Another Day In The USA

[Ford]

Not all Republicans are far-right extremists. You should know this based on how many times you guys always say, "Not all Muslims are terrorists!"

The Republicans who aren't far right extremists are pushed to the fringes of irrelevancy. You should know this based on the amount of times you quote Shapiro and Knowles.

And they never speak up to condemn the insanity.

As we're seeing in this thread, the right wing extremists are deflecting with "but both sides are equally bad" and flatly refusing to own up to the domestic terrorists in their midst.

And am I the only one who notices that when Trump reads one of these statements off a teleprompter (as he did when he had to walk back his "very fine people" remarks) he comes off as a middle school kid forced to deliver a book report?

 

[Derec]

This is the difference between the right and the left. The country has in the last forty years or so become increasingly conservative and both political parties have moved to the right.

What have you been smoking? Democrats have been moving to the left pretty hard. Sanctuary cities? Decriminalize illegal border crossings? Medicare for all? Increase minimum wage to $15/h nationwide? Pay reparations to blacks? All of those are left wing policies.
Then come things like Hillary inviting mothers of young black men who have been shot by police to the DNC convention; never mind that most of these shootings were justified.
Bill Clinton sounded almost like Trump on the matter of illegals and Obama is being attacked for deporting illegals.
And while Clinton rightly condemned Sista Souljah's racism, I have a feeling that most of this crop of 2020 hopefuls would applaud her and accuse why whites who dare disagree

This means that the Republican party has become more extreme and the Democratic party has become more moderate. Anyone supporting the Republicans or calling themselves conservatives today can't escape the simple truth that they are aligning themselves with extremists.

There is extremism on both sides. The El Paso shooting is an inappropriate reaction to what's been going on at the border, with ~100,000 mass migrants coming each month and demanding to be let in, and the Democrats who would let them all in.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

And they never speak up to condemn the insanity.

As we're seeing in this thread, the right wing extremists are deflecting with "but both sides are equally bad" and flatly refusing to own up to the domestic terrorists in their midst.

As one who is neither left nor right, I can say both are bad, and this "you're the worse one" back and forth ignores that both are bad.

The right has fewer but worse instances of violence. The left has more but less severe instances of violence. They're just not as good at it. Both sides have used pretty divisive rhetoric over the years. And we have people on the left (and in this very forum) openly preaching sub-lethal violence on a very regular basis.

 

[ZiprHead]

The right has fewer but worse instances of violence. The left has more but less severe instances of violence. They're just not as good at it.

Citation?

 

[RavenSky]

We have always had a lot of guns owned by private citizens in the US. We have always had a mentally unstable portion of our population. We have always had white supremacists in the US. We have always discussed gun control in the US.

And yet the phenomenon of all of these mass shootings is a fairly recent development, just over some decades. Does this tell us something valuable about this problem?

Something more nuanced than the bumper sticker slogans that we repeat here every time one of these happens. My areas of training and knowledge fail me. I don't know the answer.

Here is the annual body count of these events over the last forty years or so.

View attachment 22950

The number of mass shooting victims by year since 1982.​

There has to be a reason that everything in the US seems to have gone to shit since 1980. Ideas?

We had something from 1994 through 2004 that, with the exception of Columbine, did a half-way decent job in cutting down on rampage shooters:
Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act - also known as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban

 

[RavenSky]

The El Paso shooter was perfectly rational and sane. He drove 600 miles to kill Latin American people and didn't post about it until 20 minutes beforehand, knowing that any sooner might get the authorities on his tail. It was premeditated and goal-oriented in a way that doesn't point to anything except ideological commitment to white nationalism, and making noises about mental health (especially while continuing to support the for-profit system that denies it to so many) is a distraction from reality.

Using concepts and phrases directly lifted from presidential speeches, broadcasters on cable news, and millionaire YouTube personalities, this person clearly and succinctly laid out exactly why he did what he did. That means anybody who agrees with those voices can do the same thing, at any time, as long as they have the means. That's fascism arriving in America.

^^^ THIS! All of it!

 

[RavenSky]

There is the concept of leaderless resistance. Using propaganda to fill people's heads with bad ideas, and letting the indoctrinated fools go do violence on their own, not commanded by a leader of some terrorist organization who commands that violence. Leaderless resistance has been a key concept of far right racism and anti-Antisemitism for years now. Books like "The Turner Diaries" that inspired Timothy McVeigh for example. The internet has made this sort of propaganda easier to find and to find groups like violent incels and racists and anti-immagrant nativists. Those who do go on the commit atrocities are hailed as role models. the worse of the worse egging each other on to become heros.

What Trump & company is doing is stochastic terrorism: "the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted"

 

[blastula]

Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes - The Washington Post

 

[Rhea]

It appears to pick up at the same time the Internet becomes common place and rises quickly with the advancement of Social Media.

That may be a factor but it correlates with the loss of good high paying factory jobs that the U.S. once had plenty of. High-schoolers or anyone, even dropouts, could get a good job and be financially secure. Those jobs left Dodge. People of limited means and access are more fucked than ever and have lots of access to guns. Right wing xenophobia fits their predicament nicely.

Are we the only country in the world that lost factory jobs in the 1980s, then?

 

[Rhea]

Please give an example of what you consider to be an unfair background check.

You take your gun to a gunsmith for repair. You have a background check when you pick it up. Plenty of other situations exist where you have a background check to take possession of a gun you already own. One check per gun when multiple guns are being transferred.

I believe almost all of the unfair background check issues could be solved by providing a firearms card that shows you have passed the background check, you can show that in lieu of the actual check. Locally, we used to use CCW licenses for this purpose, I don't know if that survived a stupid ballot measure in 2016. (Despite support for checks on private-party transfers being near 90% the measure barely got 50%--and then got thrown in the trash by the attorney general because compliance was impossible the way it was written.)

Wait, you’re claiming that if a person passes a background check ONCE, they will never ever become a criminal and should therefore never have to submit to a background check again, ever?? What, every single criminal commits their crime the day after they turn 18? NO one becomes a background check fail after they buy a gun? Or - are you saying that you’re happy to keep guns with violent criminal people - as long as they had the foresight to buy their gun early on?

That is ridiculous. Insane.

 

[blastula]

He had an infatuation with killing people since his high school days. Do you think he knew anything about Elizabeth Warren back then?

The Cherokee princess has been around national politics for a while. So why not?
And if the Left can blame Trump for El Paso (like she personally did!), why not blame Warren for Dayton? Sauce for the goose and all that.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

He had an infatuation with killing people since his high school days. Do you think he knew anything about Elizabeth Warren back then?

The Cherokee princess has been around national politics for a while. So why not?
And if the Left can blame Trump for El Paso (like she personally did!), why not blame Warren for Dayton? Sauce for the goose and all that.

Sure, it can be viewed as the same. You just need to be a complete idiot in order to view it that way. Since you're not a complete idiot, you know that you do not.

Saying that one was inspired by Trump to do it is because one can point to Trump's rhetoric being echoed by the guy and then taken to a violent level. What are similar things which Warren has said that were then taken to a violent level by the other guy?

It's not the fact that he's a Trump supporter that has people casting blame on Trump. It's his agreement with the things that Trump was saying which were the direct motivation for his killing spree which is causing that. There's nothing similar between the other guy and Warren - unless, of course, Warren is always going off about what bitches sisters are and someone should do something about them.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

He had an infatuation with killing people since his high school days. Do you think he knew anything about Elizabeth Warren back then?

The Cherokee princess has been around national politics for a while. So why not?
And if the Left can blame Trump for El Paso (like she personally did!), why not blame Warren for Dayton? Sauce for the goose and all that.

Cherokee Princess? You mean Pocohantas? Elizabeth Warren?
Better Warren, Pocohantas than the Orange Rapist!

Just saying. Isn't name calling fun!?

 

[Patooka]

The sad and depressing reality is gun reform won't happen in the US until a muslim or black man shoots up a NRA convention. Even then it would be an each way bet.

 

[Trausti]

The sad and depressing reality is gun reform won't happen in the US until a muslim or black man shoots up a NRA convention. Even then it would be an each way bet.

What we need are the strict gun laws like they have in Brazil. Then we can enjoy a Brazilian-level gun homicide rate.

 

[Patooka]

The sad and depressing reality is gun reform won't happen in the US until a muslim or black man shoots up a NRA convention. Even then it would be an each way bet.

What we need are the strict gun laws like they have in Brazil. Then we can enjoy a Brazilian-level gun homicide rate.

At least you're not comparing every change in policy to Venezuela, so I guess that's something.

 

[bilby]

The sad and depressing reality is gun reform won't happen in the US until a muslim or black man shoots up a NRA convention. Even then it would be an each way bet.

What we need are the strict gun laws like they have in Brazil. Then we can enjoy a Brazilian-level gun homicide rate.

At least you're not comparing every change in policy to Venezuela, so I guess that's something.

John Wyndham's novel The Outward Urge (1959) tells of a devastating nuclear war that destroys much of the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, Brazil becomes global hegemon.

I remember discussing the book with my dad, when I was a teenager, and he said "If Brazil ever becomes a country worthy of emulation, God help us all".

It's very telling that Americans today are happy to consider that their nation is OK, as long as it's better than Brazil. It's not very long ago at all that they would have been offended (rightly or wrongly) by the very idea of being comparable with even the very best of the rest of the world. Now they are happy to be not as bad as Brazil.

Do you think they've even noticed just how far their standards have collapsed?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

And they never speak up to condemn the insanity.

As we're seeing in this thread, the right wing extremists are deflecting with "but both sides are equally bad" and flatly refusing to own up to the domestic terrorists in their midst.

As one who is neither left nor right, I can say both are bad, and this "you're the worse one" back and forth ignores that both are bad.

The right has fewer but worse instances of violence. The left has more but less severe instances of violence. They're just not as good at it. Both sides have used pretty divisive rhetoric over the years. And we have people on the left (and in this very forum) openly preaching sub-lethal violence on a very regular basis.

Ah yes, the "both sides" claim again.

Go read Crusius's manifesto, Dude, right out of the right's playbook, and then show me something similar from the Latino "side" where people are mass murdered like Jews in WW2.

 

[laughing dog]

At least you're not comparing every change in policy to Venezuela, so I guess that's something.

John Wyndham's novel The Outward Urge (1959) tells of a devastating nuclear war that destroys much of the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, Brazil becomes global hegemon.

I remember discussing the book with my dad, when I was a teenager, and he said "If Brazil ever becomes a country worthy of emulation, God help us all".

It's very telling that Americans today are happy to consider that their nation is OK, as long as it's better than Brazil. It's not very long ago at all that they would have been offended (rightly or wrongly) by the very idea of being comparable with even the very best of the rest of the world. Now they are happy to be not as bad as Brazil.

Do you think they've even noticed just how far their standards have collapsed?

As an American, I can attest that we have not noticed.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

As one who is neither left nor right, I can say both are bad, and this "you're the worse one" back and forth ignores that both are bad.

The right has fewer but worse instances of violence. The left has more but less severe instances of violence. They're just not as good at it. Both sides have used pretty divisive rhetoric over the years. And we have people on the left (and in this very forum) openly preaching sub-lethal violence on a very regular basis.

Ah yes, the "both sides" claim again.

I described both similarities and differences. But since I spoke harshly about the faults of one tribe that means I made a bad argument.