Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Night Thoughts On The American Cold Civil War - Look At What The Killer Watches On TV and Online If You Want To Know Why He Did It

While they're trying to figure out what motivated the mass murderer in Las Vegas to use his "Second Amendment rights" to murder close to 60 people and injure many more, trying to square an old, white man who was a millionaire, living the materialistic good life such as the United States affords to old while men like him, I'd like to know what movies and TV and other entertainment media he watched because it's more than possible that was what provided him with the idea to do such a thing, such media has certainly inspired previous violence.  Timothy McVeigh and Dylan Roof got their inspiration from The Turner Diaries, I would wonder what this Paddock was reading and watching. I suspect that might provide a more fruitful avenue to trying to piece together a motive than looking at his bank robber daddy.

But I doubt that will be done, the major news venues are all owned by people and are staffed by people who produce such content or they, otherwise, benefit from the absurd idea that the propaganda that any mass media is entirely innocuous even when it spreads the most obviously pathological glamorization of violence.  They claim it has no known effect on behavior, sometimes doing that in between the commercials it carries, those 20 second messages broadcast in order to effect behavior.

The images of manliness sold by the media, the movies, TV, novels, pop songs, are intimately involved with the cold-civil war we are in.  I don't know anything about the singer whose concert was attacked, other than what I've looked up in the lyrics he sang, things like "Dirt Road Anthem" (I didn't listen to him, I just read the words as found online) and there was no specific advocacy of guns, though I didn't look at the lyrics of everything he sang.   But when he was described as a "country" singer, the frequent advocacy of armed, gun-packing, manliness manliness in "country" music was one of the first things I thought of.  Country music as much as other pop styles promote what is contained in their content. 

And, never let anyone get away with pretending that any advocacy of gun ownership and use is anything but the advocacy of violence,  violence is the only reason guns exist, it is what they are made and scientifically enhanced to produce.   And the scientists and engineers who invent and design guns are as much a part of the chain of violence that killed and injured those people and all others who get shot have as much blood on their hands as anyone.

So, we know 64 year old, white real-estate millionaire who liked to gamble and go to shows in Las Vegas, who has an Asian girlfriend committed what is, for now, the largest single mass murder by gun in American history.  People are expressing shock and surprise that someone of his discription did such a thing but, given that he probably grew up on American TV and entertainment, such a thing shouldn't be surprising.   Such a person is likely to feel a sense of entitlement that might lead them to do this.

I would especially look to see if he liked watching things like cable crime-shows, the kind that describe real-life crimes and focus on the criminals as if they were celebrities.  After the man murdered the Amish school girls in what blurs into the tapestry of mass gun death under the Second Amendment I wrote that to probably a tiny but dangerous number of the audience members, those shows carry both a how-to set of instructions and a pathological notion of glamor and celebrity that might be emulated.  I would like to not be proven right in that suspicion but since the Supreme Court, the Republicans in congress and elsewhere, the gun industry and the "civil liberties" industry provide the phenomenon, the possibility of testing that is constantly provided.   I am afraid that for the future mass murderers in the cable TV audience, on the sewer levels of the internet, they'll see this guy as someone to learn from and to try to top to take his position.  I wouldn't bet against those people being in the audience.  What else would they be watching?


19 comments:

  1. Country music -- which you admit you know nothing about -- caused the shooting in Las Vegas?

    Jeebus fucking Christ on a piece of challah toast, but you really are the stupidest fucking crackpot on the planet.

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    1. A. You fucking illiterate, I didn't say that, I noted that what I'd seen of the guy who was singing didn't celebrate gun nuttery BUT LOTS OF COUNTRY MUSIC DOES. I know enough about country music to know that, which you obviously don't about it.

      B. Since I know everything you mistakenly think you know comes form the movies and TV, did you not see Robert Altman's Nashville? I'd recommend the scene in the night club with the hostess waving around toy pistols like Doc Holiday. Robert Altman knew more about 1. country music, 2. the movies, 3. you name it than you'll ever know and he seems to have noticed the link between such stuff and actual, people getting killed with guns violence.

      C. I know you're a complete boob but you might want to go looking at the footage of Roy Moore dressing up like a cowboy and waving his little gun around.

      Jeesh, Simps, you are so stupid that I'll bet even your fellow time-wasters at Duncan's daycare for dyspeptic duffers would see my point, though they'd be too chicken to tell you you're full of shit. Sort of like the time you tried to defend Gore Vidal's pedophile abuse on the basis of his allegedly being a great writer (he wasn't, he was merely talented).

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  2. So which country artist is responsible for yesterday’s tragedy? Hank Williams? George Jones? Lyle Lovett? Emmylou Harris? Garth Brooks?

    Altman knew absolutely nothing about country music, BTW. No wonder you like NASHVILLE the movie.

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    1. You fucking idiot. I'd challenge you to quote exactly what I said that means what you're falsely claiming I said but we'e been down that futile path any number of times YOU CAN NEVER POINT OUT WHAT I SAID TO BACK UP YOUR MISCHARACTERIZATION OF IT.

      I watched the ending of Nashville on Youtube again just now and I can remember why it remains the only movie I paid to watch twice in one week. There are two sorts of people in this discussion, people who see Robert Altman as a genius and idiots like you.

      You spend a lot of time declaring that I know nothing about things when ever time I've bothered to go over one of those in the past I've whipped your flabby white ass. Robert Altman knew more about country music and about just about anything worth thinking about than you do.

      RMJ was right, you don't even have the beginning of an idea as to how to make or even understand an argument. Everything to you is a matter of how closely it adheres to your preferred framing, in your case about the size of a window in a very small doll house.

      I looked at Duncan's blog for the first time in a while after you made that comment, I see the boy is gloating about "your hobby" being "his job". Considering what he posts as content his claim is pretty funny. I've read of people with no-show jobs who made more of an effort to look like they're working.

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  3. BTW, there’s not a single song in NASHVILLE by a genuine country songwriter. Altman let his actors write their own mediocre inauthentic tunes That’s how much he understood the genre.

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    1. Let's see, there's about an hour of music in the movie and there are about two which might stand on their own, the last two.

      It wasn't a movie about country western music, it was a movie that summed up the post-war United States up till 1975 and was remarkably accurate in predicting a lot of what would come.

      Hey, I liked Popeye too but Nielsen's music for that sucked just as much as everything else he did.

      Let me guess, you hated Three Women and McCabe and Mrs. Miller too.

      Actually, what came to mind first, after the point about the rather incredible number of country songs glorifying guns and their use was Jules Feiffer's Little Murders. But that's a more complex discussion and one I'm not interested in having with an idiot like you. I'll run it past my brother, he's not an idiot.

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  4. BTW. — Altman made a lot of good movies and a lot of stupid ones. NASHVILLE is one of the stupid ones.

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    1. Too complex for you, huh, bunky?

      I'll go with agreeing with Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert on it rather than Stupy Stale.

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  5. I notice you were too embarrassed to put up my post on the inauthenticity of the fake country songs in NASHVILLE.

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    1. I posted it six minutes before you posted this content and was responding to it as you typpled it out and posted it.

      Geesh, Simps, I know you have no attention span but ... well, maybe it took you more than six minutes to type out this comment. How many characters a minute can you type?

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  6. Wow. Self-serving and dishonest much?

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  7. Nilsson. Not Nielsen. And he was a genius.

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    1. Yeah, whatever.

      If you knew how hard I'm laughing at the idea that he was a genius you'd pout. He was about as banal a songwriter as douchebag stoners ever mellowed out and drooled to.

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  8. BTW - NASHVILLE? Like too much of Altman, facile cheap condescending stupid fake Left anti-American bullshit.

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    1. Oh, so instead of going with the Kael-Ebert school you're going with the Al Capp school of criticism.

      That's one thing that's certain, stupid people won't get great art and they'll always try to turn it into something stupid enough so they'd understand it if that's what was produced.

      Good thing I didn't go with the Jules Feiffer point, you'd be totally out of your depth, which is most peoples shallows.

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  9. COUNTRY MUSIC IS ABOUT GUN NUTTERY!!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je8xzQd6YEo

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    1. Huge swaths of country songs celebrate guns and their use, you obviously don't know much about the genre. Here's on online piece I just chose from googling on the topic, right now.

      There are indeed strong cultural connections between the world of country music and proponents of gun-ownership rights. In 2010, for instance, the National Rifle Association, the leading lobbying group for the gun industry, launched a partnership with the Nashville music scene, called NRA Country. According to its website, the partnership has featured genre luminaries such as Hank Williams Jr., the band Florida Georgia Line and Trace Adkins.

      There's evidence that some minds are changing, however, in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting. Caleb Keeter, who performed at the Route 91 Harvest festival over the weekend, wrote in a post he tweeted Monday that he had a change of heart.

      "I've been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life," he wrote Monday. "Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was." Later in the note, he wrote: "We need gun control RIGHT. NOW."

      Steve, you are an ignorant ass, one of the ignorant asses on the rump of Duncan Black's stinky blog.

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  10. What you know from country music is exactly what you know from Jews, comedy, straight boys, girls, the Beatles, etc. --

    I.e., exactly dick.

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    1. You keep telling yourself and your li'l buddies at Duncan's that, Simps, I'll take my chances on people who don't have your impairment to come to their own conclusions.

      You apparently didn't know the place of guns in country music which is about as clueless as someone could be on a topic. Not just the topic of country music, any topic. Your intellectual processes remind me of Woody Allen's joke about speed reading War and Peace:

      “I was able to go through ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia."

      That's how you and the Eschatots pretty much approach anything they don't need to know for their jobs. Dull Duncan Round Table.

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