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America's Gun Culture, Arms Dealers, Aurora Colorado, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Economic Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, James Holmes, Mass Shooting, Neoliberal Capitalism, NRA, Obama, Police State, Poverty, Robert Whitaker, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit, War on Terror
He looked like an assassin ready to go to war,” said Jordan Crofter, a moviegoer who was unhurt in the attack early Friday, about a half-hour after the special midnight opening of “The Dark Knight Rises.
Just a half hour drive from Columbine is the city of Aurora Colorado in which the latest ritual blood bath has been carried out in a hail of bullets. 71 hit and 12 dead.
Clad in a gas mask, ballistic helmet, and body armor from the neck down to the legs, the gunman burst into a theater after tossing in a couple of gas canisters. Was this a terrorist act from some fundamentalist Middle East group? No, it came from 24-year-old American James Holmes, described as “shy”, “high-achieving” and from a “good family.” He was in fact a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience. Tom Mai, a retired electrical engineer, said “the mother told him Holmes couldn’t find a job after earning a master’s degree and returned to school.” Holmes even left his apartment booby-trapped, a sort of double tap assault for those hunting him.
What can be said of this most recent disturbed outcry from modern civilization’s youth? I see it as a reflection of the perverse and twisted culture which this young person was faced with, an atomized society which commodifies everything in its site and turns all it can into a financial transaction of some sort. What is worth preserving of a society which destroys the future of its offspring with mountains of social debt in the form of exorbitant college loans, a degraded and polluted environment, no option for meaningful work, a two-tier class system of haves and have-nots, a rising Security and Surveillance State, and a world at war for the last of the earth’s resources? Of course this is all normal for a country that glorifies sociopathic behavior:
…Sociopathic behavior becomes normalized and even glorified in business culture, and the businessmen who are less sociopathic get eaten alive by the more sociopathic ones.
The entirety of business sociopathy is glorified by the nation’s culture, in art, media, etc. as tens of millions of Americans long to be the next Bill Gates, who is nothing more than a White Crips/Bloods gang member with glasses and a high IQ.
Less sociopathic businessmen who try to act decent are destroyed and then, for their decency, are attacked in common culture as losers, failures and even scum. Women avoid them and their families look at the ground when someone brings up their name. At the individual level, people who try to play fair and be nice are told that they are displaying loser attitudes and ordered to harden up and act more sociopathic.
Capitalism is really the normalization, rationalization, glorification and even deification of sociopathy across society.
My only surprise is that we don’t see more of these meltdowns taking place in this bankrupt and systemically corrupt system of ours. If you read medical journalist Robert Whitaker, America’s rise in mental illness has gone up in lockstep with “our society’s increased use of psychiatric medications.”
Another factor for America’s escalating random violence is the entrenched gun culture. America was awarded the dubious honor of being the ‘most armed country in the world’ by Reuters back in 2007. And lest we forget, America is the largest arms dealer in the world.
Surely the lack of effective gun laws that would prevent such massacres also is worth mentioning, thanks to the legendary lobbying power of the NRA whose motto was best exemplified by their now deceased spokesman Charlton Heston who said you can pry the gun “from my cold, dead hands.” America just loves its guns:
If there was a fast and sudden collapse of the economy and industrial civilization, America might be one of the last places you’d want to find yourself due to the above reasons I have described.
witsendnj said:
“My only surprise is that we don’t see more of these meltdowns taking place in this bankrupt and systemically corrupt system of ours.”
No doubt we will.
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darbikrash said:
And who could forget this classic from late ’70’s Saturday Night Live..
But of course some things never change.
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xraymike79 said:
In a world gone mad, most refuse to see the obvious.
In a world gone mad, we dig deeper the hole we are in.
In a world gone mad, we can’t see the futility of continuing past mistakes.
In a world gone mad, we believe we are immortal.
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witsendnj said:
I was just sent this “harvest” – a compendium of the endings of books about the end. Incredible. http://www.endings.typepad.com/
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xraymike79 said:
Brane Space has written an excellent analysis of the shooter worth reading:
Deconstruction of a Psycho: James Holmes
The fact that there are millions of people out there like James Holmes gives one pause. I think there are more triggers developing in society which will act to set these people off more frequently as we ignore fundamental problems with the economy and descend down the net energy cliff.
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xraymike79 said:
Also worth reading is the article ‘Did You Hear About the Shooting?’ which talks about a few of the things I touched on – the dog-eat-dog, morally devoid character of neoliberal capitalism and the all-consuming gun culture of America enforced by the NRA. In capitalism, profits come before public safety and the common good of society, no matter the cost to life and limb.
Excerpt:
“…we can see that Wilkins was experiencing stresses and crises. And at least some of them are related to the economic difficulties most of us are facing. And those are caused, at least in some cases, by greed and relentless pressure for profits, irrespective of the harm to others. That is, stresses are not all our fault. The ruthless bottom-line priorities of our society and the lack of protections for consumers and workers are factors in people becoming alienated and enraged. (We wrote a bit about regulating financial excesses the other day—you can read that here.)
Gun violence is also due, in part, to the power of gun manufacturers which constitute way too big an industry altogether. While it’s surprisingly hard to find accurate totals on firearms production, which in itself is troubling, according to a gun manufacturers’ association, even a decade ago American firms were pumping out more than 3 million combined rifles, shotguns, revolvers and pistols in a single year. And those numbers have been climbing.
That’s a mind-boggling figure. Indeed, we live in a country where firepower, both that held by individuals and by the state, is, frankly, pretty deranged. No other country on earth so bristles with means of killing—and no other country thinks it is quite so healthy an entertainment for us and our children to sit at a console for hours and try to “kill” other people—including civilians. No other country thinks it is moral behavior to use pilotless drones to kill—in large part—people whose only crime is that they’re young men of military age.
We just love our violence—so how surprising is it that violence for fun begets the real thing?…”
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xraymike79 said:
Nothing more to add to these salient words:
“No attempt is made, or can be made, by official circles to explain or plumb the depths of such social bitterness and pent-up anger. The results would be too damning for those making the study………..
Obama told the crowd that, “the federal government stands ready to do whatever is necessary to bring whoever is responsible for this heinous crime to justice. (Applause.) And we will take every step possible to ensure the safety of all of our people.”
This is demonstrably false. By its plundering of resources and military aggression overseas and its social destructiveness at home, the US ruling elite, with Obama at its helm, has made life immeasurably less safe for the American population.
Obama continued, waxing philosophical, “We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It’s beyond reason.” This from the man who helps draw up a weekly “kill list” of those targeted for assassination in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
It is too early to attempt to explain Holmes’ action. Many more facts will emerge. This much can be said with certainty. Since the Columbine massacre, social life in America has sharply deteriorated and social tensions have only increased. Past tragedies, including the Columbine, Virginia Tech and Giffords shootings have gone unexplained and unaccounted for, and the Aurora tragedy will be no different.” – source
And from The Automatic Earth:
“…I would ask readers to consider the following summary and review of the book “Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion ” by Mark Ames, written in 2007 by Ed Vulliamy for the Guardian. In the book, Ames compares modern shooting sprees to the murderous outbursts of slaves against those around them, including but not limited to their masters – acute episodes of backlash against a culture of severe oppression and alienation. In the review, however, Vulliamy takes it a step further to suggest that perhaps what we are experiencing through these acts IS our culture, and what it has been for many years now. People like Holmes are not victims, rebels or exceptions – they are the metastasized cells of a cancerous culture…”
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Timothy said:
Guns are good for when society collapses and there is no legal authority to keep the peace. If you are smart enough to recognize where society is heading then you must also be smart enough to see the need for people to have the ability to defend themselves.
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