I know, that's why I said "new" After he was corrected, several times. It's moot of course since characters in a story act as the story needs them to, I'm just sayin'
My cousin posted this to Facebook (I think I've seen it mentioned, either here or elsewhere): "Dear God, How can You allow such violence to occur in our schools? Against children so young? Signed, A Concerned Parent Dear Concerned Parent, I was told to stay out of your schools, that I was no longer welcome... and out of my love for you I have honored that request. Signed, God" My first reaction: your God sounds like a petty dick.
Most of this stuff seems like straightforward de-friend-for-own-mental-well-being stuff in a cut and dried way.
He's family; that'd make Christmas dinner awkward. One thing that is interesting: obviously a lot of liberals are going react to this tragedy as a cause celebre to talk about gun control (or rather, gun safety). That's understandable; and in general I think that's OK. Agree or not, the gun safety thing is a policy issue that people feel strongly about and shootings like this raise legitimate policy questions. On the other hand, the conservative reaction (that I've seen) is mostly to use this as an opportunity to air some resentment against liberals, often on totally unrelated grounds. You see it in the two tidbits I've posted to this thread in the past two days from my cousin; his reaction to this thing is almost entirely framed in terms of his resentment of liberals rather than any particular policy issue. I find that to be a really common feature of the modern conservative movement. It's motivated less than a desire to see particular policy outcomes and more by simple resentment. Frankly it's a deeply ugly feature of our politics.
It's a facebook quote, family's family, and my opining here is pointless internet forum commentary, but my own feeling is if one of my less favourite cousins started posting shit stupid enough I'd politely cut them from their ability to insert stupid shit into my day to day consciousness. They still get their bail posted or bone marrow transplants or whatever other familial duties come up but I'm not rolling out the red carpet for their shit-exposition via the internet.
I don't think it makes it that awkward. It just encourages your relative to not bring up religion/politics. You might have to do it a couple of times before the lesson sinks in properly, though. I speak from experience.
I'm pretty sure I first saw this email forward after Columbine. Then as now, you're probably a dick if your first reaction after hearing about a bunch of murdered children is to blame it on people who believe in a separation of church and state, and you're probably a moron if you don't realize that that anecdote makes the god you believe in out to be a monster who willfully allows children to be murdered for political reasons, even though his normal MO would totally be to step in and save them, as evidenced by the historical lack of tragedy in places and times that have no such separation.
He generally keeps his wacky political views to facebook; where it mostly just leaves me shaking my head. In person he's quite enjoyable to be around; I have no idea how he ended up turning into such a raving Fox-News loving lunatic politically.
Christmas dinners are meant to be awkward! (although in our family it was xmas eve with relatives, xmas day just nuclear family)
Looks like at least one of my brothers has started recirculating shit from my dad and step-mom (whose own emails I keep filtered). So, thanks to him I have a little more to share: EDIT: Oh, there were two: Looks like this one also originated from my step-mother & father, but it's one my brother apparently decided to forward to everybody in his address book. Here's his second one: BTW, my brother is now a father, and his daughter is just over a year old. Unlike the hands-off & ignore approach I take with my parents and extended family, all people I'm perfectly happy to see spin off into the oblivion of paranoid insanity, now I'm feeling conflicted. There's no way I'd feel okay about letting my brother continue on in this fashion now that he has a little girl to raise. I'm not a father, and have no plans to be, and I would never want to tell him how to raise his daughter, plus I reeeeaaaaally don't want to get involved in his shit... but by all indication there's literally nobody else I can think of who'd be willing to even try. Ugh. These are both just a couple small examples of where his head is at today, they're just the ones I happen to have in print.
Is your brother suggesting abolishing the need for parental signatures for field trips? That's pretty progressive. Lizard King doesn't even remember Cop Killer! Actually, I think most people don't considering I never heard about people trying to boycott Law and Order SVU.
The same "you can't compete with this person's umpteen different stupid koolaid feeder-bottles" logic applies whether or not you have an extra reason to wish someone wasn't heading off into wingnutland, Kerzain. It just sucks a lot more.
Yeah, but I demobilized it from being on my jerbaphone! Then you swoop in here and take all the likes that by my hard work should've gone to me. Just like a liberal parasite.
Nobody's used a blergphone since 2008, jesus, where have you been? I bet you still use their BBM service, don't you?
