Fox News, Tea Party, and the Joe Stack Suicide Bombing

( I posted a comment in reply to John Robb's blog entry: Rage Against the Machine -The Joe Stack Suicide Bombing, and reprint it below )

I agree people like Stack are the canaries in the coal mine. We can go down an infinity hole trying to parse if he was right wing, left wing, but it does seem that lack of economic success was the central component of this story and event.

Here is my folksy psych test: amongst my wife's network of friends, who are not fringe, radicals nor fans of a forum such as GG, one of them read Stack's letter and posted to Facebook how lucid and rational the letter was.

With a smirk I watch Fox News try to spin this suicide bombing as a crazy and a coward. Whateverz, dudez. You all (Fox) put a sheen of legitimacy and funding into some of the the key moments in the Tea Party phenomenon, and now the movement is your scariest nightmare: distributed, open source, and its least stable and most unhappy folks have small planes. I've lurked on some Tea Party forums, and was amazed at the intelligence (keep in mind I'm a hostile witness, I'm not conservative), and ability of its members to dissent from the top hierarchical players. This dissent only appeared in the comment threads, never in the main content of the webpage. The Tea Party, as it is described from the top, is nothing I'd respect, but down in its basement, there are independent thinkers who are not hemmed in by identity politics (e.g. they say progressive things, they don't endorse carte blanche funding for the Pentagon).

Someone needs to notify Rupert Murdoch, and tell him: "autopoiesis, its what's for dinner." While I'm cracking jokes, I'll add "Independence Day, oh wait, who needs an official day, oh wait, who needs an official."