House Of Crows

lenyberry:

the-real-seebs:

omegaspreem:

the-real-seebs:

when Trump said he’d create jobs, i didn’t realize the plan was to escalate rhetoric and advocate violence against the media in order to create work for bomb squads, but hey, it’s working.

as of this writing, i think we’re up to eight confirmed bombs sent to people that are Democrats, or media that are insufficiently friendly to Trump, so far today (or possibly some were yesterday?).

just for reference: this is not normal.

suggest that, if you don’t think it should be normal, you consider the possibility that the rhetorical environment in which it seems normal is probably the problem, and that the thing where the Republican party as a whole cannot be seen to say anything negative about Trump openly claiming to be a nationalist and praising people for killing dissidents and censoring their media is probably the primary root of that problem right now.

options include (1) cause the Republican party to stop doing that, (2) cause them not to be in a position of power.

suggestion: vote.

While not meaning to normalize it, but didn’t the white house and some republicans just receive ricin letters last month? I find it a bit strange that that kind of just slid under the radar without this discussion of either side normalizing this behaviour before or whatever, but then presumably a mirror version happens and this discussion is now at the forefront. I mean, are we just going to apply anything negative we want about whatever group we want to blame and say that it normalizes ricin letters now? How about any religion? I just don’t see the correlation here being justified and just trying to equate one bad thing as being the fault of a thing you want to be thought of as bad by others.

Uh… This line of discourse is sort of complete bullshit.

What normalizes violence is actively advocating for it and cheering it on and treating it as normal.

And since before the 2016 election, we’ve had people talking about getting death threats from Trump supporters, and Trump talking about how he could just shoot someone and his supporters wouldn’t care (true enough), and violence at Trump rallies, and Trump praising the fucking dictator of North Korea, specifically his “relationship with his people”, and Trump supporting the Saudis and accepting their claim that probably the journalist was dismembered before he even got to their consulate.

That is normalizing violence as a response to political disagreement.

It has nothing to do with “religion”. It has nothing to do with any of the other negative things you might believe about Trump’s coterie. There are people out there who are racist assholes and think that putting little kids in detention camps is great, who still absolutely oppose the normalization of violence. And they are not at fault in the thing where it seems normal that we’ve had more attempted political assassinations in the US this year than we had during probably any previous decade of my life.

I don’t see how you can look at someone specifically praising violence and repression, and calling out “the media” as the Enemy of the American People, and then say “I don’t see how that’s correlated to package bombs being sent to the media”.

Also they didn’t receive ricin, exactly. ( @omegaspreem for information, no judgment intended, there was definitely some confusing news put out at first and not everyone probably got as much of the follow-up details as I did thanks to the incident qualifying as “local news” in my area). The guy sent ground castor beans, which… ricin is extracted from, yes, but he did not send extracted ricin. Castor beans are still poisonous… but pretty darn safe unless you EAT them. You’d have to be pretty stupid to just… eat the powdery stuff some rando mailed you without knowing what it is (granted, Trump might actually be that stupid, but in general this was really poorly planned if it was actually meant to hurt anyone). This was not a well-thought-out assassination or even intimidation attempt, this was some loser who either lacked the intention to do real harm, or the knowledge to be able to pull it off (or both). Considering that he also listed his actual home address for a return address on the letters… either he’s a total moron, he’s delusional, or he was after 15 minutes of fame (and maybe, just maybe, deliberately trying to make liberals look bad?). I heard, but haven’t been able to confirm, that he also claimed to have sent similar letters to the Queen and to Putin (this bit might just be local rumor, I’m mentioning it because I’ve heard it a few times, but no official news outlets seem to be confirming it so I would suggest taking that bit with a few grains of salt). Also, he has a past history of making threats including against Obama, and has done prison time for child abuse and assault.

(sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Anyway, I’m guessing that the big reason that story died down real quick outside of Utah was that it… wasn’t actually ricin, just ground-up castor beans (which tested positive for ricin, since they do contain it, but aren’t nearly as dangerous as the extracted form). There wasn’t actually any real danger unless someone had decided to eat the contents of the letters, and even then they’d have a shot at surviving depending on how much they ate. But of course “Letters Sent To White House Test Positive For Ricin” is a much more attention-grabbing headline than “Actually Those Letters Just Contained Ground-Up Castor Beans And No One Was Hurt Or Even In Serious Danger”.