First, Jared Taylor and his website are being drawn into this, as somehow connected to the shooter. This is crazy; Fox News is irresponsible for reporting this. And the fact is, AmRen is not some kind of activist group or secret 'extremist' organization. I suppose the media need another bogeyman besides the Tea Party.
Taylor responds to the allegations of some connection to AmRen.
The left, to this day, harps on how Joe McCarthy and the anti-Communists back in the 1950s were ''paranoid'', looking for reds under the bed. Well, the left has surpassed the right in their fear of 'right-wing extremists' under the bed and everywhere else.
I hope that nobody on the right still has delusions that Fox News is in any way conservative, much less pro-White and even less are they 'fair and balanced', as they boast of themselves. No, they are just another group of PC hacks and lickspittles.
There's a lot of discussion about the supposed mental illness of the shooter. Naturally almost everybody, left and ''right'' starts from the assumption that he is mentally disturbed or 'ill', because anybody who would do what he did has to be crazy -- right?
Just for the sake of discussion, suppose he is not ''crazy'' as much as crazy like a fox. If he simply had straightforward political motives for doing what he did, things would go much harder for him than if he were regarded as a 'mentally ill' young man in need of medication and therapy and understanding. Best case scenario, he might simply end up in a mental hospital like John Hinckley, and be eligible for release when he is ''cured.''
Thomas Szasz wrote about what he calls ''the myth of mental illness'' and he seems to have made some converts to his thinking among libertarians. Unfortunately Scientologists have also latched onto his ideas and now anybody who questions the notion of 'mental illness' or the use of mood-altering prescription drugs is suspected of being a Scientologist.
In one of Dr. Szasz's books he cited a study which involved medical students who were asked to pretend to be 'mentally ill', and these people succeeded in fooling the psychiatrists who examined them. The professionals claimed to be able to discern between genuine 'psychotics' and fakers, but the study showed they could not.
A recent study showed that prisoners in some cases were faking mental illness, for various reasons.
The most common motives to pretend among inmates were not what Nanton had expected. Rather than to avoid criminal consequences, more common reasons included obtaining prescription drugs or getting better housing arrangements.''
The professor of course believes that there are actually few fakers, and that science will find a way to distinguish the real ''mentally ill'' from the malingerers.
Further, from the article:
Coverston believes that most people who end up in prison are either mentally ill or will quickly become so due to their living conditions.
"If an inmate is given the opportunity to escape the general population with its constant threats of violence and the generally dehumanizing aspects of prison life, it should not be terribly surprising that they'd seek to do so," he said.
"Any of us in their place would probably do the same."
Obviously I am one of the skeptics on the subject of ''mental illness.'' Brain disorders or chemical imbalances are physiological conditions that can be diagnosed with medical testing. A sickness of the ''mind'' (which is, after all, an abstract thing, unlike the brain) is not something that can be diagnosed by medical means, only by means of very subjective 'testing' by psychiatrists. And if those same psychiatrists believe, as the professor quoted above says, that ''most people who end up in prison are mentally ill'', then they will likely find a high rate of mental illness in those they examine.
And society at large certainly believes that most violent criminals are 'mentally ill', though I think there are still many who are skeptical of the old insanity plea.
So is this shooter 'mentally ill', or could he be faking it? How long ago was he writing bizarre things on the internet or posting strange incoherent videos on YouTube? Is this recent or a longstanding thing? If it's been going on for a long time --- why? If you were the relative or friend of such a person, would you not make sure he was treated for schizophrenia? Schizophrenia is, by the way, a physiological thing which can be determined by testing, unlike many other mental 'disorders.'
And where are the parents of this shooter? Apparently he has been living at home; why have we not heard more about them? Surely they should have known that sonny was not right in the head, if he has been behaving weirdly for a while.
If there is such a thing as 'mental illness' then most of the left is 'ill', judging by the increasing shrillness of their attacks on the rest of us, and their obsessions with the 'Tea Party' and with their imaginary ''right-wing extremists.'
