Pinging stuff I care about.
When Others Were Silent – Kucinich for President – kucinich.us:
Video worth watching.
Kucinich has been proven right again, and again, and again. He’s always dared to speak the truth when nobody wanted to hear it and his fellow Democrats didn’t dare to say it.
Why do people not take this man seriously again?
I was looking something up and was on the wikipedia page for the Virginia Tech shooter dude, Cho. At the time (now long since lost in hundreds of edits) there was a note on an apparent “contradiction” — some of his teachers said he was a troubled kid who needed help and they were worried about him, and at least one other just hated him, said he was just plain mean, not troubled.
I thought, “that’s not a contradiction, is it? Becoming mean yourself is one common way of reacting to being tormented. Hating yourself and hating others, loathing yourself and loathing others, they’re two sides of the same coin. I know I’m ‘meanest’ when I’m feeling wretched myself, and vice versa.”
That led me to think about how I’ve been lately. On and off I’ve been hit by some really wicked depressed moods in the last couple weeks. It’ll be there one day and gone the next and there twice as bad the next day. I’ve been able to control it with cognitive therapy work, and that’s helped, but…
I’ve been pretty angry at people lately. Mostly people I will never meet, like Bush and his gang. (I haven’t been angry at the Cho dude, not because he hasn’t earned it or anything, but because it just sounds from the story like he was way out there in some very strange bad place of his own already, you know? I mean, what’s the point of getting angry at someone that horribly, horribly messed up? It’s like being angry at a shark.)
I’ve been angry at people on Reddit whose posts I’m disgusted with. I’ve been angry at someone on a BBS for saying he thinks Africa is a lost cause and we’d be better off nuking the continent and starting over. I’ve been angry at Fox News, I’ve been angry at a technical pundit I usually like for writing a particularly spiteful column, I’ve just been overall filled with outrage, disgust, and loathing. At people who richly deserve it of course!
But I realize now that this isn’t a coincidence. The depression and the righteous anger and outrage, they’re two faces of the same beast.
It’s the tyranny of evaluation. It’s a trap. By identifying bad guys and railing against them, I’m playing the “bad guy game.” Fighting fire with fire doesn’t actually work. It makes a bigger fire.
All the people that I admire most, who got the most done to make the world a better place, like Gandhi and MLKJr, did so by transcending the need to judge people as bad. They did their work of making the world a better place by means other than identifying the bad guy and fuming about how bad they were. They were able to say “I do not accept this. This is not right” without saying, to anyone, “I do not accept you. You are bad.”
So clearly abandoning the “bad guy game” is not abandoning a commitment to making the world a better place. It is probably the only effective way to really make the world a better place.
Changing the world aside, I think I’d be a lot better off cutting the world, and myself, a little more slack than I have been lately.
Let’s see how that works out.
The Copycat Effect: School Shooting Seasons: (Mar 28, ’07)
During the spring of 2007, school professionals and paraprofessionals, law enforcement officials, and mental health personnel should be aware we are entering the most active “School Shooting Season” since 9/11. From the end of March through the end of May, this window of time could be very deadly. I sincerely hope I am wrong.
He’s not spot-on. He expected shootings of students by outsdiers, where “outsider” could include former and/or expelled students. By that definition, Cho was not quite an outsider. Interesting though.
Loren Coleman is also known for his work in cryptozoology; his work often enters the blogosphere through his friends at BoingBoing.net.
Via reddit.
Before the blood was dry on the ground in Virginia, the esr-style gun nut computer nerds on reddit.com were revealing portentously that VT had recently banned their students from carrying guns — the implication being that things would have been much better if there had been a firefight instead of a mere massacre.
A good response to that, by someone who should know, is found here.
I’m tired of listening to gun-nut’s wish-fulfilment fantasies about being the hero of the day.
One of the first rules established in the old west was that nobody carries in town. It took about three days for that rule to pass in every town, right after the first drunken brawl when someone got shot or killed. It was very much NOT like we see in westerns.
The constant, TV- and movie-fueled fantasies of the gun crowd really get to me. We know what happens when war planning is based on chicken hawk fantasies learned from the 4:30 movie rather than the war college. We get Iraq. Why should we set public policy based on Gunsmoke or Dirty Harry? It’s insane.
And by the way, I’m former co-captain of my school’s rifle team, a damn good pistol shot, a former war games designer for the DOD and have researched and written extensively about black powder, guns and their history. I’m not anti-gun. I like guns. I’m just tired of the Dirty Harry bullshit.
A horrible thing happened in Virginia to 32 innocent students yesterday.
Meanwhile, the body count during the American military occupation of Iraq is well over 60,000, with about 500 civilian deaths in the past week, including 21 children.
I hope I can suggest without disrespect to the dead in Virginia that the incident ought to wake us up to the reality of what we have inflicted on Iraq, and make us consider whether the violence in iraq can be ended by the same military occupation which created it in the first place.