Stochastic

 

Pentheus torn by Maenads, in a fresco in the Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii, via Wikipedia.

I wonder if Trump's bizarre initial response to the killing of Rob and Michele Reiner could be considered an incitement to stochastic violence, when he made up the story that their deaths were "reportedly"

due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump

—the theory that the killer was a Trump fan maddened by Reiner's criticism of Trump, like he's accepting it as a tribute to himself, the way the angry god Dionysus accepts it and indeed instigates it when his crazed followers the Maenads tear King Pentheus to pieces in the tragedy by Euripides. You feel Trump would love it if a wild Maga crowd did something like that to one of his many enemies.

Now that we're getting an idea of what actually happened to the Reiners it certainly seems tragic in the Aristotelian sense—inspiring pity and terror—but with no roles for Trumps. That human drama is not what the press will focus on, naturally; they'll be doing the courtroom drama, with close analysis of the lawyers' strategy on either side. I don't want to write about it myself, at least not yet. 

Nor about the shooting deaths at Brown University, unless it's addressing the dysfunction of the FBI under its incompetent Trumpy leadership, which may have let the shooter escape even as Patel was issuing premature announcements of success, which will have to wait until we know a lot more than we do now. As we heard last night that the law enforcement agencies had solved the crime and the murderer, a former physics student from Portugal, had shot himself dead in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, the question arose whether Trump would issue a ban on all Portuguese nationals or maybe all STEM grad students.

Does inequality cause gun violence? More than you might think

We interrupt our regular scheduled programming to bring you a take, relevant to yesterday's horror in Texas:

Actually, with respect, the senator is wrong. The US is an outlier in mental illness, in a way that correlates with income inequality. https://t.co/ixGCb1qB9j Of course the easy availability of firearms and especially assault weapons that makes that far more dangerous for us. pic.twitter.com/hNMZHYQdWf

— Yaslight (@Yastreblyansky) May 25, 2022

It is clear, or ought to be clear, that we have too many guns in this country, far too many, just crazy amounts of them serving no valid purpose (as Joe Biden pointed out there aren't any deer out there in Kevlar vests), but it should also be clear that we have too much untreated mental illness, partly because we won't spend any money on it 

Subway

36th Street station on the D line was also the site of a slashing incident in August. Uncredited photo via WPIX TV.

I don't really have anything vital to say about the shooting incident in Brooklyn this morning except to think about how much time I spent in that station, 36th Street at 8th Avenue, when we lived 20 blocks west of there in Brooklyn's Chinatown in the later 90s and it was the best stop for changing between the R local and the D express on the way to and from Manhattan, through the toddlerhoods of two kids, often in an unfolded stroller hung around the handles with plastic bags from shopping, which I had to wangle up and down the stairs (occasionally with the unexpected assistance of some friendly volunteer out of nowhere). It's just such a profoundly ordinary place.

End gun violence, please.

For the Record: Don't Make a Federal Case of It (or Try If You Want to, But You'll Fail)

 

That's pretty ridiculous, right? The video is mocking January 6 organizers inside the House, like Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar!

Somebody on Gosar's staff is a regular Jonathan Swift!

— Toxic Positivity (@Yastreblyansky) November 18, 2021

Because personally, if I'm a member of Congress and somebody portrays me as a cartoon serial murderer, I'm not going to think it's making fun of somebody else. If I were involved in it, of course, I'd put it more in the old Warner Brothers style than anime—that looks more satirical to me—putting Gosar's face on Elmer Fudd. And he'd fail to get his kill, that's a lot funnier, trust me.

And in Sinemascope

Deconstruction

This is the most deconstructionist thing that has ever happened: Screenshot from the official White House release of the president's remarks on the tragic shootings over the weekend in El Paso and Dayton and not, as I'm sure you have heard, in that other Ohio city:

Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as 'under erasure', it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Used extensively by Jacques Derrida, it signifies that a word is "inadequate yet necessary";^[1] that a particular signifier is not wholly suitable for the concept it represents, but must be used as the constraints of our language offer nothing better.

In the philosophy of deconstruction, sous rature has been described as the typographical expression that seeks to identify sites within texts where key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable.^[2][3] To extend this notion, deconstruction and the practice of sous rature also seek to demonstrate that meaning is derived from difference, not by reference to a pre-existing notion or freestanding idea.^[4]

But which, in the last analysis, are we looking at here, in the rature of "in Toledo"? Is it really "inadequate yet necessary"? or is it more "paradoxical or self-undermining"?

It's about the RPM

How it's supposed to be: Gilroy Garlic Festival 2018.

I've never heard of a case that puts it in starker terms than this shooting spree in Gilroy, California (not too far from where I spent half my childhood in the suburbs of San Jose, which meant the story immediately grabbed me—we never went to the festival, but Gilroy's devotion to garlic was something that delighted us when we drove by on Highway 101 on the way to the beach or a camping trip):

At least three people are dead and 11 people are injured after a shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Northern California, according to law enforcement and medical officials.

Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee said the shooter was fatally shot by officers who engaged him within one minute of the shooting.

One minute! Police performance was obviously superb, but they couldn't stop him from shooting 14 people, killing at least three, including a six-year-old boy. That's because the shooter had a semiautomatic weapon, though reports aren't yet clear what kind. Maybe it used one of the illegal Glock conversion devices that ATF officers found a whole bunch of in Gilroy, as it happens, last May. One way or another, those were the rounds per minute that make such guns so much more dangerous in these episodes than other weapons might be, and that was the minute in which they take place.

That's why these weapons have to go. It's not a matter of the type, dear gun nuts, please don't try to engage me in a tech-and-terminology debate because I don't have the patience for it today, it's a matter of how many bullets it shoots in 60 seconds.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Brooks on Harvard

Reading Room, Langdell Hall, Photo by John Phelan via Wikimedia Commons.

An interesting take from moral philosopher David F. Brooks ("Harvard's False Path to Wisdom") on the case of Kyle Kashuv, the gun nut Trump acolyte among the survivors of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school shooting, whose Harvard acceptance has been rescinded after the discovery of some extremely offensive text messages and other communications he wrote "years ago", in his words, or in some cases 18 months, as in the below example (via Steve M):

The racial slurs in an open Google doc have gotten more attention, but I suspect these texts from Kyle Kashuv may have weighed heavier in Harvard's decision. pic.twitter.com/hu7CYyE1M3

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) June 17, 2019

Most conservative commentators focused on the unfairness of Harvard's decision, as Ben Shapiro, a mentor of Kashuv's, described it:  "Harvard's auto-da-fe sets up an insane, cruel standard no one can possibly meet", because who among us has not as a teenager typed things like this?

Well Said, Mr. POTUS

John William Waterhouse (1845-1917), The remorse of Nero after the murder of his mother, pen and ink, via Artnet.

Do I detect—this is going to sound weird—a note of remorse in our poet-president's response to the newspaper office slaughter in Annapolis on Thursday? Because what does he mean, otherwise, with "shocked the conscience of our nation"? What "shocks the conscience" other than the awareness of guilt?

I'd Like to Address

By Donald J. Trump

I’d like to address the horrific shooting
that took place yesterday at Capital Gazette
newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland.
This attack shocked the conscience of our nation
and filled our hearts with grief. Journalists,
like all Americans, should be free from the fear
of being violently attacked while doing their job.

Horrible, horrible event, horrible thing happened.
In your suffering, we pledge our eternal support.
The suffering is so great... My government will not
rest until we have done everything in our power
to reduce violent crime and to protect innocent life.

I always feel the formula "I'd like to address" is apologetic in its own right, in the sense of if you'd like to, why don't you just do it? But yes, I'm thinking about the intemperate violence of the president's language toward journalists, the way he keeps them caged at his rallies and mocks them for the delectation of the fans, and the failure of society at large to recognize the signs, especially in the murderer's Twitter feed, as reported in the Baltimore Sun:

Smash-Mouth Liberalism

Apparently Smash Mouth was the name of the first band to give Trump permission to use their music at his rallies. Not sure how that relates to the way Douthat's using the expression, but it must be relevant.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, does not love the kids; he is deeply distressed by them, in particular their chillingly violent calls for the destruction of Senator Rubio ("Marco Rubio Must Be Destroyed"):

Since the Parkland shootings in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio has done many of the things liberals say they are desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to do. He has changed his position on gun control, expressing support for new restrictions: age limits on gun purchases, new background check rules, possibly magazine restrictions. He has co-sponsored legislation encouraging states to issue restraining orders that temporarily would strip people deemed dangerous of their guns. Some of these measures have conservative support, but in other cases the Florida Republican has effectively bucked the N.R.A.

When he showed up for the CNN town hall he met boos and heckles; one of the shooting survivors told him that just looking at him was like staring down the barrel of an assault rifle. Notwithstanding his subsequent policy concessions, at the March for Our Lives the students wore price tags around their neck, $1.05 each — the amount of money Rubio’s campaigns have received from the N.R.A. divided by the number of students in Florida schools. David Hogg, one of their leaders, began his speech with the price tag line, and told a CNN interviewer that if anything he feels that their attacks on the Florida senator haven’t been provocative enough.

I'm not having any luck finding cases of liberals saying "I am desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to" do anything. It's certainly not something I would say. I suspect Ross is making this up.

David Brooks wonders if he's wrong. Just kidding.

Clara Bow in William Wellman's Wings, 1927, via Blueiskewl.

Somewhat Shorter David Brooks, "How Progressives Win the Culture War", March 2 2018:

It's possible that I may have been wrong about guns. Well, of course not wrong exactly, I'm David F. Brooks, but right in a more complex and interesting way than I predicted, when I was reminding the supporters of moderate gun restrictions that they may have the majority of the population on their side but not the majority of state legislatures, and should therefore focus on identifying Republicans who might agree with you if you could just devote more time to making them feel better about themselves, rather than calling in radical tribalist organizations like Planned Parenthood and calling Senator Rubio a mass murderer, which only gets them upset.

I was right to say that this approach would get no legislation passed, but did not realize that it could succeed at a more profound level, by delegitimizing the opponents of progress on gun rights and, indeed, not just gun rights,  and making them unacceptable in polite society, which might lead not just to a ban on assault rifles but vast social changes.

Literary Corner: Do shooters just want to have fun?

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic no, 110, 1971, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, via Wikipedia.

This quirky little piece flashes with odd insights and surreal pictures, like that of a bank where they have armed tellers and loan officers instead of security guards, or of a man so rich he owns everything in the plural, things like banks that people really do own, and things they don't, like schools, and might plan, "I'll do that thing with my schools that I do with my banks." Or of "hardened" schools, I realize he's not making that one up, but when the expression acquires Trump's voice it acquires the strangeness of its literal meaning, of schools in danger of melting or crumbling that need to be reinforced, stiffened, or they could disappear into the natural surroundings. Then it slips into imagining something darker, the mentality of what he's elsewhere called the "sicko shooter", the attacker against whom the banks and schools must be guarded.

They Live For Gun Free Zones

by Donald J. Trump

I

You'd need 100, 150 security guards... But you
could have concealed on the teachers.
I want my schools protected just
like I want my banks protected.

Neutrocracy

The famous castrato singer Senesino, with the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni and alto castrato Gaetano Berenstadt in Händel's Flavio (London, 1723), in a caricature by John Vanderbank. Wikimedia Commons.

So David Brooks was begging Twitter to come and kill him yesterday morning ("Respect First, Then Gun Control") advising, as his title implies, that "we" need to get "our" priorities straight, and trying to stop America's schoolchildren from getting shot up with semi-automatic rifles must come second to stopping America's rightwingers from feeling less than wholly admired. Old white sumbitches have feelings too! If you'd just show them some of that R-E-S-P-E-C-T, effete liberal elitists, they'd ban those AR-15s in a heartbeat!

And Twitter obliged, as you can imagine. Don't know anybody who hit the appropriate note better than this:

other Great David Brooks Columns Of History pic.twitter.com/CkEPABACg5

— Current Affairs (@curaffairs) February 20, 2018

Which Driftglass also felt obliged to reproduce, because what else is there to say, really? But I like mine, to tell the truth:

David Brooks, man of respect: "Cute kid you got there. Shame if anybody was to blow his head off." https://t.co/JYcUNXJZIu

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 21, 2018

For the Record: Who's Emotional and Uninformed?

Via EBL News.

Excerpted from the Twitter feed: I think I managed to bring some attention to an important point.

"Parkland students aren't credentialed to talk about the gun debate" is one of the worst takes of all time, especially when it comes from people who don't have very much relevant life experience themselves. pic.twitter.com/JVjckmoSLs

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 20, 2018

Actually these students are experts on something you know nothing about, which is what it feels like to have a lot of friends murdered one day out of the blue and to realize the authorities you trust are unable to protect you.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 20, 2018

For the Record: It's the RPM, Stupid.

Three rounds per minute and sometimes you still needed a sword. Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, via WhiteRoseWritings.

Over 30 shots, 17 lethal, in under 5 minutes.

AR-15 firing rate cited as between 45 and 700 rounds per minute.

Thompson submachine gun, 600-1500 rpm, banned successfully 1934.

2nd Amendment written before invention of Baker rifle, 2-3 rpm.

Has something to do with guns.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

The Las Vegas shooter used a bump stock to achieve 9 rps (540 rpm).

The Orlando shooter reached 2.66 rps/160 rpm.

Ban on Tommy gun didn't stop gang killings, but made them far less lethal. Banning semi-automatics would save lives.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

Not a majority of lives lost to guns, which are mostly suicide and spouse/partner murder. Just a few. But these include concertgoers in Las Vegas, clubbers in Orlando, children slaughtered in Columbine, Newtown, Va Tech, now Broward County. How do you have a problem with this?

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

Gun and Done

Drawing by Rob Tornoe, 2015.

Can the Left let the families grieve for even 24 hours before they push their anti-gun and anti-gunowner agenda? My goodness. This isn't about a gun it's about another lunatic. #FloridaShooting

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) February 15, 2018

I don't see how anything I say is going to interfere with the grieving of anybody's family—I doubt any of the Broward County families whose children, brothers and sisters, and friends and teachers were murdered yesterday are hanging on Twitter waiting to see what Tomi Lahren or I have to say about it. If they are and they'd like us to stop, they're welcome to let me know, but that's not the impression I'm getting from Steph, or Glenn Greenwald's niece, who seem to need to talk, right now:

Never in a million years would I think that I had to run over dead bodies in the same hallway I once walked happily with my friends. Never in a million years would I think I had to mentally prepare myself for the worst because the gunshots were getting louder and closer. Never.

— Steph (@ohstephany_) February 15, 2018

My niece goes to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where the shooting occurred. She wasn't there at the time, but just heard from my brother many horror stories of parents still without information about their kids, others who texted as their kids hid in closets.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 14, 2018

Ben Shapiro at the Direly Wail claims that

More Prayers

Don't have the heart to write much about Parkland, Florida, and another mass murder of children, but something Rubio said got to me:

Just spoke to Broward School Superintendent. Today is that terrible day you pray never comes.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 14, 2018

It's happened 18 times this year, Marco, once every 2.5 days. And every time it happens you pray some more. Thoughts and prayers. I don't know where your prayers go, but it seems your thoughts don't go far at all. https://t.co/rmcug9nuZ8

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 15, 2018

Barrier

Bicycle path, West Side Midtown, with one of the new concrete barriers installed wherever a big vehicle could possibly enter but not many cyclists out today in the misty weather. The rakish angle and the day-glo orange make it a little sporty and attractive, runners need to dance around them. I had a microagression moment with a cyclist who wanted to squeeze by the same side of one of them as I did, on my right and his left. I'm not sorry it's there though. I stood aside.

Meanwhile, everybody's going to forget about our New York terrorist for the next few days because of this guy in Texas who shot up a whole Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a town of 362 people, killing 27 of them, as if the gun gods were jealous of the truck gods, or the Anglo crazies of the Muslim crazies, for all the attention they got last week. It's a lot of people. On October 29 the shooter sent out a picture of his new AR-15–type rifle on social media, with the caption "She's a bad bitch." He went into the Air Force out of high school in 2010 and was dishonorably discharged in 2014, with a court martial. He's dead now too, sources aren't sure how. Don't know whether the church opted in or out of the new Texas gun law, which came into effect January 1 2016, requiring churches to decide if they want to allow open or concealed carry in the sacred place, or whether it would have made a difference one way or another. I'm sure somebody will bring that up on TV and then they'll be condemned for "politicizing" this sad moment. The guy taught a month of Vacation Bible School once, so I wonder if anybody's going to speculate that's when he got radicalized.

Don't really have anything new to say myself, I just think attention must be paid, as the poor old salesman said.

The Unbearable Epiphenomenality of Firearms

Genteel Victorian elite, via Petticoats and Pistols.

Shorter David Brooks, "Guns and the Soul of America":

Well, so according to fellow Canadian and fellow David David Frum, whenever there's one of these grotesque mass shootings, America's state legislatures jump into action to start passing gun laws, only not the way you might imagine. Instead of passing laws to make mass shootings less likely, they start passing laws to make guns easier to get, or easier to carry around. 

In fact Luca, Malhotra, and Poliquin 2016 found that a single mass shooting in a given state raises the number of firearms bills that will be introduced in that state's legislature that year by 15%, and the number of enacted laws that loosen gun restrictions instead of tightening them will be 75% higher, if it's a Republican-controlled state, though not a Democrat-controlled one.

Which really blew my mind, because how are you going to explain this result other than by saying that the Republican party and the National Rifle Association exploit every such shooting as an opportunity to poison the population with fear and the irrational sense that they'll be safer if they just own more guns, and bring them to more different places, like schools, bars, and churches? 

Which is obviously ridiculous, I mean, what could the Republican party and the National Rifle Association have to do with that?

So I think the first thing has to be that it's not about guns at all. Guns are merely an epiphenomenon. The reason Republican state legislatures pass so many more bills loosening gun restrictions after a horrifying gun tragedy must be postindustrialization. The more we keep postindustrializing, the more the voters will demand more restriction-loosening gun laws. That just stands to reason.

And what can we do about this situation? What I've been telling you forever, moar narrativium! We need a new story on the postindustrialization/populism front, like Theodore Roosevelt's new American nationalism, but like different. And I want mine with extra mayo, don't disappoint me.

I know you all hate Frum, but let's just say The Atlantic has much better editors than the Bush administration did and his work is a lot better than it was in the Axis of Evil days. I may disagree with what he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say he did his homework, if I think he did, which I do at least in this case.

Which I can't, as usual, say about David F. Brooks:

Thoughts 'n' Prayers Day

The Classics IV in 1968.

Happy Thoughts 'n' Prayers Day, folks! Today's the day we have thoughts 'n' prayers, because it's Too Soon to have anything else.

Gun control is a legitimate issue, but for the Dems already raising it after Las Vegas massacre, could we just have a day before plunging in

— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) October 2, 2017

While

No Comment

Photo by Dorian Santiago via NBC News.

Tomorrow's the 50th anniversary of the day Charles Whitman of Austin, Texas, 25-year-old white man, Eagle Scout and Marine, son of a violent authoritarian father, speed freak and college student, killed his wife and his mother in their homes and then went to the University of Texas campus where he gunned down 49 people, killing 16 of them, mostly from the observation deck of the Main Building Tower.

It is also, apparently by coincidence, the day the new Texas "campus-carry" law goes into effect, as I learned from NPR, allowing anybody with a Texas handgun license to carry a concealed handgun on any Texas college campus including, obviously, UT Austin.

The NPR story went to bed too early to incorporate another Austin story, where the 6th Street nightlife district was terrorized early this morning after the bars closed by reports of an "active shooter situation" in the neighborhood. But not to worry, that was just a rumor! The fact was that there were two shooters in completely unrelated incidents, and they were just working out their own private relationship issues, I guess, and only one woman got killed and four seriously injured, so it's just Texas. The one shooter who succeeded in murdering somebody is still at large, but he isn't "active". The Second Amendment escaped unharmed.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.