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Republicans actually strategically want massacres to happen, in order to achieve other policy goals
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If you start with the premise Republicans actually strategically want massacres to happen, in order to achieve other policy goals, their otherwise hypocritical actions start to make a lot of sense.
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You can disagree with the premise, but if a political party actually wanted gun massacres to happen and then enacted a strategy to make gun massacres not only more likely and easy but practically inevitable, that party would do exactly what the Republican Party does.
My belief is that we have massacres because much of our society is oriented toward violent punishment as a 1st solution to problems, and for people who are oriented toward violence, massacres serve a needed practical, psychological, and strategic purpose.
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And yes, some of it is as grotesquely transparent as a call to end public schooling, but I think it goes much deeper.
I think without the premise that massacres are ultimately inevitable and unpreventable, the fear-based Republican worldview falls apart.
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Republicans don't just enact policies to make gun massacres inevitable—crucially, they start with the premise that gun massacres are inevitable.
When a problem can't be solved, you don't have to solve it. So it becomes very important to demonstrate the problem as inevitable.
I think it's important to notice how many problems conservatives approach this way.
Notice how quickly they took a new problem—Covid—and almost instinctively acted in order to make it an endemic problem.
Once it's endemic, you don't have to solve it.
Also important to notice how many centrist liberals—though they operate from an assumption that problems should be solved—accept this conservative framework, allowing the premise of each problem as endemic, acting as if any solution must receive conservative permission.
It's all in service of a worldview that tries to extract the maximum value from society without paying back, and treats the problems that this corruption causes as inevitable, unsolvable, and requiring violent punishment to manage, all to avoid paying the cost of solutions.
Massacres are an absolutely crucial feature to establishing and maintaining the illusion of this worldview, and so massacres must exist—even though we know they can be prevented, even though we have ample proof.
Other people don't live this way.
If this proof of a solution is shown, the fallback is: white conservatives won't allow it.
This is offered, not as a devastating critique of white conservatives, but as a self-evident rationale: the people who matter want conditions preserved, thus conditions must be preserved.
They don't want guns to prevent massacres.
They want guns because they want massacres.
The massacres are useful, and necessary. They understand a world of massacres. They don't want to pay the costs of a world that would prevent them.
The massacres are the point.
And the giveaway is that this rationale isn't just "white conservatives won't allow it" politically. It's that they're armed, and if pushed they'll get violent, because they have guns, and a belief in their right to use them to massacre as they see fit.
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I'm not the one saying this. THEY WILL TELL YOU THIS.
Their own reason for the guns eventually reduces to a need to be able to enact massacres, should they personally decide it is necessary.
They just haven't decided it's necessary yet.
Yet.
The massacres are the point.
No. It's important to understand that, while they act to make massacres inevitable, each individual massacre must be a tragedy—an incomprehensible one, one that has no room for solutions, only grief.
This is why they first establish there is no solution.
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Blamelessness is a key component of the psychology.
To be blameless is to be unimprovable. To be unimprovable means being unable to improve. Solutions become the enemy.
A massacre HAS to be an unsolvable problem. The act of even suggesting a solution is cast as unseemly.
We need guns, to stop bad people with guns, who nobody can stop, except for us, who did not stop them.
We have guns, and we know who to shoot, unlike the bad people, who shoot the wrong people, and we know they were the wrong people to shoot, because they were not shot by us.
The guns are needed to enact good violence, and bad violence reinforces that need—and the worse the bad violence, the more it reinforces, the more "unsolvable" the problem, and thus the more blameless those who refuse to seek solutions become, and the more unseemly those who try.
The massacres are the strategy.
The massacres are the proof.
The massacres are the point.
And that is why they oppose all solutions, even as those solutions are available and known.
Here we see, maintaining blamelessness is an absolutely crucial part of the strategy.
There sure are a lot of lone wolves out there, and the NRA and GOP would love it if you never notice how much money they make arming lone wolves with ideas and weapons.
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It's not that Republicans WANT children to be murdered in massacres.
It's just that a world with massacres is a world that works for them, so they are going to have to keep the policies that make massacres inevitable.
I want you to ponder this: their "solution" is to make schools a harder target.
This presupposes incentivizing a *different* target.
Do you see?
It's not that they want massacres to stop, but that they just encourage them to happen elsewhere.
The massacres are the point.
Here we see: starting with the premise that gun massacres are inevitable.
When a problem can't be solved, you don't have to solve it. Massacres *have* to be an unsolvable problem.
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Important clarification:
There are your announced beliefs & intentions, and then there is what you actually do, w/results that become the reality you preserve—and this reveals the deeper, truer intentions, which you don't necessarily tell yourself about.
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Every massacre enacts a collective desire for massacre, and we can observe this truth, because whenever massacres happen they are always followed by a collective defense of the massacre's causes.
Do they *consciously* want massacres? Mostly no. But also so what?
Remember that preserving blamelessness is a key part of the strategy.
It's important to establish that this is an inevitable, unpreventable, incomprehensible tragedy.
But it's also important to convince others (and, in most cases, oneself) that you believe it is a tragedy.
So—b/c you are engaged in a collective desire for massacre—you engage in a collective defense of the massacre's cause, and insist NOTHING can prevent massacres.
But, to stay blameless, you also mourn and pray, and claim massacres CAN be prevented—by doors, or more guns, etc.
This also points us toward some hope of a solution.
The way you attack this strategy is to attack its foundation, which is the self-established blamelessness of those who defend guns rather than lives.
Attack their perceived blamelessness.
Participate in a collective understanding that proclaims you cannot be Republican and blameless.
Create this understanding: supporting a political movement that makes massacres inevitable reveals a deeper intention for a violent world of punishment, which depends upon massacres.
Stop taking their rationales at their word when they clearly don't mean what they say.
Working with punishment-oriented people on mental health solutions, for example, will only result in punishing mentally ill people.
Instead attack their blamelessness.
Stop caring about convincing or persuading them about the issue.
Convince everybody else—who already understands the issue—about them.
Attack Republican blamelessness. Corrode the false notion of unsolveable problems.
That's what I hope this thread does in small part.
I'll likely keep adding examples to the thread.
For now I'll end w/this:
The question of whether or not each Republican *consciously* wants massacres misses the point.
A few might. Most don't.
The point is: morally & practically speaking, it doesn't matter. We should say so.
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41 replies
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They need them to achieve their policy goals of fear and fascism and control.
Republicans need them to achieve their corporate policy goals of fear and fascism and control.
Policy follows Big Money, so of course this wholly owned subsidiary of Big Corps doesn't care about 'collateral damage.' Massacres emerge from the corporate lingo of 'sacrifice,' 'freedom,' 'they're out to get ur guns,' 'good guys with guns,' yadayadayada
Thanks!
Firearm stocks spike after mass shootings as investors dismiss the chance of tightening gun laws
The stock prices of the top 5 US gun- and ammo-makers rose the morning after a Texas school shooting that left at least 21 people dead
Shootings Have Surged — and Gun Companies Have Made Billions
I forget now...whose theme song was it that goes like this?
Money Money Money Money,
Money Money Money Money...
The stock prices of the top 5 US gun- and ammo-makers rose the morning after a Texas school shooting that left at least 21 people dead
Shootings Have Surged — and Gun Companies Have Made Billions
I forget now...whose theme song was it that goes like this?
Money Money Money Money,
Money Money Money Money...