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Journal smittyoneeach's Journal: Can my narrative experts opine? 25

How about this dead Aussie?
This tragedy sucks as bad as the one that befell Trayvon. How is the narrative going to evolve to handle this one? I suspect not at all; since violence only merits notice in one direction, the Racism Industrial Complex goes on holiday, leaving the cricket chorus to pick up the slack.
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Can my narrative experts opine?

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  • Saw that on the Beeb this morning.

    I'm not Australian, but I lived there for some years, have family there, go back to visit every so often, read some of their press, etc.

    I think their take on it is going to be along the lines of "A country that lets its kids run riot *and* lets them get hold of guns is not a place that sane people want to go to."

    Which is pretty much what I've been saying for years: America's gun culture is a culture of death.

    • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

      America's gun culture is a culture of death.

      That comment is mindless, indeed. It doesn't reflect reality in any way whatsoever. You'd have to argue that this guy would be alive if they didn't have access to a gun, which doesn't fit the fact that they were out looking for someone to kill. In other words, you're just making shit up.

      Let's go back to your previous line:

      "A country that lets its kids run riot *and* lets them get hold of guns is not a place that sane people want to go to."

      There's just no sense in there. Amend it thusly, and it works:

      "A country that lets its kids run riot ... is not a place that sane people want to go to."

      Would a country that lets its kids run riot be OK if they didn't have guns? Of course not. Would a country with well-beh

  • The folks on the right do not have incentive or motivation to politicize tragedies. So only when the narrative favors, or can be twisted to favor, the left do you see stuff like Trayvon Martin. Hell, to this day, even educated leftists like the people who made The Butler believe the lie that Martin was hunted and murdered. Facts don't matter.

    • I'd edit you slightly to say that "educated leftists like the people who made The Butler [know that there is power to be derived from perpetuating] the lie that Martin was hunted and murdered".
      If you hold that the only thing that matters is controlling groups of people, much of the media and legislative behavior snap into focus.
  • The difference between the Zimmerman case and this case is, Zimmerman stood a chance of (and did) being exonerated, and was being praised.

    The murderers in the Aussie case stand no chance of walking for quite some time. And no one except objective imbeciles is praising the killers here.

    Tisk-tisking the race-baiters and saying they are hypocrites is appropriate in many occasions. This is not one of them.

    • If this year had not features such an onslaught of anti-Second Amendment (and indeed, anti-Constitutional efforts) after Newtown,
      and then the Racism Industrial Complex trying to overwhelm our legal system in the George Zimmerman complex,
      I would be fully in your court.
      Apples and oranges?
      Sir, this is a war for the fruit of our future, and Heaven take me if I'm giving up to these Godless Commies without a thorough struggle.
  • The media would have gone bananas if Martin was a white kid who was followed, harassed, and killed by a trigger happy idiot in his grandfather's neighborhood. Zimmerman got away with murder, plain and simple. Hell it was nighttime and Martin was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, he likely couldn't tell before getting out of his truck the race of the kid he was following.

    This story isn't about race either. This story is about undisciplined kids with easy access to lethal weapons. If they were sitting around
    • Zimmerman got away with murder, plain and simple.

      Not what the jury said.
      While I don't have a problem agreeing with you that neither case had to do with race, the staggering asymmetry of how one case is blown into a month-long occupation of a state capitol [tampabay.com], while another receives orders of magnitude less attention. In particular, my local news, which couldn't get either Zimmerman's or Martin's face off the screen, wasn't showing any pictures of the Oklahoma suspects. Why. Might. That. Be?

      I hope my son isn't interested in Journalism, because I don't thin

      • Zimmerman got away with murder, plain and simple.

        Not what the jury said.

        You can phrase it however you like, but nobody that I have heard from disagrees with the fact that Zimmerman killed Martin. If you're uncomfortable with calling it murder, so be it.

        While I don't have a problem agreeing with you that neither case had to do with race, the staggering asymmetry of how one case is blown into a month-long occupation of a state capitol,

        Isn't that an act of petitioning the government? If that was a group of tea partiers trying to get the state to call a special session to repeal a specific tax, would one be better than the other?

        while another receives orders of magnitude less attention

        The Oklahoma case is around 48 hours old. For the first 48 hours we didn't have all that much news on the Martin case. On top of

        • The Oklahoma case is around 48 hours old.

          This is roughly your best point. "Wait and see," indeed.

          If that was a group of tea partiers trying to get the state to call a special session to repeal a specific tax, would one be better than the other?

          Tea Partiers tend do show up at work. Has there ever been a Tea Party "occupation"? If there is, I'm unaware. For all that, your point about petitioning is not without merit.

          • If that was a group of tea partiers trying to get the state to call a special session to repeal a specific tax, would one be better than the other?

            Tea Partiers tend do show up at work. Has there ever been a Tea Party "occupation"? If there is, I'm unaware.

            I'll admit I did not read deeply into the story you posted about the group who occupied the state capitol to ask for a review of SYG. Were they actually there 24x7 or did they just show up during working hours and weekends? And depending on the number of people involved it isn't that hard to find people who work nights and are available to protest for a while during the day.

            Although if you really felt that a law was on the books that was a life-or-death matter, you might consider taking some time off

            • I've taken occasional days off of work to protest/blog various events. This Monday I was in Richmond [fairfaxfreecitizen.com].
              As somebody who's been doing Tea Party events since '09, I'll allow for some similarities with what the Left/Unions have been up to (e.g. the Scott Walker recall effort in WI). As to which side is more "astroturfed", well, I may be standing too close to judge that effectively.
              • I suspect that if I were to accuse the Tea Party of being an instrument of the Koch brothers and their big business ilk, you would have just as many counterpoints to that claim as I would if you were to accuse the Left of being an instrument of organized labor. Furthermore I suspect neither of us would be able to convince the other of a different conclusion; hence your comment

                As to which side is more "astroturfed", well, I may be standing too close to judge that effectively.

                May be as valid for me as for you. I'm actually not sure how one could find someone in this country - or really any other for that

                • I suspect that if I were to accuse the Tea Party of being an instrument of the Koch brothers and their big business ilk

                  That the Koch Brothers & 'ilk' are substantial financiers really isn't in dispute. So, what? What about the Constitutional substance of the message?

                  • I suspect that if I were to accuse the Tea Party of being an instrument of the Koch brothers and their big business ilk

                    That the Koch Brothers & 'ilk' are substantial financiers really isn't in dispute. So, what?

                    The issue relating to them is that they are exploiting the Tea Party for their own personal gains. Many people who are critical of the Tea Party see essentially no distinction between the main aims of the Tea Party (from a legislative sense) and the kinds of legislation that would most dramatically benefit big business while seldom if ever actually bringing about benefit to anyone who makes less than $250k / year.

                    What about the Constitutional substance of the message?

                    Some of us don't really see the Tea Party as being about constitutionality of anything. Fur

                    • The issue relating to them is that they are exploiting the Tea Party for their own personal gains.

                      I guess 'exploiting' implies that the Tea Partiers are unwitting participants. Another view is that the Koch Brothers are the Robin Hood, not the Sheriff of Nottingham (if you will) in the whole equation.

                      most dramatically benefit big business seldom if ever actually bringing about benefit to anyone who makes less than $250k / year.

                      I see the legislative agenda of the last several years as wholly in favor of the Big Cronies, and thoroughly against the "little guy". One ponders whether the "Emmanuel Goldstienification" of the Koch Brothers may be part of a broader strategy. In much the same way Rush Limbaugh [mediaite.com], Sarah Palin, and Grover Nor [salon.com]

                    • The issue relating to them is that they are exploiting the Tea Party for their own personal gains.

                      I guess 'exploiting' implies that the Tea Partiers are unwitting participants

                      Many people hold to the hypothesis that the people who sign up for the Tea Party have little to nothing to gain from the goals of the same, while the big business types who in part fund their activities have much, much more to gain. Basically to many people the Tea Party movement is a giant bait-and-switch where big business is offering nebulous and un-characterizable gains for the partiers while being in position to reap huge benefits for themselves. Note that this does not require the tea partiers to b

                    • All I can tell you, to offer a specific empirical result, is that Mark Levin's books aren't blowing up the best-seller lists for nothing.
                      There is a "gut feeling" afoot in the country that too much power has collapsed into DC.
                      Whether the Limbaughs & Kochs et alia are driving that, or merely riding it for their own personal gain, is moot: it's there, in spades.

                      If that link was supposed to be an unseemly attack of Rush, I couldn't find such an attack. President Lawnchair was just describing how he felt that his republican friends were worried about what Rush would say about them if they didn't vote his way. I would say that is more an acknowledgment of power than an attack of any real kind.

                      Among the set of things that W got right was that he never, ever did more than suck up the blowback from "Imma Decider" decisions, jacked up thro

                    • IRS scandal

                      Personally, I believe this has become a scandal only because the true power brokers in the media are conservatives, and they forced news coverage of it. From what I have seen, the conservative groups who were faced with extra scrutiny by the IRS were nearly without exception opposed to taxation quite nearly as a whole entity. Some of them had members who openly encouraged people to either not pay their taxes at all or to cheat on them to pay less than what the law requires. Being as the tax code is the

                    • I suspect a dissolution of the union is coming soon. I think the real question is how many countries will the US break up into.

                      You'll have to let me bet you a cup of coffee that this isn't going to happen.
                      Proof: the blue states are like that psychotic ex. The states that could go it alone, i.e. the productive "red" states, are also the ones that retain any loyalty to the 1787 Constitution in its un-sodomized-by-Woodrow condition.

      • Zimmerman got away with murder, plain and simple.

        Not what the jury said.

        While I don't have a problem agreeing with you that neither case had to do with race, the staggering asymmetry of how one case is blown into a month-long occupation of a state capitol [tampabay.com], while another receives orders of magnitude less attention. In particular, my local news, which couldn't get either Zimmerman's or Martin's face off the screen, wasn't showing any pictures of the Oklahoma suspects. Why. Might. That. Be?

        I hope my son isn't interested in Journalism, because I don't think it an honorable profession.

        Because not every race responds equally in the same way. Some kid stole my sons lunch, "you can't complain because that's racist.". Yup., 12 years old and already pulling the racist card.

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