As heard on NPR's Here & Now!

THURSDAY, MAY 26, 2022

Also, a trio of headlines: We'll start by noting a trio of headlines, two from the Washington Post.

What kind of rhetoric has perhaps been emerging from our tribe? We'll discuss that question further tomorrow, but these headlines may raise that question:

America’s Hands Are Full of Blood
Writer: David Frum
Publication: The Atlantic
You. This is your fault.
Writer: Christine Emba
Publication: The Washington Post
Yes, this absolutely is who we are
Writer: Paul Walsman
Publication: The Washington Post

Sometimes we wonder about the rhetoric to which our blue tribe is sometimes inclined. More on that tomorrow. For today, though, also this:

Yesterday, we happened to hear this interview with while we were out in the car:

Local pastor reacts to Texas school shooting

Pastor Joe Ruiz of Templo Christiano, a local church in Uvalde, Texas, joins us to discuss how the community is responding to the shooting at Robb Elementary School.

The interview was conducted by the NPR show, Here & Now. At the end of the four-minute session, this question was asked:

Pastor Joe, at some churches in Uvalde, some people prayed, not just for the victims, but the shooter. Is this a moment for forgiveness?

"Yes. There's always a forgiveness," Pastor Ruiz replied. His answer continued from there. 

For ourselves, we aren't religious. Also, we didn't lose a child in this murderous event. Having said that, we'll also say this:

To hear the full answer, click here.


32 comments:

  1. "Yes, this absolutely is who we are"

    Ah yes, this absolutely is who they are, your tribe's clowns, serving to Bezos and other globalist billionaires. 'nuff said.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Somerby finally admits he drives around in cars. Nazis and Republicans drive around in cars too. Case closed. Somerby isn't a liberal. He's a Nazi.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Is anyone still surprised that we see these mass shootings come in pairs/groups?

    There has literally been scientific papers statistically and scientifically linking mass murders to previous news coverage.

    I blame the media. But there's plenty of blame to pass around on these things.

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  4. We’d better be prepared for a lot more forgiveness, because there will be more shootings like this. (And Somerby’s “system” that he talked about yesterday will show its “forgiveness” of the shooter by either killing him on the spot or executing him in our criminal justice system. Also a part of who we are.)

    And there will be a lot more comforting of victims’ loved ones, because we are guaranteed to create more and more of them.

    Of course there is blood on America’s hands. We’re not so innocent. (Remember who said that?)

    (By the way, David Frum has never been and is not currently a member of the blue tribe. He is a conservative who opposes the GOP stance on guns.)

    Emba says that both the left and the right are to blame.

    Would Somerby care to show the left the way to persuade the gun freak party (nicely, politely, rationally, of course!) to work with liberals to help change the gun culture? What a laugh. Is he ignorant of recent history? Of the growing extremism of Republicans on this issue?

    ReplyDelete
  5. "... to help change the gun culture? "

    "gun culture" -- more meaningless liberal claptrap.

    Here:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China

    April 2018
    The death toll has risen to nine in Friday's stabbing attack outside a middle school in northwestern China allegedly carried out by a former pupil seeking revenge for having been bullied.

    October 2018
    A knife-wielding assailant injured 14 children at a kindergarten in the western Chinese city of Chongqing on Friday morning, police reported. The attacker, a 39-year-old woman, was taken into custody. No motive for the assault was immediately publicized.

    June 2020
    39 people (37 students and two adults) are injured in a knife attack at a primary school.

    On December 27, 2020, seven people were killed and seven others injured during a mass stabbing attack outside a school in Kaiyuan, in the Liaoning province.

    May 2017
    A driver angry over the loss of overtime pay set fire to his school bus in the eastern city of Weihai, killing 13 people, including 11 children from China and South Korea.

    On 15 June 2017, a bombing at a kindergarten in Feng County, Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, east China, killed at least eight people and injured 65 others.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good point that a knife is good enough to protect police officers.
      Thanks Mao.

      Delete
    2. Until we start holding cops accountable, giving them guns is a waste of money. The guns just end up getting “stolen” from their cruisers.

      Delete
    3. two dumb comments from know-nothings.

      Delete
    4. Now three, FDR.

      Delete
  6. "The supermarket chain Asda is to stop selling single kitchen knives in its stores by the end of April. The decision comes at a time of rising concerns about knife crime in the UK.

    Earlier this week, a senior police chief said the recent spate of deadly stabbings involving young people should be treated as a national emergency."

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/09/asda-to-stop-selling-single-kitchen-knives

    ReplyDelete
  7. Somerby thinks he can derive some sort of profound meaning out of an interview with some stupid small town Mexican priest. Liberals are mostly atheists. They're not stupid enough to believe in fairy tales. As if forgiving the shooter is going to help anything or anyone. Gun control laws are the only issue here and Somerby is not doing anyone any favors by trying to take people's minds off the issue and into some spiritual fantasyland.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Liberals are mostly atheists." Dumbest comment of the year! Congrats.

      Delete
    2. 69% of atheists identify as Democrats, only 15% as Republicans

      https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/religious-family/atheist/party-affiliation/

      Delete
    3. Didn't say that, did I?

      You seem to have woken up in a filthy mood.

      Delete
  8. Forgiveness is overrated. We forgive too much.....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And righteous anger is underrated, and complacency is the enemy of change.

      Delete
  9. It must have been nice being a student in those few years Somerby taught, you could skip all assignments and be forgiven.

    One wonders what Somerby would not forgive, were we to follow his lead, likely Black people would have no rights and possibly be enslaved, the Jews would all be dead at the hand of Nazis, etc.

    The pastor Somerby refers to actually offered a rather weak and mumbling response to the shooting, saying the world is sinful, but that God is merciful and will show forgiveness, so that we as Christians must also show forgiveness. Oof. Not exactly how Somerby was suggesting, Somerby has yet again put his thumb on the scale.

    Somerby avoids showing how another pastor responded to the Buffalo shooting, it's not perfect, it is human, and
    a much better response:

    PRIDGEN: Well, you know, to be very honest, I'm not much of a pastor right now. I'm just a boy from Buffalo who is grieving with my brothers and sisters. It is difficult to lead during times like this, but leadership is necessary. And so what I do say when I do have to put on the pastor hat is that there are times that there has to be tragedy for there to be change. There's never been a change in the world, in our country, without there being some form of hurt. And unfortunately, 10 people gave their lives.

    But anybody now who says there is not racism in America, anybody who says there are not still - that it's fake news that there are white supremacists who really just want Black people dead - I read a portion of his manifesto. I read and looked at how he mapped out the grocery store. I read how he looked at zip codes and looked for a place of a high concentration of, as he put it, Black people and how he desired to shoot - in his words - to shoot Black people. It's hard to be a pastor - being a pastor, because that's my calling, not because it's my wish right now.

    RASCOE: I mean, as a public servant, what would you like to see happen? And we just have a few seconds left.

    PRIDGEN: You know, as a public servant right now, you know, I know people are talking about guns and they're talking about this and they're talking about that. Right now, as a public servant, my job is to heal the community and make sure that this community does not divide along racial lines. Because it wasn't white America that walked into that grocery store, it was one American. And may he - may justice be served on that person.

    RASCOE: That's Darius Pridgen, president of the Buffalo Common Council. Thank you for joining us.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Apparently the "good guys with guns" notion does not work too well especially with scaredy cat right wing cops that stand by while someone with a legally purchased military style weapon freely murders a bunch of brown kids.

    How fucked up are American right wing Republicans?

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90755612/why-australia-has-only-had-one-mass-shooting-since-1996-and-the-u-s-has-had-dozens


    https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-44a7cfb990feaa6ffe482483df6e4683

    ReplyDelete
  11. Time for Somerby to start attacking Jen Psaki. She has a new show on MSNBC (starting in 2023) and she will undoubtedly be overpaid, stuffing money down her pants.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I've got an idea: let's all pray to the almighty god that is responsible for everything, not the least of which is the senseless deaths of 19 children. Makes perfect sense.

    ReplyDelete
  13. From Curmudgucation: https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2022/05/lets-blame-targets.html

    "In the last decade it has become a blindingly obvious statement to say that we have done nothing since Sandy Hook or Columbine or any of the rest, but that's not entirely true.

    We have been busy blaming the targets.

    We have developed entire industries that are all about hardening the targets, about making schools (and churches and a whole host of public places) harder to get into. We subject students to regular "active shooter" drills, and we make sure that staff are up on the latest approved technique for "coping" with an "active shooter situation." Or shit like this--one poster reported that at his wife's school, kindergartners closest to the door are taught to "throw things in the air and wave their arms" to buy time for their classmates (read the whole thread if you dare).

    There's an ugly damn implication in all of this--kids and teachers are dying because they are just too easy to kill. They have to make harder targets out of themselves. They have to learn to duck and cover and fight and flee.

    But the responsibility for not getting dead is all on them. Because even though this is the only damn country in the world where this regularly happens, there just isn't a thing legislators can do about it except thoughts and prayers and banning race stuff and naughty books and making sure that abortion is illegal in all cases because they are so damned pro-fricking-life.

    They're already out there on social media, explaining that if all the teachers were armed this would never have happened. If the schools had spotted the signs this time (or ten days--TEN DAYS--ago in Buffalo) then they could have stopped this.

    We won't pass laws, we won't support even the most rudimentary checks on firearms, but we'll by God send you consultants and trainers and other folks to help you make yourselves harder targets (most of whom also think that gun control not only can't, but shouldn't happen) because if you end up dead it's really your own damn fault.

    I am so sick and angry at all this stupid wasteful death, at the idea that my teacher wife and my soon-to-be-kindergarten children and my school and soon-to-school grandchildren are considered acceptable losses in the Noble Frickin' Fight to preserve the 2nd Amendment right to own guns that have no purpose except to blast lumps of metal through human flesh.

    We will now proceed with the routine and ritual. Thoughts and prayers. The proposal of stupid ideas: Arm teachers, custodians, administrators, bus drivers, because clearly more guns equals more safety and since we have the most guns on Earth we are clearly the safest nation and not one where shooting deaths and mass murders are ordinary (Yup--there's the Texas AF, right on schedule, advocating arming teachers--you know, those evil indoctrinatin' teachers who can't be trusted with students). Statistics to prove that the situation isn't really that bad. Whackburgers claiming this is a false flag meant to spur gun control--as if THAT has ever happened after a mass shooting before. Someone will blame it on mental health issues (spoiler: this will not lead to more government support for mental health treatment).

    And then nothing, except the usual background noise right up until it happens the next time. "

    This is how I feel too. Not Somerby though. Compare the way a real educator feels about these classroom atrocities with what Somerby writes here.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Because it is easier to focus on typos than to deal with ideas expressed?

      Delete
    2. There's a homeless guy who lives under the overpass looking for a job. If he doesn't get the CEO of CitiBank gig, maybe he could be 11:09's editor.

      Delete
    3. Somerby needs an editor too. You don't see him hiring anyone.

      Delete
  14. The philosophical/ religious argument that the worst must be forgiven is interesting fodder for debate. It doesn't have much, or possibly anything, to do with what the writers
    and our "tribe" are expressing about this and other school
    shooting disasters.
    This murderer by general agreement was insane.
    Cruel, stupid, many other bad things, but also nuts.
    Would he even want to be forgiven, and if not, what
    is the point of forgiving him? All questions worthy of
    some of your time.
    But the left opinion writers (Frum is a conservative
    driven to the left side by the idiocy of the Trump right;
    see Mao) are not concerned with these questions, as
    Bob surely knows if he isn't drunk.
    They are arguing the Right bears the blame for these
    deaths because they are fools and they have
    fought every effort to separate insane people from
    weapons that can inflict mind boggling damage to
    children and other human beings.
    I am stating the obvious and Bob
    couldn't watch two hours of MSNBC and
    not be fully aware of these points. Bob would not
    have to have lost one of these children himself to
    empathize with these parents if he wanted to.
    He doesn't really want to because his ego would
    be wounded if he had to admit his "tribe" was
    correct about something. This is due to his being
    one stupid son of a bitch.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "That’s not all: the Trump administration's 2018 federal budget also included a 26% cut to community health services. So states across the nation responded by slashing their allocations to community-based mental health service providers because of these cuts.

      Among them was Texas, which has continued to slash mental health budgets. In April, Abbott cut $211 million from the department overseeing mental health programs. Texas ranks last out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia for overall access to mental health care, according to the report on the 2021 State of Mental Health in America.

      Fox News hosts, naturally, would never impart that information to their viewers. Being an unrepentant Republican propaganda operation, their response was to concoct 50 different possible solutions to mass shootings that included a significant number—particularly increasing armed guards—that were proven ineffective in Uvalde. Other solutions included “God” and “prayer.”"

      From David Neiwert at Daily Kos

      Delete
  15. "Senate Republicans have given their response to the mass shooting of 19 children, and it was to vote to block debate on gun legislation."

    ReplyDelete