Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.
Month: October 2017
Public Doesn’t Support Trump Actions On Obamacare
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:
The effect of those orders is that many Americans will lose their insurance, and the others will see their insurance costs rise sharply. Trump’s hatred of Obama (and the insurance plan he passed) has caused him to make the health insurance system in the U.S. significantly worse. Now, he must own the failing system — failing mainly due to his own actions.
And he may have hurt his party in next year’s elections. The public didn’t want his actions.
White Privilege; Terrorist Edition
From Earth-Bound Misfit:
Some asswipe tried to walk into the airport in Asheville, NC with an ANFO nail bomb. He dropped the bag and fled, but was caught later.
So, why didn’t you read about an attempted terrorist attack on an American airport, you wonder?
The Ethical Knob: Ethically-Customizable Automated Vehicles
From The Journal of Improbable Research:
Vehicles could be fitted with what they call an ‘Ethical Knob’, under a proposal by Giuseppe Contissa, Francesca Lagioia, and Giovanni Sartor of CIRSFID, at the University of Bologna, Italy. The device might help clarify ethical/legal issues with Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). What for example, should a self-driving car do when it ‘realizes’ (in an impending crash situation) that it could swerve to avoid a large group of pedestrians but in the process kill the driver and passengers?
David Brooks Says Trump’s Sabotage Might Turn Out Great For Everybody
From driftglass:
Every now and then a nondescript little man from Wingnut Central Command shows up at Mr. David Brooks’ door to remind him that it is time once again to renew his Conservative credentials. It is a brief but critical ritual upon which Mr. Brooks’ entire professional life literally depends. After all, it isn’t the word “American” or “author” or “political and cultural commentator” in his CV that The New York Times shells out crazy money to slap on it’s op-ed page every week:
David Brooks is a conservative American author as well as political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times.
It’s the word “conservative” they’re renting. It is the word “conservative” which has given Mr. Brooks entree to the corridors of power, gigs on NPR, PBS and NBC, book contracts and a job-for-life at the NYT which pays for Mr. Brooks’ various hearths and homes and travels and book tours.
So every now and then he needs to get his “conservative” card punched again. And of course, given the nature of Conservatism, this means he needs to say something horrible and blatantly untrue in some public forum somewhere. This time around, the forum was The News Hour, and the horrible and blatantly untrue thing was this:
Fondly Remembering Obama – 10/16/2017
Presidents once treated former leaders respectfully
Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.
Danger, Corruption, Rape, Intelligentest, Trump the Symptom, Eminem
- M. Bouffant at Web of Evil manages to find something more massively dangerous than global warming, nuclear war, or my tantrum prone President. Or pretty much anything else man-made.
- @bjork55 at Bjork Report introduces us to a quick 48 year corruption count that seems to show that lawmakers on both sides do it, but one side does it a whole lot more.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit considers the internal evidence of I’m, like, a smart person. A hypothetical IQ test would only confirm what is already evident.
- At The Moderate Voice, Shaun Mullen argues that Trump is not the infection so many think he is. He is just the symptom of an infection.
- In another epic rant, Eminem seems to be affecting Max’s Dad’s aversion to rap. Turns out the big em has the good judgement to have a bad opinion about Donald Trump, and to put it into a very strong rhythm.
- The professional writing of John Scalzi at Whatever has slowed considerably this year. But perhaps naming a thing reduces the curse. He is finding that introspection and self-exploration helps, especially since he has articulated exactly what the distraction is: Trump. A problem this year for patriots.
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz carefully explains to conservatives why they don’t get to support Donald Trump and be outraged at Harvey Weinstein.
- PZ Myers discovers that Rush Limbaugh is right about something: leftish reaction to rape, but is right in a way that implies something dark and evil about what contemporary conservatism has become.
- Iron Knee is back (Yay!) at Political Irony after a long, long international sojourn. Iron matches an NRA solution with a global test.
- The Intersection of Madness and Reality couldn’t come up with a clever title because writing about gun violence is draining. It is, it truly is.
- (O)CT(O)PUS at The Swash Zone calculates when it is not the time to talk about gun safety.
- With the help of the ghost of Justice Antonin Scalia, nojo at Stinque, tells us what the 2nd Amendment really means and what we should do about it. Presumably, this will bring the back of the hand to the forehead of my friend T. Paine.
- Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger explains the movement: BLM.
- Infidel753 observes endless destructive efforts and warns that, as long as they control Congress, wingnuts will target health care.
- Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara opines about the bakery in Colorado that turned away business from a gay couple. He agrees that bigotry motivated by religion is still bigotry, but argues that it is more evil wrong to prohibit discrimination.
- Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass has what may be termed a low opinion of the governor of Kentucky. It got lower when that very state executive decided to campaign against legalizing marijuana because of a prospective epidemic of deaths from overdose. From pot? Really?
- Green Eagle contrasts press coverage of two deadly incidents that illustrate the relationship between news media and the GOP.
- The Journal of Improbable Research has discovered a study that, in turn, discovered a major factor in television commercial avoidance: Apparently viewers are using remotes to change channels.
- Our conservative friend T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense, takes us for a ride. He found an addictive time-lapse video taken from a shipping vessel at sea and at port. We travel in a few minutes from the Red Sea to Sri Lanka then to Singapore and finally to Hong Kong. Warning: It’s only a few minutes long, but if you even think of hitting the replay button you’ll be there for hours. Believe me, I know.
- This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from FactCheck.org which, you know, fact checks my President’s de-certification of Iran and discovers the only current non-compliance is that Donald Trump doesn’t like them.
Saturday Rate of Exchange:Should Gun Manufacturers be Liable?
Last week’s discussion of Gun Safety produced followup dialogue that ended with some unity of opinion.
Ryan begins with what we thought might become a provocative defense of firearms manufacturers.
I occasionally hear talk of wanting to hold gun manufacturers liable for the harm that others cause with their products. I don’t know how widespread this desire is, but it’s troubling for the same reason that it would be troubling to hold knife manufacturers responsible for what people do with their knives, car manufacturers responsible for what people do with their cars, drill manufacturers responsible for what people do with their drills, farmers responsible for what people do with their food (one could feed peanuts to someone fatally allergic to them, after all), etc. This sort of policy goes against basic moral principles regarding responsibility. It even comes across as a dishonest attempt to ban guns indirectly by putting gun manufacturers out of business.
Dave Dubya can often be counted on to vigorously advance the progressive side of debate.
Heroin dealers should be held accountable for selling heroin, not for what junkies do.
Gun manufacturers shouldn’t be held accountable for what people do with the guns. They should be accountable for manufacturing and selling weapons of war to civilians. As long as these weapons are legal and pumped into the population more deaths will result. It has become a clear and present danger to the public.
This is why law makers need to be held accountable for the deaths resulting from effectively legalizing weapons of war for civilians.
I won’t hold my breath for accountability on that front.
The propaganda of the NRA and GOP has been more effective than the message of the opposition. While opponents of such weapons proliferation employ facts, reason, and compassion, the NRA and GOP simply wrap the issue in fear, the flag, and freedom.
We know who always wins with this strategy.
We may always be free to salute the flag and invoke freedom, but we will never be free from the threat of mass killings by enraged Militia Amendment enthusiasts. Even the gun-totin’ Good Guys were terrorized and helpless in Vegas.
We will always live under the gun in the “land of the free”.
Ryan reacts, as he often does, with a reasonable exploration of an apparently opposing opinion.
You clearly don’t support the position I described, so I don’t have much to say in response. But I am curious about how you define “weapons of war” and thereby distinguish them from other guns. What factors come into play besides rate of fire?
But disagreement fades.
I’m not sure where we disagree. I thought I was expanding on your position that gun manufacturers shouldn’t be held accountable for what people do with the guns.
They are operating within the law, therefor I say lawmakers are ultimately accountable.
Both rate of fire and volume of fire are the factors. Bayonets used to be a factor but are antiquated and not relevant in mass killings.
Machine guns are weapons of war. Automatic rifles, essentially machine guns, are weapons of war. They are intended to be effective human-killing machines. The M16 was developed as a weapon of war. An AR15 is essentially the same rifle, and is easily converted into an automatic rifle, thus a weapon of war.
Magazines holding 30 or more rounds are also features of weapons of war.
These weapons are not used for hunting or needed for self defense.
It is not a society’s duty to keep gun manufacturers in business. Their duty is to public safety and public health. Proliferation of weapons and their destruction of life is very much a public safety/public health issue.
Humans are far too often not emotionally stable or morally grounded enough to have such weapons of war.
Confiscation is out of the question, but opening the floodgates wider is not the solution.
And there is peace in the valley.
There’s no disagreement.
Dave Dubya can often be found at Freedom Rants. Ryan often joins with Dave and other friends of the blog to provide insight – occasionally combined with a bit of heat.
Have a safe weekend.
Everywhere and Nobody Sees It
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:
I don’t really follow Hollywood stuff, other than watching movies based on comic books or that have other genre appeal to me. I guess I knew/didn’t know there were rumors about Harvey Weinstein because I read Defamer, but that kind of gossipy know/didn’t know state isn’t the same as thinking a person is a predator, because know/didn’t know is the Schrodinger’s Cat of pervert. I might not, based on this information, be alone with a person or would tell a friend not to be alone with that one in a “thing in your teeth” or “toilet paper on your shoe” kind of way, but I wouldn’t necessarily say “This is a guy who needs to straight up be locked up”. I’m not the world’s biggest carceral state backer in the first place, but also, there’s a benefit of the doubt we give men with that reputation, after all. That lady-killer shit. That pimp player. You just don’t exactly know. Do they force themselves, or just have the kind of charm money definitely might/could buy?
The Ronan Farrow investigation about Harvey Weinstein, on the other hand, is the confirmation of rumors that basically doesn’t happen with situational abusers like this often enough. It’s like what happened with Bill Cosby, where there were just too many stories–eventually, after a kind of floodgate opened. Or Roger Ailes. Or Donald Trump, if he didn’t somehow get elected president.
Health Care: Saving The ACA
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:
– More –