Congrats to this new extremist shooter for kicking the last extremist shooter (“whites don’t shoot whites”) AND the letter-bomber from the headlines. My American brothers, help out a Canadian, eh?
Why is the paranoid, conspiracy spewing, right-wing in America given a pass for propagating their inflammatory delusions on minorities? I’ll never understand the level of public discourse in America. Everything just seems so crazy. Why do you have so many guns? How is legislating this problem so taboo? I just don’t understand it all.
It’s the truth. It has nothing to do with any rational criteria or cause that you or I or anyone else can understand. What you do with that information is up to you.
Because the people who spew the conspiracy theories are in power. That’s the whole thing. They have a huge presence in media, with radio, books, and television that consistently tell them that they are under attack and Democrats are the enemy. They live in regions that are overwhelmingly “Red,” where they vote for officials who have the same values (or rather, the lack thereof.) Every single facet of America’s government is currently dominated by these people, because their repulsive rhetoric wins elections. You can’t legislate this problem away because the people who make the laws are the ones causing the problem.
Okay NFL, nice attempt to recognize the Pittsburgh shooting, but pairing it with the helicopter crash that killed the Leicester City owner is rather tone deaf.
And it’s still better and more honestly meant than anything Trump has or will say or do.
Maybe I’ve just been watching too much uplifting Anime of late, but I am of the belief that you are more powerful when you fight for others than when you fight only for yourself.
If you fight only for yourself, you have no friends or allies. Any alliance made is temporary and transactional in nature on all sides. Even those of your group face increasingly exclusive purity tests, and so betrayal is more common than loyalty.
When you fight for others, you naturally gain friends, and acquire allies that have been declared enemies or betrayed by the inclusive group.
Good doesn’t win because it is inherently better, but only because the evil side tends to stab itself in the back.
It’s meant to give some level of optimism that good will win out in the end. I could be wrong, but that would suck.
I am in agreement that we are facing tough times, and may be facing some tough decisions in our personal lives. If we do come across a mob harassing or assaulting a minority, what should we do? In a normal world, I would call the police and document the crimes. Are we far enough from a normal world that that is no longer sufficient, whether it is because the police are already over stretched, or a real concern that they may take the mob’s side?
Do we need to wade into the mob personally? Should we be armed with more than voice and wit? Should we be willing to inflict injury or even death, and risk the same to ourselves? Do we need to start forming mobs of our own, to patrol and combat the mobs that are targeting the weak?
I’ve been seriously considering joining the ranks of the gun owners, specifically for that sort of situation. If I, a 40 year old out of shape guy comes up on a bunch of violent teens and 20 somethings, it’s not what I am prepared to do, it’s what I am physically capable of doing. If I just waded in, I’d end up no better then their targets. I have been thinking that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be prepared to be more effective than that, but that’s a step that acknowledges that I no longer trust our society to not fall into lawless anarchy, and I don’t know if I am quite ready to believe that just yet.
Know your enemy, so: no. They won’t be fighting just as hard. Because there are more of us than there are of them. And frankly they are mostly sad sacks. Noah Smith, April 2017: So it’s certainly possible that the alt-right - even defined very generally, including the more moderate “alt-light” and the quietly sympathetic “alt-white” - is a shrinking, dying idea that is only becoming louder and more aggressive because it’s under threat. , though he also says immediately afterwards, But I think that whether or not the alt-right is really a growing, burgeoning movement, it makes sense to take it and its ideas seriously. First, the presence of Trump in the White House will probably force much of the country to listen to what the alt-right has to say. Even though he isn’t really their man, he has hired several people who at least loosely sympathize with the movement’s ideas - Bannon, Miller, Anton and Gorka among them. That means that at least as long as Trump’s butt is planted in a chair in the Oval Office, alt-right ideas have at least a chance of making it into government policy. That means the alt-right, and their ideas, matter.
…
And I think that there are a decent of young (mostly) men out there whose intellectual lives will be defined by this stuff - who will spend their 20s and 30s entranced by the idea of a homogeneous white society. Just as there are old hippies who still look at the world through the lens of the 1960s anti-war movement, in a few decades there will be some aging white Millennial men for whom Pepe the Frog and r/thedonald and Kekistan and the Great Meme War were the climax of their youthful energy and imagination. I want to engage with those people, even if (as I predict) they ultimately lose. That’s off topic, but I need to add it for completeness.
Since April 2017, Charlottesville happened which has put the alt-right into a state of crisis. On the streets, alt-righters are complaining that counter-demos aren’t fun anymore. The alt-right is on the run and if the Dems win solid majorities in the House (which is by no means certain) then they will remain so.
That’s a load of questions. We have so many guns because they are legal and we had a crime wave that peaked during the early 1990s. The crime wave was driven by lax gun control and high levels of lead within young cohorts, leading them to violence as a group.
Gun enthusiasts were swing voters up to around 2008, which made them more politically powerful than groups that would reliably vote one way or another. Since 2008, the NRA has aligned themselves more with right wing politics.
US politics always had a paranoid streak. The difference is that before around 1988 it was fringy. Talk radio and later Fox News mainstreamed such conspiracy theorizing. Fox News consistently screws up its facts and indeed exists in large part to shield its viewers from certain facts. This state of affairs reflects the poor character of their audience.
If you document the situation on your phone, you can always post the situation on social media. So I’d say calling the cops is a good idea if you view a crime. Which it may not be.
No. Not without training. And the training will tell you: no. Cops call for backup.
The optics of forming mobs on your own are terrible. We do have mobs: they are called the alt-left and they are showcased on Fox News.
Nonviolent means (i.e. calling 911 with your cell phone, de-escalation with voice) are maximally effective in most cases. Not all of course.
Wading in is a bad idea, and could get you arrested besides. If you have time on your hands, you might consider taking a course in self defense. And joining an appropriate martial arts studio - for exercise. Maybe that would just be cardio kick boxing. It’s likely that for SWMs heart disease is a greater threat than violence after all.
We are far from lawless anarchy.
If you can find a gun self defense course that teaches knee strikes, elbow strikes, cell phone usage, role plays self defense situations, and presents the scientifically documented risks of firearm ownership, then you might consider buying a gun. Also, post your experience on this message board: I’d be interested if an honest presentation of firearm safety exists in the US.
Sometimes having mobs is useful, so the others don’t think that they are the only ones that have them. Non-violent mobs are preferable, of course.
Some time back, we had some pretty serious bigots put together a protest at the local mosque. Antifa showed up. You can guess what happened next.
I agree that those are all the normal courses of action. I am just concerned that we are far enough from normal that those courses of action may no longer be the best courses of action.
If there is a mob beating on a few people, they may sustain serious injury or even be killed before the cops respond. And this is assuming a level of normalcy that the cops will respond, and that they will not take the mob’s side.
Best I can think of right now would be to announce that they are being live streamed and the cops have been called. Hopefully that will cause dispersion, and the livestreaming should “protect” me as well.
BTW: SWM? Single White Male, or Scared White Male? I’ll cop to one of those.
Yes, but to quote the only good line from Welcome to Sarajevo, “And are we moving up or down that scale?”
You don’t notice that you are in a lawless anarchy until you see a mob beating up on a minority, and the cops decide that they don’t want to help.
I have never bought anything without an intent to use it for its intended purpose. This is why I have never bought a gun. I’ve “played” with the guns of friends and acquaintances, and have actually turned out to be a reasonably decent shot, but target practice is not the intended use of a gun.
But buying a gun means that I have an intention to use it to kill someone else, and that’s not a step I am comfortable taking yet.
I just received an email from my rabbi and one of the women killed was a member of our synagogue for many years before moving to Pittsburgh. I didn’t know her, but it still hits close to home.
Paypal has finally cut them off, so that’s one more nail in their coffin. Facebook and twitter are hellscapes of bigotry, too, but gab actually advertises itself in certain places as a haven for racists banned elsewhere.
One of the women in the photo on today’s NYT and WaPo stories is actually a third cousin of mine whom I met via a Jewish genealogy board while she was researching a common ancestor. She just moved to Pittsburgh a year or two ago and lost friends in the shooting.
So far I have not seen any Jew who I know or to whom I am related want to respond by posting armed guards at synagogues, and certainly I have seen no desire to respond with violence. Just dismay and sadness.