A colleague of mine had as his tagline to his emails the old saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. Recent events have made me think that “When you have a gun, everything looks like a threat’, while less pithy, expresses a truism.
This thought was triggered by a recent set reports of people shooting at others seemingly for no reason other than they felt threatened by innocent actions and happened to have guns conveniently at hand to use. In each case, death and injuries arose simply because one person had a gun and felt that its use was the only way to deal with a situation when doing nothing or just talking would have worked much better. But having a gun not only prevented them from exploring other options, it escalated the situation beyond all reason.
One case that has received a lot of publicity is that of a 16-year old Black adolescent Ralph Yarl who happened to go to the wrong house in Kansas City, Missouri to pick up his younger siblings from a party. When he rang the doorbell, the 84-year old white homeowner Andrew Lester, seeing him through the glass door, shot him twice, once in the head. Yarl survived but it is very likely that there will be long-term consequences that he and his family will have to deal with.
The homeowner’s grandson said that he was disgusted by the shooting and that his grandfather said racist things and watched Fox News round the clock.
In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon Thursday morning, Lester’s grandson, Klint Ludwig, said he’s “disgusted” by the shooting and stands with Yarl.
“This country, it happens over and over again where people get away with killing unarmed innocent Black people,” he said.
Ludwig said his grandfather’s “racist tendencies” have been reinforced by his media diet.
“He was fully into that and watched Fox News all day every day blaring in his living room and I think that stuff really kind of reinforces this negative view of minority groups,”
“He’s just a stock, American Christian male, older, that’s just how they are,” he continued. “The conspiracies and weird random racist things that they say.”
Ludwig said he pushed back on his grandfather’s racist ideas and conspiracies, including about election theft, infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci, and “something about Black women getting abortions.” He said they’ve subsequently lost touch.
The next item concerns a Black householder in North Carolina Robert Louis Singletary who came out of his house and shot at a six-year old white child and her parents who had come onto his garden to collect a basketball that had rolled onto it. He then fled and was arrested 500 miles away on Florida. Racism has not been alleged to be a factor, at least not as yet.
The suspect was previously known to police for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend with a sledgehammer in December.
…A neighbour told reporters that the shooting had unfolded after a basketball rolled into the suspect’s yard.
Local residents told US media that when the children went to retrieve their ball, the suspect shouted at them. A father of one of the children went to the suspect’s door and remonstrated with him.
Police said the suspect went inside his home and came out with a gun before he fired indiscriminately at neighbours. The father who had argued with Mr Singletary was not injured by the gunfire, said neighbours.
The girl was treated for bullet fragments to her cheek. Her mother suffered a grazing bullet wound to the elbow. Her father was taken to hospital with serious injuries.
If you live in any neighborhood that has children, their stuff (balls, frisbees, whatever) will inevitably come into your neighborhood and they will come to collect it. The more polite ones will first knock on your door and ask for permission, others will quickly scoot in and out. But it is utterly routine and trivial, nothing to get angry about.
Then we have the case of four young people in a car searching for a house in upstate New York on a Saturday night who mistakenly turned into someone’s driveway and were turning around. The homeowner came out of the house and from his porch fired at the car, killing a 20-year old white woman who was in it. The 65-year old white man Kevin Monahan who killed her has been charged with second-degree murder. He has been described as a ‘confrontational and hot-tempered’ person.
Wednesday’s hearing, however, did not shed light on why the suspect would have opened fire on the SUV.
A neighbor told The Associated Press that Monahan had become more and more upset in recent years at people making wrong turns into his driveway.
People turn into other people’s driveways all the time. I cannot recall the number of times people used my driveway because there is no other way to turn around on a narrow street than to first pull into someone’s driveway. I have done the same thing many times.
Then we have the case of a 25-year old man in Texas 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr., who allegedly shot at two young women who had mistaken his car for theirs and tried to get into it.
The most seriously injured of two teenage cheerleaders shot in a Texas parking lot this week – an incident in which one said she’d opened the wrong vehicle door – is recovering from surgery as her team prepares to compete in a world championship without her, an official with her cheer company said.
Payton Washington was shot in the leg and back during the early Tuesday attack in the city of Elgin, damaging her pancreas and diaphragm and requiring her to undergo surgery to remove her ruptured spleen, Lynne Shearer, managing partner of the Woodlands Elite cheer program, told CNN on Wednesday.
…The other Texas cheerleader – Washington’s cheer teammate Heather Roth – had gotten out of a friend’s car in the parking lot and opened the driver’s side door of a car she thought was hers, only to find a stranger sitting in the passenger seat, Roth told according to CNN affiliate KTRK.
As she tried to apologize to the man, he got out of the car and began shooting, Roth said during a prayer vigil Tuesday night, according to the affiliate.
A witness told CNN on Thursday the suspect fired three to four shots as they drove away.
The man – who asked not to be named due to safety concerns – said he was sitting in his car and was on the phone talking to his family abroad at about midnight on Monday when he saw car lights turn on about 100 feet in front of him and then heard gunshots.
He remembers seeing the suspect standing outside the vehicle and firing his gun as the cheerleaders drove out of the parking lot.
“After that, [the suspect] also started following them by starting his car and follow[ing] their car,” the witness said.
Mistaking someone’s else car for your own in a parking lot is easy to do. I once tried to open the door of a car that was the same make and model and color as my own in the library parking lot and wondered why my key did not work. The actual owner happened to turn up at that moment and said that it was his car and then I realized that mine was a few cars further down. I apologized and we laughed about it and then had a discussion about how his hybrid version differed from my regular one. Then there was the time one of my daughters, who has absolutely no interest in cars, tried to get into someone else’s car. We were coming up behind her and saw this and were highly amused because our car was an old Honda Civic while the car she mistook for ours was a fairly new BMW. The only commonality was the color but she was oblivious to the differences. Fortunately we lived in a community that was not infested with gun nuts and so the thought that someone might start shooting over such trivial mistakes never entered our heads.
In all the four cases listed above, death and injury occurred because of the easy availability of guns. But you will never convince the gun nuts and their Republican supporters of this. They will say that in each case, guns were not the problem but that the shooter had mental health issues. But while that may be the proximate cause (trying to kill someone is prima facie evidence of a deeply troubled mind), the ultimate cause is the easy access to guns that allows such people to have them.
Easy access to guns also greatly increases suicide risks -- it’s way to easy to kill yourself with a gun. Successful suicide rates are much higher in places with easy access to guns compared to places that do not have such lax rules.
The old trope “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, conveniently ignores the fact that guns are extreme force multipliers. No normal human can kill another human at a distance by simply flexing their index finger. But the energy stored in the cartridge can be released with that same flex. It also conveniently ignores the fact that, with the exception of hunting rifles and firearms designed for competition, the basic design function of a gun is to kill humans. That’s it. It has no other function (excepting as a vehicle for profit for the manufacturer and as a political talisman). Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the easy availability of a device which is designed to kill humans actually winds up increasing the number of humans killed, either on purpose or accidentally. And that’s not conjecture. We have plenty of US and global data showing that availability increases gun deaths.
You combine that with a paranoid political subculture that conveniently ignores the first half of the 2A, the fact that we long ago abandoned the idea of a militia in favor of a standing army, the fact that the authors of the Constitution were not flawless saints of untouchable intelligence and wisdom (horrors!), and that (amazingly) things have changed in the past 240 years, and we arrive in the here and now.
My feelings on guns have changed considerably over the years. I grew up in a culture where young boys started with a BB gun and then moved onto a .22 rifle. Then, you got a “real” hunting rifle. Today, looking around at the craziness of guns in the US, my opinion has evolved to outlawing all handguns and semi-automatic rifles of any kind. Government buy-back at prevailing rates. The only thing allowed would be hunting rifles/shotguns, with a maximum capacity of two carts/shells. Also, specially modified devices for competition/target shooting. All of these would require licensing, registration, insurance, background checks, and passing appropriate safety coursework.
Some people would call that extreme, but I will simply point to the evidence showing that we humans simply cannot be trusted to be around firearms in the long term. Far too many people will succumb to “monsters from the id” (as in the movie Forbidden Planet).
Let’s be honest, if people really need a gun to protect themselves in their homes, cars, or when out and about in public, we have a badly broken society, and more guns will not solve that problem. (For the record, I do not believe that to be the case, but rather, bad actors are pushing the idea of extreme fear and falsely claiming expansive crime waves for their own reasons).
At the very least these incidents put the lie to the phrase “An armed society is a polite society”, a phrase that really means “Everyone is afraid of being murdered at all times”. In practice, an armed society is a society where the person who shoots first lives.
US media is relentlessly violent, emphasizing bloody revenge and mass killing as an example of dealing with social problems. Eros is banned but Thanatos and Mars are everywhere.
We cannot simply point at guns as the problem -- they are perhaps the most important part of the problem -- we need a multi-axis push for change.
That republican congresspeople post family pictures of their kids with guns -- the AR-15s in the picture are not the problem, the congressman is.
I think this ignores the cultural background of too many Americans where, in many cases, this is a logical response, if somewhat extreme. And linking gun violence with mental issues doesn’t help to solve either cause.
It should have been “mental health issues” in the previous comment.
“An armed society is a polite society” says two things about a society:
1- Rudeness is so endemic that only the threat of death compels people to act politely,
2- Murdering someone is seen as an acceptable response to someone being rude to you.
Am armed society is a sick society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_This_Horizon
jimf @ # 2: It also conveniently ignores the fact that, with the exception of hunting rifles and firearms designed for competition, the basic design function of a gun is to kill humans. That’s it.
Further exceptions do exist. F’rinstance, where I live now, I’ve shot venomous snakes more times than I can remember; where I lived previously, we can add wild boars to the list of legitimate save-a-life targets.
I’ve encountered two-legged snakes and pigs in both locations and elsewhere, but statistically and experientially feel safer if neither of us had firearms than if both did.
I’ve been making the hammer/nail analogy for years, usually with “when all you have is a gun, everything looks like a target.” Combined with the constant messages that
1) Guns are the only/best way to protect yourself
2) Everything around us is trying to kill us, especially all the ones who are black, brown, Asian, Hispanic, weird, homeless, mentally ill, liberal…
There was also the CPAC Q&A from last year (I think) where an attendee asks “…when do we get to use the guns?” No one focused on the one thing that hit me like a lightning bolt: the use of the phrase “get to”, as in “I’m really itching to shoot liberals. Can I get started?”
@John Morales — Other countries have the same access to the same media, in some cases, even more gory/sexualized/violent than we do in America.
Funny how they don’t have the same shooting problems we do.
Almost like its the GUNS, and not the media, that’s the issue…
Oops! My above should have been directed @Marcus Ranum! Apologies, John, I fucked up!
It’s the guns.
Can’t remember which comedian it was, but my favourite formulation of the old saying is: “Guns don’t kill people. Gun owners kill people. With guns.”
That said:
Well it won’t, will it? Haven’t had the SJW memo? Black People Can’t Be Racist. So racism cannot be a factor. It’s simply not possible, any more than the shooter’s ability to fly unaided could be a factor. Right?
Fixed it for you. Can’t find somewhere to turn round? That’s what your reverse gear is for. Or, y’know, just keep driving until you do. Or fucking learn to do a 3 point turn in the road, it’s on the test in the UK.
Once again -- it’s the guns. In fairness, if it’s been going on for years I can see how that continual disregard by members of the public for the boundaries of his private property and simple courtesy to not infringe on it would start to grate. Then again, for less than the cost of a gun he could have invested in a rising bollard that would automatically drop into the ground when his vehicle approaches, but which would rise up and impale anyone who tried to enter his drive unannounced. This would have multiple benefits, including not injuring anyone, not leading to being charged with assault with a deadly weapon or whatever, causing endless entertainment over the years, and if it set up some CCTV even maybe a revenue stream from Youtube showing the multiple random inconsiderate drivers whose cars his bollard fucked up and rendered undriveable. This video demonstrates them in operation in Manchester city centre -- it’s hilarious, especially the bloody stupid great Porsche 4x4 spilling its coolant all over the road after the driver destroyed its radiator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIas-5pwpZk
My understanding of the meaning of the 2nd is that the militia is supposed to protect The People from The State, i.e. the militia is supposed to pose a credible threat to the standing army. Which in 21st century America is hilarious.
@mjr, 4:
Well, yes -- like the Sun is the biggest body in the solar system. It’s not just bigger than everything else combined, it’s 99.86% of the entire mass of the solar system. And the fact that basically anyone can get a gun in the US is, I suggest, 99.86% of the problem there -- you could have a culture that glorified bloody revenge as an honourable, admirable thing, but if there weren’t guns to effect that revenge it would somewhat change the landscape. For instance: can you imagine 84 year old Andrew Lester seeing a 16 year old Black person at his door, getting angry, and going to confront him hand to hand, or even with a big stick? I don’t fucking thing so. It’s the guns.
@Pierce Butler, 9:
Where is this hellscape where you keep on cornering venomous snakes and not being in a position to let them simply leave? That’s just weird. And if an encounter with a boar is a realistic possibility and you think a 12 gauge slug from a shotgun isn’t going to work, then maybe just stay home, eh? Or are you in 20-50 feral hogs territority?
@13 sonofrojblake
The framers didn’t like the idea of a standing army because they felt an unscrupulous president would use it for his own purposes. A militia, i.e., a citizen’s army, posed much less of a threat. The idea was that the citizens would use their own guns and gather at regular intervals for training and drill (hence the “well regulated” part of the 2A). Federalist # 29 (by Hamilton) sheds light on the whole militia issue (including the fact that it should not be too large).
It was soon discovered (certainly by, oh, 1812 or so) that a militia was not going to be sufficient, and we switched to a standing army. Thus the opening phrase of the 2A “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” is not true, and was abandoned within a few decades of the writing of the US Constitution. Thus, we see that the 2A is a zombie amendment which has been feasting on the brains of some Americans for many years.
Addendum to previous:
Black people can’t be racist. I’m as woke as i think a straight white cis employed bloke can be, so i do get that.
They can sure as shit be anti-semitic, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/apr/23/diane-abbott-suspended-by-labour-after-saying-jewish-people-not-subject-to-racism
So… Anti-semitism can’t be racism. Does that sound right? Except… Isn’t saying that what’s just got that Black woman cancelled?
Can someone woker than me explain this?
sonofrojblake:
Depends on how one defines ‘racism’.
But surely they can, being people and all.
Sure. Intersectionality.
sonof
Funny, the people that get bent out of shape at someone using their driveway for a three pointer strike me as the inconsiderate oblivious arseholes.
Doesn’t take much.
I’ve gotten abuse while walking my dog because he stepped maybe 1.5m into someone’s driveway to sniff. No peeing, no pooping, nothing like that. Just sniffing.
Still, at least I wasn’t worried about either me or my dog being shot.
Other countries have the same access to the same media, in some cases, even more gory/sexualized/violent than we do in America.
Other countries like Switzerland have highly accessible guns, yet no mass shootings. So, dogma aside, it’s not just the guns and it’s not just the media. There’s more to the mix -- domestic violence is comorbid in around 80% of mass shooters.
Lots of people offer simple answers that are wrong. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I believe we need to study mass shootings as a public health problem.
However, if (for example) a German is watching John Wick they are going to tend to interpret that media as a movie about Americans doing American things -- it’s set in New York, American actors, American props, settings, and popular attitudes. We cannot simply interpret popular culture as though it automatically translates, as you attempted to do. Imagine how odd it would be to watch Seven Samurai with no thought of Japanese history or culture, and conclude they were such violent bastards just because of the swords. No, it’s more complicated than that. It’s a problem that originates from a bunch of stuff including easy access to guns, but the popular culture angle is also inescapable -- or are you going to say incels only identify as incels because they have guns? That would not make sense. It’s a complicated problem and I’m not pretending to have an answer but “it’s the guns” is at best partial. I’d go 50% on the guns, but what else is going on? The fact that domestic violence also correlates highly is not to be ignored. It’s a special toxic brew that is very American.
In conversations with Europeans, it’s my impression that they are more likely to see American media as an example of how violent we are; there is no desire to emulate us.
Another question is Bollywood. India has surreal levels of mob violence and sexual assault. They have riots there that kill more people than our mass shootings. Obviously, they don’t have mass shootings because they don’t have easy access to guns, but the mob murder rate is really high. What do we make of this? If they had guns would their mass murder rates jump? They’re already not zero. We look at American mass murders as gun violence, which is true, but pointing at other societies and saying “they have no gun violence!” sidesteps the point that a lot of people get killed in very personal and messy ways -- if we looked at the rate of “stranger on stranger mass violence” I do not know how we’d stack up.
It would be tempting to say “yeah but that’s political violence” except the US fascist wing is embracing mass murder as political violence. So how do we compare?
Again, I think we should be looking at this as a public health issue, to try to tease out the risk factors. Is domestic violence a comorbidity with mob violence in India? Or is it religion? For that matter is religion a comorbidity with mass shootings in the US?
Richard Rhodes made a solid argument that “violentization” is crucial to the psychological make-up of American mass killers in his book Why They Kill unfortunately there was little follow-up to it by social scientists. His thesis is simply that if someone learns that personal violence can solve their short-term problems, they are likely to use it. He describes a lot of interviews with murderers who determined that violence was effective when standing up to domestic abusers. I felt Rhodes was grasping for some valuable insights but the book got buried.
Anyhow, if the problem is “mass shootings” then obviously the gun is crucial because it’s the tool. If the problem is “mass stranger on stranger violence” then it’s murkier. If it’s “mass slashings with samurai swords” then it’s the swords -- or is it the Japanese, or the historical Japanese, or is it chambarra movies? (Be careful to consider Yukio Mishima in your calculations)
As I have said elsewhere I believe we could completely ban guns using some simple political expedients -- namely, disempowering young people, which Americans generally seem happy to do. I hate kids too, so the idea of armed kids gives me the eebie-jeebies. Our constitution is a joke, anyway (I wish right whingers cared as much about the 4th as they do the 2nd) so why not just piss all over it? And, since I am on that tangent let me observe that the same sorts of methods used to make abortion increasingly hard to obtain could easily be used to make guns increasingly hard to obtain while still respecting states’ rights and the 2nd. For one thing, local ordinances about open carry being a nuisance would make a huge difference. Back in Maryland you could get a carry permit but you still couldn’t carry in a liquor store, within 100 feet of a bar, in a post office, and a whole crazy-quilt that meant you had to store your gun in your car, and you were liable if it got stolen and used in a crime. Compare that with Pennsylvania, where you can go anywhere with your carry permit and “stand your ground” on your property. So long as you don’t shoot anyone white. Etc. But the whole gun-toting system could be gunked up beyond measure with “convenience” laws that made it impossible to figure out if you were committing a felony at any given time.
@16:
I’m going, as usual, with the standard SJW definition of racism that describes a structure of oppression, rather than the dictionary pedant definition of the beliefs of individuals. The one where you can’t be racist if you’re not part of the privileged oppressing race.
No, absolutely not. Have you not been paying any attention here at all over the years? If you don’t have power, then the option of being racist isn’t open to you. And if you’re part of the oppressed race, even if you don’t look as though you are and could pass as one of the oppressors, then you don’t have power and nothing you think or do counts as racism. Example: Megan Markle can’t (as in, is not able to) be racist because she’s Black. She can only be a victim of racism, never a perpetrator. Get it?
If that was intended to be a joke, I’m impressed -- it’s actually quite funny. It explains everything, and therefore nothing. Well played sir.
@Holms, 17: tell me you don’t know what the word “oblivious” means, without telling me.
@mjr, 19 & 20: you make some good points, but:
And yet every other country around the world that HAD a problem with mass shootings (e.g. Australia, the UK) and just got rid of the guns observed and instantaneous drop in mass killings to near-zero. This make me think that the guns are closer to 99% of the problem.
I make of it that you get a lot of people together and get them whipped up enough, they can be deadly.
Are you seriously asking whether, if an already murderous mob was armed, that it might kill more people? That seems, forgive me, like a daft question.
I get your point that really quite a lot of Americans are nasty, violent arseholes and simply taking their guns away won’t stop them being nasty, violent arseholes. On that we can agree. But if you’re an alcoholic and I make you live on an island with no alcohol for twenty years, then even if after twenty years you’re still technically “an alcoholic”, you haven’t been drunk for 20 years -- which statistically eliminates your chances of driving drunk, reduces your chances of getting drunk and beating your wife and kids, and pretty much eliminates all the other possible ways you’d get in trouble when you were drunk. Take away all the guns from violent arseholes, and yes, they might use e.g. a knife, bat or car to still hurt people… but those methods are simply less efficient.
It comes back to that Onion headline: “No way to prevent this, says only country where this regularly happens.”
sonofrojblake:
Exactly. Depends on the definition.
(Dictionary pedant definition is a definition)
Heh.
Surely you are taking the piss.
But fine, a powerless racist is an oxymoron, in your estimation.
Absolutely not. This is the definition of racism preferred and advanced by the progressive left, as you well know.
What I’m asking for (and obviously never getting from you at least) is advice on where one is supposed to stand in a situation where a Black woman is getting cancelled -- and it seems likely effectively fired (i.e. deselected by her local Labour party and barred from standing for them in the next election) -- for saying Jews don’t face racism.
The mainstream media (including and especially the paper that published the letter in question) have, surprise surprise, come down extremely hard on the “anti-semitism IS TOO racism, you horrible bigot” side, but while that was fine when they were doing it to Jeremy Corbyn, the epitome of White Privilege, it feels slightly more complex when the target is his former fuck-buddy, a Black woman.
She has of course produced a laughable apology, stating that the letter she sent in for publication to a national broadsheet newspaper was a “first draft”, as if that’s believable or even a defence for the views stated in it. But the sight of a pile-on of this nature, even onto someone I can’t personally stand, is disturbing.
The letter in question: https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2023/apr/23/success-for-women-not-same-as-for-men-letters
I can do advice.
Better to stand where your principles and your judgment lead you than to stand where you’re supposed to stand according to other people. The former may be a bit less popular, but then it’s sure much easier not having to pretend about one’s stance.
(And, of course, you don’t need to have a stance)
What I’m asking for … is advice on where one is supposed to stand in a situation where a Black woman is getting cancelled … for saying Jews don’t face racism.
Just for starters, I would strongly advise that person to be a LOT more careful with her choice of words, and not say things in such an offensively simplistic-sounding way. That won’t stop her enemies from trying to discredit her, but it will give them fewer opportunities.
Black people can’t be racist. I’m as woke as i think a straight white cis employed bloke can be, so i do get that.
Actually, yes, they CAN be racist, and very often are. The big difference is that they’re a minority and don’t have nearly as much opportunity to make their racism matter.
And if we’re going to talk about blacks being anti-Semitic, then we should also be asking WHY this is so — because it wasn’t always so. During the Civil Rights Movement, Jews were much more clearly on the side of blacks (and were hated and often attacked by the same people who hated blacks)…so what changed that? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just a change in black people’s attitudes — such a change was likely caused by something. Offhand, I’m guessing the Republicans’ strategy of using support for Israel to get Jews on their side was a large part of it.
🙁
And I’ve decided to be sloppy today.
“Better to stand where your principles and your judgment lead you”
Yeah nah. I have a mortgage and a family and demonstrably that shit can get you fired. I don’t have the privilege to simply ignore where the wind is blowing. Good for you if you do though.
@26: “Actually, yes, they CAN be racist”
https://simonesamuels.medium.com/no-black-people-cant-be-racist-eb6fddd18603
https://truthout.org/articles/no-black-people-cant-be-racists/
https://www.aclrc.com/myth-of-reverse-racism
sonofrojblake:
So, exercise judgement.
Oh, you poor thing! You think you need privilege to be discreet?
(To be fair, you’ve hardly been discreet here. I know mocking when I see it, your true feelings are obvious. So yeah, I suppose you lack privilege)
I don’t need privilege, I have smarts.
… anyway, wasn’t this post supposed to be about easy access to guns?
Rather the point of my query was that while exercising judgement is simple to the point of simplistic most of the time (racism bad, anti-semitism bad, white people racist, black people not racist -- easy) in this specific case it is difficult. I’m wondering out loud what the nuances are and hoping someone with more grasp of the subtleties could help. But unfortunately here you are, so I’m out of luck.
That is literally the direct opposite of what I meant.
Says the cis het white male who didn’t understand post 29.
sonofrojblake:
“Yeah nah. I have a mortgage and a family and demonstrably that shit can get you fired. I don’t have the privilege to simply ignore where the wind is blowing. Good for you if you do though.”
What is it you imagine I did not understand about it?
—
Anyway: guns.
#29 “that shit can get you fired”
Even when stated anonymously on a blog? Liar. Just state what you believe, which is pretty clearly that black people can be racist. Instead we get this half sarcastic shit.
@John Morales, 33:
I said: ” I don’t have the privilege to simply ignore where the wind is blowing.”
You said: “You think you need privilege to be discreet?”
The thing you said make no sense as an answer to the thing I said, indeed, as I pointed out, I meant precisely its opposite. Don’t get you even get that?. It is a privilege to be able to ignore social consequence. Do you believe you have that privilege? I know I don’t. Diane Abbott perhaps thought her race shielded her but has been proven wrong, at the likely cost of her job.
@Holms, 34:
If you think the “anonymity” of this conversation thread would stand even three seconds of investigation by someone with an interest in penetrating it, then you’re more stupid than I think you are -- and believe me, based on the evidence to date I already think you’re pretty bloody stupid.
I’ve already stated what I believe in post 13, and again in post 15, and again in post 21, and provided three references to justify it in post 30. If, after all that, you still think I think black people can be racist, then “pretty clearly” you’ve made up your mind in the teeth of the evidence and there’s nothing I can do or say to help. Do you even read anything I say, or do you just decide for yourself what I’ve said and respond to your fantasy of what it was?
Are you silly enough to post your supposedly risky opinion on a work computer with a signed login? Outside of that, it is up to you to reveal or maintain the privacy of your online handle. The woke and related moral scolds are hardly the CIA.
*googles “sonofrojblake”*
Oh. You’ve been silly.
…
“I’ve already stated what I believe…” Ah, wow. There I was, giving you the credit that those posts were your sarcastic way of raising an obvious contradiction, that you didn’t actually believe such stupid claims as ‘black people can’t be racist’; but I see I was being overly generous. Damn, I’m actually disappointed in you.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/27/diane-abbott-racism-letter-racial-politics
Thoughtful and nuanced.