In the 1960s sit-ins, the purpose of the sit-in was as a demand for equal rights.
The reason was to sit down and show that you’re as good as anyone else and deserving of the same treatment.
While there’s an argument for property owner rights that a business should be able to reject service to anyone, this was also a cultural argument as well as a legal rights one, such that the property owner would get the idea that he was wrong and that those doing the sit-in were deserving of respect and that their patronage should be appreciated rather than rejected. Both ways, it was a movement to demand rights.
This is a demand by authorities for more authority.
This is a demand by those in power for more power.
This is a demand by those who control the country that the rights of the citizen be overruled.
They want due process suspended, they want gun rights suspended, they want your rights suspended. They’ve already managed it in a handful of states – despite the Constitution as written forbidding it – and now they want the rest of the nation to kneel. And their current method is by throwing a tantrum, mocking the actual sit-ins of the 1960s, and demanding that Congress vote to ignore the Fifth Amendment right to due process of law so they can suspend your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Those guys at the lunch counter weren’t recognized as having a right to eat at the same counter that other folks did. Those rights weren’t recognized by the Democrats in power in the South. If they went to buy a gun in the South to protect themselves from the racist Democrat KKK night riders, when they went for a permit the racist Democrat sheriff would deny it and leave them defenseless.
Today, elected Democrat representatives who already have power are now squatting in the halls of power and demanding more powers and authorities to go after the citizenry – all to strip rights from those who now have them.
The guys at the lunch counter were fighting against Jim Crow laws. They were fighting for rights.
The Democrat representatives are fighting for more Jim Crow laws. They’re fighting against rights.
First off, congrats to the UK on escaping the EU. Having heard continental Europeans complain about how “that stupid little island” kept the pound, and knowing their attitude towards Britain* as a wayward nation that needs to be forced into the globalist amalgamation that is the EU, I’m glad for them. A lot of Britain knows exactly what it was leaving.
The Brexit map vote is kind of indicative of what you’d expect, as well.
It’s all the “middle England” regions that opposed the EU and supported UK independence. The bigger cities tended to support it (as big city thinking big city dwellers tend to lean more towards collectivism, and the non-British tend to migrate to big cities), and Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own reasons.
The internationalist leftist commentariat has already gone on to blame “uneducated, older, white” Brits for voting the EU out. Basically the same people they blame in the US. One political cartoonist drew a derby hat with “Make Britain Great Again” as his “all you need to know about Brexit”, combining the contempt the leftist ruling class has across the pond.
A whiner over at Vanity Fair crying about Brexit scribbled a piece called “how Britain was broken“… as though leaving the EU is a bad thing:
The shocking result of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union was something many had dreaded during the course of the 10-week referendum campaign, which ended abruptly in the early hours of Friday morning. The Brexit campaign, led by two conservative ministers, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, managed to overturn every expectation, while rejecting pleas to remain in the E.U. from everyone from President Obama to the International Monetary Fund. Internationally renowned Britons, from Stephen Hawking to Patrick Stewart, pleaded to stay the course. So did J.K. Rowling, Richard Branson, and even David Beckham. But as the results came in—with Leave triumphing over Remain by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent—a period of bereavement began for many. There was so much to come to terms with.
So the arguments for joining the EU come from a leftist tyrant from the US, the internationalist cabal at the IMF, and a handful of celebrities who are immune to the effects of being jammed in the EU anyway? “Won’t someone please think of the celebrities?”
Brexit was a decision based on gut instinct rather than reason. The predominant sentiments in play were nostalgia, fear and a vague hatred of the establishment. On top of this comes a fear of foreigners that was deliberately stoked by Brexit strategists during the campaign — and that’s what makes this decision both sad and depressing.
Hey, Germany, how’s that investigation into the mass rape in Cologne committed by Muslim migrants going? Have you hushed that all up yet?
The internationalist left doesn’t get that things like Rotherham probably did tie into the vote – not out of some vague “stoking fears of foreigners” – but out of fear the way a fire in your kitchen does. It’s a problem that needs to be dealt with right now or the whole house will burn down. It’s not because the native population don’t like the newcomers for superficial reasons, it’s because they don’t like them based on the content of their character. And they also aren’t too fond of Europe making most of their laws, regardless of the percentage.
The crier from Vanity Fair:
Today, the city feels diminished in a particular way. We have suddenly lost our bloom, our joie de vivre as one of the undisputed capitals of the world. But the real loss is to our country and to Europe. As I explained to my Brexit friends in a blog post this week, I would be a very sore loser if we came out. “I will be in mourning for a project that was as brave and beautiful as anything in European history,” I wrote. And I am.
MANCHESTER, United Kingdon – Women were segregated from men at a rally addressed by the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan yesterday. Mr Khan was photographed addressing the crowd with men at the front and women at the back.
The rally took place in the Northern City of Manchester, which is home to a large Pakistani Muslim population. It was part of the ‘Stronger In’ Battlebus tour, currently traveling around the country encouraging voters to support British membership of the EU at next weeks referendum.
That’s the kind of thing that should cue you in to what the “stay in the EU” people are like.
The Mayor is a controversial figure in the UK not least because he is a close friend of Babar Ahmad, a convicted Al-Qaeda terrorist. Mr Ahmad was supported by Khan as he fought an eight-year campaign against extradition to the US to face charges of “conspiracy and providing material to support to terrorism.”
That’s what happens when you bring in people who don’t share your values as a nation. That’s also where the rejection of the EU comes from. It comes from people who still do hold British values and aspire to British virtues. The voters to leave often were older, and more ethnically British – and I would wager that much like in the US, it’s a matter of wanting to protect the successes of Britain and more specifically the behaviors and values and virtues that led to that success. If everyone arriving into Britain were hard-working, productive and believers in the generally Western virtues of equality and individual rights as well as protection of those rights, there wouldn’t have been a Brexit movement. Of course, the EU is fundamentally opposed to individual rights, as it’s one huge nation of legislation without representation when some faceless unelected EU bureaucrat decides on a whim how people in different nations divided by geography and history have to live in exactly the same manner… it’s almost as if there are some parallels to that.
The EU isn’t NATO. It’s not an agreement between unique allied nations to help each other out. It’s trumpeted as a melding of nations and a blending of cultures into one mass amalgam decided on solely by those who celebrate”multiculturalism” as the solution to all life’s problems – and want to force nations into being internally multicultural as a means of homogenizing and controlling Europe. Most Europeans have individual cultures, and they have regions in which those individual cultures are centered. They’re called “nations”.
Final point – last time continental Europe told Britain they had to join the union going on in Europe, they called it Operation Sea Lion.
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*And Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the rest. With regards to Brexit, I’m mostly using Britain as shorthand for the whole UK, especially as the movement has been called “Brexit”.
It’s very much worth it to listen to Sessions – he gets rolling pretty quick, hammering home the point that Zuckerberg has gone to Mexico and called American immigration policy “unfit for today’s world”, and spends millions in pushing for amnesty as well as millions on his own home for “privacy”. He calls out Zuckerberg, who’s using his billionaire wealth and influence to push for more illegals in the country while US citizens are left high and dry despite having the skills that Zuckerberg would need for his company.
Basically, Zuckerberg wants cheap labor for computers at the expense of American workers, but cloaks his hypocritical greed in social justice rhetoric.
Just to preface this, I’ve read there are some conflicting definitions of “liberaltarian”, but for the most part I’ve seen it used not as a way to indicate some hybrid philosophy, but basically is one that is Modern Liberal that calls themselves libertarian in order to distance themselves from the negatives of the Modern Liberal… or progressive. Maybe they’ll throw in some classic liberal ideas like Friedman, but then like John Stossel did last week, will cite Hayek’s “Why I’m Not A Conservative” essay… while ignoring that a European conservative is very different than an American conservative… a point which Hayek even makes.
I managed to catch an episode of FOX Business’s “The Independents” on Friday on the radio, which frankly was entirely dependent on misconceptions, absurdities, leftist phrasing, and a lot of broken windows.
The episode’s guests included an illegal alien “Dreamer” who’s lobbying for her own special protections; Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who’s so far down in the trenches and relying on direct experience that he sounds inarticulate when talking to high-rise New Yorkers because his viewpoint and argument is dependent on that experience; and Dan Stein, a representative from the Federation on American Immigration Reform. There were a couple others as well – one a pro-amnesty shill, and the other one of those subtle muddling-the-issues amnesty supporters.
The entire episode was fraught with fallacies and errors of economic, moral, and logic standards. There was also an intentional lack of differentiation between legal and illegal immigration, except by the FAIR representative and as footnotes for Arpaio, to whom as a law enforcement official, legal immigration is of no concern.
The hosts, MTV VJ Kennedy, Matt Welch – that other guy from Reason, and I assume Kmele Foster was on, though I didn’t hear him introduced; were all engaged in almost every pro-amnesty progressive leftist point dressed up as laissez-faire economic arguments, emotional humanitarian arguments, and general bullshit.
When Stein was on, they argued that illegal immigration is down because deportations are up (a spurious claim itself), while Stein pointed out that the massive surge in illegal immigration due to stories of the illegal-alien-abetting DREAM Act-by-exec-order means that data from last year is somewhat irrelevant.
They (the hosts plus the pro-amnesty guest opposite Stein) argued that illegal aliens are only coming because the economy is improving, and that thus illegal aliens are good for the economy. Stein rebutted by explaining that illegal aliens are taking American jobs. To which the response was basically this:
The highest point the argument against Stein got to was accusing him of protectionism. To their credit, that’s not completely off base.
The purpose of a nation is to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It’s for the citizens of the nation to enjoy the benefits of the nation. It’s what citizenship is about. The whole reason to be a citizen is to be a member of a nation.
The concept of having secure borders and enforced immigration laws that result in deportations for illegal aliens is one that exists in order to protect citizenry and the security and sovereignty of that nation. The liberaltarians on “Independents” seemed only to see the glazier’s side of the economic argument of broken laws. They ignored that having a secure nation means protection not just from economic threats, but from physical ones as well – not just the lurking specter of terrorism, but also of criminals and biological hazards illegal aliens bring with them. You do want to screen who comes in to begin with at the very minimum for those physical threats – all of which lead to second and third order effects due to the hidden damages they cause.
For one, illegal aliens do take American jobs. The immediate response is – but they’re jobs Americans are too stupid/lazy/spoiled to do.
If there weren’t illegal aliens undercutting US wages, the pay rates for those unpleasant jobs would be higher. This argument is usually dismissed with a wave of the hand or a subject change, and a bias on the part of the person arguing it.
There are a lot of Americans who do take labor-intensive, difficult jobs. Mike Rowe’s made that point over and over.
If illegal aliens weren’t disrupting the job market with wages that can undercut the minimum, as well as using their illegal status as a way to reduce compliance costs for employers (no workman’s comp or insurance, only paid in cash, etc.), employers would have to pay a wage that’s commensurate with the job itself.
To give an example – throughout the midwest there used to be meat packing plants in downtown areas. Urban populations would work in them for decent, but not great, wages, but enough to keep an economy afloat, provide for a family, and do all that good-ol-American “living wage” stuff unions get all wistful about. Once illegal aliens became an exploitable resource, a lot of those meat packing plants moved out to rural areas, closer to farms, and where entire rural communities would be radically changed by the influx of illegal aliens and cheap illegal alien labor. The plants could’ve hired the guy downtown for $20/hour, but found it easier to hire two illegals for $10/hour – illegals they don’t have to provide benefits for, and if one loses a hand in a band saw, they just get another illegal to replace him.
This usually spins into the idea of “well we need to bring those undocumented angels out of the shadows and into society to protect them”… but they don’t necessarily want that. While they hypothetically could be deported as they’re here illegally, they also don’t have to deal with regulations and compliance costs, taxes, or often any laws at all. Hell, they can get drunk, drive, and crash into Democrat politicians who will still support illegal aliens.
Democrat Moran, from the news story, states:
“I know this is a tough issue that we’re dealing with and as you probably know I have been and will continue to be pro immigrant and some cases even pro illegal immigrant. And it would be politically expedient for me at this point in time to change that. That should give you some indication of my commitment to immigration and immigrants to tell you that even after being hit by one I will continue to advocate for immigrants and their rights as citizens of this country.”
Now, that moron aside, illegals enjoy the benefits of not having laws enforced against them in many states. A park ranger I spoke with last week told me how he’d encountered people breaking laws in Yosemite National Park, but could do nothing as they were illegal aliens with no ID, no auto registration, and California didn’t allow for arresting illegals for pretty much anything. A friend who did a ridealong for Wisconsin state police encountered someone who wanted to race the officer’s vehicle – when they pulled over the racing driver, it turned out to be an illegal alien and he was released with not so much as a slap on the wrist. If a US citizen decided to go race the cops on a street, or tear up through a national park, the US citizen would be arrested and in all probability jailed. If an illegal alien does it, they’re released.
So again, the illegals don’t necessarily want to stop being illegals – it takes away their protected status.
And it takes away their competitive advantage. And it gives them the option to take the route some Americans have chosen to already – those Americans who turn down work because something else is better…
Getting back to the economics of it, the next liberaltarian counterpoint is that Americans are still too spoiled and lazy and fat to do dirty jobs anyway… and that’s where welfare and unemployment come in (which would also come into play for illegals granted amnesty).
For those who didn’t know it, there’s also a way to game unemployment. I’ve heard it from employers who have difficulty finding help, and I’ve heard it from the lazy bastards themselves when they talk about what they do. The scam is to work just long enough to get unemployment, then take unemployment for a few months, then go back to work just long enough to qualify for more handouts.
From a personal standpoint, it makes sense. If you can work for three months, then take a three month vacation at taxpayer expense while your food is paid for by the taxpayer, your housing is subsidized by the taxpayer, your bills are all supported by the taxpayer, and your health care is just an emergency room trip away that’s also covered by the taxpayer… why work? Your quality of life is decent – you have access to entertainment and cars and gadgets and such – so why bother aspiring for more?
This undercuts the American work ethic and makes the illegal alien’s labor look good. The illegal alien is benefiting from being able to negotiate his wages to below the mandated minimum wage. The illegal alien is further benefiting from having his competition removed from the market via government handouts.
Do away with welfare, take away illegal alien labor and suddenly those Americans who are unemployed won’t be sitting around collecting checks from the taxpayer – they’ll have to work for their money in those now available jobs.
Do away with the minimum wage so those workers can compete at the level of their skills, and this will allow employers and businesses to utilize those lower wages to lower costs of products for everyone (which in turn generates more benefit for the new employees, which moves the economy, generates skills for those workers, and puts them at higher wages anyway – and with lower taxes to boot). But we’ve talked about the problems of the minimum wage for years.
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Anyway, back to “The Independents”.
At one point, one of the hosts, while talking with the “DREAMer” illegal alien used the term “undocumented American”. This is nonsense.
If you sneak into Quebec tomorrow where you don’t speak French, have no plans to assimilate, and seek only to send remittances home to the US, you are not an “undocumented Canadian”. You’re an illegal alien.
If you sneak into Japan tomorrow, where you don’t speak Japanese, have no plans to assimilate, but think you can make some money by working for less than native Japanese workers by staying out of sight, you are not an “undocumented Japanese”. You’re an illegal alien.
If you sneak into Mexico tomorrow, where you don’t speak Spanish (Mexican spanish, not that Castillian lisping Spanish), you have no plans to assimilate, but you think you can make some money by offering a skill that isn’t around locally… well, you aren’t an “undocumented Mexican”. You’re an illegal alien. And in Mexico, you can’t own property as a foreigner, and you’re also subject to arrest by any authority or citizen. You’re an extranjero ilegal and subject to arrest by anyone.
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The entire show was filled with false premises of how illegal immigration works, an economic view through rose colored glasses onto broken windows, it ignored the physical and biological security threats of a totally open border, and the last thing it ignored was the demographics issue.
The swarm of illegal aliens who are going to be made into wards of the state will not be voting for libertarian free market ideas. They will not be Ron Paul voters or Gary Johnson voters.
Illegal aliens granted amnesty will not be listening to the erudite arguments for individual freedom because they don’t speak even english. Those from Central America rarely even speak coherent spanish – instead speaking regional dialects, or regional indian languages.
These are not people wanting freedom – they’re people wanting “free” stuff at the expense of the taxpayer because they heard there’d be a free ride.
Demographically, amnesty will doom the nascent libertarian movement, slowly strangle what remains of both little r republicans and the Republican party, and push the Democrats into perpetual power, reigning as an oligarchy of socialist redistributors.
“When I talk to my Republican friends,” Gutierrez said, “[they tell me] all of the parts will lead to the full package.”
He made his comments on Al Jazeera America’s Inside Story on Friday. Gutierrez has called Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) his “ally” in his quest for amnesty and has praised Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) as well. He emphasized that he, like President Barack Obama, does not care if immigration reform is “in parts and pieces as long as in the end, there is a full menu.”
Last week, President Barack Obama said of the comprehensive bill that passed the Senate, “If they want to chop that thing up in five pieces, as long as all five pieces get done, I don’t care what it looks like. Then, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said that immigration reform was “absolutely not” dead.
Note Gutierrez was going to Al Jazeera to brag. And let’s not forget that Paul “Screech” Ryan is so much a RINO that Tanzanian poachers hang out by his house.
Nice to know that somebody who made billions in the US market is ready to try to destroy the nation. And of course he won’t listen to ICE agents about illegal aliens and why we’d want to screen people for admission coming into the country. He’s a billionaire. He’s the Ruling Class through and through. He’s not going to get his store robbed by some gangster illegal alien from the Ukraine, or shanked by a “gardener” illegal alien who was hacking people up with machetes during the El Sal civil war.
He’s going to get cheap labor for programming while he ditches American workers. Democrats get free votes, Republicans get cheap labor. The American citizenry, legal immigrants, legal residents, and everyone who played by the rules and believes in the rule of law gets screwed.
Now that the shutdown’s done and the intentional failure of Obamacare has been shoved onto the citizenry, it’s time to bring in some more Democrat voters to ensure the thousand-year reign of the left will not be stymied.
“Once that’s done, you know, the day after, I’m going to be pushing to say, call a vote on immigration reform,” he told the Los Angeles affiliate of Spanish-language television network Univision.
“[I]n the coming days and weeks, we should sit down and pursue a balanced approach to a responsible budget, a budget that grows our economy faster and shrinks our long-term deficits further,” Obama stated. Historically, “balanced” has been code for tax increases.
Obama then pushed on to immigration reform: “Number two. We should finish the job of fixing our broken immigration system.” Naturally, he blamed the Republican House for stalling his preferred immigration bill.
They also note the Farm Bill is on the agenda, which is interesting because it tends to be just about farm subsidies and food stamps.
Obama’s push for amnesty is considered the “smart play” because it comes as opposition is weak from opposing his dictates in Obamacare. He keeps throwing things out there at a pace so fast that no one can keep up with it. News junkies struggle to keep up, and the average Joe who has a life and things to do is going to be asking “what? They’re doing this again?”
…many say, recent weeks have seen activists use chains and pipes to tie themselves to the tires of buses that carry immigrants slated for deportation to court, block traffic on Capitol Hill and get arrested, surround Tucson police when they targeted two immigrants during a traffic stop, and chain themselves and block the entrance of a federal detention center.
More such actions, they vow, are coming.
“It’s absolutely out of frustration and impatience,” said Marisa Franco, campaign organizer for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which helped coordinate some of the more provocative actions. “Immigrant communities who are losing 1,100 loved ones every day to deportation cannot wait for Congress to end its political games or for the President to rediscover his moral compass,” she added.
“The people will take power back into their own hands and set a true example of leadership that the Beltway will have to follow,” Franco vowed.
Criminals being criminals are mad because they broke the law and are getting caught and punished. Those 1,100 “loved ones” are criminals who broke laws and are being removed. That there is an entire racist organization that exists solely to try to break the will of the US in enforcing its own immigration laws, to get American citizens and legal aliens to surrender to home invader illegals, is absurd.
To give contrast to this, the immigration enforcement of Europe from the lefty government of declining Britain has been taking this form recently:
A quote from Mark Harper, Britain’s Immigration minister:
“I don’t see any problem with saying to people who have no right to be in the United Kingdom they can’t be here anymore,” he told BBC Question.
They’re also going out and sending messages to illegals to let them know to leave or they will be arrested.
Officials have sent messages to almost 40,000 people they suspect of not having a right to be in the UK, instructing them to contact border officials to discuss their immigration status.
According to the Wall Street Journal, groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable are thinking about “backing challengers to tea-party conservatives in GOP primaries, increasing political engagement with centrist Republicans.” The Chamber of Commerce is reportedly “researching” what races they can influence in GOP primaries “in hopes of replacing tea-party conservatives with more business-friendly pragmatists” who would include support for comprehensive immigration reform.
Even before the government shutdown and the fight over defunding Obamacare, business groups “pressing for an immigration overhaul were venting frustration that the full House has been unwilling to consider any immigration legislation.” Reportedly, “several business executives said they were counting on establishment GOP leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, to move immigration and future fiscal legislation.”
They don’t care about the nation, they care about cheap labor. They’re short-sighted and stupid and don’t care that the illegal aliens they import will result in more Democrat-leftist ideologues in business, more regulations and government force against business, because they think they’ll get a seat at the table and their cronyism with politicians will save them.
They don’t listen when Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters says she wants to take over their companies – to destroy oil companies. They don’t listen when Obama says energy prices will skyrocket – to destroy the coal industry. They don’t pay attention when Obama and like politicians say they want single payer – to destroy the insurance business. Many of the highest-ups of the companies live wealthy enough not to care and thus are oblivious that things can happen to them, and the rest of them are just fodder anyway.
Businessmen at high levels still think they’re playing the same old game with conventional crooked politicians instead of ideologically-driven leftist radicals. They don’t realize they’re the useful idiots helping to plot their own demise.
Their story from The New Republic is here, and is a phenomenal example of the blind leftist desire for tyranny:
What is a president in a presidential constitutional republic to do when faced with an intransigent, bull-headed faction among his people’s representatives?
Well, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, was once faced with a similar situation exactly 20 years ago, in October 1993. The parliament, then called the Supreme Soviet, was increasingly against Yeltsin’s neoliberal economic reforms (suggested to him by young Western advisors like Jeffrey Sachs). On one hand, these reforms freed up the old Soviet command economy.
So, Yeltsin was pushing for a reform that would break up a command economy, where government would no longer dictate how and where money will be spent. Meanwhile, in Soviet America, Obama is pushing for a reform that will institute a command economy, where government dictates who and where money will be spent.
Yeltsin was pushing for reforms against state control, Obama is pushing for state control.
On the other, they drove the country into chaos and violence, and left tens of millions impoverished, their savings nullified by skyrocketing inflation.
I guess Yeltsin should’ve had Ben Bernanke doing some Quantitative Easing to hide the inflation a bit better.
The parliament, dominated by old Soviet conservatives, was increasingly against these reforms and refused to confirm Yeltsin’s key economic advisor.
Almost exactly 20 years ago, he dissolved parliament. The vice president and the speaker of the parliament dissolved Yeltsin’s presidency, and holed up with their supporters in the parliament’s headquarters, now known as “the White House.”
Then Yeltsin did this to it.
Oh, yes. So The New Republic wants Obama to burn down the capitol building and dissolve congress and eliminate the representatives of the people so he can enact his “reforms” which create a command economy with regards to the health of every citizen. It’s a bill that the Ruling Class exempts itself from (you really think Obama will be on Obamacare?), and which was pushed through without being read – passed so you can find out what’s in it rather than read it – by shady procedures in the middle of the night by a Democrat party that didn’t listen at all to what the people wanted, and the same Democrat party that knows Obamacare will fail the citizenry but knows it’s only a tool so it can be used institute a government-controlled single payer system.
On the other side of the Ruling Class statist coin, The National Interest, which seems today to mostly be a Ruling Class statist publication where party isn’t that important (with neocons it rarely is), asks “Is It Time To Abolish Congress?”
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So, DC insiders on both the left and the right are asking if the people’s representatives should simply be done away with so the great leader can get on with his business of creating a command economy against the will of the citizenry.
Congress is representing their constituents, who vehemently oppose the Obamacare mandate and taxation.
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When faced with an intransigent, bull-headed governing body, the Founding Fathers did this:
Here we go again. With 12 dead bodies at Washington’s Navy Yard, not including that of the shooter, Americans are back to the usual handwringing: Why, oh why can’t we stem the tide of gun violence?
People, this is not rocket science. (Yes, I’m mad).
That’s the best way to write a modern liberal column. Impotent Rage!
Americans currently have crappy gun-control laws, “crappy” being the technical legal term for “hopelessly, pathetically inadequate,” especially when compared to other countries‘ laws. Yes, those countries with fewer guns and fewer gun deaths — they have much tougher gun-control laws than the United States does.
Those “other countries” being the usual suspects: cold-weather politemongers of Canada (who have abandoned their long gun registry as pointless and a stupid failure), ethnically whites-only no-guns Australia, under-siege religious-ethnic bonded Israel, unarmed UK, genetically homongenous Norway, and genetically homogenous xenophobic and occasionally murderously totalitarian Japan.
And why do we have crappy gun-control laws? Because of the Second Amendment, which gives Americans a constitutional right to crappy gun-control laws. That’s why we fought a war against the British: We wanted to the right to kill each other, instead of being killed by foreign enemies.
The real reason we have the Second Amendment is to preserve a free state – as opposed to a tyrannical oppressor state.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
– Thomas Jefferson
And remember, he was referencing Shay’s Rebellion at the time – a domestic insurgency against perceived tyranny. And it was viewed as a good thing, because it was necessary to keep the government honest. Yes, that was TJ supporting armed rebellion as a way to keep government in check.
Brooks real complaint is that the classic liberal enlightenment document that the nation is based on must be destroyed.
For its time, the U.S. Constitution was a pretty impressive document, if you leave aside certain small details such as slavery, which was considered A-OK by the Founding Fathers, and women’s rights, which were considered not A-OK. But let’s give the Constitution’s authors a break; they lived at a time when slavery was widespread not only in the United States but around the globe and women were still considered semi-chattel in most of the world. For its time, the Constitution was not bad at all.
But for our time, it stinks.
First off, it was broad enough that “all men are created equal” in founding documents can easily apply just as well to everyone. And things like the 3/5 compromise were written to slowly abolish things like slavery. Also, amendments, how do they work?
Whenever I teach constitutional law, I ask my students if they’re happy that they live in a nation with the oldest written constitution in the world. They all nod enthusiastically. Then I ask them if they’d be equally pleased if our neurosurgeons operated in accordance with the oldest anatomybook in the world, or our oil tankers steered using the oldest navigational charts in the world, or NASA’s rocket scientists used Ptolemaic astronomy to chart the path of the Mars Rover.
Frankly, having the world’s oldest written constitution is not something to be proud of.
From here she goes into a leftist diatribe about how the Constitution sucks because it’s old, and thus it’s irrelevant and needs to be destroyed to represent her chosen vision of a modern world because remember, she’s mad.
But she’s got some specious argument there about age being a condition of obsolescence. A counterpoint would be to ask students if they think their mathematicians should continue to use the Pythagorean Theorem, or if they should use the positions put forth in the Kama Sutra in their dorms.
Picture of Soha Ali Khan unrelated.
Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Often it means it’s tried and true, and especially as human nature tends to be rather consistent, the Constitution works rather well, just like the Quadratic Formula and cowgirl.
And boy, have circumstances changed lately. To return to gun deaths, the framers could never have imagined weapons technologies like those used in Newtown or the Navy Yard. But because the U.S. Constitution is amazingly difficult to amend (incredibly, women still have no text-based constitutional guarantee of equal rights), Americans are stuck with gun rules from more than two centuries ago.
The Founders were very, very smart men. They were inventors themselves. They also had privately owned cannon at the time – ordnance, not arms; and they were well aware of rapid firing weapons, anti-personnel munitions, and all kind of other assorted nastiness that could be used for evil intent. Keep in mind that was also an era where swords were still commonplace, and unlike a gun, you don’t have to reload a sword ever. Also, medicine to treat wounds in the 1700s was much more limiting. thus survivable wounds today would often have been fatal wounds then.
The Constitution is difficult to amend for a reason. It’s so a bunch of mad shrews like Brooks don’t just go out and change it willy-nilly. Anger-fueled madness triumphing over reason is how with the likes of Carrie Nation and later iterations of the temperance movement, we eventually got Prohibition, which no one but some progressive anti-freedom anti-drink busybodies wanted. Government driven by progressive do-gooders inflicted Prohibition on the population, and murdered 10,000 US citizens for our own good.
Crime statistics of individual man on man pale in comparison to 10,000 murdered by the government in the name of “the common good” against “fiend intemperance”. And that’s from a mostly benign government. Government is the problem.
This may help explain why the U.S. Constitution no longer gets much global respect. Just a few decades ago, the overwhelming majority of nations around the globe modeled their own constitutions on it. Today, that’s no longer true.
Just why other democracies are losing interest in the U.S. Constitution as a model is an interesting question, and there are undoubtedly a thousand and one reasons. But I’ll bet the Navy Yard shootings just added 12 more.
Guess what, Brooks? I don’t care too much what other countries do with their constitutions. I like ours just fine.
I also don’t care because most of the world isn’t founded on the idea of a representative democratic republic based on Enlightenment ideals of the individual as the most important element of society. Most new governments are filling themselves up with collectivist declarations of the special rights of group A or group B, not with the declaration of the Natural Right of Individual X. They exist only to empower the Ruling Class at the expense of the ruled, to balance different balkanized groups against one another while the truly powerful play a game of favorites with resources they steal from the population. It is a game of plunder, where Brooks and her Ruling Class plunderers distribute it for the good of their own personal power as the Ruling Class.
It’s worth noting that her bio includes this:
Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.
She’s been a high-level advisor in the Obama administration, and a professor of law. She teaches students that the Constitution must be destroyed, and she advises government to destroy the very document that governs the government. She is one of those Ruling Class elites who of course would demand that you be disarmed. It makes her job of administering your resources and deciding how you will be controlled that much easier.
(CNN) — It has been called the most popular rifle in America, and it briefly returned to the spotlight after Monday’s shooting at the Navy Yard: the AR-15.
It’s also in the CNN slideshow. The first three photos of police and military personnel there to secure the area all carry AR variants.
A U.S. law enforcement official said Monday that gunman Aaron Alexis unleashed a barrage of bullets using an AR-15, a rifle and a semi-automatic handgun. Authorities believed the AR-15 was used for most of the shooting, the official said. The news prompted Sen. Dianne Feinstein, one of the strongest proponents of a ban on assault weapons like the AR-15, to issue a statement the same day asking, “When will enough be enough?”
Except he didn’t use an AR. The demand was made again to ban semi-automatic rifles and standard capacity magazines… yet this massacre was perpetrated with a shotgun and pistols taken from murdered security guards.
However, federal law enforcement sources told CNN Tuesday that authorities have recovered three weapons from the scene of the mass shooting, including one — a shotgun — that investigators believe Alexis brought in to the compound. The other two weapons, which sources say were handguns, may have been taken from guards at the Navy complex.
The sources, who have detailed knowledge of the investigation, cautioned that initial information that an AR-15 was used in the shootings may have been incorrect. It is believed that Alexis had rented an AR-15, but returned it before Monday morning’s shootings. Authorities are still investigating precisely how many weapons Alexis had access to and when.
One shotgun, two handguns at last count, both handguns taken from guards.
Regardless, the massacre pushed the AR-15 back into the gun-control debate.
No, it didn’t. There was no AR15 used. The media pushed it, and the rights-control debate, to the forefront.
Within a day, there were claims in the media across print, TV, and radio that “high capacity magazines” and “assault weapons” needed to be banned to prevent shootings like the Naval Yard murders, but the DC murders were done with neither of those things.
Anti-gun tyrants simply have one goal, and that is the total disarmament and subjugation of the populace, and they will not ever stop.
It seems hyperbolic, but listen to what they’ve said and the context it’s in.
A series of murders took place in a gun free zone in a gun free base in a gun free city, where a criminal madman walked through the gun free signs, killed people, and kept on going because no one could resist him as they were disarmed. He didn’t do it with an AR, he didn’t do it with “high capacity” magazines. He did it with a Remington 870 shotgun and some 00 buck shells and a whole lot of evil. The response from the media is “Ban the AR15! Ban assault clips! Ban the shoulder thing that goes up!”
Who in their right mind can have as a solution a demand to ban something totally unrelated? But they’re not mad, they’re simply fixated on the next step to the destruction of individual liberty, and the physical tools to maintain one’s own life are a big obstacle to pushing people into what the Ruling Class demands they become. It’s been a goal for decades, and they simply dance in the blood of the victims every chance they get, thinking that the next series of murders (again committed by a schizophrenic on mind-altering drugs) will give them the emotional push to convince the populace to not think about their actions and simply act and make this thing they want happen.
They can’t win a rational argument (hence why they frame tyranny with the word “reasonable”), they have all of history disproving their suppositions and showing their desires for abolition of self-defense tools and rights to be inherently destructive to the individual, but they can dance in the blood of innocents and scream very loudly about their feelings. They will,they do, and they are using every avenue to attack the rights of self-defense.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Online retailer Amazon is severing ties with its online associates in Missouri because of a new state law that subjects their transactions to sales taxes.
Amazon Associates write blogs or product reviews then link to Amazon.com, and collect commissions — between 4 percent and 8.5 percent — if people use that link to buy something on Amazon’s site.
Amazon is blaming a new Missouri new law that takes effect next week subjecting those online transactions to sales taxes for its decision to sever the ties, the Kansas City Star (http://is.gd/X0XZdE ) reported.
It’s worth noting that Amazon is for a federal internet sales tax, because it will be used to crush competitors. Here they don’t like it because it bothers them.
The end result is that small internet companies are destroyed, the taxes that the government wants to wring out of the citizen vanish with the companies, and peoples’ livelihoods are harmed. Those same citizens who owned the now dead companies now have less to spend in their own communities, and won’t pay state sales taxes or income taxes on income they no longer earn. The community is now poorer.
The Internet sales tax is hitting consumers like me in the gut – literally.
As someone interested in keeping my weight down (who isn’t), I order a supply of low-calorie pre-packaged meals from a food-and-lifestyle website – and have it delivered each month without so much as a keystroke if there’s no change to my existing order.
The company is based in Maryland, but that’s been irrelevant. The convenience of receiving the order at home in New York without thinking about how far the food travels has been hard to beat.
…
Recently, however, this polite but scary note hit my in-box – and by the way, when companies are this polite in an email you know it’s not good news:
“We wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that we will begin collecting and remitting sales and use taxes on all Internet sales where applicable as of September 1, 2013. The sales tax will be visible during checkout as part of the overall breakdown…
“Our decision to join other major Internet sellers in the collection of and remittance of sales and use taxes is in response to the growing instances of states legislatures and revenue agencies seeking the enforcement of Internet sales tax. We expect to see more measures enacted aimed at enforcement of sales and use tax collection.
He basically sums it up by saying he probably won’t be buying from the same company, since he’ll be paying more. And he may simply change his buying habits altogether, and he wonders what kinds of taxes he’ll have to pay on that.
Well, the answer is screw you, citizen, because the government will wring every last dime out of you so it can fund more perpetual Democrat voters on the welfare plantation and buy them new Obamaphones. You being free to choose what you like is a problem, because they need that money to fund their bigger and bigger governments, and you need to be nudged into the slot they want you in. The Ruling Class will do as it pleases, and it will do as it pleases to you.
Elections have consequences, and the power to tax is the power to destroy.
Amazon’s email to its associates in the state called the new law unconstitutional. LaFaver said the legislature did not hear from the company when the bill was being debated.
If you understand how the market works, then you know that raising taxes creates a cost on businesses. Those costs will be passed on to customers. In the meantime, the businesses may have to eat the cost until they can shift it to their customer base (which will shrink as a result of higher prices), and many businesses simply don’t want to deal with that.
Amazon previously said it was in favor of a national sales tax, but that’s because it’s used there as a barrier to competition that will crush their smaller competitors that can’t afford to comply with new rules. Amazon can slowly creep towards monopoly by having the government crush its competition with regulations. That’s cronyism.
Here, Amazon looked at the increased costs in one market and decided to cut off some business partners because that’s what the bottom line favored.
Of course Democrat LaFaver couldn’t possibly have forseen that an increase in taxes would result in harm to businesses. He’s a Democrat, and therefore can’t understand that actions in the marketplace by government have consequences. He seems to think you can just raise taxes and more money will magically appear. But the private sector doesn’t have Ben Bernanke and can’t run on IOUs.
ShortTimer
JBH
The Patriot Perspective 