ROTFLMFAHS!! You guys need to stop, I can’t get anything done if I spend all day laughing until my sides split.

Green tried to blame Biden for the fentanyl flood by trotting out a pair of dead teens whose deaths she blamed on Biden….they knew for a fact they had died in the early summer of 2020 from fentanyl brought in on Trump’s watch. When asked about the intentional misrepresentation to the American people her official response was “Do you think they give a f**k about your bullsh*t fact checking?”

Bohbert tried to blame Biden for federal workers abusing work from home to take vacations while getting paid, citing statistics from 2020 when Trump’s administration was incapable of formulating a plan/policy to avoid that…apparently unaware who was president in 2020 or that the administration and policies had changed since then.

Gaetz tried to blame Biden for supplying weapons to a paramilitary force Russia accused of war crimes, citing a Chinese propaganda publication, “the global times”…the reply was “I don’t take Beijing propaganda at face value.” which Gaetz had to admit was a much more intelligent position than his.

Banana Republicans tried hard to show Biden had forced Twitter to censor right wing political speech, but only proved that Trump repeatedly abused the power of the federal government to force multiple private companies to censor private citizens for upsetting him while Biden’s camp only requested they remove nude revenge porn against a private citizen that clearly and blatantly violated their TOS (and some laws).

Oof! The “L”s are coming fast and hard. Pretty sad when you start and run the investigations and just keep proving how guilty you are and how squeaky clean your opponent is by comparison. You must be so proud. I guess you all got tired of winning.

Bonus- Having learned nothing from the banking crash of ‘08 caused by Banana Republican bank deregulation, and despite all the warnings from economists and the CBO report that the plan would likely lead to another round of enormous bank failures, Banana Republicans again deregulated banks in 2018 which has now led to another round of bank failures that taxpayers will likely end up paying trillions for again in the end. Thanks Trump.
Now Fox and Republicans who caused this failure are actively working hard to turn one bank failure into a depression by telling their viewers to start a run on the banks, all banks, because they believe they can pin the results on Biden.
Also, google Larry Householder and Matt Borges

Imagine thinking the US would not intervene when China takes Taiwan...

At best the US could field 500k troops offshore without weakening other strategic locations.

China's paramilitary has 20,854,000 troops, as of 2018...
If they decided to do conscription that will probably add another 30 - 40 million.

Good luck taking that on without a draft to bolster the US numbers.

The US haven't won a war since they lost to rice farmers in Vietnam. Must be your achilles heel considering you lost against goat farmers in Afghan. Hope you do better against something more equipped that farmers...

It was "stand back and stand by" - which is actually worse. "Stand down" at least implies some degree of "hey, quit that" while "stand back" is more a warning to be careful. What's most troubling is that "stand by" is a straight-up order to wait for further orders. That direct order to an extremist paramilitary organization could well be the moment when we fully tipped to fascism. He's adopted his own Brownshirts.

Mental health is a completely separate issue that's being used as a distraction. It's certainly worthy of discussion but it does not belong as part of the gun debate.

I am not for banning weapons.

I would, however, set the bar for ownership so high that only committed hobbyists would own the most extreme weapons.

The more potentially impactful the weapon, the higher the bar. I have no problem with someone casually walking into a store and buying a bolt-action .22 target rifle or a break action sporting shotgun with a fast background check. The licensing, training and security check requirements would then grow progressively stringent until you get to fast shooting, large ammo capacity, medium-large caliber weapons. At which point there should be annual training and recertification requirements, in-home verification of safe storage compliance, thorough background checks and anything else.

Any committed hobbyist is already training regularly with their firearms and storing them safely. The certification requirements are no more than a verification of the practices they already follow. What's needed is to weed out the casual purchasers, the revenge-fantasy dreamers and the paramilitary idiots.

I often wonder what would happen if you changed the requirements around to make the minimum at least a bachelor's degree and then a one year practical certificate program or internship or suchlike. Then you start them at $40-$50K a year.

The paramilitary approach they tend to take now seems to be almost entirely based on the practical aspects of policing, and even that seems weighted towards the tactical aspects. That's fine for soldiers, but policing ought to be a very different thing from soldiering.

Besides the Massachusetts bit, I like how there are half a dozen Sherlock Holmes and an Elvis in a room lined with inkjet printed paintings waiting to be spanked by masked paramilitary. I dare anyone not to enjoy that.

Lawrence Wilkerson's dismissive comments about self defense are very disrespectful to people who have had to resort to self defense. He wouldn't say things like that had he been unfortunate enough to have had such a personal experience. (As one parent of a Fla victim said - his child would have given anything for a firearm at the time of the event.)

Re. 2nd amendment, yes, it's not for pure self defense. The reasoning is provided within the text. The government is denied legal powers over gun ownership ('shall not be infringed') in order to preserve the ability of the people to form a civilian paramilitary intended to face [presumably invading] foreign militaries in combat ('militia').

It's important to remember that the U.S. is a republic - so the citizens are literally the state (not in abstract, but actually so). As such, there is very little distinction between self defense and state defense - given that self and state are one.

Personally, I believe any preventative law is a moral non-starter. Conceptually they rely on doling out punishment via rights-denial to all people, because some subset might do harm. Punishment should be reserved for those that trespass on others - violating their domain (body/posessions/etc). Punishment should not be preemptive, simply to satiate the fears/imaginations of persons not affected by those punished. Simply, there should be no laws against private activities among consenting individuals. Folks don't have to like what other folks do, and they don't have to be liked either. It's enough to just leave one another alone in peace.

Re. Fla, the guilty party is dead. People should not abuse government to commit 3rd party trespass onto innocent disliked demographics (gun owners) just to lash out. Going after groups of people out of fear or dislike is unjustified.







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As an aside, the focus on "assault rifles" makes gun control advocates appear not sincere, and rather knee-jerk/emotional. Practically all gun killings utilize pistols.

There are only around 400 or so total rifle deaths per year (for all kinds of rifles combined) - which is almost as many as the people who die each year by falling out of bed (ever considered a bed to be deadly? With 300 million people, even low likelihood events must still happen reasonably often. It's important to keep in mind the likelihood, and not simply the totals.).

Around 10'000 people die each day out of all causes. Realistically, rifles of all sorts, especially assault rifles, are not consequential enough to merit special attention - given the vast ocean of far more deadly things to worry about.

If they were calling for a ban+confiscation of all pistols, with a search of every home and facility in the U.S., then I'd consider the advocates to be at least making sense regarding the objective of reducing gun related death.

Also, since sidearms have less utility in a military application, a pistol ban is less anti-2nd-amendment than an assault rifle ban.







As a technical point, ar15s are not actually assault rifles - they just look like one (m4/m16).
Assault rifles are named after the German Sturm Gewehr (storm rifle). It's a rifle that splits the difference between a sub-machinegun (automatic+pistol ammo) and a battle rifle (uses normal rifle/hunting ammo).

- SMG is easy to control in automatic, but has limited damage. (historical example : ppsh-41)

- Battle rifles do lots of damage, but are hard to control (lots of recoil, using full power hunting ammo). (historical example : AVT-40)

- An 'assault rifle' uses something called an 'intermediate cartridge'. It's a shrunken down, weaker version of hunting ammo. A non-high-power rifle round, that keeps recoil in check when shooting automatic. It's stronger than a pistol, but weaker than a normal rifle. But that weakness makes it controllable in automatic fire. (historical example : StG-44)

- The ar15 has no automatic fire. This defeats the purpose of using weak ammo (automatic controlability). So in effect, it's just a weak normal rifle. (The M4/M16 have automatic, so they can make use of the weak ammo to manage recoil - and they happen to look the same).

Practically speaking, a semi-auto hunting rifle is more lethal. A Remington 7400 with box mag is a world deadlier than an ar15. An M1A looks like a hunting rifle, and is likewise deadlier than an ar15. Neither are viewed as evil or dangerous.

You can also get hunting rifles that shoot intermediate cartridges (eg. Ruger Mini14). The lethality is identical to an ar15, but because it doesn't look black and scary, no one complains.

In practice, what makes the ar15 scary is its appearance. The pistol grip, the adjustable stock, the muzzle device, the black color, all are visual identifiers, and those visuals have become politically more important than what it actually does.

You can see the lack of firearms awareness in the proposed laws - proposed bans focus on those visual features. No pistol grips, no adjustable stocks, etc. Basically a listing of ancillary features that evoke scary appearance, and nothing to do with the core capabilities of a firearm.

What has made the ar15 the most popular rifle in the country, is that it has very good ergonomics, and is very friendly to new shooters. The low recoil doesn't scare new shooters away, and the great customizability makes it like a gun version of a tuner-car.

I think its massive success, popularity, and widespread adoption, have made it the most likely candidate to be used in a shooting. It's cursed to be on-hand whenever events like Fla happen.

-scheherazade

He's lucky the police dashcam footage wasn't 'lost' or 'misplaced' as it is in so many other trials like this.

Those cops need to be suspended without pay. They are so sure their fellow officers will back them up, that their chief will hide the evidence that they blatantly do this shit on film and it happens every day around the country.. and almost exclusively against minorities.

I fear this will continue to happen as we continue to turn our police into a paramilitary force.

I feel like this film is more complicated than just an anti commercialist screed. Ed Norton's nameless character chooses an extremely handsome, charming and fashionable movie star to be the vessel for his anti-commercial, anti-corporate persona. Is this done on purpose to suggest some kind of internal contradiction? Also, his group eventually becomes a fascist and violent paramilitary operation. In the end, the narrator kills off his imaginary friend. So what are we to make of Tyler Durden? To me, the film feels like it's also about ego, masculinity, extremism, growing up, the need to belong and the intoxicating effects of power, as seen through the eyes of a cheerfully misanthropic Chuck Palaniuk. Whatever Palaniuk and Fincher's intentions were, I do love this movie. I bet the book would clear some of this up for me. Anyone who has read the book want to address these issues?

In case I'm not the only person who had no idea what the AWB was...

The Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (English: Afrikaner Resistance Movement) (AWB) is a South African far right separatist political and former paramilitary organization, since its creation dedicated to secessionist Afrikaner nationalism and the creation of an independent Boer-Afrikaner republic or "Volkstaat/Boerestaat" in part of South Africa. In its heyday in the 1980s and '90s, the organisation received much publicity both in South Africa and internationally as a white supremacist and neo-fascist group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_Weerstandsbeweging

I'm not sure what to make of this video, really. Some thoughts, in no particular order:

In Syria, Bahrain, Libya, and Iran, the mere act of protesting was declared illegal. IIRC, in all four of those countries, violence was the only police response to protests, and in all four countries it escalated to police/military/paramilitary forces firing bullets at protesters.

That's not happening here.

In Egypt, the police didn't really crack down on the protests themselves. There were attempts to use agents provocateur to provoke violence to give the police some cause to shut down the protests, but that never worked. There were some touch and go moments when it seemed that the police were going to try to storm Tahrir square to forcibly end the protest, but that never happened (largely because the military stepped in and made sure that didn't happen). The result of the protests and accompanying strikes ended up toppling the Mubarak regime.

In America, things are a bit different. People who want to uphold the status quo want the protests ignored, and they know that violence and arrests will only help the protesters in the long run. So the OWS people have had to resort to a little provocation of their own. It's noble and self-sacrificing that they're doing so, and it does make the police look bad when they arrest people for innocuous sounding things (like directly protesting in on the steps of the NYSE itself, or blocking a bridge), but they're intentionally doing so to draw attention. It's called civil disobedience.

So really, I'm left a bit confused by the video. The title of the video is "I'm not moving", but spends a ton of time highlighting police violence at the protests here and abroad (and it's mostly abroad). When they finally show the guy who says he's not moving, they don't show him getting arrested or beaten, they just hear him begging to get arrested, and seemingly being ignored.

So is the point "I have a point to make that I'm willing to get arrested for" (i.e. "I'm Not Moving") or is the point "Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are hypocritical tyrants because the police arrest me when I intentionally try to get arrested to make a point."

You can't really have it both ways.

>> ^hpqp:

Yeah, protecting the 99.9% of the community from the criminal thugs that are burning their homes, cars and small businesses by cracking down (non-lethally of course) on the looters in time, now that's STATIST OPPRESSION!! ugh.
>> ^marbles:
>> ^ryanbennitt:
>> ^kymbos:
This guy is such a cock.
Nothing leaves me so uneasy as people who see simple solutions to large, complex problems.

He offered a solution? I must have missed that...

I think his solution was an increase of government force and government agents to battle the rioters. We need to get the people used to seeing the police as a paramilitary force.
Pat wants the police to go in "cracking heads" ... yet a couple of weeks ago he said violence was NEVER the answer. He must have meant unless you're the government.
Pat Condell = Statist.



Is that what's going on? From what I can tell, police were told to stand by and observe violent crime while it happened. The nanny state refuses to do it's job. So what do we need? A BIGGER nanny state with more government agents carrying guns to protect themselves. Should the citizens protect themselves? NO! The nanny state will protect you. We'll just need more of your money to buy riot gear, tear gas, assault rifles, and a bunch of other new toys. Of course we'll also need more money to employ more agents to battle the rioters.

This is all a ruse. The police let the "retail riots" happen, so they could justify expanding government force--preparation to crack heads on authentic revolutionaries in the near future.

Yeah, protecting the 99.9% of the community from the criminal thugs that are burning their homes, cars and small businesses by cracking down (non-lethally of course) on the looters in time, now that's STATIST OPPRESSION!! ugh.

>> ^marbles:

>> ^ryanbennitt:
>> ^kymbos:
This guy is such a cock.
Nothing leaves me so uneasy as people who see simple solutions to large, complex problems.

He offered a solution? I must have missed that...

I think his solution was an increase of government force and government agents to battle the rioters. We need to get the people used to seeing the police as a paramilitary force.
Pat wants the police to go in "cracking heads" ... yet a couple of weeks ago he said violence was NEVER the answer. He must have meant unless you're the government.
Pat Condell = Statist.

>> ^ryanbennitt:

>> ^kymbos:
This guy is such a cock.
Nothing leaves me so uneasy as people who see simple solutions to large, complex problems.

He offered a solution? I must have missed that...


I think his solution was an increase of government force and government agents to battle the rioters. We need to get the people used to seeing the police as a paramilitary force.

Pat wants the police to go in "cracking heads" ... yet a couple of weeks ago he said violence was NEVER the answer. He must have meant unless you're the government.

Pat Condell = Statist.