By now I assume you know about the shootings at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A heavy-set Caucasian male, dressed militia-movement-style, walked in and killed six people before being shot dead by a police officer who actually acted like the police officers I remember from my youth, the kind of cops whose big brass ones clanged when they walked — i.e., instead of running away from the gunfire and waiting for the SWAT team the way the cult of “officer safety” would call for them to do, he and his partner went in and shot and killed the perp. His partner got shot in the process, but that’s part of the job, risking your own life to save others.
From the description of the shooter, he is most likely a white supremacist who decided to shoot some ragheads. The fact that Sikhs aren’t the ragheads he thought he was shooting probably would have been of supreme disinterest to him, because for his ilk, anybody who isn’t American isn’t actually human and is The Enemy anyhow, so… (shrug).
At this point, we all know what’s going to happen. The Sikh community will once again step forward and remind folks that, uhm, no, they aren’t Muslims. Fox News will once again refrain from calling this an act of terrorism, because terrorists are *never* white men. Gun nuts will once again claim either alternately that a) that the shooting was staged by the Obama administration to justify imposing gun control, or b) that if the Sikhs merely discarded that whole “don’t carry guns in temple” part of their religion and send their kiddos and womenfolk armed into temple, then this temple picnic that was shot up wouldn’t have happened ’cause some 6 year old pistol packing kiddo woulda shot the gunman before he could shoot anybody else, despite nobody knowing that the gunman was there until he started shooting people from the entryway. And oh, Sikhs will once again claim that they have a religion of peace. Uhm, yeah, someone tell that to Indira Ghandi… oh yeah, that’s right, you can’t, because her Sikh bodyguards slaughtered her. Uhm, next?
One thing that will not happen is a discussion of the root cause of this shooting: The hate that fills America today. You don’t have to go far to see this hate. Just go look at the Washington Post or Fox News comment sections, and you’ll see all sorts of hate, spite, and viciousness on display. They are literally hate-fests, where folks like me won’t venture because the smell of ignorance and bigotry is so strong. Well, folks, that’s most of the “heartland” of America. Not just the Confederacy, but look at Kansas and Idaho and Indiana and lots of other places, and you see the same old disease, a lot of vicious, hateful inbred people who reject any attempts at coexisting with people who aren’t like them and who cherish their ignorance and hate as their birthright, stroking it lovingly in much the same way they stroke their pistols (no no, not *those* pistols, the kind made of steel that fire lead… though I suppose they stroke the other kind too, since their relationships with their wives are the stuff of trash TV shows that typically end up with a fistfight on live TV). Note that I’m not saying everybody in those places is like that… but a majority are.
But that will not get discussed at all, this disease in the heart of America that leads some to go beyond merely hating to actually shooting. Because that would mean admitting that America is not perfect, that America is suffering from Yugoslav Disease where there is a group of people who simply refuse to coexist with other ethnicities, and admitting that sad reality wouldn’t be “patriotic” or some shit like that. So it goes, in the United States of Willful Blindness…
– Badtux the Observant Penguin
I caught some olympic coverage the other day and was disappointed not to find any Americans in the men’s finals. No wonder – it seems Americans just don’t find shooting skeet very appealing these days – give them live humans – THAT’s the ticket!
Clearly the design of those skeets is defective. If they’d had the faces of women and children on them, then America would have swept the skeet shooting contest
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- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
We have the same mouth-breathin’, Bible-thumpin’, hooker-humpin’, sister-marryin’, rifle-rack-in-the-pickmup, neo-Nazi, JBS, teabaggin “morans” here in Maine, complete with great big signs on the back of the pickmup saying “imprison Osama Obama and his libral [sic] Muslim Commie friends”
I used to fear for our nation. Now I just fear it.
Mr618, now you’re in the position that all of this nation’s neighbors have been in repeatedly for the past 200 years. Just ask the Cherokee whether they should fear for our nation, or fear it. Or any of the other nations that the U.S. has invaded, such as Mexico (multiple times, and the entire Southwest is territory seized at gunpoint from Mexico), Iraq, virtually every nation in Central America and the Caribbean, the Philippines where the U.S. managed to kill close to a million Filipinos to bring Christianity to the (already-Catholic) northern Philippines, and so on and so forth. America has always been a violent nation, period, from day one when the terrorist group “Sons of Liberty” started burning the homes and businesses of folks who dared assert that rebelling against your lawful government was wrong…
The only difference today is that this hate and violence is finding fewer external releases, so we get these kinds of slaughters. But the notion of “America the Peaceful” has never passed the laugh and giggle test.
- Badtux the History Penguin
I was raised to believe in equality for all. I was educated in the value of that idea. I understand that education standards are different across the country, but isn’t equality a universal standard. So where were these fuktards educated? Is This the result of all those homeschoolers? I also understand it can never be that easy, insanity is after all unpredictable.
w3ski
I too was raised to believe in equality for all and its accompanying values. I’m also confused by the ‘dis on homeschooling. Apparently, the onus lies on this joker’s Army recruiter and his CO’s until he was drummed out for being an “Alky”(sp). I’m sure there are plenty of Midwestern Army vets who would disagree with your caricature of the “fuktard”. I do agree with the statement of insanity being unpredictable and society’s resulting confusion and distress.
I have an unverified problem with homeschooling. It is that you/ they are denied the interaction between races and subclasses that I consider to be a critical part of any education. I do not otherwise mean to ‘dis’ homeschooling. And, when I say “fucktard” I in no way demean our military. My Dad was a Lt. Colonel in WW2, can’t tell you how proud I am of that. I lost real brothers to Nam and I have the greatest respect for all military service. I even have a cousin that is a gyrene in the Stan and I love her more than I can say. No pun intended.
By “fucktard” I refer to people that have a yes or no view to the rest of mankind. And, yes you could accuse me of intolerance too.
I really dis the ” I am right and there is no other way” culture. “Kill them if they don’t agree”.
We have got to get the f along, period.
Too many people on a short fuze today, Sad no matter how .
I actually had no idea I would upset you so.
I appologise if you took my words as pain
W3ski
Henry, I’ve known a few homeschoolers and by and large the homeschoolers are *not* the problem. They’re religious zealots (for the most part — there’s exceptions), but they’re by and large *peaceful* religious zealots, content to impose their bigotry at the ballot box. When you look at the background of these shooters you see a lot of things — a troubled childhood, trouble in school, etc. — but homeschooling doesn’t appear to be one of the factors. I would blame a culture of violence that permeates even the schools.
Regarding equality for all, please note that we have local control of schooling here in America. In most of the Hate Belt, teaching such a notion would get a teacher fired as a “liberal propagandist”, just as “sharing is good” would get the teacher fired as a “communist”, and “words, not fists” would get the teacher fired as “one of those Satan-worshippin’ LIE-berals.” When I attended school in the Hate Belt, I was taught by my teachers that it was my duty as a white boy to hate blacks because blacks were stinky and ugly and stupid porch monkeys, and that Abraham Lincoln was a traitor who stole the property of the Southern gentry and stomped on the Constitution with hob-nailed boots. What, you thought every school was like the school you attended? How naive!
The local Sikh-owned restaurant had a large American flag attached to their building after 911 after they had received a few death threats from the mouth breathers who mistook them for terra-ists. That flag seemed to do the trick as all the threats stopped .
This latest outrage against sanity in Milwaukee might make them want to rethink that strategy and purchase handguns for further protection.
The NRA should be ecstatic over this latest massacre having found more potential consumers for their arms-dealer patrons.
First off, if an anti-Muslim nutjob is going to shoot at any group, the last one he should shoot at is the Sikhs. Their faith was forged in reaction to the oppression of the Muslim Moghul empire in northern India, and Sikhs have killed more Muslims than they have killed Gandhis. I work with several Sikhs, including an older guy who was in the “Panther Brigade” of the Indian Army in Punjab. He talks fondly of the time when his unit captured a couple of militants who had infiltrated across the border from Pakistan. The unit’s commander hung them upside down from a tree, built a fire underneath them, had the troops carve them up slowly with knives, and they all listened as the infiltrators’ fat and blood dripped into the flames and sizzled.
But you can’t expect a racist fuckwit, even one who was in the U.S. Army for eight years, to know the difference between one ethnic group and another. Smart enough to load a gun and drive a vehicle, but so stupid he couldn’t tell one bunch from the other.
What I look for when I read the corpomedia coverage of events like this is the between-the-lines context. It surprised me that the New York Times and other major media had nothing about the identity of the shooter for almost 24 hours. (I thought at first it might have been a Sikh factional dispute, because they’re a fierce bunch. I mean, a central tenet of their faith is that men are required to carry daggers called kirpas. But the police and meeja were silent about the white terrorist angle for a longer-than-usual time. I wonder why? Deference to the Klan demographic? They can sling terrrrrrrist allegations when it’s a swarthy person suspected of doing a shooting, but when it’s an Anglo, “oh, let’s double-check to make sure we have our facts straight.” Even when the fcuker’s dead…
I lost a job when an employer was purchased by a group of Sikh businessmen. Despite my disagreement with their decision, I had/have nothing but respect for their culture/religion. Unfortunately, fellow employees quit and customers were free with their racist comments about “towel-head’s” taking over the country. And to beat the homeschool tome to death, most of these enlightened individuals were a product of our local public school system. Henry, sorry to get my BVD’s in a knot, bad day, etc.
It probably wasn’t the Sikhism that led your bosses to be jerks, Dad, it was the capitalism. Why don’t mass shooters go wild at bankers’ conventions?
It’s a law here in Vancouver that banks have to have armed guards outside them. The guards are almost always bearded, tuban-wearing Sikhs. (Often greybearded old ones, like in their 60s.) I think there’s some reputation for ferocity amongst Sikhs, maybe dating back to their days in service of The Queen’s Frontier Forces. Or maybe it’s those kirpas in their pants.