I'm honestly rather confused about the NRA stance (or lack thereof) with regards to mental health.

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people." OK. So... Wouldn't it make sense to go after those people that are the problem, then? Crazies with guns equals pressure to take away the guns from everybody, which is exactly what you don't want. Wouldn't mild inconvenience of background checks / licensing be better than bans? (from NRA perspective)

@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.

Possible, but I don't really think so. I think that the Medical minds of the time thought that physical shock, pressure waves from bombing etc. as you described, were a (or perhaps THE) primary cause of the psychological problems of returning soldiers. So the name "shell shock" came from there, but the symptoms that it was describing were psychological and, I think precisely equal to modern PTSD. Basically, "shell shock" became a polite euphemism for "soldier that got mentally messed up in the war and is having difficulty returning to civilian life".

My grandfather was an Army Air Corps armorer during WWII. He went through basic training, but his primary job was loading ammunition, bombs, external gas tanks, etc. onto P-47 airplanes. He was never in a direct combat situation, as I would describe it. He was never shot at, never in the shockwave radius of explosions, etc. But after the war he was described as having mild "shell shock", manifested by being withdrawn, not wanting to talk about the war, and occasionally prone to angry outbursts over seemingly trivial things. Eventually, he started talking about the war in his mid 80's, and here's a few relevant (perhaps) stories of his:

He joined the European theater a couple days after D-Day. Came to shore on a Normandy beach in the same sort of landing craft seen in Saving Private Ryan, etc. Even though it was days later, there were still LOTS of bodies on the beach, and thick smell of death. Welcome to the war!

His fighter group took over a French farm house adjacent to a dirt landing strip / runway. They put up a barbed wire perimeter with a gate on the road. In one of the only times I heard of him having a firearm and being expected to potentially use it, he pulled guard duty at that gate one evening. His commanding officer gave him orders to shoot anyone that couldn't provide identification on sight. While he was standing guard, a woman in her 20's rolled up on a bicycle, somewhat distraught. She spoke no English, only French. She clearly wanted to get in, and even tried to push past my grandfather. By the letter of his orders, he was "supposed" to shoot her. Instead, he knocked her off her bike when she tried to ride past after getting nowhere verbally and physically restrained her. At gunpoint! When someone that spoke French got there, it turned out that she was the daughter of the family that lived in the farm house. They had no food, and she was coming back to get some potatoes they had left in the larder.

Riding trains was a common way to get air corps support staff up to near the front, and also to get everybody back to transport ships at the end of the war. On one of those journeys later in the war, my grandfather was riding in an open train car with a bunch of his buddies. They were all given meals at the start of the trip. A short while later, the track went through a French town. A bunch of civilians were waiting around the tracks begging for food. I'll never forgot my grandfather describing that scene. It was tough for him to get out, and then all he managed was "they was starvin'!" He later explained that he and his buddies all gave up the food that they had to those people in the first town -- only to have none left to give as they rolled past similar scenes in each town on down the line.

When my mother was growing up, she and her brothers learned that they'd better not leave any food on their plates to go to waste. She has said that the angriest she ever saw her dad was when her brothers got into a food fight one time, and my grandfather went ballistic. They couldn't really figure out what the big deal was, until years later when my grandfather started telling his war stories and suddenly things made more sense.


A lot of guys had a much rougher war than my grandfather. Way more direct combat. Saw stuff much worse -- and had to DO things that were hard to live with. I think the psychological fallout of stuff like that explains the vast majority of "shell shock", without the addition of CTE-like physical head trauma. I'd wager that when the docs said Stewart's father's shell shock was a reaction to aerial bombardment, that was really just a face-saving measure to try to explain away the perceived "weakness" of his condition.

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@newtboy -
I like / agree with your take on each of the 4 issues, but 4 really is easier said than done.

Having skills and making yourself invaluable happens quite slowly over time, and only if the arbiter correctly recognizes that value. I think capitalism has such a stranglehold on modern life that minor variations in short term profit/loss potential get overvalued while major intangible things (or at least, less tangible in quarterly reports) get ignored.

And just in general, everybody needs a job or purpose, but we can't ALL stand out and be invaluable. Eagles may soar to great heights, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines. Sometimes steady adequacy is, well, adequate.

Thinking that the world owes us happiness is a character flaw, but "checking out" by half-assing or phoning it in is a fairly rational response to a system that doesn't give a fuck about us as individuals, even those that DO go the extra mile. Fix the system (to the extent that it can be), and better results would follow.

Tom Cruise may be crazy, but damn is he a hard working actor. I don't think anybody can question his commitment to his projects. Everybody who works with him says he's like a machine when he's on the job, just solely focused on getting the shot and making the movie as entertaining as possible.

Stuff like this any other actor would get a stunt double to do, but he's said repeatedly that he always wants to do the stunts himself if possible because he feels the audience can tell when the doubles take over. And the stuntmen totally respect him because at this point in his career he's as good at it as any veteran stuntman.

I wonder though if Tom Cruise movies have higher insurance costs because he insists on doing his own stunts.

Geeze, where the heck WAS everybody?

Not everybody realizes that song was based on a real person.


http://calgarysun.com/2016/09/24/how-a-ping-pong-ball-act-excited-both-western-canadian-bar-patrons-and-the-rcmp/wcm/a58db82c-da97-4812-a3c9-c5e85d49c
4d3

To be fair, it wasn't just David. Almost everybody got a shot in and those that didn't looked somewhat bewildered by it all.

Oh well, I've not heard of any feng shui experts claiming that rearranging your living room can cure cancer, so I'm going to put in the "mostly harmless bullshit" column. Also there is something to be said for really good interior design, so maybe that's how he started off before he realised he could charge a different type of client more for the same thing if he said some shit about energy flows.

I think I see things more jadedly than you do.

Here's what I see of the situation. On a nation state level, nobody cares about the Palestinians. The Palestinians only influence on the chess board is their suffering. All of their 'allies' like Syria, Egypt and Iran don't care about the Palestinians for anything more than making sure that they suffer, the greater and the more public that suffering the better propaganda it makes. Israel and it's allies only care about the Palestinians in so far as that same suffering makes them look bad and sways public opinion as well. The threat from the Palestinians is a police and humanitarian matter, not a military one.

So everybody with boots on the ground doesn't care about the Palestinians. The Israeli side will take what they want as long as public opinion isn't too onerous on it. The Arab nations will actively arm, encite and push the Palestinians from peace to violence at ever turn because it ensures they serve their 'purpose' of public suffering better.

I count exactly zero hope for a two state solution reached between Palestinian and Israeli's as equals. A future of the region where the Palestinian people are afforded a better future either in a province of Israel, or their own state created under terms dictated to it by Israel I see as at least an existent possibility. I honestly believe seeking something more is simply not a possibility because NOBODY wants it. The Israeli's don't, the Palestinians allies don't, even the Palestinians themselves don't.

You seem to think maybe the parties can be made to change their minds on that, but it runs contrary to their self interests.

Israel gains nothing by backing down and negotiating as equals for a two state solution.

Palestine's 'allies' actually lose out greatly in any resolution to the status quo because it currently ties down Israel and makes for great propaganda. They'd lose that and gain nothing in return but less suffering for the Palestinians whom they don't care about.

Palestinians themselves might be persuaded to change their minds, but the only ones swaying their public opinion are their 'allies' with a vested interested in making sure they continue to fight forever for all of Palestine and not settle for two states. Additionally, for all intents and purposes their opinions don't matter anyways because they lack the power to make a meaningful difference.

None of the above is my opinion on how I would like things to be, nor how I think they should be, but rather how I see it actually looking. Nation state actions can usually be stripped down to narrow self interest and naught else. The exceptions are failures of the state representation, like say a dictator choosing their personal interest over a national one, or a buffoon blundering off into idiotic random actions...

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I think it's an ugly necessity.

Equality isn't about treating everybody the same. I mean, I wish we could do that, but then I wish people wouldn't decide if they are going to hire somebody from their very first glance. But that's what we do. We do nothing and we simply allow our unconscious bias to rule our decision making which, in most cases, would be great for somebody like me.

I mean, I don't like it. I can understand entirely why people feel they have been cheated when somebody gets a job or promotion ahead of them just for the sake of ticking a diversity checkbox. Maybe you're right, maybe it is just adding energy to that pendulum, but then a pendulum without resistance swings forever. I hope conscious decisions to readdress imbalanced caused by unconscious bias works more as a dampening effect, as resistance.

Back to semantics. Like the woman in the video, I probably had quite a knee-jerk response to men's rights. Sometimes probably warranted, but then some feminists have some pretty dumb things to say as well. Anyway, the person that helped changed by mind about it was a woman and a feminist. Don't define a group by it's most extreme edges because I think it just leads you to make uncharitable judgements about people that identify as part of that group before you've even really listened to them.

That's OK. I mean, everybody's a pervert. I'm a pervert, we're all perverts. Who cares?

I think everybody advocating for even more gun control needs to put a nice 24" sign on their yard saying "This home not protected by firearms." For some reason most people hesitate to do that. It's like herd immunity for viruses. General gun ownership keeps everybody safer even if they don't own one, criminals don't like to confront armed people.

"By comparing criminal victimization surveys from Britain and the Netherlands (countries having low levels of gun ownership) with the U.S., Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck determined that if the U.S. were to have similar rates of "hot" burglaries as these other nations, there would be more than 450,000 additional burglaries per year where the victim was threatened or assaulted. (Britain and the Netherlands have a "hot" burglary rate near 45% versus just under 13% for the U.S., and in the U.S. a victim is threatened or attacked 30% of the time during a "hot" burglary.)"

i think you guys are missing the point of this video.this video was not produced for YOU.

this is a dog whistle video for those who identify as "right" leaning politically,and may be on the fence in regards to the alt-right.they may adhere to more conservative and traditional values but find the alt-right a tad to extreme,a tad too racist and neo-fascist.

and they most likely already find "leftists" and "liberals" offensive to their political sensibilities.

and here we have a video showing "lefties" perpetrating violence on innocent,rightwing by-standers..you know..their peeps.

so you watch with indignation and disbelief,while the rightwingers watches in horror and fear.this video is meant to do just that:instill fear and prompt a person to action and to view this action as righteous self-defense.

this is identity politics,pure and simple.

and now we have TWO extremists groups growing,and BOTH are convinced of their righteous convictions that THEY have a RIGHT..no..a DUTY..to perpetrate violence in the name of their ideology.

well,it is not EVERYBODY..

yeah..no shit sherlock.we get that.
not everyone is a neo-fascist,racist,super white nationalist.

nor are they all communists and black bloc anarchists.

but it IS those two groups who have adopted extremist ideologies that in their little pea brains have given them the moral authority to fuck some people up.

and THIS fucking video is a goddamn recruitment video for the neo-fascists!

communists and black bloc anarchists on my left..
racist neo fascists on my right..
here i am...
stuck in the middle...

*related=https://videosift.com/video/ANTIFA-is-a-major-gift-to-the-right