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well, this is a curious exercise in self-restraint at this point, isn't it?
we live in a space of surveillance--closed circuit television systems to satellites to television---and the idea of surveillance is to render visible and the motive behind rendering visible is rendering predictable--but somehow it just seems to be the case that there's no amount of prosthetics that can make arbitrariness go away. the more arbitrariness freaks you out, the more likely you are to substitute for situations which allow it (arbitrariness, unpredictability) to surface these other scenarios in which one (everybody is strapped) or another (everybody is "hard" is more manly in their manly man-ness) functions to eliminate arbitrariness or unpredictability.
msd already said the main point, i think: people will snap. sometimes people when they snap will have access to a weapon. sometimes when those factors converge, some lunatic Mission will take shape and a bunch of people going about their lives not thinking in any way about the possibility of some lunatic Mission will end up dead or wounded or traumatized.
the reason it's good that this thread has remained characterized by self-restrain is that nothing general speaks to this kind of situation.
these are particular people in a particular town who had this particular action visited upon them. it could have been anywhere i suppose, and it could have been anyone, but it wasn't and it wasn't.
it's hard to know what to do with a thread like this really.
it makes more sense than they often do because uncle phil knew someone who died there, and my sympathies go out to him.
but there's not a whole lot more to be said that that, is there?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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