Yep. We can only live in peace when each of us is deathly afraid of the others and capable of taking them all out.
You point is well taken and it also goes by the label, āfalse equivalency.ā That being the anti-intellectual position whereby people espousing and embracing such idiocy donāt have the ability to discern a good argument from a illogical argument. These same news people also lack the intellectual background to determine an absolutely false argument from a half-truth argument from a solid argument.
I am convinced that this phenomena was born of the institutionalization of ājournalismā as a subject major by colleges and universities seeking an āunderwater basket-weavingā major for their athletic programs dunces. Journalists, if they even went to college, had majors in the liberal arts with a wide background in various subject areas and, most importantly, learning to read for comprehension. I canāt tell you how much it bothers me for someone to write āpleadedā when the proper word is āpled.ā Thatās why English and Civics/Politics were such a favorite with editors who were hiring new reporters. If a new ācubā reporter could conjugate words properly and construct active voice sentences without spoon-feeding them and had a good background in history and current events, they were hired, Whether they had a college degree or not. Oh that we could return to those days.
Training is a whole subject in itself, and Iāll agree with what youāre saying; a strong natural writer with a background and interest in history and civics and a sense of how human nature works could almost always easily outreport the types who thought all they needed was a journalism degree. Iāll broaden it out some too: I think itās actually very rare that anyone is introduced to the basics of logic and critical thinking at any point in high school or college, except for law school. Thereās been a longtime sputtering effort to change that but it obviously never really took hold. Personally Iād mandate, if I could, that you couldnāt get out of high school without being exposed to the structure of arguments, the leading varieties of misleading and fallacious ones, with practice in examining premises for validity. Weād all be better off as voters, buyers of washing machines, whatever. But itās all a beautiful, futile dreamā¦
Good to see TPM taking the repeatedly recommended road of not glorifying the perpetrators of mass violence.
Oh wait.
Currently there are 6 articles on the front page talking about this guy and zero about the people he murdered.
Pretty shameful.
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Publishing a personal manifesto seems to be de rigueur for those among the lunatic fringe. Is it a requirement for membership?
Thereās room to loosen them even more. Here are a few places that are still liberal gun-free zones:
U.S. Congress
Most, if not all, state capitols
NRA headquarters
I live in Utah, and weāve got some of the loosest gun laws in the country. Our concealed carry permit is recognized by more than 30 other states. Canāt carry a gun in the state capitol, though; our Republican legislature, which supports the right to carry guns virtually everywhere, has declared it to be a gun-free zone.
Makes you wonder, doesnāt it?
Exactly!