Guns, Penises and Revenge

American culture seems obsessed with revenge, guns and dicks. Masculinity is increasingly tied to packing a gun (substitute penis) and the bigger the better, of course. One of the most prolific and politically active arms of the military industry are gun manufacturers. Decades of lobbying and ads and cultural manipulation have led to more guns sold than ever, despite the decrease in the overall crime rate gun owners supposedly need protection from. Hell, everyone from Mother Jones to CNN has the ad from the Bushmaster rifle the shooter in Conecticut had:

Lovely, right? Aside from the sexism, this ad is a blatant promotion of the violent revenge fantasies played out in every action movie and television show. Americans want to be the vigilante, avenging perceived wrongs. Most won't act on them, but I don't think the ones who do are all that different from the ones who don't. Maybe they just got pushed a little too far, were a little to isolated or were a little on edge from life events. Think how many regular office employees with no history of violence get laid off and show up armed.

But we as a culture cannot face our own demons. When a white gunman kills 20 children in a school his mother worked at, we call him "crazy" and a "lone nut." We stigmatize mental illness and then blame it. Now the man in question may or may not have had some diagnosed disorder, but it is statistically irrelevant. The rate of violence among the "crazies" is the same as the "normal" people. It is just an excuse, a dodge from actually examining our gun laws and violence obsessed culture. We have spent too long building arms and worshipping war and revenge to simply fix it, but it would be nice to at least talk about it. A little introspection goes a long way.

Instead we have Fox claiming that it is too early to talk about gun control, then five seconds later saying guns couldn't be to blame because crazy people and because other ways to die exist. They bring up various bombers and such while ignoring the rarity of such incidents. We always fall back on absolutism. If something doesn't work 100% of the time then it may as well never work, right?

There has been a lot of examination on why blaming mental illness is a terrible thing, on why we call out white terrorists as "lone nuts" while simultaneously calling non white terrorists what they are. But at its heart, the problem really lies in our inability to talk about the problem itself. Any way to otherise the violence and defensively fall back to our culture of gun worship we will take. We have problems. And they are very closely tied together. The same military complex that gave us the cold war, the Iraq war, the missile buildup and gun culture gave us these shootings. It gave us our religiosity and fundamental fear of science and distaste for environmentalism and feminism and every other positive ism. It leads even self identified skeptics to be irrational and in the end, it prevents us from introspection. It all ties to that. We cannot look inwards.

Logic Priest

Edit: Read the hell outta this.

Antiquated Crime and Punishment

As time goes on we all like to imagine some progress or other, and one of the biggest segments of society we love to wave over the heads of "backwards" cultures like the Islamic theocracies popping up around the world is how we treat and define crime. Things which don't hurt other people are gradually decriminalized and punishments become less harsh. Supposedly we have moved from punishment towards rehabilitation, and we have tried to remove punishments for behaviors which hurt no one.

This is obviously all bullshit. We may not execute people for blasphemy but in the US we have used the prison system as an institutionalized club to keep separate black and latino populations from the working class. From the arrests to the courts to the harsher prison sentences, black and latino men and women are singled out by a system claiming to be built around justice.

We have criminalized free speech if it crosses a corporate copyright, or if it comes from someone with an islamic sounding name. We have criminalized drugs that non white communities tend to use and we send rich white kids to "rehabilitation" while we send poor black and latino kids to jail for the first offense. Three strike laws turn smoking pot in your own home three times equivalent to rape. Judges and juries and prosecutors overwhelmingly single out black men and women, regardless of actual guilt.

The prison system itself seems to still be built around dark ages ideals. We throw people into chaotic private prisons with abusive guards and slave labor. Pot heads and petty thieves are thrown in with hardened rapists, murderers and career criminals leaving them little choice but to become violent themselves to survive. When they do get out after long terms of isolation from society with no actual rehabilitating therapy or job training, they then must convince employers to hire them over white people with no criminal record. When this fails, they turn back to crime and end up back in the slave labor and abuse built privatizing penal system.

Most states in fact still have executions. State sanctioned murder still exists in the US, even as we mock the third world for barbarism. We have made distributing a copy of a work over a century old a crime that can land you in the same prisons as the violent criminals, let loose in the jungle of gangs and abusive guards. We execute mentally ill and damaged individuals for crimes they didn't even know they committed. We still electrocute people, a punishment which sometimes results in death after minutes of screaming agony. We as a people know the numbers, the facts about racial makeup and the criminalization of actions which hurt no one, but we ignore and allow it because it only affects "others," that is non whites. A rich lawyer in California can run over and kill a man and never be charged, while an inner city high school student can be sent to jail for a decade for being caught with marijuana.

The entire prison system shifts towards longer sentences for increasingly harmless "crimes" under the watch of for-profit corporations using the inmate populations as slaves while barely caring for them. Approaching two centuries out from the end of slaver in the US we have found a way to bring it back. Nothing is more important than the profits of the gentry.

Lazy People

Only lazy non whites take in welfare. Because when it is "hardworking" white people it isn't welfare, just government aid. When Exxon pays negative money in taxes after making record profits, it isn't welfare just "incentives." When the red states in the union receive far more in federal aid than the taxes they pay it isn't welfare it is... actually I am lost on that one. The only explanation is the "otherness" of the people conservatives imagine to be getting welfare.

Now intelligent and rational people know that the economic imbalance in the US doesn't stem from the lower classes working less or being lazy, but from a combination of luck and occasionally some ability. Mitt Romney, for example, was born into wealth and used it to make more. He now holds no job and makes millions a year. Millions of people work 40 or more hours per week and make at most $50,000 a year. Is this because they are lazy? Obviously not. The point of government aid was never to help the lazy but to provide a slightly better playing field and more importantly as a safety net. When the millionaires and billionaires inevitably crash the economy they lay off workers. Now hard working middle and working class families and individuals need a way to live, to feed themselves. Yes they don't have jobs but not due to laziness, rather a lack of opportunity. An ideal government would open as much opportunity to as many people as possible.

Yet somehow the myth persists with conservatives, especially those who receive aid, bitching about how welfare recipients need to stop being lazy. No one, liberal or not feels that we don't need to work. In fact the biggest issue most liberals have with the rich is the fact they receive what amounts to tax breaks and welfare by being rich. They work the least and make the most. Then these rich people use racially charged language to convince working and middle class white people to imagine lazy non whites taking all their money, causing the government debt. In reality the massive wars and too low tax rates on the wealthy cause the debt. I keep hearing about largest peace time expenditure while we are in the middle of two wars.

Rich corporations get welfare they don't deserve. Rich people get tax breaks they don't need. Liberals don't want to "punish success" they merely want conservatives to shut the fuck up about lazy poor people and look at the abuse they receive from lucky rich people. Hell, most of the wealthy who started poor and middle class are liberals. It seems to me the rich folks whining about persecution and hard work "earned" their wealth by being born to the right parents. Mitt Romney was born rich, he is a Republican. Bill Gates admits he got a lucky break, worked hard to build his wealth, and is a liberal.

The next time someone whines about poor people taking their hard earned cash, remind them the difference between a welfare check and the literally billions of dollars of "incentives" that oil companies, coal companies, and red states receive from the federal government. Remind them that most welfare recipients are either working part time jobs or can't find jobs because the rich people fired them all. Remind them that the mean income for the middle class hasn't gone up in decades while the top one percent has exponentially grown. Remind them they are fucking racist assholes.

Logic Priest

Interesting Hypothesis

And a gob of evidence supporting it right in the comments.

The link, via Rational Wiki. 

Logic Priest