Democracy for Vancouver

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1. This really makes sense. MSN has a huge spread on his Manifesto complete with pictures. I just clicked out, makes me sick. It’s as if they’re glorifying him.

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   1. By g. kortes on April 19th, 2007 at 7:48 am (replies, if any, are attributed separately above).
   

2. Just to clarify, this post is not talking about ending your life due to a terminal, debilitating illness.

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   2. By bushtool on April 19th, 2007 at 8:02 am (replies, if any, are attributed separately above).
   

3. I agree whole-heartedly.
   I’m sick of seeing him all over the news and web posing like an action hero. It just gives comfort to ill individuals out there that harbor secret fantasies about turning their rage and frustration into a first-person action shooter video game.

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   3. By Rich on April 19th, 2007 at 8:18 am (replies, if any, are attributed separately above).
   

4. During Reagan’s governorship he emptied the state mental hospitals in California. This progressed nationally under the banner of civil rights to where we are now to a point that a number of people very dangerous to themselves and to the community are out and about. The standards for dangerousness are often rigid. For example, someone who has murdered/assaulted people in the past is sent to the state hospital then released as cured after a period of monitored medications. They then go off their medications and are not considered to be dangerous until they commit an overt act. We have had a man like this living in my area.

   We really need to reopen the mental health discussion. Folks need services that were promised decades ago but never delivered. Others need structure and controls. A few need to be kept in institutions. We may need to give folks having problems a “time out” on their 2nd admendment rights like is done for young people who run into alcohol/drug violations and are kept from driving.

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   4. By Pat Campbell on April 20th, 2007 at 7:58 am (replies, if any, are attributed separately above).
   

5. Personally, I agree with Pat. We need some sort of mental health outreach to these people who refuse counseling and medication. Frankly, I have a son who is isolating here, many years. I have talked to Joe at the Portland Vets, Columbia River Mental Health & others. His pattern could go on for a long time, unless…advice always appreciated. Thanks.

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   5. By g. kortes on April 20th, 2007 at 8:04 am (replies, if any, are attributed separately above).
   

6. We need to focus on this week’s deaths in Iraq - they belong to us

   Any sense of proportion about fear and death has been lost as this age of individualism demands me-me mourning

   Polly Toynbee
   Friday April 20, 2007
   The Guardian

   It’s been a good week for death. In Iraq, 200 people were blown to bits in what witnesses called “a swimming pool of blood” with “pieces of flesh all over the place”. Remember that the dead are only part of the story: add to each of the war’s hundreds of thousands of civilian corpses all those burned and crippled survivors, far beyond Iraqi medical facilities’ ability to cope, breadwinners and babies lost. Few families are untouched by the sheer scale of slaughter.

   But it is hard for news media to find new ways to refresh repeat tales of daily carnage. The pictures and the thoughts tell the same dismal story day after day, raising the same terrible questions: what have we done, what have we unleashed, how can it end? This is our war, our fault, our bloodshed for aiding America’s reckless and incompetent invasion and for failing to stop civil war. But because news needs to be new, Iraqi deaths struggle to stay on front pages.

   Nor does the war find a place in the nation’s top concerns: people worry about terror attacks more than the war, this despite the distrust it has engendered that is now driving our three-times prime minister from power. Perhaps the public compassion fatigue is because these deaths are caused mainly by extremist Iraqi sects killing other Iraqis, and many fewer are at the hands of our soldiers. For whatever reason, neither the horror nor the national shame quite comes home to roost. Yet on Wednesday morning more ordinary Iraqis died than all the British troops killed so far.

   There is a growing disproportion and incoherence in public attitudes to death, with a curious blend of indifference about deaths that should concern us, prurience about deaths that don’t, and a squeamishness and fear verging on denial about mundane dying.

   It was a good week for death too on the Virginia Tech campus. Although it was hardly less unpredictable “news” than bombs in Baghdad, there was more press relish for this story. (College kids like ours?) On day one and day two, the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News, like the press, gave it vacuous acres of coverage from a flotilla of senior correspondents. But these 32 dead students follow in a cortege of identical tragedies: as soon as we knew this was just another deranged loner, what more was there to think? It happened in Dunblane, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Tasmania and elsewhere, routine school misfit revenges.

   The collective insanity of Americans about guns is an oft-reprised wonderment to Europeans. But there is nothing new about the National Rifle Association: even Al Gore in his Inconvenient Truth had to prove he was a regular guy by talking affectionately about his guns. Lionel Shriver made the best point: why encourage copycats by giving these narcissistic fantasists the publicity they kill for? This boy’s glory video means his name liveth for evermore - and a good deal longer than the roll call of fallen US soldiers.

   Rest of article

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   6. By bushtool on April 21st, 2007 at 11:46 am (replies, if any, are attributed separately above).