"Red Dawn" and movies like it are paeans to violent manhood. I hang out on several newgroups frequented mainly by radio hobbyists, and some of the member (almost all men) of those groups tend to go off into gun-wielding fantasy murderous fugues from time to time. It seems to happen when some post or other reminds them of the many enemies of the (White) USA who, given a bit of luck, they could actually USE those guns on.

I use to sit there appalled as these men whose main actual hobby is sitting in their houses harmlessly listening to or emitting shortwave radio signals would suddenly turn into verbal Rambos. Then I realized that if they are also gun hobbyists they must be terribly frustrated. Unlike shortwave radios, which their owners can use for their intended purpose every day, gun owners can only so use their long guns in hunting season. And, as for their handguns and automatic and semi-automatic weapons, sadly the owners can never hope to use them for their intended purpose--killling people--as long as law and order subsists.

Earlier generations of gun owners were no doubt less frustrated. They could use their toys to kill Indians. The habit of gun-loving subsists as part of male American culture long after the original convenient targets have left the building. But all the male symbology and consequent male passion associated with the weapons lingers. Add to that, for the past 30 years, a perpetual rolling assault of crushing economic forces that said gun-owners can't hope to understand or effectively resist, and you get some very angry, very frustrated guys who desperately need the catharsis that movies like "Red Dawn" provide.

Hm...so you are saying more Red Dawn movies= less gun nut, warmongering in the real world? Could be....

So, you're familiar with the Obama/MoveOn.org/social left talking points, bravo! So I guess all gun owners are some kind of fantastical man cult straight out of one of Sigmund Fraud's (misspell intended) coke fueled works, huh? Never mind that I know many women who like to hunt and shoot and that they are not all hideous raging lesbians with penis envy or whatever. You are obviously a left-elite retard who has no connection either to the history of gun ownership in this country or, indeed, reality as there are many people who like to shoot just for the hell of it and they don't have any fantasies about killing "mud people" or whatever it is you swine think we call people of color. I'm sure my male and female African American, Hispanic and Asian friends at the range would be interested in your uninformed opinions. Do us all a favor and keep your elitist ignorance to yourself

All of that might be a little more interesting if it had the slightest connection to reality.

Do you even know anyone who owns a gun? Face-to-face know, that is.

Most of the "gun nuts" in this country by far are actually hunting nuts. Sure, it'd be nice if hunting season ran longer - that's why things like bow hunting and muzzleloaders have taken off, the seasons are longer. But just like football fans don't spend the off-season fantasizing about blocking and tackling coworkers and passersby, hunters don't spend the off-season fantasizing about shooting people.

Most of the hardcore gun nuts end up in competition. Some of it is lighthearted fantasy - Cowboy Action Shooting, in which the targets are always described as bandits and rustlers, never Injuns! - and some is more practical. Most just involves shooting at bullseyes at various ranges and with different sorts of weapons. None of it is any more sinister or indicative of personality problems than any other hobby. It's related to shooting people in about the same way archery, fencing, and tai chi are related to shooting, stabbing, and beating up people, respectively.

Of course, like a martial art, a lot of the point is learning to defend yourself if necessary, but you wouldn't assume that everyone taking Tae Kwon Do lessons is constantly fantasizing about ripping people's tracheas out with their bare hands like Sonny Chiba, would you?

Good point, sir! I was engaging in a satisfying riff much like those guys I was talking about who would get together (on the newsgroup) and vie with each other to say the most vicious thing about killing liberals, etc. The difference is that my mean riff contains a grain of truth.

I have owned a gun. I grew up in gun country. I suspect that most gun owners are not the least bit murderous, even in their fantasy life. However, SOMETHING underlies the intensity of expression that SOME of them engage in in talking about liberals, minorities, and killing of same. After a lifetime of living in the South where gun owning and use is very widespread, I think I am able to discern what is at the bottom of the most vicious part of the right- wing side of the Great Culture War--resentment of economic vulnerability.

One side shouldn't get to perpetrate all the meanness in The Culture War. On the local talk radio station, right wing vituperation is SOP. I thought a little vituperation was due right back at em!

dianasatyr:

However, SOMETHING underlies the intensity of expression that SOME of them engage in in talking about liberals, minorities, and killing of same.

Maybe it's hearing decades of vituperation from the left. Maybe they're frustrated by the way liberal judges like to block the programs of the elected branches on mostly political grounds. Maybe they're egged on by jerks who get paid large sums of money to act and speak atrociously.

dianasatyr:

After a lifetime of living in the South where gun owning and use is very widespread, I think I am able to discern what is at the bottom of the most vicious part of the right- wing side of the Great Culture War--resentment of economic vulnerability.

Bullshit. Take that nonsense back to San Francisco. There have been plenty of booming cities and regions in the South for decades, and none of the gun lovers I know are unemployed former textile mill workers. And there are plenty of well-off conservative Christians.

I don't know why so many liberals cannot get it through their thick heads that many people in this country take things like God, family, and sexual morality, or preserving our civic values and traditional lifestyles, seriously in their own right, not as any kind of "false consciousness". Many take them more seriously than economics (I guess they didn't get the memo from Marx), at least as long as they aren't starving. Many of them see their values and lifestyles as under attack, not their jobs.

dianasatyr:

One side shouldn't get to perpetrate all the meanness in The Culture War.

You must be on crack. No meanness on the left? You don't think blowing up and burning down buildings or mailing letter bombs is mean? How about marching around with signs portraying a politician you don't like as Hitler, breaking windows of people who commit the heinous crime of owning a small business and providing jobs to the community, or hurling excrement, or fake excrement claimed to be the real thing, at people who dare to exercise their constitutional right to participate in a political assembly? Or calling the people who disagree with you "little Eichmanns" and saying they deserve to be murdered by terrorists? None of that is mean?

Get real. Neither side has a monopoly on meanness, and both need to stop justifying their own awful behavior by pointing at the other guy's.

All I know is when I go the beach its just the ladies flocking to my gun show.

Sounds like we're down to the essence of the "culture" part of The Culture War: which is personal preference. (The other part of that War is the real war, which is the class war.)

I grew up in Texas at a time and in a place where all those fine traditional virtues and values ruled unchallenged. What I saw was rigidity and meanness, and a complete lack of the kindness that is sometimes said to be the essence of Christianity. Kids agonized over their sexual impulses, knowing that (if they were girls) they would be bitterly shamed if they gave into them, and if they were boys their friends would congratulate them--unless they happened to be homos, in which case they would be ostracized or beaten up.

Culture was absent, or present only in the form of Disneyfied kitsch, since it had to be morally sanitized in so many ways that it couldn't tell truths about life. The USA was portrayed as the essence of Goodness on this earth. I had to go several thousand miles to college to learn about our history of suppressing governments in countries we didn't like--e. g., Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s,--and other equally reprehensible things.

Churches strictly condemned drinking and (Gasp!), dancing. The last stricture did little harm, beyond taking a great deal of the fun out of life; but the former made our county "dry"--so people routinely died driving drunk down the long highway to/from the nearest county that was "wet". In general, churches concentrated on fine-tuning personal morality, and left that good old Christian practice of helping the poor to the free market (which is not known for mercy to the poor). So every personal moral choice was fraught with the choice of ending up in heaven or hell, and shame ruled us with an iron hand.

...

Several years ago I came upon a website called "Girls Kissing." It was just that, a bunch of pictures of girls sweetly kissing each other. As I looked at these pictures I reflected on how utterly impossible such a presentation would have been in the society in which I grew up--which meant that in those days girls who happened to want to kiss girls in this Land of the Free would have been free to hide, agonize, fear, struggle hopelessly to somehow switch to wanting to kiss men, and/or end up detesting themselves.

Their harmless aspect of the human condition was so utterly forbidden that it couldn't even be talked about. They, like the poor, the artistic, the leftest, the highly intelligent, the rebellious, the questioning, even those who simply were not interested in that society's only approved activity for an adult man (business), were all persona non grata.

Since I fit into several of the above unwanted categories, I've always known which side I'm on.

<link>

So sorry for people like you.

shortcut:

<link>

So sorry for people like you.

Thank you. I could have used some of that then.

The whole reason for wanting a society to be liberal is so people can be truly free. That is, they can be different from what society considers to the "standard person", and it's OK with other people and OK with them! Since the different generally can't help being different and can't change what they are, in a rigid society they are condemned to ostracism and misery.

In a truly liberal society the unusual person doesn't need pity, or receive condemnation (unless he's unusual in a way that makes him hurt others).

TO: dianasatyr
RE: If Only....

“The whole reason for wanting a society to be liberal is so people can be truly free.” -- dianasatyr

...Liberals practiced what they preach. But, as I’ve seen often enough, they don’t. Especially of the ‘progressive’ persuasion.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Liberals aren’t. Progressives won’t.]

Liberals have sometimes deviated from our basic stance of tolerance for all non-harmful ways of life. In The Great Culture War I believe we have done so for the same reason that the War rages on year after year though lots of people on both sides are sick of it: fear.

In this respect this war raises the same burning question as lots of others have over the centuries--what will the other side do to us if we capitulate?! Having cleared a space for diversity in the US over a mere 40 years, we liberals fear that we could all be brought back by the Religious Right's political action to the Bad Old Days when there was onne approved Path to follow through life, and all else was deviance.

And, on the other side, the reason for abiding fear on the part of religico-traditionalists is obvious. When your subculture prescribes a host of rules for living, many of them onerous, it will have trouble retaining its young people if next door there is a subculture that lets it all hang out. I think this is the cultural foundation for the absolute fury of the Religious Right.

The economic foundation of that rage remains a separate issue, and is founded in the fact that Americans have had almost all class consciousness propagandized out of them by 60 years of anti-communism. There is just a remnant of it left--enough be whipped up into hatred of intellectual elites by the Limbaughs of the world, when the elite that is actually doing harm to the poor and working people is the same as it's always been--the wealthy.

TO: dianasatyr
RE: Really!??!???!!

“Liberals have sometimes deviated from our basic stance of tolerance for all non-harmful ways of life. “ -- dianasatyr

I guess it all depends upon how you define either (1) ‘Liberals’ and/or (2) ‘sometimes’. Neh?

“In The Great Culture War I believe we have done so for the same reason that the War rages on year after year though lots of people on both sides are sick of it: fear.“ -- dianasatyr

I disagree. At least from the ‘conservative’ perspective.

The reason the Great Culture War rages on is that Liberals have no basis in morality that they can point to and say, “This is what we believe. And these are the factual reasons that support our beliefs.”

Every time I’ve started dragging out FACTS that support my args regarding beliefs and showing them to so-called ‘Liberals’, these so-called ‘Liberals’ do a Monty Python moment.....

Run AWWWAAAAAYYYYYY!!!! And flee the field of engagement. That’s happened twice over on Pajama Media’s discussions this last week vis-a-vis a discussion about Palin. I drag out facts and the Liberals say, “Sorry, but I can’t participate in this discussion anymore.”

Liberals, for the most part, have no moral code other than what they make-up for themselves on a daily basis. It’s a classic return to the old axiom about ‘truth’ under Communism.....

Yesterday’s Truth is tomorrows Lie.

Hope that helps....

Regards,

Chuck(le)
P.S. Please show me where YOUR book of ‘morality’ is written in so much black and white.

I’ll show you mine. It’s the most widely published book in the history of Planet Earth. You might even have a copy of it already.

P.P.S. More to follow. I just came up for a change of environment while writing some code.....

(1) "The real war is class war" - sorry, but Marx has been about as thoroughly debunked as phrenology. Class lines are short-lived, unstable, and in many places today, extremely porous. Marx and Engels wouldn't be able to recognize anything from their theories in our society (nor for that matter would Proudhon). The best way to "win" the class war is to defect.

(2) What you're describing is a degraded form of traditional values. That's not to say it doesn't count, but you can't judge the whole concept by it, you have to look across the whole spectrum. Its counterpart on the left might be the subculture/underclass that exists in public housing. Between the two, I think any sane person would choose the rednecks - the choice of "conform or be brutalized" is preferable to "be brutalized regardless of what you do". No one is free under the law of the jungle.

(3) The version of liberal society you describe is a community of saints that's never existed on this planet and never will. The way to get there isn't to establish liberal government, it's to cleanse humanity of its flaws so we all love and respect one another. If we did that, we wouldn't need liberal laws and governments, we'd act nice to each other naturally. Its equivalent on the right would be the Kingdom of Jesus. Neither one is going to be brought into being by the laws and social agendas of its proponents.

Probably the best you can expect from instituting the liberal program is something like Amsterdam. In some ways a nice place to live, but the religious/cultural friction going on there now shows up several practical flaws in the liberal system: one, how do you define and enforce the limits of tolerance in such a way that allows each person and culture to live and express themselves as they wish while keeping out honor killings and the assassination of journalists? And two, given that you can't make the rest of the world liberal, how do you keep all their addicts, criminals, and bums from flocking to your city or country without building walls and closing yourself off from the rest of the world? Or alternately, how do you preserve your liberal culture when your society is overrun by addicts, criminals, and bums from less enlightened places?

And for that matter, how do you keep others from victimizing you from outside? The Netherlands and most of Scandinavia didn't fare too well in 1940-45 despite their nonaggression and desire to remain neutral.

One might also wonder if any of liberal Europe as we know it could have come into being without the horrific purgative experiences of the 20th century to drain and warn against the worst parts of human nature. It's much easier to take the folly of war and violence to heart after you've buried a few tens of millions of corpses, but how do your great-grandchildren gain the same understanding without such rough schooling?

TO: dianasatyr
RE: No Question

“In this respect this war raises the same burning question as lots of others have over the centuries--what will the other side do to us if we capitulate?!” -- dianasatyr

On the one hand, you seem to have little understanding of Christian ethics. We don’t CARE what you do to us, individually. However, if you threaten someone else, you let us ‘off the leash’, in the terms of Tony Stark in Iron Man. You want to kill me? Fine. However, I’ve got some friends and family members who are going to take extreme umbrage about your idea and they’ll do whatever is necessary to prevent you from doing such to me. And I feel the same towards all of them.

“Having cleared a space for diversity in the US over a mere 40 years, we liberals fear that we could all be brought back by the Religious Right's political action to the Bad Old Days when there was one approved Path to follow through life, and all else was deviance..” -- dianasatyr

Diversity is only an excuse for doing what is evil and getting away with it....in THIS venue. But, Christians, the REAL ones, only warn these people that they are only hurting themselves with their idea of ‘diversity’.

In the meantime, I find it interesting that the Christian ‘diversity’ is rather ‘under-appreciated’. Seriously. I attended a ‘Diversity Training Workshop’ at the behest of my corporation, USWEST, when I became a ‘manager’ there.

I found it hugely funny that their facilitator from the ‘religious’ perspective was a defrocked Roman Catholic priest. His presentation was on a par with a ‘reformed’ smoker confronted by someone who just lit up a cigarette. I had a hard time not laughing out loud.

You’re welcome to your ‘diversity’. However, you’re rather totalitarian in its exercise when you suppress the diversity of others who disagree with you. This is especially true when all we’re doing is saying, “You keep that up and you’re going to be VERY sorry.”

“And, on the other side, the reason for abiding fear on the part of religico-traditionalists is obvious. When your subculture prescribes a host of rules for living, many of them onerous, it will have trouble retaining its young people if next door there is a subculture that lets it all hang out.” -- dianasatyr

Again. You seem to me to be speaking from ignorance.

“I think this is the cultural foundation for the absolute fury of the Religious Right.” -- dianasatyr

Once again. You don’t seem to know what you’re talking about.

We’re not ‘furious’ with these people destroying themselves. Indeed, we see it as rather ‘sad’. But if you try to destroy US, despite your claims that you support ‘diversity’, when you really don’t, you might find some forms of fury.

“The economic foundation of that rage remains a separate issue,” -- dianasatyr

Good. It sounds like a field far from what we’re dealing with here.

“and is founded in the fact that Americans have had almost all class consciousness propagandized out of them by 60 years of anti-communism.” -- dianasatyr

As if the Communists were not ‘class conscious’. Party member verses non-Party Member. What a crock.

“There is just a remnant of it left--enough be whipped up into hatred of intellectual elites by the Limbaughs of the world” -- dianasatyr

Or the Che Gueveras, thereof.

Communists/Socialists are just jealous people trying to impose their form of misrule on everyone else.

I liked the way Winston Churchill put it....

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. -- Winston Churchill

“when the elite that is actually doing harm to the poor and working people is the same as it's always been--the wealthy.” -- dianasatyr

Hardly. The elite are the elite. In one society it is one group. In a different society, it is another.

Here, it is the wealthy. In India, it is the brahmans. In Iran, it is the Mullahs. In the former Soviet Union, it was the dues-paid-in-full party members.

The ‘elite’, like the poor, are always with you. What MATTERS is how much control they have over the society and what measures are in place to prevent abuse.

That’s Christian ethics for you, vis-a-vis, the ‘princes’.

Hope that helps.....

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Socialist: One too poor to be a Capitalist and too rich to be a Communist.]