I had really only one thought once I read "enough" about the Fort Worth shooting: Why was this guy slotted to be deployed in the first place? Seems like if the FBI is looking at him, even casually, and his colleagues seem somewhat alarmed by him, then why was he either still in the army even in a specialist role and more importantly, why was he being shipped off to a war zone?
The next thought once I ran through the "logic" of all that and got no real answer that wasn't stifled by bureaucracy: so you can be an insane radical and serve in the military, something I already knew because we let all the Christianists who want in too (Blackwater ends up with them when they're done it seems), but you can't be gay? Because certainly a gay comrade is far worse for unit morale and cohesion than being shot at in your own base by your own comrades.
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I think that about sums it up.
It's getting worse every time I read it. But it's sort of like the story back when we first invaded Iraq.
I recall the following scenarios Which would have been worse:
1) That they had WMDs that we didn't find, got moved, etc?
2) That they didn't have them and we were snookered (which is what actually happened)
3) They did have them, we found them, and then we weren't told about it?
The present situation
1) They knew the guy was crazy...and did.. nothing?
2) They looked at the guy and somehow determined he wasn't crazy.
3) They looked at the guy, determined he was crazy, and then catch-22'd the whole thing by trying to ship him off. Figuring he may as well blow up some part of a hostile territory while he's at it.
I'm guessing #2 is the right answer again. When in doubt, assume the government is capable of enormous amounts of incompetence.
I'd agree completely if you replaced 'government' with 'people' and the corresponding 'is to are' correction for grammatical harmony, of course. Most large collections of people display enormous amounts of incompetence: banks, fortune 500 companies, religions, unions, etc: all have shown their fair share of stupidity across the ages. Granted, governments often exhibit a particular flavor of stupidity, different from other large organizations, but I think that's mainly due to the specific conditions which must be met in order for that organization to be called a government, i.e. the powers it has, for example. Other institutions, because of their conditions, exhibit other flavors.
Oh, and to note, I know very little about any of the details about the shooting. I was speaking more on general terms.
"Oh of course you haven't, I was speaking in generalities." I've only known what I heard on NPR and BBC and snippets gleaned passing through my usual blog roll. It's not exactly a story I have a great deal of interest in other than it provides further evidence of incompetence.
But it is true. People, in their collective glory, are often insane. Governments tend to be able to affect more now, today, than many other institutions and organisations, but they're hardly alone in propping up wonderful examples of the human spirit.
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