I’m waiting for a gunman to go on a shooting spree because he’s tired of the mainstream media promoting “hoaxes” like Sandy Hook and Aurora CO, then have the conspiracy nuts immediately call his own shooting spree a hoax.
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Wish to hell more Democratic candidates would announce support and strategies for prosecuting domestic terrorists and their supporters.
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Those dastardly alt-righters. They once again tricked us into believing that the stereotypes about them are true.
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I’m waiting for a mass shooting where someone says “Oh yeah, I saw that guy wandering around fully loaded but I figured he was just one of those open carry activists who make a point of carrying their guns everywhere”.
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there were also several pictures on his timeline showing him doing cosplay dressed as a knight with different iterations of swords. the gladius is definitely the most realistic of the swords he had in his pictures but i know several folks deep into cosplay and renfair costuming with extremely realistic swords.
full disclosure, i own two swords myself.
i agree that there is a serious problem of epistemic closure at the heart of that online world just as there is a similar problem of epistemic closure in the fox news/drudge report/breitbart world.
i’m having trouble explaining, i think, what i mean by normality. in this instance there were posts about his new apartment, about his work at school, cosplay pictures, cousins, uncles, posts about mom and dad, posts showing his pets, posts showing his firearms (as i’ve said, i live in texas and i’ve become somewhat inured to people showing off their firearms and accessories), and landscape photos from drives and trips to various parks. if you’re comfortable with the concept of cosplay and larping and are used to seeing firearms more or less routinely, that part of his timeline was relentlessly normal and represented 65-75% of his posting activity. the remaining fourth alternated between incel/mgtow memes, anti-democrat and pro-trump memes that my fox news relatives post all the time, and dank memes that likely came from 4chan or 8chan.
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Man! Was I fooled! Now if you will excuse me I need to remove on my digital watch and head back into the ocean.
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Talking to the secret police isn’t going to do anyone any good.
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There is nothing in The Onion that will not be made literally true as the dark enlightement [sic] encroaches.
I think you mean the endarkenment.
EDIT: gawdangit! Ninja’ed by @roomwithaview only, like, hours before.
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Thanks for that.
That presentation is relevant to my interests.
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I own a few stabby knives and a compound bow.
I don’t make social media posts about “defending the Republic” with them. I also tend not to post images of swastikas with supportive commentary.
Your perception of “boring normality” may be a bit miscalibrated, is what I’m getting at.
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The way the current crop of fascists are both self-meming and self-parodying is kind of alarming. You can’t distinguish an Onion article from a news story.
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Just out of curiosity, which period of history strikes you as having “made sense?”
I just reread the excellent surrealist mystical cyberpunk novel Blueprints of the Afterlife, which came out in 2012. The world of 2019 seems to fit that timeline quite well.
I think I’m actually starting to enjoy the absurdity of our global civilization’s end days. But then again, I’ve been anticipating it for quite a while now… (And, I don’t have kids.)
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So if a police officer were approached by someone in that particular getup, do you think they’d wonder if it was an airsoft gun, or just start shooting?
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possibly the period from the congress of vienna until the resignation of bismark, say 1815-1890.
that’s as close as i can come by combing my recollections of history for 10 minutes or so.
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I mean, it is Texas…
Of course, someone will inevitably argue that he was definitionally not a good guy with a gun because he was obviously setting out to do something illegal with his firearms, but the problem is that by the time the good guy/bad guy changeover magically takes place and they become a person who clearly should never have been allowed to own a firearm in the first place, bullets are already flying.
It’s almost as though broadly unrestricted access to lethal weaponry in a civil society is a recipe for disaster, and not actually something conducive to a polite or functional civilization.
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If he were a tv or movie android, we’d know right when the change happened, and his eyes would glow red. Too bad that doesn’t happen in real life, or, when it sort of does it’s too bad people don’t take it seriously (eg, Trump et al).
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So the period in which immigrant Americans committed genocide on the indigenous population of the country, people of a specific race were enslaved by people of another race, people certainly judged one another based on wealth and class and religion and many other factors significantly more than we do today… I could go on and on, but needless to say, it’s never made much sense. Ever. Not in the way every other living species seems to make sense.
No, the human story has always been nuts, it’s just that nowadays we have advanced technologies on top of the inherent insanity. Which certainly accentuates the crazy, but not very much, in many ways.
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That’s the first thing I thought, too.
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It kind of seems like people don’t understand this is real life.
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It was outside a courthouse, not in a courtroom.
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