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A gunman opened fire at U.S. Congressmen and others who were gathered at a practice this morning for the Congressional Baseball Game. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and at least four others were reportedly injured. The gunman, who has been identified by unnamed sources as James T. Hodgkinson III, was taken to a local hospital where he died from his injuries:
A gunman unleashed a barrage of gunfire Wednesday at a park in Alexandria, Va., as Republican members of Congress held a morning baseball practice, wounding at least five people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (La.).
The suspected gunman is James T. Hodgkinson III, 66, from Illinois, according to multiple law enforcement sources. President Trump announced that the gunman, who was wounded in a shootout with officers, has died at an area hospital.
The wounded also included two Capitol Police officers and a congressional aide, according to one law enforcement official and witness accounts.
Congressman Scalise was shot in the hip and is in stable condition.
Hodgkinson's motive may have already been identified by the media:
A Facebook page belonging to a person with the same name includes pictures of Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, and rhetoric against President Trump, including a post that reads: "Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co."
Charles Orear, 50, a restaurant manager from St. Louis, said in an interview Wednesday that he became friendly with Hodgkinson during their work together in Iowa on Sanders's campaign. Orear said Hodgkinson was a passionate progressive and showed no signs of violence or malice toward others.
Also at LA Times, Reuters, The Atlantic, The Hill, and CNN.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 14 2017, @06:37PM (11 children)
He's not a Russian shill, and he's not stupid-as-in-low-IQ either. Accept the fact that evil walks among us, and wears a human face. This is a person who has confessed to wanting to burn the entire system down, whose vocabulary is full of "cuck" and similar alt-reich memes, and who is very clearly in it for no one and nothing but himself. Search his post history; you'll find some hair-raising shit in there.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14 2017, @08:15PM (1 child)
Yes evil is out there, but the weird juxtaposition of statements seems more than just authoritarian racist bullshit. Conservatives have been pretty well radicalized as a group, so now it seems like conservative viewpoints are being used to bait liberals into radicalization. The posts make more sense from the perspective that they are solely intended to piss off liberals. Valid points don't matter, and discussions are simply platforms to continue the propaganda and piss people off even more. Successfully baiting a liberal into a discussion is the end-game. Queue more and more bullshit in attempts to get a reaction.
If he isn't a foreign propagandist then he is a complete troll, and as he admitted he was trying to bait people with his initial post of predictions. I can only hope that one day we move past this politically volatile time and everyone just starts ignoring the online trolls.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 14 2017, @09:24PM
Well, yes, he *is* a troll, but that's not his entire MO. Trolls mostly just do it for the lulz. This keyboard Keystone Kop probably thinks he's advancing the cause of--what was it, again?--burning the lot down and starting fresh.
I have to wonder what his BMI is, if he has a job, and how many weird action figures he has.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @08:07AM (8 children)
I found the "cuck" term horrifying at first. I happen to value and respect virginity and marriage. I think a person ought to have exactly 1 sex partner in life, with allowance for widows of course. I'm not OK with the idea that a man should "sow his oats"; that is a shameful and disgusting man-slut to me. Cheating isn't OK for either sex, for either the married person or the homewreaker.
There are however some disturbing truths about liberals that, taken in total, seem to merit the term.
Conservatives are basically never OK with being cuckolded. The few people who are OK with it are universally liberal.
Cuckoldry also works pretty well as a metaphor for handing over your descendant's birthright to people who bear no relation to you. In a place like Germany, the natives have something like 1 kid per woman. Hostile immigrants are brought in to replace the native population. Perhaps "ethnic cleansing" or "self-genocide" is a less icky term, but "cuck" works pretty well. The nation will have children, but on average they will not be fathered by the nation's men. This is a sort of national cuckoldry. German natives will go extinct. Oddly, this decrease in diversity does not trouble the left; the left truly hates western civilization and the European race.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 15 2017, @08:38AM (3 children)
Holy damn that's a lotta crazy. Given your sexual hangups no wonder you're nuts; you're sublimating all that into defense of the fatherland, as it were. Here's a hint: leftists don't like being cuckolded either. I'm not sure this applies to lesbian couples, but I'd never cheat on my girlfriend and expect (and know I will receive!) the same consideration from her. Obviously it's missing the kids angle, but yeah.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @09:23AM (2 children)
Most leftists don't like it, but pretty much zero conservatives do.
To pull numbers from my ass: 175 million conservatives who hate being cuckolded, 174 leftists who hate being cuckolded, and 1 million (under 1%) leftists who are OK with it.
There may be shades of grey; how furious would one get? Is it an offense that merits cursing, abandonment, killing, or slow and agonizing torture? If we could score this, perhaps on a 1-to-10 scale, and draw up histograms, there would be differences associated with politics.
I'm not loving the term "cuck" for politics, but it is a workable metaphor. We need a word to describe people who eagerly assist in the extinction (via immigration, etc.) of their own culture, ethnicity, race, nationality, and/or language. It boggles my mind, but there are plenty of leftists on record with this desire. I might never wrap my head around the self-loathing that leads to welcoming one's own genocide.
The worst thing about the "cuck" term is probably that it seems to originate from the vile PUA (pick-up artist) culture. Oh well.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 15 2017, @04:24PM (1 child)
Dude, seriously...you have some massive psychosexual hangups here. Your insistence on one partner for life is bizarre, and I say this as the living embodiment of the "U-Haul Joke" who only ever wanted the same thing for herself. Maybe that works for you (and me) but I don't think most humans are naturally mate for life types and we don't have a right to force that on other people.
Cheating is a different matter entirely. I don't think, though, that it deserves torture or death. I *do* think it's justified grounds for instant termination of the relationship, with the cheater getting kicked out on his or her ass, but not death.
You touched on something that highlights the disease of the "conservative" mindset though: the cons have two extra parameters in their moral phase-space, those being "in-group loyalty" and "respect for authority qua authority." Now these of course aren't moral; they're useful cognitive shortcuts from the days when rock'n'roll involved a boulder and a hillside and "fast food" was a potential dinner that ran quicker than you did.
Point is, that extreme reaction with its undertones of disgust points to you having a dangerously un-adapted mindset for the modern (read: "post-Iron-Age") world we live in. The fact that you conflate personal sexual matters with questions of cultural expansion or takeover, specifically with the fear of having your family line ("in group") snuffed out, is a classic, diagnostic tell of this mindset. They are not the same thing, and you will be a lot mentally healthier once you untangle them.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @01:26AM
If my mindset is unadapted for the modern world, then my bloodline will die out. That is how evolution works. Other than survival of descendants, nothing counts.
Um... all of my ancestors that I am aware of have had my mindset. I have 11 kids, my parents have 4, my grandparents had 4 and 8, the next generation up had around 7 each, and the one above that includes somebody with 17. All my kids are alive, all my siblings are alive, and 10 out of the 12 in the prior generation are still alive. I have to say, I appear to be well-adapted for the modern world.
Now consider a nation-sized group of people. The more they align with my mindset, the more they are able to ensure that their culture (including religion and language) and DNA lives on in future generations. So even looking at larger populations, it is obvious that my mindset is not unadapted to the modern world.
Over in Europe, we can see that native Germans are in fact unadapted, while the immigrants to Germany are well-adapted. A more interesting case is Japan, currently shrinking without immigration. It is highly likely that an unnoticed little subset of the Japanese population is in fact reproducing well. If so, this subset will enjoy exponential growth and soon put Japan back on track as a nation with an expanding population.
On a long-term basis, the only thing that holds back population growth is death. We are currently in an odd moment in history. We have invented reliable birth control. This is a tremendous selective pressure, so evolution is likely to overcome it very quickly. The only plausible way for evolution to defeat birth control is mental differences. People who strongly desire numerous kids will be selected; they are the ones adapted to our modern world. All the rest are unfit.
I can't point to a spot in my DNA and say that I'm therefore fit, but with the large family sizes I sure do show the signs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday June 15 2017, @01:08PM (3 children)
Why do the people hung up on immigration now presume immigration and the tensions surrounding it is a new phenomenon? It's more or less a constant in American history (and perhaps elsewhere, but the rest of the world is beyond scope in this post). Previously it was protestants in America decrying all the Irish and Italian immigrants who would bring their "popery" with them and subvert religious freedom in the United States. Or the Yellow Peril (aka all the Chinese brought in to work on the transcontinental railroad). Yet as it happens those waves of immigrants did come, and they did stay, and the United States of America endures.
So, there seem to be two general paths to take on the immigration issue: accept that America evolves, and is not a static state. Or, we can acknowledge that all immigration is and always has been a mistake and roll the country back to earlier versions. That means that all current citizens with unacceptable ancestry should self-deport or be sent packing by Immigration. So all the O'Reilly's, DiMaggios, Kennedys, Marilyn Monroes, etc shall have their statues dashed and names stricken from the records. Every Taco Bell shall be razed, every PF Chang's, every Pizza Hut, every Chipotle, every box of pasta shall be purged.
What's that? Oh, wait, that's not what you meant? That's going too far? Well, unless that is what you're advocating, you're a hypocrite.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @12:42AM (2 children)
It's not new, but the level of danger is new. We are facing violent people who are extremely resistant to cultural integration. They self-isolate and self-police the isolation, attacking any of their own to dare to integrate with the surrounding society. They use distinctive clothing restrictions to help enforce this.
It mostly wasn't like that with prior immigrants. We had minor problems. Some of the German-speaking populations took a century to switch to English. We have lingering problems with a distinct black culture. Right now we are having trouble with Spanish-speaking immigrants; they might be a problem for much longer than the German-speakers due to numbers and due to proximity of a Spanish-speaking country.
Also, the country is full. We no longer have a western frontier. We have a country full of people, many of them poor and unskilled. Conditions change, and policy should be adjusted as needed.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 16 2017, @04:48PM (1 child)
You mean like Hasidim do [wordondastreet.com]? They have regressive morals (Halacha [momentmag.com]) they try to impose on others and also speak a weird language and dress weird and have been known to riot [nydailynews.com]. They have their own religious police force, the Shomrim [nytimes.com], and run their own ambulances. Surely they must also be forcibly deported according to your definition?
It was like that with prior immigrants. Germans were held collectively responsible for WWI. Japanese were sent to concentration camps in WWII; you can still see one at Manzanar in California, east of the Sierras and not far from the entrance to Death Valley.
The country is full? Where do you live, downtown Chicago? Ever been to North Dakota? You could cram several Europes into that state and still want to shoot yourself in the head to escape the tedium of its landscape.
China, which has a much, much greater claim to being 'full' than the United States still has plenty of room for more people because most of those billion Chinese live on about 25% of the total land area.
If you chose to go by how much food there is to go around instead of the vast empty acreage America does have, then it could support at least double the number it does because it wastes about half of its food every year.
All of which is to say the racially/ethnically/culturally pure America you imagine is achievable has never existed at any point in its history, not even in its pre-history, and moreover you would not recognize or welcome such a country even were you to purge all non-conforming elements. For the rest about what the country is and can do I encourage you to hop in your truck and take an extended drive around and note how really huge America still is.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @06:42PM
It does look like the Hasidim are taking active and effective measures to prevent integration into the larger society, so yes. They do not belong.
The fact that Germans were held collectively responsible for WWI was not a problem with the Germans; it was a problem with the rest of us. There was at least a benefit though: the Germans quickly ditched the German language. To solve our problems with Spanish, perhaps we need a WWIII that can be blamed on Mexicans.
As far as I know, the Japanese hadn't been a problem. The security measures were cruelly excessive.
By "full", I don't mean that the addition of more people will cause starvation. I mean that we don't need any more, and the downsides outweigh the upsides. There are no natural resources that are going untapped due to lack of manual labor.
We might benefit from a total of a million foreign-born high-value workers (scientists for example), as long as none are from a self-isolating culture and we don't get too many of the same non-English language in the same location. We don't need it though, and if we are politically unable to filter out trouble then we shouldn't bother. Bringing in a few good people isn't worth bringing in hoards of useless people with permanent anti-American hostility.