Open thread to discuss Charleston Church Shooting

@Bernado… Even more thanks, I’ve had a major interest in end of colonialism in Africa and that gives me some interesting directions to read about

This makes me so sad, just so incredibly sad. I don’t know if the guy that did this was a racist, but it seems like it was a racially motivated crime. Just horrible. And it just saddens me that people still think this way, that they can find a way to justify mass murder in their minds. I just don’t get it.

But I was raised right. You’d suffer some pretty serious punishment if you expressed any amount of racism under their roof. That was the way it was. Granted, I never was disciplined for racism, because my parents formed an environment that was all about just looking at the humanity of our fellow human beings. In the part of the community where I lived, the whole idea of racism seemed so foreign. Since I’ve moved to a new area of the country, I see racism more now. And it’s so hard to see, so sad. People here call me “naive.” I say “nope, just raised right.” To see people putting the confederate flag outside their homes, I want to say “don’t you know what that means?” Of course, they DO know what it means.

This part of the country has the death penalty. It sickens me that the majority of the guys sentenced to death are African American men. Just from a casual observation by watching the nightly news, I see that the white guys who commit murder are less likely to be sentenced to death. I feel like I traveled back in time to the “bad old days.”

My brother married a black woman. While they were still dating, he told me “don’t tell mom and dad that she’s black. Let me tell them.” I said “bro, I don’t think they’ll have a problem with it.” And I was right. When they had her over for dinner, after she went home, my brother asks them “are you mad at me?” They said “didn’t we raise you? In what world would we ever be upset?” Even raised right, even in a community where the thought of racism was foreign, still my brother was worried. And now that he and his wife and children have moved to another part of the country, they experience racism–which is tragic. Why? I just don’t get it.

The murders at this church immediately made me think of my sister-in-law’s mom. She’s a church-goer. I’m not sure what church she goes to (not the one in the news), but she does live in Charleston. I’m sure this has shocked her church community too.

When I got up early this morning and saw this on the news, it relayed to me (again, as it has in the last several months and last year) that we have a long way to go.

I hear that Faux News and Presidential candidate Senator Lindsay “Shit-for-Brains” Graham are both trying to claim that this was an attack on Christians, not African-Americans. Try making the following substitution and see if it makes sense: “You [Christians] are raping our women and taking over our country.” Yeah, right.
I grew up during the civil-rights 60s, and it is very depressing to see this sort of shit persisting in society. And, yes, this is about angry young (in this case, white) men who see no future for themselves in this society and economy — and society offers them a choice of scapegoats to blame for their plight: blacks, Latinos, illegal immigrants, women, feminists — anyone but the real culprits, the people who think that society exists solely to provide them with money and power.
So I’m old now and frustrated at how little things have changed in a number of ways — that’s why I’m grumpy. But I try to take the long view. Assuming that we don’t destroy our planet with nuclear weapons or greenhouse gases, how long could the human species survive in something resembling our present form? 100,000 years? A million? Ten million or more? So assuming we can conquer the toxic masculinity that IMO is the greatest threat to the survival of our species and our planet, the history of human civilization as we know it (using the existence of written language as the defining test) is only about 10,000 years. This means that — for all our technological sophistication — we are living at the very dawn of civilization. In whatever form the history textbooks of the 1001st century take, our century will be covered in Chapter 1 along with the Ancient Greeks, Babylonians, etc. To them we will seem like primitive barbaric pre-humans (which, to some extent, is a just conclusion). They will marvel at the stupid things we did and thought, like war and misogyny. So, as I see it, the task for those of us that want to see progress in the right direction, is to do what we can to nudge society in that direction without getting too depressed and dispirited about how slow the progress is and how many people are being harmed in the meantime. Despair is not a productive mindset.
Looking at things from that long point of view, I can see a lot of progress. Women are a lot better off today (in Western countries, at least) than they were when I was young, and despite incidents like this one, blacks are considerably better off. When I was young, the vast majority of whites believed that blacks were naturally inferior, and the beliefs behind the Charleston shooter’s act were mainstream, not those of an aggrieved minority. If you include whites who didn’t vote for Obama but would have voted for Colin Powell or Condi Rice (or, Katie forbid, Alan Keyes or Ben Carson), more than half the white people in this country are willing to consider a black person for the most important job in the world. That would have been impossible when I was young. In those days the only woman in the Senate was Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who took over her husband’s seat. There were only a few women in the House, and most of them had also succeeded their late husband. I think we all have to have faith in progress no matter how glacial it seems — the alternative is suicide (or its equivalent with drugs or despair).

More massive projectiles are more effective, and using denser materials is a good way to increase the mass without making the weapon too big and unwieldy. The problem is that bullets/shells vaporize a little bit upon firing and impact, and heavy metal dust (including lead) is highly toxic, and in some cases mildly radioactive as well (such as depleted uranium). You really don’t want even trace amounts of that stuff getting into your lungs.

Jon Stewart dedicated the first segment of the show to the Charleston Church shooting. He was very serious and very tired. I’m assuming Larry Wilmore will be the same.

Larry Wilmore so far has addressed more of people calling this as a religion motive crime rather than a racially one, and with more comedy. And the table discussion falls in line with this.

And my thoughts are with the people affected by this tragedy. It’s not fair. I don’t know what else to say, but it’s not fair.

http://youtu.be/tzb7CW9KwhM

Here is a story that made my jaw hit the floor:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/charleston-shooting-closer-alleged-gunman-dylann-roof/story?id=31865375

Dylann Roof, the alleged gunman authorities say is responsible for killing nine people in a predominantly black Charleston, South Carolina, church Wednesday night, had been “planning something like that for six months,” according to his roommate.

Dalton Tyler, who said he has known Roof for seven months to one year, said he saw the white, 21-year-old suspect just last week.

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

So this guy was talking about doing something violent and racist for six months, and just last week he said he was planning to do something like what he actually did, and then kill himself.

What did the roommate do? Apparently nothing:

http://www.ibtimes.com/who-dalton-tyler-dylann-storm-roofs-roommate-says-alleged-charleston-church-shooter-1974265

At least one other friend of Roof corroborated that account, though people apparently didn’t take the suspect for his word because of his reported deadpan sense of humor. “He flat out told us he was going to do this stuff,” Christon Scriven said, according to the New York Daily News. “He’s weird. You don’t know when to take him seriously and when not to.”

Yeah, we should take stuff like this seriously.

The roommate also seems to be at least somewhat racist, and reports that Roof was known for his racist jokes. A picture emerges of someone making racist jokes and talking out loud about planning a racist murder spree, and getting little to no pushback on it to let him know that other people don’t think this is okay.

Even if the other friend, Scriven, had no idea when to take Roof seriously and when Roof was kidding, the responsible response to racism is, at a minimum, “Hey, that’s not funny. Not even slightly.” Describing the dude’s racism in the context of a “deadpan sense of humor” implies that people haw-hawed at his racist jokes. No. That’s not okay. The jokes are not okay, and describing the jokes in benign terms is also not okay.

Re: The 91% childless statistic

There’s an awful lot of MRA whining about not being able to have ‘paper abortions’ and abandon all responsibility for any kids they fathered (I think there’s more of that than the ‘weh weh custody battles weh’ thing, but I could be wrong), and I’m wondering how many of those 91% might be deadbeat dads to kids they abandoned and therefore don’t count.

Just to add the slimy cherry to the shit sundae … check out The Guardian report

A profile on TheKnot.com shows that Amber Roof is scheduled to be married shows her wedding is scheduled for Sunday in Lexington, South Carolina, Reuters reported.

This selfish, self-absorbed, nasty little shit was intending to kill as many people as he could and commit suicide afterwards when his sister is getting married in less than a week.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/18/dylann-roof-south-carolina-charleston-shooting-suspect