Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

rugged individualism, fear of black ppl + indigenous population, political mythologies of revolution against tyranny, hunting culture, frontierism... gun fetishism is kinda the most explicable of america's faults!

http://www.theonion.com/articles/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this,36131/

fear of black ppl

Ironically, it was exactly this that spurred Reagan to sign gun control measures in California in the late 60s:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/?single_page=true

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

rugged individualism, fear of black ppl + indigenous population, political mythologies of revolution against tyranny, hunting culture, frontierism... gun fetishism is kinda the most explicable of america's faults!

― Mordy, Tuesday, May 27, 2014 3:48 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's a lot to unpack, actually!

ban men

xpost

for a foreigner, I mean.

humankind, especially americans, are the deadliest animals alive

but also... the most dangerous game?

i don't advocate confiscating guns. i advocate arming prisoners. after all, we can't take away the right to freedom of speech just because someone's in jail

Loving this.

the amazing race

I dunno, is this legit?

http://atlasleft.org/tea-party-trolls-ammosexual-misogynistic-tweets-will-piss-you-off-images/

for kincannon that's actually fairly respectful

man

south carolina since its founding has been the most reliable source of toxic politics in america

and they still fly the confederate flag at the capital building

i blame andrew johnson

http://www.policymic.com/articles/89953/elliot-rodger-s-internet-history-reveals-something-more-sinister-than-just-misogyny

wait why is racism more sinister than misogyny.

racism+misogyny is more sinister than misogyny alone

here I was thinking they cancelled each other out.

http://thechrisgethardshow.tumblr.com/post/87041806996/overcome-your-programming-and-be-a-better-man

that is about the closest to otm thing I have read so far

forgive me if this comes off as provincial or whatever but i think malcolm harris has cool stuff to say sometimes and i'm curious for his inevitable al jazeera column on this, for people in the larger-scale press he usually hits intersectional stuff on the nose ime

re: Chris Gethard, apparently he went to my high school, probably just 4 years behind me. Noticed him popping up on friends facebook pages when he started getting known for improv stuff and been seeing him increasingly more and more on tv and whatnot. I think he's gonna get real famous soon, comedy-wise, though this post is getting a lot of attention.

i cannot read any more about this. i'm done.

I don't know who Chris Gerhard is but that is excellent

Wish he'd stop saying 'stick to your guns' tho

lol he quotes the chorus of The The's Lonely Planet almost verbatim

yeah stick to your guns not the greatest choice of words

The Gethard post lost me when he got to "no one was ever out to get me" because, especially for black people, sometimes "they" is a real thing and "they" actually ARE out to get you.

And when he propagated once again the "Columbine killers were lonely, shy kids getting back at their tormentors" myth.

Black kids, whose feelings of persecution are not mostly in their heads, are also not murdering masses like the white boys he is talking to.

Also Phil, I think you are way off.

"Because my fear is that in saying I remember identifying with the Columbine kids, or that Elliot Rodgers said things about his feelings that reflected my feelings at his age, that I’m coming off as sympathetic to them and what they did – that couldn’t be further from the truth." He's talking about identifying with a sense of being treated unfairly despite your superiority, not any of the rest of the mythmaking, and he doesn't let the Columbine dickheads off the hook at all.

Eh, maybe I'm misreading him, TWU. But when he precedes "We were the Columbine kids" with

We were the kids who girls never talked to. We were the kids the popular kids looked down on. We got made fun of. We got laughed at. I remember once entering the locker room of my high school’s gym, where a kid a year older than me named Rick walked up to me and backhand slapped me across the face. I looked up at him and he shrugged and said, “What can you do?” sympathetically. As if even he knew what he did reflecteda way of things that wasn’t fair, even though he was also choosing to do it.

it gets my hackles up.

He follows it with "on many, many levels we were". And then analyzes the similarity and differences in a very sensitive way, I think, with the specific goal of getting young white dudes not to feel like victims owed by an unjust world.

I'm with DJP. Also the statement "the world doesn't owe you anything" -- sans context -- is kind of awful. People aren't owed love or affection or sex but they are all should be treated fairly and decently. The author of the article was owed not being backhanded in the face by that high school bully. Women are owed the right to not be harassed or made to feel unsafe. Humans are owed all sorts of things by virtue of being human. Maybe this is nitpicky because what the author was taking aim at was a particular, odious form of male entitlement but in that case he shouldn't make sloppy, general statements.

yeah, that guy's statement seems a bit off

treesh otm

Actually the statement "the world doesn't owe you anything" is 100% correct and should be internalized so that people stop taking the good things in their lives for granted.

debt is kind of a weird/wrong concept to apply to human relations imo

or maybe not debt, but entitlement

Like, if 25% of the people out there who aren't thinking this way realize "the world doesn't owe me the things in my life that are awesome and I am really fucking lucky", think of the overall empathy increase; the ability to get out of seeing your situation as the default and what is "owed" to any person is instrumental in making people empathic to those who are worse off than them.

I think it's hard to crystallize in words what a healthy attitude towards life/others/ourselves consists of. It's something you kind of have to absorb my osmosis, if you're lucky, by being around good role models. One sad irony is this guy thought all he needed was sex to be happy, whereas what he really needed was a friend.

this kid needed friends or maybe better support years ago, he strikes me as someone who fell through the cracks bc outwardly he appeared to have everything and yet meanwhile he was quiet and solitary and having a running unreliable narration on his own life and perceptions that no one contradicted IRL and people online only reinforced. also I read this weird aside in one piece that mentioned him periodically splashing drinks on couples?

One thing that sticks out about the Gerhard post is that for all his alienated loserdom, he obviously had some good friends. It's "we" this and "we" that - not just "me".

this is a point where the pedant and the 13-year-old converge and point out that dude's name is Gethard

iirc, "the world" is somewhat larger than human society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjgyznFc18M

true. a herzog nature doc for every child.

Actually the statement "the world doesn't owe you anything" is 100% correct and should be internalized so that people stop taking the good things in their lives for granted.

― On-the-spot Dicespin (DJP), Wednesday, May 28, 2014 6:07 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Very true