The Murderous Inner Life of America

[Star Man]

March 21, 2012

The Mass Killer as Hero

Downloaded March 21, 2012 from https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03...i-to-kandahar/

From My Lai to Kandahar

by JEFF SPARROW

My name is William Calley,
I’m a soldier of this land,
I’ve tried to do my duty and to gain the upper hand,
But they’ve made me out a villain,
They have stamped me with a brand …

The massacre of 16 Afghan men, women and children in Kandahar has, inevitably, recalled the My Lai incident in Vietnam.
But it’s worth thinking through what the comparison tells us.


In 1971, a military court found Lieutenant William Calley guilty of murdering Vietnamese civilians, a decision generally recalled by liberals as a tipping point in domestic opinion, a moment that Americans turned against the conflict.


That’s not entirely false. But it ignores an equally significant phenomenon — the tremendous outpouring of support for Calley.
The lyrics above come from ‘The Battle Hymn of Lt Calley’, a spoken word track celebrating the lieutenant as an all-American hero. That’s right – a song recorded to laud the man who had ordered soldiers to open fire on unarmed civilians, forcing some of his victims to strip before they were shot; a man who’d later picked up a weapon and joined in the killing himself. Among other deeds, when a two-year old child escaped from the ditch in which his relatives were being massacred, Calley grabbed the infant, tossed him back into the trench and personally shot him.


Historians now think as many as 500 people died at My Lai. They were overwhelmingly old men, children and women. Some were tortured before being killed. Women were gang-raped; bodies were mutilated, with the words ‘C Company’ carved into their chests.


So who wore the Free Calley stickers that proliferated in 1971? Where did this support come from?


In a history of the 70s, the conservative commentator David Frum notes:

Congressional liberals like Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut joined with conservatives like Georgia’s Herman Talmadge to condemn the verdict … The governor of Indiana ordered all state flags to be flown at half staff for Calley. The governor of Utah criticised the verdict as ‘inappropriate’ and the sentence as ‘excessive’. Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia proclaimed ‘American Fighting Man’s Day’, and urged Georgia motorists to drive all week with headlights on. The Arkansas legislature approved a resolution asking for clemency. The lower house of the Kansas legislature demanded Calley’s release from prison. So did the Texas Senate and the state legislatures of New Jersey and South Carolina. … Alabama Governor George Wallace visited Calley in the Fort Benning stockade and called on President Nixon to pardon him. Wallace then spoke at a rally in Calley’s defence at Columbus, Georgia, alongside Governor John Bell Williams of Mississippi.

One poll showed that 78 per cent of Americans opposed the verdict, while a majority wanted Calley exonerated entirely. President Nixon, acutely keen to fan any backlash against the New Left, personally ordered Calley released pending appeal. Thus, in his book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein recalls how

‘a man convicted by fellow army officers of slaughtering twenty-two civilians was released on his own recognizance to the splendiferous bachelor pad he had rented with the proceeds of his defense fund . . . complete with padded bar, groovy paintings, and a comely girlfriend, who along with a personal secretary and a mechanical letter-opener helped him answer some two-thousand fan letters a day.’

Nixon’s intervention meant that Calley, originally sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, served only three years of house arrest, despite their never being any doubt about his guilt.


In some ways, the killings in Afghanistan are quite different. Though much about the slaughter conducted in the Panjwai district of Kandahar remains obscure, U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales seems to have been acting on his own behalf rather than undertaking the kind of officially-sanctioned mission in which Calley was involved.


Thus, whereas General Westmoreland initially congratulated C Company on an ‘outstanding job’, President Obama immediately issued an apology for theKandahar massacre, claiming Bales didn’t represent ‘army values’. Bales was, the story goes, an aberration – a New York Daily News dubbed him ‘Sergeant Psycho.’


Yet for some Americans, he’s a hero nonetheless.
Blogger Charles Johnson writes:

‘I’ve looked at about a dozen right wing sites this morning to see how they’d react to the news from Afghanistan, and the comments at every single one of them were full of people celebrating the killings, praising the soldier who allegedly committed them, and denying there was any crime, while at the same time frantically trying to blame the crime on President Obama.’

Johnson documents a thread on Fox News that contains the following.

I don’t see a problem here.
[…]
Obummer what is tragic and shocking that you are a lying P O S P that supports t e r r o r i s m ! Burn in L L E H
moooooooooooooooooooslime
[…]
It’s perfectly okay for the Afghanistan military to mur der our troops, Obama dosen’t even flinch, however, condolences go out when it’s the other way around. I’ll be very glad when the loser-in-chief is on his way out. I hate muslums, big time, in a very big way! Right behind the muslums are the libtards, they’re just as bad.
[…]
What comes around goes around That soldier deserves a medal!!!!!

Just a few nutters? Perhaps. Except, as Johnson says, you can find similar comments on almost all of the big right-wing blogs, with a certain proportion of commentators greeted the killings with an open celebration of murder for murder’s sake.

One of the men responsible for bringing My Lai into the open was a helicopter pilot called Ron Ridenhour. He later discussed the war he saw.

We would identify somebody […]. We’d say, OK, here’s somebody who is looking suspicious or whatever. And some infantrymen would walk up to him and just shoot him. I mean, no provocation. They just walk right up to him. I’m not talking about something that’s ambiguous, I’m talking about murder. I’m talking about somebody walking right up, pointing a gun and, without provocation, pulling the trigger.

In those remarks, he wasn’t talking about My Lai. He was referring to the rest of his service, the everyday conduct of a colonial war in which callousness and oppression became routine.


That’s why, back in 1971, the right-wingers who supported Calley understood far more about Vietnam than most liberals. When conservatives celebrated Calley as a man who ‘tried to do [his] duty and to gain the upper hand’, they tacitly acknowledged that the war itself was inseparable from atrocity and that what took place at My Lai was merely an extreme example of a logic underpinning free fire zones and village pacification and all the rest of it, a logic that identified the population as a whole as the enemy.


In a recent interview with Democracy Now, journalist Neil Shea explained how the occupation in Afghanistan inculcates a similar brutality in today’s soldiers.

By the time I reached these guys, they had already been sort of—they had been building up anger and aggression in strange ways for a number of years. And when I saw them, they had just shot a dog that had been a pet in an Afghan home that they had confiscated during the mission, and they treated Afghan civilians fairly roughly, and they took a few prisoners and treated them very roughly, as well. Nothing that would rise to necessarily the—sort of a crime at that time, but the way that they talked about things and the way that they sort of handled themselves was really aggressive. And it was only—it seemed to me only to be barely kept in check.
So it’s just this small—when we cycle our soldiers and marines through these wars that don’t really have a clear purpose over years and years, I write in the article that we begin—we expect light-switch control over their aggression. We expect to be able to turn them into killers and then turn them back into winners of hearts and minds. And when you do that to a man or a woman over many years, that light-switch control begins to fray. And that’s what I believe I was seeing with these guys in Afghanistan.

Shea’s does not claim that the men with whom he embedded were particularly evil. On the contrary, they were, he says, entirely ordinary, which is why they needed a protective layer of hatred to perform what was asked of them.


But it’s not just that the War on Terror changes soldiers. It also changes the society on behalf of which those soldiers fight. Lukacs says somewhere that the modern mass army is directly linked to what he calls the ‘inner life of a nation’. You don’t have to look very hard to see what he means.


Since 2001, we’ve seen the normalization of torture against (mostly Muslim) detainees; the construction of secret prisons to detain Muslim prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial; the routinization of assassinations and other extrajudicial killings of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen; and, most of all, deaths of (by the most conservative reckoning) hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Muslim, in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.


What attitudes to ordinary Muslims does such a record inculcate? What notions does it foster about the way they should be treated?
Should we really be surprised that, within the semi-anonymity of a blog forum, a large number of Americans discuss Muslims as untermenschen, subhuman enemies of civilization, fit only for extermination?


Back in 1971, ‘The battle hymn of Lt Calley’ sold a million copies in less than a week. Its final verse runs like this:

When all the wars are over and the battle’s finally won
Count me only as a soldier who never left his gun
With the right to serve my country as the only prize I’ve won …

More than a decade of the War on Terror has, just as you would expect, created a new audience who wants to never leave the gun, an audience no longer shocked by atrocity but increasingly prepared to celebrate it. The consequences will be with us for a long time.

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland magazine and the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence.

* * * * * * *
The murderous inner life of America surfaces in many ways. The murder of unarmed, African American teen Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman (he's been reported to have confessed, so I am dropping the word "alleged") is an example of the murderous American inner life. Many nations have a murderous inner life. The murder of seven French citizens shows the murderous inner life of the muslim immigrant alleged to have committed the murders. Conflicts between Shiite and Sunni exemplify the phenomenon as do murders of Tutsis by Hutus, and the murders of American women by misogynists. (See Arthur Goldwag's essay in today's AlterNet on the violent misogynistic movement in America for horrifying examples). The GOP's and Tea Party's attacks on women's rights demonstrate this murderous aspect. Sara Robinson, also writing in today's AlterNet, further instances the GOP's bullying tactics and its anti-democratic belief system. We are, as Robinson explains, a family that is broken. American men are leaving the "American Family" as they are abandoning their actual families. Even here in supposedly liberal Sonoma County it is difficult to find the mutual "trust and shared vision" that Robinson states is necessary to a successful marriage as well as to a successful democracy. Here is Robinson's quote:

"Because, like all marriages, all democratic governments are founded -- first and foremost, above all else -- on an essential bedrock of trust and shared vision. We need to trust that our fellow citizens are decent people with good intentions. If we don't have even that much basic confidence in each other, there's no way that we can work together to build a society that works. In fact, there's not really even a reason to try."

Lakoff's comparison of nations to families that Robinson writes about is an apt metaphor. Infants and children absorb through the process of introjection what they experience in their families of origin. If their parents are contentious, the children will favor a rigid, uncompromising relational style. This applies on the left as well as on the right. If their parents are violent towards each other and towards the children, then when they grow up, these children of trauma are more likely to be abusive and violent.

I have argued for an approach to community life derived from 12 Step principles. My reasoning is that people must go through a fundamental change of personality if they are going to be able to participate in a true democracy. Electoral politics is an expression of dysfunctional personal and family life (the "insanity" that Step Two speaks of). Even on the left, people do not always share a vision, no matter what they may say. When liberals are more interested in winning an argument than in achieving personal and political sobriety, change is rendered impossible. My recent analyses of the fragmentation of the Green Party demonstrates these principles perfectly. Ultimately the family broke up. Ultimately the factions could not agree on a shared vision. The parties brought the introjects they'd acquired in their childhoods to the political discourse and projected distrust onto the others, just as happens in family life. There was no shared vision. There was mutual distrust. The Green Party entered the "zombie marriage" phase that Robinson describes, and divorce followed shortly thereafter.

Star Man

["Mad" Miles]

Interesting article. With familiar information. Good essay.

Yet, Star Man continues his self-admitted trolling:

"For my part, Mr. Miles, I commit to never "rattling your cage" again (which I admit to having done) regarding the Green Party or the influence of surveillance and infiltration on the fate of the Party."

With:

"My recent analyses of the fragmentation of the Green Party demonstrates these principles perfectly. Ultimately the family broke up. Ultimately the factions could not agree on a shared vision. The parties brought the introjects they'd acquired in their childhoods to the political discourse and projected distrust onto the others, just as happens in family life. There was no shared vision. There was mutual distrust. The Green Party entered the "zombie marriage" phase that Robinson describes, and divorce followed shortly thereafter."

The "family" did not and has not broken up!

He has not presented any "analyses" at all. Just repeated unfounded assertion without any supporting evidence. What evidence he claimed to produce, Peter Camejo's acount of FBI disruption in 1976 when Camejo ran as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party, had nothing to do with the Green Party. At the time it did not exist in this country.

So, once again, rumor, speculation, projection and gross distortion. It seems Star Man just can't let go of his delusions, while giving us advice on how we have to heal our society. I have strong views about his diagnosis and prescription, which I will keep to myself.

As for slandering the Green Party, he needs to stop it. Or come up with some clear evidence to support his claims. He has not, and cannot, yet he persists.

Obsession? Compulsion? Only his therapist is qualified to pronounce on that. Mine is only a generalist's layman's view. It's not a diagnosis. I am very familiar with the attendant issues and debates within the Psycholigical and Psychiatric communities. Not as an expert, as a student of ideas, history and society.

What I am expert in, is oppositional Left political movements. Star Man has consistently displayed his naivete and exagerated fears with regard to those. I'm beginning to think that in spite of his expressed affinities, he's one of the type that is all too familiar. People who think they're right and as he puts it:

"When liberals are more interested in winning an argument than in achieving personal and political sobriety, change is rendered impossible."

He then concludes, implying at that end of his post, rather than stating it outright as he has done many times in the past, that the Green Party is finished. Killed by police disruption and internal conflict due to untreated childhood trauma.

The Green Party exists. It is not dead. Quit saying it is. That is a lie.

As for the summation of where internal conflict stems from? Painting with a broad dismissive brush, unconnected to the real history, is neither "analysis" nor is it persuasive to anyone other than the uninformed and already resistant to the Green Party's goals and existence.

Star Man claims to want to help. So why is he so insistent on dismissing the work of others and reducing complex events to something that fits into his limiting, reducing and totalizing conceptual framework?

[Star Man]

Yet, Star Man continues his self-admitted trolling:

"For my part, Mr. Miles, I commit to never "rattling your cage" again (which I admit to having done) regarding the Green Party or the influence of surveillance and infiltration on the fate of the Party."

Mr. Miles, this is called "owning my part." It is not trolling.

So, once again, rumor, speculation, projection and gross distortion. It seems Star Man just can't let go of his delusions, while giving us advice on how we have to heal our society. I have strong views about his diagnosis and prescription, which I will keep to myself.

I hear you saying that I am delusional. Thank you for taking my inventory.

As for slandering the Green Party, he needs to stop it. Or come up with some clear evidence to support his claims. He has not, and cannot, yet he persists. ..... Obsession? Compulsion?

You are projecting onto me, Mr. Miles. I am engaging in a political conversation. To say that I am slandering the Green Party is a projection. Frankly, given that you have called me delusional, obsessive, compulsive, and a slanderer, it would appear you are the one doing the slandering.

What I am expert in, is oppositional Left political movements. Star Man has consistently displayed his naivete and exagerated fears with regard to those. I'm beginning to think that in spite of his expressed affinities, he's one of the type that is all too familiar. People who think they're right and as he puts it:

"When liberals are more interested in winning an argument than in achieving personal and political sobriety, change is rendered impossible."

Mr. Miles, now you are projecting naivete onto me. Furthermore Mr. Miles, you have demonstrated in your attack on me that you are one of the "liberals" I was speaking of who is more interested in contention than in personal or political sobriety.

He then concludes, implying at that end of his post, rather than stating it outright as he has done many times in the past, that the Green Party is finished. Killed by police disruption and internal conflict due to untreated childhood trauma.

Mr. Miles, a party that garners 0.12% of the popular vote in the last presidential election is indeed finished. I did not say that it was killed by police disruption in the current post. I believe that the police (who have their own childhood traumas) were able to make use of the unresolved childhood traumas of the Green Party factions to disrupt the party and render it ineffective.

The Green Party exists. It is not dead. Quit saying it is. That is a lie.

So does the Communist Party USA, the Social Workers Party, and the Peace and Freedom Party. I hear you commanding me to stop saying the Green Party is dead. I never said it was dead. I have said it has been disrupted and rendered ineffective. I thoroughly dislike it when you suggest that I am lying.

As for the summation of where internal conflict stems from? Painting with a broad dismissive brush, unconnected to the real history, is neither "analysis" nor is it persuasive to anyone other than the uninformed and already resistant to the Green Party's goals and existence.

Mr. Miles, I have attempted to step outside the CONTENT of the left's fragmentation and to examine the PROCESS going on in progressive politics as well as in the society as a whole.

Star Man claims to want to help. So why is he so insistent on dismissing the work of others and reducing complex events to something that fits into his limiting, reducing and totalizing conceptual framework?

I hear you saying that I am dismissing the work of others. I hear you saying that my world view is limiting, reducing, and totalizing.

Mr. Miles, I am finished talking to you. We clearly have different goals. I choose not to converse with people who call me names, who project onto me their own awfulness, and who cannot see their own part in a discussion. I never wanted to "win" in my discussion with you. My goal in talking with you has been to bring to light some of the PROCESS that goes on in our society for the benefit of all WaccoBB readers. My goal has been to benefit the progressive movement. I wrote my first piece advancing this kind of analysis for a publication called "Steps" that was published by the Free Speech Movement in 1966. I've been involved in progressive politics for a long time, and calling me naive is just plain foolish.

Our progressive culture here in Northern California is facing increasing pressure in the coming decade. A thorough understanding of the psychodynamics that play out in the political sphere will be essential to our survival. The beauty of the 12 Step approach is the idea of recovery from dysfunction. Another beautiful concept is the idea of a "group conscience." If the Green Party had had such a concept in the 90s, it would never have fragmented as it undeniably did (as evidenced by the fact that there are two "green parties" in the U.S. now.

Star Man

[Star Man]

For the record, I have placed Mr. Miles on my Ignore List.

Star Man

["Mad" Miles]

Two things:

1. What a relief!

2. Star Man asserts there are two Green Parties today. I summarized that history on the previous thread where he continued his "dismissals" of the GP. He in no way indicates that below. Nor anything else I have written to clarify the actual history that he so sweepingly, inaccurately and dismissively continues to misrepresent.


As I've stated at least twice in our go arounds, I'm sure he thinks he means well. But he's wrong. Wrong about facts, Wrong about conclusions. Wrong about the primary sources of the social problems he so doggedly claims to be addressing. I know that opinions differ. I understand we all have a right to our point of view. But, we do not have a right to our own facts.

As for his very articulate defense. I've never thought him unintelligent or uninformed about psychology. But, note the evasions. He has never once, responded to anything I have shown to be inaccurate in his factual claims. He just keeps on keeping on with his advocacy that unless, and until we all go through an extensive 12 step program to heal our childhood traumas, we're going to go on fussing and fighting and we're doomed.

I addressed the "problems" with that approach to trying to make political change, over a year or two ago. It's in the archive.

What chaps my grits about Star Man, aside from his repetition of exaggeration and unsupported claims of fact that dismiss the electoral party to which I belong, is he NEVER addresses criticisms directly.

He just psychologizes from a distance, applying his pet theory to every political or personal dispute on the planet. That's what I mean by reductive, totalizing thinking.

It's not really thinking, it's habit, reaction. Not unusual, but as pernicious to our ability to communicate and cooperate as any unmet needs and trauma from childhood.

Onward!

[Dixon]

Star Man, I myself have tried, in at least one thread here on Wacco in the past, to get Waccovians to address in some honest way the fundamental darkness, bigotry and brutality of all colonial countries, notably the USA, with very little success. I was able to get almost no one among these Wacco liberals and even self-styled "progressives" to endorse my proposition (that the USA was founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery and that these things are morally wrong and should never have happened). If, as I believe, progress necessarily involves confronting our darkness as individuals and as nations, we're in trouble.

So, while my analysis of the causes and cures of our national, imperial malaise differs from yours in important ways, I thank you for at least mentioning the issue.

[podfish]

Our progressive culture here in Northern California is facing increasing pressure in the coming decade. A thorough understanding of the psychodynamics that play out in the political sphere will be essential to our survival.

I agree with Miles (maybe I'm putting words in his mouth; sorry if it's incorrect) that you followed up a perceptive and well-reasoned article by incorporating some of your favorite themes as if they follow naturally along. That's fine, but it seems you deny that's what happened and dislike being called out on it. I suspect I'm in for some psycho-analysis again, though...

["Mad" Miles]

As I stated below and at other times, the concerns Star Man raises about surveillance and disruption from the Forces of Order, and the Cthonic forces and generational traumas that damage our social relations (My catch-phrase is: We Are All War Orphans. Started saying it in 1980.) are important, legitimate concerns for anyone who cares about Peace, Social Justice and Environmental Survival (Preservation, Conservation, Protection).

What I do not accept, is the idea that because of those problems we all have to go through years of therapy to reach a state where we no longer replicate negative patterns. Some of us probably need to, no doubt.

But the arrogance of prescribing for others, and the impracticality of any viable project to make that happen (I know the state of mental health services in this country, I saw the results on a daily basis while teaching in San Quentin, and I knew what was up long before that) causes me to doubt his approach.

I'm also allergic to being diagnosed from a distance, without my invitation. I've lived in communities where popular fads stemming from Humanistic Psychology of the fifties and sixties, run rampant.

Here's the basic "logic".

"I said something that you disagree with and you're arguing with me, or vice versa.

The fact that I don't like that means you have deepseated issues that are untreated and therefore unresolved.

It has nothing to do with what I said, and the holes in my logic and facts that you pointed out. In fact, I intend to repeat what I said because it's what I believe, and the fact that you keep refuting me is proof that I'm right and you need therapy.

I'm not fighting with you. You're fighting with me. Until you get the help you obviously need, I will ignore you all of your logic, evidence and questions, and I will keep repeating the things that you disagree with. Any attempt on your part to point that out, is proof that my diagnosis of your unresolved issues is correct.

And repeat."

It's a tautology. Self-reinforcing. The information may have value, but the purpose to which it is put, is to psychologize others. And anyone who criticizes that approach, well, they prove that the problem exists! A classic Catch 22 of love bombing.

Aside from being simplistic and bad* thinking about the complex ways in which the Personal, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural (all really the same knotty ball at a high level of abstraction, and at micro-levels as well) interact and mutually create our existences in The Social, it's incredibly arrogant. Anyone who argues, is a patient in need of help. We're all patients, whether we argue or not.

* By "bad" I mean illogical, unfounded, naive, misinformed. I do not mean evil, malicious, spiteful, immoral or any such. The consequences of such thinking, if applied in a wholesale manner to social policies? Well then the latter set of pejoratives could apply. They certainly have many times in the past. The dangers of horrible consequences stemming from the best of intentions is a well known historical phenomenon.

We're all patients.

That's infantilzing and insulting. Also quite silly and of little practical use.

People who cannot separate debate from violent conflict, genuine sincere differences of opinion and theoretical analysis from signs of unresolved childhood trauma, they might think there's something to Star Man's Global Theory.

I've had occasional experiences where in the emotional heat of political or intellectual discussion, some found it distressing. Not the discussants, usually (at least not the able ones) others who were observing.

Why, in contemporary American (U.S.) culture many people are uncomfortable with intellectual dispute, or any spirited disputation, well, that's a big topic. One I've visited here occasionally, but will leave aside for now.

Simple ideas that mystify reality, verifiable reality, are dangerous. They lead to bad policies. They satisfy the under educated and encourage them to think simply as well. It's OK to summarize and generalize. But when your summaries and generalizations are all you have? It means you haven't done the work. Go Deeper. Stuff's complicated.


(Those sick of the ins and outs of the GP argument, might want to stop reading now.)

As for GP presidential totals. The Party has always gotten low percentages since we started. 2000 was the high mark. And the results were very disappointing. We'll be back. Rumors of our demise, and bold statements of the same, are premature. (What defines "winning" in terms of third party efforts, that's a big discussion I'll also leave aside here. Anybody who read my debate with SonomaMark and others already knows all about it.)

One wonders, if it is true that I am wrong, deluded, and the GP is toast, why the Stellar Homme feels the need to keep repeating it. (Other than his admitted trolling, which he immediately denied when his clear statement was highlighted!?)

If the GP is irrelevant? What is the point of repeatedly asserting that it is? Asserting it changes nothing (in this hypothetical scenario). It adds nothing to the general discussion of politics. Unless its purpose is to insult and dismiss those who are in the GP. If our party is toast, why not just ignore us while we writhe in our slow death spiral?

(I'm sure many who share his opinion, do just that. If you're one who does, thank you for your respect and forbearance. Misplaced as it is here in the real world! For the ironically challenged, the previous sentence is a joke. Yet, it isn't...)

I find his repeated obituaries "puzzling" from someone who also claims that we can't get along because of our unresolved traumas. Wouldn't a counselor, a therapist, focus on healing emotional wounds by avoiding insult, dismissal and pessimism in this and many other matters, rather than rubbing rhetorical salt in the wounds of the already defeated? I look for the reason, the logic, the therapeutic method and it escapes me.

But, given his other claims it really isn't that complicated. Inconsistency in the guise of helping, reducing everything to some central cause, ignoring evidence that ones evidence in an argument does not apply, and so on, that tells me something. And hopefully also others who are paying attention to this argument.

Or, it could just be I'm an angry, wounded, child with dysfunctional family issues and every time I criticize someone's fuzzy "logic" and lack of evidence in matters that I care about, I'm just "ACTING OUT"!

Yeah, that's it. Now where can I find Mommy?