Month: October 2017

 

When Glenn Beck program on Fox got so far past what even conservatives think of as conservative, he began to lose advertisers. He and Fox parted company and he started a new far right enterprise in 2010. It was a subscription on-line video site, appropriately called Insider Extreme. It pretty much petered out a few months later in 2011. You can still find the remnants here.

Beck started TheBlaze as a broader network to replace Insider Extreme, continuing the far far right, conspiracy oriented, tradition in a number of internet based media. It is not widely considered a credible source of reliable fact.

Our friend T. Paine is a 2nd amendment enthusiast. Oddly, he bases his latest effort on what he read in TheBlaze, attacking thoughts about the 2nd Amendment by Michael Moore. According to TheBlaze, Moore wants an amendment to the constitution that would enable more gun regulation.

We linked to T. Paine at Saving Common Sense where he focuses on what he sees as Moore’s distortions of original intent.

Of course he misses the entire purpose of why our founders insisted that citizens must have the right to keep and bear arms, and it has nothing to do with sport or hunting. I suppose it would have been more astonishing if he had understood that fact.

Reaction here was intense and largely unified.

From Trey:

Another rousing defense for maintaining the status quo! Another idea put forth to deal with our gun violence. Not saying it’s a good or a bad idea, but it’s an idea. So let’s answer that idea by not countering it with a different idea… but by waving around an opinion of what we think the founders’ original intents were and off no ideas of your own.

As an aside; I do not know what was bemusing about Michael Moore’s facebook post… his intention seemed pretty clear.

From Burr Deming:

Let me propose a hypothetical: If T. Paine became convinced that innocent lives would best be saved with more gun regulation, would he favor that regulation as a God given duty?

I’m thinking of these words of wisdom:

At the end of the day, we have a God given right, and I would argue a duty, to protect innocent lives from evil as best we are able.

I also wonder about this:

Of course he misses the entire purpose of why our founders insisted that citizens must have the right to keep and bear arms, and it has nothing to do with sport or hunting.

If I read the beginning of the amendment correctly, the entire purpose is explicit. Has to do with well regulated militia. That entire purpose would not involve any other God given right.

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From Ryan:

I don’t encounter much in the way of rational debate over gun control.

Conservatives seem mostly concerned about repeating stupid slogans (“Guns don’t kill people, people do!”/”Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun!”), mocking big cities whose gun-related crime rates defy their stricter gun control laws, and attempting to apply their understanding of the country’s founders’ intentions regarding guns to modern weaponry. The first two behaviors are typical in politics: repeat the catchy lines you’ve heard and misunderstand the data. But the last is particularly egregious to me because of the way conservatives present the problem.

They insist that our right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed, per the Second Amendment, but they are rather dishonest about it. Not even they think that every citizen is entitled to nuclear weaponry or other arms understood as “massively destructive.” This is a very clear restriction on our freedom regarding arms, but it’s treated as irrelevant, probably because the thought of any of us owning a nuclear missile and the means of launching it seems so absurd. What about something less destructive, like tanks, RPGs, and other weaponry unnecessary for hunting or typical self-defense scenarios? Some people believe that we should have access to them, but not many. This is also a very clear restriction. The point is that conservatives and liberals are both willing to draw lines on the matter of infringing this right, but conservatives refuse to actually see it this way, preferring instead their self-serving narrative that liberals hate the Constitution and want to rob us of our freedoms and that conservatives are loyal defenders of everything for which the country’s founders stood.

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From Trey:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Seems a lot of people forget about insuring domestic transquility, providing common defence, promotion general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty. We can never have this discussion because one side talks about doing something, anything about the violence and the other side immediately leaps to ‘WE’RE GOING TO BE DISARMED’.

I’m still waiting on Obama to come knocking on my door to take my guns.

From Dave Dubya:

The fact those “good guys with guns” in Vegas saved nobody with their guns directly contradicts the NRA’s master plan.

If we didn’t have an industry of military-style weapons flooding the country, the death count would be lower in many mass shootings. This is simple reality. So much for wanting to “save innocent lives”.

Their entire argument is, “More weapons of death mean more lives saved.”

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From Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Especially in high-tax states like New Jersey, people are up in arms about the proposal to end the deduction for state and local taxes, on the grounds that we shouldn’t be taxed twice on the same income. Though the issue of tax deductibility is more complicated than that, for the sake of this principle I’ll just say: Fair enough. But if that’s so, then we should eliminate the corporate income tax. The corporate tax is the poster child for double taxation.

A business corporation is not a person. It is an association of individuals who come together voluntarily for a productive mission. It is a legal and cultural framework for cooperation. It makes no more sense to tax a corporation than to tax a labor union or a chess club. The owners of the corporation are taxed at the individual level, to the extent they draw dividend income or earn capital gains or draw wages and salaries from the company. To tax a corporation is to tax the owners twice, which is no less bad than taxing individuals once at the state level and again at the federal: Both are double taxation. Morally, this is wrong.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

He started out by chiding the people of Puerto Rico for throwing the U.S. budget out of whack. WTF!!! I don’t know if that was a joke, or just stupidity — but it was the wrong thing to say, at the wrong time, and to the wrong people. Puerto Rico had no control over their being hit by two hurricanes in about a week.

Then he compared the disaster in Puerto Rico to “a real catastrophe like Katrina” — comparing the death tolls of each. Again, the wrong thing to say, at the wrong time, and to the wrong people. The American citizens trying to survive their island’s disaster don’t need to be told that other disasters were worse — they need help, and they need it desperately. And many parts of the island have still had no help at all, and when help reaches them, the death toll is sure to rise.

Those gaffes would have been bad enough, but Trump wasn’t done.

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From Saving Common Sense:

Today I came across this sadly bemusing article regarding Leftist film maker Michael Moore’s latest idea. Of course he misses the entire purpose of why our founders insisted that citizens must have the right to keep and bear arms, and it has nothing to do with sport or hunting. I suppose it would have been more astonishing if he had understood that fact.

What is truly sad is that there will be quite a few people that will look at his misguided ideas and think this newly proposed constitutional amendment of his is a really good idea.

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From John Scalzi at Whatever:

We’ve had terrible presidents before — George W. Bush springs to mind — and yet my ability to create work was not notably impacted. When Dubya was in office I wrote five novels. The Dubya era was a crappy time for America (recall the wars and the Great Recession) but from the point of view of productivity, it was just fine for me.

The thing is, the Trump era is a different kind of awful. It is, bluntly, unremitting awfulness. The man has been in office for nine months at this point and there is rarely a week or month where things have not been historically crappy, a feculent stew of Trump’s shittiness as a human and as a president, his epically corrupt and immoral administration, and the rise of worse elements of America finally feeling free to say, hey, in fact, they do hate Jews and gays and brown people. Maybe other people can focus when Shitty America is large and in charge, but I’m finding it difficult to do.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.
 

 
From Capt. Fogg at The Swash Zone:

Expecting yet another round of amorphous generalities and off-the-shelf solutions to the problem of determining in advance just which solid citizen will become a psychotic citizen, I tuned into Rachel Maddow last night. Much to my surprise she seemed to know what she was talking about and got right to points that needed to be heard through the clamor and frenzy.

How do I know these were important points? Because I’ve been trying to make them, that’s how. And wouldn’t you know the worst and most angry attacks against some simple ideas have come from our young Liberal friends who see any departure from dogma as anathema. Background checks would have been useless here. the weapons weren’t bought at a gun show nor would registration have made a difference. Other things might have. Can we talk?

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From PZ Myers:

Good god, our president is in Puerto Rico and he opened his mouth, and this came out:

"You have thrown our budget a little out of whack, because we've spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico and that's fine," Pres. Trump says pic.twitter.com/9V4caKaG80

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 3, 2017

The bit at the beginning in which he jokes about having to spend money on their island, “You have thrown our budget a little out of whack, because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico and that’s fine”, is bad enough. But listen to the whole thing, and what came next is even more nauseating.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

Another case of nominative determinism:

If you want to make steps towards understanding the highly complex issues regarding how when and why ice cracks, you’ll probably need the help of an expert on the subject.

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