Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

What is tyranny if not keeping an entire nation hostage to the NRA and people like Ken Paxton?

you and all of your families would suffer and likely perish in a civil war

oh word

Yeah, that’s likely. And one of many reasons why it won’t happen.

Yeah, there are liberal gun owners, but conservatives have decades of amassing weaponry on their side.

I don't know what needs doing. Passing the universal background check and assault weapon ban bills? Amending the Second Amendment out of existence? Saying fuck you to this fucking country?

The latter.

I’m not suggesting generalized violence or civil war. But man are we mote passive than our ancestors.

look, I'm all for meaningful action on gun reform, but god, just look at this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country

there are 1.2 firearms for every person in this country. no other country comes close. we have 4-5 times more guns per capita than virtually every other major country on the planet. even assuming that we can pass background checks, implement fingerprint scanners, magazine limits, greater waiting periods, etc. etc. there are still so many guns in this country that it will never be an issue finding one within my lifetime. I'm not saying that we shouldn't try, of course we fucking should, but the right-wing line that this is inevitable or "the price of freedom" is...more or less true right now???

yeah, it's like climate change. The things that can be done won't be done, so we focus on mitigation of damage instead.

My wife and I deliberately are not having children (despite our relative privilege as white heterosexual middle class) and one reason is because of the bleak future we see for any children in this stinking corpse of a country under climate change. That’s our protest.

No disrespect at all to those with children, I know it’s a personal decision and I do not judge people for having children.

you and all of your families would suffer and likely perish in a civil war

― imago, Wednesday, 25 May 2022 bookmarkflaglink

What a ludicrous thing to say to people who are living in fear of being gunned down already. Or suffering because they can't get affordable healthcare.

I know that, when someone floats the idea of secession of the rational states from the irrational states of this syphilitic union, the answer back is usually “well it will doom the poor, people of color, and the good people to be trapped in those hell holes”, and I’m not waving that away, I understand it. But the minority of shorty states are dragging the rest of us down to hell with them. They are not going to let blue states have legal abortion, or gun control laws, or universal health care. All states will be dragged down to their level. If you are rescuing a drowning man, and he’s thrashing and trying to pull you down with him, the advice is to let him go and drown lest you be drowned with him.

A new country with a generous refugee policy from the hell hole states may be the way to go.

A fanatic minority in this country is actively dragging down to drown tens of millions of its would be rescuers. When do we let go and save as many as we can?

I can send you my Venmo account number.

I generally give dramatic “threats” to leave this country the side eye, but every month that goes by my partner’s EU citizenship provides us a little more comfort. unfortunately nothing doing until her kids are graduated from hs, so we’ve got at least 7 more years to be murdered by a gun freak while 106 year old Nancy Pelosi sends fundraising e-mails for a pro forced-birth candidate with an A rating from the NRA

the idea of 'good states seceding from bad states' is many years out of date' imho, the cult of white supremacy, gun obsession & fascist death worship is no longer confined to "the bad states" (if it ever truly was.) the divide today is urban vs suburban/rural, in every state.

otm

Hell, even reliable D states like Illinois become near complete R washouts once you get 45 minutes outside of Chicago city limits (minus the two small pockets of downstate college towns). Every few years the rest of Illinois starts making noise about seceding from Chicago. But this isn't a state by state thing anymore.

wonder how many heretofore pro-secessionist conservatives (outside of DC) have figured out that their lopsided electoral power means that in reality they’re not locked in here with us, we’re locked in here with *them*.

I can send you my Venmo account number.

I live in Nassau County, NY and specifically in a very liberal village and still there are are nearly 40% of wingnuts here against masks, taxes, etc. Last year our school budget vote, which until 5 years ago had always been a formality, only passed by 17 votes, because a couple of people are pissed off about the budget and started accusing the school administration, board, union, teachers, etc. of basically being corrupt, suing the district, etc.

This year they whipped up such hysteria there were yard signs everywhere. Turnout and the margin of victory increased to 3-400 hundred votes (out of a couple thousand cast)

The long and the short of it is this fight is everywhere, not just red v. blue states, and will be going on long after we are all gone.

wonder how many heretofore pro-secessionist conservatives (outside of DC) have figured out that their lopsided electoral power means that in reality they’re not locked in here with us, we’re locked in here with *them*.

Oops that wasn’t really a response to Will. I agree with his point.

I am 100% serious about Alfred making me Negronis, though.

they’re not locked in here with us, we’re locked in here with *them*.

That's the goal, for sure. They don't want "us" to leave, they need our productivity and our money. If you look at per capita GDP by county, it looks very similar to voting maps — the blue areas are where most of our economic activity is concentrated.

xp - I was told there would be Alfred making Negronis on every corner.

I am 100% serious about Alfred making me Negronis, though.

― DAMAGED by Black Flat (Boring, Maryland),

You bring the Stilton!

What a ludicrous thing to say to people who are living in fear of being gunned down already. Or suffering because they can't get affordable healthcare.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 25 May 2022 13:54 (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes clearly these terrible iniquities which I somehow wasn't aware of already will be solved by armed conflict

you manage to come across as both a truly boring bastard and a radicalised nutcase, dunno how you do it but props

shut up, eh

get the fuck away from me too, you tedious cunt

ukilx has driven away anyone interesting or good-natured, leaving in its wake a hive of dickheads

Can we fucking PLEASE keep this shit out of this thread right now

sorry, going now

sure, sure, take your time

NEW: Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) says gun control measures would likely not be taken up until after Senate Memorial Day recess

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) May 25, 2022

this country hates children and makes no effort to hide it.

was working in a primary school when sandy hook happened. they had us do a lot of extra trainings and stuff, obviously. it ranged from light self defense and hiding to how to talk to the kids if it came up.

the synopsis is basically: nobody thinks it will happen to them.

(and then when it does: jeez, sucks for those parents. we're prepared at my school.)

in the weeks after sandy hook, a group of students started a "library group" at recess and i was of course happy to accommodate. turns out, the group of kids was scared to be outside and even more defenseless than usual and going to recess was giving them nightmares. another group of "troublemakers" (i.e. otherwise great kids that had some ongoing behavior issues) started ditching school to canvas the neighborhood for suspicious people so they could then run to school and warn everyone. these were all fifth graders: between 9 and 11 years old.

maybe stating the obvious, but we're creating generations upon generations of children riddled with ptsd and we're doing absolutely fucking nothing to prevent, mitigate, or even acknowledge that it's happening.

i would have traded places with any of those kids in texas yesterday.

Yeah can we please quarantine the fantasist LARPing to a more appropriate thread. Plenty of us are suffering under the yoke of violence. That’s zero reason to assume an outbreak of increased violence will improve anything, at all. Especially when you consider how much of our body politic lives on corporate-controlled social media now which basically exists to inflame divisions. /rant

I have an appointment with an immigration lawyer in the country of my choice booked for Monday morning. I've been thinking about leaving for years and a number of factors have combined to convince me it's no longer worth waiting. Nothing is going to improve. In fact, things are likely to get substantially worse. Did you know that subsidies for health insurance are going to be allowed to expire? That means that if, like me, you have an Obamacare plan where the monthly payment is $1100 but the government pays $900 of it, it's about to go to the full $1100 by year's end.

Oh yeah I’m also actively planning my getaway (back to China) even as I take breaks to crap up this discussion.

I've thought more and more about what options I have either for relocating somewhere else in the US other than Texas or leaving altogether. It's something I really don't want to do, I'm happy where I am, and I don't know what would be a decent alternative. But I also don't want to wait it out until actual armed brownshirts are roaming the streets. It seems absurdly farfetched, but combining theocratic laws that encourage vigilante responses with massive weapons stockpiling does not leave me feeling particular secure and safe here.

one other reason attacks in schools have been allowed to slide is that the right also hates public schools and sees it as a positive that people don't feel safe sending their children there

^bingo. hate to attribute some 4-D chess to these bags of pus but I mean goddam

Intersectionality isn’t exactly 4D chess, and there is negative intersectionality just as well as positive. The military-industrial complex has been an open secret for yonks, and you can go back to the Powell memo of 1971 to see how they explicitly named schools, courts, and the media as their main targets for capture.

“Capture”, or elimination failing that presumably.

they hate schools bc they see schools as places for nerds and they are insecure & dont like things that make them feel dumb, no more complicated than that

Reminder that active shooter drills are especially worthless now because the war on elementary schoolers has been going on for long enough that the active shooters also went through active shooter drills

— moby dickgirl (@epistemophagy) May 25, 2022

xpost

Yes no doubt we can dumb any issue down to some basic insecurity on the other side’s fault. Here is an actual statement quoted in the memo I just cited though:

“Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men who are practitioners of ‘the politics of despair.’ These young men despise the American political and economic system . . . (their) minds seem to be wholly closed. They live, not by rational discussion, but by mindless slogans.”A recent poll of students on 12 representative campuses reported that: “Almost half the students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries.”

“fault” = part, I think. You know what I was getting at heh.

It is depressing to me to read respondent surveys about "why do school shootings occur?" and seeing that barely half of respondents in these studies cite "it is easy for them to get a gun" as being a contributing factor.

it’s the horror twin powers of “zomg woke globo indoctrination, teaching our kids slavery was bad!” of the hoopleheads and the death drive to privatize financialize and gamify literally every single aspect of our existence, courtesy of the multi-millionaire and + class and their handmaidens in both parties, activating

Speaking to a dozen senators this morning, it’s clear that the right to buy assault-style weapons will be protected by this Congress, and that many republicans have no intention of supporting any federal measures at all in response to this school shooting.

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) May 25, 2022

i'm shocked.

well, not that shocked