When you need to rant...

[Pig'sSaysAdios]

I have very little sympathy for the "Black Lives Matter" protesters when some of them are willing to kill innocent cops and even white people in general. Plus, a lot of their behavior just gives racists more ammo to use against them, both literally and figuratively.

That's the key word though, "some" of them. Not all or even most of them. There's always extremists of every group. It's just like feminism. Some people refuse to except what feminism is just because of a few man hating bad apples here and there. But the majority of them just want equality and don't hate men. That's why there's a difference between feminists and what the internet calls "feminazis.
The same with "Black Lives Matter". The vast majority doesn't hate white people or cops and they protest peacefully. In fact, that's what a lot of them were doing in this case in Dallas, they were protesting peacefully side by side with police officers. Until a few radical racists came and started shooting. You can't blame a whole movement on a few bad people.

 

[Drtooth]

The "some" in that equation are of the vocal minority, ultra-radicalized types. I'm sure that the overwhelming majority find them just as disgusting and counter productive to their movements as everyone else does. To say the entire movement is like the worst of the group is to say "All vegans want to force pregnant women to give milk for Ice Cream." A lot of animal rights activists hate PETA for making them all sound like loonies.

While indefensible by any means, this is the by-product of how the media handles these cases. There is outrage, and most of those outraged just want to peacefully say "HEY! There's something wrong here and we want to have a conversation." Which is met with either "Ehhh...No!" or "Youse guys is stupit because we have no problems," particularly from a certain news organization who's head is currently on trial for sexual harassment. The extreme opposites butt heads, and the middle ground is forever lost, and a conversation is never had. This leads to the angry, disillusioned types to attack police officers. If we really want to stop this kind of retaliation, something needs to be done.

Which comes down to my rant about all this, every time there's a huge problem, certain groups likes to not only sweep it under the rug, but they then turn the perpetrators into the victims. When it was revealed there's a rampant poverty problem in this country, instead of having a conversation or giving long term compromises to help, the upper upper upper class started whining about how it's unfair that everyone hates them. When certain uber-conservative, ultra-fundie religions are exposed doing something UnChristian, instead of saying "sorry, the US is not a religious autocracy, and freedom is a two way street," they whine about how their freedom to take away the freedoms of others is under fire. And in this case, when there's systemic racism in Podunk police departments that leads to police brutality, instead of saying "Holy crap! This needs to be fixed." we get either awwwwww you hate the police or awwwww you hate white people. Really? There's no nuance. There's no subtlty. I'm sure that most who agree that there are problems also know that most police officers and most law enforcement aren't the corrupt jerks that manage to screw something up so badly they make the news. But we'll never hear it because some talking head won't be able to sell some book somewhere.

The problem is that something should be done about things. It isn't a righty lefty issue, but certain hateful media outlets, not to mention tin foil hats online want to spread American Exceptionalism (a frightening ideal I'll rant about later), hide the fact that there are problems because they (gasp) could very well wind up taking indirect blame for it, and then vomit the blame back on anyone who disagrees with them. And frankly, we should not be surprised that those who are that disillusioned wind up going insane and trying to kill people. It's horrible, it's destroying the world of good peaceful protesters are trying to accomplish, it's giving Bill O'Reilly more credibility, and it's leading to violence that could totally be avoided if we just calm down, let cooler heads prevail and stop listening to the kinds of jerks on a network that makes money off of the suffering of others.

 

[Drtooth]

While no one added to the conversation, new info came in...

Not only was the shooter not associated with Black Lives Matter (in fact, he even fired upon some of them, supposedly), he wanted to wipe out white people indiscriminately and planned a series of attacks. Hopefully that message gets across that he wasn't even involved with the movement, at the very least CBS reported that. I'd hate to think that someone with half the information will lump the entire thing into a race war.

The thing that's really disturbing is this guy was a veteran of the still going Afghan War. It's clear to me that there's a conversation about soldiers' mental health that's either going to come up briefly or be completely ignored. Whatever the reason, he shouldn't have been able to horde ammo and get access to assault rifles.

 

[Pig'sSaysAdios]

FOX News might not care though.

 

[Drtooth]

Their brand of misinformation, manipulation, and just plain pandering to hateful old people is a good chunk of why this keeps happening. At the risk of saying "I watch every comedy news program ever," I kinda do. Not in the "it keeps me informed better" type of way so much as the "it keeps me relatively sane" way. I can't remember if it was Larry Wilmore or The Daily Show, but when they were reporting about how Fox News fired Gretchen something or other for being the victim of sexual harassment (though Larry was probably on the ball about it being about reasonably questioning assault rifles), they showed a montague of disturbingly Mad Men-esque stuff. And I'm like, why the heck does the country get their morality from the least moral people there are? THESE are some of those behind that American Exceptionalist, fingers in the ears,discrediting everyone who wants to have a conversation bullcrap that leads to civil unrest. If anyone's trying to star a race war, it's overprivilaged, entitled far right wing types that don't want to admit they're partially wrong about something.

That said, the conversations we should be having about this are:

• Sometimes protesters are hijacked by a vocal minority, or even just a couple crooks taking advantage of the chaos. They are not the movement, and the movement hates them just as much as the movement's detractors.
• If gun violence is a mental health issue, let's freaking do something about mental health and not just pass the buck because the NRA owns the souls of congress (I say souls, but I mean something else, it's a family site after all)
• And if it is indeed a mental health issue regarding war vets, let's do something for the darn veterans besides slapping made in China "We support our troops" platitudes on cars.
  
• Confronting the fact systemic racism is still a thing isn't exactly going to make us look like the worst country in the world. Letting it flourish does.
• The same groups that mourn over the shootings of unarmed black men also mourned the sniper shooting in Dallas with the same level of grief.
  
• No one is saying that being anti-corrupt cop is being anti-cop entirely. News mostly reports on something going wrong (unless there's a human interest story), and for every corrupt cop exposed by a news report, there's thousands doing good things that never get news coverage.
• and Yes, we have to do something about assault rifles and access to them. If someone hoards a bunch of ammo like that...ehhh...they ain't exactly hunting deer. If they did they'd have like...uhhh...ground venison? Just eat around the bullets?

 

[D'Snowth]

So now, the right is blaming Jesse Jackson in addition to Obama for the Dallas shooting. Why? Because Jesse Jackson actually called the right out on all their crap for not doing anything about these shootings.

 

[fuzzygobo]

Why does the country get its morality from the least moral people there are?
Push God out of the picture, see for yourself what happens.

 

[D'Snowth]

That's just the way of the world today, fuzzygobo. Much of today's society lives in the mindset that morality and anything of the sort is now "outdated," because, "we live in the twenty-first century."

 

[fuzzygobo]

Circumstances and times change, but God's word doesn't.
At least I can sleep at night, in spite of all the problems, and there's no shortage of them.
Through God I found a measure of peace you can't find anywhere else. I just wish more people could have that same peace.

If morality is outdated because it's 2016, I'd rather be an Old School Retro Fool! 8)

 

[JT Yorke]

Where does it stop? i mean i only see it getting worse..


I believe in god myself but less people then ever believe in him.. they think god is ancient..