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I will note that I said on your blog something to this effect - if the right wing discourse sometimes sounds schizophrenic this tells us something about the right wing but little about schizophrenia or schizophrenics. I have agreed with your take on Loughner though not necessarily with your take on the tea party (I see the tea party as connected to a dangerous right wing authoritarian trend in neoliberal democracy, they may be a distraction now but it does not mean they will remain so). The general lack of understanding of mental illness has been discouraging. In part this is is no doubt simply the result of the general public lack of knowledge about mental illness but I wonder if it also doesn't have to do with a certain reluctance on the left to see people in biological terms. Certainly there is a very real history of the misuse of biological concepts for reactionary political ends so it is reasonable to be suspicious and critical (and I think this became ingrained during the new left as a sort of knee-jerk response) but frankly there is a lot of good science out there now on the biological basis of behavior that we won't be able to ignore forever. Sorting out the politics of recent advances in neurobiology and genetics is a task that remains to be done. To recognize that biology must be taken seriously both in itself and at a political level is not to be reductionist or 'biologist' it is to be materialist. On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote: > ====================================================================== > Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > ====================================================================== > > > Sander: > > > > "his madness drove him in that direction,"* implying that only the mad > are > > interested in 9/11 Truth. > > > > That's not what I meant at all. Loughner was also drawn to Herman Hesse's > "Siddhartha" and "The Communist Manifesto". My basic point is that there > is nothing consistent about his ideology and that it is wrong to > stigmatize him as a rightwinger in the same way we would describe Timothy > McVeigh. All in all, the left has fucked up by making such an error, a > function undoubtedly of its general ignorance about schizophrenia, an > illness that affects some 24 million people worldwide. Mostly, > schizophrenics are invisible to the general population, known only to most > New Yorkers as the disheveled homeless people talking to themselves on the > street. I can't blame Fidel Castro for making an amalgam between Jared > Loughner and Timothy McVeigh, but for people on Marxmail to blather on > about this young man in clear innocence of the facts about this disease is > really quite off-putting. I have yet to see a single post that makes a > distinction between having "nutty" conspiracist ideas and a disease based > on brain chemistry. Sad, really. > > > ________________________________________________ > Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu > Set your options at: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/dave.xx%40gmail.com > ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
