Culture changes over time, of course, but it normally does it slowly as we creep towards a more civilized future.
England doesn’t feel more civilized — quite the opposite. It feels more feral. And the UK has just accepted its fate.
The lack of an American culture means Hungarians don’t know what’s missing, because they never had it. But there is a gaping hole in America: something is obviously broken. America is collapsing on itself.
I was left having to examine myself. “You’re not anti-gun,” Mr. Toure told me. “Ask yourself this. It’s a zombie apocalypse. Tomorrow, you wake up, and you can’t find your children. You go out to search for them. Do you want a gun now?” His analogy was not outlandish. This was, of course, the constant threat enslaved people endured. Had I been fooling myself about my anti-gun stance? I don’t think so, but I did come to realize through a series of unexpected exchanges that the issue was more complicated than I had allowed and that my views of just coexistence and human flourishing might not require the absolute prohibition of arms.
I concede that Lewis Hayden could be viewed as a champion of the right to bear arms in defense of freedom. But more than that, he dedicated himself to community building, forging a complex, self-funded, interracial network of people joined in common cause. Guns were there to defend those things. The home he made with Harriet was a gathering place for the Boston Vigilance Committee, for progressive white Bostonians and for members of the enslaved and free black population. Mr. Kantrowitz observed that Hayden sought to build “a world of common struggle against slavery in which racial hierarchy seemed to dissolve into human unity and affection.” Together, Lewis and Harriet Hayden opened their doors to those on the run, turning their home into a haven for strangers whom the federal government deemed illegals.
This is the essence of his example that I hope our community and country will follow.
Imagine the Democrat party with the votes of blacks stripped away because of gun control.
This is how I view that mindset. One cannot expect a slave to remain a slave if they are armed. And you cannot expect a free person to remain free if they are not allowed arms.
Therefore Berejiklian wants to to keep slaves and/or enslave people and she does not have the moral character to serve in government at any capacity.—Joe]
During February I was sort of blocked on some rifle reloading I wanted to do. I needed to test out some new loads before I went “into production” with them. I normally like to do my rifle load tests in Idaho where I have several hundred yards available. I went to Idaho a couple weeks ago but there was so much snow that I ended up not having the energy and time to snowshoe the distances required to set up the targets and do the shooting I wanted to do. I finally joined a local range in the Seattle area which has 200 yards available. I went there yesterday and did some of the testing I wanted to do.
I reloaded 80 sample rounds with various charges and bullets for .300 Win Mag and another 99 rounds finishing off some old bullets.
In .223 I reloaded 60 sample rounds in various charges for one powder and bullet. I was able to test these and concluded I should test a different powder before settling for the best this combination could give me.
This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:
The political left dominates both conventional and Internet social media outlets. This bias is so overwhelming that it probably isn’t possible to recover from the adverse public perception generated by their bias by public discourse. If an environment where the free exchange of political thought is possible has to be someplace other than the media. Gun ownership is but one case in point. Our retention of gun owner rights and even freedom of political thought must be recovered via other means. I’ve been thinking for some time now that other means is the courts. That is why it was absolutely critical that Hillary Clinton not be allowed to appoint Federal judges.
So, its off to the courts and this looks like a good start:
California GOP Rep. Devin Nunes filed a major lawsuit seeking $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages against Twitter and a handful of its users on Monday, accusing the social media site of “shadow-banning conservatives” including himself to influence the 2018 elections, systematically censoring opposing viewpoints and totally “ignoring” lawful complaints of repeated abusive behavior.
…
Although federal law ordinarily exempts services like Twitter from defamation liability at all levels, Nunes’ suit said the platform has taken such an active role in curating and banning content — as opposed to merely hosting it — that it should face liability like any other organization that defames.
“Twitter created and developed the content at issue in this case by transforming false accusations of criminal conduct, imputed wrongdoing, dishonesty and lack of integrity into a publicly available commodity used by unscrupulous political operatives and their donor/clients as a weapon,” Nunes’ legal team wrote. “Twitter is ‘responsible’ for the development of offensive content on its platform because it in some way specifically encourages development of what is offensive about the content.”
If Twitter and other leftist social media platforms get slapped down for their bias and collaboration in defaming those with different political beliefs it will not only make them less inclined to do this in the future it will also enable more people to realize the political left has an evil streak.
For example, the advent of the internet has facilitated a massive, unregulated gun marketplace in which just one website in 2018 had more than one million ads for guns for which no background check was required.
Shannon Watts February 11, 2019 The Gun Reform Movement Is Stronger Than Ever. And Now We’re Winning | Opinion [If laws are being broken on such a massive scale it should be trivial for law enforcement to set up sting operations and haul the criminals off by the bus load. But of course this isn’t happening. It’s just that she would like to see gun owners hauled off by the bus load and she is willing to lie and/or deceive to make that happen.—Joe]
Of the 10 states in the country with the lowest murder rates, half of them have some of the loosest gun laws in the country, and of those, the lowest consistently have murder rates comparable to Europe. I’m not going to tell you what to make of that, but in my mind, those states have essentially, intentionally or not, solved their violence issues, and they did it without gun control. Perhaps you may have a differing opinion, and that’s fine, but to me, knowing there is a solution to violence out there that doesn’t involve restricting rights, means that’s the only path we should pursue.
Good Snek December 29, 2018 Gun Control: How the Media Manipulates You to Give Up Your Rights [A stronger statement can be made and defended, such as, “Rights are not negotiable and not in any way conditional upon crime rates.” But you could get more political support for Snek’s weaker version.—Joe]
Liberals collect scalps, conservatives collect moral victories. This isn’t a battle for local dog catcher, it’s a fight for the future of the country; it’s time for the right to fight back the way they’re being attacked. Mutually assured destruction is the only way to stop these fascists in their tracks.
I can picture that woman walking around a gulag with a notebook taking complaints from prisoners, and then reminding them that they are there because they are considered problematic by the communist party, with a smile on her face. She is that scary.
[Rupp’s comment may be a little overstated but it’s not wrong.
This was an fantastic podcast. Daughter Jaime strongly recommended it to me. She was super impressed with Tim Pool. I’m really glad I listened to it.
Jack Dorsey is, of course, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter. Vijaya Gadde serves as the global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety at Twitter.
If you are following the suppression of speech in social media issue you must listen to this. After faltering a bit in the beginning Tim Pool articulates the case for free speech extraordinarily well. There were times when he would say something so clearly and compelling I could not think of anything other than, “Wow!”. More than once, in response, Gadde would respond with, “I don’t know what that means.” They apparently live on a different planet.
I did form the opinion that they are probably not being deliberately malicious. Everyone agreed that the political left wants to ban anyone opposing them from social media. Twitter’s own internal data shows that the political left has a strong tendency to only follow those of a similar political view while the political right are much more likely to follow a political mix. Even if Twitter employees were politically neutral, which they are not, there would be difficult challenges in creating a social media platform that was “comfortable” for all participants. Because the political left exercises their Outrage Culture with the tiniest or even fabricated justification and the political right tends to shrug it off, the “squeaky wheel gets greased.” This comment by Vokzmedizen is a good summary of this aspect of the discussion:
The left wants to suppress free speech, and is cowardly in its willingness to rat people out to accomplish this, and hypocritically willing to deliberately exaggerate and distort context to claim offense they do not actually feel (In fact, they are overjoyed to discover something ‘actionable’ in what the other person said, even when they know full well something else was meant!) They right is loathe to suppress free speech, and does not wish to show gutlessness by reporting people, and would rather contend with the offender directly.
So it is obvious that a policy that relies on reporting frequency and simply accepts statements of harm in the report, and seeks for context in the ‘tweets’ that supports the report rather than exonerates the speaker, is going to manifest serious skewing to the left. This is simply because the left is going to report anything opportunistically, while the right will only report on the truly egregious.
A fair policy would take THIS ‘context’ into account, and tend to give LESS credence to reports that are essentially harassment themselves (left), and MORE credence to reports that come from the right. The REALITY is most likely that Twitter CREATED the policy in order to FACILITATE the left methodology. There are many other facilitations that source a DELIBERATE skew. For example, accusers are anonymous. The accused is allowed to face his accuser in our culture, anything else is generally considered Stalinist. Again, as mentioned, the policy against misgendering is politically left. Again, they consider dog piling bannable, but yet a coordinated mass reporting is considered legitimate.
My impression is that Tim Pool completely outclassed Dorsey and Gadde. They were overwhelmed.
I suspect Tim is right in that Twitter will continued down the path of good intentions not realizing that this path cannot turn out well. Twitter management doesn’t really want to facilitate the avalanche even if they do have strong signals it is coming. Because they view themselves as just another snowflake (Pool’s analogy) they will not realize they were a contributor when the avalanche (civil war was discussed) happens.—Joe]
When anti-gun people bring shoes to their rallies send them this:
Gun control advocates are advocates for the enabling of genocide. For some it may be unwitting. But they are still attempting to enable genocide and must not succeed.
A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
As sheriff of Nye County, I agree with Sheriff Watts: I will not participate in the enforcement of this new law and certainly won’t stand silent, while my citizens are turned into criminals due to the unconstitutional actions of misguided politicians who, for the most part, are trying to do the right thing.
Sharon Wehrly March 7, 2019 Sheriff of Nye County, Nevada Letter to Governor Sisolak [I think she is being generous with the “misguided politicians”. But I can understand why saying, “You are a bunch of evil, communists, SOBs!” would not be helpful at this point in time so I give her a pass on that.
If the political left does not, or cannot, pull themselves out of this downward spiral into a confrontation we could see their first trials in a few years or perhaps even months. Give them fair warning. Tell them to enjoy their trials. Give them these links http://bit.ly/EnjoyYourTrial1 for private citizens and http://bit.ly/EnjoyYourTrial2 for government employees.—Joe]
Drive around Caracas, and you see long lines of cars waiting for hours at the few gas stations still operational.
Motorists park on highways, cell phones aloft, searching for a signal. The rich have taken refuge in luxury hotels. The poor stand in lines in the street.
As is required by all gun control advocates the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has to lie to have any hope of making progress. Lying is part of the anti-gun culture.
At this point in the political climate, it is my belief that talk and debate is and has been useless about this issue and others with regards to the Left.
I’m not telling others what to believe about guns, but my mind is made up and I have severe doubts as to my being assuaged at this point.
Grog March 9, 2019 Comment to GUN CONTROL which had this as the entire post: [I can see his point. But, being a ridiculous optimist, I still have hope the courts will settle the problem in a satisfactory manner and the bullets will be used for punching holes in paper rather than in people.—Joe]
As a law enforcement agency, our job is to uphold the law, and we take an oath to uphold the Constitution. We are dedicated to ensuring a safe community and will be keeping a close eye on all proposed legislation.
Steve Hebbe Farmington Police Chief February 20, 2019
What is it, maybe 75% of Washington state is 2nd Amendment sanctuary territory? Parts of Oregon are as well. Then there are nine states which have passed the Firearms Freedom Act.
It’s trivial to create analogies to free/slave states and sanctuaries in the early 1860. The Democrats are pushing, and passing, bills that I couldn’t have imagined they would try even a couple years ago. Nearly all semi-automatic guns are to banned?
They have become berserkers. My guess is that it is some sort of late stage Trump Derangement Syndrome. What happens if the courts slap them down? What happens if the courts support them? I hope they recover their senses before the only cure is a repeat of the 1860s, but The Fourth Turning keeps coming to mind.—Joe]
I find it amusing people expect me to believe collecting taxes and administrating the redistribution of the remainder will somehow result in a more equitable situation. Either they are stupid or they think I can’t see that they are lying. In either case I see it as funny.
