How many do you mean by “a lot”? Looking at your 1st & last sentences … surely you don’t mean there are millions of U.S. citizens who would happily murder any government employees? Even their own mailman?
Gallows humor is a common response to dark events. Besides, there haven’t been any recent developments posted, so we started talking about other stuff.
Actually, looking back, one hijack directly led to another. The admittedly odd-sounding clunker of a housing price detail in the original report led to a general discussion about housing prices in the area … and, broadly speaking, Canada is “in the area” of where the crime happened. (Helluva lot closer than Southern California.)
So that led to the topic of how big Canada is, vs the area of the U.S. and from there … yeah. Conversational drift occurred.
I wasn’t able to read the NYTimes article on kids and globes these days, but I just asked my 9- and 7-year-old whether they have a globe in their class and both answered yes, and both go to different schools (one public, one Catholic.)
Speaking of which, I keep meaning to say, it’s probably just because they get paid by the word. So they dredge up any details they can and submit them in hopes of increasing the payout. The original probably had even more useless dreck that the editor nixed.
Wow. Even the Daily Mail thought that detail was extraneous, as it’s no longer on the current version of the story if you use the OP’s link. It looks like it was edited out sometime yesterday early in the morning, EST, according to the Wayback Machine.
I read a reminiscence by a writer back in the pulp fiction days. His heroes always seemed to dispatch the baddie with the last round in his revolver. “I was paid three-cents a word. No way in hell I’m going to let him die with fifteen-cents worth of unexpended ammunition.”
I dunno. Would millions of people kill their mailman? God, I hope not. Are millions of right-wingers totally deranged? I give you: Trump’s fervent base, the ones who adore him. (How many is that? Say, just 2% of his voters?) Has this movement inspired murder? Absolutely I believe that, including our decapitator here. Yeah he’s extremely ill, but it does sound like he was motivated by some right-wing talking points about the Deep State and whatever, in addition to of course the voices in his head. It’s impossible to know why a mentally ill person did a mentally ill thing, but there’s some real and intense right-wing hatred of federal government employees. I’m scared to death of it; people are whipped up by you-know-who and some of them are going to act on that. This isn’t that new but it’s ratcheting up.
Anyway (not that you should care) I’m not actually all het up about this thread and didn’t intend to wade in, but when the OP found it going the way it is, had to express some solidarity there. It took me off guard.
I’m a parent. I was not and am not abusive. My kids are not violent or bad people, nor have they committed any crimes. However, a couple of them do things that while not criminal are a bit not cool. I did not raise them that way. I see victim blaming in your post. YMMV
Frogs could, potentially, turn into a prince, which is mostly a good thing (I guess, depending on your sexual orientation. I’m not sure I personally want a prince but I do know a few singles who might)
Toads could, potentially, give you a wild trip into unknown territories
Both, I think. Violence against the Federal government and other “enemies” is baked into the Right’s worldview, and QAnon conspiracy theories are irrational enough that anyone buying into them is already irrational.
And when you tell irrational people they should be violent, some of them will be; classic stochastic terrorism. Behavior like this is the intended result of the rhetoric they’ve been pushing for decades, now. They want violence, murder, terror; those have always been core goals of the Right for as long as the concept of “the Right” has existed.
“The cruelty is the point”, including when it’s patricide.
I’d be less creeped out if it was a guillotine. But it wasn’t, he had to take a saw or machete and hack away at his father’s neck. It takes time, up close and personal, to see the gradual severing of a head. Who among us could do it to a dog? Yet this guy did it to his own parent.
My workplace – a university’s Dept. of Geography and Environmental Science – will soon get a new building. When consulting with the architects, we considered including this Magic Planet globe in the lobby. We decided (for now) it wasn’t worth the cost.
Instead, we have the GEOCHRON wall display, from a company that, in the 1970s, made a clever mechanically-driven wall map that showed where it’s light and dark at any time of day or year (watch the shadow line go vertical around the time of the equinoxes!).