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I kid you not. A letter sent out by the head of Tea Party Nation, Judson Phillips, to its membership culling from an article by TPN member Timothy Birdnow. (via Right Wing Watch):
Support the creation of local organizations to act as “neighborhood watch” for schools. Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive.
How on earth does crap like this advance a sane debate about gun rights or control at a time when this nation is in sore need of leadership?. Look at more of this irresponsible garbage:
3.Engage in more frank discussion of race and culture. For far too long we have tiptoed around these issues, fearful of being branded a racist. If black thugs kidnap and rape a woman, ask if there is something in the black culture that fostered that. If an evil white kid murders a bunch of children at the school, ask the same question of the white community. What was it that spawned this behavior? What was this kid taught? We have to stop hiding from our respective national sins.
Well, I have to give it to him, that’s frank. And what spawned all of the violence perpetrated by white perps? This society is soaking in hair-trigger tempers that are resulting in horrific levels of domestic abuse and violence between complete strangers. That has no color.
6.Work to devolve power back to the parents, the local officials, and the communities. A society that is top-down will inevitably lead to alienation of the sort we have seen here. This young man was twenty years old, and his actions were neither spurious nor random. As an FBI profiler said on television last night, he undoubtedly felt powerless and sought to remedy that. Why does a twenty year old feel powerless? He could leave his mother’s home at any time at his age. He feels powerless because he has lived in an over-bureaucratized society, one run ultimately from a far-away central location. He sees his life as at the mercy of others, and sees himself as having no real input or control. He has been coddled all his life, given free rein to indulge his senses but not to face the responsibilities that freedom necessitates. He was an eternal juvenile, a child who was not allowed to grow up. He lived in a world of the Progressives making, not in reality.
The family is the fundamental building block of civilization, and from it all power originates. The Left has systematically destroyed the family for the purpose of empowering the State, and this has destroyed so many lives. Individuals – especially immature individuals – need to be taught how to live, how to think, how to believe. Man’s animal passions must be placed in check and his rational faculties engaged. His moral compass must be set. Liberalism sought to destroy all the controls by destroying the family and community, centralizing power in meta institutions and granting the individual absolute moral autonomy without giving him the wisdom he needs to exercise it. . It is a recipe for disaster, as we have seen.
7.Restrict the sex in movies, television, on the internet. There is a reason why young people commit these sorts of crimes, and sex plays no small part. Their passions are eternally inflamed, and they wander the Earth with no outlet for their overstimulated glands. People have understood the close relationship between sex and violence through history; sex was an inducement to military service in ancient times (and modern, too) and it has traditionally been understood that a sexually robust individual will fight harder and more aggressively. We are engaging half this equation, overstimulating our youth while denying them a planned outlet. Even if they were to live promiscuously (a very bad thing for society) they still cannot find adequate outlets for their passions, which have grown to titanic volume. Fighting is the traditional outlet. Societies have always carefully planned ways to release this tension constructively – through physical labor, through hunting, through military service, sometimes even through intellectual pursuits. Now we have nothing, no place for this pent-up frustration to go. The only answer is to follow the other societal coping mechanism, which is to tone down the sexual stimulation, encourage chastity and modesty. Our society has conveniently thrown that away as well. We have to restore it.
Um, what does sex have to do with someone shooting up a movie theatre, a school, a hospital, a mall, a house of worship…I could go on, but that one really says more about some ISSUES the author has.
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I’ve been waiting for the call to arm 5 year-olds.
When it comes to families, these folks romanticize the Leave it to Beaver families of the 50s, promoting inaccurate stereotypes that didn’t speak to experiences from the 1920s and earlier. (Women working at home in the 20s generally had tough, physical jobs, no time for afternoon bridge games with pearls on.)
With this arm-the-schools nonsense, they’re romanticizing shoot-em-up westerns of the 1920s-50s — that the best we can possibly aspire to is gun battles between good guys and bad guys in classrooms and hallways of our schools.
If an armed George Zimmerman were standing at the door of that school, may God have mercy on any child who tried to smuggle in a bag of Skittles.
I think this guy and his 7 point plan is channeling Jerry Falwell’s unrealized dreams. Which were all dangerously wet to begin with.
And as has already been pointed out, the current trend among mass murdering shooters is to wear body armor.
I’d like to see a six-year-old kid stop a perp in body armor with anything that the kid could actually lift, much less shoot without getting killed by the recoil.
Tragedies like this are not driven by progressives or progressive polices It’s because we have a business first world, a socially useless society-for-the-sake-of-business world. It’s because we have busy work lives that begin in production oriented class rooms. It’s because most people live off profitized fake food and while overweight are nutrition starved but still over stimulated and sleep deprived. It because most people due to the conservative business first world spend the majority of their days in involuntary tasks ( a kind of murder by wage slavery) that are both counter production and unnecessary. At least slavery could yield some sense of sacrifice and some connection to necessity but in the face of so much automation this baby-sitting, warehousing and cannon foddering for the benefit of a parasitic right side elites leaves people without dignity but with an extreme stress for lack of security and this bleeds over into families and rips them apart. The children are the casualties. When it was Enron time the Enron execs supposedly did it for the right preschool for their children and not for the corner office because in this backwards Republican paradise it’s your kids they fire into the street and blackmail you with.
Notice the conservative mode of speech, It amounts to censorship. Look at Fox, its censorship for profit. It is time we took away the ‘money is speech’ argument from them and turned it on its head. If money is speech then it’s the coercive kind like telling someone their kid died knowing fully that it wasn’t true. If its speech it speech with that kind of coercion behind it. That’s dangerous enough but in the Republican and Conservative system in which we live it’s money-for-the-sake-of-money or coercive speech for the sake of more coercive speech, it loudness without content, its censorship and it needs not only to be limited but to be deliberately downgraded and de-priortized. When a crime or anything like a crime is committed for profit it needs to be charged as aggravated. We need to scrap the idea that the purpose of the firm is to make profit- its purpose is to serve society and firms that exist primarily for profit destroy society. Progressive charters need to be enforced and firms dissolved when they fail a charter audit.
Kids watching 180 hours of barrel scraping stupidity inducing TV per month of which 60 hours might be ads and their parents paying for this brainwashing is pure insanity. Consider the medium, it’s a mass one-way propaganda system and it’s completely tyrannical yet it’s also what imparts values and behavior to our children- it’s what drives tragedy. It prime purpose is to drive mindless consumption and passivity. It’s generally useless commercial speech of the sort that causes the wrong kind of purchase decisions and in successive cycle after cycle weakens consumers. This is much like Wall Street where something like 8000 mutual funds invest money for 50 million people in the 2000 NYSE firms with most betting the entire market. This is like people throwing money into a street and expecting to come back and not only find their money but find more money. The firms get their money no matter what their CEO do. Its absolute magical thinking just like the 300 billion a year rip-off the Bush Administration handed to the drug companies by saying the government couldn’t negotiate with them so that the public would be ripped off by these extortionists and there would be more financial pressure to hand a solvent Social Security to the insanity of Wall Street.
The United State’s fake (representative) democracy and its unsustainable catastrophic market-growth economy and its nation state nationalism have to be completely redone in a truly progressive democratic way that avoids the fraud of conservatism.
“Had George Zimmerman been at the front door…” If he had been, we’d all be able to mourn poor George with the rest. The gunman would have cut him in half to start with.
Mz. Spaulding, I’d argue with you about color and violence, but, it seems the evidence points to white males, 18-25, for most of the mass killings since 1980 or so.
But, I still believe race factors in to anger and violence, and that all races have their peculiar sets of reasons of why crazy happens.
However, crazy happens, across all races, across all classes of incomes.
So that’s pretty solid from all I have ever learnt. Individual factors and such, but, the crazy cross it all. Misogyny, homophobia, racism, child abuse, spousal abuse . . . it crosses all countries, borders, classes, and cultures, and has for thousands of years.
A great read, Ma’am. Lemme get to some specifics:
This young fucking man had a huge inheritance from his grand mother.
This young man saw his mom and dad divorce.
This young man was white.
This young man lived with his mother who had a $10K MONTHLY alimony, and lived in a newish $700,000 house in a wooded lot, in a community of wooded lots, of people of RICH upbringing, who did NOT cross them wooded lots to comingle. No, like Stepford Wives And Stepford Husbands, they went to town and put on their best faces, all the time leaving the horrors they were dealing with, in their wooded lots.
This mother, divorced somehow and it’s not important cept for the fact it fucked up the kid, this mother THEN, with all the money, and all that money could buy, ignored her son’s behaviors over the years, bought guns, took him shooting with her to learn how to USE them guns, and then, in one fell fucking swoop, did not lock them up in a safe where only SHE could get to them.
And she’s dead cuz her son was fucking nutz, got her guns, killed HER, himself the senseless fucking coward, and took out 20 kids and 6 other adults cuz, his mom couldn’t store the guns properly.
So, as I said on TBoggs diary, this is on her, and it’s on Reagan in CA, and Reagan in USA, for closing mental hospitals and mental services and putting them all on the streets so the incarceration prison system could PROFIT from OUR taxes by putting SOME of them behind bars. The rest are still homeless, and that’s how this shit started, this homeless shit, by Reagan.
N that’s my 2 cents to all this. The mother and Reagan are to blame, and every politician that’s come after Reagan, at every level, who won’t fight and stand for mental services programs reinstatements, mental hospital reinstatements, and profit in their own campaigns from the prison lobbyists who back them at every city, county, state and national level.
End of story.
I don’t disagree with anything you say, but I don’t think it has a damned thing to do with this problem.
Vitriol will solve nothing.
See TBogg and Meghan Mac . . . all I see is red. Phreakin nutz.
These are harsh, harsh facts RM, end of story, don’t try and paint me grey. This is THE reality.
That was really hard to read thru, but I tried.
Funny, there’s a lot in there I agree with.
Nice slant on Wall St. Side Of Life items . . . well done.
Oh fucking shit it does too, it takes it all to the root, aside of ending mental health programs and services and legislation to empower the growth of the incarceration industry.
Get the fuck outta here.
End of story.
Minor point, but it was the Kennedy brothers that said it was false imprisonment and emptied the “mental wards”.
Not to defend ronny ray-gun for the start of the destruction of the U.S.
Stop the planet. My eight-year-old and I and her mother will get off at the next stop.
Stop the planet. My wife and eight-year-old daughter and I will be getting off at the next stop. Just can’t take this sh. . . anymore.
If George Zimmerman had been at the front door, we’d better hope the kids were white and none were wearing hoodies.
Interestingly, the place in the US where the cult of the gun is strongest is also the most violent:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/23/six-facts-about-guns-violence-and-gun-control/
What was that again about “an armed society is a polite society”?
Pheonix Woman- Your hatred of the South and Southerners is starting to seriously p!ss me off. It may be the opinion of the Washington Post that the South is the nation’s most violent region, but on one here has shot up a school and killed a bunch of children.
Get a job, and you’ll have less time to spew your hate on websites.
I don’t think there is a single one of the suicidal lone-wolf terrorists we’re looking at in this kind of context that would have been confined, regardless. Even if there were legions of mental health professionals scouring the neighborhoods and a mental institution on every street corner.
Family members may be a better source of info, but I dread to think of a society where your maiden aunt can get you put inside because she thinks you’re crazy. My maiden aunt thinks everybody is crazy, including but not limited to, all her nieces and nephews.
As cultural historians like David Fischer have noted, the South is HIGHLY decorous; rigid caste and class lines often bring extremely polite behavior. As a born Detroiter living in the sorta South (Tallahassee, in the most liberal voting precinct in Florida), I’ve just come to wish that instead of vaguely writing off whole portions of the country and electorate we could begin to notice things like:
1) the fact that just a few percentage points separate ALL of the red and blue states (writing anyone off is miserable, anyway, but writing off white people like yourself is psycologically suspect, I’d say);
2) that the stats Phoenix Woman is drawing on show that all of the largely rural states have higher rates of gun violence
Etcetera. Easier to point a lazy condemning finger, even when the recent mass murders have taken place in the north and west. Let’s all help one another to the nuances rather than to the easy generalizations, what do you say?
Would be curious to know how those who condemn the South so readily and reflexively explain the fact that a reverse exodus of Black people has been underway in this direction for two decades; or that there is a higher percentage of gay parents in the south than in the north?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19gays.html?pagewanted=all
Nine of the ten most segregated cities in the US are in the north, and Miami, the tenth, is a rather special case:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/07/americas-10-most-segregated-cities_n_845092.html#s261062&title=1_Detroit_Michigan