remembered a mock debate where their teacher made students stand on one side of the classroom or another to signal their allegiance. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
Gonna do some armchair psychoanalyzing because that’s what everyone is going to be doing over the next couple days. He probably was a old fashioned Republican conservative, small government, guns rights etc. who was a loner. Whenever he tried to speak to his beliefs his classmates would always just respond with some dumb things trump said and he’d get frustrated and point to him as the reason no one took him seriously.
I’m still sad that this probably awkward boy got lured into that shit, shot at the crowd and got his head popped by a sniper. We wouldn’t know at what stage he could’ve been helped. He’s lost now. And there are many boys like him who can take a gun and spray whoever with it, who can be saved as are their possible victims. There should be something to help his peers or otherwise this chaotic violence would continue, not like in Trump’s case but like in regular shootings it somehow overshadowed.
Couple facts according to BBC early reports:
- gunman was a registered republican
- gunman donated $15 to the dems
FWIW. Ideology could be either way based on that info. People sometimes register for the opposing party as a tactic to vote in the primaries for the weaker candidate (less likely to win). Donating to dems could either mean allegiance to dems or it could just as well be a true conservative who hates Trump (because true conservatives tend to oppose Trump as well over Trump’s disregard for antitrust situations and his sloppy spending). A Trump-hating republican would also likely register as republican to vote against Trump in the primaries.
The donation appears to have been done by the similarly named 69-year old Thomas Crooks, not gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Trump Rally Gunman Was ‘Definitely Liberal,’ Conservatives Recall
Nothing people love more than feeding their own narrative. The guy was clearly mentally unstable and in dire need of therapy. He could have been a communist or an ancap for all I care. This attack doesn’t reflect on anything other than the sad state of mental healthcare in this country.
edit: I guess being pro mental healthcare is an unpopular opinion on Lemmy.
Yes, somehow when a conservative murders (or tries to murder) someone, they’re just a mentally ill lone wolf and this in no way reflects on their ideology, which coincidentally somehow manages to keep producing vastly more of these mentally ill lone wolves compared to others.
It’s almost like encouraging people to believe the nonsense you want them to believe enables them to believe any nonsense.
Well, that, and also it seems like conservatives are more likely to have dark triad or tetrad personality traits – Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism and everyday sadism.
(Sources in a spoiler block so it’s not a wall of text)
sources
In the present research (N = 675), we focus on the relationship between the dark side of human personality and political orientation and extremism, respectively, in the course of a presidential election where the two candidates represent either left-wing or right-wing political policies. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism were associated with right-wing political orientation, whereas narcissism and psychopathy were associated with political extremism. Moreover, the relationships between personality and right-wing political orientation and extremism, respectively, were relatively independent from each other.
We found eleven significant correlations between conservative [Moral Intuition Survey] judgments and the Dark Triad – [narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy,] all at significance level of p<.00001 – and no significant correlations between liberal [Moral Intuition Survey] judgments and the Dark Triad. We believe that these results raise provocative moral questions about the personality bases of moral judgments. In particular, we propose that because the Short-D3 measures three “dark and antisocial” personality traits, our results raise some prima facie worries about the moral justification of some conservative moral judgments
I ran a follow-up study testing the Dark Triad against conservative and liberal judgments on 15 additional moral issues. The new issues examined include illegal immigration, abortion, the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools, the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the war on terrorism, laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and environmentalism. 1154 participants […] Twenty-two significant correlations were observed between “conservative” judgments and the Dark Triad (all of which were significant past a Bonferonni-corrected significance threshold of p = .0008), compared to seven significant correlations between Dark Triad and “liberal” judgments (only one of which was significant past p = .0008).
Lemmy has a real problem listening to what people say and instead injecting their own narrative, and this is a great example. Where in my post am I defending conservatism or making any kind of statement as to “which side” produces more crazies? Fact is the has been the only assassination attempt in many years, despite an insanely vitriolic political environment. That goes to show even the crazies are not coming out en masse to start shooting at politicians.
I mean there was hammer guy, we can probably count him too but even so it’s pretty clear these are mentally unstable individuals, not the average conservative as Lemmy would love you to believe.
All conservatives are mentally unstable they are fearful reactionaries as proven by multiple studies.
Sorry I forgot I was on Lemmy. I should have just joined the blind rage. All conservatives are inherently evil and need to be destroyed. Can I have some of my points back now?
Lemmy is shit. It’s a gigantic echo chamber full of authoritarians. It won’t get better until it becomes more diverse, and that will take many years.
