Raskolnikov only killed two people in his efforts to become a superman. Today he’d be reading about dirty bombs and fertilizer on the internet.
My heart goes out to Norwegians suffering and grieving after yesterday’s atrocity. A scary number of people want to achieve otherwise-unattainable notoriety or significance by creating mayhem. They then explain their motives to themselves or to others by conjuring some world-historic justification for it.
Raskolnikov only killed two people in his efforts to become a superman. Today he’d be reading about dirty bombs and fertilizer on the internet.
Author: Harold Pollack
Harold Pollack is Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He has served on three expert committees of the National Academies of Science. His recent research appears in such journals as Addiction, Journal of the American Medical Association, and American Journal of Public Health. He writes regularly on HIV prevention, crime and drug policy, health reform, and disability policy for American Prospect, tnr.com, and other news outlets. His essay, "Lessons from an Emergency Room Nightmare" was selected for the collection The Best American Medical Writing, 2009. He recently participated, with zero critical acclaim, in the University of Chicago's annual Latke-Hamentaschen debate.
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the usa has potentially thousands of these right wing nuts. what will push them over to their (nazi-like) glory? the good news is that so far, it hasn’t been a black president. we need to read more about this norwegian wooden man to find out.
There will no doubt be defensiveness from right-wingers rationalizing their demagoguery of “illegals” and Muslims. What they need to understand is that anger and vitriol is one thing, but when combined with an out-group, the historical recipe is disaster. This isn’t about being able to criticize beliefs we don’t like. It is about being wary of long-established patterns of cognitive biases, and not allowing ourselves to fall into the old traps of scapegoating and fearmongering.
mendel says:
“the usa has potentially thousands of these right wing nuts. what will push them over to their (nazi-like) glory? the good news is that so far, it hasn’t been a black president. we need to read more about this norwegian wooden man to find out.”
Dave Niewert (at Orcinus) has been cataloguing precisely this. What the USA MSM does is to not mention the right-wing terrorism aspects of right-wing terrorism.