Perhaps provide some good reasons why you put all your faith in the United States government. — Tzeentch

I don't need to have faith in the US government to not have faith in mass murderers.

One of these is a genuine problem; the other is largely a paranoid delusion getting in the way of addressing the mass murderers.

“He fucked us and his fingerprints are absolutely fuckin’ everywhere on that,” a moderate Liberal MP says. “The bloke thinks he is a master strategist. He is a fuckwit.”

:blush:

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2022/05/28/coalition-loss-the-transphobe-thing-was-absolute-disaster

Unsurprised that Ted Cruz would forget a key incident in American labor history that shows how that's a god awful idea. — Maw

Yeah, I know about Cruz's suggestion. Meant that ths was the first time I'd heard it suggested in general after a child gun massacre. But yeah, that incident does come immediately to mind hey? Just nuts.

ingle entrances in schools — Maw

This one is new - at least to me - and particulalrly horrifying. Like, imagine the saftey issues with this. A fire? Hell, say a shooter did get in? Like, these people would rather pick a fight against... doors, rather than address mass gun murder.

Are all of you just completely unaware of what an insurgency is and how it works? — Tzeentch

You will never be an "insurgent" kindly go back to playing a video game with your mountain dew instead of enabling the regular murder of children. Comic-con is a far better place to play out your fantasies than the blood-stained walls of classrooms.

On one end we're being asked by Tzeentch to envision a vague government takeover that requires wide gun ownership to counter. Maybe if he repeats the phrase "armed peasants" in a mirror three times it will come true. On the other hand, we're also asked by @Moses to not use political imagination at all! Enforcement is too difficult, we cannot possible stop a determined mass shooter. So we're simultaneously being asked to use the fullest extent of our political imagination, i.e. a government takeover, in order to comprehend the necessity of gun ownership, as well as restrain our political imagination in order to accept the futility of gun control. — Maw

Yep. As long as nothing changes and kids continue to die, these LARPers will simply say anything from one end to the other.

he yelled from his glass prison. — Tzeentch

he yelled surrounded by the real life corpses of children as he fantasied about being opppresseedddd.

You know you like dead kids like lots of dead kids

Because you're afraid to give up the Call of Duty simulator in your head.

"What we're dealing with is this fantasy I made up in my head can't wait till more real life children die"

Turns out gun nuts are just pussies scared of the shadows in their own heads. And if children have to die for them, so be it.

Lol these fucking people think they are in a video game.

We just watched a bunch of "trained" people with guns shit themselves and enable the murder of classrooms of children but I'm sure this internet fash monkey will do much better.

As if right on cue, the fascist drops in to fantasize about being a victim.

At some point, when your whole identity is nothing but the fantasy of playing rebel freedom-fighter from your TV couch, you will literally let classrooms of children be shot to death so that one can still maintain that fantasy in their head. These people want to role-play victims so hard, they will let any number of real life victims drop dead so they LARP about being some Hollywood 'insurgent'. May they all commit suicide.

Why would we do that via breaking a naval blockade when we could do it without losing a single life simply by paying the food producers a fair wage so that they can afford the food we export? — Isaac

Why would we do that when we can have a lovely little war?

Just say you want more dead children already.

Anyway I don't think the gubberment should take anyone's guns except in one single case: they should absolutely take the guns of anyone who is worried about the government taking their guns. There should be a questionare with a single question that reads: "are you worried about the government taking your guns?", and anyone who ticks yes gets their guns taken from them permanently. Literally everyone else can keep the guns.

To be fair I am pessimistic that gun control, absent any coupling with deeper, structural social change, will be very effective. Left activists rightly point out that the selective nature of policing in the States means that gun control will largely be used as an additional weapon to target minorities and the poor. Which historically has been the case. But at this point, take all of the fucking AR-15s and smelt them then pour the molten down the throats of conservatives.

The "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" crew starting to filter in I see.

What incredible level of comfort and entitlement it must take for people like Olivier and Rogue to sit behind their teak desks and demand that people fighting on one potato a day play out their power fantasies of "getting revenge on Putin" and "punishing Russia":

DRUZHKIVKA, Ukraine — Stuck in their trenches, the Ukrainian volunteers lived off a potato per day as Russian forces pounded them with artillery and Grad rockets on a key eastern front line. Outnumbered, untrained and clutching only light weapons, the men prayed for the barrage to end — and for their own tanks to stop targeting the Russians.

“War breaks people down,” said Serhiy Haidai, head of the regional war administration in Luhansk province, acknowledging many volunteers were not properly trained because Ukrainian authorities did not expect Russia to invade. But he maintained that all soldiers are taken care of: “They have enough medical supplies and food. The only thing is there are people that aren’t ready to fight.”

But Lapko and Khrus’s concerns were echoed recently by a platoon of the 115th Brigade 3rd Battalion, based nearby in the besieged city of Severodonetsk. In a video uploaded to Telegram on May 24, and confirmed as authentic by an aide to Haidai, volunteers said they will no longer fight because they lacked proper weapons, rear support and military leadership.

“We are being sent to certain death,” said a volunteer, reading from a prepared script, adding that a similar video was filmed by members of the 115th Brigade 1st Battalion. “We are not alone like this, we are many.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/26/ukraine-frontline-russia-military-severodonetsk/

It must be so nice to expect other people to bear the misery of war for Western revanchism. On to Moscow they can go!

I think they will 'bad apples' this in the end. The solution will be - more funding and more police in schools. They can't do anything else.

I dream that I am proven wrong.

No what's lame is cheerleading mass murder.

The miserable bit of silver lining coming out of this is the enormous outpouring of venomous hate being rightly directed towards police in the wake of the mass child murder.

This is what happens when children are not private property or capital.

I don't assess propaganda I put it in the bin where it belongs.

Westerners can circulate literal war propaganda and then congratulate themselves on not being subject to propaganda.

Applebaum is an insane person who has been preaching for - in her words - "total war" with Russia for nearly 10 years. A neocon warmongerer only slightly less dangerous than Putin because she happens not to be a head of state.

That's fair. I was just more using your post as a jumping-off point.

---

In general, for all the talk, one thing can be sure: nothing will change. Until it is accepted that nothing will change, nothing will change.

Another school shooting will happen within at least 3 months. More children are already dead, they just don't know it yet.

A comment on this graphic you posted:



One thing I noticed about myself today was something of a change in how I received this. It's an image I've seen before, and I think I've even posted it here in a debate a while ago. When I did, I commented on it much like you did: a kind of 'look, everyone else can do this, why can't the US?'. It's also what seems to be the predominant reaction wherever I've seen that graphic used. But my reaction today is quite different. It's simply: of course the US can't do any different. This graph is not proof that things can be different. It's proof that things can't. That enormous, murderous gap shows that the US is much too invested in whatever the hell it is, to do otherwise.

If that is so, then one needs to really have a good hard look at oneself when one's reaction to this graph is: 'look, things can be different, see'. Because that reaction is an attempt at mastery, of falling back upon a superior knowledge, something that, in the midst of all the terror, acts as a panacea. I think this is a mistake. There is no panacea. That graph needs to be taken literally and seriously. Not: things can be otherwise. But: things cannot be otherwise. That graph should offer no consolation. It should offer only more horror. And the question to answer is why that is the case. Because short of demanding the impossible - which is what, ultimately, needs to be done - that graphic only shows that US has in fact earned, rightfully, its place at the top-right of that chart.

There ought to be nothing in that graphic that offers any hope. Only the complete absence of it. And until that is confronted, nothing will change. That graphic should not function as a darkly snarky "gotchya" - which is how I used to treat it.

There is no American gun control debate. The debate is settled. It is settled on the side of being totally OK with murdering children, regularly. The rest is performance.

Anyway, leaving the bigots to their blather...

--

It is quite interesting to watch the slow pivot of US Empire from Russia to China. Having now (for now?) mired Russia in a stupid, senseless war it did everything to enable, it now looks to Taiwan as the next bunch of people who can drop dead for their purposes. Now with the timing of the - rightly horrifying - 'Xinjiang Police Files', the pressure on the America's next geopolitical rival is set to be ramped up.

Why is this type of behavior by [Jews] so common? Why is the brutality systemic? We can criticize other nations for brutality and war crimes, but it generally happens as isolated cases, mostly under one asshole doing it. But in this, there are so many [Jews] showing total moral bankruptcy, a systematic level of the behavior. If it's ingrained in [Jewish] traditional culture, conservative values of "masculine power", national heroes, to achieve greatness, then they truly are living in the past as I've been saying. No wonder they want to expand the empire, create a new world order and create a massive [Jewish homeland] with a proud people under a strong man. It almost reminds me of...

Can you imagine? I feel sick typing that.

One fun thing to remind conservatives is that there is no group of humans on Earth more obsessed with gender than children themselves. Children code male and female and transgressions thereof incessantly, in all modes of play, dress, object choices, social relations and so on. Children cannot shut the fuck up about gender. In this, they share a quality with conservatives.

Of course the only time these people - especially the men - tend to actually be around children is when they are actively trying to fuck them, so the oversight is somewhat understandable.

Some little side benefits of expanding NATO:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2022/05/23/expanded-nato-will-shoot-billions-to-us-defense-contractors/?sh=63252d933189

Treaty obligations will a mean significant increase in defense spending. Finland has already ordered 64 new F-35 warplanes, the elite joint strike fighter developed by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems (BAESY). The JSFs cost between $110 million and $135.8 million. More importantly, aligning with NATO is a commitment to interoperability with the American defense ecosystem. This directly benefits the big U.S. contractors. The market for their goods is expanding and they will face no competition for the foreseeable future.

American defense contractors are reliable technology partners. The companies are also backed-up by the largess of the U.S defense budget, a record $810 billion in 2021. There is no appetite politically to decrease military spending. And that sentiment is spreading globally, thanks to the carnage in Ukraine. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are currently the best way to play this bigger trend. At share prices of $90, $424, and $443, the stocks trade at 15.5x, 14.9x, and 16.3x forward earnings respectively.

--

But surely it must be because the pathetic Russian army which can barely face up to a bunch of weaponized tractors poses a threat to the rest of Europe.

OK! So she mentioned that. So I stand corrected, enough to be corrected earlier in the article that I didn't notice it. Yet the issue is that now in every age group and income group, there is a majority for NATO membership. Which was left out. (So at least I have better in Finnish literacy than you are, Aussie.) — ssu

Your illiteracy knows no bounds, not in any language.

In this media environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that support for NATO membership is high: about 60% in Sweden and 75% in Finland.

...On 23 March, 44% of young people surveyed were for NATO and 21% against. Last week, 43% of them were for NATO and 32% against: a double-digit leap. Support for membership rises with each age bracket, with the elderly most staunchly in favour. — The Article

The scale of LNP defeat is actually wild:

Guess there is something to be thankful to Scott Morrison about.

Someone once remarked that if aliens ever invaded Earth, the best thing to do would be to hand them a copy of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. They would likely find it so abhorrent that they would leave immediately.

Also this NYT post on Haiti has been doing the rounds recently. There's some controversy because of its bad citational practice, but it makes a good case for burning all of France to the ground, along with everyone in it.

That actually the Finnish Parliament voted 188 to 8 in favor of NATO, which one of the most unanimous votes ever taken in the Parliament (a bigger majority than the vote in 1917 for Independence), isn't noted. — ssu

God I wish you were even semi-literate:

In Finland, however, there is little mainstream opposition to NATO. The issue has been tinged by nationalist sentiment, and opponents of membership are accused of not caring about their country’s security. Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of membership this week, with 188 for and only eight against. — The Article

But that would be too much to except to a Nazi PR pusher.

Scotty doesn't hold a government

:up:

oh my god this beer is so good its a 14.5%

Looks like it's the good beer... maybe.

Speak for parochial yourself.

Because I am not a racist and a bigot, I reckon most people can discuss anything regardless of where they are from.