"Either a person is evil or he is 'mentally ill.' He can’t be both. Either his actions are evil, or they are symptoms of an illness. They can’t be both." Deliberately mischaracterizing the evil as mentally ill.
(A)llusions to “gun violence” and “mental health” are especially pernicious inasmuch as they obscure the evil nature of the deed being explained. To see just how egregious an offense this is, consider some analogies. Imagine if, while discussing the Holocaust, we spoke about “gas chamber violence,” or while discussing Islamic State mass beheadings, we talked instead of “machete violence.” Or suppose that discussions of the lynching of blacks were peppered with references to “rope violence.” None of this would sit well with decent human beings, for it is clear, or at least it is thought that it should be clear, that such descriptions miss entirely that which is fundamental to the phenomena being described—the perpetrators responsible for these wicked deeds.
Of course the reason the collectivists blame "gun violence" and seek to expand the definition of "mentally ill" as pertains to restricting the availability of firearms is the traditional method of such people to win the argument -- citizen disarmament -- by framing the question and corrupting the language. Buy into that, and they've won the argument already -- an old Communist trick. Remember, they think anybody who resists them is, ipso facto, mentally ill. Why do you think they call us "gun nuts"?
Besides, admitting that there is unrelenting evil in the world leads back to the Devil which leads back to God, and overarching moral authority other than their own cannot be conceded or tolerated. It was not accidentally that Obama criticized people who "cling to their Bibles and their guns." Collectivists view both as deadly dangers to their appetites.
16 comments:
Evil IS mental illness
They said Andrea Yates was mentally ill. Well yeah, anyone who drowns their own children in a bathtub is mentally defective! And there can be no other reason offered for destroying the innocent young than pure evil. So why call it "mental illness"? Well, in order to claim there is some elusive "cure" of course! We know otherwise though, because there is only one true way to combat evil - goodness. Goodness is the only counter to evil but to invoke goodness obliterates the notion that man made rules apply. Goodness is next to godliness - for a reason.
This is spot on. The lefties refuse to admit we are dealing with evil (by playing semantics in creating mental illness the same way they fabricated assault rifle) because it would indeed be leading to the admission that God is the answer to it.
YES!!!!!
Spot on Mike!!
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02513/obama_2513348b.jpg
My proposal: We take an AR-15 M4, load it with a full ammo load in a thirty round magazine, crank one round into the chamber, flip the safety off, lean said weapon against a tree, then position 100 observers around that tree, all wearing level IV armor, to report if that rifle makes any moves towards becoming violent, all on it's own and without any humans being close to it. If that rifle, all on it's own, suddenly becomes violent, sprouts legs and arms, stands up and proceeds to start attempting to kill innocent individuals, we should definitely ban them for all time.
These weapons, mixed with the real possibility of magical self-animation, are a threat no-one should have to live with. Such would be an undeniable case of "gun violence"!
(Is that 'assault weapon' still leaning against that tree?)
Hi Mike,
Again your simplicity of language is eloquent and "To the Point!!!!!"
"Gun violence" eh?? As Brodrick Crawford, actor who portrayed a police officer on the old TV show "Highway Patrol" usedta' say a "safety message at the end off the show, one was,"It's Not The Car that Kills!, ..It's the 'DRIVER!!!'"........... May I say, "It's not the 'GUN'that Kills!,..It's the person utilizing it!!" 'Kinda changes the equation.
Got Gunz....OUTLAW!!,
III%,
skybill-out
Thinking about psy ops and false flags......Hollow point, presumably sizable caliber, point blank range = no blood? Really?
The follow on videos by the dad are disgusting in their blatant pandering to the gun grabbing crowd. 10-1 this never happened.
Please watch the videos closely and look for signs of lying and deceit. They are abhorrent. Which means this is likely yet another play to gain rights destruction under the guise of saving us from evil yet again. BS.
“We had a love that burned white hot,” Hurst said.<----the "boyfriend" is an even worse crisis actor than pops. He was out plugging donations on twitter. No normal person would act this way and show zero emotion in ANY interview. No normal person would be giving interviews like theese. Wake up, it's all bad acting. Damn we are in a lot of trouble.
While I agree that conflating "evil" with "mentally ill" is a tactic of Cultural Marxists, the reason it is effective is mostly because 'evil' is inadequately defined in the popular imagination.
"Evil" originally encompassed all forms of deficiency, but "bad" eventually took on the meaning of more general deficits and "evil" became reserved for moral deficit. The problem arises because in popular imagination 'bad' and 'evil' are something more than the absence of what is good (in and of itself) or beneficial (apt to make something else better).
The same sort of difficulty occurs with common concepts like "darkness" or "emptiness". We all know intellectually (or at least I hope most of us do) that there isn't really any real substance of either darkness or emptiness. Darkness doesn't literally close in around you, it is simply the absence of light, the darkness is merely the condition of not having light to see.
I think that we can illustrate this by looking at the terms 'pitiless' and 'remorseless'. A rock (let us specify a rough-hewn ton of granite) is utterly without pity or remorse. If you happen to be downhill of it, it will roll over you and crush you to death (unless you are very strong or quite agile) without the least concern. But we do not commonly call rocks evil or even bad. We refer to the particular circumstance in which their pitiless, remorseless nature was allowed to cause harm. We know pretty well how rocks are going to behave, and if someone puts a rock where it can, for instance, crush an infant, we blame the person and not the rock.
And this is where we come round to V.L. Flanagan. If we regard him as a person, then he is morally responsible for his actions. But if we regard him as less than a person, then we should blame whoever falsely accorded the dignity of personhood to him. Of course personhood is not a binary state, there are examples that fall in between, for instance many humans have limited capacity...which for the record includes everyone who doesn't have an infinite IQ.
So the question can't really be whether we treat all humans as if they have absolute moral accountability for everything they do, because it is completely obvious that this is not the case. And thus many people focus on the question of exactly how morally accountable humans are in general and in particular cases. But that skips a rather important question, which is how should we treat humans differently if they were merely complex deterministic packages of animal behavior and not people at all.
See, if humans weren't people at all, and thus had no personal dignity, we should simply treat them in the manner which was demonstrated to elicit the kind of behavior we desire of them (leaving aside whether our own desires are expressions of free will or animal instinct). What we desire of humans may vary, but the means of getting humans to behave in ways we desire are pretty well established. We first provide the instructions and means for them to behave as we should like, and then reward them for doing what we like and punish them for doing what we dislike. Reiterating this process consistently is how we raise children to learn what is expected of them, how to do it, and why it is in their best interests. The process doesn't stop just because a human reaches biological adulthood, it merely stabilizes since the mental and physical capacities do not change as drastically or quickly for adults. We tell people how they should behave if they want to be rewarded, give them the opportunity to behave, and then reward them for behaving properly and punish them for behaving improperly. The scale and intensity of the punishments and rewards are adjusted by practical limits on what we can provide and proportionality to how much we want to encourage or discourage a given behavior.
Now, this is exactly how we should treat any hypothetical person who was completely morally responsible. We'd just say different things about why we were doing it. We'd talk of betrayal and hatred or friendship and honor and love. But of course, such talk is also part of how we'd instruct humans if we regarded them as entirely deterministic biological entities, the only difference is that we wouldn't actually believe what we were saying unless we believe in the personal dignity of those of whom we are speaking.
So, what about humans who are partially morally accountable, but not perfectly so? Since we treat humans the same whether they are completely without personhood or totally accountable, why would we treat anyone that is in between those two extremes any differently?
Only because we suppose that there is a difference between moral accountability for personal actions and dignity of being a person. And in fact there are cases when it is temporarily convenient to make this distinction. And this gets to the point of the idea of mental illness. The key idea of illness is that it is a departure from wellness. We do not speak of a rock being ill because it cannot ever be well. But a human can be temporarily mentally (and thus morally) incapacitated. And thus it matters to identify when the behavior of a human is a temporary aberration which has arisen as a result of extrinsic factors. Now by 'extrinsic' I mean that all the necessary factors for the incapacity arise from outside the will of the person in question. For instance, a person who is intoxicated because of voluntarily using drugs (including alcohol) differs from a person in the similar state because of being drugged against their will, in that one of the necessary factors for the incapacity, the decision to be intoxicated, is intrinsic to the first person's will while it remains extrinsic for the other. We should say the same of a person who, having a history of psychosis, chooses not to take a prescribed anti-psychotic...or of any human who deliberately goes without sleep until they are in a similar state (this only takes three or four days, and usually requires drugs or torture).
A person kept awake by torture against their will who falls into a psychotic episode is deprived of accountability for their own actions, but the corrective for this is to recognize the extrinsic cause, the torturer keeping them awake. And this brings us back to an assignment of moral accountability. The same is true of Flanagan, if we say he was mentally ill, then we need to seriously examine the question of why he was mentally ill. Could it have had anything to do with how he was raised? Might it be a result of a relentless program of brainwashing he was subjected to throughout his life? Were there unhealthy elements of his sexual activity which promoted delusional behavior?
I think the answers to all of those questions is yes. And while Flanagan may have chosen at least some of the factors which drove him over the edge, given that there is no longer any question of holding Flanagan morally accountable for his behavior, I think it is worth pursuing the question of who else might be responsible.
Notice that we are not being told, nor is it being asked for, about how many times these reporters were shot. What locations on the body, whether shot in the front or the back. MMMMM hhhhmmmmm. Got Mike Brown? I am not going to go all false flag, but I will admit that when I saw the video for the first time, I said to myself, he is shooting at her from that close a range and there wasn't a obvious scream of pain? I agree there was a look of terror, but then a couple more shots fired and she is still running? Did the first shots miss? If that is the case, how many more missed?
I sure wont make any declarations besides this one - I am so sick of information hidden, placated ,and otherwise tanked. What would be so wrong with just telling the truth for a change?
Chiu ChunLing raises so many good points that the analysis obfuscates the obvious:
This person made a decision based on rage. Whether the rage was part of his mental condition or because of a history of occupational and personal disappointments is interesting and pertinent .... but it doesn't excuse his behavior.
Blaming his moral intransigence and legal irresponsibility on " .. who else might be responsible ..." is an exercise in futility. The measure of man is his ability to coexist with others, constructively and without deliberately causing harm to his society.
To act otherwise is evil; it's not only self-destructive, it's the precursor to the collapse of civilization.
Or you can compare him to Genghis Kahn, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, or any other icon of evil. Either model works for me. Except I don't think The Dread Pirate Roberts quite fits the model.
The mentally ill are capable of a wide spectrum of behaviors outside the norm, with some behaviors considered "evil", and other behaviors considered bizarre but innocuous. Assignation of blame or moral responsibility can be a game. Ultimately, in a free society, everyone is responsible for their own behavior.
Here's what I took away from the article....the very last sentence sums up the left's entire problem.
"Thinking is hard."
They do not think.....EVER!!! All they do is "feel" and let their unchecked emotional responses guide what they do. It's so much easier. I know that in the military and the fire service (where I have experience in both) doing that will get you or your people killed. Too bad those on the left really never get to experience the consequences of their actions. But that day of reckoning may be drawing near...
The Armed Civil Disobedience of Non-Compliance is just the beginning.
I thought that this sounded familiar, and I found it.
Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers", Chapter 8. Background: A trooper in training has deserted after only two days. Some months later he killed an infant. So he was turned over to the military, tried, and hung.
"If Dillinger had understood what he was doing (which seemed incredible), then he got what was coming to him.. . .except that it seemed a shame that he hadn't suffered as much as had little Barbara Anne - he practically hadn't suffered at all.
But suppose, as seemed more likely, that he was so crazy that he had never been aware that he was doing anything wrong? What then?
Well, we shoot mad dogs, don't we?
Yes, but being crazy that way is a sickness --
I couldn't see but two possibilities. Either he couldn't be made well -- in which case he was better off dead for his own sake and for the safety of others -- or he could be treated and made sane. In which case (it seemed to me) if he ever became sane enough for civilized society . . . and thought over what he had done while he was "sick" -- what could be left for him but suicide? How could he LIVE with himself?
And suppose he escaped BEFORE he was cured and did the same thing again? And maybe AGAIN? How do you explain THAT to bereaved parents? In view of his record?
I couldn't see but one answer."
The rest of the chapter goes into a discussion of how "juvenile delinquent" is a contradiction of terms. Well worth the read, in light of this discussion.
B Woodman
III-per
While no prophet, Heinlein was an outstanding futurist, and his ability to extrapolate social trends to their logical conclusions was a significant asset. I also remember that meditation on the fundamentally irreconcilable assumptions implicit in "coddling criminals" because it was presumed they weren't responsible for their own behavior...but more because it impressed on me the similarity between how one should treat people if you presumed them to be morally accountable and thus have human dignity and how you should treat them if all you wanted was to condition their behavior, rather than vice versa.
I also find it necessary to clarify that, when I refer to extrinsic social factors which helped drive Flanagan to senseless murders to avenge his imagined slights, I am not talking about Confederate flags and "racist" photographic color balancing technology. I'm talking about Affirmative Action, generational welfare, and sexual 'liberation'.
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