Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
…showing his open-mindedness to ideas, cultures, and value systems alien to his own…
In “Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre” (Paradigm, 2008), UCLA professor of education and cultural critic Douglas Kellner argues that school shootings and other acts of mass violence embody a crisis of out-of-control gun culture and male rage, heightened by a glorification of hypermasculinity and violence in the media.
“The school shooters and domestic terrorists examined in this book all exhibit male rage, attempt to resolve a crisis of masculinity through violent behavior, demonstrate a fetish for guns or weapons, and represent, in general, a situation of guys and guns amok,” Kellner says.
So funny the way we do this. You look into the biographies of these young men who do this, you find the same stuff any cop is used to seeing after a career spent investigating slightly less horrible crimes: Not only an abundance of masculine energy, but a shortage of places to put it — with the second of those factors being key to the performance of whatever misdemeanors or atrocities are under discussion.
Masculinity itself is one of those things that is always to blame. Anyone my age & up, with a reasonable adequate memory should be able to recall the events for they are crystal clear: We made masculinity into a ugly thing to be assaulted, and then crime spiked. When masculinity was an okay thing, when you could put on a television show or movie where daddy dispensed sage wise advice and “always knew best” as they say, and nobody deplored what you were doing — violence and willful property damage were rare things, compared to now.
It’s so interesting. I thought you had to be smart to be a perfesser of edyoomakayshun. Or at least, broad minded enough to consider ideas that aren’t quite initially suiting your fancy. The older I get and the more things I see, the more I have to doubt this. Our edyoomakayted folks with all them fancy letters after their names and all, seem to share a handy talent for shoehorning the events around them into their pre-selected opinions, rather than the other way around. The hostility toward masculinity itself — it’s simply unwarranted. After all, we didn’t declare any kind of parallel jihad on femininity when Andrea Yates drowned her kids in the bathtub.
Credit goes to Miss Cellania for finding the cartoon.
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I’d like one of these propellerhead paranoids to please define what they mean by this “gun culture” of which they speak.
I have guns. Several, in fact.
I don’t hang out with any angst-filled guys filled with anger. I don’t belong to any culture or subculture that encourages guys to run around shooting people. Where is this culture outside of inner city gangs?
The only gun organization I belong to is the NRA. And the NRA promotes responsible gun ownership and use, and high standards of gun safety. We’re responsible, law-abiding citizens.
The truth is that if these odd whackos that commit these crimes couldn’t get guns, they’d find something else. Knives (9/11). Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Poison gas. Whatever.
If more people carried — and I mean carried concealed guns, these whackos would know their chances of “success” — which usually has something to do with body counts — would be sharply limited. Criminals are afraid of law-abiding citizens with guns.
- philmon | 02/21/2008 @ 14:33Ah, yes… “male rage,” which is like a fart in a hurricane compared to the other gender’s capacity for sustained and persistent animosity, albeit at a lower level of expression. Still and even…rage is rage. This observation is based entirely upon (a wide variety of…) personal experience, of course. YMMV.
- Buck | 02/21/2008 @ 15:37When I want to find some choice-grade high-octane rage, I’m making a bee line for women who are unhappy being women and men who are unhappy being men (the latter of which I suspect the good professor is a textbook example). Men who are happy being men, and women who are happy being women, just can’t compete in that department.
- mkfreeberg | 02/21/2008 @ 15:42I thought the “amok” comment of Herr Professorin’s rant was priceless. So much for education. He’s apparently unaware of the statistical relevance of school shootings, which amount to background noise in the set of all shootings, or unable to do the math himself. But why cloud such an important agenda issue with facts?
- dcshiderly | 02/22/2008 @ 14:11