Monday, June 13, 2016

The guilty punish the innocent for the crime of existing




     Soon you'll be able to put a filter on your newsfeed to screen out these mass shootings. Then you won't be forced to feel the queasy chill of reading horrific news — such as 50 partiers slaughtered at a gay nightclub in Florida. The worst mass shooting in U.S. history. Your attention won't be wrenched away on a beautiful Sunday, the hot weather breaking into a delightful cool. You won't be left tapping your finger on your watch, waiting for officials to figure out exactly what — overwhelming hatred, religious insanity or just regular old psychosis? — motivated someone to throw away 50 innocent lives and his own poisoned existence.
     As if the reason mattered.
     Such a filter would certainly save me the discomfort of having to set aside a promising topic — how Donald Trump's pathological lying and Tourette's syndrome insults are not separate character flaws, as typically presented, but two sides of a coin, the latter an essential raspberry to blow off anyone who dares point out the former. I woke up eager to get at it.
     Not today. Today we stare at the carnage in Orlando.
     Or should I say, we stare at more carnage in Orlando. One day and four miles away from where a mope gunned down 22-year-old "The Voice" singer Christina Grimmie — no official reason for that yet, but I'll put my chips on what Hamlet calls "the pangs of disprized love" — a better-armed shooter walked into Pulse, a "high-energy gay dance club" and shot about 100 people, killing more than 50, as if in rebuke for our focusing on just one death.
     Crying over one young person? Here's 50 more. Cry about that.
     Hmmm, let's see . . . futility of even talking about sane gun control? Done it. Inhumanity of using other people's horrific tragedy for political ends? Been there. The day fast arriving when such atrocities become such a quotidian part of American life that we don't even.... 


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28 comments:

  1. And the Bible requires disrespectful sons to be stoned. It's disingenuous to take the Koran with a literalness that only a very few Muslims do, and then pretend that it instructs the whole, particularly given the long and bloody history of Christians murdering non-believers. It's a weak tea form of hate, with the healthy dose of hypocrisy and cowardice that is typical.

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  2. Looks like someone around here has formulated their opinions by visiting the Drudge Report®. I've managed to inoculate myself against such faulty logic, and from having my brain eaten away, by mainlining Pyrethrum.

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  3. Not that it matters a bit, but this wasn't the worst mass shooting in U.S. History. Tops in the modern era perhaps. Apart from atrocities on both sides during Whe Indian Wars (150 Lakota were gunned down by the U.S. Army at Wounded Knee) the laurels should probably go to the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 11 (familiar date) 1857, in which members of a Mormon militia murdered 120 men, women and children passing through southern Utah on their way to California.

    Religious paranoia also played a role in that grisly episode.

    To Clark's comment, if it turns into a Christian vs. Muslim thing this sad old world is in for a bad time. Commenting on the bloody 20th Century, Winston Churchill said the wars of the peoples were worse than the wars of the Kings. A war of the priests, imams and reverends would take it to another level.

    Tom Evans

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    1. Don't forget Rabbis, Tom.

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    2. Fortunately for our age, the zealots are few and far between; unfortunately, they're all armed to the teeth and capable of inflicting great harm in a short period of time.

      john

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    3. Thanks for the history lesson, Tom. I was skeptical of the worst massacre in U.S. history angle, but couldn't put my finger on it.
      I still believe religion can act as a restraint on its adherents preventing excessive bad behavior. Even when people are worked up into a frenzy of hate in a pogrom, their blood lust is sated after a few days of killing, giving the surviving victims a chance to get out of town while they still can. The big numbers of deaths, in the 20th century, were caused by the atheist leaders who executed their plans with cold methodical precision, with no sympathy for the victims. Psychotic malefactors like, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, various Kims in North Korea, and Pol Pot, really racked up the big death counts. Although Hirohito was of the Shinto faith, I don't believe religion was the driving force behind Japan's mid 20th century militarism.

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    4. Not an easy matter to sort out. Communism has been described, not entirely inaptly, as a secular religion. Certainly, its 20th Century adherants acted with religious zealotry. Hitler may have come to his rabid anti-Semitism via his Catholic upbringing. Over a million died in Muslim/Hindue violence when India was partitioned. As the Founders recognized, religion has many benefits, but becomes poisonous when paired with the power of the state.

      On the Saudi's and Wahibbism, Hillary Clinton criticized their funding of schools that foster fundamentalist views in her statement today. Something she probably would have been contrained from voicing as Secretary of State.

      TE

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    6. TE - No surprise on the Mormons. They pulled some hijinks in Central IL at the Missouri border as well, in the 19th century. No Romney for me for a variety of reasons.

      As for the Orlando terrorist, he got past the FBI in the past, but the bureau is probably stretched thin with these types of cases... don't know how he got past the club security guard with such a large weapon.

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  4. Clark, you are right in saying this will help elect Trump.

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  5. The Bible specifically calls for the killing of gays...the Koran does not.

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  6. It's not a few Muslims that follow the Koran literally.
    It's all of them that follow the Wahhabist trained imams that the Saudis are spreading throughout the world, especially the US.
    The Saudis are determined to change Islam to their insane way of thinking & life & are succeeding at it in much of the Middle East, Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan & are even supplying the occasional bomb to the Uighurs in Eastern China.
    Then you have the mullahs in Iran, who are determined to destroy Israel & supply the Arabs there with money, weapons & their insane beliefs.
    Jews stopped killing people over religion 2000 years ago. Christians finally stopped a few hundred years ago, with the exception of the Nazis last century.

    Islam continues to kill over religion & just isn't going to stop until we, the West, put an end to it!
    They even kill each other over minor shit that happened over a thousand years ago.
    Swift was dead on correct, when he created the Lilliputians fighting over which end of the soft boiled egg to crack open!

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  7. How do you suggest we "put an end to it" without becoming the Nazis?

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  8. @Wendy: As Golda Meir said, "We don't hate you for what you do to us, we hate you for what we have to do to you"
    We're going to have to kill them, if they don't stop killing us! It won't be fun, that's for sure, but until we force the Saudis & Iran to stop exporting hate, they will keep doing it, because they believe they must conquer the world & impose Sharia Law.
    We have to stop buying their oil. While the US imports almost no Gulf oil, the Navy, Army, Marines & Air Force do use Gulf oil for our Middle Eastern operations & much of the crap we buy from China is either produced from Gulf oil or powered by it. That also has to stop.

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  9. The part in the 'Bible' that speaks of stoning is the Old Testmament and part of the Jewish books as well- let's not forget.

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  10. If we shouldn't generalize against Islam, then we shouldn't generalize about Christianity either. (am not a born again)

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  11. The part in the 'Bible' that speaks of stoning is the Old Testmament and part of the Jewish books as well

    What "Jewish books" would those be? "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"?

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  12. Clark St.: Whom exactly should we be killing overseas, or anywhere else, to prevent a gunman born in New York from committing mass murder in Florida?

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  13. BS- from quote

    "Torah comes from the Hebrew word for "law" and refers to the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—also known as the Pentateuch. The word torah is used also to refer to the scroll of parchment on which the Pentateuch is written. The scroll is considered a sacred liturgical object in synagogues and is often richly decorated and given other marks of respect. In Orthodox Judaism, the Torah also can refer to the entirety of the law, both in written form (Scripture and other sacred writings) and in oral Tradition.

    When Christians refer to the Old Testament, we are referring to all forty-six books of the Bible written before Christ, including the first five that the Jews call the Torah."

    And the OT/Torah in part, is where the stoning is mentioned.

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  14. Of course the NRA and gun makers and conservs are knee deep in this too. Why would anyone outside the military need an automatic rifle? They'll sell to anyone too. Liberals have tried to tighten the laws on this, good luck.

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    1. The AR-15 rifles as manufactured and purchased by Mateen, are semi-automatic, that is each trigger pull will discharge one bullet. Some survivors of the Pulse nightclub shooting, in interviews describe the sound a fully automatic weapon, or machine gun would make. That would mean the rifles were illegally modified. The NRA may oppose such laws, but they never advocate breaking laws, their website has explicit instructions on how to comply with existing gun laws. Hopefully these details will be clarified, as more information is revealed in the ongoing investigation.

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  15. Private: And your point is....???

    Bitter Scribe

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  16. Just replying to your comment about what book that comes from. No need for sarcasm when one disagrees with you.

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  17. Some of those Crusaders were also keeping Muslims from entering further into Europe. They aren't always the bad guys.

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  18. Bernie- from a quote

    The assault-weapons ban was in effect from 1994 to 2004 and banned certain semiautomatic weapons, including some AR-15 models, and set a limit on high-capacity magazines. Congress chose not to renew it after it expired.

    I think we know which party would want that ban to expire most.

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  19. As to Julie's comments-Islam is still very tough on gays.

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