Why attack Sikhs?

If I want to take Plan9 to Jose Andres' Minibar restaurant in DC, I have to make reservations months in advance!

I could take him to Andres' America Eats tavern, but I'm not paying if he orders the $16 peanut butter, jelly and pate sandwich.

 

I still dont understand the problem if the 5-day wait and background check is only on the first visit. Or is their website misleading or incorrect?

 

Your objection is what is unreasonable. I realize I'm coming from the German perspective here, but the very idea that criminals (and in your scenario, any kind of criminal) go and practice the use, aiming, and shooting of firearms in a legitimate setting and without restrictions (the only one being how deep their pockets are for this "hobby" of theirs) simply cannot make sense, even to an American.

Letting them become more proficient in the use of firearms and, by extension, deadlier in their application simply as to not inconvenience hobbyists with these pesky little background checks literally boggles my mind.

I do not see how you can reconcile your own desire with such an outcome, and stick to objecting to the present reality. And unlike others in this thread, I'm not an anti-gun liberal.

*thinks of the guns back in Afghanistan*

Ever consider that the system in Las Vegas may be flawed, and not the other way around?

Especially since Las Vegas is renowned worldwide for being a very sensible and not-crazy place.

 

are you seriously trying to juxtapose your own pain and suffering at the hassle of going through a routine background check so that you can exercise a hobby to a massacre?

perhaps you got so sucked into the anguish of being inconvenienced that you lost sight of what happened. this may help:

Wade Michael Page's acquaintances recall a troubled man guided by hate | World news | The Guardian

6 people are dead.
you are inconvenienced when you decide to indulge a hobby.

unbelievable.

 

That'll be the day.

 

um...cyn? did you notice what the thread title is before you collapsed in agony at the inconveniences you suffer at the hands of evil background checks if you want to go shoot targets somewhere in nyc? if you notice the title, then you will see the basis for the equating of the two things. there's no straw man. there's a chain of absurd arguments from you, coupled with sniping at me. now it's just boring.

 

Cyn...with all due respect, it leaves me baffled and a bit frustrated to think we should look at the impact of these acts of gun violence and how the nation should respond, in terms of public policy solutions, w/o, at the very least, including gun laws in the discussion.
--- merged: Aug 8, 2012 at 5:59 PM ---
Or refrain from raising the impact of the anti-Muslim fervor that has been stirred up by some conservative political leaders, talk radio, and special interest groups.

That is all...for now.

 

I'll move on from guns and accept the fact that it is off the table as part of a solution.

To the point Sikhs arent Muslims, I would suggest that ignorance combined with hate might not make the distinction, particularly when some attacks on Sikhs have included vile comments about Muslims. Along with the growing anti-Muslim rhetoric since 9/11 fueled in part by $millions from SOME conservative groups to promote fear of Islam or hate speech of SOME mainstream conservative talk radio or the recent McCarthy-like witch hunts by SOME conservatives in Congress?

SOME conservatives complain that good Muslims are not speaking out enough against Muslim terrorists.

Or that SOME conservatives in Congress created such a backlash against the 09 DHS report on the growing threat of right wing domestic terrorism/hate groups that nothing was done with the report's recommendations.

Perhaps good conservatives are not speaking out enough about the extremists and the haters on their far wing.

That is how we might begin to address the growing intolerance of "foreign" religions.

 

i wouldn't think it necessary to take gun control issues off the table entirely. maybe ending the direction that debate had taken before would be enough.

the casting of the united states as a christian nation is a function of the right's general shift into territory that would be understood as neo-fascist in much of western europe. remember that we were subjected to this logic as an aspect of mainstream american political discourse after the trade center attacks--that this is neo-fascist in western european political terms should be an embarrassment. better to pretend it's not the case, i suppose. anyway, this pattern of argumentation has not gone away for our buddies on the populist right---the entire, amazingly stupid reaction on last sunday from cnn and other paragons of intellectual excellence in emphasizing that sikhs are not muslims--again, as if it would have been understandable had they been so---is in itself an indication that this stupid way of thinking has not at all gone away. and it leans on something--it leans on populist conservative ideology. and that, folks, is conservativeland. it's a fantasy world. it's not at all like traditional conservatism--but i've noted this before and am hardly the only one to have done so---but back in the old days, conservatism was far more anchored to concrete historical reality and used that position to critique the liberalism of the day for its preference for abstract principles and so on. this move into neo-fascist territory is particular and, frankly, dangerous. but it does help maintain a level of consent for the continuation of grotesque levels of expenditure on the military apparatus.

to be clear, an ideology or a set of stories about the world typically comes with subject-positions built into them that people can take over and internalize as they take over and internalize those stories. back in the hoary old days of the 60s, the term for this was interpellation. it also means being placed under arrest, which is, obviously, a loss of freedom. maybe that's why the translators responsible for its introduction, such as it is, into english chose to keep the french word and pretend that it had a correlate. but i digress. the point is that not everyone necessarily takes over these stories at every moment, nor does everyone do it in the same ways---but it's available socially as a way of looking at the world. so like any other neo-fascist ideology, populist american conservativism hinges on identity and defines it through a series of exclusions--an outcome of which is this ridiculous idea that the united states is somehow "really" christian and that, therefore, anyone and everyone who believes otherwise is somehow "foreign"---and people--a LOT of them--buy into it---typically, they say, with increasing likelihood as the topic moves away from the range of their immediate experience. the structure of this identity is also that of racism. and it's normalized. and that's a problem. but i am not going to go through that again.

off to load more edits.

 

When questioned today about the McCarthy-like tactics against American Muslims in the federal government, Newt Gingrich praised McCarthyism for rooting about communism.

In another story today, a leader of the homophobic Family Research Council called for an “Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households.” I wonder when we might see the first case of kidnapping the child of a same-sex couple to deliver the child from evil.

But I'm getting off topic again....unless the topic is the need to call out intolerance every time we see it.

 

an interesting little piece about how the republicans got heimat security to end passive monitoring of the ultra-right:

Were the Sikh Temple Killings Preventable? | Mother Jones
for example, this is an interesting question:

here's a parallel segment from this morning's democracy now:

Former DHS Analyst Daryl Johnson on How He Was Silenced for Warning of Far-Right Militants in U.S.

 

perhaps this report offers an partial explanation for the reluctance of the right to investigate its racist extremities:

Author: Sikh Temple Massacre is the Outgrowth of Pervasive White Supremacism in U.S. Military Ranks