Arizona
Yeah, I'm gonna go there.
So there's a thread on coleoptera's facebook in which (very loosely summarized) coleoptera calls for the victims to sue Sarah Palin, and LF decries the implicit blame assignment as a formal logical fallacy.
LF is right, of course, in the formal logical sense. But the argument has helped crystallize my thinking on the topic. Of course it's impossible to draw a direct, perfectly logical line between Palin and the assassination; this is one reason why she shouldn't face any sort of legal consequences (the other reason being the good old first amendment...). But pointing this out is about as useful as pointing out that we can't draw a direct line from Al Gore to last summer's drought. The systems involved are too complex. If we're interested in science rather than sophistry, we will instead ask if she is responsible for creating a climate in which assassinations are more likely.
The hypothesis has to be (and indeed, seems to be) that beyond-the-pale rhetoric from Palin made it easier for a nutjob[1] to decide that assassination was a good plan. So, we should address both rhetoric and nutjobs.
[1]I need a word which indicates that one has to be pretty messed up to do this sort of thing, but doesn't connote mental illness in the usual way. Because people with actual diagnosed mental illnesses seem no more likely than the rest of us to flip out and go on killing sprees.
First, rhetoric. I'm going to assert a sort of taxonomy of incendiary rhetoric:
0. Unfortunate metaphor.
1. "That thing that person X is doing is monstrous."
2. "Person X is a monster."
3. "Person X deserves to die." (or otherwise suffer horribly.)
4. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Person X?"
5. "Someone should kill Person X."
6. "I'll give you a dollar if you kill person X".
Stuff in level 1 is generally defensible as rhetoric; stuff in level 2 can be in bounds if supported by argument from level 1 but is usually not: there aren't that many monsters in the world. Level 6 is clearly illegal; I'm not sure about level 5. Levels 3 and above are always beyond the pale; a level three statement is monstrous.
A common and effective strategy of monsters is the following:
Step one: Using calm, measured language, propose a policy from the neighborhood of level five, as if it were the most banal thing in the world.
Step two: Wait for the sane people to come spluttering and saying that your proposal is monstrous.
Step three: Point out that the sane people all sound shrill and overwrought, and wonder if it's possible to have a reasoned conversation with them.
Step four: Win.
Rhetoric at level zero is more interesting. It tends to be embarrassing, as the metaphor, if taken at face value, would generally rise to one of the higher levels. If the error is pointed out, the rhetor has to choose between walking the metaphor back and doubling down; doubling down is as bad as the face-value reading. (It's worth noting that the extremely effective Republican Hissy Fit works by loudly asserting that a perfectly innocuous statement (e.g., lipstick on a pig) actually lives in level two; the victim eventually tries to defuse the situation by apologizing for going to level zero.)
Now, absent any context, I would have thought Palin's now-infamous bullseye map lived in level zero. But she was pretty quickly called out on it back in March (, among others) and chose to double down. I think that puts the thing in level 4.
What about the rest of the rhetorical climate? Ignoring the constant drumbeat of level two rhetoric from the Fox media empire, and focusing on important Republican voices from the last two years or so, we've got:
- Michele Bachmann telling supporters to be armed and dangerous.
- Sarah Palin telling tea partiers "don't retreat, reload".
- Sharron Angle talking about "second amendment remedies".
- John Boehner calling Steve Driehaus "a dead man".
... off the top of my head. I think these are all related to the health care overhaul. Boehner's in level three, Angle's in level five, the other two are in level four.
And then of course there's this, which I presume lives in level zero, but...
I can only remember one statement pre-Obama that rose even to level three: Jesse Helms telling Bill Clinton to bring a bodyguard if he came to North Carolina.
So, I'm willing to conclude that the rhetorical climate is as ugly as it's been in recent memory, and that Sarah Palin and her fellow travelers share most of the responsibility. Could this have possibly led to Saturday's killing?
First, we need to recognize that anyone who would actually try to kill a sitting judge, a sitting congresswoman, and a bunch of innocent bystanders is pretty much by definition a nutjob, so the correct question is not "would a reasonable person take that stuff as an incitement to violence?" but "would a crazy person take that stuff as an incitement to violence?"
Second, we have to ignore the actual crazy person who did the actual shooting, both because moral questions deal with probability distributions, and because it's too hard to read his mind. (The limited information we have on this Loughner character - who is innocent until proven guilty, by the way - suggests that he's some cross between high-school outcast and hate-fueled libertarian; if so, he would surely have been exposed to the "hate-fueled" part of the tea party. But the information could be wrong, or he could be the wrong guy.) There are two questions: Is there are realistic mechanism by which the rhetorical climate could turn otherwise peaceful nutjobs violent, and is there any evidence that it's happening?
I submit that the answer to both questions is "yes". For the first question, it's enough to construct a plausible story. Here's one: Nutjobs, being human, crave approval. They encounter incendiary rhetoric at level three or four, both from political leaders and from their politically active friends, and, in some cases, interpret it as a promise to approve of whoever does the killing. And there it is.
For the second question, we actually have a large population of nutjobs available to do statistics with: All the nutjobs in the United States. For example, we can ask how many have made a credible attempt to engage in politically motivated violence recently.
In the last two years or so, there's:
- Nutjob tries to shoot up Holocaust museum.
- Nutjob tries to shoot up Pentagon.
- Nutjob flies private plane into building in misguided tax protest.
- Nutjob assassinates doctor in Kansas.
- Nutjob in California, on way to shoot up Tides Foundation[2] and ACLU, gets picked up for reckless driving and has extended firefight with police.
- Nutjob from Arizona converts pickup truck into bomb, drives to Washington, gets arrested on National Mall.
- Nutjob from Arizona assassinates judge[3], tries to kill congresswoman, kills or wounds a dozen innocent bystanders at open town hall meeting.
...again off the top of my head.
[2]I don't know what the Tides foundation is, but Glenn Beck said they were monsters, so there it is.
[3]It's also worth noting the the judge was recently the target of an intimidation campaign by local hate radio, on account of he was willing to hear a case brought by some immigrants.
Compare that to the Bush (the lesser) administration, where my memory serves up:
- Man tells Vice President to go fuck self.
Or the Clinton administration, where I'm getting:
- Nutjob blows up federal building in Oklahoma.
- Nutjob bombs Olympics
- Nutjob assassinates doctor.
- Nutjob assassinates doctor, nurses.
- Nutjob assassinates doctor, nurses.
That's anecdotal, and subject to all kinds of selection bias, but it looks like a major uptick to me. If we're not satisfied with the anecdote, there's this report from DHS, which was suppressed by a Republican Hissy Fit, and leaks that the Secret Service is getting five times as many death threats for Obama as they did for Bush.
So we conclude that something has made America's nutjobs more violent in the last couple of years. Is it necessarily the Palinized rhetorical climate? Of course not. Maybe the shitty economy is driving people to desperation, or simply creating more nutjobs out of people who would normally be productive citizens. Maybe the nutjobs are all independently deciding to turn violent in response to something or other the Obama government has said or done, and Palin and her friends are just Cassandras trying to warn us. Maybe it's just random statistical noise.
I think I'll go with Occam's razor on this one.
So I conclude that, while there is no direct connection between Palin and the assassination, she and her co-agitators are nonetheless morally culpable for creating a climate which made an assassination more likely - both in general and the attempt on Giffords in particular. They cannot and should not be expected to face any official sanction for their flagrant misuse of their freedom of speech, but they are subject to civic censure all the same. As
Bill Clinton reminded us after the Oklahoma City bombing, freedom of speech is also for the rest of us. If people of good will rise up together and name monstrous words and deeds for what they are, those with nothing else to offer may yet be driven from the mainstream of our discourse. Such action doesn't come naturally to most of us; we prefer to sidestep, avoid real conflict, and allow the monstrosities to flame out on their own. But now, reminded of the potential consequences of silence, perhaps we must step forward.
I intend to try.
So there's a thread on coleoptera's facebook in which (very loosely summarized) coleoptera calls for the victims to sue Sarah Palin, and LF decries the implicit blame assignment as a formal logical fallacy.
LF is right, of course, in the formal logical sense. But the argument has helped crystallize my thinking on the topic. Of course it's impossible to draw a direct, perfectly logical line between Palin and the assassination; this is one reason why she shouldn't face any sort of legal consequences (the other reason being the good old first amendment...). But pointing this out is about as useful as pointing out that we can't draw a direct line from Al Gore to last summer's drought. The systems involved are too complex. If we're interested in science rather than sophistry, we will instead ask if she is responsible for creating a climate in which assassinations are more likely.
The hypothesis has to be (and indeed, seems to be) that beyond-the-pale rhetoric from Palin made it easier for a nutjob[1] to decide that assassination was a good plan. So, we should address both rhetoric and nutjobs.
[1]I need a word which indicates that one has to be pretty messed up to do this sort of thing, but doesn't connote mental illness in the usual way. Because people with actual diagnosed mental illnesses seem no more likely than the rest of us to flip out and go on killing sprees.
First, rhetoric. I'm going to assert a sort of taxonomy of incendiary rhetoric:
0. Unfortunate metaphor.
1. "That thing that person X is doing is monstrous."
2. "Person X is a monster."
3. "Person X deserves to die." (or otherwise suffer horribly.)
4. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Person X?"
5. "Someone should kill Person X."
6. "I'll give you a dollar if you kill person X".
Stuff in level 1 is generally defensible as rhetoric; stuff in level 2 can be in bounds if supported by argument from level 1 but is usually not: there aren't that many monsters in the world. Level 6 is clearly illegal; I'm not sure about level 5. Levels 3 and above are always beyond the pale; a level three statement is monstrous.
A common and effective strategy of monsters is the following:
Step one: Using calm, measured language, propose a policy from the neighborhood of level five, as if it were the most banal thing in the world.
Step two: Wait for the sane people to come spluttering and saying that your proposal is monstrous.
Step three: Point out that the sane people all sound shrill and overwrought, and wonder if it's possible to have a reasoned conversation with them.
Step four: Win.
Rhetoric at level zero is more interesting. It tends to be embarrassing, as the metaphor, if taken at face value, would generally rise to one of the higher levels. If the error is pointed out, the rhetor has to choose between walking the metaphor back and doubling down; doubling down is as bad as the face-value reading. (It's worth noting that the extremely effective Republican Hissy Fit works by loudly asserting that a perfectly innocuous statement (e.g., lipstick on a pig) actually lives in level two; the victim eventually tries to defuse the situation by apologizing for going to level zero.)
Now, absent any context, I would have thought Palin's now-infamous bullseye map lived in level zero. But she was pretty quickly called out on it back in March (, among others) and chose to double down. I think that puts the thing in level 4.
What about the rest of the rhetorical climate? Ignoring the constant drumbeat of level two rhetoric from the Fox media empire, and focusing on important Republican voices from the last two years or so, we've got:
- Michele Bachmann telling supporters to be armed and dangerous.
- Sarah Palin telling tea partiers "don't retreat, reload".
- Sharron Angle talking about "second amendment remedies".
- John Boehner calling Steve Driehaus "a dead man".
... off the top of my head. I think these are all related to the health care overhaul. Boehner's in level three, Angle's in level five, the other two are in level four.
And then of course there's this, which I presume lives in level zero, but...
I can only remember one statement pre-Obama that rose even to level three: Jesse Helms telling Bill Clinton to bring a bodyguard if he came to North Carolina.
So, I'm willing to conclude that the rhetorical climate is as ugly as it's been in recent memory, and that Sarah Palin and her fellow travelers share most of the responsibility. Could this have possibly led to Saturday's killing?
First, we need to recognize that anyone who would actually try to kill a sitting judge, a sitting congresswoman, and a bunch of innocent bystanders is pretty much by definition a nutjob, so the correct question is not "would a reasonable person take that stuff as an incitement to violence?" but "would a crazy person take that stuff as an incitement to violence?"
Second, we have to ignore the actual crazy person who did the actual shooting, both because moral questions deal with probability distributions, and because it's too hard to read his mind. (The limited information we have on this Loughner character - who is innocent until proven guilty, by the way - suggests that he's some cross between high-school outcast and hate-fueled libertarian; if so, he would surely have been exposed to the "hate-fueled" part of the tea party. But the information could be wrong, or he could be the wrong guy.) There are two questions: Is there are realistic mechanism by which the rhetorical climate could turn otherwise peaceful nutjobs violent, and is there any evidence that it's happening?
I submit that the answer to both questions is "yes". For the first question, it's enough to construct a plausible story. Here's one: Nutjobs, being human, crave approval. They encounter incendiary rhetoric at level three or four, both from political leaders and from their politically active friends, and, in some cases, interpret it as a promise to approve of whoever does the killing. And there it is.
For the second question, we actually have a large population of nutjobs available to do statistics with: All the nutjobs in the United States. For example, we can ask how many have made a credible attempt to engage in politically motivated violence recently.
In the last two years or so, there's:
- Nutjob tries to shoot up Holocaust museum.
- Nutjob tries to shoot up Pentagon.
- Nutjob flies private plane into building in misguided tax protest.
- Nutjob assassinates doctor in Kansas.
- Nutjob in California, on way to shoot up Tides Foundation[2] and ACLU, gets picked up for reckless driving and has extended firefight with police.
- Nutjob from Arizona converts pickup truck into bomb, drives to Washington, gets arrested on National Mall.
- Nutjob from Arizona assassinates judge[3], tries to kill congresswoman, kills or wounds a dozen innocent bystanders at open town hall meeting.
...again off the top of my head.
[2]I don't know what the Tides foundation is, but Glenn Beck said they were monsters, so there it is.
[3]It's also worth noting the the judge was recently the target of an intimidation campaign by local hate radio, on account of he was willing to hear a case brought by some immigrants.
Compare that to the Bush (the lesser) administration, where my memory serves up:
- Man tells Vice President to go fuck self.
Or the Clinton administration, where I'm getting:
- Nutjob blows up federal building in Oklahoma.
- Nutjob bombs Olympics
- Nutjob assassinates doctor.
- Nutjob assassinates doctor, nurses.
- Nutjob assassinates doctor, nurses.
That's anecdotal, and subject to all kinds of selection bias, but it looks like a major uptick to me. If we're not satisfied with the anecdote, there's this report from DHS, which was suppressed by a Republican Hissy Fit, and leaks that the Secret Service is getting five times as many death threats for Obama as they did for Bush.
So we conclude that something has made America's nutjobs more violent in the last couple of years. Is it necessarily the Palinized rhetorical climate? Of course not. Maybe the shitty economy is driving people to desperation, or simply creating more nutjobs out of people who would normally be productive citizens. Maybe the nutjobs are all independently deciding to turn violent in response to something or other the Obama government has said or done, and Palin and her friends are just Cassandras trying to warn us. Maybe it's just random statistical noise.
I think I'll go with Occam's razor on this one.
So I conclude that, while there is no direct connection between Palin and the assassination, she and her co-agitators are nonetheless morally culpable for creating a climate which made an assassination more likely - both in general and the attempt on Giffords in particular. They cannot and should not be expected to face any official sanction for their flagrant misuse of their freedom of speech, but they are subject to civic censure all the same. As
Bill Clinton reminded us after the Oklahoma City bombing, freedom of speech is also for the rest of us. If people of good will rise up together and name monstrous words and deeds for what they are, those with nothing else to offer may yet be driven from the mainstream of our discourse. Such action doesn't come naturally to most of us; we prefer to sidestep, avoid real conflict, and allow the monstrosities to flame out on their own. But now, reminded of the potential consequences of silence, perhaps we must step forward.
I intend to try.