Gunman Assassinates U.S. Congresswoman

[giblets]

Only right wingers would claim abortion = terrorism.

[Asher]

I'm saying Limbaugh isn't so crazy that he WOULD kill someone. At least Limbaugh can put together coherent sentences and hold down a job, which alone puts him significantly further along the "sane" scale than this guy.

Also there is a difference between "crazy beliefs" and "crazy". Crazy is like schizophrenia. Crazy beliefs is like denying the moon landings.

I think the difference is far smaller than you think.

And Rush has a lot of mental problems, crazy is pretty accurate.

[giblets]

Once again you're getting into this "a lot of X are Y, so all Y are X" thing. Can you really not grasp this obvious fallacy? It's downright retarded.

I have never claimed all Y are X. You just keep making strawmen erect.

[MOBIUS]

Yeah, having/enjoying those books don't mean anything. Things can be interesting without having to agree with them.

Yeah, know thine enemy is a good start, at least in my case...

FFS, his rantings are almost exclusively conservative and/or anti-government:

The gold and silver standard of currency stuff that the tea party douches constantly blather on about, not to mention that nasty piece of work, Glenn Beck of Fox News...

He agrees with loads of the populist **** spewed out by the tea party: anti govt stuff on his you tube about Washington of mind control and brainwashing and the fact that he seems to live and breathe the US constitution and therefore anti-federalist:

"You don't have to accept the federalist laws. Read the United States of America constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws."

So, he basically thinks the US govt is treasonous for acting against the constitution - no right-winger nuttery there - oh no!

Then he bought a gun - I mean how right-wing is that!?

Oh, and that church of Westboro loves him!

He is so slam dunk right-wing it's not funny!

[MOBIUS]

I'm saying Limbaugh isn't so crazy that he WOULD kill someone. At least Limbaugh can put together coherent sentences and hold down a job, which alone puts him significantly further along the "sane" scale than this guy.

Also there is a difference between "crazy beliefs" and "crazy". Crazy is like schizophrenia. Crazy beliefs is like denying the moon landings.

Thankfully Limbaugh only shoots his mouth off...

[giblets]

He also notes that Loughner's views and theories grew more bizarre after he quit using drugs and alcohol in late 2008.

Proof that alcohol is good for you

[MOBIUS]

Wasn't the abolitionist movement right-wing?

[Felch]

What the **** does right wing even mean?

I own guns, I smoke weed, I'm pro-life, I'm a registered Democrat, I don't trust the government, and I don't trust big business. Am I right-wing or left?

[Felch]

Wasn't the abolitionist movement right-wing?

Asher won't like this, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you mean temperance, or prohibitionist, movement, not abolitionist.

Prohibition was backed by women for the most part. It was aligned with the Progressive movement, and it hoped to forge a new society through social engineering.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

You are left wing, even in Europe... in US you must be considered a communist with a small government anomaly.

[Wezil]

I own guns, I smoke weed, I'm pro-life, I'm a registered Democrat, I don't trust the government, and I don't trust big business. Am I right-wing or left?

You're confused.

[Felch]

You are left wing, even in Europe... in US you must be considered a communist with a small government anomaly.

Calling a man a Communist is fightin' words.

[Elok]

Oh, and that church of Westboro loves him!

Leaving aside the rest, the WBC loves anything and everything that hurts America in any way, including Osama Bin Laden. I'm sure they love this nut, but only insofar as his crazy rampage was the wrath of God inflicted on us for not lynching gays.

EDIT: Nyuknyuknyuk.

[The Mad Monk]

#

On Good Morning America today, Jared Lee Loughner's former close friend Zach Osler described how the accused shooter did not watch political news, but did admire a "a web-based documentary called Zeitgeist, that focused on currency based economics that 'poured gasoline on his fire . . . The Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact on Jared Loughner's mindset,'" according to Osler.

Last year, the New York Times ran a piece on "Z-Day, the educational forum associated with the online movie 'Zeitgeist,'" produced by Peter Joseph. The Z-Day event drew a crowd of 900 in Manhattan and others around the world:

“The mission of the movement is the application of the scientific method for social change,” Mr. Joseph announced by way of introduction. The evening, which began at 7 with a two-hour critique of monetary economics, became by midnight a utopian presentation of a money-free and computer-driven vision of the future . . . . some basic themes emerged: modern economics is a fraud; global debt will crush the planet; society itself is dying from the profit motive; and people ought to wise up to the fact that more than legislation — or presidential administrations — needs to change.

The first of Joseph's three films has been criticized, among other things, for perpetrating 9/11 conspiracy theories, as well as for denying the existence of Jesus. The Zeitgeist Film Series website elliptically describes "The Zeitgeist movement" as calling for a "new social system:"

While the films have served as inspirations for The Movement, the subject matter in the films is not to be confused with the main materials/interests of The Zeitgeist Movement itself, which focus on values, resource economics and sustainability. For example, TZM is not about 9/11, Comparative Religion, Central Banking, Financial Reform or the like. In the world today, many are active in these areas and work to resolve them on a per case basis. TZM is not interested in this - its function is to find the 'source' of problematic social phenomena and act to resolve it at its core. This is why a completely new social system is expressed in the Movement's materials.

The site attempts to rebut religious critiques of the films:

Sadly, some in the religious community have been the most vehement in this regard, grossly misinterpreting the intent of Part 1 of Zeitgeist: The Movie. (Source) Some have even composed full books/videos in an attempt to refute. These rebuttals appear to be almost always one sided and radiate with emotional disdain.

Christian apologetics have denounced the movie's claims that Jesus never existed, and the New Testament's account of his conception, birth, life, death, and resurrection were "stolen" and derivative of pagan and pre-Christian belief.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/4033/loughner_admired_conspiracy-minded_zeitgeist_film/

[The Mad Monk]

They’ve Seen the Future and Dislike the Present

By ALAN FEUER
Published: March 16, 2009

Two hours into Z-Day, the educational forum associated with the online movie “Zeitgeist,” Peter Joseph, the film’s director and the evening’s M.C., stepped out from behind his lectern and walked forward earnestly on the stage.

In his goatee and mustache and tieless in a brown suit, Mr. Joseph had been lecturing for nearly 90 minutes on the unsustainable nature of the money-based economy — on cyclical consumption, planned obsolescence, corporate malfeasance and piles of poisonous waste. “It’s time that we wake up,” he intoned, speaking solemnly through a wireless clip-on mike. “The doomsday scenario, the big contraction, might be happening right now. The system of monetary exchange is — in the face of advancing technology — completely obsolete.”

This drew wild applause from the sold-out crowd, a patchwork of perhaps 900 people who paid $10 a head on Sunday night to sit in a packed auditorium at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on Chambers Street near the West Side Highway. Z-Day events were taking place from New England to New Zealand, but this was the big one: the marquee happening with the marquee names.

There, in the crowd, was Jacque Fresco, an industrial designer and the engineering guru of what people unironically called “the movement.” Mr. Fresco, an elfin 93-year-old, sat beside his partner, Roxanne Meadows, smiling self-effacingly.

Mr. Joseph, back on stage, waited patiently as some of the crowd, still cheering, refused to leave their feet.

If the election of Barack Obama was supposed to denote the gradual demise of churlish, corporate governance and usher in a new, sustainable era of visionary change, there was little sign of it at the second annual meeting of the Worldwide Zeitgeist Movement, which, its organizers said, held 450 sister events in 70 countries around the globe.

“The mission of the movement is the application of the scientific method for social change,” Mr. Joseph announced by way of introduction. The evening, which began at 7 with a two-hour critique of monetary economics, became by midnight a utopian presentation of a money-free and computer-driven vision of the future, a wholesale reimagination of civilization, as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his “Imagine” days to do no less than redesign the underlying structures of planetary life.

In other words, a not entirely inappropriate response to the zeitgeist itself, which one young man, a philosophy student in a roomy purple blazer, described before the show began as “the world as we know it coming to an end.” As the evening labored on with a Power Point presentation, a panel talk with Mr. Fresco and a spirited question and answer session, some basic themes emerged: modern economics is a fraud; global debt will crush the planet; society itself is dying from the profit motive; and people ought to wise up to the fact that more than legislation — or presidential administrations — needs to change.

Though they were never actually shown — as most in attendance had seen them several times — Mr. Joseph’s two films, “Zeitgeist, the Movie” (released in 2007) and “Zeitgeist: Addendum” (released last fall), were the subtext of the evening: online documentaries that have been watched, he says, by 50 million people around the world.

The former may be most famous for alleging that the attacks of Sept. 11 were an “inside job” perpetrated by a power-hungry government on its witless population, a point of view that Mr. Joseph said he has recently “moved away from.” Indeed, the second film, the focus of the event, was all but empty of such conspiratorial notions, directing its rhetoric and high production values toward posing a replacement for the evils of the banking system and a perilous economy of scarcity and debt.

That’s where Mr. Fresco came in, an author, lecturer and former aircraft engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio who has spent the last six decades working on the Venus Project, a futuristic society where (adjust your seatbelts, now) machines would control government and industry and safeguard the planet’s fragile resources by means of an artificially intelligent “earthwide autonomic sensor system” — a super-brain of sorts connected to, yes, all human knowledge.

If this sounds vaguely like a disaster scenario out of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Mr. Fresco did not seem worried in the least. Machines are unemotional and unaggressive, unlike human beings, he told the crowd during the question-and-answer phase. “If you took your laptop and smashed it in front of 50 other laptops, trust me, none of them would care.”

The audience — white, black, young, old, baseball caps and business suits alike — received such words like a tonic, and the questions kept coming: What would family life be like in the future? What would happen if the automated system decided that a person had to die? Mr. Fresco and Ms. Meadows are planning the production of a major feature film to bring the Venus Project to a wider, global audience. Before the night began, Mr. Fresco, a small man with a V-neck sweater and a hearing aid, sat signing books and answering questions from a dozen or so college students gathered like acolytes at his feet.

As the evening came to a close, someone finally asked: So what would it take to actually put such a program into action? A grassroots movement, Mr. Joseph said.

“We already have a quarter-million members,” he insisted from the stage. “At the rate things are going, this will be at Madison Square Garden next year.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/nyregion/17zeitgeist.html?_r=1