The Killa from Wasilla
posted by x4mr at 12:15 AM
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- Congresswoman Giffords Shot
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- Peddling Cloth
- Travis Clarifies Cloth Conversation
- Four Corners
- David Nolan 1943 - 2010
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- Sarah Palin Blasts Academic Elitists
- Let Me In
Monday, January 10, 2011
22 Comments:
You are a moron & a sick & deranged person. It's really sick of you to try to score political points off of such a tragedy. Obviously, you have no decency. You're as bad as the Westboro Baptists.
But maybe you did get what you wanted; somebody finally read part of your blog. I'll try not to make that same mistake again in the future.
-Tyler M
X4mr,
Delete the troll.
Please.
Liza,
I seriously doubt that x4mr will delete the comment, which displays complete ignorance of this blog.
As you know, x4mr has built up over two years of blog post after post predicting that exactly this kind of event would occur, and he did so in detail. We have both commented at these and you did at his 3/25/2010 post that I heard is now going viral. At that post, x4mr explicitly predicted that the Sarah Palin cross hair map would lead to an assassination, and I can't share how, but I heard that the Department of Homeland Security has read that blog post.
Time will tell, but I am hearing that this cross hairs thing is a big deal.
Liza, Sirocco, myself, Observer, Casey, Robish, and others know that x4mr has posted a lot of material on Giffords, Palin, hate speech, impending violence, so it is no surprise that his blog is getting tons of hits from the search engines.
It freaks me out that x4mr's prediction came true for the one elected official he most cared about. What are the odds of that?
Navigator,
Yeah, it's all true. I know.
I think that our discussions about the potential for violence were atarting to become serious when President Obama was close to winning the Democratic nomination in 2008.
Then, of course, after the election there was the rise of the Tea Party and the associated hate speech.
Then there was the rise of Palin, Inc and her exploitation of low information right wing voters for personal gain.
X4mr's post about Palin's map will haunt us forever. Now I wonder why Homeland Security was not interested in it when Palin first published it.
However, I will admit that the troll upsets me. Some people are just reaching for something to say and the right wing is most definitely trying to distance themselves from culpability. But we know better and I suspect that is why most of us have been silent for these past few days.
I may write more later, but I am having a hell of a hard time with all of this.
X4mr is not doing well either. Having been the prophet just takes the emotional pain to a higher level.
If you are able to write more on this, Navigator, I think a lot of people would appreciate it. Just your thoughts...
Why didn't you show a similar map of the DNC illustrating their targeted election areas???
Chuck Frietas,
Why don't you post the link to the "similar map" and include a reference to whatever inflammatory gun rhetoric the DNC used to promote it? Please identify all those Democrats who promoted the "similar map" with inflammatory gun rhetoric.
Here is the link to the image Chuck is referencing, along with the full post around it so it can be viewed in context.
To answer your question Chuck, I ting several things come into play:
1. The DNC posting, while it does also regretably include the phrase "Behind Enemy Lines" within the graphic, doesn't include any threatening rhetoric in the text of the post itself.
Most specifically, it doesn't include names of specific individuals such as the Palin post did before it was taken offline.
The Palin image and post, taken in full context, is far more inciting than the DNC one, and intentionally so.
2. There is not a recent history of individuals shooting a Republican politician, or, say, an abortion doctor after he was targeted in a similar manner by conservative pundits and crusaders.
Apparently sick, delusional people, individuals perhaps incapable of distinguishing hyperbole, and groping for any straw to justify their lives and actions, are not being inspired by liberal rhetoric in the same manner they are reacting to conservative rhetoric.
X4mr,
The troll, Tyler M, regularly posts on Tedski's blog. I think it is a mistake to allow him to continue this. He is extremely prolific.
Needless to say, exchanges with him amount to nothing and accomplish nothing.
Liza-
I guess you were also gloating about the senseless shootings & loss of life & how they could be used to advance your political agenda. You are also a sick person.
Tedski, on the other hand, seems to be a very decent person who isn't trying to win political points off of this tragedy. X4mr, has no decency.
It looks like my last comment contained too much logic & common sense to be allowed to remain on a blog that would post disgusting pictures & captions like this one.
-Tyler M
Tyler,
No, of course he had not heard of the Tea Party in 2007. However, your reasoning has a flaw.
No one, that I am aware of, is claiming the shooter was directly influenced by anything Palin or anyone else, other than the voices in his head, told him.
However, where Palin and other conservative pundits are culpable is in consistently, over a long period of time, shifting the rhetoric of political discussion into more-and-more violent terms. For normal individuals, those who understand the meaning and use of hyperbole, this may not matter much, other than being perceived as inspirational by some and tasteless by others.
However, for a (thankfully) small percentage of people, these hyperbolic turns of phrase simply serve to reinforce their delusions, as well as to help justify a violent approach to resolving whatever it is they are paranoid about. Those who are committed to violence will always find some means to justify their actions, but not all sick individuals are so predisposed. Why help push them in that direction by making such behavior apparently socially acceptable (realizing, again, they are taking the rhetoric literally)?
The fact it was predicted (and not just by x4mr, but by a number of other figures, including national ones) doesn't imply anyone is happy to have been demonstrated correct - people make predictions all the time they hope to be wrong about. However, a prediction is what you think might happen, not what you want to happen - and in this case the prediction was tragically found to valid in our own backyard.
There's only so many times conservatives can spin variations of "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest" and then try to wash their hands of the affair when someone, however sick, actually tries to get rid of the priest.
Sirocco,
Thanks for the clarification.
I want you to know that I am so terribly sorry that Saturday's massacre has affected you on such a personal level.
Like everyone else, I am at a loss for words and can barely describe my own feelings. Mostly I am just reading what others have to say, but not finding much there.
I suppose it is time to admit that there are no words. There is just suffering and pain, this cannot be made right, and the victims cannot be made whole. And, as in all acts of violence, there are those who will bear the burden of this devastating loss for the remainder of their lives.
This has changed us here in Tucson, I am sure of that. I hope that it becomes a wake up call for the entire nation.
I thought I'd recognized that name, and of course we are going to see the right insist that their vitriol and demonizing never touched this lunatic.
I deleted Tyler's recent comment, not because of his argument that the shooter is a nut, which is clearly accurate, but because of his assertion that Navigator was disappointed when Giffords lived.
I went through ten minutes of thinking Gabrielle was gone, and it was the worst ten minutes I've experienced in a very long time. Then I heard Clarence Dupnik on TV insisting she was alive. To suggest that Nav or any of the regulars here was disappointed on hearing that ray of hope crosses the line.
I am guessing he is new to this blog and does not know the history it has with this subject or, for that matter, the Congresswoman.
Prepare to hear repeated chants of "The left does it too!" as if this issue were balanced, which is nonsense.
X4mr,
He has another one at 12:35 PM that you might consider deleting, saying essentially the same thing about me that he did about Navigator. He also states that you "have no decency."
I wouldn't let him get started here. Seriously.
For the moment, I will leave the 12:35 post in place so others can taste the nature of what was deleted a few comments earlier. The comment also allows me to distinguish something worth grasping.
In classic troll fashion, which also crosses the line, the comment asserts that Liza is gloating. I invite the reader to review the last few days of this blog, and read Liza's comments. Go ahead.
Then ask yourself if she's gloating. That's not the distinction. For that, ask yourself where he could be coming from such that he could assert that she is.
Of course he knew nothing about this blog (or us) when he arrived. The distinction I am making is that he will continue to know nothing, because he isn't listening. He is on the other side of a wall.
As Liza noted, the interaction will produce nothing. His future comments repeating the same refrain won't last long.
One thing I have learned from writing on blogs is to not be upset by outrageous and unsubstantiated attacks from strangers.
Even so, it's really obnoxious and no one is in the mood for it right now.
Also, it ends discussions that might have been going somewhere, which is, of course, one of the primary reasons for trolling.
Sirocco-
We have no evidence that Loughner paid any attention to any kind of political discourse from the right or the left or that he could even comprehend that discourse if he had listened. I would hesitate to classify Loughner in political terms or make conclusions about what set off this psychopath.
We could say just as easily that it was the music that he listened to or the movies that he watched. We at least know for sure that he had heard & posted a video online that contained the song "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" while the American flag was burned. Burning the American flag isn't something that is ever encouraged by anybody on the right. Quite the opposite, and by that I mean that conservatives are extremely opposed to flag burning - as are many liberals too.
Those idiot murderers in Columbine were reported to absolutely love violent video games.
Now, with those things said, if we follow your logic that:
However, for a (thankfully) small percentage of people, these hyperbolic turns of phrase simply serve to reinforce their delusions, as well as to help justify a violent approach to resolving whatever it is they are paranoid about. Those who are committed to violence will always find some means to justify their actions, but not all sick individuals are so predisposed. Can't that same thing be said about violent music, movies, video games, TV?
The only thing we know for sure at this point is that he listened to violent music, but I'm sure that more about him & what caused his twisted nature will come out.
Once again, it is irresponsible to jump to conclusions or point fingers like X4mr does in this post. "The Killa from Wasilla"?
X4mr, it does seem that you want to score political points off of this tragedy. It wouldn't take years of reading your blog to realize this. And I do think that you could be more decent. We are all angry about what happened on Saturday. Why make this a political issue when it affects us all?
-Tyler M
I don’t think I experienced what x4mr must have endured on Saturday, but the thought of x4mr standing in his Kentucky home thinking that Gabrielle Giffords had just been killed makes my chest ache. I was lucky enough to only learn of the event when it was already announced that she was out of surgery and doing as well as could be expected.
Actually, an understanding of this blog would make it obvious that x4mr is not trying to score political points, but why would a troll let information interfere with an opinion. For other readers that might be new here as a result of this weekend, here are some key links on the subject.
I’ll start with Toxic Talk (3/1/2009) and the T-Shirt Post (4/25/2009) which illustrate how out of the control the language on the right was becoming. Those occurred over a year and a half ago.
Over a year ago x4mr was sounding the alarm about a
Gun at a Giffords Event (8/10/2009) which was followed with a warning about the Seduction of Hatred (8/12/2009) where someone spray painted a swastika over an official’s name.
The post that supposedly went viral this weekend featured the cross hair map.Retreating Reloading Re-aiming (3/25/2010). In this post x4mr says that real bullets will fly.
The Truth about Tea (4/17/2010) is also relevant.
Sirocco is right of course that many people at many levels were warning about the dangers of all this hatred.
Instead of scoring political points, x4mr is reinforcing his well established argument in an effort to restore sanity to the public discourse. The hate speech and demonizing has to stop. He could have used Beck or Hannity or Limbaugh, but he chose the Palin map because it is the perfect distillation of what is happening.
Tyler only reinforces x4mr’s argument by admitting the possible influence of music, television, video games, and the rest. Any of it can cause a wacko to pop his cork. Isn’t that x4mr’s point?
We can’t make the world a soft cushion where all is swell, but kooks exist, and what x4mr has said, and what Giffords herself said, is that there are consequences for provocative material like the cross hair map.
Use common sense. What’s more likely to inflame someone to assassinate someone, Marilyn Manson singing “God sucks” or a cross hairs on a politician with language about getting on target, reloading, and shooting automatic weapons?
I don’t care if it turns out that this Loughner asshole shot Giffords because he had an inoperable hemorrhoid. Maybe his mama fondled him as a child. What difference does it make?
Tyler M,
I agree with Nav that your last post weakens your argument rather than strengthen it.
I agree any number of things could push a damaged individual over that last step into violence, and as you note a variety of influences - violent music, violent video games, etc. - might do so.
Given this, doesn't that imply members of our political class have a responsibility to take more care in their rhetoric and images? Or are you seriously claiming politicians and political pundits/columnists should be held to no higher standard in this regard than rap singers and bad video game designers?
My contention here is not that Palin/Beck/etc. specifically were the trigger for Loughner - as you say, I don't know that, and nothing may ever be known about what finally pushed him to his actions. Rather, I am arguing they and others like them have disproportionately contributed to helping create an environment where individuals such as Loughner, or Scott Roener, can convince themselves such actions are socially justifiable.
I don't think it's unreasonable for me to expect more from politicians and political talking heads than I get from bad lyricists.
Navigator,
It is both sad and disturbing to look at those old posts.
The first thing that I did on Saturday morning was go to the Rincon Farmer's Market that is on Old Spanish Trail on the way to Vail. As you might imagine, the people who go there are generally conservative. I got into an argument a few months ago with a guy who was wearing an anti-Obama tee shirt. He was one of the vendors that day. I was talking to him about something unrelated and then noticed his tee-shirt. So, one statement leads to another and then suddenly I realized I was arguing with kind of an ignorant person who even admitted that he had burned up his brain with alchohol. As soon as I realized what I was doing I just walked away and never went back until this past Saturday.
So, I'm walking around at this Farmer's Market by myself and then I heard someone's radio. It was apparently a station that plays old R&B and Johnny Moore and the Drifters were singing, "Under the Boardwalk." Johnny Moore is my favorite singer of all time, but Sam Cooke and Ben E. King are very close. No one else is even in the same league, in my opinion.
I stood there for a moment and listened to Moore's incomparable voice and a song that I must have heard a thousand times. I tried to think of it as one of those moments where you get an unexpected and pleasant surprise, hearing R@B in a place like that. But the feeling didn't come. Just about everybody my age likes The Drifters and the old R&B.
Shortly after I got home, I logged on to read the news. I happened to be looking at NPR.org when the breaking news banner appeared about Gabrielle Giffords being shot. There wasn't much known at that point and I looked everywhere for more information. I went back to NPR just to make sure that I had actually seen what I thought I had seen. After that, my day was probably like everyone else's in Tucson, one of the worst days ever.
Johnny Moore, interestingly, is probably one of the most famous American singers but hardly anyone recognizes his name because unlike other lead vocalists for The Drifters, Clyde McPhatter and Ben E. King, he did not have a successful solo career. But he is actually the longest serving lead vocalist for The Drifters.
In 1964, Johnny Moore and Rudy Lewis were both lead vocalists for The Drifters. On the morning of May 20, 1964, Rudy Lewis was found dead, apparently from a drug overdose. The Drifters had a recording session scheduled for either that day or the next, and Lewis was supposed to be the lead tenor. Johnny Moore replaced Lewis, and the song recorded that day was, "Under the Boardwalk."
On the many occasions in my life when a friend or family member has died, I always play music when I'm alone, and I always play "Under the Boardwalk." It is the most beautiful expression of sadness and grief ever recorded. It is not about a summer love at all.
"I don't think it's unreasonable for me to expect more from politicians and political talking heads than I get from bad lyricists."
I would like to add that I do not think it is unreasonable for the Democratic party to participate in elections without the opposition and their supporters using the language of guns and violence to intimidate Democratic candidates.
Sheriff Dupnik correctly noted in his press conference this weekend that if this does not stop, there will be no decent people willing to run in these elections.
Maybe after the President's very powerful & comforting speech tonight, you can take his advice, tone down the rhetoric & stop the finger pointing & point scoring.
-Tyler M
And perhaps you can find a different blog to troll on.
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