Just so that you know: In this carnavalesque culture of insipid offense-taking...There is no "line" between

There is no "line" which separates, on the one hand, the manically obsessed 'concern' shown by Trump's opponents for what they, in their mental states, experience as a conspiracy of "collusion" by Trump & Campaign with Russian authorities--though this matter was wholly contrived--and, on the oher hand, the now-inescapable 'P-C' reactionaries' knee-jerk obsession with, to take just a very recent instance, the way Roseanne Barr's Twitter "tweets" are such stuff as multi-miilionaire Los Angeles media moguls find themselevs obliged to determine, " 'There was no way to come back from this,' (one of the sources said.)"

No "line" between them. You have two very typical examples of what is essentially the same set of wacko psycho-phenomena. Trumpian collusion with the Rooskies and Roseanne Barr, wiping out a top-earning television "sit-com" with only her weak self-control, her distracted reasoning and her Twitter account.

This is now a major (as in characteristic) feature of this amazingly shallow, weirdly egotistical and "identity"-obsessed 'cutlure'. It happens, somehow, that Trump seems to have a knack for gaming it, for playing it and that he can often do this to his and his interests' advantages over his often even-more-ridiculous looking critics.

A recent so-called "science" article made the rounds at the "RealClear" "suite" of spin-offs--this news article being posted at "RealClear Science". The article pitched a supposed "finding" which was called "depressiing":a scientist (Russian in this case*) had supposedly confirmed " Fermi's Paradox" according to which the lack of an encounter between "us"--i.e. human Earthlings--and some other form of extra-terrestrial life is to be explained by the fact that, briefly, "the Paradox has a trivial solution, requiring no controversial assumptions, which is rarely suggested or discussed" ... "the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion" because, according to A. Berezin's hypothesis, "a highly developed civilisation" ... would inadvertently "wipe out other lifeforms" because they "simply won’t notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it." Thus, “We are the first to arrive at the stage,”... “And, most likely, will be the last to leave.”

This supposedly gloomy conclusion is, we're informed, inevitable. Why? Because, "Avoiding this fate, ... is impossible,... it will 'require the existence of forces far stronger than the free will of individuals.' ” And physicist Berezin could not come up with an idea of any such more powerful countervailing force.

That, it seems to me, is to greatly underestimate the power of human stupidity. This is a force which can and does easily meet, match and trump "free will" every minute of every day, and has since the dawn of humankind's existence.

Humans of Earth, relax. We are no threat to any actual or potential extra-terrestrial life. There is a vanishingly small possibility that any such life shall ever be encountered and that is not because we'll have inadvertently destroyed it in the course of doing other more important things--like saving the stock-share price of Disney–ABC Television Group from the P-C social-political fallout of Roseanne Barr's Twitter tweets--but simply because our capacity to do the imbecilic is vastly more powerful that this illusory "free will."

Neither Ms. Barr nor Messrs. Ben Sherwood (1) or his superior in management, Robert Iger (2) can really help themselves. They don't have that much "free will." And extra-terrestrial life "everywhere" in the galaxy and the larger universe has nothing to worry about from we humans.

21st century culture won't ever get that far.

'There was no way to come back from this,' ? Really? They pull down multi-million dollar salaries and they can't figure out how to save their company's top-earning program?

Of course there was a "way back from this." However, they didn't have enough "free-will" to find it.

Somewhere, more intelligent life is doing what, for its forms, are the equivalents of our "laughing our asses off."

________________________

* "physicist Alexander Berezin from the National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET) in Russia"

"A Depressing Answer to the Fermi Paradox" ||
Andrew Masterson, Cosmos Magazine || May 29, 2018

(1) net worth est. 15m. USD.

(2): "Salary US$36.3 million (2017)" (Wikipedia)

Just to let you know--I don't watch much TV--I don't watch sitcoms--I've never seen the fascination for Roseanne Barr ever and I don't understand why she felt the need the other day to say what she did which was not only abhorrent but incredibly idiotic besides. I don't understand the fascination with twitter or the fascination that celebrities have with twitter. I don't even like Valerie Jarrett and I don't care for our celebrity crazy country and IMO all this was an insane and self destructive episode that has almost nothing to do with the economic or political life of the people who live in this country--it's more entertainment/distraction than anything else. IMO there's also this 'I can get away with anything because I'm a superstar' entitlement thing going on and FWIW her show being cancelled--I thought good, who fucking cares?--I'm pretty much thinking it was almost without a doubt shit anyway (and to be replaced by some other different shit) and also thinking that she's probably got millions and millions of dollars squirelled away and quite possibly illegally in some bank in the Cayman Islands which is what a shitload of celebrities and superwealthy people do. So I don't even get the point of feeling sorry for her if you were so inclined in the first place.

>2 lriley: ditto

>2 lriley: Thanks for ending this thread in a most efficient and accurate manner.

>2 lriley:

"Just to let you know--I don't watch much TV--I don't watch sitcoms--" ...

LOL! Don't watch "much"? Yeah, right. (That's what they say. But how much is "not much"?)

And, not that you noticed, you missed the point. You don't have to watch that much TV--or, indeed, any television. (I don't even have a television.) It happens, never the less, that this stupidity we live as a 'cutlure' is practically completely run on chords tuned by and to television-and-related mass media's owners' commercial priorities.

While you're not watching 'sit-coms', you're effectively cut off from, cut out of, a direct experience of what now constitutes the single-most prevalently-shared cultural vehicle--having long since superseded print's short-stories and novels and rivaling the formerly powerful and important movie-theatre attending experience.

So, if you don't understand things in the cultural scene, you needn't wonder.

"I don't understand why she felt the need the other day to say what she did "...

Right. Of course not. And, now, in fact, neither does she, by the way.

"I don't understand the fascination with twitter" ...

No? Again, this is not surprising.

"or the fascination that celebrities have with twitter." ...

See above.

"I don't even like Valerie Jarrett" ...

Great! But that is completely beside the point. Not that the point here matters to you, of course.


"...and I don't care for our celebrity crazy country..."

and, yet. that's what you get for a culture. You don't have to care for it, you don't have to "watch much TV," none of that is going to alter the fact that the culture you live in is consumed by these things as the ultimate in importance.

"and IMO all this was an insane and self destructive episode that has almost nothing to do with the economic or political life of the people who live in this country--"

Now you actually touch on some of the point. In fact, to our great detriment, it has, if not literally "everything" to do with " the economic or political life of the people who live in this country," it has, at the least a very, very great deal to do with it. And that's a problem--whether you're watching much TV or not.

..."it's more entertainment/distraction than anything else."

Oh, I see. As a distraction, (which indeed it surely is) then, we can dismiss it, is that right? LOL!

"IMO there's also this 'I can get away with anything because I'm a superstar' entitlement thing going on and FWIW her show being cancelled--I thought good, who fucking cares?--"

Not you. That's for sure! LOL!

"I'm pretty much thinking it was almost without a doubt shit anyway" ...

Of course. And I understand that you have to specify that you're "pretty much thinking" that because, after all, you never bothered to actually watch an episode before "pretty much" thinking that it was "almost without a doubt" (more hedging, just in case) "shit anyway."

..."(and to be replaced by some other different shit)"...

Surely.

...·"and also thinking that she's probably got millions and millions of dollars squirelled away and quite possibly illegally in some bank in the Cayman Islands which is what a shitload of celebrities and superwealthy people do."

Comfort yourself with those thoughts.

"So I don't even get the point of feeling sorry for her if you were so inclined in the first place."

I wasn't. I was commenting on the culture.

#5--disregarding pretty much all of the above--do you ever watch 24-7 news television proximity? Are these people really news reporters? Any Walter Cronkhite's? A Howard K. Smith even? Because they all look like they stumbled off the sets of soap operas to me or were sent over to the news studios by modeling agencies. It's hard for me to take any of them seriously when looking at any one of them I start to think 'where the fuck did you come from'? And that's not just the people at CNN or MSNBC or CNBC--it's the beloved people on Fox News too. This Barr thing by the way is the classic hijack of let's not tell the truth about what's going with the economy or what your troops are doing overseas slogging around in someone else's backyard----let's instead focus on the rich, famous, entitled and kooky and ride it out as far as we can. I don't give a fuck about celebrity culture. I never have. But for your information Sean Hannity is not a real news person and neither is Anderson Cooper as far as I'm concerned--their opinion setters. One might be worse than the other--you can guess---but in the final analysis AFAIC they're both full of shit.

Maybe I shouldn't be this cynical but I don't care--there are times I've been sorely tempted to throw the television set right off the deck. Do I ever watch television? When the Rangers are on. But they had a shit season and I turned that off a bunch of times because I'm not so masochistic that I'll watch them grind away in futility to the last moment when they're getting their asses handed to them. It's a good thing that I only really care about one sport--it gives me the whole summer to relax. I'd rather not be one of those people who go from one thing to the next--always chasing something they have no control over. I watch shit on the computer a bit--that's true---maybe not the same but I can be pickier and choosier. You know what that's my daughter does too and a lot of other people these days. Maybe you should try it.

TV's not a carnival. It's one part of the carnival--the sideshow, the freakshow. TV tells me almost nothing about news, the world, life, reality.

If it didn't exist, how different would America be?

>6 lriley:

Your comments--which boil down to essentially saying

'the dreck on television--of which I watch very little--doesn't interest, concern or affect me because I don't watch it,'

brought this image to mind:

A fellow who is about to board the Titanic is told by a wild-eyed stranger that the ocean-liner's maiden voyage is doomed, that it's going to strike an iceberg and sink in the North Atlantic.

The passenger replies that, since he's travelling in the first-class section, he'll get through all right.

Now, of course, the analogy fails in certain respects. We aren't, of course, by any stretch in some equivalent of the first-class section of anything--certainly not a luxury ocean liner; and the voyager, unlike us, could in theory choose to heed the warning and decide not to go aboard. Ours isn't the same case in that respect. We can't choose not to "go aboard" this culture and this culture is a television-culture whether or not one watches television. We're 'aboard' whether we like it or not.

And this is part of the point: what happens to this 'ship' is going to seriously affect us and choose-y television viewing or no-television-viewing at all is not going to alter that.

When I write that

There is no "line" which separates, on the one hand, the manically obsessed 'concern' shown by Trump's opponents for what they, in their mental states, experience as a conspiracy of "collusion" by Trump & Campaign with Russian authorities--though this matter was wholly contrived--and, on the oher hand, the now-inescapable 'P-C' reactionaries' knee-jerk obsession with, to take just a very recent instance, the way Roseanne Barr's Twitter "tweets" are such stuff as multi-miilionaire Los Angeles media moguls find themselevs obliged to determine, " 'There was no way to come back from this,' (one of the sources said.)"

No "line" between them. You have two very typical examples of what is essentially the same set of wacko psycho-phenomena.

I mean that the same source-idiocy is at work in both examples. The political culture suffers from the carnivalesque characteristic that has come to define practically all aspects of the culture now: journalism has, yes, turned into something like the digusting, ugly, cheap and shoddily made consumer articles with which we're swamped. Education, morals, principles of justice and honesty--these have all followed the course of and are are now suffering that same degraded condition of the shitty taste in music, clothing, in publishing.

Pointing out that many of the wealthy élite in the media-industries are at once victimizers and victims of their own idiocy is not a plea for sympathy for them nor an attempt to excuse them for the vast damage they've wrought on the culture.

Nothing obliges us to like these people. But we dare not imagine that we can afford to ignore them and what they have done and are continuing to do to the culture simply because we think that not tuning in to their products means we remain aloof from them. If the wealthy, in their bubble-protected existences, cannot achieve that then cettainly we can't achieve it either.

>7 barney67:

"If it didn't exist, how different would America be?"

Vastly different.

California would have the cultural impact of, say, Alaska--also a geographically immense state but not a maker-and-mover of the culture as a whole. Its economy, rather than the 6th-largest in the world (2017) would be nothing like that. It's political influence, now immense, would be vastly diminished.
_________________________________________







No Governor Schwarzenegger





No Speaker Pelosi









No President Clinton







No First Lady, Senator or Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton







No State senator, U.S. senator or president Barack Obama

These are all creatures of television culture.

And these examples don't even begin to scratch the surface.

The essence of the proximity posts '...don't even begin to scratch the surface.'

Solutions?

Sometimes I think people don't think about it but LT is a place for people who read. I see myself as something like an auto-didact---a person who reads---a person who doesn't need a degree to do that or to have gone to a college or university--who just goes from one book to another and when finished to another again. Anyone can do it but from my experience very few do. When I first came to LT I wasn't thinking at all about the Pro and con group--nor have I ever thought of giving more attention than I feel like to any particular person. I'm also a person who drinks--there's a lot of them, so I would think if the reading makes me less ordinary the drinking makes me more ordinary---I'm also a person who watches his hockey team. I'm not particularly anyone special--there are over 300 million people just in the country I live in--so why would I think that anyway? and since we all have a time span to do whatever we're going to do. I'll go back to the first sentence--I read a lot. Visual media is not as important to me.

>9 proximity1: You left out the first president TV elected - Regan. But I have no intention of participating any more in communist rants about not watching television & thereby destabilizing our American culture. ;-)

I thought a sitcom with Trump vs everyone else divergent political opinions in a family was a good idea {never watched a show} but somehow they ran that off the tracks.

Rosanne lives in Hawaii on a big farm - that is where she dumps all her money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseanne%27s_Nuts

>13 DugsBooks:

" You left out the first president TV elected - Regan."

No, that was would be the subject of this photo--



and while, yes, just as I didn't mention Ronald Reagan, I didn't mention Kennedy as neither of these men quite qualify as creatures of the television culture. Kennedy was born in May of 1917 and Reagan in February of 1911, thus, they were born and grew up prior to it. Those others I mentioned? --not so much. It is true that JFK's election owed a great deal to television and that Nixon's and Reagan's --and, of course, those since--owed even more to it.

But I did indeed think of both Reagan and JFK before him. Their political careers were quite importantly influenced by television--and radio and, for Reagan, of course, film.

>11 barney67: "Solutions?"

Deep-rooted cultural flaws don't have solutions. They have disasters.

(Vanity Fair (Politics) "Even in an era of historic media fragmentation, Donald Trump dominates our attention universe to the point where he blocks out the sun. Is it any wonder that people don’t have any idea what Democrats stand for?" || by Peter Hamby ||
May 26, 2018 3:30 pm

... ... "We inhabit a world of niche interests and platforms and distractions, where everyone is supposedly paying attention to their own thing. Unlike the mass-audience days of I Love Lucy—a show that commanded a remarkable 71 percent of television eyeballs in 1953—today you can happily silo yourself from signals that you don’t care about. Our attention spans are shrinking. Axios reported this week that more than 70 percent of the American population regularly uses another digital device while watching TV. It’s incredibly hard to seize attention in 2018; there’s too much to read and watch, too much to look at." ... ...

That, however, is only one part of the larger picture. While "(i)t’s incredibly hard to seize attention in 2018," most mass-media feeds ultimately from a very small "pond."

A relatively little media "pond" furnishes the source-topics which get major attention nationally--whether that is from media giants or the small-time media retailers which mainly comment on these topics.

There's a lot to say about television, and it's easy to overstate the influence. Although the poison has been diluted by more competition, and by young people who stream Netflix through their laptops rather than buy TV sets, television still dominates our culture.

Suppose, for example, that we relied more on our own ideas, rather than the ideas and images put into our heads by a small group of people in New York City and Los Angeles. Suppose the habit of passivity that TV encourages no longer existed. Suppose its narcotic effect vanished. Suppose the noise were silenced. Suppose the high cost of extended basic cable were spent somewhere else. Suppose TV sets no longer existed in bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, man caves, and minivans.

In recent decades, when we talk about the corrupting influence of money in politics, we're talking about the high cost of campaigns, and how that cost ends up being bribe money. Contribute to my campaign and I'll vote for Bill XYZ. The Trump presidency is a reaction against that kind of thing.

I've never broken it down, but why are campaigns so expensive? Off the top of my head: there's a large staff. Those people need salaries, and perhaps the money to feed and house that staff on the road. There's the cost of flying all over the country. Think of how quickly air fare adds up. Harry Truman campaigned by train. That was 1948. Not so long ago.

But to reach people today, to reach a large audience in a large country like America (100 million voters) you have to go through TV. That means advertising, speeches, and debates. Suppose you removed that from the equation. Suppose TV were paid for. What effect would that have?

>15 proximity1: "Deep-rooted cultural flaws don't have solutions. They have disasters."

Well, that's one way of looking at it. I don't expect swift, dramatic change. It doesn't work that way. But I have lived long enough to see TV fade a bit. I often see a backlash against TV, though it's not always expressed in those terms.

Perhaps school shootings would be fewer if TV didn't exist. Columbine was quite a drama. Psychopaths like Eric Harris and his copycats like drama, theatricality, grandiosity. Take the spotlight off the shooter, withhold his name, don't make him a hero, and you might prevent the next copycat.

You can get into a chicken and egg argument here.

Nevertheless, I never enjoy concluding that the situation is hopeless. Human beings lived without TV for a long time, most of our history, and they can do so again. If nothing else, the hours can be reduced. When I was a kid, there were four channels and TV signed off at night with America the Beautiful.

>14 proximity1:. In my mind Regan was the tipping point where opinions were formed 90% by what the candidates image was on TV rather than derived from newspapers, radio etc.
i was actually saying Regan was the first president elected by the TV when he won, i was stunned. I thought people would see beyond his great polished TV presence to the issues {protect the rich, make ketchup a vegetable in order to bring school lunches into compliance for nutrition regulations etc.}. Screw that elect the Tv cowboy president is what happened.

>18 barney67:

"Perhaps school shootings would be fewer if TV didn't exist."

I wish I'd thought of that--I'd have written that myself. Very good point.

I agree very much--I think they'd be very very likely to be far less (and still might decline slightly if television were reduced to a tiny 'peep' of a factor)--if television had not already wrought its damage. But unfortunately, it has wrought that damage and I think that, for all the good that would come from it if television as we know it vanished tomorrow, our social ills would still produce youth who go into schools and indiscriminately kill people.

People often speak glibly about "slippery slopes." Well, we're already well onto to this one. There isn't the option now of avoiding what television once represented in a most unfortunate "slippery slope."

_______________________

"I never enjoy concluding that the situation is hopeless."

Yes, but I don't have the luxury of drawing only conclusions which comfort me. It's hard to say what is hopeless and what isn't. People have proven to hold on to hope in bleakest, the most desperate, situations. And they've only sometimes gotten through these. Hope + a serious plan is a far better course than what we're depending on: "hope + nuthin' much else" = "we'll get by somehow."

Not necessarily.

______________________

"Human beings lived without TV for a long time, most of our history, and they can do so again."

You could say the same about "architecture" : Human beings lived without architecture for a long time, most of our human history, (in fact), and they can do so again."

True--as a theoretical possibility, it has to be admitted. But what would it take to see that?

>19 DugsBooks:

"i was actually saying Re(a)gan was the first president elected by the TV"

Oh. I see now what you mean by that. I'm still not sure this couldn't be said with the same meaning about JFK's election. But I agree that in the time between the two of them the general public habits of thinking had been immensely 'worked over', much for the worse, by the instruments of broadcasting, especially television, mass-media messaging.

I think that there is all the difference in the world between a society in which nearly everyone gets nearly all of his information about the world of political affairs from a combination of printed words on paper and radio, and, on the other hand, one in which this is almost entirely from television, directly or indirectly.

Perhaps there would be fewer school attacks if there were less guns--if they were harder to get---if they were harder for kids to get. There are other reasons that might factor into why these shootings occur--like bullying or mental issues, couldn't make the football team, or blah, blah, blah but the easy availability of guns to teenagers is still the biggest key in preventing these massacres or at least curtailing the worst of them and IMO when you go off of that point you're doing the NRA's work ('it's got nothing to do with guns') for them, you're doing the handwringing congresspeople's ('moment of silence'--'say a prayer') who don't want to give up their NRA donations handwringing for them.

>22 lriley:

I don't agree. When a youth reaches a point at which he has a clear and reasoned plan to take some up some lethal weapon, go into his current or former school with it and commit indiscriminate murder on the school's staff and students, then "there being" (fewer) guns, ... harder to get ... harder for kids to get" is unlikely to change more than how long it takes this young person, who is no longer looking forward to any future, to any productive life in society--if he ever had such expectations in the first place--to get possession of the type of weapon he eventually comes up with.

Are swords, inflamables, all kinds of materials which could be used in making home-made bombs next on your "to be prohibited" list?

Then we arrive a pocket-knives. In Britain there's well-advanecd campaign to rid society of the deadly menace of the pocket-knife.

At what point --if ever--are you seriously prepared to say, "Alright. We've prohibited all that we really reasonably can now. We're going to have to accept the present level of risk and danger."? My guess is that you haven't even posed this question to yourself and that, thus, you in fact have no such limit already in mind.

Meanwhile, there remain youth who reach a point at which they develop a clear and reasoned plan to take some up some lethal weapon, go into their current or former school with it and commit indiscriminate murder on the school's staff and students.

About these, your entire focus is on keeping lethal weapons out of their reach. And I think you like that "solution" because it's the simplest, the least demanding--though it's illusory. In that regard you actually share something of an outlook with the hopeless youth who decide to commit murder-suicide: in both cases there's this fatalistic assumption that the society's ills are intractable.

>23 proximity1:

I doubt if anyone is claiming that murder can ever be completely stopped. But first off, a knife will not kill as many people as a gun or bomb before someone manages to tackle the dsturbed young man. Secondly, as has been pointed out by others in parallel threads, while a bomb may kill a good few people in the first blast, the absence of a gun means he can't kill the fleeing survivors nor shoot it out with the police who come to arrest him. Yours seems to be a verson of the tired old argument that if we can't achieve 100% success rate we should not aim to achieve 70% or 50% or even 10% reduction in the number of our young people being killed. That fallacious argument would say, for example, that wearing seatbelts in cars will not save every single life so there is no reason to enforce the wearing of seatbelts, even though it saves many many lives.

I get it. Guns have become sacred and holy objects. More sacred in any case than the lives they take. To take a man's gun away would be like emasculating him. He wouldn't know who he was anymore.

>23 proximity1: Assault weapons are expensive! And they really do a lot damage with big clips. I have had a shotgun for hunting since I was 12 but how could that lady give her mentally ill son an assault rifle “because it made him feel better” ? , then he killed her and all those elementary school kids where she taught.

Making those type rifles legally required to be kept out of access of non adults and/or very restricted sales would be the way to go.

>26 DugsBooks:

"Making those type rifles legally required to be kept out of access of non adults and/or very restricted sales would be the way to go."

So, if I understand you, you've actually read >23 proximity1: and, having considered its point, including this:

"When a youth reaches a point at which he has a clear and reasoned plan to take some up some lethal weapon, go into his current or former school with it and commit indiscriminate murder on the school's staff and students, then "there being" (fewer) guns, ... harder to get ... harder for kids to get" is unlikely to change more than how long it takes this young person, who is no longer looking forward to any future, to any productive life in society...to get possession of the type of weapon he eventually comes up with."

your advice is that we "make those type of rifles legally-required to be kept out of access of (minors) and... (make their sale) very restricted."

Thus, this person, who's already got his plan in mind*, who has no faith in or hope for his own future and is, in effect, planning to get some final revevnge on the world before he leaves it-- he's going to stop, stymied because legal restrictions prohibit his obtaining his weaon of choice lawfully.

Again, I disagree.

______________________________________

* and that might, of course, include a devious way to obtain an assult-type magazine-loading firearm.

>25 lriley:

"I get it."

No, you really don't; not if you think my reasoning has anything to do with the following junk straw-man:

"Guns have become sacred and holy objects."

Not the weapons per se, of course. But, if a right to keep (arms), that is, let us be very clear: weapons of defense and assault in conditions of war or civil insurrection---and that is what this right was recognized and promulgated to ensure : that ordinary citizens could possess of their own accord and initiative and by a recognized right which government's authority could not deny--weapons by which they could both defend themselves in an armed conflict and, if they see fit, take up for use in a concerted effort to throw off what has become, in their view, an illegal, oppressive and tyrannical govenment--then the fact is that these weapons, while neither sacred nor holy--your idiotic strawman description--are, none the less, still essential today to that right's meaningful point.

Without them or something else as effective for defense, the right amounts to useless words on paper--the Constitution of the United States' item number 2 of the Bill of Rights.
_____________________________

"More sacred in any case than the lives they take."

Again, not the weapons per se. But the civil right to hold and keep such weapons for potential use against a government become, by wide and commonly-held appraisal, tyrannical and deserving to be thrown off in the only manner left--resort to force of arms? Then, yes, that right is more to be prized, preserved and respected than the lives of people lost in the course of its being safe-guarded from repeal. That is because to resort to and to use this right already implies the knowing readiness to risk the loss of lives--many of them--to counter and reverse a tyrany which can no longer be countered effectively in any peaceful manner.

______________________________

"To take a man's gun away would be like emasculating him. He wouldn't know who he was anymore."

Firearms or not, we already have a society in which many men feel effectively "emasculated" and as though they do not know who they are anymore or, more specifically, do not any longer know what being a man even means or ought to mean.

As I've said, I have no problem restricting the use of certain kinds of weapons. That already happens. I have also said the problem is bigger than choice of weapon.

When we analyze issues, things are always easier to control than people, or at least that's the common assumption. Control the things, control the problem, right? So guns can't be about people, it has to be about things, things are the problem, otherwise the problem is too complicated for television and politicians and journalists and the average Joe, and of course we must guarantee that the average Joe understands.

Indiana showed us a pretty good way to handle the problem, but I don't expect everyone to treat the situation that way.

By the way, television and cultural decay are worldwide problems. Ever read the Daily Mail by those highbrow British friends of ours? India doesn't have just one Bollywood. They have Bollywood and two Tollywoods. Reality TV, which is as big a misnomer as Smart TV, is all over the world. I don't know where it started. Probably Japan. Slovenia has the Big Brother TV show. Nearly every country has some version of American Idol, which I think was started in England by Simon Cowell.

But this stuff is old hat. Chicken and egg, right? Which came first? Corrupt nature of mankind or mankind corrupted by the culture? Some of you know the old term "bread and circuses". I expect that kind of thing be with human beings in some form forever. But the conservative in me can't stop wishing for a return to a sense of balance and proportion, for measured responses, for world views with wide vistas.

The emasculation problem is part of the larger problem wrought by the cultural revolution, which didn't start in the 1960s, though it seemed to bubble over then. I see, maybe, hundreds of years of ripping up assumptions about nearly everything. The destruction of established ways and definitions. Not of all of that can be replanted, but some of it can. Some of it was too deeply rooted ever to be torn up permanently. I'm thinking of what Frost called the truths we keep coming back to.

The recently deceased Tom Wolfe wrote in the 1970s about The Great Relearning. A fictional version of that can be found in Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerny. Love in the Ruins. But you know the complaints aren't new either.

Chris Rock had a comedy routine about charging $1000 per bullet.

Supposedly, we live in an Age of Blissful Mutual Tolerance. That's what we're told time and time again, and it doesn't ring true at all in my mind. Reality, though, tells me that opinionated people of the far-left in particular are discoursing like they are today's New Puritans. We have never had it so bad as we have it today.

Fine by me, on their own blood pressure be it when they die prematurely of constantly spewing volcanic ashes of indignation and making their own blood boil. They can go point the Finger of Moral Superiority elsewhere while I'm doing something more agreeable. These people have to be avoided at all cost if you want to have something more pleasant to do with your life. Don't give them the attention, anyway.

Better chill out at any opportunity presented to you, and let these wankers explode with their bullshit. We are better than that !

Supposedly, we live in an Age of Blissful Mutual Tolerance. That's what we're told time and time again, and it doesn't ring true at all in my mind. Reality, though, tells me that opinionated people of the far-left in particular are discoursing like they are today's New Puritans. We have never had it so bad as we have it today.

Fine by me, on their own blood pressure be it when they die prematurely of constantly spewing volcanic ashes of indignation and making their own blood boil. They can go point the Finger of Moral Superiority elsewhere while I'm doing something more agreeable. These people have to be avoided at all cost if you want to have something more pleasant to do with your life. Don't give them the attention, anyway.

Better chill out at any opportunity presented to you, and let these wankers explode with their bullshit. We are better than that !

Sorry, someone needs to delete the duplicate comment. Computer's getting slow at this point and I had clicked post button a few times.

Only you can edit your post.

>32 Luchtpint: We have never had it so bad as we have it today.

You don't seem to have taken your own advice. Most of us are doing pretty well.

>36 prosfilaes: If us means humans, you don't seem to understand what is happening on your planet. Check, for instance, distribution of income, calorie intake, infant mortality...

>37 RickHarsch: Yes, look at the Infant Mortality Rate. As far as I can tell, it's dropped massively since the 1950s, in all regions. Compared to the the 1950s or even 1980s, yes, most of us are doing pretty well.

>38 prosfilaes: You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I made the mistake of offering one measure you could leap at to disregard the rest. Nothing is more important than the maldistribution of income and as you certainly must know that is worsening in the US and around the world.

'Most of us are doing pretty well.' That's one of the delusional things I have ever read on LT.

I should add that there is no problem affecting humanity at large, particularly environmental, that is not made worse by the dynamics that propel the growth of maldistribution of income. And if infant mortality is on the decline, I would guess even that is temporary.

>27 proximity1: To think you can stop someone from obtaining a gun in the USA is a pipe dream I agree but I was thinking along the lines of lessening the impact , on a statistical basis, by making it more difficult to obtain a “weapon of mass destruction “.

Who cares about the mindset of the shooter, remedying that is a more complex problem akin to the other topic about kicking a sub teen out of school for talking about a bubble gun or whatever. {one finger typing on a pad}

>40 DugsBooks:

... "Who cares about the mindset of the shooter, "...

A lot of people care, even if you aren't one of them. Their working theory is apparently that, if we only learn enough about the typical profile of such potential gunmen (this is their reasoning, not mine) then there's a reasonable chance of preventing some of the incidents by earlier intervention.

Actually succeeding in such an ambition would be a great thing. Doing that simply by expecting that stronger restrictions on guns' availabilty shall prevent a potential perpetrator's getting his hands on a firearm strikes me as a naive plan.

A world full of youth who feel very deeply that they have so little or nothing to live for that they're attracted by the idea of ending their own lives by going out in a blaze of indiscrimate murdrer--but who can't get their hands on the firearms-- is only a little better than a world full of such youth who can get their hands on them.

>41 proximity1: "A world full of youth who feel very deeply that they have so little or nothing to live for that they're attracted by the idea of ending their own lives by going out in a blaze of indiscrimate murdrer--but who can't get their hands on the firearms-- is only a little better than a world full of such youth who can get their hands on them."

Sure I get that, your are right, but the quickest method to expedite a reduction in numerical loss of life would be to have fewer "assault rifle clubs" providing access to kids in schools.

Psychological research to divine the mind set of such a large group of people and develop a winning strategy for treatment is an admirable goal but IMOHO in a comparison of the two methods the phalanx of shrinks advancing on the trouble youths is the loser in the time it would take to effect an answer. Both methods implemented being the best case scenario of course.

I was thinking of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting when posting this but I see the jerk was 20 years old and under psychiatric care as you suggest, point being he should not of had access to such a weapon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting

Wow, really morphed the topic in this discussion - sorry about that.