So we’ve got another mucker, this one a right-wing nutjob with a long criminal history.
And as sure as the sun rises, we’re seeing the political slinging and dodging begin. The lefties are wagging fingers and saying “see!! The DHS report you all slagged was soooo correct!” and the righties are bobbing weaving and covering up.
This is a boring and stupid game, and it has one point only – to delegitimize one’s political opponents.
Look, if you can’t tell the difference between Michelle Malkin and some unemployable whackjob who walked into the Fed with a shotgun, may I suggest that whatever you’re using as a discriminator may need some serious work?
Having said that, there is a toxic sludge in our public life – that comes up in a variety of ways – on the right, on the left, around issues like animal rights, the environment, gun rights, etc. – that we all need to see, identify and isolate.
Jesse Walker actually has a very good post on this over at Reason:
Why did the DHS report come under such fire? It wasn’t because far-right cranks are incapable of committing crimes. It’s because the paper blew the threat of right-wing terror out of proportion, just as the Clinton administration did in the ’90s; because it treated “extremism” itself as a potential threat, while offering a definition of extremist so broad it seemed it include anyone who opposed abortion or immigration or excessive federal power; and because it fretted about the danger of “the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities.” (Note that neither the killing in Kansas last month nor the shooting in Washington yesterday was committed by an Iraq or Afghanistan vet.) The effect isn’t to make right-wing terror attacks less likely. It’s to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the right, just as the most substantial effect of a red scare was to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the left. The fact that communist spies really existed didn’t justify Joseph McCarthy’s antics, and the fact that armed extremists really exist doesn’t justify the Department of Homeland Security’s report.
Let’s start talking – all of us – about what it is that distinguishes someone who is vocally unhappy with fiscal policy direction from someone who walks into the Fed with a shotgun. When we get that sorted out, let’s see how well that distinction applies across the political spectrum.
And as a side note, let me pass a virtual beer to the guard who shot the whackjob – making a head shot against an active shooter armed with a rifle is good shooting. One for the good guys.
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(Not sure if comments work or not, but I can always save this and mail it to myself for later posting.)
I dunno, A.L. I suspect this is not the direction you might have wanted comments to go, but while I was watching the incessant CNN coverage of all this a few nights ago, I was struck by something really scary– namely, the sheer number of prominent idiots that CNN found who were not only willing, but eager to pitch the First Amendment out the window and start enacting serious criminalization of various forms of hate speech.
No one that I saw came right out and said it, but the number of rhetorical questions and statements, like, “In Europe, this couldn’t have happened, because such speech would be illegal!” or, “In Europe, the speech leading up to this would have had the guy arrested! Why, oh why, do we allow this?!” made their position quite clear to me.
And annoyingly, the best counter-speaker they permitted was, to be blunt, someone who came off as a raving wing nut, who could not defend free speech without also bring the Second Amendment into the argument. (Don’t get me wrong– I support both, strongly. But the talking head they had was just doing a very bad job. I was wincing because I could feel him doing damage to causes I believe in by supporting them badly.)
To your original point, the blunt answer is, “I don’t know how to tell one from the other.” And I don’t want to sound fatalistic or defeatist about this, because I am not. I don’t want to sound panglossian about this either, because I am not. But I think something that the American public (and the publics of all democracies, for that matter) needs to get used to is the notion that zero-error policies simply cannot be achieved, and if we try, the results are inevitably harmful. I am perhaps more sensitive to this than most, because areas of my professional and academic life have been revolutionized over the last fifty years by the growing realization– more than realization, the professional internalization– of the fact that noise and error in large systems is simply inevitable.
One of the earliest things one learns in serious communication theory (I’m talking about electronic communications, not social) is that error is inevitable and, statistically, governed by some iron relationships of power, bandwidth, and computational power. You can do a hell of a lot to move the inevitable errors around to where you can deal with them better, as our communications infrastructure shows. But if you plan on no errors in your system, you have already failed, terribly.
These ideas creep slowly and steadily into other fields as far flung as robotics, economics, game theory, sociology and too many others to easily list. For whatever reason peculiar to individual fields, when you start modelling inevitable error and noise into systems, you start to achieve better results than you had before. I cannot possibly believe that large-scale criminology is going to be any different.
I know you’re not proposing this, A.L., but I really worry that in the public’s desire to have effectively zero errors on matters like this, that we’re not going to tweak the system a little bit, but rather we’ll end up making some drastic and stupid change, like criminalizing free (though odious) speech, or encouraging the FBI to put certain classes of free (though odious) speech on watchlists and both take away manpower from more pressing concerns and open the door to further politicizing those watchlists in the future.
This is a boring and stupid game, and it has one point only – to de-legitimize one’s political opponents.
Bingo, and with an extra large dose of cynicism on top this time. Right wing? How precisely is this guy a right winger?
Let’s see:
Socialist
White Supremacist
Anti-Semite
Anti-Christian (especially Anti-Catholic)
Hated Bush
Anti-War (both Iraq and Afghan.)
9/11 Truther
Anti-Globalist
Hated Fox news and especially O’Reilly
Or in other words he supported the expansion and usage of government power to engage in economic and social re-engineering for the purpose of forcing a desired (and in his eyes better) outcome. If we want to play labeling games, which sides basic philosophy is this then?
Rather than admit that beyond the light of civilization, in the deep, dark, dank corners of the world, shredded bits of meme wander, occasionally merging and combining into horrifying monsters, twisted specters all the more terrifying precisely because you can almost recognize the bits and pieces of source material.
Instead the left prefers to engage in their favorite big lie technique and assert racism = right wing, regardless of what other beliefs you hold, solely so that they may use that narrative as a rationalization to themselves to justify the muzzling of their political opponents, by any means necessary. How long, I wonder, before various Dem Congress-critters start publicly musing about the Fairness Doctrine again?
It seems simple to me. Someone with a long criminal record is, first, someone with a long criminal record.
Their political beliefs are deeply secondary, be they national/socialist like this guy, or otherwise. He’s a serial criminal who happens to be X…
Be encouraged, Andrew. Given the number of women and underage girls who are savagely raped in this country, obviously people take the liberal media seriously, too.
Hey, Glen, when Rachel Maddow goes out there calling for rape of underage girls, get back to me. Until then, you’ll just have to deal with a complete asymmetry between the stoking of nutcase hatred on relatively mainstream right-wing media outlets (Fox, Limbaugh) and the absence of any such behavior from media liberals—most of whom make their points satirically (Stewart, Colbert, etc.).
Nice job of holding it down Andrew.