Wah-hoo! Jared Lee Loughner is a very wacky boy. See for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?annotation_id=annotation_564778&user=Classitup10&feature=iv#p/a/u/2/PnNx0WThoF0

Here, Einstein explicates his....um...philosophy.... Methinks Jared Baby is one glowstick short of a Rave.....

The targets of his only vaguely coherent rants are pretty familar, though: the illegitimacy of the current federal government, the illegitimacy of a currency not backed by gold and silver, illegitimacy of public education, contempt for those not literate in the English language, etc.

I suspect we'll find that he's diagnosed as an emergent schizophrenic suffering his first (or perhaps one of his first) psychotic breaks.

Conservative iconoclast Andrew Sullivan's quote of the day was this, from William Manchester's Death of a President:

Interestingly, other schizophrenics I have known and loved.... are fascinated by syllogisms, and come up with some mighty odd ones. To the sanest of us, what language denotes and how it is parsed--- and its implicit meanings--- is indeed a loaded question, but the Jared Loughners of this world don't have the stability or circumspection to study linguistics in more depth... so they erupt in bizarreries of this sort...

More pearls of wisdom from Jared:

[video=youtube;oTfb4CV8cs8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTfb4CV8cs8

Andrew Sullivan a conservative? Can I have some of what you're smoking? Just because he calls himself a conservative doesn't make him one. He's not an iconoclast either.

I submitted this to http://urbandictionary.com. (It is still pending review)

My last submission (double rainbow) was in the running for Word of the Year, but "gate rape" won. Cross your fingers, this could be our chance for immortality.

telling you the truth, I didn't understand the sense of this video!) Could someone explain me like to a 5-year-old child?!?!

He's not your kind of conservative, perhaps.

I grew up in Orange County, CA, in the 50s and 60s in a strongly conservative family. John Birch Society was far from a dirty word in the milieu I grew up in. I grew up reading and watching Bill Buckley and other conservative guiding lights.

I know a little something about conservatism.

There's a big difference between true conservatism and the sort of reactionary populism that so many try to pass off as conservatism today. There's a word for that -- and my dad and his brother went off to fight it in World War II: fascism.

Yes, fascism. The word nobody wants to use. I say the biggest thing people could do to improve discourse is everybody get a dictionary and read it. Otherwise, the media defines the terms and look where that got us.

I'm a conservative guiding light, these jokers in D.C. and the media are just neocons. "Con" being the operative word.

As the orbit gets farther out and more wobbly, the jump between ideas seems to get longer, but they don't seem to realize that whatever connection they're making in their own minds doesn't get translated into what they think of as their logical constructs.

Without much doubt, Loughner probably looked right at those oddly disjointed attempts and felt they were perfectly understandable -- and it appeared that he was frustrated that others couldn't see the sense in them.

If you read enough essays from typical folks -- as in a practical writing, bonehead English, or other non-major writing courses -- or, of course, on the internet -- you'll see plenty of relatively sane folks who similarly lay out attempts at logical discourse that similarly leave one shaking his head in wonderment.

As someone who has read a lot of (really stupid) debates on various aspects of audio technology at GearSlutz, I'm painfully aware that most folks -- even many who have the audacity to call themselves recording engineers -- can't think themselves out of a paper bag. You wonder how they can drive cars and perform relatively complex everyday tasks -- but it was likely because someone showed them how to do it, drilling them constantly -- and, all too typically, they have no real idea why they are doing what they do in the order in which they were drilled to do it.

Yes, fascism. The word nobody wants to use. I say the biggest thing people could do to improve discourse is everybody get a dictionary and read it. Otherwise, the media defines the terms and look where that got us. I'm a conservative guiding light, these jokers in D.C. and the media are just neocons. "Con" being the operative word.

I might be just a wee bit on edge today.

time to move this to PP

time to move this to PP

I was thinking yesterday that it wouldn't take too long before it was a candidate for forced migration.

I don't think many folks will be able to discuss this with requisite circumspection to keep it out of the political forum. And I'd count myself among that number.

Keeping political vitriol and anger out of the other forums is why the political forum is there and I support that. That said, while there was a time when I spent much of my time there, the level of discourse there reflects its pustulic morphology and function -- time spent there simply makes me angrier and ever more despairing of the stupidity of my fellow humans on both sides of the political spectrum. The curse of passionate centricism, I guess.

Keeping political vitriol and anger out of the other forums is why the political forum is there and I support that. That said, while there was a time when I spent much of my time there, the level of discourse there reflects its pustulic morphology and function -- time spent there simply makes me angrier and ever more despairing of the stupidity of my fellow humans on both sides of the political spectrum. The curse of passionate centricism, I guess.

I agree with this whole quote, and emphasized a portion.

The trick is to "wake up", and then "wake up" again...and I'm sure keep cycling this process for maximum results.

The curse of passionate centricism, I guess.

What are ya, some kind of moderate [spoken in derogatory tone]?!

It would be real nice if people wake up and see the curse of rampant extremism in this left-right noise. And they're calling us extremists. Yeah, sure.

Remember back when I was much more radical? Call it maturity or whatever, but I've learned a whole lot in the last ten years. About myself and about the world and people. I love learning and expanding my perspectives, not trying to narrow them to fit some pre-packaged set of ideals. That's just dogma.

I think you got as much out of it....as one CAN.

?! It would be real nice if people wake up and see the curse of rampant extremism in this left-right noise. And they're calling us extremists. Yeah, sure. Remember back when I was much more radical? Call it maturity or whatever, but I've learned a whole lot in the last ten years. About myself and about the world and people. I love learning and expanding my perspectives, not trying to narrow them to fit some pre-packaged set of ideals. That's just dogma.

I must be a centrist because outliers on both extremes of the (admittedly fuzzy and not quite unidimensional) political spectrum seem nutty to me. It's not that I don't appreciate the singular elegance of simplistic idealism that makes libertarian anarchy seem so appealing to some and pure communism so appealing to others -- it's just that they also seem so simplistic and unrealistic -- and the adherents so unbending, unworldly, and divorced from practical reality.

Also, I've noticed that many of those on one extreme used to reside at the other (like, say, David Horowitz, who went from being a scary Marxist-Leninist to a scary ultra-rightist with, as far as I can tell, precious little layover in between).

Looks no different than your typical Glenn Beck show.