by JanieM
A “disgruntled employee” killed two Walmart colleagues and wounded a responding police officer Tuesday in far northwest Mississippi, authorities said.
RIP:
Anthony Brown, of Olive Branch
Brandon Gales, of Hernando
Both men were managers at the store, family members said.
*****
The Gilroy festival victims:
Stephen Romero, 6, of San Jose
Keyla Salazar, 13, of San Jose
Trevor Irby, 25, of Romulus, N.Y.
*****
A man killed (shot twice in the back) in a petty dispute at the Walmart in Auburn, Maine, last Saturday:
Jean Fournier, 41, of Turner
*****
No names yet from El Paso.
It’s enough to make one wonder whether Walmart might want to rethink selling guns and ammunition at its stores generally. They have apparently stopped selling guns in New Mexico recently, and they stopped doing so in California years ago, so it wouldn’t be a totally novel idea.
So hard, after all, to get repeat sales to dead customers….
Walmart is probably afraid of the Moron Labe backlash that would come down on them if they did.
Walmart is probably afraid of the Moron Labe backlash that would come down on them if they did.
Still, if they’ve already stopped selling guns in some states, maybe they could do it in others. CVS stopped selling cigarettes five years ago and the world didn’t end for them.
And anyhow, if both white power terrorists and brainless punks (the Auburn ME incident) are using your properties to slaughter people, maybe it’s time to rethink the trade-offs.
Yes, but in both CA and NM they could frame their decision to stop selling firearms and ammunition as a decision to reject the states’ regulatory regimes. But there is no way to spin a withdrawal from the market in response to violence that lets you blame things on governmental overreach. It would be seen as a traitorous defection in the midst of the culture war.
It would be seen as a traitorous defection in the midst of the culture war.
Sometimes, you have to do what you have to do.
Because customers are important to a business. And the number of potential customers desiring to shop without getting shot is rather larger than the number who would be seriously offended by being no longer able to buy from you the means to shoot other customers.
I agree. I’m just trying to parse out the particular bind that this decision will put them in, and how it is different from their more limited decisions in select states.
I think I’d see it as a matter of hitting a tipping point. Scattered attrition to the customer base is (apparently) quite tolerable. But a sufficiently large spurt of losses, in a short time period, starts to look a lot less tolerable.
Especially if it occurs to you that, because you seem to have become a popular site for shootings, your customets cost/benefit calculations could start coming up less in your favor. How big a dollar savings is required to compensate your customers for how big a (perceived) increase in the chances you you and yours getting shot?
So it turns out the shooter wrote an anti immigrant manifesto. And now all the claims from the right that this has absolutely nothing to do with Trump’s hatemongering or the complicity of the rest of the party with his hatemongering or the participation of the rightwing “news” in promoting not only his hatemongering but hate directed outward toward the rest of us for years and years and years.
Romney had the nerve to tweet that he didn’t understand where someone could get such a dark sick idea as to shoot all those people. SO shut the fuck up Romney you gutless asshole. YOu know exactly where he got his ideas.
Americans valorize violence. It is, to a disturbing degree, seen as an acceptable way to resolve conflict. And, it is almost absurdly easy for anyone to buy quite powerful firearms.
Unsurprisingly, we shoot ourselves and each other in shocking numbers. And then find ourselves shocked by it.
All of this is profoundly sad. I can’t, or maybe just don’t want to, imagine the pain of having lived ones torn out of their, and our, lives so pointlessly.
Some people just want to see the world burn. Here in the US, we’ll sell those people guns.
Thank you, Janie, for posting the names. These were just people going about their lives, and their lives were taken from them. They should not be forgotten.
Loved ones, not lived ones.
You know, almost immediately after I started posting at ObWi, I got into a fight with Slarti about guns. It had actually never occurred to me that any reasonable, sane people (such as I knew from observation to constitute the ObWi commentariat) could possibly support America’s gun laws. And to tell you the truth, it still amazes me. I had thought that the existence of all those other “free”*, democratic countries getting along just fine without guns would prove that you didn’t need access to firearms to guarantee freedom from tyranny, or anything else. I had failed to allow for, among other things, the fact that when people are used to a right, they will object to it being taken away, particularly when they have absorbed so much propaganda about what that right really represents.
*Depending on your definition of freedom, of course. I could quote the great Randy Newman again for just one example of the USA’s vaunted freedom:
From nbcnews.com:
In this way, we ensure that we can never discuss gun policy, because there are always bodies that haven’t been recovered yet: early the next morning in Dayton. Many more names to follow.
*****
GftNC: you didn’t need access to firearms to guarantee freedom from tyranny
It depends what you mean by tyranny. It’s tyranny if you’re not allowed to grab far more than a fair share of the goodies, but it’s not tyranny if you can get shot at the grocery store by some random asshole. It’s tyranny if you have to share the city park with some gay or brown people, but it’s not tyranny if the gay or brown people have to live in fear of you, because they aren’t really fully human, after all, and it’s your country and your world, not theirs, so there. And so on.
“In less than one minute, Dayton first responders neutralized the shooter,” Whaley said.
Hey, since there were good guys with guns (in this case, the police), only nine people died. What’s not to like?
It’s tyranny if any given individual can’t own enough weaponry to wipe out the Continental Army. It’s not tyranny if you can’t go to the grocery store without being butchered.
Repeating, from the Texas governor: “We need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics.”
As with tyranny, a convenient assertion of the right to control definitions, and to tailor them to one’s own ends.
Mass slaughter with assault weapons is politics, quite overtly in cases like El Paso. So these cynical assertions that it’s the people who would like an end to the bloodletting are the ones using the slaughter for political ends are (I’m just repeating the obvious) making sure debate never happens. Thanks in part to the Parkland kids, and the overreach of the criminal cabal at the NRA, maybe the tide is turning.
Rankings.
Collective insanity.
And this is without getting into the really big numbers, the daily drip drip drop of murders and suicides that would happen in a country that wasn’t drowning (or bleeding to death) in firepower, like that one at the Auburn Walmart last weekend.
7:57: that “wouldn’t” happen in a country….
*****
tyranny: When you can’t go to the grocery store or your place of worship or a concert or to school without fear of getting massacred by some punk with a theory of the superiority of what he imagines to be his kind of people.
said it before, i’ll say it again: the 2nd amendment’s widest, most-felt, effect is the copper-plated guarantee that most people must live with the constant fear of being shot by a random asshole with a gun.
“Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights”
Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber
GftNC, to each country its madness. For Germans it is football (soccer to our US readers) on non-pay TV and freedom of the road for cars. There have been actual attempts to have our highest court declare free football on TV a human right and speed limits on the Autobahn unconstitutional. At least one RW extremist party made it part of the party platfom to get rid of 30 km/h zones in-town. Not enough kids run over by speeders, it seems.
The classic slogan is “Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger” (free (=unregulated) driving for free citizens).
Funny how across cultures, “freedom” always means “freedom to do things.” I think we ought to generate a global campaign to add nuance, so that “freedom from things” (like the murderous hobbies of our neighbors) is just as important.
FDR tried to get the point across:
Freedom of speech
Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
Just another part of his legacy that the right is bent on destroying.
In Orwell’s newspeak ‘free(dom)’ still exists but is very narrowly defined ex negativo as an absence (‘the doog is free of fleas’).
I had thought that the existence of all those other “free”*, democratic countries getting along just fine without guns would prove that you didn’t need access to firearms to guarantee freedom from tyranny, or anything else.
The extent to which the average American is flat out ignorant of other countries can be difficult for those from elsewhere to wrap their heads around. Ignorance of what gun laws actually are elsewhere. Ignorance of how much (or little) tyranny other people tolerate. Generally clueless.
You don’t have to look at gun laws to see it. Just listen to our discussions about health care. We’re not talking about what kind of system would avoid the problems that other countries’ systems have (and they do have them); we’re starting from “first principles”. And the detail that nobody else in the world pays anything like our drug prices? The average American would be astonished; at most, he would posit huge government subsidies, with the drug companies getting the same amounts.
Jordan Anchondo
More on her life, rather than her death, when that information becomes available.
Apparently the RWers are already all over the media blathering about mental illness and other murderous deflective nonsense.
This is how it’s going to end. Or has ended, because really, we’re already in a civil war, cleverly obscured as such by the main perpetrators, who have constructed an elaborate plausible deniability built around inciting stupid young men to shoot up public spaces. Of course it may well get much worse, which will be the perfect excuse to move on to the phase that Nous mentioned yesterday.
Fine, lets make it about mental illness.
Require a psych workup before you can buy a gun.
So glad to live in a country where, if you feel like someone is taking away your freedom, you have the right to murder your way back to freedom again.
USA – we’re apparently the only country in the world with mentally ill citizens!
let’s flood the country with guns!
Arturo Benavides
Dayton victims
More when more information is available.
ADL:
but really it’s the left’s fault for trying to make the US a safer place for people who aren’t male white Christian right-wing assholes (redundancy is free today).
“Require a psych workup before you can buy a gun.”
Require one before you sell and/or manufacture a gun. If the suspect passes that test, all the more reason to prohibit their actions.
“You passed the sanity test. Now feel free to go do something insane, like manufacture and sell firearms.”
Require that every person who applies to purchase a gun be shot in one foot first, right there in the fucking store. Let them hop around hollering just for a taste.
If they still want to buy a gun after recovering from that, require that they bring a close relative along the next time for a flesh wound in the thigh.
Maybe un-insurable sepsis will set in.
Christian America believes in human sacrifice at the alter of the Second Amendment.
Their absolute, unwavering certainly on this matter is reinforced ideological rebar self-shoved up their fundaments, the better to stand athwart humane sanity in this unrecoverable country and yell “No!” at it.
In a malign reversal of the Scriptural metaphor of the predicament of Abraham and Isaac, wherein Yahveh the trickster fools Abraham into sacrificing a lamb (“kabobs!” stage coughed the Lord’s messenger in the nick of time, like the bohunk murderous, racist oaf presently befouling the linen in the White House lifting a tariff threat at the last moment, just for sadistic yucks) instead of his human son, mutton in this country rejoice and gambol free at America’s murderous insistence on carrying through with mass human sacrifice because of a misreading of three ambiguous commas in a fucking Amendment.
Several of the human beings who survived the Garlic Festival massacre, all very late term fetuses, whose deaths stinking conservatives would view merely as further down payment on their ballistics technology freedom, also survived the Las Vegas Country Music Festival massacre.
No doubt at least one of them decided to relax and visit a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas as well, and when the shooting started there thought to themselves, on the whole I’d rather be in Dayton Ohio enjoying a cold one.
What’s more, the authorities (of what, law? What fucking laws?) in El Paso suspect some of the gunshot victims and survivors who are immigrants ran and crawled away from the scene of the carnage because of fear that the Comanche Republican Conservative ICE fascists would visit further indignities upon them if they were caught alive.
All of that is some sick endemically American pig shit.
Innocent Americans, mostly moderates and liberals, are now like V-2 rocket target Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrup in Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”, psychically wearing homing devices for Nazi rockets and now conservative Republican vermin bullets.
The Governor of Texas and the rest of the conservative movement, its politicians, NRA deaththink tanks, and lickspittle media, once again gauging American citizens’ right to speak out against the weapons regime by the rapidly cooling body temperatures of the dead (not yet, not yet, the organs haven’t even been removed yet) whose sacrificed blood is on their hands count on one thing: principled liberals won’t shoot them dead as they goddamned fucking deserve.
What this country needs is fewer principles and better knife skills.
Texas Republicans are blaming the removal of prayer from schools for the murders.
Presumably because kneeling, praying students and teachers, like all of the praying churchgoers scragged with weapons distributed by the conservative movement in this country, make for even more unsuspecting and supine targets to boost NRA membership and pay for those NRA trips to the local strip clubs and the mag wheels on the hot cars.
I’m calling for the murderers to stop praying before they set out to kill
You go, Janie.
Certainty never sounded better.
Apparently the RWers are already all over the media blathering about mental illness and other murderous deflective nonsense.
Right up until someone wants to spend money addressing mental health problems. Then that becomes “political correctness” (and probably “socialism” somehow).
Another RW theme seems to be: you Dems are politicizing when we should all be coming together to grieve.
It is typical of Republicans to dodge responsibility just as it is typical to define unity and coming together as joining with them on their terms.
We need to put the blame on Trump and the Republican party and be relentless in our assertion of blame.
This next series is from this article.
Derrick R. Fudge, 57
Fudge was a Springfield, Ohio, resident who was visiting the Oregon District with his son, his niece Asia Fudge told NPR.
“He had a dog … that he loved dearly. … He was fun, happy,” Asia Fudge said. He is survived by five siblings and his extended family.
“Everyone’s just trying to come together and get through it as best as we can,” his niece said.
Lois L. Oglesby, 27
Oglesby was in nursing school and was the mother of two children, according to a friend quoted in the Dayton Daily News. She had recently returned from maternity leave. “She was a wonderful mother, a wonderful person,” Derasha Merrett told the newspaper. “I have cried so much, I can’t cry anymore.”
Megan K. Betts, 22
Betts, the shooter’s sister, was a student at Wright State University studying earth and environmental sciences. According to her LinkedIn page, she spent the past four months as a tour guide at the Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center in Montana, where visitors learn about fighting fires in remote areas with no roads.
Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl told reporters that the siblings came together to the city’s Oregon District before the attack, though the brother separated from his sister and another friend at some point in the evening. Biehl said that Betts was one of the first people killed in the attack and that their friend was among the injured.
When asked about the family, Biehl said, “I think you can imagine this is a nightmare for them, and I think they are struggling, as you can understand.”
Logan M. Turner, 30
Turner was a resident of Springboro, Ohio, and a machinist at the Thaler Machine Co., according to his Linkedin page. His mother, Danita Turner, told the Dayton Daily News that he was out on Saturday night in the Oregon District with his friends to celebrate his recent 30th birthday.
“He was very generous and loving and the world’s best son,” Turner’s mother told the newspaper. “Everyone loved Logan. He was a happy-go-lucky guy.”
Turner’s mother said he was a graduate of Sinclair Community College and the University of Toledo, where he had studied engineering.
Nicholas P. Cumer, 25
Cumer was a graduate student in the master of cancer care program at Saint Francis University in Loretto, Penn., according to a statement released by the school on Sunday afternoon.
“Nicholas was dedicated to caring for others,” wrote the university’s president, Malachi Van Tassell. “He was recognized at the 2019 Community Engagement Awards among students who had completed 100+ hours of service. In addition he was a graduate assistant with the university marching band.”
Cumer had been in Dayton this summer completing an internship program with the Maple Tree Cancer Alliance.
Thomas J. McNichols, 25
McNichols was a father of four from Dayton, according to the Dayton Daily News. His two daughters and two sons range from ages 2 to 8. His aunt, Donna Johnson, told the newspaper that everyone regarded him as a “gentle giant.”
Jevin Lamar, a cousin of McNichols, told the New York Times that McNichols, who went by Teejay, was “a great father, a great brother — he was a protector.”
Johnson said McNichols attended Dunbar High School in the city and worked at a Dayton factory. She added that McNichols went to the Oregon District on Saturday night with a cousin.
Monica E. Brickhouse, 39
Brickhouse hailed from Springfield, Ohio and lived in Virginia Beach, Va., according to her social media profiles. She worked as a recovery specialist for Anthem, her LinkedIn profile states. Her Facebook profile also advertises a design, event planning and catering business called “Two Good Girls.”
Brickhouse attended Springfield South High School and the College for America at Southern New Hampshire University, according to her LinkedIn page.
Saeed Saleh, 38
Beatrice N. Warren-Curtis, 36
Not much information available yet.
Mentally ill New York City man who said “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any of my voters” claims he’s losing his deplorable subhuman mentally and conservatively ill voters one at a time because they keep shooting people at his and the Republican Party’s urging.
Commenter on a thread at The Mentally Ill American Conservative claims El Paso killer said on 8Chan that he was not influenced by mentally ill President’s hateful, racist rhetoric, and we should always believe the shooter, even if he is mentally ill, unless they are a woman who has been molested.
“Romney had the nerve to tweet that he didn’t understand where someone could get such a dark sick idea as to shoot all those people”
Just saw a Yahoo story quoting Trump saying there is no place for hatred in this country.
So yes, these people are slimy hypocrites and in Trump’s case he should be impeached for incitement ( the attack on the Squad and other things).
But it is also good that they still feel the need to be hypocritical. Because I imagine Trump’s first instinct might be to double down in his rhetoric and then we might start seeing pogroms. Though no need to reference Russian history, as the US was doing the same sorts of things in the same time period, though with different ethnic groups as victims.
This next series comes from this article.
Jordan and Andre Anchondo
[Jordan was mentioned above. Her husband died too.]
Jordan Anchondo and her husband, Andre Anchondo, were fatally shot while shopping for back-to-school supplies, her sister Leta Jamrowski said.
Jordan Anchondo, a 25-year-old mother of three, was probably shot while she was shielding her 2-month-old son from the gunfire, her sister said. The baby was treated Saturday at the University Medical Center of El Paso for broken bones.
“When she got shot she was holding him and she fell on him, so that’s why he broke some of his bones,” Jamrowski said. “So he pretty much lived because she gave her life.”
My heart is so fucking torn right now. Jordan gave her life protecting her child. I hope you are resting easy in knowing you saved your baby boy.
I am praying you are in recovery, Andre. My heart goes out to you. All of El Paso is here for you and those beautiful babies. pic.twitter.com/efTALC7I9v
— Benjamin Thompson (@benjaminjamess_) August 4, 2019
Andre Anchondo’s brother confirmed his death on Facebook.
His friend, Benjamin Thompson, said the two had recently rekindled their friendship and that he had “just finished building a home for his family (with his own two hands nonetheless.)”
Thompson, who had not met his friend’s wife, said that from what he’d heard about Jordan Anchondo she seemed to be a “happy and family-fueled mother.”
The Anchondos married a little more than a year ago, and Thompson said Andre Anchondo was thrilled when he found out his wife was pregnant with a son.
“There was no happier moment in his life and you could tell,” Thompson said. “What happened to their new beautiful family is devastating.”
Jessica Coca Garcia and Memo Garcia
PS to the above: The Garcias were injured but are still alive. Maybe their children will be able to grow up with parents who are alive.
Javier Rodriguez
Sara Esther Regalado and Adolfo Cerros Hernández
More from Mexico:
Sunday in Chicago.
attention “conservatives”: if you want to keep your guns, police yourselves. now.
via LGM.
I’m getting tired of the “don’t blame guns” formulation I keep seeing. What the hell does that even mean?
It means the same as ‘too soon’…
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/el-paso-dayton-shootings-too-soon-guns-white-supremacy-terror.html
.. or “nothing to see here”.
Chantell Grant and Andrea Stoudemire…
What the hell does that even mean?
he was ccrrrraaaaayyyyyyzzeee.
murder is already illegal!
knives!
cars!
sunspots!
in any case, nothing could be done. time to move on.
A couple of dozen mass shootings ago, I pissed off Slarti by saying that we need to make guns as embarrassing to own as inflatable sex dolls or something. Note that “we” is not The Government. It’s each of us, personally, in our dealings with friends and relatives in Real Life.
Slarti was good and pissed, then. I don’t know how he feels now. But I also said (maybe in a different mass shooting thread) that my contempt for “responsible gun owners” would increase with every outrage. And it has.
–TP
Dana Loesch: The real problem is mental illness!!!
Also Dana Loesch: Hooray! El Paso prosecutors will seek the death penalty, these people need to be deterred!
What the hell does that even mean?
It’s an attempt to obscure or deflect from the issue.
Everybody knows that guns don’t autonomously shoot people. Everybody knows that some human actor is responsible for killing other people with firearms.
What gun advocates want to say is, I use my gun responsibly, I didn’t shoot that guy, why should my rights and privileges be infringed in any way by other people’s criminal or irresponsible or insane behavior?
That’s a great question. Let’s address it.
I’ll start with an analogy. In MA we recently had an incident in which a guy who is a MA resident, and has a MA drivers’ license, was cited in another state for dangerous driving. The other state informed the MA RMV of this. The MA RMV failed to follow up and take action.
The guy ended up killing 7 motorcyclists in NH.
Gee, what should we do to prevent things like this?
We could take everyone’s car away. Or we could exercise greater oversight and discretion about who gets to drive.
We’re probably going to go with plan B.
Nearly all of the proposals for addressing the fucking horror show of gun violence in the US are of the plan B type. The one exception is the on again / off again attempt to ban assault weapons. More on that in a minute.
What people who aren’t fucking gun nuts are asking for are:
* universal background checks
* no exemption from universal background checks for private sales
* limits on the number of bullets that can be loaded into a clip or magazine
* some ability for local law enforcement to take someone’s guns away if they deem that person a threat to other’s safety
And yes, I know there is a difference between a clip and a magazine, and no I can’t tell you what it is without going and looking it up, and no the fact that I can’t do that has not one fucking shred of relevance to the issues we are discussing. The issue is how many rounds a shooter can fire without having to reload the firearm, and gun advocates by god fucking well know it.
The above restrictions are roughly analogous to:
* You have to demonstrate that you can safely operate a car before we’ll let you drive one legally
* No, you can’t give your car to your 14 year old nephew and claim you’re just “passing along your legacy”
* No, you can’t sell your car to J random stranger without transferring the title so that the RMV knows who owns the car
* No, you can’t put a freaking jet engine in your car and drive it on the street
* If you drive like a knucklehead, the cops can take your license away and you won’t be able to drive anymore
The analogy is not exact, but I think everyone gets the drift. With the single exception of the attempt to ban assault weapons, gun control at the federal level amounts to (a) making sure knuckleheads and homicidal freaks don’t get guns, and (b) making sure that in any actual firefight that might happen due to a failure of (a), a shooter can’t just slaughter 30 or 50 or 100 people without taking a brief pause to reload.
That last point saved lives at Sandy Hook, and in fact enabled the Gifford shooter to be prevented from killing even more people. Gun advocates with say “yeah, but you can re-load a clip in 2.17 seconds”, which is true when you make a YouTube video after practicing your clip-reloading skills all day so you can Own The Libs, but it’s generally not true if you’re a disgruntled 20 year old who wants to burn the fucking world down because life hasn’t treated you fairly and you’re trying to reload in the middle to the total freaking chaos you yourself have unleashed.
Two more topics:
Assault weapons. The issue with assault weapons is that it’s hard to legally pin down exactly what one is. We all know pornography when we see it, and we all know an assault weapon when we see one. But the features that make an assault weapon an assault weapon show up in lots of other firearms. And, the firearms we think of when we say “assault weapon” – especially rifles based on the AR-15 – actually are useful for other purposes.
So, score one for gun advocates.
That said, I still call bullshit on this. Gun advocates say “libs just want to ban AR’s because they look scary”. Yes, that’s likely so. And every fucking gun advocate who wants to stick it to the libs uses a fucking AR-15 to do it. Because they look scary. They look like a military rifle, because they are a military rifle. They are a firearm that was designed to let the shooter prevail in a firefight. They were designed as a gun for shooting other people, quickly accurately and efficiently.
They are fucking scary, which is why every T-shirt, bumper sticker, and whatever else folks cook up that has the freaking “Molon Labe” slogan on it, also has an AR-15 on it. It’s why every knucklehead that wants to ram his or her “2nd Amendment rights” down everybody else’s throat by open carrying a firearm to their local Burger King or grocery store, inevitably carries and AR-15.
It looks like a gun that is meant to kill people. Because that is what it is. Folks use it for other stuff, but that is what it was made for. You, gun advocates, know it, and that is why you shove it in all of our faces.
Second topic – second amendment.
The Second Amendment was written to preserve the institution of the militia. When the Constitution was being debated, people were wary of federal power, and did not want the federal government to be able to dominate local governments through military force.
At the time, there was no federal army, and people did not want one, at least not a standing army. There was a system of militias, in which most able-bodied adult men participated, which were under the control of local, state-level civil authority.
People wanted to keep that, and they wanted a promise that they would be able to keep that.
That is what the 2nd Amendment is about.
If you get your ass out of bed and go train with your local militia – a militia operating under the authority of your state government, in compliance with regulations promoted by Congress – you can claim a constitutional right to keep and carry a firearm.
If you don’t do that, you can’t.
And I’ve read quite a lot on the topic, most of it written by gun advocates and hobbyists. So if you want to go chapter and verse, fine with me. But what I’ve just laid out is the actual history of the 2nd.
It, like the 3rd A, has almost no applicability to the modern US. The institutions it refers to don’t exist, the thing it was trying to prevent or counter – a standing federal army – is a given at this point in time.
If you’re really concerned about the feds imposing their will through military power, Posse Comitatus is your friend. Guard it jealously.
“Don’t blame guns” means don’t try to take my guns away or do anything that will limit my ability to own or use them.
Rights incur responsibility. The rest of us cannot be expected to accept being fucking murdered as we go about our daily lives, just so you and folks like you can pursue your hobby.
Universal background checks. No exceptions for private sales.
Reasonable limits of clip sizes. The ability of local police to take someone’s guns away if they think they present a danger to other people.
If gun advocates are, remotely, interested in not simply flipping the bird to the rest of us, those things are must-haves.
If you all just want to keep flipping the bird to the rest of us, do your thing. If it ends up biting you on the ass, that is on you.
Step 1: repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
Step 2: pass the Fair Compensation for Gun Victims Act, making gun sellers liable for homicides committed using guns they’ve sold.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBEtS0CW4AEiQ2W.jpg
Still can’t post links, so there is one to an excellent diagram in the spam trap if anyone wants to rescue it….
GftNC – I can’t release it but let me try to repost it:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBEtS0CW4AEiQ2W.jpg
Thank you Ugh.
aha! it’s drag queens’ fault.
Since the El Paso domestic terrorist is in custody, he should clearly be waterboarded and other ‘enhanced interrogation’ so that he gives up his fellow-travelers, co-conspirators, and those who radicalized him.
Then waterboard them too, until the entire terrorist sect is rolled up.
FOX, the NRA, and Trump would be good places to start.
Since I cannot post the link, I have copied and pasted Krugman’s June 13th 2019 on Elizabeth Warren in the NYT. I must say, it doesn’t look like a shivving to me….
wrs, as always. Also Pro Bono.
Can we add a requirement that gun owners have to buy liability insurance, just like car owners?
And it has to come with ownership, not use, i.e. you buy it when you buy the gun. (With a car, you can have one sitting back behind the barn that you never drive, and if you don’t drive it, you don’t have to insure it.)
To reinforce Russell’s commentary on the AR-15, Eugene Stoner would like a posthumous word:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-ar-15-inventor-speaks-out-n593356
Stoner owned the means of production, but not the product.
I have little use for Beto O’Rourke, but he doesn’t let his good looks get in the way of telling the press corps what they are:
https://www.eschatonblog.com/2019/08/shut-fuck-you-stupid-assholes.html
The press corps would like nothing more than to convince law enforcement to cease and desist from killing mass shooters at the scene, at least until they can mic the guy up and get him on the air in a panel discussion setting on a Sunday morning, say, with his heavily bandaged and sutured survivor victims and give both sides a chance to air their points of view, since both sides do it, whatever “it” is, and all points of view having validity in a free, democratic society.
The moderator could then cut away to mental illness carrier and expert Dana Loesch for her balanced view of the proceedings.
“Well, Gene”, Loesch will intone in that hypnotic, menacing, gun sell-side YouTube attitude she has perfected, “while it’s clear that despite my agreement with the shooter politically in some ways, he has gone over the line with his actions and should have his head examined, I must say that the hysterical reactions of the victims on the other side of this panel make me wonder who the crazy ones are.”
“Look, yes, Eugene Stoner didn’t own an AR-15, despite inventing the weapon and using the full socialist powers of the federal government to get it into the hands of our patriotic, God-fearing fighting men and women as they defend this country, but he did own a set of butter knives and think of the damage those implements could have caused to friend or foe alike. My God, he left them within the reach of his kids too. Put a butter knife in the hands of a drag queen and what do you have? I’ll tell you what, besides yet one more reason why fag-baiter Rod Dreher will vote for Donald Trump: the paramount mortal threat to our American way of life and, by the way, a hoarder of eye liner as well, which raises my cost of living.
Moderator: Thank you, Dana. You are the voice of reason in a sea of diluted politically correct puke.
At this point, two burly guys in white suits wrestle Loesch into a straight jacket while jamming a tongue depressor between her top and and bottom teeth, and drag her off camera for her hourly medication regime.
Moderator: “Next up after our commercial break, we’ll have combat veteran and Marine Lieutenant Colonel Joffrey Lambastard on to explain why he carries the fully combat-capable AR-15 assault rifle into war, because that’s the sole purpose for which it was designed, to kill the enemy, but not so fast, we’ll also ask why he carries that butter knife on his belt as well. The reason may shock you! Stay with us.
Off camera, you can hear Lieutenant Colonel Lambastard give a snort of derisive laughter and “well, I carry the butter knife for its intended purpose just in case some gook wog towelhead on the other side asks me to butter his toast.”
wrs, as always. Also Pro Bono.
Agreed. Also, what Janie said in her 10.37 about liability insurance.
Gunrunner Governor and fetus-killer by other means Governor Mike Dewine of Ohio:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/protesters-dewine-ohio-governor-shooting
We’ll soon, and obviously, have mass shooting murders AT the vigils for mass-shooting victims.
Tax-cutting conservative vermin cucks like Dewine will plead during the deluge of vigil gunfire, bleating into the microphone: “As God is my sheep-herder and Beyond Human Sacrifice lamb chop server, it’s too soon to start shooting dozens of human beings AGAIN before we’ve had a chance to do nothing about yesterday’s mass shootings and call our brokers to load up on the shares of gun manufacturers.”
one of these days, Loesch is going to get caught on camera with her black wings unfurled and teeth bared as she growls the humanly-unpronounceable name of her unholy master – right before she bites the head off of a Honduran who has been procured for her meal.
What russell said (at 8:49).
As a note, if you want to “own the gun nuts” (because why shouldn’t everybody get to play?), ask one what he thinks is meant by “a well regulated militia”. In my experience, at least 1/3 (and probably more like 2/3) don’t even know that’s in the 2nd Amendment. And those that do mostly either think it’s just a distraction, or agrue that it’s a mandate to set up their own, private, militia — complete with anti-armor and anti-aircaft weapons. They’re called “gun nuts” for good reason.
Dang! That was 8:45 of course.
Angelina Englisbee
Insane person found sleeping in the White House given access to microphone for public statement while accompanied by the Vice President of Absolute Biblically-Revealed Certainty On All Matters, who performs a perfect 10 leap of faith, the facts being short on believability, into a vat of predigested dog shit:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-says-us-must-condemn-white-supremacy-with-one-voice-after-shootings-and-contends-china-is-manipulating-currency-2019-08-05?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
Gun and ammo stocks are up on the day in a display of what conservative economists would call “perverse incentives” if instead of weaponry, the companies were providing food stamps or lowering the price of insulin against the wishes of shareholders’ interests.
Insane person wishes good will to all and then raises tariffs on the yellow peril chop suey chinks.
Krugman:
Warren has been able to lay out plans that are very progressive but also well grounded in evidence and analysis.
I’m with GFTNC here, I’m not seeing a shiv. On the contrary, this sounds like a mild rave, to me.
The only thing I’d change in Krugman’s statement here would be to replace “but also” with “because they are”.
Krugman:
Warren has been able to lay out plans that are very progressive but also well grounded in evidence and analysis.
I’m with GFTNC here, I’m not seeing a shiv. On the contrary, this sounds like a mild rave, to me.
The only thing I’d change in Krugman’s statement here would be to replace “but also” with “because they are”.
via BJ.
Kids, if any kids are reading this, if you have a classmate who keeps a hit list to plan for future assassinations, and/or a rape list of girls he wants to assault, find an adult you trust and tell them about it.
That person needs help, and is unlikely to seek it out for themselves. Or, more accurately, that person is screaming to the world that they need help, but they have no idea how to get help. Help them. Find an adult you trust and tell them what you know.
If you know such a person and you know they have a firearm, or access to a firearm, follow up with a call to your local police. They’ll want to know about it, if they have a brain in their heads.
This has been a public service announcement courtesy of ObWi.
Crazy world we’re living in.
From the KTLA piece:
Plus, the cops took the rape list thing seriously enough to call the kids that were on it to give them a heads up.
A public service safety suggestion:
If someone is deemed dangerous enough to prompt a police investigation and for the cops to reach out to folks so they know that they need to watch out for that person, THAT PERSON SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO BUY A FIREARM.
Can I get a freaking amen?
Insane, but imbued with future sight person in White House reveals Toledo as the next location for planned right wing mass shootings.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-asks-gods-blessing-on-shooting-victims-in-toledo-2019-08-05?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
White House staffers, gobsmack themselves and tell the press without attribution: “Does he have to give away all of our murderous plans for America like that?”
Journalist, to be fair to both sides, points out that Biden is a few hearts short of a heart attack too.
In great news for conservative religious nuts who
want birth control banned but are running out of places to have sex on account of the hypocrisy police, this:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/driverless-cars-will-lead-to-more-sex-in-cars-study-finds-2018-11-12
White House orders a dozen self-driving presidential limousines on the news.
Falwell Jr. hitches a ride with p to check out the new technology.
Rod Dreher condemns self-driving vehicles, capitalism, and electricity in general because now LGBTs are now hands-free woke and on wheels.
Drive by killers endorse the technology so they can keep both hands on their weapons while firing, but still avoid running over innocent pedestrians.
https://mobile.twitter.com/freedlander/status/1157792910827491329
Only took one (1) death to spur action. Guess there isn’t a lawn dart lobby.
russell, 12:52
Amen
When they outlaw lawn darts, outlaws will just switch to badminton and croquet.
The thing about the kid killed by a lawn dart is they actually did have to pry his lawn dart from his cold dead hands.
can we not have Joe Biden ?
Can I get a freaking amen?
Not from the guys who insist that being on the terrorist watch list is no reason to be banned from having and getting firearms because
a) this would warn them that they are on the list
b) the tyrannical beings with the jack-boots will put innocent people on the list to have a pretense to take their guns.
Biden remains, out of all the current candidates, the single strongest candidate for the 2000 presidential elections.
When (some) states have decided that it’s OK to sell firearms to the legally blind, what exactly do you think will be a bridge too far?
“failing the paper-bag test”. Oh yeah, forgot that one.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/5/1876897/-Hours-after-El-Paso-shooting-Mitch-McConnell-tweeted-photo-of-a-graveyard-with-name-of-his-opponent
russell:
Amen
I think this Krugman- Warren shiv issue is in the wrong thread—I can’t find where I started it.
Anyway, yes, Krugman did like Warren. Then she and Sanders were on the same side in the last debate.
Here is the shiv—
https://mobile.twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1156561932406710273
Actually scroll up a bit.
https://mobile.twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1156557739583258624
But sorry about the thread confusion.
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454161/gun-violence-solution
Here is the shiv—
Thanks Donald, much appreciated!
Agreed that choosing single payer as the hill to die on is, at this point in time, like running while chained to an anchor.
I have nothing against the idea on principle, I also think we’re not there. And may never be there. And if folks get to go to the doctor some other way, that’s fine.
And if I lived in Toledo, I’d probably stay indoors and out of sight for a day or two. Just because people are that crazy.
JDT @ 03:29…yup. Take them away. Take all the guns away. If you don’t want to give them up, go away with them.
Being pro-gun is simply another form of anti-vaxxerism…an irrational assault on public health.
I shall have no truck with either anti-vaxxers or gun lunatics. My position on guns is uncompromising: They need to go.
If you don’t like that, just shoot me.
The proper response to the Krugman style concern trolling is simply this:
“If my plan for Medicare for all is superior to your current plan in all respects, just what the fuck are you afraid of? If my plan raises your taxes but offsets that with a larger raise in real income, just what the fuck are you afraid of? If you enjoy having urgently needed coverage disputed by your carrier, or paying high deductibles and co-pays, raise your fucking hand. My plan eliminates those. My plan is better. The one you have sucks.”
Russell— I have very mixed feelings about tge primaries and issues and which hills to die on, so will just argue with myself on that.
On the shootings—
National Review actually has some decent pieces up. Here is one.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/declare-war-on-white-nationalist-terrorism/
We are likely to have the usual arguments about gun control, but at least some on the right are scared of the white nationalist monster their side has stirred up.
My own feeling on gun control is that people don’t need semiautomatic rifles or pistols. Revolvers for home defense if you really think you need it and as I have seen various people say, if you need a semi automatic rifle to hunt then you shouldn’t have a hunting license. Shotguns— same thing. Hunters could have double barreled weapons if they need two shots.
Or that is what I would lean towards. I would be willing to compromise. Probably nothing will happen.
My only concern with taking all of the guns away is that then I will be forced to stab conservative Jim Hoft many times in the neck with a butter knife, a la Genghis Khan:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/right-wing-conspiracy-site-gateway-pundit-mylife-el-paso-shooter
I’m not going into this bloody, savage Civil War empty-handed.
The many facets of Genghis Khan.
“Beyond his military accomplishments, Genghis Khan also advanced the Mongol Empire in other ways. He decreed the adoption of the Uyghur script as the Mongol Empire’s writing system. He also practised meritocracy and encouraged religious tolerance in the Mongol Empire, and unified the nomadic tribes of Northeast Asia. Present-day Mongolians regard him as the founding father of Mongolia.”
Aha, so that was the shiv. Sorry, I think it was my mistake to put the NYT piece in this thread, so I’m putting this apology here too. But personally, (in for a penny etc), I’m pretty keen on Warren, and hope she regains ground, if this was as detrimental as Donald (and some of the commenters on Krugman’s twitter feed) seem to think.
Aha, so that was the shiv. Sorry, I think it was my mistake to put the NYT piece in this thread, so I’m putting this apology here too. But personally, (in for a penny etc), I’m pretty keen on Warren, and hope she regains ground, if this was as detrimental as Donald (and some of the commenters on Krugman’s twitter feed) seem to think.
Aha, so that was the shiv. Sorry, I think it was my mistake to put the NYT piece in this thread, so I’m putting this apology here too. But personally, (in for a penny etc), I’m pretty keen on Warren, and hope she regains ground, if this was as detrimental as Donald (and some of the commenters on Krugman’s twitter feed) seem to think.
Jesus, not so good it was worth saying twice, let alone thrice!
Being pro-gun is simply another form of anti-vaxxerism…an irrational assault on public health.
Except that the anti-vaxxers can at least say that the government has taken away their freedom to harm their children. Whereas the pro-gun folks merely claim that, contrary to all the evidence, the government is about to take away their freedom to kill their (and others’) children. In short, paranoia on top of utterly irrational fantasy.
just what the fuck are you afraid of?
It’s hard to get complicated things completely right the first time out of the gate. Plus, if an incremental approach gets it done, that’s better than nothing getting done.
But, as I say, I have no issue with single payer in principle. If that’s what folks will vote for, then let’s have it. You’ll get no complaint from me.
I have very mixed feelings about tge primaries and issues and which hills to die on
Yes, I do as well.
My overall position is that a ham sandwich with a (D) after its name will get my vote. Full stop.
The rest is commentary.
I will vote for the Democrat.
just what the fuck are you afraid of?
There are a lot of people who work for the health insurance industry (thought you were all about workers’ rights, bobbyp?). Deleting their source of income all at once seems suboptimal. Many of the best healthcare systems in the world have some combination of public and private insurance (including Medicare). I’m not against migrating to single-payer, but I don’t see that happening. And sure, I’m for anything that works, or will eventually work, including the ACA, which has already helped a lot of people, and had a lot of promise, and would eventually work if we could do what was originally envisioned. The problem will be and always has been Republicans.
All that said, I prefer Elizabeth Warren to the other candidates running, and will probably vote for her in the primary unless something happens to change my mind. I like a lot of the D’s. As for having “any use” for Beto, I like him, although he should be running for Senate. What he said about the shootings, and his ability to be eloquent off-the-cuff, is very admirable.
Nous suggested that Biden is currently our most promising potential winner. I will vote for him if he wins the primary, but I won’t vote for him in the primary. I think we can do better with at least five of the other candidates, but I too want D’s to win. Biden is showing his age – it’s unlikely that his image is going to improve over the next year and a half.
Nearly all of the proposals for addressing the fucking horror show of gun violence in the US are of the plan B type. The one exception is the on again / off again attempt to ban assault weapons. More on that in a minute.
What people who aren’t fucking gun nuts are asking for are:
* universal background checks
* no exemption from universal background checks for private sales
I’m fine with this, but it’s worth pointing out that there isn’t a shooting that a background check would have prevented. Further, the feds do nothing about straw purchasers. If they did, there would be a disparate racial impact.
* limits on the number of bullets that can be loaded into a clip or magazine
As an aside, a clip is external and has to be inserted. A magazine is integral and is loaded manually. You can’t replace the magazine, you simply reload it. Think of a revolver—the cylinder is the magazine.
On the merits, regulating magazine/clip capacity will affect .0001 percent of gun injuries/deaths. It won’t prevent any shootings and it will convert millions of law-abiding citizens into criminals if they don’t turn in their formerly legal clips (there aren’t any guns with “high capacity” magazines that I know of, but there are probably a few out there somewhere).
* some ability for local law enforcement to take someone’s guns away if they deem that person a threat to other’s safety
On the officer’s say-so? No hearing, no probable cause, just the officer’s say-so? That’s a bit authoritarian. Actually, more than a bit. It eviscerates the presumption of innocence, and even if you could pass it, you wouldn’t like the impact at all since mostly young, minority males would be targeted.
They are fucking scary, which is why every T-shirt, bumper sticker, and whatever else folks cook up that has the freaking “Molon Labe” slogan on it, also has an AR-15 on it. It’s why every knucklehead that wants to ram his or her “2nd Amendment rights” down everybody else’s throat by open carrying a firearm to their local Burger King or grocery store, inevitably carries and AR-15.
It looks like a gun that is meant to kill people. Because that is what it is. Folks use it for other stuff, but that is what it was made for. You, gun advocates, know it, and that is why you shove it in all of our faces.
I agree, they look scary lethal. I own a Beretta over and under shotgun and a Ruger Model 77 carbine that fires a .270 Winchester cartridge. It has a scope and a sling and is built on the European style of stock where the wood extends to the end of the barrel. It’s an attractive piece of workmanship if your tastes run in that direction. It looks like a hunting rifle that someone who hunts 3-5 times a year might own. OTOH, the cosmetically frightening AR-15 fires a 5.56MM NATO that is known by the civilian name of a .223 Remington. A .270 has more than twice the weight and power of a .223. The military intent of the 5.56 is to wound or incapacitate when the shot isn’t fatal. An incapacitated enemy uses up a lot more enemy resources than a dead one. The result is a bullet design that “tumbles” internally, exacerbating physical damage. The .270 functions on hydro-static shock, which is intended to make a quick, painless kill. If you can hit what you are aiming at, it’s a quick end for whatever you are hunting. Even a shot to the arm or leg with a .270 would be crippling and possibly fatal due to the violence of the strike and the attendant hydro-static shock. The second advantage of the 5.56 is that the bullets are so light, a soldier can carry 2-3 times the amount of ammunition into battle.
The first mass shooter I can recall was Charles Whitman at the University of Texas. He used surplus military equipment, all pretty conventional stuff—bolt action rifles, pump shotguns.
The Second Amendment was written to preserve the institution of the militia. When the Constitution was being debated, people were wary of federal power, and did not want the federal government to be able to dominate local governments through military force.
Well, sort of. The 2nd Amendment gives states the right to raise a militia. For use against an over-reaching federal government, among other things. A state might decide to have a militia for a time, then not have a militia, then have one again. The underlying essential ingredient for a state to raise a militia is an armed citizenry that the state can call out or draft or what have you–it doesn’t have to take any particular form. The intent was that the feds could not interfere with a citizen’s right to keep and bear arms which in turn provided the population from which a militia might be raised. “Well-regulate” back then, didn’t mean a whole either.
Step 2: pass the Fair Compensation for Gun Victims Act, making gun sellers liable for homicides committed using guns they’ve sold.
Of all of the ideas proposed this is the worst. First, no other service or product supplier is strictly liable for the use to which their service or product might be put. This would be an attempt to ban the sale of guns indirectly because it can’t be done directly. Further, it would be palpable and enormous hypocrisy. Alcohol kills more people annually than do firearms—88,000 for alcohol, 33,000 and change for firearms including suicide and accidents. However, everyone loves to drink, so no one is willing to impose on this particularly brand of lethality, only the brand that they don’t indulge in. Lethality for me but not for thee. Like I said, hypocrisy.
Here are the links for the stats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics
Can we add a requirement that gun owners have to buy liability insurance, just like car owners?
Sure, if you could find an insurance company who would sell it. But, insurance doesn’t cover intentional acts. So, this wouldn’t do much for mass shootings or even the one-off’s. And, people who are prone to kill other people probably won’t worry a whole lot about whether their insuring requirements are current.
My own feeling on gun control is that people don’t need semiautomatic rifles or pistols. Revolvers for home defense if you really think you need it and as I have seen various people say, if you need a semi automatic rifle to hunt then you shouldn’t have a hunting license. Shotguns— same thing. Hunters could have double barreled weapons if they need two shots.
If you are an elderly man or a woman of any age, I’m pretty sure you don’t want your self-defense options limited this severely. If someone comes inside my house intending harm or signaling an intent to harm, I want to lay down as much buckshot as I can as quickly as I can. For this, I would use a pump or semi automatic shotgun. There are very few semi-automatic, traditional hunting weapons. I’ve seen the AR-15 used to hunt deer (and hunt them effectively), but your point is correct, you don’t need to lay down a spray of bullets to bring home some venison. As for shotguns, even though I have an over/under, I rarely shoot it. It is quite uncomfortable after firing 25 or so rounds (one round of skeet is 25 shotgun shells) because double barreled shotguns deliver all of the recoil directly into the shoulder. Back when I hunted in Argentina, I used a gas-operated 20 gauge which had virtually no recoil. I could and did fire over 1000 shells in a day for three or four days in a row (yes, we ate or gave away what we killed).
i like Harris. i like Pete. i like Warren.
i don’t care at all about the specifics of any particular plan they might have, simply because Presidents don’t enact big policy on their own. i do care about them having their head on straight, a good command of facts, basic decency, and a general lefty bent. put a decent person in the WH and after that, it’s up to Congress.
Ham sandwiches are relieved to be endorsed for the Presidency.
It’s the one legal shelter from Judge Wachtler’s dictum that grand juries could indict a ham sandwich if they want to.
the cosmetically frightening
feh.
“assault rifles” are guns that are designed to be used in combat, to assault other people. the “cosmetics” are there for ruggedness, ease of transport in difficult situations, and to facilitate rapid firing against humans who would otherwise try to run or fight back if you had to spend time feeding cartridges into your weapon. it’s not the paint job.
Limiting box fed magazine capacity is perfectly feasible. We do it in CA and it really doesn’t affect much except necessitating that the ammo profligate spend more time loading magazines and less time practicing their anti-personnel fantasy marksmanship.
And it certainly doesn’t affect any of the old-school hunters that the NRA loves to pretend it represents (even while the threepers and preppers call them all Fudds in private). Ruger was correct when it said (much to the Patriotically Correct crowds eternal enmity) that “no honest man needs more than 10 rounds in any gun” for any hunting application. I know McKinney will likely come back with javelina as an exception, but we all got along fine back in the days before the gun buying public began buying their box magazines the same way that they buy their condoms and anything other than XL became a badge of shame at the local range.
Box magazine limit of 10 rounds. Anything larger needs to be turned in.
If you want exceptions to that, then follow the rules for Sweden or Canada (both of which still have plenty of hunters and plenty of guns). License yourself as a competitive shooter. Store your magazines only at a range, use them only at a range. Law enforcement has permission to inspect storage at any time. Take them off premises, you lose your license and your mags.
As to whether or not this makes criminals out of people who have previously owned such things legally – don’t care. If you find one, surrender it for destruction and get some nominal reimbursement. We don’t need 100% compliance so long as anyone who shows up anywhere in public with one gets slapped with a fine and a misdemeanor and has it confiscated.
Mostly what cleek said at 6:03.
Except I’m not really enthused about a “general lefty bent” — just so it’s not a generally reactionary bent. And all of those are in the GOP these days.
Also, add to my 6:32 that we should outlaw any semi-auto centerfire rifle with a non-fixed magazine and limit the capacity of fixed magazines to 10 rounds maximum. End of discussion.
Don’t care if this prevents attacks, so long as it makes things damned inconvenient from a logistical standpoint.
Plate carrier backpacks for kids are damned inconvenient, too.
McKinney,
Would you rather drink yourself to death, or get shot by a “responsible gun owner”?
Do you imagine booze is less regulated than firearms are?
If some Northeast commie pinko gets elected President and Texas calls out its militia to resist the intolerable repression such an assault on Liberty would represent, what combat role do you think you’d be called on to fill?
Guns I can stand. It’s the endless excuses for social irresponsibility “responsiveness gun owners” come up with that I look down my nose at.
–TP
That plate carrier backpacks for kids is even a thing I need to internalize is nauseating.
I’ll bet drag queens presenting to kids in public libraries don’t suggest that quintessential American perversion.
there isn’t a shooting that a background check would have prevented.
On the officer’s say-so? No hearing, no probable cause, just the officer’s say-so?
The dude in Dayton was known to local police as the guy who wrote up a list of people he wanted to kill and rape. They took him seriously enough to look into it and contact the people on the list to give them a heads up.
I say that’s a sufficient basis for saying no guns for you, sonnie boy.
In most places the local cops don’t have the authority to do that. In MA they do. Applications for a firearms permit go through local police, and they can deny the permit based on their knowledge of the applicant’s personal history. Including things that might not show up on a background check, including for instance somebody’s habit of threatening other people.
It’s not authoritarian, it’s freaking sensible. There is no “presumption of innocence” involved, nobody is being accused of a crime. People can be denied a permit to own a firearm if their local police think they present a risk, based on their knowledge of that person.
The applicant can appeal if they don’t like it, and may do. Sometimes they win, sometimes the cops do.
That all seems more than fine to me. If it doesn’t suit you, don’t move to MA.
And my finding it sensible has bugger-all to do with anybody’s skin color.
The military intent of the 5.56 is to wound or incapacitate when the shot isn’t fatal. An incapacitated enemy uses up a lot more enemy resources than a dead one. The result is a bullet design that “tumbles” internally, exacerbating physical damage.
The military intent of the 5.56 is to penetrate a steel helmet at 500 yards and be light enough for a soldier to carry lots of them. It’s a high-velocity round, which lets it accomplish the first goal while also meeting the second.
The tumbling thing apparently depends on whether it’s FMJ or not.
But whatever, I’m not here to nerd out on ordinance. I already spent all the time I’m gonna spend reading about gaping wounds vs. pinholes and tumbling cavitation patterns in people’s internal organs.
It ain’t my thing, and I plan to keep it that way.
The first mass shooter I can recall was Charles Whitman at the University of Texas. He used surplus military equipment, all pretty conventional stuff—bolt action rifles, pump shotguns.
You can kill people with pretty much anything. I have a nice kindling axe, I could probably do somebody in with that if I was so inclined.
What you can’t do with bolt action rifles and pump shotguns is kill 9 people and wound 26 in 30 seconds.
The intent was that the feds could not interfere with a citizen’s right to keep and bear arms which in turn provided the population from which a militia might be raised. “Well-regulate” back then, didn’t mean a whole either.
I don’t believe this hangs together.
Militias weren’t a hypothetical. There were existing militias. Not as something that governors could call out under hypothetical scenarios, but as actual, tangible, functioning bodies.
People got their asses out of bed and trained. In real life, with firearms, under the direction of real live officers. Under the control of state and local civil authorities.
What “well regulated” meant at the time is addressed by the Militia Acts of 1792. Every able-bodied white male between the ages of 18 and 45, excluding congressmen, ferryboatmen, and coach drivers. The Acts specify in some detail what arms and other gear every such man was required to outfit himself with in order to participate.
If you were white, male, and of the correct age, you were obliged by federal law to own a gun. Because you were by god in the militia.
We eventually got rid of the militia because it wasn’t a particularly effective institution for fighting wars at any kind of scale.
I don’t really give a crap if people own guns. Hunt, target shoot, self-defense, whatever. If you want a gun, get a gun and go with god. I don’t care.
You should have to demonstrate a basic level of personal sanity and responsibility to own a gun, and you should have to demonstrate that you know how to use it safely. There are jurisdictions in the US where you can get a license to carry without demonstrating that you so much as know which end the bullets come out of.
And if you express a desire to kill, injure, or intimidate other people by force, that ought to be ample grounds for denying you the privilege of owning or carrying a firearm, and should be ample grounds for taking any guns you currently have away from you.
If that seems too much like “overreach”, I really don’t care. People are shooting themselves and other people in alarming numbers. If people jumped off of bridges, or threw other people off of bridges, in the numbers that they shoot themselves or others, I don’t think we’d call it overreach if people in authority did something to address it.
Look, I’ll save you the Google search. Something like 125 people a year kill themselves by jumping off a bridge in the US. Many bridges, and most or all bridges that are attractive suicide locations, have barriers and/or nets to prevent it. Some bridge authorities have maintained phones *on the damned bridge* that suicidal people can use to talk to someone who will try to talk them down.
For 125 people a year. I believe the number of suicides by firearm per year in the US is over 20,000.
But we mustn’t take guns away from people who pose a risk to themselves or others.
People shoot themselves and each other in alarming numbers. You have to get into countries where there is basically no really functional government to get to the kinds of levels that we accept as normal.
It’s messed up.
Guns are dangerous objects. They should be owned and used responsibly. If you demonstrate, by word or deed, that you are likely to present any danger to other people, no freaking gun for you.
The fact that that is at all, in any way, another other than blindingly obvious just makes me shake my head. But there it is.
The 2nd A argument is, to me, a pile of crap. Not the original intent, although the spurious commas are puzzling to the modern reader, but the claims that people make about it now. The 2nd was not about “allowing for” governors to maybe “call out” a militia if some hypothetical scenario emerged. It was preserve and protect a living, functional institution. It’s an institution we no longer have, except perhaps in the form of the National or state-level guards.
If you want to join the Guard, I have no problem with you claiming a right to bear a firearm.
Absent that, it’s a privilege. Don’t abuse it, and nobody will bug you.
Insist that a flaming violent obvious asshole like Betts has to have the right to buy 100-round drums for his AR-15 – on the fucking internet, with local pickup – and you are going to lose everyone except the minority of knothead paranoid preppers and fascist vigilantes that are the *exact* people who should not own firearms.
So pick which crowd you want to hang with.
There are a lot of people who work for the health insurance industry (thought you were all about workers’ rights, bobbyp?).
I am for workers rights, and for good snark. Why aren’t you?
Deleting their source of income all at once seems suboptimal.
If all the overpaid healthcare executives found themselves standing in the unemployment line, the deadweight loss to the economy would be nill. It is amazing that most of what passes for the ‘left’ in the country stood by and said little or nothing as highly paid manufacturing jobs were sent overseas by the hundreds of thousands in a relatively brief period of time. This was due to public policy. There are policies that could be implemented to offset the spare time on the hands of underwriters, clerks, and salespeople. A jobs guarantee is one.
The problem will be and always has been Republicans.
On this fundamental point, we agree.
All that said, I prefer Elizabeth Warren to the other candidates running
Me, too.
That plate carrier backpacks for kids is even a thing I need to internalize is nauseating.
That kids have to be trained in how to respond to an active shooter, in their school, likewise.
I have friends that home school their kids just to avoid putting them through that. Other reasons too, in some cases, but that one is right at the top of the list.
At least when I was a kid it was the Russians. Now it’s your scary neighbor who is gonna kill you.
I could and did fire over 1000 shells in a day for three or four days in a row (yes, we ate or gave away what we killed).
LOL. Must have been a lot of misses there, Tex.
In my brief hunting existence, I hunted chukars in the Snake River breaks and pheasant and Huns in the Palouse. I didn’t have a dog, and my gun was a .410 single shot.
I never had a chance.
and what nous said.
the 2nd A is obviously meant to cover every advancement in firearm technology in the last 250 years. but it’s obviously not meant to care about the role of militias.
it’s just simple logic.
If you are an elderly man or a woman of any age, I’m pretty sure you don’t want your self-defense options limited this severely.
Bull crap. Speak for yourself.
If all the overpaid healthcare executives found themselves standing in the unemployment line, the deadweight loss to the economy would be nill.
Do you really think that the 500,000 people who work for health insurance companies are all executives? I’m not against a migration to single-payer, but incremental change seems like the best way there. And, yeah, manufacturing jobs went away incrementally too. I am in favor of compensating people whose jobs have gone away because of public policies (or even because of more efficient technologies), so we are in agreement there.
We’re actually in agreement about most of it. Having read about European health care systems that work well, there seems to be a private insurance component built in to most of the best ones (here’s a Wikipedia explanation of what exists in France, which is considered the best). Incrementally working towards a system where complementary private insurance is a small part of care seems like a good way not to upend an entire industry all at once.
In the end, I find it hard to imagine that anything is going to be done about health care in the immediate future, so I don’t really care that much about the issue.
I’m more concerned with eliminating concentration camps, and ending the deliberate cruelty towards vulnerable families at the border. I’d like to see climate change addressed in some meaningful ways. And, for any of this to happen, we need to repair what Trump is doing to corrupt our institutions of government. Not sure what horrible things will transpire before we have enough power for even modest improvements to occur, especially with our judiciary packed with heinous Republican hacks. We’ve blown it, I think.
I’m at a conference with only my ipad, getting back on the 11th, but here are the names from Dayton
Megan K. Betts; Nicholas P. Cumer, 25; Thomas J. McNichols, 25; Lois L. Oglesby, 27; Logan M. Turner, 30; Beatrice N. Warren-Curtis, 36; Saeed Saleh, 38; Monica E. Brickhouse, 39; and Derrick R. Fudge, 57
Bull crap. Speak for yourself.
Seconded. No guns in my house. Never have been. Most likely never will be.
On the merits, regulating magazine/clip capacity will affect .0001 percent of gun injuries/deaths
The shooters at Sandy Hook, Aurora, and Tucson all were interrupted either by the need to insert a new clip, or deal with a jammed one.
In all three cases, there are people whose lives were saved. In Tucson, the pause created an opportunity for the shooter to be captured.
I’m guessing you are pulling the .0001 thing out of a hat. In any case, there is tangible value in an active shooter situation in making the bastard stop, even if just for a couple of seconds.
If people want to keep the monster clips they already have, whatever. If they want to turn them in, great, they get a cookie.
With, of course, an exception for the 100 round drum, ownership of which should entitle you to a visit from your local chief of police and a psychiatrist.
Just quit making more of the damned things.
This whole conversation is kind of obscene. I’m gonna go read something that won’t give me nightmares.
Do you really think that the 500,000 people who work for health insurance companies are all executives?
Why, no. How many straw men have you burned up today?
Incremental change is certainly better than nothing. Continued Republican control of the Senate insures that is exactly what we will get.
You want to get folks off their ass and vote, right? Getting all into the weeds on just about any issue will not do it. Conservative appeals to ‘personal liberty’, ‘freedom’, and ‘free markets’ are not calls for incremental change.
They are, however, quite effective.
Why, no. How many straw men have you burned up today?
Just answering your question: “just what the fuck are you afraid of?” People are afraid of eliminating 500,000 jobs, and that implementation of a whole new and untested health care system will suck worse than what they have.
Sure, the Democrats’ healthcare mantra should be: Universal Coverage. But Democrats are not Republicans – a lot of them like to see numbers adding up. Maybe the less said the better to stay out of the “weeds”, but what is said needs to be truthful.
My impression is that health care systems with private insurance components regulate the living crap out of them, which seems about as likely to fly here as single payer. I also suspect ( it’s not just me) that plans with a public option are practically begging to fail. Yes, you have to change incrementally. Even the plans with single payer as the explicit goal do so. But you could do this in different ways. One would be lowering incrementally the age at which you become eligible for Medicare, and also by expanding Medicare’s benefits so that people would want to switch over to something they know works and which is even better so there would be less demand for Medicare Advantage plans.
Or you could just have a public option on the theory that people migrate to it , but if you don’t make it very attractive the private plans get the healthy folks, the public option gets the poor and sick, and you demonstrate that government plans don’t work. If you made it extremely attractive people would migrate in mass hordes and where is the incrementalism? I expect the less attractive form is the way it will go or that people will work very hard to make it go this way. I expect this road is attractive to donors to Democrats from the health care industry. It goes without saying that if a public option is forced on them, Republicans will also go this way.
Having said that, I want Warren or Sanders to win, but expect that Sanders has both a floor of dedicated supporters (and no, not composed chiefly of stereotypical Bernie bros) and a ceiling he won’t break through and if I am wrong and he won, all Republicans and big chunks of the Democrats would work against him. Warren would have more support from the educated upper middle class, but to the extent that she goes in the same general direction as Sanders, she also gets the shiv from the donor class and people who listen to them.
Basically, in the privacy of my own thoughts, I am a defeatist. Saying all this here is practically saying it in private.
Trump sucks and on this lowest common denominator a large number of people agree. Elections are generally not about good policy anyway. They are about who really sucks.
On guns—MkT, are there many actual examples of older people defending themselves with guns with high rates of fire where they actually used that capability? I don’t follow the issue closely,but this sounds more like TV show material. My guess is that usually in success stories of armed self defense the homeowner scares off the bad guy or maybe does shoot them, but not that there is a prolonged exchange where the homeowner goes wild with the shooting.
Anyway, it seems like at least semi automatic rifles could be eliminated.
First, no other service or product supplier is strictly liable for the use to which their service or product might be put.
No other product has the primary function of killing people.
This would be an attempt to ban the sale of guns indirectly because it can’t be done directly.
It would be an attempt to make gun prices reflect the actual cost, in dead people, of gun ownership.
One advantage is that instead trying to specify exactly what makes a rifle too lethal to be allowed, we let the price mechanism decide.
Alcohol kills more people annually than do firearms—88,000 for alcohol, 33,000 and change for firearms including suicide and accidents.
Certainly the position of alcohol is anomalous compared with other recreational drugs. I don’t see why that means people have to get shot.
An interesting, and ultimately chilling, interview with a reformed white nationalist:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/conversation-christian-picciolini/595543/
…I just think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. They’re all trying to outdo each other, not just the last person, but Timothy McVeigh. Terrorists will always find another way to do it. I have to ask myself, Do we have white-nationalist airline pilots? There have to be. I knew people in powerful positions, in politics, in law enforcement, who were secretly white nationalists. I think we’d be stupid and selfish to think that we don’t have those in the truck-driving industry….
No other product has the primary function of killing people.
well, not just people: anything.
but, do guns even have a secondary purpose? ‘target practice’ is just working to get better at killing things – “practice” is right there in the name.
but anything else?
besides fetish objects, of course.
Well, alcohol is treated as a murder weapon in the context of some US (state) laws concerning pregnant women. Proposed and passed fetal personhood laws include testing of women reporting (or reported for) misacarriages for alcohol or drugs with the expressed intent to charge said women with homicide if found positive.
DUI is also illegal in most places and may aggravate charges in case of accidents.
The numbers DO add up.
My impression is that health care systems with private insurance components regulate the living crap out of them
Correct.
Folks should go look up the conditions for an efficient market. Then, come back here and explain how anything to do with health care other than maybe aspirin and band-aids meets those conditions.
And then maybe we can have an intelligent discussion from that point.
As far as old people defending themselves, I have a two-part strategy:
1. Don’t own anything I’d kill anybody over
2. Run away
It’s worked perfectly so far, I expect it will continue to.
“Saying all this here is practically saying it in private.”
Donald’s sentence should replace the armed kitty and its crack about the radio station at the top of OBWI.
I’d suggest the kitty holding the sniper weapon be replaced with a kitty holding an alcoholic beverage but that would be the height of hypocrisy.
The Dayton Ohio shooter shot down nine possibly inebriated human beings, including his sister, and injured 27 more.
If we run the grisly annual numbers (1.00 to 2.67 deaths) on the comparative mortality resulting from gunshots and consuming alcohol, we’ll clearly see that while the gunman’s toll was pretty bad, on that strip of drinking establishments alone 24 were killing themselves with alcohol, with help from their accomplices, bartenders, with another 72 doing enough damage to themselves to lead to eventual death anyway.
Let’s put the implications in high relief: You could say that gun violence in America is like the historical violence attributed to Christianity, which is bad enough, but it pales in comparison to the death toll compiled by alcohol consumption, the Genghis Khan of historical genocidal marauders.
There are two lessons here: 1) to protect against the sin of hypocrisy, which is worse than death in the course of human affairs, we must maintain the status quo in gun violence, else Saturday nights down at the old watering hole will be absolutely no fun as we forcibly contravene the movement of alcohol from cup to lip.
Lesson 2) These killings were directly caused by the universal healthcare and anti-gun rhetoric of Bernie Commie Sanders and Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren who, by implication, cast a prejudiced, hateful eye on the users of both guns and alcohol who make up most of the emergency room visits in this country, thus driving up costs for the rest of us. And Joe Biden, by God, not Joe Biden.
And people say p’s hate directed at Hispanics has something equally to do with the El Paso killings. No, I’m here to tell you that a good number of the dead in El Paso were either alcoholics, moderate drinkers (which is just like being a moderate killer with a gun) or when the first gunshots rang out said to their female companions: “Betty, I’m going to need three drinks if we live through this!”
Think about it. THINK who the real haters are.
Say, I’m sitting in a bar with a drink in one hand for self-damage and a semi-automatic pistol in the other for self defense. Say a gunman firing a weapon with plenty of cool features and engineering touches that at a different, more peaceful moment I could admire for their design craftmanship, barges through the door.
What to do?
It would be a tough choice as I weigh my possible position on the hypocrisy scale. Should I shoot the bartender for the damage she is visiting upon my liver and in self defense throw my drink at the gunman, who, facts being what they are, does not really pose as big of a threat to me as the bartender and nature takes their converging courses … or vice versa … it’s a tough decision in the heat of the moment, for an uncertain individual like myself who quakes at the fear of doing any goddamned thing at all for fear of accusations of being a hypocrite.
On this day in the parlous history of bullshit accumulation in America, I think the best course of action would be to down my drink in one gulp and shoot myself in the head and let the bartender and the gunman sort things out from there.
Perhaps my actions would confuse all of the parties for just long enough to give time for more folks to escape the gunman and live long enough to reconsider their alcohol consumption habits.
I did this in a hurry, so please be wary of typos.
Bull crap. Speak for yourself.
Seconded. No guns in my house. Never have been. Most likely never will be.
Fine, but you’re misreading what I wrote. Downthread, Donald understands perfectly. I’m arguing for choice, not requirement. Anyone can choose for whatever reason to own a firearm or not.
I’m guessing you are pulling the .0001 thing out of a hat. In any case, there is tangible value in an active shooter situation in making the bastard stop, even if just for a couple of seconds.
Kinda, sorta, yes. Depending on how the numbers are manipulated, it’s .001 or clip capacity is statistically significant. One of the advantages of engaging with lefties is that I’m obliged to think through my own positions. The relevant number isn’t “number of lives saved during reloading/jamming” divided by the total number of firearms fatalities nationally. Rather, it’s “number of lives saved during reloading/jamming” divided by the number killed or wounded at these planned, mass shootings. So, I think your point is well-taken and a good argument for either limiting clip size OR—as I’ve given this more thought—drawing a bright line between center fire, semi-automatic rifles that are clip-fed and those with integral magazines (as a practical matter, an integral magazine won’t hold more than 4-8 rounds and someone built one to hold 20, it would take forever to reload. For the former, i.e. the clip-fed, require licensing, a test and minimum storage standards with attendant regulations on the sale and transfer of weapons and clips.
It would be an attempt to make gun prices reflect the actual cost, in dead people, of gun ownership.
Then we should apply the same rule to automobiles, alcohol and who knows what else. If you have your stinger out for guns, there is no argument that doesn’t make sense. But, it’s not persuasive outside your bubble.
On guns—MkT, are there many actual examples of older people defending themselves with guns with high rates of fire where they actually used that capability? I don’t follow the issue closely,but this sounds more like TV show material. My guess is that usually in success stories of armed self defense the homeowner scares off the bad guy or maybe does shoot them, but not that there is a prolonged exchange where the homeowner goes wild with the shooting.
Who knows whose done what over the years? As a kid, I used a shotgun—not a .22—when someone tried to break into our house when our parents were out. Never had to fire it, but I had it. Revolvers are unwieldy and require a fair amount of planning and coordination to shoot accurately—at a time when the victim’s adrenaline is at max capacity. What the defender needs is to lay down as much lead as he/she can if it comes to that—which it does with some regularity. The people who don’t defend themselves are the ones who die or get raped or both. Hard fact, but a true one. I’d rather go down swinging.
well, not just people: anything.
but, do guns even have a secondary purpose? ‘target practice’ is just working to get better at killing things – “practice” is right there in the name.
but anything else?
besides fetish objects, of course.
This is just arrogant, dismissive horseshit. I hunt. I like venison. I like dove (wrapped in bacon with fresh onion and jalepeno and grilled with a martini). Target shooting, skeet shooting, is fun. It may not be your cup of tea, but you know what? You aren’t the grand high arbiter of what other people do for fun. You like to drink? So do I. Our fondness for alcohol hurts and kills more than guns by a substantial factor.
There are millions of gun owners in America. Very conservatively, there are 30,000,000 gun owners. Firearms deaths are 33,000/yr. That is .001. If you want to talk about fetishes, what about your fixation on guns to the exclusion of all else, your total unwillingness to even concede there is another side of the story.
As far as old people defending themselves, I have a two-part strategy:
1. Don’t own anything I’d kill anybody over
2. #1 includes my life
I’m quite sure I dont need a gun, I’m not killing anyone. I might wish I had one if my kids were threatened.
Anyone can choose for whatever reason to own a firearm or not.
do i get to choose if they shoot me with it or not?
no?
sounds like a shitty deal to me.
Fine, but you’re misreading what I wrote.
Bull crap. Here is what you wrote:
If you are an elderly man or a woman of any age, I’m pretty sure you don’t want your self-defense options limited this severely.
Again, speak for yourself. I don’t have the slightest problem with having my self-defense options limited that severely.
If you can’t write clearly, it’s not my job to make up the deficiency. Bully for Donald that he’s willing to take the trouble.
Rather, it’s “number of lives saved during reloading/jamming” divided by the number killed or wounded at these planned, mass shootings. So, I think your point is well-taken
Yes, that is what I was driving at. Thanks for your comment here.
I’m quite sure I dont need a gun, I’m not killing anyone.
Pretty much where I land.
I really don’t make any judgement about people who are interested in guns, or feel they need a gun. Some of my best friends and family, etc…
I want it to be somewhere between hard and impossible for people who intend harm, whether through malice, maladjustment, or plain old insanity, to get a firearm.
I don’t really care about the rest of it. If you like to hunt or shoot target, or feel like you need a firearm for personal or home defense, or just think that guns are interesting objects, have at it. Learn how to use it properly and safely and don’t threaten people with it.
It’s not a big ask.
What cleek said.
McKinney has come here yet again (“adieu” — promises, promises) to tell us we’re all blockheaded and closed-minded because we don’t understand that we’re the only country in the world where there’s nothing that can or should be done about people getting slaughtered by the dozens at the fucking grocery store, and where kids have to have active shooter drills at school because school is another place where people can get slaughtered by the dozen.
We don’t understand that there’s “Another side to the story” — well and truly, there’s no other side to the story for the people who are dead.
I will get the names of the dead out of this thread as soon as I can.
I also suspect ( it’s not just me) that plans with a public option are practically begging to fail.
Can somebody help me out here? Why would a plan which included a public option be “begging to fail”? What would be the cause of its failure?
The closest thing to a reason I can come up with (and I don’t buy it personally) is that essentially everybody would take the public option, so the rest of the plan wouldn’t be viable. But somehow I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what Donald meant. (By all means correct me if I’m wrong.)
My impression is that health care systems with private insurance components regulate the living crap out of them, which seems about as likely to fly here as single payer.
Is that what happens with Medicare Advantage plans today? Yet there are a bunch of them on offer….
“No other product has the primary function of killing people.”
Ahh, c’mon, whaddaya talkin?
At a car show once, a winsome blonde draped over the hood of a new Caddy convertible noticed an expression of interest on my face and hopped down off the thing with surprising agility, considering the tight gown and heels she was wearing, and went into an extended pitch about the number of people the thing could take out in crowd conditions should I have a grievance I needed to settle with an infinite number of strangers.
No reloading, no clip replacement, just punch the accelerator and go, baby!
Plus, the weapon doubles as a getaway car. You don’t have to shoot and then around the block and find you car, start it, and do a U-turn against traffic. Seamless action. It’s all in the brochure.
Melon ballers. Have you read the small print? One word: Eyeballs. See what I’m saying?
I own two wood baseball bats and two metal softball bats. Mine aren’t signed on the barrel with Al Kaline’s or Ken Griffey Jrs’ brand … no … mine were signed by Charles Manson, the Boston Strangler, and inevitably, Genghis Khan, who was a pretty good defensive third baseman in his day.
I have another bat signed by Juan Marichal, whose original bat was used primarily to stove in Johnny Roseboro’s skull. I mean, other hitters would have used it for another function, but Marichal couldn’t hit a major league pitch if his life depended on it, so he aimed for bigger targets.
I have a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II single-seat, single-engine, all-weather, stealth, fifth-generation, multi-role combat aircraft, designed for ground-attack and air-superiority missions, sitting and moldering in my parking garage at the moment, but I haven’t quite figured out what to do with it.
The brochure hints at its function somehow in making hollandaise sauce, but you have to level Holland first, so I’m hesitant.
Hungry, too.
About those modest legislative proposals from russell…
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/senate-republicans-gun-control-judges.html
This is just arrogant, dismissive horseshit.
we know. but subtitles should be rendered in different typography than body text.
I hunt.
i did. i don’t now. so what?
I like venison.
so what?
i can buy venison at the store, and so can you.
Target shooting, skeet shooting, is fun.
so what?
If you want to talk about fetishes, what about your fixation on guns to the exclusion of all else, your total unwillingness to even concede there is another side of the story.
yes, i’m fixated. lol.
maybe you could read the title of this thread and see if you can puzzle out why we might be talking about guns here.
here’s the only side to the story that matters anymore. gun owners have collectively failed to stop the slaughter of Americans. and things are going to change. and we don’t give a rat’s ass how much “fun” you’re having.
If you like to hunt or shoot target, or feel like you need a firearm for personal or home defense, or just think that guns are interesting objects, have at it. Learn how to use it properly and safely and don’t threaten people with it.
It’s not a big ask. [emphasis added]
Except apparently it IS a big ask for some people. Otherwise they wouldn’t so feverishly resist laws to require training and testing to get a firearms license.
I have to get re-tested regularly if I want to drive a car. And if I want to drive a bus or a bigrig, I need further training and testing to get a license. But to get a gun, any and every kind of gun? At most I need a background check.
“I hunt. I like venison. I like dove (wrapped in bacon with fresh onion and jalepeno and grilled with a martini). Target shooting, skeet shooting, is fun.”
These activities can be maintained under much stricter gun and ammo controls.
As an aside, this thread is just like an after-funeral get-together wake. I arrive in mourning and outrage, but pretty soon I’m suffering from hunger pangs and wondering who brought the potato salad.
There’s an improvised wet bar on the sideboard.
You could have gotten the dove drunk by sharing your martini with it and killed it that way instead of shooting it.
I’m offering alternatives.
A dove, the symbol of peace no less.
Still, bacon goes with anything.
Sorry, I engage in babbling inappropriate black satire to keep myself off the streets and wreaking vengeance.
The nice thing about satire is the victims live through it.
One thing in the plus column about hunting down your own food in America, you can avoid the risk of murderous, genocidal gunfire down at the Walmart grocery section.
The feature about the F-35 I really appreciate is that it won’t start.
I paid extra for that.
There must be a reason OBWI has never, in my lengthy institutional memory, featured a front page post calling for government regulatory action to halt all hunting, trapping and skeet shooting in America, but I can’t think what it is.
I don’t recall ever reading a memorial screed here with the names and ages of the tens of thousands of deer taken out by gun and bow every Fall in America.
Just the same, if it was the deer shooting the humans instead in a mass murder situation out in the woods, we would host condemnations of that horror, with accompanying venison recipes of course.
It is surely not because lobbyists have paid all of us to lay off hunters.
We should change the name of Obsidian Wings to “Nobody Is Saying”.
“Adieu” is an affectionate form of “Goodbye”.
Just saying.
But in the context of the matter at hand, O can understand why some might think it sounds like “See ya later, suckers!”.
“1. Don’t own anything I’d kill anybody over
2. Run away”
Unarmed blacks have the first one down pretty well, but the second proviso only leads to bullet entry wounds in the back.
In my warped view of home self-protection by firearm when I enter codgerhood, I have a similar attitude to that subject as I do to the airline attendants’ safety sentence starting with “In the unlikely event of a water landing …”
I go back to reading my book.
The only thing an armed intruder is going to get out of me is a “Fuck you.”
A quick googling comes up with numerous cases of animals shooting humans (including hunters shot by deer as far back as 1947).
The only proper home defense is claymore mines in every room and on all sides of the bed.
Given the nature of American homes one can restrict that to outside facing ones in the central room since they will blast all interior walls away (and the outer ones too with non-negligible probability). To be safe from the falling roof, you should switch to a stable fourposter in your bedroom though.
Why people bring up automobiles (requiring registration, licensing to operate, and, in many places, insurance) and alcohol (must be 21 to purchase, and it’s illegal to do a number of things under the influence of it) when discussing tighter regulation of gun ownership, I have a hard time understanding. (What would be the analogous gun-control measure for public intoxication, I wonder?)
Well, at least if the person making the argument is arguing against tighter regulation, I have a hard time understanding it.
The only thing an armed intruder is going to get out of me is a “Fuck you.”
Be careful, he may successfullY sue you for attempted sexual molestation.
What’s the gun-control analog to this?
https://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/dram-shop-laws.html
I offer these links, each with bleeding obvious reasons of my own, which shall go unremarked by moi:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/democrats-exploiting-massacres-for-political-gain/
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-maga-khan-abyss/
Why people bring up automobiles […] and alcohol…
Because the constitution does not guarantee the right to either, so they, unlike guns, may be regulated*.
At least that’s what I have heard from gun regulation opponents ad nauseam.
Usually the same guys that also consider the US Air Force unconstitutional as a separate service since it’s not authorized (unlike armed forces on land and sea) by the constitution.
*and prohibition of alcohol has been tried and it failed => ANY regulation of guns (even, if it was constitutional) can’t work either.
You know who else likes hunting and target shooting? Swedes. And Canadians. And Finns. You know who else has responsible firearm use as cultural and familial traditions? Swedes. And Canadians. And Finns.
They like venison. They like moose. Pick up a cookbook from any of the three and you will find more recipes for game than in 90% of the cookbooks written in the United States.
But they regulate their firearms more rationally and more effectively, and they are not culturally awash in the bullshit myth of redemptive gun violence. Their hunters and shooters are, by and large, more practical and more responsible than are ours. They act like adults rather than riled up teenagers with all the foresight of a drunken rhino.
People all over the world own guns and hunt and shoot for fun. Regulation doesn’t dampen that one bit. All it dampens is the ridiculous level of violence that American gun fetishists insist we must tolerate in order to keep firearm ownership as a right rather than as the privilege that these other people enjoy.
I’m not trying to speak for Finland, especially with Lurker lurking around here. But I’d trade our insanity for any one of these well regulated national licensing systems in a heartbeat. I’d register our firearms and go to the range to keep in good standing.
Because the constitution does not guarantee the right to either, so they, unlike guns, may be regulated*.
But the arguments they’re making are not constitutional. They are in the form of “These things are dangerous, but we don’t blame cars or alcohol.” (Whatever “blaming cars” or “blaming alcohol” means.)
They aren’t saying, “We regulate these things only because they aren’t guaranteed by the constitution.” They’re saying we don’t regulation them, therefore we shouldn’t regulate guns.
I offer these links,
The American Conservative is an ass.
What Nous said.
yes, what Nous said.
But the arguments they’re making are not constitutional.
they’re flailing.
No mental illness or video games in Canada, Sweden, or Finland. Ever think of that, Nous?
the Onion got to run their classic headline again: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
they said nothing about alcohol, though. so, massive hypocrisy.
The Future Gunned Down Republican Leaders of America:
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/59nmax/aoc-rips-mitch-mcconnell-for-photo-of-young-men-groping-and-choking-a-cutout-of-her
The six of them would make a quorum on the Supreme Court.
Not only what Nous said, but it bears repeating word for word:
“You know who else likes hunting and target shooting? Swedes. And Canadians. And Finns. You know who else has responsible firearm use as cultural and familial traditions? Swedes. And Canadians. And Finns.
They like venison. They like moose. Pick up a cookbook from any of the three and you will find more recipes for game than in 90% of the cookbooks written in the United States.
But they regulate their firearms more rationally and more effectively, and they are not culturally awash in the bullshit myth of redemptive gun violence. Their hunters and shooters are, by and large, more practical and more responsible than are ours. They act like adults rather than riled up teenagers with all the foresight of a drunken rhino.
People all over the world own guns and hunt and shoot for fun. Regulation doesn’t dampen that one bit. All it dampens is the ridiculous level of violence that American gun fetishists insist we must tolerate in order to keep firearm ownership as a right rather than as the privilege that these other people enjoy.
I’m not trying to speak for Finland, especially with Lurker lurking around here. But I’d trade our insanity for any one of these well regulated national licensing systems in a heartbeat. I’d register our firearms and go to the range to keep in good standing.”
what Nous said and JDT repeated.
Americans are violent. There are good things about us, too, but we are freaking violent.
The prohibition of hand grenades in the hands of the public has done nothing to prevent trout fishing in America.
Max Boot is starting to get woke…
strange days have tracked us down
Americans are violent. There are good things about us, too, but we are freaking violent.
I’m not at all sure that Americans are exceptionally violent. What is exceptional with us is that we have been persuaded to enable, rather than constrain, our ability to act on our violent impulses.
Hartmut and Lurker can correct me if I’m wrong, but:
Americans as a whole may or may not be more violent than Germans or Finns, but they are statistically much more religious.
Some may say that, even if true, that has nothing to do with guns, violence, or gun violence in America. All I know is that I have heard at least one caller to WBUR’s “On Point” claim that America suffers from too much gun violence because it’s not religious enough. This being a (N)ice (P)olite (R)epublicans broadcast, the silly fool was not immediately told to get a clue by either the host or the guest.
Ignorance among The People and tolerance for it by The Media will kill us all yet.
–TP
Beyond Caviar:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/beyond-meat-insiders-made-much-more-than-the-company-in-stock-sales-2019-08-06?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
It’s funny, the whole post-IPO “pop.” Financial publications make it sound like you’re IPO was some kind of bust if there wasn’t a big jump in share price afterwards. Meanwhile, all the “pop” means is that you didn’t set your share price high enough during the IPO and your company raised less capital than it could have (assuming that raising capital for the company was the goal, of course).
YOUR (I hate that!)
their they’re. its ok.
But seriously, Adam Silverman has it about right:
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/08/06/there-is-a-real-risk-to-criminalizing-domestic-terrorism/
The conservative movement turns everything around to the detriment of their enemies. These laws will be used to persecute and prosecute the Other in America, which means anyone who resists the conservative movement while talking funny and looking a bit dusky and olive-skinned.
I’m not at all sure that Americans are exceptionally violent. What is exceptional with us is that we have been persuaded to enable, rather than constrain, our ability to act on our violent impulses.
I guess I’m unclear on what the distinction is.
https://www.eschatonblog.com/2019/08/land-of-free.html
Here’s what I’d like to see. Surround every FOX lair in this country with heavily armed gunman and gunwomen to monitor the racist, vermin hate speech from within those nests of foreign outside agitators.
If the subhuman contents of the building attempt to leave the premises, the gunmen and women should ply them with alcohol and force them back into the building and keep the drinks coming.
It’s not as efficient and timely as shooting them point blank with firearms, but in the long term it’s 2.666 times as deadly.
When Sean Hannity is an old man, shitting his diapers in the nursing home, I’m going to break in and introduce myself to him.
We’ll see what the fascist c*nt has got besides mouth.
God Bless the people of Toledo, Ohio.
They are next.
The curiouser and curiouser case of the guns that did not shoot in Georgia in the night:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28626189/brian-kemp-georgia-voter-suppression-intimidation/
Vermin subhuman racist republican confederates steal the vote and prevent fair elections in the United States of America, and not one conservative gun is fired at the criminal perpetrators for this betrayal of our founding fathers vision of one white man, one vote.
Oh, wait, I see why not.
But still, if conservative weaponry is not used to halt this unAmerican behavior, what is the point of being armed in this country.
We slaughtered the Brits in 1776 for exactly these crimes. And the Russians in the movie “Red Dawn”.
The Founders have plenty of commas at the ready to obfuscate your answers so we don’t know whether we are coming or going.
Every bit of buckshot wasted on a dove is one less vote stealer brought to ultimate justice and terminated.
I understand Brian Kemp, if wrapped in bacon and grilled, makes for a tasty meal.
I guess I’m unclear on what the distinction is.
It’s a matter being able to address the level of violence experienced by removing the tools used for violence. Without needing to try to change the psychology of a major portion of the population — which, even if possible, would take far longer.
Not that cleaning up our infestation of weapons of war would be easy or quick. Just that it would be easier and quicker. And is clearly possible . . . however improbable it seems at the moment. In short, it’s not hopeless.
Krugman was invoked earlier.
Here, he nails it:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/6/1877096/-If-You-Only-Read-One-Thing-Today-Read-Paul-Krugman-Trump-Tax-Cuts-and-Terrorism?utm_campaign=trending
I hunt. I like venison. I like dove (wrapped in bacon with fresh onion and jalepeno and grilled with a martini). Target shooting, skeet shooting, is fun.
Amazingly, people here in the UK go hunting too. Deer stalking, as it is called, is big in Scotland, pheasant and grouse shoots are big business among the rich, and pigeon- and rabbit-shooting are not uncommon among country dwellers. Also amazingly, the guns they all use are only suitable for such pursuits, obtaining them and keeping them is strictly regulated, and deaths by gun are almost unknown here except for the very occasional criminal hit. We have murder by knife, of course, but it seems very hard to kill more than one person per incident that way. Comparing what we call “sporting” guns to the kinds of thing commonly owned and used in the US is completely absurd, and surely only done to confuse the true issue.
p.s. We call skeet shooting clay-pigeon shooting, and we have that too.
p.s. We call skeet shooting clay-pigeon shooting, and we have that too.
BUT ONE THING YOU DO NOT HAVE IS FREEDOM or MORALITY YOU CLOSE MINDED WHINY ANTI-CHRISTIAN, anti-AMERICAN, HYPOCRITICAL GENGHIS KHAN WORSHIPPING NANNY STATE LIBRUL*.
I trust you are overwhelmed by the force of my compelling logic, and I look forward to your abject surrender.
*you need to take up THE GOLF
Comparing what we call “sporting” guns to the kinds of thing commonly owned and used in the US is completely absurd, and surely only done to confuse the true issue.
Well, no — not only to confuse. I think you have to give at least some “credit” to simple massive ignorance of the rest of the world. Although certainly some intent to confuse is involved on the part of those not too ignorant to know better.
I was at my wife’s family reunion recently and two folks there told me all about armed robbers and how they had hidden guns (many deadly kinds with really deadly ammo) all through the house to protect themselves against “them”.
Who is “them?”, I asked.
“Armed robbers,” they replied.
“It strikes me that being confronted by an armed intruder in your home is a rather uncommon occurrence,” I stated.
“Oh, no.” They replied, “It happens all the time,” they asserted.
In actuality, the chances of that happening are remote (1 in 6,000 I read somewhere), and I would wager that pulling your piece out when somebody is standing there already pointing a gun at you is not likely (shitting pants syndrome), and would also likely result in serious bodily harm….and not to the intruder.
This does not stop them in their righteous belief, because deep in their hearts they absolutely know that, just like in the movies, they would “get the drop” on the arch-fiend and be the hero.
LUNACY!
Episcopalian lawyer and no-doubt-convivial-drinker McKinney Texas needs to answer the same questions as bobbyp’s in-law relations should be asked:
Does your need to “defend” your home with guns have ANYTHING to do with the fact that the country is full of guns?
Does the country being full of guns have ANYTHING to do with your own opposition to gun control laws?
IT’S THE GUNS, STUPID. All other hypotheses about the uniquely American carnage problem are either sheer sophistry or willful ignorance.
–TP
Well, bobbyp, if those folks at the reunion were in more rural areas, they may in fact be seeing an increase in crime.
https://atlantablackstar.com/2018/07/16/rural-red-states-that-voted-for-trump-are-experiencing-a-surge-in-crime/
The same forces that have hollowed out the American city are now hollowing out the American countryside, and rural Americans are beginning to discover just how much better they are able to resist the symptoms of despair and desperation that their urban counterparts have had to deal with. It’s hard to deal with opium addiction at the same time that you are coming down cold turkey off of moral luck and self-righteousness.
And those guns *are* being put to use. Just look at the rural suicide rates.
*you need to take up THE GOLF
yeah, yeah. and i’ll bet you’ll say you have that, too. Fake internets!
The same forces that have hollowed out the American city are now hollowing out the American countryside
I hear ya’. When greed and the free market sweep through the land leaving social atomization and destruction in its wake, this is what you get. They don’t call capitalism revolutionary for no reason.
But that’s just me.
You don’t need a firearm . . . at least if you are attacking a child.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/06/man-assaulted-year-old-because-he-was-disrespecting-national-anthem-witness-says/
There’s something to be said for the thesis that some individuals are just evil.
Does the country being full of guns have ANYTHING to do with your own opposition to gun control laws?
a cynic might think that their was some kind of … profit motive at work here.
like, just hypothetically, a company that made guns could set up a system where one branch of their marketing team scares people about the vicious gangs of robber and rapists coming to get them. and then there’s another branch to market guns to those scared people. and then those two could work together behind the scenes to make sure that the people the first group are scared of have easy access to guns, by making sure the legal obstacles they face are as few and as ineffectual as possible.
and then they could dress it all up with handwaving bullshit about freedom and patriotism.
of course that would require you to believe that a company that makes a product designed, intended and marketed as an efficient way to kill people would be unconcerned about human life.
My wife and I have a good friend, former runway model, who now lives in the Ardennes with her French farmer husband. They hunt a lot, most dramatically wild boar. She keeps getting in trouble for shooting the boar in violation of the rules, whatever they are. The French love wild boar, but they want to be fair to the crazy beasts.
When my wife and I were in Umbria, you could hear the hunters blasting away up the hill, night and day. Drove the inn-keeper’s dog nuts.
A lot of people hunt. Not many people shoot themselves or each other at the frequency with which we do.
wj, I take your point, basically, but I think it’s deeper than just the availability of firearms. Not that that isn’t an enabling factor, but I think the cause and effect more or less go the other way around.
Lots of people get angry and resentful. Not many people resolve it by shooting up the neighbors at the frequency with which we do.
Our games are violent, our movies are violent, our freaking porn is violent. Or so I’ve heard. We are violent.
I think my dead horse has been beaten enough for this particular go-round.
I’m for the good city of El Paso taking the President of the United States into custody, jailing the fuck, and demanding payment for services rendered.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-visit-el-paso-unpaid-debt-campaign-rally
Let’s exercise vermin confederate states rights and local control over the conservative Federal hegemony.
Let El Paso be the Fort Sumter of Civil War II.
Settle this fucking hash now.
How amusing would it be if El Paso simply declined to take any action for Trump’s visit. No police escort. No roads cleared. No nothing. That seems like the normal way to treat someone who doesn’t pay his bills: don’t provide future services until he pays up.
I am all for the right of citizens to concealed carry of boar spears. That’ll show those hogs!
BUT ONE THING YOU DO NOT HAVE IS FREEDOM or MORALITY YOU CLOSE MINDED WHINY ANTI-CHRISTIAN, anti-AMERICAN, HYPOCRITICAL GENGHIS KHAN WORSHIPPING NANNY STATE LIBRUL*.
Rats! Owned!
I think you have to give at least some “credit” to simple massive ignorance of the rest of the world
But wj, my comment was in reply to McKinney, who despite his very partial (as opposed to impartial) view of world history is definitely not massively ignorant of the rest of the world, and I believe travels regularly. No, the comparison was absurd, and either consciously or unconsciously meant to confuse the issue.
via BJ, I give you a thoughtful dialogue about gun ownership. Featuring your Twitter pal, “Boats & Hoes”.
I don’t know how to say this any more strongly. I don’t give a shit if you want a gun. Keeping telling people you’re going to kill them if they try to “take your guns away” and you have made me your enemy.
All of you folks who are gun owners and / or enthusiasts – you probably know one or more major assholes like our pal “Boats & Hoes”. You might mention to them that they should tone it down, or as we like to say, here in the people’s republic, STFU.
Want a dialogue? Let’s have a dialogue. Threats of murder and mayhem are not a dialogue, they are by definition acts of terror.
“How amusing would it be if El Paso simply declined to take any action for Trump’s visit. No police escort. No roads cleared. No nothing”
How quickly could an airport runway be painted with a “Hate has no home here” logo?
Just asking.
“Hate has no home here”
Too long. Try “SUMP TRUCKS”. Bright orange letters.
–TP
A reminder that even the finest legal mind is susceptible to absurd conspiracy type theories…
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/an-unexpected-letter-from-john-paul-stevens-shakespeare-skeptic
Or an indication that experts have an exaggerated sense of their abilities outside of their field.
Shakespeare was a woman.
From Nigel’s link: I hope that it may be of value to others interested in how one of the finest legal minds of the past century interpreted evidence, read the past through the present, and comfortably embraced a conspiracy theory.
The passages Shapiro quotes from Stevens’s letters sound like a lawyer pleading a case, not like a judge pondering evidence impartially. In this matter, at least, Stevens seems to have been a lawyer first, a judge a distant second, and a scientist not at all.
(Not that scientists don’t sometimes cook the books, or get over-attached to their favorite theories, or try to discredit or destroy rivals and upstarts….)
Warning! The following link includes disturbing video of … Kellyanne Conway … speaking.
https://news.yahoo.com/kellyanne-conway-mad-dayton-shooter-leftist-warren-172616634.html
Another blatantly stupid tack that will be lapped up by the faithful. One shooter writes a manifesto about Mexicans invading Texas, parroting language the president used, drives 9 hours to a border town, and shoots Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
The other shooter randomly shoots people in his hometown, but happens to mention on twitter that he’s a “leftist” who supports Warren and Sanders. He doesn’t go out of his way to shoot people he knows to be Republicans. He has a long history of an apparently apolitical fascination with violence and mass shootings.
But they’re still pretty much the same thing. Both sides.
Disturbing indeed.
I can’t watch or listen to Kellyanne Conway any more than I can watch or listen to Clickbait. And though I don’t like commenting on people’s looks, she looks like just what she is: a person whose soul has been eaten away until it’s a tiny glob of rotting shreds.
A thought on the “self defense” argument. It occurs to me that we see politicians with “A” ratings from the NRA come out in favor of gun control when gun violence suddenly hits close to home. (Most recently, Rep Mike Turner of Ohio, after his wife and daughter were right across the street from the Dayton shootings.) Not all do, but some.
On the other hand, I can’t think of a single instance of a politician who opposed gun control becoming pro-gun after someone close to him was close to a shooting. Can anyone think of a gun control advocate announcing: “I now understand the need for individuals to have a gun, even a high capacity gun, for self defense.”? Even one?
https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-jr-compares-list-trump-donors-to-kill-list-2019-8
Disturbing?
They willfully ratchet up the road to horrific, savage nationwide war and our brows are stuck in the mild furrows of disturbance.
General McClellan sat in his tent for months, logistically paralyzed and his brow furrowed over the traitorous Confederate Army’s machinations as they took the high positions in the meadows and forests.
Time to follow Lincoln’s precedent and borrow that army, provided it could be made to do something, in Lincoln’s words, which was to butcher and slaughter the confederate enemies of America, who now ride high once again.
The Civil War has already been declared by the Republican Party.
Sorry, Janie, I know you are angry enough to spit, but the old vocabulary is woefully insufficient.
and, of course, Trump just both-sided this
https://twitter.com/CNNPolitics/status/1159100140835299328?s=20
the party of Personal Responsibility is really pretty quick to deflect
Can anyone think of a gun control advocate announcing: “I now understand the need for individuals to have a gun, even a high capacity gun, for self defense.”? Even one?
Of course not.
Should such a beast exist, it would be a regular on Fox News.
It’s pretty clear which way the electorate leans, which is why Trump is temporising (while simultaneiously nominating Second Amendment extremists to the beach).
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/guns-parkland-polling-quiz/
Bench.
The beach would be a great alternative.
So if the guy across the counter holds up a hefty haunch of Beyond Meat vegetable product for my inspection and asks me how I would like that cut, do I still call him a butcher?
This self-defense argument is a good example of the fallacy of composition. It’s good for any given member of the populace to be the one with a gun. It’s not good for the populace as a whole if too many of its members have guns.
More or less what Tony P. wrote earlier – you need a gun even more because too many people have guns. Neat trick, NRA.
you [can be induced to think you] need a gun even more because too many people have guns
FTFY.
A friend of mine who was at the time married to a cop who loved guns once argued to me that guns are needed by, for example, shopkeepers, in case crooks try to rob their stores. It boggles my mind that people really believe this makes any sense. If someone comes into your store and points a gun at you and says “Give me the cash,” what good is the gun in your drawer going to be? You will be shot yourself before you can take your hand away from the cash register. Contrariwise, are you going to get your gun out and shoot some teenager who’s trying to steal a pack of Twinkies or a bottle of gin? I suppose in a stand your ground sort of state you might get away with it, but it’s a barbaric way to run a society.
I know about myself that I don’t think well in a crisis. I suppose I could get some kind of training that would make me learn to think more effectively in a crisis (although given my age I’m dubious…), but as it is I’m reasonably certain that my having a gun would just increase the chances of someone getting killed. For once I can say: “What Marty said”:
FTFY.
Well, not for me. ;^)
While the number of guns owned is very high in the good ol’ US of A, they are concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population (though still too many people, IMO). The majority of us get by just fine without them somehow, despite all the criminals darkening our doors.
Shakespeare was a woman.
He’d perhaps take that as a compliment.
“Spend more time on your knees than on the internet.”
— Mike Pence
Well, Pence would have to say that, since he’s spending so much time on his knees genuflecting to Trump.
“Genuflecting”?? Bollocks!
–TP
“taking a knee as a sign of worship”
Sounds right to me. But I’m open to better suggestions.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/08/the-conservative-campaign-finance-two-step
OBWI alum Lindsay Beyerstein gets a word in.
The Republican Party will be transparently wiped off the face of the Earth.
There are two ways to take a knee.
The Colin Kaipernick right way.
And the Pence/Stormy Daniels way.
My rhetoric brings people together, don’t you think?
I hope p doesn’t accidentally crash land in Toledo and misses the shows in El Paso and Dayton.
It’s a matinee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx-rrBv2lyc
OBWI alum Lindsay Beyerstein gets a word in.
You realize the disclosure issue related to corporate donors, not individual donors? There is a difference and it’s actually spelled out if Lindsay took the time to read her own article: corporate democracy–a bit of a reach–*does* allow for shareholders to say their piece of a company they’ve bought takes a position they don’t like. That’s not what Castro did. He didn’t out a company publicly traded company for taking a political position. He outed Trump donors. Maybe this is just good, clean fun these day, but it strikes me as specie of voter and donor intimidation. Legal, but that seems like the intent. Coming from folks who routinely decry voter suppression, it seems a bit inconsistent. This strikes me as being of a piece as accosting political opponents at meals and sending demonstrators to opponent’s homes. The intent here is to do personal or reputational harm to people for their views. There was a time when, if the shoe was on the other foot, this would not have been at well received. This leaves me to wonder what’s next–photographing and doxxing who has what signs in their yard and on their bumper stickers (all of this is public record if you take the time to do the research)? Do we boycott their employers unless they are fired? Take their politics into consideration on college and employment applications. Just how far are we going to go in attacking people who see things differently from you?
I have to say, I’m pessimistic. Given the tone and tenor here since Trump got elected, quite frankly, it seems like anything short of armed attack is fair game if it’s directed at Trump supporters. What I fully expect is a series of replies to the effect that their politics are so horrible, the usual rules don’t apply and they deserve what they get. So much for “norms”.
He outed Trump donors.
ehh… this information is trivially easy to find:
https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/
type in your ZIP code. it’ll tell you all the contributions your neighbors have made (which have been reported so far).
amusingly, it has me down for a few dozen donations of $1.00 each, because i donated to ActBlue which splits donations among a pool of candidates.
What you are decrying here has been SOP for the Bannon wing of the right since at least Gamergate. Last I saw, their champion was still the de-facto GOP candidate for the 2020 presidential election and everyone in the party is tucking tail and keeping their heads down rather than raise a stink about these tactics. Romney? Sasse? Calling any vertibrates…
We’d all love a return to decency, but that’s not something that can be done unilaterally. You can’t stop a dog fight with only one dog on a leash.
Yep, about what I expected so far. Just good clean fun, they started it, blah, blah, blah. And who said just the other day they wanted a “decent” candidate? What definition of decent holds sway these days on the Progressive side?
McTx’s screaming silence on the fact that the leader of his party routinely calls out individuals (both public and private) by name is clear proof of his enormous hypocrisy. totally expected, of course.
We’ve got a few to choose from. Castro is not likely to be the one that makes the cut.
Meanwhile, on the right…
Where’s your alternative?
And who said just the other day they wanted a “decent” candidate?
why, that was me!
and until you start supporting someone who has a chance in hell of beating Trump essentially every criticism of any Dem you make is hypocrisy of the highest order. because it’s going to be very hard to find any criticism of any Dem that isn’t manifest tenfold in The Leader Of Your Party.
No. I have the right to deeply dislike both sides. I don’t have to denounce Trump to have standing to call out the kind of confrontational chickenshit that is now a part of Progressive tool kit. Read Castro’s tweet: he wasn’t just passing along neutral information. Quit thinking you have the moral high ground if this is the kind of shit you’re going to support.
I’m sure Democrats should maintain the moral high ground particularly when it disadvantages them politically/electorally.
Naming maxed-out Trump donors? Snore…
I don’t have to denounce Trump…
omg. lol.
He refuses to do anything about that Trump mote in his own eye until we deal with that Castro beam.
He refuses to deal with the fascist and white supremacist violence mote in his own eye until we deal with that antifa beam.
He hates both motes AND beams.
I have the right to deeply dislike both sides. I don’t have to denounce Trump to have standing to call out the kind of confrontational chickenshit that is now a part of Progressive tool kit.
You have to loathe Trump to have any sort of claim to having a voice worth hearing.
Meanwhile, encouraging action against small donors is not something I think well of. So that’s one D candidate who is maybe 100th as bad as Trump and his enablers.
encouraging action against small donors is not something I think well of.
Granted there are those who contrive to donate (indirectly, at least nominally) far more than the Federal maximum. But do those who have donate that maximum really qualify as “small donors”? (Now if Castro was tweeting out the entire donor list, including those who merely kicked in $10 or $20, that would be a different story.)
i would have advised Castro to not re-tweet that, if he had asked me. it’s hardly beyond the pale, but it’s not how i’d do things.
nobody asks me for campaign advice.
the kind of confrontational chickenshit that is now a part of Progressive tool kit
“confrontational” ?
for the sake of Mrs Fuck…
Trump has called for journalists to be beaten. he’s suggested the “2nd amendment people” could take care of HRC. he has been threatening for years to “lock her up” – not to try her, just to lock her up. he has attacked athletes, actors and private citizens by name. he has insulted, demeaned, threatened, dehumanized countless people, cities, states, countries. accused them of treason. he has explicitly accused all Democrats of hating America. he grins while his deplorable crowds chant a racist slogan that went out of style a century ago. CricketsFromTx.
McConnell’s ‘graveyard’. the endless parade of GOP functionaries busted for forwarding racist emails and tweets. GOP Senator talking about the “cosmopolitan elite”. CricketsFromTx.
but it’s not how i’d do things
… not the least of which is that the list gives “conservatives” an excuse to equate him with the Dayton killer. all lists are equivalent, after all.
for the sake of Mrs Fuck…
Trump has called for journalists to be beaten. he’s suggested the “2nd amendment people” could take care of HRC. he has been threatening for years to “lock her up” – not to try her, just to lock her up. he has attacked athletes, actors and private citizens by name. he has insulted, demeaned, threatened, dehumanized countless people, cities, states, countries. accused them of treason. he has explicitly accused all Democrats of hating America. he grins while his deplorable crowds chant a racist slogan that went out of style a century ago. CricketsFromTx.
Actually, from time to time, I’ve been very explicit about Trump, about Ted Cruz, about Roy Moore and about Steve whatever from Indiana. I don’t have to go on and on about them in an echo chamber that already goes on and on about them. I never defend Trump or even the rare policy I agree with.
But, the idea that Trump is such an outlier douche that everyone else is excused whenever and wherever a fig leaf can be found from previously understood rules of the road is bullshit.
Read Castro’s tweet: he wasn’t just passing along neutral information.
He said: “Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump — the owner of @BillMillerBarBQ, owner of the @HistoricPearl, realtor Phyllis Browning, etc.
Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’”
In other words, what Castro said was true. Their donations are public information (just as mine are). They aren’t “small donors” as Pro Bono suggested; they are maxed out. If you donate the maximum you can legally donate to a candidate, and you’re not proud of doing it, what does that say about you? Good on Castro. I’m glad to know who is responsible for Trump so I can boycott their businesses.
And, except for advising against what Castro did, what cleek said.
previously understood rules of the road
The rules of the road (in other words, the law) are that contributions to election campaigns are public information.
What definition of decent holds sway these days on the Progressive side?
I don’t have to denounce Trump to have standing to call out the kind of confrontational chickenshit that is now a part of Progressive tool kit.
I asked you the other day, and you ignored it, which rightwing (or RWNJ) sites you frequent to call out and insult those people, and presumably their enthusiastic supporters, you claim to despise. My exact words were:
I rather think the answer to this is important, if you are implicitly claiming even a smidgen of above sea-level ground at all, let alone any moral high ground, and let’s face it, by putting us down you are.
the idea that Trump is such an outlier douche . . . is bullshit.
Not really. Among politicians and office holders, GOP politicians and office holders, he is definitely an outlier. Unless you count excusing his misbehavior as the equivalent to engaging in that behavior. Not to excuse what they have done, but very few of them are anywhere near on his (low!) level.
McKinney, do you visit the sites frequented by, as you colourfully phrase it, the likes of Trump and the current Republican party which kisses his ass and excoriate them for their actions and sympathies? Don’t misinterpret me: I am on record as saying I like your visits here and think you add to our rich tapestry and often stimulate excellent stuff, but I’m just curious about where we fit in to your other conversations.
I rather think the answer to this is important, if you are implicitly claiming even a smidgen of above sea-level ground at all, let alone any moral high ground, and let’s face it, by putting us down you are.
I do remember the question and giving it some thought. Here is my daily read: ObWi, National Review, Slate, Salon, Atlantic, WSJ occassionally, WaPo occassionally and Real Clear Politics which comes closest to providing some insight to the pro-Trump camp. At RCP, I usually just scan the titles of the pieces because 95% of it is partisan cheer-leading and I find that intensely boring. I watch zero, zip, nada news on TV and have not for years.
I don’t even know of any pro-Trump sites and have no interest in visiting them. I come here because I’ve been coming here for over 10 years. I don’t feel like I have to go somewhere else and raise hell to retain my standing at ObWi to occasionally drop by and discuss discrete topics, particularly when I think there are grounds for moving the needle a small bit.
So, Sapient, while I take your point in a way, I’m just not organized or interested in going toe-to-toe with people I haven’t been talking to for 11 or more years, people I don’t know and don’t care about (other than I wish no one ill will). FWIW, most of the people I socialize with who are political–an important distinction–are all or mostly in for Trump. We don’t agree and rarely have conversations on the subject. I engage when asked, but I don’t go looking for discussion since they aren’t commenting publicly. I think that people’s views are almost always very, very complex and so I don’t get into meta discussions uninvited. Even here, I prefer discrete topics. Always have, for the most part.
You asked a fair question and I hope this gives you a reasonably responsive answer. Also, I’m not claiming any kind of moral high ground other than occasionally trying to identify when I think something is out of bounds.
Finally, since I really do appreciate your approach in making the inquiry, I often find myself in agreement with you and with Cleek and many others here, particularly when y’all are having intra-progressive discussions. Where I find myself getting put-off is when I address an issue and I get some form of “you’re just a Trump lover” response. I find that irritating. Argument by categorization–particularly false categorization–is off-putting.
FWIW, my opinion is that Castro’s tweet was ill-advised. Feelings are so heated that is just seems unnecessarily provocative. Especially for the campaign manager for a candidate for POTUS who also happens to be a Congressman.
Yes, the information is on the public record. No, it’s probably not a good idea to fan the flames, toward those particular people, at this particular time.
Everything is lawful, but all things are not expedient.
But, like cleek, I’m not on anybody’s Rolodex when these kinds of questions come up.
Also FWIW, asking Huckabee to leave a restaurant, or for that matter heckling Nielsen such that she felt obliged to flee a restaurant, don’t really bother me at all. Those people are not private citizens, they are spokespersons for, and in Nielsen’s case a principal implementor of, policies that are shameful and noxious. I have no problem with calling out public persons, in public, for their public actions.
I’m not sure where all of that lands me on the McK high ground meter, but so be it.
Both McK and Marty have repeatedly expressed how nutty we all seem to have been driven by Trump. Somehow we are all acting like he is some kind of “outlier douche”.
He is miles, many many miles, beyond an outlier douche.
Hmmm, McKinney, was your answer supposed to be addressed to sapient, or to me? And if in fact to me, did you mean what you said about often agreeing with me – I’m surprised if so.
“Actually, from time to time, I’ve been very explicit about Trump, about Ted Cruz, about Roy Moore and about Steve whatever from Indiana. I don’t have to go on and on about them in an echo chamber that already goes on and on about them. I never defend Trump or even the rare policy I agree with.”
Yes, you have, and you never defend that douche, and thank you.
Meanwhile, I give tit for tat on this forum … I retract nothing … to p and the republican party …. you are neither despite plenty of other issues we may disagree vehemently over… in the voice they taught me, in close observation of their unswerving and now ruthlessly applied certainties, shouting over everyone’s heads into the ether, as that political entity is, in my opinion, the most dangerous movement in the world in league with its nationalist orthodox fellow travelers in numerous other countries, including Russia.
You are also an apostate and a heretic to the conservative movement, which is not Christian in any normative sense of the word as a political force, perhaps as a cult, solely for your support of gay marriage and your membership in the socially progressive Episcopal Church (correct me if I’m wrong) which has adjusted its dogma admirably among the established American Christian sects to the world as it is.
Thank you for being so.
You are not Orthodox. We now live in a world in which Orthodox religious and political majorities are attempting to crush non-Orthodox religious and political minorities into a permanent supine posture.
I’m an agnostic. Doubt is my middle name. I am faith-curious in a way. You made a leap of faith somewhere along the pilgrimage to your beliefs ….. I’ve read my Kierkegaard, my Pascal, my Flannery O’Conner, my Walker Percy, etc and I respect their faith and the leaps over the mysterious abysses therein described.
I keep my recently purchased translation of the Hebrew Bible snug up against the collected works of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi imagining the conversation leaking back and forth between the two of them, when I’m not dipping in for a look see.
That I would like to punch cult leader Jerry Falwell’s face in is not an anti-Christian sentiment.
Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, both frail human Christians, would punch him in the face too, were they still with us, though Day might have been too much of a socialist to get violent.
The misguided true believers in p, especially those among the black, Hispanic, gay, feminist, and working class minorities remind me of the Association of German National Jews in the early going of the Third Reich.
All of their faith will go up in smoke.
They can sew their tax cuts into their suit linings when the going gets tough, which it will.
Of course, I’m agnostic even about my own opinions and dire predictions.
Stick around McKinney.
McKinney, the quotation you responded to was from GftNC, not me (although I’m certainly not insulted to have been confused with her, but she might have been with me!).
Castro did nothing wrong. People shouldn’t send money to campaigns if they’re ashamed of being discovered, since the information is public. If they’re in business, and their goods or services are worthwhile, some people will ignore their political leanings. At the moment, I want to know who I’m dealing with. I don’t want to patronize people who, in 2019 after over 2 1/2 years of seeing him, support his hate, treason and division.
I’m proud of the candidates I support. It’s public information to whose campaigns I contribute, and I also (often) put bumper stickers on my car promoting whatever candidate I support. If I were ashamed of supporting someone’s candidacy, I wouldn’t give that candidate money, particularly not the maximum amount. I hope that I wouldn’t vote for a candidate if I were ashamed to be supporting her, although the vote itself is private for a lot of different reasons.
I am for outing p’s and the republican party’s political donors, individual, corporate, anonymous mail drop, every chance we get, just as I am in favor of naming the names of organized crime donors to waste management companies.
That goes for Democratic party donors as well, natch.
Provocation is absolutely necessary.
It moves the thugocracy in the Republican Party to advance to its worst measures, which are coming, they can’t wait, and the sooner the better to see the ruthless nationalist, authoritarian whites of their eyes.
Huckabee, McConnell and company entered private establishments and requested the equivalent of right wing wedding cakes.
The answer was no.
Don’t let the door hit them in their lying asses.
When they rescind Brown versus Board of Education ,their children will be asked to leave their schools as well.
This game will be played until there only one total winner, like everything in America.
I’ll be a lot more forgiving of people’s wishes to be private when they are not directly supporting and amplifying the voice that is spreading fear and paranoia about people whose skin and cultural habits are public markers they should not have to hide.
Hmmm, McKinney, was your answer supposed to be addressed to sapient, or to me? And if in fact to me, did you mean what you said about often agreeing with me – I’m surprised if so.
Yes, dammit. Late afternoon dyslexia. It was a fair question and I hope I answered it to your satisfaction. I often agree with your substantive views and I particularly like your mode of engagement (most of the time!). Even when I don’t agree, I understand your position.
Sapient, lot’s of stuff is public if you know where to look. Aggregating a certain class of information on a certain class of people and dumping into the public debate, particularly at a time like this, is chickenshit, bad faith, below the belt, what-have-you. The other side will respond in kind or escalate. This will escalate, again and again. It’s hard enough getting through to people who aren’t already on board these days. This just makes it harder. It’s not a substantive position. It’s a low blow and intended as such.
Thanks John. As always.
What nous said.
Both McK and Marty have repeatedly expressed how nutty we all seem to have been driven by Trump. Somehow we are all acting like he is some kind of “outlier douche”.
Ok, I don’t think I make an issue of it routinely, but it is fair to say that since the election, things have not been the same around here–at least as I see it. To repeat myself somewhat, there was a time when we had extended exchanges–not agreements–just back-and-forth’s over differences, asking questions, making points, and having a dialogue. Long exchanges, over days sometimes, and not without humor and fun. Jesurlaic–who I miss greatly–and I went round and round and remained friendly throughout. That all changed with the election. Someday, Trump will not only be history, he’ll be dead. A lot of the rest of us will still be around. Whether we will still be talking or looking at each other over open sights is what keeps me up at night. Not kidding about this. I really cringe at what people are finding acceptable these days. And, yes, let me repeat, Trump is beyond the pale, your preferred adjectives go here:____________________________.
I’ll be a lot more forgiving of people’s wishes to be private when they are not directly supporting and amplifying the voice that is spreading fear and paranoia about people whose skin and cultural habits are public markers they should not have to hide.
So, the right to privacy is determined by how those who disagree with someone characterize the disagreement? That is no right at all. Here’s another point: even if each of the individual donors practices cannibalism and bestiality, when that person is outed, so is that person’s family. If that person is a political minority in his/her location, then you’re invoking majority oppression not only on that person but on his/her family as well. In effect, you are saying: because of how I assess your beliefs, I have the right to pillory you in the public square–and drag your family and your business (including your employees) into it. Castro’s outing, regardless of the blowback on innocent bystanders, says a lot for his ego and his lack of concern for others. He’s a prick, at best.
This tactic is a very sharp knife that cuts both ways.
Trump is beyond the pale
McConnell is beyond the pale, Pence is beyond the Pale, McCarthy is beyond the pale, King is beyond the pale, Stephen Miller is beyond the pale, Brett Kavanaugh is beyond the pale, William Barr is beyond the pale, Wilbur Ross is beyond the pale, etc.
These people have something in common, and those who support them do too. I’m glad you plan to live through this McKinney. Maybe your fortress will get you to the other side. We have a whole thread called “Names Once More”. They’re not going to see your happy day, and neither will many of us.
The “the right to privacy” does not exist in public information.
In effect, you are saying: because of how I assess your beliefs, I have the right to pillory you in the public square–and drag your family and your business (including your employees) into it.
This is a bit dramatic, no? If this mob who drags people’s families and employees around is so determined, they won’t wait for a public statement of public information. They’ll go look up some people themselves. I doubt that in Texas it’s hard to find Trump supporters who are out and proud. I can sure find people around here who are when I’m in the mood to drag and pillory.
No, McKinney, this is not about how I disagree with anyone, it’s about the effects of public discourse.
The WP types have a saying that once the Racial Holy War starts, everybody’s skin will be their uniform. A uniform that cannot be taken off allows for no privacy.
Talking about Mexican invasions and shooting invaders is, in point of fact, advocating violence against people who, given their skin, cannot be anything but public figures. The president’s remarks land quite predictably in the ears of the WP community. Anyone should be able to see this and to predict what the outcome of such language will be.
But he’s “a straight shooter” and “rough around the edges” and “calls it like he sees it,” so it’s fine to support him in private, but there should be no *public* marking of a person who was not born with the uniform of the wrong team.
Anyone should be able to see this and to predict what the outcome of such language will be.
Speaking of dragging. Yeah, again, not the angry liberal mobs being mean to Republicans.
Castro should have tweeted: “Here is a list of proud Trump donors.”
Leave it at that. Wait for the maxed-out donors to complain that it’s nobody’s business who they’re proud of, and they’re not proud anyway, and they wish libruls wouldn’t bring Politics into Real Life.
–TP
Jesurlaic–who I miss greatly–and I went round and round and remained friendly throughout.
Just to say, you got her name wrong, and I know this because it was a pain in the ass to respect her, and go back to cut and paste her name so many times, but still she bullied me.
Also, she was very witty and lovely, but she bullied me, and I hated her. She’s probably responsible for the fact that I became hostile to a lot of people here. I hope she’s okay because who cares what happened that many years ago, but if she was “friendly” to you, it was because you didn’t challenge her.
Again, I wish her well. That was a long time ago.
it is fair to say that since the election, things have not been the same around here
Yes, I think that’s true. And not just here.
Trump is a line, drawn in the sand. He is a giant bird, flipped by his supporters, to the rest of the country.
Leaving aside his personal shortcomings – his bullying, his cowardice, his fraudulent underhanded and likely criminal business practices, his gross and vulgar ignorance about any topic that fails to offer him some advantage – he is, politically, an authoritarian thug.
He is the end of dialogue. There is no conversation to be had with the man. There is no compromise, no negotiation, no honorable or respectful victory or retreat.
There is only win, or lose. Win is accompanied by braggadocio, and loss by petulance and attempts at revenge.
He makes it impossible for the institutions of responsible self-governance to function.
So yes, people are disturbed. More like, alarmed.
It’s not so much that people find it difficult to have thoughtful conversations with their political opposites, here in the age of Trump. It’s more like people wonder what the point is.
Let’s all chat, while the institutions that have made it possible for us all to co-exist for lo, these almost 250 years, burn to the ground. Let’s all chat, while people’s lives are being destroyed.
I’ve been engaging with people of all stripes, here and elsewhere, in online fora since the USA Patriot Act was a topic. That’s over 15 years now. The assumption – my assumption – is and was that there is and was some value in an exchange of ideas.
And I think that’s true. But I also think that the demographic for which that is true – the scope in which that has any effect – is fairly narrow.
Meanwhile, we have POTUS Trump.
“If anything can’t go on forever, it will stop”. Stein’s Law. The bullshit we’re seeing now can’t go on forever. So, at some point it will stop.
What will be left? How will we, as a people, look each other in the eye, when all of this crap is done, and say, yes, I can share a nation, a community, a society, with you?
Conservatism, and the (R) party, has taken a really dark fucking turn. There will be a reckoning.
We can talk civilly about anything we like. But sometimes – a lot of the time – it feels like we’re just dancing around that basic fact.
There is going to be a price to pay for all of the bullshit that is going on right now.
Let’s talk about that.
I really cringe at what people are finding acceptable these days.
You are not alone.
Trump . . . is a giant bird, flipped by his supporters, to the rest of the country.
That pretty well sums up the situation. Except that it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
What’s rather appalling is how many of his supporters would whole-heartedly embrace this characterization of their vote. It wasn’t, for that part of his base, an attempt to get particular policies implemented. It was just sending a crude message as crudely as possible; nothing more.
WJ
I think the public option would end up being underfunded. Republicans would want it to fail and so would some Democrats ( or their donors). If it were well funded and was a very attractive choice, then people would flock to it. So it won’t be, I am guessing. Could be wrong.
“My impression is that health care systems with private insurance components regulate the living crap out of them, which seems about as likely to fly here as single payer.” —me
“Is that what happens with Medicare Advantage plans today? Yet there are a bunch of them on offer….” — WJ
I was talking about other countries. My nonexpert impression is that those countries which use private insurance regulate it more than we do here, by having the government set prices for procedures, for example.
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/18080458/single-payer
don’t have to go on and on about them in an echo chamber that already goes on and on about them.
for the record, i hope you can see that i’m simply returning your “liberals here don’t complain about the Chinese Revolution so they must be enormous hypocrites” baloney.
and, i can point to the day when my attitude about all of this changed. it was the day Trump was elected. that’s when i realized most people on team GOP don’t actually care about anything except winning. and i was set free to hate them for it.
I can be angry, and I can despise and hold in utter contempt their leaders, but I can’t hate half a nation.
A google search for “lists of Clinton donors” brings up “about” 12,900,000 hits.
boo, hoo.
Today, before our eyes, Trump and his allies seek to crush the foundations of multiracial democracy and replace them with a white ethnostate where the ruling class directs violence at scapegoat communities to create the climate it needs to get away with looting the country and dismantling all checks on its power. If you can see that, and articulate it, you don’t ask what Trump might do to make things better, or say he “urges unity vs. racism.” If you can’t see it, or your job requires you to blind yourself to it, you must treat his ultimate purposes as an impenetrable mystery. You might explain away his efforts to end an investigation of an attack on the United States, and his coziness with the perpetrator, as impulses of a man who merely worries the Russia matter undermines his legitimacy. You might marvel at his occasional, scripted, disingenuous condemnations of all the forces he has fostered, and chase down Democrats to ask them if they think Trump is racist. But seriously: What the fuck?
This is the nub of it. This is where we are at. It’s not about civility. It never has been. It is simply this: Whose side are you on?
but I can’t hate half a nation.
they hate us. and they don’t care about your compassion.
Perhaps they, or some of them do, but do you want to look at that picture and think that’s what I’ve become, too ?
O’Rourke nailed it with his “what the fuck ?” response to the press question about how Trump might make it better.
And indeed in his speech beforehand:
“We have a President right now who traffics in this hatred, who incites this violence, who calls Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, calls asylum seekers animals and an infestation. You may call a cockroach an infestation—you may use that word in the Third Reich to describe those who are undesirable, who must be put down, because they are subhuman. You do not expect to hear that in the United States of America, in this age, in our generation, in this beautiful country.”
but do you want to look at that picture and think that’s what I’ve become, too ?
i don’t know what you’ve become. i know they hate you, me and everyone who isn’t a Trump supporter. they’re ruining the USA in his name. and i hate them for it.
During my politically aware lifetime, the US presidency has been held by Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush, Obama, and Trump.
Nixon was a crook, and GW Bush was spectacularly bad. Of the others, only Obama would get onto a shortlist if the job were by appointment – the US system seldom elects excellent presidents.
But Trump is a different thing altogether. He’s a fascist. He and the Republican party which supports him are a danger to democracy in the US and in the world.
This is not politics as usual, where we argue as politely as possible about how best to organise a liberal democracy. Now it’s about whether we should have a liberal democracy or not. And if you say not, I’m not interested in having a friendly discussion with you of the merits of fascism, or whatever other word you want to adopt for Trump’s politics.
It’s helpful to be reminded by McKT that we must not be like the other side – that Winston was wrong to agree to do whatever the Brotherhood asked. But the reason to treat Trump donors decently is not because they might possibly be good people, but because we should be.
All of bobbyp’s Crooked link is good, but this also deserves to be excerpted:
Thanks for that link, bobbyp and for highlighting the other portion, GftNC.
It is easier to look away than to connect the dots, because if the president has truly fascistic ambitions—if he has abused his power to recruit violent sympathizers in the military or civilian life with the lure of immunity—then conventional journalism lacks the language to say so.
Part of lacking the language is our overzealous insistence on “civility.” Fighting this requires that we call it out, and that we know who’s who. If people who are supporting Trump by giving him money, we should know who they are. If they’re ashamed, good for them – they should take their self-examination a step further and stop it.
or the record, i hope you can see that i’m simply returning your “liberals here don’t complain about the Chinese Revolution so they must be enormous hypocrites” baloney.
That’s a small part of my point. My larger point is my sense is that a number of subsets across the political spectrum are driven by a view of history. My sense of the progressive left–and other lefty subsets–is that they have a particular issue with the white, western, Christian, capitalist world. My point is that, in context, (1) Christianity is a piker in terms of spreading misery compared to socialism–which some number of Progs are willing to flirt with if not entertain in some watered down form and (2), if you want historical perspective, both Islam and the Chinese and/or Mongols were much farther out there on the warlike spectrum than the white, Christian, capitalist west. As a result, a lot of conclusions drawn the farther left one goes are based on an erroneous and skewed take on history. I don’t expect any agreement with this. I’m simply trying to explain my point.
it was the day Trump was elected. that’s when i realized most people on team GOP don’t actually care about anything except winning. and i was set free to hate them for it.
Ok, you were always free to hate anyone you want. I am with Nigel on this 100%. My view: Hating the opposition is wrong for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that a number of people voted for Trump because–sorry to say, the Dems didn’t offer anything of interest to them. Trump got the nomination with a plurality of base voters. Now, they seem to be all in for him, which will stain their brand for a decade at least (and it should). However, spewing vitriol doesn’t change minds. It produces escalation. I can find plenty of lefty finger-giving on the internet–does that mean everything you say about Trumpers is also true for the left?
Just to say, you got her name wrong
Yep, Jesurlac. No “i”. My bad. Late evening dyslexia. You two did not get along. I do recall that.
i know they hate you, me and everyone who isn’t a Trump supporter. they’re ruining the USA in his name. and i hate them for it.
This is silly. They don’t all hate you. My law firm is split in three sections politically and no one gives a damn how others vote, and we are a very tight knit group. Do you know what the Democrat judges in Harris County do with respect to the Republican judges they unseated? They do the same the Republican Judges did back when Harris County went from blue to red: they appoint their former opponents as mediators, arbitrators, receivers and they ask them to sit as visiting judges. Castro’s move was grossly out of character for inter party squabbles in Texas. It was a big norm violation in this neck of the woods. Here, at least so far, when someone wins an election, that is that.
People here work side by side. I think that’s probably true everywhere. If I had a political fire breather from any spot on the spectrum giving others grief in the work place, I’d fire them. FWIW, I think it’s more likely that people like you–right or left– scare the shit out of people like me, who think you’ve lost most if not all since of proportion.
It’s helpful to be reminded by McKT that we must not be like the other side – that Winston was wrong to agree to do whatever the Brotherhood asked. But the reason to treat Trump donors decently is not because they might possibly be good people, but because we should be.
Thanks for this but the larger picture is that voting for Trump–or Sanders–doesn’t make someone a Nazi any more than it makes them fans of the USSR or Cuba or what have you. Like I said, people can be voting against someone just as easily as they can be voting for someone. There is a big-ass difference. Just because I can’t stomach Trump doesn’t oblige me to vote for Elizabeth Warren if I can’t stand her policies. I am allowed, as an American, to refuse to vote for either house.
My sense of the progressive left–and other lefty subsets–is that they have a particular issue with the white, western, Christian, capitalist world…
Except that would be caricature.
Progressive Warren for example, labels herself an enthusiast for capitalism. But better regulated capitalism.
Of the score of candidates running for the nomination, only Sanders labels himself a socialist – and he’d be a fairly moderate one from a European perspective… and is a self-made millionaire.
I’m not sure the progressive left or its lefty subsets have much of a problem with Christianity, either. After all, Jesus himself was someone who displayed alarmingly socialist tendencies.
Particular interpretations of Christianity, especially those which don’t seem very interested in what Christ is reported to have said, perhaps.
I don’t even know what you mean by white and western, given a very large part of their vote is one or the other or both.
Unless it’s an objection to this kind of thing :
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/anti-feminism-gateway-far-right/595642/
I think the public option would end up being underfunded. Republicans would want it to fail and so would some Democrats ( or their donors). If it were well funded and was a very attractive choice, then people would flock to it. So it won’t be, I am guessing. Could be wrong.
Donald,
Thanks for the reply. Certainly the evidence from Obamacare suggests that a lot of Republicans would want it to fail. (Unless, like Kentucky with kynect, they can rebrand it and pretend it was their idea.) But the example of Medicare suggests, optimistically, that it might not be underfunded enough to fail.
It will be interesting to see what happens in practice. My guess is that, having seen that attempts at compromise with the GOP will be spurned, what we gets will be the reult of internal Democratic compromises. Including on funding.
I can find plenty of lefty finger-giving on the internet–does that mean everything you say about Trumpers is also true for the left?
i have no idea.
i do know that the people who voted for Trump voted for someone who was clearly and undeniably an abhorrent person. not just that his policies were not mine, but that he, personally, was vile in every way. but they voted for him proudly, in no small part because they wanted to stick it to the left. and they still stick with him.
i don’t see much point in trying to find common ground with those people. they want something from the country that is completely orthogonal to what i want. or maybe they aren’t paying any attention at all, but they damn well should be.
if there are Republicans who are offended by Trump, they are free to stop supporting him – that would be a clear signal to me and everybody else that they aren’t deplorable. but his approval among Republicans is currently at 88%, exactly where it has always been.
Trump regularly tells the country that i – and all Democrats – am the enemy. and the GOP supports him and cheers him on, top to bottom, tooth and nail.
well, message received.
no olive branch from me.
you hate me? fuck it, i’ll hate you.
If I had a political fire breather from any spot on the spectrum giving others grief in the work place, I’d fire them.
for the record, i have never, ever brought up politics with anyone in the workplace. even when asked or when the topic is broached, i keep my responses as mild as i can make them. i just don’t want to bring that into work.
i’m sure most people where i work have no idea what my politics are. and that’s how i intend to keep it.
My sense of the progressive left–and other lefty subsets–is that they have a particular issue with the white, western, Christian, capitalist world.
Thete are, indeed, a few on the left who feel that way. And they make noise far exceeding their numbers.
But the vast majority of the progressive left that I know only have a problem with
a) unregulated capitalism, and maybe
b) the kind of “Christianity” which behaves as if it sees itself as a political group, uninhibited by the teachings of a teacher 2000 years ago.
My sense of the progressive left–and other lefty subsets–is that they have a particular issue with the white, western, Christian, capitalist world.
You mean the progressive left and other lefty subsets that live in the white, Western, Christian, capitalist world? I’m not exactly sure if that’s a description of something you think exists or something you think lefties think exists (i.e. the white, Western, Christian, capitalist world), but it does seem to acknowledge where power lies (and you might add straight and male for good measure!). So, yes, lefties do seem to want to break the stranglehold that certain groups have had historically in this country in particular. But it’s a problem with the dominance, not whiteness or Christianity or capitalist wealth in and of themselves. (The “Western” part is a little too vague, for me at least, to get into much and is probably covered well enough by the combination of “white” and “Christian.”)
My point is that, in context, (1) Christianity is a piker in terms of spreading misery compared to socialism–which some number of Progs are willing to flirt with if not entertain in some watered down form
I guess “flirt with” includes things like strong labor representation, a robust safety net, and vigorous environmental and financial regulation. How that becomes a contest between Christianity and socialism, I don’t know. It’s probably better to discuss given policies on their merits without all this unhelpful and irrelevant “context.”
(2), if you want historical perspective, both Islam and the Chinese and/or Mongols were much farther out there on the warlike spectrum than the white, Christian, capitalist west.
I don’t live in a predominantly Muslim country or China or Mongolia. I don’t know what these comparisons have to do with whether or not, say, Affirmative Action or single-payer healthcare are good policies. Whether or not white, Christian capitalists are the *Worst People Ever in Human History* has no bearing on my policy preferences.
I find this whole line of reasoning to be, for lack of a better word, goofy.
voting for Trump–or Sanders–doesn’t make someone a Nazi…
Putting “or Sanders” in that is ugly. There is no “both sides” equivalence between Trump and any imaginable D candidate.
Just because I can’t stomach Trump doesn’t oblige me to vote for Elizabeth Warren if I can’t stand her policies.
Declining to vote for whoever runs against Trump is, just, something we could have a conversation about. But we were talking about donors who have made the maximum possible personal financial contribution to getting Trump re-elected.
On the name, I think it was Jesurgislac. I am not sure.
On the substance, Trump’s interference in the military justice system was shocking. I usually go on about war crimes and have given up on that to some extent. We will always commit them and on a bipartisan basis and nothing will be done to high ranking perpetrators. So under both parties we will have unjust wars, bomb cities, supply weapons to war criminals and terrorists and impose murderous sanctions because we are unaccountable to anyone. But at least we did have a system which sometimes went after the people on the ground who committed embarrassing acts of brutality without sanction from above. Trump just gave his sanction to war crimes at all levels. Well, he did run on that back in 2016, so he kept his promise.
Calley got off lightly as well, so there has always been a constituency for this.
I haven’t had (and continue to not have) much time today to do more than just keep up. But:
sapient: I am not remotely insulted (although slightly confused) to be mixed up with you.
and
McKinney: Thank you for both your answer, and your kind remarks. I think your answer to my question is very interesting, for reasons that I do not currently have time to outline, but will hope to come back to.
but they voted for him proudly, in no small part because they wanted to stick it to the left.
File under “Cleek’s Law” – er, um – cleek.
I have no desire to stick it to anyone. I’d prefer that, even if people wanted different things than I did, they didn’t feel like I was purposely trying to poke them in the eye with my preferences. I f**king hate this crap that we’re living through right now. It’s a hundred times worse than arguing about NAFTA, WMDs or the Iran nuclear deal. I have tons of Trumper friends who I used to argue politics with, but don’t anymore because I would prefer to continue liking them, even if it requires certain avoidances.
(The above paragraph isn’t in response to you, specifically, cleek.)
An alternate view of the Deep State
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-can-no-longer-justify-being-a-part-of-trumps-complacent-state-so-im-resigning/2019/08/08/fed849e4-af14-11e9-8e77-03b30bc29f64_story.html
Oh, and isn’t it “Jesurgislac”?
i’m kindof impressed that Trump went through with actual workplace raids.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/ice-agents-raid-miss-work-sites-arrest-680-people-in-largest-single-state-immigration-enforcement-action-in-us-history/2019/08/07/801d5cfe-b94e-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html
i didn’t think he’d have the guts to make life hard for big biz.
(The above paragraph isn’t in response to you, specifically, cleek.)
what hsh said.
didn’t think he’d have the guts to make life hard for big biz.
You might want to note that these businesses aren’t all that large. And note that
So, not too much inconvenience for the business’ owner.
Also note that
That is, many of those picked up are going to be back at work in a day or two. Because apparently under a Trump administration, “anchor babies” are a real thing.
I’m nearly certain Donald and hairshirthedonist are correct on the spelling of Jes’ handle.
But if we are lucky, she may appear shortly and confirm the spelling for us.
I say this because the last time she appeared here, to my knowledge, was several years ago (it all bleeds together) when I was trying to figure out what Slart was getting at in a comment, and I jokingly wrote something like “do I have to summon Jes in here to tell you are being obtuse?”, as she would in the old, old days, and sure enough, within the hour, after some years of silence from her end, down she swooped, like Pallas Athena alighting next to Achilles to question his motives, to tell Slart he was being obtuse (about what, who cares).
And then off she went.
It was pretty cool. I felt like a little kid pointing at a cloud and instantly causing it to give forth with thunder and lightening. Or like a seance participant causing a teapot on the sideboard to speak in the voice of a long-gone ancestor.
Jes, are you there?
[Jes, i promise to be nice]
It’s taken a while, but the Democrats have finally realised that the Senate filibuster is of less importance than… the survival of human civilisation:
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/456704-harry-reid-democrats-should-scrap-filibuster-to-battle-climate-change-if-they
“The answer is yes,” Reid told the Daily Beast, when asked if he would get rid of the tactic requiring 60 votes for legislation to be brought to the floor if it allowed Democrats to pass a bill addressing the climate crisis. “[T]he No. 1 priority is climate change. There’s nothing that affects my children, grandchildren, and their children, right now, more than climate.”
Reid predicted that the death of the filibuster for legislation is inevitable.
“It is not a question of if,” he told The Daily Beast. “It is a question of when we get rid of the filibuster. It’s gone. It’s gone.
For the ultimate proper perspective on human depravity, this, from a New Yorker review of a new book on the mosquito throughout human history:
“In total, Winegard estimates that mosquitoes have killed more people than any other single cause—fifty-two billion of us, nearly half of all humans who have ever lived. He calls them “our apex predator,” “the destroyer of worlds,” and “the ultimate agent of historical change.”
As mortality becomes a palpable presence on my horizon, the very unspeakableness of the perils of existence leaves me depressingly small in the course of history.
My kingdom for a vodka tonic and mosquito net.
McKinney wrote:
“My point is that, in context, (1) Christianity is a piker in terms of spreading misery compared to socialism–which some number of Progs are willing to flirt with if not entertain in some watered down form.”
This makes zero sense with just about anything argued here over the years by anyone that I can remember. If you are comparing flirtation with a European-type or Canadian government health care insurance scheme with Joseph Stalin’s all-in socialist (not even that, as with p, in smaller proportion, the cruelty was the point not socialism) romance with catastrophic agricultural crop policies in the Ukraine during the 1930s or whatever cruel collectivist Maoist deprivations were forced on China, then all we have is a conversation stopper.
Just the same, the fact that China currently has a fragmented healthcare system in which many are not covered by insurance is a failure to my mind, but whether its a failure of capitalism or socialism I’ve no idea, and frankly I don’t care.
Covering all of the Chinese citizenry with subsidized health insurance is not the disappearance of thousands in Tiananmen Square.
McTX, you are revulsed by p, but what line can he (he will, if you draw the line and point him at it) cross to make you wish you had voted for Hillary Clinton, the only other candidate who had a chance to prevent this monstrous Presidency.
Even if Daffy Duck would have been a suitable alternative to p and had been on the ballot.
oh shit…. can’t believe i didn’t catch this… the Castro who retweeted The List was Joaquin. he is not the candidate; his brother Julian Castro is.
lol
“My larger point is my sense is that a number of subsets across the political spectrum are driven by a view of history. My sense of the progressive left–and other lefty subsets–is that they have a particular issue with the white, western, Christian, capitalist world. My point is that, in context, (1) Christianity is a piker in terms of spreading misery compared to socialism–which some number of Progs are willing to flirt with if not entertain in some watered down form and (2), if you want historical perspective, both Islam and the Chinese and/or Mongols were much farther out there on the warlike spectrum than the white, Christian, capitalist west”
I agree that some on the left are overly sweeping in their criticisms. I occasionally find my teeth grinding when a secular liberal friend of mine in real life says something like “ religion is responsible for nearly all wars”. It’s bumper sticker analysis.
But I doubt your sense of the relative death tolls is correct. Western imperialism has a gigantic death toll. Leopold II in the Congo might have killed as many as Stalin and with a smaller population. One could go down a list, which is pointless. And Christianity was used to justify Western colonialism, as well as antisemitism. I don’t reduce Christianity to all the evils committed in its name, but try not to deny or minimize them.
But obviously the left tried to make up for lost time in the atrocity department, starting with the atrocities of the French Revolution. Some lefties take a no true Scotsman approach to leftist atrocities, but I think they are part of our history, just like Luther is a central figure for Protestants as well as a vicious antisemite. ( I think God takes a no true Christian approach, but have no idea how that actually works out when applied to people and vague abstractions like “Islam” or “ the West” as opposed to deeds. It is easy to judge deeds.)
Liberals distance themselves from the far left, but some liberals support “ humanitarian” wars. Give them time— they can rack up a respectable body count.
I also have a friend ( mentioned earlier in this or a recent thread) who is an Islamophobe. He sees Islam as pure evil. I don’t see a huge difference in the historical record when it comes to aggression between the Christian West and Islam.
On socialism, in the watered down social democracy form that Sanders supports ( and to some degree Warren while avoiding the socialism label), I think it is entirely consistent with what the Old Testament prophets and Jesus teach. The Bible teaches people to have great suspicion of people who worship Mammon and to have institutions to make provision for the poor. It takes for granted that the rich will trample the poor unless kept in check.
I’m pretty sure that quite a few someones have been made Nazis, or close enough, in recent years and liberals didn’t do it.
As I usually do in the morning, I rose and took a piss and fired up the coffee pot. Then I lit the ceremonial incense to Kim Il Sung (Juchi!) and read several passages from the Great Helmsman’s little Red Book.
Before firing up the computer to drive on the internets, I chanted three times (and clicked my heels), “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”. Uncle Joe sure had a way with words, didn’t he?
And then the question of the ages came upon me like the malevolent morning calm just before the Great Kahn’s calvary mounted for another murderous charge:
Just what the fuck do we do about the good Germans? I shall let history be my guide.
FWIW, I think it’s more likely that people like you–right or left– scare the shit out of people like me, who think you’ve lost most if not all since of proportion.
eek! there’s a liberal out there who is done with being called an-American-hating enemy of the state by a party that can’t stop celebrating the most grotesque failure of a human being to ever set foot in the WH!
with all due respect, you don’t know much at all about me.
From the same review of the mosquito book:
“The most dramatic conquest by mosquitoes came when old diseases encountered a new continent. When Columbus arrived in the New World, the mosquitoes there were pesky but carried no diseases. (Winegard chalks this up to different farming practices here: far less cultivation and disruption of natural ecosystems, and less direct contact with animals through husbandry. Syphilis was perhaps the only disease to ride the Columbian Exchange eastward.) But the blood of the new arrivals, and the mosquitoes that crossed with their ships, changed everything. Just twenty-two years after Columbus stepped onto Hispaniola, a census revealed that the local Taino population had dropped from between five and eight million people to just twenty-six thousand. Along with smallpox and influenza, mosquito-borne diseases led, by Winegard’s estimate, to the deaths of ninety-five million indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, from a pre-contact population of about a hundred million.”
Mosquitoes are opportunists, like communists, religions, and capitalists whose policies kill humans.
We may be related to mosquitoes in our DNA.
As with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Duarte of the Philippines, Bolsonaro of Brazil, and Steven Miller, for Robespierre the cruelty was the point.
anyone know the death toll for racism and nationalism ?
because that’s something we have a lot of right now, unlike the faint shadow of modern European-style social democracy that has the right so afraid (it’s this year’s ebola).
with all due respect, you don’t know much at all about me.
I don’t think McKinney’s really scared of people like you, either. Maybe he is. I’m no mind-reader. But I don’t buy it. It’s really just a rhetorical flourish AFAICT.
Commenting on a blog, short of believable threats of violence, isn’t all that scary. (Well, unless you’ve lost all sense of proportion.)
JDT,
Tried to read that this am, but not savvy enough to get past the NYT paywall.
Neither a Julian or a Joaquin does a Fidel make.
nor (iega)
FWIW –
My sister and her family (husband, two daughters, three grands) live in Phoenix AZ. Sis and hubby moved there over 40 years ago. They didn’t start out as right-wingers, but now they are, and have been. As was my mother, who also retired to AZ with my step-dad, before she passed back in ’03.
My sister taught me to read, and to drive. I was the officiant at my niece’s wedding ceremony. I’ve known my brother-in-law for 50 years at this point.
They are all Trumpies. Sister maybe less so, because she’s a strong evangelical and Trump is such an offensive beast, but basically all Trumpies. Niece and her husband are deep into the Breitbart / Milo thing.
I do not, and am not going to, hate them. There are simply enormous areas in which we do not share values. I think they are, not so much wrong, as wrong-headed. Mistaken. They think a lot of things are true that are not true, and unfortunately don’t appear to be interested in examining any of it.
I’m sure they either think the same of me, or else don’t really care all that much why I think what I think, and are just happy to go on their own way.
We don’t talk about politics. Full stop. There are lots of other things to talk about.
If I talk about a “reckoning” that is coming due to Trump and the conditions that made him possible, I’m not talking about revenge. I’m talking about the lasting damage that is being done, and the time – not 10 years, more like maybe 50 – and difficult effort it is going to take to unwind it all.
And it won’t all be able to be unwound. Some people – a lot of people – have been, are now, and will continue to be irrevocably harmed by the policies and attitudes that have taken over the (R) party and American conservatism in general.
That asshole in the “Fuck Your Feelings” shirt is probably going to pay, and nobody like me is going to make that happen. It’s going to happen when he loses whatever job he has, or reaches the end of his working life and has nothing to show for it, or needs to go to the doctor, or his kids end up dead from an Oxy overdose.
That is what I’m talking about. And you can extend that to all of the international relationships that are being broken by Trump’s belligerence and general rudeness, all of the environmental damage that is going to flow from his mania for deregulation, all of the animus he is creating toward and with minority communities, and on and on and on and on and on.
He is a bully, a bigot, and in general a fucking ignoramus. That is Kryptonite to leadership.
I’d love to help all of the angry folks who have been left behind by whatever it is that’s happened to this damned country over the last 40 or 50 years. They don’t want my help. They resent it.
So I got nothing. I’m just waiting for the fever to pass.
Also FWIW, I am probably one of a very very small handful of people here – maybe me and bobbyp? – who are actually not essentially capitalist in their view of political economy. Nor am I socialist. I’m not any kind of ist.
What I think about capitalism is that people conflate it with market economies, and with American political liberty and self-governance. I enthusiastically support both of those things, and neither of those things are capitalism.
Capitalism asserts that the value created by productive effort belongs to the capital investor. Labor is seen as, and is to be treated as, a necessary expense, and otherwise not deserving of a share in the value created.
I say that’s wrong, so I’m not a capitalist.
In general most folks, including myself, have made peace with the fact of capitalism as the prevailing regime, here and in most places. We’re just trying to keep it between the lines.
‘Socialism’ has almost no meaning in the United States, other than to refer to things the government does that some particular person doesn’t like.
Dreher frequently makes me angry and other times I like him, often on the same day and sometimes within the same column.
Anyway, this is a piece about how the Trump Administration deported a mentally ill diabetic Christian back to Iraq where he doesn’t speak the language and couldn’t get insulin. Of course he died.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/merciless-america-killed-jimmy-al-daoud/
Regarding donor lists:
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/08/08/naming-shaming-open-thread-even-trumps-supporters-find-the-association-embarrassing/
Right wing commentators cite George Soros’ name on left campaign donor lists all of the time, here and in Europe, being sure to remind us that he is both a Jew and a self-hating fake Jew just in case cosmopolitan liberal is too coy for red meat-eaters.
In a world of total, malignant hateful bullshit, The Castro boys are a spot of desultory deserved pigeon crap on Robert E. Lee’s statue.
The Iraqi Christian could have stayed in the United States for lots of humanitarian reasons, but affordable insulin, unless sherpaed in from Canada, was not one of them.
Flirtation with socialism being what it is.
“and difficult effort it is going to take to unwind it all.”
The most immediate effect, and possibly the most dangerous, of p being gone, and I mean gone, will be the debilitating boredom that sets in when we as a country are no longer subjected daily, upon awakening in the morning, to President PT Jazzhands Barnum sending repeated electrical shockwaves through the body politic over otherwise pedestrian policy questions, formerly dealt with some degree of solemnity by people whose job it is to govern, that have been ginned up into a three-ring circus edited with quickcutaways like a reality show.
I fear the amount of dopamine and serotonin that is going to be required to keep America’s frontal lobes functioning, but I fear what fresh Hell will be concocted by the next bigger monster so we don’t miss the current show of our testicles being hooked up to car batteries for a group of right wing deplorable assholes’ amusement.
Still, mosquitoes.
Some ponderables with regard to the ICE raids:
http://paydayreport.com/ice-raids-miss-plant-after-3-5-million-sexual-harassment-settlement/
Gotta love it when they open fire on human rights and do structural damage to workers rights in the process.
They refuse to say whether they will go after anyone in management who was involved in the hiring practices.
Wonder what those donor lists would look like?
“The most immediate effect, and possibly the most dangerous, of p being gone, and I mean gone, will be the debilitating boredom that sets in when we as a country are no longer subjected daily, upon awakening in the morning, to President PT Jazzhands Barnum sending repeated electrical shockwaves through the body politic over otherwise pedestrian policy questions”
I blame Reality Television.
More destructive of human civilization than hydrogen bombs? Sounds plausible.
Use one to cure the other.
Donald, I grow increasingly fearful of Rod Dreher.
I asked the other week on one of his threads (no response from him) what sort of measures, surveillance and otherwise, will be in place in his Orthodox Benedict Option communities he wants to embed across the country to make sure the hated LGBT individuals who might want to share his faith are first segregated, and then discriminated against and removed, maybe by train.
This, after yet another prattling column about the vast majority number of Christians being the real discriminated-against victims in this country.
I believe he is dangerous. I think he is working up a bolus of orthodox resentment and hatred against the LGBT community among his readers and faithful that can have no good end.
That he cloaks it in his Christian sentimentality makes the hairs stand up on my back even more.
Regarding the murder of Jimmy-al-daoud by American policy via its instrument, p, this is how Dreher thinks: “The Left needs to back off on LGBT rights completely, (oh, and socialism, the meme) because it offends my rights as an Orthodox Catholic, or they need to explain to me why I shouldn’t vote for Trump in 2020, no matter how many Jimmy-al-daouds are murdered by Trump’s policies.”
Dreher is a hostage taker. But he gets to play the hostage too.
He goes on and on about Weimar America. Well, we know what followed as punishment for those petty sins.
I plan to fight him physically one day.
He once answered one of my smart-ass comments by writing “You seem nice.”
I should have said: “You don’t.”
He’s the Jim Cramer of Christian identity victimization as he cites every maladjusted freak, a small percentage of the LGBT community, he can dig up on YouTube as evidence for his revulsion … he’s prolific to the point of chronic typist diarrhea like Cramer.
Well, and me.
Actually, he sounds hauntingly at times like Carl Schmitt, mentioned way upthread and about which more later, maybe tomorrow.
Dreher likes a strong sovereign to force his issues … Bolsonaro in Brazil, the right wing freaks in Hungary and Poland.
No, we aren’t going to do history again like that.
Dreher is so bad.
someone suggested that maybe white people shouldn’t run everything! panic!
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/america-anti-white-supremacists-al-sharpton/
Both sides, blah, fucking heil:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/08/the-critic-as-political-figure
John—
Dreher is petrified because his side lost the culture wars on gender issues. I don’t think he is sadistic or cruel, but he is driven by fear and he makes his living being hysterical and playing Cassandra for Christians. I might have been banned. I have gotten a little sarcastic there lately.
The scary people over there are mostly in the comments. Not all of them, but some fraction are pretty much white nationalists . Dreher isnt that, whatever else he is. Violence scares him even if he does his best to claim that both sides are equally responsible.
The Left needs to back off on LGBT rights completely, (oh, and socialism, the meme) because it offends my rights as an Orthodox Catholic
I realize that this is a parody of Dreher’s position, but it nonetheless is close enough to literal reality – for him and others – that the following question applies:
How does *somebody else being gay* interfere with your beliefs or your practice of your beliefs?
NOBODY IS TRYING TO MAKE YOU GAY.
It’s not enough for folks like this to affirm and practice their beliefs. No-one who does not affirm and practice their beliefs can be allowed to exist.
That is what is dangerous.
they think that the presence of and acceptance of anyone who isn’t at least as Christian as they loudly claim to be is going to erode society. not just ‘going to’ – already is. that’s why they want to wall themselves off from the wicked world and create places where they won’t melt.
Maybe the solution can be found in these cheesy lyrics from an old metal tune:
He’d had enough
He couldn’t take anymore
He found a place in his mind and slammed the door
No matter how they tried they couldn’t understand
They washed and dressed him fed him by hand
Yeah I’ve left the world behind
I am safe here in my mind
I’m free to speak with my own kind
This is my life
This is my life
I’ll decide not you
Withdrawn he’d sit there staring into space
No sign of life would flicker on his face
Until one day he smiled it seemed as though with pride
The wind kissed him goodbye and then he died
Keep the world with all its sin
It’s not fit for living in
Yeah I will start again it can take forever and ever and ever
But I shall win
How many like him are there still
Who to us all seem to have lost the will
They lie in thousands blank and lost
Is knowledge worth this bitter cost
Beyond the realms of death
How does *somebody else being gay* interfere with your beliefs or your practice of your beliefs?
At a guess, merely being forced to acknowledge that gays exist interferes with his beliefs. Because, after all, that would suggest that God doesn’t view the universe the same way Dreher does. That is, quite simply, an attack which must be countered at all costs. Lest he have to change any fragment of his worldview.
It IS the cruelty.
The hand of vigilante justice will one day lay on the neck of William Barr.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/08/the-critic-as-political-figure
Emmett Till still has not been avenged to my satisfaction.
We will take a moment to bring justice to Mr. Barr only after citing the correct link:
https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-attorney-general-of-united-states.html
Vigilantes on the Left like to observe the proprieties.
“NOBODY IS TRYING TO MAKE YOU GAY!”
If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t have one. But don’t stop me.
If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one. But don’t stop me.
If you don’t want a gun, don’t get one. But don’t stop me.
It’s that last one, tho, that ain’t like the others, even as it purports to be. Because that’s the one I fear in Walmart (or wherever). The second one is self-explanatory. The first one… well, I’m just picturing a John Waters-ey thing, and that sounds like a serendipitous thing I would have a blast being caught up in.
On a sobering note, “blast” seems like a word that shouldn’t be used there.
I’m leaving it. You’ve taken enough already. You don’t get to take my words. You know who you are.
I don’t think it’s the mere existence of gays, it’s that we’ve hit a tipping point in society where power is acknowledging the right of gays to be publicly gay. They don’t want gayness to be mainstreamed or to have to be polite and acquiescent when someone gay wants to live and love in full view of their society the same as any het couple might.
it’s against their religion for gays to be mainstreamed. Gays can exist, but only if power sides with the rights of ordinary people to cluck their disapproval and refuse them service.
Regarding Dreher:
His criticisms of classical liberalism, materialism, and consumer capitalism, which sound like Marxist criticism regurgitated would be valid to some extent, but not to free market conservatives, if the roots of his criticism didn’t originate in his visceral revulsion toward gay sex acts and their increasing validation by mainstream churches.
Meanwhile, Peter Thiel, no CLASSICAL liberal.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/08/behind-the-republican-war-on-democracy
I fear Peter Thiel.
I’m going to fight him too.
We will not relive that fascist history again.
This time, we kill them first, which sounds alarming.
But so did “Lock and Load” and “Give me Liberty Or Give Me Death”, and “I’d like to borrow that Army for a Time.”
Thiel is gay and proudly so.
So was Herman Goering, but it has nothing to do with defeating him thru force.
It’s just more of “the other” crap that I had really hoped we were getting past. The hypocrisy of “freedom” & “live & let live” is a blast furnace in the face sometimes.
I’m just venting. Apologies.
Vent away.
Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously . . . hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.
snicker.
It’s true.
Gay pastors are not cruising Walmarts and forcibly hitching up straight men and other men with marriage vows.
Abortion choice advocates are not cruising Walmarts and forcibly removing fetuses from pregnant mothers’ wombs.
I’m tired.
Goodnight.
At a Smashing Pumpkins concert, and the opening act is whatever Noel Gallagher’s band is. They dedicated their last song to our president. “All You Need is Love” by some obscure band.
I think there’s a man-made floating island somewhere in the Pacific with Peter Thiel’s name on it.
Bon voyage.
Probably too much to hope that the floating island would spend its time policing up some of the plastic (and other) trash floating around in mid-Pacific. Pity, that might have actually done the world some good.
Also FWIW, I am probably one of a very very small handful of people here – maybe me and bobbyp? – who are actually not essentially capitalist in their view of political economy. Nor am I socialist. I’m not any kind of ist.
“me and bobbyp” — isn’t that a song……?
I’m with you and bobbyp on this, though. I’m just inarticulate about it.
I have a hard time seeing how both we and capitalism will survive the ongoing ecological collapse together.
The lack of urgency in addressing the coming ecological crisis is depressing indeed.
Good article on the latest IPCC report:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/how-think-about-dire-new-ipcc-climate-report/595705/
One quibble with the article, this statement isn’t absolutely true:
The biggest of these issues: Land can’t really multitask…
We’ve already demonstrated, to a limited extent, that land can multitask – for example, growing crops in semi-arid zones underneath solar panel arrays increases yields:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190729123751.htm
The AG has some rather unlawyerly ideas about ‘justice’…
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/bill-barr-interview-dirty-harry-death-wish-vigilante-justice
In response to the next question, about his love of the TV show Banshee, Barr said that he enjoyed the show in part because it delves into a “basic tension between justice in the sense of the ultimate outcome versus justice as a process.”
“Americans have tended recently to view [justice] more as a process, as if the criminal justice process is justice, and it isn’t,” Barr said. “It’s a process that’s supposed to achieve justice, but very frequently doesn’t.”
“That’s the theme in the Dirty Harry movies,” he added, before also referencing Death Wish…
And is apparently deeply confused about the difference between fiction and reality.
a man’s got to know his limitations, Barr.
Christian homophobes also tend to subscribe to the OT idea that G#d will punish the collective for the misdeeds or wrongness of the individual. From that POV tolerating gays to live among us (even closeted ones) is a violation of faith/religious duties. Tolerance is an abomination in the eyes of the(ir) Lord.
I have a hard time seeing how both we and capitalism will survive the ongoing ecological collapse together.
Standing athwart history is one thing. Standing athwart physics is another thing altogether.
I’m not going to get hung up on ‘capitalism’, when Warren proclaims herself a capitalist. About as silly as the ‘socialism’ label in US politics.
But climate change need immediate and concerted government leadership – and around 2-3% of GDP worldwide spending every year for the next couple of decades on re-making our energy system.
Waiting until next November might not be disastrous, though it’s not going to help at all; waiting another five years after that very probably would be.
I recognise that a global effort is required, but that is just not going to happen anywhere quickly enough without the US.
I have a hard time seeing how both we and capitalism will survive the ongoing ecological collapse together.
How about we seal Thiel and Shkreli in a pit filled with cockroaches? They can teach the cockroaches ‘capitalism’, so that it can survive the extinction of humanity.
Dibs on the pay-per-view rights.
Keep asking proud capitalists this question:
Will the Dow be higher in 2050 if we IGNORE climate change, or if we DO SOMETHING about it?
Don’t hold your breath for a straight answer. I have never heard one yet.
–TP
Tony,
Hard to answer a hypothetical question that assumes an option is available that isnt. Climate change is not being ignored already, so that option doesnt exisr.
There are significant steps being taken to reduce fossil fuel usage in industries across the board. These are already having a positive impact on the economy, in fact, the recognition of the potential impact of climate change has been a key driver in Anericsn capitalism for some time.
There is no shortage of funding for green companies, several VC funds focus on just ecofriendly solutions. Capital access is at the heart of solving the problem.
So, that the government isnt adequately focused on it says nothing about capitalism.
Will the Dow be higher in 2050 if we IGNORE climate change, or if we DO SOMETHING about it?
There might still be a Dow if we do something.
I recognise that a global effort is required, but that is just not going to happen anywhere quickly enough without the US.
don’t wait for the US, because we’re not going to help. our political system forbids the kind of changes that are needed.
I think that’s wrong.
Two thirds of voters back something along the lines of the ‘Green Deal’. This is a winning issue for Democrats.
And as Warren showed with her farming proposals a couple of days back (which she notably came out with in advance of the latest IPCC report), it can be presented to appeal to the ‘heartland’, too.
I think this is an election too far for Biden, though.
This is not the first such gaffe in recent days:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-tells-minority-voters-in-iowa-that-poor-kids-are-just-as-bright-as-white-kids/2019/08/09/4926be02-ba8e-11e9-a091-6a96e67d9cce_story.html
Two thirds of voters back something along the lines of the ‘Green Deal’.
voters are irrelevant.
members of Congress are what matter, and House gerrymandering + the ridiculousness of the Senate guarantee small, Republican, fossil-fuel-producing / regulation-hating states have an outsized influence.
if the Dems were to pick up 20 Senate seats 50 more House seats (all AOC clones), plus the Presidency, something like the GND might stand a chance. otherwise, there are going to be too many conservative and/or business-enthralled Congresspeople to allow anything like the GND through.
don’t count on the US. we are not going to lead.
This is not the first such gaffe in recent days:
While that is an embarrassing choice of words, it’s got a certain truth to it considering the racial wealth gap in this country.
It’s a crazy world. Someone oughta sell tickets.
There’s that.
In front of a banner saying “Asian Latino Coalition”, though ?
And “we choose truth over facts” was odd coming from Biden.
It would almost make sense from Trump…
So, that the government isnt adequately focused on it says nothing about capitalism.
A significant portion of the book value of some of the largest corporations in the world are represented by oil and gas that is currently in the ground.
If we extract and burn it, things will get worse. If we don’t, the nominal value of those companies goes down, significantly.
So, there is a tension there.
The folks who run those companies are doing their damndest to influence public policy such that we pull that stuff out of the ground and burn it. So, ‘government’ is not really operating in a vacuum.
In terms of their fiduciary responsibilities, it’s the only rational move, even if disastrous.
Biden has made a lot of ‘gaffes’ like that: so many that i can’t help but think they’re moments when he accidentally tells the truth (as he sees it).
want a gun? plant ten trees.
i’d up it to 50, and require at least 75% of them to be alive (or replaced) every year in order to keep the gun.
If we extract and burn it, things will get worse. If we don’t, the nominal value of those companies goes down, significantly.
So, there is a tension there
There is – though even that is changing.
You can fight economics for only so long, and the major financial firms are all recognising that oil just isn’t going to be worth as much in a decade or so…. Japanese banks will no longer finance new call fired power station projects, etc.
It’s not happening anywhere near fast enough, though. The timetables of climate change and long term investment are not the same.
Which is why government has to apply a very large thumb to the scale. ASAP.
“So, that the government isn’t adequately focused on it says nothing about capitalism.”
So, the tidal wave of campaign contributions from capitalist corporations and capitalist individual donors, much of which in the prior case is shareholder money accumulated via capitalism, to bribe the p Administration … avowed Christian capitalists, though corrupt to the core …. its Cabinet Secretaries, and the entire Republican Party Congress to utterly halt the government’s focus on global warming science across the board by defunding, firing, and gagging many of the best American government global climate scientists in the world is the fault of ….. socialism?
Bull fucking shit.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/ruthless-how-it-feels-when-the-trump-administration-guts-your-agency
Bull fucking shit!
Dupes carry water.
Start bailing.
They are all fucking murderers:
https://thinkprogress.org/lindsey-graham-vows-obamacare-repeal-if-gop-takes-control-2020-1e14cdc2267a/
Isolated incidents bleed together to form motherfucking conservative America:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28657948/el-paso-armed-trump-voter-detained/
In the follow-up to JDT’s TPM link (most if it is also in the original link):
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/in-40-seconds-mulvaney-revealed-truth-about-moving-govt-scientists-to-real-america
What absolute f**king a**holes these “people” are.
Somehow, I don’t think most people ever thought “drain the swamp” had anything to do with USDA scientists and economists. Jesus effing Christ.
No entities on earth are more focused on climate change than the oil companies. Yes, they want to extract their reserves and sell them, in the meantime energy is really their forte. So they are investing billions in figuring out how to transition to an ecofriendly model.
The government can make the cost tradeoff between the two models happen sooner, but the energy companies know it isnt firever.
NC DMV did the same thing: moved HQ from Raleigh to Rocky Mount, and more than half the staff quit.
oddly, Dem Gov was OK with it.
“out into the real part of the country”
Fuck these people.
Yes, they want to extract their reserves and sell them
Yes, and if they do that, we are well and truly fucked. For, like, hundreds of years if not millenia. And not just us.
So maybe their is a profound and compelling public interest in not letting them do that.
Start with that, and then figure the rest out from there.
“out into the real part of the country”
Fuck these people.
Pretty much.
No entities on earth are more focused on climate change than the oil companies.
They are focused on diversifying out of a depleting resource, and also responding to political and social pressure, nothing more. In sum, they are bullshitting us. The spin you put on this pathetic effort is telling.
In other news, the energy sector continues to spend big bucks to defeat measures that would actually begin to capture the costs of the existential threat posed by the externalities continuing to burn carbon (i.e., the fucking so called “free market” is under-pricing the real costs of carbon based energy).
If we were really serious about taking on climate change we would mobilize our effort similar to that undertaken during WWII, and we would expropriate the oil, gas, and coal sector.
We are simply running out of time.
So they are investing billions in figuring out how to transition to an ecofriendly model.
for example, Aramco is talking about a $5B investment in solar.
they made $111.8B last year alone. they are the world’s most profitable company.
drop in the barrel.
($111B is their profit)
The Socialist Chinese global climate change hoaxers have opened vast capitalist opportunities for the world’s oil and gas companies.
Corporate budgets in America and Russia are exploding for exploration in the Arctic while the only budget line item both corrupt fascist governments increase to subsidize the exploration …. socialism … is the one dedicated to building dozens of military ice breakers in the race to shove the remaining melting ice out of the way to encourage and facilitate that exploration:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/politics/pompeo-sea-ice-arctic-council/index.html
It’s a hoax, sez Pompeo, but as hoaxes go this one beats P.T. Barnum’s hoaxes by leaps and bounds in the profit margins.
As long as I got ice in my drink, sez Pompeo, what’s the point of all dat ice in the way, anyway.
I’ll take my Arctic neat, sez he, but don’t tell the rubes and the dupes. Then we might have to pay them to lie for us.
“transition to the eco-friendly model”
Yes, yes, a “business decision”.
The Mafia transitioned to the waste management-friendly model too.
It’s our new business model ovah heah. How do like the tits on nat model, hanh? Not as laundry friendly as casinos, but you know, landfills are a good way to hide the bodies while we wait (meaning doubling down on the bribes) this thing out.
Me, the idea that garbage should be collected at all and not just thrown into the alley is a hoax, but we gotta do what we gotta do.
The IRA is transitioning to the knife, SUV, and slingshot-friendly model too as a hedge against nothing being done about their semi-automatic weapon-friendly business model.
We are long Bowie knives, while fading the cop-killing bullets. It hadda be done, business being what it is dese here days. We’re having a little, whaddaya call it, a public relations problem at the moment.
Meanwhile, Rocco, take dis heah brief case ovah to da State Department and make a little Pompeo-friendly contribution to our associate’s favorite charity.
Meanwhile let’s get as many semi-automatic weapons out the door into the hands of Walmart shoppers as quickly as possible so dumbass conservatives can keep shootin all the wrong people.
I guess we’d better start .. ahh, ya know … re-allocating our portfolios, Seymour:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/what-worries-iceland-a-world-without-ice-and-it-is-preparing/ar-AAFze74
Hold on, while I get my sea legs.
Come to think of it, maybe we ought to be concerned about the ice pack, because it’s white and it’s disappearing.
Like us.
It’s a victim.
Ya know, ya might have something there.
Could be a trick of the light, however
But tell us more, so we can mesmerize our shareholders with some accounting jazz hands.
NRA, IRA …. MIA
This guy is transitioning to the “Someone please shoot me in the head” business model:
https://juanitajean.com/meet-my-neighbor/
There’s more transitioning going on in America than in a Rod Dreher apocalyptic wet dream.
No matter how many of its dicks and the hair on its back Exxon has surgically removed, it’s never going to be an eco-friendly runway model.
Alex Jones has a brand of nutritional supplements?
Who looks at Alex Jones and says “I wanna eat what that guy is eating”?
He eating their lunch on their tab.
He converts their money into steak and lobster.
It’s a step by step dietary program.
Beyond Stupid.
Who looks at Alex Jones and says “I wanna eat what that guy is eating”?
The same bright bulbs who looked at Trump and said “I want to buy his steaks.”
For a con man, what he’s nominally selling is irrelevant. It’s all about taking the rubes for all they have.
McKinney: Thank you for both your answer, and your kind remarks. I think your answer to my question is very interesting, for reasons that I do not currently have time to outline, but will hope to come back to.
OK, I made a numbered list of things McKinney told us, and the conclusions that can be drawn from them taken together with his various contributions here on ObWi. I am hereby withdrawing my intention to come back to it – he gave an honest answer to my question and everybody is as entitled as I to draw whatever conclusions they can from it.
for example, Aramco is talking about a $5B investment in solar.
they made $111.8B last year alone. they are the world’s most profitable company.
drop in the barrel.
And the influence the US government has to stop them pumping is… very limited.
Unless they make it not worth pumping – which is where mass renewables come in.
(Note that Saudi Arabia itself now generates the cheapest electricity in the world from solar.)
I keep running into Genghis Khan everywhere, all of a sudden:
https://harpers.org/archive/2003/03/jesus-plus-nothing/
Craptacular Cultist Creeps run the world without my permission.
Let us prey:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/08/compare-and-contrast-2
If the El Paso and Dayton gunmen had murdered Tucker Carlson and Mick Mulvaney past week instead of innocents, America might have looked a little better going into next week.
America’s aim sucks.
Meanwhile, p’s thumb momentarily transitions away from his butt-hole to ruin it for thumbs everywhere.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-melania-baby-el-paso-thumbs-up-hospital-parents-mass-shooting-a9049086.html
I hope that little kid grows up to wreak savage vengeance on the filth who murdered his parents.
I hope he leads armies into apocalyptic war against conservative America.
That the blood-soaked thumb-up hands of those two perverted conservative ghouls were permitted to touch that child.
Who made that fucking decision?
We are sick fucking shit.
Oh, Lord:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uSz0mEtEsQ
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/our-big-silicon-valley-brothers/
Well, I’m about to start reading “Surveillance Capitalism”, but I’d like to remind Dreher that I purchased and paid for his book “The Benedict Option” on Amazon, and I found and return to “The American Conservative” (like a spy sniffing out the enemy behind lines) via Google Chrome.
But, sure, carry on.
JDT, that’s a very creepy Harpers piece.
There were already enough men ministering to the down-and-out, Vereide had decided; his mission field would be men with the means to seize the world for God. Vereide called his potential flock of the rich and powerful, those in need only of the “real” Jesus, the “up-and-out.”
Upon further reflection, McKinney’s objection to Republican donors whose public contributions were highlighted by Joaquin Castro is even more infuriating than it was when I first considered it.
Even the vile Citizens United opinion recognized the validity of disclosure. This is a fundamental electoral issue about whether we’re going to let dark money (of any kind) control elections.
Obviously, what nous said about the issue is extremely compelling, but just think about it. The NRA laundered Russian money to support Republicans. So many other examples exist. The person who has most abused the public disclosure of campaign contributions is Donald Trump, and thank goodness that Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe are suing.
I don’t talk about politics at work either, for what it’s worth. Haranguing a captive audience is not appropriate. This has nothing to do with getting along at work. It’s a matter of people knowing whether you support a white supremacist, authoritarian, regime (NAZI for short). If you’re embarrassed to give them money, don’t do it.
Please don’t buy into McKinney’s bullshit. He couldn’t even be bothered to look up someone’s nym.
Maybe little Paul’s relatives, after his parents were murdered in that ordered hit in El Paso can appoint p and Melania as the kid’s Godparents and have them stand in at his christening and other life milestones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf06ov-MJbk
Just for clarity, there is a difference between being embarrased and fearing that a bunch of crackpots will interrupt your dinner with your wife and kids at the local eatery.
Or stake out your house with hateful signs.
For what is supposed to be a basic right to support the candidate of your choice.
Well, be brave, Marty. A lot of children are in cages, or went to their first day of school to find that their parents had been disappeared.
Cry me a river about your dinner engagement.
And, by the way, this. Not about who they voted for.
Do you have a link, Marty, about your persecuted people? No?
Didn’t think so.
An article which says that authoritarian personality traits are at the root of our problems these days. Yes, this is obvious, but there are some interesting tidbits and nuances in here. Not sure I agree with all of them.
Plus, given the replication crisis in the social sciences I wonder if the study on which this is based holds up.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/what-if-left-was-right-race/595777/
I don’t know how Hillary Clinton does it:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/epstein-found-dead-suicide
They’ve got the guns in Alaska. Goddamned use them:
https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/08/its-ba-ack-by-bloggersrus.html
Maybe the Governor of Alaska will hang himself.
It doesn’t require much of a conspiracy theory to think it possible that one of the many rich and powerful connected with Epstein might have found it very convenient for him to commit suicide.
I think Hillary is out of the frame, though.
And the British Royal family don’t have that kind of reach anymore.
According to a comment on the digby post someone official from the WH already tried to pin it on Hillary (Vince Foster part 2).
yeah, that’s an interesting article, Donald.
Here’s who murdered Epstein:
Whomever wins the Democratic Party Presidential Primary.
The dissemination of the conspiracy is already in the works and ready to be booked on every right wing media amplifier and right wing congressional office and every White House tweet.
Jim Hoft will be first up.
Lindsay Graham will grimly call for investigations.
William Barr will go completely Dirty Harry on this.
This election will be stolen, again, and on the way it will be the dirtiest violent piece of right wing shit in American history.
“According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on Thursday, people with inside, compromising knowledge of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial and political dealings are 843% more likely to commit suicide.”
CDC: People With Dirt On Clintons Have 843% Greater Risk Of Suicide
CDC: People With Dirt On Clintons Have 843% Greater Risk Of Suicide
ok. p.o.v. aside. not bad.
Then why is Marty still with us?
That’s a haha question like the Babylon Bee is satire.
However, the Babylon Bee and the fake CDC will be quoted verbatim across the Twitter Universe by Federalist Society jurists jousting for Supreme Court appointments and Tucker Carlson will return from racist, white nationalist exile, should he live, with a new gig and a new drumbeat.
I’ll know, because my all-up-in-there-on-p acquaintances, just home from seances with Vince Foster, will start every sentence with “Did you know Hillary Clinton managed to send concentrated poisonous sewer gas bubbling up through Epstein’s cell toilet and snuffed him in his sleep. She’s a she-Devil wraith, a wisp of witch-breath seeping into all of American political life.”
Tell me how I’m wrong.
America is a dead letter as a recognizable entity.
The thumbs up by the conservative movement’s thug obscenity of a President in the El Paso photo was the muerte signal to Epstein that NOW would be a good time to check out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U89DzP8NGM4
I wear a foil hat all the time so the Clinton’s cant find me. Otherwise who knows?
Some cogent questions about Epstein’s suicide:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/10/jeffrey-epsteins-apparent-suicide-is-unfathomable/
You can feel the tremendous centrifugal force mounting as America is torn asunder at the seams:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/scarborough-epstein-death-russian-theory
Everyone should wear their plate carrier foils hats for protection.
This Epstein phenomenon is right up p’s and his enablers’ alley, right in their sweet spot, for deadly political exploitation.
America: The Death Panel by Free Market Ration
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/7/1877400/-Young-man-dies-after-losing-his-insurance-and-turning-to-cheaper-form-of-insulin
America: The Death Panel by Free Market Ration
Healthcare will always get rationed. The question is who or what will do it.
most everything that isn’t trivially available (air, sunlight) is rationed. the question is ‘to what degree’?
the food supply is finite and there are countless bottlenecks through the supply chain from farm to table. it’s not free, ultimately. even if you didn’t pay for it, someone did. but the US does a pretty good job in general of making sure that people don’t simply starve. there’s food out there if you need it, even if you can’t pay for it. yes, we could do better; but in general, people can get food if they need it.
by comparison we do a terrible job of making sure that people don’t die from lack of access to basic health care. we have a patchwork of public and private insurance and providers, and too many people just slip through the cracks – and the system just outright fails for many. we could do so much better, and all you have to do is look at other wealthy countries for examples.
we could increase the amount of care available (employ more doctors and nurses – there’s certainly a demand). we could make it cheaper to see them (several ways to do that). we could make the safety net bigger and less porous. we could do all kinds of things.
“conservatives” don’t want to.
“The question is who or what will do it.”
Yes, but if it’s the government who causes a diabetic to go without insulin, it’s called the predations of socialism on a par with Genghis Osama Trotsky, and an occasion for prideful ideological smirking, and proof of the collective’s incompetence.
If it’s those left to perish by the inadequate and expensive private sector, it’s the rational workings of the rationing free market and the victim’s fault, and an occasion for prideful ideological smirking from the same people smirking in the above paragraph, and proof of the free market’s well-oiled, efficient success.
Shall we compare body counts?
In the specific case of insulin, there is no socialist or free market case for some to have and some to have not.
Bullets aren’t rationed. When there is a shortage, production is ramped up and, bingo, we have more bullets than one guy can spray a crowded Walmart with.
Insulin is rationed by an OPEC of insulin producers.
just think, if we outlawed guns, brave sportsmen could hunt sandhill cranes.
i hear they’re delicious, and a lot of fun to kill!
s/could/couldn’t
feh
Las Vegas neo-Nazi charged with plot to bomb gay club, synagogue.
The FBI executed a search warrant at his home on Aug. 8 and found thermite, sulfuric acid, a soldering iron, circuit boards and other bomb-making components, according to the complaint.
Raided on -no shit – 8/8. Let it never be said that the FBI has no sense of humor.
The question is who or what will do it.
If health care is something we want to allocate based on price, and the conditions for a free market exist across all of the goods and services that fall under the heading of “health care”, then I’m fine will letting market dynamics be the basis of allocation.
Pencils, open heart surgery – same/same.