This is going to be short, it's a horribly busy week here.
That woman who shot up the Home Depot parking lot in Auburn Hills, Michigan is a product of a number of things, all of them getting back to paranoid, idiotic ideas fed to the susceptible by TV, Movies and hate-talk radio.
She obviously saw herself as an adjunct law officer, packing a 9mm handgun, I assume enabled by the gun-industry sponsored carry laws that have sprung up like poisonous mushrooms all over America. Those sold through TV and hate-talk radio and, to an extent, the movies.
She obviously had some kind of fantasy heroic idea of what she was doing, again as sold through a long series of movies, TV shows and later hate-talk radio and, now, the internet.
That the police as of the last time I looked, hadn't yet charged the nutcase who is packing is probably also a product of the media, I'm sure they're wondering what kind of FOX style hero this dangerous person will be turned into, they being the villains in a story line pitched to other insane people with guns.
This is all the product of crappy hack writers who work in the media churning out crap with the most facile and unrealistic story lines, story lines which never have to face what real people face, the real results of things like psychotic would-be vigilantes who are packing heat. It is also the result of the "news" arm of that media who are as unrestrained by reality and responsibility as the "entertainment" arms of it. Once broadcast and other media were released from any kind of responsibility to the communities and the country in which they operate, they did what any intelligent person could have predicted they would, they drove the media and the country straight to the bottom where the easiest money could be found.
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Related to this, we now know that Laurel Harper, the mother of the latest serial mass murderer, was an open-carry, paranoid gun-nut who expressed all of her multiple symptoms on Face-book. I think when someone publicly announces themselves as an open-carry gun nut with symptoms of paranoid delusions their neighbors and other members of the community have a right to know it. I suspect the police can't and, perhaps, shouldn't monitor the online rantings of these crackpots who haven't, yet, killed anyone, that shouldn't stop private citizens from keeping a watch list based on the self-given, voluntary, information that these people self-publish. I wouldn't even be especially concerned if the police did keep a list of those people but since the government enables this class of violent psychopaths they permit to roam, armed, among us, we have a right to know who they are.
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And, finally, that terrible story about the bigot posting a selfie with a 3-year-old boy for the edification of himself and his racist, dirt-talking twittering, fellow bottom scum goes several steps lower than the Palin-Dawkins-Maher bullying of a 14-year-old boy. That's another class of people who should be considered to have opened themselves up for unwelcome publicity of the kind that, I read, got him fired.
The internet, the "information age" has turned out to work at least as well for the worst of human pathology as it has for anyone looking for reliable information and ways to improve life. Anyone who has seen American media in the post-Sullivan decision, post-Fairness Doctrine, post- community service era should have seen this happening. It's the same thing the vaunted free-press did with its freedoms, it's no wonder that the people whose minds are formed from the content they got there would do what they do.
More and more I despair of all the benefits the internet was supposed to bring.
ReplyDeleteAll it is doing is convincing disparate groups that there are people out there who agree with them on the most churlish, idiotic, mindless, and uncivilized opinions, and that makes them powerful and all they need do it bellow.
And everything is more popular if it drives outrage. It's talk radio on steroids. It's the old fringe TV shows like Joe Pyne (sp.?), the crackpot stuff that showed up after midnight back when TV went off the air for at least a few hours. It's all the internet seems to be for: pandering to the lowest common denominator, which always sinks lower and doesn't even need to be that common.
And now Rupert Murdoch uses Twitter to opine that Ben Carson would be the first "true" black American President, and he would not be racially divisive, like Obama has been. Because an octogenarian Australian understands American culture and racial history better than anyone else.
Oh, well, I guess at least we get to see clearly how vile Murdoch is, if we didn't know already. But really, we need social media for this?
I thought Clinton was our first true black preznit.
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