In my opinion, unless he or she is making a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder and is prepared to do some long-term work and careful explaining, a psychologist should never ever use this word to describe a client's behavior, even if it is an accurate description of behavior according to that psychologist's theoretical orientation (and I don't think self injury is necessarily or even usually an issue of narcissism per se as much as extreme pain and difficulty with regulating emotions). The word has a pejorative connotation that is inappropriate and dismissive when used carelessly. It's no wonder that comment stuck with the LW. It would have with me too. It is judgemental and insensitive, and therapy is probably the last place most people are expecting to be judged in that way.

We don't do anything to help change the tone of political debate when we call people "sodomites" perjoratively. And progressives who attack conservatives by indicating that they have homosexual sex are setting up the rather conservative equation: homosexual = bad and worthy of ridicule. That's not very progressive at all.

We just support Limbaugh's (and Gingrich's) access to "victim" status when we hurl bombs at them. We give them more cultural cache by giving them the opportunity to claim to be victims of persecution. This is one of the reasons why people keep listening to them (see post #1 on this thread as an example).

I wonder if the apparent divide between liberal and conservative responses to the Cho massacre has less to do with conservative power in the media, as Joan claims, and more to do with the way our different worldviews influence our reactions to traumatic and existentially-challenging events.

This event does little to challenge liberal ideologies, as far as I can tell. It reinforces liberal attitudes about gun control and about the lack of adequate social services for vulnerable populations (such as the mentally ill). Since we don't tend to have a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality, it is not as much of a challenge for us to process and come to a peaceful understanding of how an individual might end up in such a dark and violent place. It's still a challenge, mind you, but not one that threatens our core values or our core sense of self.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are more likely to feel reflexively defensive about gun control when this type of event occurs (a symptom of self-consciousness that was clearly present in the Whitehouse press-secretarie's initial statement about the incident). They are more likely to have split worldviews in which people who commit violent acts (at least, violent acts unsanctioned by the status quo) must be cordoned off and defined as wholey separate from the rest of us. A belief in absolute good and evil can have the drawback of presenting a bit of an identity crisis when one is confronted with the human face of evil acts -- one must make an immediate effort to explain how the evil person is fundamentally different from oneself.

These are generalizations, so I'm sure they do not apply to everyone in the liberal or conservative camps respectively. However, they might help explain why there are a larger number of over-the-top commentators about this issue coming out of the right wing.

Then again, we are probably saying things about this event that conservatives find equally outrageous and disgusting.

This seems a bit of a straw man article to me. Sure, if you want to assume that most parents today are pathologically afraid of any sign of disapproval of their children and work relentlessly to puff up their undeserving egos, this article might be persuasive and feel liberating to you. That seems pretty unrealistic and one-dimensional to me, not to mention unfair to the majority of parents who struggle on a daily basis to feed and clothe their children and raise them to be good people without dominating and tormenting them in the process. Sometimes we err too far in one direction or the other, but for the most part we struggle to find a balance.

Perhaps, though, the one-dimensionality was the point -- the article clearly is intended as humor to some degree, though perhaps the humor is a bit of a duck-and-cover for making points that the author is less willing to defend with reasoned argument -- but it is not particularly insightful or original. It isn't making a complaint we haven't heard from the anti-PC crowd over and over and over again, and it isn't based on any particularly deep or interesting take on parenting. Stephen Metcalf over at Slate opined in reference to the Imus scandal that, "in talk radio, the P.C. bogey is kept on life support, the better to allow the heaping of abuse on the marginal and disenfranchised to pass itself off as speaking truth to power." What's true on talk radio is also occasionally true on internet magazines, even nominally progressive ones.

Most good parents lose their tempers every once in a while and say things they should not. Most of their kids learn valuable lessons when the adults own up to their mistakes and apologize. A few unlucky kids have parents who like to make excuses for their bad bahavior. Some of those excuse start out with "in the good old days ..."