As you may or may not have heard, Michigan (Michigan!) passed a Right-to-Work law. Needless to say the Unions are, shall we say, a bit upset, and decided to storm an AFP tent and tear it down. Apparently they came at the tent with knives drawn (to tear the tent down, of course, not to intimidate or anything). One of them punched Steven Crowder. Am I hearing things here, or is one of the union thugs stating that someone has a gun, and then getting all tough guy?
Dana Loesch is raising funds to have the thug brought to justice. Glenn Reynolds has pledged 1000 dollars to the cause. I don’t know if there was really a gun in there but I would suggest any activist going up against unions be well armed, especially with less than lethal force. Don’t start anything, but I wouldn’t let them assault people and destroy property either. It should be noted that most defensive sprays contain a taggant, which helps police identify the perpetrator quickly. Most states laws are also pretty lenient when it comes to using force against unruly crowds.
It should also be noted that wise tactics suggest anyone coming at you with a drawn knife should soon find himself quickly in the unenviable position of realizing he’s just brought a knife to a gunfight. I’m wondering if that’s what happened here, and the arm person successfully got out of dodge (the wise move).
I agree with Glenn: “Zero tolernace for this crap.” Arm yourselves well.
I doubt there was a gun present; what I’ve heard is that the thugs were making threats about THEM having guns.
If it had been one of the AFP people with a gun, then the networks would be running wall-to-wall coverage of the “right-wing lunatic who pulled a gun on peaceful, Kumbaya-singing demonstrators”. Since the networks are apparently silent on the incident…
The problem is…within the confines of the gulag known as the state of Maryland, even if you have a permit unobtanium, it would have been illegal to carry at this protest if it was so designated as permitted and you were informed by an officer of the crowd uncontrol variety.
“It should also be noted that wise tactics suggest anyone coming at you with a drawn knife should soon find himself quickly in the unenviable position of realizing he’s just brought a knife to a gunfight.”
Agreed on the less lethal, but if the above happens and the perp(s) is within 21 feet of me he’s going to realize it as rounds start impacting his torso. You can’t take chances with knives, within that range someone can deliver a mortal blow before you can pull your trigger even if you were holding a gun pointed at him. (Nowadays I’ve seen recommendations of a 24 foot threshold.)
Note that this is also in the context of a Democratic state house Representative saying “There will be blood“. If the 20th Century has told us anything, it’s don’t ignore such threats.
Although … in this unusual context, with a tent, a shotgun loaded with “less lethal” ammo would have been a good idea.
Right-to-work — and all the anguish and angst over it on the part of unions and their long-term members (you see any young faces on the union side in that vid?) — is a direct result of the indebtedness and subsequent hard times addressed in your previous post.
When the economy was in better shape and long-term prospects indicated more of the same to follow, the nice pay and benefits unions were able to negotiate were supportable. When things started to look worse, employers fled offshore and to right-to-work states. Boom times are long gone; the folks complaining that it’s a “right to work for less” are essentially correct, they’re just omitting that the alternative is to not work at all. (This looks especially terrible if you happen to be a union official; in their nice suits and big cars, they remind me a lot of some other group, oh, who was that — botches? No, bosses! Gee, just like that scene in Animal House.)
Or was it Animal Farm? Come to think of it, the former rebels end up the ruling class in both of ’em. Except for Flounder and D-Day.
“When things started to look worse, employers fled offshore and to right-to-work states.”
I’d suggest — and I mean no more than that, sincerely — that it might be worth looking into why, in highly unionized Germany, that has not been the case, and why (as I recall) their standard of living is higher than ours, with broader industrial-based employment.
I’m not and expert, but neither am I an ideologue on this issue, and I’ve been seeing that cited as a fact quite often recently. Is it?
As I recall their standard of living is not higher, although disentangling that from having much a much higher population density (almost 7 times) and therefore housing costs would be difficult.
I think the basic answer is that “We’re not Germans”. Just think about the unlimited speed Autobahns (advisory speed limit of 81 mph) (which also means you can’t compare car quality/cost in a simple manner). Outside of Montana that’s unthinkable in the US.
Other things: compare their industrial apprenticeship system with the general disparagement of and lack of investment in vocational K-12 education in the US, e.g. California has all but nuked theirs. But … let’s step back even further, our public schools can’t even be trusted to teach children how to read and do basic math. Officially we and Germany have 99% literacy rates … but do any of us believe those statistics are really comparable?
Anyway, their unions are not short-sighted crazy like ours, don’t know why, don’t really care why, I accept it as a fact. Although … the country is plenty crazy in other ways. How well will those factories run in 2022 when the finish shutting down all their nuclear power plants and find out that “renewable” electrical power is useless for both baseline and peaking power? (This country is so hysterical about radioactivity they’ve banned ionization based smoke detectors.)
(Of course, if the EPA succeeds in shutting down all our coal fired plants too quickly we’ll be no better off, although it’s those of us in flyover country that I gather will be the worse off.)
I agree thoroughly that it is a complicated problem — but then, how complicated is OUR [RKBA] problem in real world terms, and don’t we tend to condemn people who arrive at some conclusion without thinking about those complexities?
I think my main point is this: There are countries in the world that have remained (even become) competitive without sending their industries to China, Bangladesh, etc., etc. So it is not necessarily an outcome of manufacturers not getting their way, vis-a-vis labor and wages. Since regulation is going to be involved, come hell or high water, shouldn’t we be paying some attention to what has been done elsewhere in the First World?
While Utah doesn’t have freeways without speed limits, we *do* have a couple of 80mph speed limit stretches of freeway. It’s something that generally ought to be considered in any place where there’s big, long stretches of freeway, and not much population.
For that matter, I had a friend who treated Salt Lake City’s freeway as though it had no speed limit, and he seems to be doing ok!
Gee, Andy I dunno; I only live in the shattered ruins of a state that was (once) huge in manufacturing. Not so much, now. Most of those jobs went overseas. Some went to the South. We did manage to land a few Japanese auto plants, but lost heavily in cars/trucks, electronics and steel/other metals.
Have you compared cost of living in Germany to the ‘States? The size of homes? Degree of economic protectionism? (Especially for outside-EU items) …Prices in their Wal-Marts…?
And why is highly-unionized Michigan in such dire straits?
“Degree of economic protectionism? (Especially for outside-EU items) …Prices in their Wal-Marts…?
And why is highly-unionized Michigan in such dire straits?
As mentioned, I think a lot of the latter is that “we’re not Germans”.
But for the former, as a first step look up banana import restrictions (codified at least in part by curvature…) and note the severe restrictions on when shops can be open. The latter not for the convenience of consumers. Don’t know how allergic they are to Wal-Mart/big box style stores; the concept per se doesn’t sound like it was why Wal-Mart’s attempt in Germany failed.
I think the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy makes our policies look sane (ignoring burning food as fuel, although they do some of that). Prior to the financial crisis it represented nearly 1/2 of the EU’s budget….
Additional thoughts on “We’re not Germans”: our … rather different WWII experiences might have something to do with that as well. Study of the period of the German economic miracle prior to Social Democratic sclerosis would probably be fruitful, their unions obviously followed a very different path, and one can imagine how sympathetic the Nazis were to work actions and independent unions, especially during the war.
If I had been at this spectacle in Michigan, I would have thrown some of my likely-stale-by-now Twinkies at those old, fat, and loudmouthed union thug bullies. I still have two boxes of them that I bought late last month.
Here’s my speculative take: Crowder is open about having a CCW, so one of the thug’s buddies yelled “He’s got a gun!†as a warning that he is not the best person to be punching, to which he replied “I’ve killed guys with guns beforeâ€.
Crowder’s lips aren’t moving when whoever says that says it.
I got into the habit of keeping a can of bear spray in the car once I moved to Alaska, where you can run into a moose or bear sitting in your parking spot or at the bus stop. A single burst creates a big wide cloud of spray that hangs in the air at a range of about 6-9 yards. A single can has a few sprays in it. Works great on bears. I imagine it’d work well for other applications as well.
Bear spray is one tenth the strength of human pepper spray. Bears have more sensitive noses than humans; it is inhumane to use a stronger spray on a bear. But don’t rely on bear spray to stop humans.
You don’t need to take my word for it: companies publish their MSDS (material safety data sheet) on the web. You can goggle and compare.
It’s my understanding that you can’t even rely on *human* pepper spray to always work on humans. If someone is determined, or sometimes just experienced, enough, they won’t let something like pepper spray from stopping them…
Somewhat of a digression, but, wouldn’t you love just once if the Republicans applied all the last minute intrigues and hardball tactics they did to passing the Right-to-Work legislation in Michigan, to a genuine RKBA issue? To hear them talk, you would have expected it to have happened by now. The last time I remember something like it happening in PA was when the Republicans got an Assault Weapon Ban passed in our House of Representatives in the final minutes of the session in December 1993.
Gee, I wonder why that is? I doubt it has anything to do with the special interests whose payroll they’re on.
Was it that hard? I mean, they’ve got majorities in both houses, and the voters told them it was safe after they voted down the ballot measures that would have enshrined the union’s position.
But you’re ignoring the massive incentives the Republican party has towards trashing the one of the Democrat’s biggest supports in people and $$$, not to mention how difficult rescuing Michigan would be without curtailing the public sector unions. Or how the private sector just might do better under the new regime.
Note that the compromise WRT to the free-rider problem with collective bargaining is to charge the non-union members for only that, in Michigan well under 20% of dues based on something I recently read, and not charge them for political action or overhead (the latter officially over 60%, but a fair amount of that is hidden political stuff).