In light of the massacre in Virginia....

[_Fortigurn]

When do you think these things weren't happening...before complex society or going back to more egalitarian times?

Serial killers are a modern urban phenomenon. There's plenty of research available which demonstrates that they a manufactured product of the post-industrial

I think free speech is taken to far in America myself. Just because I have the "right" to say (for example) the "N" word doesn't mean I should. Why shouldn't I? Because I think it's a mean word that would show myself to be ignorant. I make a free choice not to use racial slurs because I've been nurtured to think they are wrong. Freedom of speech is one thing, but freedom to be stupid should be curtailed as much as possible (in my honest opinion).

Exactly. And people think that 'freedom of speech' means 'freedom to speak as I please regardless of harm to others', or 'freedom to speak without being held accountable for what I say'.

I think the problem in America is that we are such a diverse country. We aren't a homogenous population religiously or racially/ethnically (which are often the most obvious...especially skin color) and until we start thinking of ourselves as humans rather than "African-American baptist" and "Mexican-American Catholic" and "Japanese-American atheist" and "Anglo-American Lutheran" and all the combinations we will always be in the situation of being exclusionary to the others. It's natural we use our eyes to gather the most information...rather than our ears. If we'd listen to each other rather than screaming at the same time we could probably kind common ground, but some people never will be able to.

More so, our form of government in theory wants to make us embrace each other as fellow countrymen, when in reality we may have nothing in common except for living in the same general area. We will always have these major rifts in America until we interbreed into one ethnic group (which could take god knows how many centuries) that believes one way spiritually (another almost impossibility). Even then we still have political and economic inequalities to deal with. So right now...we are the melting pot, and will be for a long time to come.

I'm not really up on Australias ethnic and religious makeup so you may have the same problem.

We don't have quite the same problems. We're massively diverse in ethnic and religious terms (about 23% of Australians were born overseas), but we get along a lot better. The major difference is one of culture. We never had a slave culture like North America did, we never had a class system like the UK and North America did (an aristocracy in the UK, a plutocracy in North America), and we didn't have ethnic ghettos.

I remember my first trip to New York, and being shocked when I went through the boroughs to see ethnic groups so obviously geographically segregated. Walk through one area, and it's all Italians. Next it's all Russians. Now it's all Greeks. Blacks. Jews. Whatever. I'm used to seeing everyone living next to everyone else, not people segregated into ethnic blocs. I do realise that this largely unintentional (certainly not planned or forced by the government), but I believe it's symptomatic of a wider problem - people just don't integrate.

[_Fortigurn]

As to dehumanization:

I don't know that we'll ever be able to get out of this either. People living in cities of more than a few thousand will never meet everyone in their community. Often the majority will just be nameless faces. I don't know how this can ever be changed or how to get some people to think of those faces as humans with lives behind them.

There's a simple answer - decentralize and deindustrialize.

Furthermore, I don't think our leaders want us to (for military reasons). It's alot easier for a US private from ALabama to think of an "enemy" as just a face rather than Mike, father of 3, owner of a business, married to Sarah. This dehumanization in my opinion goes back further than the Industrial Revolution (with apologies to beastie) and has its roots in the apparently natural desire for man to conquer his fellow man to gain wealth and territory. It's alot easier for soldiers to kill each other when they're just faces holding spears rather than actual people.

I certainly agree. This is an excellent point. But technology has assisted the dehumanization of the military foe, by increasing the physical distance between antagonists. This is an observed and well studied psychological effect.

I do thing the industrial revolution further exacerbated the situation by making people faceless cogs in the economic machine (making people both faceless for a military/defense standpoint and from an economic standpoint). It removed the identity of being a farmer in a certain area around a bunch of other longstanding farmers to being faces at a factory somewhere. The loss of economic identity and the loss of the community has fed this problem and multiplied upon it.

Just my opinion,

Bond

An excellent opinion, in my opinion.

[_Bond...James Bond]

We don't have quite the same problems. We're massively diverse in ethnic and religious terms (about 23% of Australians were born overseas), but we get along a lot better. The major difference is one of culture. We never had a slave culture like North America did, we never had a class system like the UK and North America did (an aristocracy in the UK, a plutocracy in North America), and we didn't have ethnic ghettos.

I remember my first trip to New York, and being shocked when I went through the boroughs to see ethnic groups so obviously geographically segregated. Walk through one area, and it's all Italians. Next it's all Russians. Now it's all Greeks. Blacks. Jews. Whatever. I'm used to seeing everyone living next to everyone else, not people segregated into ethnic blocs. I do realise that this largely unintentional (certainly not planned or forced by the government), but I believe it's symptomatic of a wider problem - people just don't integrate.

I think our immigration pattern (waves of people of different groups) has led to this. Irish came in the 1850s and were hated on by the English who were already here, so they lived together with other irish. When italians came they were disliked by the groups who were here, so they lived with italians. Same thing with hispanics today...they're the new kids on the immigrant block (difference being skin color and not being European). The melting pot continues. It will take a few generations for some of the hating to die out. We still have people alive who's near ancestors were slave owners...it's going to take time for the years to wipe away some of our uglier acts.

I think people have the natural tendency to dislike the invader (even if legally and peacefully). It's probably part of our natural makeup to want unknown groups to stay anonymous for fear of the outsider (and his unpredicability). In my opinion we are naturally conservative..and like what we're used to. Immigrants are things we're not used to...thus it takes many years (or generations) to get used to them. And some never will, but eventually their children or their children's children will.

I agree people don't integrate. So should government make them?

[_Fortigurn]

I think our immigration pattern (waves of people of different groups) has led to this. Irish came in the 1850s and were hated on by the English who were already here, so they lived together with other irish. When italians came they were disliked by the groups who were here, so they lived with italians. Same thing with hispanics today...they're the new kids on the immigrant block (difference being skin color and not being European). The melting pot continues. It will take a few generations for some of the hating to die out. We still have people alive who's near ancestors were slave owners...it's going to take time for the years to wipe away some of our uglier acts.

I think you're right. Australian immigration appears to have been less stratified. But at the same time, immigrants to Australia weren't demonized and stratigraphied as they were in North America. One contributing factor is that immigrants were often intelligent, well educated and reasonably well off middle class persons, entering a society still largely populated by ex-convicts of no superior social standing. There doesn't appear to have been the social mechanism necessary to build a rigid social stratigraphy.

In Australian society, an ex-convict became a free man and took his place in society as an equal with other free men. Certain stigmas undoubtedly remained, but after a generation or so there were so many ex-convicts who all accepted each other as equals that the society was unavoidably influenced. This was certainly helped by the fact that new settlers to Australia could hire convicts or ex-convicts as labourers, which actually gave the convicts a mechanism for re-entering society, and social validation into the bargain. It was arguably one of the most successful rehabilitation programs in the history of penology, though that was purely accidental.

I think people have the natural tendency to dislike the invader (even if legally and peacefully). It's probably part of our natural makeup to want unknown groups to stay anonymous for fear of the outsider (and his unpredicability). In my opinion we are naturally conservative..and like what we're used to. Immigrants are things we're not used to...thus it takes many years (or generations) to get used to them. And some never will, but eventually their children or their children's children will.

All true.

I agree people don't integrate. So should government make them?

It can't. But it can prevent ghettos forming. New immigrants can be diffused throughout the local population by planned settlement programs. This assists integration. In Australia it would be difficult to form a ghetto, since our population is already so diffuse. You have areas of ethnic concentration in various suburbs, but even these areas aren't sufficiently dense to form ghettos, and they're unavoidably socially porous.

[_Fortigurn]

Now where oh where is Cogs while these kinds of intelligent mature discussions are taking place?

[_Gazelam]

They were stating on the news today that the guy was heavily medicated on anti-depresents.

Who knows what kind of reality he had built up inside his own mind.

But who am I to do armchair psycology. We all know it was the guns fault.

[_skippy the dead]

But who am I to do armchair psycology. We all know it was the guns fault.

I shall dip my toe gently into these waters, with no intention of getting into a full discussion:

Do you suppose he could have accomplished the same results with a knife? Doubtful.

And now I shall make a hasty retreat, and resolve to avoid further comment on this particular issue.

[_Fortigurn]

Do you suppose he could have accomplished the same results with a knife? Doubtful.

Well said.

[_Mr. Coffee]

Do you suppose he could have accomplished the same results with a knife? Doubtful.

Well said.

If the two of you are trying to say the harsher gun control is the answer then I guess I'll have to counter with...

If the residents of the state of Virginia hasd not votes against a measure that was on the ballot last year to allow concealed carry permit holders to carry on campus then Cho Seung-Hui would have been stopped the second he walked into the first classroom. Another would be to change gun ownership laws to restrict ownership to US Citizens only. Mr Seung-Hui was not a naturalized citizen, and be barring him from purchasing a firearms legally he would not have been able to easilly obtain a firearm.

A gun a tool, people, nothing more.

[_Bond...James Bond]

If the residents of the state of Virginia hasd not votes against a measure that was on the ballot last year to allow concealed carry permit holders to carry on campus then Cho Seung-Hui would have been stopped the second he walked into the first classroom.

They could also allow someone to take weapons into places more easily.

Supposing that someone had a concealed gun and started firing at Seung-Hui, who's to say they would hit him? Odds are just as likely that in the confusion they would hit an innocent bystander.

Another would be to change gun ownership laws to restrict ownership to US Citizens only. Mr Seung-Hui was not a naturalized citizen, and be barring him from purchasing a firearms legally he would not have been able to easilly obtain a firearm.

The Colombine guys were American citizens.

A gun a tool, people, nothing more.

I agree.

Guns, don't kill people, people kill people. (Guns just make it a whole lot easier).