Touchy subjects and Internet Trolls

general
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I’m not going that stark. Let me refine my point better.

In America, if 10 people go all Clockwork Orange somewhere someone will stop them. Unless it’s a “gun free zone” which we’ve discussed before. In many other places, if a group does something like that, then it could be dozens of minutes before someone shows up to stop it.

And a gun could pause a group of 100 or so, maybe not 500, but if they aren’t crazy then you’ve got to think who wants to get shot first, it’s happened. Police deal with those kinds of odds in any riot.

It’s not about overthrowing the government. It’s about resisting a bad law or a bad decision. Let’s say they ban Furbys. 10,000 people own them in DC, 1,000 of those people will fight to keep them, that protects the other 10,000 to an extent. Because of the deaths, or press, or protests, or whatever caused by trying to take everyone’s Furby the government would back down. And if they didn’t, then the resistance would expand to people who didn’t have Furbys. Now it’s 800 originals with Furbys resisting, plus another 2k that were willing to give them up, plus another 10k joining them in solidarity.

You can cripple a modern city with that many people. And the Air Force won’t bomb the city, and the National Guard won’t move in, and the regular army certainly won’t. You can’t bomb a city of millions to get at thousands of people. It’s not like they are camping out in some open field, they are in their homes, in apartment buildings, at work, whatever.

Europe seems to join in when the jackboots come out, America generally resists the urge. What’s interesting lately is it’s the people who used to protest so hard that are now wearing the jackboots. The right here isn’t all that good at protesting, they get sidetracked and then pinned down as some sort of “ist”. The Tea Party let the media define it, and the media did so well. Up to and including cutting minorities out of pictures and scouring the nation for the looniest of loonies out there. Just like when they talk to a libertarian they always look for the pot head or the strict isolationist.

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Or the Ayn Rand quoting anarcho-capitalist.

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The 9 Chickweed Lane comic for this week featured Thorax introducing “Sphinxter, the Mobile Comments Wart”. It starts here. Brooke McEldowney does not have article comments enabled for Chickweed or his other comic strip, Pibgorn.

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Lindsay Ellis has run a two-part feature on the 9/11 attacks and their effect on the media. For obvious reasons she’s disabled comments on the videos, but her Twitter has become a total shitstorm. Oddly enough, it’s not truthers, it’s mostly people demanding she stop being disrespectful (the old “too soon” argument).

But… too soon? It happened 15 years ago. I know it was a terrible disaster, I know it’s even effected people I know - we were in school when a special assembly was called, and one boy in Year 10 who I shall leave nameless was called out of the assembly not by the Police, but by actual MI5 agents. Investigating the effects of events on media, and society as a whole, is something that should be done, regardless of the event itself, and telling someone they’re being disrespectful for doing so is just plain silly.

We had our own attack in London in 2005, the 7/7 bombings. They pale in comparison to the atrocity in New York, and in no way am I trying to draw comparisons between the severity of the attacks; what I will call comparison between is the reactions. Did we suddenly surge the rest of our army into fighting Al Queda? No. We funded counsellors, we funded retreats for the EMS who responded, we funded mental healthcare, funerals, and pensions for those who had lost family members (christ, I miss having a Leftist government). The most recent actual news stories I’ve read about the 9/11 attack is that the State Department is refusing to pay for medical care for the EMS workers who were responsible for saving many dozens of lives from the wreckage, let alone counselling. It’s gauche to say it, but we kept calm and carried on. Literally.

The same can be said for the reactions to talking about 9/11 and 7/7 in general. When we, in Britain, talk about 7/7 we talk about it in the same was as the bombings in WWII. They were terrible, but they happened, they were real, people were affected, and we took care of them. Unfortunately it seems that at least amongst people who comment on internet videos, talking about 9/11 will always be “too soon” - despite your current Presidential Election for the first time including voters who were literally too young at the time to remember 9/11 happening.

If I have offended anyone in my bluntness, I offer the most sincere apologies. But things have to be talked about. If we don’t talk about them, they grow into some terrible subconscious tumour, poisoning the ability to move forward as a culture.

(edited: completed a sentence I stopped in the middle of by accident)

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Crazy cowboy Bush pushed the same things. September 11th Victim Compensation Fund - Wikipedia

Now, some of the recipients argued that since their missing loved one was worth more money they should have gotten more compensation, which almost broke the fund.

Still don’t know why not. Or why France only cares when there is oil, because unlike the US and Iraq, France is getting oil from Libya.