Transparent Eye

The ancient Greek mechanism is linked to Syracuse and possibly Archimedes.

The gunman who killed two at a UU church in Knoxville targeted the church because of its liberal views.

Police say a man opened fire at a Knoxville, Tenn., church yesterday because he couldn’t find a job and “his stated hatred for the liberal movement.”

More at Philocrites.

Coming from a Jewish background, I’m certainly not shocked by religious violence. But this is the first time I’ve read of UUs being specifically targeted. I don’t know what the mental status of the perpetrator is, but even guessing that he’s not quite right in the head, the choice of targets that mentally disturbed people make is often reflective of propaganda they are exposed to. In this, I am thinking of numerous cases where Jews are targeted, and the perpetrator is found to be disturbed. Sure, I’ve thought, that person was disturbed, but they didn’t pick their victim at random. They were conditioned by something in the society they lived in to hate that group of people.

David Brooks is obviously reading some of the same scholarly literature that I am regarding how people make choices.

Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.

He doesn’t go so far as to advocate regulation to limit what marketers can do. I would. For instance, I would restore limits on credit-card interest (also known as usury or loan-sharking limits) which seem to have disappeared. You can argue that people are free whether or not to borrow at ridiculous interest rates, but in fact, when people do, they are almost always making emotional decisions that are bad for them in the long run.

We don’t allow manufacturers to market automobiles with fuel tanks that routinely explode, and we should not allow financial services companies to sell products that are inherently unsafe. The motto of the Bush administration seems to be, “There’s a sucker born ever minute, and that’s good for us.”

According to this NY Times article, it’s mostly associated with funerals, and even being supplanted there.