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Thread: American Tragedy

  1. #1

    Exclamation American Tragedy

    American Tragedy

    https://www.takimag.com/article/american-tragedy/

    by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel

    August 16, 2019

    One thing about tragedies: They reveal people for who they really are. In the past two weeks, we’ve learned a lot about our media and political class. Our country endured two separate and horrifying mass shootings, one in El Paso, Texas, and the other in Dayton, Ohio. Between them, at least 31 people were murdered. Two massacres, back to back. It’s tempting to look for themes that connect them, but if there are any, they’re not political. One gunman appeared to be a Trump voter. The other supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren. There’s no obvious ideological lesson here. But that hasn’t stopped the usual power-hungry politicians from trying to leverage human pain for political advantage. Here’s just a sampling of the commentary from the Democratic presidential field:

    Rep. Beto O’Rourke: “You don’t get mass shootings like these, you don’t torch mosques, you don’t put kids in cages until you have a president who has given people permission to do that. And that is exactly what is happening in the United States of America today.”

    Mayor Pete Buttigieg: “It is very clear that this kind of hate is being legitimized from on high.”

    Warren: “White supremacy is a domestic terrorism threat in the same way that foreign terrorism threatens our people. And it is the responsibility of the president of the United States to help fight back against that, not to wink and nod and smile at it and let it get stronger in this country.”

    Mayor Julian Castro: “This echoes the kind of language that our president encourages.”

    “Thirty-one dead, and the only thing these politicians can think about is how to terrify Americans into voting for them.”
    Sen. Cory Booker: “I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this.”

    Thirty-one dead, and the only thing these politicians can think about is how to terrify Americans into voting for them. These are our political leaders. Their comments are disgusting. They’re also totally unimpressive, unequal to the task of fixing a society that on some days seems on the verge of collapse. Maybe that’s why they spend so much time trying to divert our attention from America’s actual problems.

    Nobody really believes this is about Trump or about assault weapons. If only it were that simple. Our problems go far deeper. What’s the real diagnosis? Author James Howard Kunstler, one of our wisest cultural observers, summed it up this way: “This is exactly what you get in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters. Extract all the meaning and purpose from being here on earth, and erase as many boundaries as you can from custom and behavior, and watch what happens, especially among young men trained on video slaughter games.”

    He’s right. Young men are the problem. Many of our boys are living in what Kunstler describes as an “abyss of missing social relations” with “no communities, no fathers, no mentors, no initiations into personal responsibility, no daily organizing principles, no instruction in useful trades, no productive activities, no opportunities for love and affection, and no way out.”

    Our leaders are too cowardly to say so, but the signs are everywhere. Mass shootings are just the final manifestation. Suicide rates for young Americans are the highest ever measured. So are drug-related deaths. Fifteen percent of millennials still live with their parents. Fifty years ago, more than 80% of American adults ages 25 to 34 were already married and living with a spouse. Today, less than half of adults in that age range are married. A huge portion of American young people aren’t in any kind of relationship at all. It’s no wonder millions of young people feel helpless, miserable and alone. They lack friends or parents or religious organizations to give their lives purpose and moral coherence. They live in a suffocating culture they feel no control over: Local identity and local institutions are the weakest they’ve ever been in this country.

    Most people think our democracy is fake. The policies they live under, the jobs they hold and even their personal opinions are controlled by tech monopolists, media scolds and Washington bureaucrats. America is supposed to be a free country, but millions of young people look around and feel like they’re trapped in a stagnant dystopia. In such an environment, a few people will lash out in violence. Millions of others will simply fade away, from suicide or overdose or diabetes. This is the real crisis, the one that produced those horrifying scenes on TV over the weekend. Washington is happy to pretend it isn’t happening. But it is. You can’t ignore it forever.
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11



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  3. #2
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    American Tragedy

    https://www.takimag.com/article/american-tragedy/

    by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel

    August 16, 2019

    One thing about tragedies: They reveal people for who they really are. In the past two weeks, we’ve learned a lot about our media and political class. Our country endured two separate and horrifying mass shootings, one in El Paso, Texas, and the other in Dayton, Ohio. Between them, at least 31 people were murdered. Two massacres, back to back. It’s tempting to look for themes that connect them, but if there are any, they’re not political. One gunman appeared to be a Trump voter. The other supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren. There’s no obvious ideological lesson here. But that hasn’t stopped the usual power-hungry politicians from trying to leverage human pain for political advantage. Here’s just a sampling of the commentary from the Democratic presidential field:

    Rep. Beto O’Rourke: “You don’t get mass shootings like these, you don’t torch mosques, you don’t put kids in cages until you have a president who has given people permission to do that. And that is exactly what is happening in the United States of America today.”

    Mayor Pete Buttigieg: “It is very clear that this kind of hate is being legitimized from on high.”

    Warren: “White supremacy is a domestic terrorism threat in the same way that foreign terrorism threatens our people. And it is the responsibility of the president of the United States to help fight back against that, not to wink and nod and smile at it and let it get stronger in this country.”

    Mayor Julian Castro: “This echoes the kind of language that our president encourages.”

    “Thirty-one dead, and the only thing these politicians can think about is how to terrify Americans into voting for them.”
    Sen. Cory Booker: “I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this.”

    Thirty-one dead, and the only thing these politicians can think about is how to terrify Americans into voting for them. These are our political leaders. Their comments are disgusting. They’re also totally unimpressive, unequal to the task of fixing a society that on some days seems on the verge of collapse. Maybe that’s why they spend so much time trying to divert our attention from America’s actual problems.

    Nobody really believes this is about Trump or about assault weapons. If only it were that simple. Our problems go far deeper. What’s the real diagnosis? Author James Howard Kunstler, one of our wisest cultural observers, summed it up this way: “This is exactly what you get in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters. Extract all the meaning and purpose from being here on earth, and erase as many boundaries as you can from custom and behavior, and watch what happens, especially among young men trained on video slaughter games.”

    He’s right. Young men are the problem. Many of our boys are living in what Kunstler describes as an “abyss of missing social relations” with “no communities, no fathers, no mentors, no initiations into personal responsibility, no daily organizing principles, no instruction in useful trades, no productive activities, no opportunities for love and affection, and no way out.”

    Our leaders are too cowardly to say so, but the signs are everywhere. Mass shootings are just the final manifestation. Suicide rates for young Americans are the highest ever measured. So are drug-related deaths. Fifteen percent of millennials still live with their parents. Fifty years ago, more than 80% of American adults ages 25 to 34 were already married and living with a spouse. Today, less than half of adults in that age range are married. A huge portion of American young people aren’t in any kind of relationship at all. It’s no wonder millions of young people feel helpless, miserable and alone. They lack friends or parents or religious organizations to give their lives purpose and moral coherence. They live in a suffocating culture they feel no control over: Local identity and local institutions are the weakest they’ve ever been in this country.

    Most people think our democracy is fake. The policies they live under, the jobs they hold and even their personal opinions are controlled by tech monopolists, media scolds and Washington bureaucrats. America is supposed to be a free country, but millions of young people look around and feel like they’re trapped in a stagnant dystopia. In such an environment, a few people will lash out in violence. Millions of others will simply fade away, from suicide or overdose or diabetes. This is the real crisis, the one that produced those horrifying scenes on TV over the weekend. Washington is happy to pretend it isn’t happening. But it is. You can’t ignore it forever.
    Which is exactly why I keep quoting The Matrix.

    Time to WAKE UP.

    There is no spoon.

  4. #3
    Welfare, and the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex.

    Related:

    http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...-Opioid-Empire
    ____________

    An Agorist Primer ~ Samuel Edward Konkin III (free PDF download)

    The End of All Evil ~ Jeremy Locke (free PDF download)

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Ender View Post
    Which is exactly why I keep quoting The Matrix.
    Time to WAKE UP.
    You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Ender again.
    ____________

    An Agorist Primer ~ Samuel Edward Konkin III (free PDF download)

    The End of All Evil ~ Jeremy Locke (free PDF download)

  6. #5
    I'm going to have to read more from this writer Kunstler. Many have asked why this Evil keeps occurring and I have merely pointed out that there is Good and there is Evil. And that is just the way it is. But, I believe this Kunstler has hit the nail on the head.

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    I'm going to have to read more from this writer Kunstler. Many have asked why this Evil keeps occurring and I have merely pointed out that there is Good and there is Evil. And that is just the way it is. But, I believe this Kunstler has hit the nail on the head.
    Read his blog:

    Cluster$#@! Nation.
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    Read his blog:

    Cluster$#@! Nation.
    Yeah, was just looking him up. Here's the blog this article references...

    Hold the Teddy Bears and Candles

    In a nation afflicted by fads, crazes, manias, and rages, mass murder is the jackpot for nihilists — begging the question: why does this country produce so many of them? Answer: this is exactly what you get in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters. Extract all the meaning and purpose from being here on earth, and erase as many boundaries as you can from custom and behavior, and watch what happens, especially among young men trained on video slaughter games.

    For many, there is no armature left to hang a life on, no communities, no fathers, no mentors, no initiations into personal responsibility, no daily organizing principles, no instruction in useful trades, no productive activities, no opportunities for love and affection, and no way out. This abyss of missing social relations is made worse by the everyday physical settings for everyday lives based on nothing: the wilderness of parking lots that America has turned itself into. Such is the compelling myth of the New World as a wilderness that we obliged ourselves to re-enact it, minus nature, including human nature, especially what may be noble and sacred about human nature.

    The old truism sticks: when nothing is sacred, everything is profane, and what could be more profane than slaughtering your fellow humans en masse, for no good reason? Just because you felt like it at the time? Another time, you might feel like scarfing some tacos, or checking in on the free porn sites, or tweaking some crushed-up oxycontin. One message from the culture of anything-goes-and-nothing-matters comes through loud and clear: if it feels good, do it! And if you feel bad, do something to make yourself feel better.

    The wonder is that the way we live these days hasn’t turned more people into homicidal maniacs, considering how many are out there feeling bad in this grotesque landscape of incessant motoring, vivid purposelessness, and lost aspiration — unless these bloody skirmishes are the precursor to some more general outbreak of murderous havoc. It’s not hard these days to imagine the political animus ratcheting up to something like a new civil war. If it works out that way, it will be the most psychologically confused political event of modern history.

    The Walmart is the perfect setting for these ceremonies of nihilist wrath. The sheer size of these places makes the “consumers” inside feel small, and informs them that they are at the mercy of colossal forces for their pitiful daily needs, their Hot Pockets, their disposable diapers, their roach spray. The shooter is just a momentary concentration of everything else grinding the dignity and meaning out of American lives. The bad karma in these dynamics compels some periodic release. Cue some young man jacked on his own hormones and a comic book conception of human power relations.

    I’m not persuaded that a ban on gun sales will do anything to prevent more of these deadly episodes because there are already too many firearms loose in America. But it is probably necessary to make some kind of statement, say a ban on military-type weapons, and I rather expect that will happen. But the political process of recognizing what really ails this society is mired in bad faith, idiocy, and neuroticism. And the political actors are signaling their ineptitude clearly, which only adds to the sweeping demoralization of everybody else.

    We await a restructuring of American life into real communities of people working together at things that matter, and it will require the demise of the things that have worked so hard to destroy all that, namely, the tyranny of the giants, the town-killing Walmarts, the suffocating monster of government, the media manipulators of reality, the too-big-to-fail banks. The people alone won’t loosen the grip of these monsters and, honestly, they lack the will to even imagine life without all that. But history onrushing will do it for them, first in the form of a financial fiasco that upsets the meaning of what “money” is, and all the instruments calibrated in it; and then with an economic collapse of supply lines and activities that we can’t afford to carry on anymore.

    The people may have to be dragged kicking and screaming into that new disposition of things, just because it’s so hard to let go of what you’re used to. Something like this appears to be underway now in global business and markets. For a while, it will only add to the confusion. Clarity is a lagging effect.
    https://kunstler.com/cluster$#@!-nat...s-and-candles/

  9. #8
    We await a restructuring of American life into real communities of people working together at things that matter
    For that to happen there must be some understanding of what a "community" is.

    A community is not a random gathering of human protoplasm, all pressed together in "Stack-a-Prole" housing units.

    A community is a group of human beings that have come together based on shared ideals, cultures and ethnicity.
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    For that to happen there must be some understanding of what a "community" is.

    A community is not a random gathering of human protoplasm, all pressed together in "Stack-a-Prole" housing units.

    A community is a group of human beings that have come together based on shared ideals, cultures and ethnicity.
    +rep. Though I will add that the last, "ethnicity," is not exclusive. If an individual of differing ethnicity wished to participate, and honestly held the ideals and culture to be one in which they would strive to work towards, there is certainly room for inclusion. But, no community can withstand an over abundance of those that do not share in their commonly held beliefs.

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    +rep. Though I will add that the last, "ethnicity," is not exclusive. If an individual of differing ethnicity wished to participate, and honestly held the ideals and culture to be one in which they would strive to work towards, there is certainly room for inclusion. But, no community can withstand an over abundance of those that do not share in their commonly held beliefs.
    Assimilation works if the number of outsiders is sufficiently limited.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    +rep. Though I will add that the last, "ethnicity," is not exclusive. If an individual of differing ethnicity wished to participate, and honestly held the ideals and culture to be one in which they would strive to work towards, there is certainly room for inclusion. But, no community can withstand an over abundance of those that do not share in their commonly held beliefs.
    Yes, agreed.
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Assimilation works if the number of outsiders is sufficiently limited.
    Yes, agreed as well.
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Assimilation works if the number of outsiders is sufficiently limited.
    Yes. But, they must have some core beliefs and the wish to assimilate. There is a fairly well sized Hmong community locally. I've worked with some. Know a few others that we always say "hey" at a local watering hole. They are strictly conservative in nature. Cops aren't ever called to the neighborhoods they have congregated in. There is no need. At no time have I ever seen a Hmong name in the local 'arrested' reports. And they are 100% pro-second amendment. No doubt because they have seen Communist rule and their displacement. In fact two were walking out of the local sheriff's office with handgun permits as I was walking in last week. I'd side with them 9/10 of the time over most my fellow Americunts.

  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    Yes. But, they must have some core beliefs and the wish to assimilate. There is a fairly well sized Hmong community locally. I've worked with some. Know a few others that we always say "hey" at a local watering hole. They are strictly conservative in nature. Cops aren't ever called to the neighborhoods they have congregated in. There is no need. At no time have I ever seen a Hmong name in the local 'arrested' reports. And they are 100% pro-second amendment. No doubt because they have seen Communist rule and their displacement. In fact two were walking out of the local sheriff's office with handgun permits as I was walking in last week. I'd side with them 9/10 of the time over most my fellow Americunts.
    Yes.
    Assimilation is delayed by many generations or entirely prevented by incompatible cultures, especially if the incompatibility involves fundamental values like liberty.
    ZERO immigration should be allowed from incompatible cultures.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  17. #15
    Some more Tucker pointing out the violent Left.

    FJB



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