I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.
Alfred Hitchcock
Via Robert J. Avrech in Hollywood on Hollywood
[I’m not convinced that all actors should be treated like cattle. But when actors start expressing views and getting involved in things that they either know nothing about, or worse, have firmly held erroneous beliefs, then I understand the sentiment.—Joe]
PETA is now promoting the idea that eating chicken will result in a small penis and other problems.
Well sure– If the idea that animals are essentially equal to humans doesn’t stop us from eating animals, then we might as well take the penis angle, because apparently people care more about penises (and sex) than practically anything else. It’s bound to get a few more, uh, members.
This is part of a long term trend. Leftists used to attack people they don’t like by calling us “fags” or “queers” but since they now have to pretend that they’re promoting the rights of homosexuals, they have to turn to other methods of distraction. Hence Markley’s law, and the recent PETA story is part of the same trend of using sex as a cultural/political lever.
A common phrase used back in the 1960s and early ’70s (the Vietnam war period) was “Girls say yes to guys who say no”. It’s an appeal to young, horny men, telling them straight up that they’ll get laid more if they at least pretend to help support the Progressives and the communists.
It’s a common theme among communists, to get the vulnerable young people on board, and sex is a powerful lure. Charles Manson used young women as bait to sucker young males into the group, and Sun Myung Moon, Jim Jones, the Heavens Gate Cult and others in a long line of socialist predators (but I repeat myself) followed very similar tactics. Islamists, we are told, will be treated to a harem of dozens of virgins if they die in the great and glorious jihad (and Allah will be super happy about your killing people too, but seriously; virgins!). They could just as well promote a new scientific study which finds that reading American freedom blogs will result in sexual dysfunction, and so the 72 virgins in heaven might go unsatisfied, and we wouldn’t want THAT to happen would we? If they haven’t done it already, they will.
Nothing changes. PETA has just put a slightly different twist on it, but their new spin has a lot of precedent. It is a good one though, as the left has also been trying to make us fear our food, our water, our air, and our neighbors, and this gimmick hits on at least two fronts.
And so I say to PETA; Good one, guys! Right on! You’re in good company. Keep up the good work. You’re completely insane, sure, but you’re giving it the old college try, you’re learning from your predecessors, and that deserves some respect.
Parenthetically; if animals raised for slaughter are as good and have rights the same as people, then people are no better and have no more rights than animals raised for slaughter, which is the whole point of organizations like PETA even if most of their members are clueless kids just trying to get laid. Remember it.
Where laws and politics are concerned, no battle for freedom is ever won in perpetuity. But gun owners have certainly pushed freedom’s adversaries back across the Rhine, and apparently no one knows it better than Josh Horwitz.
NRA-ILA
August 23, 2013
What a Difference a Year Makes
[Horwitz is the director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence which was formally known as the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. You might think that the name change was to soften their image of gun banners but actually it was because they wanted to broaden their scope to include “assault weapons”.
And now Horwitz has dreams of, maybe, someday, getting “universal background checks” as the law of the land.
Give it up Josh. Gun ownership is a specific enumerated right and your desire for infringing that right is no more valid than denying the rights guaranteed under the 13th Amendment if someone fails a background check.—Joe]
Once we’ve gotten that pesky self-preservation instinct under control, getting everyone to head toward utopia will be as easy as loading a cattle car.
mikee
August 22, 2013
Comment to Evil
[This is in regard to the CSGV making it explicitly as well as implicitly clear they are philosophically opposed to self-defense. It shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise to anyone. As irrational as they (or anyone) are within some restrained context their world view will make sense. I’ve seen this sort of thing in many individuals.
I’m reminded of a joke my psychology professor in college told:
Some guy is in the cafeteria holding an empty water glass to each ear. Another guy comes up to him and the conversation goes like this:
Guy2: Why are you holding the water glasses to your ears?
Guy1: It keeps the wild elephants away.
Guy2: But there aren’t any wild elephants in North America.
Guy 1: See! It works!
It is going to be very difficult to convince, in the abstract, the guy with the water glasses that he is wrong about their effects. Within his set of constraints his world view is entirely consistent. Rock solid logic.
The anti-gun person is going to be drawn to the same sort of constrained world view where their logic works. It might go something like this:
Guns are bad.
Guns are used for self-defense.
Self-defense involving lethal force must therefore be bad.
The lethal force qualifier may or may not be required.
It turns out that the concept of using lethal force for self defense is not a universally believed to be moral. I’ve talked to people that strongly believed in “proportional response” even when the aggressor was using lethal force such as a club or a knife. A gun would not be “proportional”. Somehow they believe, and sometimes explicitly state (as my cousin, who has been raped three times that I know of, once told me), that it would be worse to be killed with a gun than clubbed or stabbed to death. In their world view if there were no guns in the hands of private citizens then even the weak/disabled/elderly would not need guns because they would (almost) never have to confront someone with a gun. Hence victims would (almost) never be justified in using a firearm for self defense because proportional force would (almost) always be something less than a gun.
But, you might claim, eliminating self-defense is a long way from loading up the cattle cars. There isn’t anyone that wants to do that these days.
I would like to remind you of Barack Obama’s “neighbor and family friend” Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground who told FBI informant Larry Grathwohl:
I asked, “Well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.
And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.
And when I say “eliminate,” I mean “kill.”
Twenty-five million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious.
You could now claim that that was a FBI informant that can’t be trusted.
Perhaps. But it is consistent with what happened in the USSR. They sent 10’s of millions to reeducation camps. And they sent millions to their graves in their pursuit of utopia.
How could they rationalize that? How could they believe that was a path to utopia?
Easy. My communist brother-in-law, a business professor in Chicago, indirectly explained it to me:
The good of the majority always outweighs the good of the individual.
My protestation about individual rights being violated were dismissed without concern:
You have to look at the big picture. The good of the majority is more important that the individual.
He views me as narrow minded. He claims that I “can’t see the big picture”. My examples of tens of millions of innocent people murdered by their own governments in the last century were dismissed with:
We just need to have the right people in charge.
It’s all so simple, logical, and blindingly obvious to these people. This is why they think there is something wrong with us. This is why they want “reeducation camps”. They really believe that despite the grinding poverty and mass graves of all the communist utopia that it is always the fault of a few greedy/selfish/ignorant/stupid individuals that their utopia fails to materialize. Reeducate those that are willing and elimination of the rest and then mankind will finally achieve equality, peace, and social justice. How can it be a high price to pay to dismiss the so called rights of an individual when the achievement of a peaceful forever is so close? What about the rights of the billions of others and the billions more to be born in the future? Don’t they have a right to live in utopia?
The cattle cars will be filling up soon. It’s for the greater good.
My belief is that the greater good will be achieved by small pieces of precisely placed rifling engraved copper jacketed lead in the heads of the so called leaders and intellectuals who give the orders to load the buses and trains*. They think I’m just a narrow minded bigot who can’t see the big picture. But they mistake the narrow focus for narrow mindedness and underestimate the clarity of the picture at a distance with my Leupold scope.—Joe]
* One could make the case there is a compelling reason why liberals are so opposed to individual transportation.
When I hear this drivel about “having a conversation” it sounds like this, set in 1930s Germany; “It’s time we had a serious conversation about the Jewish problem.”
Lyle
August 21. 2013
Comment to Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
The situation in CA doesn’t qualify as a “slippery slope”, it qualifies as Free Fall.
Rivrdog
August 13, 2013
Comment to Quote of the day—Chuck Michel
[It’s not quite that bad. The courts have slapped them down a couple times and the lawyers are winding up to do a bunch more swatting.
The “silver lining” in all the oppressive laws against gun owners is that it makes it more likely to get favorable rulings in the courts that can be built upon to push things even further back.—Joe]
This year’s extremist legislative package proves that the threat of the slippery slope is all too real.
Chuck Michel
Attorney for the California Rifle and Pistol Association
August 10, 2013
Gun-control bills could push California to top of firearm-restriction list
[As if we didn’t have enough proof already of the existence of the slippery slope.—Joe]
Anyone know of a canonical list of “Liberal Canards”?
Catch-phrases like “it’s for your own safety,” “let the [trained] professionals handle it,” and “you shouldn’t fight back” are what I’m looking for. Things that sound good at first, and appeal to an “emotional common sense,” but fail to actually work or be correct as applied in real life. If there are no lists, comments are welcome, trying to build a list.
“We don’t make decisions based on common sense” – USAA Insurance claims representative, total loss department. That was pretty obvious by the time he said it. I told him it was going to be a quote of the day.
In June an old man pulled right in front of us in his pickup, from a cross road on our right, while we were at speed in our pickup on highway 26 in central Washington State. WHAM! My 15 year old daughter was driving on her learner’s permit. She could not have done anything to prevent a hard hit, but I think she saved that old man’s life.
You never really know what you’ll do in a situation like that, but I tell myself not to swerve for deer or anything else unless there is a real need to. Hit the damn deer and stay on the road, or hit that car in front of you and avoid a head-on, if it’s a choice between the two. I’ve seen it go very badly when people swerve. She swerved. If she hadn’t, if she’d gone in a straight line, that old man would have been squashed like a melon, I think. As it was we hit corner to corner instead of hitting him in his driver’s door.
I was telling the claims rep that since I had the trans rebuilt and replaced the engine, the hubs, the breaks, etc., that 309K odo reading meant very little, that the newer and shinier pickup I replaced it with actually has “Less useful life left in it, it cost me more than twice what I’m being offered for the totaled truck, and that I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that the injured party (I) should be made whole, within reason, to the fullest extend possible, and we’re not even talking about our ruined vacation.”
“Where did you get that verbiage?” He asked in reply.
“What do you mean?”
“Where did you get that verbiage?” He repeated. Well how do you answer that question? He seems to think that I’m reading from some book, or repeating someone else’s words, which I wasn’t. So rather than argue about that;
“It’s common sense” I told him. That’s when he came out with the money quote.
Yeah, so I’m out thousands of dollars after I take their settlement. Insurance markets, and the whole set of industries surrounding them, like the towing business and the body repair business, medical care, et al, are completely distorted. In a proper world it would be between me and the offending party, and if things fell apart there it would be in the courts, and the insurance company’s role would be to write a check afterwards (or up to the value of the policy). But this is the messed up world of scammers, politicians (but I repeat myself) and Progressives (and again I repeat myself) and so the party writing the check is the same one determining the value of the loss.
I guess that what we were supposed to do, rather than tell the EMTs at the scene that we were all OK and happy to be alive, if a little bruised, and go against their advice to take a ride in and get checked out by doctors, was instead to complain about pain, act all messed up an carry on and so forth, get some prescriptions and braces and all that, like most people, and scam the insurance company for all that pain and suffereing, woe-is-me-I-have-to-take-three-weeks-off-work-and-I-might-have-to-file-for-disability crap. But we didn’t, and won’t.
Karl Marx hated the USSR and what it did under the claim of his ideas.
Don’t believe me? Look it up.
NightShade09
August 4, 2013
Comment to The Invention of Ideology
[I’m quite suspicious of people who claim they can “channel the spirit” of someone. Defending the claim that it doesn’t happen is trivially easy. Hence I think the only look up required is that Marx died in 1883 and no government could claim the title of USSR until sometime after the revolution in 1917.
But Marxist defenders don’t really need facts. They just have to “understand” the benefits of communism even if they can’t understand the simplest and best tested of economics theories.—Joe]
The New York SAFE ACT represents a tremendous step toward sensible gun control.
Michelle Schimel
Assembly Member, NY State 16th District
August 6, 2013
Exit Wound: Who Will Take on Gun Control?
[The New York SAFE ACT is some of the most repressive, short of a total ban, legislation this nation has ever seen. That she thinks of it as a “step toward sensible gun control” should tell you all you need to know. I can only conclude that in her mind “sensible gun control” is a complete ban on firearms.
What we really need is for “sensible politician control” to be enforced.—Joe]
The New York City Department of Education is waging a war on words of sorts, and is seeking to have words they deem upsetting removed from standardized tests.
The words that could be banned include, alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, drugs, evolution, hunting, nuclear weapons, politics, slavery, terrorism, war, and weapons (guns, knives, etc.).
That’s going to make it rather difficult to write a test that addresses history and even the 2nd Amendment. But perhaps that is their intent rather than some sort of unintended consequence. It is New York City after all. They have put stunning restrictions on large sweet drinks, salt, and guns. Is it any surprise they now want to ban words?
Whether it’s sugar, salt, patrol rifles, or words the answer should be the same, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ.
American gun owners should resolve to drive gun grabbers into social and political oblivion. Gun owners and gun owner groups should develop, promote and implement an attack strategy against gun grabbing establishmentarians.
For over four decades law-abiding gun owners and gun rights organizations have fought the enemies of freedom generally from a defensive position, reacting against anti-gun proposals as they are advanced.
However, gun rights people and interests should go on the offensive. It’s time to attack ideologically and practically the gun-grabbing establishment and its spokesmen and adherents with vim, vigor and absolute determination.
John M. Snyder
April 25, 2013
USA Should Drive Gun Grabbers into Oblivion
[Other than “YES!” I have nothing to add.—Joe]
August 4th, 2013. The Non Sequitur cartoon strip has “the birth of ideology.” Fundamental denial of reality, then parsing words in really silly ways to “prove” you are right. Yup. Pretty much. Comments are interesting, too. Shows some serious ideology.
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2013/08/04
So you think that money is the root of all evil?
Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
Francisco d’Anconia
From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
[I have a silver round on my desk that was a gift from son James a few years back that sums it up far more succinctly than Rand’s character did:
Get your round here.—Joe]
Separating words from realities is one of the most important steps toward evaluating government policies, whether domestically or internationally. Since rhetorical skills are the most highly developed skills among politicians, any serious attempt to see government policies for what they are means keeping our eyes fixed on facts despite the distractions of rhetoric.
Thomas Sowell
2010
Dismantling America: and other controversial essays
[Separating words from realities is one of the most important steps in human interaction, not just in evaluating government policy.
I’ve dealt with many well spoken but irrational people and I know that identification of and dealing with them early is far better than later. It’s too bad we don’t have a quick and easy test for this. It would make life in general, not just politics, far better.—Joe]
The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange. Several years from now, the federal government will want nothing to do with private insurance companies. The feds will have a national system of health insurance and they will pull the trigger on the insurance companies.
Sheryl Nuxoll
Idaho state Senator
January 23, 2012
Idaho senator compares health exchange to Holocaust
[My resident medical insurance expert says, “Time will tell.”
The problem is similar to the Jews boarding the trains. Once you enter the camp it’s too late to change your mind about getting on the train. I wonder how many of them said, “Time will tell.”—Joe]
From the Seattle Police Department blog:
Security came out of nowhere,” he told officers, adding that all he did “was not pay for some items.”
I will concede that the perpetrator could just be criminally stupid. But nearly every time I walk down the streets of Seattle I’m amazed at the number of communists openly advocating their failed economics. I can’t walk more than a couple blocks without seeing someone selling “Real Change” (here is one socialist/communist editorial I found after about 30 seconds of looking).
Tonight as I was heading to my bus I crossed Pine Street on the east side of 3rd. There were a bunch of people chanting and holding signs in the middle of Pine street. The one sign I bothered to read was something about demanding a $15/hour minimum wage. I couldn’t understand all the words of the chant but it ended with “against the wall”. I don’t know for certain but it sounded like a threat to me. On the north side of Pine there were a bunch of police officers on bicycles. One was giving directions to the others and they broke into two groups and surrounded the chanting crowd. A few minutes later I received a couple Tweets from the Seattle PD:
Officers have made 8 arrests in demonstration @ 3/pine. Police now working with crowd to unblock Pine St. Between 3/4 Ave.
— Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) August 1, 2013
3/Pine demonstrators requested “symbolic arrests.” After giving dispersal orders, officers granted their request.
— Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) August 1, 2013
I have to wonder; Is this what it was like in the early days before the communists took over in other countries? Even in the cities of Kirkland and Bellevue just a few miles to the east of Seattle openly advocating for communism is rare. On the east side of the state and on into Idaho it’s even more rare. Yet in downtown Seattle it’s so accepted that someone there acts as if there isn’t a problem with taking things from a store without paying for them.
We have a serious problem if the concept of private property is so alien that when these people get caught stealing their response is bewilderment and ask, “What’s the problem?”
What we really need are policies that penalize politicians and managers who undermine the right and ability of law-abiding citizens to get, carry and use the guns and ammunition they need to protect the right to life itself from the madmen and criminals who burden our society.
John M. Snyder
July 25, 2012
Colorado Mass Murder Shows Need for Unencumbered Armed Citizenry
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
I had my most successful year this year. I introduced 26 pieces of legislation and 21 of them are now law – – that’s almost a career.
Angela Giron
July 24, 2013
Colorado Firearm Advocates Push Recall in Gun Control
[I find it very telling that she measures success by the number laws introduced and passed into law. That she participated in the infringement of the Second Amendment rights of all the people of Colorado is just confirming her obvious unfitness for public office.
If I were keeping score for her I would measure success by the number of laws she successfully removed from the books.—Joe]