Category Archives: Psychology

The psychological model

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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.

This is what I’m talking about

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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.

Joe: 

And it is ridiculous to think those saying, “Rats. Destroy Them.” actually wanted to see that.

Spiegelman-Rotten

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.”

Quote of the day—Defens

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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]

Quote of the day—Charles___Darwin

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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]

Why just the gun manufacturer?

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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.

Some people get it

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Meet Jonathan Gentry.

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.

Quote of the day—Anonymous Conservative

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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]

Another psychology example

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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.

Quote of the day—Gary Mauser

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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:

  1. Evil intent
  2. Power (this could be considered a special case of evil intent)
  3. Money
  4. Attention and/or fame
  5. Peer acceptance
  6. Ignorance
  7. Stupidity
  8. Bigotry
  9. Mental issues

Or some combination of the above.—Joe]

Crude insults are the best they have

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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.

Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Anonymous Conservative

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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]

Quote of the day—Jane Thynne

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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]

Quote of the day—Martin Fischer

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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]

Quote of the day—Bob Owens

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If you ever hear of a gun control rally happening nearby, do yourself a favor and make it a point to attend.

Do not go to share your opinion on the subject or confront their ideas as a counter-protestor, simply go to their event and listen.

If you experience turns out to be anything at all like the experiences I’ve had, you’ll note a sort of nervous energy in the supporters of gun control. If you spend time listening to them, you’ll probably see them swing back and forth from sorrow to a anger, and back again… often within the span of a few minutes. There’s often chanting involved, a repeated catch-phrase, or a mantra to help keep them focused on the cause.

Almost invariably, they’ll veer from mania to depression, and show signs of poor impulse control.

Bob Owens
October 3, 2014
AND SHE STABBED HIM IN THE HEAD: Why Gun Control Supporters Don’t Trust You With Guns
[I can second that.

They have extreme difficulty in clear thinking. The cannot seem to differentiate between facts and feelings. They will literally say, “I don’t believe your facts”. As Lyle says, they are telling us they are insane when they do this.

You can explain that eliminating all “gun deaths” does not mean people are safer and they cannot understand how that can be true and respond with “Huh? totally missed this logic. I don’t think there is any there.“

They will pontificate on all they are doing for “gun safety” and then have a deer in a headlight response when you ask how many gun safety classes they have attended or taught.

They will tell you that many lives will be saved if there was a waiting period “so people could cool off” before they could buy a gun. Then when asked, “So, if I go into a gun shop, show them my concealed carry permit and a pistol on my hip then they wouldn’t need to make me ‘cool off’ before purchasing another one, right?” they will shut down the discussion because… well… I guess it’s because they have crap for brains.—Joe]

Quote of the day—John R. Lott, Jr.

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I can’t find a single study from Bloomberg’s groups that aren’t loaded with errors. They have an anti-gun agenda and will lie to achieve it.

John R. Lott, Jr.
September 25, 2014
How Bloomberg’s Million-Dollar Desire For Gun Control Is Backfiring
[While I think there is a fair amount of lying going on they don’t think of it as lying. They just don’t understand facts are independent of their feelings. If they feel something then, in their view of reality, it is true. I’ve had people flat out tell me this. I would point out that what someone was saying was in direct contradiction to verifiable facts. And I would get a response of something to the effect, “Well, it’s true to them and that is what matters.”

There is also a very telling anecdote about liberal “research” in this same article:

In 2006 I was at a cocktail party in Arlington, VA, talking to a liberal journalist about his soon-to-be-released book on Iraq when John Lott joined us. John listened for a moment and then said to the author, “I’m curious. You say you just finished a book on the Iraq war. I always find it so hard to finish a book. I get so deep into the research I have a hard time stopping to write. I’m guessing you had a hard time leaving Iraq. There is so much to investigate and understand.”

The author said, “I didn’t go to Iraq.”

John paused with this quizzical look on his face before asking, “Oh, how did you do your research?”

The author said, “I didn’t have to do much. I mean, I already know what I think.”

Feelings versus facts. It’s a type of mental disorder.—Joe]

Psychology of mass shooters

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Via CGL Admin we have this is a fascinating article on the psychology of mass shooters: Everything We Think We Know About Mass Shooters Is Wrong.

The bottom line is that it isn’t so much that they are psychopathically evil but that they want attention and to be accepted so badly they are willing to kill other people to get that attention. This is consistent with other psychological assessments that say the media coverage of mass shooters helps create more mass shooters.

Quote of the day—Rachel Lucas

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Nor would it be different if “mothers” were suddenly put in charge.  I feel vicarious resentment of that claim because if I were a man with children, I’d really like to know just what in the hell makes Sally Field think women love their children more than men do.  Human nature is what it is, and we will fight over shit until we go extinct.  Even if the best mother EVER was Queen of the Planet, someone somewhere would still need to have their ass kicked, and she’d have to send somebody’s child to do it.

Rachel Lucas
September 17, 2007
If mothers ruled the world, there’d be no goddamn….lots of things
[H/T to Erik Onstott for the Facebook comment.

Continuing the almost theme from last week. It gives us more clarity on the issue.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rick McGinnis

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There’s an article of faith on the left that the world would be a kinder, more humane place if it were run by women. Based on the leftist women I knew, the world they ruled would be a place you’d navigate by the mountains of skulls.

Rick McGinnis
August 29, 2014
Comment to Three Essential Films About Terrorism
[There is some evidence to support this hypotheses. For example the Weather Underground had many women it.

On a more personal note an admitted Marxist woman I used know was also heavily involved in the ecology movement. To the best of my knowledge she didn’t actually do it but she didn’t see problem in spiking trees even though it presented a life threatening danger to loggers and sawmill employees.

Another way to look at this is the differences in the behavior of females versus males of most mammals. The female is a much more vicious defender of their young than the male. Could those who view a strong government of their making as a “child” and transfer that same instinct of a vicious defense to defending their political creations?

And how about women who are strong advocates for gun control? Does this hypothesized trait explain why anti-gun women are so violent?—Joe]

Calling it ‘Ignorance’ is being generous

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I had thought it was well understood that one of the tactics of the anti rights movement has been to blur the distinction between fully automatic and semi automatic firearms (the former being ultra-restricted and therefore ultra-expensive and prohibitive and the latter being widely available and affordable). Apparently I’ve been very wrong.

Coyness apparently remains one of the most successful ruses for the anti liberty movement, even today when we have so much information at our fingertips that ANYONE who cares enough to jiggle his fingers over a keyboard for a few seconds can learn just about anything that is known by anyone.

That proves that most of us in the pro-liberty camp still fail to understand what we’re up against.

KNOW THY ENEMY!

It has been well-documented that anti-rights activists have spoken about, and organized efforts aimed at, confusing the issue of full verses semi auto, and yet we still would rather have fun pointing out the “stupidity” of people like Don Lemon. Well the joke’s on us, people.

More to the point though; if we were standing on principle, the distinction between full and semi wouldn’t matter. The Progressives have had most of us cowed for generations into accepting the NFA, and “defending” ourselves by accepting THEIR premise that, “Oh, well yeah– NO one wants machineguns ‘on the streets’! No-no-no-no!”

And so it’s an interesting play we’re in. The antis are using our own faults against us, by fooling people into making a distinction (which they’re trying to blur now) that only matters because they’ve been successful in fooling or intimidating us.

It’s the very definition of Progressivism. Get us comfortable with one outrage (in this case the NFA) and use that as a stepping stone to the next outrage (conflating semis with the already successfully demonized autos).

Far from calling Don Lemon an idiot or an ignoramus then, I’d say he’s pretty damned clever. So far he appears to have fooled 100% of the commenters on that Beck article.

Quote of the day—David Dunning

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If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent … when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.

David Dunning
June 20, 2010
The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)
[H/T to Linoge who got me started on the Wiki-wander that led here.

I found it fascinating that there have been similar astute observations on the same topic throughout history.

This is exactly what happens with many of the anti-gun people we encounter. They cannot even comprehend how disparate in competence they are when they engage us on the topic. They are frequently profoundly clueless, don’t know it, and cannot be told how clueless they are.

It find it interesting that another aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that those who are highly competent tend to underestimate their skill level. Perhaps the following Twitter exchange demonstrates that:

 Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 7h

@apple_butter NOBODY WANTS YOUR DAMN GUN! Understand now? @TANSTAAFL24 @KentAtwater4 @wallsofthecity @psherm07

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 5h

@djmincey11 You must have your head in the sand: https://blog.joehuffman.org/category/gun-rights/no-one-wants-to-take-your-guns/ … @apple_butter @TANSTAAFL24 @KentAtwater4 @wallsofthecity @psherm07

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 4h

@JoeHuffman I don’t care to read your “opinion” piece. @apple_butter @TANSTAAFL24 @KentAtwater4 @wallsofthecity @psherm07

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 3h

@djmincey11 Factual examples are not opinions. Are you allergic to facts? @apple_butter @TANSTAAFL24 @KentAtwater4 @wallsofthecity @psherm07

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 3h

I know the difference between fact & speculation. Cognitive powers aren’t magic. I’ll give you a minute to Google the big words @JoeHuffman

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 3h

@djmincey11 For years I had the job title of Senior Research Scientist II. I know this topic well and I know you don’t. @wallsofthecity

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 3h

For years I held the title of Executive Director, Reigional Director, CEO and Vice President/Owner. Now what? @JoeHuffman

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 2h

@djmincey11 I suggest you learn some science and educate yourself on the topic at hand. @wallsofthecity

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 2h

I suggest you KNOW your opponent BEFORE you run into battle. @JoeHuffman @wallsofthecity

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 2h

@djmincey11 I find it odd that you don’t follow your own advice. Is hypocrisy one of your greatest strengths? @wallsofthecity

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 2h

Are we finished yet? I am bored with this sniping. @JoeHuffman @wallsofthecity

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 2h

@djmincey11 Only if you stop tweeting nonsense about guns, gun owners, and the enumerated right to keep and bear arms. @wallsofthecity

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 2h

And FYI… I will NEVER stop tweeting facts because it hurts your feewings. *here’s a hanky* @JoeHuffman @wallsofthecity

I dropped it there because she was going off the deep end into irrationality at that point. At no point did my feelings come up in the conversation or was I even aware of having any particularly strong  feelings on the matter. And she was particularly lacking in facts.

But the point I wanted to make was that I didn’t think I was being particularly effective. Perhaps just a little bit more than holding my own.

So imagine my surprise to the following tweets in response to the exchange:

Linoge ‏@wallsofthecity 2h

Your afternoon’s entertainment: #gunsense useful idiot @djmincey11 is trying to have a battle of wits with @JoeHuffman. She came unarmed.

towerclimber37 ‏@towerclimber37 53m

@wallsofthecity @djmincey11 @JoeHuffman hahahahah she got owned.

Blackstone ‏@bitterclingerpa 36m

@towerclimber37 @wallsofthecity @djmincey11 @JoeHuffman Owned? Broken, sold, used, traded & then sold again. Science vs a Suit

Epic.

Interesting. Very interesting.—Joe]