I agree connections shouldn't be 'overplayed', but rightly played. Then I wouldn't even say that this is a connection, I would say it's more like an illustration.
But just out of curiousity what happened to the 'overplayed' connections the right so glibly made about liberalism and John Walker (American Taliban guy) and even the unabomber or the pronouncements today that the shooter was, in fact, a 'leftist'? Did that come back to bite them? If so I forget where exactly.
Boonton, the military images come from both sides —
Errr no its not. Look I'm sure you might be able to find 'cross hairs' somewhere on a powerpoint deck on Democratic election strategy or people using the word 'target' a lot and like sports politics does lend itself to military metaphors nicely ('outflank Republicans by veering right', 'Tea Party insurgents ousting the choice of the establishment' etc.) But no it doesn't just come from 'both sides'. Keith Oberman is not simply a left wing mirror image of Glen Beck. '2nd amendment remedies' are not casually dropped by left wing leaders when, say, the DREAM ACT fails.
"No. I’m saying that if you’re worried about paranoia, the last thing you should do is something that will largely serve to reinforce that paranoia. "
The paranoid have a moral duty to address their mental illnesses. The sane cannot try to proactively appease the paranoid by avoiding real truths. The real truth is such rhetoric should be avoided so as not to encourage things like this. If someone wants to say something like "this guy was just an incoherent nutbag therefore I'm still going to say if they don't vote to repeal the health bill we should look at 2nd amendment remedies" then instead of appeasing him or her they should be booted from the field of respectable voices.
"Yet we haven’t had an outbreak of political violence in this country in any kind of meaningful manner, nor does there appear to be any threat of that happening."
Well actually the increase in death threats and such is violence.
"Meanwhile, as Balko pointed out, we’re more hung up on the casualties of anti-government rhetoric than we are on the casualties of pro-government rhetoric. If anti-government rhetoric is ratcheted down, does that mean that dissent is ratcheted down? "
Just imagine for a moment that the shooter was really motived by Tea Partish concern for liberties, say because the congresswoman supported the health care bill. Is dissent helped? No its not, as you can see the repeal bill has already been put on hold a while. So clearly actually shooting those you disagree with doesn't help dissent.
Why would you think that just rhetorically flirting with the idea of shooting those you disagree with would be more helpful? Some Founders like Jefferson flirted with the idea of periodic uprisings to secure liberty but the more sensible ones thought it was more sensible to diffuse passions in the cumbersome machinery of gov't. Look at what happened with the whole 'Waco Black Helicopter' meme. Those that were happy to flirt with violent rhetoric to bash Bill Clinton on civil liberties almost all pounced harder than ever on civil liberties when they got a Republican in the White House and had 9/11 to motivate them. Notice today how those who applaud the rhetoric on 'overturning tyranny' happily and casually consent to things like abridging the freedom of religion for Muslims in NYC or having wikileaks attacked as a terrorist organization.
But fair is fair, if you have someone in the Obama administration saying, say of the individual mandate in health care, that people who refuse to buy insurance are traitors or are helping the terrorists then I'd be happy to condemm that 'pro-gov't violent rhetoric' too.
"Why should we government be treated with more respect than it treats, for instance, Drug War victims?"
Well for one we see here if someone does take anti-gov't rhetoric a bit too seriously and, say, tries to kill a congressperson it's not government that is getting hurt but innocent people. As a result of this it will be harder to, say, walk up to your congressperson unnanounced and try to talk about drug war victims or if you stand up at a meeting and start talking to him or her about it in a loud manner people aren't going to listen fully to you since in the back of their heads they are going to wonder if you're going to be the nutcase who pulls the gun out. So yea the victim here isn't some vague gov't but you, esp. you who wishes to press a relatively offbeat criticism of gov't policy.
Maybe this nutcase was unavoidable but if toning down the rhetoric a notch does allow us to avoid a few other nutcase incidents maybe the damage won't be so bad.
"I think there’s a need to be careful about making this assumption. We, coincidentally, have a uniquely terrible economy right now; we have at the same passed a major overhaul of a massive section of the economy that affects people’s very ability to live on a daily basis; we are fighting two increasingly unwinnable wars; a major mainstream cable channel purportedly dedicated to non-fiction has been running millenialist BS about 2012 non-stop for four or five years; and it’s probably safe to assume that because of the intensity of anger over several of the above, government officials are more likely to report threats than they used to be."
You absolutely right, however if the wiring in your house is bad you still shouldn't smoke in bed next to a bucket of gasoline. I can't easily fix all the wiring in the house but putting the can of gas outside is really easy so I should do that. We should try to address all the above issues but in the meantime avoiding '2nd amendment remedies' to not getting your way in an election is really easy (unless you have no other way to communicate your policy desires) and something you should do all the more if you can't fix the other issues easily.
I think in spite of all the back and forth over the 'rules' that should apply, one fact belies Mark's claim that because the shooter had no coherent Tea Party political stance, no criticism of overheated rhetoric is merited by this incident.
Before it happened, we had the right saying things like '2nd amendment remedies', 'reload' and placing sniper cross hairs on representatives. Now no Republican will go near such rhetoric for quite a while. Why? The answer is not unfair left wing blogs pinning the blame on them unfairly. I think the answer is the moment it happened a little voice went off in many heads that said something like "ohhh shit, this is the last thing we need, I better take it down a notch"
But why did this little voice go off? If this shooter was just a nutcase why would it be necessary for the idea to spark immediately that a little toning down was a good idea?
Is there no evidence? We have had a spike in 'rhetorical violence' and a spike in threats on Congressional representatives. Even though a threat is not the same as an actual shooting it is a criminal act and people who do such things do indeed tend toward nutty. I see no reason to assume that the reason one or more such people haven't taken it a step beyond anonymous threats and low level incidents like vandalism is anything but luck on our part.
Likewise we have seen in other times and other places that spikes in 'rhetorical violence' do indeed bring out nuts who are willing to one up the rhetoric with real action. For example, you have Rabin's assassination in Israel and the Ok. City bombing. Both preceded by escalating rhetoric of the sort the right has flirted with over the last two years.
I agree this should be criticized when it happens but when something that is a real potential consquence of this happens it is proper to cite it as a caution about what we might be unleashing if we continue to probe certain roads.
"No, my counter is that falsely tying the Right’s paranoid rhetoric to an event will in fact serve only to justify the paranoid rhetoric. “See, the Left really is out to get us – look at how they’re blaming us for something that we had absolutely nothing to do with – and they even know we had nothing to do with it!” "
And that did happen after the OK city Bombing. G Gordon Liddy got a 'free speech award' from the right and they cried that they were the victims. But saner heads prevailed and for a while at least the right did tone down the 'black helicopter' / "The President better have lot of bodyguards if he wants to speak in my state" BS.
Again what the right does is the right's business. The left should stop censoring itself on the grounds of what it imagines the right will do. The right will happily take a pass offered by the left on their rhetorical violence and turn it around on the left. We already have the right declaring this guy a 'left winger'.
I think you're making a logical fallacy here. You are correctly noting that its quite possible for there to be an over-response or wrong response to a tragedy but from that you are incorrectly concluding that any response that is not addressing only the exact circumstances of the tragedy is wrong.
A proper response to 9/11 is to examine all areas of vulnerability to terrorism, not just airplanes. Likewise it would also be proper to look at all groups that have or are likely to engage in terrorism (not just Al Qaeda, not just Islamist groups). But it is possible to take this sensible reasoning too far. Questioning evangelical groups because some of their rhetoric about abortion *could* be construed to justify terrorism when there's no indication that they are going in that direction would be taking things too far. But, say, Homeland Security opening up folders on radical right groups that posted that they admired the 9/11 attack and wish they could pull something similiar off (and that did happen) would be justified.
Throwing the body of a 9-yr old girl at the feet of Sarah Palin or the Tea Party would likewise be totally unjustified here, but pointing out the "2nd amendment remedy" shit leads to real tragedies like this one (even if it didn't lead to this particular one) and should be knocked off is totally justified.
This deserves a bit more serious thought. Protesting the Ground (near)Zero (non)Mosque as a result of 9/11 would be over the top. Likewise I'd say standing outside Sarah Palin's office with signs saying "You have blood on your hands" would also be over the top. Unlike Mark, though, I think it would be over the top even if we discover a slew of material that indicated that this crazy person was in love with the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.
Maybe a better analogy, though, would be to say as a result of the OK City Bombing and first WTC bombing, police are on the lookout for trucks and vans that are parked unattended near gov't buildings and 'trophy' targets. That policy was implemented soon after the OK City Bombing. Using Mark's reasoning, though, this was exploiting the tragedy. We should have only targetted vans and trucks being parked by lone white guys and ignored, say, a van parked by an Asian guy with a t-shirt that says "Lord Buddha ends the world today!"
All that needs be said is that the over the top "let's overthrow tyranny", "reload and lock" rhetoric should be knocked off because this incident reminds us that we have crazies who will gravitate towards such ideas and they can do things just like this even if this one particular crazy would have acted this way no matter what. If someone wants to say the Tea Party is responsible for this then I'd say that is unfair.
If Jaybird won't agree with my arguments he may argee with my bullets.
After all since the shooter doesn't seem to have ever read or cared about this blog nothing bad could ever happen by encouraging such rhetoric here. If you don't agree then you're just exploiting the tragedy.
The reason to buckle up is so you don't die in a car crash. The purpose of citing or using the friend's death as motivation is a reminder that such things are not just imaginary hypotheticals but real things that happen in the real world.
Your right, the anti-seat belt person may counter that your friend didn't die because he didn't buckle up. But then what? Translating back to the real world because this looney didn't shoot the woman because of the health care law then it's ok to talk about '2nd amendment remedies' because no crazies would actually shoot anyone over such a thing? Your counter seems to be that the right may say because this guy wasn't motivated by insane right wing rhetoric, the right should keep up the insane rhetoric. I say if they really want to go there then they will go there.
This is an amusing stance since the usual criticism of our post 9/11 actions is that we focused too much on trying to prevent an exact replay of the 9/11 attack (looking for terrorists trying to hijack an airplane with knives and such). Wouldn't it be more intelligent to use the incident as a call to 'wake up' for related possibilities as well? Say cultist religious groups that might be planning a terrorist attack or different styles of new attacks like truck bombs at major buildings? Or is the only proper reaction to raise a cry about the exact incident that happened and only that incident? In this case maybe to call for better screening & treatment for mental illness in this country.
If you heard tomorrow that an old friend had died horribly in a car accident, you might yell at your kid for not buckling up. Your warning would not be irrelevant if it turned out your friend's death wouldn't have been prevented by wearing a seat belt.
Likewise when you stoke the fires things like this happen, even if this particular thing didn't happen from stoking the fires. The idea you seem to be articulating here is that we either waited too long to say something (as if the November elections happened years ago) or we have to wait until people have forgotten about this story unless we can find that somewhere this crazy person was a Sarah Palin fan just seems silly to me.
Now this isn't to say that the counter reaction can't possibly veer too far, motivated by 'ulterior motives'. I think Rep. Brady's bill to ban 'crosshairs' in political ads is over the top, for example, even if not particularly self serving.
And in terms of a case it already happened. During the Clinton years we had the 'black helicopter crowd' combined with talk radio artists who argued it was ok to shoot ATF agents if their warrants were unconstitutional (determined, of course, not by a court but by the person who is subject to the warrant) and then we had OK City where Tim McVeigh directly linked his attack to Waco (back then a favorite hobby hoarse of the radical but not too radical to be Republican right).
According to Krugman today (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/opinion/10krugman.html?ref=opinion) documented threats against Congressmen surged 300% last spring (running up to the election). Is that just random crazies who think the gov't is controlling people's minds with grammer rules who just happened to peak at a random time that just happened to be during an election year? Or might that be crazies motivated by over the line rhetoric pushed by the right who peaked with just making anonymous death threats and petty vandalism but very well could have peaked with something as insane as what this one crazy did?
The case is that ideas have consquences. Harping on rhetoric that likens the current political situation to one where armed revolution is justified does put the idea out there that violent action is justified. Whether that meme is taken up by a person that is pure crazy or taken up by a person who is not crazy but willing to act on it doesn't really matter. It's a bad idea to be putting out there to begin with.
"making it look like you’ve got an ulterior motive."
This would assume that the Tea Party/Sarah Palin types are unable to effectively articulate their positions without 'bullets and 2nd amendment remedies' rhetoric.
But the event does have something to do with it in that rhetoric like that is like a 'dog whistle' to crazies. If this particular crazy wasn't drawn by such rhetoric then so be it, why keep playing with fire though?
It seems odd to me that the 'right thing to do' is so highly contingent on the nature of one person's insanity. If they discover this guy was a Sarah Palin/Tea Party fan then all in the sudden upping the criticism of the rhetoric will be ok? What if he was an Obama fan? Will the '2nd amendment remedy' rhetoric suddenly become ok?
So would it be ok today for a right winger to talk about '2nd amendment remedies' to, say, a failure to repeal the health bill or use 'don't retreat, reload' rhetoric when it comes to winning elections? Or can we at least say this is in bad taste?
Do we have to wait for a crazy to shoot someone while wearing a Sarah Palin t-shirt? I say this because I don't recall the right missing a beat to link, say, John Walker Linh to fuzzy 'liberalism'....I believe even the unabomber was linked to the left by the right because his anti-technology ranting (which seems about as incoherent as this guys ranting on 'mind control through grammer') might have been sorta like some environmentalists.
I hate to be a nudge but after tutoring statistics off and on for years the 'coin' analogy here is a bit irksome.
Let's say out of 100 cars 10 are carrying drugs. Now imagine a dog who barks at 5 cars carrying drugs and not at any of the others. We'd say casually this dog is 'always right', is 100%. But he isn't.
Likewise consider a dog that barks at 20 cars catching the 10 that have drugs but also barking at 10 other 'false positives'. The article says this dog is no better than flipping a coin since he is wrong 50% of the time. But he isn't. He catches 100% of the drug smuggling cars. A coin flip would generate 45 false positives, 5 true positives catching only 50% of the smugglers.
I'm not saying a dog with so many false positives is acceptable but we should keep both sides of the coin in mind. The 2nd type of dog may be more desirable when the stakes are much higher, say a bomb sniffing dog where you want zero people with bombs to get through.
In terms of probable cause, the 2nd type of dog has lots of false positives BUT that doesn't mean his barks are no better than coin flips. If he barks at you the odds are still greater that you're carrying drugs.
Even so your tax bracket is probably not higher than 35%. If you didn't make that donation you wouldn't be giving the gov't $10K in added taxes but at best 35% of $10K. Even if your charity spent 65% on proselytizing and 35% on doing stuff to help offset the gov'ts welfare it's an even swap.
Of course most charities do a lot better than 35% so it's likely that 90% or more of that $10,000 will be spent in some way to help society whereas only $3500 would have gone to the gov't in taxes....and what % of that $3500 is spent really helping the poor versus subsidies to agribusiness, overseas wars, and locking up people who smoke pot?
The real problem IMO comes from fact that most charitable giving would happen anyway. For everyone who gives $10K to save $3.5K there's probably two or three other people who would have given $10K anyway who now get $3.5 off.
Technically the hospital would bill you, sue you and secure a judgement against you if you did not bother to insure yourself and ended up in the ER sick. Those who are very wealthy (such as the Facebook founder guy) could simply self insure writing the hospital a check for whatever emergancy expenses they incur, even if its a million dollars.
I do think it works as a tax to fund insurance for those who are relatively poor. Tax funds would help offset the cost of subsidies. Those motivated to buy insurance to avoid the tax are likely those who are not very sick. Such people would lower insurance rates by coming into the pool so they are indirectly making the costs of subsidizing insurnce for the poor less costly.
I won't say my thoughts on the matter are worthier than Hayek but here's how I'm approaching this:
I understand that one can craft laws that are on their face 'taxes' but are in reality something different. For example, say you had a 'tax' on murder in colonial times where the rate for each murder was 100 tons of pure gold. Since they had debtors prisons at that time, no murder would ever be able to pay the tax and it would functionally the same as life in prison for murder. The courts would almost certainly have struck down such a law ruling it to be a criminal penalty which required full due process of law to convict and sentence....not just a 'tax collector' declaring a person was in arrears.
From that perspective the health mandate looks a lot like a tax. It's not very high. The law goes to great lengths to insist that the gov't cannot use law enforcement functions to enforce it. It even prohibits the gov't from using its more severe but legitimate tax collecting functions from enforcing it. When the law was first introduced many critics from the right were less aghast at the liberty infringing aspect of the 'mandate' than they were worried that the mandate was far too weak to work leaving insurance companies vulnerable to being swamped by people waiting till they got sick to buy insurance.
Now in terms of laws there are things that are allowed but with a fee or tax and things that are not allowed. For example, you are allowed to make income but you have an income tax. On the other side you are not allowed to park in a no parking zone even though the parking ticket might be pretty small compared to, say, the income tax.
Imagine someone is nominated to the Supreme Court. Obama's right wing critics start scouring the candidate and discover he has thousands of parking tickets. For the last twenty years he's been parking illegally racking up multiple tickets every week. He always pays the tickets, though. But the number of citations he has been issued is just thru the roof. I can easily see the counter attack on this guy. How can he be a high judge when he seems to disrepect the law so much? His defenders might say he pays all the tickets, in fact he gives his local town gov't more money in ticket revenue than he pays in property tax. Over the years his ticket revenue has purchased a quarter of the cop cars in the force! I think, though, his critics will maintain his chronic illegal parking is showing disrespect for the law.
Imagine someone else whose nominated who has simply made a lot of money and paid his income tax per the law. On this count there's not much you can say. The law allows you to make money, he did and he paid his taxes per the law.
So now finally let's imagine a person who may opt not to buy insurance. Say that young guy who started Facebook. I can see his financial advisor telling him he has billions of dollars, if he gets some horrible illness he can easily spare $2M for medical bills but he is young and healthy and unlikely to get sick so buying insurance isn't a great deal. Instead he pays whatever the penalty or fee is which is less than a typical policy would cost him. Now let's say he gets nominated to the SC or some high position.
Do you see him being viewed like the judge who insists on illegally parking his car or like the judge who simply had a healthy income and paid his tax? If its the former then the mandate really is more like a mandate. Maybe the 'fine' or 'penalty' is modest but the law is written in that you're really not supposed to violate the mandate doing so makes you a lawbreaker even if you pay the penalty the law prescribes.
On the contrary, the insurance mandate seems to fall pretty clearly on the side of the those who are the actor (the person who chooses to buy or not buy insurnace).
Imagine an alternative universe where the penalties were more in tune with, say, not withholding or paying social security taxes or what states do to those who let the insurance on their cars lapse. That would seem to be closer on the spectrum to your 'economic commands' rather than just laws that create economic incentives that may or may not induce a particular decision.
Each of these are prohibitions or taxes, not commands. They don’t tell you “perform this specific action.” They say either “refrain from performing this specific action” or “pay this sum of money.”
Subsidies are not taxes or prohibitions. Patents likewise are not prohibitions but a grant of a property right on the patent holder (if I infringe on your patent you have to sue me, not call the FBI).
Granting Congress powers of this type is a much smaller set of concessions than granting them the power to command particular actions.
It would seem the opposite. I wouldn't want the gov't to order me to 'pick twenty bales of cotton' but if the gov't had a policy that made choosing to pick cotton more economically advantageous (say by issuing land grants to agricultural colleges, import quotas on foreign cotton, granting patents to manufacturers that invent new things to do with cotton etc.) I would not consider that as great an infringement on liberty.
Economic commands are not good. Economic commands are specific directives, like “Buy a pink cupcake from Starbucks,” or “Pick twenty bales of cotton.” ...
These seem like just the set of political commands that are not allowed by the Constitution. I think the confusion here is that 'political commands' can sound a lot like economic ones. 'Serve on a jury' is, basically, saying 'you can't go to work today but instead you have to work on the gov't jury for like $5 a day'. I agree political/economic commands are problematic and that they are rightly limited in the Constitution.
Where I've been confused, though, is economic incentives. When you have something that's not an economic command (donate to charity, buy a home on credit, buy domestic goods rather than imported ones subject to a tariff) but is a decision you make because various gov't policies have made the decision more financially appealing to you. I've been thinking that you've been lumping those in with 'economic commands' because this is what the 'insurance mandate' takes the form of. You aren't required to buy insurance in the sense that you're required to serve on a jury or register for selective service. Simply not buying insurance is less financially appealing with the law than without it.
Or another 'mandate' is the tax deduction for giving to charity. The logic here is not that its simply punative to those who don't like to donate. The defendable rationalle is that those giving to charity are lessening the need of the gov't to provide welfare and other services therefore they get a tax deduction because, in a sense, they are taking some of the problems off govt's plate.
The problem, though, is that the tax is not 'merely punitive'. If a person opts not to get health insurance, they pay the tax which contributes to paying off the national debt (from the subsidies given to those who can't afford insurance). If they opt to buy insurance they presumably will help lower insurance rates which lessens the need for subsidies.
I understand better your difference between acceptable political commands and 'economic commands' but you're in an awkward position in that the Constitutional specifically allows a range of 'economic commands'. Import quotas, subsidies, patents, taxes etc. were all features of early American government. Sometimes they were based on defendable economic theories, sometimes they were just about naked special interest groups pandering, and sometimes they were based on totally crackpot ideas but the Constitution puts most of the judgement about this in the hands of the legislature rather than the courts.
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On “A Closer Look at Jared Lee Loughner”
I agree connections shouldn't be 'overplayed', but rightly played. Then I wouldn't even say that this is a connection, I would say it's more like an illustration.
But just out of curiousity what happened to the 'overplayed' connections the right so glibly made about liberalism and John Walker (American Taliban guy) and even the unabomber or the pronouncements today that the shooter was, in fact, a 'leftist'? Did that come back to bite them? If so I forget where exactly.
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Boonton, the military images come from both sides —
Errr no its not. Look I'm sure you might be able to find 'cross hairs' somewhere on a powerpoint deck on Democratic election strategy or people using the word 'target' a lot and like sports politics does lend itself to military metaphors nicely ('outflank Republicans by veering right', 'Tea Party insurgents ousting the choice of the establishment' etc.) But no it doesn't just come from 'both sides'. Keith Oberman is not simply a left wing mirror image of Glen Beck. '2nd amendment remedies' are not casually dropped by left wing leaders when, say, the DREAM ACT fails.
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"No. I’m saying that if you’re worried about paranoia, the last thing you should do is something that will largely serve to reinforce that paranoia. "
The paranoid have a moral duty to address their mental illnesses. The sane cannot try to proactively appease the paranoid by avoiding real truths. The real truth is such rhetoric should be avoided so as not to encourage things like this. If someone wants to say something like "this guy was just an incoherent nutbag therefore I'm still going to say if they don't vote to repeal the health bill we should look at 2nd amendment remedies" then instead of appeasing him or her they should be booted from the field of respectable voices.
"Yet we haven’t had an outbreak of political violence in this country in any kind of meaningful manner, nor does there appear to be any threat of that happening."
Well actually the increase in death threats and such is violence.
"Meanwhile, as Balko pointed out, we’re more hung up on the casualties of anti-government rhetoric than we are on the casualties of pro-government rhetoric. If anti-government rhetoric is ratcheted down, does that mean that dissent is ratcheted down? "
Just imagine for a moment that the shooter was really motived by Tea Partish concern for liberties, say because the congresswoman supported the health care bill. Is dissent helped? No its not, as you can see the repeal bill has already been put on hold a while. So clearly actually shooting those you disagree with doesn't help dissent.
Why would you think that just rhetorically flirting with the idea of shooting those you disagree with would be more helpful? Some Founders like Jefferson flirted with the idea of periodic uprisings to secure liberty but the more sensible ones thought it was more sensible to diffuse passions in the cumbersome machinery of gov't. Look at what happened with the whole 'Waco Black Helicopter' meme. Those that were happy to flirt with violent rhetoric to bash Bill Clinton on civil liberties almost all pounced harder than ever on civil liberties when they got a Republican in the White House and had 9/11 to motivate them. Notice today how those who applaud the rhetoric on 'overturning tyranny' happily and casually consent to things like abridging the freedom of religion for Muslims in NYC or having wikileaks attacked as a terrorist organization.
But fair is fair, if you have someone in the Obama administration saying, say of the individual mandate in health care, that people who refuse to buy insurance are traitors or are helping the terrorists then I'd be happy to condemm that 'pro-gov't violent rhetoric' too.
"Why should we government be treated with more respect than it treats, for instance, Drug War victims?"
Well for one we see here if someone does take anti-gov't rhetoric a bit too seriously and, say, tries to kill a congressperson it's not government that is getting hurt but innocent people. As a result of this it will be harder to, say, walk up to your congressperson unnanounced and try to talk about drug war victims or if you stand up at a meeting and start talking to him or her about it in a loud manner people aren't going to listen fully to you since in the back of their heads they are going to wonder if you're going to be the nutcase who pulls the gun out. So yea the victim here isn't some vague gov't but you, esp. you who wishes to press a relatively offbeat criticism of gov't policy.
Maybe this nutcase was unavoidable but if toning down the rhetoric a notch does allow us to avoid a few other nutcase incidents maybe the damage won't be so bad.
"I think there’s a need to be careful about making this assumption. We, coincidentally, have a uniquely terrible economy right now; we have at the same passed a major overhaul of a massive section of the economy that affects people’s very ability to live on a daily basis; we are fighting two increasingly unwinnable wars; a major mainstream cable channel purportedly dedicated to non-fiction has been running millenialist BS about 2012 non-stop for four or five years; and it’s probably safe to assume that because of the intensity of anger over several of the above, government officials are more likely to report threats than they used to be."
You absolutely right, however if the wiring in your house is bad you still shouldn't smoke in bed next to a bucket of gasoline. I can't easily fix all the wiring in the house but putting the can of gas outside is really easy so I should do that. We should try to address all the above issues but in the meantime avoiding '2nd amendment remedies' to not getting your way in an election is really easy (unless you have no other way to communicate your policy desires) and something you should do all the more if you can't fix the other issues easily.
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I think in spite of all the back and forth over the 'rules' that should apply, one fact belies Mark's claim that because the shooter had no coherent Tea Party political stance, no criticism of overheated rhetoric is merited by this incident.
Before it happened, we had the right saying things like '2nd amendment remedies', 'reload' and placing sniper cross hairs on representatives. Now no Republican will go near such rhetoric for quite a while. Why? The answer is not unfair left wing blogs pinning the blame on them unfairly. I think the answer is the moment it happened a little voice went off in many heads that said something like "ohhh shit, this is the last thing we need, I better take it down a notch"
But why did this little voice go off? If this shooter was just a nutcase why would it be necessary for the idea to spark immediately that a little toning down was a good idea?
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Is there no evidence? We have had a spike in 'rhetorical violence' and a spike in threats on Congressional representatives. Even though a threat is not the same as an actual shooting it is a criminal act and people who do such things do indeed tend toward nutty. I see no reason to assume that the reason one or more such people haven't taken it a step beyond anonymous threats and low level incidents like vandalism is anything but luck on our part.
Likewise we have seen in other times and other places that spikes in 'rhetorical violence' do indeed bring out nuts who are willing to one up the rhetoric with real action. For example, you have Rabin's assassination in Israel and the Ok. City bombing. Both preceded by escalating rhetoric of the sort the right has flirted with over the last two years.
I agree this should be criticized when it happens but when something that is a real potential consquence of this happens it is proper to cite it as a caution about what we might be unleashing if we continue to probe certain roads.
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"No, my counter is that falsely tying the Right’s paranoid rhetoric to an event will in fact serve only to justify the paranoid rhetoric. “See, the Left really is out to get us – look at how they’re blaming us for something that we had absolutely nothing to do with – and they even know we had nothing to do with it!” "
And that did happen after the OK city Bombing. G Gordon Liddy got a 'free speech award' from the right and they cried that they were the victims. But saner heads prevailed and for a while at least the right did tone down the 'black helicopter' / "The President better have lot of bodyguards if he wants to speak in my state" BS.
Again what the right does is the right's business. The left should stop censoring itself on the grounds of what it imagines the right will do. The right will happily take a pass offered by the left on their rhetorical violence and turn it around on the left. We already have the right declaring this guy a 'left winger'.
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I think you're making a logical fallacy here. You are correctly noting that its quite possible for there to be an over-response or wrong response to a tragedy but from that you are incorrectly concluding that any response that is not addressing only the exact circumstances of the tragedy is wrong.
A proper response to 9/11 is to examine all areas of vulnerability to terrorism, not just airplanes. Likewise it would also be proper to look at all groups that have or are likely to engage in terrorism (not just Al Qaeda, not just Islamist groups). But it is possible to take this sensible reasoning too far. Questioning evangelical groups because some of their rhetoric about abortion *could* be construed to justify terrorism when there's no indication that they are going in that direction would be taking things too far. But, say, Homeland Security opening up folders on radical right groups that posted that they admired the 9/11 attack and wish they could pull something similiar off (and that did happen) would be justified.
Throwing the body of a 9-yr old girl at the feet of Sarah Palin or the Tea Party would likewise be totally unjustified here, but pointing out the "2nd amendment remedy" shit leads to real tragedies like this one (even if it didn't lead to this particular one) and should be knocked off is totally justified.
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This deserves a bit more serious thought. Protesting the Ground (near)Zero (non)Mosque as a result of 9/11 would be over the top. Likewise I'd say standing outside Sarah Palin's office with signs saying "You have blood on your hands" would also be over the top. Unlike Mark, though, I think it would be over the top even if we discover a slew of material that indicated that this crazy person was in love with the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.
Maybe a better analogy, though, would be to say as a result of the OK City Bombing and first WTC bombing, police are on the lookout for trucks and vans that are parked unattended near gov't buildings and 'trophy' targets. That policy was implemented soon after the OK City Bombing. Using Mark's reasoning, though, this was exploiting the tragedy. We should have only targetted vans and trucks being parked by lone white guys and ignored, say, a van parked by an Asian guy with a t-shirt that says "Lord Buddha ends the world today!"
All that needs be said is that the over the top "let's overthrow tyranny", "reload and lock" rhetoric should be knocked off because this incident reminds us that we have crazies who will gravitate towards such ideas and they can do things just like this even if this one particular crazy would have acted this way no matter what. If someone wants to say the Tea Party is responsible for this then I'd say that is unfair.
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If Jaybird won't agree with my arguments he may argee with my bullets.
After all since the shooter doesn't seem to have ever read or cared about this blog nothing bad could ever happen by encouraging such rhetoric here. If you don't agree then you're just exploiting the tragedy.
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The reason to buckle up is so you don't die in a car crash. The purpose of citing or using the friend's death as motivation is a reminder that such things are not just imaginary hypotheticals but real things that happen in the real world.
Your right, the anti-seat belt person may counter that your friend didn't die because he didn't buckle up. But then what? Translating back to the real world because this looney didn't shoot the woman because of the health care law then it's ok to talk about '2nd amendment remedies' because no crazies would actually shoot anyone over such a thing? Your counter seems to be that the right may say because this guy wasn't motivated by insane right wing rhetoric, the right should keep up the insane rhetoric. I say if they really want to go there then they will go there.
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This is an amusing stance since the usual criticism of our post 9/11 actions is that we focused too much on trying to prevent an exact replay of the 9/11 attack (looking for terrorists trying to hijack an airplane with knives and such). Wouldn't it be more intelligent to use the incident as a call to 'wake up' for related possibilities as well? Say cultist religious groups that might be planning a terrorist attack or different styles of new attacks like truck bombs at major buildings? Or is the only proper reaction to raise a cry about the exact incident that happened and only that incident? In this case maybe to call for better screening & treatment for mental illness in this country.
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If you heard tomorrow that an old friend had died horribly in a car accident, you might yell at your kid for not buckling up. Your warning would not be irrelevant if it turned out your friend's death wouldn't have been prevented by wearing a seat belt.
Likewise when you stoke the fires things like this happen, even if this particular thing didn't happen from stoking the fires. The idea you seem to be articulating here is that we either waited too long to say something (as if the November elections happened years ago) or we have to wait until people have forgotten about this story unless we can find that somewhere this crazy person was a Sarah Palin fan just seems silly to me.
Now this isn't to say that the counter reaction can't possibly veer too far, motivated by 'ulterior motives'. I think Rep. Brady's bill to ban 'crosshairs' in political ads is over the top, for example, even if not particularly self serving.
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And in terms of a case it already happened. During the Clinton years we had the 'black helicopter crowd' combined with talk radio artists who argued it was ok to shoot ATF agents if their warrants were unconstitutional (determined, of course, not by a court but by the person who is subject to the warrant) and then we had OK City where Tim McVeigh directly linked his attack to Waco (back then a favorite hobby hoarse of the radical but not too radical to be Republican right).
According to Krugman today (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/opinion/10krugman.html?ref=opinion) documented threats against Congressmen surged 300% last spring (running up to the election). Is that just random crazies who think the gov't is controlling people's minds with grammer rules who just happened to peak at a random time that just happened to be during an election year? Or might that be crazies motivated by over the line rhetoric pushed by the right who peaked with just making anonymous death threats and petty vandalism but very well could have peaked with something as insane as what this one crazy did?
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The case is that ideas have consquences. Harping on rhetoric that likens the current political situation to one where armed revolution is justified does put the idea out there that violent action is justified. Whether that meme is taken up by a person that is pure crazy or taken up by a person who is not crazy but willing to act on it doesn't really matter. It's a bad idea to be putting out there to begin with.
"making it look like you’ve got an ulterior motive."
This would assume that the Tea Party/Sarah Palin types are unable to effectively articulate their positions without 'bullets and 2nd amendment remedies' rhetoric.
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But the event does have something to do with it in that rhetoric like that is like a 'dog whistle' to crazies. If this particular crazy wasn't drawn by such rhetoric then so be it, why keep playing with fire though?
It seems odd to me that the 'right thing to do' is so highly contingent on the nature of one person's insanity. If they discover this guy was a Sarah Palin/Tea Party fan then all in the sudden upping the criticism of the rhetoric will be ok? What if he was an Obama fan? Will the '2nd amendment remedy' rhetoric suddenly become ok?
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So would it be ok today for a right winger to talk about '2nd amendment remedies' to, say, a failure to repeal the health bill or use 'don't retreat, reload' rhetoric when it comes to winning elections? Or can we at least say this is in bad taste?
Do we have to wait for a crazy to shoot someone while wearing a Sarah Palin t-shirt? I say this because I don't recall the right missing a beat to link, say, John Walker Linh to fuzzy 'liberalism'....I believe even the unabomber was linked to the left by the right because his anti-technology ranting (which seems about as incoherent as this guys ranting on 'mind control through grammer') might have been sorta like some environmentalists.
On “It’s Not Accuracy They Want…”
I hate to be a nudge but after tutoring statistics off and on for years the 'coin' analogy here is a bit irksome.
Let's say out of 100 cars 10 are carrying drugs. Now imagine a dog who barks at 5 cars carrying drugs and not at any of the others. We'd say casually this dog is 'always right', is 100%. But he isn't.
Likewise consider a dog that barks at 20 cars catching the 10 that have drugs but also barking at 10 other 'false positives'. The article says this dog is no better than flipping a coin since he is wrong 50% of the time. But he isn't. He catches 100% of the drug smuggling cars. A coin flip would generate 45 false positives, 5 true positives catching only 50% of the smugglers.
I'm not saying a dog with so many false positives is acceptable but we should keep both sides of the coin in mind. The 2nd type of dog may be more desirable when the stakes are much higher, say a bomb sniffing dog where you want zero people with bombs to get through.
In terms of probable cause, the 2nd type of dog has lots of false positives BUT that doesn't mean his barks are no better than coin flips. If he barks at you the odds are still greater that you're carrying drugs.
On “Economic Commands are Different from Political Commands or Taxes”
Even so your tax bracket is probably not higher than 35%. If you didn't make that donation you wouldn't be giving the gov't $10K in added taxes but at best 35% of $10K. Even if your charity spent 65% on proselytizing and 35% on doing stuff to help offset the gov'ts welfare it's an even swap.
Of course most charities do a lot better than 35% so it's likely that 90% or more of that $10,000 will be spent in some way to help society whereas only $3500 would have gone to the gov't in taxes....and what % of that $3500 is spent really helping the poor versus subsidies to agribusiness, overseas wars, and locking up people who smoke pot?
The real problem IMO comes from fact that most charitable giving would happen anyway. For everyone who gives $10K to save $3.5K there's probably two or three other people who would have given $10K anyway who now get $3.5 off.
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Technically the hospital would bill you, sue you and secure a judgement against you if you did not bother to insure yourself and ended up in the ER sick. Those who are very wealthy (such as the Facebook founder guy) could simply self insure writing the hospital a check for whatever emergancy expenses they incur, even if its a million dollars.
I do think it works as a tax to fund insurance for those who are relatively poor. Tax funds would help offset the cost of subsidies. Those motivated to buy insurance to avoid the tax are likely those who are not very sick. Such people would lower insurance rates by coming into the pool so they are indirectly making the costs of subsidizing insurnce for the poor less costly.
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I won't say my thoughts on the matter are worthier than Hayek but here's how I'm approaching this:
I understand that one can craft laws that are on their face 'taxes' but are in reality something different. For example, say you had a 'tax' on murder in colonial times where the rate for each murder was 100 tons of pure gold. Since they had debtors prisons at that time, no murder would ever be able to pay the tax and it would functionally the same as life in prison for murder. The courts would almost certainly have struck down such a law ruling it to be a criminal penalty which required full due process of law to convict and sentence....not just a 'tax collector' declaring a person was in arrears.
From that perspective the health mandate looks a lot like a tax. It's not very high. The law goes to great lengths to insist that the gov't cannot use law enforcement functions to enforce it. It even prohibits the gov't from using its more severe but legitimate tax collecting functions from enforcing it. When the law was first introduced many critics from the right were less aghast at the liberty infringing aspect of the 'mandate' than they were worried that the mandate was far too weak to work leaving insurance companies vulnerable to being swamped by people waiting till they got sick to buy insurance.
Now in terms of laws there are things that are allowed but with a fee or tax and things that are not allowed. For example, you are allowed to make income but you have an income tax. On the other side you are not allowed to park in a no parking zone even though the parking ticket might be pretty small compared to, say, the income tax.
Imagine someone is nominated to the Supreme Court. Obama's right wing critics start scouring the candidate and discover he has thousands of parking tickets. For the last twenty years he's been parking illegally racking up multiple tickets every week. He always pays the tickets, though. But the number of citations he has been issued is just thru the roof. I can easily see the counter attack on this guy. How can he be a high judge when he seems to disrepect the law so much? His defenders might say he pays all the tickets, in fact he gives his local town gov't more money in ticket revenue than he pays in property tax. Over the years his ticket revenue has purchased a quarter of the cop cars in the force! I think, though, his critics will maintain his chronic illegal parking is showing disrespect for the law.
Imagine someone else whose nominated who has simply made a lot of money and paid his income tax per the law. On this count there's not much you can say. The law allows you to make money, he did and he paid his taxes per the law.
So now finally let's imagine a person who may opt not to buy insurance. Say that young guy who started Facebook. I can see his financial advisor telling him he has billions of dollars, if he gets some horrible illness he can easily spare $2M for medical bills but he is young and healthy and unlikely to get sick so buying insurance isn't a great deal. Instead he pays whatever the penalty or fee is which is less than a typical policy would cost him. Now let's say he gets nominated to the SC or some high position.
Do you see him being viewed like the judge who insists on illegally parking his car or like the judge who simply had a healthy income and paid his tax? If its the former then the mandate really is more like a mandate. Maybe the 'fine' or 'penalty' is modest but the law is written in that you're really not supposed to violate the mandate doing so makes you a lawbreaker even if you pay the penalty the law prescribes.
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On the contrary, the insurance mandate seems to fall pretty clearly on the side of the those who are the actor (the person who chooses to buy or not buy insurnace).
Imagine an alternative universe where the penalties were more in tune with, say, not withholding or paying social security taxes or what states do to those who let the insurance on their cars lapse. That would seem to be closer on the spectrum to your 'economic commands' rather than just laws that create economic incentives that may or may not induce a particular decision.
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Each of these are prohibitions or taxes, not commands. They don’t tell you “perform this specific action.” They say either “refrain from performing this specific action” or “pay this sum of money.”
Subsidies are not taxes or prohibitions. Patents likewise are not prohibitions but a grant of a property right on the patent holder (if I infringe on your patent you have to sue me, not call the FBI).
Granting Congress powers of this type is a much smaller set of concessions than granting them the power to command particular actions.
It would seem the opposite. I wouldn't want the gov't to order me to 'pick twenty bales of cotton' but if the gov't had a policy that made choosing to pick cotton more economically advantageous (say by issuing land grants to agricultural colleges, import quotas on foreign cotton, granting patents to manufacturers that invent new things to do with cotton etc.) I would not consider that as great an infringement on liberty.
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Economic commands are not good. Economic commands are specific directives, like “Buy a pink cupcake from Starbucks,” or “Pick twenty bales of cotton.” ...
These seem like just the set of political commands that are not allowed by the Constitution. I think the confusion here is that 'political commands' can sound a lot like economic ones. 'Serve on a jury' is, basically, saying 'you can't go to work today but instead you have to work on the gov't jury for like $5 a day'. I agree political/economic commands are problematic and that they are rightly limited in the Constitution.
Where I've been confused, though, is economic incentives. When you have something that's not an economic command (donate to charity, buy a home on credit, buy domestic goods rather than imported ones subject to a tariff) but is a decision you make because various gov't policies have made the decision more financially appealing to you. I've been thinking that you've been lumping those in with 'economic commands' because this is what the 'insurance mandate' takes the form of. You aren't required to buy insurance in the sense that you're required to serve on a jury or register for selective service. Simply not buying insurance is less financially appealing with the law than without it.
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Or another 'mandate' is the tax deduction for giving to charity. The logic here is not that its simply punative to those who don't like to donate. The defendable rationalle is that those giving to charity are lessening the need of the gov't to provide welfare and other services therefore they get a tax deduction because, in a sense, they are taking some of the problems off govt's plate.
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The problem, though, is that the tax is not 'merely punitive'. If a person opts not to get health insurance, they pay the tax which contributes to paying off the national debt (from the subsidies given to those who can't afford insurance). If they opt to buy insurance they presumably will help lower insurance rates which lessens the need for subsidies.
I understand better your difference between acceptable political commands and 'economic commands' but you're in an awkward position in that the Constitutional specifically allows a range of 'economic commands'. Import quotas, subsidies, patents, taxes etc. were all features of early American government. Sometimes they were based on defendable economic theories, sometimes they were just about naked special interest groups pandering, and sometimes they were based on totally crackpot ideas but the Constitution puts most of the judgement about this in the hands of the legislature rather than the courts.
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