Posted on 01/24/2011 9:49:07 AM PST by Cardhu
Most saw the Jan. 8 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others in Arizona as a product of insanity. But assassination researcher Manfred Schneider told SPIEGEL that the presumed gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, did not act irrationally. Rather, his crime resulted from "hyper-rationality."
SPIEGEL: Mr. Schneider, on Jan. 8 in Arizona, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the head at close range and killed six people. While the world searches for explanations, you write, in your recent book "Das Attentat" ("The Assassination"), that an assassin like Loughner is not crazy but the product of hyper-rationality. What does this mean?
Schneider: Every assassin is a perceptive observer and interpreter of signs and events. For him, nothing happens by accident. He scrutinizes the world in search of hostile intentions, and he imagines conspiracies everywhere. To us, the outcome seems insane. Yet logic and rationality are key components in the paranoid suppositions arrived at by the assassin. Paranoia is not irrationality but hyper-rationality. Loughner is a very typical example.
SPIEGEL: As if he had read your book.
Schneider: Yes, almost.
SPIEGEL: What's so typical?
Schneider: First of all, from his subjective perspective, Loughner acted in an extremely moral fashion. The paranoiac is saving the world from a threat. He disconnects his system of interpretation from everything else and, within this system, reestablishes an order that is no longer frightening for him. Second, Loughner left behind messages, which is always part of a rational assassination plot. It would seem to be an act that he had spent a long time thinking about and preparing. Third, it was a political act. In the assassin, mania, which can be expressed in endless ways, takes on a political form.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Yes, he’s pretty funny. I am curious how long he will go on making a fool of himself.
Yeah, I’ve read similar versions. The fact is that Alexander was, generally speaking, pretty lenient toward cities that didn’t resist him, and he was hell on cities that did resist. And Jerusalem would have seen the examples of Tyre and Gaza before he showed up at their doorstep.
I get too many pings. What thread is he/she on?
Is this the burrito boy?
I can’t find the thread. He was posting stuff to himself.
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