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US Politics Mass freedoming: the one thread noone wants but everyone needs

This is the Big Corruptor in US politics.

This is why Trump scares the establishment, I think.. It's not his antienvironmentalism or anti-migrant stuff or whatever. It's the fact that he managed to get elected largely outside of the lobby system. That means he can't be controlled by the usual mechanisms! He's beholden (almost) entirely to his electorate. That's unheard-of.

Sanders is the same kind of threat.

EDIT: it's not about issues, it's about power and access to power.

I wouldn't say Trump is outside the lobby system. I'd say he bypassed the lobbyist (aka the agenda people) and moved straight to the backers (aka the people with money who have agendas). About the only electorate Trump is worried about would be the Electoral College, I'd say.

Edit: changed 'removed' to 'bypass'
 
I wouldn't say Trump is outside the lobby system. I'd say he bypassed the lobbyist (aka the agenda people) and moved straight to the backers (aka the people with money who have agendas). About the only electorate Trump is worried about would be the Electoral College, I'd say.

Edit: changed 'removed' to 'bypass'

I don't know who you're referring to when you mean the people with money who have agendas. (?) You are differentiating the people with influence from the people who they hire to spread their influence?

I mean that the usual pattern is Candidate Evil get lots of money from Bank Greed, and then when elected he promotes Bank Greed in exchange. Trump bypassed that' he didn't win through the efforts of other people's money, but by appealing to the electorate.

_His_ electorate, not the people in general. Sure he lost the popular vote. He does care about his electorate though; at least it seems that way to me.
 

5 dead, 20 injured

"'No way to prevent this' says only nation where this regularly happens"
 
Authorities say he was a white male in his 30s.

Do I need to say it...?
 
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You know? I skimmed through my news feed and upon reading about the latest shooting in Iowa i inmediately thought there was a 3rd shooting. It is utterly depressing.
 
Apparently just posting "thoughts and prayers" is an infraction on SB in these threads. Now if only it could be one for the Republican politicians too.
 
Apparently just posting "thoughts and prayers" is an infraction on SB in these threads. Now if only it could be one for the Republican politicians too.

I mean, I think it is using only these 3 words, specially since most people doing that are being snarky, which... is not really that productive.
 
I mean, I think it is using only these 3 words, specially since most people doing that are being snarky, which... is not really that productive.
Neither is offering thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting while taking no action to take guns away or to address the rightwing rhetoric that causes most of the mass shootings outside of gang wars.
 
Neither is offering thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting while taking no action to take guns away or to address the rightwing rhetoric that causes most of the mass shootings outside of gang wars.

Here's a list of mass shootings on 2019. It would be very hard work to find a general underlying motive. The ones with their own wiki pages range from "I hear voices" to "politics" to "I got fired"
 
You're silly, the one underlying motive is video games.

Huh, yet another similar point made by both the Republicans and the puritan Islamics clerics.

I wonder if Fox and the GOP knew they were regurgitating Al-Mehri (dunno if I got the spelling right) and the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Dawah and Guidance.
 
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You mean a list that doesn't discuss motives at all? There's a great source for determining motives!

As I said, the instances that have their own wiki pages show a variety of motives.

I have a crazy idea. When you have a complicated phenomenon, you should acquire data about it, then construct hypotheses, and test the hypotheses. This is the opposite of instantly assuming that everything is racism and/or video games or whatever one's ideological bugbear is.

As I have said multiple times, this mass-shooting phenomenon started around 1980 and picked up speed since then. If you want to understand the phenomenon, you want to look at that. Did racists only appear in 1980?

Weirdly enough, the current wave coincides with a plunge in crime overall. Weird huh?

EDIT: here's a data point. Mass shootings do not in fact correlate with race.
 
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Their "underlying" motive seems tbh to be to commit terrorist attacks based on extremism (usually ethno-nationalist and/or fascist in nature).
 
Their "underlying" motive seems tbh to be to commit terrorist attacks based on extremism (usually ethno-nationalist and/or fascist in nature).

Let's see, as well as we can using wiki. These are the 2019 events that have pages.

Midland, Odessa -- unknown
Dayton -- politically leftist guy, motive unknown, possible psychosis
El Paso -- white supremacist
Gilroy Garlic festival -- Italian-Iranian guy who seemed to hate meztizos and "white twats"
Virginia Beach -- black perpetrator, motive unknown (?)
STEM shootings -- "people should suffer like I have"
UNCC -- motive unknown
Poway -- white supremacist
Aurora -- "I hate the people who fired me"
Louisiana -- motive unknown. Guy seems to have been psychotic.
Sebring -- bank robbery gone bad (?)

We've got three, maybe four, white supremacist types, a bunch of psychotics, a couple of "I hate the world in general", and a bunch of unknowns. There's probably overlap between psychotics and others.

EDIT: one problem is that these guys usually end up dead. A real study of their psychology is impossible.
 
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Let's see, as well as we can using wiki. These are the 2019 events that have pages.

Midland, Odessa -- unknown
Dayton -- politically leftist guy, motive unknown, possible psychosis
El Paso -- white supremacist
Gilroy Garlic festival -- Italian-Iranian guy who seemed to hate meztizos and "white twats"
Virginia Beach -- black perpetrator, motive unknown (?)
STEM shootings -- "people should suffer like I have"
UNCC -- motive unknown
Poway -- white supremacist
Aurora -- "I hate the people who fired me"
Louisiana -- motive unknown. Guy seems to have been psychotic.
Sebring -- bank robbery gone bad (?)
The Virginia Beach shooting has already been declared different from other attacks. The STEM shooting was vindictive teen drama (and "mental illness" likely had little to do with it) and the UNC Charlotte killer, while lacking clear motive, had a clear target. The most recent are too early to have anything worthwhile on regardless. Furthermore, if you actually do research beyond this past year (going a bit beyond Wikipedia of all places also helps) you'll find a very different picture.

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We've got three, maybe four, white supremacist types, a bunch of psychotics, a couple of "I hate the world in general", and a bunch of unknowns. There's probably overlap between psychotics and others.

I didn't say exclusevly white supremacists. Go back and re-read my post.
 
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The Virginia Beach shooting has already been declared different from other attacks. The STEM shooting was vindictive teen drama (and "mental illness" likely had little to do with it) and the UNC Charlotte killer, while lacking clear motive, had a clear target. The most recent are too early to have anything worthwhile on regardless. Furthermore, if you actually do research beyond this past year (going a bit beyond Wikipedia of all places also helps) you'll find a very different picture.

OK, then enlighten me. What % of mass shootings are deliberate terrorist attacks, what are the result of psychosis, and what are other things?

I thought we were arguing about the motives behind mass shootings in general, and not the terrorist ones specifically -- in which case "their motives are terrorist" is kind of tautological, no?

Maybe it's coincidental, but it just popped into my head that this stuff starts at the same time as the near-disappearance of the organized terrorism of the 60s and 70s. Maybe these guys would have joined the KKK or Weathermen if they had lived earlier.

EDIT: but the likelihood of one's own death is a totally different thing
 
Maybe it's coincidental, but it just popped into my head that this stuff starts at the same time as the near-disappearance of the organized terrorism of the 60s and 70s. Maybe these guys would have joined the KKK or Weathermen if they had lived earlier.

Might this tie into rise of the "lone wolf" strategy employed by the far right after their more organised groups were infiltrated. Leading into an environment with a continuos tradition of far right terrorism in the USA while it's left wing counterpart withered away and did not leave successor groups.

As a result terrorist mass shootings in the USA are not evenly split among all ideologies.

And "bad people just decide to become terrorist at a fixed percentage" is not the mainstream view on political terrorism. Instead radicalisation and organised communities to provide emotional and social support are seen as being a key factor in endemic terrorism. It is in my view the decades long tradition of far right communities promoting "lone wolves" combined with the modern online alt-right radicalisation pipeline, is to blame for the regular white supremacist mass shootings in the USA rather than mass shooters being psychotic.
 
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