Stephen Paddock (1953-2017), a White American gunman, killed at least 58 people and injured 515 last night in Las Vegas. It is being called the worst mass shooting in US history.
The shooting: At about ten o’clock on Sunday October 1st 2017, Paddock, holed up with more than ten guns in Room 135 on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, started shooting on an open-air country music concert across the street, 1,000 feet (300m) away. It was the third and last night of the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. Jason Aldean was singing when what sounded like firecrackers went off. And then came what sounded like a machine gun firing on and off. It went on for five to ten minutes. People were ducking for cover or running. There was screaming and bullets flying and people getting hit and bodies lying on the ground and the smell of gunpowder in the air. The Mandalay had two broken windows up on the 32nd floor.
His brother Eric in Florida:
“He’s just a guy who lived in Mesquite who liked burritos.”
Mesquite is a town 80 miles (128km) north-east of Las Vegas.
His brother said Paddock was not religious or political or military, was “not an avid gun guy at all”, though he did have some guns. He had no history of mental illness. He said there were no warning signs.
A gun seller in Mesquite, who had sold Paddock three guns, said he had no criminal record and called him a “normal guy – nothing out of the ordinary.”
ISIS claimed him as one of theirs, saying he converted to Islam “months ago”, but did not give his name.
The FBI says Paddock has no known ties to terrorists, but they are looking into it.
The police say he was a “lone wolf”. They got tons of calls about shooters, but Paddock was the only one they found. It took them over an hour to get into his room – they had to use explosives. When they got inside he had already shot himself dead.
The IRS says he has gambled up to $30,000 at a time. Bets of more than $10,000 have to be reported to them.
Hotel workers said they had noticed nothing “nefarious”. He had been at the Mandalay since Thursday, the 28th.
No motive so far is known. He will likely be written off as a nutcase, a courtesy the press and the police extend to White Christian mass shooters. The police are already starting to do that. Sheriff Joe Lombardo:
“I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath at this point.”
His father, by the way, Patrick Benjamin “Chromedome” Paddock, was a bank robber who made the FBI’s Most Wanted List in 1969. The FBI said he “employed violence in attempting to evade arrest,” and had “been diagnosed as being psychopathic, with possible suicidal tendencies.”
President Trump called the shooting an act of “pure evil”. But said nothing about gun control. Instead he offered his “warmest condolences and sympathies.”
– Abagond, 2017.
Update (October 4th): The death toll now stands at 59. It could rise further: about 30 people are in the hospital still in critical condition. Pictures of Paddock’s hotel room shows guns everywhere, many of the modified to make them as deadly as machine guns. There is also what appears to be a written note, but authorities are still saying his motive is unknown. They are bringing in his girlfriend for questioning. She was in the Philippines and was wired $100,000 by Paddock.
See also:
- Bowling for Columbine
- The top mass murders in US history
- Whitespeak
- ISIS
- White male shooters (not counting police or military)
- Also in Vegas:
- White American terrorists
The dominant culture loves their guns. So Paddock’s old man was a bank robber who made the FBI’s most wanted list. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Still what was this man’s motivation? Was it religious beliefs or some crazy fringe group or political ideology? Did he have some chemical imbalance in his brain to cause him to become unhinged? So many questions that need answers.
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This is pure gold for Trump. He will hype this shooting as a way to distract from his mishandling of Puerto Rico and the dust storm he started with Black football players. Not to mention tax cuts for millionaires and the end of an open internet.
This story is so full of irony. Just last week the Vegas cops spent a lot of time defending their brutish treatment of a Black football player.
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Lots of opportunity for conversation of how race comes into play in mass shootings and who gets the label of terrorist. And yes the syphallitic orange feces gibbon will do a whole lot of deflection and once again him and his sycophant zombie followers have mass confusion in the media.
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For hours they flashed a picture of his S.O. On msnbc, someone tweeted the host why they weren’t showing the shooter, she insisted it was because they had no picture. I thought back to 9/11 when they had the terrorists photos up before Bush addressed the nation. Once they confirmed him to be white this was no longer suspected terrorism.
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And there is confusion of the whereabouts of Paddock’s Asian ladyfriend some news outlets reported she was in the Phillippines and others said she fled to Japan. The news media outlets can’t get anything right. Some may even say it’s a false flag.
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@ Abagond
Sept. 28 was last Thursday, not Monday.
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@ Mary Burrell
Religion too. If he does turn out to be a Muslim convert, watch how fast he’ll change from a lone wolf to a terrorist.
If he had been an immigrant, especially a Muslim POC immigrant, Trump would be talking about borders, walls, travel bans, security, and extreme vetting.
Why isn’t Trump talking about extreme vetting for gun ownership, especially for semi-automatic weapons??
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@ Solitaire
Thanks!
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@Solitaire: Exactly, those are always the things that come to mind in a terrorist attack. The first person who comes to mind is Muslims and immigrant people of color. And yes 45 would start in with the usual xenophobic rhetoric that he always uses. I can’t stress it enough how much a large segment of the dominant culture loves the possession of their firearms and I am curious to hear from the NRA. No civilian should have access to weapons that are used for military operations. Ilegal gun sales add to the problem as well.
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@V8driver: Thanks for sharing that very enlightening.
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Wonder if he was indoctrinated by radical terrorist like ISIS?
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Or he could also have radical fundamentalist Christian ideology that made him go off the rails. Lots of radical fundamentalist Christians view Las Vegas as a wicked place like a biblical Sodahm and Gomorrah.
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@ Mary Burrell
Good observation about fundamentalist Christians, but news reports are saying he was a high-stakes gambler who had placed as much as $30,000 on a single bet.
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Also very true about the dominant culture and firearms. But this does seem to be a white American thing as opposed to a white thing. Look at the gun control laws in Britain, many European nations, even Australia which in many other respects has a lot of the same rough frontier mentality as the U.S.
The gun culture here definitely is tied to and overlaps with racism, but there are other things going on as well, like fear of the government. I don’t understand it myself.
If the Second Amendment was intended to prevent a tyrannical government from taking power, that ship sailed long ago. These militia types may be heavily armed for civilians, but they wouldn’t have a chance against tanks, jet fighters, or drone warfare.
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@Solitaire: I was just trying to think of what caused this individual to such a heinous act of violence? There are many fundamentalist Christian extremists who commit violent acts in the name of God.
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@ Mary Burrell
You are very right about that. Possibly it will turn out that he was a Christian extremist who was conflicted about his gambling and maybe other behavior considered immoral by his church. Kind of like the Orlando shooter was Muslim but apparently rather than being a politically motivated terrorist, he was conflicted about his own homosexuality and couldn’t reconcile it with his fundamentalist Islam.
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He is a “regular white guy”. How talk radio was descibing him this morning.
Paddock worked for Lockheed Martin in the 80’s so he may have been an engineer.
He owned 42 guns which says a lot right there. The assault rifles were likely modified for “rapid fire” with inexpensive kits that are sold at gun shows. These allow simi automatic rifles to be fired like machine guns.
Too me it seems he spent some time planning out his assault. He chose a corner suit giving him two angles to shoot people from. The music event hosted up to 20,000 people confined in a small area so all he had to do was point and shoot.
It’s possible he didn’t have an idiological reason behind his evil. He was a sociopath that wanted to kill before commiting suicide.
The social media is all ready full of conspiracies with some calling it a false flag event and others saying it is “deep state”.
There might actually come some gun control measures from this event in an attempt to keep white people from killing each other.
R.I.P. all those whose lives were needlessly cut short.
Yet within that terrorist attack many individuals showed courage and risked their own lives to help others.
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I have not heard anyone, including 45, refer to Paddock as an SOB.
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@mjb
Yes, there might not have been an ideological component even though his behavior was terroristic. And that brings us to the issue of who is a terrorist.
There is definitely truth to the notion that there is reluctance to label white mass murderers terrorists. It is seen as alien to them despite the fact that they gained these lands through genocide and maintained oppressive and unjust systems by employing terrorist tactics such as church bombings, lynchings with mutilation etc. I can’t remember Dylann Roof, for example, being labelled a terrorist even though there was a clearly ideological component to his murderous actions. OTOH, when Islamic terrorist attacks occur the motivation is often clearly stated. Their obvious political motive combined with, of course, their usual classification as non-white results in the label of “terrorist” being swiftly applied. It is not usually so swift with white people even when they have a manifesto as Roof did.
However, I think there may be a secondary reason for the difficultly in calling some white mass killers terrorists. Sometimes it’s not quite the same. People like Paddock often kill scores of random people indiscriminately for no known cause. It is not uncommon that their violent rampages seem extreme, completely irrational, and without any motivation at all. Often, the “why” dies with them. When we think of Adam Lanza (of Newtown), James Homes (Colorado movie shooter) or our current sociopath we simply don’t know why they decided to murder strangers, most of them white Americans too. There’s just a horrible pychopathic mean streak that didn’t seem to require cultivation through religious, political or other kinds of indoctrination.
So that’s the puzzle. A terrorist is usually fighting for some cause yet it seems as if these guys just wanted to kill people. In a sense, it’s human behavior that defies classification. Planning and executing the murder of scores of your fellow citizens for completely personal and private reasons is a deeply sociopathic act. They’re not martyrs to a certain community like the suicide bomber might be, they didn’t know their victims so there was no prior history of conflict, they were not hungry like the lion on the savannah, they’re just the purest, most distilled, form of murderer. People, ANIMALS, in general, are not wired like this.
So in some sense, calling these, usually white, mass killers “terrorist’ is a cop-out. We need something worse. Demon straight out of the deepest depth of hell is the best I can come up with. But when you have to invoke the mythical to approximate reality one has to concede that there are probably no words.
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I think that the USA must definitely review its law regarding gun ownership.
I can understand that an individual can own a gun for self-protection, but I can’t understand that he/she owns a whole panoply of heavy artillery and a world of munitions for “self-protection”. This simply doesn’t make sense!
From a purely technical point of view the state should maintain a comprehensive database of gun owners and their respective guns in order to limit this artillery in private hands and the damage that it can provoke in case the owners go nuts.
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At this point of the cruise’s discussion, the question of “terrorism” is a more useful issue to tackle than, I think, is the ideological wrangling over what is or is not good gun control. I have fallen in & out of love with Michael Moore on a number of occasions, but his legacy in my opinion remains his penultimate conclusion in Bowling for Columbine, which was that all evidence would seem to indicate that it is American culture itself, far deeper than American law, that leads to what we are witnessing.
Clearly the label of “terrorist” is grounded firmly in tendentious white supremacist ideology — with the ironic caveat that organized white supremacists can indeed rise to that official distinction by crossing the path of “law & order”. But any lone actor is immediately knee-jerked into the presumptive category of “nut” or “terrorist” depending upon skin tone and ethnicity.
And if that’s not enough, the people in charge of regulating whatever laws happen to be on the books are wont to let a white dude walk around brandishing firearms, but shoot a black kid down for looking scary while running the other direction. Keep this in mind when it comes to who is and isn’t a domestic terrorist.
While I believe the terrorism category as such is not problematic, indications are that official applications of the term — that is, I mean, how to deal with it by law — are utterly useless except to expand the purview of war-makers, sell more weapons, take control of territory and sign building and extraction contracts and on and on.
As to what motivates people, it is clear that anyone can be motivated by a cause to act in a particular way… without belonging to any group that inspired the cause and action. The rush to know if “ISIS was involved” is useful for the military state’s ongoing propaganda, but the question as to whether the lone person or group “got training from” or was merely inspired by a “terrorist organization” should not change the approach as to how to handle it as a society. Clearly finding the training center and drone bombing it — or marching into and occupying a country or part of it — is not the answer.
Thus, I maintain that for the purposes of description, one might perhaps usefully say that all such actors, whether organized or not, are engaging in guerilla warfare. If they’re found to be “lone nuts” so be it. I suppose certain gun control measures can prevent a few of these, but I’m pretty sure that those in charge of finding out where the hell the cadre ’round the corner got their illegal weapons will be increasingly in control of militarized police forces infested with white nationalist sympathizers.
Like I allude in my tasteless opening clause, America the Beautiful finds itself between Arock, New England and Hardplace, Californy.
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So an older white man who likely voted for Trump (i.e., white supremacist mentality) killed 50+ people who likely voted for Trump (because they share his white supremacist mentality) + injured 200+ more people (likely white supremacists) who likely voted for Trump, at a country music concert where headliner Jason Aldean likely voted for Trump (because he shares Trump’s white supremacist mindset) and where the concert was full of likely Trump supporters (i.e., likely white supremacists).
Uh, I’ll let white folks handle this one.
I bet the NRA And Trump were hoping the killer was Muslim and/or Person of Color so they could pin it on the Left, Antifa, and/or some other Progressive organization.
I’m calling for a complete and total shut down of all white men from entering the USA until they figure out what the hell is going on!
#stopwhiteonwhitecrime
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These shootings will not end anytime soon. Gun nuttery in America is not about freedom, it’s not about the Second Amendment, it’s not about the sport of marksmanship, and it’s not about self-defense. Private gun ownership in the United States exists to uphold white supremacy and prevent an insurrection by PoC (and of course, white people always project their own cruelty onto PoC when imagining what course such an insurrection might take). If the “militias” supposedly guaranteed by the Second Amendment are ever activated, they will not overthrow a tyrant usurper or expel foreign invaders, but instead serve as death squads, American Einsatzgruppen, to carry out the genocide of people whom whites feel didn’t “know their place”.
And when one of these potential genocidaires flips his lid and decides to shoot a bunch of white folks instead? Well that’s just the cost of doing business. Bill O’Reilly even said as much recently in one of his tweets. 58 people were sacrificed to white supremacy on Sunday, and it’s only a matter of time before there’s a sacrifice of 59, because white supremacists love whiteness more than they love their own lives. Everything is expendable, only whiteness matters.
Fuck this country.
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In MLK’s April 4, 1967 Beyond Vietnam speech, Dr. King described the actions of the USA in the world and how those actions are reflected in the actions of the American people toward each other:
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/
The bullying, belligerence, violence and terror the US government flings against people in other countries [and its internal colonies like Black communities and Native American reservations] eventually finds way back to the dominant US group. It’s called blowback.
Stephen Paddock’s actions in Vegas differed with US actions with the rest of the world in scale, but the results were the same: injury, destruction and death.
One more thing to consider.
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@ tankermottind
Oh my, my.. I hope you are wrong…it’s simply insane!
But this thoughts make me remember that a few years ago a book of the extreme right was printed, that echoes a similar pattern of ideas: The Turner Diaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries
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Mass murder was a major tool that aided the rise of European descended people as the primary power over the planet and its resources. That’s an inconvenient truth that explains the current demographics of at least three continents.
So I agree that Paddock is a microcosm of the whole. However such unreservedly violent behavior is usually directed at the “other” so he also represents a sort of “glitch” in the system that would destroy it if not contained somehow.
As Dr. King alluded to in Afrofem’s post, there is an incredible avarice that underpins it all and I suspect that the secret motivation behind killers such as Paddock is raw rage that they do not POSSESS everything they deem is their right to possess as white men.
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That was @Afrofem BTW.
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“It is being called the worst mass shooting in US history.” Nah, the U.S. Cavalry killing 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee still takes the cake for that one. Hands down, government is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world at mass murder.
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@ Origin
nodding yes
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@ Dru
Agreed.
There are so many mass killings in US history that it’s hard to keep track. When do we start counting, the 1600s, the 1700s, the 1800s or the 1900s?
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@ tankermottind
The NRA would not defend Philando Castile. That tells you right there everything you need to know about guns in America.
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Jonathan Smith the young black man and father of three was courageous and caught a bullet in the left side of his neck to save 30 people in the Las Vegas shooting. He was a hero. A decent human being in these dark and awful times.
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Just read a post on Longing For Death. LFD explores a totally different angle on Stephen Paddock, his possible motivations and worldview.
The Eurasian male blogger contends that Paddock’s serial relationships to Asian females was a red flag. He feels that a certain type of White/European male is attracted to Asian women. White men who struggle with an intense distaste for what the blogger describes as “modern society” that gives lip service to notions of equality even though it falls flat in actually practicing equality. The blogger writes:
https://longingfordeath.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/mandalay-bay-las-vegas-shooter-stephen-paddock-had-an-asian-wife-and-i-predicted-this-five-months-ago/
No matter how much weight you give his opinion, his angle on Paddock is thought provoking.
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The fact that Stephen Pollack was an angry white man with a long serial history of relationships with Asian women in the USA needs to be considered, especially if his targets were not mostly black people. Yes, this should be a red flag.
Unfortunately, I think that the Eurasian / Hapa son of a WMAW relationship also needs to considered as a potential red flag, especially if they are in law enforcement or if they go out and buy a lot of guns.
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@Dru
That’s the thing about a Euro-centric White Supremacist Society. Those Injuns were a inconvenience nor considered ‘human’. The mass murdering of Sioux doesn’t matter for the dominant culture.
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Trump supporters on Reddit before and after they learn the identity of the Vegas mass murderer:
(Note: you will have to zoom your screen in a lot because the type is pretty small)
Source: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/03/murderous-rich-white-men.html
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Hate to appear callous and unfeeling and hate to racialize everything but can’t help but think if this had been a Hiphop concert and a large number of black people had been killed I can only imagine what the narrative would be. In light of the protest of deaths of unarmed black Americans by police and the dominant culture ignoring the plight of black Americans it’s hard for me not to be cynical. When something affects white Americans the focus is all about them. I am glad the shooter wasn’t black or a Muslim. There needs to be discussion about white male domestic terrorist in America. Whites like to bring up black on black crime as deflection tactics so what about white on white crime? Heather Heyer was killed in late August by a white nationalist and now these shootings. Whites need to be honest about what’s happening in this country right now.
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Country Western fans are a certain variety of white Americans they are all about so called patriotism and their level of white Christianity and American icons the flag and especially their beloved Confederate flag and their love of possessing their beloved firearms.
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Update (October 4th): The death toll now stands at 59. It could rise further: about 30 people are in the hospital still in critical condition. Pictures of Paddock’s hotel room shows guns everywhere, many of the modified to make them as deadly as machine guns. There is also what appears to be a written note, but authorities are still saying his motive is unknown. They are bringing in his girlfriend for questioning. She was in the Philippines and was wired $100,000 by Paddock.
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(https://youtu.be/7mjJllD-EZc)
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http://www.americanspecialtyammo.com/Tac_Trigger.html
Um but really its easier to get a ‘seared firing pin’
Called 80%
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So have the victims’ families forgiven Paddock yet?
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We live in a nation where Paddock had a right to build up an arsenal but his victims don’t have a right to health care — that’s a privilege.
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@ Afrofem
Right, people act like mass killings are some kind of aberration, something that White people are incapable of unless they are mentally ill. The country was FOUNDED on mass killings:
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Guns and mass killings and racism this country is in denial about so many things.
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“If every black adult male in the U.S. bought & registered a semi-automatic rifle tomorrow, Congress would Pass gun control laws by Friday.”
Eric Benét
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@michaeljonbarker: That’s an interesting post that says a lot about gun ownership and the intersectionality of race. Thanks for posting this very enlightening.
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@ Abagond
“…[this] country was FOUNDED on mass killings”
Aye. I should have known that you already covered the mass murders committed by George Washington, one of the founders of this country.
This is the tradition White supremacists want to continue. Only now it has turned back on them in blowback.
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@Afrofem
“This is the tradition White supremacists want to continue. Only now it has turned back on them in blowback.”
I guess little truisms like “what goes around comes around” exist because they are, well, true.
Tangentially, I saw this today:
http://quotestore.blogspot.com/2017/07/as-democracy-is-perfected-hl-mencken.html
Perhaps this is the season of consequences.
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@ michaeljonbarker
Benet is on the money. Gun control laws were hastily enacted in California after an armed 1967 Black Panther Party (Negro Invaders!) protest in Sacramento.
The sensationalistic Huffpo article can be found here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-panthers-california-1967_us_568accfce4b014efe0db2f40
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@ Origin
The “plain folks” have indeed reached their hearts desire———to the detriment of themselves and everyone around them.
Be careful what you wish for, huh?
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@Afrofem
Once Hillary got the nomination I deeply suspected Trump could have won. His legislative agenda will go nowhere despite the fact that his own party is in full control. That is how incompetent he is as a politician and I suspected as much which is what muted any fear I would otherwise have had of him.
However, I have to admit that, in terms of character, Trump seems to be more of an empty shell of a person than I had thought (and I’d already read him as a charlatan). It’s hard to imagine a president cursing citizens devastated by a natural disaster and showing callous self-importance when meeting with them. Acting appropriately in such a situtation requires only basic, and presumably common, human empathy and decency. Yet Trump failed, abyssmally.
So despite my initial poor opinion of him, he’s actually worse. Literally the only thing he knows how to do is boast about himself even when he hasn’t done ****. Between him and Mrs “pay-for-play” perhaps Mencken’s “glorious day” could not be evaded any longer.
Anyway, I realize I’m going off topic, yet it feels as if everything that happened over the past week is related to the overall theme of the times.
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Re: Mary Burrell
This link should be in the links above:
(https://abagond.wordpress.com/2015/06/25/white-american-terrorists/)
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In the middle of all reflections around the Las Vegas episode and the possible motivations of the killer I must call attention to the fact that despite that most of those type of mass killers seem to be White, sometimes Black ones appear too.
Not so long ago we had the case of the D.C. sniper – in fact two persons, one adult and other an adolescent – who carried out 17 killings and wounded a few more people in a few weeks.
One must wonder if those killers and this last one do those acts out of a feeling of pleasure, as much as, some safari tourists (mostly coming from Western societies) extract pleasure in killing of wild animals.
Back to Paddock and further speculating about his motives, with the latest information about him, in particular the fact that he seemed to have planned fleeing from the crime scene later, begs the question if he had not an accomplice and they were more conventional terrorists after all, and not a simply deranged individual.
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The media will try its hardest to pinpoint this at Asians because somehow him having an Asian GF made him kill their kind of people even though many victims were the ‘others’ as well. This man got that many guns and ammunition up a 4 star hotel suite because of his ‘white privilege’. And the thing about this situation is he was ready to execute the same action upon goers of a hip hop concert but for whatever reason decided not to. Guns and bumpers are a big part of the American economy, their sales will never be altered in any shape or form to feed the right for the White American to arm themselves and in doing so maybe bring more hostility and psychological trauma to everybody else.
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@ jefe
Thanks.
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@Jefe: I meant that America needs to be honest about white male terrorist.
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@ Origin
“It’s hard to imagine a president cursing citizens devastated by a natural disaster and showing callous self-importance when meeting with them. Acting appropriately in such a situtation requires only basic, and presumably common, human empathy and decency.”
Two thoughts:
🌀 Trump cultivates dissension and outrage as tools of distraction. They help keep his opponents off balance. His opponents are either chattering about his latest action and mounting symbolic opposition or they have disengaged altogether. Both reactions serve his agenda.
The US media love his antics because they increase viewership, listenership and readership of their outlets. Win for Trump, win for the media, lose for the American people. It helps to remember they are the group that promoted him with billions of dollars of free campaign advertising.
✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧
I recently saw a movie about the Krays. They were a set of notorious gangster twins in 1960s London (UK). One of the characters in the movie remarked that the Kray’s nightclub was always filled with the very rich and criminals. She noted that those two groups had several things in common:
➽ they constantly craved excitement
➽ they shared a disdain for working people
➽ they thought rules about human decency did not apply to them——-they should be able to do whatever they wanted without experiencing consequences
[info about the film:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/sep/16/legend-tom-hardys-double-take-dilutes-the-story-of-the-kray-twins%5D
🌀 Trump fits that profile. He shares the traits of the very rich and criminals. It helps to remember that the next time you see or hear him stirring the pot. He thinks the consequences of his actions will rarely, if ever affect him. So far he has skated away from bad relationships and financial ruin relatively unscathed.
His luck may not hold out forever. This presidency may yet be his Waterloo.
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@Afrofem: The Kray brothers movie The Krays is good also another film about The Kray Brothers with Tom Hardy playing both twins Reginald and Ronnie. Both films are very good. Great story telling very compelling.
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@Afrofem: The other Kray Brother movie is Legend. The Krays are similar in their sociopathy and narcissism just like Trump.
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I was reading Paddock had scoped out other concert venues such as Chance The Rapper’s concert and The Lollappaloza venue. Paddock may very well have just been an evil sociopath plain and simple. He was just looking to spread his chaos and mayhem with no moral conscience he was just a soulless monster.
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@ Mary Burrell
I agree with that Paddock was a sociopath. Just another millionaire criminal.
It is surprising that he did not take the opportunity to fire into Chance The Rapper’s concert. That would have made quite a splash. However, killing only White people increases his notoriety.
P.S. I agree that while both Kray movies were good, Legend was extremely bloody and difficult to watch.
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@Afrofem: Indeed a distraction and I’m torn as to the extent he is aware and can steer such, as the immediate result of this melee already as we discuss this is the institution of body scanners at hotels and the people who are profiting are the usual suspects like Michael Chertoff and Sheldon Adelson. Now I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about “my freedom” in the way that people worry about overreach by the NSA and Homeland Security et al, but find it sick that people can profit from death and destruction. Every president seems to serve a useful function for some truly awful things, and I am not necessarily convinced they are aware of much of it themselves. Plausible denial and all that. The current dolt’s usefulness might simply be his unpredictable predictability.
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@davidly
I concur… A 4 star hotel where rates are top dollar need to thoroughly scan every single thing a guest checks in. I want my safety too. Fuck Vegas and its negligence.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41519815#
Ok so he wasn’t a gunsmith, this tech has been around for a while, like a ‘bolt on’ modification, and it’s filing the sear pin, or buying a modified ‘receiver’. Interesting.
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Cnn is bleeding leftish ‘statist’ conservative idk what the word? Conservative democratic party line?
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@TeddyBearDaddy: I don’t believe you read me thoroughly. While I don’t care about these things from the “freedom” angle, I don’t want the people who are cashing in on it to cash in on it. Fuck them and their security products.
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uh sorry no sarcasm bleeding blue ie papist leftie claptrap thou shalt not be part of a well regulated militia
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https://daytonatactical.com/products/80-ar15-lower-receiver
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https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/Filing_down_the_sear____/5-1348130/
this is what i meant to say
there ya go
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bump stock, please. that’s ghetto
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this need to get off my radar but from that distance? i guess it was literally ‘center mass’ the angle and across the highway like what? 300m? that’s far to shoot a m16
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At the link the Asian blog Afrofem posted above I saw a reference to recent comment by a white supremacist speaking about how he would accept a half-Asian member than looked white enough and was down for the cause. He mentioned that they already have a Mexican that fits in, in that way. It really underscores how white supremacist will dangle acceptance before people they classify as both non-white and non-black in order to focus on their REAL enemy (you know who).
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This seems appropriate:
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@ Origin
“…white supremacist will dangle acceptance before people they classify as both non-white and non-black in order to focus on their REAL enemy (you know who).”
The majority of the non-White and non-Black fall for it. They are completely flattered to be “accepted” by their heroes.
Kiss up, kick down politics in action.
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