For the past week since the deal was announced, gun owners have been wondering “What do we get out of this? How is it a compromise if all we’re doing is ceding ground.”
After reading the proposed language, I’m surprised by how much of this looks to me like it’s aimed at Mexican drug cartels. So what you have here is a bunch of Republicans who are probably retiring or will soon announce they are retiring, who love themselves some “law and order,” who are using Uvaldi as an excuse to get a wish list to target the cartels.
There’s also a few cases where they are requiring action from states, which the feds cannot do. The state can literally refuse to pick up the phone and there’s nothing the feds can do about it. This is well-established precedent. So know we know what the GOP worms got out of this: some drug warriorin’. And what flag waving Republican doesn’t love that?
Just go read them trying to define “dating relationship.” Are you kidding me? At least they didn’t apply it retroactively, and limited the prohibition to 5 years, but you know what would have been nice? To do the same thing with all of the Lautenberg Amendment. There would have been a compromise. But no. This just takes. The concessions are only things law and order GOP swamp creatures care about.
This bill is garbage and should be opposed, and any Republican who votes for this needs to be tossed out on their asses in a primary if they aren’t retiring.
Why? Because while I did look at year-over-year data in my post, it was presented with very important contextual information – like the closure of offices, shifting demand, and where we stood compared to 5 years ago which matters for looking at trends. Now that still isn’t the entire picture, but it puts the 65% increase into an important context that takes into account those with expiring licenses from 5 years earlier. (If everyone renewed exactly when they needed to do so, that is responsible for 42% of the issuances in 2020.) And the introduction of an online application may have shifted more early 2021 renewals into 2020 – all data we won’t be able to see in trends until next spring.
Are license issuances up? Without question. The questions are on how much.
And here’s why The Reload’s piece leaving out information about the shifts in demand bothers me. Because how you present data can change the picture of things quite a bit.
Take the graph below. In red, I used Stephen Gutowski’s model of strictly looking at year-over-year data to plot change in demand on my county since 2004. (I have my county’s historical numbers saved for easy calculations, but not the statewide data.) According to his method, our county’s issuance rates have gone on a wild ride of a low of -26.1% decline (2014) to the high of 65.1% growth (2020) with repeated declines in 2019, 2017, 2014, 2010, 2008, and 2004.
But that steadier blue line? That’s the rate of change on issuances for rolling 5 year periods – the period that licenses are valid in Pennsylvania. That shows a much steadier rate of change from a low of -4.8% (2004) to a high of 16.8% (2013) with small declines only in 2018, 2006, and 2004.
And, if you want raw numbers, here are the rates of currently valid licenses for the same county over the same period (total of previous 5 years of issued licenses). This trend line looks very different than the rates of change in issuance…
Why does this look so different than even my tamer rolling 5 year numbers above? Because of the way it accounts for surge years. The end of 2012 and 2013 were incredibly high due to the political fallout and threats following Sandy Hook in late 2012, so we saw a license issuance drop in 2014 because all of those new licenses issued 1-2 years prior were still valid. That doesn’t mean that all of those newly licensed people disappeared. They should be part of the numbers through at least 2018 when those 2013 LTCs expired. (We did actually see a very small drop between 2017 and 2018 – not all of those people who got their licenses opted to renew them, clearly.)
So while year-over-year data has a place in analysis of where we stand with the right to bear arms movement and possible sympathetic voters in Pennsylvania, it’s not the whole picture and no one should get too excited by extreme swings up because they are usually followed by slight drops later on.
Conservatives should spend more time thinking about what it would mean to build effective 21st-century labor unions or guilds. Republican leaders often defect because woke concerns function as a way to signal class status. Conservatives need to find ways to nurture a new leadership class that isn’t crippled by status anxiety. The working class is less tied to woke pieties than the managerial class, and finding ways to increase their political agency would defang woke nonsense.Â
Tech monopolies can’t truly be fought without fighting their anti-American labor practices. Republicans spent a year fundraising off the threat of tech censorship, and then as soon as the election was over they rewarded big tech with cheap labor. A new labor movement could help curb immigration, reform the H1-B1 program, and lessen offshoring, while encouraging strategic manufacturing in America. New labor movements must also divorce the white-collar workforce from the university wherever possible. Most colleges are a total joke, and there are plenty of well-paying white-collar jobs with fancy titles that could be done by a 19-year-old. It’s time to end the charade. These are already popular issues among the populist Right, but it’s important to stress how they help cultural fights.Â
From the point of view of political strategy, this is difficult to argue with. Without wealthy donors, a political movement has to rely much much more on grassroots organization, and labor unions were good at that.
But a 21st century labor movement will look different than the 19th and 20th century labor movement. How it will look different is an interesting question.
You know, it would probably help put a lid on all this Q-Anon bullshit if our social betters could do everyone a favor and actually stop touching kids.
I’d say I couldn’t agree more, but I can, since it’s my comment. I’m sure once they let our sniffer-in-chief back out among the people, it’s not going to get any better.
Increasingly, Americans are rejecting America. Including this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Instead, we’re moving quickly to another foundational ideal, by another author:
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others
Or to put it another way, the idea was that if we helped the China get rich, its single-party state would adopt our liberal values. But that’s not what’s happening. We’re adopting their illiberal values.
I’d like to think I’m pretty grounded, but the pandemic has honestly opened my eyes to a number of realities that have made me deeply uncomfortable. It’s been eye opening. The first is that a lot of people I’ve had considerable respect for struggle with reality as times get more difficult. This probably goes double when the pandemic has limited in-person interactions. I’ve been fairly present at my club during all this, at some risk to myself, but even life there has been seriously hampered by the inability to meet and gather in person. Work life, which is a lot of people’s only interaction, is also suffering. I’ve noticed that extroverts are suffering considerably more than introverts. Someone at my club commented at the beginning of all this, when I asked him how he was doing: “Great! I’ve waiting all my life for social distancing.” I might not be quite that stoic, but I’m faring better than most, from what I can tell. But with many people around me going stark raving mad, I can’t be completely sure. I’m probably not the best judge of myself.
This article struck me, because it touches on mass delusion. Bitter and I were discussing over dinner whether we’ve gotten a brief taste of what the world would be like if all anyone had was social media. Every other national institution we’ve relied on for years are in a holding pattern. Still there, but not moving forward.
… I’ve been saying for years in this space that the Woke Left is awakening demons that it cannot control. If you are on the Left, and you can’t see this, then you are as deluded as the QAnon crackpots who live in their own reality.
This fits what I see. It’s becoming increasingly more difficult for rational voices to be heard, as our nobility enable absolute madness, on both sides of the aisle, exploiting the madness in order to remain in power by stretching the post-WWII order to its breaking point. Division pays, if you want power, and disarmament is hard when no one is talking to each other. It’s easier to whip up hate among the crazies than to try to find a new center.
Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other.Â
If the introduction sounds like quackery to you, I think it is, but this is one of the better written examples I’ve read about the complaints of the deplorables. Wretchard the Cat has more today.
Today, as Rana Dasgupta argues in Harper’s, the Western middle class including those with gender studies and critical theory degrees — especially them — are the new unemployables, made redundant by cheap Chinese and robotic labor. The only way to make the destitute Woke feel good about themselves is to let them look down on the Deplorables.
One reason I’m reducing my presence on Facebook is that it promotes a weak thinking and discourages real discussion. The correct cultural understanding of social media is that it is a dinner table: meaning politics is not something to be discussed. It’s always kind of been boorish behavior in ideological mixed company to assume everyone else wants to hear the (usually) dumb shit going through your head. But there it all is on Twitter and Facebook. I quit Twitter years ago and did not miss it. Twitter is a toxic witches brew, and the sooner we purge it from the earth the better off humanity will be. I felt it was turning me into an awful, shallow person.
I am soon to largely quit Facebook (except for pages I manage, including this one). The only thing that’s kept me on there is that it’s a great way to keep in touch with family and distant old friends. But not really. My experience on Facebook is that people on the left will spew their politics to you on a regular basis, as if no one should disagree, then berate you if you dare to argue. I’ve even had family do this!
No one wants to think about anything. Everything is simple, black and white, one-dimensional sameness. People on the right have been quiet for a while if they were thoughtful. It’s largely the clueless boomers on the right that keep sharing shitty memes all day and spewing vapid political nonsense. The primary difference between the left and right on Facebook is on the left, it’s the educated who are spewing vapid political nonsense.
If we’re to come to a new political consensus, it will take serious discussion and honestly. But Facebook is no place to have that conversation. But neither will moving to platforms like Gab and Parler going to help either.
As a part of the ongoing back and forth with Michael Saladino, I posted a comment that seemed to resonate with us both. I thought I’d problem it and see what other folks think of it.”
Let me present a hypothesis. The ‘front-row kids’ have a coherent, articulatable worldview – which is reassuring and which cements their internal cultural alliance. That worldview has policy/action outcomes which – so far (key point) – have worked relatively great for those who can get over the wall and join the front-row crowd.
They are also those _charged with_ developing the consensus worldview (what Habermas calls ‘communicative reason’). The _problem_ is that the worldview developed is one that has cast adrift everyone outside the wall, and is now busily working to make the wall as high as possible.Why? Because the model doesn’t work in the real world.
So they build a huge pool of people who checked the boxes on joining the front row team, but there aren’t enough chairs any more. This gives us three groups:
A. Folks comfortably in the front row (or who are confident that by scrambling they can stay there);
B. Folks trying to get into the front row, and realizing that there aren’t enough chairs and the wall is impossibly high;
C. Folks who aren’t front-row (note that this doesn’t mean poor) who no longer have a coherent worldview that _they can relate to_ to latch onto.
Group C is in the midst of Millenial (as in thousand-year) craziness as the social and mental structures they depended on splinter. So they are ripe for all kinds of crazy shit.
Group B is the group that has historically launched revolutions – we oughta watch what they do very carefully.
Group A is just trying to hang on long enough to cash out and buy the house in Sun Valley. They are increasingly abandoning their duty of care for their fellow citizens.Note that I see this in my European friends as well as my US friends…it’s not Trump that splintered things.”
Any time I have the urge to use Facebook, I’m just going to post it on here. Might be a lot of drive by, but I used to do that a lot:
One unintended consequence of crushing speech on the right is that sane righties lose the ability to talk lunatics out of crazy. Back in the old days, I had many conversations talking sense into conspiracists from Rothschild to contrails. They listened to me because I’m credible in a way CNN is not. Now, instead, I shut up. I fear we’re about to embark on an unfortunate experiment to rediscover why, precisely, free speech has for 300 years been considered a bedrock necessity for a civilized society.
This is absolutely true. I do not see the value in driving people deeper and deeper into the fever swamps.
November’s election revealed that the class realignment of our two parties is solidifying. Democrats have increasingly emerged as the party of upscale suburbs, of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and Wall Street, of the owners of capital and the professionals who service them. The GOP, meanwhile, is trending toward a multiracial working-class party, preferred by those who generally make their living by toil. . . .
The big donors are abandoning the GOP, so they won’t have much choice. I have to level with you all, I never thought Trump was any savior. He made a lot of unforced errors. The big thing Trump saw and exploited was that the coalition had shifted. I think he’s a talented self-promoter, which is how he managed to win the White House with no prior political experience. But I don’t think he was going to build a movement that wasn’t centered around himself.
He attracted the loyalty he did because he positioned himself to be seen as fighting for the deplorables, when no one else would. If change is going to come, it will probably come from someone who understands the DC machine, and knows how to dismantle it.
