News Stories

[Urzu 7]

So, do those stupid jerks from the westboro church plan to picket the funerals of children? They wanted to do that with the victims of the Aurora Colorado shooting.

[Destined_Fate]

If it will get them on TV and thus money they'll do it, without a doubt.

[kyp275]

Originally Posted by ChainLegacy

I don't even understand the buffer argument. NK doesn't seem like a very good ally and would probably be benefiting far more from the partnership than the Chinese do. I also don't see why a unified, pro-US Korea puts China on edge... I have trouble envisioning such a scenario somehow hurting Chinese supremacy/influence in any truly appreciable manner.

It's simple geopolitics. Just like the Soviets had the Warsaw Pact to put some distance between Moscow and their adversaries (US&Allies), China too does not like to have a major pro-US nation right on its border. The same for the US really, ala the Cuban crisis.

China would much rather the US having to go through N.Korea first before getting inside China proper in an invasion, rather than getting directly inside China from the start.

[KiraYamatoFan]

Originally Posted by kyp275

It's simple geopolitics. Just like the Soviets had the Warsaw Pact to put some distance between Moscow and their adversaries (US&Allies), China too does not like to have a major pro-US nation right on its border. The same for the US really, ala the Cuban crisis.

China would much rather the US having to go through N.Korea first before getting inside China proper in an invasion, rather than getting directly inside China from the start.

Turkey, a long-time ally of the US and a member of NATO, was sitting right on the border with the Soviet Union. The Soviets didn't feel too bothered about it in the long run after the time those outdated Jupiter missiles were dismantled as a part of that secret deal to solve the Cuban missile crisis.

If the North Korean regime falls, I'm not sure the reunification process would be immediately going underway considering how the gap between North and South Korea is way too wide. North Korea will need to show that they have something valuable of their own as well as the will to work hard in order to improve their current situation before South Korea would consider reunification with a more serious eye. In other words, North Korean people will need to prove that they won't act like parasites only feeding off South Korean help if the reunification process begins.

[kyp275]

Originally Posted by KiraYamatoFan

Turkey, a long-time ally of the US and a member of NATO, was sitting right on the border with the Soviet Union. The Soviets didn't feel too bothered about it in the long run after the time those outdated Jupiter missiles were dismantled as a part of that secret deal to solve the Cuban missile crisis.

The Caucasus posed a much smaller threat as land invasion goes compared to the open plains of eastern Europe, not to mention the Soviets had already taken over Georgia/Azerbaijan etc. in the region.

If the North Korean regime falls, I'm not sure the reunification process would be immediately going underway considering how the gap between North and South Korea is way too wide. North Korea will need to show that they have something valuable of their own as well as the will to work hard in order to improve their current situation before South Korea would consider reunification with a more serious eye. In other words, North Korean people will need to prove that they won't act like parasites only feeding off South Korean help if the reunification process begins.

O_o You serious? This isn't a nation divided for centuries and have veered off on their own separate paths, it's only been a few decades.

I mean, East Germany totally had to show they had to have something valuable and would work hard to prove they won't act like parasites before people tore down the Berlin Wall!

...oh wait.

[Ithekro]

It will be a struggle to balance it out between North and South Korea. Mainly because of how the North Korean government has treated its civilians. While they might be good for cheap labor in the first years, the amounts of food production and other things will take time to normalize within the South Korea economy.

Consider that it has only been about a decade ot two since the border was reclosed. Before that families could see each other sometimes (I don't recall when the border became slightly less hostile to work and family visits, not how long that lasted...only that there was another shift around the time the North Koreans started renewed work on nuclear weapons and missiles).

[Bri]

Originally Posted by flying ^

This new university study should reverberate across the gaming community...

... and in a couple days or hours from now: the mainstream media.



http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddis...re-aggression/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57...lative-effect/

So...what have they proven? PvP in FPS is more likely to stimulate anger than in racing games? Well duh, but where does the violence come in?

[~Yami~]

so many things happened when I was sleeping

deep condolences for the family and Americans...
why he should choose Elementary school to do his deed? that's horrible...

and United States should really take gun-control rules seriously...

[Ithekro]

Why the school? Because that was were his mother worked. He killed her too and used her guns it seems.

[Cosmic Eagle]

Originally Posted by Destined_Fate

You will never understand why people do some of the things they do. Maybe they were sick, or they just wanted to screw the world because they were screwed over something. In the end it doesn't matter, what's done is done and the next step is to bring justice to the monster and learn to move on from tragedy.

Talking about understanding such selfish people reminds me of my friend who committed suicide earlier this year. I'll never understand why he did it and I'm sure he never even thought how this effected his family or friends just that he wanted to end it for himself, consequences or others being effected be screwed.

Had good times with him but I don't think I'll ever bring myself to forgive him for killing himself since his family still loved him and were more than willing to help him make a future for himself.

yet if no one makes an attempt to understand, more such rubbish is going to happen. You can have armed guards ready to blow away any attacker in society but preventing such attackers from manifesting in the first place is important as well.

[sa547]

Originally Posted by ~Yami~

so many things happened when I was sleeping

deep condolences for the family and Americans...
why he should choose Elementary school to do his deed? that's horrible...

and United States should really take gun-control rules seriously...

They're been there before, but it never solved the problem; the real issue behind all of this is (1) social and/or (2) psychological problems, especially suppressed anger and/or anger management.

Looks like this copycat pattern of horror is bound to continue. :|

[Kyuu]

Originally Posted by Cosmic Eagle

yet if no one makes an attempt to understand, more such rubbish is going to happen. You can have armed guards ready to blow away any attacker in society but preventing such attackers from manifesting in the first place is important as well.

And how do you expect to get that stuff PAID for?

At the high school level -- they achieved this since Columbine. Schools took notice and increased security.

[KiraYamatoFan]

Originally Posted by kyp275

O_o You serious? This isn't a nation divided for centuries and have veered off on their own separate paths, it's only been a few decades.

I mean, East Germany totally had to show they had to have something valuable and would work hard to prove they won't act like parasites before people tore down the Berlin Wall!

...oh wait.

East Germans preserved the pride of being German as well as they were the instigators (not a negligeable thing to consider) of the movement towards reunification by taking open civil action against their own regime. However even today, the process is still not completed considering many of the older folks are still deep into communist mentality.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Vast differences between the former East Germany and West Germany (for example, in lifestyle, wealth, political beliefs and other matters) remain, and it is therefore still common to speak of eastern and western Germany distinctly. The eastern German economy has struggled since unification, and large subsidies are still transferred from west to east. The former East Germany area has often been compared to the underdeveloped Southern Italy and the Southern United States during Reconstruction after the American Civil War. While the East German economy has recovered recently, the differences between East and West remain present.

I'm not sure the North Koreans, especially when 25% (I'm sure I read that number somewhere) of the population is in the army and know little of doing something else, could help bridging the gap if Germans have issues of their own. And also, who in North Korea would shape the image of an unified Korea? Meanwhile, there are East Germans are shaping the image of Germany at home and abroad, including Kurt Masur, Michael Ballack, Katarina Witt, and Angela Merkel.

Originally Posted by Ithekro

It will be a struggle to balance it out between North and South Korea. Mainly because of how the North Korean government has treated its civilians. While they might be good for cheap labor in the first years, the amounts of food production and other things will take time to normalize within the South Korea economy.

That's why I used the term "parasites" (taking advantage of a host to feed themselves). Just food production itself is a big problem for South Korea should the reunification process kicks in because the North Korean administration knows nothing about generating food. Heck, those 3 billion dollars spent annually on missile development could have been spent to help feeding North Koreans with crops for 3 entire years.

[Cosmic Eagle]

Yeah...that's always the problem isn't it? Resources....

Let's divert resources away from important things like social and mental care and focus solely on the hammer solution of armed security when the hammer may not always swing down in time to end the threat.

Let's leave out certain individuals to rot in their own blackened minds perhaps as a result of interaction with other individuals. And when they finally snap and such shit happens, let's pretend that the greater society did not contribute to it in any way...that people's minds are not affected by their environment, that these people are anomalies.

Yeah, I love this world so much indeed.

[Ithekro]

But they shouldn't need increased security. Guns or no guns, there shouldn't have been a need for such security measures in schools.

This sort of thing didn't seem to happen (or at least not to any scale like these events) when were were growing up in the 80s and early 90s. News were fairly wide spread then. No internet yet, but the cable news channels were starting up and regular news media changed from the days of Walter Cronkite. What happened between when I graduated from high school and these sorts of incidents?

[Urzu 7]

American society has a problem, ethically. There are too many people who lack good moral standards and who are poor, ethically. It isn't just these shooting sprees. You can find the lack of good ethics all across America from all sorts of people (male, female, young, old, liberal, conservative, etc.).

Why this is...is probably due to a large number of factors. America is a very complex and complicated society. I think this is a big reason for its instability. It is probably the most complex and complicated society on earth and in the history of humanity. I definitely think this is integral to our moral decline.

[ogon_bat]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

What happened between when I graduated from high school and these sorts of incidents?

An evil well orchestrated plan. Some may say that the plan is to make guns illegal in the USA, that ain't happening since it is a bu$ine$$. But as these incidents keep happening people will not protest as law enforcements slowly but surely becomes 1984-esque. I do not mean to say someone is brainwashing these guys, as someone said before, the reduction (or complete absence) of government funded mental institutions to treat people (or at the very least identify) this people is what happened between then and now. Criminal profiling is not going to work because these are not criminals (which usually are sane and just want some money for their hard illegal work), these are people that stared for to long into the darkness and snapped.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by kyp275

I mean, East Germany totally had to show they had to have something valuable and would work hard to prove they won't act like parasites before people tore down the Berlin Wall!

East Germany was poorer than West Germany, but it was still the most prosperous Warsaw Pact country. The gap between the Koreas is orders of magnitude greater than between the two Germanies before unification.

Originally Posted by Ithekro

What happened between when I graduated from high school and these sorts of incidents?

One thing that has changed is that we stopped warehousing people with mental illnesses. Unfortunately we did not feel any need to pay for the extensive outpatient diagnosis and treatment services that such policies required. This article from 2009 observes that "growth in mental health care costs has not tracked growth in health care costs overall. While the share of national income going to health care has been growing, the share going to mental health held steady at about 1 percent of national income for thirty years up through 2002." What is worse, if you look at the graphs in that article, mental health spending by Medicaid, which serves poor Americans, was at the same level in 2006 as it was a decade earlier. For Americans with private health insurance, spending on mental health actually outpaced spending on health care overall, largely because of the expanded use of drug therapies.

[Ithekro]

Reagan closed the mental institutions in California in the 1960s. I wasn't even born yet when that happened. I graduated in the mid-1990s. Something happened after that (or progressed enough after that to start showing more and more problems).

[flying ^]

Looks like there's undeniable pattern emerging... let's say for ~14 yrs

OP/ED slightly dated but still relevant, fresh...

Why Most Mass Murderers Are Privileged White Men

Are white men particularly prone to carrying out the all-too-familiar mass killings of which last week’s Aurora shooting is just the latest iteration? Is there something about the white, male, middle-class experience that makes it easier for troubled young men to turn schools and movie theaters into killing fields? In a word, yes.

Not every mass murder in recent years has been committed by a middle-class white guy. But as Jamie Utt pointed out in the hours after the Colorado theater massacre, in those rare instances where a man of color is responsible for a shooting spree (as in the 2007 Virginia Tech killings or the 2009 Fort Hood rampage), the popular reaction is to search for connections between the race or religion of the murderer and his act. After Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in Blacksburg, media attention focused on the likelihood that a Korean culture unwilling to acknowledge mental illness helped drive the young man to commit the worst mass murder in U.S. history. After Maj. Nidal Hasan carried out the Fort Hood shootings, his Muslim faith became all the public needed to know about his motive.

It seems likely that Islamic extremism did lead Hasan to kill; it’s possible that Cho’s cultural background did mean that his psychological problems were particularly likely to be ignored. Ethnicity, faith, and social class are key parts of the modern human identity; they are always part of the explanation for why we think the way we think and act the way we act. The difference, as Chauncey DeVega made clear on Saturday, is that when white men commit mass murder we don’t hear how their skin color, their maleness, or their social class were contributing factors to their acts. As Peggy McIntosh famously wrote in her White Privilege Checklist, we see whites as individuals whose moral state reflects their individual will. In other words, white men kill simply because they are “sick” or “evil.” When men of color murder, it is because they are both those things and because of factors uniquely attributable to their race.

Perhaps the greatest asset that unearned privilege conveys is the sense that public spaces “belong” to you. If you are—like James Holmes last week, or Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people on the University of Texas, Austin campus in 1966—an American-born, college-educated white man from a prosperous family, you don’t have a sense that any place worth being is off-limits to the likes of you. White men from upper middle-class backgrounds expect to be both welcomed and heard wherever they go. When that sense of entitlement gets frustrated, as it can for a host of complex psychological reasons, it is those same hyper-privileged men who are the most likely to react with violent, rage-filled indignation. For white male murderers from “nice” families, the fact that they chose public spaces like schools, university campuses, or movie theaters as their targets suggests that they saw these places as legitimately theirs.

The vast majority of white men from comfortable backgrounds don’t commit mass murder, of course. Our entitlement doesn’t manifest in the sense that public spaces are ours to terrorize, but it does show up in the confidence with which we move in those spaces. The certainty of belonging is at the core of our privilege.

When I went off to college at Berkeley, I felt as if I were following in the footsteps of my ancestors. I literally was; my maternal great-grandfathers had both graduated from Cal in the 19th century. I rushed the same fraternity to which my grandfather had belonged in the 1920s. Though I struggled with adolescent anxieties, I never doubted that I belonged on that campus.

It was at Berkeley, however, that I learned about white male privilege for the first time. I saw how my sense of belonging served as an invaluable crutch in times of personal crisis. And by witnessing the experiences of roommates and friends from less advantaged backgrounds, I learned that the confidence I took for granted was given only to a few. My friends who were first-generation students did just as well in the classroom, but were often more tentative about navigating their way around institutional obstacles. My roommate Oscar—the son of farm workers from the Central Valley—once, with great effort and embarrassment, asked me to go with him to see an administrator. “I need your white boy mojo,” he said with a pained grin, caught between jest and anger.

That “white boy mojo” can still open all sorts of doors: to boardrooms, to judge’s chambers, to country club memberships. It’s not that those institutions are still overtly racist (though a few come close). It’s not that white men are guaranteed preferential treatment in every setting. It’s that white men are raised to expect to be welcomed wherever they go. When they find that that automatic welcome isn’t forthcoming, they tend to be indignant. When angry middle-class whites gather together in political groups to “take back our country,” what they want to grab back are the privileges they sense they’ve lost.

We don’t yet know what drove James Holmes to do the terrible things he did. We only partly understand what drove the likes of Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Charles Whitman, and the many other white men who have committed similar massacres. While each killer had a unique pathology that helped drive him to do the unthinkable, the fact that these white male mass murderers felt so confident choosing public spaces to commit their crimes reflects a powerful truth about the culture in which they were raised. Put simply, they did what they did because of an individual sickness—but they did it where they did it in part because of white privilege.

It’s not that white men are more violent. Rates of domestic violence, including homicide, are roughly the same across all ethnic groups. Statistically, murderers are more likely to kill family members and intimate partners than strangers. But while men from all backgrounds kill their spouses, affluent white men are disproportionately represented in the ranks of our most infamous mass murderers. In other words, the less privileged you are, the less likely you are to take your violence outside of your family and your community.

White men from prosperous families grow up with the expectation that our voices will be heard. We expect politicians and professors to listen to us and respond to our concerns. We expect public solutions to our problems. And when we’re hurting, the discrepancy between what we’ve been led to believe is our birthright and what we feel we’re receiving in terms of attention can be bewildering and infuriating. Every killer makes his pain another’s problem. But only those who’ve marinated in privilege can conclude that their private pain is the entire world’s problem with which to deal. This is why, while men of all races and classes murder their intimate partners, it is privileged young white dudes who are by far the likeliest to shoot up schools and movie theaters.

Lax gun laws provided the means for the Colorado theater massacre. A yet-unexplained psychotic break provided the likely motive. And at least in part, white male privilege determined both the location and the scale.

Spoiler for TL ; DR:

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/36GSKQKwrZo&autoplay=1