Quote of the day—Jacob Sullum

His plan does not pass the laugh test, but it beautifully illustrates the magical thinking of gun controllers.

Jacob Sullum
October 2, 2019
Joe Biden Plans To Ban and Register ‘Assault Weapons’ but Won’t Say What They Are
[It also demonstrates how easy it is to lead the useful idiots.

See also the QOTD for yesterday.—Joe]

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2 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Jacob Sullum

  1. “register them like you would machine guns, suppressors, and rifles with barrels under 16″ inches.”
    Except that weapons that have to be registered are already described by the NFA?
    Crazy Joe just living up to his nickname.

  2. No problem. We’ve been prepped since childhood to believe in magic;

    “I never did believe in miracles
    But I’ve a feeling it’s time to try
    I never did believe in the ways of magic
    But I’m beginning to wonder why”

    — Fleetwood Mac

    “Do you believe in magic in a young girl’s heart
    How the music can free her, whenever it starts
    And it’s magic, if the music is groovy
    It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie
    I’ll tell you about the magic, and it’ll free your soul
    But it’s like trying to tell a stranger ’bout rock and roll”

    — Lovin’ Spoonful

    There are thousands of them. It’s kind of creepy when you look at it in print.

    Think of a kindergarten playground. The kids are playing various games of imagination. Living in imagination land, if you will. We do it too, when watching movies and such. Hillary nailed it with the “suspension of disbelief” comment.

    When you criticize the leftist rank and file, you’re ruining their game, hurting their feelings by trying to break the spell. You’re that guy behind them who won’t stop talking in the theatre. In refusing to play along with the game, you’re identifying yourself as either being too stupid to know the rules and to use your imagination, and/or you’re simply being cruel by deliberately spoiling their game.

    I’ve been watching a number of flat earth videos, flat earth debunker videos, and responses of flat earthers to debunking, etc. They work the same way; the flat earth host is playing a game of imagination, and so the universal response to criticism is anger. They’re playing “scientist” or “skeptic” but cannot tolerate any real science or skepticism. It ruins the game, you see. It breaks the feeling.

    They want you to either play along or go and find another game. Failure to do one or the other identifies you as being too stupid to understand what they’re doing, or too cruel to let them do it.

    The emotional response, in itself, to any criticism, reveals the nature of the conversation as a game. It is NOT any sort of quest for truth, or for knowledge of the world. Also, the sexual insults we’re so familiar with in the “gun control” conversations are equally prevalent in the flat earther’s response to debunking.

    Now the question becomes this;
    Do such people realize, or believe, that anyone can be serious about anything, or do they believe that we’re all fakes, all playing games, like them? Maybe they’ve been playing games for so long, and lived with other gamers for so long, that they’re no longer capable of recognizing someone else as being serious. That would be a serious mental problem, and dealing with it appropriately would be very different, I believe, from what we usually do.

    An even more disturbing thought is; maybe we’re not fundamentally different from them. Maybe it’s only a matter of degree, or of the subject matter at hand. Maybe sometimes we like to pretend that we’re more serious about understanding reality than we actually are. There’s a parable about a mote and a beam there…

    Are we making things worse by calling them names? I certainly did advocate shaming once upon a time, but now I’m thinking differently.

    If they wanted to understand the world, they’d welcome a good debunking. It may be temporarily painful, but long-term satisfying. So maybe we should be trying to make the transition (de-programming, really) as pain-free as possible.

    If they don’t want to understand the world, but are determined to play for rest of their lives, then there’s truly nothing we can do. So the “Job”, it seems to me, is to separate those two groups; the ones who might be interested in reality from those who’ll do anything to avoid it.

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