hummingwolf | (no subject)

From Slacktivist: "Only a crazy person would take what we say seriously."

Every few years, tragically, some poor confused bastard fails to realize that it's all a big game, a pretense, a lie. He takes them seriously and he takes their words seriously and he behaves as someone who believes what they say. So Paul Hill murders a doctor in Florida. Eric Rudolph bombs the Atlanta Olympics. Scott Roeder guns down a doctor in church.

And each time this happens all of the people who have, for years, been suggesting that such violent resistance is obligatory recoil in horror at the sight of someone treating their words as anything other than the disingenuous lies they were always meant to be.

You know, I was thinking when I woke up this morning that with all the news coverage about Saturday's shooting, Julian Assange must be feeling terribly left out. So when the first thing I heard after turning on the news radio station was that Julian Assange had compared himself to Gabrielle Giffords, I greeted the news with a certain lack of surprise. Then again, given what Sarah Palin and other rightwing superstars have said about the Wikileaks crew, the statement may have a point. It's a point hidden underneath a gigantic, bloated ego, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

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Ever since the Tea Party started and I heard and read some of the awful things they say and the rhetorics they use, I've been waiting for something like this to happen.

It's not a question about what party or what religion you have though, but a question of how you look at your opponents or those who don't share your opinions.

If you think everyone who don't think or do like you should be silenced - that's the problem right there.

As for someone being mentally ill...I have my own views on that. Everyone and anyone of us can be triggered or shaped into doing things we would never think we could.

And we're all influenced by things around us.
That's why it's better to focus on good things instead of bad, and it's better to try to understand rather than using violence.

I don't think this is a thing specific to the Tea Party. For decades, there are groups of Americans who have been sharing paranoid theories about all the ways they believe the government is out to get them. The Tea Party might appeal to the more mainstream of those paranoid types, but there are others who just give up on the political process altogether and prepare themselves for the civil war they're sure is coming. Those are the types who frighten me.

Everyone and anyone of us can be triggered or shaped into doing things we would never think we could.

Yes. Even people who are mentally ill are still influenced by their environment.