Gifford (and others) Shooting

[Mr. Tea]

Edit: never mind. Yes, social factors people have no control over inevitably have an influence on the attitudes and values they grow up with - no, that does not in itself absolve any given person of any given crime.

 

[grizzleb]

Got to love the hyperbole, baiting and seething mass of barely contained vitriol kicking about...and that's just this thread!! LOL

 

[zhao]

if ever you choose to look closer, and if you dare believe your own eyes rather than what people in positions of power tell you.

just so we're clear, you do realize that this is exactly the same thing that crazy right wing dudes say? I feel like you're a heartbeat away from referring to "sheeple".

maybe. and just off the top, i can also think of a few other people who may have said similar things... Slavoj Žižek, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), Michel Foucault, Gandhi, Plato. Buddha, etc, etc, etc.

 

[zhao]

the second point, perhaps more important, is that your view of U.S. - from your far-off expatriate's perch - is nearly as distorted as, indeed, Sarah Palin's. all the things you named - segregated cities, rampant inequality, and so on - undoubtedly exist, sometimes with awful frequency, but they are hardly the entire picture and to claim otherwise is to surrender to all the worst aspects of this country and those who would enshrine and further them.

no they are not the entire picture. i do believe the ENTIRE picture would be much more grim. how about the pandemic normalized racism toward the invisible Mexican low wage labor force? how about the millions of impoverished descendents of former slaves who live in economic bondage and with conditions much worse than their ancestors? how about under age child workers which picks the fruit sold in super markets? none of these things see mention in newspapers, ever.

of course there are good things that happen in America. you should see me defending Americans and American culture to Europeans. but that doesn't change the system which is designed to enforce and propagate social injustice, injustice which is routinely ignored/hidden/normalized, or the, as you say, "galling" hypocrisy.

and why does it matter at all from where i type? i lived in America for 20 years and i actually feel, far as my personal identity is concerned, probably more American than anything else at this point in my life. so i can be typing from a submarine under arctic ice, and my present location would not detract one gram of truth from my words.

and the truth that my eyes see for themselves, is simply a lot more fucked, on so many different levels including structural and institutional, than most people care to acknowledge.

 

[zhao]

If that Reagan quote is 'WRONG, WRONG, WRONG", why do you want Palin to burn in (or even before) hell for something she's not accountable for? She's no less a product of her environment than anyone else is, after all.

that's not a Reagan quote. you missed the "she said" part in the article extract.

products of environment... compassion for white collar self serving criminals like Bush and Pallin? i suppose i would have to have some if i don't want to be like them. but not much. not much at all.

 

[Mr. Tea]

But the morally corrupting influence of wealth is proverbial. It's probably harder not to be evil if you've very rich than if you're poor.

 

[zhao]

and the likelihood of turning to petty criminality exponentially increases as you move down the poverty ladder.

you don't see the poor street kids caught up in a life of crime get any leniency due to social circumstance, why should the powerful fat-cat white collar thieves and murderers?

 

[Mr. Tea]

[edited as it has FA to do with the thread]

FWIW, it does seem - by the sound of things - that this arsehole with the Glock may well have been influenced by Palin's violent rhetoric and/or her shitty website. It's perfectly possible that the blame for the shooting lies mainly on the perpetrator's shoulders but that Palin's campaign bears some responsibility for it too.

 

[crackerjack]

this is getting weird

 

[Mr. Tea]

Sorry. Off-topic rant there. I'm just quite strongly opposed to this tendency to say that nothing is ever anyone's fault, there there, you couldn't help it, blah blah. Not that there aren't sometimes extenuating circumstances, but there are limits to what you can excuse by blaming society.

Anyway. None of this has much to do with Sarah Palin, per se. Neither does it mean I don't think this arsehole with a gun necessarily wasn't influenced by Palin's rhetoric and stupid website. Sarah Palin is not, after all, 'society' (thank god).

In today's news: man who accessed ('hacked') Palin's emails jailed for a year on insistence of govt officials, even after judge recommended his sentence be served in a halfway-house.

 

[IdleRich]

"there is, but as you mostly likely know the libel laws in the U.K. are famously much, much stricter - that is, far more generous to the plaintiff - than they are here."

Not for long hopefully - although I'll believe in Nick Clegg's reforms when I see 'em obviously.

 

[zhao]

The other day on the tube, some coked-up piece of shit threatened to 'stab the shit' out of me for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I mean, he wasn't even trying to mug me, he was just trying to feel like a big tough man to make up for his tiny dick. And you know what? Fuck that guy and his precious 'social circumstances'.

no, there might be exceptions, but the vast majority to all fucked up people are products of fucked up situations, and most of them deserve compassion and treatment rather than prison or the electric chair.

if you were a victim of abuse like that guy probably was as a child you would be in similar shoes as him.

and if he was pampered and spoilt rotten he might have become a smug little closet neo-con shit like you.

 

[zhao]

threatened to 'stab the shit' out of me for absolutely no reason whatsoever

well judging from the way you behave on here sometimes...

 

[Mr. Tea]

Abused as a child? Probably just never shown that there are boundaries to acceptable behaviour, is more likely. Which I suppose is a form of neglect, when you look at it like that.

well judging from the way you behave on here sometimes...

Yeah, sitting there reading a book like I had any right to, guess I was asking for it...

Anyway, you can fucking talk! I've never called anyone a "pathetic little slave", "child rapist", "smug little neo-con shit" or any of the millions of other delightful epithets you dish out when you (frequently) lose your rag. As for "smug"...you really don't have an atom of self-awareness, do you? I do love the way you try to be all Buddhistic compassion and love-thy-neighbour and then hurl screaming invective in the same post.

 

[grizzleb]

Just ignore him Tea. Not seen zhao blow up for a while, it always comes in a colourful fashion.

 

[hucks]

Just ignore him Tea. Not seen zhao blow up for a while, it always comes in a colourful fashion.

I think he was joking. I laughed, anyway.

Besides, I was gonna complain elsewhere that the board had got a bit quiet of late, but this thread's showing potential. So, zhao you should have heard what tea said about your mum!

 

[IdleRich]

"there is, but as you mostly likely know the libel laws in the U.K. are famously much, much stricter - that is, far more generous to the plaintiff - than they are here."

Having thought about this, it's not exactly libel I'm talking about though is it? I mean, if you say that the pilgrim fathers fled communism or that Stephen Hawking would have died if he'd been English you're not libelling anyone as such (maybe Hawking in the latter but only tenuously), you're just lying. Where is the law that prevents that? I don't know if there is one in this country either but for some reason it's no so often that I see someone telling such a huge fib - although I'm sure that it does happen, maybe just not so flagrantly with such high profile issues.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Blair's 45-minute claim? Everyone knows it was bollocks now, but there's been no legal repercussions for him (yet), despite everything that followed.

The thing about Hawking not having survived "if he'd been English" is just too funny for words, I mean do people not realise that he is English? Or do they think he comes from some obscure corner of the States where everyone talks like a robot?

 

[IdleRich]

It was Hoon who made the forty minute claim wasn't it? They've had to explain the genesis of the quote and claim quite vigorously that it was Chinese whispers and a misunderstanding that caused it to appear on the front of the Standard though right? Effectively admitting that it was untrue - whereas as far as I can tell the things I am talking about went unchallenged - I mean, blogs and that picked them up but there was no way in which the people who said those things were directly confronted with the proof that they were lying and asked to justify themselves.

 

[crackerjack]

It was Hoon who made the forty minute claim wasn't it? They've had to explain the genesis of the quote and claim quite vigorously that it was Chinese whispers and a misunderstanding that caused it to appear on the front of the Standard though right? Effectively admitting that it was untrue - whereas as far as I can tell the things I am talking about went unchallenged - I mean, blogs and that picked them up but there was no way in which the people who said those things were directly confronted with the proof that they were lying and asked to justify themselves.

It was part of the "dodgy dossier". I don't know if that was written by intelligence sources or the MoD (allegedly with a put of pushing from Campbell, though that was probably just Gilligan's invention). I think the mistake in the Standard front page specifically referred to Saddam's WMD hitting Britain rather than British interests or bases - the govt claimed they were talking abut Malta (I think). Hoon memorably said he hadn't corrected the Standard story cos he'd been out of the country and hadn't seen it.

edit: fwiw there's been too much made of the 45-min claim. It was a particularly egregious example of govt bullshit, but it's only retrospectively that people have claimed it played a major part in leading us into war. It didn't.