ireland?
Is Technology the answer? Psychiatry lies uneasily at the nexus of Psychology and Neurology. The pendulum swings back and forth and tends more these days methinks towards the somatic explanations. One day will we be able to test for the physical deterioration that indicates schizophrenia, and even with a high confidence level determine who is likely to become violent?
My early question is repeated. How many people are we talking about? Is it 1:100, 1:500, 1:2500, or 1:12500?
I’ve argued above that the current system of laws strikes a good balance between societal structure and individual rights with regard to potentially dangerous mental illness.
Maineman,
This is your profession so I will give you props. But I would also add the note that you don’t want to come across like Big Sis in asserting “The system works.” (I realize her exact quote was “The system worked” – past tense – to be expounded on in a minute).
Something is amiss. People are sensing that.
Now. You could argue that the damage caused by the Chos and the Loughners in the current system is statistically less than the damage caused by the pre-1970s abuses of involuntary institutionalization, and that people’s sense that something is amiss is only reflective of the high visibility (due to wide media exposure) of the Chos and the Loughners, and the relative invisibility of the pre-1970s abuses.
If we truly have to make the choice between the lesser of two evils — a Loughner world vs. a Snake Pit world — then let us bring forth the evidence and debate it. Long and vigorously.
As Wretchard has stated, again in the warfare context, that there is no cost-free, completely sanitary 100% approach to security, you need to inform people of the costs of each approach, have them weigh & debate the alternatives, make an informed decision, and then respect the decision when it’s made.
What people are reacting to in part on the domestic security scene is that they feel like information, decisions and power of action have been taken out of their hands as citizens. Things just seem to get “decided” … and not by “We the People” … and the sheeple are then just told to follow along.
“Yah? Sez who?” is the classic American response.
You are asserting, with your above statement, that the current arrangement provides for the appropriate balance of maximum societal safety and maximum individual rights of the dangerously insane.
And yet lots and lots and lots of citizens have horror stories. Lots and lots and lots of citizens do not feel safe walking the streets, or living next door to or going to class with someone they know is a dangerous nutter. Lots and lots and lots of these horror stories never hit the national news. The Chos and Loughners are the tip of the iceberg.
You are telling us the system works. That things are under control. (By and large, and that failure is rare and aberrational, not systemic.)
A significant portion of the populace believes otherwise. They believe the failure is systemic, not rare and aberrational.
I’d like to know what accounts for the discrepancy between your perspective and that of millions of your fellow citizens. Are they misinformed? Uninformed? Panicked by media?
What’s going on here?
Please correct me if I have misstated your views.
respectfully,
bw
Maineman #64:
“I don’t see the relevance of just any heinous crime to those committed as a result of severe mental illness.”
You missed my point, quite entirely. Raping a girl and chopping her arms off is not “just any heinous crime.” Shooting the clerk in a 7/11 and emptying the cash register is “just any heinous crime.” And that is how the man who cut off the little girl’s arms was treated. Which was a huge mistake.
I contend, with no medical training on my part, that a guy who shoots a clerk may just be able to be rehabilitated while one that rapes a little girl and chops her arms off can’t. Or at least, barring convincing scientific evidence of demonic possession and a successful exorcism, we can’t. We can never ever trust that he has been cured.
Life imprisonment in a mental hospital would have been infinately perferable to what happened, but you would not do that to the guy who just shoots the clerk to get to the cash register.
But that is just what they did in California: Treated the dangerous nutjob as a simple criminal, one who robbed the store did not quite kill the clerk. And that is because we have redefined “normal” to the point that it means nothing anymore. He was just a Normal criminal. And so was Mohhamed Atta.
Maineman “Besides, why can’t someone be sentenced to life in a mental hospital instead of jail? ”
I think this solution is reasonable, however, for whatever reason, this solution, it seems to me, is rarely used. The insanity defense in this layman’s eyes seems to used as a “get out jail free” card. One hears often of the insane criminal sent to a mental institution instead of jail, declared sane and then set free.
There is a legal concept called the “Reasonable man’s theory”, which used to hold sway in our judicial system. The idea is that in matters of ambiguous and disputed criminal negligence and civil suits, the expectations of what a reasonable man would do, would be used a standard for resolving a dispute. When this standard was more commonly used, the outrageous, frivolous and politically correct legal suits were more rare, because the standard of the reasonable man denied them a favorable conclusion.
However, to this non-attorney, it appears the leftist legal community has successfully discarded this legal concept for many disputes, just like our constitutional protections, because it hindered both the growth of the frivolous lawsuit industry and the alternative leftist legal interpretation of the law.
So for me, the abandonment of the reasonable man, has led to the failed institution of our legal system where the legal arena is now the playground for sharks and traitors.
55. Bogie Wheel.
Thank you for saying what I was thinking…and saying it much better than I ever could.
The only thing I would add is that, thanks to political correctness, we are no longer allowed to to even discuss such issues amongst ourselves. Loughner’s apparent mental illness placed him in a special protected class that made him virtually untouchable until he committed some heinous act. Like Maj. Hassan, Loughner gave plenty of warning signs; but those signs had to be ignored…
KRB
RWE
“I contend, with no medical training on my part, that a guy who shoots a clerk may just be able to be rehabilitated while one that rapes a little girl and chops her arms off can’t.
Or at least, barring convincing scientific evidence of demonic possession and a successful exorcism, we can’t.
We can never ever trust that he has been cured.”
—
But we are to believe that a devil that shoots a woman in the back of the head, and then goes on to kill a 9 year old girl and other innocents,
AND SMILES ABOUT IT
can be best delt with by the Magicians of Psychological Therapy.
Sorry, mental health guys:
You have a valid task, but that does not include the impossible.
The left are always “locked and loaded” (sorry about the gun reference-I hope it doesn’t cause another shooting), on point for the next “event” like this one. They not only are ready, I believe they actually pray for this type of violence so they again have the opportunity to bellow about conservative speech and gun control. They know that the public will never tolerate these positions at any other time-ever.
To take Richard’s on-point observation (that “we can never anticipate the future without constraining the present),” I contend that the left’s relentless and illogical projections are designed not to constrain the present but to choke it to death.
Let’s make a deal with those who believe in preserving the “civil liberties” of people like Loughner:
We’ll let you “preserve” the “civil liberties” of the depraved if in turn you allow us the full civil liberty of private handgun ownership without restrictions. Is it a deal?
I wonder, for every Loughner that makes threats and then carries them out, how many “crazies’ are out there that make threats when they are simply blowing off steam and never intend to follow through? A hundred? A thousand? A hundred thousand?
How do you determine intent if you are law enforcement?
Or do we pass laws that deem anyone that makes any kind of threat to be insane and fill the country with insane asylums?
Yeah, it’s always bad when people get killed. I guess it’s been going on since Cain and Able with very little let up.
But it’s not the killing , it’s the aftermath of more legislation contra to the Bill of Rights.
* Stifle free speech
* Tighter control of gun ownership
etc, etc.
Every time something like this happens the Socialist Democrats want more control over OUR rights. F-em.
Also by now everyone who has done some reading is aware of obamas statement:
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said in Philadelphia last night. “Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”…Jan 2008.
That was a Dup-Nik-ski and inciteful hate mongering,population baiting,hate crime speech.
BTW..any good Dupnik jokes going around yet? I’d like to hear from Dennis MIller on DubSki.
In 1978 I was visiting an office of the National Parks Service in Harpers Ferry, to review a project I was producing for them. In the waiting room I picked up a magazine — I think it was the new bright green “GEO.” One of the features was an interview/conversation (apparently reprinted from The Co-Evolution Quarterly) titled “Nobody Should Decide Who Goes to the Mental Hospital: Dr. Thomas Szasz Talking with Governor Jerry Brown and Dr. Lou Simpson.”
The gist of the thing was that these worthies all seemed to agree that NOBODY has the right to round up and imprison humans against their will in psychatric hospitals just because they’re DIFFERENT from the rest of us!
Mind you, this was less then ten years after the nationwide controversy over the film “Titicut Follies” — a film suppressed for years by the Commonwealth of Massachussets after some careless bureaucrat had given permission to filmmaker Frederick Wiseman to go into the Bridgewater State Hospital to film conditions and treatment of inmates of that correctional facility for the criminally insane.
The nastiness shown in the film was judged to be too embarrassing to allow the film’s distribution.
At about the same time, information was coming to light showing that several states’ publicly-funded psychiatric programs had for decades been forcibly imposing lobotomies, sterilizations, and devastating medications on patients deemed to be unfit, retarded, idiots, and troublesome.
These all contributed to the DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL movement to empty state-operated mental hospitals, in case anyone wonders why homelessness only became a problem in the US beginning in the 1980′s.
Look up the writings of Thomas Szasz, MD.
Let’s make a deal with those who believe in preserving the “civil liberties” of people like Loughner:
We’ll let you “preserve” the “civil liberties” of the depraved if in turn you allow us the full civil liberty of private handgun ownership without restrictions. Is it a deal?
Works for me.
I would also settle for residential zoning.
The judge, the ACLU lawyer, the social worker & the psychiatrist who advocate turning the dangerous nutters loose? They get to live next door to the nutters in their own special neighborhood. Halfway houses for the Loughners right next to Hizzoner’s mansion.
Call it ACLUville. A gated community.
Heh.
78. feeblemind
“I wonder, for every Loughner that makes threats and then carries them out, how many “crazies’ are out there that make threats when they are simply blowing off steam and never intend to follow through? A hundred? A thousand? A hundred thousand?
How do you determine intent if you are law enforcement?
Or do we pass laws that deem anyone that makes any kind of threat to be insane and fill the country with insane asylums?”
—
Your nik applies:
This was a hazard that even Pima college could not ignore.
A threat noted by MOST of those who interacted with him.
Your “any kind of threat”
is ludicrous.
No laws need to be passed, political hacks like the Sheriff and The Media need to be held accountable.
More killing coming soon? Count on it.
Gates Warns of North Korea Missile Threat to U.S.
BEIJING — In a major new assessment of North Korea, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Tuesday that the country is becoming a direct threat to the United States and was within five years of developing a missile with the potential of hitting Alaska or the West Coast.
IN FIVE YEARS FOLKS
More http://tinyurl.com/4rcgz2h
I’ve been back in Tucson for three years after many years in Alabama. Arizona is a libertarian/conservative state, but Tucson is a bastion of liberal stupidity. The University of Arizona considers the city government and Tucson Unified School District their private fiefdom for liberal social experimentation. The result is epic fail. The schools are pretty wretched, the county prosecutor doesn’t back the cops and then you have the dupe Dupnik.
While the other sheriffs from here to the border are unified in trying to stop illegal immigration and keep the violence in Mexico, Dupnik stands in opposition to their efforts worried about alleged profiling and illegals’ civil rights.
Don’t get me started about the morons on the city council including (allegedly) Big Sis’ girlfriend. Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Well given that my memory is bad I seem to remember discussions in the past on Wretchard’s blog and other blogs about the law enforcement problem of the “homeless,” mentally ill, and governments response or should I say lack of response to them. A side subject is how they clog up emergency rooms along with the illegal aliens. Now with the Gifford’s shooting I’m starting to see this subject and the associated corruption of the shrink profession creeping up the media chain.
I’m hoping that there will be a Fox News expose on it. I’m not holding my breath waiting for the MSM to address the issue unless the tort lawyers start making big scores on it.
The blogger at “Shrinkwrapped” nails it: This was “a narrative waiting for an event.” Brilliant.
Pima College called the Sheriff
SEVEN TIMES
At about the same time, information was coming to light showing that several states’ publicly-funded psychiatric programs had for decades been forcibly imposing lobotomies, sterilizations, and devastating medications on patients deemed to be unfit, retarded, idiots, and troublesome.
These all contributed to the DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL movement to empty state-operated mental hospitals, in case anyone wonders why homelessness only became a problem in the US beginning in the 1980′s.
Well, MF, you have to admit that the master plan worked in its own nefarious way. Out of sight, out of mind. Dispersion of these people into the general population renders them next to invisible on the media scale (the only scale that matters to pols, other than the geld scale). Whereas, when you have a couple hundred housed in one facility, news cameras can be trained on them.
BTW I hope I don’t come across as flippant on this issue. As I have mentioned a couple times in the past, my father was a paranoid schizophrenic (as were/are at least 2 of his siblings). But otherwise a great and admirable guy. Which makes his mental illness so much worse in my eyes, because it ravaged someone who could have contributed so much more than he did (and what he managed to do, despite his limitations, was still pretty awesome) had he been healthy.
For every Jared Loughner I suspect there are many more like my dad. Good and moral people who struggle with (heroically, in my dad’s case) this disease. For which I have no adjective adequate on the scale of invectives. It is straight from hell. It may have taken his mind there, but my dad refused to let it take his soul there. God bless him.
As for how to “deal with” schizophrenics, some of them, like my dad, will never be able to hold down a viable job and are therefore going to have to be taken care of financially by the rest of us. Fortunately for my family (dad’s family having no money), that worked out as military benefits after dad’s 10 years in the USMC and USMCR and a subsequent honorable discharge when they discovered his condition. He lived very reclusively on that very modest income for the rest of his life. He was never a danger to anyone. I’m proud to have had him as my father. I could have done a lot worse. Considering the faith & patriotism he instilled in me, I don’t see how I could have done better.
BEIJING — In a major new assessment of North Korea, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Tuesday that the country is becoming a direct threat to the United States and was within five years of developing a missile with the potential of hitting Alaska or the West Coast.
Aaaaaand it’s 1956 all over again.
Except we aren’t who we once were. THAT is the part that scares me.
“the results would have turned up on his background check and prevented his buying a firearm.”
Reality check. It would have prevented him from buying a “legal ” firearm. The illegal kind are just a deadly. They often cost less. The last throw-a-way I bought was a S&W .38. It cost me 60$US. No bullets. Retail at that time was about $250. What worries me is a flood of automatic weapons if handguns are outlawed. A mac 10 with 2 or 3 mags would have killed everyone there. Jared Lee would have probably gotten away. For a while. When the Law makes an effort, nobody escapes for long.
80. Mad Fiddler:
Judge Harold Greene issued the order emptying the mental hospitals. This was one of the more eggregious examples of judicial fiat bypassing legislative action.
I consider the actions of the American judiciary to be depraved indifference to the safety and well-being of the general community. “Depraved Indifference” is punishable by incarceration, which should be imposed on any judge responsible for ordering the release of any criminal who then goes on to kill again.
81. bogie wheel
It will give new meaning to the term “gated community.” Works for me.
In Utah, which I suspect is similar to most of the states, the standard for involuntary commitment is “likely to cause serious injury to himself or others if not immediately restrained”, established by a sworn statement by someone with personal knowledge and an accompanying medical evaluation, or by a “peace officer” who “observes a person involved in conduct that gives the officer probable cause to believe that the person is mentally ill”.
The sad events have obviously borne out the fact that Loughner was “likely to cause serious injury to others”. Who would have been most likely in a position to take action for involuntary commitment? Loughner’s parents are logical suspects. The Sheriff had apparently fielded complaints that Loughner had made threats. The nature of these threats is not yet known. But the strange conduct of the Sheriff may be explicable by the fact that his office had enough information that he now realizes he should have acted and is trying to peremptorily shift blame from himself to others. Maybe neither the parents nor the sheriff knew the total picture, but they sure knew enough to take a closer look. So amid all the illogical or leftest hysterics, who among the great mainstream investigative reporters will be the first to follow the logical leads as to who is most responsible for letting Loughner run amok? Any wagers?
89. bogie wheel
Actually, Generation X ( generation Kill) are much better warriors then past generation were. You are being misled by the MSM. You might be right on a draftee basis, but there is no more draft and won’t be in the next few decades.
That is OK, since one of the reasons generation kill is so good at killing is they want to. That is why the Obomination won’t bring home the troops in Afghanistan. Remember his ‘army’;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXkBJh9RJy8&feature=related
The real Army would go thru those clowns like grease thru a goose.
In the end all those fine young men and women will save our bacon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y_5vxM8PYM&feature=related
If you have never seen “Generation Kill” It is worth watching. there is a certain amount of Hollywood BS there but a lot of it rings true.
The troops come from broken homes in broken neighborhoods in a broken society.
Like one of the kids says of Baghdad, ‘it’s just like home only I have a tank.’
A crazy/sick guy with a gun shoots a bunch of people. Hard to predict, hard to prevent. Bad stuff happens. Okay? So, stop talking about it, stop obsessing. Get on with your lives.
89. bogie wheel
Boy are you right when you say we aren’t who we once were.
If we began tomorrow to begin bulding a force big and powerful enough to handle whats just barely over the horizon…Iran, NK, China,Russia we still couldn’t win without going nuclear.
Gates is in Beijing most likely getting a serious warning lecture from the Chinese and he has few if any KNOWN assets to fall back on in countering their aggression.
But to allow Iran and NK the ability to attack us, nore than likely with nuclear weapons is a derilection of the Presidential Oath to protect the country. How many times have I said that obama is a threat to our national security. He has destroyed our middle class and in in the process of dismantling our military.
Yeah the deal in Arizona is bad but in FIVE years LA could eat a nuke killing millions…..which is the most important to deal with?
Soon, and you can count on it nukes will be in Hugo’s hands aimed at us.
Our entire government is failing us…where are the voices of the retired Generals and Admirals on this?
Rachel Carson and Helen Keller would be great poster folks for our nation.
Preemptively nuk’em. Preemptively: designed or having the power to deter or prevent an anticipated situation or occurrence
bw@51:
Something is amiss. People are sensing that.
A significant portion of the populace believes otherwise. They believe the failure is systemic, not rare and aberrational.
A world-historical perspective would suggest that western society reached a (semi-quasi-pseudo) state of ceased hostilities among nation-states using physical aggression to establish and achieve the goals of a hegemon, or empire if you will; which opened a window of opportunity for the creation of a sizable money class (distinct from blert’s Money Trust by an order of magnitude or two, call them The Millionaires) which, in turn, provided a means as well as motive to look more closely at festering problems of social organization and interaction.
I am not so sure that the Good Old Days were better, (preoccupation with basic survival and lack of journalistic, legal and political mediation may have created a false sense of security from threats not related to weather, food, or shelter), but it’s comforting to think so as we attempt to deal in a humane fashion with inhumane behavior.
I think I may have made statements about ‘systemic brokenness’ of the banking and financial failures tributary to the 2008 crash, but that was the heat of frustration and shock, which has since settled into a controlled boil. (Joke.)
Someone here made a funny statement about bureaucrats with clipboards, funding and mission statements. Beware also The Grand Vision.
It almost always ends up looking like Loughner’s mug shot.
stoicheion @ 93:
I guess I was unclear. My reference was not to the military but to the country at large. I ain’t worried about the military. At least not exceptionally so. (effects of DADT and growing culture of kiss-@ssism with retirement of the capable officers may change my opinion)
We can have the best military in the history of the world. And, I would assert, we probably do. But it gets us bupkiss if the military is not supported when and how it counts. Dangerous (for our troops) ROE, social engineering, defunding, moonbattery, PC Hassanery … you can call it being nibbled to death by ducks but it still amounts to being nibbled to death.
As a country, I fear that we are on the verge of becoming (or quite possibly have already become) unworthy of the blood we ask to be shed in our defense.
If the sheepdogs go Galt … what then?
93. stoicheion
Sorry dude but you’re wrong, Our adversaries have the bulge on us RIGHT NOW and right now there is no way we could withstand attacks from Iran , NK, Venezuela, China, and Russia..even in five years we couldn’t. Much less suffer an economic squeeze they could put on us by negating the dollar as the worlds reserve currency which China and Russia have already agreed to do.
And as far as Gen X your big killers..they have all the conveniences of home ..they couldn’t hold a candle to the Marines at Tarawa or Hue City. They whine too much about running out of pizza and Playboys.
h@95: Rachel Carson and Helen Keller would be great poster folks for our nation.
Reports of Peace on Earth may have been premature.
“If the sheepdogs go Galt … what then?”
I have a sheepdog, a roughcoat border collie (ergo my moniker), and I actually do herd sheep with her. And I can tell you this from experience: she will NEVER go Galt. The work ethic and the need to serve are too strong. I suspect the same is true about our military.
Josh #16
“No shortage of whack jobs at the LA veterans hospital.”
Thanks Bubba, So all vets are potential whack jobs?
Along the lines of the cry, Loughner was an afgan war vet I guess.
Things are always clearer in 20-20 hindsight
No they aren’t, especially when one is looking into a smoking mirror.
All that one can do is follow where the facts lead, after making sure that the facts one sees really are facts, as opposed to fairy tales conjured by charlatans.
Hindsight has its advantages, but so does a diary with contemporaneous accounts. Recollections can be foggy and distorted, while facts remembered at the time can be fresh in one’s mind.
Our news media should follow facts, facts, and leave conjecture for the historians. As it is, I think there is a large proportion of the media (Michael Moore, Keith Olberman, and Amy Goodman come to mind) who actively desire and promote a bloodbath which they can naturally blame on their enemies.
Habu @ 95 and 98 -
My 97 post crossed with yours. I should clarify again in that I agree with you on the fleet, equipment & economic squeeze issues. But those come down to the country’s ability & willingness to support the troops, not the troops per se.
As for the character of the troops themselves, well I don’t know if it’s such a clear-cut thing to compare between now & WWII. Consider just the raw numbers — 16 million in uni then, vs about 1.5m active & 1.5m reserve now. And consider the proportion of those numbers with respect to the country: about 10 percent of the population in WWII, about 1 percent of the population now.
The giant accomplishments of our WWII warriors were due in part to the giant size of the military. They could, in a sense, “afford” a proportion of losers and do-nothings in the ranks, again due to the sheer vastness of the roster, though you certainly would not have wanted to find yourself hunkering down in a foxhole next to one of the cr@pweasels.
OTOH I do tend to concede your point that these same warriors were the harscrabble kids of the Depression & that that experience made them innately tough. My dad was one of those Depression kids. Grandpa lost his construction business during the Depression & as a consequence the family of 13 lost their house. Two of my uncles had to drop out of school & find whatever work they could to keep the family off the street.
I’m sure we have some young people in our military now who come from some pretty effed-up backgrounds and have, character-wise, learned to prevail. But as a generation, numbers-wise? It’s pretty hard to match let alone exceed the trial of fire that the Depression-kids-turned-WWII-warriors went through.
maineman@ 2: Sorry to jump in so late. The psychiatric excuse “impossible to predict dangerousness” is. like so much psychiatric work since the 1970s, a lie or nearly so.Yes, it’s true IF you accept “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” as a standard AND successful execution of a murder as the only proof of correct diagnosis.
Homicidal patients make the examiner afraid in the same way depressed people make you sad. Most schizophrenics are pathetic, not scary.
The scary ones should, beyond a doubt, be locked up. When one of these events occurs, many people say, instantly, “It was Cho” or “It was Jared”.
Psychiatrists trained in the modern era are the only ones who don’t know what everyone else does. This is unacceptable.
bogie wheel …. if you haven’t seen this you’ll get a real kick out of it.
http://tinyurl.com/6l3u2u4
w @ 23: No he didn’t threaten anyone, though that won’t keep people from arguing that Sarah Palin or the local sherrif should have anticipated it. Gun control is itself an anticipatory argument, as is screening or monitoring.
Well, first, didn’t he? All stories are that he was so bizarre, people all around him feared violence. Does he have to get a UN resolution threatening action, before he is officially threatening?
But the real point is that he was himself lost and injured, and no institution nor individual, not his family or anyone else, reached out to get him help. LEOs see it every day. I’ve seen it personally once or twice, where it seemed that *someone* should step up and impose some help on someone who was incapable of asking for it himself. In my case, I did not, and if nobody died but the subject himself (and I don’t know for sure that even he died), then I guess the tragedy is less, but even so, morally, I wonder.
HT @ 101: Sorry, but that’s the way it is. They go to the VA for help, get some degree or other – and maybe the VA holds onto those approaching Loughner status. But the others, for better or worse, are soon back out on the streets, perhaps they want to stay nearby the VA, and the street is the only way they have to do that. It’s also a big, open area that may well attract others of like mind, so to speak, if only because they have an acclimated police force that allows them the area. Not to say the rate is any higher for veterans, but there are a lot of veterans, and this has to be one of the largest VA facilities in the nation … also one of the most rundown and underused.
(problem is the land is absolutely LA prime, easily worth a billion dollars, and the neighbors aren’t keen on the VA developing more government facilities there of any kind)
The European Theater of WWII was a battle of attrition. Military strategy and tactical prowess were accomplices to the raw embankment of bodies required to halt the ground assault.
I demean neither the military of yesterday or today, but the corners of war create profiles in courage that have many dimensions not to be simplified for the sake of posturing relative demographic superiority over the generations. The war(s) in the ME prepared, trained, and equipped USA military in ways that have yet to be demonstrated.
sally @ 13: “Without a specific threat, without some sort of overt action, there is very little one can do. We don’t institutionalize or incarcerate people just because they’re creepy and strange and scary, even if they clearly seem to need help.”
Sally, take the red pill and wake up! You state “there is very little one can do, we don’t…”
Of course “we” don’t. THAT’S THE PROBLEM!
In 1955, there were >300 000 crazy people locked up, most of them for life, and for damn good reason. Do you think the number in need of either confinement or asylum is LESS now than in 1955?
It’s at least a million, if not more. The torments that these poor souls endure for their “freedom” are at least as bad as the crimes they commit, or the innocents who die. You status quo, what “we” don’t do, is barbarism.
bogie wheel
Certainly it’s fair to compare generations of fighting men and generations in general. We do it all the time.
The Marine Corps of today doesn’t allow for the type of abuse I went through .. too harsh cry the critics which leads to a weaker psychological and physical Marine. I use the USMC because that was who I served with and because their not a person in the world who can make a case that any other service comes close to their training.
Tom Browkaw wrote “The Greatest Generation” and elevated that generation which was in most cases much tougher than any that have followed to this day. We continually ask less of our society as it asked more from the government. We have more “labor saving” machines which aid in creating a more slovenly civic.
The eposodic “Kill Generation” already mentioned was a Hollywood production which left out the McDonalds, the Pizza Huts, the daily showers and other things the guys in Hue City couldn’t have dreamed of having. Sure the M-1 has been surpassed as the “spray and pray” of the SAW has replace marksmanship, and arty and close air support is far greater but deep down todays soldier has it far, far easier than his predecessor and is no where near as hard.
107. YBR
“The war(s) in the ME prepared, trained, and equipped USA military in ways that have yet to be demonstrated.”
Baloney … what are they waiting on then in order to demonstrate this uber training?
105 Habu -
LOL big time. Although the sad part is, for a brief second you do wonder if it’s real. That’s how eye-rolling the insanity has become.
Am sending along to an ex-Ranger friend.
104 gm -
How much of the response of “psychiatrists trained in the modern era” has been shaped by the legalities, do you think?
I’m not arguing, just expanding the circle. Gut reaction that tells you someone is dangerous is useful to the citizen, esp. in context of a parking garage at night or the weirdo in the workplace. The same gut reaction by multiple people to the same person tells you, common sense conclusion would be, YES, that person is indeed dangerous.
But the law does not allow for gut reactions or common sense, I don’t think. Someone above mentioned the “reasonable man” interpretation. The more psychiatrists have to dance the lawyers’ tunes and disregard “what everyone else does” is not, it seems to me, an arrangement that serves society at large. Nor the individuals who are forced to be in daily contact with the dangerous nutters while the latter are allowed to roam on the loose.
BTW David Brooks’ NYT column quotes a book by Dr. E. Fuller Torey, “The Insanity Offense,” that says the seriously mentally ill population (I am guessing in the U.S.) stands at about 4 million. One percent of those, or about 40,000 people, are violent. The violently mentally ill “account for about half the rampage murders in the United States.” (I am guessing that distraught Philly fans account for the other half? Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
The Marine Corps of today doesn’t allow for the type of abuse I went through .. too harsh cry the critics which leads to a weaker psychological and physical Marine. I use the USMC because that was who I served with and because their not a person in the world who can make a case that any other service comes close to their training.
Re: regard for the Devil Dogs, you know I stand right there with you.
I just think we have to distinguish between “abuse” that actually has psychological value in building the warrior versus “abuse” that is just, well, abuse. I’d wager to say that both types have gone on concurrently in the Corps. And I’d even surmise that we have cut too far into the fat (eliminating useless abuse) in efforts to get rid of that which is just unnecessary, and are to the point of cutting meat & bone (“abuse” that builds). But the PC excesses of today are not reason not to call the excesses of yesteryear for what they were.
“Big deal, we survived the abuse” from previous generations of warriors may be the best reason to shrug our shoulders at the continuation of old practices, but the statement that “no Marines were harmed during the making of this Old Breed” is *still* not an answer to the question, “Can we do better today?”
All that said, some commentator wrote recently, with regard to the incident of the Naval commander losing his position over “inappropriate” videos, that the military culture is different than the general culture, and as Americans we have to recognize and respect that. Humor, abuse, language & behavior that would horrify many civilians “work” in the context of the military culture to bond and toughen, in ways and for purposes that are not necessary in the civilian world but are critical to troops.
The prevalence of cameras & the internet are opening up the military culture to a lot more people than before. Needless to say the nannies (female and male) don’t like it. But nannies by nature do not respect boundaries.
Interesting how the “all cultures are equal” crowd that nods tolerantly and solon-like at ritual Aztec human sacrifice suddenly gets the vapors if an American soldier says “you f@g.”
re: the crazy vets meme is addressed in Jug Burkett’s “Stolen Valor” where he pulls the cover on fake Viet Nam vets who claim to be homeless. It led to much of the whole media portrayal of Viet Nam veterans as lost, hopeless wrecks of humanity. In reality, most Viet Nam veterans are well adjusted (probably some of the cream of the Baby Boomer generation)
I believe the Middle East wars will produce many fine future leaders also.
As I was perusing the policy recommendations stemming from the Tucson shooting across media I was struck by something on display on many of my center-right websites. There is too much focus on systemic fixes to the Loughner-Problem.
This suggests that many in America’s center-right think we are dealing with a systemic, society-wide failure in need of a Federal palliative. This puts them on a trajectory to intersect with the Left-liberal “social justice” warriors’ trajectory in 3..2..1…
Strange bedfellows, indeed!
To get them to track a fresher scent-trail let me offer this. The more I ponder the murders in Tucson, the more interested I become in the private goings-ons inside the Loughner family. As important as the murderer’s face-book poetry and reading list may be, his at-home political and civic behavioral models during his formative years are much more important. Who were his parents? What did they think? What do they read? Who did they vote for? What did they encourage him to read?
The case is not all that unique. The murderer entered a public venue and sprayed bullets at a group of people, one of whom was a politician. Like so many youth crimes, attention, publicity and avertissement were the paramount goals. It has all the hallmarks of an adolescent’s brazen call for attention.
Attention to who? Attention to what? These are the questions I’m left with. And I’m convinced the answers to them will most likely be found by centering in on the Loughren adults and family-life…by performing profound reporting, that is, on what i think will turn out to be a personal family tragedy with a super-sized political impact.
H@110: Baloney … what are they waiting on then in order to demonstrate this uber training?
Uber leadership. I lost count of the number of high level military resignations since 2003, but a lot of retired generals are writing their memoirs.
And Uber direction. The philosophical battle between the Long War enabled by COIN theory and, well, your approach, has not yet been resolved or reconciled (which I doubt is possible) at the policy level.
I would add a few more things, such as the high caliber of many engaged in the anonymous field ‘negotiations’ that are on-going as we speak, which is not to suggest that we/they have circumvented a complete FUBAR; merely that the process is on-going. The military still has issues (DADT being the very least of them), but my bigger concern is the caliber of input and participation provided by Congress and the intelligence agencies, neither of which have particularly impressive performance records in responding to the geopolitical threats imposed by the Middle East, let alone East Asia.
112. bogie wheel
A fine assessment of abuse, but as you pointed out today is the PC world, the “kinder, gentler” zeitgeist that doesn’t allow for training deprivations, either physical or psychological. Today many of our troops and Marines are used not to kill, which is their prime job, dare say their only writ but to do the work of organizations more fitted to handholding.
It has been said on this thread by stoicheion that the Kill Generation is so good because “since one of the reasons generation kill is so good at killing is they want to.”
Well, killing the enemy of my nation is very gratifying. I know, and I wanted to very much. I never fretted over any of it. I did it with clinched teeth and malice…the way it should be done in war. F with the USA and you get my full dose of fury for it is my country and too many who have gone before have defended it in circumstances more horrible than those I faced. No quarter asked nor given, just kill the enemy in mass numbers. It is not done that way today ergo the “kinder, gentler” zeitgeist has changed the edge of the warrior.
115. YBR
Many good points, however DADT is not a military problem it is a political problem. Additionally, “but my bigger concern is the caliber of input and participation provided by Congress and the intelligence agencies, neither of which have particularly impressive performance records in responding to the geopolitical threats imposed by the Middle East, let alone East Asia.”
OK, I’ll easily agree with you on our Congress but neither you nor I, nor any civilian ,or even intelligence people can speak to the efficacy of their product. It’s too compartmentalized that very few know the entire picture and the public sure as hell NEVER knows of their success, just their failures.
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/09/132780313/sheriff-accused-shooter-unhinged-made-threats
“As we understand it, there have been law enforcement contacts with the individual where he made threats to kill,” Dupnik said during a press conference Saturday evening. But he wouldn’t say who those threats were aimed at.”
Hmmmmm, I read today that Arizona doesn’t recognize the not guilty by reason of insanity defense. That’s going to make for an “interesting” trial and a MSM hoo haw. Texas has a not guilty by reason of insanity defense but it rarely successful. If there are any indications that the suspect new right from wrong it won’t fly. For instance one person called 911 after she killed her kids. This was offered up as evidence that she knew right from wrong by the prosecution. I kind of felt bad, sorta for one lady that killed her husband, but the “temporary” insanity defense didn’t fly. She had a husband that was constantly cheating on her and she tried everything she could think of to keep him from straying. She had a boob job, plastic surgery and etc. Well she caught him comming out of a motel room with his latest, and snapped. She ran him down and over, numerous times, with her step daughter in the car screaming at her to stop. She went to prison of course. I alwasy thought there was a good comercial for the car she used in that story. “Want to run your husband down, use a Mercedes. It can take it.
If Loughner is a paranoid schizophrenic, is it accurate to characterize him as insane? I thought insanity was a disease of the mind–a psychological maladay–whereas schizophrenia is now recognized as primarily a physiological disease, i.e., a brain chemistry malady. Is this in fact the case?
I know that the physiological changes in brain chemistry that lead to (or cause?) schizophrenia typically occur in late adolescence or early adulthood. I was in my late teens when I experienced the onset of OCD, which is now being treated (successfully, in my case) with medication and is regarded as a physiological not a psychological problem.
If Loughner’s derangement is physiological in origin, can he be held accountable for his actions? I don’t think so.
The one area I think the Far Left has culpability in this tragedy is the transition from freedom of speech, being just speech, and freedom of speech including actions against others. On the extreme side you have the Weather Underground blowing people up. But the subtler actions of throwing pies, shoes, breaking windows, slashing tires, etc, are just as troubling to me. This is not “speech” and should never be allowed to hide behind her skirts.
I see no value whatsoever in keeping killers alive regardless of sanity. They have no place and add no value in civilized society. If they are insane, well then it really doesn’t matter if they understand why they are getting the “booster shot”, does it?
I’ve just read that some are appealing to the Hell’s Angels to come and help guard the funerals from the Westboro Baptist Church. The regular anti-Phelps biker group can’t make it.
I mean no disrespect to anyone, but this, and the recent fact of all the different voices placing blame for this tragedy where they did, exemplifies I think why “sanity” may not even be a useful term anymore.
71 bw: You put it exactly right. We want everything for free but that’s not the way things work. Going for perfection in everything dooms us to unintended (but frequently anticipated) consequences.
Put simply (as I did with my med students Monday):
Is the “cost” of hospitalizing some people too long and others who shouldn’t be hospitalized at all greater or lesser than the risks that there will be violent mentally ill that slip through the nets and hurt people?
This is not unlike the mammogram dispute a few months ago: Which “costs” more? Letting women in their 40′s get coverage for mammograms and have less money available for other things? Or denying women in their 40′s coverage for mammograms and having a small percentage of them die of breast cancer that might otherwise have been detected?
One highly significant problem with the left is its utopianism. Every time they see a problem they want government to fix it, and every time they do, they create two more problems.
114. steveaz said…
“I’m convinced the answers to them will most likely be found by centering in on the Loughren adults and family-life…by performing profound reporting, that is, on what i think will turn out to be a personal family tragedy with a super-sized political impact.”
—
The MSM/DC Complex has other ideas -
Silence all reporting except the banal:
DRUDGE:
SILENCE: RI Gov. bans state employees from speaking on talkradio…
Dem Congressman: If Violent Rhetoric Didn’t Cause This Shooting — It Will Cause Next One!
BILL CLINTON: ‘WE NEED TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT THINGS WE SAY’…
NEW PUSH FOR ‘FAIRNESS DOCTRINE’…
MSNBC Matthews Cites Radio Stars Mark Levin, Michael Savage As Reason For AZ Shooting…
Dem Senator Fundraises Off Murders…
Lawmakers struggle for answers, consider curbs on incendiary speech…
OBAMA FLASHBACK: ‘If They Bring a Knife to the Fight, We Bring a Gun’…
Dem rep urging ‘civility’ had called for FL guv candidate to be shot…
Obama Thanks the Sheriff…
ARIZONA REPUBLIC rips Sheriff Dupnik…
Limbaugh: Dems Trying to Profit From Tragedy…
—
Un PC God works in mysterious ways:
Rep Gifford read the First Ammendment aloud in the House.
98. Habu
Evidence please! I doubt that all the nations you mentioned could defeat us together, much less alone.
As Logic points out, if they could, why haven’t they? Remember, all those nations are dictatorships. No public opinion to hold them back, no ‘free’ press to egg them on. All those nations can do is create a blip in the crime statistics by landing troops.
Steveaz, I think you touch on an important point re; his parents. Count me with those who believe that actions of the parents leads to many of today’s psychological disorders, and that doesn’t always mean obvious parental abuse.
Many of today’s generation of kids have been so pampered, have received so little discipline and have been given so few boundaries that they grow lost and develop a tenuous tie to reality. From the reports we are hearing, Loughner’s parents used their influence within the bureaucracy to protect him from the earlier police investigations, allowed his crazy altar in their home and barricaded the home after the murders. Sounds like some extreme enablers of an extremely spoiled brat.
g-m @104 – I think you may have a point: remember when an NIMH director was murdered by a schizophrenic a few years ago? He agreed to meet with the sick young man alone in an empty office building. That’s what’s called poor judgement or poor training or you name it. He was considered a “renowned expert” on schizophrenia.
http://tinyurl.com/4vbor3s
The article contains some general information on the state of affairs as well.
Britain began closing its asylums about the same time we did.
Great photos of some of the old places:
http://tinyurl.com/yaphy2h
r @ 120: If Loughner is a paranoid schizophrenic, is it accurate to characterize him as insane? I thought insanity was a disease of the mind–a psychological maladay–whereas schizophrenia is now recognized as primarily a physiological disease, i.e., a brain chemistry malady. Is this in fact the case?
It is likely that every mental behavior has some physical basis. If you learn to bet big on a pair of queens, somewhere there is a chemical change. The issue is difficult. The big question is, if the mind is based on these physical changes, is there such a thing as free will? I think the answer has to be “yes, there is such a thing as free will” and the chemistry is simply not the issue. If someone drinks a lot of alchohol and then shoots and kills six people, there is a physical basis but I don’t think any court would recognize a temporary insanity defense. You can make a million different cases, of any degree of difficulty.
fwiw
For those unaware: MANY mentally ill victims show clear cut evidence of brain damage in their MRIs.
Such damage occurs as a direct result of viruses. Rabies is such a virus. It deliberately triggers insanity as a mechanism for self propagation of the pathogen.
It is NOT alone. There are many parasites that deliberately trigger insanity for the host as a way to propagate. Some are known to wipe out ants by the colony. Others afflict snails.
Humanity is late on the biological scene: we’re being infected by viruses jumping over from fowl and beast.
It is NOT true that the bulk of insanity is due to genes. That concept is pure assumption dating from the era before MRI imaging.
Since modern man does not practice cannibalism, the path of propagation for any such viruses depends on other ‘vectors’/agencies.
The consumption of sweetbreads should be ended — at all levels. It is a virtual certainty that they are an essential path in the propagation of viruses that injure the mind. Regardless of their protein value — they are too risky.
Viruses are VERY hard to destroy — particularly if you are counting on traditional food preparation methods. This goes triple for sweetbreads. Conditions that would destroy the viruses will make any sweetbread terrible to the taste: always overcooked.
Fish know not of water — it’s their universal condition.
We woefully underestimate the impact of viruses — the bulk of whom do not kill. Like the ‘common’ cold, we survive them.
And that’s the problem with viruses that attack our minds. Those unlucky enough to have a defect in their immune system or to have eaten contaminated food suffer an assault upon their minds.
The absolute top killers of humanity have been viruses. And apparently, the number one source for them is Chinese geese. For the layman: China raises geese in numbers that astound. Unfortunately, these fowl are raised in extremely close proximity to their owners. Viruses as ancient as the dinosaurs afflict their kin: birds and ducks.
Then one not so fine day, the virus jumps the species barrier and a new variant afflicts homo sapiens sapiens. It is for this reason that WHO monitors outbreaks from Hong Kong with great concern.
It is NOT true that most viruses kill. Like a properly bred parasite, they’d rather carry on their bad work and then jump to a fresh host.
Like the common cold — a virus — those that afflict the mind are normally survived — but the cost to ones sanity may be great.
If genetics drove insanity — we’d never have so many mentally ill people.
Polio is a virus. It has been frustrated by modern medicine. We must take the same attitude WRT mental illness: it is normally the expression of viral damage. That is the only logical reason to explain why we see such MRI images and why insanity/ hyper-paranoia can show up so late in life.
What appears to be a genetic pre-disposition to insanity may well be nothing more than a genetic weakness against viral attack in the immune system.
We’ve got everything backwards.
——-
For all of the above reasons, it is essential that MRIs be obtained for anyone so afflicted that LEOs have to be called in. It’s the least society can do for them and us.
Sorry Habu (#98)-can’t let this go. The men from Iwo Jima were brave, good men. I treated a lot of them at VA hospitals in the 80s when I was in med school. I take care of today’s Marines and am about to deploy with them for the third time. They fight a less glamorous war, with much less public support. They are superb professionals who are every bit as brave as the Marines of yore, whom I greatly respect. What sets today’s Marines apart is better training and much more experience than their warrior ancestors. Against today’s Marines, the men from Iwo Jima would have died bravely and honorably.
Westmoreland was a super-achieving paratroop officer in the WWII 82 Airborne…
As time went by he gained stars…
It was his opinion that the quality of paratrooper simply got better and better as the years rolled by.
Physical standards just kept getting tougher and tougher.
In the WWII draft if you had even half your teeth you’re in.
Todays common standard for boot recruits is about as stiff as that of elite formations in WWII.
You see this vividly in professional sports: football & basketball…
Bill Russell was a super star 45 years ago. Today he’d be in the middle of the pack if not too short to even get off the bench.
Joe Montana was the best quarter-back of his era. Today he’d have a hard time making the cut: too short.
You see it in the Olympics, too.
But, the real shocker is to look at todays Army and USMC as they stand side by side with their allies. They are larger, stronger, taller, smarter and more tech savvy than any other nation.
The Iraqis discovered that their men were only occasionally taller than our women. Our smallest Marine could out wrestle their toughest man in their platoon — and profoundly so. One particular contest was posted to uTube. The Iraqi towered over the Marine by 5 inches. He was done and pinned in under 60 seconds.
These effects go double in AfPak. We’re not sending over losers. The last time Afghanistan saw an army as physically fit it was commanded by King Alexander… And they were ten inches shorter.
And then, there’s the exchange ratio. Even with impaired or missing high tech support todays Marines kick ass. That’s why the opfor considers them ‘insane.’
——-
BTW, have you noted the winter campaign against the opfor? They’ve never seen that before. We’re attacking them in conditions that shut down all other armies. The opfor is freaking out. They have no combat solutions to winter war… so they’re reduced to being a punching bag.
Bill Roggio’s LWJ tabulates tick by tick punishment delivered directly to opfor leadership. That’s something that has never been done before: snatching opfor commanders from their beds!
moniker @128: “APA President Pedro Ruiz, M.D., observed, “We should not overreact and think that most patients with mental illness are more dangerous than the population at large. To do so would negate the work of Dr. Fenton. .”
The above moronic quote is from your link to the story on the murder of Dr. Fenton.
I have had only a few encounters with homicidal patients in my career (I’m not a psychiatrist). However, each one is very memorable.
The statement “most patients with mental illness are not more dangerous…” is sort of true, taking into account the need to define “most” and “dangerous”.
But it’s irrelevant to the question at hand. In the next sentence, Dr. Ruiz gives the game away: “To build stereotypes would undoubtedly lead to stigma, thus increasing barriers to providing patients with the highest quality of care possible”.
Stereotypes are essential to functioning in the normal world. ACTING on a stereotype after you have factual information to invalidate it is, of course, unfair and could be unjust.
Just as depressed people make us feel sad, homicidal people make us afraid. That’s not “stereotyping”, that’s reality. Dr. Ruiz denies reality in an attempt (so far quite successful) to make the ignorant think that psychiatrists are doing all that could be done to control homicidal crazies, and that to do more would HURT patients rather than HELP them.
That is, like so much else that the APA has done since 1973, a lie.
The word “fake” in the article caught my attention. Holden Caufield in Catcher in the Rye talked about all the phonies in the adult world. He had a dream in which he wanted to keep all the kids from rushing through fields of rye over the cliff. He wanted to keep some part of himself that he figured was lost to the adult world. “Sadly, some of you don’t dream,” he might have said.
I think both shooters of Lennon and Reagan had well worn copies of the book. Loughner’s list of favorites on YouTube doesn’t include it, though. Still, perhaps we ought to ban that book, some say.
I wonder, in passing, whether sustained mental suffering can lead to mental illness, specifically acute loneliness, or some sense of loss, and schizophrenia. (Lennon wrote a song about all the lonely people, but then he committed the unforgivable, he enjoyed life, made some form of peace with himself. To Hinckley, still suffering, perhaps that made him a phony.) Or is it that those who don’t adjust, don’t adjust because they are mentally unstable. A chicken or the egg question?
St. Paul said something about reasoning as a child when a child, and putting away childish things in adulthood. A comparison between what we may know now, in this present time, versus a time of fulfillment, when we will see things clearly as they are. In the meantime, love abides. Was Loughner one who demanded of himself to act on the nihilism he espoused, where charity was finally extinguished? Was he ushering in a new state of being for himself, “conscious dreaming”, the dawn of the overman?