Omar Mateen and Rightwing Homophobia

Sigh.

Well, who can argue with “sigh”? Congrats, bnw. You won the Internet today.

;>)

Zooey wrote:

So what we have here is a sexually-conflicted man who suffered self-hatred because of all the “gays will go to hell” stuff he believed.

that was my initial gut feeling on Sunday morning this mass murder broke…… sadly not many are sensitive to mass shootings… I had 3 softball games that day, and not once was this shooting discussed amongst us in the dugout.

We talked OJ, Draymond Green’s suspension, good Chinese food, Giants baseball, family, even the Cal guys who know me as the lone Rams fan talked about Goff (BTW, they love Goff)

not once did this tragedy come up in conversation while spending 6 hours at a softball field.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Sigh.

Well, who can argue with “sigh”? Congrats, bnw. You won the Internet today.

;>)

Some of us have already transgressed a bit. So let’s stay inbounds now to make up for it.

What a banner day. Billy admits defeat and you complimented my mod skills. Rest assured I remain bnw, the source of reason and harmony in this Public House.

What do we know?

1) The people calling for actual changes in gun laws aren’t Democrats because Democrats don’t have the balls (Connecticut Dems aside. I’ll give them credit. But they learned the hard way when they got abandoned by the rest of the Dems). Fuckin-A. If the slaughter of kids isn’t enough to go to the mattresses with the NRA, then nothing is, so screw every LAST Democrat and their milquetoast stance on guns.

2) The belief that a “good guy with a gun will defeat a bad guy with a gun” was put to the test and soundly defeated. There was an armed off duty cop inside the club at the time of the attack who DID engage the attacker. And STILL, 49 people dead and 53 people injured. Next argument will be “it was just one gunfight” or “the officer was outgunned”… uh huh…

3) The attacker was someone who was either a closeted gay man who was sexually active or exploring that possibility while openly in a very conservative Muslim family. Whether it was self-loathing, mental illness, a mental breakdown from not being able to reconcile his outer and inner self or some unknowable combination, a tragedy ensued.

4) This was NOT Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. The attacker knew less about terror groups than news producers do here in the US, which is to say barely any at all. He pledged allegiance to the head of ISIS and to Hizbollah which is fighting ISIS and the head of Al-Nusra which is also in conflict with ISIS. Him pledging his allegiances must have sounded like Eddie Murphy telling his VietNam story in the beginning of Trading Places, it was so absurd to anyone who knew even the slightest thing that it’s cringeworthy.

5) Victims mean nothing, anymore. We’ve heard about the killer, his father, his ex-wife and even what celebrities had to say on twitter and Instragram. But the media is going to keep the victims as “the victims” with no voice. It’s important that people speak for and about them, but under no circumstances will they be allowed to speak for themselves.

6) The next tragedy is only a few days away. It is a blessing that the death of my daughter forever broke my heart such that as much as I’ve tried over the years to harden my heart to the animals that call themselves people or worse, have the arrogance and hubris to believe for a moment that they have the grace to be human… I just can’t. I have cried or been on the verge of tears feeling the pain of loss. Is it worse because it’s so pointless? I read blogs and posts with poems from the community and hear the words and listen to the outcry…truly just try to listen. Now it is not for me to speak. Not yet. Even to my child…I just listen…and we embrace, and I pray that we’ll be safe today because that’s all we have. And even with all of that, I know the heartless clock is counting down and the next tragedy, the next “thing we can’t imagine”, the next “unexplainable” thing that we have so ingrained that the MSM have packages for explaining it…WILL happen…soon…within DAYS. And I will mourn again. My heart will not harden…because it can’t. I’ve been blessed.

7) We’re all insane. Whether it’s Climate Catastrophe or this cycle of mass killings or institutional dysfunction (corporate or governmental) that allow for water poisoning in Flint, MI or Hoosick Falls, NY or umpteen other examples of entities where people in charge felt it was okay to put other people at risk for their own gain, be it monetary, power or something else. We’re all insane because we really COULD solve all of these problems, but as a citizenry, we’ve decided in absentia that solving our problems just isn’t that important. We can always point to systems and people at the top and some “other” and KNOW they are the cause of our collective demise. It may even be true. It doesn’t change that for the most part, we as a citizenry acquiesce to most of this garbage which the masters are all too happy with.

8) If we want the world to change, we have to BE the change. That’s not just a slogan. If we want grace, we have to be graceful. If we want peace, we have to be peaceful.

In light of all of this and likely other things I’ve missed, it would be all too easy to give in to sarcasm and pessimism. I won’t do that. We all deserve to be happy, to feel loved and to feel like we belong. That’s worth fighting for.

Mackeyser wrote:

What do we know?…
7) We’re all insane. Whether it’s Climate Catastrophe or this cycle of mass killings or institutional dysfunction (corporate or governmental) that allow for water poisoning in Flint, MI or Hoosick Falls, NY or umpteen other examples of entities where people in charge felt it was okay to put other people at risk for their own gain, be it monetary, power or something else. We’re all insane because we really COULD solve all of these problems, but as a citizenry, we’ve decided in absentia that solving our problems just isn’t that important. We can always point to systems and people at the top and some “other” and KNOW they are the cause of our collective demise. It may even be true. It doesn’t change that for the most part, we as a citizenry acquiesce to most of this garbage which the masters are all too happy with.

8) If we want the world to change, we have to BE the change. That’s not just a slogan. If we want grace, we have to be graceful. If we want peace, we have to be peaceful.

In light of all of this and likely other things I’ve missed, it would be all too easy to give in to sarcasm and pessimism. I won’t do that. …

—————
Well Mack, weve been discussing “how the people got this way” for a decade now.

I have a book I leave on a table close to my front door. I have to pass it to go out the front door. It’s called “Dont Blame the People”. I glance at the title everyday before i leave the house. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it dont.

Sometimes I remember the system shapes, moulds, creates these…’voters’ we are surrounded by. …I’m not sure if knowing that is a blessing or a curse though….I mean…what can we DO about an entire, omnipresent, white-noise of a system….What can we do?

w
v

“….The last and most obstinate of the impediments in the way of forceful
political dissent is what Walter Karp understood to be the
“corrupting consolation of cynicism.” Karp employed the phrase
to describe the attitude of mind adopted by a generation of American
intellectuals responding to the Wilson administration’s harsh suppression
of unlicensed speech during and after World War I. Finding themselves
suffocated by a climate of opinion in which dissent was disloyalty
and disloyalty a crime, a good many independent-minded and once
outspoken citizens acquired the habit of looking at the national political
scene from the point of view of spectators at a tenement fire or a train wreck.
As compensation for their loss of a public voice, they retired to a library or
a lawn party and there contented themselves with private and literary
expressions of anger and disgust. Language served as an end in itself,
the imagination a vehicle for escaping reality rather than a means of
grasping or apprehending it.
The attitude is one that ive encountered often enough in myself to
recognize in other people — not only among the card carrying members of the
country’s various intellectual guilds but also among the well-to-do gentry
content to leave the business of government to the hired help. Our schools
teach marketing instead of history, and the prosperity of the last thirty years
has encouraged a disdain for politics on the part of people who imagine
liberty is an asset inherited at birth — together with the grandfather clock
and the house on the lake — rather than the product of hard and constant
labor….Lewis Lapham

—
another locus of this theme of the decline that shows up as pseudo renewal, is
the work of Don DeLillo, particularly his novel White Noise. The book is literally
a masterpiece, portraying as it does a busy commercial culture that Is riddled with
purposelessness and paranoia. …the central character Jack Gladney, a college
professor…stops in a shopping mall and thinks to himself: ‘I realized the place was
awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loud-speaker
and coffee making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all,
a dull unlocatable roar, as if some form of swarming life just outside the range of
human apprehension. M. Berman quoting D.DeLillo’s novel.

“The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies,” he thinks to himself
appreciatively, after checking his bank balance at an ATM. “The system
was invisible, which made it all the more impressive…”

This notion of invisibility — of no one in this glorious new age of corporate cyberglobalism
being to blame because the system is not really located anywhere (but everywhere)
— is important for an understanding of the present crisis of American culture
M. Berman quoting D.DeLillo’s novel.

—

“…Because the schools serve an economic system rather than a
political or philosophical idea, they promote, not unreasonably
, the habits of mind necessary to the preservation of that system,
which is why an American education resembles the commercial
procedure that changes caterpillers into silkworms instead of
butterflies. Silkworms can be turned to a profit, but butterflies
blow around in the wind and do nothing to add to the wealth
of the corporation or the power of the state. “ L.Lapham

bnw wrote:

Mackeyser,

To your

#2 above. It was a no gun zone. Thats also a reason why he chose it. Licensed conceal carry patrons won’t lie on the bathroom floor waiting to be executed.

#3 above. I think it possible SSRI antidepressants were involved as they frequently are in these shootings.

#4 above. In the end he professed allegiance to the leader of ISIS.

#5. above. The victims are heard through family and friends at least initially. It is unfortunate that over time they are relegated to statistics whereas the murderer still has a name.

more later

He didn’t “choose” it because it was a “no gun zone”. He had been a frequent visitor there. And he had multiple gay dating apps on his phone AND he had used those apps to communicate with gay men. We still are finding out if he actually was gay or was internally coming to terms with his sexuality. But the idea that he chose the Pulse exclusively or even remotely in part because it was a “no gun zone” is just wrong.

I can’t say anything about any anti-depressants. You’ve mentioned them multiple times and it sounds like you have an agenda that you’d like to share and will at some point. I don’t think they had any bearing on this tragedy although they might.

As I said, he pledged allegiance to the head of several groups that are fighting one another. You can’t just cherry pick ISIS and leave out Hizbollah which is fighting ISIS or the Al-Nusra Front which is also in conflict with ISIS. If he didn’t say something, people would have easily pieced together why he did what he did. Turns out it’s not that hard and the truth is pretty evident. It had nothing whatsoever to do with terror or any terror groups.

I’ll leave my point on #5 stand. I pretty much agree with you, but the coverage hasn’t really even let family or friends speak on their behalf and they certainly haven’t let victims speak when they are capable. So glad Nick Jonas got the mic, tho…

now i’m reading that this florida bomber had connections to the nusra front whereas mateen pledged allegiance to isis which would seem to put them at odds with one another.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by InvaderRam.

it’s hard to keep up with all these threads sometimes. sorry.