Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Idiot Control...

  "We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men..." -- George Orwell



Once again Americans have to endure the pitiable scene of a mass shooting in a school.

Once again Americans will be lectured to by well-meaning-but-fairly-stupid people on a laundry list of "solutions" to this social and behavioral problem which, upon examination, have already been undertaken to one extent or another (apparently, we're just supposed to "try harder" and give government more authority and money to see the laundry list magically fulfilled) which will solve nothing.

Once again, we're to have additional and simultaneous discussions that originate in the Fucktarded Fringe of both sides of the political spectrum, all of it mere posturing and virtue signaling, whether it is the soft-and-flabby, recycled trope of "thoughts and prayers" or the authoritarian demand to forcefully disarm the nation.

I've spoken at length about both of these archetypes before in this same context, and I will return to my previous comments a little later. Neither is much of a solution to anything and the people who engage in such rhetoric -- even when they do mean well -- do nothing but confuse the real issues surrounding these sorts of events.

The mass shooting in Uvalde is, indeed, a tragedy. And when the shock of the initial horror begins to wear off, we're going to discover it was probably a very preventable one, but for the ineffectiveness of government and the handicap of misplaced emotion.

I lost my shit yesterday watching a father on television tell reporters that some hours after the shooting he still could not find his 10-year-old daughter, nor could he get any information on her whereabouts or status from local authorities.

It reminded me, all too-painfully, of the aftermath of 9/11, when children were shown standing outside of hospitals holding up signs with their mother or father's photographs on them -- mostly office workers and first responders -- who could not be located or contacted. It is a heartbreaking scene, and if you cannot put yourself in their places, if you cannot feel their sense of panic, fear, despair, then there's something wrong with you.

These are victims just as much as the people who were killed, the people who have lost a loved one.

And their primary value, it would appear, is that they make for good television, which is a circumstance that makes me want to puke.

Because even the Media, which suddenly is able to quickly rally vast and expensive resources to cover this kind of story, but totally ignore a Presidential candidate acting in conspiracy with government to attempt an overthrow of a duly elected President (or merely to verify basic facts before going to print/air) has a role in these things.

But let's start at the beginning. Let's start with The Shooter.

As seems de rigueur with these sorts of people, the particulars are ALWAYS the following:

1. He's known to school or local law enforcement authorities who have had multiple contacts with him and his family, often involving arrests. According to what's known at this point, his mother is a drug-addicted mess, the police have been called to the home on multiple occasions to deal with some kind of domestic violence, and the Shooter has only posted threatening or oddly-themed videos and messages all over social media.

2. He's known to his community as "a weirdo" who engages in the sort of behavior that one does not expect from healthy people -- obsession with guns, perhaps they torture animals, are regarded as "loners", have few -- if any -- friends, are generally thought to suffer from a variety of mental disorders.

In this case, Salvador Ramos was known to have had a habit of shooting innocent passers-by with BB guns, to mutilate himself with knives, to be violent and aggressive towards others, to often threaten others, and is described as someone who has been relentlessly bullied and tormented by his peers (he apparently suffered from a stutter).

3. We'll soon discover (if we haven't already) that Salvador Ramos was known -- probably well -- to both social services and mental health authorities in his locale, and that other than filling in the required paperwork or performing a half-hearted "investigation", did literally nothing to help or stop this young man.

4. He's known to school authorities as a potential troublemaker, at one extreme, or as the victim of uncivilized little bastards who are supposed to be in school, we're told, as a "socializing experience" on the other. Considering what we know of school shooters and what happens inside a public school, the number of children assaulted, molested, robbed, raped, beaten and mercilessly tortured by their classmates to the point of suicide, it would seem that the Public School is the furthest thing from a good "social experience" as one could possibly get this side of prison or combat.

5. There are people who attempt to intervene on this young man's behalf, typically because they are kind-hearted and responsible members of the community, who find they are unable to help for lack of resources, time, or who are under the mistaken impression that government in some form will magically ride to the rescue before this young man goes all Vesuvius on their asses with a firearm. Their efforts, though well-intentioned, are often stymied by government interference and ineptitude, or their efforts peter out because they haven't the requisite knowledge or ability to do much of anything useful.

You will find all five of these dictum present in all of these incidents, as surely as 100 follows 99.

My intention here is not to beatify Salvador Ramos. Because there are no saints here.

Now to address the two archetypes I mentioned above.

To the "our thoughts and prayers" crowd, you're about as useful as fleas on a dog. One resorts to the tired and shopworn trope of ":thoughts and prayers" when one doesn't have anything particularly helpful to add or say. While it is certainly just "good manners" to express a solidarity with and to make an expression of support for those who have suffered, it's also a day late and a dollar short.

"Prayer" does not return a dead child to life, nor does it prevent anyone from going Rambo in a grammar school. You add the ridiculous -- if understandable -- ex post facto chorus of "thoughts and prayers" -- because you are tacitly admitting that you haven't the foggiest clue as to what to do, and believe an expression of a pious wish is an acceptable substitute for effective action.

Don't get me started on your "thoughts". As a misanthrope I believe the very concept of having a thought is alien to most of you. If this were not true there would not be an Alzheimer's patient in the White House, a functional illiterate with an oral fixation on deck, and the apparent antidote a tried-and-failed narcissist with poor taste waiting like a vulture for the carcass to stop moving before swooping in.

So much for your "thoughts and prayers".

To the "we need common sense gun control" fucktard who, generally speaking, knows not the first thing about guns, crime, or mental illness, but who will gladly regurgitate the boilerplate nonsense that has been used by the Communists, The Nazis, The Apartheid government, the religious dictators, and the worst sorts of human beings to ever walk this planet in an effort to make victims of their fellow men, you can STFU.

If "thoughts and prayers" is about as efficacious as giving a cancer patient an enema, your parroting of a "party line" that has historically bad consequences is beyond useless. We would have to invent a new word to describe just how ineffectual that sort of thing is, because the language, at present, doesn't contain such a word that simultaneously encapsulates both futility and shit-for-brains-on-a-cosmic- scale.

You, too, unleash the Ten Commandments of Dipshit for lack of anything constructive to add. Only you're more annoying.

But both are equally oblivious to what's really wrong here.

One because they believe an application of God -- in some form, and usually retroactively -- is an answer to social problems, the other because it labors under the misapprehension that human beings, ultimately are never truly responsible for their actions.

The "thoughts and prayers" brigade is easy to dismiss because the foundations of their stupidity are easy to dismiss -- they believe in an Invisible Man in Sky who has the power to create everything by force of will, but who seems powerless to prevent the gruesome and evil deaths of innocents. By the same token, this phantom menace is described as just, loving, merciful and forgiving, and somehow still manages to inflict brain cancer upon toddlers and allows schoolchildren to be massacred as they learn everything they didn't need to know about transgenderism inside an institution of "education".

God either doesn't exist, or He's a fucking dick (I use "he" by default because God has not yet seen fit to declare his personal pronouns).

You have to be a dolt to believe these mutually-exclusive dictum.

The "We Need _____ Control" moron (because the solution to all problems, apparently, is greater reliance on the forces that usually created them) is a bit harder to dismiss out of hand because along with the self-bestowed power to re-order society according to their wishes, comes the self-inflicted handicap to be even more delusional than the believer of ghost stories.

And these are typically more-destructive personalities because they have substituted a moral and ethical worldview with a more-utilitarian one whose only restraint is the limits of their own fevered imaginations.

To reiterate their nonsense would just be a waste of bandwidth because by now anyone capable of independent breathing is well aware of the litany of "solutions" offered by these fucktards. I'll deal with the three biggest ones here, just to illustrate how detached from reality these idiots are, too:

1. We already have gun control laws, you dumbass.  Thousands of them. They don't seem to be working. More laws won't help. More enforcement won't put a dent in the problem. The main reason being that those with criminal intent and determined to kill don't regard the law as a barrier.

The choice of weapon is also irrelevant. Had this kid not had access to guns (which I guarantee you will have been obtained legally, in accordance with the existing "Gun Control" laws, as they almost always are in these cases), he would have found a different means by which to kill.

A butter knife, a screwdriver, a chainsaw, the caustic chemicals beneath everyone's kitchen sink and inside everyone's garage, an automobile, aircraft, a hammer, a meat cleaver, a baseball bat, a rope, all can be used to kill. The primary difference is the ease with which death is meted out and the numbers who can be killed.

Simply putting restrictions upon a single method of murder is about as efficacious in preventing murder as Kamala's liquid-protein-and-pubic-hair diet has been to promoting good governance. Or as Hillary's fairy tales have been to national unity.

The bad news for all of you is that Society, all Societies, have existed on a bedrock of an armed populace. Weapons are integral to the creation, defense and promulgation of Society. Society exists because armed people are willing to do violence on your behalf or in their own defense from forces willing to do equal or excessive violence in the name of destroying Society.

A people who are not willing to defend themselves, their rights and their way of life are at the mercy of others -- even of individuals -- who are far less scrupulous and much more ambitious. You sleep soundly at night because people with guns stand between you and people who wish to do you harm. The tools they use to do so -- to even give you the ability to repeat garbage like a troupe of parrots -- makes this possible.

It is when the tool is used irresponsibly and deliberately to commit acts of evil that it becomes a problem. But this is something people like this routinely ignore, because their own sense of dumbfuck leads them to the false formulation that people are inanimate objects lacking in moral motivations and that inanimate objects can be imbued with both the power of independent action and moral motivations.

So that "Guns Kill People". All by themselves. That human beings are somehow automatically inclined to get seriously, murderously violent while in the presence of the Shootin' Iron. The Gun casts a spell upon the poor human being who can't be counted upon to exercise restraint and good judgement without a fucking libtard hanging over his shoulder whispering in his fucking ear.

To a liberal, the only times a human can be counted upon to exercise good judgement and moral turpitude is when he's voting commie, aborting a baby or figuring out how to jam his genitals into an orifice they weren't meant to penetrate.

2. The Liberal doesn't really care about other people's lives or rights. Only their own. And she (it's usually a "she") defines these rights as the ability to take from others for her own benefit, to bully and coerce behavior and policies that accrue to her benefit, and to be released from any and all codes of ethics, morality or personal responsibility.

The Liberal is an eternal adolescent on a continuous quest to avoid any personal responsibility at all. And like adolescents, their arguments and methods show a lack of maturity and an insatiable desire for immediate gratification that automatically dismisses the rights and prerogatives of others. No matter how destructive such a program turns out to be. "Gun Control" is a means by which that task is made easier, by taking away the ability and rights of of others to defend what is theirs.

It is the same with many other issues: you are to be forcefully vaccinated against your will, to be attacked, harassed and beaten in restaurants on the basis of your politics, denied medical care based upon who you voted for or your race, your cities will be burned to the ground, your property stolen or destroyed, your children forced to learn how to finger one another's buttholes while wearing rainbow spandex, calls for your imprisonment without due process on the basis of mere disagreement, a mob assembled on your front lawn, criminals allowed to rampage with impunity, your voice eliminated from the public sphere, your livelihood and reputation destroyed, your life threatened, just because you're an inconvenience to a liberal's wish list.

And then they can't figure out why anyone would ever want a gun?.

This sort is all hot and bothered to present "solutions", but fails to recognize it is part of the problem.

Perhaps the entirety of the problem.

3. Opinions, especially uninformed ones, are like assholes.

Everybody has one.

They all stink.

They should rarely be heard in polite society.


I forget who said this, but it is generally true that Liberalism, at it's base, is a movement of well-intentioned-but-ill-informed people led by the well-informed-but-ill-intentioned.

This becomes ever more crystalized when it comes to subjects like "Gun Control", especially in the wake of such a tragic event.

The "solutions" offered are always the same -- more laws, more restrictions on liberty, more enforcement, even a forced disarmament of the population -- and tacked on at the end, as always, a bunch of squishy platitudes regarding "better mental health services", a call for more "diversity" and "equity" in all aspects of society, and so forth.

These last are not "solution" in any meaningful sense of the word. They are expressions of poorly understood emotions and even-more-poorly formulated ideas that have repeatedly been shit on by reality.

Guaranteed this kid was already known to the Mental health Services, such as they may be. As for "better", considering these services were most-likely to be run by government, and government always does things according to compromise and contract tot he lowest bidder, and selects employees on the basis of tests deliberately designed to be passed by illiterates, this is a pipe dream.

(Having had vast experience with the Mental Health System in this country, both the private and public parts, I can unequivocally say they fail because the people who are in these fields are often eminently unqualified, unbelievably lazy, usually only took up the profession to get a grip on their own shortcomings, and incapable of doing much more than passing pills or finding ways to justify, validate and elevate deviant behavior for profit).

Guaranteed this kid was known to law enforcement which apparently didn't enforce many laws, or worse, had the law tie their hands in an attempt to prevent such a massacre before it ever happened.

I rather doubt that race, social class or a lack of "diversity" and "equity" ever entered this kid's head before he shot everyone up. When such things do make an appearance -- like in last week's shootings in Buffalo, a rash of recent shootings here in Sodom-on-Hudson -- you discover the people involved were vehemently opposed to "diversity" and generally believed that "equity" only comes about with genocide.

The arguments, such as they are, then, all fall flat. It would seem as if the "solutions" have already been applied, to one extent or another, and they have universally failed.

We don't need Gun Control, we need Idiot Control.

It is time to break this one out, again. It's a (partial) solution less lunatic-fringe than the ones offered up by The left.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just read the essay from 2018, and at least one of your contentions has been proven false -- that children can learn just as effectively from online tuition as they can from in-person.

While government schools are a hotbed of dumbfuck and problems galore, the solution to the immediate problem is to have a sufficient number of responsible adults capable of meting out instant justice at 1,300 fps such that the lunatic fringe does the calculation and realizes (like one Isla Vista shooter who shall remain nameless) that the body count he seeks won't happen because the body count will be one: him (and it's almost always a him).

-brian

Matthew Noto said...

Go back and read it again, Brian. You've missed this part:

"The brick-and-mortar school is an anachronism, like horse-drawn carriages, hoop skirts, and Bernie Sanders, that likewise serves no useful purpose -- no one is being truly educated; money is being spent in enormous sums for no good return on investment; and the school and it's policies constitute as great a threat as a shooter -- and is no longer needed. Just as technology has provided the Modern Day Einsatzgruppen of One with sophisticated tools of destruction, it also provides a replacement for the government-run Enstupidation Center of Death.

Modern computing and communications make it possible for millions to attend class online from someplace else. It makes it possible for everyone to have access to the same textbooks, the same libraries. It makes it possible for a single teacher to reach hundreds of students, simultaneously, several times a day, instead of a few dozen at a time in a condensed time frame. Students and parents can choose their curriculum. Students can learn at their own pace; the better students can take as many classes a day as they wish, the slower ones can spend more time repeating a class until they get it, or better yet, if they can't find an instructor who reaches them, have the option to try another. You can take your online school with you wherever you go and can get a Wi-Fi signal, even while on vacation. You can attend school all year round, if you'd like. You don't have to miss a day of school due to illness, a doctor's appointment, or a holiday. You can replay a favorite lesson or lecture any time you'd like to."

I am a true believer when it comes to alternatives to government-run public schools.

Matthew Noto said...

Children can -- and do -- learn with Distance Learning, Brian. I've undertaken enough of these projects in private business to know that it works -- so long as you don't leave the job up to the same unionized, bureaucratic morons who currently control the public school systems.

If the last two years have proved anything, it is that leaving an ad hoc distance learning program in the hands of people who are as incompetent and corrupt as the ones who currently make up the inefficient, expensive and utterly craptastic system we already have only produces WORSE results.

Anonymous said...

That's all nice and good. And it leaves out the other variable that I've seen destroy "distance learning".

Incompetent parents. The same exact kinds of parents that create school shooters. I have friends that are teachers in the system, and friends with kids in the system and they all say the same thing - many kids do not stay engaged when they are not in a controlled environment.

I've been in tech my whole life. I do not believe for a second that tech has an answer to education, rather I think education (especially primary education) has gotten significantly worse as a result of technology.

There are more problems with the current situation than we're going to solve in your comment section, but I think the very first thing that needs to be done away with is the federal Department of Education. After that, ALL teachers' unions must be destroyed with prejudice and teachers never allowed to unionize again.

Then we can talk about rolling back the current system of teacher education where we wind up with subjects being taught by teachers who haven't the first notion of what it is they are teaching.

Maybe you're right about remote learning. I'm doubtful, especially for the youngest of children. But literally none of what you would like to see comes without the gutting of Leviathan. And I don't see that happening in my lifetime.

-brian

Matthew Noto said...

See today's rebuttal.