If only Stephen Paddock had been a Muslim … If only he had shouted “Allahu akbar” before he opened fire on all those concertgoers in Las Vegas … If only he had been a member of ISIS … If only we had a picture of him posing with a Quran in one hand and his semiautomatic rifle in another …
If all of that had happened, no one would be telling us not to dishonor the victims and “politicize” Paddock’s mass murder by talking about preventive remedies.
.. Then Donald Trump would be tweeting every hour “I told you so,” as he does minutes after every terror attack in Europe, precisely to immediately politicize them.
..We will turn the world upside down to track down the last Islamic State fighter in Syria — deploying B-52s, cruise missiles, F-15s, F-22s, F-35s and U-2s. We will ask our best young men and women to make the ultimate sacrifice to kill or capture every last terrorist. And how many Americans has the Islamic State killed in the Middle East? I forget. Is it 15 or 20? And our president never stops telling us that when it comes to ISIS, defeat is not an option, mercy is not on the menu
.. No matter how many innocents are fatally shot — no matter even that one of their own congressional leaders was critically wounded playing baseball — it’s never time to discuss any serious policy measures to mitigate gun violence.
.. But for Pruitt, we know, it’s never time to take climate change seriously.
.. It’s also corrupt. Because it’s driven by money and greed — by gunmakers and gun sellers and oil and coal companies, and all the legislators and regulators they’ve bought and paid to keep silent. They know full well most Americans don’t want to take away people’s rights to hunt or defend themselves.
.. Forget about persuading these legislators. They are not confused or underinformed. They are either bought or intimidated.
.. This is about raw power, not persuasion. And the first chance we have to change the balance of power is the 2018 midterm elections. Forget about trying to get anything done before then. Don’t waste your breath.
Just get power. Start now.
Horror in Las Vegas polarises the world of religion
SINCE the horrific massacre in Las Vegas, the word “evil” has been heard with unusual frequency, on the lips of political leaders as well as clerics. This evil-talk is not just a reflex response or a banal statement of the obvious. It has philosophical implications, and often places the speaker in a particular corner of the debate about guns.
In the first minute of his response to the killing spree, Donald Trump termed it “an act of pure evil”. Striking an unusually scriptural tone, he went on to quote a verse from the Psalms, proclaiming that “The Lord is close to the broken-hearted, He rescues those whose spirits are crushed.” Even in that comforting passage, talk of evil is in the background. It comes a couple of lines after the declaration that “The Lord turns his face against those who do evil, He will erase their memory from the earth.”
.. In the first minute of his response to the killing spree, Donald Trump termed it “an act of pure evil”. Striking an unusually scriptural tone, he went on to quote a verse from the Psalms, proclaiming that “The Lord is close to the broken-hearted, He rescues those whose spirits are crushed.” Even in that comforting passage, talk of evil is in the background. It comes a couple of lines after the declaration that “The Lord turns his face against those who do evil, He will erase their memory from the earth.”
.. Another clear implication of the stress on “evil” is that there is no point trying to stop its effects through regulation. If evil is an inexorable feature of a fallen plane of existence, one that has been tainted from the very start of things by human sin, then no policy measures will ever remove it. The only response to evil is to identify it clearly, to avoid secular soft-headedness, and perhaps to mitigate its effects as and when they arise, without presuming to abolish it. In other words, gun control will not work.
.. the Vatican under Pope Francis has shown sympathy for the view that the “structural violence” implicit in unjust and unequal societies is as much to blame for gun deaths as any individual moral calculus. The Pope has particularly condemned the sale of weapons for profit, whether within countries or internationally, as a huge moral scourge.
Frank Schaeffer: Roy Moore Pulling Out a Gun at a Rally Is a ‘Threat’ and What Fascists Do
Saturday on MSNBC, author Frank Schaeffer claimed former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore pulling a concealed handgun out of his pocket while speaking at a rally Monday in Fairhope, AL, one day before his election against Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL), was not only a “threat” but also “the act of a fascist.”
“When you see Judge Moore pull out a gun at a public rally, that is a threat,” Schaeffer told MSNBC “AM Joy” host Joy Reid. “This is the act of a fascist. This is not American. People don’t do this.”
“We’re in new territory here,” he later added.
Is Trump mentally ill? Or is America? Psychiatrists weigh in.
Review of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” by Bandy X. Lee (ed.), “Twilight of American Sanity” by Allen Frances, and “Fantasyland” by Kurt Andersen.
“The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” features more than two dozen essays breaking down the president’s perceived traits, which the contributors find consistent with symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy and other maladies.
.. In his new book, “Twilight of American Sanity,” psychiatrist Allen Frances asserts that Trump is not mentally ill — we are. “Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society,” he writes. “We can’t expect to change Trump, but we must work to undo the societal delusions that created him.”
.. And those delusions, Kurt Andersen contends in “Fantasyland,” have been around for a long time. “People tend to regard the Trump moment — this post-truth, alternative facts moment — as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon,” he writes. “In fact, what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of attitudes and instincts that have made America exceptional for its entire history.”
.. The volume’s contributors take solace in Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, a 1976 case in which the California Supreme Court held that mental-health experts have a responsibility to speak out when they determine that someone poses a physical danger to others.
.. “The majority of mental health professionals tend to be liberal in their leanings,”
.. Noam Chomsky makes an odd cameo in the book’s epilogue, warning that the Trump administration may stage a fake terrorist attack.
.. Allen Frances wrote the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder used in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and he doesn’t think Trump qualifies. In “Twilight of American Sanity,” Frances says the diagnosis requires the patient to experience significant distress because of his condition. But throughout his life, Trump “has been generously rewarded for his Trumpism, not impaired by it,” Frances writes. “Trump is a threat to the United States, and to the world, not because he is clinically mad, but because he is very bad.”
.. He trashes Trump as a “secular antichrist,” a “two-bit, would-be Mussolini,” even an instrument of divine vengeance. “If you were assigned the task of punishing humanity for its original sins,” he thunders, “you could do no better than invent a Donald Trump and give him extraordinary power.”
.. America is delusional not just because it elected Trump, but because it doesn’t conform to Frances’s views on climate change, population growth, technology, privacy, war, economics and guns.
.. Kurt Andersen is here to tell us that America has featured magical thinking and nutty impulses for centuries. Thanks to our mix of religiosity and Enlightenment values — plus the do-your-own-thing vibe of the 1960s and the super-powered distribution channel known as the Internet — Americans have developed a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue,”
.. he chronicles those he considers purveyors of secular and religious pipe dreams, from Cotton Mather to P.T. Barnum, from Walt Disney to Oprah Winfrey. And, of course, from Donald Trump the real estate huckster to Donald Trump the commander in chief.
.. “Fantasyland” reads like the work of an author who comes up with a catchy idea and then Dumpster-dives his way through history for anything supporting it.
.. “Fantasyland” reads like the work of an author who comes up with a catchy idea and then Dumpster-dives his way through history for anything supporting it.
.. “Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham,” Andersen explains.
At that point, Trump fit right in.
.. writing books lamenting America’s generalized insanity — and the delusions of Trump supporters in particular — may not be the ideal first step to win that trust. For all their expertise in human behavior, these psychiatrists don’t seem well-equipped to coax us out of our current political madness.