Like most popular, tech oriented websites, Boing Boing affects a relatively neutral political cast. I say “relatively” because, as with sites like TechCrunch, Ars Technica, and similar others, while they refrain from openly cheering for the Reds or Blues, they also love science, and the right wing in this country hates science. Even just respecting science has become political position that de facto comes with a Blue jersey. Since most of them are run and read largely by members of Generation X or younger, culture war issues don’t have nearly the resonance, and so it’s possible to have an ostensibly politically neutral website that, by virtue of being reality based, isn’t a welcoming place for Young Earth Creationists or climate change denialists and therefore has a relatively Blue hue.
I bring all that up because the comment thread at this post about the on-line rantings and ravings of Jared Loughner, the guy who shot all those people in Arizona, is a fascinating look at how even a non-insane conversation at a non-insane website can quickly devolve into goofy tribalism. The fun gets started right in the first comment:
F*ing scumbag. Our country is set up to allow for change in a non-violent means.
I can already see the liberals saying he was a tea party member. And the tea party caused this.
The very first comment is a pre-emptive defense of a charge that has not yet been made. Things really get going with a nearly Grampa Simpson formality at the fifth comment:
Dear editors of BoingBoing,
now that it is becoming more and more apparent that the shooter was simply a lunatic, and neither a left nor right wing lunatic, when can we expect a full apology from Xeni Jardin for making a vile false accusation against Sarah Palin?
I hope the answer doesn’t include the phrase, ‘when hell freezes over…’
That was posted by user MrJim, and, predictably, a whole rash of commenters jumped on him, both because what he said was stupid and because everybody loves Xeni Jardin. The staff of Boing Boing are pretty much the coolest nerds on the internet, and they have no shortage of on-line defenders. MrJim ended up apologizing for part of his original comment, but remained mostly intransigent. He even had a few defenders, and the comment thread was still going this evening when it got down to pointless, hundreds of words rebuttals and counter-rebuttals about gun control, censorship and all manner of hogwash.
Some of the more humane commenters point out that this is a political issue, but that it’s not primarily about gun control or eliminationist rhetoric, it’s about access to health care. After all, we live in a country where a mentally ill person has a right to purchase firearms but doesn’t have a right to competent psychiatric care. A nice handgun can be had for a few hundred dollars, but even a one off trip to a psychiatric emergency room can run several thousand, and that doesn’t include follow up visits to the doctor and prescription medication. Loughner may indeed be a loon with no discernable political motivations, but if he is then he’s a loon who lives in a country where right wing policies on gun control and heath care mean that it is easier and cheaper to purchase a semi-automatic pistol than to see a psychiatrist.
More broadly, the tit for tat taunting in comment threads like the one at Boing Boing focus on this specific case at the expense of the larger picture. Whether we’re talking about guys who murder women, murder doctors, or get into shootouts with police on their way to murder do gooder liberals at a non-profit, the trend in right wing violence is undeniably up. Each one of these guys can be dismissed individually for this reason or that, but ultimately they are all flowing with a larger current.
It may just be locker room taunting when Bill O’Reilly repeatedly calls Dr. George Tiller a “baby killer”. But it becomes deadly when someone who isn’t savvy enough to know that O’Reilly is just an entertainer takes him at his word. After all, if you saw someone literally murdering a baby, wouldn’t you try to stop them with any means at your disposal? The same is true of everybody’s favorite teevee clown Glenn Beck, who rants and raves about gold coins and the Tides Foundation with reckless abandon, only to act shocked, shocked, that someone took him at face value.
Whatever the motivations behind the mass murder in Tucson yesterday, and the details of the case are far from clear, at the moment the simple fact is that a gun happy white guy shot a Blue congresswoman who had taken several positions, on charged issues like immigration and heath care, that were widely unpopular. It is impossible to consider those facts outside of a political context, even if the justification for linking him directly to the comments and actions of someone like Sarah Palin remains thin. So the whining from what one later commenter at Boing Boing called “butt-hurt Republicans” is both self damning and entirely predictable.
