Random musing related to US gun control, but at least from this particular rando Finn’s perspective the American mentality regarding guns is sometimes just really fucking puzzling. I mean yes I get the historical whoop-te-doo that led to things being how they are now and what the rationale is behind US gun culture & laws and so on, but even given the context it doesn’t make sense to me. It also seems like lots of Americans agree that things are… well, not optimal right now and would want tighter controls, but by all appearances gun control is such a political minefield that it seems to be hard to get things fixed, and I’ve understood that eg. Republicans have a real tendency of being really pro control when it comes to restricting the ability of “unwanted” people to own guns. And then there’s how the culture around guns plays into all this, of course.
Let’s see, start from the conclusion that liberals are satanic pedophiles. Use non-law enforcement to identify liberals who must also be pedophiles. Entrap them and use whatever means necessary to take these evil satanic pedophiles off the streets.
Which is funny to me, because I’ve had two coworkers in two different orgs catch a set of bracelets for enticement of a minor using a computer, and neither one was a liberal.
General IT work. One was remote user support, the other was remote MSP work. Lots of really cool people in the industry, but apparently some super sketch peeps.
At my last job, the CTO told me how he was promoted, and how his predecessor was in the national news. Used state owned computers to chat up a minor for months and then flew across the country to meet up and was arrested. Funny enough, he was not a cross dresser or liberal. Just a small town conservative older white guy that nobody suspected and everyone respected.
Weirdly, same. Two different guys, both publicly pillars of the community. Both arrested for raping kids. In each case, they were just not at work one day, and our supervisors would just say, “So-and-so isn’t employed here anymore.”
That happened to me (kinda) the first time. I found out early because I got a a call about taking the on call phone (while already on call), and we were told not to talk about anything about it and he was totally coming back. But looking up the filing, we knew he wasn’t ever coming back.
Kinda funny how the party that isn’t sexually repressive or regressive doesn’t prey on children. I wonder what inferences could be drawn between conservative rhetoric and the sheer number of conservatives busted for child abuse. Is it just the power imbalance?
I think there are many reasons. For one thing, they have the Christian vote locked up, and the sort of Christianity they preach is one where you can do any manner of atrocious things, ask forgiveness, be forgiven, then repeat the cycle. So many clergy that are even in prison for being sex offenders still get defended by their former parishioners.
Another is definitely a power imbalance thing, especially when there is a lot of evidence tying psychopathy to business success. Lacking any real moral code is fine when you’re a rich CEO. As Trump said, “when you’re wealthy, they let you do it.”
A third is that there are a lot of Republican voters who are so rabidly anti-left that they will literally elect a sex offender (Jim Jordan) over a Democrat.
Well this is all part of the cult indoctrination that has made conspiracy theories a cornerstone of how they interact and interpret the world.
It’s going to take decades (or likely generations) to undo the damage done to the critical thinking of so much of this country. The fact that as you stated they would elect known sex offenders (Trump/Jim Jordon/Matt Gaetz) but still think it’s the “Radical Left” that is the demonic pedophiles is just cognitive dissonance at an alarming level.
I’d love to find the flavor of Christianity that says you need to confess your sins and accept just punishment from the government for them. Without the conservative wink next to “just punishment” of course.
And confession is voluntary so only the true believers bother with it lol. But still better than having to do literally nothing to atone for your sins except say you love Jesus.
I think it is rather that conservatism has nothing to do with being conservative really at the end of the day, that is just the team colors these people wear to identify what team they are on.
Conservatives are conservative so they can hate without guilt and so they can control and possess with violence and be rewarded for it. From this angle the synergy heinous shitheads see in being a Republican and being a pedophile (but also defining your public persona completely around hating pedophiles too) is pretty straightforward in my opinion. Also probably the most pathetic thing on the face of the earth.
Here’s the thing. I really believe that the Republican party is loaded to the gills with criminal creeps. However, if I were to share this list with any of my right-wing Christian acquaintances or (sigh) family, they’ll respond with “Democrats are worse!”
Is there a similar list of Democrat Sexual predators, abusers, and enablers?
Without a corresponding list, it makes it look like it’s just trying to make Republicans look bad (as opposed to just showing what they are).
I’d rather have both lists, and be able to point at the 53 pages of Republican predators and two pages of Democrat predators and say, "see the difference?"1
Samuel Jason Ingle, Dean of Asheville Christian Academy and a graduate of Liberty University has been arrested for engaging in a sexual act with a student. While registered independent, he chose the GOP primary ballot.
That’s not fair man. I’m registered independent and chose a GOP primary ballot because I wanted to vote against Trump as many times as I could.
I couldn’t imagine being in his position and being accused of being a Republican because of that.
While I agree with you on how ridiculous everything this person does and believes in, I am not sure how I feel about the “entrapment” part
While I don’t know the specifics of the entrapment, anyone getting entrapped by pedophile bait should be exposed.
It’s absolutely ridiculous to believe pedophiles only exist in one political camp, especially with mountains of evidence showing anyone with wealth, power, influence, and status (politicians, police, religious leaders, authority figures) are more likely to be pedophiles. It seems that politically, more Republicans than Democrats are convicted pedophiles, but it’s certainly not one or the other.
“Hunting pedophiles” rings hollow when you truly believe that anyone who likes the letter R cannot be a pedophile.
I’m not 100% sure it’s being used correctly here, but entrapment in general is when a police officer convinces or coerces a person into committing a crime, and then arresting them for that crime. So, if a police office is standing somewhere and you walk up to them and ask to buy drugs, they can arrest you for that. But if they are like “hey man, want to buy some drugs? Come on, it’s only $10. You know what, for you, first time is free. Just take them”, and then you take them, that is entrapment.
The reason entrapment is problematic is because it’s hard to tell if you would have committed a crime, had the officer not pushed you into it. Maybe you were just feeling pressured and wanted the uncomfortable situation to go away, etc.
As for not exposing entrapped people, there is this moral dilemma in general that often gets dramaticized in cop shows and movies, which is that the person we know is guilty gets away on a technicality or procedural issue. And at first blush that looks like a flaw. But actually it’s more like the lesser evil of a bad situation. Because what we don’t want is police using powers that erode the freedoms of the innocent people, like breaking into people’s homes and going through their stuff, or wire tapping, or torture, or whatever. Things we don’t want police to do to innocent people.
If doing these things were “frowned upon”, but we still used the information we gained from it anyway, then it would be a viable police strategy. It’s a cost of doing business, but it gets the job done. Even if a single officer got fired for it, they could choose to matryr themselves to do the bad thing and get the guy. But we don’t want cops doing these things, because anything they do against a person they think might be guilty is something they could be doing to a person that’s actually innocent. So we kinda have to make the rule be that any information, no matter how good, that was gotten in a bad way becomes bad information that we all agree never to use. Because that’s the only way to make sure the police don’t want to do the bad things.
It may let some guilty people go free, when the police screw up, but in theory it protects all of us against an escalating police state.
The FBI already investigate LEO across the country more than a decade ago and found that white supremacists were actively infiltrating our police force. Nothing has been done about this finding.
White supremacists are “infiltrating” into police forces in the same way I infiltrate into my buddies house… when they specifically invite me over to hang out with them at their house and stand up and come over and hug me with a warm greeting when I show up.
There is NO sense of infiltration here, rather we are looking at a fresh turd on a hot day (police), and there are flies all over it (white supremacists).
As part of their investigation into what could have motivated Thomas Crooks to carry out the shooting, the FBI accessed his cellphone — but a preliminary analysis found the information was not helpful for investigators, a senior U.S. law enforcement official said.
The thing is, we legitimately can’t believe them.
It may just be after the Vegas shooter they stopped saying they found motive if they’re not gonna release the motive.
Yeah, that Vegas shooting dropped out of the news quickly. So did that theater shooting in Colorado.
I feel like my worry is that they have some valid salient arguments and then put something like: this is the only way to get on the news/protest anymore or I have no idea what, something that doesn’t sound bad shit insane.
If someone wants a race war or something the news is all over it.
Because of mods. Most other communities on Lemmy will let you crack jokes like that. There are two specific mods who just perm ban anyone saying that about Trump, but not about Biden
You’re not wrong, but not normalizing political assassinations is about quite a bit more than “decorum”
This is like saying “well this guy is doing date rapes so I don’t see why I can’t joke about raping his sister”
The answer is 0 assassinations. The answer is the rule of law. I actually 100% agree with you that most of the political left has its head in the sand about the urgency of coming to grips with what the right wants to do and stopping it, but “let’s go ahead and have the civil war then, what’s the worst that could ensue” is about the worst possible take and strategy that you could employ in response
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for anyone being assassinated at all. But my point still stands, in that the right has no sense of decorum and everyone else falls over themselves to tone police anything even slightly unseemly.
I’d argue there’s a big difference between wishing someone to be killed, and witnessing them almost die and wishing the outcome had just been a bit different. Like, you don’t want it it happen in the first place, but have an opinion on the outcome if it did anyways.
He’s not saying “I wish someone would go out and kill Trump”, it’s “if a bullet was already flying towards Trump I wish it had hit him, especially instead of a random crowd member behind him”.
He’s not saying “I wish someone would go out and kill Trump”, it’s “if a bullet was already flying towards Trump I wish it had hit him, especially instead of a random crowd member behind him”.
I hate people who make a big show of being “outraged” over child abuse as a way to cover for their own repugnant, violent beliefs and behaviors.
It’s the same way some prisoner who murdered an entire family will beat or kill pedophiles in prison because he thinks he somehow redeems him on some level by having a “code”. In reality he’s still a massive piece of shit.
It’s deeply self-serving exploitation of a very serious issue.
It is in human nature that most people prefer not to be demonised by their abhorrent character/morals. One way to ‘break free’ or cover them up, is to demonise another minority. Of course, there is a lot of examples from extreme to light.
In context with your post, that minority does seem to be the most ostracised within the majority (even the non-offending) - to the situation that harassment and ‘murder?’ By most communities is tolerated.
The situation can be observed everywhere, online and offline; and one point can be ruled out in some cases “murder is justified if the person was a pedophile (non-offending & offending)”.
This is one of the most extreme cases of improving your character at the cost of others. Harassment will remain harassment no matter what.
It’s not just about rehabilitating your own character. Most animals on this planet have a deep seated need to protect the young of their own species. Even to the point of adopting the young from other species sometimes. Pedophiles violate that protective instinct. That’s why it’s so hard to treat them fairly in the justice system. Where we can look at some one accused of an armed robbery and ask ourselves if the evidence meets the burden; we are already working backwards from trying not to kill an accused pedophile in a courtroom.
For those who didn’t read the article, take note that one of the women involved ran for office as a Republican (obviously) and has been indicted for child abuse
Either way it’s intellectually dishonest, hypocritical and inherently anti-justice.
If I get robbed by someone, and then later go to prison and find out some random prisoner is a thief, I’m not morally entitled to attack that person (who is already serving their time).
No, they don’t care if you were a thief outside. They care if you’re a thief inside. They’re not doing it just because of a code, they’re defending the tiny amount of property they’re allowed to have. We also wouldn’t even blink if a homeowner beat up a thief in their house, so this is a bit hypocritical.
No, they don’t care if you were a thief outside. They care if you’re a thief inside.
I’m not talking about if someone steals from you in prison (not that it’s justifiable to be violent because someone stole something from you in prison anyway).
The analogy here is getting robbed at some point and then beating up some other entirely random thief who never robbed you (who’s already getting punished for their crime in prison). When a pedophile is put in prison, there are no children for them to victimize, they are being punished for the crime they committed. They are not trying to rape the adult prisoners, so those prisoners can’t claim they were victimized by that person.
Prisoners are not fit to administer justice, they are there to serve for their own crimes and moral failings, not play at being judge and jury for fellow criminals.
Dude, most of the people in prison are there for drugs and robbery. That’s not even feasible. I don’t know where you heard that’s a thing, but it isn’t.
It would be infeasible for the prison justice code to include thievery done outside prison. Your example is ridiculous and meant to minimize the impact sexual predators have on people’s lives.
It would be infeasible for the prison justice code to include thievery done outside prison.
What are you talking about? Why is this so difficult for you to understand? If Joe steals from you, that doesn’t give you a moral right to take it out on Bill because Bill also stole from someone before.
Likewise, if you were sexually abused by Joe, you don’t have a moral right to take it out on Bill because he sexually abused someone. Especially when Bill is already serving prison time for his crime.
I don’t know how I can make it any simpler for you.
Your example is ridiculous and meant to minimize the impact sexual predators have on people’s lives.
No. It’s not, and you know it’s not. It’s too illustrate how revenge is not transferrable and is mot an acceptable form of justice. The pedophiles that are attacked in prison are already recieving their punishment as handed down by the justice system by being in prison. The prisoners are not agents of our justice system, they are fucking criminals who are in prison for breaking the law. They don’t get the right to hurt anyone
What you’re advocating is that everyone is entitled to administer whatever extrajudicial punishment they want because it makes them feel good.
Prisoners do not have a legal or moral right to administer their own justice, regardless of whether or not they were victims of some crime in the past.
No one is equating anything. But I think you understand this, you’re just being dishonest.
Answer me this: If a murderer is tried and goes to prison, do any of the prisoners (or guards for that matter) have a moral right to kill him if they feel like it?
Murder is a really bad crime, right? It’s certainly not stealing a bag of chocolates. If someone murdered my friend, does that give me a right to kill any murderer in prison I want to?
Ok, so you literally just don’t believe in a justice system based on impartiality and laws. Just whatever arbitrarily feels right to someone at the time based on whatever line they draw for themselves.
That’s all I needed to know. What a completely incoherent way to run a society. Good bye.
But it’s also very much like how homophobes watch gay porn. These people are deeply religious, and that fruit comes from the same tree that gives us the virulent homophobes talking about how “everyone has gay thoughts and it’s our duty as soldiers of Christ to ignore them because it’s the demons.” They think everyone else is just acting on the same impulses they have, and this is just them being weak to “demon influence.”
These people are dangerous for kids just like they’re dangerous for everyone else.
And yet they show lesbians as a thumbnail/front picture. It’s obvious, that todays society clearly favours women’s bisexuality right out of sexual desires and (yes of course) the liberation of women. Bisexuality of Man are still beeing held back in society’s discourse, not just because it’s mainly without „general“ sexual desire by the ruling class which also reproduces its patriarchal world believes, but because todays feminism is all about empowering only women to fight against this and not empowering men to fight against the system that is also suppressing them. It’s true, that we need what current feminism is doing right now more then ever, but I want to live in a future where boys are also getting good grades in schools and have the same sexual freedom based on cultural expressions as women have, without being the only sex that lives less long and lies in war trenches.
I think we’d be better off dealing with the illegal actions of some unhinged Trump mourners than dealing with a legal second Trump administration for 4 (or more?) years.
I disagree with this completely. I believe if he had been killed his supporters would massively ramp up the division that exists now, which would be bad. Revenge, and Retribution are terms used by trump and his followers. I think under that reality it would have triggered some awful things.
Would love for you to expand “already doing that” in relation to what I was suggesting. I do not see political opponents being physically attacked, I do not see/hear of any armed mobs actively physically trying to ‘take their country back’.
I think that because of 1) trump is still alive and 2) this cook kid doesn’t seem to fit the narrative of their enemy has kept things ‘civil’.
Would love for you to expand “already doing that” in relation to what I was suggesting. I do not see political opponents being physically attacked, I do not see/hear of any armed mobs actively physically trying to ‘take their country back’.
You already forgot about Paul Pelosi? The plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan? January 6th? Gabby Giffords? The Proud Boys? Charlottesville? Austin Combs? Kyle Rittenhouse?
Do you need me to keep going? I can name the armed mobs trying to ‘take their country back’ until the cows come home and barely scratch the surface.
There is nowhere to “ramp up the division” any further, it’s already at the point where the news simply can’t keep up with all the political violence in this country.
You already don’t ever hear about the FBI and Secret Service following up on death threats to politicians anymore, that stopped being a story decades ago. Bomb threats against institutions like schools are so common that word of them rarely escalates beyond the local area. Mass shootings occur regularly, but only the most egregious ones make the news.
When a sudden power vacuum appears, two things are likely to happen. One, there’s a mad scramble to grab that power and two, they’ll turn on each other in the attempt. But that’s all that seems certain.
Leadership would change hands and divisions would deepen, but they’ve been on a path of retribution and violence for a long time now. Trump’s exit wouldn’t end that.
He’s not wrong. If you thought the last debate was bad for Biden imagine if there was a DeSantis or Haley up there to really hammer the age difference and speak in complete sentences. That person also gets to carry out Trump’s vision and honor his memory. Once they won the election, they also get the opportunity to pass legislation that was Trump’s dieing wish.
Nah, if Trump got killed, the chances of Joe Biden getting replaced by someone even better than DeSantis and whoever that whore is would increase, and even someone like Joe Biden would shit on someone like DeSantis
Yeah. His family was conservative and pro-2A. Whatever the narrative is here, it isn’t a left-wing thing. The way the right has a fetish for guns, no one is surprised.
I’m not saying this guy is definitely a lefty, I don’t think they have enough information to say anything with a lot of confidence yet. He had a one time donation to Act Blue, which doesn’t mean a lot, and he was a registered Republican, which also doesn’t mean a ton either.
There are plenty of 2A lefties that own guns too, a couple of my friends are darn near progressive (US progressive, not EU progressive) and own a decent number of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. Owning a gun or multiple guns does not automatically make you a right winger, at least not in America.
I don’t pretend to know what this guy was thinking though. Just saying it’s still early and we don’t know a ton.
We're talking past each other here. I presume I'm no less invested in keeping fascists out of office than you are. That doesn't provide any excuse not to fully inform myself, or to pretend that something is anything other than what it really is.
You're talking in context of the upcoming election. I'm talking in context of not abandoning reality. Discarding nuance because other people are irrational doesn't serve you well in the broader scheme. Let them be confidently wrong. They aren't going to care what your argument is regardless of what you say, so serve yourself better by giving things their due consideration.
We are not quite talking past each other. No, don’t let them be confidently wrong. Put the argument into language they can understand. You have no hope of convincing anyone outside of your own circles with the attitude that some people are too stupid to understand.
So what argument are you making when they are acting with insufficient information and there isn't yet sufficient information to come to any actual conclusion? If it's anything other than "we don't know yet / I don't know, and neither do you" that's not grounded in reality. "I don't know" is a perfectly valid statement, but it happens a lot that people favor something definitive if flawed. That's a problem when "I don't know" is ultimately accurate, not abandoning nuance, and using language that anybody can understand. But that is essentially what the comment you replied to was saying when you said nuance isn't relevant.
I'm not saying anyone is too stupid to understand. I'm not using willful ignorance to imply an inability to understand, but rather that they simply don't know, and don't care to know.
You say, “I don’t know, but-” and then you talk about how, for example, there were a lot of guns in the shooter’s home and talk about American gun culture. You use it as a starting point.
This back and forth is getting dangerously close to being overwrought. If we disagree by such minimal degrees I don't really care to pursue this further. I think we've both made our point.
Yeah so what if he registered Republican and his classmates talk at length about how conservative he was? He’s probably a communist because he supposedly gave $15 once to act blue /s
I haven’t read any reports on what his classmates are saying. I’m not jumping to conclusions. I’m just saying it’s early and there is a ton of misinformation and owning a gun or multiple guns doesn’t automatically make him a right winger, it’s just one data point.
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