Tag: linkery

Don’t Pee On My Leg and Tell Me it’s Raining

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So Diane Feinstein’s “Assault Weapon Ban” bill is out of committee.  We’re told endlessly by the media that our betters in Washington want to pass new gun control legislation to make America safer.  But if you’ve been paying attention, you know for a fact that this is complete bullshit.

Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish explains it so that I don’t have to.  Pertinent excerpt:

67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average. Those numbers are from six years ago. They have grown worse since.

Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. The places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. These are the places where the family is broken, money comes from the government and immigrants crowd in from some of the most violent parts of the world bringing with them their own organized crime. These are also the places that have run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.

Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory. He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average.

These places aren’t America. They’re Obamerica.

Obama isn’t the cause, he’s merely the latest symptom. But here’s the point:

America does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem and a broken family problem. These social ills cannot be solved by banning something. The War on Guns is not going to fix the inner city just as the War on Drugs didn’t. Rigid law enforcement can keep the numbers down, but does not deal with the causes of the violence.

As Say Uncle puts it, “Gun Control – what you do instead of something.”

They’re not interested in making us safer, they’re intent on disarming us.  Newtown just presented another opportunity to try.

Remember that Sultan Knish Piece…

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…The Closing of the Liberal Mind that I took a QotD from on Tuesday? Here’s another:

As a scientist, you formulate a conclusion that will lead to a healthier society, and then you build a hypothesis around it, and then you declare it to be science. Your science, like your journalism, consists of the progressive narrative that proves whatever you want it to prove, whether it’s that capitalism will melt the icebergs, homosexuality is genetically fixed or oil is about to run out. Scientific objectivity has no more meaning to you than it did to the Caliph who torched the Library of Alexandria. If science is worth anything, then it’s progressive. And if it doesn’t, then it’s worthless.

And PowerLine has a recent example of exactly that.

Of course, the whole history of gun control is an example of exactly that, but….

“STOP DIGGING!”

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Reader Phil B., the Brit expat now living in Middle Earth, sent me a link to a wall-o’-text essay,  Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell, by one Scott Alexander. Aside from being a tremendous source for Quotes of the Day, it’s an absolutely outstanding piece of work I cannot recommend strongly enough.

But it is, absolutely, an überpost. Get a beverage and a snack before you sit down to savor it. Excerpt:

Reaction isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s not suggesting there’s a secret campaign for organized repression. To steal an example from the other side of the aisle, it’s positing something more like patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn’t have an actual Patriarch coordinating men in their efforts to keep down women. It’s just that when lots of people share some really strong cultural norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas. And Western society just happens to have a really strong progressivist immune system ready to gobble you up if you say anything insufficiently progressive.

And so the main difference between modern liberal democracy and older repressive societies is that older societies repressed things you liked, but modern liberal democracies only repress things you don’t like. Having only things you don’t like repressed looks from the inside a lot like there being no repression at all.

The good Catholic in medieval Spain doesn’t feel repressed, even when the Inquisition drags away her neighbor. She feels like decent people have total freedom to worship whichever saint they want, total freedom to go to whatever cathedral they choose, total freedom to debate who the next bishop should be – oh, and thank goodness someone’s around to deal with those crazy people who are trying to damn the rest of us to Hell.

And that’s just for openers. Go. Read.

It Worked for Caleb

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Dunkin’ Donuts worker stops robbery — with hot coffee

When a man tried to rob a Dunkin’ Donuts in Connecticut on Saturday night, an employee acted quickly and stopped him with the closest weapon available — hot coffee.

The attempted robbery happened shortly after 11 p.m. at a Dunkin’ Donuts in West Haven, when a man pulled up to the drive-through and asked the clerk for change for a $100 bill, according to Sgt. David Tammaro, of the West Haven Police Department.

When the clerk refused to make the change, the man said this was a robbery and tried to climb through the drive-through window, police said.That is when the clerk threw hot coffee in man’s face, police said.

The man fled the area in a newer model white Ford Explorer without stealing anything, according to a news release from police.

When a man tried to mug Caleb a few years ago, he got a hot cup of Starbucks in his face, with the same result.

Which resulted in this coffee mug:

photo Claymoremug.jpg

Quote of the Day – Sultan Knish Edition

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Via email from Unix Jedi:

But now you are a liberal in 2013 and the society is already very liberal. You are the product of liberal professors who learned at the feet of other liberal professors for 3 or 4 generations. You grew up in a liberal community to parents whose grandparents were already singing red campfire songs. Like them, you came of age as a member of a natural elite.

The newspapers you read, the textbooks you studied, the movies you watch, the professors who taught you and every adult you grew up with all reflect your point of view. You have no sense of being marginalized or out of step. Nor do you have any sense that there is another point of view out there. Only ranks of ignorant teabaggers paid for by corporate money who are about to be swept away into the dustbin of history as soon as the multicultural youth of tomorrow put together another Hip-Hop Against AIDS protest.

You live in a bubble and you see no need for an open society or for maintaining the integrity of institutions such as journalism or the scientific community. The very idea of objectivity is at odds with your entire way of thinking because it presumes that there is some higher truth than the one propounded by the progressive reality-based community. And you know, with the casual faith of any born believer, that this is not possible.

Read the whole thing.

Violent and Predatory vs. Violent but Protective

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A couple of months ago, while attending a play group with my four-year-old son and one-year-old daughter, another little two-year-old girl lashed out and hit another child. Her mother, ripe with indignation, swept the girl into her arms and scolded, “No! It is NEVER okay to hit people.”

My skin crawled. The scenarios flowed through my head and I couldn’t restrain myself.

“Would you tell her that if she was being abducted?” I asked.

The mother stopped and blinked a few times and then stuttered, “Well… that’s different.”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “But you just told her that it was never okay to hit people. That’s not entirely true. There are times it’s okay to hit people and to hit them hard.”

That’s from Limatunes’ Range Diary, Yes, My Son, It Is Okay To Hit People. Read the whole thing.  Good mom.

Quote of the Day – Culture War Edition

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Publicola has written an excellent piece, Resolve, that I strongly recommend you read.  Today’s QotD comes from it:

We have to be more determined than our enemies, but our focus does not have to be on them exclusively, or rather not on who we think our enemies are. Bluntly, our enemy isn’t flesh and blood – that’s just a manifestation. Our enemy is the idea that our culture is not worth saving. Our enemy is the notion that our culture can compromise on its values. Our enemy is the practice of appeasement.