bnw wrote:

Those that support the 2nd Amendment want freedom. Those that don’t support the 2nd Amendment want perceived safety. I see no middle ground.

———–
I think that sums up your view (and many others) accurately. I dont view your notions as ‘alien’ just different than mine. Your view is dominant here in WV, btw.

My own summary of my view is… the 2nd-amendment/gun-control ‘debate’
is like… Frodo and Sam arguing about whether the local werewolf should be permitted
to have a crossbow…meanwhile Sauron
is in Mordor planning to destroy the biosphere and middle-earth.

…ok, maybe thats a bit confusing…but thats my view
and I’m sticking to it.

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zn wrote:

…Gay Muslim…

The carnage in Orlando has shaken my very core, but after my experiences traveling throughout the Middle East as a gay man (open in some countries, fully closeted in others), I cannot say I am surprised. Any identity I have ever claimed now lies exposed as a wound that will never heal. Saying “gay Muslim” seems like a reason for damnation.
I’ve spent the last decade of my life making two films. The first, A Jihad For Love, is about the lives of gay Muslims throughout the world. The second, A Sinner In Mecca, dealt with my own personal journey and my effort to reconcile my faith and my sexuality in Islam’s holiest places, surrounded by people who would sooner see me publicly beaten, thrown off a cliff or beheaded.
These are strange times. It is a season of Islamophobia in America, where Donald Trump whips up xenophobia with a tweet. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s attacking a religion that’s already at war with itself. Muslims like me have fought hard not to become casualties…

——————-

These stories about christians or muslims who remain ‘of the faith’ but want to
‘reform’ their particular Religion/superstition…always leave me smiling…and sighing.

I mean, yes, I am in favor of humans reforming their fairy-tales
and making them less patriarchal, less bloody, less racist, less homophobic, etc.

But yet…I wish-ta-god they didnt need their damn infantile fairy-tales
to begin with.

What a planet. Fairy-Tales and Corporations are gonna be the death of us all.

And tornadoes. The weather people are saying we may have tornadoes around here
this evening. I just hope they are not radical-islamic tornadoes.

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Billy_T wrote:

Also, WV,

That fear people have? Where does it come from, and what (and whose) purpose does it serve? The most obvious source is the Gun Industry. Whip up fear, in any way possible, through the NRA, the GOP, Hate Radio, craven Democrats, etc. etc. . . . and you get a huge increase in gun sales — as in, profits for billion-dollar corporations. Since we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that more guns means more death and injury, those people who live in fear, including the poor, are being radically hurt by this steady stream of propaganda.

————————

Well, walk around on the street like a poor person sometime. The street of a city at night. In a poor neighborhood. Kinda like Chris Long did. Then ask “what purpose does fear serve” and then wonder if its only the gun industry thats whipping up irrational fears.

I work with the poorest of the poor everyday. I hear their stories of life on the street. (And this is just a little town in WV). Their fears are justified. They cant rely on the police or the middle-class-folks safe in their homes or behind their gates.

I see too many wealthy pundits on the media acting like there’s nuthin to fear. Really?
Try going out in the city the way the poor have to.

At any rate, I just dont care about gun control. I’m not against it, I’m not for it. Its just not an issue I’m gonna spend brain-energy on. Corporate-Capitalism has created a dangerous hell-hole for a lot of poor people — if they wanna get guns, fine by me. If the Government bans assault weapons fine by me. The gun issue pales in comparison to the “corporate-capitalism is mass-murdering the biosphere” issue.

Im a mono-maniac on the corporate-capitalism issue, BT. I just am. I know hundreds of folks are gonna get shot in amerika every year coz of mean-guns. And banning assault weapons might save some of those folks. Not all, but some. (cause the legal weapons can kill a lot of folks too, and weapons are easy to modify, etc, etc)

As you know though, corporate-capitalism is killing all life. How bout we ban corporate-capitalism. Its a tad worse than an assault weapon — itz an assault-ideololgy 🙂

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• This reply was modified 9 years, 10 months ago by wv.

Mackeyser wrote:

I call the gun people’s bluff.

Pull the guns and let’s see what happens. Let people go on “stabbing rampages” and we’ll see what the deal is. Not that I want that to happen, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing the kinds of devastation we see regularly with guns.

Let’s do it. Let’s call the bluff.

Cuz I call bullshit. Total and complete bullshit.

This isn’t a debate or an argument. It’s complete and utter preference.

A segment of the population wants something and that something results in the senseless deaths of a lot of people. It’s time for that to end.

But I’m with you, WV.

If we overthrow the corporate-capitalist stuff, it’ll be so much easier to deal with issues like this…

=======================

Mack, people are afraid. Lots of real, palpable FEAR out there in the land.
Fear of being attacked, raped, mugged, humiliated, emasculated.

That fear aint going away. Its getting worse, as society continues to crack
and disintegrate, and the rich get richer and the rest get more vulnerable to “street
crime.” The gun mania is a side-effect of corporate-capitalism.

That fear is not going to be trumped by ‘reason’ or logic. Thats why MORE guns are gonna be sold after this latest murder-spree, not less. More.

The kindergarten murders didnt lead to any gun-control and this wont either.
And the next wont either…

Too much real fear out there.

Did you ever see the Louie CK episode where Louie is bullied by a tough guy?
Louie’s character is humiliated by this ruffian in front of his date while they
are in a diner. If you’ve seen that show, you will recognize what the gun-control folks are up against. That was a fictional episode of course, but it hit on a fear
that is at the bottom of the American male soul. Until people feel safe, they are not
gonna change the laws.

Just my opinion, but i dont see any change coming from this latest massacre. Cept more fear, and more gun sales. Heck i bet half the people that survived that thing will go out and buy guns now.

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bnw wrote:

I’m from Tennessee the land of unlawful search and seizure. What? Just one gun? A musket?

———–

I agree with you, btw, that political-folk will always want to twist the science.
The various interest-groups on the liberal-side may very well twist the science findings one way. And the rightwing-interest-groups may very well twist the science in a different direction. But I dont blame ‘science’ for any of that. Science is just science.

So, lets not ban science just because one group or another might twist the findings.

Instead lets work for an educated public that can understand science on their own.

Ok, thats my last word on the gun-shit. I’m way more interested in building a revolution to overthrow corporate-capitalism. I cant be bothered by band-aid issues 🙂

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zn wrote:

zn wrote:

Ex-Wife Says Orlando Shooter Might Have Been Hiding Homosexuality From His Family

Enh.

This one is all just speculation.

.

============

Yeah, agreed.

w
v

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

I’m not sure anything quite typifies what the Republicans have become,
more than the law they created barring scientific research.

I mean….just pause…and think about that.

Does anything say “Republican” more than that?

And i own a gun.

w
v

bnw wrote:

wv wrote:

PA Ram wrote:

And yet Trump will benefit by convincing frightened people that this is just another part of the holy war and that the answer lies in building giant walls around our country.

And it won’t solve this problem.

—————-
Well if the majority of American citizen-voters thinks ‘like that’
and want Donald Trump to be President of the United States — what does that say about America, and how did those voters get ‘that way’ ?

w
v

Provide proof that Trump has said he wants to put US citizens in internment camps! The real question is what does that say about those who won’t vote for Trump that they would fear monger such an outcome?

—–

I dont know anything about Trump talking about internment camps, but he shoots from the hip constantly, so: A) it wouldnt surprise me if he said it, and B) I wouldnt take him seriously if he did talk about it.

I know you like Trump. You are entitled to like Trump.

My own thing is to lump Trump and Hillary together. I see them both as
reflections of an electorate that has been propagandized to the point
we get voters thinking the are wasting their votes if they DONT vote
for the corrupt-corporate-puppet-warmongerer, or
the billionaire talk-radio-Republican.

w
v

His main point was — the D will be fast and fine if we stay healthy.

I, agree, to state the fairly obvious.

w
v

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

And why couldnt he drop the weight?

The impression I get from this is, it’s not “couldn’t”, it’s “didn’t.”

————-
Why do you think that? Seems more like ‘couldn’t’ to me.

w
v

I wouldn’t say couldn’t because he did last year.

But in any event, it just randomly strikes me that we have a different discussion if we used: mustn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, shan’t, daren’t, hadn’t, hasn’t, needn’t, doesn’t, can’t, won’t, and/or oughtn’t.

Football can be so complicated.

=============
Yes, i know he lost weight last year (some posters thot it was a mistake)
So why would he want to lose even MORE weight ? Or did he gain it all back
again.

These are important matters. Matters of ‘mass’. I remember when Wistrom was so light he floated away one windy-game in Chicago. I always thought Pat Haden should have tried to gain some height in the offseason, but I guess the idiot-coaches wanted him to play short.

My goal this offseason is to develop powers like Dr Strange. I think if I had a big Cape
it would all fall in place. What is your offseason improvement program-goal ?

w
v

I dunno that i agree with Mack, that this would benefit Trump.

I suspect Trump has already won-over the “anti-Islam crowd.” I doubt
there’s anymore folks to be won over from that piece of the voting-pie.

The election now, is down to a small slice of the pie,
and i dont know exactly who those uncommitted folks are.
But i doubt they are the anti-islam, anti-immigration folks.
They are already wearing Trump buttons.

What do i know, though. I’m just a meteor guy.

I dont have anything intelligent to say about the actual crime, cept,
there will be more. Every year there will be more. No matter which Replicant
or Duplicat is President.

w
v

zn wrote:

The stupid governor of Texas quoted “reap what you sow” on this one.

Let’s hope that holds true for him saying that.

—————-
A Meteor would be nice,
maybe.

“Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump also weighed in on Twitter, calling the incident “really bad” and linking it to terrorism. Trump later said that he appeciated the congratulations he was receiving about “being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” but he instead wanted toughness and vigilance.”

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