The real reason for mass shootings
by digby
... can be boiled down to women. According to this Brietbart writer anyway:
I might be a raging homo, but I still innately understand the male need to conquer, crush and win. Men need to express that dark, powerful part of themselves, or it can abruptly overflow. If it is suppressed, derided and ridiculed, it can show up without warning and with horrible consequences.
That’s why I’m so distressed that heterosexual men are being told, constantly, by the media and even in schools, that what they are is bad. This, I submit, is at least in part what’s driving the recent spate of shootings.
The media trash-talks everything men love: guns, booze, boisterousness, drugs, sex and video games. Economic pressures are relentlessly stripping away male spaces like the traditional pub, where blokes can drink and bond. Social pressures are opening up male-only golf and social clubs to women, destroying what made them precious and essential.
The breakdown of the nuclear family is a euphemistic phrase used to describe a more troubling picture: there are more absent fathers now and vanishingly few positive male role models for young men to admire and emulate. This is often fuelled, or at least endorsed, by wrongheaded progressives who want to tear down supposedly patriarchal institutions.
But it is those patriarchal institutions, if you like, that for centuries provided the sort of structure, order and role models that young men need.
Masculinity isn’t fragile, as a spiteful, sociopathic feminist Twitter hashtag recently claimed. But — and here’s where some man-hating feminists almost get it right — it is powerful, and exciting, and it does have a flip-side if not properly respected. At its best, male competitiveness is the driving force behind most of society’s progress. We would be nowhere without the patriarchy, from the internet and space travel to the road under your feet and the roof on your house. The same thing that drives mass shooters inspires courage, too.
That doesn’t mean masculinity is “toxic.” What’s toxic is society’s attitudes towards men. Masculinity only becomes “toxic” when it is beaten down and suppressed and when men are told that what and who they are is defective. It becomes toxic when young boys are drugged in school because they don’t conform to feminine standards of behaviour.
What’s worse is that the media ridicules, criticises, punishes and demonises masculinity, then uses the product of its own hatred to justify more man-hating, in a Kafkaesque cycle of progressive insanity that has only one, inevitable consequence: more innocent dead people.
Progressives don’t see the irony in going after “straight white men.” But they are hypocritical bigots, hounding people for gender, skin colour and sexuality and saying that essential male characteristics are wrong. Men must be allowed to compete. To fight. To shoot things. Today’s man-punishing, feminised culture is creating killers by suppressing these urges. We have to stop it.
It goes on in that vein.
Civilization has been tamping down the human urge to fight, shoot, kill since time began. One might even say that it's the fundamental reason for civilization in the first place. It doesn't always work, obviously. But the effort is largely why the species has progressed.
The idea that America, the country with the largest military the world has ever seen, with more bloodshed than any other developed nation, which boasts only 17% of female political representation and 5% of female business leadership is smothering its males and denying them their "masculine urges" is vacuous in the extreme.
The most chilling thing about this is that we don't have anything like equality and people are making this argument. Lord only knows what they'll say and do if the half of the population that is female ever achieves parity of power. I know that so far distant that I'll long be dead in that event but I do feel sorry for the people who will be alive then and have to deal with the fallout of this insistence on violence as a "masculine" need that cannot be denied.
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