West Virginia man fatally shoots wife and himself while kids watch

Ignorance vs. Evil

Interesting talk about ignorance with perhaps political and social implications...

The Anatomy of Ignorance 1 - An Overview

The centrality of ignorance as a root of suffering
and three main inter-related forms of ignorance -

(1) Personal and psychological
(2) Social and
(3) Universal

Progress Not Perfection

I'd recommend getting the whole family involved in making more humane choices.

Let's take eggs for example. If you and your family consciously chose to only buy eggs from local farms that treat their chickens humanely, you could continue to spend the same amount (or slightly less) of your food budget on eggs, but you would probably consume a lot fewer eggs because they're more expensive. You would eat more fruits and vegetables to make up the calories. All around healthier options. But the eggs you do consume would also be better quality and without the lifetime of cruelty experienced by factory-farmed animals. Plus, you would be removing yourself from the supply-and-demand cycle for factory farmed products. And when you only have one fairly expensive egg every couple of weeks or so, you tend to value and savor more.

Now extrapolate that approach to other animal products. Soon you're increasing the market demand for healthier foods and humane farming practices while decreasing the market demand for the worst, cruelest practices. You're family is healthier while not being deprived. It's a sustainable approach, and without becoming preachy you can set an example for your friends and neighbors.

I'm hoping that this is an approach that will spread. I'm vegan, but I'd rather have a million "mostly-vegetarians" who eschew factory farm products (hopefully some day to make factory farms a thing of the past) than a few perfect vegans and a million people who can't begin to imagine life without meat every day.

I think not. Am I yet?

Hi y'all. I'm a gay by-god West Virginian living in San Francisco. I've only made 10 posts so far, but apparently I've already convinced several people that I'm some sort of right-wing, gun loving infiltrator. Nothing could be further from the truth. I'm looking for lively respectful discussion, education and intellectual integrity. Turns-offs include classism, groupthink, echo chambers, poor reading comprehension and bad grammar. "Sanddog" comes from Dune and "42" from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I miss ice cream and steak because I recently chose to become vegan.

Unless You're Dick Cheney

The story I read said he was standing near his truck and said "yes, I shot that kid."

What it doesn't tell us is whether he said it casually, proudly, indifferently, defiantly, or through tears and choking horror at the thing he had just done.

All I'm saying is, we don't know the whole story here, and let's not allow ourselves to be whipped up into a mob frenzy. Once we commit ourselves to "hang 'im high" it's harder to back down if new details come to light.

I suspect that he brought the gun to intimidate someone in particular that lives in the neighborhood with whom he had some disagreement and shot the child accidentally. He's probably just an idiot, but so far there's no evidence this was motivated by racial animus or abject evil.