Why attack Sikhs?

I've come to the conclusion that I am not capable of understanding the choices and sacrifices that people are willing to make to protect either the image of their political identity or the inanimate objects that they enjoy playing with. It is not within me to understand.

I remember a few years back (when host was still here) there was a thread that promoted violent revolution to counteract the excesses of the Bush administration. It sickened me then, and it still sickens me.

Political action taken against property that results in the destruction of said property, to my thinking (and I know people differ, because we had this discussion here a long while back, too), is valid. I realize that it is illegal and I realize that those who practice it run the risk of going to prison. BUT, that is what activism is. The history of protest in this country is rife with acts of political vandalism and the outright destruction of property. In fact, many of the rights and privileges we enjoy today are the direct result of people taking to the streets and fucking.shit.up. Protest in America today is like a cakewalk compared to the labor revolts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

On the other hand, murder as a political act is rooted in hatred. It is a perversion of activism. I understand, to an extent, the circumstances (often highly unjust circumstances) that bring people to the point where they believe it is their only choice. I still don't support it, but I understand.

I guess I've lost my way...

I suppose what I'm getting at is that, I see my country as becoming possessed by reactionary preoccupations and it is not possible, very often, to determine whether a person is or is not a real danger until they have done something horrendous. If the mental health sector were able to predict these things, they might more often be able to prevent other deaths. Such as suicide, for instance. It is illogical to point at every contributing factor to these horrible events and claim that changes need to be made in order to prevent them...except for any guns that were involved. Which is most often the case in America.

As always, I just want things to make sense. Strive for balance. I don't want to take away everyone's guns and make it impossible for cyn to go to the shooting range. And chances are, if everything were laid out on the table and people decided to look at the issue rationally and with everyone's best interest in mind, then there's a chance that modifications could be made to existing law that makes everyone happier. But instead we have this intractable ideological standoff on the part of the 'gun lobby' that prevents any sort of rational dialogue. So we have intrinsically unbalanced people making decisions for all of us in an unbalanced world with increasingly larger numbers of unbalanced people. It's fucking insane. I can't wrap my mind around it.

 

So discussion about it at all is nonsensical and imbalanced?
How does that work?

 

that kind of wholesale relativism undermines even the barest illusion of democracy. it undercuts the possibility of rational debate because it collapses principles and even information into the particularities of individual interpretations and then offers nothing to appeal to. "it's just my opinion, man..." it's yet another intellectual black hole floated and used out there in conservative ideology that is of a piece with their surreal identity politics---but this one operates to protect that identity from any unhappy-making aspects of reality--like, for example, that the form of identity politics that it is of a piece with is structurally the same as any other racist discourse. if you opt for this facile relativism, you never have to think about it--or anything else that's unpleasant---you just opt out of dissonance and retreat into some subjective hole in the ground. you can even say to yourself that you're doing something else. it's just my opinion, man. another, equally simple-minded version of this is the assumption that all infotainment except that which comes with an explicitly ultra-rightwing frame is necessarily false because it comes from this phantom "liberal media"...all that does is substitute aesthetic preference for thinking...what is true is what "feels" true, and what "feels" true is what resonates with your political pre-dispositions, which you've exempted from any rational debate at all because, in the end, "it's just my opinion, man"....these are problems, you'd think---especially if, in other sectors of that same bizarre-o ideological patchwork, you'd feel inclined to blab about what a great democracy the us is---which you would be obliged to do, of course because without something like that, the victimization trope that makes the illusion of "being invaded by foreigners" which is not far from "being invaded by brown people" has no explanation. the arbitrary assertion of american fabulousness is kind of a big deal for this circuit of memes. and if the arbitrary of american fabulousness is predicated entirely on the presence of words you like, and you are told you like the word "democracy" then that explains the fabulousness. and if your very identity-political viewpoint that lets you say that is, by it's nature, the opposite of democratic, it doesn't matter. the information source is hostile, and therefore false by definition. and besides, it's just my opinion, man.

 

That pretty much encapsulates the last paragraph of my previous post.

 

Start with a little common sense (nothing should be off the table)
Add a willingness to compromise and build consensus for the greater good
Stir until rigid ideologies are dissolved
Repeat as needed

 

As an aside, a mosque in missouri was burned down a couple days ago. there's also been a political shift in missouri toward the nutcase tea party right. obviously there's no direct causal link. but there's something more than a correlation to it. on the other hand, within the past 48 hours about half the money required to rebuild the mosque has been donated from other americans. so there is an outside of contemporary neo-fascist thinking.

Missouri mosque burning: Imam says 'tragedy' will not 'stop us'

the wisconsin massacre was not a matter of chance. people are not little particles zipping about inside a box of some kind in enough number and at such rates that once in a while one just pops out. people act in accordance with what the context enables. so, like baraka says, there's an obvious problem with racism and xenophobia in the states that's been made worse by the slide into neo-fascist language since 2001, one that's gotten worse and more pervasive in the populist right since denial about the record of the bush administration became a political imperative after the farce of 2008. there are other problems as well--if the democracy now reports above are correct, it's become difficult to monitor ultra-right organizations. the explanation for this leads in no good directions. there's also a considerable body of information that points to a problem with racism in the military---not only explicit white supremacy movements, but in the way in which this asshole "war on terror" has been reduced to instructional manual material and made to seem legitimate there. and there's no doubt extensive connections between involvement with neo-fascist organizations and passage through the military---but obviously the reverse is not the case...at the same time, given the importance of the military as a conduit for conservative voters (one always votes for one's patrons and the right has been dumping VAST amounts of money into the military since reagan...and of course there's the jingo thing...but i digress)...maybe that is yet another cultural factor at play here. but who wants to investigate that? cutting across this is the wider problem of ease of access to guns.

these contexts exist independently of the massacre in wisconsin. but i doubt very much the massacre in wisconsin would exist without them.

 

the american discourse of "terrorism" is simplistic and racist. that's the point of the exercise above. it's simply a list of curious side-effects of that discourse.

 

How convenient. That how you distilled what I said, leaves no space for discussion.
Which is, you know, what I actually said.

 

Um, you stated what I stated more concisely? Cyn. Really? I'm kind of in shock. I may need time to recover from that one.
Or, better yet, refrain altogether from 'stating what I'm stating more concisely.'

Rather than that, take something specifically that I said and show me how I am planning on encroaching on your rights. The way it stands right now, it sounds like you didn't even read what I wrote.