Abstract: DOES THE USA HAVE HUMANITY AT THE POINT OF A GUN? The obsession 70% of Americans have with shooting other Americans is the most violent violation of Civil Rights imaginable. That’s why they want it. The will to shoot others is worse than the will to enslave them. Who would profit from such a mentality? How did it come about? Why is the pro-gun obsession progressing in the USA, in parallel with the progression of plutocracy?
This essay explains why plutocracy pushes guns onto society. It opens new perspectives sure to make the nasty scream, and reveal who, among us, deep down inside, overflow with nastiness at heart. It may shame the majority whose action enables child killers (see teachers financing Assault Rifles makers).
Guns in the USA against all and any reason, but the most abject, is not just an Americano-American problem. Life at the point of a gun imposes, in the world’s leading nation, a mentality of privileging violence over reason, and hatred over empathy. That mentality, in turn, is forced onto the rest of the planet (say from movies, universities, opinion, diplomacy).
The Grossest Propaganda Works the Best
Most legislators in the USA are millionaires, and that’s not from their salary! But by doing exactly what their plutocratic masters want them to do. And one fundamental lesson to legislate is: France Bad, Guns Good.
[See note.]
The gun mentality plays the central role in the greenhouse-acid seas disaster: no nation has been so keen to block meaningful action as the USA. The most influential right fanatics who insist upon making the USA into a gun society are those who want plutocracy and maximal fossil fuel burning. Everybody is afraid of them. Letting them shoot their way through civilization, the most basic humanity, and common sense, is not how matters will improve on this planet. (But, of course, making things worse is exactly what they want, and that’s why they caress their warm guns.)
Those who have little time can read my main thesis immediately following (the rest of the 5,000 words of the essay just buttress that main thesis by going into the nitty-gritty, including the direct implication of plutocrats):
***
Main Thesis:
GUNS ARE NOT JUST ABOUT SHOOTING PEOPLE, BUT ALSO ABOUT SHOOTING DOWN LOVE, REASON, By, And While Embracing The Very Mood That Enables Cruel & Violent Masters To Reign:
Possessing guns to kill people with, is about imposing one’s own violence as the ultimate arbitrage. Many Americans claim to view this as the ultimate expression of the American sense of freedom. Call it the freedom to inflict carnage.
The mood dominating the present USA depends upon commoners accepting violence as an overriding principle, and guns symbolize that. Instead of trying to understand things, the way Europeans have learned to do, not knowing enough to know any better is erected as definitive, glorious, all-American.
So right from the start gun advocates are tied in to the worst of man, the Darkest Side, when thoughts are only directed towards murder. Getting them out of that spiral of horror means giving them the courage, and knowledge to recognize that they have made a pact with the devil: their souls, against the orgasmic feeling a warm gun give them. They represent, they have made into an idolatry, the worst of man.
Moreover, gun fanatics succumb that way, not because they are free, but precisely because they are slaves, not because they are courageous, but because they are cowards.
The preceding is not insulting, but objectively descriptive. Insults claim what is not. An accurate depiction is not an insult.
If I describe a garbage pile, that I am contemplating, it’s not an insult. If I describe an angel as a garbage pile, it’s an insult, to the angel, and to reason.
By turning innocent little children regularly into garbage, the gun advocates of America are insulting humanity, as they claim to have the freedom to make holes into children. All the more as gun fanatics cover it all by holier than thou inanities. This essay will come up will plenty of reasons to justify the preceding, turning what precedes not into insults, but into faithful representation of what is.
A plutocracy is not a civil society. Thus, to have a plutocracy, one needs, first, to have a society that is not civil. Guns help to achieve this lack of civility indispensable to plutocracy. This is why the plutocracy insures, through the mass media enough mind control to make sure that, in the USA, people attack each other like rats in cage, with the biggest weapons they can find.
Through its control of mass media, and unending repetition, of the same lies and idiocies, the plutocrats have made the citizens of the USA believe half a dozen absurdities about gun ownership. The result is exactly what the plutocrats wanted: a society where everybody is afraid of everybody, and where the most basic human right, the right to life, is violated. Once the most basic civil and human right is violated, other violations shall easily follow. Such as having the richest and nastiest pay no, or very little taxes. Yes, my point is that the gun problem is just one aspect, part and parcel, one more way to help enable plutocracy.
More subtle, the trite idiot thoughts supporting massive gun usage have made people deeply stupid. The cowards blurt:”We have to defend ourselves!” and grab a gun. Never mind if children get killed. It sounds good to them, so they believe in it, all the more since the rest of them also bleat that way. However, statistics and observations contradict the argument that they have guns to defend themselves. Actually they have guns to kill themselves. Not only are they sadists, but they are also suicidal narcissistic masochists. (The lunatic at the primary school still had hundreds of rounds, but as the police closed in, he killed himself, proving the point that his fundamental mission was to take out his despicably low life. This is typical.)
In the USA, keeping a gun in the home carries a murder risk 2.7 times greater than not keeping one. Never mind! They believe in it! It’s all about faith! Gun and God! Gun is god, and bullets make the only points they can understand.
Gun ownership is not about reason, it’s all about the opposite. Gun ownership is about violating reason: the more one says guns are for defense, and the less true it is, the better! Thus the little minds learn that reason is irrelevant, that what their masters, the plutocrats they venerate, told them, is dominant.
Thus, symbolically, Civil and Human Rights, and reason itself, are exhibited as secondary to what gun fanatics have been told to believe in, namely their right to murder. And they have been told that, again and again and again, by big money, all over the media they control, by the wealthy ones who devise the American discourse. That is all what the plutocrats want their commoners to believe.
Conclusion: A guns totting society is scared, divided, prone to violence against itself, stupid, and, having no time or inclination to establish a class consciousness, cannot organize itself against cruel abuse, as it is too busy dodging bullets. What a better place to establish plutocracy, which is vigilantism writ enormous, for the benefit of the few? And if small people are small vigilantes, is not it natural that the plutocrats employ armies of lobbyists and politicians, let alone body guards and private enclaves, to, well, defend themselves, too?
It goes without saying that the internal violence of the USA comes out externally, and that is why the USA has sabotaged all efforts against heat trapping industrial gases, in the last 30 years.
Interestingly, the same situation exactly, of violence unchained, brought down the Late Roman empire, when plutocracy mutated into the feudal order. Not a coincidence.
Now for the details.
***
Patrice Ayme
Tags: Children, Civil Rights, Guns, Schools, Second Amendment, Shooting, USA Constitution
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
December 17, 2012 at 10:27 pm |
I haven’t had a chance to read this broadside yet, but that graphic is awesome.
Related: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/newtown-follow-the-money.html
Newtown: Follow the Money
nymag.com
Will investors in big firearms companies start to ask questions?.
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December 17, 2012 at 10:33 pm |
Andy: It’s more than investors who have to ask questions. All those who pretend to feel sorry should ask themselves questions!
PA
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December 17, 2012 at 10:48 pm |
Alexi Helligar: Okay, so it appears that the leading financier of military style weapons like the one used in the Sandy Hook shootings is a hedge fund called Cerberus Capital Management. Cerberus was the three-headed hound that guarded the gates of Hades which is the kingdom of Pluto. It is interesting when myth intersects with the morning news.
Here’s an excerpt from the article on the Huffington Post:
“Any move to clamp down on consumer sales of military-style weapons could fall heavily on Bushmaster and its corporate parent, Freedom Group, a private company owned by a New York-based hedge fund, Cerberus Capital Management. According to its 2011 annual report, Freedom Group is the nation’s largest manufacturer of military-style semiautomatics, which it calls “modern sporting rifles.”
Freedom Group also owns Remington and DPMS Firearms, two other leading manufacturers of military-style semiautomatics.
In its 2011 report, Freedom Group described semiautomatic rifles as among the firm’s most promising areas of growth. The market for such guns grew 27 percent between 2007 and 2011, the firm said.”
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December 17, 2012 at 10:51 pm |
Hi Alexi! Thanks for the very interesting comment and discovery. I knew, but had forgotten this! So I scrambled to add it to this 5,000 words essay against guns. More ammunition to shoot down the well armed enemy on the other side of the guns! When mythology, the description of our deepest fantasies, thus of our deepest nature, comes to the surface, new legislation can blossom. That, or savagery.
PA
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December 17, 2012 at 11:16 pm |
The Plutocrats’ greatest fear must surely be that one day the plebs will wake up to their crimes and rise up against them, so the last thing they would wish is for the plebs to be armed.
And if you would like a conspiracy theory (we haven’t had a good one for some time), then it is is obvious this is all a CIA plot to enable Obama to take the plebs’ guns away from them …..
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December 17, 2012 at 11:23 pm |
Chris: One does not fight the government of the plutocrats with guns, but with clever ideas of mass distribution. People rise with ideas. Other thing: full war weapons are unlawful anyway. Nobody has suggested to take hunting rifles away. Those are most effective against an armed oppressor, not handguns. But they are much easier to bar from public places. Try to go the airport with a gun to kill boars with!
There are millions of such guns in France, and they enable the occasional massacre. But an order of magnitude, or two below the USA, simply because boar hunting rifles are NOT Assault Rifles: they fired only two enormous shots, but reloading takes a while (during which time potential victims can flee!)
After the recent Australian regulation of Assault Rifles, the number of murders by firearms went down 60% (guns are still aplenty in Australia, just more regulated).
It seems to me extreme efforts are deployed to make the USA as non civil a society as possible.
Completely insane reasonings about mass destruction guns are left unmolested. That seems a conspiracy to me. Look at the Roberts-Bush SCOTUS finding that mass destruction guns are a right. What about a right to life?
PA
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December 17, 2012 at 11:41 pm |
As for the shooting, I would like to know why “something should be done” NOW when it wasn’t deemed necessary the LAST time? And though the removal of guns from the public would undoubtedly be effective to some degree, so would better procedures. This woman was KNOWN to be batty (a “The world is doomed” survivalist) AND to be a fanatical gun handler AND to have a looney son. If all these things were KNOWN then why on earth was she allowed to keep an arsenal of weapons at her house? It is as if any checks made (including anything new introduced after Colombine) were so pathetic as to be pointless.
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December 17, 2012 at 11:45 pm |
Chris: The lady was reasonably rich, and police in the USA worries more about low lives. I guess you never heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back? Or seeing a long list of children aged 7 or 6, some shot up to eleven times?
There are millions of survivalist types in the USA armed to the teeth. One cannot check all their houses and dens deep in the woods. After interviews with psychiatrists. Every few months. Remember that there are no checks on firearms resales. Also, to enter a home, one needs a motive, only the Nazis conducted such searches for guns… And it did not work out too well: they had to admit that the French resistance kept at least 17 German divisions busy, full time in June 1944 (when they had other things to do!). The first thing to implement in the present USA is to duplicate what was done in Australia, where there are still plenty of guns, but much fewer murders. Nothing very dramatic.
PA
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December 18, 2012 at 12:03 am |
Chris: There is no law against being “batty” or “looney”. The problem is that it is far too easy for those with violent imaginations to lay hands on weapons designed to automatically kill as many as possible. Yes, we need to address mental illness. Yes, we need to address the prevailing social message that violence is the solution. But, for love of Christ, let’s seize the low-hanging fruit and severely restrict civilian access to military-style automatic weapons.
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December 18, 2012 at 12:05 am |
Chris: Alexi is right. People get enraged sometimes. I have come across people (in the USA) who threatened to kill me (in public, to the point that, having witnesses, I had the police visit the perpetrator once!) The same gentleman (plenty of people would describe him that way) is now calm, years later, and even talks very nicely to my daughter (who looks like me). At least that is what my spouse, and others, told me (I avoid him).
But, if the day he threatened to kill me (because I had gone one reasoning too far), he has had an Assault Riffle around, that may have been different (as he was crazy enough to threaten me in public, he could have got even crazier and kill the disapproving public). Yes, he is a gun fanatic. All sorts of guns. Such is life in the USA.
What the mentally retarded and corrupt U.S. Supreme Court feels it can feign to not realize is that the amendment of 1791 was made for militia (the police can be viewed as the militia the Second Amendment posited, there was no police in 1791), and for muskets (reloading time between shots thirty seconds; a semiautomatic gun can fire several times in one second).
PA
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December 18, 2012 at 3:44 pm |
Forget about meaningful gun control. It is too late. There are 300 million guns in America, average 3 per household. Better to concentrate on people control.
Back in the 50s, crazy people were institutionalized. Then in the 60s, it was determined that crazy people had rights, too, and that with proper meds, they could safely be released into society.
Oh, and we would save money by closing down mental hospitals.
Half a century later, we need to revisit this decision. I am all for freedom for all, but the safety of the community is of equal importance.
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December 18, 2012 at 4:23 pm |
Dear OGP: We both know it’s R. Reagan who closed the cages for mental retards, so they are now roaming around, clearly a problem. However, with Obama proposing half a trillion of cuts in Medicare over ten years, re-opening mental hospitals is a a no-go.
I propose simply to copy what was done in Australia for gun control. Not perfect, but better than the situation getting much worse as it has in the last four years (see my future answer to chris Snuggs)…
True the mad ones kill with knives, also, but it’s much more difficult to do, especially with modern medecine, as the case in the Chinese elementary school showed last week (22 wounded, no one killed).
PA
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December 18, 2012 at 4:45 pm |
Your “solution” Chris is exactly that of the NRA. Arming teachers. Arming teachers is perfect for Bushmaster, owned by Cerberus, owned exclusively by plutocrats (and some… teachers retirement funds, as I mentioned in the essay). Plutocrats want everybody armed, so they can shoot them all (as they, plutocrats, have private armies).
You keep on saying the lady was batty, but that’s your opinion unsupported by facts. She was not arrested to my knowledge. The economy of the USA is depressed, and millions of Americans think it’s going down the drain, if that’s batty, then you consider batty most of the population. They also made a big deal of the son being asocial, but he was in school at some point and in a science club (a proof of higher sociability). So what happens when the local “batty” teacher grabs his semi-automatic with hundreds of rounds?
The teaching profession faces heavy cuts, teachers are depressed…
Other point Chris: There are basically NO gun control laws in many states of the USA. You can walk in and buy several semi-automatic guns, with thousands of rounds. Next you can go to Washington DC with your armament. The Supreme Court found that the city of Washington had no right to prevent that. AUSTRALIA just bought back guns; that would work by the dozens of millions in the USA, as the economy is depressed. Now Obama is probably physically scared. A batty guy (since arrested) fired a high power riffle from nearly a mile away (where there is a major road). The round left a hole in the White House, at the height of a man’s head, where Obama often walks. Obama left the bullet hole as a reminder.
Chris, you talk about the USA of your dreams, you don’t live there. Anti-gun laws have been CONSIDERABLY relaxed since Bush. A century ago, you could not introduce guns in national parks. Now you can (Obama). And now you can take the train with your armament (Obama). And countless states have passed concealed weapons laws, something that was NOT EVEN LEGAL IN much of the THE WILD WEST. The worst effect of it all is that an ambiance of uncivilized terror is creeping in. So when I see Europeans dreaming of the USA, I smirk. The first thing my spouse said after visiting a large, expensive private elementary school, full of international children was that a gunman with an assault riffle could break in, and kill all the international babies (something alluring in much of USA folk culture). That was 24 hours before the Connecticut massacre. In the Silicon Valley area, dozens of children get shot, every year. The murder rate by firearms in some cities there is as much as 1 per 2,000 per year. Enough of the madness! At least let’s qualify it as it is!
PA
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February 20, 2013 at 1:01 am |
Just what are the gun laws in Australia.
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February 20, 2013 at 4:50 am |
Alex: Wellcome to the comments sections here! I wrote TWO essays on guns, and I may have dealt a bit with the situation in Australia. Australia, like the USA or South Africa now, used to be a gun obsessed society. Then there were a few massacres too many, including a bouquet final in Tasmania. That was followed by a crack down, a gun buy back, and now the number of gun murders has enormously gone down.
In Europe, the country with the most easily accessible war weapons is Switzerland, where soldiers can bring their guns home (!). The murder rate there, by guns, is enormous (more than ten times Britain for example).
In South Africa, 80% of gun murders are within families. The scariest thing is the inability to loom at the facts, just like the blade runner guy, a scared rabbit who shot his latest conquest the fashion model, arguing she looked like a burglar to him. Except that was through the door… Of the bathroom…
PA
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December 19, 2012 at 4:15 pm |
My thinking has been changed from this horrible event. Although Ray-Gun closed the hospitals to save money, I supported the rights of crazy people (so-designated by society) to be free, as long as they did not harm others. That meant putting up with panhandlers and street people.
But I now see what havoc one maniac can wreak.
BTW, he could also have taken his car and driven it through the playground during recess.
So, I hate to agree with the NRA, but it really does come down to how we deal with mental illness.
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December 19, 2012 at 5:56 pm |
Dear OGP: I disagree with you, and so do the experts:
I am going to break up my essay in two. First part will be the general ideas, the connection between increasing plutocratic rule and giving the ability to citizens to kill each other, in other words, the weakening of the state.
Then I will gather all the technicals. That, incredibly, needs to be extended a bit. It turns out that the connection between mental illness and guns is weak. There are probably as many crazies in europe as in the USA, but mass murders are rarer there by an order of magnitude, at least. The maniac in Norway (77 killed) was not much more maniacal than the 900,000 who voluntarily entered the Himmler’s SS. At least that is what experts found in Norway.
Mentally sick ideas are much worse than mentally sick people, because they affect otherwise healthy individuals. Thinking all and any normal people should have semi-automatic gun in hand, bearing hundreds of rounds, each and any time when they may happen to very angry, is insane. That is, not sane. It’s that idea, fabricated by the NRA and its plutocratic masters that is insane, not the trigger men (the Bushmaster 223 is made by a company owned by Freedom Group, owned by Cerberus, a conspiracy of billionaires).
Human anger is cathartic, it helps mental phase changes. But, mass murdering gun in hand, anger makes massacres. And a society continually terrified.
PA
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December 20, 2012 at 4:59 pm |
Damn it, PA. Now you’ve got me thinking the other way. You are right – the USA has no monopoly on lunatics, but we sure lead the world in gun violence.
However, the Israelis ALL keep firearms in their homes, as do the Swiss. Of course, all the owners have been through military service and one would suppose are not insane. But their children might be.
The biggest problem in the USA is, of course, the REMOVAL of all the guns that have been accumulated over the decades during which the Congress failed to act.
We can’t have the FEDs going around kicking in doors, can we?
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December 18, 2012 at 4:14 pm |
To be fair, I never said people had no right to be batty. I am merely trying to be logical:
A) There are SOME rules in the USA about owning guns, right?
B) Whatever rules there are, they did NOT prevent a batty woman and her insane son to own assault rifles.
CONCLUSION: Either
A) The rules are pathetic and might as well not exist.
B) The enforcement is criminally negligent.
Alright so far?
My second point was – and I now try to make it more clearly – is to ask what Obama will DO, no government having done anything effective since the LAST massacre. They cannot ban guns as in Europe, not only because of the Constitution but also because it would start a war with those (among whom are many batty) who would refuse to give up their weapons – especially in rural areas. THOUSANDS would die if the govt really tried to remove people’s guns.
Conclusion: all the govt can do is to ban assault weapons and the like, which they COULD have done years ago but didn’t. I fear that once again there will be a lot of huff and puff about this and then things will go on much the same as before.
My solution is to arm teachers ….. Do send your message to the Supreme Court that they are mentally retarded. The onus would then be on them to resign en masse and report to the nearest shrink for treatment.
B) Banning guns would lead to a humungous black market. Anyone remember Prohibition?
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December 19, 2012 at 4:49 am |
Chris: The civilizational retards at the U.S. Supreme Court are VERY SENSITIVE to the pain they feel when they are called mental retards, or thoroughly uncivilized, by serious Europeans (especially fellow judges; OK, not really fellow, as they are from different civilizations!). Because they know it’s true.
That’s why they backed off a bit about the death penalty.
They, truly are savages, though, and they violated the spirit of the Founding Fathers when they overrode the Washington DC elected city government and forced it to become a gun city. Those naughty savages have to be shamed into civilization!
PA
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December 19, 2012 at 4:17 am |
Everything is violence, these are your own words. So what are guns doing that isn’t already being done?
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December 19, 2012 at 4:23 am |
Amna: Any statement, sufficiently deprived from context, or sufficiently endowed with an unintended context, can be rolled out to say anything. For example, once I said “Yes!” But yes to what? Sure forces are everywhere and thus, in a sense violence is everywhere, but the context there could be Quantum Field Theory, or biological evolution. When we talk about guns in the USA, the context is guns in the USA.
PA
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December 19, 2012 at 7:33 am |
Mom: Too many Americans are still stuck into the killing Indian mode. Killing and guns is from a lack of culture. Just something primitives do.
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December 19, 2012 at 7:44 am |
Dear Mom: Not the “politically” correct thing to say, but probably the philosophical one. As strange and gross as it may sound. As simple as that. The history of the USA shows that violence worked, and works. So far, so good…
PA
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December 19, 2012 at 10:31 pm |
It is hard for people in the UK to understand how the USA came to enshrine the right to bear arms in its Constitution. This incredulity is not shaken even when two unarmed policewomen are lured to a house in Manchester and shot dead by a wanted criminal. Even after such an atrocity, the majority of British people recognise that restricting access to guns – for public and police alike – restricts the potential for those guns to be misused (and/or for fatal mistakes to be made).
Early European settlers became accustomed to carrying guns in the midst of the free-for all of carving-up and claiming ownership of the so-called New World. Such a rights-claiming but responsibility-free mentality was understandable in an apparent wilderness but, today, it is not understandable, appropriate, or sensible. I therefore hope that this latest atrocity will result in semi-automatic assault weapons being banned once again; and that this time the prohibition will become permanent.
The USA today stands at a fork in the road; it can now choose to ban the guns that are used by most of these unbalanced individuals; or it can make handguns standard issue for all schoolteachers. Given the insanity of their denial of climate change, I am not at all surprised that it is the neo-Conservatives that are in favour of the latter. Thankfully, such ideologically-blindness is now destined for oblivion (because of the defeat of Mitt Romney).
So, there is yet hope that the USA can pull itself out of the cess-pit of its own making that is a gun owning meritocracy; and choose not to make all teachers potential killers (which would steal away the innocence of all children – not just those caught up in atrocities such as that we have just witnessed).
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December 20, 2012 at 1:56 am |
Dear Martin: I have to run right now, I will answer you more in detail later. Anyway, thanks for the nice comment. Yes, the USA has 50 (Fifty) times the firearms murder rate of Great Britain. This is saying that there is something in the mood in the USA that is 50 times bigger than in the UK. Hard to imagine. (I cut the essay in two, putting the technical details in a second essay.)
I am happy to report that, after a bit of wobbling (the stupid White House talking head, some young guy, whined that the gun problem was “complex”), Obama acted DECISIVELY, and named a “task force” headed by VP Biden to support legislative change.
Violence against people readily extends to violence against the environment. So ecologists should be concerned about the attitude to violence that people have.
PA
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December 20, 2012 at 1:20 pm |
I think that last paragraph of your reply is very significant, Patrice.
Human violence against Nature started with deforestation. Today, violence against Nature is perpetrated by all those that cling to the post-Enlightenment belief that we can dominate and subdue Nature… Sadly, they are wrong; if we do not live in harmony with Nature it will almost certainly exterminate us.
Therefore excessive shooting with guns is deemed to be legitimate because of our success in cutting down trees; and – in the minds of many today – there seems to be little difference.
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December 20, 2012 at 8:59 pm |
Perfectly correct, Martin! Now the ancestors had to cut trees. However, they did not get away with it: in many places of the Middle Earth (Whatever can be reached from the Middle East within a few months of travel by Neolithic means, i.ei from Britain to India) cutting the trees accelerated, or even created desertification. Egypt is case in point (!).
Right now, we do NOT have to proceed with coal. Anymore. British leaders were debating getting out of coal, exactly a century ago. Now leaders, everywhere, and especially the developping world, have decided to develop coal big time. In a few years, it will become, again, humanity ‘s main source of energy! Thus we will carry the sins of the Kyoto accord.
So what is going on? These leaders are actually plutocrats. They are not just leaders. They are rich, powerful, and nasty.
OK, Martin, I am turning these remarks into an essay within an extensive geo-historico-political landscape. You inspired me! Thanks! I will publish it tomorrow…
PA
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December 20, 2012 at 9:24 pm
Your comment about the events of 100 years ago reminds me of a comment Pendantry has made many times regarding Polly Higgins’ book Eradicating Ecocide, which highlights the Conference held in the UK in 1911, the conclusions of which got lost in the cataclysm if World War One…
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December 20, 2012 at 10:41 pm
Yes, Martin, there is a very long history of terrible pollution in Britain due to heavy industry and coal. After around 5,000 people died in a smog in London in the 1950s, measures were taken. However, right now, decisions have been taken in developing countries to smog us out, pretty soon. And CCS can’t work, because the whole idea of coal is not too pay for the pollution (otherwise it would be locally uneconomical, which means, it is globally uneconomical!)
Anyway, I am sure you will like the next essay. it entangles the last 50,000 years with our present ominous fate, tightly…
PA
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December 21, 2012 at 7:43 am |
Patrice,
Will read the rest of your piece when I have enough time.
By the way, not only French cheese but proscuitto crudo/chambon cru/Rohschinken is another thing you will not find in many U.S. supermarkets. Instead, what you find in most U.S. grocery stores is “cooked” ham full of water and additives. Some “choice.” Also, one of the reasons so many Americans are overweight and that the factory farms that produce hogs pollute so much.
100 grams of proscuitto crudo for sandwiches for lunch lasts us several days and tastes better and contains a lot less calories and other crud that the “safer” U.S. ham. The meat industry employs lobbyists to pass laws that allow it to keep better European products out of the U.S. so it can enjoy a near-monopoly selling inferior ones, instead. Come to think of it, some environmentalists would be happier if Americans consumed less meat, too. Not surprisingly the Dept of Agriculture is the tool of the meat industry.
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December 21, 2012 at 7:44 am |
Jeff: Agreed, USA ham is disgusting. They also put water (with carcenogenic additives) inside meat.
So when you put it in a pan, it makes bubbles… Chemical bubbles. But then the sheeple bleat that this is the country of freedom. freedom for plutocrats, slavery, mental slavery, for the rest.
My general essay is along the lines you were speaking of, actually. Just more general.
PA
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