One of the distasteful aspects of our national mass-shooting ritual is the part where we all speculate about the motives and identity of the shooter before we know anything about them, just to make sure we can get a dunk in on our ideological opponents.
We're not saying "don't politicize this," because there often are real social and political issues at play. What we *are* saying is that people should question their kneejerk reactions when those reactions are always to blame groups of people they are already inclined to dislike.
On that note: tragedies like this are just as worthy of our attention as the more dramatic Columbine-style mass shootings are (maybe more so, as they're distressingly common). But it's rare that they're discussed except as rhetorical point-scoring.

To be blunt, it's rare that someone who utters the phrase "what about black-on-black crime?" actually has any investment in solving the problem of violence in inner-city neighborhoods.

But it's also true that very few politicians in either major party are trying hard enough.
Many of our communities *simultaneously* suffer from poor relationships with the police, a history of abuses, etc, and high violent crime levels.

They don't need more OR less policing, but *better* policing that does more of what it should and less of what it shouldn't.

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More from @AmSolidarity

24 Mar
The thing about mass shootings is that they are a meme–in the original sense of the word, that is. They are a cultural template for a certain way people behave that has been propagated overtime (like a gene in biology).
That is, for a certain subset of isolated, angry, unstable men (usually it’s men), lashing out at the world with a gun has become a recognizable pattern that they can emulate to deal (if you can call it that) with their inner rage. One commentator called it a “slow-motion riot.”
Unhappiness and mental/emotional struggles exist in every society. But this particular deadly meme has only really come to the forefront in ours during the last several decades.
Read 11 tweets
23 Mar
Watch these guys unironically post something immediately afterward about the vital importance of Judeo-Christian values to our civilization.
As the guys at PragerU should know, one the better takes on Ayn Rand remains that of Whittaker Chambers, a long-time Soviet spy who recanted, then became a political conservative and a writer for National Review.

He wrote this in 1957. It's still true.

whittakerchambers.org/articles/nr/bi…
From Chambers' review of Atlas Shrugged:

"The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book."
Read 6 tweets
22 Mar
There are legitimate ways to criticize the Biden administration's immigration policy (including in ways it fails to live up to those "humane treatment" claims).

"Actually we should be crueler" is not it, though.
You would think immigration hawks would be invested in thinking that border enforcement and humane treatment are not incompatible (which most people agree with, broadly speaking).

Instead the attitude we often get is:

Read 5 tweets
18 Feb
Looks like PragerU didn't catch our thread yesterday.

It's kinda weird, though, that a group that praises Judeo-Christian values so much is also pushing this sort of content, which equates morality with pure liberalism, in the classical sense of the word.
Then again this is the same group that made a video with Jesus helping a homeless guy become an entrepreneur, so we probably shouldn't be surprised.
Markets are useful things. We like markets.

The fact that market transaction takes place without physical force or fraud doesn't make its results *good*, though.
Read 15 tweets
18 Feb
Past a certain point, being unimaginably rich is no longer useful for improving anyone's material comfort. It's a form of power.

Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post so he could make a nice return on his investment and buy another jet.
When you understand this, you can still argue about ways to respond to inequality. But it's an inescapably political question. The problem with billionaires is not how much money they have or have not "earned." It's the unaccountable power they wield over society.
Glad you brought this up. Yes, when you have enormous concentration of economic power, you need government power to regulate it, and that creates its own problems.

This is why we think we need policies that disperse economic power in the first place.

Read 4 tweets
18 Feb
One of Rush Limbaugh's better traits was a certain wry self-awareness: in the 1980's he started calling his loyal fans "ditto heads" because of how many of them would call in just to say they agreed with him or with the previous callers.

(thread) Image
It's hard to remember in the hyper-fragmented media landscape we live in now, but one of the reasons for that reaction is that many of those listeners really didn't see their views represented in the media landscape of the day, in the big networks and newspapers.
Those establishment sources of news and opinion had a certain sense of gravity and responsibility as the go-to-sources for Americans of all walks of life, but they were indeed pretty reliably liberal, if not especially radical.
Read 7 tweets

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