Look, it's just the evil version of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, OK? Trump probably bought it at an auction, or stole it from Cupertino before Cook could use it.
/s
More seriously, the people most prone to "The government is gonna eat our babies!" levels of conspiracy nuttery, are also the ones most susceptible to being brainwashed by the mainstream media. The government has nothing to fear from them really. All they have to do is keep conjuring up paper-thin boogey men and saying the freedom of the world depends on vanquishing them, and the nutters with guns will sign up in droves. Hell, an alarming number of them are members of "militia" groups already, and have been spoon fed "red menace!" since they were in diapers.
The evil cynic in me says that the government types-- the actually truly evil fucks in the NSA and pals (Since sustaining American hegemony is one of the fundamental reasons they exist, and the very conception of staying on top at all costs is itself fundamentally evil, no matter what other people may think of that. Despite the similarity in tone here, I am not talking about conspiracy theories about the NSA, since we have actual dirt released thanks to people like Snowden. Rather than be hyped that Snowden made such releases [since that would prove that at least some of the conspiracies they have wondered about for years are indeed true], these people [referred to in above paragraph] more often than not consider him a "Traitor" and "Commie sympathizer" that is "Out to destroy America!" and shit-- which is why my harping about this is very different. That there are some truly evil fucks in the NSA, CIA, and pals, is well established fact at this point.) -- actually WANT it this way. Such people are very easy to control and manipulate for a wide assortment of purposes, and being so easily controlled, they are a treated like a resource.
Sorry, but this contagion in my society has me very hostile, and my ability to be polite about it has been bled dry a long time ago.
The problem is not the second amendment. There are perfectly valid reasons for people to be able to own weaponry in the modern age (and I have frequently gone to bat about them on here in the past). The problem is with the end-stage mental cancer caused by "Red Menace!" mind control efforts, and the shameless manipulation of the media to sustain it, along with the ever escalating trend to make the american public as divided (and divisive) as is humanly possible. When you make the public hate each other, and then throw in guns-- you end up with some crazy shit. When you subtly add justification to dangerous notions about racial superiority or even just racial stereotypes, like with racial profiling, you end up with security guards getting shot for holding a gun while black, and police officers doing horrible things behind their badges.
The thing that has me so hot and angry about this, is that there are people in government who honestly think that sustaining the red menace scare mongering to keep controllng the narrative, is worth all this collateral damage, and are eager to turn the knob up to 11 and break the damn thing off.
Trump is too dumb to adequately fall into that group, but in his inept stumbling, does much to further that kind of purpose. It's a mad house, and the clowns are running the circus. We have electorate that is deranged, and does not know better, and trump is a symptom. The real issue, is to deal with why the public has such a widespread problem with this kind of mental cray-cray. That reason, is because they keep getting it hammered at them with the volume turned all the way up, which reinforces that kind of narrative in their heads.
Britain suffered this kind of nonsense long before we did. They had a word for it. Jingoism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JingoismRather than try to diffuse this toxic cloud of flatulence under a heavy administration of enlightenment era rationalism--- our civic leaders have decided that jingoism is a useful tool to effectively control the population, with disastrous results. Started with the McCarthy era, and never once has it really backed down.
This is nothing new-- Voltaire spoke about the same kind of evil in fact--
Mais, monsieur, en étant persuadés par la foi, des choses qui paraissent absurdes à notre intelligence, c'est-à-dire, en croyant ce que nous ne croyons pas, gardons-nous de faire ce sacrifice de notre raison dans la conduite de la vie. Il y a eu des gens qui ont dit autrefois: Vous croyez des choses incompréhensibles, contradictoires, impossibles, parce que nous vous l’avons ordonné; faites donc des choses injustes parce que nous vous l’ordonnons. Ces gens-là raisonnaient à merveille. Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste. Si vous n’opposez point aux ordres de croire l’impossible l’intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre coeur. Une faculté de votre âme étant une fois tyrannisée, toutes les autres facultés doivent l’être également. Et c’est là ce qui a produit tous les crimes religieux dont la terre a été inondée.
Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life. In days gone by, there were people who said to us: "You believe in incomprehensible, contradictory and impossible things because we have commanded you to; now then, commit unjust acts because we likewise order you to do so." Nothing could be more convincing. Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate. This has been the cause of all the religious crimes that have flooded the earth. (Translation from Norman Lewis Torrey: Les Philosophes. The Philosophers of the Enlightenment and Modern Democracy. Capricorn Books, 1961, pp. 277-8)
We have a government that has demonstrated a vested interest in the active indoctrination of people, into the learned behavior of believing in absurd and incomprehensible things, for the very purpose of getting them to do atrocious things.
THAT is the fundamental problem. Not that the people that are being compelled to do atrocious things are armed. (though it certainly does nothing to help matters, for sure.)
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