We’ve all seen the lucrative delusions packaged and sold like a pound of butter to the religious right over the years. Some of them revolting, most of them a little bit comical and almost all of them sad. They are created and marketed to fleece hard earned money from people who may lack the finely honed critical thinking skills we take for granted here, but the marks are by and large honest people who do not deserve being victimized and made fools of. That in itself is repugnant: the very voters the grifters depend on for success are held in utter disregard and open contempt. Well, there’s a new one making the rounds and its a doozy: the Newtown massacre was staged by the government as a ruse to take away our guns!
Daily Kos — The vanguard of this effort is a video on YouTube to which I will not link here for the same reasons that Gandalf does not utter the language of Mordor. This video purports to prove that the Sandy Hook incident was not the work of a deranged mass-murderer, but that it was a carefully crafted conspiracy, that those commonly credited with helping rescue some of the children were actually paid actors (one of whom is currently being harassed on a daily basis), and that at least one of the children is actually still alive. That last theory is based on the fact that the sister of one of the victims sat on Obama’s lap wearing a dress that belonged to her deceased sister, so obviously, they’re the same person.
That’s crazy, right? I mean, the last thing you’d do if you were orchestrating a government conspiracy to murder children is to put one of those same children on the lap of the president of the United States in full view of the world? Sure, it’s insane. And yet, that video has over 10 million views on YouTube, and those views are not coming from people who simply can’t avert their eyes as if watching a trainwreck in slow motion. How exactly does this happen? How can so many people want to believe, much less actually believe, that the government programmed a mentally disturbed individual to murder children? The NRA is of course involved in this conversation, but this problem is a pre-existing condition that could set the stage for some very dangerous consequences.
I’m sad to say this very conspiracy, or possibly a similar one as at this point they have proliferated like bacteria, was voiced by my own sister last night. Of course President Obama is the chief conspirator. She then went into a full on anti-government tirade, all the usual stuff. When I pointed out she’s a public school teacher, her husband and daughter also teachers, and asked her if they too were part of the various government conspiracies she adroitly espouses at every family gathering, she panicked, like a frightened animal — she had never thought of that giant hole in what passes for her reasoning? — and quickly explained she doesn’t work for the government, she works for a school district.
She owns no guns, she doesn’t like weapons, she’s completely non violent. When pressed, the reason she wants weapons of war in the hands of non military housewives and plumbers and software engineers is so they can be turned on our own troops. Troops that will land any day in black helicopters to take voer the US in the name of the UN os some such crazy shit. Remember when Support the Troops was their mantra? How quickly patriotism was redefined.
I could get mad at her, argue and ridicule, I could debate the merits knowing full well it wouldn’t make a it of difference, I can and do detest the right for what they do even more because of this. But instead it just made angry, fed up in a way that I haven’t ever quite felt, at the crooks doing this.
My sister is a caring, deeply religious women. In high school she lobbied to have the death penalty banned out of religious conviction, it was, she said, morally indefensible. She spent her college years earning a degree in special ed and volunteering in dangerous neighborhoods working with poor, mentally handicapped children. My sister embarked on a a career teaching special needs children, her entry level pay in the1980s was less than 20k, about a fifth of what her degree cost. She has bounced form several schools because, over and over again, fudning has been cut or eliminated. Special needs children are politically defenseless, they are easy to steal from
She did this because she felt the Gospel and other Biblical passages about helping the helpless were more than mere words, they were a coda, a standard, and she was determined to live her life and dedicate it to spreading kindness and expertise where it is most sorely needed. She has made sacrifice after sacrifice, spent her own paltry pay in many cases, to make sure her kids have as many resources as possible to reach their fullest potential. And the right took that admirable sister of mine and her most precious faith, and used them to turn her into a hate filled zealot. All so that David Koch and Paris Hilton could pay a little less in taxes and Glenn Beck could sell a few more books.
Jesus counseled forgiveness, most Christians I know personally do their best to live up to it; it’s not always easy. Forgiving those who lie and cheat to steal from the faithful is probably a healthy thing to do when you can’t do anything about it, let go, don’t let it consume you.
But I’m not a Christian, and I wouldn’t forgive these disgusting gun freak wingnut excuses for human beings if I wanted to,
Unfortunately, this tinfoil-hat theory is NOT new; it resurfaces with every fresh massacre and has done so for several years at least.
All evidence that no one person we would recognize as Jesus ever existed. Religious scribes, decades or centuries after the biblical events supposedly happened, wrote down what we now recognize as the gospels. At various ecumenical councils during the intervening centuries the various gospels were edited, with the most outrageous ones being omitted.
I would have preferred the phrasing “christian gospel teaches that…”, or perhaps “the christians’ (purported) figurehead is credited with saying…”
I was going to call this on the very day of the massacre, but I figured it would be in bad taste. But yeah, saw this coming a mile away.
???
@4
Humans are complicated.
You can go to Media Matters for America, read the comments on just about any given article on gun control, and see a pretty fair sampling of these nutcases. One guy suggested there was something suspicious about the press not being allowed to go into the school itself on the day of the shooting to look at the evidence themselves (I suggested he look up the term “crime scene”). One main thread that seems to run through all these “theories” is that the reports from that day weren’t completely accurate (one guy was crowing over having DVR’d what he considered contemporary “proof” of cover-up- that there was some immediate confusion over whether, and where, a rifle was found). It seems to me that confusion immediately surrounding a chaotic situation is to be expected; it’s not proof of anything except that the situation was chaotic. Hindsight, it seems, isn’t always 20/20, at least not when it’s used as a lens to see something that isn’t there.
I think Americans(and I say this as one) watch way to much TV. Life and especially police work is not anything like you see on most TV shows. Securing the scene, collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses all take a lot of time. Its not CSI or Law and Order where the crime is all solved and the case is tried by the end of the hour.
And interviewing witnesses is probably about 10 times harder when they are all completely traumatized ( I think one of the pieces of “evidence” these bozos are spouting is that some of the people in the school did not hear any gun shots). Ummm what average person knows what gun shots or silenced gun shots sound like hitting a body, never mind the fact that some of these witnesses are GRADE SCHOOL CHILDREN.
Sorry to get shouty, I live in Connecticut and while I will not presume to co-opt this tragedy as my own because it is not, there are friends of friends who are first responders to this scene and they will NEVER unsee what they saw.
So these conspiracy theorists can go soak their heads.
This seems to be the most “mainstream” style of conspiracy thinking nowadays. From the “9/11 Truthers”, to the “Birthers”, and now to the “Sandy Hook Truthers”, this mode of conspiracy focuses on one event, and allows people to dis-believe it. For whatever reason, many Americans feel a need to withdraw from consensual reality, and these conspiracy theories let them do that.
Apparently accepting that terrorists can actually kill Americans, or that black people really can become president, or that guns allow rampage murderers to kill people en masse… apparently believing these things causes too much mental anguish. I can understand the desire to escape anguish, but the more popular this type of thinking gets, the more deranged the public gets, and the more impaired our collective decision making becomes.
Yeah these so-called ‘truthers’ (I snigger to myself whenever I type that) are crawling out of the woodwork all over the place, harassing the families and residents, demanding ‘the truth’, accusing people of being crisis actors, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean.
There are some real shit bags out there; one of the slimiest is Mike Adams, the ‘Health Ranger’. He’s a conspiracy nut, woo pedlar and general fantasist. He’s really caught my attention recently with his Sandy Hook inspired bullshit, amongst other genreal craziness.
Oh and my spellcheck offerred up’ duthers’ inplace of ‘truthers’ that was worth a giggle.
http://anodeofranvier.posterous.com/just-cant-stop-the-trolling
Just thought I should swiftly clarify; I’m not disparaging your sister, but the shit-stains that are actively going out at making peoples’ lives a misery:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/01/16/sandy-hook-hero-harassed-by-burgeoning-truther-movement/
I’d giggle, perhaps, if I knew WTF ‘duthers’ is, or why a spelling checker would have this in the default dictionary.
—
Ooh, OK, maybe ‘druthers”? That coincidence/irony/whatever is strangely apt and would be worth a giggle. (Despite it being the sort of “folksy” “contraction” that irks me.)
Well of course it’s all a hoax. Everything has been a hoax ever since that damned darky started living in the White House. Why the hell do you think they call it the White House anyway?
It’s just his way of trying to disenfranchise you and I and all our white immigrant ancestors. We are supposed to be afraid and flop about like decapitated chickens so the ebil brown people can extract their revenge from our pure, white hearts. Their hearts are black, as any fule no.
/ end snark
Blast and damn! these lie mongers! It’s not so much that they lie like rugs, and poorly woven ones at that, it’s that they know that there are people who will suck their shit up and pass it on. Oh, my lands and stars. Sometimes I just get so weary.
@ #11; yep my bad, it was was indeed druthers, I just managed to misstype it in my haste to post.
Meaning basically;
‘if I had it my way’ and also being also the name of a burger-chain-gone-bust.
For the record, druther, or druthers=I’d rather, I’d ruther, ‘druther. That is, how things would be arranged if I was in charge. It really is little more than the way common words are mispronounced or the effect of regional accent and the tendency for common phrases to become slang. Linguistic laziness, actually. But the same tendency is what colors our language and makes it fun.
When I was a small boy I used to know, and dearly love, an old man who taught me how to do some very neat stuff. One of his linguistic idiosyncrasies had to do with reacting to something that irritated him, rubbed him the wrong way (sorry, kitten). He would say it one of two ways, in ascending order of frustration: “Wouldn’t that just frost ye?”, or “Well, that just rasps me.” A rasp is a course file and if you run it across your knuckles, well, you know what being rasped means.
If he thought he was out of earshot he’d cuss mightily, and I loved him the more for it. It was just that he knew nobody wanted to hear his bad language so he was always in charge of his words. He was an old fashioned gentleman. I was named after him, my mother and father did love him so.
That there is confusion today about the meaning of “druthers” actually frosts me. Just a little.