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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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If the CIA can't tell apart weddings from insurgents I doubt they will be able to tell militiamen inside crowded cities from other civilians.
You need police to run a police state, not drones, and a government that uses PGM and drones on its own citizens inside its own territory is a government that shouldn't be ruling anyway.
Inter arma enim silent legesThe whole "If the Jews had been armed thing" seems to think that the Nazi government didn't have overwhelming force on their side when they went about rounding people up. If it had come down to having to round up and shoot them, they could have done. It would have been costlier, MAYBE, and that is a strong maybe, but the Jewish people and anyone else the Nazis felt like killing would have been just as dead. The whole argument is based on the government getting scared off and having equal or lesser access to the necessary supplies. It's ignorant from top to bottom.
Re Carson's Holocaust comment, brings to mind a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
It's weird when people talk about "the Jews"- while of course the Nazis thought of it that way, you're talking about people who were citizens of a bunch of different countries (including Germany). There was no organized group of "the Jews". I think sometimes people are thinking in terms of German Jews specifically, but that's a fairly small subset of those targeted.
Now I know gun control opponents also like to bring up the fact that German Jews were denied rights of gun ownership, but that was part and parcel of being stripped of all rights (and IIRC the Nazis were pretty favorable toward Aryans owning guns- so it wasn't really a "afraid of armed citizens thing"; it was a "crazy racist thing").
edited 8th Oct '15 8:44:54 PM by Hodor2
I don't know. I think there's a chicken/egg or correlation/causation issues.
Lots of authoritarian regimes restrict rights to gun ownership, but usually those regimes aren't really big on citizens having any rights.
I don't think there's any historical precedent for the common right wing meme of "first they take your guns and provide healthcare; then they take away all of your rights".
And speaking of gun control, People magazine has jumped into it now
, publishing contact info for everyone in Congress and encouraging their readers to tell Congress to man the fuck up and pass gun control solutions.
In an editorial on Wednesday, the magazine's editorial director Jess Cagle explained the unprecedented decision to enter the gun debate after the latest mass shooting at a community college in Oregon.
As President Obama said, our responses to these incidents—from politicians, from the media, from nearly everyone—have become "routine." We all ask ourselves the same questions: How could it happen again? What are we doing about gun violence in America? There are no easy answers, of course. Some argue for stricter gun laws, others say we should focus on mental health issues, some point to a culture that celebrates violence.
But this much we know: As a country we clearly aren't doing enough, and our elected officials' conversations about solutions usually end in political spin.
In this issue we pay tribute to the nine Oregon victims, as well as 22 other men, women and children who've lost their lives in mass shootings—incidents where a murderer has opened fire on a crowd—in the U.S. during the past 12 months.
The move by People is remarkable considering the magazine—a staple at every newsstand and doctor's office in America—is traditionally associated with celebrity gossip and general human interest stories that carry little risk of being offensive or overtly political, meaning its message could reach many more Americans outside the DC echo chamber, in which action on gun violence has completely stalled.
Just out of curiosity... how do you define "American government" vs "any given European government", given that Europe consists of everything from constitutional monarchy to republics and federations, as well as uni-, bi- and even tricarmeralism, and even with or without single-document constitions. <honestly confused>
PS: You developed your system by mixing English, French, Greek and even First Nation ideas... and then baking over time. Call me daft, but that's a lot of C18th Europe in there.
edited 8th Oct '15 11:21:23 PM by Euodiachloris
When Americans say they want to be "like Europe," they mean they want socialism and social liberalism, not to mention a Scandinavia-level standard of living. They aren't exactly any happier with Europe's turn rightward than...well, European socialists.
That said, up until very recently, America had no form of socialized medicine, and all of Europe did. So the idea of a "European-style social welfare state" did mean something, and at least in the minds of us dreamers, still does.
edited 9th Oct '15 12:34:20 AM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34In a victory for freedom of the press, Mother Jones won their defense against a lawsuit by a GOP billionaire financer
, who tried to claim defamation of character. It's a long article, so have some excerpts, and emphasis by me.
<snip>
What we do know is that the take-no-prisoners legal assault from Vander Sloot and Melaleuca has consumed a good part of the past two and a half years and has cost millions (yes, millions) in legal fees. In the course of the litigation, Vander Sloot sued a former small-town Idaho newspaper reporter whose confrontation with him we mentioned in our article. His lawyers asked a judge to let them rifle through the internal records of the Obama campaign. They deposed a representative of the campaign in pursuit of a baseless theory that Mother Jones conspired with Obama's team to defame Vander Sloot. They tried to get one of our lawyers disqualified because his firm had once done work for Melaleuca. They intrusively questioned our employees—our reporter was grilled about whether she had attended a Super Bowl party the night she finalized the article.
Legally, what we fought over was what, precisely, the terms "bashing" and "outing" meant in the context of our article. (Read the decision for yourself.) But make no mistake: This was not a dispute over a few words. It was a push, by a superrich businessman and donor, to wipe out news coverage that he disapproved of. Had he been successful, it would have been a chilling indicator that the 0.01 percent can control not only the financing of political campaigns, but also media coverage of those campaigns.
Throughout this lawsuit, Vander Sloot appeared to be engaged in rewriting his own history of opposing the expansion of civil rights to LGBT people. His complaint focused on two things: He asserted that we defamed him by "falsely stating that Mr. Vander Sloot 'bashed' and 'publicly out[ed] a reporter.'" He also claimed that Monika's tweet about the article defamed him by referring to "gay-bashing."
In a way, there was something ironically hopeful about this: A conservative Republican—someone who not long ago was quoted saying it was "child abuse" to put a film about gay parents on public television—had apparently come to believe that to call him a gay-basher was so damaging to his reputation that he must fight the argument at virtually any cost. It's a sign of just how far America has moved in just a few years that this entire case felt like something from a time capsule.
To be sure, Vander Sloot has much at stake in reworking his public profile. He's now widely recognized as one of the megadonors who will help determine who wins the 2016 GOP nomination. He has vowed to be even more "financially active" than he was in 2012, when he raised between $2 million and $5 million for Romney. In burnishing his image as a national figure, he might like people to forget about certain aspects of his past, such as the fact that he financed an ad campaign to amend the state constitution to ban marriage equality.
<snip>
Fast forward to 2012. Miller's article about the Boy Scouts controversy was one of the stories that our reporter Stephanie Mencimer found after Vander Sloot's name popped up in the January campaign finance filings. It was the first presidential election of the dark-money era, and Mother Jones' politics team had zeroed in on the huge new super-PA Cs being created to pump unrestricted money into campaigns of both parties. Vander Sloot stood out because Melaleuca was among the top contributors to Restore Our Future, the super-PAC supporting Romney. Mencimer wrote an article about him that included a few paragraphs on his history of anti-gay-rights activism and his run-in with the Post Register.
Those paragraphs are what Vander Sloot and Melaleuca sued us over. They filed the suit in Bonneville County, Idaho, and asked for damages of up to $74,999—exactly $1 under the amount at which the lawsuit could have been removed to federal court. That ensured the case would be decided by jurors from the community where his company is the biggest employer and the sponsor of everything from the minor league ballpark to the Fourth of July fireworks.
Since then, Mother Jones and our insurance company have had to spend at least $2.5 million defending ourselves. We also took up the defense of Zuckerman, whom Vander Sloot sued halfway through the case for talking to Rachel Maddow about his experience. (Vander Sloot did not sue MSNBC or its deep-pocketed parent company, Comcast. Make of that what you will.)
<snip>
And that wasn't the end of it. Vander Sloot's legal team subpoenaed the Obama campaign, which had run ads naming him as a major Republican donor. Apparently they believed we had somehow fed the campaign that information—never mind that our article, and the Federal Election Commission data that prompted it—was on the internet for anyone to read.
When officials from the Obama campaign refused to turn over their records—offering to confirm under oath that there had been no communication between them and Mother Jones—Vander Sloot's lawyers dragged them into court, resulting in the spectacle of a major GOP donor seeking access to the Democratic campaign's emails. His lawyers did the same thing to a political researcher who had gathered information on Vander Sloot and who also had no connection to Mother Jones.
This kind of legal onslaught is enormously taxing. Last year, Lowell Bergman, the legendary 60 Minutes producer (whose story of exposing Big Tobacco was chronicled in the Oscar-nominated film The Insider), talked about a "chill in the air" as investigative reporters confront billionaires who can hurt a news organization profoundly whether or not they win in court: "There are individuals and institutions with very deep pockets and unaccountable private power who don't like the way we report. One example is a case involving Mother Jones…A superrich plaintiff is spending millions of dollars while he bleeds the magazine and ties up its staff."
Litigation like this, Bergman said, is "being used to tame the press, to cause publishers and broadcasters to decide whether to stand up or stand down, to self-censor."
Postscript: In her decision Tuesday, the district court judge found in our favor on every single claim Vander Sloot had made. She also included a passage expressing her own opinion of Mother Jones, and of political news coverage in general. For his part, Vandersloot issued a statement saying he had been "absolutely vindicated" and announced that he was setting up a $1 million fund to pay the legal expenses of people wanting to sue Mother Jones or other members of the "liberal press." We'll leave it with the reaction from our lawyer, James Chadwick: This was "a little like the LA Clippers claiming they won the NBA Finals. I think everyone can see what's going on here."
Double-posting because I read something that, more than ever, seems like an insight into the mind of a Tea Party politician.
Specifically I'm talking about this exchange from Jim Butcher 's new Steampunk novel:
"Since when, miss? We're a democracy."
"Just what I mean. We have dispensed with violence as a means of governing ourselves, have we not?"
"The heart of democracy is violence, Miss Tagwynn. In order to decide what to do, we take a count of everyone for and against it, and then do whatever the larger side wishes to do. We're having a symbolic battle, its outcome decided by simple numbers. It saves us time and no end of trouble counting actual bodies - but don't mistake it for anything but ritualized violence. And every few years, if the person we elected doesn't do the job we wanted, we vote him out of office - we symbolically behead him and replace him with someone else. Again, without the actual pain and bloodshed, but acting out the ritual of violence nonetheless."
Doubt they go that far in their thinking. If they did realize democracy was a substitute for violence, they'd probably turn against it.
But the Tea Party's brand of democracy has always been about power plays and they don't really try to hide it.
@Carson
On one hand, there always is the feeling, from Europe, than the American elite is so self-centered that they don't know anything about the rest of the world because they don't care. So it could feel nice whenever one of them mentions world history or culture.
On the other hand, more often than not when they try to talk about history or geography they say something like this and everyone facepalms hard.
In any event, the Warsaw ghetto became a problem for the nazis for a rather simple reason: all of its inhabitants, give or take, fought back. But pretty much everywhere else in Europe the Jews blended within the population (just like today). And I don't think urban guerilla would have helped them become more popular in an era where antisemitism was a major issue.
Of course, Mr Carson probably means that everyone in Europe should have been armed to resist the nazis, but then we come back to the efficiency of weapon owners against a real army with tanks (which in my opinion is: inefficient).
Carson also seems to have never heard of the Freikorps, on of the big problems of pre-Nazi Germany. They were essentially right-wing militias and often served as a private army for political parties - the SA recruited from the same pool of people. Sometimes they even tried to start uprisings to topple the government - the kind of stuff your right-wing militias seem to wait for.
Maybe you really need your Munich over there to get finally rid of this nonsense.
We learn from history that we do not learn from historyI can't help wondering if this is Boehner's clever ploy to teach the rabid methhead bobcats he's been trying to herd that they can't manage without him.
Because we haven't talked lately about abusive police forces from Missouri, here's a story about the Piedmont, MO cops pulling a SWAT raid
on a local protestor for flipping off the mayor.
Tina’s local activism made her a target for the local police, who pulled her over several times, reportedly demanding that she stop a petition drive that she was organizing about water bills.
According to Warren, her house was also raided and searched for drugs on Kirkpatrick’s orders. Now she is filing a harassment lawsuit against the city, stating that the mayor and the local police colluded to intimidate her and prevent her activism.
Warren’s feud with the city began last year when she lost water service for nearly a week and was treated rudely by Kirkpatrick when attempting to get answers about the lack of service. She later randomly had her water meter removed by the city and wasn’t given any explanation. The encounter where her water meter was removed can be seen in the video below.
Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU of Missouri, has pointed out that the mayor was using the police to prevent Warren from speaking freely.
“The mayor and police cannot use their power to intimidate individuals who communicate in ways that some may find offensive,” Rothert said.
“They have been harassed repeatedly by government officials since Ms. Warren began expressing her disgust with the mayor by flipping him her middle finger,” the ACLU said in a later statement.
In before Carson claims september 11 could have been stopped if everyone inside the towers AND airplane had guns.
While we are at it, let us add hiroshima, nagasaki, and why not? The 1930 depression.
edited 9th Oct '15 7:31:14 AM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

The "we need guns to protect ourselves from the government" thing is a red herring anyway. There are plenty of good arguments for why people should be allowed to have guns even without it. Personally, I dislike the idea of a categorical ban on something with legitimate uses just because it can be misused. Regulate it to minimize the misuse, certainly. I wouldn't at all mind seeing gun ownership be akin to car ownership (you need a license, insurance, etc), but the idea of banning them entirely (or regulating it so hard that it's effectively banned entirely) rubs me the wrong way.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.