Redstate

Trying to spin the inner machinations of a mentally diseased mind into "the Left's sick poster child" is inflammatory and despicable. This man did not kill 32 people because he read too much Noam Chomsky. He did not kill 32 people because five or one or none of his professors made David Horowitz's list of dangerous academics. He killed 32 people because he was batsh-t crazy. There is certainly criticism that can be made from a conservative perspective about what the college may have done differently, what the media may have done differently and so on and so forth, but simply trying to weave it into some overarching partisan narrative spanning from the LA Times to Ho Chi Minh to this evil man is disgusting and propagates the same simplistic causation that we should be most rigorous in opposing. This is not an attempt to see this tragedy as a conservative sees it, or maybe should see it. It is an attempt at spin.

It took me a while to catch on to Gamecock, but once you get him, he will make you smile every time you read him.

Cho was evil and a lunatic and he has nothing to do with any coherent political philosophy and he deserves nothing more than oblivion.

I don't think you even know the country that I love.

The country that I love is the one built by Paine, and Jefferson, and Mason, and Hamilton the one renewed by Lincoln, strengthened by TR, protected by FDR, won by MLK and now seriously imperiled by those who would tear down the Bill of Rights and Habeus Corpus and who would make the country an imperial state with two branches of the government gutted and who would welcome a theocracy.

I am a leftist and a liberal and I love the country I grew up in. I LOVE AMERICA! I, and many others on the right and left, are fighting for her soul - the soul that the neocons and the theocons and the neo-liberals and the corrupt of both parties would sell to Exxon and Blackwater and foreign interests and hate-merchants such as Coulter and religous fanatics... I love America - and I am proud to be an American. So deal with it.

it makes me think, and it reminds me of lessons learned that need to be remembered. The evil violence at Virginia Tech this week is not a new phenomena. The first story of murder in the Bible tells of a perspective of convincing yourself that you are a victim not to be blamed. Here is a good link for you, gamecock.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/david/fohrman_cain_abel9.php3

You’re a persistent cuss, pilgrim.
John Wayne to Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

evil of the left is worse than Cho. Its on the order of Stalin and the Mao t-shirts they wear or grin at. Its the mass slaughters they avert their eyes from. Modern day liberalism is the greatest danger in the world. It is the descendant of the promise of the serpent in the garden's promise that ye may be Gods and we know what that choice has wrought.

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
Starbucks: Coffee, good. Cups, bad, but
"One man with courage makes a majority."-Andrew Jackson

is the ONLY Commandment on the Left and in academia. Little of that creature's rhetoric would be surprising coming from any young person today. I've heard much of the same resentment from my own stepkids; whenever they wanted something and were denied, and they weren't denied much, we'd get some refrain about how "we" had this or that so it wasn't fair that the kid couldn't have whatever stupid thing they wanted. They never got the linkage that "we" went to work every day to make it possible to have whatever "we" - and they - had. They're getting it now - the hard way. The culture of envy and victimization permeates education and any lie, any excuse, will suffice to explain bad behavior or failure since the educators will not use, maybe don't have, the God-given common sense that any parent or authority figure should have and use to call BS on the bad behavior and excuse-making.

We threw the baby out with the bathwater in the Sixties. I don't believe that America was ever as homogenous and straitlaced as "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," but the elites convinced first themselves then much of the popular culture that it was and that the orthodoxy had to be extirpated. In a decade, we went from "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" to "If It Feels Good, Do It." No behavior was too aberant, no belief too abhorent; who were we to judge?

When I entered college in the fall of '67, button down collar shirts and khakis were considered casual dress and jackets and ties were the standard for ball games, dances, and significant events; skirts and blouses, and only occasionally slacks, were the standard for the women and they could't be out on campus in their gym clothes; PE was still required in that antediluvian time, so the London Fog overcoat was the standard dress for a girl on her way to or from PE. In only a couple of years that was all gone; replaced by hippy camp or jeans and tee shirts and if the girls wore skirts, they were decent by a quarter of an inch and braless was the standard. Behavior and speech standards went out right along with the dress standards; the F-word became a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb and was interspersed in every sentence.

In my former life, I hired quite a few college students or recent graduates and from time to time participated in the HS's job shadowing and intern programs. Most would show up looking like the dogs drug them in and I sent more than a few back to the HS and told the teachers not to send me something that looked like that. Few could engage in any normal workplace conversation as their vocabulary was limited to teenage patois and they had little or no experience with speaking standard English; they don't much ask kids to do any sort of public speaking, even answering questions aloud, anymore, since some can do it better than others and it might damage the self-esteem of those who do it less well. The recent college grads had lots and lots of self-esteem, but I could see little reason for them to have it. Even the law school grads tried to write in a chatty, informal style more suited to a friendly letter than legal writing and the grammar, syntax, and orthography wouldn't have gotten you out of my high school. And as titilating as it might be, I really don't want to see the thong peeking out of the low-cut pants on a young lady lawyer working for me and had to have some unpleasant conversations about stuff like that - no belly buttons allowed at work! If you watched Fox's coverage from VT, it seemed that after the first few hours they really went out of their way to make sure the students they interviewed could actually speak coherently, those approached early on had the standard adolescent vocabulary of "like" and "you know."

To further illustrate: I took a 400 level seminar on The Holocaust at the U here a few years ago. There were a few adults but most were college juniors and seniors. A goodly percentage couldn't have put the Holocaust in WWII or WWII in the right century. At the end of the semester we had to do a not less than twenty page paper and give a ten minute precis of our paper to the class; not more than half a dozen out of the thirty or so in that class could give a ten minute talk with a beginning, middle, and end or speak in anything resembling standard, formal English. The Prof never said a word whether the boys mumbled for three minutes or the ed majors showed up with a stack of cards and visual aids and prattled on incoherently for twenty minutes. It didn't matter; you got an A if you did anything and a B if you just showed up - nobody got a C or less!

So, to sum up what became a rant; we have an educational system and a popular culture that expects little and tolerates almost anything except what they style "intolerance." Perhaps had some people been less tolerant of that creature, Monday would not have been such a dark day.

In Vino Veritas

...of "Catcher in the Rye" yet?

My Chinese wife has gone into an irrational "ban all guns" swoon over this. She thinks that all of Cho's rants, photos and videos should be released to the public immediately, so we can try to discover his dark, complicated motivations that went undetected until it was too late. I told her that it was obvious to so many people who could or would do nothing about it that he had serious problems.

You can take any one paragraph he wrote, any single picture he took, 10 seconds of any video he made and you will have all you need to understand that he no Manson or Bundy. He was just another shallow, predictable, pathetic little man stunted at 14 years old for the rest of his life. He couldn't handle this reality and had to end a life he couldn't bear living, after making others pay with the lives he wished he had.

I guess it's true what they say about the banality of evil.

[Kiddo, when we toss somebody, that means that they have to leave. You only validate us with your attempts to restart the conversation.]

[Now shoo. - Moe Lane]

When the Oklahoma City bombing took place (4/19/95) a number of leftist commentators said that Newt Gingrich and his Republicans fostered the climate that made it possible.

Well, now the Dems have been in the ascendant ever since launching their race-baiting critique of the Hurricane Katrina response. A Democratic prosecutor launched the Duke Railroad Rape Case by targeting rich white guys (sic). The Dems won Congress using their time-honored class rhetoric along with their disingenuous talk on Iraq. The Virginia Tech shooting targeted and killed rich (sic) men and women.

Newt: time to return the favor, perhaps?

When was the last time since 3 months after 9/11 that any liberal member of the MSM, university faculty, Hollywood, or the Democratic party (save Zell or Lieberman) expressed unqualified love for America... (Iraq clause snipped)

If we clip the quote there, the answer is nearly certain to be 0.001 seconds from the time you finish reading this sentence.

Are you really this limited in meaningful human contact with people across the political spectrum who disagree with your viewpoints that you ascribe to them all the qualities of this silly strawman you relentlessly attempt to construct beyond any shade of reason or logic? This is devolving into self-caricature.

Get out there, meet and speak with folks who disagree with you, and discover that there are well-informed patriots of good character across the philosophic divide.

...but upon further reflection I realized another reason why your post so greatly disturbed me. You said:

Does anyone imagine that Cho's curriculum at Virginia Tech was filled with classes touting the virtues of America?

Are you implying in some roundabout way that the faculty who were murdered were somehow complicit in their own deaths? That you have some specific knowledge of the curriculum at Virginia Tech, what Cho was taught, and that it led him to become a murderer?

Your casual and broad-brush denunciation of academics suggests that perhaps you haven't fully informed yourself about those murdered in this attack. You can find a full list of students and faculty who died here, including tributes to German Professor Jamie Bishop here and Holocaust survivor Liviu Lebrescu here, a man who literally gave his life to save the lives of his students.

I come from an academic family, and neither my mother nor father, both academics, have ever expressed anything but love for our nation. When I think of those I've met who I most admire and whose character I seek to emulate, I inevitably turn to the academics who've made a difference in my life.

Again I ask you...please, meet more of the real-life people for whom you seem to hold such vitriol. You will likely be impressed.

wearing academic gowns, and some of those at VT appear to have been legitmate heroes. That said, for every one of those, I'll show you ten who got their Ph.D dodging the draft during Vietnam and whose head I wouldn't urinate on were their brain on fire.

In Vino Veritas

Selective Relativism

Conservatives often decry "moral relativism," but really they mean something slightly different. Moral relativism is a serious philosophical theory, which holds that universal moral standards are nonexistent and all moral judgments are circumstantial and subjective.

True moral relativism is a position of detachment: One sees one's own society's morality as contingent, inherently no better or worse than those of other societies. But just as "multiculturalism" turns out to have little to do with actual respect for other cultures, so the left's ostensible moral relativism actually often is a cover for hostility to tradition, patriotism, individual responsibility and common sense.

A pair of items illustrate the point. The first is a blog entry in which Jim Wallis, possibly the only member of the religious left, weighs in on the Virginia Tech massacre. Wallis begins with a rather tacky celebration of "diversity" in mass murder, and then goes on to counsel against rushing to judgment:

Looking at the profiles of the dead, I am struck by their diversity. They ranged in age from 18 to 76; they came from nine states, along with Puerto Rico, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Romania. They were male and female, African-American, Asian, Middle Eastern and Caucasian. They were all people who began Monday little knowing it would suddenly end their lives.

This is not a time to seek easy answers or to assign blame. It is, rather, a time to pray, mourn, and reflect. While this tragedy can perhaps be partially explained by the easy accessibility of guns in our society, by the saturation of violence in our popular culture, by the fact that the visible signs of Cho Seung Hui's troubled life could have been taken more seriously, by concerns about university security, or by any number of other things, ultimately there is no simple explanation. And there are generally no single causes for such horrible events.

"There is no simple explanation." Well, we can think of one: An evil man made and carried out a decision to murder as many people as he could.

Is this too simplistic? In a sense, sure. It's certainly true that people in positions of authority and cultural influence bear some moral responsibility if they encourage, or fail to prevent, or fail to minimize the damage of, acts like Cho's. And Wallis is surely right to counsel against hasty apportionment of such secondary blame, if only because such rashness could lead to the adoption of counterproductive policies that actually increase the danger, or that impose other costs without decreasing it.

But note the one person Wallis doesn't even consider blaming for Cho Seung-hui's murderous rampage: Cho Seung-hui. This is not because Wallis doesn't want to belabor the obvious; he expressly says "there is no simple explanation" and "there are . . . no single causes."

It may be that Cho was crazy, not evil; that his actions were a sort of force of nature, more like Hurricane Katrina than 9/11. It is true that he was found to be "mentally ill," but as the Los Angeles Times suggests, this was a rather haphazard diagnosis:

According to court records, Cho was declared mentally ill by the intake officer who evaluated him on Dec. 13, 2005, at New River Valley Community Services, a public provider of mental health services.

On the basis of that evaluation, a court magistrate issued a "temporary detention order" and Cho spent the night at Carilion Saint Albans Behavioral Health Center in Christiansburg.

The next day Cho was evaluated more fully by a psychiatrist, and met with a special justice. According to court records, the psychiatrist also declared the future gunman mentally ill but determined that Cho "did not present an imminent threat" to himself and others, and did not require hospitalization.

Maybe there's more to it, but it sounds to us like this was all just guesswork: The intake officer and psychiatrist agreed that Cho seemed nuts, but the psychiatrist--the more authoritative figure--wrongly concluded that he wasn't an "imminent threat." It hardly seems enough to disprove that Cho was responsible for his own actions. But Wallis doesn't need disproof. To him, the absence of individual responsibility is a given.

Now consider this blog entry by Tony Rhodin, editor of the Express-Times of Easton, Pa.:

What would you call a place where Virginia Tech-like orgies of violence happen every day?

Iraq.

So, where's the daily outcry? The shock? The horror? The huge newspaper headlines?

We all mourn the victims at Virginia Tech. As we should.

Why don't we all mourn the Iraqi victims of George Bush's war? Are we numb to the numbers? When a car bomb kills 40 are they somehow less human than the 32 in Blacksburg?

Because it's a war? But we started the war. Before we did that, it was a stable, if brutal dictatorship.

Is it because people would have died anyway, because of Saddam's brutality? But now it's on us. They're dying because of what we did. Often times dozens if not hundreds a day, because we decided to go to war in a country we didn't understand. Not because we had to fight, but because we wanted to. . . .

And the blood on all of our hands.

Wallis implicitly absolves Cho of his actions, and Rhodin does the same for the terrorists who are wantonly murdering Iraqis, and who surely are not "mentally ill." Whereas Wallis tries to avoid blaming anyone, Rhodin blames America for the actions of its Iranian, Iraqi and other Arab enemies, while giving America no credit for saving Iraq from the institutionalized terror and murder of Saddam Hussein.

If you take the position that those who do evil are not responsible for their actions, it is not such a big leap to scapegoat others for those deeds. By scapegoating America because it is strong, Rhodin excuses those who are actually preying on the weak. In an earlier blog entry, he advocated leaving the weak to their own devices:

What to do next? . . . My thought is, it's up to the Iraqis, if there really is something to being Iraqi--a country created then lost by the British a century ago by corralling folks who historically hate each other. A heavy boot kept order in recent decades, but the boot's been hanged.

One thing I know for sure, if the White House comes up with a plan, whatever it may be, I'm opposed. How big a leap is it from this position to actually scapegoating the weak?

Not an exact agreement, but in the ballpark, so I am going to stick with my guns despute the strong crticism I have received for this post.

Thanks also to Ac, Moe, Quitter, Pil', other recommenders and others for getting it. I know I went over the top a little and made some logical leaps, but my mortal enemy and America's is

The Left

And this was a rare teacheable moment.

We try.

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
Starbucks: Coffee, good. Cups, bad, but
"One man with courage makes a majority."-Andrew Jackson

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/04/was_cho_taught_to_hate.html

April 20, 2007
Was Cho taught to hate?
James Lewis
Yes, I know. Tens of thousands of ordinary college students are lonely, full of rage, lost and frustrated. A few percent are psychotically disturbed, and some of them can kill. Our big factory colleges are alienating. Take millions of adolescents, and at any time there are bound to be quite a few confused and seething souls walking loose. Just visit downtown in any American or European city, and you can see all the lost and disturbed living in their private hells. And no, that doesn't excuse executing thirty-two innocents.

Still, I wonder --- was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes --- did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently --- was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho's English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.

Just check out their websites.

I wonder if Cho took the senior seminar by Professor Knapp, on "The self-justifying criminal in literature." Because he certainly learned to be a self-justifying criminal. Or whether he sat in courses with Nikki Giovanni, using her famous self-glorifying book, "The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni (2003)". Maybe he read Professor Bernice Hausman's "Changing Sex: Transsexualism, technology, and the idea of gender" --- just the thing for a disoriented young male suffering from massive culture shock on the hypersexual American campus. And even more gender-bending from Professor Paul Heilker, who wrote "Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude)." Or the Lesbian love stories of Professor Matthew Vollmer. Yup, that's just what this student needs. These trophy "art works" are all advertised on the English Department faculty websites.

Or maybe Cho was assigned Professor Lisa Norris' prize-winning book, Toy Guns, featured on her web site. The book reviewers wrote
"All ten stories in this disturbing collection revolve around Americans' passionate devotion to guns, gun-toting, sexually-tinged violence, and the womanly pursuit of power and dignity." [....]

"In each wrenching story, we see an America out of control, in love with war...."
I don't know any Americans who are in love with war, but that is the picture Cho got from his teachers. Having spent the last 14 years as a resident alien in the school system, he could know nothing else.

And then there is the big Marxist website from Professor Brizee, all in fiery red against pitch black, showing old, mass-murder-inspiring Karl flanked by two raised fists. It celebrates revolutionary violence and hate for capitalist America (which is paying for Cho's education). "Critical Social Theory" --- the euphemism for PoMo (Post Modern) Marxism --- is a big part of English teaching at VT. The Marxist page links prominently to the British Socialist Worker's Party, which is currently leading the charge for Islamic fascism through such creatures as George Galloway.

And, talking about Islamist ideas, there is Professor Carter-Tod, who wrote a report about "Treatment of Arab American, Muslums and Seiks (sic) Post 911," for the US Civil Rights Commission. The racial grievance industry is alive and growing at VT.

Post-modernism, with its hatred for reason, is another big theme at the VT English Department. Professor James Collier boasts about his book, Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge: A New Beginning for Science and Technology Studies, But "the end of knowledge" is the beginning of ignorance.

And of course there is the "diversity" crowd, diversity being a very well-funded program at ole' guilt-tripping VT. There's Professor Carlos Evia, who describes himself as "...soy director de la Comisión de Igualdad y Diversidad en Virginia Tech." Or in English, "I am also chair of the Virginia Tech Commission on Equal Opportunity and Diversity." There's "research" in "Feminist science fiction" and "The comic strip" from Professor Susan C. Allender-Hagedorn. Scratching racial and gender wounds until they bleed is a big preoccupation at VT. What's a kid from South Korea to think?

The question I have is: Are university faculty doing their jobs? At one time college teachers were understood to have a parental role. Take a look at the hiring and promotion criteria for English at VT, and you see what their current values are. Acting in loco parentis, with the care, protectiveness, and alertness for trouble among young people is the last thing on their minds. They are there to do "research," to act like fake revolutionaries, and to stir up young people to go out and revolt against society. Well, somebody just did.

I'm sorry but VT English doesn't look like a place that gives lost and angry adolescents the essential boundaries for civilized behavior. In fact, in this perversely disorienting PoMo world, the very words "civilized behavior" are ridiculed --- at least until somebody starts to shoot students, and then it's too late. A young culture-shocked adolescent can expect no firm guidance here. But we know that already.

What's the English Department's official frontpage reaction to the murder of thirty-two students just a few days ago? Here it is.

"We do not understand this tragedy 


We know we did nothing to deserve it

But neither does a child in Africa 


Dying of AIDS

Neither does the baby elephant watching his community 


Be devastated for ivory 


... Neither does the Mexican child looking 


For fresh water

... Neither does the Appalachian infant killed 


By a boulder 


Dislodged

Because the land was destabilized"
In other words: We didn't do nuthin.' It ain't our fault. It's greedy capitalism's fault. We don't teach civilized behavior, the value of reason, the cultural foundations of Western thought. We teach adolescent rage, because that's how we make a living. We do narcissistic "research" in Marxist analysis of American brutal capitalism. We're good people. See how much we care about AIDS in Africa. Don't blame us. We ain't responsible.

James Lewis blogs at www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
Starbucks: Coffee, good. Cups, bad, but
"One man with courage makes a majority."-Andrew Jackson

Seung-Hui Cho was born with autism, a biological disorder of the central nervous system. Like anyone born with a problem, he was faced with a choice. From the very beginning, Cho made the wrong choices, to not attempt to fix his problem or accept help, and to be violent & evil.

Here is one quote from an article. There are many more from relatives, etc.

Cho As Boy

Cho was unusually quiet as a child, relatives said. He did not respond to greetings. He did not want to be hugged. But when Cho fought with his older sister, he would punch her with shocking violence.

He was always silent. With parents, other relatives, teachers, and everyone else, from childhood and later, Cho would not speak.

What he ended up to have, in addition to the autism, was a Cluster A Personality Disorder. That is a paranoid loner who lives mostly in his own dream world, while thinking everyone is out to get him, and everything is an insult to him. Studies have shown that a higher percentage of Cluster A's are violent than normal people.