I don't like Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov.
I don't like him because, even if he did have some kind of grievance, the way he took it out was totally unjustifiable.
I'm not too fond of religions, that are constantly being used to turn people against each other, and indoctrinate people to blindly obey leaders claiming to speak for God either.
Are you angry because I even considered the possibility that he might have a justifiable grievance that should have been addressed? Or that I said something that might question religion?
Maybe not, but, I get the impression that some people that get all their news from the mainstream media might not even consider why he might have done it, any more than they would consider why many of the other high profile shootings or crashes might have happened.
The media routinely goes into the same routine after every mass shooting; and it never involves a sincere effort to figure out what causes violence in general or even the specific shooting that happened, especially if it challenges the ideologies or profits of the fraction of one percent of people that control the six oligarchies we refer to as mass media.
Most of the pundits that dominate the mass media go into the same routine after every terrorist attack looking for some people to portray as heroes, glorifying them for doing something dramatic at the last minute, creating a new ad to promote the coverage of the latest terrorist attack and talking about how our country is so great and terrorists are so evil acting as a result of some deranged fanatical religion that can't be understood or prevented.
On the morning after the attack Chris Cuomo went on one of these typical speeches, which I don't remember entirely, but he said that New Yorkers were "resilient" and "brave" and wouldn't let it interfere with their normal lives, and went on with there Halloween parade as usual.
Yea, if people go on and do what they were going to do anyway and go along with the program, like everyone else, that is all it takes to make them "resilient" or "brave."
In a country of over three hundred million people it doesn't take much math or logic to realize that even the worst terrorist attack, including 9/11, only accounts to a fraction of the deaths in any given year, which must be over four million, assuming the average life expectancy isn't much more than seventy five or eighty years. Even if you compare it to other "Terrorism attacks in the United States" according to Wikipedia most of the Deadliest attacks were decades if not centuries ago, although, two of the biggest ones were in the past thirty years. The ones since 2010 are mostly in single digits but the biggest one is the Orlando shooting which is relatively recent. For one reason or another they don't even count the Mandalay Bay as a terrorist attack, even though it had a higher death toll than Orlando.
And there was another shooting at Walmart in Colorado, that killed three people for no apparent reason, yet it hardly got any attention in the mass media, even though there are shootings there every month breaking records every year with over a hundred in the first ten months of this year and a hundred for the entire year in 2016. this has been rising steadily every yer, yet the media hardly pays attention to it.
Regardless of why this attack happened the police are using it as an excuse to put up more concrete barriers and to search more people for security reasons; and the media is making this seem as if it is the new normal and there is no way to avoid it.
More importantly they don't do a good job discussing why it is happening and how to prevent it in the future. Even though the ones that are labeled a result of Islamic terrorism are relatively small compared to other murders, they receive much more attention. One thing that is very simple to understand which the mass media practically never mentions is that the wars we fight which are almost always based on lies are cl;early inciting many of these attacks, yet instead of admitting this and sopping them the political establishment is coming up with increasingly antagonistic rhetoric, that is clearly far more likely to incite more terrorism than to prevent it.
Donald Trump's claim that our court system is a "laughing stock" might actually be closer to the truth than most pundits admit, but for all the wrong reasons; and what he wants to change would obviously make it much worse. When they set up a prison at Guantanamo Bay it obviously violated the Constitution, or at least the intent of the Constitution even if they came up with an absurd interpretation to allow it in practice. The claim that we fight for freedom around the world is what makes supporting the war on terrorism worthwhile, or at least seem worthwhile.
However if we really were fighting for freedom we wouldn't be holding people without trial or lawyers or even any evidence declared publicly, for years if not decades based on the so-called "War on Terrorism," nor would we be fighting other wars like against Iraq which was of course based on lies about weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist or torturing people in these wars based on lies.
And we now have a president, or perhaps I should say person masquerading as president, who says that he wants to bring back torture, "bomb the shit out of" the so-called terrorists, with or without evidence, invade countries and take their oil, without due process, and even use first strike nuclear weapons. I'm skeptical of Tom Steyer, but with a fanatical president like this it should be clear that we should be trying to get him out of office as fast as possible! However we also need to change the electoral and media system that enabled him to take power in the first place in this insane charade!
A trial shouldn't be the most effective way to point out all the lies used to fight one war after another and incite vengeance from fanatics like Saipov, but if we allow him to eliminate that in this insane panic to fight terrorism then it will be one less way to get the truth out to the American public and prevent all the wars based on lies.
Trump's call for the death penalty before they even begin to do much of the investigation is also blatantly against the basic fundamentals of justice, although in this case there seems to be little doubt of his guilt, assuming some of those far-fetched conspiracy theories aren't partly true. With all this panic, propaganda and appeals to emotion neither the mainstream media, Donald Trump or anyone else in the political establishment is willing to do any debating of issues that might raise major doubts about the state of perpetual war that is being maintained for decades; and if he's allowed to rush to judgement about the death penalty it will be even worse.
Regardless of how they wound up in this position, whether it's Donald Trump's demand for the death penalty before the investigation exposes the motive or any potential mitigating circumstances or allowing the defense to make a case, or his other rhetoric, about many things it enables the media to look like the more rational of the two, as long as no one else gets a chance to speak and expose both of them. However, it is important to remember that the media enabled him to get elected in the first place by providing an enormous amount of obsession coverage for the two most corrupt nominees in history!
If we had a rational diverse media neither of these two clowns could have gotten the nomination in the first place and we wouldn't be constantly replacing one war monger with another one, inciting terrorism leading to this attack and many others.
Furthermore, what the media rarely ever mentions, is that the death penalty clearly isn't even a deterrent that is likely to prevent violence at all especially when you consider this person was obviously on a suicide mission! It's not just this attack that wasn't likely to be deterred by the threat of the death penalty; according to Death Penalty Information Center: Murder Rates Nationally and By State the states with the death penalty have far more murders than those without! Eight out of the ten states with the lowest murder rates don't have the death penalty but only two of the states with the highest murder rates don't have the death penalty.
Not that the death penalty is likely to cause higher murder rates; however it clearly isn't deterring it; so if we want to figure out how to prevent these disasters this won't do it! As I have pointed out in previous articles the correlation between high murder rates and use of corporal punishment in schools is even stronger; and that almost certainly is a major contributing cause to higher murder rates. Seven out of the states with the top ten murder rates still allow corporal punishment in schools and none of the ten with the lowest murder rates do.
There's an enormous amount of research, some of which I have gone into in previous articles including Panic About School Shootings Won’t Help! P.S. They’re Going Down, to indicate that early child abuse is a major contributing cause to violence later in life; and preventing it and providing better early childhood education will dramatically reduce violence in the long run; and areas that are doing this at the local level are setting a good example and providing evidence to prove it!
However the media refuses to report on this research and the politicians refuse to act on it, unless people at the local level force them to, then only the local politicians act on it!
Another major contributing causes to violence is abandoned inner cities yet the media refuses to report on the best research to show that as well!
We have an enormous amount of propaganda about how this is the "land of opportunity" from the same people that tell us that they're sending our military to "fight for our freedom," when they send them to fight wars based on lies, including the weapons of mass destruction; however the people that live in these abandoned inner cities know this isn't true at all!
Whether it's people living in abandoned inner cities or fanatics, both foreign and domestic, they may not have the opportunity that the propaganda tells them is available but there's plenty of opportunity to strike out in anger.
If the public rallies behind someone who caters to that anger and demands the death penalty without consulting the best research that could reduce violence then it will only escalate the decline that may be beginning. Contrary to what most people are led to believe we actually have among the lowest rates of violence in history, with the lowest murder rates in 2013 and 2014 at only 4.5 per hundred thousand; however the long steady decline since 1991 may be reversing with two consecutive increases since then to 5.3 in 2016.
If we act on the best research instead of appeals to emotion for vengeance then the reduction in violence can resume but if the corruption in the government and the business sector continues unchecked it will inevitably cause more violence and a decline in our society!
One small segment of society has all the opportunity and they're never subject to threats of the death penalty even when they fight one war after another based on lies, profit off of epidemic levels of pollution, manufacture defective products, and other activities killing thousands if not millions of people! they also deprive people of opportunities and when one of them strikes out at other people that aren't responsible for the atrocities committed by our political leaders they think they can get our support by loudly calling for the death penalty for crimes much smaller than their own.
If too many people rely on traditional media they might be right; but that may be changing!
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