With this season too upon us, does anyone remember when right wing was a hockey, not political position? These days, it has even more teeth, and might as well take a sawed-off-shotgun style also — wait that’s an old-school-term — with all the politically tainted shootings occurring.
I quote Metallica, as metal and hockey are much alike, Adam Sandler, we are a country with liberty and justice for … a few? Speaking of which, have you actually read OUR constitution, and know what’s really in it and not in it, (and even then we should go in and revise it. But those amendments — do you icy right-wingers know the word? — would be blocked by court actions in front of packed higher powers in red states.) How and who decides??
— Does Kirill slice or hook on the course, in the course of securing a contract extension. The Russian winter-here wunderkind is back in the Twin Cities, and his first large-scale public appearance was at a golf course in Lake Elmo, as part of a Wild team event. A source close to the route, said that on a main avenue between I-94 and Hwy. 36, which normally sees a car or two cross at a time at the light, was up to five or six each way. Media types and gawker types. Meanwhile in Somerset, the Vulcan Krewe also trekked over from St. Paul, for a charitable golf event. Was it perchance anything to do with helping Kirill keep up with the Joneses, as far as his killer contract conditions.
Over at Green Mill, the set of shelves by the door, formerly filled with staff picks for kids books and games for charitable purposes, now showed only a few potted plants. Guess the arrival of school means they are suddenly all picked out. Good kids are still reading. The wall of causes for paws, helping out pets, also has been replaced with a handful of event flyers more general in nature.
Moving from paws to parking, Ziggy’s downtown Hudson has become the first nightclub to formally offer parking on both sides of the main drag, utilizing the west-side marquee sign in the former Associated Bank building. —
For gun-gaining answers we might look to our (former) brethren to the north, Oh Canada. There they have carefully crafted and detailed gun laws, and ownership is a privilege not a right and not everyone gets one, as you think our background checks are stringent? (John Candy’s characters might not possess.) And all assault weapons are basically banned. Seems that Charleton Heston and his gun lobby got their fingers frozen off the trigger.
Canada, by comparison, has not only red-flag laws for guns, but yellow-flag laws for those with basically all kinds of motivations chosen to be questionable. And what about having a pink-flag, hate crime law?
Canada doesn’t mention hunting? Even if it does, you could say that you need an AK-47 to take out a polar bear, but not a deer. And this scenario illustrates my problem about all those internet ads who say their high-powered product will meet all your safety needs. They make up those needs so there exists a market for their product. Like a Bowie knife the size of the one carried by Crocodile Dundee, not David. (The former couldn’t carry that while movie filming these days.)
The result in Canada? Relatively few murders to speak of. Their gun laws work.
Further analysis of Canadian gun statutes would take on much of the length of their Library of Congress.
But after all, ban AK-47s and such, and keep smaller arms legal with restrictions, and Charlie Kirk would still be alive. A pistol’s reach is not a city block.
So what more do we do to solve this mess? A lot of it involves the questions asked of one another and how to phrase them. For instance, with this newer term Christian Nationalism now thrust in front of us, many would stand in the way of having “one Christian nation?” But few would argue greatly with this statement: “We should all live our lives with the virtues espoused by Jesus Christ.”
And as per Kirk: Refer and defer to Spock’s logic. Climate change can be cited where life if you are indeed living in the real world has proven the conservative position to be explicitly and irrefutable wrong. (View the stats of science.) Hands down. With certainty. No (further) qualifications. Pass a science test before you should be allowed to run for office.
But it may now be too little, too late.
But aim to instruct and educate but not incite, advocate but not antagonize and agitate, be spicy (like I am attempting to be in this wide-ranging post on the dangers of our politics, one of them being death) but not too bold, and there is a fine line.
The result if we don’t? John Lennon and Dimebag Darrel may come from different schools of rock, lyrically too, but their epitaphs are very similar. They, like Charlie Kirk, were not far enough gone to be Cowboys From Hell. Play guitar for God, not fiddle for Nero.
Lennon also, with the riveting questions asked of him, should have used a little more forethought before reacting. In fact, with the queries put before all our candidates, give them time to think first, not just blunder forward like The Donald.
Also, when debating, choose key and carefully chosen words, then work around them with the structure of your sentence. See the above example of alliteration.
A problem with situations like Kirk’s shooting, and we keep on seeing the same pattern play out in our country, is that only after giving it a few days, are we finally reflective and truly searching for answers, to keep the same problem from happening again and again. At the start, being reactionary rules the day, and everyone, including all the president’s men, just focus on merely saying all the right things.
And maybe only a bit later give them a little truthful edge.
The key, I think, is to balance these things out, over the entire course of our reactions, from the first hours — give it a few minutes to settle in — to the next few days, after which it’s yesterday’s news and we move on to another tragedy. Their timeliness will help win the game.
I think that the stances Kirk took could be irrefutably debunked in a debate, and that would be the way for his opponents to address these issues, not shooting him. I think as came up often in the 2024 election presidential debates, the best way to fight bad speech is with more speech, as in using good speech.
The bottom line to consider here if you are someone like Kirk is this: These days, if you take an outrageous and extreme political stance, you might get more than ridiculed, you might get shot. So I say to you, unfortunately and thus posthumously, Mr. Kirk, be captain of your own ship, and dear God protect yourself by toning down the venom of your rhetoric. Debate, do not soundly denounce. Shout for justice, do not shout down, and Kirk despite all his bluster about wanting to debate, has in some, if not many, cases tried to simply silence people he didn’t like.
With this we move to the likes of Hobbs and Locke and The Marketplace of Ideas, which I doubt Kirk and his followers have read. In this marketplace, Kirk and his positions are like rotten tomatoes being sold for $9 a pound, and soundly distasteful, and soon getting bad reviews. No one buys them and eventually they start literally dying at the vine. At which time the maker floods the marketplace, and mailboxes, with deceptive ads, and everyone, including those who bought them, becomes angrier, and there is a boycott. At which point the maker cries foul, and the advertisements are filled with even more falsehoods. The government steps in, and the tomatoes later are banned by the FDA.
Sound familiar?
Some right-wing media outlets boasted that many of Kirk’s videos have fifty million views, but these days that’s not that much. Some rock videos that would take him to task have more than a billion. Maybe he was more like Charlie Sheen, with arrogance, and just wanted to be more popular and accepted?
I cite that kind of insipid country song known for singing, “at least I know I’m free.” Note that caveat, “at least.” That implies settling for less, like not working to do better, and resting on your laurels, and nothing is more American than that.
After all, and not to defend the killer, isn’t anti-fascism, a big part of the Kirk shooter’s manifesto, a good thing?
It is not Christian to invoke God, but praise ungodlike ways, like despise hatred and, let’s say it evoke pacifism, to turn the other cheek, although I realize that is basically a parable and maybe not to be taken literally.
Note that word, literally. A lot of Kirk’s manifesto is a loosely-strung-together set of “principles” that never get beyond the “black and white, all or nothing” simplistic viewpoint that is so wrong with many conservative arguments.
And for his views, Kirk paid the ultimate price. That litany of irresponsible positions. He is more matador, waving red at bulls, than martyr.
There are some people of whom you don’t touch, unless you’re being very careful, and Kirk was not. Don’t go after Martin Luther King Jr.
Like so many sports and music figures too, Kirk wanted to live in the limelight. That means if you’ve truly got the goods, you will get the money to safeguard yourself. It also could be argued that with such prominence comes more responsibility.
On my list of applicable tangents, I will cite the Chuck Berry song, as example, of the country kid Johnny who “didn’t learn to read and write so well, but he could play guitar like ringing a bell.” This song is a brilliant example of a black man penning a nice slap in the face to the white establishment, so clever they won’t even know it. In the Old South, it was a crime to teach black people to read and write, but this kid — a black boy? — rose to be the rock star, while the whites were left as wannabes sitting in the back rows.
After all, if you are on a subway, even in some of those red cities, aren’t you going to watch your step, and back?
In response to a post, saying that present gun limitations would not have prevented most recent killings. Idea: Place limitations on assault guns, and have gun rights advocates band together with non, and provide self-policing transport groups to hunting areas, including more than one witness who would make available the hunting weapon, then drive them back when finished. If the group members put their actions where their mouth is, they will not mind the scrutiny, since the weapon would not be needed for foul play. Any inconvenience? That comes with the freedoms of democracy baby … Who needs a fucking revolver anyway? And for what? Besides hobbying and injury. If you feel you need it, an ordinary pistol will do.
And as far as safety needs? Consider keeping your gun-toting butt out of high risk areas, and if you have the high-priced property money, pay for security. With rights come responsibilities, and the mere fact of having this in place by definition means limits. With responsibility means you can’t just go doing anything you want. Get out a newer-version, with new inserts, dictionary. Such rights are not a license for all behavior, they are defined as having limitations.
Christian nationalism, too, is a non-starter, as I have always said that patriotism is fine, but nationalism of any type or form is approaching a dangerous line. I cite Nazi Germany, and let’s face it people, right now we are living in a police-state country where we are at the same crossroads as Germany in the mid-1930s.