Nobody Cares: PRS

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Assuming that they know where the man is from, it's a good bet that he indeed did go there with a purpose in mind, given the comment about it being someone outside the community.

At that news conference, I think they mentioned that the guy they've got is from Allen, TX. Allen is a suburb of Dallas, which is quite a ways from El Paso; but it does make sense if his goal was "war against the invading Mexicans", he would go to a border city with a large number of Hispanics.

 

[Myficals]

]However, something deep inside me is revolted that a newspaper columnist should launch that sort of attack on just about anyone, and particularly on someone who is, when all is said and done, a seventeen-year-old girl

Andrew Bolt is our local equivalent of Piers Morgan, or pretty much any Fox news talking head. Being an abrasive, abusive, reactionary gobshite is pretty much his entire reason for being.

 

[Grandma Bates]

At that news conference, I think they mentioned that the guy they've got is from Allen, TX. Allen is a suburb of Dallas, which is quite a ways from El Paso; but it does make sense if his goal was "war against the invading Mexicans", he would go to a border city with a large number of Hispanics.

I was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for a brief time. It is not a border city. A large percentage of the people in the city are Tejanos. People whose families lived in the area when it was a Spanish and later Mexican territory. Many are descendants of people who died at the Alamo and fought in the war for an independent Texas. They have generational ties to the United States far longer than most others in this country. To view them as anything other than American is deeply offensive and lays bare the racist basis of this undercurrent of hate that infects the United States.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for a brief time. It is not a border city. A large percentage of the people in the city are Tejanos. People whose families lived in the area when it was a Spanish and later Mexican territory. Many are descendants of people who died at the Alamo and fought in the war for an independent Texas. They have generational ties to the United States far longer than most others in this country. To view them as anything other than American is deeply offensive and lays bare the racist basis of this undercurrent of hate that infects the United States.

Didn't the shooting happen in El Paso? That's about 8 hours away from San Antonio, and is a border city.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Tangentially relevant to today's terrorism. This is genuinely one of the most chilling things I've seen.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Roughly two hours ago, in Dayton Ohio:

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

According to a police press conference, 9 people were killed and 16 more injured in the Dayton mass shooting. Shooter is also dead. Police didn't give any information about the shooter except that it was a male and he used a "long gun".

 

[Grandma Bates]

Didn't the shooting happen in El Paso? That's about 8 hours away from San Antonio, and is a border city.

Ugh, I am a moron. You are right. Sorry about that. I read the mention above about Allen TX thinking it said that he was a couple hours away and did the calculation. I should have been more careful.

I went through basic training at Fort Bliss in El Paso. It is definitely a border town and has a richer mix of people with respect to how many generations have been in the US.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

My thoughts about both El Paso and Dayton.

I don't get it. White men STILL have most of the power in this world. Why, oh why, are they going on rampages and murdering innocent people?

Well, they're being told constantly that "others", brown, black. women, gay, whatever, are taking their power away. That POS sitting in the White House incites it, then sends "thoughts and prayers", the NRA incites it, the money that backs them incites it.

What is an average American to do? Vote anyone who is pro-NRA out of office, now! I don't care if they are Democrat or Republican. They are compromised by money. They aren't your gun rights/education organization anymore. Don't live in the past of what they once were. This is not your father's organization anymore. They now take Russian money to funnel to people like Trump and they promote hatred and violence, as well as the idea that you are going to fight a tyrannical govt with your guns while they use a drone on you. We HAVE a govt that flouts all laws and rules, in case you haven't noticed. Where are the patriots?

Get rid of ANY politicians supporting the NRA. Your loved one's lives might depend on it. I don't want to hear any nonsense about how "only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun." Really? We expect teachers in a school, average people in a mall, a church, a movie theatre, a store and people with MAYBE a pistol to be able to fight off an attacker with an AR-15, because of our fetishization of guns? C'mon now.

When was the last time you heard of anyone with a gun averting the deaths of 10-20-30-40-50-58 (Vegas, and worst ever) innocents by killing the bad guy who is sporting a semi-automatic rifle? Never? Yeah, that's what I thought.

I'm angry and I vote. Join me in rejection of our murderous enterprise for money. We have allowed these abominations and only we can fix it, assuming we haven't yet been completely compromised.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Holy $@%# is this awful take destined for deletion.

 

[Lady Darnk Juniorette]

Holy $@%# is this awful take destined for deletion.

Just goes to show that no matter how smart you are, you can still be a daft cunt.

Bravo Neil.

 

[Sid]

Seems like some kiddie who wants to defend his right to play with his toy, no matter what.

 

[Lady Darnk Juniorette]

Neil is really hyper dorking his turbo nerdism.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

He makes a perfectly valid factual point, but my reaction to it isn't that it's simply one more example, as if we needed any more of them, to demonstrate Bentham and Kant were wrong about how we form judgments -- it's not a straightford calculus based simply on trying determine the quantity of harm or good caused to the greatest or least number of people, which I don't think many people really believe to be the case anyway. Profound philosophers with their own YouTube channels that make you dread getting stuck in an elevator with them, maybe, but not most people.

Seems to me that a significant difference between a mass shooting and the other causes of death he lists are both part of common culture and experience and seem, in some way, explicable. They're part of our mental picture of the world -- we know such things happen, and we may well ourselves have been personally affected by some of them. With the auto accidents, in particular, I think most of us must, at the very least, have once or twice thought "that was close -- it could have been a very nasty accident" at something we've seen on the road, even if we haven't been involved in a road traffic accident ourselves.

Similarly, while few of us can have had much experience of murders, they're something we can readily understand, by our constant exposure to accounts of actual and imaginary murders via the news and entertainment media. Most murders seem to us to be committed for reasons we can understand, though obviously deplore -- revenge, anger, greed, jealousy, whatever.

In contrast, a mass shooting is a sudden and shocking irruption of completely unexpected and inexplicable violence into the most mundane of daily life --people are peaceably going about their legitimate everyday business, someone suddenly appears and starts murdering them for no comprehensible reasons.

Of course it's particularly shocking and horrifying. How could it be otherwise?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Dayton shooter bullied, intimidated schoolmates

The man who killed nine people Sunday morning in Dayton’s Oregon District was once kicked out of Bellbrook High School for making a list of girls he wanted to kill, the Dayton Daily News learned in interviews with former classmates and school administrators.

Police said they haven’t yet established a motive for Sunday’s massacre. But acquaintances tell the Dayton Daily News the warning signs — signs of the shooter’s unusual obsession with killing and death — cropped up long ago.

“This isn’t a mystery to me,” said one middle school classmate. “I’m furious.”

The classmate, who spoke to the newspaper on condition of anonymity, said the shooter once said he fantasized about tying her up and slitting her throat. The fetish was so macabre that even the shooter admitted he was scared of his thoughts, the woman recalled him saying.

“He knew it wasn’t normal,” the woman said about the decade-old conversation. “He and I talked at length about him getting help.”

The woman said she and her parents told Bellbrook police about the bizarre admission, but the woman said she felt she wasn’t taken seriously, despite the would-be shooter including her on a hit list.

Bellbrook police haven’t released information about any involvement they might have had with him.

Chris Baker, the former Bellbrook High School principal who resigned this summer, confirmed to the Dayton Daily News that the shooter was suspended for causing a lockdown by writing a hit list on a bathroom wall.

“I would not dispute that information, but I don’t want to get involved any more than just making that comment,” Baker said.

The twist in this case though, is that unlike the El Paso shooter who was all about the "Mexican invasion", the Dayton shooter on social media described himself as a "leftist", complained about the proliferation of guns, and criticized politicians for not acting in the wake of the Parkland school shooting. He made tweets urging people to "vote blue". Doesn't fit the mold of the typical white American mass shooter at all. I mean, the woman-hating is right there, but the rest of it is unusual.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Ava Glasgow]

The twist in this case though, is that unlike the El Paso shooter who was all about the "Mexican invasion", the Dayton shooter on social media described himself as a "leftist", complained about the proliferation of guns, and criticized politicians for not acting in the wake of the Parkland school shooting. He made tweets urging people to "vote blue". Doesn't fit the mold of the typical white American mass shooter at all. I mean, the woman-hating is right there, but the rest of it is unusual.

Unfortunately violent misogyny doesn't seem limited to conservative ideology.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Random interest: