Monday, June 13, 2016

Business As Usual

Hey look, another mass shooting! I wonder how Americans will desperately deny reality this time?

No surprise, they've picked the "terrorism" angle. I figured the shooter wasn't a white guy the minute Orlando PD used the T-word on the radio Sunday morning - that's an adjective that only ever means "Muslim" in mainstream discourse. And the shooter himself, Omar Mateen, helped solidify that comforting delusion by babbling about Islamic State and the Boston bombing in a 911 call:

Hopper [head of FBI in Orlando] did not comment on whether Mateen declared his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also know as ISIS) group as reported in US media, but said the caller made references "to the Islamic State."

Mateen's own father also stated in an interview that the boy was more outraged by men kissing than by America's dabbling in Syria's gore, but that hasn't slowed anyone down. The stupid people are blaming it all on "Islamic Extremism." Just like everyone blamed white women after Dylann Roof declared he was protecting their honor.

But the veracity of a source is less important than whether or not it confirms existing assumptions of the world. In that regard, Omar Mateen is entirely trustworthy because it's not like any non-Muslims go on shooting sprees in service to some crackpot ideology. Nope, those are all lone nuts who need psychiatric help. Mateen was clearly an existential threat to American national security.

Even though the FBI disagreed. Once again proving you can't profile a rage murderer, the Feds interviewed Mateen twice over "inflammatory comments" he made to co-workers in 2013 and 2014. Anyone who's held a job in America knows that just disagreeing with your boss over Game of Thrones can constitute "inflammatory" but they insist it was for reals about terrorism and national security and all that jazz.

The Feds let him go because everything was inconclusive, something you think all the liberty-loving small-government types would understand. But as the waffentwerp-in-chief Donald Trump demonstrates, principles don't count for shit among Americans. They're all for draconian police state actions when it involves brown people - so long as y'all don't touch their guns.

And with that, you can see the Standard Mass Shooting Response wrapping up in the media. While calls for stronger gun control and to classify this a hate crime have come up from everyone without a job inside the Beltway, exactly fuck-all is being done in either case.


The next week will see lots of weeping, hand-wringing, and indictment of the American gun lobby. And the only lasting effect will be dumb racists rallying around the dumbest racist, citing the massacre of fifty people they'd have dismissed as debauched catamites at any other time. And when it all happens again - whether for Islamic State, the sanctity of white women, or just another layoff - Americans will again be shocked that such things occur.

UPDATE: Apparently Omar Mateen was motivated by Larry Craig levels of self-loathing. This has naturally prompted Clinton and Trump to argue over how to bomb the most Muslims.

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