Conflating crime and individual rights is a sign of hoplophobia, a serious mental illness. This calls for an intervention and medical treatment for PBS staff, not propaganda film production. Maybe they could show good faith and publicly sign up for a permanent personal felony-level gun ban, just to be safe.
Alan Korwin
January 12, 2015
PBS scraps ethics, assaults civil-rights group (NRA)
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
Height over bore, that is.
I’ve only half jokingly mocked other “future weapon” designs in the past, saying that the trend is toward an ever more clownishly high sight axis. My educated guess is that this is in fact a psychological problem.
With the lower velocity of the grenade/shotgun, it would make actual sense to put it on the bottom, with the flatter trajectory rifle barrel closer to the sight axis.
The new terms like “Soldier integrated such and such” (which obviously turn ordinary warfare into something totally new and different) are also the result of psychological problems. Years ago, while reading one of the supposedly big cheese U.S. military publications, I found that such a thing as an “army” is, technically speaking, no more. No, ladies and gentlemen; we now have a “Soldier-Centric Force Structure” instead, don’t you know, which no doubt changes EVERYTHING.
The advantage you see is that people who have actual experience in stuff are no longer needed, and can therefore be safely and conveniently brushed aside. Who needs an Army General when you can have a shiny, new, Soldier-Centric Force Structure Command and Control Engineering Specialist? Hmm? Was General Patton a Soldier-Centric Force Structure Command and Control Engineering Specialist? I don’t think so. All he did was lead an Army to kill a bunch of folks and break things. Feh!
And who needs a stupid old rifle when you can have something that looks like it came out of a bad Sci-Fi movie written by an ignoramus, and having the ergonomics of a cinder block?
As I mentioned in the QOTD this morning last night I attended a presentation entitled Active Shooter Preparation by the Bellevue Washington Police department at the Newport High School.
The presenter was Officer Scott Montgomery who usually is a traffic cop but is also on the SWAT team and is a “certified active shooter instructor”.
It was a relatively small group attending. I was fairly close to the front making it difficult to see everyone and didn’t take a close inventory but I expect it was about 30 people.
At the time the Columbine massacre happened police training was that the police should secure the area and wait for the SWAT team to arrive and possibly enter the building. Of course the shooters had long since run their course by the time SWAT entered the building. This was a wakeup call and police training changed in response.
The training now has long been that the school should go into “lockdown”, people hide wherever they can, and they wait for the police to arrive. Upon the arrival of three or four police officers they would form a team and enter the building to engage the shooter. No active shooter incident has ever been stopped by such a multiple officer team.
At the Marysville Pilchuck High School shooting there were students on the football field when the shooting started in the cafeteria. The school went into “lockdown”. The people on the football field went back into the school toward the shooter because that is what you do in a lockdown situation. They were following their training.
Active shooters evolved their tactics and so both the police and private citizens need to evolve as well. The Virginia Tech shooter took advantage of the lockdown and upped it one. He brought his own lock and chain. He went into a classroom, locked the doors shut, and started shooting them.
He had practiced this. We know this because people at the gun range where he practiced reported, when interviewed after the Virginia Tech event, they he did something very odd when he was at the range. He put his targets on the ground in rows. He then walked down the “aisles” with a gun in each hand and shot the targets as he walked by.
Montgomery told us they train using Simunitions in actual schools that are about to be remodeled or torn down. He stressed that even though they train for active shooter situations in a school they cannot be there in time to prevent horrific outcomes. “You are the first responders.” he said. If you do nothing, that is wrong. Fight, flight, and freeze are very natural responses. If you have children under your care you will probably not leave them. It is against our nature to fight. Almost no one practices fighting. Hence, if you have not thought about the situation you almost for certain will freeze. You just won’t know what to do.
You need to think about these things now, frequently, and prepare yourself mentally to do something other than freeze.
What private citizens need to do is think about all the “What if?” cases and plan for them ahead of time. What will you do? What are your options? How many exits are there in your situation? Don’t just think of the doors. Windows can be broken and dropping from a second story window is probably going to result in fewer injuries than waiting for a bullet to find you as you hide under a desk.
Teachers of younger students are particularly resistant to “losing track of a child”. “What if they get lost out on the street?” He response to this is, paraphrasing, “Which would you rather have, a lost kid on the street with every cop in the state converging on the site or the kid at immediate risk of being shot? We can find the kid on the street in the next hour. We can’t protect them from a bullet in the next minute.”
He told us that in police academy they were taught there are three types of people, “Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs”. Most people are sheep. The police are clearly the sheepdogs. But you don’t have to have a uniform to protect your flock.
An active shooter is a dynamic event. Things change rapidly and the police cannot tell you what is going to be the best action to take. The people on the scene right then and there have to adapt to the situation and take appropriate action based upon the information available to them:
People need to develop a survival mindset: Awareness and preparation are key:
Make a decision:
This is the new mindset people must develop. It is not a static decision. Adapt to the changing situation.
If you have to fight allow yourself to have a “righteous anger”. You can be a “mother bear”. If you attack do it with a full commitment until the threat no longer exists. You may have to take their life.
Your mindset is important. His mindset which he encouraged others to have, “I’m not going to give my life for someone else. Someone else is going to have to take my life.”
DHS produced a video to teach the new mindset:
He was generally okay with it but with some minor issues. The two issues I remember were that it portrays women, but not men, as inclined to freeze. Men freeze too. Women can and will fight. This is particularly true when defending children.
The first police to arrive will be extremely single minded. They will not be friendly. They will not help you. They may yell at you and/or push you aside. Their mission will be to engage the shooter as quickly as they can so the total number of victims can be minimized.
When you encounter the police show your hands. Don’t worry about having a cell phone in it. It is very unlikely they are going to mistake your cell phone for a gun and your cell phone may come in handy later.
They will be doing active shooter response training, similar to fire drills, with the schools. It’s not quite the same thing and the results will never be as good, but keep in mind that in the last 50 years they have been doing fire drills no student has ever died in a school fire. Training works.
Much of the presentation seemed to presume there was a single shooter. I asked something like the following, “I realize Columbine was a somewhat unique event but there were two shooters and they used explosives as an significant component of their attack. Does this change your training?”
Montgomery said 67% of the active shooters in this country have been a single person. But they train for multiple shooters and even well planned team attacks such as a terrorist group might implement. It doesn’t change the mindset of the private citizen much. Events are dynamic and you won’t have perfect information. Yes, you may be running away from a shooter into an ambush but you are running away from a known threat. Be prepared to change your actions based on new information.
Someone else asked about the layout of the school and the risk of all the students exiting into the common area. It is surrounded on three sides by the building with a hill overlooking it (the eastern part of the parking lot). School officer Greg Mills explained they have timed the various paths to exit the buildings and can exit in reasonable times to other areas.
I then pointed out, paraphrasing, “I think was in Arkansas in the late 1990s where two shooters pulled the fire alarm and then waited in the tree line with rifles for when the students came out into the open. A similar attack at Newport might look inviting.”
Mills also addressed this. He said that during fire drills he is not responsible for evacuation of the students. He immediately exits in that direction and looks for “anything out of place”. He said, paraphrasing, “I might be the first one shot, but we are aware of that risk and try to address it.”
I was tempted to ask about private citizens with firearms because strictly speaking the presentation wasn’t just about active shooters in schools. But I decided not to. First off it is illegal for private citizens to have a firearm on school property and this was primarily a presentation for parents and students. Secondly this is a tremendous change in attitude from cowering and waiting for the police. If this new mindset takes hold then private citizens with guns to defend themselves and their children will come naturally. The culture is changing and the law will follow.
The title is of course misleading, as is all the speech of authoritarianism. Is it to protect the possession of responsible body armor? But an inanimate object can be neither responsible nor irresponsible. Is it to protect responsible bodies with armor? If so, why does it limit said armor? Is it to protect the responsible possession of body armor? How then would body armor be possessed in an irresponsible manner? Are there hoards of people possessing their body armor in some obnoxious fashion, say, wearing orange body armor with red clothing? One is given to wonder.
With all the Progressives pretending to be concerned, to the point of hyperventilating, about all the carnage carried out with guns, you’d think the one thing they’d want to see, besides a monopoly on gun possession for criminals, is more people wearing more effective body armor. Oh wait…
Authoritarians are of course insane, so in that sense there is nothing to see here.
One has to wonder what the authoritarian Republicans will do with this. My gut tells me they’ll be very much in favor of it, but will at the same time feel uncomfortable about letting their support be known. How that will manifest itself in their political actions I cannot guess. This sort of thing is an on-going problem for them (damn those liberty-minded little Hobbits!).
Please try to avoid getting caught up in the matter of the technical details of the various classes of body armor. This has nothing to do with any of that you know.
If the truth be known (perish the thought) this is one of many signs indicating that Congress is preparing for war with the American people. Many of them are no doubt blissfully unaware of that prospect, but it must be understood that blissful unawareness, and the vehement defense thereof, is a key component of such campaigns, right up to, and through, the the very end.
Bill Whittle brings the facts;
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pELwCqz2JfE
You decide. Would you rather raise your children in Democrat controlled-since-the-Stone-Age, Detroit, or in Gun Nut Central, Plano, Texas?
(Hat tip Kevin Baker)
Would you rather more places be more like Detroit, or more places be more like Plano? There are causes and effects involved here. Are you interested in cause and effect, or are you more interested in furthering the Progressive agenda?
If you’re interested in “saving the children” the answer is fairly simple, and yet you’ll reject it out of allegiance to your political agendas. Therefore you’re not interested in saving children, QED, and no one should listen to you. You’re interested in something else entirely, and it isn’t pretty, or noble, or based on compassion or understanding.
I’ve often criticized the use of statistics, when asserting the principles of liberty takes back seat, and I will likely continue to do so. This bit from Whittle however will be very useful in the sentencing hearings of Progressive operatives who’ve been depriving people’s rights under color of law. One of those rights being deprived is the right to protect one’s children using a gun, and a very high death rate has resulted from that deprivation. Progressives are killing people at an astonishing rate, right here, right now.
Save the children; get a gun. Save the children; defeat Progressivism and relegate it to the dust bin of an ugly history. Save the children; advance the American Principles of Liberty.
ETA; There can be no “getting along”, or making nice, or living with, an idealogy that violates human rights on a wholesale level as a matter of national policy. Practicing Progressivism is in fact a crime, right now. All of it. It’s a violation of everythig America stands for and a violation of the constitution, and it’s perpetrators should be dealt with accordingly. The only question left is; are we going to it the easy way or the hard way?
Some background; local cops have been out for me and my family. Not in a big way, just looking to take advantage of opportunities. Both of my kids have had run-ins with the law. Some serious and some very, very, laughably trivial. I was once the victim of selective enforcement regarding dogs being off-leash ($100 dollar ticket) on or the day after the local cops were subpoenaed to appear in court as witnesses on one of those trivial cases, they’ve threatened to have the dog destroyed, and recently one of the cops was seen prowling in my yard, and was not forthcoming as to why when I called him on the phone afterward. One of the former cops from the same department had been “hitting on” my under-age daughter and her under-age friend. That’s 2.
I came across a great new word today at ESR’s blog. “Kafkatrapping”
The term Kafkatrapping is based on the story “The Trial” by Kafka. (whole story here)
The definition: a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.”
There are several variants of it explicitly discussed and described in the blog post. Well worth reading. We run into it a lot from the left, and among anti-rights activists generally.
I had an interesting “conversation” with some people on Twitter the last few days. Their contribution was a constant string of insults such as:
@jgrubb62190 @EndNRA @AWorldOutOfMind Because you show your inadequacies so proudly. Someday you might find a woman.
— Darth (@DarthNihilus1) December 9, 2014
@JoeHuffman @CharleyVCU1988 @EndNRA @jgrubb62190 @AWorldOutOfMind PS, at no time did I refer to myself as anti-gun, presumptuous dick-bag.
— Darth (@DarthNihilus1) December 29, 2014
@DarthNihilus1 @JoeHuffman @CharleyVCU1988 @EndNRA @jgrubb62190 The gun nuts are a sad, sorry lot with zero human empathy. Heartless, dense.
— Saint Brian (@AWorldOutOfMind) December 30, 2014
@JoeHuffman @AWorldOutOfMind @CharleyVCU1988 @EndNRA @jgrubb62190 Put your glasses on, old timer..
— Darth (@DarthNihilus1) December 30, 2014
@JoeHuffman @AWorldOutOfMind @CharleyVCU1988 @EndNRA @jgrubb62190 More blog links, this guy is fucking dense!!
— Darth (@DarthNihilus1) December 30, 2014
@AWorldOutOfMind @JoeHuffman @CharleyVCU1988 @EndNRA @jgrubb62190 I enjoy destroying them slowly.
— Darth (@DarthNihilus1) December 30, 2014
@DarthNihilus1 @JoeHuffman @CharleyVCU1988 @EndNRA @jgrubb62190 And did you? I mean, you should have, but you can’t destroy Teflon Idiocy.
— Saint Brian (@AWorldOutOfMind) December 30, 2014
@AWorldOutOfMind @JoeHuffman @CharleyVCU1988 @EndNRA @jgrubb62190 I destroy him publicly, so others can see him with his pants down.
— Darth (@DarthNihilus1) December 30, 2014
@DarthNihilus1 @JoeHuffman @CharleyVCU1988 @EndNRA @jgrubb62190 I can’t interact with them that much anymore. I get actual nausea.
— Saint Brian (@AWorldOutOfMind) December 30, 2014
You don’t win the gun rights debate by getting your peer group to agree with your insults. You win by getting public opinion on your side and winning court cases.
Yet the psychology is interesting. Insults versus logical arguments? Patting themselves on the back thinking they have won? Nausea?
Hmmm… this is all consistent with the neurological and psychology model proposed by Anonymous Conservative.
In the comment thread here ubu52 demonstrates something I have been saying for a long time. Sometimes people literally cannot “hear” (or in this case read) your words without mapping them into something else which you did not say.
Here is an abbreviated version of the conversation:
ubu52: That’s ridiculous. That’s like saying all those who wanted to see Bush/Clinton tarred and feathered actually wanted to see that.
And it is ridiculous to think those saying, “Rats. Destroy Them.” actually wanted to see that.
Right?
ubu52: [Repeatedly says she doesn’t get it. After completely spelling it out for her she finally says she gets it.]
Joe: [In six different contexts I ask, “Is it ridiculous to believe they are serious?”]
ubu52: So, who created it? Was it the occupiers? Was it someone Danish? Did they do it under duress or with their own free will? Was it created to mock the Nazis or was it created by someone who agreed with them? Without knowing it’s actual background, it’s really just a piece of 1940’s art.
…
Sometimes, creative people do things for effect. It has absolutely nothing to do with what they really think or feel. You are looking for some sort of deeper meaning to things that may not mean anything at all. (You’re also trying to compare them to people who are mentally ill, but that’s another topic altogether.)
You have such a black/white way of looking at things, it seems that you are incapable of seeing any of the grays in life.
I was asking if it was ridiculous to take the rat poster seriously. This was the work of the most famous genocidal group of all time targeting their most famous victims and she changes the subject to be something about “creative people” doing “things for effect” and claims I’m “incapable of seeing any of the grays in life.”
I cannot fathom how someone could see “shades of gray” in answering the question whether it was ridiculous to take the poster seriously. This poster cannot be interpreted any other way than literally deadly serious. It would be unfathomably ridiculous to interpret any other way than serious.
My question was not verbal, but in written word, repeated six times, and yet ubu52 ignores the question, changes the subject to be a question about the person who did the actual artwork, and tells me I have some deficiency in seeing the nuances of “just a piece of 1940’s art.”
Either she is deliberately trolling me to waste my time or chiefjaybob got it right, “In the end, they are all like Joan. It’s just a matter of degrees.”
ubu would enter a museum of Nazi artifacts and comment on the delicacy with which the lampshades had been stitched.
Defens
December 24, 2014
Comment to Their humor is very telling
[I have long been pleased to have ubu52 comment on my blog and have invited her to attend Boomershoot to meet friends and others in the gun culture. I always viewed her as mildly anti-gun but with good intentions. My model for her was that she understood the facts and the logic of the gun rights movement but had trouble getting over some emotional hurdles into real acceptance. I appreciated her “keeping us honest” when we would get a little carried away with conclusions not fully supported by the evidence. It was “fear” of her calling me on something that would cause me to do a little more research before stating something I wasn’t totally sure of.
My model of her totally changed last night after I read a comment from her about a fiction, extremely graphic, story about someone engaging in degrading, casual sex with Ann Coulter. Her comment was:
The writing is brilliant, creative and professional. No editing required. No surprise, it was written by someone in LA because there are so many professional “creatives” here.
You may not like it because it doesn’t match your core beliefs, but the writing is brilliant.
This blew apart my previous model for her. I’m not sure what to think now but whatever model Defens is using is consistent with the known data.—Joe]
Some of these hunters should get Viagra instead of bigger guns. Take away some of the “envy” if you know what I mean.
Charles___Darwin
December 4, 2014
Comment to 3 challenge Florida decision to lift ban on gun silencers for hunting
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
What is most interesting to me about this particular example of Markley’s Law is that the article this guy commented on didn’t even mention “bigger guns”. It was all about suppressors.
These people have mental health issues. They literally “hear” things that were not said. I’ve dealt with people like this before. You can repeat your words and they still hear something completely different from what was said. You can literally have them read the words you wrote and they insist there are words there that do not exist. You can push them hard enough to read carefully and agree that those words do not exist then, literally, ten seconds later they insist those words are there again.
I’m reminded of a story where, after visiting a mental health ward, a person asked a health provider, “Why do so many of the patients insist they hear the voice of God?” The response was, “Because it’s one of the few socially acceptable delusions.”
It is my hypothesis there are so many mentally unfit people in the anti-gun movement because it’s one of the few socially acceptable areas where total government control is somewhat accepted. Their lives are chaotic, they feel out of control, and they seek stability even though they make the very decisions that created much of the chaos. Individuality, and gun ownership in particular, represents unpredictability and chaos to them. Government control of their lives and the lives of others represents, however delusional a belief this actually is, the ultimate stability and security.—Joe]
I’ve been thinking about the lawsuit against Bushmaster because of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting. And the more I think about it the more clear it becomes that our political opponents are not rational.
If the gun manufacturer is responsible then isn’t the magazine manufacturer just as, if not more, responsible? Why just the gun manufacturer?
What about the manufacturer of the custom springs in the gun? Why just the gun manufacturer?
What about the manufacturer of the ammunition? Why just the gun manufacturer?
What about the manufacturer of the propellant in the ammunition? Why just the gun manufacturer?
What about the manufacturer of the bullets? Why just the gun manufacturer?
What about the manufacturer of the shell casing? Why just the gun manufacturer?
What about the manufacturer of the cups, anvils, and explosive compounds in the primers? Why just the gun manufacturer?
And of course we could, and have, asked similar questions about the car the shooter drove to the school, and that leads to the gasoline, tires, oil, and roads he used to get there. And once we go there why not the shoes and clothes of the shooter? Or maybe he wore glasses and would have had trouble hitting his targets if it hadn’t been for the manufacturer of the corrective lenses and the optometrist who prescribed them.
We could carry this on to bizarrely extreme levels but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. So how does the anti-gun mind work such that they think the gun manufacture is responsible but none of the other manufactures of the components involved in the crime are? The point is that there is no clear threshold where it is easy to say the manufacturer of one component is responsible and the next is not.
The only thing I can think of is that they have some mind distorting hatred of GUNS!!! such that they cannot think rationally. They recognize the absurdity of blaming the car and corrective lens manufacturers but it just doesn’t register that since the ownership of a gun is constitutionally protected right that makes the liability of gun manufacturer even more absurd.
The inability to recognize the obvious in defiance of clear and presence evidence is evidence of a mental disorder. We see it with Peterson Syndrome and we see it here.
This is what happened as I see it now. The Party of the KKK, the Party of Progressivism and Margaret Sanger, saw what was happening in the 1960s, and saw that they could not stop it. So they got out in front of it. It’s a standard tactic of the left; if you can’t stop it, at least take some credit for it, join in, and steer it your direction or otherwise work it to your advantage. Co-opt it.
Now the Democrats have over 90% of Black Americans in their back pocket, keeping them angry, keeping them feeling sorry for themselves, keeping them hopeless, and thus keeping them voting Democrat. Meanwhile far more black babies are being aborted, as a percentage, than white babies, and the black family has been degraded such that Black mothers turn increasingly to the government as a surrogate father. Margaret Sanger, right there. She and Woodrow Wilson both loved the KKK.
In summary; the Democrats, with help from Uncle Toms like Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson and promoter of violent revolution Lewis Farrakhan, are trying to turn black Americans into the objects of hate that they’ve always been for Progressives. And as a two-fer, they’re also trying to turn police into the “pigs” that the hippie/beatnik/communist/Progressives said they were back in the ’60s.
Same thing has been happening with the feminist movement, by the way. It’s standard playbook. Co-opt a budding pro-liberty movement and turn it into a tool of agitation, of anti-liberty, anti-rights, anti-capitalist anti-human activism. It’s happening all around you.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party is frozen stiff with fear, and anger at their own base. They didn’t get into politics to fight. They didn’t run for office to be harangued and maligned, yet that’s what they’re facing, and they’re making it worse the longer they sit on their hands and play their stupid games. They will never lead. Principled leadership has been bred out of the Party. Forget the parties. They’re done. Totaled. FUBAR. It’s up to the People.
Edited to add; Here are a few famous and very loved Progressives, spilling the beans;
Early 20th Century playwright and darling of the Progressives, George Bernard Shaw.
Democrat President Woodrow Wilson and his pro KKK movie “Birth of a Nation”.
Margaret Sanger, early 20th Century Progressive, revered to this day, on the “Negro Problem” and the purpose of advocating birth control. Sound familiar? It should. It was the inspiration for the German National Socialist’s Eugenics programs, and their Final Solution, which we now know as The Holocaust.
And we’ll wrap it up with another all-time darling of the Progressives all my life and even to this day, Helen Thomas on what they view as the Jewish Problem.
They must be laughing like hell at the fact that they actually managed to get the American black and Jewish votes wrapped up, and that no one called them out on it all this time.
That desire to get two people fighting and then hide is a very deeply imbued urge. It is borne of an attempt to make something which stimulates the leftist’s amygdala stimulate their enemy’s amygdala, combined with sheer cowardice making direct confrontation not an option. As with every other leftist tactic, the goal is an outcome which would terrify the leftist, were positions reversed, namely manly men coming to kill them.
From simple social out-grouping, to calling cops to a store in such a way that they might shoot a conservative, to out-right swatting, to deploying various other government agencies to harass and intimidate conservatives, leftists have a burning, innate desire to get K-strategists fighting each other, especially as things get crazy. It is not a coincidence and it is not an accident – it is a long-evolved strategy, and we should all expect to see a lot more of it in the next two decades. The obvious solution is to not fall for it, and instead focus on the leftist themselves as the source of the problem. Very quickly leftists would abandon that strategy.
Anonymous Conservative
October 14, 2014
Amygdalae in the News
[If you want to understand the psychology of our political opponents and strategies for defeating them and just as important how they attempt to defeat us, you must read Anonymous Conservative’s work. He has a book, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans, which is sometimes available free on Kindle.
One of the more important insights I have gotten from reading him is that, in general, the police are our natural friends. They enforce the rule of law and only enforce the whims of some ruler because the ruler had the authority to make law. Our state and federal constitutions, being higher law than those that would be our unconstrained rulers, gives them authority and license to oppose those rules. See, for example, the opposition to many of the gun laws such as in New York, Colorado, and in Washington State (I-594). At some level our political opponents recognize this and attempt to get us to fight each other, to the death.
Recognizing this we can adopt a much better strategy of encouraging and supporting the police to respect our guaranteed rights and deal with those that would infringe upon our rights in an appropriate manner.—Joe]
Yesterday I posted about how our political opponents use insults because they know insults are effective on themselves even when the insults are totally baseless. The Obama administration calling Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu “chickenshit” is an example that is making world news. Anonymous Conservative does the analysis:
So why launch such an attack? If you are intimately familiar with the psychology, you’ll immediately see that this was an amygdala hijack directed at Netanyahu. Like many such attempts by narcissists, it was predicated on an understanding of human psychology that arose from the narcissist’s self examination of themselves, and thus it assumes the narcissist’s malady is ever-present in everyone.
…
It make me think about how things must be unraveling inside the White House now that Dear Leader and his entire entourage are being criticized by leftists afraid of seeing the Obama administration’s failures reflect back badly upon the movement. Groups of narcissists can become amygdala echo chambers. One get’s hijacked and tries to relieve the strain by hijacking two others himself. Like nuclear fission, it can create a very unpleasant environment.
Similar conclusions are probably valid when our anti-freedom opponents spew crude insults at us.
No methodologically sound study has found any important effect on homicide, suicide or violent crime rates from Canadian gun laws.
Gary Mauser
Professor emeritus at the Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University.
October 29, 2014
Did Parliament Shooting Change Canada’s Gun Control Debate?
[The same is true in the U.S.
So why do some people still advocate for more gun control? I can only think of the following possible reasons:
Or some combination of the above.—Joe]
I recently tweeted this:
@CamEdwards@robdelaney@NRA@YouLikeAaron In a debate you lead with the best you have. They have crude insults. We have SCOTUS rulings.
It was in response to this tweet from rob delaney (@robdelaney):
This is how
@NRA guys have sex. RT@YouLikeAaron:
The associated drawing is so crude I’m putting it “below the fold.”
This is entirely consistent with The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans. They are not data and logic driven. Anti-gun people are driven by emotions. They know that insulting and degrading people is what is effective on them. They therefore attempt to use this same tactic on us as their best weapon in a debate.
In a lot of ways you really can model them as not having matured beyond grade school.
Liberals are not designed to flourish under any conditions but free resource availability, and no danger or exposure to reality. Limit resources or add some dangerous reality, and they will begin to drop like flies.
Anonymous Conservative
October 7, 2014
Ebola, Natural Selection, and Facilitating a K-Shift to Conservatism to Save Lives
[I think this is overlooking that fact that liberals (Progressives) seek and hold on to power. In a time of limited resources or dangerous reality they are likely to use that power to take resources through unlawful means. “The good of the many outweigh the rights of the few”, will be the essence of their justification.
I suspect it will only be in a state of partial or full government collapse that his predictions will become dominant. But the interesting thing is that history has shown us that government collapse can occur remarkably rapid.—Joe]
It would be surprising, as Amis says, that such a warped psychology as Hitler’s could ever be “a considerate and energetic lover”. Yet, once I began to write about the Nazi wives, I realised that the ability of mass murderers to compartmentalise their lives is one of their most disturbing aspects.
A new documentary about Himmler’s home life, called The Decent One, by the acclaimed filmmaker Vanessa Lapa, focuses on the tender personal letters between Himmler and his wife Marga, largely about their daughter Puppi, even as he perpetrated daily atrocities. It raises the same questions as Thomas Harding’s book Hanns and Rudolf, about the private life of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant, whose children played just yards away from the camp, oblivious of the horrors occurring there.
Jane Thynne
October 15, 2014
What Hitler’s sex life was really like
[What I don’t think most people really understand is how easy it was, and is, for people to murder people on a mass scale. Hitler and the Nazi’s are viewed as terrible monsters the likes of which have only been seen once in history. Wrong.
People, across differing societies, accept orders to do terrible things to other people up to and including murder them. Read Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Or The Gulag Archipelago. Or The Rape Of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II. Those are just some of the better known instances.
You can’t imagine our government rounding up people and putting them in camps? “That just can’t happen in this country”? Wrong. It did happen. Read Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps.
The people that inflict these terrible things did not have warning beacons flashing on their foreheads. Many, if not most, were kind to their family and pets and widely admired in society at the time. In both Hitler’s Willing Executioners and The Rape of Nanking, it is documented that the perpetrators sent photos and postcards of their atrocities to their families and the public at large. They were happily doing their jobs for the good of their country and the betterment of mankind.
I think one of the key flags to identify people who do these things are that they believe that the good of society outweighs the rights of the individual. There may be exceedingly narrow circumstances where this is true, Ebola comes to mind but when I hear someone advocate people “make sacrifices for the greater good” I go on full alert. Those are fighting words to me and such a person is, at a minimum, an enabler of, if not an advocate for, the next genocidal tyrant. And as such they deserve all the contempt given Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler.—Joe]
I had a liberal colleague giving me grief about guns and that gun owners are crazy, so I just put the question to her – if someone handed you a loaded gun, what would you do with it? She said “I’d look for someone to shoot”. I told her “That’s the difference between me and you – I’d be looking to be sure it was pointed toward a safe place. You’re the one that needs professional help, not me.”
Martin Fischer
October 4, 2014
Comment to AND SHE STABBED HIM IN THE HEAD: Why Gun Control Supporters Don’t Trust You With Guns
[H/T to Paul Koning.
I have nothing to add.—Joe]