Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == 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
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:35:12 -0800 dave x dave...@gmail.com writes: 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. In the case of left-wing attitudes towards mental illness, I think that Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness played a major role in shaping attitudes back in the 1960s and 1970s, even though Szasz himself is a right-wing libertarian. And Szasz was part of an anti-psychiatric trend that also encompassed Michel Foucault (who Szasz drew heavily from), and R.D. Laing, whose writings were also very popular in the 1960s and 1970s. 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. Up through the 1960s and beyond there was very legitmate concern about people being involuntarily institutionalized for being different. Since at the time in many states, all you needed was the signature(s) of one to three doctors (depending on the state) to get someone committed. Most of us here are familiar with the use of psychiatry in the former Soviet Union against political dissidents. But similar practices existed in the United States and other countries too. So that sort of history, I think, helped to shape left-wing attitudes towards psychiatry. 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. Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math Travelocity Vacation Package Deals Book A Vacation Now Save Up To 30% on Hotels Vacation Packages. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/4d343b05b22b6c47412st04vuc 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
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Dave: 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. The confusion is over paranoid and paranoia. There is a paranoid style in American politics. Richard Hofstader wrote a book about this. It involves conspiracy theories, worries about government surveillance, etc. In the 1980s the militia movement obsessed about black helicopters. But paranoia schizophrenia is a mental illness. It stems mostly from inner voices telling the sick person that powerful forces are out to get him or her. In rare instances that person would use violence against innocent people during a psychotic break, as was the case with Loughner. If you want to see a fairly interesting film on the illness, I recommend A Beautiful Mind about the Nobel prize winning mathematician played by Russell Crowe. For the first third of the movie or so, you see him involved in skulduggery with Russian spies and the FBI, only to learn that this was all in his mind. The most inaccurate thing about the movie is its wide-scale recreation of visual hallucinations when schizophrenia is almost exclusively about aural hallucinations--accusatory voices mostly. If Loughner had shot a reactionary politician, there would not be the kind of knee-jerk reaction from MSNBC et al about the need for civility. Although it is not worth constructing hypothetical situations, I would remind comrades that Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace for pretty much the same reason that Loughner shot Giffords and other innocent people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Bremer After graduating from high school, from September 1970 Bremer briefly attended Milwaukee Area Technical College where he studied aerial photography, art, writing and psychology. He dropped out after just one semester in college, where he was recalled as a strange, aloof and argumentative[6] student who rarely talked to anybody.[7] Bremer got a job as a busboy at the Milwaukee Athletic Club in 1969. Although his employer said he was a very hard and dependable worker who kept himself to himself, in 1971, Bremer was demoted to kitchen work after customers complained that he talked to himself, and that he whistled and marched in tune with music played in the dining room.[8] Angered by his demotion, he complained to the program planner for the Milwaukee Commission on Community Relations. The complaint was investigated and dismissed. The planner wrote on November 8, Mr Bremer is a young man who is rather withdrawn. Appears to bottle up anger but will sometimes let it go. I assess him bordering on paranoid whilst at the same time, conscientious in doing his job at the Athletic club.[8] After this, Bremer quit his job at the Athletic club. 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
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == RE: The left has the causality all wrong on Loughner. He was not sparked into action because of all the conspiratorial ideology that surrounded him. *Instead his madness drove him in that direction, but once he began moving in that direction his understanding of what he read--from Mein Kampf to the CM--was mediated by a short-circuited brain*. -LP Greetings, MarxMail. This will be my first post in a number of years. Pardon me if it's a tad on the long side. I was active on this list in the late 90's. I am a left historian, author, and vocal critic of the Bush/Cheney War on Terror. Louis recently posted an article about the history of a publishing company I started. But he did so with a strange, prefatory note, noting that I was once on this list, but I have since degenerated into a truther. He lamented this turn of events with a crestfallen tragic [sigh.] Well don't cry for me. In truth, studying the history of the Bush/Cheney War on Terror goes to the heart of a very Howard Zinn-like practice. Zinn talked about the need for the people to take up the creation of history, the studying of history, as a way to empower the working class. A penetrating careful, materialist historicity is at the heart of what makes the Left, the Left. So I have always been puzzled at the American Left's reticence to study the history of the War on Terror, which continues to enfold around us, up to the present moment. In fact, just last week, I made a rare prediction. I don't often feel comfortable making forecasts, but if one studies the ruling class's War on Terror closely, patterns do begin to emerge. In the wake of Tucson last week, I posted this on my blog on Tumblr: Nothing is as it seems with these things. And if the Pentagon Shooter http://www.wusa9.com/news/breaking/story.aspx?storyid=98041catid=158case of just nine months ago is a pattern being followed here, then young Jared, it will turn out, will probably become a big 9/11 truther…. “New evidence” will arise, probably in about 12 hours. But don’t you believe it. And now today, with this New York Times article, and the ABC News footage a couple days ago, we learn that Loughner supposedly questioned [gasp] the Bush/Cheney account of 9/11. ABC News reported, via Loughner's best friend, that Loughner supposedly was a fan of the Zeitgeist 9/11 truth movie. YET we have been given NO DIRECT QUOTES about this. Where are the sources? Bourgeois journalism violates its own ethics [shocking, I know] and maligns a huge social movement. This is a defamatory action against an entire working class social movement. I can't say whether this is true or not: was Loughner a truther? I am open to actual evidence. What I will say is that the Pentagon Shooter, March 2010, was an eerie turn of events. This was another lone gunman who made no statements as he opened fire on Pentagon security guards, and was then gunned down. However, in the wake of the tragedy, a tenuous link to 9/11 was found, online, posted by someone with a similar name. And with that vague association, the Pentagon Shooter became a 9/11 Truther. Thus, making 9/11 Truth even more of a taboo topic to the would-be critics of the oppression, secrecy and war without end that have come to define today's modern National Security State. That same weekend, left activists like Cindy Sheehan and myself were speaking alongside a diverse group of activists and speakers at the Treason in America conference in Valley Forge. ABC's Nightline showed up, and on camera, asked me about the Pentagon Shooter being a 9/11 Truther. I pointed out to host Chris Hardy that I knew nothing about that sudden bit of breaking news, but I did point out facts he was not aware of, such as that Osama Bin Laden is NOT even on the FBI's Most Wanted List for 9/11. (Even the FBI admits that there's not enough evidence linking Bin Laden to the attackers.) I am amazed that the entire 9/11 Truth cause has been largely poo-pooed by the the more doctrinaire factions of the Left. But let's remain materialists, let's be true to science, and let's stick to the facts. No steel frame structure has ever collapsed due to fire. Yet, It happened three times on 9/11. No case has ever been made that those 19 young Arabs were even on the planes. And yet most of the Left and Centrists and GOP have all gone along with the racist scapegoating of the Arab people for 9/11. Two wars of imperialism have been waged, without a peep from most anti-imperialists, who should be filled with an exacting rigor when it comes to investigating the *cause* for war. The 9/11 event has taken the reins off ruling class power. Bourgeois democracy has leaped towards all out fascism: the torture, the renditions, the surveillance, the subway searches in NYC, the kevlar coated
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== 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/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == But Jared, a curious teenager who at times could be intellectually intimidating, stood out because of his passionate opinions about government and his obsession with dreams. He became intrigued by antigovernment conspiracy theories, including that the Sept. 11 attacks were perpetrated by the government and that the countrys central banking system was enslaving its citizens. His anger would well up at the sight of President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he considered to be the nefarious designs of government. I think he feels the people should be able to govern themselves, said Ms. Figueroa, his former girlfriend. We didnt need a higher authority. Breanna Castle, 21, another friend from junior and senior high school, agreed. He was all about less government and less America, she said, adding, He thought it was full of conspiracies and that the government censored the Internet and banned certain books from being read by us. Among the books that he would later cite as his favorites: Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. Also: Peter Pan. And there was that fascination with dreams. Ms. Castle acknowledged that in high school, she too developed an interest in analyzing her dreams. But Jareds interest was much deeper. It started off with dream interpretation, but then he delved into the idea of accessing different parts of your mind and trying to control your entire brain at all times, she said. He was troubled that we only use part of our brain, and he thought that he could unlock his entire brain through lucid dreaming. With lucid dreaming, the dreamer supposedly becomes aware that he or she is dreaming and then is able to control those dreams. George Osler IV, the father of one of Jareds former friends, said his son explained the notion to him this way: You can fly. You can experience all kinds of things that you cant experience in reality. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16loughner.html 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
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == To clarify for those not blessed with residency in the American heartland, not liking Dubya doesn't mean anything vis-a-vis the teabaggers. A lot of them think George W. Bush was a closet fancy-pants corporate Republican. A lot of them also distrust the official tale about 9/11, as I've pointed out many times to the truthers on this list. ML 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
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == To clarify for those not blessed with residency in the American heartland, not liking Dubya doesn't mean anything vis-a-vis the teabaggers. A lot of them think George W. Bush was a closet fancy-pants corporate Republican. A lot of them also distrust the official tale about 9/11, as I've pointed out many times to the truthers on this list. ML You're missing the point, Mark. There is no coherency to Loughner's thinking, as the favorable reference to the Communist Manifesto would indicate, not to speak of lucid dreaming. While my next article will focus mainly on Obama's calculations, I will make the point that Loughner's schizophrenia was manifest FIVE years ago long before Palin was a factor in American politics. The left has the causality all wrong on Loughner. He was not sparked into action because of all the conspiratorial ideology that surrounded him. Instead his madness drove him in that direction, but once he began moving in that direction his understanding of what he read--from Mein Kampf to the CM--was mediated by a short-circuited brain. 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
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Materialists should not have such a hard time understanding this very basic point. On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Louis Proyect l...@panix.com wrote: You're missing the point, Mark. There is no coherency to Loughner's thinking, as the favorable reference to the Communist Manifesto would indicate, not to speak of lucid dreaming. While my next article will focus mainly on Obama's calculations, I will make the point that Loughner's schizophrenia was manifest FIVE years ago long before Palin was a factor in American politics. The left has the causality all wrong on Loughner. He was not sparked into action because of all the conspiratorial ideology that surrounded him. Instead his madness drove him in that direction, but once he began moving in that direction his understanding of what he read--from Mein Kampf to the CM--was mediated by a short-circuited brain. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/gregmc59%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
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Sorry, Greg. I don't see what's obviously materialist about blue-skying about the motives and psyche of someone none of know. We might as well be trying to psychoanalyze Howdy Doody. For my two cents, I'd be flabberghasted if Loughner was actually goaded by his understanding of the _Manifesto_ or _Mein Kampf_. Indeed, I see absolutely no evidence that he ever actually read these things, and a strong indication that he did not read either of them... Otherwise, I doubt he'd have tossed them into the same buffalo chip salad. Most likely, he found them to be verbal irritants he used to shock, impress and get attention from his peers. Everybody's whose taught for any period of time has probably encountered students like this. While I was in grad school, one of my professors in Chicago--a Jewish historian of Germany--had a student who used to argue about the Nazis the way some of the would-be ancestor-worshippers of the Lost Cause talk about the Confederacy as a multicultural grass roots movement against Federal regulation. When the class spent a session on Nazi propaganda films, this guy showed up for class in an SS uniform. A friend of mine who taught English had a student who came up to him several times and told him that he had an irritating voice and that he (the student) was going to shoot him. There are mentally disturbed people out there and who knows what's going to set them off or how they're going to express their being set off The bigger questions about Tucson are those I've posed earlier...but we're probably beating a dead horse here... ML 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
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Most likely, he found them to be verbal irritants he used to shock, impress and get attention from his peers. No, Mark. I was just playing a kind of shock jock game in 1960 when I joined the YAF to scandalize my JFK worshipping classmates in high school. Or Charles Bukowski telling his classmates in 1938 that he admired Hitler. Loughner was somewhere else entirely. He was in an alternate universe as he frequently expressed. 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
