re: #18 Obdicut

Yeah, I know you did. I’m not sure why you feel this is so important to caps-lock reiterate.

I was criticizing your focus on murder, and your psychobabble language. Two separate criticisms.

Though, here’s another one: The main reasons for the high murder rate is a very hard-fought drug war and systemic poverty in a lot of places in the US. There are other countries that have loads of guns and lower murder rates, because they have better attitudes towards drugs than we do and fewer problems with massive wealth inequity. A large number of those murders are black-on-black murders related to gangs, often kids who have had no real life choices, who nearly inevitably wound up in gang culture. It’s irking when you talk about homicidal mania in the US because it reminds me quite a lot of dog whistles about black violence.

I know that’s not at all, in any way, how you meant it, but a lot of the language you’re using is the same that people on the right use to scaremonger.

Alternately, it can just be seen as a condemnation of all murders as driven wild by this culture, rather than influenced by their actual life circumstances. Many murders are murders of desperation, and while they’re not in any way excusable they may be quite understandable.

In cultural problems, we have a great toleration for violence, especially any violence we can see as vigilante. But the amount of murders we have I think is much more influenced by the specific socio-economic conditions we have due to the drug war and systemic poverty in inner cities, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, etc.

Michael Moore made a few documentary movies about what is wrong with America that can cause this from economics to cultural reasons. When you have a society built around the social-darwinian model where losers are ground down and discarded then even racism makes sense because you don’t wan’t your kind losing to those others. It is an all-vs-all world that creates this mindset. It’s the mindset of the prison exercise yard as the model for American society.