Culturally Impoverished

The last, very long post, dealt with the failings, in my opinion, of whats his name - to thoroughly explicate why he and so many others do not like America, think so little of America that they would place America subservient to the UN, would take an entire book. I think I began the process in the very long post, but so to have many others, long before me.

Sidebar:
The point of this is, sometimes we have great ideas, or really smart ideas, phrases, thoughts, expressions ... and we lose them in time. We can't remember the argument as well weeks later. That is the point of many of these posts, to allow review. What isn't seen are the labels that allow searches to be done on words, or in my case, many words, adjectives, labels, phrases. It is easier than printing off articles and filing them in a cabinet, as I am very, very, very slow at filing and I end up with piles (think several feet) of articles with no means of finding what I need at any given moment.
End Sidebar

The long post about whats his name is about him, but it is also about an ideology that permeates a small subsection of a larger portion of the American populace. This ideology is deadly to almost everything that America was and is, and could ever be. The plan or goal is to dismantle everything they believe is a hindrance to the fulfillment of their happiness (to find out what makes them happy - read the long post on whats his name), or to the happiness of mankind. The problem is not that they are unhappy, nor that some things would thrill them, if changed. Rather, it is their failure to understand the most basic of economics, international politics, diplomacy, and human behavior, and instead to believe that all human behavior can be modified by the carrot and no stick, or where a stick is needed, the world will naturally agree on a stick.

America is wealthy, not because the poor were robbed, nor because the world was raped. America is wealthy because of our ingenuity, and entrepreneurial spirit, supported and encouraged by our political and economic system. No other country, and no other people have that combination, and you cannot simply transplant our attitudes and beliefs onto another people and suddenly they will prosper (no more than you can impose our democratic system on a Middle Eastern country). Yet, a large subsection of Obamessiah followers do believe that there is no difference between what we have, and how we have achieved it, and any other country or people, culture on earth. That but for the luck of ... they would be where we are.

What these messianic followers believe is that America is full of bad things, corrupted and vile, we shoot each other, car jackings, rapes, robberies - and all because the perpetrator is poor and young, and we should provide them with educational opportunities not jail. That our jails are already too full and we, a crime ridden society, are terrified of each other because we live with guns and fear, and each (guns and hate) perpetuates the cycle of hate in our cities where the poor have no hope and respond accordingly.

The messianic followers look at the more civilized countries, where they do not have guns and people do not die in shootouts on the freeways, or in shootouts with the police, and they dream to themselves: if only we transplanted that culture and its laws on guns onto the American system!! I suppose, right after we impose our democratic system on Middle Eastern countries - using that same dream state argument!

Well, we would hear - other countries like the UK, FR, CA, and GR, have less gun violence and a more civilized and tolerant culture. We would believe all this nonsense, if the messianic followers could convince us, and they do try - from early grade school through college, they are trying! Persistent they are.

Then comes this story from Canada - Calgary, the gateway to the West (in Canada) - a booming city.

National Post, May 29, 2008.
(I have no link to the original story as the source I get some news bits from are not free and thus do not have links but the links below are as complete as possible.)

Five Dead in Calgary Home.
Original Link. One more Link. Another Link. Another. Video.

Three adults and two children aged 4 and 6 were STABBED to death. The
only living person in the house - a one year old found crying and unharmed. The rest of the family had been slaughtered. The initial inspectors/police on the scene have gone into counseling.

That's the thing about violence ... no guns needed. They will slaughter without them, entire families, children, mothers, fathers. No matter.

Rwanda - of the million butchered, most were killed with the machete. One does not need a gun to kill every living person in a village. What retards. Knives are so much easier and quieter. Just ask OJ.

Just think - what if the Tutsi had been armed. The Useless. Nations. would not have been needed - not that they did anything but watch.



.

How would you choose to die

Gun, Knife, Grenade, Car ...

Every year in the United States - thousands of murders from guns and every weapon imaginable, and no weapon in some cases (if hands constitute weaponless).

Every day we hear about the need for gun control to prevent needless deaths.

Every day we hear about a culture of violence and death in the United States.

And if not every day, very nearly so.

But the question is - if we took all the guns off the streets, would you be safer? Too often this simplistic question and equally simplistic answer are puffed up as THE only reasonable answer when they are in fact a glaring indication that we have failed to deal with aggressive and violent behavior.

Instead of dealing with the causes of the violence, they deal with how that violence plays out in society via guns or by whatever means. The simplistic answer above is a failure to address the problem by pretending the problem is guns.

From the: Edmonton Journal, April 19, 2008. Front Page.

MAN ARRESTED IN SENIOR’S STABBING
Suspect in west-end killing apprehended in Saskatchewan

By STEVE LILLEBUEN and TRISH AUDETTE

Police in Saskatchewan have arrested a man in his 20s in connection with the slaying of 77-year-old man in a shopping centre parking lot earlier this week.

The man’s identity and information about how officers found him was not released.
The man, arrested Thursday, has a history with police. Charges have not been
formally laid.

Witnesses to the attack said Hans Alberts was helping his wife, Adelaide,
into their car in a parking lot at Stony Plain Road and 149th Street when he was
approached by a man in his 20s with stubble on his head and a mole or scab on
his cheek. The man didn’t say a word to the couple who had just finished
celebrating their 29th wedding anniversary at the Royal Fork Buffet.

Alberts was stabbed repeatedly. Adelaide tried to fight off the attacker, beating
him with her purse.

[...]

It doesn't make a difference. That is the truth. Now, address the problem and guns and knives and axes and shotguns and rifles and poison and rope - won't be material to the issue.

Mass Shootings More Common Since 1960s

Mass Shootings More Common Since 1960s

Apr 21, 2007. 7:09 PM (ET)By MATT CRENSON

NEW YORK (AP) - Mass public shootings have become such a part of American life in recent decades that the most dramatic of them can be evoked from the nation's collective memory in a word or two: Luby's. Jonesboro. Columbine.
And now, Virginia Tech.
Since Aug. 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed a 27-story tower on the University of Texas campus and started picking people off, at least 100 Americans have gone on shooting sprees.
And all through those years, the same questions have been asked: What is it about modern-day America that provokes such random violence? Is it the decline of traditional morals? The depiction of violence in entertainment? The ready availability of lethal firepower?
Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox blames guns, at least in part. He notes that seven of the eight deadliest mass public shootings have occurred in the past 25 years.
"I know that there were high-powered guns before," he said. "But this weaponry is just so much more pervasive than it was."
Australia had a spate of mass public shooting in the 1980s and '90s, culminating in 1996, when Martin Bryant opened fire at the Port Arthur Historical Site in Tasmania with an AR-15 assault rifle, killing 35 people.
Within two weeks the government had enacted strict gun control laws that included a ban on semiautomatic rifles. There has not been a mass shooting in Australia since.
Yet Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota State Department of Corrections, said the availability of guns was not a factor in his exhaustive statistical study of mass murder during the 20th century.
Duwe found that the prevalence of mass murders, defined as the killing of four or more people in a 24-hour period, tends to mirror that of homicide generally. The increase in mass killings during the 1960s was accompanied by a doubling in the overall murder rate after the relatively peaceful 1940s and '50s.
In fact, Duwe found that mass murder was just as common during the 1920s and early 1930s as it is today. The difference is that then, mass murderers tended to be failed farmers who killed their families because they could no longer provide for them, then killed themselves. Their crimes embodied the despair and hopelessness of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, the sense that they and their families would be better off in the hereafter than in the here and now.
On Dec. 29, 1929, a 56-year-old tenant farmer from Vernon, Texas, named J.H. Haggard shot his five children, aged 6 to 18, in their beds as they slept. Then he killed himself. He left a note that said only, "All died. I had ruther be ded. Look in zellar."
Despondent men still kill their families today. But public shooters like Virginia Tech's Seung-Hui Cho are different. They are angrier and tend to blame society for their failures, sometimes singling out members of particular ethnic or socio-economic groups.
"It's society's fault ... Society disgusts me," Kimveer Gill wrote in his blog the day before he shot six people to death and injured 19 in Montreal last year.
In the videos and essays he left behind, Cho ranted about privileged students and their debauched behavior.
He also mentioned the Columbine killings, referring to Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris as "martyrs." Imitation undoubtedly plays a role in mass shootings as well, said Daniel A. Cohen, a historian at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
"Certain types of crimes gain cultural resonance in certain periods," Cohen said.
So many post office employees gunned down their co-workers during the 1980s and early '90s that they spawned a neologism. To "go postal," according to the Webster's New World College Dictionary, is "to become deranged or go berserk."
The most recent postal shooting was in January 2006 when Jennifer San Marco, a former employee who had been fired a few years earlier because of her worsening mental state, walked into a letter sorting facility in Goleta, Calif., and killed six people with a handgun.
Criminologist Fox speculates that the increasing popularity of workplace killings, and public shootings generally, may be partly due to decreasing economic security and increasing inequality. America increasingly rewards its winners with a disproportionate share of wealth and adoration, while treating its losers to a heaping helping of public shame.
"We ridicule them. We vote them off the island. We laugh at them on 'American Idol,'" Fox said.
But there has also been an erosion of community in America over the past half-century, and many scholars believe it has contributed to the rise in mass shootings.
"One would think that there's some new component to alienation or isolation," said Jeffrey S. Adler, a professor of history and criminology at the University of Florida.
People used to live in closer proximity to their families and be more involved with civic and religious institutions. They were less likely to move from one part of the country to another, finding themselves strangers in an unfamiliar environment.
Even so, the small-town America of yesteryear wasn't completely immune. On March 6, 1915, businessman Monroe Phillips, who had lived in Brunswick, Ga., for 12 years, killed six people and wounded 32 before being shot dead by a local attorney. Phillips' weapon: an automatic shotgun.
Remarkably, violence in today's media seems to have little to do with mass public shootings. Only a handful of them have ever cited violent video games or movies as inspiration for their crimes. Often they are so isolated and socially awkward that they are indifferent to popular culture.
Ultimately, it is impossible to attribute the rise in mass shootings to any single cause. The crimes only account for a tiny fraction of homicides.
And a significant fraction of those who commit them, including Cho, either kill themselves or are killed by police before they can be questioned by investigators.