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Category: Off Topic Forum
Forum Name: Talk about anything
Forum Description: (In other news... current events happening now)
URL: http://www.avianflutalk.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=37040 Printed Date: April 26 2024 at 5:48pm
Topic: Broward School shooting.Posted By: jacksdad
Subject: Broward School shooting.
Date Posted: February 14 2018 at 3:48pm
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and families of today's mass shooting. As a father myself, I can only imagine the anguish and pain they're going through. Tragic beyond words.
------------- "Buy it cheap. Stack it deep" "Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.
Replies: Posted By: Satori
Date Posted: February 14 2018 at 4:03pm
The Florida School Shooting Was the 18th School Shooting of the Year. And It's Only February
American politicians and indeed the public as a whole have absolutely refused to do anything meaningfull to stop this sort of thing
the only option is GET USED TO IT
------------- “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
Posted By: Satori
Date Posted: February 14 2018 at 5:50pm
------------- “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
Posted By: EdwinSm,
Date Posted: February 14 2018 at 10:26pm
Our local radio news has this story (so no link), but in addition to easy access to guns it also mentioned poor mental health care....a terrible combination.
Recently the UK High Court blocked an extradition to the States stating the poor mental health care in the prison system as one of the reasons.
I am starting to see a common theme here.
But prayers and hugs to all those who lost loved ones in the tragedy
Posted By: Satori
Date Posted: February 15 2018 at 2:37pm
Grandmother turns in teen after finding mass shooting plot one day before Florida massacre
------------- “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
Posted By: Satori
Date Posted: February 19 2018 at 8:43pm
"There is a sickness eating at the body and soul of my home country, and it is on full view for the world to see."
------------- “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
Posted By: EdwinSm,
Date Posted: February 19 2018 at 10:20pm
On the radio news I heard statements about BLOOD MONEY
It seems the the NRA paid something like $21 - $36 million* in the last election to make sure there was nothing done to stop "the shooting of children".
* figures depended on which news source I read
Posted By: jacksdad
Date Posted: February 21 2018 at 10:09am
If I was the NRA or one of their paid politicians, I'd be awful worried. The kids are coming for you and they do social media better than anyone.
------------- "Buy it cheap. Stack it deep" "Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.
Posted By: Satori
Date Posted: February 21 2018 at 8:55pm
and as expected the NRA opposing even cursory reforms
The Latest: NRA protests minimum age hike for rifles
------------- “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
Posted By: Satori
Date Posted: February 22 2018 at 5:49am
California school shooting plot foiled, assault rifles found
------------- “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
Posted By: Satori
Date Posted: February 22 2018 at 7:33am
BREAKING: Trump Lays Out His Gun Agenda For Congress
can ANY of this get passed by a Republican controlled Senate and House ???
who are the politicians most afraid of?
the voters
or
the NRA ?
(I'm going with the NRA on this one)
------------- “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
Posted By: Satori
Date Posted: February 22 2018 at 8:09am
oh my God
NRA’s Dana Loesch: ‘Many In Legacy Media Love Mass Shootings’
------------- “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
Posted By: Satori
Date Posted: February 22 2018 at 9:02am
What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns
------------- “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
Posted By: Technophobe
Date Posted: February 22 2018 at 9:06am
Now who is "making political capital"?
I admit, I envy America's freedom loving attitude to such things as guns, but there has to be a limit when the price is so tragically, horribly high.
Concealed carrying teachers might limit the numbers, so would overall tighter gun laws. Unlike the red and blue brigade I do not see this as an either-or solution. Why not both?
If someone is determined to comit mass murder, they are going to find a weapon. The trick then is to limit The numbers as much as possible. So, concealed carrying teachers might help. Every single life saved is a treasure.
However, many countries other than America have liberal gun laws, but no mass shootings and some countries with repressive gun laws have suffered mass killings by truck or car. This needs a deeper look at your society.
Value your people more. Care for them in your system. Stop training people to jibe at each other all the time. - Have you looked at the TV your kids are watching? Even the Disney channel's stuff seems to encourage personal nastiness.
And finally, stop murdering your own people. You can't teach the value of human life whilst taking it away.
------------- How do you tell if a politician is lying? His lips or pen are moving.
Posted By: Dutch Josh
Date Posted: February 24 2018 at 4:18am
But what still isn't being discussed is that Douglas High School is more than http://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/3943017/jewish/At-Least-17-Killed-in-Florida-High-School-Shooting.htm" rel="nofollow - 40% Jewish , that Cruz believed that Jews were https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/16/us/exclusive-school-shooter-instagram-group/index.html" rel="nofollow - part of a conspiracy to unseat white people from power and destroy the world, and that the shooting could credibly be termed an anti-Semitic hate crime.
-
We're not having that discussion and not taking Cruz’s anti-Semitism seriously because common anti-Semitic tropes paint Jews as powerful and privileged, which leaves room for people to ignore the fact that the long history of prejudice against us continues to this day.
According to the FBI, 1.7% of Americans are Jewish, but last year https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/topic-pages/incidentsandoffenses" rel="nofollow - 54.2% of religiously motivated hate crimes were against Jews and 11.5% of overall hate crimes were against Jews.
-
When I published https://medium.com/@natalielifson/the-florida-douglas-high-school-shooting-was-an-anti-semitic-hate-crime-e1977d46bcef" rel="nofollow - my first response to the shooting, and asked why it wasn't being called out as an anti-Semitic hate crime, I was taken aback at the vitriol.
Comments range from anti-Semites despising Jews for supposedly https://medium.com/@restoringlogic/if-you-will-check-who-have-overtook-control-over-the-holywood-you-will-find-they-are-most-jews-5b68793a5629" rel="nofollow - taking over the world to claiming American Jewish high schoolers https://tikkunolamorgtfo.tumblr.com/post/170950149871/the-florida-douglas-high-school-shooting-was-an" rel="nofollow - deserve to be shot due to Israel’s crimes to completely https://medium.com/@sandboxws/even-if-what-you-claim-is-true-why-would-you-deflect-the-focus-from-gun-control-to-anti-semitic-564f929073c9" rel="nofollow - denying that anti-Semitism is a problem that needs to be addressed and asserting that Jews are https://medium.com/@sam.john.davis/does-the-author-not-realize-that-her-attempts-to-appropriate-this-crime-as-an-antisemitic-attack-39c39e2979ff" rel="nofollow - always "playing the eternal victim".
------------- We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. ~Albert Einstein
Posted By: Technophobe
Date Posted: February 24 2018 at 4:33am
Surfing idly through my regular news feed, I found this article arguing my point for me:
"America’s Gun Sickness Goes Way Beyond Guns
The ongoing debate about gun control points to a deeper rot that pervades this country's culture and political economy.
By https://newrepublic.com/authors/jacob-bacharach" rel="nofollow - Jacob Bacharach
My friend George recently suggested I watch Grimm, a sort of Law and Order-meets-Buffy the Vampire Slayer
television show about a Portland cop with the ability to see the
fairy-tale monsters who live, disguised, among us. (As in, the Brothers
Grimm, get it?) We’re both connoisseurs of bad TV, and because we are
both temporarily in long-distance relationships (his girlfriend is in
another city for work; my boyfriend is abroad on a research grant) we
have a great deal of time to watch them. You know, the thing that struck
me about the show—more than its absurd supernatural premise; more than
the cheesy creatures and special effects—was that in almost every
episode, our cop hero shoots someone to death. Yes, they’re monsters,
wolf-men and pig-men and snake-men and so on, but their monstrousness is
part metaphor for criminality, and while the precise timeline of an
episodic series is a little tough to pin down, it’s hard to avoid the
sense that this detective is aerating uncharged suspects something like
every other week.
I am for gun control in the abstract,
although I have my doubts about the efficacy of piecemeal legislation in
a nation with 300 million guns already bouncing around in private
hands. As is frequently the case in American political culture, the
“issue” of guns gets discussed largely in isolation from other “issues,”
although it’s lately become fashionable to link it to so-called mental
health, a bowdlerized catch-all term that mostly serves to reinforce the
canard that guns aren’t a problem so much as crazy people are. The only
particular evidence that Americans are in aggregate any crazier than
any other people on earth that I can find is that we have so many
goddamn guns, but let’s leave that aside. At root, the only political
considerations permitted into the gun debate are those that exculpate
the owners, distributors, and manufacturers of the guns. Better
background checks, higher age limits, specifically banned modifications?
Marginal improvements to be sure, but they, I believe, skirt some
fundamental social problems.
This year, the United States will
spend about a trillion dollars for war—more than $700 billion in base
“defense” spending alone. In the findings of a recent external audit,
the Defense Logistics Agency (the purchasing and procurement arm of the
Pentagon) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42954050" rel="nofollow - simply could not account
for hundreds of millions of dollars in spending. It seems they don’t
keep the receipts. Back in 2016, the Office of the Inspector General https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army/u-s-army-fudged-its-accounts-by-trillions-of-dollars-auditor-finds-idUSKCN10U1IG" rel="nofollow - found that the Army had made $6.5 trillion in erroneous accounting adjustments—a decade’s worth of defense appropriations—in a single year.
And yet the money flows in, more every year; the military remains the
most respected and beloved institution in public life, despite this
endemic corruption and waste. And despite some desultory efforts to curb
the practice in the Obama years, much used and surplus military
hardware finds its way into the hands of police.
Our police, in turn, are some of the most violent in the world. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police-shootings-2018/?utm_term=.141260bd6e98" rel="nofollow - relatively conservative estimates
put the number of Americans killed by cops at nearly 1,000 a year. It
is impossible to know how many violent but non-fatal encounters citizens
have with law enforcement annually. But while movements like Black
Lives Matter and growing coalitions for criminal justice reform have
drawn some public attention to the issue, our culture—especially our pop
culture—continues to valorize the heroic soldier-cop, the SWAT team
bashing down the door, helmeted and black-goggled, rifles ready to
blaze.
The radical right in America has an
expression: “politics is downstream from culture.” Leftists often
dismiss it as facile, and argue that much of what we consider cultural
is a product of specific political and economic choices. I think the
latter is true in a general sense, but I think the hard-right slogan is
instructive nevertheless and points, if unintentionally, to a maddening
feedback loop in American life. The political and economic choice to
allocate so many of our society’s resources to endless, expanding
war-making, to armed cops and barbaric prisons, has a deranging
influence on our cultural life. Among other things, it makes warfare—a
gun culture—quotidian and banal; it makes weapons of war perfectly
ordinary tools; it makes TV cops taking body shots at suspects who are,
obviously, always guilty, normal; it makes the idea of turning teachers
and principals (and custodians! and guidance counselors!) into armed
agents of the state, there to protect children against equally armed
citizens, a topic for political debate rather than a notion as
insane as fake moon landings and a flat Earth. And this, in turn, makes
the billions and trillions we spend on warfare, at home and abroad,
likewise seem like something other than the craziness that it manifestly
is.
To consider the preponderance of gun violence
in American society in isolation from the broader questions of how we
allocate our collective resources—of how we determine social value—is
inherently self-limiting. A strong anti-gun movement may make some
marginal gains; I would be thrilled to see even a modest effort to move
mental health out of the purview of police and prisons and back into the
realm of counseling and medicine. But in the absence of a larger
leftist agenda to move guns and war from their central position in our
government and political economy, I find it hard to imagine that there
can be really fundamental change, and I fear we will continue this slow
drift toward more armed guards, more locked doors, more checkpoints, and
more professions—educators now, then what: nurses? doctors? transit
workers?—simply deputized as armed agents of a violent state whose
citizens in turn enact in ever greater numbers the gun-happy antics in
which they marinate every moment of their waking lives." Source: https:///newrepublic.com/article/147185/americas-gun-sickness-goes-way-beyond-guns" rel="nofollow - https://newrepublic.com/article/147185/americas-gun-sickness-goes-way-beyond-guns
I think a few of the views expressed a little extreme, but generally it simply put it better than I did. I can only see things getting slowly (but steadily) worse and the death toll rising. Unless a few mass shooters go after the gun lobby, or those who profit from it, instead of the completely innocent. Those who face death, lose loved ones or their own mobility and long-term health tend to go anti-gun, surprisingly. (I am not advocating that approach - every death or maming is a tragedy best avoided.)
The refrence to "Grimm" does nicely illutrate the "gun and firearm killings are normal/laudable" culture. It does, however, fail to notice the acceptance of the: "I'm alright, Jack, so f**k you." attitude or the: "Isn't it fun to mock people - especially if they are different in some way?" culture. That omission does not surprise me, it is so endemic it has become totally invisible. Unless you are arthritic, when was the last time you really noticed how wonderful a design your knees have? Lack of care has become the norm to the extent it is even more invisible than Harry Potter under his cloak.
Here is an illustration:
A kindly soul going to church and making a sizeable donation to the "Repair The Roof" fund, walking outside after the sermon with a warm feeling of "having done Gods good work". Then walking on the other side of the road to avoid the beggar who is obviously dirty -and who might be mentally ill and dangerous.
I am not saying America is full of heartless ba****ds, the vast majority of you are wonderful, warm and kindly. But, your culture is twisted and warping your young. You cannot treat that which is undiagnosed. Only your best friend has the courage to say: "You need a shower." or "Yes, it does make your bum look big."
------------- How do you tell if a politician is lying? His lips or pen are moving.