Occupy Los Angeles has chosen to honor Chris Dorner in the wake of his death, despite the body count he apparently amassed…

The statement of support and solidarity was posted on the Occupy Los Angeles’ official Facebook page Wednesday. The statement came in the form of a posted picture captioned with the phrases “Rest In Power Chris Dorner” and “Assassinated By The Police for Trying To Expose LAPD Corruption.”

The “We Stand With Christopher Dorner” Facebook page had drawn almost 22,000 likes Thursday afternoon. “We Are All Chris Dorner” drew 4,400…

Scott Talan (@talan), a professor of public communication at American University in Washington, told USA TODAY that some people have grudges against government, police or other authority and see a bit of themselves in Dorner…

He noted that social media make visible what some people say in private. “We can see the posts. We can see the tweets,” he said. “Before, they would have said these things in a car, in a bar, in a home, and no one else would have known.”

Online support for Dorner in the days since his rampage has crept out of the internet’s more extreme corners — where such perverse boosterism is commonplace — and into more mainstream venues. Dorner is now hailed as a kind of folk hero by some on the Chomsky-esque left and the Ron Paul right, who view the killer’s manifesto as an articulate indictment of the “police state” they have always opposed.

“This story has a lot of moving parts, thanks in large part to Dorner’s long manifesto,” said J.M. Berger, a journalist and expert on domestic extremism. “With the fragmentation of the media these days, people are more prone to selection bias — they pull out the parts of a story that resonate with them and ignore the parts they don’t like. This is really a common practice among extremists, but it’s creeping into the mainstream more and more.”

“The LAPD’s troubled history and continued bad reputation are also big factors here,” Berger said. “I think it’s difficult for a lot of people to root for the LAPD under any circumstances. But you really have to ignore big parts of Dorner’s story in order to cast him as Dirty Harry or Rambo, as many people have. Dirty Harry didn’t kill the daughters of people who got on his wrong side.”

It is important to remember that Dorner murdered a young woman and her fiancé simply because she was the daughter of a cop — the man who acted as Dorner’s defense advocate in the LAPD proceedings against him. But as one comment on a left-wing site noted, that was a good idea: If the cop had been murdered, he wouldn’t have suffered, but now that his daughter and her fiancé have been murdered, the cop will experience real pain until he dies.

Any public figure, and especially any member of the clergy, who does not unambiguously condemn Dorner as a psychopathic murderer is failing his or her duty. This is not the time to discuss allegations of racism in the Los Angeles Police Department. For one thing, being wrongfully dismissed from a job — if, indeed, that is what happened to Dorner — inhabits a different moral universe than murder. For another, the more the public pays attention to this murderer’s “manifesto,” the more murders-for-attention will take place…

What we have here is another proof that nothing leads to murder and other evils more than a sense of victimization.

Via the Right Scoop.