the stations wouldn't be on the air. If there wasn't enough of a audience businesses, wouldn't pay to advertise on the air. No advertisement no income, no income no program.

I'd be careful about this.

Think of the slain PA officers thinking they were about to talk to a "normal" American citizen about a dispute between they guy (his dog) and his mom.

I'd leave it it up to the cops.

I hope there is a nationwide re-training of 911 dispatchers in light of the "miscommunication" involved in this incident.

Also, the shooter's mother should be incarcerated, period.

And as far as guns go, and here I will probably cause a spat,
it has nothing to do with the guns.

Fuck that, there's nothing that mobilizes these freaks more than the mere mention of "gun control". The necessary laws are already in place. Just like with all laws, the people that are going to break them are doing just so.

Instead of riling up the fucking loonies, people should do this:

It's time the American people start "calling out" these psychos.

Notify the authorities if you have a founded suspicion.

If you're wrong, oh well, no harm, no foul.

If you're right, you may have saved a life (or more).

Don't fear these fucks, but don't take matter into your own hands and don't "give them a reason".

The signs are usually there, be vigalent.

I imagine with the increase in this kind of batshit crazy killing that's going on....

The police will be more than willing to work with a sane and concerned citizen.

That's my take.

Peace.

Its very simple, when people call for budget cuts, the govt. both dem and repub say they will have to cut police, fire, school budgets. And since the people do not want that, they say well okay I guess you don't have to. Yes a very simple explanation but pretty true.

they probably taste better in airport bathrooms.

You can if the theatre is on fire.

What else are you going to yell, popcorn?

Hoo boy. You pick the easy questions, dontcha?

I do discuss this a fair amount in The Eliminationists, especially the final chapter. So I'm gonna kind of give the book away here, but hopefully you'll see that the answer is built out of a book's worth of work and go buy it to read the rest.

Some excerpts:

___

Recognizing what we are up against—namely, a form of fascism—is critical to dealing effectively with it, because even if wielding the term in discourse can be unhelpful (it remains loaded and easily misinterpreted), the concept gives us a key to understanding the thought—or rather, emotive—processes at the core of the para-fascist appeal. Getting our opponents to see, for example, that dissent is not treason but patriotism, requires getting them to let go of their preconceptions. It means, in the end, getting them to see us as human beings, too. And when we do that, the fascist facade will crumble.

This raises the ultimate conundrum regarding recognizing and dealing with para-fascism. On the one hand, attaching the term to just anyone—even in a qualified way, but particularly to people we think of as our neighbors and friends—can itself be a kind of demonization. At the same time, we cannot escape confronting it when we see it.

... No doubt, the degraded state of the word fascism is a large part of the reason the Left applies it willy-nilly to virtually anyone opposed to its agenda, in much the same way that the Right has debased the idea of communism. Fascism has become a black hole of a term instead of the red flag it should be, making it that much more difficult to recognize the genuine article when it sidles up alongside one.

Of course, as we have seen, liberals are hardly alone in abusing the term. Over the past decade, such abuse has become fashionable among conservatives as well; indeed, the Hitler/Nazi comparisons were particularly rampant in the identifiably proto-fascist elements of the Far Right during the 1990s, when they frequently compared Clinton to Hitler and government workers to Nazi storm troopers. Likewise, the fascism comparisons have crept into mainstream conservative rhetoric—particularly by the Rush Limbaugh and Freeper crowds, and immortalized in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism—as part of the attempt to paint liberal America as an oppressive police state.

In the end, this Newspeak—and its underlying eliminationism—is about naming the Enemy. For the Right, the Enemy is anyone who is Not Us. This naming is an enterprise doomed to descend into a downward and destructive spiral. Too often, those who have found themselves labeled Not Us have played into the dynamic rather than recognizing it for what it is. Escaping the spiral means refusing to become part of it.

... Naming the enemy, identifying him for purposes of elimination and purification, is the clear theme of all eliminationist rhetoric. It arises when a person takes the mantle of the hero upon his own shoulders; after all, a hero is nothing without an enemy. And so overcoming this cultural toxin means renouncing the attempt to claim the heroic role.

One of the best examinations of the mindset that relies on mythopoeic heroism can be found in sociologist James A. Aho's book, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy. Aho describes the symbiotic relationship between heroism and enemy-naming:

The warrior needs an enemy. Without one there is nothing against which to fight, nothing from which to save the world, nothing to give his life meaning. What this means, of course, is that if an enemy is not ontologically present in the nature of things, one must be manufactured. The Nazi needs an international Jewish banker and conspiratorial Mason to serve his purposes of self-aggrandizement, and thus sets about creating one, at least unconsciously.

Aho goes on to describe how the enemy is constructed in detail:

Whether embodied in thing or in person, the enemy in essence represents putrefaction and death: either its instrumentality, its location (dirt, filth, garbage, excrement), its carriers (vermin, pests, bacilli), or all of these together. . . .

The enemy typically is experienced as issuing from the "dregs" of society, from its lower parts, the "bowels of the underworld." It is sewage from the gutter, "trash" excreted as poison from society's affairs—church, school, workplace, and family.

... Aho describes a dynamic latent in all sectors of American society but which finds a virulent expression in right-wing extremism. In this dynamic, the two sides—the Far Right and their named Enemies, that is, Jews, civil-rights advocates and the government—essentially exchange roles in their respective perceptions; the self is always heroic, the other always the enemy. Each sees the other as the demonic enemy, feeding the others' fears and paranoia in an increasingly threatening spiral that eventually breaks out in the form of real violence.

Aho does, however, also argue for a way to escape this dynamic, to break the cycle. And it requires, on the part of those seeking to oppose this kind of extremism, a recognition of their own propensity toward naming the enemy and adopting the self-aggrandizing pose of the hero:

As Ernest Becker has convincingly shown, the call to heroism still resonates in modern hearts. However, we are in the habit of either equating heroism with celebrity ("TV Actress Tops List of Students' Heroes") or caricaturing the hero as a bluff-and-swagger patriot/soldier making the world safe for, say, Christian democracy. In these ways heroism is portrayed as a rather happy if not entirely risk-free venture that earns one public plaudits. Today we are asked to learn that, in the deepest and truest sense. Heroism is really none of these things, but a largely private vocation requiring stamina, discipline, responsibility, and above all courage. Not just the ascetic courage to cleanse our personal lives of what we have been taught is filth, or even less to cleanse society of the alleged carriers of this filth, but, as Jung displayed, the fortitude to release our claim on moral purity and perfection. At a personal and cultural level, I believe this is the only way to transcend the logic of enemies.

For all of its logic and love of science, modern liberalism is weighed down by a consistent flaw: an overweening belief in its own moral superiority. (Not, of course, that conservatives are any better in this regard; factoring in the religious Right and the "moral values" vote, they are objectively worse.) This tendency becomes especially noticeable in urban liberal societies, which for all their enlightenment and love of tolerance are maddeningly and disturbingly intolerant of the "ignorance" of their rural counterparts. This is not an omnipresent attitude, but it is pervasive enough that rural dwellers' perceptions of it are certainly not without basis. There's a similar stigma attached to religious believers as well, especially among the more secular liberals, and that, in turn, has given birth to a predictable counterreaction that is only partially informed by misunderstanding.

If we want to look at all those red counties and come to terms with the reasons the people there think and vote they way they do, it's important to come to terms with our own prejudices, our own willingness to treat our fellow Americans—the ones who are not like us—with contempt and disrespect.

I am not suggesting that we respond to such provocations with touchy-feely attempts at "reaching out" to the other side; these are always rejected with contempt, or viewed as a sign of weakness. Indeed, it's an absolute imperative to fight back, especially when threats and intimidations arise. But if progressives want to win, they need to break this dynamic; and to do that, a little self-reflection will go a long way.

Respecting people from rural areas or the exurbs and suburbs, or those who hold deep religious beliefs, doesn't force progressives to compromise their own beliefs or standards. It simply means accepting being part of a democracy that is enriched by diversity of all kinds. Certainly, traditional rural values should have a place among all that diversity that liberals are fond of celebrating. Because until those liberals learn to accord it that respect, they are doomed to remain trapped in the vicious cycle being fueled on both sides. Conservatives will also have no incentive to escape that cycle. For liberals, escaping it may be a matter of simple survival—especially if the rabid Right's eliminationist fantasies ever start coming to life.

In the end, we cannot prevent fascism from happening here by pretending it is something it is not; it must be confronted directly and straightforwardly, or it will not be confronted at all. Yet, at the same, those who are the targets of its eliminationist bile must resist the temptation to wield this recognition like a cudgel. We cannot dehumanize and demonize those who have fallen under its sway. And we cannot stop the forces of hate by indulging it ourselves.

Escaping the downward spiral of eliminationism means seeing those who indulge it as human beings, as our fellow Americans—affording them the very recognition they would deny us. We must rely on the force of persuasion and not the persuasion of force. If we are serious about defending democracy without betraying its beating heart, we have no other choice.

responsibility?

What a novel, impractical, liberal idea?

There is only one ethic in bidness: profit, by any means possible.

Bidnesses lie, cheat, steal, and kill (see the Latest findings about OSHA under Mr./Ms McConnell...search "OSHA failed"

They didn't call it 'Giuliani time' for nothing...