posted
I was referring to speculation about the mental health of the shooter, motive, type of weapon, location of purchase, etc. Things that have been, in recent cases, speculated upon by certain people before the dead bodies are even cold. I didn't claim any sort of equivalance.
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posted
Well you brought it up in the context of a series of mass shootings and murders, and suggested that this time speculation will be lessened. You didn't have to make a plainly spoken claim of equivalence, it was implicit. If you didn't intend to, that's another matter, but your words did. There was also, I think you would have to agree, your usual political slant on things-a clear commentary on being quick to judge and such. We've all got 'em, and you plainly did here, man.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by capaxinfiniti: I was referring to speculation about the mental health of the shooter, motive, type of weapon, location of purchase, etc.
Then tell us why you think speculation on this case will be much more reserved, capax.
posted
I'm totally on pins and needles to hear about how that doesn't involve a political statement about liberals and conservatives.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Of course it was a statement about liberals and conservatives. If the roles in this shooting were reversed, Hatrack would be exploding with commentary about Christian's inciting violence and hate, lax gun laws, and all the usual rhetorical points.
Whats more, looking around the internet, there's nothing about the shooting on the front page of the online NY Times, The Atlantic, MSNBC, Gawker, Mother Jones, The Nation or TNR. The Huffington Post has a little on it a few scrolls down but the "reporting" and comments have the predictable liberal bias. It's clear liberals don't want to talk about it. When the issue of it possibly being a *hate crime is mentioned, you get liberals responding along the lines of, "Uh, wait now. Uh, those Christians.. shooter.. mental illness.. provoked.. etc, etc.."
If this shooting had been apolitical (with regard to gay marriage/religion) it would be getting more attention. But because the shooting has a less-than-appealing political bent for liberals, it gets swept under the rug.
*hate crimes (also known as bias-motivated crimes) occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, sex, or gender identity.
Posts: 570 | Registered: Sep 2009
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posted
It seems like whenever a conservative hears a story in the news they dislike, or that has coverage they disapprove of, they forget entirely about Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, and talk radio. Such frequent willful bouts of amnesia.
Anyway,
quote:Of course it was a statement about liberals and conservatives.
Yes, that was the point in the first place. You looked to one event and implied 'liberals are speculating', and then at another and said 'they aren't speculating', and then as though we'll suffer the same sort of amnesia you do say 'I'm not making a statement of equivalence'.
It's right there in the comparison. Liberals are jumping to all sorts of conclusions about the one thing, but keeping quiet and waiting on another thing. If you weren't suggesting equivalence, why exactly compare apples to those strangely red-skinned oranges?
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by capaxinfiniti: Whats more, looking around the internet, there's nothing about the shooting on the front page of the online NY Times, The Atlantic, MSNBC, Gawker, Mother Jones, The Nation or TNR. The Huffington Post has a little on it a few scrolls down but the "reporting" and comments have the predictable liberal bias. It's clear liberals don't want to talk about it.
posted
I'm trying to figure out why a failed shooting would be front-page news on any of those outlets. Maybe if someone tried and failed to kill the president...
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quote:Originally posted by capaxinfiniti: Whats more, looking around the internet, there's nothing about the shooting on the front page of the online NY Times, The Atlantic, MSNBC, Gawker, Mother Jones, The Nation or TNR. The Huffington Post has a little on it a few scrolls down but the "reporting" and comments have the predictable liberal bias. It's clear liberals don't want to talk about it.
posted
Ok, just to be clear here: you're criticizing the media and liberals for not speculating and giving publicity to a single shooting that didn't kill anyone as they do to mass murders that kill handfuls or dozens, using multiple weapons with total casualties ranking up past multiple score.
Yeah, that pretty much encapsulated conservative whining about the media.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by capaxinfiniti: Whats more, looking around the internet, there's nothing about the shooting on the front page of the online NY Times, The Atlantic, MSNBC, Gawker, Mother Jones, The Nation or TNR. The Huffington Post has a little on it a few scrolls down but the "reporting" and comments have the predictable liberal bias. It's clear liberals don't want to talk about it.
Front or home page. The news source equivalent of the "landing page."
For major news outlets, there isn't one "front page" that everyone sees on any given day. The online New York Times "front page" changes from minute to minute and varies depending on where you are physically accessing the internet and numerous other factors. Just because it wasn't on your nytimes front page when you happened to access it, does not mean it wasn't on my nytimes front page when I happened to access it.
The bottom line is that everyone of those news sources covered the story very quickly after it happened. Most of them have more than one story on the shooting. Your claim that "liberal news outlets don't want to talk about it" is patently false. They are talking about.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Ok, just to be clear here: you're criticizing the media and liberals for not speculating and giving publicity to a single shooting that didn't kill anyone as they do to mass murders that kill handfuls or dozens, using multiple weapons with total casualties ranking up past multiple score.
Yeah, that pretty much encapsulated conservative whining about the media.
You're ignoring all the underlying issues simply because the inept shooter didn't succeed in killing anyone. You're illustrating my point. Assuming a "no harm done" kind of attitude doesn't allow the appropriate dialogue to take place. This is a hate crime and possibly domestic terrorism. If you don't think this is a big issue, you're welcome to share your reasons for thinking so.
The Rabbit: I didn't say they didn't cover the story. They would have to be devoid of journalistic scruples to not even mention the shooting. When I say they're not talking about I'm referring to the lack of continuing reports, opinion, commentary, story connections, the exhaustive background digging the media so loves to engage in.
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quote:You're ignoring all the underlying issues simply because the inept shooter didn't succeed in killing anyone. You're illustrating my point. Assuming a "no harm done" kind of attitude doesn't allow the appropriate dialogue to take place. This is a hate crime and possibly domestic terrorism. If you don't think this is a big issue, you're welcome to share your reasons for thinking so.
Careful checking reveals I haven't said or suggested this was or wasn't a hate crime, though it looks quite likely. Further careful checking reveals you never raised the question of one being a hate crime and the other not, making this a clear movement of the goal posts.
What I and others have been getting at, and have demonstrated several times now, is that multiple shootings with multiple deaths and large numbers of injuries tend to be met with more sensationalism and speculation than single shootings with no deaths even if they spring from the same sort of motive.
If you want to change the discussion to whether and which one is a hate crime and the other isn't, that's fine. We can talk about that, but it's not what you said originally, which was transparently partisan and absurd, and not what people objected to.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:You're ignoring all the underlying issues simply because the inept shooter didn't succeed in killing anyone. You're illustrating my point. Assuming a "no harm done" kind of attitude doesn't allow the appropriate dialogue to take place. This is a hate crime and possibly domestic terrorism. If you don't think this is a big issue, you're welcome to share your reasons for thinking so.
Careful checking reveals I haven't said or suggested this was or wasn't a hate crime, though it looks quite likely. Further careful checking reveals you never raised the question of one being a hate crime and the other not, making this a clear movement of the goal posts.
What I and others have been getting at, and have demonstrated several times now, is that multiple shootings with multiple deaths and large numbers of injuries tend to be met with more sensationalism and speculation than single shootings with no deaths even if they spring from the same sort of motive.
If you want to change the discussion to whether and which one is a hate crime and the other isn't, that's fine. We can talk about that, but it's not what you said originally, which was transparently partisan and absurd, and not what people objected to.
Expounding and presenting further arguments is "movement of the goal posts" according to you? From your first post you started telling me what my position was then you get huffy when my opinion of the issue proves to be more complex then you wish it to be. No, I don't think I'll be continuing a discussion with you. We're not even talking to the same points.
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posted
That's fine, since 'Expounding and presenting further arguments' isn't what you actually did. First you denied implying an equivalence, which you clearly did and have had pointed out, with even a 'is this what you meant?' tacked on. Then you admitted it was a political issue that was bad form on the part of liberals for not treating one issue like the other, without ever actually copping to the claimed equivalence. Then you ignored multiple people explaining how the media coverage doesn't actually indicate what you suggested it does, and only THEN did the topic shift to hate crimes.
So I suppose my question would have to be 'how can we be talking to the same points, when you keep changing them?'
-------
Now, as to what you (have started to) are talking about: yeah, seems likely to be a hate crime to me, and if things pan out with respect to motive and execution as they seem likely to do, domestic terrorism would not be inappropriate to use as a description. It may indeed grow to be a more serious and pressing problem than it is now, but-and I say this without yet knowing what sort of, if any, ideological or material support he received in this from others or other groups-but for right now, if it is (as I'll bet it is) a hate crime and domestic terrorism, it's far too soon to label it as serious a problem as hate crimes against Muslims (or people bigoted Americans think are Muslims), or for that matter hate crimes against gays.
Would you have used the word 'domestic terrorism' to describe the lynching of any number of homosexuals in the past decade, for example? And bear in mind there are far, far fewer homosexuals in the United States than there are socially conservative Christians, and that that gets more true the further back you go.
So no, now that you've started talking about this new topic instead of claiming there is an equivalence (there isn't) or that media coverage is minimal and biased (it isn't), this is a serious problem and we need to keep a lid on violence against anti-gay Christians and Chrisian groups, which the FRC certainly is. In fact I'd go so far to say, human nature being what it is, as the shoe gets onto the other foot and groups such as the FRC become marginalized in the eyes of society as theyve worked so hard to keep homosexuals, it will become more urgent to keep a close eye on attacks against them.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Well there's nothing quite like posting (again) to say you're done posting:) Certainly not an indirect effort at the last word of your own or anything.
Personally, is count myself lucky to get an actual response to the half dozen or so direct, relevant criticisms myself and at least two others have made in response to your claims. But it certainly doesn't seem likely.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Personally, I think capaxinfiniti deserves a lot more sympathy.
It's a tough place to be in when you have to look through roughly 31 firearm homicides a day and you finally see out of the corner of your eye, a near homicide that fits your political needs. Then you go to all the media outlets, looking for some balance to all those murders that make liberals look good and *nobody is hyping it up.* You even curse http://www.foxnews.com/ when they don't even hype it up on their front page. They must be in on it too.
Life doesn't get much harder than this and he has my full sympathy for surviving it.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
This is exactly as ridiculous as it looks. Nevermind that this is a non-homicide situation that actually got well more attention than most fatal aggressive homicides get nationally (Yes! Even with the Liberal Media Capax tasks himself with snapshotting poorly) — it's crap that wasn't even snapshotted to 'prove how much liberals don't want to talk about it' until a day later when
oh, nevermind, some part of capax's brain figured out he was pinned to the wall on this one so he departed
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
cool everybody, a new shooting, wow nothing changed who expected that.
a mom talks about raising a kid who probably has oppositional defiant disorder and a host of explosive, violent issues which put the entire family at risk. After several police and medical interventions (one in which police and paramedics have to wrestle the child onto a gurney) the child is taken to an ER, because there are literally no beds left for mental health patients. He's kept there for three days. She realizes that the child is a danger to herself and her other children (they have a safety protocol where they run to the car and lock the doors) and that she will not be stronger than him for long. When she asks for help, she's told that her only option is to press charges.
"he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”
I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people."
I disagree with her direct comparison between her son and other individuals like holmes, loughner, and cho — her kid and whatever we can piece together about the mental state of shooters are too tenuous to directly link and say "i'm raising a school shooter!" but she is at least personally relating a story about how the entire system is unconscionably broken and turned inexorably into another structure of oppression which probably exacerbates potential and as of yet not sufficiently studied underlying issues with aggrieved privilege, gun culture, broken masculinity, etc. that feed into a culture of violence that results in seemingly worse and worse shooting issues, every year, in a country that obviously has the resources to deal with it, but doesn't, because we're beholden to all sorts of backwards views. Backwards views which include but are not limited to wholly unscientific and discredited views on mental health, psychological realities and points of interventional necessity, and the systematic defunding and neglect of our medical systems.
posted
I'm just thinking now of a kid we had in my class at school. I say he was in my class, and lived in my town growing up, and we all knew this, but I think he actually managed to be at school with us for a day, once. They sent him on the first day of I think 3rd grade. He was carried out by the principle, and left school in the back of a police cruiser. I don't remember the details of the incident, but I sometimes wonder what became of him. I think in those days, while we maybe didn't have as common a vocabulary for these behavioral problems, there were options for the parents. At least I hope there were some.
The idea that a woman has to charge her son with a crime to get him some form of mental health attention is ludicrous. This is where we are now?
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posted
Yes, or worse. There's just no beds, no availability. They're just left to be dealt with by the police or the families.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
I'm just bringing this one back up for 2013 for the latest in our grisly festival of these affairs.
The short and sweet version: the navy yard shooter is the product of failed mental health services and support in america. Sound oddly familiar?
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Alexis had been arrested in recent years for firing guns at a car, through a noisy neighbor's floor and into a friend's wall; drank heavily; heard voices in his head; and suffered from what acquaintances referred to as paranoia, post-traumatic stress disorder and anger-management issues.
A month before he went on the rampage, Alexis complained to police in Rhode Island that people were talking to him through the walls and ceilings of his hotel rooms and sending microwave vibrations into his body to deprive him of sleep, according to The Associated Press. Police notified the Navy of the incident, but it's unclear what was done with that report.
quote:Six weeks ago, Aaron Alexis told people someone had threatened him at an airport in Virginia. A few days later, in Rhode Island, he heard voices. He thought people were speaking to him through "the walls, floor and ceiling" of the Navy base there, where he was working.
In his hotel room, the voices used "some sort of microwave machine" to send vibrations through the ceiling and into his body, a police report shows him saying. He could not sleep.
Alexis frequently moved as part of his contract work at military installations from New England to North Carolina; he arrived in Washington on Aug. 25. He switched hotels several times until Sept. 7, when he finally settled into the Residence Inn — a mile from his new workplace at the historic Washington Navy Yard on the capital's waterfront.
On Saturday he visited a gun shop in the Virginia suburbs. He practiced firing a rifle, then purchased a Remington 870 shotgun and 24 shells.
posted
I think this is another example of the piss poor way the VA takes care of our veterans, and an example of how horrible mental health care is as well.
Do you know if the police are still looking for two other suspects? The way Alexis is described, it is hard to believe he acted with others. Knowing his mental state would indicate he acted alone.
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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posted
I wish they'd stop making such a media spectacle of these things. Every time they do, mental health and gun control advocates actually seem to LOSE ground.
It also might dissuade some who seek a perverse form of glory and fame.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
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