Historically and currently untrue. An armed society is a scared society. If arms made a society polite, the US would be the politest society on the planet.
After viewing this display of raw hatred and savage hunger for violence against non-Blacks, who could blame those so threatened from taking up arms and being prepared to defend themselves and their loved ones. Dr. King would not be proud of this vitriolic mob.
e.pierce has no interest in actual history. I've deduced that his unusual preoccupation with CRT, eery though it is, is in fact a case of Freudian academic self-modeling. Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, he's proven himself here to be primarily a critical race theorist above all else, as well as a very reductive eugenicist and active race profiler. A fascinating case he.
Malcolm X repudiated racialist thinking after world travels showed him people of all backgrounds working cooperatively for common good, and left the Nation of Islam.
He publicly stated regret he had ever joined in an interview with photographer Gordon Parks (see link bellow). He told Mr. Parks the Nation of Islam was trying to kill him.
Soon after he was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
Interesting; I wasn't aware that parish priests would have been illiterate. I thought literacy, in Latin, was a requirement. OTOH, "Cultural Marxism" remains a completely opaque term for me.
I'm mostly anti-religion, so I haven't studied Islam (my study of Christianity was involuntary), and "Axial culture" is new to me - will have to at least check it out.
However, I do understand maps. Islam, in its early centuries, violently overran about half of the then-known world, which is what I meant by "Medieval:" post-Roman. Both it and Christianity like to preach about "peace," but both have been spread by conquest - primarily, I would say. Words vs. actions.
I'm an odd duck about firearms. I despise them and none are allowed in our home. I'm retired military officer and became very proficient with long-barrelled weapons. While serving in South America I was assigned responsibility for a sector of the Embassy compound to repel an attacking mob. A head popped up above the wall, then shoulders and arms. He began firing at targets in the compound. I returned fire; his head snapped back and his body fell to the ground.
I sleep well at night. I support the Second Amendment because if it can be administratively dismissed, so can all the others. The current administration holds the entire Constitution in contempt. This cannot stand.
My grandfather was forced to “participate” in an “election” in Ukraine in the 1930s. Everyone was told to bring every firearm in the village to the “polling place”, where they were forced to wear a pair of government shoes while “voting”,b/c Stalin apparently saw a picture of hillbillies in Alabama voting barefoot, and said that would never happen in the USSR. After turning in their firearms-mostly crappy rifles or shotguns, the villagers had the privilege of “voting” for A-Commie stooge on the ballot or B-Write In Candidate-Death in Siberia.
The presidential oath of office includes the “take care” clause regarding enforcement of the national laws. He is not doing that on immigration. The civil rights laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of race; the President has signed into law several bills codefying race essentialism into law. The Justice Department is ignoring DC practices and policies to deny speedy trials to those arrested due to January 6.
You're lying again, Bill. And dissembling. Every President has routinely violated the strictures of the "take care" clause because the "take care" clause has never been enforced by the Supreme court because it's too broad and was an arcane provision from the beginning.
No race essentialism bills introduced into law by Biden, either. Nope. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Surely you can do better than this piece of esoteric nonsense.
And the Justice Department IS NOT ignoring DC practices and policies to deny speedy trials to those arrested due to January 6. You're listening to too many of those right-wing talk shows. Perhaps you're thinking of another president? Or another country?
The saying 100 years ago was that "God created men, Samuel Colt made them equal". Pistols were called "the great equalizer". Minorities arming themselves and taking the power of self-defense in their own hands is the ultimate act of empowerment. There's some academics and politicians that will be out of a job but the ultimate act of equality is claiming the same rights as the oppressors...
I get one cup of 7-11 coffee every morning, usually about 6 am. There’s often clouds here in the morning which makes the streets dark with shadows of houses and trees. You turn into the parking lot and see through the glass front the same guy behind the counter, every day, a human speck alone in an ocean of fluorescent light.
He’s a Bangladeshi dude with bad teeth and a moodiness that comes from working 7 12 hour night shifts week-in week-out. He told me. He never has a day off — for months, never one. He told me he has a son, in grade school. The father has a beaten sallow face pocked like he’d been poked with an ice pick as a kid. He’s slight of stature and his teeth are yellow and rotted, Really. But there’s something about the guy that’s tough like a wire. He has that “fatherness” about him, he’d die for his son, to help his son, to extend himself through his son in that great yearning for life, anything it takes. You can tell without asking.
He told me something else although I never asked. This week he said he has an interview with US Immigration, to become — if he passes — an American citizen. He’s told me this several times, each time as if it’s the first time and each with a hopeful burst of enthusiasm and a smile that’s actually alive with something he never otherwise shows in any way — hope.
His son is already an American. He told me that proudly.
Now, he has to pass the test — this week in fact. And if so he’ll become one too.
Let’s hope he makes it. If I could “write a letter to someone” I would.
Dear Someone,
This guy is a tough cookie and for some reason he loves this country more than 100 of us put together. He believes in something that we have forgotten, if we ever knew. I don’t know if he’s a thief or a saint. I know he mops a floor and he has yellow rotten teeth, he works 12 hour night shifts 7 days a week and he loves his son. Maybe one day his son will be a congressman, or a senator or a judge or a great man of some kind. Or maybe nothing at all, like most of us. I’d say, Give the guy a chance to be an American. There’s far worse among us.
I don’t pretend to myself this note will make any difference in how you think about him. But I will say honestly, and perhaps for his cause too, he makes a difference in how I think about us. And I think he’s right. Hopefully, when I see him later this week. He’ll be smiling.”
I own guns. I support BLM. I think that our criminal justice system is profoundly broken and racist.
I also know that 2nd Amendment "activism" an oxymoron. Anyone who knows anything about the Constitution knows that the 2nd Amendment (which begins with "A well regulated") was never meant to be a protection of everyone's "right" to own "arms" (muskets back in the day, now all manner of high power firearms, if we're OK with that leap of interpretation why isn't it OK for us to stockpile dirty bombs and chemical weapons?)
It's only since DC v. Heller (way back in 2008!) that the 2nd Amendment was reinterpreted to mean there's an individual right to "bear arms". There have been countless amazing examples of when the Supreme Court has expanded protections of rights included in the Constitution (Yick Wo v. Hopkins e.g.). But DC v. Heller is the opposite. It's empowering the NRA and gun manufactures and the militarized police.
I definitively don't blame anyone of color in the South for thinking that they need to arm themselves considering that they have so many white supremacist assholes around them who are openly packing mainly to intimidate non-whites.
How is discourse possible (even, or especially amongst like-minded people) if someone is carrying?
The idea that the 2A doesn't apply to modern arms doesn't hold any water, unless you also believe that the 1A doesn't apply to modern communication methods but only to early printing presses. I think we can agree that radio and the internet are not outside the purview of the right to free speech, and that the men who wrote the constitution did not believe that humanity had somehow reached its technological peak in the late 18th century. No, they could not have forseen the internet or automatic firearms, but they appreciated that rights are fundamental and the counterbalance of individual to state power cannot be confined to a particular mechanism.
If the state can project propaganda into a citizen's home via radio waves, then a citizen has the right to dispute that propaganda by setting up a radio station of their own. As well, if the state can send a SWAT team into a citizen's home with modern rifles, then a citizen needs to be able to possess similar weaponry.
Historically, a militia was less of a permanent organization like the Panthers or whatever version of Red Dawn Wolverines the local 2A guy want to call themselves and much more of a minute-men style ad-hoc arrangement. The men of the town grabbed their guns and rushed to the defense of their people, rather than reported for duty to a state-sponsored depot which issued weapons when it deemed them necessary. Maintaining the locus of lethal power in the hands of the citizenry rather than a central state bureaucracy is the fundamental concept of the right to bear arms.
Hell, private citizens were allowed to own cannon and war ships in the 19th century, and many a fortune was made privately buying and selling Civil War surplus. Take a look at the history of the American military surplus store industry and the idea that the right to own military-grade weaponry is a new development falls apart quickly.
Many Christmases ago I was shopping for a doll for my son when another man reached for the last remaining Cabbage Patch. As I rained downed blows upon him, I realized there had to be a better way. .. and so was born a new Holiday: a Festivus for the rest of us.
I agree that people should be able to sit down with each other and genuinely try to understand each other’s perspective, not necessarily coming to an agreement but face to face realizing that their areas of agreement and areas of disagreement. Build solutions to issues on areas you can agree on. Make some actual progress vs just voicing opinions on line. This is not just because of some feel good ideology, but to function as a society/country we have to show a basic level of respect to everyone
So, I am confused by your logical answer here and your personal attacking responses elsewhere.
"Give out gift certificates to the firing range. Ask the owners of the firing range if they host picnics and barbeques. Find a Festivus pole and spend the rest of the year waxing and lubricating it with Zen transmission fluid. Set up a GoFundMe if necessary..."
---Lauren Boebert, directing her staff on her birthday party preparations
“We believe in armed self defense”, say the Courthouse gun-toting LARPers. Does it occur to them that’s exactly what the defendants in the Arbery case asserted? If these armed LARPers actually go on patrol and make an adversary of someone, for whatever reason good or bad, and it ends in somebody dead, what will a prosecutor think? The Arbery case should give them as much pause for sober thought as reason to parade their automatic weapons and tout their grandiose plans.
And what about reality? According to a Google search there hasn’t been a lynching in Georgia since 1946 and most of the state’s sorry history there is more than 100 years old and older. Nobody today believes that aspect of Georgia history is anything but despicable. That Georgia is long dead and gone with the wind. It doesn’t exist and hasn’t for a long long time.
But there have been 1000+ murders in Atlanta alone since 2009 (per wikipedia); we can infer from demographics and crime data that a large percentage of the victims and assailants were probably African-American. Georgia citizens with majority African ancestry today have far more to fear from local neighborhood crime than from any “racist white boy”, notwithstanding the horrific reality of the Arbery case, which appeared to be a terrible statistical outlier driven by a perfect storm of bad luck, bad actors and nearly inconceivably unlikely twists of fate.
What makes it even more tragic is that Mr. Arbery, who evidently had diagnosed and untreated psychiatric issues and probably panicked at the sight of an armed man confronting him, may be home watching playoff games tonight if he’d only had the composure to just keep walking rather than physically confront the armed man. But we’ll never know since that’s not what happened.
I suspect most African Americans in Georgia understand that privately, and I’d be surprised if this sort of a parading of arms appeals to even 1 out of 10. And if it’s really 1 out of 50, I apologize for my error, which is only a wild guess.
I still believe the vast majority of people just want to live in peace as friends.
The Arbery family grief is totally understandable because they are living in hell in the here and now. But these LARPers and their enablers are living in their own imagination in 1922. It doesn’t exist and you can’t live there. The only thing you can do by pretending is fukk people up, yourself included. Martin Luther King would be disgusted.
I’d almost call this sort of thing (the courthouse spectacle of armed marchers) culture porn not worthy of TK News video coverage. Or perhaps a bit more philosophical discussion with the marchers, just to flesh out some of their absurdities. I give props to the dude at the 6 minute mark who went out of his way to say his group wasn’t about blind vengeance from the Old Testament. I hope he doesn’t some day end up on the wrong side of a prosecution. But it’s reality and so I concede you can put it in front of camera. But it doesn’t say much, really about anything, except the dark side of the American moon and just as postcards (if anybody remembers those!) with nothing on them but empty space where perhaps something more should be.
That's the problem with revenge, it is against the law but when someone seeks revenge they have lost their self-control. There are many ways to seek revenge.
Interesting. But not surprising. That is, the usual round of Professor Marvel theorizing, categorizing and pigeon-holing. Must have got fedup hobnobbing with the crowned heads of Europe.
I've not heard you once on these threads discuss the "tribalistic, regressive ideologies (cultists)" of the assault-rifle-toting, maga-gear-adorned tribal cults the "Shroud" Boys, or Elmer's (indicted, insurrectionist) "Oat-Meal Eaters." I should think Elmer's colorful if pale posse, at the very least, would earn a mention or two, if not 3-4 links, in an e.pierce TK missive, delivered with your typical (and expected) nostalgie de la boue flamboyance.
What gives? The Oat-Meal Eaters are a hot trending item, the most famous cohort of militia losers since the 900 or so drunken Hessians Washington put down in Trenton 250 years ago. But at least the Hessians forced Washington to march hundreds of miles in bitter winter weather and cross the frozen Delaware, while Poor Elmer suffered everlasting ignominy by merely getting a Federal subpoena handed to him at his front door by one of Merrick Garland's errand boys. In a sense that's progress, I suppose, but makes for dull reading, even on Twitter, let alone in a High School history text.
Too bad about Elmer, though. Maybe the Oat-Meal Eaters can get that Rittenhouse kid to head up the posse. New generation of insurrectionists. He seems to know how to handle an assault rifle ok, but might need some mentoring in the administrative department. But I dunno. He'd have a tough act to follow, what with Elmer's Skull and Bones schoolin' complemented by the Rooster Cogburn cosplay.
Gun ownership for personal defense, and open carry displays, indicate extensions of the state. Target practice and hunting indicate personal uses of guns.
I doubt this was much more than players on an emotional stage...what happened was tragic for all the families...the sadness was real...but if the MSM is correct, black on black crime takes more young lives than any police encounters that result in confrontation. Why did Ahmaud enter the private building site if he was only jogging. At 25 yrs old, that's silly...and those men in the pickup? Citizens' arrest? Just as short-sighted.
I'm glad to see the word "cult" applied more frequently to the our current social phenomena -- both in comments and in MT's recent interview (and in "Cult Nation" last year). In my "talking to myself" efforts here in the comment section in recent months, that's a word I've pushed as an analytical descriptor. Group psychology seems to me (perhaps out of ignorance, but I'm not an academic in the field) an under-thought area in the study of human psyche.
The Greek tragedians, who were the master psychologists of their era, understood cults in an instinctive and artistic way. Even the Oedipal saga, the metaphor of a man doing something with his own mother that most of us revulse at even briefly imagining, can be seen as cult analogy: 1) the state of being enmeshed womblike in a form of strident and unconscious group-mind illusion and 2) the subsequent epiphany, the recognition of "what you've done", and the confrontation of that illusion with true conscious self while "you" stand by as a helpless observer of your own destruction. Euripedes in THE BACCHAE illustrates the manic loss of self attendant to the cult of Bacchus. The Greek tragic character more broadly follows an arc of 1) psychic unpreparedness for a set of energies which he is about to confront, 2) the commission of a crime against consciousness while possessed by those energies and 3) a belated recognition and often destruction as a form of karmic punishment.
While this goes beyond cults, and is a fully human experience even on a personal level with respect to events on a life path, it also forms a sort of chiaroscuro that maps the animating energies in our culture today -- mostly the possession of the cultural left, national media. university administrators, and elements of the US domestic security state by a set of cult-like beliefs, from which they rage outwardly powered by a voluptuous and unconscious caressing of the very energies that animate the delusion.
Let's not forget the sage wisdom of Malcolm X, who in an interview with photojournalist Gordon Parks, said, ""Strangely enough, listening to leaders like Nasser, Ben Bella, and Nkrumah awakened me to the dangers of racism. I realized racism isn't just a Black and white problem. It's brought bloodbaths to about every nation on earth at one time or another."
"Know thyself" commanded the Oracle at Delphi.
The world is a bigger place than you and your petty bureaucratic ambition, your power hunger, your narcissism, your "career", your anxiety and loneliness whose only balm is some kind of group affirmation. You and your blind attacks on tens of millions of innocent people are trafficking in energies that can destroy the very world in which you want to prosper. Where will you be then, if they do?
I recall seeing the Black Panther Party in Oakland, I believe 1968. They were impressive, strong men, very courageous. I went with members of our Draft Resistance Movement to meet with the Party and form an anti-Vietnam War alliance. This worked out well, including in battles fought at Berkeley for the Third World Studies movement.
I am thrilled to see this 'Second Ammendment' Black Panthers. It seems long overdue and I love the irony of seeing the intent of the Second Amendment (to keep control of the Southern slave system) turned around and used against modern racists.
Speaking of narratives, I notice one taking shape in this thread alone---Washington showing up for a dust-up only when the opposition can be said to be reliably hammered or if there's certain to be a good deal of booze on site, i.e. the Hessians in Trenton and the Pennsylvania farmer-bootleggers.
Thanks for the post Matt....crickets from the media. Guns don't make you tough (especially when there are snipers on rooftops). And Hate is a mental condition. Black Hate is just hate. Sad state for these Revolutionaries posing as Wannabe Panthers ala 1971. Failed then will fail now. I smell Nation of Islim under all this Hate
In 1969 there was a student race riot at what is now Concordia University. Many of us understood the racism endemic in hierarchical societies. In Montreal in 1969 the poor Irish Catholics who arrived during the genocide were the bottom of Montreal society. Concordia was then Sir George Williams University and Loyola College.
Some things never change. What we witness with our own eyes and what we hear with our own ears don't really exist outside our own skulls if we just pretend. America is very good at pretending.
I spent 10 years living in a Southside Chicago Ghetto. It was the best ten years of my life and I am still reaping the benefits. Life is good when everyone knows that you're crazy. I love bean pie and got to know some of the sellers. They are just like us.
Here in Quebec there is now only one race Homo Sapien. Talk about hubris. I am an antiMarxist Marxist. I talk of flocks of humans and constant migration. Stop trolling and start listening. It is difficult enough dealing with the insanity without your denial. John Jay is particularly hated in these part he built walls between brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers and friends and neighbours. Now we don't even speak the same languages. we trust OUR government because it is our government and is mandated to tell us the truth and we have an independent press watching every minute of every day.
If you don't understand my drivel why are you so engaged in attempting its dismissal?
We have outlawed religion in our public places. We base decisions on empirical evidence. There is only one race of human currently surviving on the planet, homo Sapien.
I am of course always open to evidence that may disprove scientific theory. Have you looked into a mirror lately?
When I was somewhere close to your age I subscribed to National Review and Ramparts.
McWhorter is a linguistic philosopher and I love linguistic philosophy whether or not it conforms to my beliefs. I also lived for 10 years in a Southside Chicago ghetto called Woodlawn.
It is impossible for me to believe you are more than 16.
Nobody can be so smart, lived so long and be so stupid.
I like it, "an armed society is a polite society."
Historically and currently untrue. An armed society is a scared society. If arms made a society polite, the US would be the politest society on the planet.
After viewing this display of raw hatred and savage hunger for violence against non-Blacks, who could blame those so threatened from taking up arms and being prepared to defend themselves and their loved ones. Dr. King would not be proud of this vitriolic mob.
Malcom X might be thought... at least in one part of his life. And lets not even ask about Bobby Seal.
Those "basic beliefs" didn't prevent them from conquering half the medieval world.
e.pierce has no interest in actual history. I've deduced that his unusual preoccupation with CRT, eery though it is, is in fact a case of Freudian academic self-modeling. Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, he's proven himself here to be primarily a critical race theorist above all else, as well as a very reductive eugenicist and active race profiler. A fascinating case he.
.e.pierce is correct about Malcolm X.
Malcolm X repudiated racialist thinking after world travels showed him people of all backgrounds working cooperatively for common good, and left the Nation of Islam.
He publicly stated regret he had ever joined in an interview with photographer Gordon Parks (see link bellow). He told Mr. Parks the Nation of Islam was trying to kill him.
Soon after he was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/int_parks.htm
Why do you post? If it’s to persuade you need another message. If it is to make yourself feel superior, there’s help for you
I post for the same reason you post. You simply refuse to admit that fact.
Sounds like a Poe short story that writes itself.
Jordan Peterson is currently atop my list of Americans I would most like to sucker-punch in a barroom brawl.
So your excuse for frequent name-calling and troll like replies is a module in your brain goes irrational and disinhibits?
you need to reflect and look at yourself. All of this is what you are doing.
Interesting; I wasn't aware that parish priests would have been illiterate. I thought literacy, in Latin, was a requirement. OTOH, "Cultural Marxism" remains a completely opaque term for me.
I'm mostly anti-religion, so I haven't studied Islam (my study of Christianity was involuntary), and "Axial culture" is new to me - will have to at least check it out.
However, I do understand maps. Islam, in its early centuries, violently overran about half of the then-known world, which is what I meant by "Medieval:" post-Roman. Both it and Christianity like to preach about "peace," but both have been spread by conquest - primarily, I would say. Words vs. actions.
I'm an odd duck about firearms. I despise them and none are allowed in our home. I'm retired military officer and became very proficient with long-barrelled weapons. While serving in South America I was assigned responsibility for a sector of the Embassy compound to repel an attacking mob. A head popped up above the wall, then shoulders and arms. He began firing at targets in the compound. I returned fire; his head snapped back and his body fell to the ground.
I sleep well at night. I support the Second Amendment because if it can be administratively dismissed, so can all the others. The current administration holds the entire Constitution in contempt. This cannot stand.
My grandfather was forced to “participate” in an “election” in Ukraine in the 1930s. Everyone was told to bring every firearm in the village to the “polling place”, where they were forced to wear a pair of government shoes while “voting”,b/c Stalin apparently saw a picture of hillbillies in Alabama voting barefoot, and said that would never happen in the USSR. After turning in their firearms-mostly crappy rifles or shotguns, the villagers had the privilege of “voting” for A-Commie stooge on the ballot or B-Write In Candidate-Death in Siberia.
Tell us more. About how well you slept that night.
Good post until the last statement - overeggageration.
The presidential oath of office includes the “take care” clause regarding enforcement of the national laws. He is not doing that on immigration. The civil rights laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of race; the President has signed into law several bills codefying race essentialism into law. The Justice Department is ignoring DC practices and policies to deny speedy trials to those arrested due to January 6.
You're lying again, Bill. And dissembling. Every President has routinely violated the strictures of the "take care" clause because the "take care" clause has never been enforced by the Supreme court because it's too broad and was an arcane provision from the beginning.
No race essentialism bills introduced into law by Biden, either. Nope. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Surely you can do better than this piece of esoteric nonsense.
And the Justice Department IS NOT ignoring DC practices and policies to deny speedy trials to those arrested due to January 6. You're listening to too many of those right-wing talk shows. Perhaps you're thinking of another president? Or another country?
The saying 100 years ago was that "God created men, Samuel Colt made them equal". Pistols were called "the great equalizer". Minorities arming themselves and taking the power of self-defense in their own hands is the ultimate act of empowerment. There's some academics and politicians that will be out of a job but the ultimate act of equality is claiming the same rights as the oppressors...
I get one cup of 7-11 coffee every morning, usually about 6 am. There’s often clouds here in the morning which makes the streets dark with shadows of houses and trees. You turn into the parking lot and see through the glass front the same guy behind the counter, every day, a human speck alone in an ocean of fluorescent light.
He’s a Bangladeshi dude with bad teeth and a moodiness that comes from working 7 12 hour night shifts week-in week-out. He told me. He never has a day off — for months, never one. He told me he has a son, in grade school. The father has a beaten sallow face pocked like he’d been poked with an ice pick as a kid. He’s slight of stature and his teeth are yellow and rotted, Really. But there’s something about the guy that’s tough like a wire. He has that “fatherness” about him, he’d die for his son, to help his son, to extend himself through his son in that great yearning for life, anything it takes. You can tell without asking.
He told me something else although I never asked. This week he said he has an interview with US Immigration, to become — if he passes — an American citizen. He’s told me this several times, each time as if it’s the first time and each with a hopeful burst of enthusiasm and a smile that’s actually alive with something he never otherwise shows in any way — hope.
His son is already an American. He told me that proudly.
Now, he has to pass the test — this week in fact. And if so he’ll become one too.
Let’s hope he makes it. If I could “write a letter to someone” I would.
Dear Someone,
This guy is a tough cookie and for some reason he loves this country more than 100 of us put together. He believes in something that we have forgotten, if we ever knew. I don’t know if he’s a thief or a saint. I know he mops a floor and he has yellow rotten teeth, he works 12 hour night shifts 7 days a week and he loves his son. Maybe one day his son will be a congressman, or a senator or a judge or a great man of some kind. Or maybe nothing at all, like most of us. I’d say, Give the guy a chance to be an American. There’s far worse among us.
I don’t pretend to myself this note will make any difference in how you think about him. But I will say honestly, and perhaps for his cause too, he makes a difference in how I think about us. And I think he’s right. Hopefully, when I see him later this week. He’ll be smiling.”
Sincerely yours, __Me___
I own guns. I support BLM. I think that our criminal justice system is profoundly broken and racist.
I also know that 2nd Amendment "activism" an oxymoron. Anyone who knows anything about the Constitution knows that the 2nd Amendment (which begins with "A well regulated") was never meant to be a protection of everyone's "right" to own "arms" (muskets back in the day, now all manner of high power firearms, if we're OK with that leap of interpretation why isn't it OK for us to stockpile dirty bombs and chemical weapons?)
It's only since DC v. Heller (way back in 2008!) that the 2nd Amendment was reinterpreted to mean there's an individual right to "bear arms". There have been countless amazing examples of when the Supreme Court has expanded protections of rights included in the Constitution (Yick Wo v. Hopkins e.g.). But DC v. Heller is the opposite. It's empowering the NRA and gun manufactures and the militarized police.
I definitively don't blame anyone of color in the South for thinking that they need to arm themselves considering that they have so many white supremacist assholes around them who are openly packing mainly to intimidate non-whites.
How is discourse possible (even, or especially amongst like-minded people) if someone is carrying?
The idea that the 2A doesn't apply to modern arms doesn't hold any water, unless you also believe that the 1A doesn't apply to modern communication methods but only to early printing presses. I think we can agree that radio and the internet are not outside the purview of the right to free speech, and that the men who wrote the constitution did not believe that humanity had somehow reached its technological peak in the late 18th century. No, they could not have forseen the internet or automatic firearms, but they appreciated that rights are fundamental and the counterbalance of individual to state power cannot be confined to a particular mechanism.
If the state can project propaganda into a citizen's home via radio waves, then a citizen has the right to dispute that propaganda by setting up a radio station of their own. As well, if the state can send a SWAT team into a citizen's home with modern rifles, then a citizen needs to be able to possess similar weaponry.
Historically, a militia was less of a permanent organization like the Panthers or whatever version of Red Dawn Wolverines the local 2A guy want to call themselves and much more of a minute-men style ad-hoc arrangement. The men of the town grabbed their guns and rushed to the defense of their people, rather than reported for duty to a state-sponsored depot which issued weapons when it deemed them necessary. Maintaining the locus of lethal power in the hands of the citizenry rather than a central state bureaucracy is the fundamental concept of the right to bear arms.
Hell, private citizens were allowed to own cannon and war ships in the 19th century, and many a fortune was made privately buying and selling Civil War surplus. Take a look at the history of the American military surplus store industry and the idea that the right to own military-grade weaponry is a new development falls apart quickly.
A Festivus for the rest of us.
Many Christmases ago I was shopping for a doll for my son when another man reached for the last remaining Cabbage Patch. As I rained downed blows upon him, I realized there had to be a better way. .. and so was born a new Holiday: a Festivus for the rest of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbfMmCf5-ds
*get thee to a nunnery.
I agree that people should be able to sit down with each other and genuinely try to understand each other’s perspective, not necessarily coming to an agreement but face to face realizing that their areas of agreement and areas of disagreement. Build solutions to issues on areas you can agree on. Make some actual progress vs just voicing opinions on line. This is not just because of some feel good ideology, but to function as a society/country we have to show a basic level of respect to everyone
So, I am confused by your logical answer here and your personal attacking responses elsewhere.
"Give out gift certificates to the firing range. Ask the owners of the firing range if they host picnics and barbeques. Find a Festivus pole and spend the rest of the year waxing and lubricating it with Zen transmission fluid. Set up a GoFundMe if necessary..."
---Lauren Boebert, directing her staff on her birthday party preparations
“We believe in armed self defense”, say the Courthouse gun-toting LARPers. Does it occur to them that’s exactly what the defendants in the Arbery case asserted? If these armed LARPers actually go on patrol and make an adversary of someone, for whatever reason good or bad, and it ends in somebody dead, what will a prosecutor think? The Arbery case should give them as much pause for sober thought as reason to parade their automatic weapons and tout their grandiose plans.
And what about reality? According to a Google search there hasn’t been a lynching in Georgia since 1946 and most of the state’s sorry history there is more than 100 years old and older. Nobody today believes that aspect of Georgia history is anything but despicable. That Georgia is long dead and gone with the wind. It doesn’t exist and hasn’t for a long long time.
But there have been 1000+ murders in Atlanta alone since 2009 (per wikipedia); we can infer from demographics and crime data that a large percentage of the victims and assailants were probably African-American. Georgia citizens with majority African ancestry today have far more to fear from local neighborhood crime than from any “racist white boy”, notwithstanding the horrific reality of the Arbery case, which appeared to be a terrible statistical outlier driven by a perfect storm of bad luck, bad actors and nearly inconceivably unlikely twists of fate.
What makes it even more tragic is that Mr. Arbery, who evidently had diagnosed and untreated psychiatric issues and probably panicked at the sight of an armed man confronting him, may be home watching playoff games tonight if he’d only had the composure to just keep walking rather than physically confront the armed man. But we’ll never know since that’s not what happened.
I suspect most African Americans in Georgia understand that privately, and I’d be surprised if this sort of a parading of arms appeals to even 1 out of 10. And if it’s really 1 out of 50, I apologize for my error, which is only a wild guess.
I still believe the vast majority of people just want to live in peace as friends.
The Arbery family grief is totally understandable because they are living in hell in the here and now. But these LARPers and their enablers are living in their own imagination in 1922. It doesn’t exist and you can’t live there. The only thing you can do by pretending is fukk people up, yourself included. Martin Luther King would be disgusted.
I’d almost call this sort of thing (the courthouse spectacle of armed marchers) culture porn not worthy of TK News video coverage. Or perhaps a bit more philosophical discussion with the marchers, just to flesh out some of their absurdities. I give props to the dude at the 6 minute mark who went out of his way to say his group wasn’t about blind vengeance from the Old Testament. I hope he doesn’t some day end up on the wrong side of a prosecution. But it’s reality and so I concede you can put it in front of camera. But it doesn’t say much, really about anything, except the dark side of the American moon and just as postcards (if anybody remembers those!) with nothing on them but empty space where perhaps something more should be.
That's the problem with revenge, it is against the law but when someone seeks revenge they have lost their self-control. There are many ways to seek revenge.
Interesting. But not surprising. That is, the usual round of Professor Marvel theorizing, categorizing and pigeon-holing. Must have got fedup hobnobbing with the crowned heads of Europe.
I've not heard you once on these threads discuss the "tribalistic, regressive ideologies (cultists)" of the assault-rifle-toting, maga-gear-adorned tribal cults the "Shroud" Boys, or Elmer's (indicted, insurrectionist) "Oat-Meal Eaters." I should think Elmer's colorful if pale posse, at the very least, would earn a mention or two, if not 3-4 links, in an e.pierce TK missive, delivered with your typical (and expected) nostalgie de la boue flamboyance.
What gives? The Oat-Meal Eaters are a hot trending item, the most famous cohort of militia losers since the 900 or so drunken Hessians Washington put down in Trenton 250 years ago. But at least the Hessians forced Washington to march hundreds of miles in bitter winter weather and cross the frozen Delaware, while Poor Elmer suffered everlasting ignominy by merely getting a Federal subpoena handed to him at his front door by one of Merrick Garland's errand boys. In a sense that's progress, I suppose, but makes for dull reading, even on Twitter, let alone in a High School history text.
Too bad about Elmer, though. Maybe the Oat-Meal Eaters can get that Rittenhouse kid to head up the posse. New generation of insurrectionists. He seems to know how to handle an assault rifle ok, but might need some mentoring in the administrative department. But I dunno. He'd have a tough act to follow, what with Elmer's Skull and Bones schoolin' complemented by the Rooster Cogburn cosplay.
Gun ownership for personal defense, and open carry displays, indicate extensions of the state. Target practice and hunting indicate personal uses of guns.
I doubt this was much more than players on an emotional stage...what happened was tragic for all the families...the sadness was real...but if the MSM is correct, black on black crime takes more young lives than any police encounters that result in confrontation. Why did Ahmaud enter the private building site if he was only jogging. At 25 yrs old, that's silly...and those men in the pickup? Citizens' arrest? Just as short-sighted.
Why are you still watching the media and believing ANYTHING you see on TV? Seriously, why?
Short-sighted. Interesting.
Bingo....exactly!
I'm glad to see the word "cult" applied more frequently to the our current social phenomena -- both in comments and in MT's recent interview (and in "Cult Nation" last year). In my "talking to myself" efforts here in the comment section in recent months, that's a word I've pushed as an analytical descriptor. Group psychology seems to me (perhaps out of ignorance, but I'm not an academic in the field) an under-thought area in the study of human psyche.
The Greek tragedians, who were the master psychologists of their era, understood cults in an instinctive and artistic way. Even the Oedipal saga, the metaphor of a man doing something with his own mother that most of us revulse at even briefly imagining, can be seen as cult analogy: 1) the state of being enmeshed womblike in a form of strident and unconscious group-mind illusion and 2) the subsequent epiphany, the recognition of "what you've done", and the confrontation of that illusion with true conscious self while "you" stand by as a helpless observer of your own destruction. Euripedes in THE BACCHAE illustrates the manic loss of self attendant to the cult of Bacchus. The Greek tragic character more broadly follows an arc of 1) psychic unpreparedness for a set of energies which he is about to confront, 2) the commission of a crime against consciousness while possessed by those energies and 3) a belated recognition and often destruction as a form of karmic punishment.
While this goes beyond cults, and is a fully human experience even on a personal level with respect to events on a life path, it also forms a sort of chiaroscuro that maps the animating energies in our culture today -- mostly the possession of the cultural left, national media. university administrators, and elements of the US domestic security state by a set of cult-like beliefs, from which they rage outwardly powered by a voluptuous and unconscious caressing of the very energies that animate the delusion.
Let's not forget the sage wisdom of Malcolm X, who in an interview with photojournalist Gordon Parks, said, ""Strangely enough, listening to leaders like Nasser, Ben Bella, and Nkrumah awakened me to the dangers of racism. I realized racism isn't just a Black and white problem. It's brought bloodbaths to about every nation on earth at one time or another."
"Know thyself" commanded the Oracle at Delphi.
The world is a bigger place than you and your petty bureaucratic ambition, your power hunger, your narcissism, your "career", your anxiety and loneliness whose only balm is some kind of group affirmation. You and your blind attacks on tens of millions of innocent people are trafficking in energies that can destroy the very world in which you want to prosper. Where will you be then, if they do?
I recall seeing the Black Panther Party in Oakland, I believe 1968. They were impressive, strong men, very courageous. I went with members of our Draft Resistance Movement to meet with the Party and form an anti-Vietnam War alliance. This worked out well, including in battles fought at Berkeley for the Third World Studies movement.
I am thrilled to see this 'Second Ammendment' Black Panthers. It seems long overdue and I love the irony of seeing the intent of the Second Amendment (to keep control of the Southern slave system) turned around and used against modern racists.
Speaking of narratives, I notice one taking shape in this thread alone---Washington showing up for a dust-up only when the opposition can be said to be reliably hammered or if there's certain to be a good deal of booze on site, i.e. the Hessians in Trenton and the Pennsylvania farmer-bootleggers.
Robert Malone goes full anti-science on Joe Rogan's podcast – Jan. 5, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjszVOfG_wo
Or Oakland. 134 homicides last year, all POC — as were all the suspects.
in the South having a gun was necessary self-defense for Black family and home back in the day
Remove the parts about the south, race, and back in the day and you're right.
Having a gun is necessary self defense for home and family.
Rufo, Posobiec and Lindsay are working for the Russians? Unaware of that.
Thanks for the post Matt....crickets from the media. Guns don't make you tough (especially when there are snipers on rooftops). And Hate is a mental condition. Black Hate is just hate. Sad state for these Revolutionaries posing as Wannabe Panthers ala 1971. Failed then will fail now. I smell Nation of Islim under all this Hate
Good for them. I would like to see them in the inner-city.
In 1969 there was a student race riot at what is now Concordia University. Many of us understood the racism endemic in hierarchical societies. In Montreal in 1969 the poor Irish Catholics who arrived during the genocide were the bottom of Montreal society. Concordia was then Sir George Williams University and Loyola College.
Some things never change. What we witness with our own eyes and what we hear with our own ears don't really exist outside our own skulls if we just pretend. America is very good at pretending.
I spent 10 years living in a Southside Chicago Ghetto. It was the best ten years of my life and I am still reaping the benefits. Life is good when everyone knows that you're crazy. I love bean pie and got to know some of the sellers. They are just like us.
Here in Quebec there is now only one race Homo Sapien. Talk about hubris. I am an antiMarxist Marxist. I talk of flocks of humans and constant migration. Stop trolling and start listening. It is difficult enough dealing with the insanity without your denial. John Jay is particularly hated in these part he built walls between brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers and friends and neighbours. Now we don't even speak the same languages. we trust OUR government because it is our government and is mandated to tell us the truth and we have an independent press watching every minute of every day.
If you don't understand my drivel why are you so engaged in attempting its dismissal?
We have outlawed religion in our public places. We base decisions on empirical evidence. There is only one race of human currently surviving on the planet, homo Sapien.
I am of course always open to evidence that may disprove scientific theory. Have you looked into a mirror lately?
When I was somewhere close to your age I subscribed to National Review and Ramparts.
McWhorter is a linguistic philosopher and I love linguistic philosophy whether or not it conforms to my beliefs. I also lived for 10 years in a Southside Chicago ghetto called Woodlawn.
It is impossible for me to believe you are more than 16.
Nobody can be so smart, lived so long and be so stupid.
John McWhorter?
What are you attempting ?
Both sides against the middle?
Isn't that what has already been done?
I know you're just a juvenile but John McWhorter is everything you rail against. He is a Black Noam Chomsky.