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Breaking News
posted by takyon on Wednesday June 14 2017, @04:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-baseball-jokes dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 15 2017, @04:24PM (1 child)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday June 15 2017, @04:24PM (#526079) Journal

    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...
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @01:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @01:26AM (#526290)

    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.