Joe Biden made gun control an important part of his campaign platform.
He noted there are 40,000 gun deaths per year. To stop them, he will ban, regulate, confiscate and tax certain rifles, high capacity magazines and build-your-own kits; prohibit inheritance and private sales; stop minors from hunting with guns by imprisoning any parent who gives the minor access to a firearm; prevent teachers from defending their students; and let the trial lawyers off the leash to sue the American gun industry into oblivion to give the competitive edge to our foreign rivals.
All good stuff, but will it work? Of those 40,000 deaths, 30,000 are suicides committed by people who passed the background check, endured the waiting period, and fired a single round. None of Joe’s proposals will affect them.
Oh sure, he blandly proposes to improve access to mental health services, but the lack of detail and funding reveals the enormity of the problem. Most of those suicides are old white men who have lost everything and have nothing left to live for – you think they’re going to spill their guts to a mental health counsellor, hand over their gun and have a group hug? Ridiculous.
And his proposal does nothing to take guns away from the people who commit most of the gun violence in major cities. Instead, he’ll connect them with economic and social programs that may deter violence. Is it me or did Midnight Basketball just make a come-back?
Honestly, I’m surprised the Biden Administration is wasting time with impeachment. They should be pushing their gun control agenda as hard and fast as they can. They need to get the guns out of the hands of all those new gun buyers, so when they defund the police, the people will be entirely at the government’s mercy. Well, them and the criminals on the street.
Joe Doakes
I endorse Joe’s position entirely.
Democrats – get on your phones to A-Klo and the Butcher of Vandalia and get them to pressure President Harris to get on it, already.
During the presidential campaign, every time candidate Biden went on one of his roughly 200000,000,000,000 television ads saying “… I have a plan…“, I warned you.
“Ask for specifics“. What is the plan. Tell us.
I mean, neither I nor any of you could ask the campaign directly, of course. That fact got me thinking – wouldn’t it be cool, and salutary to democracy, if we had an institution with printing presses and transmitters and – work with me, here – perhaps rooms full of people who consider themselves a nearly monastic class of information gatherers, processors and disseminators, who take it not merely as their job but their calling to ask questions of those who would aspire to power, to hold them accountable, who might have asked those questions in our stead?
To paraphrase John Lennon, you might say that I am a dreamer.
And when it comes to schools – they of the infamous “plan“ to re-open them all within 100 days of coming in the office?
I grew up in grew up in a family of Democrats – Dad was a teacher, Mom had a little hippie inclination – and it’s probably not a huge shock that’s how I started out as well. At North Dakota Boys State, I wrote a party platform that would have made Paul Wellstone blanche in horror – not because I was an especially well-read or committed econommic “progressive”, but becasue that was the water in which I figuratively swam as a teenager.
In college, my major advisor, Dr. Blake, convinced me that it just wasn’t true – that I was in fact a conservative. And he was right. I voted for Reagan in my first presidential election, and never really went back.
About ten years later, disgusted with the 1994 Crime Bill, I left and went to the Libertarians (just in time to miss a great redemptive moment in GOP history – but I had two babies at home at the time, so I wasn’t actually doing that much political thinking, to be honest.
Four years later, I went back, figuring the problems in the GOP were best fixed on the inside. It’s still an ongoing battle – maybe never moreso.
One thing I didn’t do? Spend years making theatrical amends to Republicans for having been a Demorat; trashing my former Republican friends to my (temporary) Libertarian pals; hovering over Libertarians’ sayings to find things to pounce on to show my GOP friends I was a true believer.
I’ve encountered a lot of that lately – various people I know who’ve left one party or another, and felt the need to not just express their new beliefs (yay, more power to you!) but expound on how blinkered, deluded, malformed and stupid the people in their old party are, and how very decisively they’ve left them behind.
One longtime real-life as well as social media friend felt the need to issue a heartfelt – “theatric” might be a better term – public apology to all his new (Democrat in this case) friends for ever having been a Republican sympathizer.
But that was just the most extreme example.
The only comparison I have is with a jilted spouse whose ex ran off with the cabana boy or secretary, and spends years sputtering first with rage, then the sort of passive-aggressive sniping that becomes a lifestyle (and a tiresome one) if you let it.
And it’s a pretty ecumenical phenomenon. I’ve seen it with ex-Republicans in the Libertarian party, Republican Trump supporters AND Never-Trumpers, ex-Trump supporters of any and no affiliation – and I’m sure it happens with ex-Democrats too.
I mean – your political beliefs changed. If your politics are so closely tied to your personality and the fabric of your life that you have to spend that kind of time and energy attacking not only your old beliefs, but the people who still hold them?
No, not Trump. Myanmar (formerly Burma) where military officers have seized control, declared a one-year state of emergency, plan to hold fresh elections under supervision, and pledge to turn over control to the winner.
Apparently, their senior military leadership believes supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some fraudulent electoral ceremony. When they see the electoral process so blatantly corrupted that it robs the people of their right to self-determination, the military takes their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution seriously enough to intervene and force a do-over to vindicate the people’s Constitutional right.
He had a lengthy series of convictions, many of them disqualifying him from holding, much less owning or buying firearms.
He was in violation of an order for protection – itself a crime.
He had a history of same:
Gregory Ulrich was already subject to every restriction, sanction and consequence a “Red Flag” law can provide, and then some.
And still he shot up the Allina Clinic in Buffalo yesterday – a “gun free zone”, by the way – killing one and injuring several. He was prohibited from having, buying or owning guns by state and federal law, he was subject to at least one restraining order, and he built bombs – itself a very, very serious federal felony.
In short – when people say “we already have laws in place that do literally everything a “Red Flag” law is supposed to do”. Gregory Ulrich was a case in point.
Which didn’t stop Metro Minnesota’s political class from plying their dismal trade – exploiting crises:
Two years in a row I rose on the House floor to share stories of states both red & blue that enacted Red Flag Laws after horrific tragedies devastated families and communities. I implored my colleagues not to wait for another tragedy. https://t.co/BukWofvPMu
And we, the good guys, implored our political class “learn the facts before you start jabbering about policy”. What good did it do us?
The Carver County sheriff pointed out in various news conferences yesterday that a “Red Flag” law would have been about as useful as a “Miss Minnesota” tiara on tow truck driver. Which ensures that Carver County’s sheriff won’t be getting any more live feed time.
“Green” industries – like the jobs “building solar panels” that the current administration is telling newly-unemployed pipeline workers to try to get – are fleeing Germany for…
The number of jobs in the German renewables sector (production and installation) has fallen from about 300,000 in 2011 to around 150,000 in 2018, the German Trade Union Association (DGB) found in an analysis of employment in the energy transition.
The drop in employment is mostly due to the collapse of Germany’s solar power industry over the past decade, as many companies were forced out of business thanks to cheaper competitors from China scooping up most of the market. The number of jobs in solar PV panel production and installation fell from a record 133,000 in 2011 to under 28,000 seven years later.
Industries build around commoditizing technology – like solar panels – are inevitably going to be drawn to the cheap labor.
To be fair, Democrat policy is to skip the “cheap labor” phase of the continuum of misery, and drag most Americans straight to perpetual underemployment.
I confess, I am often tempted by those click-bait ads. This site advertises the 10 Greatest Sports Cheaters.The authors act as if it’s a big deal, as if the cheaters were some kind of villains and the people who called out the cheaters were some kind of heroes.
Who cares? You lost. Whether you lost fair and square or the other guy cheated to rob you of victory, what difference does it make? Move on. Try harder next time.
Besides, you have no proof, and even if you did, we don’t want to hear about it. Questioning the result only undermines public confidence in the sport. In fact, your continued harping about it is so tiresome, we’re shutting down your social media account and if you don’t zip it, we’ll get you fired from your job.
Nobody likes a sore loser. That’s not who we are.
Joe Doakes
To suggest otherwise is seditious. Maybe even Treason.
In a city ravaged by leftist violence several times in the past year, we’re going to focus, hard, on finding the dozen doughy ex-Libertarians, sitting in their parents basements, who identify as Trumpo-Anarchists.
But have no fear, Master Hogg. Logically, factually and intellectually, the intellectual foam pillow that is your worldview and movement has been on Mars for quite some time now.
It bursts onto the scene, kills a bunch of people who have no immunity, then fades into the background as the vulnerable host population dies off and the immune population go on with their lives.
So where’s the big emergency that justifies the dictatorship, again?
Last summer, on my show, I interviewed a guy – an engineering professor – who had a side project, mathematically modeling the progress of the Covid pandemic.
His assertion – that somewhere between 5-10 times as many people had been infected as the testing showed – because “getting tested” was at best a self-selecting set of subjects (if, at that time, they could get tested at all) and most people were asymptomatic, or had limited symptoms.
The numbers were plausible – and the limited symptoms part resonated with me. I barely talked myself into getting an antibody test. My symptoms were fairly minimal – a fever for about a day, a nasty cough for a few more, basically the bronchitis I get every couple years. Were it not for a rash on the back of my hands, I might have just skipped the whole thing. The antibody test showed I’d had Covid, in late March or early April – consistent with the symptoms I did have.
Here’s the deal – the modeler and I considered it good news. With viruses, all other things being equal and acknowledging there’s a lot we still don’t know about Covid, recovering from an infection gets you, if not immunity, at least resistance, at least for some period of time. And even limited immunity and enhanced resistance is a huge thing; the common cold is largely shrugged off by most Westerners, but it was frequently lethal to natives when Westerners traveled to places where the people had never had exposure to it. The difference between a lethal pandemic and the sniffles was a few (or few dozen) generations of having had it and survived.
The modeler’s advice? Everyone who wasn’t under sixty and/or in relatively decent health should protect themselves accordingly until a vaccine came out; everyone else should “play spin the bottle, and power through the infection as fast as possible”.
Having “Survived” a mild case, I’ll recuse myself from the games.
And that particular modeler is not the only person to have found these results.
Shrieking Ninnies In Expensive Suits – which was why I was a little surprised not only to see this story from National Public Radio’s “health” beat reporters, about a study from Columbia that reached precisely the same factual concusionthat Covid had infected 5-10 times as many people as we thought…
…and not just that they thought it was seriously ground-breaking news (emphasis added)…
The model has not been published or peer-reviewed yet, but lead researcher, Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University, sharedthe data exclusively with NPR.
…when my lil’ ol’ talk show covered this exact same conclusion eight months ago…
…but the conclusion these “elite” “journalists” reached:
…[the model] gives a much more complete — and scary — picture of how much virus is circulating in our communities…The model’s conclusion: On any given day, the actual number of active cases — people who are newly infected or still infectious — is likely 10 times that day’s official number of reported cases.
So let’s recap: a model that is:
Unpublished
Not peer-reviewed
Reaches a statistical conclusion that is “news” only if one’s sense of credentialism has eaten whatever journalistic inquisitiveness one might have had
…is presented not only as “new” news, but as bad news.
Now, during my brief, not very successful career as a reporter, one thing I did do well was ask questions – which used to be a key qualifier for journalists.
And I have so many of them, reading both the study and the “elite” journos at NPR’s take on it.
Given that the number of deaths and serious hospitalizations are a reasonably known quantity, and their numbers has been broadly tracking with known infection rates, and we presume that this discrepancy is not brand new, doesn’t that mean the disease is on 10-20% as fatal as we thought?
Again assuming that the infection rates have always been ahead of testing, doesn’t that mean an order of magnitude more people have been infected, and (remember, we know the death rates) recovered, and thus are at least partly immune or resistant? Isn’t that good news (except of course for the number of immune people getting scarce vaccines, and also the fact that our government response seems to be discounting natural immunity entirely?)
Wny, in fact, does this story ignore the natural/herd immunity implications of numbers like this?
This sort of “reporting” is neither science nor, if my various bosses, teachers, editors and mentors were to be believed, journalism in any sense other than “providing PR for an authioritarian narrative”.
David Hogg, who has built a very rewarding career slandering law-abiding gun owners, is his immense expertise from “gun safety” to industry. Seeking to “own” Mike Lindell [1], he announced last week he seeks to start a pillow company.
Last Friday, it turned out Hogg’s big idea had run into the same roadblock as his gun control agenda – reality:
Why it matters: several on-line stock brokers suddenly and simultaneously changed the rules for little guys. You can use our on-line discount stock brokerage account to sell your valuable stock to the big boys (thus bringing the price down), but you can’t buy more of it (which would have continued to push the price up). The rules which formerly were uniform have now become arbitrary.
Remind you of anything? Several states suddenly and simultaneously declaring house arrest to promote mailed voting? Several states suddenly and simultaneously kicking out election observers so they could count mailed ballots in secret? Social media sites suddenly and simultaneously kicking conservatives who questioned the counting of mailed ballots, off their platforms? And now several brokerages suddenly and simultaneously shutting down purchases of select stocks by select individuals, just when they need to buy them the most. The big-shots are once again flexing their muscles against the ordinary working class peasants. It’s the hallmark of the new administration – rules for thee but not for me. Bidenism. It’s the way things are done, nowadays. Oh, naturally, the liars and cheaters have excuses. We had to stop trading for your own good, the market was too volatile, prices were unsustainable, there was misinformation being circulated. Nobody believes any of that (a better lie would have been “we had to stop them, they were price-gouging”). Instead, everybody knows buying was stopped to protect the big-shot investment funds which had made disastrously bad investment decisions. The chart proves the lie. Congress will harrumph, the White House will deny making phone calls to pressure people, the stock market board will meet to discuss rule changes for big-shots versus peasants, a bunch of investors will lose their shirts and lawyers will make a killing fighting over the scraps. Yawn, the same as always, nothing much will change.
Except everything has changed. Another naked emperor was seen, mocked and humiliated and in response, the peasants were punished for revealing the truth. The peasants won’t forget. Joe Doakes
I’ve been writing about Reagan – who, along with PJ O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn, Dostoevskii and Paul Johnson is the reason I’m a conservative today – as long as this blog has been in existence. His eight years were not perfect, and I don’t beatify my presidents, even if they’ve been out of office for over three decades. His last term wasn’t as stellar as his first, and his last two years were very difficult.
Still and all, he was the greatest president of the second half of the 20th Century, and head, shoulders and ankles the best of my lifetime.
But in these difficult times, after two terms of a President who promoted fear and malaise in the guise of “change” and “doing something”, and four years of another for whom “conservative principles” were a tactic to be slipped on and off like a power tie, it’s worth remembering Reagan’s example; when times seemed at their most dire, Reagan walked onto the scene with a smile and a vision, and a backbone of steel, and cleaned up the mess lefty by his failed predecessor – something our next president will need even more of in 2024.
And the most important part? He did it by unleashing something that many, then as now, thought was dead – the inner, optimistic, take-charge greatness of the American spirit – something that feels largely beaten into submission as this is (re)written, in 2021.
Oh, there are those who say “today’s GOP wouldn’t nominate Reagan!” – to which I respond with a contemptuous sigh, before telling the critic to listen to “A Time for Choosing”, and tell me who it more resembles; Arne Carlson, or Rand Paul?
Reagan’s gone. But that spirit, the one he understood, almost alone among American politicans of his era, lives on in the American people. Half of it, anyway.
So Happy Reagan’s Birthday, everyone!
NOTE: While this blog encourages a raucous debate, this post is a hagiography zone. All comments deemed critical of Reagan will be expunged without ceremony. You’ve been warned.
You have the whole rest of the media to play about in; this post is gonna be gloriously one-note.
(This post was originally written in 2017, and has been slightly touched up for 2021).
It was another brutally cold February evening. I was working at a doomed dotcom, five months into one of the series of “New Normals” we’ve had in the past couple decades, after 9/11. I was a newly-divorced single guy, I had a couple kids to take care of, I had all kinds of anxiety about the near future as the software industry began an ugly contraction.
I was also chafing. While ten years of marriage and raising kids had modified my priorities a bit, I was missing something from my twenties, badly.
That “something” was a soapbox. I’d had one, fourteen years before, at KSTP-AM – an overnight weekend talk show where I opined about politics and argued with drunks and had the time of my then very young life.
Life had moved on, and I went with it. But there was a part of me that missed having the big discussions with complete strangers.
That afternoon at work, I’d read an article in Time magazine about the new wave of conservative intellectuals and their chosen medium, the”Blog”. Andrew Sullivan was their example. I went, read it, checked out “blogger.com”, thought a bit about the possibility that maybe I could get back into writing stuff again…
…and started “Shot In The Dark”.
Nineteen years ago today.
I gush about this every year about this time – how I started this blog hoping to maybe draw five readers a day that weren’t subject to the vagaries of the various list-servers I was on, how I’d happily keep doing it if five readers were all I had, how thankful I am not only for the outlet, and for the opportunities it’s led me to, and especially for having it introduce me, virtually and often in person, to every one of you – new friends, and old friends with whom I’ve been able to reconnect.
It’s been nineteen years, and while writers block comes and goes, it’s still just as fun as it ever was.
CM Mitra Jalali is really proud of the unanimous support. They’re really sticking it to those white supremacist racist highway planners by saying that these poor, mostly Black and Asian communities need to ride busses instead of cars. Wait a minute- what is our city council actually saying here?
It’s saying “we don’t care when you get somewhere – just don’t do it in a car”.
Allahpundit looked into this on Tuesday, but the story behind Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s massively popular Instagram video where she describes her experience during the January 6th Capitol Hill riot keeps growing more convoluted. Despite claiming that she thought she “was going to die” and at least insinuating that rioters were attempting to break into her office, AOC wasn’t even in the actual Capitol Building when all of the action went down. Over at RedState, Nick Arama breaks down the distinctions between reality and perception. AOC’s office is in the Cannon Building which was never breached during the riot. She was briefly evacuated along with everyone else there, but other members were in immediate danger inside the Capitol Building and were far more at risk.
The writer – Jazz Shaw at Hot Air – points out he believes the #AlexandriaOcasioSmollett hashtag that erupted earlier this week on Twitter may have been a little off target – the Representative certainly didn’t concoct the riot from whole cloth.
I’m sure that AOC was legitimately afraid during the riot and with good reason. Assuming there’s a television in her office and she had the news on she would have known that hundreds of angry people were busting up the Capitol Building and acting in a threatening fashion. Given her unusually high profile for a very junior member, it would be reasonable for her to believe that some of the rioters could present a physical danger to her.
With all of that said, however, AOC failed to make one thing clear in her video (which quickly amassed more than six million views). At no time did any rioters enter the hallway where her office is located and it’s not clear that any of them ever entered any part of the Cannon Building at all. The one person who did reach her office was a Capitol Hill Police officer who was coming to evacuate her and her staffer. They had located a suspicious package (which was later cleared as being random and mundane) so they were getting everyone out of the building in an abundance of caution.
Leaving aside the sliming of the Capitol cop – who had a whole building to evacuate as his colleagues were being overrun a few blocks away – and even if you don’t make the Smollett comparison, I do find one thing intensely troubling.
The whole episode – the assault on the electoral process as well as a riot that led to five deaths, directly or indirectly – to her is nothing but a stage for…
…Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Her feelings, her sense of assumed victimnood…her.
To AOC, AOC is always the real story – by way of using that story to slime her boogeymen-du-jour.
UPDATE: I’m going to expand on this just a tad.
AOC was about as far from the Capitol riot as I was from the pharmacy that burned down, about 1000 feet from my house, during the riots.
Were either of us under immediate threat? No. Were both of us right to be nervous? Yep.
Should either of us be appropriating the experiences of those who were in immediate danger?
Let’s just call it emotionally manipulative overkill and hope everyone can do better in the future.
Democrats seek to impeach Donald Trump, not to remove him from office, but to make sure he can’t hold office again.
They rely on Article 1, Section 3, last paragraph, which provides: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States . . ..”
My question: suppose the Republican nominee is unacceptable to RINOs and a genuine threat to Democrats. Could Congress use this precedent to ram through a quick impeachment to prevent that person from taking office?
Why bother with the effort and expense of printing up all those fake ballots? Simply impeach every opponent and you can rule the country forever.
Joe Doakes
I see a thriving business in pre-impaching potential GOP candidates.
Don’t bring ’em to Erin Maye Quade, former MN state representative, 2018 Lieutenant Governor candidate, and (along with former commenter Dog Gone and William Davis) one of the Minnesota DFL’s most imortant intellectual thought leaders.
Because, being a thought leader, she’s got the answers:
Trans girls are girls and trans boys are boys. When trans girls compete in girl’s sports, there are no boys competing. https://t.co/O5nAnbMPHA
So a trans woman, having experienced none of growing up as a bio-female, can not only appropriate a lifetime of bio-female experience, but in so doing scoop up all the scholarships – which, I hasten to add, are what put a lot of working-class bio-girls a shot at a higher education (for what little that seems to be worth these days)?
Seems a little…misogynistic?
My daughter grew up playing basketball in elementary school and junior high with, and against, a bunch of very talented, largely black girls from Frogtown, the Midway and the North End.
Some of these girls, even at 10-13 years old, were already working hard on their games, in hopes of getting scholarships.
I’m dying to see how Ms. Maye Quade would explain to those working-class girls how not only were their scholarships going to bio-boys, but they’d best shut up about it if they ever wanted to do lunch at the Saint Paul Grill again.
I’m just waiting for a bunch of bio-guys who couldn’t quite make the NBA, and are tired of playing in Italy and Poland, to “transition” and dominate the living s**t out of the WNBA and Women’s Soccer.
the numbers: The National Shooting Sports Foundation tallied more than 37,600 statewide requests to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System in January — nearly double from 18,990 in January 2020.
It wasn’t just January: More than 380,000 background checks were recorded here in 2020, up 49% from the previous year.
380,000 NICS checks in 2020 is more than one for every ten eligible Minnesotans (over 21 with a clean criminal record).
I planned a vacation, leaving January 14 and returning January 21. I went on-line two weeks early, January 6, to request the Post Office hold my mail. Had to create an on-line account to submit the request. Had to verify my identity to create the on-line account using multi-factor authentication. But not by email – not available – nor by text message – their system doesn’t work with my phone. By mail.
The authentication code to establish the on-line account so they could accept the on-line request to hold my snail mail arrived in my mailbox on Saturday, January 23, two days after my scheduled return.
You want to know why people despise the Post Office? It’s not the workers – they’re standard issue government employees following the rules laid down by management because the workers have no authority to deviate from the rules and independent thought is punishable by dismissal. It’s the bureaucracy: the stunning idiocy of the regulations, the stubborn adherence to 19th Century service and delivery guidelines, the utter failure to recognize what needs to be done to make the Post Office relevant and competitive in 2021.
It’s sad, because the Post Office is one of the few activities the federal government is constitutionally authorized to do. It’s a shame they do it so poorly.
Modern American “progressivism”, like all its many forebears in the past 200 years, has been all about rallying people against boogeymen. From “monarchists” in the French Revolution, to “Wreckers” in Stalin’s USSR to the Wobbly’s “Bosses”, up through “the patriarchy” and “the man” and “counterrevolutionaries” in Red China and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, and if you have a hard time distinguishing between ’em, join the club.
Today, the boogeymen…er, boogiepeople on the left are pretty much all the things that people who are included are told to be “anti”. “Anti-Racism” “Anti-Misogyny” (not just sexism, anymore – it’s the more active, more malevolent noun these days), “Anti-Fascism”, “Anti-Transphobia”, and on and on – all of which sounds like good things to be “anti”…
…and, unsurprisingly, when you dig into the “Root Causes” of all those nouns, all things trace back to “Western Civilization” in all its particulars: the Judeo-Christian value on the individual and their worth, value, rights and responsibilities and potential of each and every person, as a person with a mind, a point of view, and at the end of the day an indivisible soul of personal, societal, political, intellectual and metaphysical worth.
Those aspects of humanity are anathema to progressivism in all its flavors. The focus is on the group – the Marxists “classes”, the Nazi’s irreducible focus on race, the modern academic Left’s obsession with a byzantine network of intersectional identity groups. The individual is nothing but a vote (for now), an appetite, a widget to be moved through the production line of life (like Obamacare’s awful caricature of Progressive humanity, “Julia”). Progressivism is “Materialist”. Souls, individual intellects and thoughts and reams, all are ephemeral; humans are widgets that consume and produce, and whose worth and value (to those in power) is expressed via their membership in the collective.
Those widgets have a term. “Bodies”. Not people. Not brains. Not souls.
She’s “a gun owner herself” – which might be seen in several ways. Is “P”M moderating? Are they realizing that the culture war has slipped far enough away from them, especially over this past year, that they have to start speaking to people who need to be convinced?
And she’s apparently incredibly famous, since she apparently just goes by “Rashmi”. I’ve turned “Protect” Minnesota’s website, Facebook feed and other social media upside down, and not been able to find any reference to a last name, which is Seneviratne, by the way.
But even during the reign of the serial fabulist the Reverend Nord Bence, “Protect” MN wasn’t nearly extreme enough in its hatred of guns and (law-abiding) gun owners, enough for some people.
“P”M spawned a breakway group, “Survivors Lead” – basically a woman, Rachel Joseph, with a long history of progressive activism and a story; an aunt who was murdered, according to Ms. Joseph’s story, by a gun.
Quick aside: I don’t minimize anyone’s trauma over having a loved one murdered. But in the many times I’ve heard Ms. Joseph’s story, she’s never once mentioned a perpetrator, someone actually holding and using the gun that killed her aunt; that persons evil motivation, the legal fallout from the murder, whether that person was sentenced or not. It’d be wrong to crack wise – “what, did the gun animate itself?” – but omitting a perpetrator, his/her motives and the like from the conversation is incredibly intellectually dishonest.
Anyway – “Rashmi” and her apparent moderation are not going over well with “Survivors Lead”:
The extreme heckling the not-as-extreme about getting less extreme. That qualifies as “dog bites man”, at the very most.
Rather less so? There followed some more, er, ethnically pointed traffic on one social media feed (from which I’ve long been blocked) or another.
After which “P”M – operating through its usual social media persona, the omniscient third person that used to be Martens and Nord Bence – responded:
On the one hand, watching the agents of Big Left eating each other is one of my favorite spectator sports.
And if the biggest semi-organic anti-gun group in MInnesota (shaddap about Moms Want Action already) is pivoting from pushing Linda Slocum’s gun grab bill to highlighting the inequity of gun control (“Race, class and geography all play into who gets to have a gun and who doesn’t” – which is something every Second Amendment activist has known for 50 years) and speaking in the first “person” to the prudence of victims of violence to arm up, then in culture war terms that’s the sound of the first tank crossing the pontoon bridge at Remagen.
But…”white bodied privilege?”
What the flaming hootie hoo?
I thought for a moment – is this a shot back at the Rachel Dolezals and Elizabeth Warrens of the world, with their flip-flopping identities, by “actual” “people of color”, reinforcing the idea that while you might “identify” with one degree melanin or another, your apparent appearance still wins out in the great privilege lottery (which will, I suspect, get pilloried hard by the Trans crowd, for whom perceived identity is everything? I’ll let the fight that one out).
But no. It’s much less hilarious than that.
It’s “inclusion language” – slang or argot that one class of people use to track who is in, and who is “out” – to be sure. That’s part of it, and people are noticing:
Referring to people as bodies is a reminder, writer Elizabeth Barnes says in an interview, that “racism isn’t just about the ideas that you have in your head.” Barnes is the author of “The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, The Girl Behind the Wall.” In intellectual discussions, theories about social oppression sound almost disembodied; “we talk about prejudice,” Barnes says, “like it’s just a matter of ideas.” The point is to emphasize the physical violence done to black people through slavery, lynching, and police brutality. In the case of women, the term “bodies” highlights “what happens to women’s bodies in health care contexts, in sexual contexts, in reproductive contexts.”
But behond that?
It’s a nod to the materialism of the left – that the mind, the thoughts, the indivisible soul of the indivisual human being is not merely irrelevant, but inconvenient to the obsession with identity.
Your melanin defines you.
In some ways its a cheap ad hominem – “of course you’d think that, you are (add a reference to your target’s melanin, or lack thereof)”. But pointing logical fallacies out to the foot soldiers of Big Left is a little like arguing salinity with sharks; it’s just part of the water they swim in.
So – gun groups eating each other? Good.
The debate contributing to the ongoing hijacking of the language? Bad.
The whole thing participating, in its own little way, in the further erosion of one of the ideals that’s made Western Civilization the most successful, and humane , civilization in human history?
