Another Right-Wing Loon Makes the News

[ivan]

had bush been shot (as much as he might have deserved it),

 

There you go - proof positive - thanks, Ivan!

curious - did my op dissappear into the ether? makes it hard to do the SAT reading analysis w/ you - you seem to think i said bush said be killed, which is wrong, nor could i have agreed w/ someone doing that- woulda been more of a malcolm x "chicken's coming home to roast" sorta thing for me - don't know that much about the congresswoman in quesiton here, but it's probably safe to assume she didn't invent a war that killed thousands for no damn reason

 

anyhow, i'm sure you'll believe what you want, but if the secret service is reading (hi fellas!) please note that kk fellow is just a daft-bastard

 

what's lost amongst all the chatter is how normal, really, this incident is - seriously, 3 months from now, who the hell's even goign to remember this apart from all the other nastiness? as said, the environment is toxic enough that likely something similiarly shitty will have occurred in the interim to make us forget. this incident hasn't broken new ground either. all the classics are involved to some degree: bad economics, bad education, drugs, political vitrol, guns, immigration, yadda, yadda, yadda.

[ivan]

Lets cut the shit, this is about making political hay out of a tragedy.

is there any other reason to watch the news? or to study history?

 

i can't hardly think of a real tragedy in our history that didn't get used for hay - can you?

[Nitrox]

Lets cut the shit, this is about making political hay out of a tragedy.

is there any other reason to watch the news? or to study history?

 

i can't hardly think of a real tragedy in our history that didn't get used for hay - can you?

 

Actually no, I can't. However, even OKC didn't get this combative and with such crazy accusations. McVeigh was a straight up right wing extremist and even when Rush Limbaugh was getting blamed it wasn't this retarded. Seriously, we have the hardline left pundits falling over themselves to blame the single person the shooter probably had the least interest in.

 

 

[ivan]

worth mentioning that just 'cuz yer making hay of something doens't mean you're wrong - folks made a big deal out of 9/11 n' pearl harbor too n' the maine n' the lusitania too, maybe 1 of those actually deserved it

[ivan]

haven't heard anyone mention yet that maybe this incident is just the price of living in a world that demands human sacrifices w/ frightening regularity - across the world in the past week we've had soldiers, cops, governors, kids and now a congressman killed - you wanna be alive? great, it comes w/ certain drawbacks, hardly any of them new....

[Nitrox]

worth mentioning that just 'cuz yer making hay of something doens't mean you're wrong - folks made a big deal out of 9/11 n' pearl harbor too n' the maine n' the lusitania too, maybe 1 of those actually deserved it

 

Which talk show host did we blame 9/11 on?

 

 

 

[ivan]

worth mentioning that just 'cuz yer making hay of something doens't mean you're wrong - folks made a big deal out of 9/11 n' pearl harbor too n' the maine n' the lusitania too, maybe 1 of those actually deserved it

 

Which talk show host did we blame 9/11 on?

 

 

i can't recall - i thought it was b/c god hated fags, and we like fags, so god hates us?

[tvashtarkatena]

Lets cut the shit, this is about making political hay out of a tragedy. The guy had no political connections to the right and if you watched his videos you'd know he pretty well hated them. In the past, prior to Palin and the tea party, he had correspondence to the Congresswoman but his ramblings no longer line up with a party affiliation. If anything he could be called a truther since he blamed Bush for 9/11.

 

By the way, he made threats against a bunch of people and was turned into the police. They didn't do anything about it and the real question should be why not? If there was a failing in law enforcement it should come out. The sheriff down there seems to be taking a preemptive position blaming Palin and others, which strikes me as very odd.

 

 

Maybe the sheriff knows a lot more about what's going on in AZ than you do.

[Nitrox]

Lets cut the shit, this is about making political hay out of a tragedy. The guy had no political connections to the right and if you watched his videos you'd know he pretty well hated them. In the past, prior to Palin and the tea party, he had correspondence to the Congresswoman but his ramblings no longer line up with a party affiliation. If anything he could be called a truther since he blamed Bush for 9/11.

 

By the way, he made threats against a bunch of people and was turned into the police. They didn't do anything about it and the real question should be why not? If there was a failing in law enforcement it should come out. The sheriff down there seems to be taking a preemptive position blaming Palin and others, which strikes me as very odd.

 

 

Maybe the sheriff knows a lot more about what's going on in AZ than you do.

 

Or maybe his deputies had contact with Laughner prior and failed to act on the threat so he's bracing for the shitstorm.

 

 

 

 

[Mal_Con]

[Lucky Larry]

Ivan: what's lost amongst all the chatter is how normal, really, this incident is - seriously, 3 months from now, who the hell's even goign to remember this apart from all the other nastiness? as said, the environment is toxic enough that likely something similiarly shitty will have occurred in the interim to make us forget. this incident hasn't broken new ground either. all the classics are involved to some degree: bad economics, bad education, drugs, political vitrol, guns, immigration, yadda, yadda, yadda.

 

Hey, theres no pink elephant in the room. Surely your not blaming the modern(economic) progress we have made in this country for the lack of the social progress we have made. And most certainly technological progress hasn't harmed a fly. And it would appear that philosophy has answered everything. Science has solved everything.

 

Wikipedia:

Progress trap, the condition societies find themselves in when human ingenuity, in pursuing progress, inadvertently introduces problems that it does not have the resources to solve, preventing further progress or inciting social collapse.

 

Remember the movie, A Clock Work Orange.

 

Certainly this guy is kooky for killing. Follow this premise and it reads thus: violence is a form of insanity.

 

Our country cheers the heroes into battle. What happens to the heroes is sadness. Are the leaders anywhere to be seen on the front lines?

 

The Philosophical Dictionary

Voltaire

Selected and Translated by H.I. Woolf

New York: Knopf, 1924

Scanned by the Hanover College Department of History in 1995.

Proofread and pages added by Jonathan Perry, March 2001.

 

 

Free Will

 

 

 

EVER since men have reasoned, the philosophers have obscured this matter: but the theologians have rendered it unintelligible by absurd subtleties about grace. Locke is perhaps the first man to find a thread in this labyrinth; for he is the first who, without having the arrogance of trusting in setting out from a general principle, examined human nature by analysis. For three thousand years people have disputed whether or no the will is free. In the "Essay on the Human Understanding," chapter on "Power," Locke shows first of all that the question is absurd, and that liberty can no more belong to the will than can colour and movement.

 

What is the meaning of this phrase "to be free"? it means "to be able," or assuredly it has no sense. For the will ''to be able '' is as ridiculous at bottom as to say that the will is yellow or blue, round or square. To will is to wish, and to be free is to be able. Let us note step by step the chain of what passes in us, without obfuscating our minds by any terms of the schools or any antecedent principle.

 

It is proposed to you that you mount a horse, you must absolutely make a choice, for it is quite clear that you either will go or that you will not go. There is no middle way. It is therefore of absolute necessity that you wish yes or no. Up to there it is demonstrated that the will is not free. You wish to mount the horse; why? The reason, an ignoramus will say, is because I wish it. This answer is idiotic, nothing happens or can happen without a reason, a cause; there is one therefore for your wish. What is it? the agreeable idea of going on horseback which presents itself in your brain, the dominant idea, the determinant idea. But, you will say, can I not resist an idea which dominates me? No, for what would be the cause of your resistance? None. By your will you can obey only an idea which will dominate you more.

 

Now you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will.

 

You ask me how thought and wish are formed in us. I answer you that I have not the remotest idea. I do not know how ideas are made any more than how the world was made. All that is given to us is to grope for what passes in our incomprehensible machine.

 

The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

 

Where will be liberty then? in the power to do what one wills. I wish to leave my study, the door is open, I am free to leave it.

 

But, say you, if the door is closed, and I wish to stay at home, I stay there freely. Let us be explicit You exercise then the power that you have of staying; you have this power, but you have not that of going out.

 

The liberty about which so many volumes have been written is, therefore, reduced to its accurate terms, only the power of acting.

 

In what sense then must one utter the phrase-" Man is free "? in the same sense that one utters the words, health, strength, happiness. Man is not always strong, always healthy, always happy.

 

A great passion, a great obstacle, deprive him of his liberty, his power of action.

 

The word "liberty," "free-will," is therefore an abstract word, a general word, like beauty, goodness, justice. These terms do not state that all men are always beautiful, good and just; similarly, they are not always free.

 

Let us go further: this liberty being only the power of acting, what is this power? it is the effect of the constitution and present state of our organs. Leibnitz wishes to resolve a geometrical problem, he has an apoplectic fit, he certainly has not liberty to resolve his problem. Is a vigorous young man, madly in love, who holds his willing mistress in his arms, free to tame his passion? undoubtedly not. He has the power of enjoying, and has not the power of refraining. Locke was therefore very right to call liberty "power." When is it that this young man can refrain despite the violence of his passion? when a stronger idea determines in a contrary sense the activity of his body and his soul.

 

But what! the other animals will have the same liberty, then, the same power? Why not? They have senses, memory, feeling, perceptions, as we have. They act with spontaneity as we act. They must have also, as we have, the power of acting by virtue of their perceptions, by virtue of the play of their organs.

 

Someone cries: "If it be so, everything is only machine, everything in the universe is subjected to eternal laws." Well! would you have everything at the pleasure of a million blind caprices? Either everything is the sequence of the necessity of the nature of things, or everything is the effect of the eternal order of an absolute master; in both cases we are only wheels in the machine of the world.

 

It is a vain witticism, a commonplace to say that without the pretended liberty of the will, all pains and rewards are useless. Reason, and you will come to a quite contrary conclusion. If a brigand is executed, his accomplice who sees him expire has the liberty of not being frightened at the punishment; if his will is determined by itself, he will go from the foot of the scaffold to assassinate on the broad highway; if his organs, stricken with horror, make him experience an unconquerable terror, he will stop robbing. His companion's punishment becomes useful to him and an insurance for society only so long as his will is not free.

 

Liberty then is only and can be only the power to do what one will. That is what philosophy teaches us. But if one considers liberty in the theological sense, it is a matter so sublime that profane eyes dare not raise themselves to it.

 

 

Hanover Historical Texts Project

Return to Hanover College Department of History

Please send comments to:

luttmer@hanover.edu

 

 

[Fairweather]

 

Dude, where is the historical record of leftist vitriol congruent with violent action in the last 30 years much less the last three? Your "dude abides", "same as it ever was", and "it's all the same, left or right" doesn't correspond with historical reality. Pull your head out.

 

Compare that to McVeigh, the Texas plane attack, abortion docs, shooting congressmen and judges....

 

Very weak.

 

Here's a good place to begin the long climb out of the small box you've built around yourselves:

 

Das Unabomber. Libtard extraordinaire.

 

Crickets chirping...

[ivan]

this calls for a t-chart!

[Fairweather]

Laws banning threats of violence have been on the books for a long, long time. You are suggesting that such bans on speech be lifted, apparently...if you're post has a message at all.

 

your

[Fairweather]

Dumbass.

[Fairweather]

this calls for a t-chart!

 

Congrats Ivan. Now that Rob has seen the true nature of Jabba, you have the master's lap all to yourself!

[Lucky Larry]

this calls for a t-chart!

 

I'm slow, shoot me, what is a t-chart?

[Bosterson]

Crickets chirping...

 

Ok. As I said before, this shooting is not really a political issue (unless you're talking about gun control) because the kid was clearly suffering from some sort of mental disorder and wasn't acting out party politics of some kind.

 

But you threw down that gauntlet, so I thought I'd take it up out of curiosity. I don't know much about Ted Kaczynski, and I turned to Wikipedia, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here. But that said, wasn't he an anarchist of some kind? He doesn't appear to be at all associated with "leftist" politics, unless you're implying that environmentalism is by default leftist. (But that'd be silly. Environmentalism in its true form should not be a party issue; it just becomes one due to its connection to government and regulation, where party lines split.)

 

Describing Kaczynski's manifesto (italics added):

 

He claims that revolution, unlike reform, is possible, and calls on sympathetic readers to initiate such revolution using two strategies: to "heighten the social stresses within the system so as to increase the likelihood that it will break down" and to "develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology". He gives various tactical recommendations, including avoiding the assumption of political power, avoiding all collaboration with leftists, and supporting free trade agreements in order to bind the world economy into a more fragile, unified whole.

 

Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with the shooting in Arizona.

 

[Coldfinger]

Ivan: what's lost amongst all the chatter is how normal, really, this incident is - seriously, 3 months from now, who the hell's even goign to remember this apart from all the other nastiness? as said, the environment is toxic enough that likely something similiarly shitty will have occurred in the interim to make us forget. this incident hasn't broken new ground either. all the classics are involved to some degree: bad economics, bad education, drugs, political vitrol, guns, immigration, yadda, yadda, yadda.

 

Hey, theres no pink elephant in the room. Surely your not blaming the modern(economic) progress we have made in this country for the lack of the social progress we have made. And most certainly technological progress hasn't harmed a fly. And it would appear that philosophy has answered everything. Science has solved everything.

 

Wikipedia:

Progress trap, the condition societies find themselves in when human ingenuity, in pursuing progress, inadvertently introduces problems that it does not have the resources to solve, preventing further progress or inciting social collapse.

 

Remember the movie, A Clock Work Orange.

 

Certainly this guy is kooky for killing. Follow this premise and it reads thus: violence is a form of insanity.

 

Our country cheers the heroes into battle. What happens to the heroes is sadness. Are the leaders anywhere to be seen on the front lines?

 

The Philosophical Dictionary

Voltaire

Selected and Translated by H.I. Woolf

New York: Knopf, 1924

Scanned by the Hanover College Department of History in 1995.

Proofread and pages added by Jonathan Perry, March 2001.

 

 

Free Will

 

 

 

EVER since men have reasoned, the philosophers have obscured this matter: but the theologians have rendered it unintelligible by absurd subtleties about grace. Locke is perhaps the first man to find a thread in this labyrinth; for he is the first who, without having the arrogance of trusting in setting out from a general principle, examined human nature by analysis. For three thousand years people have disputed whether or no the will is free. In the "Essay on the Human Understanding," chapter on "Power," Locke shows first of all that the question is absurd, and that liberty can no more belong to the will than can colour and movement.

 

What is the meaning of this phrase "to be free"? it means "to be able," or assuredly it has no sense. For the will ''to be able '' is as ridiculous at bottom as to say that the will is yellow or blue, round or square. To will is to wish, and to be free is to be able. Let us note step by step the chain of what passes in us, without obfuscating our minds by any terms of the schools or any antecedent principle.

 

It is proposed to you that you mount a horse, you must absolutely make a choice, for it is quite clear that you either will go or that you will not go. There is no middle way. It is therefore of absolute necessity that you wish yes or no. Up to there it is demonstrated that the will is not free. You wish to mount the horse; why? The reason, an ignoramus will say, is because I wish it. This answer is idiotic, nothing happens or can happen without a reason, a cause; there is one therefore for your wish. What is it? the agreeable idea of going on horseback which presents itself in your brain, the dominant idea, the determinant idea. But, you will say, can I not resist an idea which dominates me? No, for what would be the cause of your resistance? None. By your will you can obey only an idea which will dominate you more.

 

Now you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will.

 

You ask me how thought and wish are formed in us. I answer you that I have not the remotest idea. I do not know how ideas are made any more than how the world was made. All that is given to us is to grope for what passes in our incomprehensible machine.

 

The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

 

Where will be liberty then? in the power to do what one wills. I wish to leave my study, the door is open, I am free to leave it.

 

But, say you, if the door is closed, and I wish to stay at home, I stay there freely. Let us be explicit You exercise then the power that you have of staying; you have this power, but you have not that of going out.

 

The liberty about which so many volumes have been written is, therefore, reduced to its accurate terms, only the power of acting.

 

In what sense then must one utter the phrase-" Man is free "? in the same sense that one utters the words, health, strength, happiness. Man is not always strong, always healthy, always happy.

 

A great passion, a great obstacle, deprive him of his liberty, his power of action.

 

The word "liberty," "free-will," is therefore an abstract word, a general word, like beauty, goodness, justice. These terms do not state that all men are always beautiful, good and just; similarly, they are not always free.

 

Let us go further: this liberty being only the power of acting, what is this power? it is the effect of the constitution and present state of our organs. Leibnitz wishes to resolve a geometrical problem, he has an apoplectic fit, he certainly has not liberty to resolve his problem. Is a vigorous young man, madly in love, who holds his willing mistress in his arms, free to tame his passion? undoubtedly not. He has the power of enjoying, and has not the power of refraining. Locke was therefore very right to call liberty "power." When is it that this young man can refrain despite the violence of his passion? when a stronger idea determines in a contrary sense the activity of his body and his soul.

 

But what! the other animals will have the same liberty, then, the same power? Why not? They have senses, memory, feeling, perceptions, as we have. They act with spontaneity as we act. They must have also, as we have, the power of acting by virtue of their perceptions, by virtue of the play of their organs.

 

Someone cries: "If it be so, everything is only machine, everything in the universe is subjected to eternal laws." Well! would you have everything at the pleasure of a million blind caprices? Either everything is the sequence of the necessity of the nature of things, or everything is the effect of the eternal order of an absolute master; in both cases we are only wheels in the machine of the world.

 

It is a vain witticism, a commonplace to say that without the pretended liberty of the will, all pains and rewards are useless. Reason, and you will come to a quite contrary conclusion. If a brigand is executed, his accomplice who sees him expire has the liberty of not being frightened at the punishment; if his will is determined by itself, he will go from the foot of the scaffold to assassinate on the broad highway; if his organs, stricken with horror, make him experience an unconquerable terror, he will stop robbing. His companion's punishment becomes useful to him and an insurance for society only so long as his will is not free.

 

Liberty then is only and can be only the power to do what one will. That is what philosophy teaches us. But if one considers liberty in the theological sense, it is a matter so sublime that profane eyes dare not raise themselves to it.

 

 

Hanover Historical Texts Project

Return to Hanover College Department of History

Please send comments to:

luttmer@hanover.edu

 

 

Sweet Manifesto! Even has a citation to Wiki......

 

Maybe it should've been "Loony Larry" or "Liberty Larry"?

 

Basic law of existence is you reap what you sow, so no real mystery this is the upteenth shooting rampage this year.

[kevbone]

 

Basic law of existence is you reap what you sow,

 

 

Agreed. So the right really needs to back off with all their hate talk.

 

[ivan]

 

Basic law of existence is you reap what you sow,

 

 

Agreed. So the right really needs to back off with all their hate talk.

you assume they don't want to reap what they've been sowing

[Coldfinger]

Gee maybe we need to take a cue from Nordic Biathalon......

 

Combine sport climbing with marksmanship?

[billcoe]

I don't think we need more control over our speech or our weapons. Certainly back in Ronald Regan's day in an effort to save a buck they started to let out mental patients who were semi-sufficient into society. Yet the conversation of "who is crazy" and "when should they forfeit their freedom" was and is still being carried out to this day and that's what we are looking at here. Mentally ill have rights too. What are they and when do those rights to live free impair our ability to operate with freedom? That is the root question we have here. In the old days many folks like this guy would have been swept up into the system and possibly even neutered so that he couldn't breed. Many people who bumped into this guy thought he should have been locked up. The police were having contact with him before although I can't say what it was. Now we are a kindlier and gentler society and don't do that....we wait for things like this to occur instead.

 

That is the question here. As a society we have let many marginal and not so marginal nutcases loose to live free, free range, fend for themselves. I'm discussing severe mental illness and not talking about nuts like Pat, who basically thinks he's Napoleon and has dreams of grandeur and is harmless.

 

In PDX the other day, the police were called out to deal with an angry, mentally ill homeless person. It led to him being shot and killed by the police when he advanced on them with a knife. What the police chief said in discussing that event is that the police are called and have contact every hour, on average, with a mentally ill person. We have deferred the $ we payed the mental profession to help or lock them up, and have put it onto the police. This is clearly a case of "you can pay me now, or you can pay me later".

 

Yet we can pay for all kinds of mental health workers and you will still cannot get rid of every instance of this kind of thing in a free society. Restrictions on weapons and free speech won't do it. Take for example the case of Nidal Hasan, the Muslim soldier who killed thirteen people and wounded thirty others at Fort Hood just back in 2009. Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he opened fire. You going to disarm all of the soldiers? Eliminate all free speech or just all free speech for Muslims? Clearly the answer is no.

 

Where do we go then and still maintain our freedoms? Ivan lays it out above, you get some of this with your freedoms. Probably time to re-read the Voltaire tract Larry posted.

 

Live free my brothers.

[ivan]

this calls for a t-chart!

 

Congrats Ivan. Now that Rob has seen the true nature of Jabba, you have the master's lap all to yourself!

think you missed somethign - libtards can actually disagree on shit n' still be friends...

[Coldfinger]

 

Basic law of existence is you reap what you sow,

 

 

Agreed. So the right really needs to back off with all their hate talk.

you assume they don't want to reap what they've been sowing

 

I was also thinking that they have actively and deliberately made use of ANGER (i.e. Paladino) and guns in their speech, so whether or not the assassin was motivated by the "toxicity" and "bigotry" (BTW it DOES mean something when a Sheriff uses those kinds of words) is one thing, they can't then have their cake and eat it too when someone takes their nut talk (Paladino, Beck, Palin) and actually walks the talk.