How to Know When You Are Not The Beneficiary Of Cognitive Privilege:
You read Marx, and you didn’t get the joke.
Tirno
August 2, 2017
Comment to I guess we have not reached Peak Social Issues
[I came to a similar conclusion when I read The Communist Manifesto.—Joe]
Michael Hammond, legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America, claimed that “he’s ‘probably’ the guy who, after the Newtown massacre, killed the bipartisan bill that would’ve required background checks on commercial sales of guns. He had ‘a very big role’ in designing opposition in the Senate.” That’s too bad. I would have preferred a guy who “probably” pushed through legislation so that not one more person since that massacre was ever shot in the United States. Let’s work toward that — keeping everyone safe and preventing any danger of anyone being shot ever again. We need gun control.
David Fallick
July 24, 2017
We need gun control
[If Fallick believes there is legislative action possible such that “not one more person since that massacre was ever shot in the United States” he has to be the all-time winner of the Crap for Brains award.
That is industrial grade stupidity.—Joe]
Interesting. Short version: PISA is the “Programme for International Student Assessment”, it tests schools/kids from around the world. 65 nations entered. America ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. Ouch. Nations that didn’t enter were mostly places like all of sub-Saharan Africa which routinely score badly on such tests; it’s safe to assume the US did better than Haiti, even if they didn’t take the test.
However… Someone looked at how kids performed in each nation by ethnic backgrounds within a country, and compared them across borders (i.e., compare American Chinese to Chinese in China, American whites to whites in Europe, Mexican-Americans to Mexicans in Mexico, etc). Quote:
Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese. White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests.
African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate,Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.
Huh. That means that one (or both) of these two cherished narratives are false:
(a) American schools are abject failures for the amount of money we spend per student, and spending more money will fix the problem, or
(b) There are no real and significant racial /ethnic /cultural differences, and the low academic scores highly correlated with economic achievement of certain groups is the result of white racism, oppression, discrimination, etc.
You can lead a horse to water… etc., etc.
You can’t have it both ways with this analysis of the data. Personally, I think we should treat all people as individuals, and do what we can with / for them. Move to an ability-based class-placement system for most things rather than age-based.
Without Central Banks this market wouldn’t exist. All the algorithms today are but spin off of linear regression. Boats rising with the tide.
Earnings can be replaced with Central Bank cash/credit, but not over the long run. And that day could be tomorrow, or in 10 years. Who could have thought that easy money would have created so many walking corpses.
kam
June 15, 2017
Comment to What Happens When the Machines Start Selling?
[H/T to Brett.
Who? I’m not sure about “walking corpses” being explicitly predicted but there were many people who thought it was a really bad idea.
The lessons learned in the next few years will be remembered for probably a generation or so before “the new kids on the block” believe they are smarter and/or times are different. The best fix would probably be when the lesson is visible world wide as burned out ruins of cities for governments to be prohibited from trying to “manage the economy”. But I put the odds at 50-50 that will happen on even one continent.—Joe]
All the shocked media coverage of the latest acid attacks in London carefully tiptoe around the obvious issue. Acid attacks tend to involve immigrants or the children of immigrants. They’re a horrifying tactic that has been imported to the UK.
Acid attacks are one of those enriching benefits of diversity.
Instead of dealing with the obvious, the proposals push for “Drain cleaner control”. As if you can seriously prevent people from getting their hands on chemicals that don’t go well with the human face. After the triumphs of gun control and knife control, now it’s onward to drain cleaner control.
Acid attacks in London have climbed from 162 in 2012 to 454 last year.
We could talk about immigration. Or we can try to ban drain cleaner.
Daniel Greenfield
July 14, 2017
“Diversity” is Why London has Acid Attacks
[I expected that after gun and knife control they would started demanding either rock or stick control.
I was wrong, but it could still happen. Give them a few years. Intelligence has its limits but stupidity does not appear to have an upper bound.—Joe]
This is what they think of you:
Via Kimberly Morin. As Morin says, “Gun control addicts never have been the brightest bulbs on the tree.”
Incidents like the Virginia and San Francisco shootings inevitably lead to a debate over gun control. Here again the media, politicians, and advocacy groups play their scripted roles. The media quote Republicans and conservatives repeating their claims that tougher gun-control laws wouldn’t have prevented the Virginia shooting, because the shooter could have obtained the gun illegally. And, they add, gun control undermines our liberties.
To provide “balance,” the media quote Democrats and gun-control advocates, repeating their claims that this specific shooting, and the epidemic of mass shootings, would be dramatically reduced if we restricted the sale of guns and ammunition, including sales across state lines, because shooters often obtain guns in states with lax laws and bring them to states with tough laws.
Peter Dreier
June 16, 2017
The Virginia Shooting Isn’t About Bernie. It’s About the Right’s Embrace of Guns.
[I’m more and more convinced that, as Michael Savage says, Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder. I haven’t read his book but I took a college class on, and have experienced enough, abnormal psychology to recognize it. In this case it is conclusive because he cannot see that his political beliefs contributed to the bad results. One thing common to all personality disorders is that, in their minds, they didn’t contribute, in any way, to a bad outcome. It is always someone else’s fault.
With that mindset he goes on to describe a delusional world that is nearly unrecognizable to normal people.
This nut job, Dreier, not only gets things wrong, but he gets his “facts”, essentially, backwards. In this case the guns were purchased legally in a state, Illinois, with some of the most strict gun control laws and brought the gun to a state with much more relaxed laws. Although I didn’t quote that portion of the article, he repeatedly claims the gun was an AR-15 (it was actually an SKS). Furthermore, gun sales across state lines are already restricted.
This idiot thinks he knows what his writing about but his story is very nearly wrong in a fractal way. There is no attention given to fundamental principles, he does not address the infringement of specific enumerated rights, his conclusions are wrong, the theme is wrong, the paragraphs are wrong, nearly every sentence is wrong, and some of the words are wrong.
He has crap for brains.—Joe]
Sometimes we point out anti-gun people and those on the political left not being able to do math or even arithmetic. But, as I have pointed out before, it’s worse than that. It’s numbers they have trouble with:
Terry McAuliffe (D) called for gun control. McAuliffe called for more background checks and ending “gunshow loopholes.” McAuliffe said 93 million people are a victim of gun violence a day.
“This is not what today is about but there are too many guns on the street,” the governor said Wednesday morning. “We lose 93 million Americans a day to gun violence.”
“It’s not just about politicians, we worry about all of our citizens,” he said.“Why are you bringing it up? People are going to criticize that you are bringing up gun control at this time?” a reporter asked.
“I’m talking about it today. This is a very serious issue,” he replied.
McAuliffe repeated the 93 million number once more before he was corrected by reporters.
“With 93 million people a day it’s just something,” McAuliffe said before reporters jumped in.
Even if you give McAuliffe some serious slack and let him get away with saying he really meant 93 per day then he is including suicides and legal shootings by police and private individuals protecting innocent life. This is deliberate deception on his part.
When someone is anti-gun then numbers, arithmetic, and math, not to mention constitutional law and political philosophy, are a threat to what is really important to them. That is their delusions and their desire to control other people.
It’s about the gun lobbies, the people who — you know, it’s all about money in people’s pockets — the people who argue this and say, “We want our rights to guns.” Nobody is trying to take away your guns. If you want to go shoot, you know, whatever, in the woods, that’s fine, but it’s a hobby. If your hobby is [affecting] innocent people being killed all the time, children included, don’t you think you should reconsider the lack of restrictions placed on your hobby?
Chelsea Handler
June 6, 2017
Chelsea Handler Talks Gun Violence, Activism and Kathy Griffin
[Amazing! The stupid and/or ignorance is so abundant she has trouble expressing it.
The gun lobbies she refers to represent gun owners, not gun manufactures. How can it be “all about money in people’s pockets”? It’s not.
“Nobody is trying to take away your guns”? Wrong.
“It’s a hobby”. No. It’s a natural right which is specific enumerated for protection against government infringement.
“Don’t you think you should reconsider the lack of restrictions placed on your hobby?” No. Don’t you think you should reconsider your speaking in public when you are so profoundly stupid and/or ignorant?—Joe]
Update: I’d like to add that it’s called The Bill of Rights. Not The Bill of Hobbies.
If there’s one thing gun owners in America don’t need, it’s the star of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” telling them whether or not they can own and operate firearms.
Zachary Leeman
Just What We Need: Kim K Calls for Gun Control
[I think what is happening is a perverted form of “argument by authority”. If someone has a high status/visibility they are viewed, by some, as being an authority regardless of the subject matter. I suspect it is “hardwired” into our brains and served a valuable evolutionary purpose. Just because someone is well known, that, obviously, does not make them a subject matter expert. But at some level it satisfies a need for an authority opinion on the subject.
When, in high school, I first noticed this sort of thing I thought it was one of the most bizarre things I had ever heard of. Decades later during the I-676 campaign our anti-gun opponents used the approach and I was confused. Who, I wondered, would care whether some well known, but ignorant and/or stupid, person supported a law. Our side ended up doing the same thing and I still thought it was weird and felt rather “soiled” to be associated with that. But now, decades later, I realize that advertising uses celebrity endorsements all the time and they wouldn’t do that if wasn’t effective. If it works, it’s not stupid.
I still think it’s weird but I now think of it as a quirk of our brain evolution. Most people do not have a process by which they can accurately determine if something is true or false. Having such a process is an, in evolutionary timescales, extremely recent development. A quick and dirty test to determine truth of falsity that improved the odds of a correct determination by 20% is a huge evolutionary advantage over a ecological niche competitor. And quick and dirty test can even beat out competitors which use a more rigorous test that takes much longer. Hence even when more rigorous tests are available something as stupid as getting your firearms law recommendations from Kim Kardashian will feel entirely appropriate to people who appear to function normally. This is because it works often enough that they don’t remove themselves from gene pool.—Joe]
Predictably, another attack occurred in London this weekend. Theresa May did at least mention radical Islamism as a problem, but went on to call for more police powers, and to blame the internet.
Centuries upon centuries of Islamist aggression and murder, and it’s the internet’s fault. Your freedom, and mine, is to blame.
One report claimed some fifty shots were fired by police to stop three Muslims armed with knives. I could understand that number of shots if they’d been taking return fire, but against knife wielding punks it seems like an awful lot of shooting.
At least one person was wounded by police gunfire. When that happens (and it sometimes will) and it’s a police bullet, it is a footnote. If a regular concealed carry holder in America were to do the exact same thing, never mind that lives were saved; the howls of accusation would last for weeks.
Practice on moving targets. Aerial clay targets are good, if you can find a place to do it safely;
With only a knife, it is relatively easy to murder innocent, unsuspecting people, in a country that talks about freedom and rights but has forcibly disarmed its citizens and practically turned self defense into a crime.
The Brits have invited this upon themselves with their idiotic policies and their embrace of Progressivism, and we in America are not far behind. They’ll ramp up their police state, clamp down on the internet (control of which has been coveted by authoritarians since its inception) spend more of their tax payers’ wealth, and accomplish next to nothing.
Once again, as always it seems, at least one of the perpetrators was known to the British security network. The result of that knowledge was that they were able to say, after the fact, that they’d been watching that person.
The only way jihad will ever stop is if they’re all convinced that it is utterly hopeless, or foolish, or morally wrong, to continue. There are several ways to accomplish that end, only one of which involves a commitment to total extermination. Theresa May eluded to one of them, but I don’t believe that there is currently a government on this planet that is either principled enough or committed enough, or politically capable of any of those ways.
Maybe it’s not really a government’s problem to solve. What was that saying? Something about a people, or ideology, or process, which created a problem will never be the one to solve it.
We all make typos. Butt-dials happen. Interruptions occu….
I found the world’s reaction to the partial information broadcast far and wide fascinating at many levels. At 12:06 AM Wednesday morning, the 31st of June, The Real Donald Trump (the God Emperor and President of the united States) sent a tweet. As with so many things said or typed at odd hours of the night, and from our president, it wasn’t phrased with quite the perfect polish and eloquence some might have hoped. Continue reading
I’M NOT AGAINST GUNS AND I’M NOT AGAINST PEOPLE OWNING GUNS. AFTER WHAT HAPPENED TO ME IN PARIS, I KNOW HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO BE SAFE AND TO HAVE ARMED SECURITY. ALL OF MY SECURITY TEAM IS ARMED, BUT THEY ALSO SUPPORT STRICTER GUN CONTROL LAWS AND BELIEVE THAT WE SHOULD RESTRICT ACCESS TO FIREARMS FOR PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS, ANYONE PREVIOUSLY CONVICTED OF A MISDEMEANOR, THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN SUBJECT TO A TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER AND THOSE AT A HIGHER RISK OF COMMITTING GUN VIOLENCE.
I HOPE THAT WE WON’T BECOME NUMBED BY THE INCREASING NUMBER OF GUN-RELATED TRAGEDIES WE SEE ON THE NEWS. WE ALL HAVE A VOICE AND A RIGHT TO FEEL SAFE, TO BE PROTECTED FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE A THREAT, PARTICULARLY WHEN HANDED A DEADLY WEAPON. I WANT TO HELP BUILD A SAFER FUTURE FOR MY CHILDREN AND I BELIEVE TOGETHER WE CAN FIND WAYS TO DO THAT, WHILE STILL PROTECTING THE RIGHTS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Kim Kardashian
June 2, 2017
FAVS
[Via Elle.
I recognize the difficulty the anti-gun people have in getting knowledgeable people to support their side, but they really should keep highly visible dimwits on a shorter leash. This dimwit is advocating for the denying someone convicted of shoplifting a jar of baby food 30 years ago their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. On top of that she believes she has a right to feel safe and to be protected.
However, the topper is that one paragraph after advocating for the explicit infringement upon the rights of people she claims, “we can find ways to do that, while still protecting the rights of the American people”. You can’t find ways to infringe upon the rights of people while protecting their rights.
This conclusively demonstrates she has crap for brains.—Joe]
A National Rifle Association lobbyist is telling a Wisconsin legislative committee that guns were a great equalizer for “the blacks.”
Scott Meyer appeared before the state Senate’s judiciary committee during a public hearing on a Republican bill that would allow people to carry concealed weapons without permits or training. The NRA supports the measure.
Meyer told the committee that the cost of training can prevent minorities from obtaining concealed carry licenses, adding that guns were one of the great equalizers for “the blacks” after emancipation.
Sen. Lena Taylor, a Milwaukee Democrat who is black, chastised Meyer. She told him calling African-Americans “the blacks” doesn’t help cultural diversity.
What matters to Democrats is whatever the politically correct rule of the day is rather than the substance of what someone has to say or is doing.
I’m not surprised she does this. The left has used political correctness a tool for divisiveness and oppression since at least since the days of Stalin.
I have a message for Sen. Lena Taylor. It doesn’t help you or the people you care about when you attack people trying to make your life better. These types of attacks are big part of the reason the Democrats have been losing elections and we have President Trump. He was, and is, willing to stand up to your B.S. and call you out it.
The silencers are an accessory to make up for the loss of guns sales since President Obama left office.
They’ve sold the Barbies, and now they need to sell the Barbie Dreamhouse, and the Barbie shoes, and the Barbie car. That is essentially what suppressors are.
Shannon Watts
Founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America
May 29, 2017
Gun lobby seeks to calm fears about silencers
[Watts and her left wing ilk apparently believe that money is the motivation for everything and/or that motivation by money it is an evil impulse. Hence by lying about the NRA being primarily monetarily rewarded for firearm related sales Watts thinks it will generate more support for her position. All it really does is demonstrate she is clueless and/or has evil intent.—Joe
Update: It occurs to me that this is also about insulting gun owners. She is dismissing our exercise of a specific enumerated right as the equivalent of “playing with dolls”. ]
Republicans are using guns to defend against Democrats.
And I have given many examples of the violent nature of the political left. Today we have a very public example of this:
Republican Rep. Matt Rinaldi came over and said: “This is BS. That’s why I called ICE.”
…
In a subsequent Facebook statement, Rinaldi admitted saying he had called federal authorities and threatened to shoot Nevárez — but said his life was in danger, not the other way around.
“Nevárez threatened my life on the House floor after I called ICE on several illegal immigrants who held signs in the gallery which said ‘I am illegal and here to stay,’ ” Rinaldi wrote. He said Democrats were encouraging protesters to ignore police instructions and, “When I told the Democrats I called ICE, Representative Ramon Romero physically assaulted me, and other Democrats were held back by colleagues.”
Rinaldi said Nevárez later “told me that he would ‘get me on the way to my car.’ ” Rinaldi said he responded by making it clear “I would shoot him in self-defense,” adding that he is currently under Texas Department of Public Safety protection.
And what does the media say about this? As you might guess the media is against the person, Republican, saying they will defend themselves:
Protest sparks Texas lawmaker threats of gun violence
As usual, there is no distinction between protective violence and criminal violence. That means they have crap of brains and/or they are evil.
Anyone with a gun as their avatar has no objectivity They also have a small penis
Dr Sally @slsandpet
Tweeted on December 28, 2016
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a tweet from BFD @BigFatDave.
Also, as further evidence of her mental capacity, she also tweeted:
no you cannot be bigoted against gun ownership
I can only conclude she is using a dictionary from some alternate universe and/or she has crap for brains.—Joe]
It’s clear we have to do things differently. What we’re doing currently isn’t working. The strategy isn’t working.
Brandon Scott
Baltimore City Councilman
May 3, 2017
ATF brings ballistics van to Baltimore after murder rate surges
[Recognizing that what they are doing does not work is a step in the right direction. But then what do they do? Instead of looking “next door” to Virginia or Pennsylvania, to see what they are doing that has been tried and known to be working better they add something new to the situation. Maryland infringes upon the specific enumerated right to keep and bear far more than neighboring states and even though they apparently are aware the problem is related to guns they can’t imagine they are going in the wrong direction. Instead of making easier for innocent people to defend themselves they attempt to increase their ability to trace and infringe gun ownership.
When you are in a hole you don’t want to be in STOP DIGGING!
This is yet another demonstration of crap for brains and/or outright evil. Scott and his gang should be arrested and prosecuted.—Joe]
How do you recognize who the good guys are? How does arming ourselves with more weaponry make us a safer society?
Nicole Hockley
May 1, 2017
Why do people buy guns after a mass shooting?
[The good guy is putting high velocity lead into the guy shooting the elementary kids and teachers. Duh!
The second question is probably answered best by another question:
How does making people defenseless make us a safer society?
But I don’t think Hockley is interested in answers to her questions. If she were she would have had them ages ago. She just wants to believe the questions support her agenda. Either she has crap for brains and/or she thinks the rest of society is as stupid as she is.—Joe]
The main problem with the notion of self-defense is it imposes on justice, for everyone has the right for a fair trial. Therefore, using a firearm to defend oneself is not legal because if the attacker is killed, he or she is devoid of his or her rights.
Justin Curmi
April 26, 2017
A Revision on the Bill of Rights, Part III
[H/T to Kimberly Morin.
Unless you have crap for brains there is no problem here. The right of self-defense trumps the right to a fair trial. Another way to look at it is that the perpetrator gave up their right to fair trial for the duration of the violent attack.
In much of the rest of the post Curmi is beyond dimwitted and travels deep into incoherency.—Joe]