Try Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. It's a look at politically motivated mass killings primarily in the areas divided by then disputed between Nazi Germany and the USSR. It also provides a much better understanding of the Holocaust than most accounts of individual survivors by putting it back into the greater context of the eastern European theater. If you're coming to this from Leningrad then it is a must read.

One thing I will caution is that it may complicate your view of the conflict in certain respects, including regarding the moral superiority of the victors (to clarify it is not at all in a manner that could ever be pro Nazi).

It seems to me that there is a similar level of hypocrisy on the part of conservatives who make government incompetence a significant basis of their political platform but suddenly when the state is killing people insist that the system is trustworthy and should be subject to as little review as possible.

The problem is that there has become an easy market for what I'd call bias confirmation journalism. Everyone can see great examples of it on their Facebook feed at anytime. The OP dug deep for his left wing example of it but all you have to do is google 'uva' and 'rolling stone' to see the same dynamic on the left that Fox News and the O'Keefes of the world have set up on the right. The lesson is that we all need to become more sophisticated consumers of information, lest we start believing in fairy tales about abortion as big business and rape culture.

That’s part of its ideology. It makes an appeal to rationality but it really reproduces an enormous amount of irrationality. This is the way in which it deforms language. It talks about freedom as something that is utterly reduced to freedom from, into individual responsibility; as opposed to being able to translate how private issues get transformed into or can be understood in terms of larger public systemic considerations. That’s a deformation.

I think the issue he's identifying here is that, outside of what is considered the fringes, our political discourse no longer contains values (with a small 'v,' as opposed to Family Values) when it comes to what might broadly be called economic policy. From the Paul Ryan right to the Ezra Klein left our political arguments are cloaked in the language of technocratic government that don't acknowledge that there are value judgments being made. Often left out of these conversations seems to be whether or not the commodification of everything is good for democracy or makes for a well functioning society.

I agree with @tod-kelly that posts of this nature are baffling. When same-sex marriage was put to the vote in Maryland I voted in favor. I'm ambivalent on the idea of state-sanctioned marriage generally but I understand it's something we have and if we're going to have it then I see no reason not to extend it to same sex couples. If we can extend equality and the ability for people to live happily without doing harm to others (expanding the pluralistic society tent as I call it) then I'm all for it.

The reality this post fails to acknowledge is that opponents of same sex marriage had already lost. The Supreme Court only sped up what would have inevitably happened, state by state. However, if opponents of same sex marriage playing the victim card is eye-rolling weak sauce then this type of triumphalism only feeds the paranoia that once made laws against same sex marriage a big winner at the ballot box.

Those who would use opposition to same sex marriage to ostracize need to be very careful about what they wish for, because this isn't the country they think it is. Same sex marriage is one of very few issues in which something that was considered radically liberal only a couple decades ago has now become the norm. Are supporters of same sex marriage ready for people to be fired for being caught donating to Planned Parenthood? Or taking part in a demonstration against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank? Or any number of liberal causes? The reason that same sex marriage has won out is because the argument for a more inclusive society and to allow others the freedom to express love as they see fit is compelling.

The goal should be to make opponents of same sex marriage wonder what it is they were so concerned about in the first place. Scorched earth, on the other hand, will make progress on other important political problems even more difficult.

Your position is similar to what the Canadian Supreme Court held in RE: Secession of Quebec. The court's view was that even if a large majority of the Quebecois wanted Quebec to secede it could not legally do so unilaterally as long as the Quebecois were capable of exercising their right to self-determination within the Canadian system of government.

I see your point in terms of Tsarnaev (or Roof) being fodder for the pro death penalty argument. That said I don't see either case as being particularly good fodder compared to any other mass killer. If a person has come to a philosophical conclusion about the wrongness of the death penalty that person has presumably thought about the really nasty people who would he spared execution if it was stopped.

It's kind of like arguing against the 4th amendment because occasionally evidence is suppressed and a guilty person goes free. The guilty person walking sucks, much as a murderer getting some simple pleasures denied to his victims sucks. However it's something we have to suffer lest we enable greater injustice meted out by the government, which is far more dangerous than any criminal.

I think the response to that argument is that it isn't possible to determine the justness of a policy based on a single data point. Or as I've said to my uncle, it's easy to argue that the death penalty is just when the conversation is about Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden or any person who has committed mass murder against whom overwhelming evidence of guilt exists. Discussing it in those terms removes the death penalty from how it operates in practice. Most capital cases aren't that easy.

The question to ask is whether or not allowing the state to (maybe, after extensive legal process has been exhausted) execute Tsarnaev is worth it if the price is to occasionally have the state execute an innocent person. Improving the process isn't viable. We've been trying for decades to no avail. We can keep tweaking it but as long as it remains a human process it will be fallible.

There's also the question that LWA raises below about whether or not executing even a guilty person debases us as a society, and whether it's ever just for the state to kill a person who does not himself pose an imminent deadly threat to others. That might sound a bit abstract, but think about who the state is most likely to execute, and how inconsistently it executes. Is it worth killing Tsarnaev if the price is having an irreversible punishment that isn't predictably carried out, but when it is we know we're going use it against certain groups and people more than others?

This is an understandable sentiment but I'd advise against it. It isn't justice and it's that exact mentality that allows so many people to be comfortable with citizens being shot or otherwise brutalized by law enforcement. People who oppose unnecessary use of force generally shouldn't embrace it when the (in this case hypothetical) person on the receiving end is someone they don't like.

I agree completely, and I think it's that dynamic that most explains why a given individual commits a crime of this nature. It's a frustrating answer for a lot of people I think because it implies that there might not be much that can be done to stop it (or at least not much that's consistent with living in a free society). Even if we did allow the state to behave in a much more repressive fashion I think the effectiveness would be limited. The knife attacks on elementary schools in China come to mind.

It doesn't mean that we don't have serious problems with race in this country (or gun violence for that matter) but I'm always wary of using an episode of mass murder as the nexus for reform on broader problems, at least in a modern context. During the Jim Crow era through the civil rights movement rampant murder of black people by white people acting in a private capacity to enforce segregation was a problem. At risk of sounding naive I don't think that's really true anymore. Now the big racial problems are disparate impact and entrenched economic inequality (not that there isn't state sanctioned violence that arises from that but I don't think it's the same as an embittered racist coming out of the woodwork to commit murder).

I agree that it's time for South Carolina to, for example, take down the Confederate flag. It might make people feel good but I'm not sure it changes the forces that give American born black people a disadvantage.

I'm not sure this is entirely true. He's most certainly responsible for his own actions and I haven't seen any indication (yet) that whatever problem he was medicating mitigates his criminal responsibility.

Nevertheless I think in the rush to compartmentalize mass shootings into broader political debates we've often overlooked how blurry a line it seems to be between psychological problems and politically motivated mass killers (what we often now call "terrorists," though that's a term I try to avoid). Read up on the people the FBI occasionally arrests (or in some instances entrap) for what are characterized as Islamist terrorist plots. Many of them are, for lack of a better term, losers, who don't seem quite in touch with reality. They remind me more of Dylan Klebold or John Muhammad than Osama bin Laden.

My suspicion is that, at least in this era, it's people who already have some type of personal dysfunction or psychological problem who latch on to outrageous ideologies, as opposed to the ideologies themselves inspiring the violence. I'm not arguing that broader racism still present in our culture or fetishization of firearms has zero role (something that makes me uncomfortable at times even as a gun owner) but I don't think that's the root. After all, we're all exposed to it and yet most people don't commit brutal murders.

I appreciate the warm welcome, and will be sure to be less shy about weighing in.

"...first is the sneaking suspicion one has that the public is simply being acclimatized to the fact of trigger-happy cops beating, shooting, and killing the most vulnerable members of the public on the slightest of pretenses, on mistaken suspicions, or even utterly invented pretenses. At some point, we simply accept this state of affairs as a matter of course and fail to ask the larger question: why is it that a society, as it becomes increasingly market-driven, simultaneously becomes more punitive?"

Long time lurker, first time commenting. I like the proposal but I disagree with the above. There have been people sounding the alarm about this issue for years without much fanfare. Radley Balko of course is the most notable (and he has deservedly finally gotten to a wider audience at the Washington Post). The only thing new is that there has finally been enough backlash from the more abused populations to get the attention of major media outlets. In many respects that's a good thing.

The greater danger I think is that media continues down the path it's already on, which is to make the problem of police militarization solely about race. Now race certainly can't be removed from the equation, and the war on crime and war on drugs, the primary policies that got us here, are inextricably intertwined with race and racism. I think the danger is less acclimation, and more that it becomes just another "law and order" issue drawn along familiar culture war and partisan battle lines.

Again, I can't stress enough that I don't want to downplay race, only to say that it's bigger than that. Police militarization has been on the radar here in a way that it may not have been in other places since a notorious botched SWAT raid in 2008.