I have never ever been embarrassed to be a pro-Second Amendment advocate. To me it’s far from something that should cause a person shame. After all, guns are a necessary tool and pastime for a lot of people. It seems naive for folks without an understanding of a way of life to say “these are antiquated and unnecessary!” I mean, personally I think baseball is antiquated and unnecessary but I’m not going around trying to make it illegal, trying to make everyone turn in their bats and bases and sixty-feet-six-inches measuring tape.
But now, since “Sandy Hook” or “The Newton Massacre” I’m seriously wondering about some of the folks who are sharing the pro-gun bandbox with me.
Let me be very clear right now. If you think that that murder of innocent people going about their day in an elementary school was either staged–with no one actually dying–or orchestrated by President Obama/the CIA/Homeland Security/the NSA/the Democratic Party you have optioned yourself out of any responsible conversation about the issues of media responsibility and government-ordered disarmament*.
The media did really screw up with Sandy Hook coverage in the first 24 hours. They all admit this–print and television news coverage both online and in traditional outlets. They got names wrong, occupations wrong. In fact nearly every fact of the shooting was initially misrepresented.
Yes, this is cause for outrage and says an awful lot about how news works now and should be a good lesson in why it’s not the worst thing in the world to avoid immediate news coverage. I have done for years and I’m actually happier for it and much more well-informed.
These errors do NOT mean that everything was made up, or that there was confusion before the official press release on Oval Office Stationery hit the news desk. The fact that there are people who want to believe this is understandable. I’d rather believe that people didn’t actually die. I know that some people have spent 8 years with entertainers bombastically declaring to them that President Obama is evil. They’ve invested so much of their lives in that lie that the idea of him masterminding this horror seems perfectly in line with their assumptions thus far.
But it’s not the belief of a well-ordered mind. It’s magical thinking. And it’s ridiculous.
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*I no longer say “gun control”. That’s a spin term that makes it sound nice and neat. Disarmement is the legal term for what is happening–registering private weapons in databases and seizing those weapons is disarmement.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I have not heard the one about it being staged. Where did that absurd story originate from?
At the same time, it’s hardly magical thinking to imagine that government powers could orchestrate the killing of people for political gain. History teaches us that political powers can and will do this. However, there is no proof (at this time) that this is what occurred at Sandy Hook. So it’s perhaps a huge leap of logic to make without definite facts, but it’s still not magical thinking.
Yeah, it actually magical thinking. It’s possible unicorns exist, but in the absence of any evidence to suggest it, it’s magical thinking to believe in them.
There is no evidence unicorns exist (except in the King James Bible, of course ;)). There is, however, documented evidence that government bodies seeking power will conspire to kill others/start wars for political gain. It isn’t magical thinking to suspect that our government could quite possibly be made up of power-hungry human beings that are really no different than power-hungry human beings of other epochs and nations. When the facts don’t add up, many people begin to suspect they are being lied to because many people AREN’T magical thinkers (or at least not all the time). The theories they propose may be false, but it would be more along the lines of magical thinking to believe our government is somehow special and different and beyond perpetrating evil. We already know they have perpetrated evil and have conspired against others–think of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, for example.
Having thought about my answer to you for a minute while eating some rice (good for the brain), I would have to say that it’s magical thinking to automatically believe the government perpetrated a horrendous act, and it’s magical thinking to believe our government could never perpetrate horror. So, yeah, I get what you’re saying, and I get what Katherine is saying. But people looking at confusing facts and theorizing about them does not–to me, anyway–constitute magical thinking. It constitutes normal thinking, so long as those theorizing are willing to give up their theories in light of irrefutable facts that contradict them. For my part, I try to remain neutral on conspiracy theories, unless they are completely wacko, of course, because I like to keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions (though, admittedly, like all human beings I’ve jumped to many wrong conclusions throughout my life).
So it’s perhaps a huge leap of logic to make without definite facts, but it’s still not magical thinking
It actually IS an increasingly dangerous form of magical thinking that is found in American Politics. Whereas traditional magical thinking is “if I step on a crack, I break my mother’s back” or “If I clean my room I don’t get the flu”, there is also this magical thinking in politics.
I. The government has power.
II. The government has created propaganda in the past.
III. [Any action that exhibits power and captures the imagination] was created by the government.
See: Faked Moon Landing; Faked Challenger Explosion; Faked Sandy Hook; Government caused 9/11; Government blew up Oklahoma City Federal Building, etc.
http://skepdic.com/magicalthinking.html
Magical thinking invests special powers and forces in many things that are seen as symbols.
1. “Government” is so powerful that it can make this thing happen
that things that resemble each other are causally connected in some way that defies scientific testing (the law of similarity).
Our government resembles the government of Stalin in that there is a one-person executive and then legislative bodies of multiple persons. Because it resembles that superficially it has the same end aims as Stalin’s government.
According to psychologist James Alcock, “‘Magical thinking’ is the interpreting of two closely occurring events as though one caused the other, without any concern for the causal link.
The weird thing in politics right now is that people are doing BACKWARD magical thinking. “Sandy Hook led Obama to push for gun control. So Obama’s push for gun control CAUSED Sandy Hook.”
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All of this is why I’m comfortable calling it “Magical Thinking” at this point.
That doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible for a government to fake a thing or direct a thing. But my mind isn’t going to go there unless I’m, say, given the minutes from the Wannsee Protocol or shown photos of a black ops team shooting people inside Sandy Hook Elementary School.
I would have to say that government is powerful enough to make many things happen. They have the might of the military and wealth, but that doesn’t mean they WILL make something happen or were responsible for Sandy Hook or any other tragedy. Blame games are easier than acknowledging social ills that we may all, in fact, be responsible for. As I said to Dolphin above, I get where you’re coming from. I do. And I agree that automatically jumping to conclusions is foolish, or could even be called magical thinking. But I don’t think attempts at making sense of confusing facts is the way magical thinking works. For example, if a person of average intelligence who doesn’t have a proclivity for research believes hoaxes because they were published via a news outlet they trust, is that magical thinking? To me, that’s simple laziness at work.
I’d say it’s magical thinking once-removed. Trusting media outlets is its own form of magical thinking.
“They said it on TV / In The Paper / At Mediamatters / on Daily Kos. That makes it true.”
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
Also to clarify:
I am the last person to trust the government on anything. I am a trust but verify person on everything except Christianity. And even then I still TBV ministers, elders, deacons, Sunday School Teachers, etc.
But while I think distrust is a healthy engine of intellectual rigor I think it is also misused when it is accompanied by blind trust in something else. EG: distrusting the government but trusting videos on your favourite online news site that offer “evidence” that 9/11 was caused by the CIA.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
This is where I’m at, too. I guess I would have to broaden my definition of magical thinking to agree with your other assertions–which is fine. But I wonder who among us doesn’t fall prey to it, then. I don’t like to think of myself as a magical thinker. Yet, I am at times.
What worries me is not this, so much as the mainstream press persistently highlighting the lunatic fringe in order to tar all conservatives with that brush. I usually browse sites like memorandum, and there’s a near-constant focus on the fringe in the news. Like with all the “republicans who say stupid things about rape”-there’s a tremendous amount that don’t, you know? Yet the MSM jumps constantly on the fringe, and the ones that aren’t helping your case really don’t help your case when the opposition uses them in that way.
It’s worrying, because people want to make policy based on containing that fringe, who really are marginal.
I agree that the newsmedia (not only the mainstream parts, but non-mainstream outlets even more so) highlight lunatic fringes of all persuasions. In order to build circulation, viewership, clicks, donations, and all that. But the example you use, of “Republicans who say stupid things about rape,” isn’t at all an example of media focusing on the fringes. The Republicans whose views on rape were highlighted were elected officials and candidates for elective office who had won Republican primaries. To say that they ought to be ignored as fringe elements is just plain wrong. Sure, there are infinitely more Republicans who don’t “say stupid things about rape” — I recall the mainstream media covering their initial moves a lot of them made to distance themselves from the crazies, too. I don’t see that anyone has a legitimate beef with the way this set of stories was covered.
I agree with you about the media’s constant focus on the fringe; during the height of the Secession movement it was maybe 200K people but the media covered it like it was half the country.
But like nm I think I have to disagree about the Rape thing. Those men said those things as a calculated move to draw in what they believe to be “conservative” people.
So the story was not only that some elected officials / candidates for office believe these things but that there is also a selection of voters who believe these things.
There’s a selection of voters who believe Bush was behind 9-11, too. If I trawled hard enough, I could find elected officials saying a lot of out there things. But the difference is the liberal media isn’t going after people they like, only people they don’t in order to tar the entire movement as believing the same things through repetition.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be covered at all, but they kept going back to it again and again to reinforce the point and perpetuate a myth that all Republicans are like this. They are doing the same with gun issues, and are trying to create a narrative rather than report news in context, and it’s working pretty well. Akin got savaged by his own party for God’s sake-every conservative after a while was telling him to shut up about it. Usually the nuts get taken out by their own compatriots and retreat back beyond the pale.
If you find an example of an elected Member of Congress or Senator, or the candidate for those offices of any major political party in this country, claiming that GWBush was behind the September 11 attacks, I hope you will share it with us. I promise you that I personally will dedicate a great deal of time and effort making sure that attention is paid. But … it’s been over 11 years, and no one has come up with any example of that. Even the mainstream conservative media, like Fox News, who would have quite the vested interest in making it public, don’t you think?
I had been inclined to think that you were arguing in good faith, but now I’m not so sure. You can’t actually think that if some official or official-wannabe had said or written such things in the same contexts (press conferences, public appearances, campaign speeches) that saw the recent offensive comments about rape and women’s bodies, they would have been swept under the rug.
I didn’t say elected officials believed he did it but that they often believe “out there” things. I’m sure most media could easily dive into the Democratic party and find things people would see as nuts. The difference is that there’s no reason they’d talk about them except to explain away-they aren’t going out and linking incidents to create a narrative of democrats all being anti-israel lobby or 9-11 truthers.
It’s a recent thing I noticed where they seem to be starting to link cranks together to create a narrative of republican craziness, and it’s really dangerous in my opinion. Without a sense of perspective it’s going to lead to radicalization.
They can and they do “dive into the Democratic party and find things people would see as nuts.” Democrats who say and do stupid things are regularly tarred and feathered by the news media. The news media reports on the crazy because that’s what sells.
Let me make some assumptions for a moment; you’re a conservative so when you are embarrassed by the actions and/or words of another conservative it irks you and you feel it, however when a liberal says something stupid it merely plays into your preconceived notions about what liberals think so you scarcely even notice that what is being reported on the liberals is the same thing that makes your blood boil when it’s reported on the conservatives. Combine that with a belief in the myth of the “liberal media” and you see something that actually done to pretty much anyone as being a one-sided attack on Republicans.
You assume wrong. Let me give a concrete example.
I read memeorandum, a current political news aggregator. Ever since Sandy Hook, almost once a day it seems some instance of gun violence is posted there. A current one is “three shot at Lone Star state college.” These are sad, but when you think about the size of the USA and the sheer amount of people who own and use guns, this happens in the same way car accidents can happen-someone who drives and shouldn’t be does something bad.
I admit the bad, but when I constantly see a stream of these articles without realizing the above fact-that while tragic, this kind of violence is rare and in a way impossible to legislate away effectively-I worry that it is being shown to create a narrative of fear that all guns are bad. I fully admit we have some idiots on our side who aren’t helping, like the nuts who take AR-15s and walk through neighborhoods because they can do so legally.But whenever you see the news shaped this way, people are selecting things to create a story.
If you want a liberal example, remember the welfare queen? That was conservatives trying to shape the narrative and that was stupid, because it was focusing on a very tiny portion of users-fraudulent or “professional” ones-and demonizing those who used the system as intended, for short term relief. We’ve really been unable to focus on that because of all the narrative spinning, and people advance and defend stories that have little to do with what is needed.
I’m worried that recently the dems have seen the effectiveness of this, and are using it for political gain. It’s easier to marginalize Republicans through defining the narrative about them than to engage ideas or criticism.
Oh, don’t do the car accidents/shooting comparison. It completely undermines your case. Because, on the one hand, we do focus on car accidents (“if it bleeds, it leads” on local news). Always have. And also, on the other hand, because we don’t just shrug and say “what a tragedy” about cars. We say “vehicular manslaughter,” and we regulate car ownership and driving to a faretheewell.
I fail to see how the media reporting on shootings indicates some kind of anti-conservative bias.
For better or worse, large scale tragedies have have been considered newsworthy for as far back as when the “media” was merely word of mouth from one person to the next. I’d suggest that NOT covering a tragedy would be more indicative of some kind of bias than covering it, as NOT covering it would require intentionally going against the very purpose of the news media (to spread “news”).
If we can agree that the reason the news media covers shootings is because they ARE news, can we also agree that the reason the news media doesn’t cover Joe Average who keeps his gun locked in a safe at home between hunting trips is because that’s NOT news. There’s no story there. It’s boring. It’s not bias that keeps the media from covering it, it’s the fact that if the media covered every mundane detail of every person’s life, (a) there would be enough time in the day, by a long shot, and (b) it would be REALLY boring and mundane.
What it’s sounding like is that you want the news media to forgo their intended purpose of spreading news and instead create a narrative that is specifically tailored to a conservative political message. And you believe their failure to create such a narrative (to your satisfaction) is evidence of bias. You’re right, my assumptions were wrong. Call it giving you the benefit of the doubt, because what you’re saying now is downright nefarious.
I guess I don’t understand exactly what you’re getting at. I don’t see serious news stories presenting out-there cranks (left or right) as representative of mainstream political thought. I do see elected officials or candidates to become elected officials being presented (in serious news stories) as out-there when they say out-there things — but I don’t see it being one-sided or as an attempt to present a narrative about one party rather than another. There are too many (serious news) stories about out-there things Dennis Kucinich or Cynthia McKinney have said for me to buy that. If more Republicans are saying out-there things right now, well, y’all just lost an election and are having some of your assumptions challenged. I expect that some of the responses to that will be over the top.