The Emptiness
January 14, 2011

As could be expected after the shootings last weekend in Tuscon AZ, fingers are being pointed at right-wing politics. The media is the US tends to lean towards the left-liberal side of the statist political spectrum and never seems to tire of painting people with conservative or libertarian leanings as kooky and potentially dangerous. It’s not surprising then that none of the right questions are being asked about the background of the shooter, and attention is being focused in all the wrong places. Political opportunists seek to blame the tragedy on their immediate opponents, and liberals are coming out with their usual ritualistic calls to “tone down” the overheated rhetoric. This is all wrong.

Relevant questions about the background of Jared Loughner would be: Was he abused? What were his parents like? How was he treated at home? How was he treated at school? Was he abused by the staff or other students at school? Were alarm bells raised about him previous to this incident by either his parents or the schools? Was he on any psychiatric medications, particularly antidepressants like zoloft, paxil or prozac, or stimulants like ritalin or adderall? But of course these questions will not be asked. They will not be asked because to ask them would be to make too many powerful groups in society uncomfortable. Parents and school officials are authority figures and political constituents. Pharmaceutical corporations have a significant amount of power and influence in government. None of these groups are served by rocking the boat and asking the relevant questions, so blame will be shifted to skepticism of government and religion.

If Jared Loughner was in fact responding to calls for violence by right wing politicians, why did he choose this particular course of action? Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh never actually called for the shooting of these particular people. They do call for violence on a regular basis though. These right wing pundits and politicians have openly called for a war, and possibly a nuclear attack on Iran. They have openly called for the assassination of Julian Assange. If Jared Loughner was really so affected by calls to violence from the right wing, why didn’t he try to kill Julian Assange?

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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Much like the call made by government comedian Jon Stewart in his “Rally to Restore Sanity” political liberals are making the usual calls for everyone to just be nice to each other and talk in their inside voices. Liberal pundit Keith Olbermann recently said on his show that “There is no place for violence in our political discourse.” Now this is a real howler. Political discourse is violent rhetoric. Political advocacy is a call for violent action. There is no way around this.

The government is a group of people that systematically use force and threats of force to accomplish their goals. With no justification other than their ability to use overwhelming violence against those that resist, they act as a monopoly on violence and ultimate decision making over a certain geographical area. They claim the people that live in this area as property, call them “citizens” and take a certain percentage of their income as tribute. They set up rules against certain kinds of non-violent behavior and certain kinds of voluntary transactions between consenting adults. They then initiate force against people that engage in these behaviors and transactions and extract further tribute from them. They are no better and no different than a mafia gang subjecting a local business to a protection racket. Government is just a protection racket writ large.

When you advocate for government action, you are necessarily engaging in violent rhetoric. Even if you voluntarily submit to government and would voluntarily submit to whatever new program or control you are advocating for, there is no reason to assume that this is true for anyone else. Politics is so heated precisely because is it a winner-takes-all game of abuse and victimization. Each side of the left-right political spectrum is eager to be the abuser and avoid being the victim. Those of us that do not participate just seek to avoid being the victim as much as possible.

Not only are calls for government action necessarily violent, they are also hypocritical. The person that advocates for this or that government program, regulation or law has presumably used their own rational faculties to come up with the idea. They have used their own rational mind to think of the rule and to make the decision to follow it. Yet this is precisely what they would deny others. They give themselves the right to use their rational minds and to make decisions about their own behavior, yet they would use the violence of government to deny this to others. They would force you and I to conform to their opinions of how people should act and how society should be.

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Given the violence they call for on a daily basis, complaints by statist comedians and pundits about overheated rhetoric ring especially hollow and are hypocritical in the extreme.

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