General News

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/china-completes-first-yuan-settled-lng-trade

US not going to like this. Petrodollar in danger. Unlucky for them China ain’t no Iraq or Syria to invade and submit. :slight_smile:

I hate how people are paying this dumbcunt for these speeches

What insight does a failed PM have to offer bankers? ‘do as I didn’t?’

Typical of how these people continue to fail upwards no matter how bad.

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No surprise to anyone, we have another mass shooting in the states again.
Four dead in another random attack in Alabama.

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We have so much freedom here we’re having multiple mass shootings per day.

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Read about this earlier. Do people become sanitised to these reports in different states because of the vastness of the country?

I guess we become desensitized because of the way a lot of it is covered in the USA. Local news, which often skews very conservative (John Oliver has a very long bit about Sinclair Broadcasting that I’d recommend if you aren’t totally put off by his shtick) will cover mass shootings with a sort of breathless defeatism the same way they’d cover a natural disaster.

And I think the real thing that’s desensitized people in the USA is the way the NRA and Republicans have managed to make it just normal that your average Republican official won’t support gun reform even after elementary school children were murdered at Sandy Hook. That was when I realized we were in deep shit here. If you have a feckless ghoul like Mitch McConnell refusing to pass gun reform after children were massacred, you don’t have a real negotiating partner.

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That might play a part but I think the way violence is so normalized in American culture has a good bit to do with it as well.

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Did you consider this before having children or is it something that seems bigger now you have?
I became a lot more aware of child crimes I feel once I’d had kids.
Guess it maybe different for you working in a law situation and you have some real insight on victims of violence.

Gun violence especially. We have so many guns.

It’s somehow both overwhelmingly in your face but also the right makes a good job of deflecting and distracting just enough that people believe it couldn’t possibly happen to them.

They live in a good neighborhood. They send their kids to nice schools. They don’t go to “the ghetto” or cities like Chicago or Baltimore. It’s a bit of wishful thinking and a bit of self delusion necessary to stop yourself from going insane on a daily basis.

@Stroller I always wanted kids and wasn’t sure I’d be able to have them so it was kind of a no-brainer that when we were able to get pregnant it was a happy thing. But I thought about gun violence basically all the time while working at the prosecutor’s office. I worked on property crimes and a lot of them involved people stealing guns to sell on the secondary market. What happens to those guns? Who gets them? I’m pretty sure it’s not some salt of the earth rancher who needs a weapon to fend off hungry coyotes.

In terms of victims of violence, I can really only think of two cases where it was sort of a stranger on stranger situation. In one these two groups of guys got into a silly argument at a local pool. One group of guys followed the other home and basically executed one of the guys in his car outside his apartment. The other involved a man pretending to be a cop and lying to a sex worker about it, she gave him oral sex (which at the time wasn’t considered rape but I believe is now included under rape in our Criminal Article).

But yeah, I’ve thought about gun violence constantly even after leaving the prosecutor’s office. I’m not sure where we’ll send our kids to school. My partner and I joke about moving to Canada which sounds ridiculous. And even though I personally believe the country is worth saving, I’m not willing to bet my daughters’ lives on it if I had a choice.

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Still very relevant.

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So now we’re shooting kids for ringing the doorbell.

Let’s be honest. If a little white girl rings that guy’s doorbell she’s not getting a hole in the head.

Also, why does an 80 year old have a gun?

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I don’t like them, but if I was 80 years old in the US, I’d also have a gun.

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Nothing like the media throwing skin colour and and race into a headline for more clicks.

84 year old shoots teen is the story, why does the skin colour matter? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

It’s impossible to ignore race in this situation.

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You don’t think skin colour played a role in the man’s decision to shoot?

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This is a very naive post IMO

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I think that’s certainly what the media want to make it out to be. It doesn’t necessarily need to be true and I certainly don’t think it needs to be called out in the headline and blurb.

Nah. Like @Joshua said you can’t ignore race in this situation. It’s impossible.

Well was gonna ask him but since you’ve doubled down on it, why?

What in the article other than the descriptors of the individuals in the headline make it clear race has anything to do with the actions? The comment from the prosecutor?

Or is it just an automatic assumption now because man was white and kid was black?

Kansas being a traditionally white trash hillbilly state is the only thing that would give me any inclination towards that. Either way it seems very unnecessary to make it the primary focus as seems to be the case all the time now.