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
In his book, The Ideas Industry,” Daniel W. Drezner says we’ve shifted from a landscape dominated by public intellectuals to a world dominated by thought leaders. A public intellectual is someone like Isaiah Berlin, who is trained to comment on a wide array of public concerns from a specific moral stance. A thought leader champions one big idea to improve the world — think Al Gore’s work on global warming.
Which I think is sidestepping the point Drezner really wants to make: that the traditional "marketplace of ideas" has been transformed in the 21st century into an "ideas industry"—so that the old intellectual village, I guess, where we always used to get together to haggle over the price of the dry goods before repairing to the local for some spiritual liquid refreshment has given way to a Satanic intellectual mill, powered by some previously unavailable energy source, where we must toil in smoke and darkness, whipped into submission.
Follow Igor Volsky of Center for American Progress on Twitter for constant updates on all the US congresspersons and senators who have taken campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association and voted against every kind of gun control legislation.
Every time some terrible thing like this happens they send out messages offering their "thoughts and prayers", but no apologies for the lack of action on their part that would help to put an end to it. Igor is there to call them out for it.
One religious leader who calls for thoughts and prayers and DOING SOMETHING:
Pope Francis has condemned “the terrible massacre that has taken place in Orlando, with its dreadfully high number of innocent victims”.
He released a statement through a spokesperson, who said the attack “has caused in Pope Francis, and in all of us, the deepest feelings of horror and condemnation, of pain and turmoil before this new manifestation of homicidal folly and senseless hatred.
Pope Francis joins the families of the victims and all of the injured in prayer and in compassion. Sharing in their indescribable suffering he entrusts them to the Lord so they may find comfort. We all hope that ways may be found, as soon as possible, to effectively identify and contrast the causes of such terrible and absurd violence which so deeply upsets the desire for peace of the American people and of the whole of humanity.
"Contrast" is a bad translation for Italian contrastare, meaning "oppose" or "prevent".
