Another Mass Shooting

[Miisa]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

Although on second thought, they also don't report the mass shootings that don't happen because no-one had a gun.

Otherwise knows as tantrums.

[The Lone Ranger]

We live in a country where there's an average of more than one mass shooting per day. And nothing is being done about it at the national level. Leading political candidates openly run on platforms of fear-mongering, hatred, bigotry, and demonization of the poor. But if anyone so much as dares to suggest that maybe, you know, just maybe we shouldn't make it easier to get your hands on an assault rifle than a decent bagel -- [s]he is shouted down as "Un-American."

Politicians openly advocate slashing funding for welfare, education, science, and environmental protection while sneering at the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society and calling them leeches -- even as they work ever harder to ensure that the rich get even richer and everyone else gets even poorer.

We live in a society where sneering at intellectuals and actively denying science doesn't get you labeled as a dangerous idiot; it gets you elected to office. We live in a society where people who will live their entire lives from paycheck to paycheck nonetheless insist on voting for politicians who openly advocate for policies that will benefit the rich while harming everyone else.



It's official. This frakking country is collectively insane.

[Stephen Maturin]

Amen, brother. The 1956 Republican Platform was several orders of magnitude more progressive that the alleged "liberal" Democrats are today. John Paul Stevens is a lifelong law-'n'-order Republican yet was viewed as a crazed, wild-eyed liberal during much of his tenure on SCOTUS. Someone like William Brennan couldn't even get nominated nowadays, much less confirmed.

Brandeis was right all those years ago when he said we can have democracy or great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both. We've long since opted for great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, and at this point there's no going back.

All the rhetoric about free market capitalism from the moneyed elite is horseshit. This is the most centrally planned economy in world history, by the design of our beloved jerb creators. The plan is pretty simple -- free money + publicly funded bailouts when the moneyed elite eventually and inevitably fuck everything up. And corporate welfare falls like rain from every legislative body at every level of government.

And us schlubs? We're a nation of pegboys, happily lapping up all the jizz the oppressor classes can produce. Give a poor single mother a pittance to buy groceries? Fuck that! Welfare queen! Billions of dollars in subsidies to some oil and gas producer or drug manufacturer? No problem! Happy to oblige! Spend it in good heath, and feel free to come back for more when that's gone! Just keep up the rhetoric about keeping us safe from the coloreds and the camel jockeys, and we're yours to do with as you please!

Maybe Stalin was right. People are just too fuck-all stupid to have any say in managing their own affairs.

[The Man]

Senate Republicans respond to Planned Parenthood shooting by voting to defund Planned Parenthood. Republicans, why do you support terrorism? (I'm using their own style of argument against them, you see. It's very sophisticated).

[Stephen Maturin]

I'ma follow your lead, The Man. Time to start donating to Planned Parenthood.

[viscousmemories]

I'm following both your leads and setting up a regular donation to PP. I had stopped when I was unemployed last year and never got around to starting up again.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Amen, brother. The 1956 Republican Platform was several orders of magnitude more progressive that the alleged "liberal" Democrats are today.

I didn't feel like reading the whole thing, but was it really?

And more importantly, were the Republicans elected actually following it? Or was it just a document that took paying labor and the New Deal lip service as a political necessity, but something they intended to undermine if given the chance?

[Kael]

Party platforms are always heavy on the rhetoric and rarely matched by action. But, I think the shift in rhetoric is the salient point from looking at those old party platforms, especially if you do an appropriate mental adjustment for how far off the party's actions have been from it at any given point in time. And I don't think it's an overstatement or rosy-goggled to say that Eisenhower era Republicans were far more centrist in action as well as word over a number of policies compared to the mutant monstrosity that's grown up since the Reagan era.

[Dragar]

Surely part of this is because your population shares these nutty views about abortion, right? If some nutter of a politician tried to ban abortions in Wales/England/Scotland, there would be huge public outcry.

I don't think you can just blame the Republican elected officials for this. It runs deeper.

[godfry n. glad]

Originally Posted by Dragar

Surely part of this is because your population shares these nutty views about abortion, right? If some nutter of a politician tried to ban abortions in Wales/England/Scotland, there would be huge public outcry.

I don't think you can just blame the Republican elected officials for this. It runs deeper.

Well, yes...but abortion is not the source, it's a hotbutton attempt at control. Ignorance, xenophobia, and bad interpretation of religious dogma are more likely sources. Republicanism is now just the hat which that skulking, knuckle-dragging, anti-intellectual bigot portion of the population wears. The oligarchs who have manipulated the Republican Party for generations thought they could control the beast and they are now dealing with the unforeseen and unwanted consequences of so thinking.

[SR71]

Along those lines, and not to derail, but sometimes I like a Bill Moyers article.

The GOP Is on the Eve of Destruction | Alternet

Norman Ornstein shocked the inside-the-Beltway establishment (especially the press, with its silent pact to speak no evil of wrongdoers lest they deny you an interview) when they published their book, It’s Even Worse than It Looks. The two esteemed political scientists wrote, “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

In the years since, an ugly situation has only gotten increasingly dire, with right-wing radicals whipped into a frenzy by a Republican establishment that thought it could use their rage, only to find it running amok and beyond their control.

[Janet]

On a slight tangent. I listened to "Eve of Destruction" the other day and the line "Even the Jordan river has bodies floatin" struck me as extraordinarily quaint. It's hard to believe there was a time when we found violence in Palestine surprising.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

I'm following both your leads and setting up a regular donation to PP. I had stopped when I was unemployed last year and never got around to starting up again.

Me three. I set it to come out of my paycheck automatically and my employer will match my donation.

[Ari]

The news media are actual Vultures picking over the remains as TV entertainment channels got access to the shooters apartment and carelessly doxed family and friends.
Journalists storm San Bernardino shooters' apartment after landlord pries open door

[BrotherMan]

What a bunch of fucking shit.

[lisarea]

Think about the long, unbroken chain of assholes and idiots that brought this spectacle to us, too. Incompetent law enforcement leaving all that shit there, unsecured and unguarded, and then apparently releasing the site. The craven landlord, and the throngs of reporters and fucking lookieloos pretending they don't notice that this is a clear and obvious mistake. Fucking freaks. Fuck every last one of these horrible garbage people.

And fuck these garbage people as well:

Gun Industry Executives Say Mass Shootings Are Good for Business

I'm thinking I need to start making sure I don't buy anything from anyplace that sells guns.

I mean, yeah, it's not exactly massive economic power I'm wielding, but I will get my flashlights and shit at establishments that aren't actively courting gun nuts.

[Ari]

It gets worse when you realize someone was apparently still living there, so the FBI left stuff they felt ya know wasn't the shooters, just to have the piece of shit land lord (are landlords never not pieces of shit) let in the ambulance chaser media in to paw at things, which they of course did to an abundance and I know Fox and MSN like to play up the rivalry for ratings (fox cutely getting their minions to call everyone else MSM) and yet both were there side by side along with ISIS dildo flag CNN, drooling for any last bit of blood.

Fired, everyone should be fired. You fired and you fired, and you, oh you so certainly fired!

[Miisa]

Maybe if Trump becomes president there would be a slew of firings? *hopeful*

[The Man]

Long post incoming:

The FBI confirmed yesterday that they are treating the incident as a terrorist attack. They do not believe the suspects were directed by Daesh, though they seem to have been radicalised by Daesh videos. Daesh' reaction suggests that they were not even aware of the attack before it happened; their initial responses said there were three shooters, just like the news reports did. Evidence suggests that the wife was radicalised first, and then radicalised her husband afterwards.

Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice has quite a lot to say on this:

We’ll probably never know if Malik suffered from post-partum depression, but it surely wouldn’t have come as a surprise if she did. I remember the guy responsible for Desperate Housewives saying he conceived the idea when he was watching the news with his mother and expressed surprise that a different “new mother” could be so damaged as to kill her baby before committing suicide… and his mom told him, Don’t be — I often thought about doing that myself, when you were a baby.

And, tragically, the “consolation” of religion in Malik’s case gave her a ready-made instruction set for making something blessed of her despair and her husband’s weariness. People get radicalized because they need something they can’t find elsewhere. Was Malik and Farook’s radicalization due, at least as a contributing factor, to a new mom’s isolation and her husband’s feeling of helplessness?

Digby also has some relevant links:

Everyone is getting very, very excited over the idea that this was some kind of Manchurian candidate scenario with Tashfeen Malik groomed for years to marry an American Muslim so she could come into the US, seduce her husband into becoming a radical and carry out a terrorist attack. Lindsey Graham pretty much said so on TV this morning.

But ask yourself an important question: if this was a sophisticated plot, years in the making, does targeting a Christmas party full of county bureaucrats in San Bernardino really make a lot of sense? If this "sleeper" had been trained and groomed for this job, you'd think she would have come up with something with a little bit more political impact.

No, this is probably exactly what Engle says, an amateur pair of Lone Wolf killers in a land where they can easily get their hands on as much firepower as they want who carried out their own little jihad. It's no less devastating to the victims of their insanity, of course. But everyone needs to take a breath and recognize that this is likely no different than all the other mass shootings we've had this year.

The New York Times has run its first front-page editorial in one hundred years about the gun epidemic. Naturally, the Republicans shot down an amendment that would have restricted people on the terror watch list from being allowed to purchase firearms. This is more than a bit short-sighted considering what al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn is saying:

America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?

At this point, I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the Republican Party is objectively pro-terror, and I hope Obama points this out at some point.

Donald Trump recently proposed that we have to kill not just terrorists but their families. This is rather charming in lieu of the fact that it turns out the shooter's brother is a decorated Navy veteran.

Think Progress has a good overview of anti-Muslim rhetoric that is only likely to become worse in the aftermath of the shooting. Roy Edroso is worth reading for a brief overview of right-wing reactions to the shooting; I'm not aware of anyone who does this stuff better.

Meanwhile, the usually fairly centrist New York Daily News has run two utterly incendiary covers, which can be displayed at the link. Charles Pierce is also well worth reading.

Wonkette has overviews of journalistic malpractice from Fox News, the Daily Beast, the news in general, and MSNBC. In addition to MSNBC doxxing one of the suspects' mother, the Daily Beast doxxed a completely innocent person who just happened to share one of the shooters' names. There's plenty of other horrible stuff in the links. I know I posted a lot of them, but every link in this post is worth reading in its entirety.

In conclusion, everything is terrible and likely to remain so.

[Ari]

A fascinating take on things.
Many terrorists aren't that smart and I've wondered about that for awhile and it seems like because being a terrorist was low on their actual reasons for what we all need to be considering a suicide. Just look at this case, they were 'terrorists' yet oddly left lots of people alive and seemed pretty select, as far as terrorists go.

[BrotherMan]

Of course the Muslims are being investigated as terrorists even without ties to organizations of terror. But none of the disturbed lone gunmen who are white.

[lisarea]

It does seem like it was at least marginally terroristic in nature. Not as much as the Planned Parenthood or Isla Vista attacks, though.

I want to see the analyses where someone points out that, while the "Center for Medical Progress" may not have ordered the PP attack directly, they (and Carly Fiorina and Operation Rescue, etc.) were responsible for radicalizing the killer.

[slimshady2357]

Not sure if this has been posted anywhere yet, but if it's accurate, its a pretty clear statement.

Edit: that pic was too small to read, try this link for a better version:

https://img.njdc.com/media/media/201...wholechart.png

[JoeP]

For comparison, List of countries by firearm-related death rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (which doesn't claim to be complete but as far as I can tell uses a similar measure), the lowest state on the chart, HI, still has a higher rate (2.5) of gun-related death than 42 countries. Including Canada at 2.22 and Luxembourg at 2.02.

Conversely the highest rate, 19.8 in AK, is still "safer" than South Africa (21.5), Jamaica (39.7), and several others.

[lisarea]

Beheading the Blacksmith of Balkh: Iranian Americans scapegoated again | World news | The Guardian

Ryan Blames Mass Shootings on Mental Health Laws | Al Jazeera America

Hey, maybe next time there's a mass shooting, can we outlaw putting corn in salsa or maybe bring back those 12 packs of cotton crew socks you used to be able to get everywhere?