What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas

[RedMaterialist]

What is the meaning of the carnage in the Schtick Capital of Western Capitalism?

[willowtooth]

It's weird right? Multi millionaire real estate investor, who owned an arsenal of weapons shoots up a country western concert.

http://www.10tv.com/article/las-vegas-shooting-everything-you-need-know

[Jimmie Higgins]

Do you mean symbolic meaning or meaning in terms of motivation or meaning for US mainstream politics?

I have no answers to any of those questions. It's been odd watching the media and politicians react to it.

The US is violent, people in the US are isolated, powerless more or less, and guns (as symbolic power and control) are fetishized by middle class white dudes who are paranoid.

These are big overwhelming things. The RNC only offers the status quo and crocodile tears for shooting victims; the DNC only offers the status quo in de-facto ways: mostly they just offer "tough talk" right after a shooting and when they go for policy, it would likely only be enforced against poor people using the black market, not middle class white guys at gun shows with private arsenals.

[TomLeftist]

Hi, i am not a professional psycho-analyst and a professional scientist of the behaviour of people. But i've noticed that the levels of social ethics, of courtesy, of well mannered social beahaviour in public areas, the social skills that people need in order to behave in a regular society are pretty low in USA. One thing I've noticed about in many parts of the whole USA, specially in far-right wing cities and right-wing red states, is almost no social skills at all, an excess of group-narcissism, family-narcissism, workplace-narcissism, sports-team-narcissism, city-narcissism, church-narcissism and many other types of group-narcissism, In other words in most right-wing cities and even in cities that are not foo far to the right-wing, most people in the USA are pretty bad, pretty low when offerning a good nice smile to strangers.

By group-nacissism, what I mean is that we have system of living in America, in which people only have special love, special attention for members of their own central specific and a sort of evading eye contact, evading social contact and right in your face straight hatred toward people who don't belong to the specific sub-division or sub-group.

In a system like this, any person who has not been pretty good at having relative nice sub-group, in a way of life like this, any person who doesn't belong to any sub-group, sub-culture, literally would be bashed, trashed and feel like a piece of garbage.

So people who feel hated in this country because they are not part of any sub-culture, will feel bashed, trashed and destroyed, and that leads that person toward revenge against this society of hypocricy, mysanthropy, pieces of trash, even within the left, there is an excess of hatred from a spciefic leftist group (like Socialist Equality Party of USA, Green Party, Socialsitworker.org (a very elitist group) against other leftists and against anti-imperialist leftist governments and anti-imperialist leftist parties in other countries

And we should be aware that leftists should be internationalists and love everybody

In fact there is so much xenophobia in the USA, that even far-leftist groups expose their feelings of ultra-nationalism. I've seen comments in the World Socialist Web Site page http://www.wsws.org/ of people supporting the Mexican-USA border wall of Donald Trump

So having said all this, it is very easy in the USA for any regular person to feel the need to revenge against the whole USA, or against any representative of the USA (like a baseball game or any public place) because americans themselves are not pretty nice, the whole country is a country of hateful people and only a minority are humble and open-minded to mingle with strangers from the whole world.

So I think that the guy who killed the 59 people in Las Vegas, was not crazy, I think he did that out of a rational feeling that people have when they are hated and treated like garbage.

One of the good things about socialism, communism. The temporary stage of the workers-dictatorship, is that it will try to destroy the group-narcissism, and individualist-narcissism, Robisnon Crusoe philosophy of life and will replace it with a collective, team-work way of life, in which people will try to solve all the problems of society in their own community by loving, imingling and being nice and friendly with members of their own neighborhoods. (In socialism not now. because right now even neighbors of their own street hate each other. That's why i believe USA needs socialism as soon as possible, in order to destroy all the current values, all the current behaviour scripts and replace it with communists, leftists mutualist, cooperative way of life


What is the meaning of the carnage in the Schtick Capital of Western Capitalism?

[willowtooth]

He did it for fun

[ckaihatsu]

One of the good things about socialism, communism. The temporary stage of the workers-dictatorship, is that it will try to destroy the group-narcissism, and individualist-narcissism, Robisnon Crusoe philosophy of life and will replace it with a collective, team-work way of life, in which people will try to solve all the problems of society in their own community by loving, imingling and being nice and friendly with members of their own neighborhoods. (In socialism not now. because right now even neighbors of their own street hate each other. That's why i believe USA needs socialism as soon as possible, in order to destroy all the current values, all the current behaviour scripts and replace it with communists, leftists mutualist, cooperative way of life


On an aside, I wonder if 'neighborhoods' as we know them would even exist the same way in a worker-controlled society -- much attention and physical organization / presence would have to be around the means of mass production themselves, the factories. So instead of the hyper-subdivided sections of a city that are given team-like names, to foster localist groupthink identities, such would probably be *dispersed* and people could form their individual and group identities more on the basis of what they're actively doing for the *social good*, and each-other, without some empty shell-abstractions ('Go Tigers-of-the-Lawn!') to fill-in for the sake of local-group identity and individual fitting-in.

In other words, there would be a solid *material* and *social* basis for one's social identity, based on voluntary productive efforts for the sake of fulfilling human need. This is *far* better, qualitatively, than the current, contrived 'community'-type activities that are supposed to provide social group cohesion, like sports or gardens or whatever. (Not that I'm dismissing sports or gardens or whatever *entirely*, because this is simply how the world is at this point, so I'll conclude that the cup is 'half-full' -- but certainly not *fully* full.)

[TomLeftist]

Ckaihatsu: Hi, how are you? Sorry for my very late reply. Thanks a lot for your comment. You are right, there is an excess of categories in the US, an excess of groups, sub-groups, groups based on income, groups based on wether they drive new car or old cars. Groups based on the kind of clothes they wear. This is crazy, almost like the song "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie. And the song "Pressure" by Billie Joel. And another cool song Subdivisions by Rush/

You are right, there is an excess of categories and sub-grups in the United States



On an aside, I wonder if 'neighborhoods' as we know them would even exist the same way in a worker-controlled society -- much attention and physical organization / presence would have to be around the means of mass production themselves, the factories. So instead of the hyper-subdivided sections of a city that are given team-like names, to foster localist groupthink identities, such would probably be *dispersed* and people could form their individual and group identities more on the basis of what they're actively doing for the *social good*, and each-other, without some empty shell-abstractions ('Go Tigers-of-the-Lawn!') to fill-in for the sake of local-group identity and individual fitting-in.

In other words, there would be a solid *material* and *social* basis for one's social identity, based on voluntary productive efforts for the sake of fulfilling human need. This is *far* better, qualitatively, than the current, contrived 'community'-type activities that are supposed to provide social group cohesion, like sports or gardens or whatever. (Not that I'm dismissing sports or gardens or whatever *entirely*, because this is simply how the world is at this point, so I'll conclude that the cup is 'half-full' -- but certainly not *fully* full.)

[ckaihatsu]

Ckaihatsu: Hi, how are you? Sorry for my very late reply. Thanks a lot for your comment. You are right, there is an excess of categories in the US, an excess of groups, sub-groups, groups based on income, groups based on wether they drive new car or old cars. Groups based on the kind of clothes they wear. This is crazy, almost like the song "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie. And the song "Pressure" by Billie Joel. And another cool song Subdivisions by Rush/

You are right, there is an excess of categories and sub-grups in the United States


Thanks, Tom, no prob.

I just meant to front-and-center the 'social production' dynamic -- under capitalism social life is *segregated* into time-at-home, in neighborhoods, and time-at-work, at the workplace (not to mention any collective politics-from-below). These realms have nothing to do with each other, because we're treated little better than cows or other livestock, exploited for our labor-power, with no control over the very work areas that we work in.

With the work realm tightly controlled from above, our 'home' / neighborhood life remains, but since it has nothing to do with our life at work it's politically *managed*, from above, for some semblance of a societal-rational paradigm that we purportedly live 'our' own lives in, usually based around artificially subdivided neighborhood 'turf' / identity, and leisure-type pursuits like sports or whatever, to societally 'frame' our activities in that cleaved-away social context.

This leads into the revolutionary-leftist standing critique of 'commodity fetishism' (the consumerist type), and consumerism in general.

[Comrade Eclipze]

Americas population is fucked, we've seen it multiple times. Only school shootings there were 200 of them in 2016 thats about 1.25 every other day. Which is insane. Wonder why none of these shootings occur any where on the planet but USA only. The country which is so "great".

[willowtooth]

Americas population is fucked, we've seen it multiple times. Only school shootings there were 200 of them in 2016 thats about 1.25 every other day. Which is insane. Wonder why none of these shootings occur any where on the planet but USA only. The country which is so "great".
Who do you think is making all the guns in the first place?