No shooting? They must have been white students.
This was in early 2004. Itās far worse nowā¦ it was like Revenge of the Nerds then
Face meet palmā¦ when you scratch the surface on police shooting stats theyāre very in line with justification under the circumstances and police are actually more likely to shoot huwhytes in similar circumstances. You tried though.
Hahaā¦ wouldnāt waste the options on those cretins
I responded to a joke, with a joke. Take it easy there killer.
Never knowā¦ I think I mistook you for someone else, actually. My bad if so. But I am a killer so ty
I canāt tell if this was tongue in cheek, but itās too perfect in the context of the police-shooting riff, lol
Indeed. Wink.
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It was St. Louis, which might as well be the Congo, and they were āscholars.ā
Iām confused. My school? No way, haha.
I donāt know for sure. I had to read a lot. And write. Last year alone, off the top of my head, I read Gilgamesh, the Bible, Homer, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, Virgil, Ovid, St. Augustine, Twain, London, Hemingway, Frost, Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Faulker, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot, Flannery OāConnor, John Herseyā¦thereās many more ālesserā names but those are the main ones I remember being assigned.
I think that was probably the main reason. I learned a lot about the world and life through reading so much. It gave me lots of time to think deeply about things. It probably is why I can even actually think deeply. Many people donāt/canāt do that anymore (on both sides). Even if they think they can. The list above was only one year of reading. Other years included a lot more American political writings, religious writings, or books about specific areas of history. But someone else couldāve done the exact same reading and walked away with totally different thoughts. That happens all the time. I did an independent study with a professor last semester about sexuality and marriage, and we read, among other things, Shakespeare and Austen. You can get wildly different opinions reading those writers and especially given the theme of the course. But mine happened to skew right, I guess.
I donāt consider myself a Republican. I know we differ here, but Iām quite anti-Trump. (And not really pro-anyone else.) But Iām definitely veryā¦ātraditionalā in many senses. And today that seems to mean conservative. Iām Christian, which tends to = right wing in the U.S. today. I grew up in a small-ish town in a red state. Those factors probably laid a foundation for me to lean right.
So I would say being raised Christian in a place where most people lean right (though my family, like me, is not staunchly Republican, merely ātraditionalā) and having a quality education that forced me to think deeply about things right at the age where I was becoming an adult happened to result in someone who leans right. At least more right than left, generally. Not always. I try to let my faith guide my politics and sometimes that means supporting some left-wing things. And I donāt like the leading politicians on either side, haha. So I donāt identify with any parties.
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Free thinking will let you align where you want to, and your preferences will simply graph where they lay.
I personally vote Republican because in the majority of cases, especially if I apply weight to hot topics, I most closely align with them and Iām not going to throw a vote away on a 3rd party to ābuck the systemā.
But Iām not religious, I could tell stories that would make a stripper blush and I donāt give two shits how other people live their lives as long as they donāt encroach on mine.
And as a general comment to the broader topic encroachment is where I take issue with DEI, and am glad to see itās institutional latticework erode.
I havenāt been a white N in a green circle for a while 
Politically, I generally feel the same. But Iām not convinced it actually works out. Teenage/early-20s me spent enough time around drugs, violence, sex, etc. that I got a real good sense of what happens when some people are allowed to live however they want. And it doesnāt bode well for society. I donāt like being told what to do, but some guardrails are good for people. I donāt see anything good happening when no one is held to any standards and morals are dropped.
This is where I see conservatism and liberalism, at least in the classic sense, begin to blur lines. A govt creating guardrails is a big govt, and definitely not conservative in its original definition. Itās just another nanny state by a different set of rules.
Let people fuck themselves up if they want to. Donāt make it your water to carry. Society will be fine without them.
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I understand the conflict. I canāt quite make sense of it myself.
Though I know you donāt share the same view, my faith does not allow for this. I often wish I didnāt have to care about anyone but myself and my family, but thatās not what I feel called to do.
And even if I didnāt feel that way, I still donāt think it really works. When people get into shootouts in the streets, that affects my safety. When drug users hang out in the park, I donāt feel comfortable letting my child play there. When people have wanton sex with whoever and donāt have the commitment to stick around and parent together, that decreases the amount of suitable partners for my kids when they reach that age. Other peoplesā choices affects the society me and my loved ones live in, and thereās no escaping that reality.
I think this is where personal views and politics begin to intersect in a way that doesnāt actually marry. Youāre projecting your religious belief on to a political platform, which is your prerogative, but I would make a case that Christians are all actually liberals at heart. Or at least by stated belief. Especially where entitlement programs enter the picture. But the outward expression is policing from God mode around lifestyle choices instead. At least to my non-religious eye.
I would add that people should be free to do as they please until they are harming another in the classic sense of conservatism, which of course is a can-of-worms of a line to draw, with significant manipulations around āharmā to circle back to DEI.
We still end up paying unless you simply execute them.
I know how you feel but donāt expect most Americans to understand how you feel. I know youāre American, as am I, but you see things from a different historical and cultural perspective than most Americans. They donāt comprehend the idea of belonging to a people. Saying youāre a citizen of a nation and saying you belong to a people are not the same thing.
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