Hey, Democrats! We need you to get your act together!

It’s now just a bit over a month since Election Day, and I’m starting to be seriously concerned about the possibility that the U.S. might become a one-party democracy.

Therefore this is an open letter to Democrats; the country needs you to get your act together. Yes, ideally I personally would prefer your place in the two-party Duverger equilibrium to be taken by the Libertarian Party, but there are practical reasons this is extremely unlikely to happen. The other minor parties are even more doomed. If the Republicans are going to have a counterpoise, it has to be you Democrats.

Donald Trump’s victory reads to me like a realignment election, a historic break with the way interest and demographic groups have behaved in the U.S. in my lifetime. Yet, Democrats, you so far seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Indeed, if I were Donald Trump I would be cackling with glee at your post-election behavior, which seems ideally calculated to lock Trump in for a second term before he has been sworn in for the first.

Stop this. Your country needs you. I’m not joking and I’m not concern-trolling. The wailing and the gnashing of teeth and the denial of reality have to end. In the rest of this essay I’m not going to talk about right and wrong and ideology, I’m going to talk about the brutal practical politics of what you have to do to climb out of the hole you are in.

We need to start with an unsparing assessment of that hole.

First, your ability to assemble a broad-based national coalition has collapsed. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise by your popular vote “win”; that majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex and disguises a large-scale collapse in popular support everywhere else in the U.S. Trump even achieved 30-40% support in blue states where he didn’t spend any money.

County-by-county psephological maps show that your base is now confined to two major coastal enclaves and a handful of university towns. Only 4 of 50 states have both a Democratic-controlled legislature and a Democratic governor. In 2018 that regionalization is going to get worse, not better; you will be defending 25 seats in areas where Trump took the popular vote, while the Republicans have to defend only 8 where Clinton won.

Your party leadership is geriatric, decades older than the average for their Republican counterparts. Years of steady losses at state level, masked by the personal popularity of Barack Obama, have left you without a bench to speak of – little young talent and basically no seasoned Presidential timber under retirement age. The fact that Joseph Biden, who will be 78 for the next Election Day, is being seriously mooted as the next Democratic candidate, speaks volumes – none of them good.

Your ideological lock on the elite media and show business has flipped from a powerful asset to a liability. Trump campaigned against that lock and won; his tactics can be and will be replicated. Worse, a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night.

Your donor advantage didn’t help either. Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost.

Your “coalition of the ascendant” is sinking. Tell all the just-so stories you like, but the brute fact is that it failed to turn out to defeat the Republican candidate with the highest negatives in history. You thought all you had to do was wait for the old white men to die, but anybody who has studied the history of immigration in the U.S. could have told you that the political identities of immigrant ethnic groups do not remain stable as they assimilate. You weren’t going to own the Hispanics forever any more than you owned the Irish and the Italians forever. African-Americans, trained by decades of identity politics, simply failed to show up for a white candidate in the numbers you needed. The sexism card didn’t play either, as a bare majority of married women who actually went to the polls seem to have voted for Trump.

But your worst problem is less tangible. Trump has popped the preference-falsification bubble. The conservative majority in most of the U.S. (coastal enclaves excepted) now knows it’s a conservative majority. Before the election every pundit in sight pooh-poohed the idea that discouraged conservative voters, believing themselves isolated and powerless, had been sitting out several election cycles. But it turned out to be true, not least where I live in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where mid-state voters nobody knew were there put Trump over the top. Pretty much the same thing happened all through the Rust Belt.

That genie isn’t going to be stuffed back in the bottle. Those voters now know they can deliver the media and the coastal elites a gigantic fuck-you, and Republicans know the populist techniques to mobilize them to do that. Trump’s playbook was not exactly complicated.

Some Democrats are beginning to talk, tentatively, about reconnecting to the white working class. But your real problem is larger; you need to make the long journey back to the political center. Not the center you imagine exists, either; that’s an artifact of your media bubble. I’m pointing at the actual center revealed by psephological analysis of voter preferences.

That center is far to the right of what you would prefer. For that matter it is rather to the right of where I would prefer – but facts are facts and denying them isn’t going to help. You Democrats need to think about what it takes to be competitive on a continuum where Fox News is barely right of center, Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch liberal, and as near as I could tell the politician who actually nailed the psephological center in 2008 was none other than Sarah Palin.

If you do not do this thing, you will continue to lose.

Again, I emphasize that I am not issuing an ideological prescription here. I am not arguing in this essay that the present Democratic platform and strategy is wrong in an abstract moral sense, but rather that that it has become suicidal practical politics. Trump has dynamited almost every connection it had to winning elections, and smarter Republicans than Trump will take the lesson going forward.

Before I get to suggesting some changes, I want to point out that the results of the dominance Republicans have already achieved are going to make your problems even worse than they look now. Those problems don’t end with not having a farm team. State-level control means the Republicans will largely determine redistricting in the 2020 census. Their ability to pass voter-ID laws will surely hurt you as well.

I also need to point out that you shouldn’t count on Republican failure to save you. Yes, I know Democrats tell themselves Republican “hard right” policy actually implemented will alienate so many voters that they’ll come running back to your party. But you also thought Hillary was inevitable and how did that work out for ya? Trump’s popularity has risen as his program becomes clearer. You need to be positioned so that you can cope with outcomes other than catastrophic disenchantment with Trumpian populism.

So, what can you do?

The most obvious thing is that you have to stop contemptuously dismissing the largest single demographic segment of the American electorate. Because believe me, they noticed. So did their wives and children.

This has larger implications than you may yet understand. It’s not just that you need to take any Democrat who uses the phrase “angry white men” out to the woodshed and beat him or her with a strap until he/she wises up. The whole apparatus of racial and ethnic identity politics is turning in your hand, reversing (like your old-media dominance) from an asset to a liability.

(Just to drive the point home, the gender card doesn’t work any more either. Trump is a feminist’s worst nightmare. He won anyway. He came close enough to winning the entire female vote to trigger bitter post-election denunciations of American women in general by feminists – which pretty much epitomizes the sort of reaction that isn’t going to help you.)

Your best plausible case is that the minority groups you counted on passively fail to add up to a winning coalition in the future, as they did this cycle. Your worst – and increasingly likely – case is that white people now begin voting as something like an ethnic bloc. This is, after all, how you’ve been teaching other ethnic groups to play the game since the 1960s.

You will not prevent this development by screaming “racism!”. Here’s a hot tip: people you dismiss as retrograde scum will not, in general, vote for you. In fact, one of the things you Democrats most urgently need to do is banish “racism” and “sexism” from your political vocabulary.

While these words point at some real problems, they are also a trap. They lead you to organize your political pitch around virtue-signaling, exclusion and demonization. That, in turn, can be successful (though repulsive) politics when it’s used against a minority to mobilize a majority or plurality. But you’re in the opposite situation now. You were trapped by your own privilege theory. You demonized a plurality of American voters, and in return they gave you Trump.

If you continue to do this, you will lose.

It is irrelevant whether an actual plurality of American voters actually are as racist and sexist as you think. They don’t think they are, and they’re fed up with being hectored about it. This isn’t 1965, and your ability to tap into a substratum of guilt by white people who deep down know they were in the wrong is gone. What that same move brings up now is resentment.

Speaking of virtue signaling, another thing you need to give up is focusing on peacock issues (like, say, transgender rights) while ignoring pocketbook problems like the hollowing out of middle-class employment.

Again, this advice has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of individual peacock issues and more with a general sense that the elites are fiddling while Rome burns. For the first time since records have been kept, U.S. life expectancy went down during the Obama years, led by a disturbing rise in suicides and opiate addiction among discouraged unemployed in flyover country. A Democratic Party that fails to address that while it screws around with bathroom-law boycotts is willfully consigning itself to irrelevance.

Many of Trump’s “pro-working-class” policies are objectively terrible; a new wave of trade protectionism is, for example, bound to have dire long-term consequences. But that doesn’t matter, in a political competitive sense, until you Democrats have something to answer him with.

Right now, you have nothing. You have less than nothing, because your instinctive solution repels the Trump plurality. They don’t want welfare, they want jobs and dignity and a modicum of respect. (And, just as a reminder, not to be dismissed as retrograde racists and sexists.)

Now we need to talk about guns.

This is a more particular issue than I’ve touched so far, but it’s one that cuts straight to the heart of the self-alienation of the Democratic Party from the political center.

Again, I’m not going to address the rights and wrongs of gun policy here, just its practical political ramifications. A quarter century ago Bill Clinton – who is as shrewd a practical politician as has ever operated in the U.S. – warned his fellow Democrats that pushing gun control was a sure way to lose more voters than it gained. They ignored his advice and got shellacked in the 1994 elections.

Today voter support for personal firearms rights is at an unprecedented high. This is revealed both in polls and in the wave of state-level liberalizations of concealed-carry laws. One of Trump’s most popular first-hundred-days promises is nationwide concealed-carry reciprocity. From the fact that gun control was slow party suicide in 1994 we can deduce that it’s even worse practical politics today.

And yet, the Democratic Party line is still hostile to gun rights, and less than six months ago its leaders and captive pundits were talking up Australian-style gun confiscation.

If you continue to do this, you will lose.

The Democratic line on gun policy is a perfect symbol of everything that has become disconnected about the party. It reads as corrosive disrespect for middle-Americans who like their firearms, think of themselves as a nation of armed citizens rather than cowering subjects, and use their guns responsibly. It reeks of class warfare, urban elites against flyover-country proles. It’s disempowering, not empowering. It is, in short, a perfect focus for anti-Democratic populist anger.

Here’s what I’ve been building up to:

You Democrats don’t just need to reform your gun policy, you need to reform your attitude towards the voters to a place from which your present policy looks as vicious and absurd as it does to them.

You Democrats don’t just need to reform your rhetoric about racism and sexism, you need to reform your attitude towards the voters to a place from which your present rhetoric looks as vicious and absurd as it does to them.

It’s all of a piece. You’ve forgotten how to be the party of the people. Trump was the price of that forgetfulness. Now, you need to relearn it, for all our sakes.

The alternative is that something like the Republicans, or possibly worse, dominates American politics for the foreseeable future. I don’t want that, and you should fear it more than I do.

So get your act together now.

1,398 comments

  1. On a related note, the Democrats’ current claims about the looming catastrophe of a Trump presidency (Fascist! Racist!) are going to do real and lasting harm to their credibility when he ends up being merely incompetent (at worst) rather than evil.

    1. >On a related note, the Democrats’ current claims about the looming catastrophe of a Trump presidency (Fascist! Racist!) are going to do real and lasting harm to their credibility when he ends up being merely incompetent (at worst) rather than evil.

      To quote Douglas Adams: “There is another theory which states this has already occurred.”

  2. I might be wrong, but it appears that you’re saying that Liberals need to *stop being liberals*.

    Do you think the problem is the policy platform and views, or just the implementation of them?

    Cause it’s all well and good to say the country’s shifted to the right, but unless you’re willing to back it up with “and that’s good because Conservative policies are inherently better”, then your argument is weak, and if don’t think that, then why should the left track there?

    1. >I might be wrong, but it appears that you’re saying that Liberals need to *stop being liberals*.

      If your notion of “liberal” is so opposed to what can win elections, it doesn’t matter what I think about the rights and wrongs; you need to stop being that.

      If your notion of “liberal” is so tied to constant accusations of racism and sexism directed at people who have no such intention, than yes, you need to stop being liberals.

      If your notion of “liberal” is so tied to hoplophobia, than yes, you need to stop being liberals.

      But it’s me not making the choice to tie these things together, it’s you.

      Don’t try to make this about what I want; other than my premise that we need a healthy opposition party, I wasn’t writing from my personal political desires.

      >Cause it’s all well and good to say the country’s shifted to the right,

      I’m not even sure that’s true. I think our intelligentsia see it that way because they took a crazy jog in the other direction 50-60 years ago.

  3. So how do I reply to that, from the left, Hank? “I hope he blows up the fuckin’ world, just to prove you wrong”?

  4. The parallels with Britain’s Labour party (with Bill Clinton as Tony Blair, Brexit as Trump, and no shortage of candidates for Corbyn) are hard to miss.

  5. I don’t think the politics has anywhere as much to do with it as pure charisma and demagoguery.

    Trump is politically essentially incompetent, but knows how to play to an audience and a TV camera better than HRC, so pulled a win. There was essentially no discussion of issues for the duration of the campaign: it was all personality politics, which HRC, as a well known wonk, was destined to lose. Another Obama might’ve pulled it out.

    That said, I agree about the Dem leadership and backbench – for a progressive party they sure don’t seem to trust their young people very much. If they did, they might’ve listened to them and run Sanders instead of HRC.

  6. The problem is the Democratic party is converged (SJWs always lie, Vox Day also explains it on the universities: https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/12/shut-down-universities.html )

    The Democrats are for destroying Christian bakeries and transgender locker-rooms. Gay marriage, which was moving slowly but democratically was shoved down the country’s throat and Brendan Eich (I type on the Brave browser) was purged. Most Democrats cheered.

    California just passed more tough gun restrictions. And New York Bloomberg is trying to push it in other states. Cheering in CA, but also an exodus.
    Polarization – red areas are getting redder, blue areas bluer.

    Trump was not a token resistance polite loser cuckservative like Romney. Neither was Ron Paul, but the CuckOldParty machine crushed him.

    But note the reaction of the left. NotMyPresident. Mess with the electoral college. That’s SJW full converged shrieking and virtue signalling.

  7. Plentiful 22 ammo is back on the shelves at gun stores. It’s not as cheap as it was, but my vote for Trump is justified. The Pat Moynihan plan, implemented by Obama, to choke off the Second Amendment by bureaucratic stealth has been stood off for now. It wasn’t as bad for America as when Pat Moynihan and Ralph Nader broke Detroit, but I’m glad it’s gone for now. Politicians who bring it back will be punished. Politicians who weasel will be on the internet forever. Any politician who holds hearings to track the guilty bureaucrats will be rewarded.

    Before the Hillary campaign staked its credibility on Alicia Machado’s good character, I’m sure there were staffers who checked Wikipedia, saw her narco-mafia gun moll background, and watched her sex tapes. But speaking up would have been career suicide. They would have been admitting a lack of faith in the narrative. Pious fraud works great for loyalty testing. I don’t see the D party losing the habit in my lifetime.

  8. Put differently, the effect will be to split CA amd create Jefferson, and WA to produce Liberty, two more red states.

    Democrats are still pushing things that are making WI, MI, OH, PA go from 48% red to 52% red because it makes NY and CA go from 60% blue to 65% blue.

    It was already visible. WI -Scott Walker, right to work, joined by MI Snyder. Even OH with the cucky Kasich. All GOP. With Jerry Brown in CA and two Democrats rinning off for Senator.

    Montana’s (conservative) incumbent Democrat governor won with 50.2% – I.e. almost lost. There are conservative Democrats here in flyover country but they are anathema to the costal elites.

  9. “and I’m starting to be seriously concerned about the possibility that the U.S. might become a one-party democracy.”

    Scrap the Democracy part. It has become progressively more difficult for potentially Democratic voters to cast a vote:
    http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/12/13/while-democrats-chase-russians-republicans-keep-rigging-elections

    I know no “Democracy” where voters have to wait 6 hours in line to vote (but they did so in Zimbabwe).
    http://www.vox.com/presidential-election/2016/11/6/13542680/there-are-4000-people-in-a-half-mile-voting-line-in-cincinnati-today-this-isn-t-okay

    This is even without considering gerrymandering.

  10. Back when George W. Bush won his first term in office, I watched the shock and hooror and disbelief among my Democrat friends, as they tried to grasp what happened.

    From my viewpoint, it was simple. The Republicans had traditionally been the party of the Haves, trying to preserve and increase the slice of the economic pie they held. The Democrats had been the party of the Have-nots, trying to get a slice of the pie.

    But time had passed, the economy had expanded, and many traditionally Democratic voters realized they now had a slice of the pie and became concerned with preserving it, with taxes a notable hot button. The Republican pitch appealed to them and they switched. I don’t believe either party has fully understood this change.

    When Bush left office at the end of his second term, and Barack Obama took over, I tried to tell folks “Barack Obama did not win because he was Barack Obama. He won because he wasn’t George W. Bush.” His election was a rejection by the electorate of the policies of the Bush administration and what the Republican party had become.

    Fast forward 8 years, and Donald Trump is President, precisely because he isn’t Barack Obama. Hilary Clinton didn’t lose because she was a woman, ran a flawed campaign, or was the person demonized by her opponents. She lost because the electorate lost confidence in the Democratic Party and its agenda.

    A recent book here is “The Myth of the Rational Voter.” The premise is that the real problem with American democracy is precisely that elected officials try to give the voters what they think they want. But what the voters say they want and what they actually need tend to be rather different things, and trying to give them what they want leads to efforts that are mutually contradictory and well meaning attempts to do things that simply can’t be done.

    I think both parties need to get their act together, and recognize the nature of the world in which they currently live. And I think both need to develop leaders, who are capable of telling consituents “What you say you want simply can’t be done, so stop asking. Here are things that can be done, and this is how they will benefit you. Follow me!”

    That will be profoundly disruptive, and the nature of both parties will end to prevent it, so I’m not laying any bets on it occurring.

    >Dennis

  11. The current Democrat in the running to become head of the DNC is Keith Ellison, a radical black Muslim from Minnesota who was at one time a member of the Nation of Islam. I pray to Allah that he’s appointed, as it would all but guarantee their losses going forward.

    I’m one of those spooky evil alt-right supporters the media keeps harping on about – historically speaking, countries with a preponderance of whites or Asians are successful, while countries that don’t possess those demographic groups are unsuccessful. Demography is destiny. When I realized that the Left is trying to en masse import poorly educated minorities to act as voter ‘shock troops’ against conservative whites, I really flipped. Not to mention the intergenerational albatross they’re going to place on the American taxpayer, and the social cost they’re going to inflict in terms of a divided culture and lower national IQ (Jason Richwine from Harvard had a good paper on this – it even got him fired by an SJW lynch mob).

    I grew up in a very white area of the country and remember there being high levels of social trust, low crime, and a general esprit de corps and happiness in the community. You could leave your door unlocked and be reasonably certain that nobody could come and steal your belongings. I’ve since lived in a lot of different places, and can say with reasonable certainty that the more diverse an area is, the less people trust each other/are engaged in civic life. Robert Putnam (also Harvard) has some great research on this, which he always presents with about 10 minutes of handwringing about the importance of egalitarian values to satisfy the anxieties of his presumably liberal audience.

  12. I think when Trump is opposed by republicans, he should take his followers in mass and switch to the democratic party. After a great shuffling, we will have two viable parties again.

  13. “…when he ends up being merely incompetent (at worst) rather than evil.”

    Incompetent is worse than evil. An evil president-elect wouldn’t blunder closer to a war with China than we’ve ever been before even putting his hand within a mile of a bible.

    I’m not 100% sure there’s even going to be a 2018.

  14. I think your worries are baseless. The “Era of Good Feeling” and the collapse of the Whigs in the run-up to the Civil War suggest to me that if the Democrats succeed in making themselves irrelevant they will disappear as a political party, and the Republicans will fission into conservatives and populists, or pragmatists and purists, or along some other plane of cleavage.

  15. The premise of the article is false. The Democrats are still in power and they are still winning. All the demographic trends are against the Republicans and in favour of the Democrats. Being the Anti-White Party still becomes more powerful each cycle. Trump is a blip caused by more American whites realising that they are facing an Anti-White Party, leading to consolidation of the white vote, but the trend is still toward the total white vote, and total historical Republican demographic vote, becoming a strict minority in the United States in the very near future.

    The Democrats will need to rethink their strategy if Trump actually reverses dysgenic immigration and dysgenic fertility in the United States in a way that seems like it cannot be overturned in 2-3 terms. That is very unlikely to happen. What is more likely is that Trump will delay the US becoming a one party state by 10-20 years (this will look like Jeb Bush becoming the extreme right of the Republicans, rather than a literal one party state; there is always space for two figureheads saying the same thing).

  16. Spot on, esr, but one slight error: the 25/8 Senate races in 2018 are simply the respective party seats up for grabs, but are not all in states where the other party took the popular vote.

    anon-to-avoid-the-crap: I don’t know what election you watched, but there were plenty of issues discussed, including Trump’s winning issue: immigration.

    Winter: Oh, please. A secure voting system with IDs is a basic requirement for fair elections, not a sign that Republicans are “rigging” elections. It’s a fantasy that there are significant numbers of eligible voters who cannot get IDs. It’s nearly impossible to live in modern America without photo ID. A post-ID drop in black and Hispanic voting probably measures a drop in fraudulent votes.

    Your example of a long voting line in a city controlled by Democrats is similarly absurd to blame on Republicans.

    As for gerrymandering, it’s totally bipartisan. Democrats loved it and used it to (e.g.) create “majority minority” districts they would always win, and now whine about it when it turns out to have an inevitable side effect that hurts them.

  17. >> a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night.

    Hey! how you dare lecture them! do you have an idea how hard they worked to screw their fellow countrymen?

    They find themselves in a hole they dug themselves in with sweat and blood, they worked on it night and day, some recognition please!

  18. PapayaSF: those majority-minority districts aren’t just Democrat gerrymandering. They’re actually required by the Voting Rights Act, in a part that did not get struck down.

  19. Jay Maynard: Correct, that part of the Voting Rights Act is one way they used gerrymandering to their advantage.

  20. “Their ability to pass voter-ID laws will surely hurt you as well.”

    Is this a tacit admission that Democrats rely on voter fraud to win elections? Because the only people that voter-ID laws actually stop from voting are (1) dead people, and (2) criminal aliens. Both of which are heavily-Democratic constituencies (heh), and neither of which are actually entitled to vote in U.S. elections.

    This video by Ami Horowitz illustrates how ridiculous the opposition to voter-ID laws sounds. Horowitz visits the UC campus in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, and asks a bunch of white liberal kids about why voter ID laws are bad. Their answers are things like, “black people don’t have ID, they don’t know where to go to get ID, they can’t access the Internet to use that to get ID, and oh, most of them are felons so they wouldn’t be able to vote anyway if they had ID.” Gee, don’t those attitudes sound mighty…racist?

    Well, then Horowitz goes to Harlem, and asks some actual black people what they think about what those white liberal kids said. Their reaction is pretty dumbfounded. Of course they have ID. They know where the DMV is, and how to get there, to get ID. They have Internet access, including through smartphones and tablets, and they know how to use it. They don’t mind having to show ID to vote. And, when hearing what those white liberals think about the issue, they’re…not impressed.

    1. >Is this (“Their ability to pass voter-ID laws will surely hurt you as well.”) a tacit admission that Democrats rely on voter fraud to win elections?

      I left that ambiguous quite deliberately. It doesn’t matter whether your theory is “Voter ID laws suppress Democratic constituencies” or “Voter ID laws keep illegals from voting”. My opinion on this is irrelevant to the point at issue.

      Either way, the Republican lock on most state legislatures mean that voter-ID laws will be passed and will hurt the Democrats. This is a reality they have to deal with by broadening their appeal.

  21. And the new version of ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ is… ‘neonazi’ – a term which, through abuse and overuse, is becoming meaningless and therefore useless. For an analog, see antibiotic resistance. Should the real thing present, the label-tool will be too rusty to be of any value in fighting it.

  22. Is this a tacit admission that Democrats rely on voter fraud to win elections?

    No, it’s an admission that Republicans rely on excluding the poor and minorities to win elections.

    Even if voter IDs are free, if you’re working three jobs just to keep food and a roof you don’t have the time or money to get the documentation together to get a voter ID. Voter ID laws should be recognized for what they are: a form of unconstitutional poll tax.

    1. Now that is a lame sounding way to bolster the democrats, No”ID to vote issue”.We need to do something to confirm that voters do posses the right to vote.ID everyone.

  23. “… if you’re working three jobs just to keep food and a roof you don’t have the time or money to get the documentation together to get a voter ID.”

    Then maybe that’s the problem we need to be addressing…that people shouldn’t need to “[work] three jobs just to keep food and a roof.”

  24. Jeff Read: Wrong. You need a photo ID to drive a car, open a bank account, fly on an airplane, buy liquor, collect welfare, and countless other things. The idea that someone is “working three jobs,” and is an eligible voter, but can’t get a legal ID, is absurd.

    Some years ago a very old black women without an ID was used by anti-ID people as a prop. They took her to register to vote, expecting that she would be denied because she did not even have a birth certificate. Well, the state office (PA, IIRC) used other ways to confirm her identity, she got her ID, and that lawsuit was stopped in its tracks. Oops!

    The fact is that the US has the least secure voting system in the developed world. Even Mexico has a more secure system. E.g. California gives driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, and relies on an honor system when it asks them if they would also like to register to vote.

  25. The Democrats are still in power and they are still winning. All the demographic trends are against the Republicans and in favour of the Democrats.

    On the first part, well, uh … what definitions of “in power” (beyond “yes, haven’t left office yet since it’s still December”, but that’s inevitable and irrelevant) and “winning” do you mean, and can you connect them to the real extant world?

    On the demographic trends, note that Eric mentioned the actually true thing that there is no inevitability of demographic mapping to party membership; there’s no law of nature that black people and hispanics and women must prefer Progressive/Democrat policies.

    Indeed, note as elsewhere that Trump did better among non-white voters than “generic Republican”.

    Tell me again that “all the demographic trends” solely favor Democrats, and then explain how each one actually is so, and how the Democrats own those voters forever, and exactly how they do so?

    Because I don’t see any of it.

  26. esr:

    Thank you for another interesting piece. And now, the corrections:

    > Yet, Democrats, you so far seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

    Did you mean “…forgotten everything“?

    > Tell all the just-so stories you like, but the brute fact it failed to turn out to defeat the Republican candidate with the highest negatives in history.

    Did you mean “…the brute fact is that it failed…”?

    > …who is as shrewd a practical politician as has every operated in the U.S.

    Did you mean “…has ever operated…”?

    And in a comment you wrote “than yes” (instead of “then yes”) and “…it’s me not making the choice…” (I think it should be “not me” rather than “me not”, but I’m not sure; after all, there’s “forget me not” and the like).

  27. Because I don’t see any of it.

    While he is at it I would like him to address the fact that the left has lost several (all?) of it’s major engagements recently.

    And the fact that they appear to be utterly incapable of making an effective counterattack.

  28. Ugh, sorry for double post. Forgot this point:

    @ESR

    As someone upthread mentioned, you are severely underestimating the degree to which the various factions of the “conservative” movement would be tearing each others guts out with their bare hands if it weren’t for the common enemy.

    Just the fault lines between the National Defense / Evangelical / Libertarian factions contain enough energy to destroy the movement.

  29. I’m not surprised that you brought up guns, given your position on them, and think you have a point there. But I wonder what you think about abortion. As social conservatives like Ross Douthat have pointed out, most people have pretty mixed positions on the issue, favoring something like relatively open access early in the first trimester and increasingly fast and tight restrictions as the first trimester closes and the fetus proceeds to viability. The Democratic party, on the other hand, has taken a hard tack to the left, even adding the repeal of the Hyde amendment to their platform. Their platform is probably always going to leave little to no room for pro-lifers like myself, but on the other hand, a lot of pro-lifers-like-myself took a look at the terrain in 2008 and somehow managed to vote for Obama (who is pretty radically pro-choice) based in part on the olive branches and understanding he offered such folks (I’m thinking in particular of a story he told about a doctor who wrote to him and convinced him to remove some anti-pro-life boilerplate from his website).

  30. @FooQuuxman

    I think you’re right, but what does the timeframe look like? Does the democratic party slowly wither into irrelevance over 20 years, or is it over-night? Does the GOP tear itself to shreds all at once when the Democratic bogeyman is crushed, or does that take a decade or more? How big are the resulting parties? Does it give a supermajority to a coalition between Evangelicals + National defense faction, whilst the libertarian become a small second party, having the existing ex-Democrats form a third?

    I’m not saying ESR’s right about his preference for a stronger Democratic party as a counter to unchecked GOP power, but it’s certainly a reasonable position

  31. “I am not arguing in this essay that the present Democratic platform and strategy is wrong in an abstract moral sense,”

    Don’t pull your punches. Any party that predicates that those supporting it are upstanding and right and those opposing it are abject racists based on the execrable lie of “white privilege” is completely immoral bullshit.

    The Dems need to find some morality as well to adequately reform their party. They’re already coming off like blistering fascists in the wake of this defeat.

  32. > the execrable lie of “white privilege”

    I actually read something recently that made me think of a really good analogy.

    “”” The Tea Partiers’ deep story goes something like this: They see themselves standing in the middle of a long line going up the hill of the American dream. The line isn’t moving, or is doing so very slowly. But these people are patient and work hard to get ahead. They are willing to endure hardship, including losing their homes to polluters, because they believe that through hard work, they will eventually move forward. But as a result of the actions of the federal government, people in the back of the line—minorities, immigrants, the poor—are allowed to cut ahead of the hard-working Tea Partiers. “””

    That’s not really, per se, a bad way to see the world. It’s simplistic, but analogies often are. But, the thing I realized is – within that analogy, the thing liberals refer to as “white privilege” is nothing more than the fact that somehow, the descendants of the – undeniably openly racist – white people of centuries gone by have managed to get all the spots further ahead in line in first place.

  33. Sigivald: Note Trump’s recent meetings with Jim Brown and Kanye West. They seem convinced that Trump is a good guy, sincerely concerned about black Americans. If Trump can get the black GOP vote from about 8% to about 25%, the Democrats will find it extremely difficult to win national elections.

  34. “On the first part, well, uh … what definitions of “in power” (beyond “yes, haven’t left office yet since it’s still December”, but that’s inevitable and irrelevant) and “winning” do you mean, and can you connect them to the real extant world?”

    Their policies continue to be enacted; the net effect of policies enacted is to strengthen their electoral position over time; the permanent bureaucracy openly obstructs the merely elected government in its attempts to stop and reverse Democrat policies, and implement its own policies.

    When the net effect of policies is to reduce Democrat demographics over time and expand Republican, and who controls the elected branches doesn’t much alter these policies, and if the elected branches try to alter them the bureaucracy closes ranks and obstructs them, THEN the Democrats are out of power, rather than just out of office.

    “On the demographic trends, note that Eric mentioned the actually true thing that there is no inevitability of demographic mapping to party membership; there’s no law of nature that black people and hispanics and women must prefer Progressive/Democrat policies.”

    There is no inevitability in terms of *party membership*. What happens is that the Overton Window shifts leftwards, and both parties shift leftwards. Sure, Catholics vote Republican. And the Republicans now enthusiastically endorse the Progressive administrative state for which Catholics voted.

    “Indeed, note as elsewhere that Trump did better among non-white voters than “generic Republican”.”

    By some irrelevantly tiny margin.

    “Tell me again that “all the demographic trends” solely favor Democrats, and then explain how each one actually is so, and how the Democrats own those voters forever, and exactly how they do so?

    “Because I don’t see any of it.”

    America is becoming a low IQ, low future orientation country by genetic displacement.

  35. The election was close in some ways, which makes it hard to be sure about which factors were crucial.

    https://niskanencenter.org/blog/defense-liberty-cant-without-identity-politics/

    I recommend the link– I’ll note that the sanctions against Cuba were not consistent with libertarian principles, but the people who got the sanctions lifted were people who cared about Cubans (some Cubans, probably the majority, but there are pro-sanction Cubans, perhaps especially in the US), not libertarians.

    This being said, I’ve seen leftists reacting in a bunch of ways ranging from blaming one group or another of their own for not trying hard enough, doing bunch-of-factors overviews, and telling each other to quit looking for people on their own side to blame. There is, of course, a lot of blaming people who voted for Trump and/or didn’t vote for Clinton.

    People who didn’t vote at all get blamed less, mostly. This is interesting mostly because of the pressure to vote before the election.

    ““Elections are won not by converting the opposition but by getting out your own vote, and Scudder’s organization did just that. According to histories I studied at Boondock, the election of 2012 turned out 63 percent of the registered voters (which in turn was less than half of those eligible to register); the True American party (Nehemiah Scudder) polled 27 percent of the popular vote… which won 81 percent of the Electoral College votes.”

    “In 2016 there was no election.”

    –Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, 1987”

    I agree with you about gun control– that it’s alienates a lot of people from the Democrats. I’ve talked with some of them about it, and it seems like it’s so much an identity issue for them that it would be hard for them to give it up.

    PapayaSF, do you have a link for that story?

  36. I have always felt that one party states lead to despair, dread, and death for populations that are subjugated to them.

    Most of my life I have been a conservative leaning libertarian. Never has the Democrat party resonated with me on nearly any issue outside of certain civil rights and first amendment concerns. Concerns, notably, that the modern incarnation of the Democrats have thrown in the trash and burned.

    But I do not want a one party state, even from the party I support. A mindful opposition is Always needed.

    The Dems have been unfaithful in that as well. After Obama’s win in 2008 they took it upon themselves to use the filibuster proof majority to rule as if they had just been handed a one party state that would last generations. Hell they even openly SAID that that was what they had achieved. They failed to notice that the American people get really damn nervous at being controlled by a one party state and the American people removed their “generational” majority after only two short years.

    The crux of the issue is that I think the Republican party thinks about governance and what it can sell the people by promising good governance, and the Democrat party now thinks about how it can rid itself of all these awful citizens that won’t willingly give in to their one party rule.

    Come to think of it, I disagree with your initial premise. The Libertarian party needs to rise, the Democrat party needs to die. And to put it in context, barring almost wholesale change the Democrats will never get a vote from me. Libertarians already have on quite a few occasions.

    So, Democrats can read you post and think about changing, (Prediction, you will be vilified by them for giving them advice) or their party can just go ahead and die.

    I’d much rather have nearly any party other than them become the faithful opposition…

  37. > Well, then Horowitz goes to Harlem, and asks some actual black people what they think about what those white liberal kids said. Their reaction is pretty dumbfounded. Of course they have ID. They know where the DMV is, and how to get there, to get ID.

    Is Harlem really the right place for such a study? (let’s pretend for a moment that it was a scientific study and not a video edited to support a conclusion) Harlem isn’t somewhere you have to go three counties over to find a DMV that’s open more than one day a week, after all. Anyway, the effect of voter ID laws isn’t to actually make it impossible for any one person who is determined to vote, to be able to vote. It’s to increase the amount of time, money, energy required, so that more people decide not to bother.

  38. “Hell they even openly SAID that that was what they had achieved. They failed to notice that the American people get really damn nervous at being controlled by a one party state”

    You don’t think that’s going to happen in 2018 to Paul Ryan’s “new era in unified government”, even if the GOP weren’t coming apart at the seams?

  39. @Jeff Read Hmmm, I’d love to know how that guy working three jobs without and ID managed to fill out the I9 form that required at least one form of ID!!!

    The ID freakout of the Democrats is pure bullshit designed to allow illegal immigrants to vote…. Period. It also allows Dem voters to vote in multiple precincts/polling places.

  40. I agree with many of your observations however the 2.8 million votes that Hillary Clinton won the popularity vote is just as significant. We had 48% vote for Hillary, 46% for Trump and 6% (rather large number for a third party) vote for somebody else.

    The story here is the geographical shift that has gone on. I agree that the Democrats and Clinton totally screwed up by not addressing the needs or concerns of the counties outside of University town and Urban area. Let poise this What If.

    Suppose the agendas of the Urban Areas and Universities continue to diverge from Rural America. What happens when their population continues to increase and now we are facing popular votes difference of more than 3 million.

    I am well aware that the founding fathers stacked the deck so to speak to make sure that Urban areas don’t dominate the political discourse. But at there is a point where the system has to give way to the will of the majority. There is no true conservative majority but it is true the overwhelming majority of the land area of the country is dominated by conservatives.

    For me, I consider myself liberatarian and believe that we need a smaller government with its power chopped up more finely between the different federal entities. I value personal freedom above everything else and while I disagree with some of the particular of the Democratic Party, I agree more with them than I do with the Republicans on that issue. In recent years I been voting Democratic because of that including this one. Well just for President, I voted Libertarian for all the State races.

    But after this election, I am going to resume voting Libertarian for everything. The power of the Federal government is such that it vulnerable to a Caesar and the only way in my opinion is to shrink it to lower the stakes of controlling it. The Libertarians are the only party to consistently advocate for that as well as champion the cause of personal freedom.

  41. Random832

    “It’s to increase the amount of time, money, energy required, so that more people decide not to bother.”

    Stupid, disorganised, uninterested people do not bother. Such people are quite common and constitute a large fraction of the Democrat (and socialister party in every country)-voting population. Which is why instead we hear about weird cases of people working three jobs, rather than the most common and plausible case of people who decide to stay at home and drink or watch daytime TV rather than getting their vote in order.

  42. @Random832

    The problem with your analogy is that many of the people screaming “White Privilege” are actually in line in way in front of the “tea party white people” in your example.

    i.e. the story from a while back about a black student on scholarship being immensely rude to a white waitress at a restaurant where she served him purely because of her skin color. She was in no way more privileged than he was, but he felt entitled to belittle her and put her down because of her skin color. That’s not calling someone to check their privilege, thats being a racist asshole.

    The whole white privilege shtick is racism pure and simple. Per ESR’s recommendations the Dems better dump it like its radioactive if they want to be able to win anything again.

  43. Eric, can you describe a scenario in which some group within the leadership of the Democratic Party reads this post and attempts to implement it’s prescriptions? Nancy Pelosi was recently re-elected as Minority Leader in the Congress and Chuck Schumer will soon be taking over for Harry Reid in the Senate. I don’t see a realistic path unless Donald Trump switches parties.

    My biggest fear is that liberal dogma has effectively become an addiction that is immune to rational discourse. In general, addicts do not change until they hit bottom or die.

  44. People who work three jobs are extremely organised, dedicated, and engaged. They may not be all that intelligent, but intelligent enough to fill out some forms, or find someone who knows how to do it and buy him a beer.

    I would bet money that the enrollment rate of people working three jobs is higher than that of the general population.

  45. @Random832 You are right on your point regarding the 2018 elections. Although I think the Democrat brand is so tarnished that it will not be involved in the pushback against the Republican dominated government.

    The fighting will be coming from inside the party. The Republican primaries of 2018 will be where the interesting political distinctions and discussions will come from. All while the Democrats will keep screaming “racist, racist, sexist, homophobe, islamophobe!!” and continue to get ignored.

  46. @Robert Conley what happens as the rural/urban constituencies drift apart is that migration in and out of areas will turn blue states more blue and red states more red. Eventually we’ll be living in essentially different countries, and shortly after that we will begin actually living in different countries.

    If the Dems keep up this divisive rhetoric and maintain their control of small regions of the country, while losing total influence in all other areas of the country, the fracturing of the union is inevitable.

  47. Jason, there is an opposing factor. People vote to make blue states blue, taxes and regulations become too high, so people leave for red states… and vote the same way. See CA to NV and OR, NY to FL, etc.

    In addition, this happens on the international level: Hispanics leaving Mexico and other screwed-up Latin American countries, and then voting for the same sorts of policies that made their home countries suck in the first place. And now Europe has Muslim migrants, too many of whom seem to want to continue the behaviors that created the same problems that they say they want to escape.

  48. I find the reference of transgender rights as a “peacock issue” interesting because I saw the exchange a different way. Transgender issues are certainly an issue I would expect the Democratic party to pick up. But the way the issue was taken up made me think they didn’t care about the object-issue and instead only cared about the symbology.

    There are many reasons people oppose transgender rights/issues. Some are flat-out objectively wrong, some are matters of opinion. One of these is that straight-cis-males may use transgender bathroom laws to go and leer at women in the opposite bathroom/changing room. This has actually been documented as having occurred. Mandating bathroom access without addressing this issue (even if to say that we think it’s less important than bathroom access) is demeaning and avoids the whole issue.

    If Obama had wanted to address the actual issue, he could have issued guidelines for new Federal building and funded school construction which required a minimum ratio of single-commode/non-specific/family/special-needs bathrooms to be constructed. This would be great for integrating those with physical disabilities who might require the assistance of a nurse, for example. And it provides an accessible bathroom for transgender students. And by focussing on new construction it eliminates the needs for massive capital expenditures while providing a standard which can be used during renovations to address those needs. But that would have been less dramatic, more effective, and wouldn’t have caused massive backlash and outrage.

  49. The democrats have existed as a dog whistle for international marxism for at least 50 years. They will never be a valid counter party to the republicans, and they will never be interested in bringing about some abstract sense of political balance.

  50. Jeff Read: every time I’ve gotten a job, I’ve had to provide two forms of ID for my tax paperwork. Who are these people working three jobs, none of which required them to provide ID?

  51. Robert Conley:

    I agree with many of your observations however the 2.8 million votes that Hillary Clinton won the popularity vote is just as significant.

    Not in a system where you don’t win by getting the majority vote and if you’re sane, you pursue Electoral College votes; as it turns out, the geniuses running Hillary’s campaign actually spent millions on getting more votes to just get more total votes in cities like New Orleans and Chicago. We cannot know how the election would have gone if both had pursued the popular vote total. E.g. how many people don’t bother to vote when they know it won’t count in their local polity?

    But at there is a point where the system has to give way to the will of the majority.

    The majority of citizens? The majority of votes including the fraudulent, which could be upwards of 10% or more? Note the others who have addressed how the current alignments are under stress or perhaps changing, are not historically stable, and how “European-Americans” are now joining the identity politics game … which alone would seriously change the rules of this already changing in this election game.

    There is no true conservative majority

    We’re certainly told by Gallup and company that many more people self-identify as “conservative” than “liberal”; maybe enough of these are No True Conservatives by your definition, but….

    The Libertarians are the only party to consistently advocate for that as well as champion the cause of personal freedom.

    This would be the same party that nominated notoriously anti-gun Bill Weld for VP, who then reminded us of that? Then again, your preference for the Democrats on “personal freedom” shows you don’t think that’s at all important to keeping it….

  52. I think that history will record the moment of Hillary’s loss as the instant when she uttered the word “deplorables”.

    Attacking your opponent is normal and expected. Attacking your opponent’s supporters is simply incompetent.

  53. I’ll agree with some of the others: I expect the Republican party to fracture and form the two main parties of the US. Note how the GOPe is coming out of their shock at the election results and starting to openly help the effort by our betters to delegitimize Trump’s victory with “The Russians Did It!” canard, including the Senate Majority Leader….

    One additional reason which I got from an essay written a few years ago that I can’t quickly find right now is that the Democrats are the party of free stuff, and the free stuff party we’ve been having on trillions of borrowed dollars is going to run out sooner or later (no predictions on when, but it seems inevitable short of a Singularity). If they can’t deliver the goods and they ignore advice like ESR’s and keep playing SJW games, as they show every sign of continuing to do, especially since it has survival power inside the party even if it externally dooms the party, why would we expect them to continue to be major contenders? Heck, they might collapse as quickly as the Whigs did given enough of an politico-economic discontinuity.

  54. @Random Observer

    Yep, I believe thats what did Hillary in too. And if the Democrats do not disavow that statement, they party will die. But, alas, they’re still running around telling people who voted for Trump how much they hate them and wish they were dead.

    ESR, the one thing you left out was the warning that the Democrats really really don’t want the Civil War that their fringe elements are clambering for so badly.

  55. ” We cannot know how the election would have gone if both had pursued the popular vote total. ”

    Yes, exactly. Trump got 30-40% of the vote in heavy “blue” states, despite basically not campaigning or spending any money at all in those states. If the rules had been different, he would have.

    Something else that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: Clinton outspent Trump by 2-1. It’s an article of faith that money is the only thing that matters in modern politics, yet Clinton lost despite spending twice as much money, and despite having the entire mainstream media trying to drag her criminal ass across the finish line.

    It is a very, very good thing for the Democratic Party that Clinton was facing Trump. If she’d been facing, say, Reagan, there simply wouldn’t be a Democratic Party any more, except perhaps as a fringe group like the Prohibition Party.

    1. >It is a very, very good thing for the Democratic Party that Clinton was facing Trump.

      Indeed it was. The next Republican populist they face is unlikely to have near-terminal foot-in-mouth disease.

    2. >Something else that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: Clinton outspent Trump by 2-1

      You know, that’s so important that I may edit the article to add it.

  56. “I think that history will record the moment of Hillary’s loss as the instant when she uttered the word “deplorables”.”

    I have a friend who almost never votes for major parties. What pushed him over the edge and turned him into aTrump voter was Lena Dunham calling for the extinction of all white men. You see, my friend has sons.

    Have the Democrats repudiated people like Dunham? Like fun they have. Obama even sent his teen daughter off to intern with that crazy bigot.

  57. >To quote Douglas Adams: “There is another theory which states this has already occurred.”

    Well, yes. Liberal/Democratic credibility has already been damaged by exaggerated criticism of Trump during this year’s campaign and other Republicans in past campaigns (producing a Cry Wolf effect that likely helped get Trump elected). The disconnect between the hysterical hyperbole of the last month and the likely reality of a Trump presidency will be more of the same – but I think the effect on credibility is likely to have a greater depth and breadth than what we’ve seen in the past.

  58. I recently learned that in 1948 Truman connected Dewey with Nazis, so the tradition goes way back.

  59. [I]f the Democrats do not disavow [Hillary’s “deplorables”] statement, they party will die.

    For me, it was tacking on that we’re “irredeemable”. That’s a very telling word, claimed to even be religious in nature. OK, now I’m impressed, http://www.merriam-webster.com has in the last few weeks dropped the important definition of that word, but it still remains in their “Defined for English Language Learners” and “Defined for Kids” entries. That suggests to me just how significant her statement was, and, of course, how the party is doubling down on it as you note:

    But, alas, they’re still running around telling people who voted for Trump how much they hate them and wish they were dead.

    ESR, the one thing you left out was the warning that the Democrats really really don’t want the Civil War that their fringe elements are clambering for so badly.

    So Hillary is a fringe element of the party? Well, maybe in a few days, they still are holding out hope for “faithless” electors … ah, it’s not actually until January 6th that their votes are officially counted … anyway, no, I don’t think this is a “fringe elements” things. Probably not a majority of the party, depending on how you want to even define that, Trump Democrats were a thing after all, but are you so sure about, say, the majority of the drivers of its policies?

    Seriously, this is a party that deserves to die before they spark another civil war. Which “enough” of them very clearly want to do.

  60. “majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex”
    And New York City, where, if you shot a gun in Times Square, the only Republicans you would hit are tourists who don’t vote there.

  61. Pithiest summary of the indirect election thing I’ve seen: “It’s not a popularity contest among the voters, it’s a popularity contest among the states, and it doesn’t matter how much New York and California love you if too many other states think you suck. I’m not sure why it’s been so hard for the DNC to grasp this, but if they don’t, after 2020 there may not be much of a DNC left to do any grasping.” (@maradydd in https://status451.com/2016/11/28/its-protein-world-we-just-live-in-it/)

  62. If adults actually take charge of the Democrat Party, what you prescribe could well happen. I’m not holding my breath, however, because virtue-signalling around the issues you identify has become the key element in the catechism that guides those associating with the Left.

    These are people that desperately need to feel elect, and virtue-signalling has become a kind of Free-Mason’s handshake of belonging. (Bumperstickers with which they crap up their cars are another way public signalling.)

    If you haven’t done so, I recommend reading Joseph Bottum’s recent book, An Anxious Age. Essentially what we see in the contemporary American left is the turn-of-the-20th-century Social Gospel, minus the Christianity that that movement was gradually abandoning.

    I’m not religious of any kind. But even I can recognize the telltale signs of people who need to organize around a sense of sin and redemption. Their problem is that traditional religions are experienced in handling that, but their atheism or agnosticism closes off that sanctuary. Hence the personal becomes political.

  63. The real Irony of Trump?

    He ran & won on a traditional Democratic platform. His entire platform is lifted pretty much wholesale from Democratic Populists like Huey Long.

    The GOP President that the Democrats are having conniptions about is a life-long Democrat (Registered until 2009) running on a traditional Democrat platform and was elected by traditional Democrat constituencies (primarily blue collar white voters)

    The fact that this is true shows just how far the Democratic Party has wandered from its roots.

  64. Adam Maas: People keep saying that, but when was the last time the “traditional Democratic platform” included rolling back a major government program, cutting taxes and regulations, restricting immigration, and expanding Second Amendment rights?

  65. Harold, I’ve been answering the flood of articles on Medium about how electors need to vote for someone besides Trump and how they have a duty to our democracy to exercise their judgment…yadda yadda flambé.

    They universally respond with incredulity and outrage when I tell them that they very people whose voices they are attempting to silence through the kind of legalisms that they’re using are the ones who have been crapped on that same way for decades, and are also the same ones who understand the true purpose of the Second Amendment. They just can’t bring themselves to understand that there is a line beyond which the average flyover-country American will not allow themselves to be dragged, and a coup by way of the Electoral College may well be that line.

    Damn straight that there will be a civil war if anyone but Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.

    1. >Damn straight that there will be a civil war if anyone but Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.

      I’m not certain of this. It might not be the last outrage; it might be the last but one.


  66. hey just can’t bring themselves to understand that there is a line beyond which the average flyover-country American will not allow themselves to be dragged, and a coup by way of the Electoral College may well be that line.

    Damn straight that there will be a civil war if anyone but Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.

    The electoral college will in fact become a major liability to the system in the likely event that it votes Trump into office. In practical terms it would negate the purpose it was put in place for, and would ultimately hasten its death as an institution.

    In the unlikely event that enough faithless electors materialize to deny Trump, there won’t be a civil war. The house will pick a moderate republican and life will go on.

    1. >In practical terms it would negate the purpose it was put in place for, and would ultimately hasten its death as an institution.

      No, uma, it wouldn’t. The Electoral college is intended to produce the outcome it just did – that is, require a candidate to have broad support across the U.S. rather than just a geographically-concentrated majority.

      You are not American, so you are excused for not knowing this. Most Americans don’t either.

  67. Papaya- ‘When was the last time a traditional Democratic program included-‘

    Dick Gephardt, 1990s. Seems like two decades ago nowadays, doesn’t it?

  68. OK, there’s some overlap with Gephardt, but not with all the items I listed. And I meant an election platform, not a get-demolished-in-the-primaries platform.

  69. ‘Something else that doesn’t get nearly enough attention- Clinton outspent Trump nearly two to one.’

    I like when rich people openly put a lot of money in politics, for 18th-century political theory values of like. The Passions and Interests of the most financially competent citizens of the Republic are a very proper part of public life.

    I REALLY like when the rest of us stomp a mud hole in their campaigns. !Jeb! Hillary! THANKS!

  70. Excellent article and unusually good comments, IMO. But I would not be so kind to the Democrats as to give them useful information and ideas on how to win again. I for one hope they elect the odious, Black Muslim, Keith Ellison as chair of the DNC. That will ensure their further move to the extreme left and further erode their ability to compete in the future.


  71. > The Electoral college is intended to produce the outcome it just did – that is, require a candidate to have broad support across the U.S. rather than just a geographically-concentrated majority.

    If each state’s electoral college votes are awarded proportionately, as opposed to winner-take-all, the outcome of the election would have been different. And the point you make above (ie. giving flyover states like Montana and Wyoming a greater say in the final outcome) would still be valid.

    The electoral college was not put in place as a ceremonial institution whose only purpose is to rubber-stamp the outcome of each state’s popular vote.


    > You are not American, so you are excused for not knowing this. Most Americans don’t either.

    Of course I am.

  72. When the election wasn’t decided by 6 or 7 PM pacific time it pretty well guaranteed that people in California would turn out to vote for Hillary. Most elections it is a waste of time; it is already decided by supper time.

    The center left in Canada was divided into four parts and lost elections to the conservatives until one major change happened; the Liberals under Trudeau didn’t promise to shut down the Alberta oil patch. Before that the vote was divided, and turnout was low.

    Hillary announced to cheers that a large industry employing quite a few people was going to be shut down on her watch. People aren’t stupid; they heard that loud and clear, and Trump won.

    I agree about the accusations of racism and sexism. It has almost become a mark of honor to be accused by some overeducated jackass of being racist. Not using that accusation would be a huge difference and improvement, and maybe actually allow some of the nasty situations to see some discussion and maybe improvements.

    If the Democrats manage to twist something to get Hillary as president, they won’t see power for a generation.

  73. And us Republicans in California didn’t even have a candidate in the Senatorial race to replace Barbara Boxer. It was a choice of two Democrats. I guess you could say, um, ida know…. Republicans were disenfranchised?

  74. “Even if voter IDs are free, if you’re working three jobs just to keep food and a roof you don’t have the time or money to get the documentation together to get a voter ID. Voter ID laws should be recognized for what they are: a form of unconstitutional poll tax.”

    If you (and the other people thinking voter ID laws are about disenfranchising certain groups) actually believed this, you would have MANY complaints about IDs beyond just voting:

    -opening a bank account
    -buying alcohol
    -getting on a plane
    -buying a firearm
    -GETTING A JOB

    Seriously, the people making these claims are either FLAMING racists or being completely dishonest (or both).

    There is no true conservative majority

    We’re certainly told by Gallup and company that many more people self-identify as “conservative” than “liberal”

    And if you ask about policy positions, even a lot of the self-identifying “liberals” are actually conservatives! By pure policy preference, this country has a HUGE conservative majority – the Democrats have spent decades making it politically incorrect to be “conservative”, or this country would be a VERY different place.

    The Libertarian party needs to rise, the Democrat party needs to die.

    Meh, I don’t care about the name, I care about the ideology, and ideology that drives the current Democrat party definitely needs to die. I do like a lot of libertarian things, but the Libertarian party has consistently been off-the-deep-end crazy in how they run and comport themselves, so I wouldn’t put any hope there. If they couldn’t get their crap together for THIS election, the best chance they’ve had in my lifetime (and the obviously couldn’t), then stop putting your hope there – they’re a lost cause.

  75. You left out a glaring issue and that is Americans do not feel safe and secure from terrorism. The Democratic Party would rather create a safe space for a snowflake but are not serious in dealing with terrorism (mainly Islamic). Many like myself gave the democrat party the middle finger for their narrow and unrealistic view of a dangeraous world. As a Floridian and someone who lives in Central Florida, I like many voters resent the glib answers of gun control and blaming Republicans for gun violence. Ask the residents of Chicago if liberal policies are working for them. The Democrat Party is on the verge of getting its ASS kicked again in 2018 if they do not stop their whining and bitching as they continue to blame racists, homophobes, sexist, islamaphobes, Russia, Drudge, Bernie Supporters, Christians, red heads, cat lovers, etc. for their pathetic performance in 2016. The navel gazing and the echo chamber gets to be replaced with living where real America lives and identify with us as Americans.

  76. PapayaSF:

    Adam Maas: People keep saying that, but when was the last time the “traditional Democratic platform” included rolling back a major government program, cutting taxes and regulations, restricting immigration, and expanding Second Amendment rights?

    Jimmy Carter was arguably closer than you might think to this in office (not being a Republican tainted by Watergate was of course his biggest selling point), except of course for the cutting taxes, and immigration wasn’t a big issue back then. Yeah, he created the Department of Education and gutted the civilian nuclear program, starting before Three Mile Island, but he also signed the bills that ended intrusive, controlling trucking and airline regulation and their agencies, the Interstate Commerce Commission and Civil Aeronautics Board. He and his Georgia crew were smart enough not to mess with gun control, albeit this was during a high period of state gun control. Also appointed Paul Volcker to the Fed, and was capable of getting a clue after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

  77. I keep reading about voter ID and how bad it’s supposed to be. Well – we’ve had it in The Netherlands for ages and no one ever seems to think it is either bad or inherently racist, at least not that I’m aware of. It is just not a point of discussion. Want to vote? Show a valid ID and your name better be on that voter registration list, or else you’re not getting a ballot.

  78. esr:

    >Damn straight that there will be a civil war if anyone but Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.

    I’m not certain of this. It might not be the last outrage; it might be the last but one.

    Agreed; it’s hard to see it not lighting a fuze to inevitable civil war, but we’re “slow to anger”. Hillary’s prior verbal attacks turning into real world ones, plus her colossal general incompetence (seriously, the only thing smart she’s ever done since getting her law degree was marrying Bill), makes it hard to see any other outcome.

    Then again, as physically ill as she is, who knows how long she’d live, or who would be really running things after a while.

  79. Look, the Electoral College is not going to do anything other than vote Trump into office. The so-called faithless electors are all Clinton supporters bar one. There absolutely will not be defections on any meaningful scale. And all the nonsense about Boris and Natasha swinging the election for Trump at the behest of Fearless Leader (Putin)? No-one who voted for Trump gives a damn about that, and the people that didn’t don’t count. Trump voters know it’s nonsense (at heart the Democrats know it’s nonsense, too, but can’t resist a bit of drama). Yes, the Russians might—might—have got up to some mischief, but the idea that it had any real impact on the outcome of the election is a further slap in the face to people who are sick and tired of being told they voted for Trump because they’re ignorant, racist Neanderthals. It’s begging the question anyway; the Podesta emails were leaked, not hacked. There has been no evidence presented of Russian involvement, let alone effective Russian involvement.

    This isn’t even the first time that a leak has pointed up the double standard that the Left has when it comes to such things. If it’s a Republican whose communications have been leaked, then the media focus is on the content of the leaked documents (viz. Sarah Palin). If it’s a Democrat that’s suffered the leak, then the focus is on how dastardly the leakers were (viz. Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame). The Democrats loved Snowden and Assange until they didn’t any more. And people see this. They’re not stupid. The raw contempt that Clinton and Podesta and the whole slimy gang in the DNC had for the white working class was on display for all to see. The same people are scratching their heads wondering why it apparently wasn’t a big deal having Clinton run State Department comms through a server that a child could ransack, but some putative shenanigans by shadowy Russkies is suddenly the Cuban Missile Crisis redux.

    None of the current histrionics is harming Trump; quite the opposite. They are further evidence that the Left is still flailing about with no idea of what to do next. I’ve seen toddlers throw a tantrum in the shopping mall, but generally they calm down after a couple of minutes. The adult babies of the Left have been shrieking and wetting themselves for five weeks now, and normal, sane people are just tuning them out.

  80. Russia wanted Trump to win for reasons other than Trump’s expressed love for Putin. Putin knows that Trump says something and its exact opposite in the same sentence.

    Russians want a continuation of the weak Obama presidency and a useful fool like Trump potentially offers better prospects on that front than Hillary. Their aim is geopolitical expansion and weakening the western alliance. Trump offers far better prospects on those fronts. An America paralyzed with internal squabbles over it’s president’s tweets is the America that Russia wants to see on the international stage.

  81. > If each state’s electoral college votes are awarded proportionately, as opposed to winner-take-all, the outcome of the election would have been different. And the point you make above (ie. giving flyover states like Montana and Wyoming a greater say in the final outcome) would still be valid.

    Ummm. No.

    Even with proportionality enforced inside states, Trump would have garnered 274 electoral votes. Do the arithmetic yourself if you don’t believe me.

    But that’s beside the point. Your “tweak” is not the deal everyone agreed to beforehand, not in 1787 and not in 2016. Proportionality can’t be enforced on the states, because they’re sovereign in and of themselves. Their deal, whenever they entered the union, is that they make their own rules about these things and the smaller ones get bonus points just to avoid strict majoritarianism. Break the deal; break the union. If you want to change it, amend the constitution. Good luck with that, given that amendments need ratification by 38 state legislatures, and Republicans control 32 of them outright.

    Coming to 2016, you’re complaining about the rules after the fact, and squirming trying to find some “minor variation” that puts you ahead. That’s bullshit. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. Since kindergarten, everyone knows it. Yes, you can wave your hands and try to waive the rules ex post facto. No one else is willing to play on those terms. Since the entire purpose of this shtick is to see who ends up king of the hill, it’s pretty pointless if no one will play with you, is it?

    You lost, uma. Whining about it a month later makes you a poor loser. Fiddling the rules after the game is over makes you an arse.

  82. @ESR
    I suspect the Democratic party has shifted too far towards big government, nanny regulation, unionism, crony capitalism & PC identity politics to have any chance at all to recover. It has actively driven the centrists and realists out of the party apparatus and pretty much out of existence. In actuality, it has forced conformity to the party narratives becoming more and more intolerant of alternate viewpoints.

    We have been on a long road to arrive at Republicans controlling 32 legislatures and 33 governors while Democrats control only 13. This only reinforces the conclusion that the Democrats have painted themselves into the corner of their liking.

    @ those who think the GOPe or the NeverTrump GOP factions represent any kind of coherent political assemblage, these folks are mostly the corrupt hogs at the trough segment of society represented by the US Chamber of Commerce and the Open Borders Globalists. Those few are going nowhere as one would expect seeing just how spiked the Jeb! candidacy did in the primaries.

  83. This is even without considering gerrymandering.

    Winter, kindly explain to us rubes how gerrymandering plays a role in US presidential elections.

  84. I think very telling were the Democrats who joked about bankrupting coal companies or going after logging (replace it with eco-tourism) or fracking or pipelines. Meanwhile, millions of people who earned livings through those industries didn’t get the joke. Meanwhile they looked around at dying communities, rising opiate addiction rates, suicides, and a jobless future. The irony is that many of these were traditional blue-collar Democrats voters (like construction union members who supported pipelines). As an aside, these formerly Democrat voters were a tad more conservative on other issues (pro-defense, may own a gun, support the cops, think dudes shouldn’t be in the lady’s room). They used to fit within the Democrat Party, but were shoved out.

  85. @Odd Man Out
    “Winter, kindly explain to us rubes how gerrymandering plays a role in US presidential elections.”

    The original post was not limited to the presidential elections. Neither is voter suppression and related shenanigans. And about voter IDs to combat voter fraud. I have still to see any real evidence that voter fraud is a factor in the elections, or that it even exists.

  86. Would those of you who think a civil war is likely go into some detail of how it would happen? We may need at least a rough definition of civil war.

    I can’t imagine a civil war because the sides are geographically pretty mixed. There could be some deadly violence, but my assumption is that the federal government has the means and the will to squelch it.

    Maybe I’m missing something, but I think you can only have a civil war when both sides have military weapons and organization. It might be possible to whomp up a scenerio where the US military is divided against itself, but I can’t quite get it to gell. One possiblity (certainly good enough for fiction, and possibly already in print) would be that part of the military thinks the US is becoming disasterously dominated by Russia and another part thinks that loyalty to the existing administration still makes sense.

    1. >It might be possible to whomp up a scenerio where the US military is divided against itself, but I can’t quite get it to gell.

      I can. People unfamiliar with the U.S. military culture don’t grasp what fervent Constitutionalists our officer class are. A civilian politician ordering the U.S. military to move against an insurrection on U.S. soil had better be damn sure the insurrectionists don’t have a sound Constitutional argument, because if they do a U.S. officer’s training would not only permit but require him to refuse that as an unlawful order. Remember what the swear their oath to; not the CinC, not the government, the Constitution.

      Of course different officers would have different judgments of what arguments are sound. So yes, in the event of civil war a divided military is quite likely. Especially since part of our folk memory is that the reconciliation process after the last Civil War did not involve hanging Confederate officers for treason – in fact, not only were they reabsorbed into the Union Army, it even adopted what was essentially Confederate uniform for some service areas in the West. In effect, we set a precedent for a divided military…

      On the other hand, only a damn fool would try to order the U.S. military to confiscate civilian weapons in the absence of people actually shooting at them. There would be little if any division about that.

  87. @Nancy Leibovitz
    “I can’t imagine a civil war because the sides are geographically pretty mixed. ”

    That is not much of a consolation. The same was true in Yugoslavia before the civil war.

    However, in the USA I think there are brakes on any civil war. First, there is no recent history of war, just the civil war of the 19th century. Second, the economic and industrial imbalance between the Democratic and Republican parts of the US is more extreme than it was in the 19th century. The Democratic parts generate 2/3 of the US GDP. I think that a secession is more likely.

  88. @Nancy Lebovitz

    The US contains uncontrolled militia violence right now; there are places in the US you cannot safely go because you would be robbed or murdered by militias. The US federal government has argued itself into a position where all effective countermeasures to low level violence are immoral and illegal. A civil war akin to the 19th century war with conventional field armies on both sides does not seem plausible, but the US being made ungovernable by low level violence does.

  89. esr, your advice to the Democrats is crap. The winning strategy for democrats is double down on hating white males, starting with fining you four hundred thousand dollars because all your patches come from white males.

    White males own just about everything because white males create just about everything. So in a democracy the winning strategy, assuming you are successful in smashing families and preventing family formation in the first place, is to promise to take stuff from white males and give white male stuff to everyone else.

    They need to mobilize their base. The best way to do that is to find more witches and confiscate the stuff belonging to witches.

  90. And all the nonsense about Boris and Natasha swinging the election for Trump at the behest of Fearless Leader (Putin)? No-one who voted for Trump gives a damn about that….

    Actually, a lot of us did care in one way that we can be certain Putin did as well: Hillary palpably wanted to start another shooting war, this time with Russia, ignoring among other things the minor detail that it’s the only country than can end the US in 30 minutes. We obviously have our differences with Putin and Russia, but neither of us wanted that outcome, so Trump was the only viable alternative. It was the strongest, at least in the short term, existential argument for voting for Trump, vs. someone who had a major hand in setting way too much of the world on fire.

    None of the current histrionics is harming Trump….

    That I’m not sure of, now that enough GOPe members of the Senate including the Majority Leader have evidently recovered from the shock of the election outcome and signed onto this delegitimization of Trump’s victory. For example, would any of us be surprised if their diminished majority fails to Consent to Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, who’s had successful business dealings with Putin, even got an Order of Friendship medal (which in its older form never counted against Armand Hammer), or many of his other picks they have to vote on, including Mattis for the DoD, who requires a waiver like Marshall did because he hasn’t been out of the military for long enough?

    Of course, there are two sides playing this game, and Trump’s demonstrated he’s very good at it, so these sorts of bad events might not come to pass, but right now it doesn’t look good.

  91. Winter on 2016-12-15 at 05:47:52 said:
    “. I have still to see any real evidence that voter fraud is a factor in the elections, or that it even exists.”

    In some parts of Detroit, Clinton received not merely one hundred percent of the vote, but three hundred percent of the vote. Which is probably why the recount was cancelled.

  92. However, in the USA I think there are brakes on any civil war…. Second, the economic and industrial imbalance between the Democratic and Republican parts of the US is more extreme than it was in the 19th century. The Democratic parts generate 2/3 of the US GDP.

    Perhaps, but what about what I’ll label “essential” GDP? Which parts grow the food, extract and/or refine most of our fuels, or manufacture guns and ammo (the latter is more mixed, but it’s steadily tilting towards Republican parts due to the Democrat’s general anti-business and specific anti-gun policies, plus my side has already “banked” enough ammo to fight such a war by our rules). How much of that GDP will go poof when we no longer can borrow trillions of dollars at near zero real rates of interest, or if things get nasty enough, we start killing exquisitely fragile big Blue cities (way too easy to cut off their power, and note the recent fun with the Colonial Pipeline)? How much will the design and distribution (obviously little of the manufacture today) of new iPhones count in such a scenario? Medicines, ah, that gets sticky, then again aren’t most generics manufactured in Canada or offshore?

    I very much don’t want a civil war to come to pass, but I think the Left is insane if they think they hold a good hand of cards.

    1. >we start killing exquisitely fragile big Blue cities

      Or, in at least one important case, an entire multi-urban blue enclave. The lefty parts of CA are hideously vulnerable to an attack on their water supply.

  93. “Many like myself gave the democrat party the middle finger for their narrow and unrealistic view of a dangeraous world. ”

    And it’s a HUGE portion of why we give the Libertarian party the same finger and then some.

  94. “For example, would any of us be surprised if their diminished majority fails to Consent to Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, ”

    Which is why 2018 won’t be the GOP cakewalk some people think. 8 Republicans are guaranteed a primary if that happens.

  95. ESR, there’s another factor involved: If the US military is ordered to fire on its’ own citizens, it won’t be firing on people in some distant state with evidence of slavery close at hand. It will be firing on its’ next door neighbors, friends, and family members. Which is something a lot of Leftists also forget: there aren’t a neat contiguous group of states you can have Sherman go commit war crimes in. That Hellfire missile will be hitting the house next to yours.

    1. >Which is something a lot of Leftists also forget: there aren’t a neat contiguous group of states you can have Sherman go commit war crimes in.

      On top of that, a disportionately large share of our officer class hails from Red states.

  96. SDN:

    “For example, would any of us be surprised if their diminished majority fails to Consent to Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, ”

    Which is why 2018 won’t be the GOP cakewalk some people think. 8 Republicans are guaranteed a primary if that happens.

    Indeed, an internal, non-violent “civil war” in the GOP is a much safer bet, and many of us are looking forward to primaring a lot of the House GOPe and indeed no doubt some of those 8 in the Senate. But I think it’s the GOPe(stablishment) that’s not going to enjoy a cakewalk, not necessarily the GOP proper. Or as we’ve been discussing, an eventual formal split of the party and displacement of the Democrats … although thinking about the specifics now, I wonder if the GOPe side of the spilt would have much success.

    A formal alliance with the Democratic party in its lamentable state which prompted our host’s posting sounds unlikely, but tacit one, that’s, well, exactly what we’ve seen since 2014 in the “Uniparty” at the national level when the Republicans took the Senate, and that had a great deal to do with Trump’s success. So formal splitting looks far off, at least before 2018, and in the meanwhile imagine the fun of Team Trump playing by his/the new rules and running against a “Do Nothing GOPe (Congress)” in 2018. As was said early on in the primary, “You ‘conservative pundits’ still don’t get it. Trump isn’t our candidate, he’s our murder weapon, and the GOP is our victim“.

  97. You know, I’m sort of “conservative”. I’m glad the democrats (temporarily) lost control.

    But I support California’s secession bid wholeheartedly. I don’t even wish them ill, or bitterly anticipate any horrible future for them on their own: There are parts of California’s culture that seem to work well (against all odds, the aerospace industry still seems to be doing the most interesting work out there), and I’m sure they’ll figure out something that works for them.

    But America needs a divorce. Now would be preferable, since the left is on the outs and it’s no longer “evil racist treason” to contemplate it. I have no desire to dominate or control the coasties, I just want them to stop screwing with our lives, liberties, and livelihoods.

    It’s possible that a looser alliance among states or blocs of states will be better for all concerned: Politics will cease to be tribal warfare between people who hate each other and want to grind each other into the dirt. (It’s also possible that within each smaller state, some parasitic elite will reappear and whip up the same divisions on a smaller scale to loot the country – but at least it won’t happen everywhere simultaneously.)

    If something like this can be worked out (probably a long shot), we can all win and all independently pursue something that works for us.

  98. >Trump is politically essentially incompetent, but knows how to play to an audience and a TV camera better than HRC, so pulled a win.

    I would argue that knowing how to play to an audience and a TV camera is the height of political competence. You can be the smartest policy wonk on the planet, but it’s all for naught if you can’t get elected. Getting yourself elected to the highest office in the country, and as the most powerful leader in the free world, is pretty much the height of political competence.

  99. The problem with a lot of the Democrat narratives about the election fail for one simple reason: this election was excellent for the GOP in general, not just for Trump. The liberals have spent the last month shrieking and crying about Trump, but they have failed to account for the performance of the GOP down the ticket. This was supposed to be a tough year for the GOP, yet they did well at every level. If trends continue this way, 2018 is going to be a Democrat bloodbath because the Dems have to defend a lot of seats in red states. So in that sense, this election was just a continuation of the red wave that began in the 2010 midterms.

    The Democrats failed on many fronts, but the “rising coalition” fallacy may be what dooms them. They assume that Latino’s will always be a Democrat force, much like African Americans have been since the Great Society days, and so more Latinos equals more Democrats in their estimation. But it is not clear that this is the case, and in fact if curbs are put on immigration and efforts at assimilating immigrants are stepped up, there is every reason to believe that many immigrants will lean conservative. (Cubans in Florida, for example, and even an increasing number of Puerto Ricans.)

    Michael Barone has called the disaggregation of America the “great sorting”, as liberals and conservatives concentrate themselves into different enclaves. The Democrats flock to the coasts and the large urban centers; the conservatives concentrate in the suburbs and rural hinterlands. This process will likely continue — California and the New York-Philadelpha-DC metroplex will draw the bulk of Democrats, while the vast interior of America goes on being what it pretty much has always been.

    Running up the vote in California and New York City won’t help the Democrats gain relevance in the rest of America.

  100. Good article. However. a quibble…

    > smarter Republicans than Trump will take the lesson going forward.

    Not convinced there are any. All of the descriptive language about how Democrats are out of touch with the center apply as well to half of the Republican “leadership”. One thing Trump appears to be doing is moving a lot of Republican-conservative outliers into positions of power, something neither Bush was willing to do. Trump didn’t just beat the Democrats; he beat the Republicans, or at least its so-called leadership, as well.

    Reagan showed Republicans how to win 36 years ago. Democrats thought Reagan was a bumpkin, but so did the rest of the GOP “leadership” — even Gorbachev was shocked at how little GHW Bush respected Reagan. They don’t call Republicans “the Stupid Party” for nothing.

  101. a) Lincoln’s war was not a “civil war”
    b) If we do finally have an actual “civil war”, it will be a war of people vs government – and it will swiftly vaporize the government.

  102. > On top of that, a disportionately large share of our officer class hails from Red states.

    Not to mention most large military bases are located in southern states, and most of the rank-and-file members of the military hail from the south, midwest, or mountain west.

  103. Eric: If an Electoral College coup or other overthrow of the will of the people happens and Trump is not inaugurated, and the people did not revolt, what further outrage could there be that would push the people into it?

    uma: About a weak Trump and Russia: I think this will turn out to be yet another case of “be careful what you ask for. You may get it.” How’d supporting an easily beatable candidate work for John Podesta?

    Winter: Think that all the way through. Do you think the American government will stand for a secession? Indeed, I think that’s one very likely vector for the start of a civil war. And there may be no recent history of war among the general population, since the end of the Korean War, but that does not mean that the American patriot does not have the heart of a warrior should it come to that. The US military has gamed out putting down armed uprisings before. When you factor in the likely defection of a nontrivial amount of the armed forces to the side of the rebels, the outcome is not at all guaranteed.

    And as far as voter fraud is concerned, there is a very good case to be made that it foisted Obamacare on us. Al Franken was the last Senator to take the oath of office in 2009 due to a lengthy recount battle. He wound up being declared the winner by 312 votes. There were, later, over 200 people charged with voting illegally, as convicted felons. Do you honestly think that very many of them voted for his opponent, or that they caught every last one?

    Eric: “On top of that, a disportionately large share of our officer class hails from Red states.”
    Something for the Left to think about in this connection: the largest supplier of officers to the US military is not the service academies. It is Texas A&M University. The numbers aren’t even close.

    ams: Sorry. The California Left hee-hawed incessantly over the Texas secession movement as recently as this past March or so. (Remember the resolution at the Texas GOP Convention?) Now that the shoe is not he other foot, I have exactly zero sympathy for them.

  104. Jay Maynard:

    Eric: If an Electoral College coup or other overthrow of the will of the people happens and Trump is not inaugurated, and the people did not revolt, what further outrage could there be that would push the people into it?

    Not Eric, but the outrages whomever they would replace him with would perpetuate or worse on us. If Hillary, this should be obvious, although that assumes the “faithless” electors would swing to her instead of throwing it to the House. Then again, would we be entirely surprised if they chose Hillary? More likely, I’d guess from my quick reading just now of the relevant Amendments, is that they’d game it to throw it to Pence (per 12, by not choosing anyone, per 20, it devolves to the VP elect). And thus we’d assume the Uniparty would continue in formal power, and how our wrath plays out depends on what it does in the interim.

  105. @Jay Maynard “The California Left hee-hawed incessantly over the Texas secession movement as recently as this past March or so. (Remember the resolution at the Texas GOP Convention?) Now that the shoe is not he other foot, I have exactly zero sympathy for them.”

    I’m beginning to think the only political ideology that matters is the right of self-government – which means very local government. If the last century has proven anything it is surely that disconnected far away governments don’t work – whether they be centered in Moscow, Beijing, Brussels, or DC doesn’t matter. The right of (peaceful) succession ought to be considered a supreme non-infringe-able right like free speech, bearing arms, etc.

    I’m gonna suggest that this is at least nominally compatible with ESR’s anarchist view.

    So let California, Alaska, Hawaii and Texas go in peace. And all others everywhere.

  106. @Harold
    Of course under the constitution pursuing the popular vote win is stupid. And it wasn’t my point. Nor is my point that Clinton ought have won THIS election because of her winning the popular vote.

    My point is that if the electoral system doesn’t work to fulfill the will of a large majority then change needs to occur. What is a large majority? That is definitely open to debate. My view is that if for the next few election the Democrats keep winning the popular vote by millions but losing the electoral college then there going to be problems.

    Is it likely that scenario going to occur? Probably not but right now I consider it something more than just an intellectual exercise.

    And in case in point, various state had to deal with this issue over the years. For example Virginia even after the split with West Virginia and the Civil War still had issues with the imbalance of power between the coastal counties dominated by the planters and the interior counties.

    The demographics of this country is changing. It changed several times before and we survived. And now it changing again.

    As a general comment, I am personally tired of both sides mocking each other. I see comments disparaging the coastal and urban enclaves, and comments disparaging the people living in rural regions. Everybody started it. Everybody things they are on some damn fool great Crusade to save the nation.

    The answer is that the nobody is right, the 160 million can’t impose their will on the other 160 million. That in a republic and democracy such as ourselves the only path is to sit down, talk it out, and come to a compromise.

    My personal view is that in the long run is to lower the stakes by shrinking government and distributing power even more than it done know. It also my view that from what remains, still have to function as a social safety net of last resort, still have to prove for the common defense, still has to maintain the infrastructure of the nation, and still safeguard the individual liberates of all citizens regardless of belief or circumstances of birth.

  107. Tom: “I would not be so kind to the Democrats as to give them useful information and ideas on how to win again.”
    What makes you think they’ll listen and heed Eric’s advice?

    “I for one hope they elect the odious, Black Muslim, Keith Ellison as chair of the DNC. That will ensure their further move to the extreme left and further erode their ability to compete in the future.”
    They seem determined to do just that. As a regular reader of Power Line, I’ve been following the Ellison story ever since he first ran for Congress. I have no doubt at all that he’s just exactly the kind of candidate the Bernie-bot Left would love, and that the rest of America will run away from.

  108. @Michael “So let California, Alaska, Hawaii and Texas go in peace. And all others everywhere.”

    It’s already happened. DC, Colorado, Oregon and Washington are in open revolt against Federal authority, giving aid and comfort to the enemy in the war on drugs.

    It’s almost as if the powers not delegated to the Federal Government by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

  109. No, uma, it The Electoral college is intended to produce the outcome it just did – that is, require a candidate to have broad support across the U.S. rather than just a geographically-concentrated majority.

    I think a better mechanism would be switching to a better voting method (instant runoff, Borda count, etc.) in addition to requiring a supermajority of, say, 65% to win. That would mean that as the population of the cities grows in relation to the rural areas, it requires broad support without the messy system of elections.

    The problem with the current situation is that it allows the candidates to focus on a handful of swing states, and that’s it.

  110. Can someone provide credible citations to Hillary getting 300% of the registered vote? That’s … something.

  111. @Winter wrote: “voters have to wait 6 hours in line to vote (but they did so in Zimbabwe).
    http://www.vox.com/presidential-election/2016/11/6/13542680/there-are-4000-people-in-a-half-mile-voting-line-in-cincinnati-today-this-isn-t-okay

    I live in Cincinnati. Those long lines were for early voting on the Sunday before Election Day, not on the day itself, and at the Hamilton County (of which the city of Cincinnati is merely a substantial part) board of elections office, not individual precincts. Note again that this was the Sunday before elections: I have friends whose entire church congregations got on busses after the Sunday service and went down together to vote early, instead of going on their own on Tuesday. I imagine that at least half of those congregations were intended to vote Democrat… but I cannot promise that the other half were not intended to to vote against Hillary Clinton. The city of Cincinnati is a Democratic stronghold; the rest of the county is not.

    And if Mr. Trump’s outreach to the African-American community produces the results is promising, four years from now Cincinnati may not be such a stronghold, either.

  112. If each state’s electoral college votes are awarded proportionately, as opposed to winner-take-all, the outcome of the election would have been different.

    That’s impossible to know; you can’t assume events that played out under one set of rules would also occur under a different set of rules. The players in this game should and do plan their strategies around those rules.

    As a rough analogy, if football switched switched from deciding the winner based on time-of-possession and not points, the games would play out much differently.

  113. I’m a little late to the party, but I’d point out a lot of the first 50 or so comments made a fundamental error in mistaking the Democratic constituency with the Democrats themselves. The Democratic constituency is doing fine right now. Should they get their act together in the next 2 years, they Democrats will do fine modulo the issues they face with unbalanced incumbancies in the Senate. The problem is the Democratic leadership.

    My personal suspicion is that Hillary Clinton has been, behind the scenes, squashing any Democrat who might have been able to upstage her in the Presidency. Unfortunately, it turns out that squashing “everybody less good that Hillary” really hollows out a party, because Hillary turns out to be terrible. We got Obama because as a less-than-one-term Senator, the Clintons never took him seriously. Then he beat her handily. As we’ve seen in the last eight years, that is not because Obama is some sort of political prodigy… it’s because Hillary was terrible. In this election we got a non-Democrat who switched parties and still nearly beat her in a lot of ways (possibly, if you remove fraud, he may have won the popular vote in the primary). Again, not because much of anybody seriously thought Sanders was a good candidate, but because Hillary is terrible. I think that’s why you see such a hollow Democratic party in the 40-60 year old range; that’s the age range that didn’t have enough power already to resist being culled (Biden, for instance), and was in competition with Hillary and had to go.

    Turns out 20 years of hollowing out a party takes its toll. Now the leadership is almost a vacuum at the top. It’s disconnected. I suspect it may have taken its radical left turn because radical leftists were permitted by the Clinton Machine to survive because they were A: less of a threat and B: useful to the Machine to vote for Clinton in the primaries and then leave plenty of room for Clinton to jog to the center, or at least, that was the plan.

    They need to fix this. The structure of the situation almost guarantees they eventually will; a one-party system is not stable under US electoral rules. However, how we get from here to there is not clear. Though at least one aspect is clear; the Democrats need to extract themselves from the Clinton machine. (I’d suggest a strategy of ensuring Chelsea is unelectable at the earliest available opportunity.)

    I tend to agree the Libertarians or any existing third party is unlikely to pick up the slack, but I think the probability of a new Democratic replacement, which I’d still rate quite low, is higher than it has been in decades.

  114. It’s pretty easy to see a world where the US has zero national parties. There are states where the Democrats are such political appendixes that they too could be replaced without affecting much in the state. For the other side, the GOP in NY state is very vulnerable, for instance. That would elevate its conservative party as the second party. I can’t imagine that NY State is the only such state though the third party elevated would probably not be the conservative party but the libertarian one.

    We might do well to go through a period where regionally strong parties have a cage match to consolidate back down to two national parties.

    I can’t find any primer laying out the details as to how to elevate a third party into second party status. The rules would be in each state’s election law but I can’t seem to find anybody who has created a book or a wiki that lays all of them out.

  115. To those of you pondering how a U.S. civil war might, in reality, be possible, may I respectfully suggest you read “Empire” by Orson Scott Card?

  116. No, uma, it wouldn’t. The Electoral college is intended to produce the outcome it just did – that is, require a candidate to have broad support across the U.S. rather than just a geographically-concentrated majority.

    Yet if anyone suggested that any other minority but the “geographically-disperse” deserved to receive disproportionate representation, they would be laughed out of the room.

  117. Also you’ve got a funny definition of “intended”. Decades went by before the situation of “a presidential candidate’s name appears on the ballot, and all the electors for that state more or less automatically vote for the candidate who wins that state’s popular vote” became settled. Were it intended, that would have been the case from the start, and we wouldn’t even have actual electors.

    It’s become a tradition but, like the two-party system, it’s hard to argue that the founders even imagined it would happen, let alone intended it.

    1. >It’s become a tradition but, like the two-party system, it’s hard to argue that the founders even imagined it would happen, let alone intended it.

      I elided some history. (And wondered if anyone would be literate enough to bring that up.)

      The intention wasn’t that of the Founders themselves. For them, the EC was a kluge to get around high communications costs, with no principled function. The modern understanding of the EC as a firewall against regional tensions dates from the decades before the Civil War, the era of the early telegraph and railroad.

      At that point, the EC could have been abolished but was not. It did function to cool off regionalism for a while, only to fail under extreme load in 1860.

  118. Garrett:

    Can someone provide credible citations to Hillary getting 300% of the registered vote? That’s … something.

    You could try your favorite search engine and type in Detroit ballots and find reports from notorious Right Wing Conspiracy sources like the Detroit News, founded in 1873, where they even have video of the State Elections Director explaining what was found. And from the top article by them as selected for me by Google:

    Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News.

    […]

    The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.

    And by Michigan’s laws, those vote counts stand, cannot be a part of a recount … very convenient, that.

    And here’s a sentence you can search on to get a Detroit Free Press article, or that gives you enough very specific information to find other sources (I’m not including links since that puts me in the moderation queue):

    Most clerks insist the mistakes are made in good faith, but state Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton, and some of his colleagues asked for a state investigation into pollbook irregularities, citing Detroit Precinct 152, where only 50 ballots were found in a container that should have had more than 300 votes.

    Separately I read that that container had 10 or so votes for Trump, but the count was all for Hillary. Further digging should get you a total for the overage for Detroit.

  119. It is interesting the paradox we see in the reaction to the idea of faithless electors being brought up in an election where the popular vote did not match the (presumptive) electoral vote. The will of the people matters to one party only in so far as “will of the people” is narrowly defined to the will of some amount less than 50% of the people, whereas to the other party there’s the cognitive dissonance of both arguing a populist position of respecting the popular vote and the fundamentally elitist position of having electors have the right to choose who to vote for.

  120. Eric, very succinct article. A bit windy, perhaps, but the soul of wit does not *always* come with brevity.

    At the turn of the last century before the turn of the last century, the California of the Union before there was a California, was big, bad New York State. When most of the colonial and post-colonial Union consisted mostly of states the size of postage stamps, they also relied on the Electoral College to erect a firewall preventing the Empire State imposing their will on the lesser electorate. Considering the country was only a few election cycles deep, and Washington was ushered in by decree (and therefore only counted in the pre-season standings), there had to be considerable doubt about the wisdom of this direction at the time.

    One can imagine how many trees had anguished Decrees nailed to them, not to mention the rabble rousers with their damned printing presses! Hmph.

  121. > Proportionality can’t be enforced on the states, because they’re sovereign in and of themselves. Their deal, whenever they entered the union, is that they make their own rules about these things and the smaller ones get bonus points just to avoid strict majoritarianism.

    States aren’t completely ‘sovereign in and of themselves’, else the Constitution ‘interferes’ in state elections all the time: see the 15th, 19th, and 24th Amendments.

    Lessig recently made an interesting argument (at https://medium.com/equal-citizens/the-equal-protection-argument-against-winner-take-all-in-the-electoral-college-b09e8a49d777 ) that Winner-Take-All elector methods violate the Equal Protection Clause because (the way I understand the argument) Electors that are elected via a statewide election thus represent the population, and it denies the minority their representation.

  122. >>Trump is politically essentially incompetent, but knows how to play to an audience and a TV camera better than HRC, so pulled a win.

    >I would argue that knowing how to play to an audience and a TV camera is the height of political competence. You can be the smartest policy wonk on the planet, but it’s all for naught if you can’t get elected. Getting yourself elected to the highest office in the country, and as the most powerful leader in the free world, is pretty much the height of political competence.

    …but is the fact that politics-as-popularity-contest triumphs over politics-as-statesmanship and/or politics-as-policymaking a bug, or a feature? I vote bug, in case that was unclear.

  123. Random832, if you’re going to argue that we need to honor the will of more than 50% of the people, here’s one for you: More than 50% of the people said Hillary Clinton should not be president. How about them apples?

    The presidential election is structured as 51 separate elections, one in each state. (Plus DC.) Donald Trump won a majority of them. Each state set them up as winner-take-all, with two exceptions. Trump won enough states to be elected. Anything else is carping after the fact.

    Doing away with the Electoral College would transform the presidency into an imperial ruler, chosen by a small number of elites, and the rest of the country into the elites’ colonies, turned be ruled however the elites please. Anyone who thinks we’ll take that lying down is deluding themselves.

  124. >Doing away with the Electoral College would transform the presidency into an imperial ruler, chosen by a small number of elites, and the rest of the country into the elites’ colonies, turned be ruled however the elites please.

    The EC itself doesn’t prevent this (well, presuming that any small-enough minority qualifies as a ‘small number of elites’). Exercise for the reader: Presuming everyone votes, calculate the minimum number of votes a candidate needs to win, accounting for the Electoral College. Express your answer as a percentage of the total population of the US.

  125. It’s not just that Dems will lose, but that Dems will disappear as they make themselves anathema to the American Public.

  126. >most of the rank-and-file members of the military hail from the south, midwest, or mountain west.

    The discrepancy is even more striking if you look at the combat arms specialties. Those are way more white and way more rural/southern than the military as a whole.

    Overall, about 30% of the U.S. military is made up of people who self-describe as minorities, but have a look at this picture of some members of the 82nd Airborne. What do you see?

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/2/82nd-airborne-deploy-250-paratroopers-iraq-support/

  127. Good article and making the point I have for years- we don’t have a conservative party. We have had a far left of center (D), and a left of center party (R).

    Only quibble I have is the line, “Their ability to pass voter-ID laws will surely hurt you as well.”

    There is no evidence for that, minority participation has been higher under voter-ID laws. Perhaps more correlation than causation– but if you believe minority turnout favors the Dems, there’s no evidence they hurt the Dems.

    Now- if you believe that there is in fact rampant fraud in places like Detroit (more votes shown to be cast then actual ballots turned in) or California – no ID check, millions of illegal immigrants and activist groups telling them they can vote…
    Well, yeah, than voter-ID laws hurt them.

    Although, they do give the electorate more confidence that it is a fair and accurate system.

  128. In parliamentary systems, each faction goes its own way and then after the election they assemble into a Government and an Opposition. In the American system, the factions assemble into coalitions before the elections determine whose In and whose Out. Usually the coalitions are assembled through the primary process, but sometimes major third-parties are stepping stones for constituencies to switch columns. See TRs Bull Moose or the Dixiecrats or Ross Perots Reform.

    In American political history the patterns and communities of interest are slow-changing, but the coalitions they assemble vary over time. Trump’s election is a sign of a realignment, not a cause. The ‘Midwestern working class’ /white-ethnics/deer-hunters/trades unions/whatever you want to call it faction was reliably on the Donkey team a few decades ago and is now trending towards the Elephant. Just like the southern whites/rednecks did a generation before.
    During that same time the Yankees/Northeastern Establishment/WASP/bi-coastal/Ivy League/whatever faction switched from a mixed swing constituency to reliably Donkey.

    The Donkeys as a coalition have several choices to retake power; import new voters (tried it), change the Constitution (unlikely w/o other changes first), or change their appeal to get a coalition of supporters that will win the electoral college as it is currently organized (which is what you recommend). Would Senator Sanders have lost to Trump?

    Alternately, they can go the way of the American Federalists, the Whigs, the Progressives, and the Jim Crow era dixiecrats. Throw their extreme elements into the inscrit, and supplement their moderate rump with dissatisfied elements of the other party.

  129. “Trump has dynamited almost every connection it had to winning elections, and smarter Republicans than Trump will take the lesson going forward.”

    I think you give the Republicans far too much credit. Those of us who have been outraged by their sheer incompetence for the last three decades were initially more motivated by the desire to burn the republican party to the ground than to elect Trump. Unless we see the corrupt, incompetent, evil old guard sent to the proverbial (preferably literal) firing line and replaced with fresh, Trumpian candidates, Trump’s next 8 years will be the Republican’s last.

  130. Exercise for the reader: Presuming everyone votes, calculate the minimum number of votes a candidate needs to win, accounting for the Electoral College. Express your answer as a percentage of the total population of the US.

    In case anyone’s wondering – by a somewhat naive method, the answer is 23%. Excluding Maine and Nebraska, sorted all states by the number of people represented by each electoral vote (Wyoming and Vermont at the top, California and Texas at the bottom). Added up “50%+1” of the states’ populations, until the number of electoral votes represented by those states exceeded 270. Stopped at Georgia, with an E.V. total of 278. Running it backwards (from the most populous states), you stop at Arizona with likewise 278 E.V. and 30% of the popular vote.

    I do wonder if you could get the number smaller by selecting states so you end up with only 270 electoral votes, but it seems like a hard optimization problem. 23% is damning enough, to anyone who cares enough for the answer to be damning at all.

    “”The EC itself doesn’t prevent this (well, presuming that any small-enough minority qualifies as a ‘small number of elites’)””

    No, see, that’s the trick. They wouldn’t *be* a minority in the scenario described – the only thing that qualifies them as “elite” is that they are geographically concentrated. Because no-one really cares about people, they care about the number of unique stories they can attribute to those people, and to someone who lives out in the country, all the people in the cities run together as one generic blob of urban-ness and therefore should “naturally” get less of a vote.

  131. Although the original post does have some valid points to be made about appealing to non-urban areas, I think the funeral for the Democratic Party is a bit premature. I seem to remember the 2000 and especially 2004 elections leading to a “permanent Republican majority” which evaporated in 2008.

    The bottom line is that two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in history ran against each other. One of them had to win, and did, narrowly (0.8% margin in Wisconsin, for example) by tweaking his message. (Although why anybody thinks a man who literally has a gold toilet is going to be a fan of the working poor is beyond me.)

    What the Democrats need to do is pick up 10% in some of the upper Midwest states (or Texas – Trump won by 9% there) and everybody will be singing a different tune.

  132. Speaking practically, how likely is it that the Democrats will undergo the personality transformation needed to become a viable Opposition again?

    Because the party in its current form reflects the radicalism of the Boomers who turned it leftward in the 1960s, my guess is that the Boomers in charge will need to die off before their influence is gone. Or, more likely, an intra-party coup is staged to move them out of influential positions.

    Nothing in politics is forever, but it appears it’ll take a decade or more for the party to get out of the corner it painted itself into. So figure on one or two addition conservative presidencies (after Trump’s first one) before the Democrats redefine themselves enough to get back into office.

    There’s a lot of Big Government to remove before then, and time’s a-wasting.

  133. I think this goes too far. Clinton lost because of three states where she came up just a bit short. The loss has more to do with her incompetently-run campaign than anything else (i.e., not Comey/PutinWikileaks). If she had bothered to go after Rust Belt votes, rather than laying on her deplorable/irredeemable dis, she would have won those states and we would be in a very different conversation (e.g., that Trump lost because of his “sex” tape that outraged women). Republican majorities in both the House and Senate shrank.

    I maintain that any normal Dem could have beaten Trump, while any normal Rep could have beaten Clinton.

    The question of the states, where Reps truly triumphed, is different. Were they decided by a rejection of political correctness, guns, etc? If it were coattails, that would have been reflected in the House, no? Curious to know where the money went in those races. Trump got outspent 2:1. I’m guessing that’s not true down-ballot, but I don’t know.

  134. >Exercise for the reader: Presuming everyone votes, calculate the minimum number of votes a candidate needs to win, accounting for the Electoral College.

    I don’t think a minimum number of votes can be determined, assuming that an undetermined number of third parties that receive non-zero vote totals are present.

    If you’re looking for the minimum population that makes it mathematically possible to receive 270 electoral votes, this chart:

    http://theweek.com/articles/447714/which-states-screwed-worst-by-electoral-college

    indicates that taking Texas and everything below it would give you 280 electoral votes (enough to win, with 10 spares).

    The whole “popular vote” thing is just a red herring, anyway. As far as I know, with the sole exception of France there aren’t any Western democracies that appoint their chief executive based on a straight popular vote. Canada, the beloved pseudo-destination of disgruntled liberals, certainly doesn’t.

  135. “In the unlikely event that enough faithless electors materialize to deny Trump, there won’t be a civil war. The house will pick a moderate republican and life will go on.”

    There may not be a full scale civil war. But there will be violence, and there will be a lot of blood. Not the type of leftist protests funded by Soros, beat-up random folks you think supported the side Soros is paying you to hassle. Not just burn a few cars or businesses of random folks as intimidation.

    Folks who were part of the ‘Tea Party’ being told they needed to participate in the process to effect change- they did so, peacefully, getting Republican majorities which turned around and ignored what those folks wanted once elected. They supported the polite, well-mannered republican types, nothing. These are the folks who heard Obama say– “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election,” To do so, many embraced a candidate they found vulgar, rude, rash– but– perhaps finally someone who would listen and actually abide by the will of the people on at least a couple of key issues.

    They went out and won an election. Use some underhanded method of changing the rules after that- polite politics working within a party didn’t work, embracing an outsider to ‘Go out and win an election’ didn’t work– you have left them nothing but directed, well-executed and targeted political violence. They’ve run out of options.

    There will be blood. There will be violence. It will be politically targeted and conducted by folks who know what they are about and committed to it, and will feel morally justified in carrying it out.

  136. >Although why anybody thinks a man who literally has a gold toilet is going to be a fan of the working poor is beyond me.

    As opposed to a woman whose business model is based on sucking down millions of dollars in “speaking fees” and “charitable contributions” from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Saudi Arabia? Though Trump’s business history is certainly checkered, he has in fact built actual real-world projects, and has in fact employed actual people doing real jobs. Clinton’s only product has been graft. Note what’s happened to the contributions to her “charity” now that the election is over and she has no more clout to sell.

    Trump doesn’t call voters deplorable and irredeemable. Trump isn’t promising to put coal miners out of business. Trump isn’t calling them sexist and racist when they object to this. Trump isn’t adding insult to injury by lecturing the unemployed coal miners on their supposed “white male privilege”. Trump isn’t calling for the unemployed coal miners to go extinct.

  137. You’re underestimating just how flat out evil the now dominant Progressive wing of the Democratic Party has become. Reports of increased suicides and lowered life expectancy in “fly over” country brings about the clinking of glasses and cheers at any DNC social.

    The hollowing out of the middle class as you call it isn’t bad or ignorant policy on their part- it’s the *intended* result, and they thought demographic trends would protect them from the consequences. This is a government that is *actively* hostile to a major demographic, not careless. They want me and mine dead, and as far as many of us are concerned, we’re already in a civil cold war- have been for some years now. If they somehow succeed in subverting the electoral vote, the war will turn hot.

    This is not paranoia. It’s all out there if you doubt me. They’ve been quite open about it for a good while now if you know where to look.

  138. A harsh but probably necessary prescription, Eric. For the sake of the country, we should hope the Democrats take it. All indications to date are that they’re incapable of doing so.

    > If the Dems keep up this divisive rhetoric and maintain their control of small regions of the country, while losing total influence in all other areas of the country, the fracturing of the union is inevitable.

    Bingo. The only question is whether it will be a peaceful separation or not.

    > I agree with many of your observations however the 2.8 million votes that Hillary Clinton won the popularity vote is just as significant.

    This has been debunked several times. They stop counting absentee ballots once the outcome is certain. We don’t actually know who won the popular vote, nor does it matter.

    > He ran & won on a traditional Democratic platform. His entire platform is lifted pretty much wholesale from Democratic Populists like Huey Long.

    Pretty much, yes.

    > My point is that if the electoral system doesn’t work to fulfill the will of a large majority then change needs to occur.

    Do you really think that 35 states will tolerate being dictated to by 15, regardless of their relative population totals?

    And I agree with others that the “basket of deplorables” comment was the turning point in the election.

  139. “Donald Trump’s victory reads to me like a realignment election, a historic break with the way interest and demographic groups have behaved in the U.S. in my lifetime.”

    It was a reaction to two highly flawed candidates; the lesser of two evils emerged victorious. Lower class whites who had voted for Obama twice based on his economic proposals voted for Trump. It was a revolution only in the fact that a non-politician won. Voters still elected establishment types to state and national office.

    “Yet, Democrats, you so far seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Indeed, if I were Donald Trump I would be cackling with glee at your post-election behavior, which seems ideally calculated to lock Trump in for a second term before he has been sworn in for the first.”

    Seems being the operative word. Much will happen in the next four years.

    “Stop this. Your country needs you. I’m not joking and I’m not concern-trolling.”

    Which means you are concern-trolling.

    “First, your ability to assemble a broad-based national coalition has collapsed. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise by your popular vote “win”; that majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex and disguises a large-scale collapse in popular support everywhere else in the U.S. Trump even achieved 30-40% support in blue states where he didn’t spend any money.”?

    Hillary lost the Rust Belt by a close margin in the popular vote. The only collapse is that Hillary ignored the needs of blue collar whites. These same voters will swing the pendulum in four years indeed if the Democrats get their act together.

    “County-by-county psephological maps show that your base is now confined to two major coastal enclaves and a handful of university towns.”

    You conveniently forgot about major metropolitan areas in the Midwest and the political prowess they hold.

    “you will be defending 25 seats in areas where Trump took the popular vote, while the Republicans have to defend only 8 where Clinton won.”

    In some cases by close margins. If Trump doesn’t deliver the goods, those R’s are vulnerable.

    “Your party leadership is geriatric, decades older than the average for their Republican counterparts.”

    Current national party leadership.

    “Years of steady losses at state level, masked by the personal popularity of Barack Obama, have left you without a bench to speak of – little young talent and basically no seasoned Presidential timber under retirement age.”

    Not quite.

    http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/24/opinion/sunday/14-young-democrats-to-watch.html

    “The fact that Joseph Biden, who will be 78 for the next Election Day, is being seriously mooted as the next Democratic candidate, speaks volumes – none of them good.”

    Who is seriously taken him into account? Please elaborate.

    “Worse, a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night.”??This statement is accurate.

    “Your donor advantage didn’t help either. Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost.”

    She misused her financial resources, since people had made their decisions well ahead of her team saturating areas with political ads.

    “Your “coalition of the ascendant” is sinking. Tell all the just-so stories you like, but the brute fact is that it failed to turn out to defeat the Republican candidate with the highest negatives in history.”

    Because Hillary was a historically flawed candidate. The negative perception of her ability to lead by opposing voters was epic.

    “African-Americans, trained by decades of identity politics, simply failed to show up for a white candidate in the numbers you needed. The sexism card didn’t play either, as a bare majority of married women who actually went to the polls seem to have voted for Trump.”

    ??Identity politics occurs through ideology.

    “The conservative majority in most of the U.S. (coastal enclaves excepted) now knows it’s a conservative majority. Before the election every pundit in sight pooh-poohed the idea that discouraged conservative voters, believing themselves isolated and powerless, had been sitting out several election cycles. But it turned out to be true, not least where I live in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where mid-state voters nobody knew were there put Trump over the top. Pretty much the same thing happened all through the Rust Belt.”

    Those voters lean center-right, not conservative. Major difference here.

    “That genie isn’t going to be stuffed back in the bottle. Those voters now know they can deliver the media and the coastal elites a gigantic fuck-you, and Republicans know the populist techniques to mobilize them to do that. Trump’s playbook was not exactly complicated.”

    Which means that the Democrats, again if they get their act together, will also use that playbook like they have in the past.

    “Some Democrats are beginning to talk, tentatively, about reconnecting to the white working class. But your real problem is larger; you need to make the long journey back to the political center. Not the center you imagine exists, either; that’s an artifact of your media bubble. I’m pointing at the actual center revealed by psephological analysis of voter preferences.”

    ??Political center, indeed. Long journey back? No.

    “You Democrats need to think about what it takes to be competitive on a continuum where Fox News is barely right of center, Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch liberal, and as near as I could tell the politician who actually nailed the psephological center in 2008 was none other than Sarah Palin.”

    Fox is hard right. Mitt is a cuckservative. Palin is nuts.

    “Before I get to suggesting some changes, I want to point out that the results of the dominance Republicans have already achieved are going to make your problems even worse than they look now. Those problems don’t end with not having a farm team. State-level control means the Republicans will largely determine redistricting in the 2020 census. Their ability to pass voter-ID laws will surely hurt you as well.”

    ??Those voter-ID laws may not pass constitutional muster at the federal court level.

    “Trump’s popularity has risen as his program becomes clearer. You need to be positioned so that you can cope with outcomes other than catastrophic disenchantment with Trumpian populism.”

    Populism by an elitist has been a common political American trait.

    “Your best plausible case is that the minority groups you counted on passively fail to add up to a winning coalition, as they did this cycle. Your worst – and increasingly likely – case is that white people now begin voting as something like an ethnic bloc. This is, after all, how you’ve been teaching other ethnic groups to play the game since the 1960s.”

    False News Story. White people personally and individually voted for a candidate they believed would best serve their economic, not racial, interests.

    “The alternative is that something like the Republicans, or possibly worse, dominates American politics for the foreseeable future. I don’t want that, and you should fear it more than I do.”

    When Obama was elected in 2002, Democrats foolishly predicted that the death of the Republican Party. There are similar sentiments here.

  140. One quibble – the idea that this outcome was obvious to everybody except Clinton. It wasn’t – even Trump admitted that as late as Tuesday afternoon he thought he was going to lose.

  141. Why are you so concerned NOW about a single party system? What about the last several decades of de facto single party rule with only a few minor details to distinguish anti-American left from anti-American further left that were all that we had to choose from with regards to politicians? NOW it concerns you? NOW it bothers you? I tell you what; the reforged Republicans will be a much better uniparty than the openly anti-American uniparty that’s ruled the Washington cartel since Reagan at least. That’s the LEAST of my concerns for the future.

    And you also fail to mention another few points that could be significant; the Overton window has ALREADY shifted and will continue to shift. You think the far left r-selected insanity of the Democrats is out of synch with America NOW, wait until we’ve four years, or even eight years, of hearing and seeing that there’s another way to order our affairs after all in spite of the incessant propaganda from our media/entertainment/academic Ministry of Propaganda, EVERYONE can see that that other way actually works.

    You think that protectionism is going to have dire consequences (let’s not, for the moment, get into the history of protectionism in America) and that it’s a given that Americans will continue to accept the mass invasion of our country with hordes of Third World socialists who’s only purpose here is to damage us economically, vote for Democrats, and destroy the country and traditions that are our birthright—do you REALLY think that that paradigm is going to continue? ALREADY Americans ALL OVER AMERICA are asking themselves why they’ve been flooded with people from cultures that will inevitably clash with ours, and what business they have here, and who are the responsible traitors and quislings that brought them here to destroy the peace of our communities.

    In short, as good as this analysis is, it still refrains from assuming that anything will really change.

  142. ‘Fox is hard right. Mitt is a cuckservative. Palin is nuts.’

    Fox is establishment Republican, as per thirty years of Murdoch’s orders. Palin is mostly entertainment, though she was okay when she was in office.

    ‘in 2012, Democrats foolishly predicted the death of the Republican party.’

    Yes, this was a close election, not a death knell. Clinton got caught stealing the primary from a left-liberal, which really annoyed the left-liberals. But who are these left-liberals? Nutbags who live for orthodoxy-sniffing and naked Lena Dunham pictures, or adults like Will Shetterly who want some kind of social democracy that works? If the Democrats go full Lena, they are as doomed as ESR fears and the faster the better. If the Shetterly wing took David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom challenge ‘I don’t mind if you call me a socialist’ and got some competent administrators for their programs- a well-administered Obamacare, a Universal Basic Income that fires a million bureaucrats and send everyone some money, and they keep Trump’s unwillingness to fight the Russians over, for example, Russia’s Navy base in Syria? I’d be a social democrat.

  143. Everyone seems to be under the assumption that we actually know what the popular vote count was in the November election. The fact is that usually, not every vote is counted unless it could change the outcome.

    On election day, the votes that are cast are tallied up and if a state has early voting, those votes are added in.

    If and only if the difference between the winner and the loser is less than the number of absentee votes, the absentee ballot envelopes are opened and the votes are added to the vote counts.

    This means that the popular vote count is likely to undercount the number of people who voted when a state votes overwhelmingly for a candidate. Since the Presidency is decided by the Electoral College, it is not important just how many votes the winner got.

    In 2000 California Governor Gray Davis ordered all of the absentee ballots counted which increased the number of popular votes for Al Gore. This was not done in any of the states that voted for George Bush because counting all the absentee ballots by hand costs money that could be used for other, more useful things.

    I don’t know if California did the same thing in the recent election but I know that large states that voted for Donald Trump did not.

    The bottom line is that nobody knows who won the popular vote and most states do not spend the money to find out because it doesn’t matter. However, butthurt Democrats should cling to this incomplete statistic to make themselves feel better and to nurture their belief that they are the wronged majority.

  144. The intention wasn’t that of the Founders themselves. For them, the EC was a kluge to get around high communications costs, with no principled function.

    Federalist #68 suggests a little more than that. “It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided…It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation…It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder.”

    So if Hamilton had it right, they were hoping the Electoral College would combine features of the House and Senate…with the actual, final selection made by an elite body after debate and deliberation, rather than coming to their vote with their choices pre-ordained. I’m not aware that it ever worked that way even once.

  145. For those folks wanting to identify the popular vote as the true will of the people, there’s an anomaly to deal with. According to this site (http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/index.html), Clinton won the popular vote 65,818,318 to Trump’s 62,958,211 for a margin of 2,860,107 votes.

    But that includes California. Hillary’s vote margin in California alone was 4,269,978 in a state with no Republican running for the open Senate seat! About 13 million voted in California for President, and about 10.5 million voted for the Senate race. This is an anomalous situation to say the least. It’s actually amazing that almost 4.5 million CA Republicans showed up to vote at all for a lost cause. But remove California from the mix, and here are the vote totals:

    Clinton: 57,204,530
    Trump: 58,474,401

    Trump wins the national popular vote sans CA by 1,269,871.

    Now, does this matter? Of course not. As Scott Adams likes to say, Donald Trump clearly lost the contest he wasn’t in. Manipulating things a bit to show that he could have won that contest doesn’t matter in this election either. But suppose NY and IL and MA followed CA’s lead in their next Senate races? Talk about suppressing the vote….

  146. LS: Mexico doesn’t have to invade. The legislature already operates as if California is a province of Mexico and their duty is to further the interests of Mexican citizens.

  147. In deep blue California, Proposition 8 – to ban Gay Marriage – passed by a wider margin that Hillary’s popular vote.

    Brendan Eich was purged from Mozilla over that (get the Brave Browser), but it was well in the past by then.

    If you want the tyranny of the mob in Hillary, then we should also put Gay Marriage to a vote. It would lose by a large margin.

    I detest it when Liberals go to the courts when democracy chooses the wrong result.

  148. Joseph W.:

    [esr:] The intention wasn’t that of the Founders themselves. For them, the EC was a kluge to get around high communications costs, with no principled function.

    Federalist #68 suggests a little more than that. “It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided…It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation…It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder.”

    So if Hamilton had it right, they were hoping the Electoral College would combine features of the House and Senate…with the actual, final selection made by an elite body after debate and deliberation, rather than coming to their vote with their choices pre-ordained. I’m not aware that it ever worked that way even once.

    As I understand it, it was supposed to be a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon style system. With massively lower numbers of voters per elector, like, 30,000? I seem to remember, you’d vote for your elector based on either knowing him, or knowing someone you trust who recommends him. The elector in theory would know the President and VP he was going to vote for to a sufficient degree it would be a minimally informed choice.

    As you say, it may have never worked this way, Washington, the indispensable man of the Revolution, aftermath (e.g. not marching on the Continental Congress to get paid), and of course the new Constitution and wasn’t there a tacit understanding he’d be the first President? So he short circuited this, and I’m not up on the history after that. And of course this was a system that couldn’t scale, which is a general problem with the House, if you’re one of half a million constituents you have much less influence over your Congresscritter vs. the 30K I vaguely remember.

  149. “As far as I know, with the sole exception of France there aren’t any Western democracies that appoint their chief executive based on a straight popular vote. Canada, the beloved pseudo-destination of disgruntled liberals, certainly doesn’t.”

    It’s true, we don’t. Very few of our Prime Ministers ever won power with more than about 33% or so of the actual popular vote at most. And it’s amazing how reliably the fact gets touted as a bug by the press when Conservatives are in power but is utterly ignored when the Liberals are in power. :)

  150. “??Those voter-ID laws may not pass constitutional muster at the federal court level.”

    Alito and Ginsberg’s replacements won’t have a problem.

  151. gcm: “You conveniently forgot about major metropolitan areas in the Midwest”

    Chicago/Milwaukee, the Twin Cities, St. Louis, maybe Denver if you stretch the definition of “Midwest”. Whoopee ding.

    “Political center, indeed. Long journey back? No.”

    Considering just how far to the left Clinton ran and how much farther the Bernie Sanders supporters are saying they need to go? It’s a very long journey indeed.

    “Fox is hard right.”

    No, Eric has it right. Go read Professor Tim Groseclose’s book Left Turn. He examined the media’s political biases and compares them to the American public, with and without the influence of the media. He finds Fox News to be slightly left of center of the American people except for the MSM’s influence.

    “White people personally and individually voted for a candidate they believed would best serve their economic, not racial, interests.”

    Live by identity politics, die by identity politics. If you tell white men that they’re eeeeevil just because they’re white men long enough and loud enough, eventually they’re going to embrace their identity – and vote accordingly. Economic interests, true, but no less identity-based for all that.

  152. And about voter IDs to combat voter fraud. I have still to see any real evidence that voter fraud is a factor in the elections, or that it even exists.

    Then you have had your hands over your eyes. Just go look at the people actually convicted of voter fraud in the last decade…

    Or check out he woman who claimed on national television that she voted for Obama 6 times (and yes, that checked out – she had access to the absentee ballots of 5 other people), and she didn’t get prosecuted.

    Or the precincts that routinely have 100% Democrat voting. Heck, even tyrants like Hussein didn’t claim 100%!

    Or the claims on hidden video from Democrat operatives that they actively engage in such. Surely those are all lies and bravado? Even when those exact people have long histories of being paid Democrat operatives?

    Check out the case of Al Franken, for a great example of obvious fraud. Also, the 2004 election of Christine Gregoire, where King County “found” more and more ballots until the Democrat won, is another.

    If you haven’t seen any evidence of voter fraud, you’re not looking.

    The US contains uncontrolled militia violence right now; there are places in the US you cannot safely go because you would be robbed or murdered by militias.

    Um, what? Unless you’re using “militia” to be “gang” (and they are VERY VERY different), then I have no idea what you are talking about. What color is the sky in your world?

    It’s pretty easy to see a world where the US has zero national parties.

    Then you don’t understand the system – it is inherently two party, where the alliances are made in advance (as opposed to a parliamentart system, where the alliances are made after the voting).

    Any time in American history where that system has problems (a major party split, for instance), the SMALLER political group rules while the LARGER group fights internally. Because of this, there is incredible pressure to make the alliances in advance and outside the actual voting process.

    Exercise for the reader: Presuming everyone votes, calculate the minimum number of votes a candidate needs to win, accounting for the Electoral College. Express your answer as a percentage of the total population of the US.

    Mathematically, that’s incredibly easy to approximate: 50%+1 in 50%+1 of the electoral votes approximates to 25% of the voters. (Slightly less that 25%, actually, due to the extra 2 electoral votes for each state from the Senate.)

    But that’s an ivory tower answer, so phenominally unlikely to happen as to be silly – it requires that exactly half of the voters (plus one) in half-of-the-electoral-votes-worth-of-states (plus one) vote for the winner, and 100% of the voters in the other states don’t.

    That’s like a World Series where the team that won 4 games only got 4 runs total across all 7 games, and the team that won the other 3 games got 50 runs in each of them. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but nobody actually worries about that, because it’s crazy.

    There will be blood. There will be violence. It will be politically targeted and conducted by folks who know what they are about and committed to it, and will feel morally justified in carrying it out.

    Sadly, I agree with this sentiment, and even more sadly, for quite some time now, I have thought that the path to the lowest body count may well be the intentional, public, “not trying to get away with” killing of public officials by completely unconnected individuals, with the explicit and confessed reason that they were committing terrible crimes against the Constitution and getting away with it. One would definitely be ignored, two would almost certainly be hand-waved away, three MIGHT do it, but probably not… I think four would get the attention of the bureaucrats and our professional “betters”, but it might take five or even six.

    Even so, 8-12 people sacrificed (those doing the killing would stand a better-than-average chance of execution for their HORRENDOUS crime of killing somebody who actually MATTERS!, but even without, they would likely spend the rest of their lives in prison) seems like the lowest loss of life scenario at this point.

    (Heck, how many people have been killed in the race riots and targeted police murders fostered by Obama’s fecklessness in the last year alone?)

    And no, that doesn’t mean I LIKE that, or think it’s a good thing… only that I (sadly) can’t come up with anything remotely likely to have a lower body count.

    “Your worst – and increasingly likely – case is that white people now begin voting as something like an ethnic bloc. This is, after all, how you’ve been teaching other ethnic groups to play the game since the 1960s.”

    False News Story. White people personally and individually voted for a candidate they believed would best serve their economic, not racial, interests.

    In the short-term, it would be so VERY satisfying for you to be wrong, but in the long term, it would be the worst political and racial development in this country in at least decades.

    But Eric is right about how the Democrats have been pushing for it, albeit I THINK unintentionally. The best way to get a group to think of themselves as a group, to ACT as a group, is to attack them as a group and make them group up to defend themselves…

    There has only been one racial group that it has been publicly acceptable to mock and attack racially for my entire adult life (and I’m no spring chicken), and that is whites. If they were to “group up” and start acting like an ethnic group, THEY WOULD WIN, as they are still easily the largest such group, actually a bare majority even (at the moment).

    As I said, in the short-term, that would be great (and watching the Democrat hoist on their own petard would be incredibly satisfying), but in the long term… wow, so so so so SO SO SO SO bad!

    I really wish the Democrats would stop encouraging it so very very much.

  153. > I seem to remember the 2000 and especially 2004 elections leading to a “permanent Republican majority” which evaporated in 2008.

    “Evaporated”? Have you seen the number of governorships, statehouse seats, and Congressional seats Republicans have picked up since 2008? The GOP hasn’t held this much power nationally since the 1920’s. Republicans hold 33 governorships, and control both chambers of the legislature in 32 states. (In 25 states, they control all three.) In 44 states, the GOP controls *at least one governorship or legislative house*.

    All you have to do is look at states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kentucky to see the Democrat wipeout during Obama’s term.

    Trump won a state – Pennsylvania — that hasn’t gone for the GOP since 1988. He also took Michigan and Wisconsin, which (until last month) were considered reliable Democrat strongholds). None of this was accidental, nor did it fall out of a clear blue sky. I understand that Democrats are comforting themselves with the myth that this fiasco was a hundred-year-storm, but the truth is that Democrats have been losing ground steadily since the 2010 midterms.

  154. >But who are these left-liberals? Nutbags who live for orthodoxy-sniffing and naked Lena Dunham pictures…

    Given that Obama sent his teenage daughter off to intern with Dunham, I know where my money would be.

    I wouldn’t even leave my child alone in a room with Dunham, much less let the kid do an internship with her.

    One hopes the Secret Service was keeping close watch on her.

  155. Jay Maynard:

    “Fox is hard right.”

    No, Eric has it right. Go read Professor Tim Groseclose’s book Left Turn. He examined the media’s political biases and compares them to the American public, with and without the influence of the media. He finds Fox News to be slightly left of center of the American people except for the MSM’s influence.

    And two months after the book was published, founder Rodger Ailes announced it was turning to the left, and of course this year he was ousted in a coup and replaced by two Murdoch sons who are said to be a lot more liberal. We’ll see what happens in the Age of Trump and as the contracts expire of various right of center figures on it….

  156. @esr:

    >Yes, ideally I personally would prefer your place in the two-party Duverger equilibrium to be taken by the Libertarian Party, but there are practical reasons this is extremely unlikely to happen. The other minor parties are even more doomed. If the Republicans are going to have a counterpoise, it has to be you Democrats.

    I dunno. If Trump is the future of the GOP, there are a fair number of Republicans (especially, I think, among evangelicals, for whom Trump is morally repulsive and any Democrat is both morally repulsive and suicide to vote for) that could at least hold their nose for a Libertarian (Libertarians would be in favor of a whole bunch of stuff they don’t like, but at least they aren’t of a mind to silence dissent).

    If there’s a similar block of potential libertarians on the left, and if the two blocks could each be made aware of the other’s willingness to vote Libertarian, and if a better candidate than Johnson could be found, it is not inconceivable that the Libertarians could actually replace one of the two major parties.

    Of course, the real nice thing to do would be to get a constitutional Amendment going requiring preferential voting for all federal elections so that the Duverger equilebrium goes away.

  157. “That’s like a World Series where the team that won 4 games only got 4 runs total across all 7 games, and the team that won the other 3 games got 50 runs in each of them. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but nobody actually worries about that, because it’s crazy.”

    You must open old wounds, mustn’t you? The closest this scenario came to reality was the 1960 World Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Yankees. The Yanks won three games by double digit blowouts; the Pirates won four by two, one, three and one runs, respectively:

    NYY wins:
    16-3 (game 2)
    10-0 (game 3)
    12-0 (game 6)

    PGH wins:
    6-4 (game 1)
    3-2 (game 4)
    5-2 (game 5)
    10-9 (game 7)

    The Electoral College gave Pittsburgh the World Series title with 4 “votes”
    The Yanks won the Popular vote by scoring 55 runs to the Bucs’ 27 in runs, and 91 hits to 60.

    However, the Elitist Coastal Pinstripes would have petitioned unsuccessfully if they tried, that they dominated the flyover country Bucs from western Pennsylvania in every phase of the game, except, that is, in the only one that counted, and therefore deserved the title.

    To me, baseball isn’t a matter of life and death, its more important than that. There, now I can die in peace.

  158. @Jon Brase “I dunno. If Trump is the future of the GOP, there are a fair number of Republicans (especially, I think, among evangelicals, for whom Trump is morally repulsive …”

    I’m prolly the token “evangelical” that occasionally comments here, but I don’t see much of this reaction among my tribe. We voted for him as president, not pastor.

    “… that could at least hold their nose for a Libertarian (Libertarians would be in favor of a whole bunch of stuff they don’t like, but at least they aren’t of a mind to silence dissent).” Repubs don’t tend to silence dissent either. But the Libertarian official platform contains some showstoppers.

    “If there’s a similar block of potential libertarians on the left, and if the two blocks could each be made aware of the other’s willingness to vote Libertarian, and if a better candidate than Johnson could be found, it is not inconceivable that the Libertarians could actually replace one of the two major parties.”

    That’s a lot of “ifs”, Bro. I wish it could be, but it’s about as likely as the Democrats taking ESR’s excellent advice.

  159. Jon Brase:

    @esr:

    >Yes, ideally I personally would prefer your place in the two-party Duverger equilibrium to be taken by the Libertarian Party, but there are practical reasons this is extremely unlikely to happen. The other minor parties are even more doomed. If the Republicans are going to have a counterpoise, it has to be you Democrats.

    I dunno. If Trump is the future of the GOP, there are a fair number of Republicans (especially, I think, among evangelicals, for whom Trump is morally repulsive….

    That may be so, but they voted for him in a higher fraction that any presidential candidate since they started asking “evangelical” vs. “born again” after 2000, even above Bush in 2004. So I suggest they’re playing a deeper game; for instance, it’s widely believed they are under greater threat from the state than in any time in recent memory. Note for instance the persecutions and prosecutions of those not willing to bake “gay wedding cakes” and even pizza, and the Feds using the law to push for biological men in restrooms with their children, Target’s travails are illuminating.

    I’d guess not since Jimmy Carter was president and started going after their schools. Which makes both of the last two really stupid, you go after people’s children and, well, in the ’80s one thing we got was the “Moral Majority”. And they got a lot more active in politics.

    Trump attacked Political Correctness, and said the bathroom question should stay with the states. He’s a lot more on their side than any cuckservice Republican, and of course pretty much any influential Democrat, and all he has to do to fulfill that promise is to take the DoJ’s thumb off the scales, which his pick for AG suggests will happen (although that will be quite an internal battle; we really, seriously, need to go back to some variety of the Spoils System, so called Civil Servants have turned out to be worst than the disease in way too many domains, here, I would say any lawyer in the DoJ or above).

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  161. “Libertarians would be in favor of a whole bunch of stuff they don’t like, but at least they aren’t of a mind to silence dissent).”

    Oh really? Try telling one that open borders aren’t an unalloyed good, and see how fast the bigot word is heard.

    1. >Oh really? Try telling one [Libertarian] that open borders aren’t an unalloyed good, and see how fast the bigot word is heard.

      I will raise my hand at this point and say that I am both as hard-core libertarian as they come and I have never dismissed restrictionists as mere bigots. Contingently wrong, maybe, but not bigots.

      Reading about Robert Putnam’s research on how diversity erodes social trust has done a lot to move me on this issue. I am now cautiously in favor of immigration restrictions intended to prevent net loss of social trust and capital by preferring immigrants from cultures close to ours.

      I think other libertarians are movable on this score. To move them, what you have to push home is the charge that they are undervaluing social trust relative to the labor input of immigrants.

  162. We don’t expect Trump to govern as a Christian; we expect him to recognize that we want to be left alone.

  163. Trump is NOT the future of the Republican Party. He’s an aberration, like The Mule in Asimov’s
    Foundation series. Right now, both Republican and Democratic operatives are trying desperately to see how to get back to The Plan.

  164. The alternative is that something like the Republicans, or possibly worse, dominates American politics.

    Read somewhere, paraphrasing, that after all the violent rent-a-mobs, debate-rigging, transparent press water-carrying and so forth, that if Trump failed the Democrats were *really* not going to like what came next. Whatever.

    The alternative will be something like what happened to the ’94 Republican Wave, where twelve years of legislative control and a bumbling opponent yielded dumbbells, creeps and pocket-liners every bit as bad as Lott, Hastert and Delay. Which then yielded the equally as repellent Pelosi and Reid. We need to break that cycle.

  165. @Odd Man Out
    > And about voter IDs to combat voter fraud. I have still to see any real evidence that voter fraud is a factor in the elections, or that it even exists.

    Trying to detect voter fraud is raciiiissssst Any effort to detect voter fraud is deemed suppressive.

  166. And next time, don’t nominate a corrupt, incompetent, pathological liar that accomplished nothing in the 30yrs she spent in government

    1. >And next time, don’t nominate a corrupt, incompetent, pathological liar that accomplished nothing in the 30yrs she spent in government

      This is something I could have said, yes. But I was trying to write in terms at least a few Democrats would be able to hear.

  167. Chris Gerrib on 2016-12-15 at 14:21:05 said:
    > One quibble – the idea that this outcome was obvious to everybody except Clinton. It wasn’t – even Trump admitted that as late as Tuesday afternoon he thought he was going to lose.

    Those who live in a bubble refuse to admit that their is any reality outside their bubble, claim that everyone else lives in the same bubble that they do. We saw the same phenomenon in the Reagan revolution. Not only was Reagan supposedly wrong, a fool, an idiot and a complete moron to believe the Soviet Union was weak and falling, he also supposedly believed the Soviet Union was a big success.

  168. “But don’t you understand?? She has a vagina! Wait, that’s not right… she self-identifies as a woman! (My sincere apologies to all women without vaginas! Please don’t get me fired!) The inevitable progress of history requires a woman president, and the sooner, the better. Don’t you get it? It’s the current year! Ugh, I can’t even….”

  169. “The conservative majority in most of the U.S. (coastal enclaves excepted) now knows it’s a conservative majority.”

    What a dimwitted statement. It would be more accurate, but just as stupid, to say that the country has a liberal majority, the ex-confederacy excepted.

  170. Democrats need a young face (white) who is a combination of Joe Biden and Bernie. They need to make an ironclad commitment that they won’t take any special interest money (Bernie model) and banish anyone who does from the party. The rest will automatically follow. The American people are not as right-leaning as ESR suggests. They do not want corporate rule, nor crony capitalist republicans. They like social security, big infra structure spending, medicare, and even the broken Obamacare. Democrats do that, and the next time they come into power it will be a more overwhelming wave than the one that brought Obama into office 8 years ago.

  171. Hey ESR, long-time reader, first time poster.

    Question for you, since this is as close to a “relevant” topic as you’ve written of late for me to pose it, but I recall you expressing the goal of writing a “Code of Conduct” for FLOSS projects that wasn’t obnoxious SJW tripe.

    Unless I missed it, I haven’t seen you mention it anywhere since. I know you’ve been hard at work on paying gigs and that those must come first, but I had been holding out, waiting on your CoC to appear.

    Are you still wanting to do this?

    1. >Are you still wanting to do this?

      Yes, but NTPsec has been eating my bandwidth so totally that I didn’t even blog for two months.

  172. Hillary got more hits than Trump in the baseball game. Therefore, hits should count, not runs, and Hillary should be declared the winner.

  173. A lot of great comments. I would just like to point out a few quibbles.

    Democrats understand that this conservative was a never trumper right up to the point Trump won the nomination. Then I became a never hillary, which I always was.

    The dems posting here are making a huge mistake if they think Trump will govern as a guy with a gold toilet seat, as someone said above. Why would he do that? He is 70 years old and just won the Presidency, he doesn’t need money anymore. The only thing that will motivate him for the rest of his life, is to make everyone forget Reagan. He is a narcissist just like Obama. He saw what happened to Obama. This guy has stolen about half of the middle class away from you, now he is coming for the other half. As the post said, you are in deep shit. Sorry, but I do not think Trump will give a damn about Trump inc in a couple of years, he will be focused on the history books.

    Also, the whole EC argument, jeff greenfield posted an article a few days ago, and since he wrote a book on the subject you should go have a peek. The EC votes must be ratified by each states Sec of State and sent on to congress. If they dont like that vote from the EC they can change it. The EC is just symbolic and not the last word. If all that fails it goes to the congress, and then its even harsher due to each state delegation getting one vote each. Trump will be the next President unless he croaks.

    And the whole civil war thing. I hope the blue states understand that the anger they saw election night was just the tip of the iceberg. There are millions of people who would love for a hot war to erupt. Nothing would ensure the constitution more than a hot war that would allow these people to cull the socialists out of the gene pool. And no way do we allow you to take all the ports on the west coast without a fight. So we could split peacefully, but only if we got say San Diego and the republican counties that grow a lot of your food to boot.

  174. @Jim
    “Trying to detect voter fraud is raciiiissssst Any effort to detect voter fraud is deemed suppressive.”

    So there is no evidence, thought so. Even the most racist of Republicans have not been able to find any proof. See also:

    In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud
    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html

    The truth behind voter fraud in Indiana
    http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2016/10/24/indiana-voter-fraud-real-but-rarely-matters/92508486/?from=global&sessionKey=&autologin=

    Top Indiana election official alleges more voter fraud
    http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2016/10/18/state-alleges-more-voter-fraud-names-and-birth-dates-changed-on-forms/92365268/?from=global&sessionKey=&autologin=
    (this one is nice, because the fraud was that many voters could not vote because their registrations had been altered)

  175. Elitist liberals will always be elitist liberals who believe in their hearts that their feelings are closer to the truth than the facts belie. That sort of mental illness can not be cured with logic. So, while this was an excellent treatise on the ideological problems that are rendering the democratic party more and more powerless, it reads more as a requiem than a call to action.

  176. this is a party that deserves to die before they spark another civil war.

    Funny you should mention that. I got a couple of people really angry with me when I said that nominating Hillary was the Democrats’ biggest mistake since firing on Fort Sumter.

  177. If there’s a similar block of potential libertarians on the left,

    There’s not. There’s a smattering of left-wingers who occasionally pretend to be libertarians (Markos Moulitsas, for example), but when push comes to shove they love the taste of boot leather.

  178. “I will raise my hand at this point and say that I am both as hard-core libertarian as they come and I have never dismissed restrictionists as mere bigots.”

    esr, you are sui generis, and you know it…. 8-)

    1. >esr, you are sui generis, and you know it…. 8-)

      While it is arguably true that I an sui generis, I admit this only to make the observation that I think I am not sui generis in this way. I continue to believe that most libertarians can be moved on this issue by the same logic that moved me.

  179. “I got a couple of people really angry with me when I said that nominating Hillary was the Democrats’ biggest mistake since firing on Fort Sumter.”

    I also like the (absolutely true) statement that Democrats haven’t been this angry since we freed their slaves.

  180. Random832 on 2016-12-14 at 14:18:13

    That’s called “begging the question”.

    It’s almost as if you don’t realize there have been generations worth of race-based civil rights laws, quota systems, set-asides, agitation, “community organizing” etc. etc. specifically intended to mitigate that initial disadvantage.

  181. @Winter on 2016-12-16 at 06:08:32

    You should broaden your reading.

    Witnesses to the MI recount in Detroit saw instances of scanner records saying ~300 votes were registered. Opening the locked ballot box of the machine found only 50 ballots inside. There were numerous instances like this where numbers could not be reconciled. In these cases, the 300 number is the legally-binding count. 95 vote logbooks “went missing” and still are.

    Democrat districts are always “overrepresented” with these “irregularities”.

    All random chance, right!

  182. esr, excellent essay.

    My late father was an old-time rust belt dem. He wouldn’t recognize the party today.

    I’m not a dem and will never be one, but the competition of ideas is essential. Nobody gains from effectively one-party rule.

  183. Of course there’s no evidence of voter fraud; having precincts with more actual voters than registered is how it’s supposed to work. Not to mention this little gem from Issa’s district; I suspect that if they hadn’t screwed up and gotten caught he’d have “lost”.

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/03/voter-fraud-california-man-finds-dozens-ballots-stacked-outside-home.html?refresh=true

    The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.

    “I think this is spooky,” Mosna said. “All the different names, none we recognize, all at one address.”

    His wife, Madalena Mosna, noted their 89-year-old neighbor lives by herself, and, “Eighty people can’t fit in that apartment.”

  184. The situation reminds me of the ‘dancing sickness’ mass hysterias in the middle ages.

    Looking at the large number of people afflicted, I’m not seeing a path to sanity, or a way in which anyone can (or should) trust Democrats ever again not to turn rabid and ready to do whatever it takes to ‘win’ (and then some).

    Also: how did they get here in the first place? (it’s a long process!) Democrats are insulting people because they despise them, even if you could stop them from being rude and behave with better decorum, they’d still feel the same, just silently so.

    You’re better off using the current vacuum to build a new party with better principles and saner, less bitter people, picked from the pool that currently roots for Trump, and cut lose the democrats for good, because if you ever admit them again, they will eventually revert to using the methods that worked so well for them for years, until they didn’t any more.

    {It’s no different to ending an abusive relationship — you have to work with reality as is, not the dream you’d like life to be}

  185. > It would be more accurate, but just as stupid, to say that the country has a liberal majority, the ex-confederacy excepted.

    Stupid, certainly. “More accurate”, no.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_state_legislatures#/media/File:United_States_state_legislatures.svg

    Since when were (e.g.) New Hampshire and Wisconsin part of the “confederacy”?

    The Republicans currently control 32 state legislatures. The Confederate States of America only had 11 members. You are not only wrong, but laughably so.

  186. And it’s worth noting that Minnesota’s legislative houses had Republican gains, with the Senate flipping to Republican control – for only the second time in more than 40 years. The first time lasted just one cycle.

  187. Jay Maynard–Live by identity politics, die by identity politics. If you tell white men that they’re eeeeevil just because they’re white men long enough and loud enough, eventually they’re going to embrace their identity – and vote accordingly.

    Except white men in general aren’t falling for the trap set by the radical liberals. Again, that identity is based on their political, economic, and social beliefs.

    Michael–“I’m prolly the token “evangelical” that occasionally comments here, but I don’t see much of this reaction among my tribe. We voted for him as president, not pastor.”

    A president who among a number of “your tribe” would state unequivocally runs directly counter to Christian beliefs. It would seem then principles in the end do not matter given his past conduct to those strident religious folks who voted for him.

  188. In the early 20th century there were a lot of new theories in the physical sciences that solved new problems; quantum mechanics, relativity, and plate tectonics for example. But because the new learning disrupted old models no one who mattered was allowed to endorse them until the old guard who made their names proving the old models died.

    Something similar will happen in politics. The Democrat party will continue to champion its current policies until the organization collapses, or its machinery is captured by a charismatic mutant, or there’s a generational turnover of the leadership cadre. Seeing what the youth are up to in the universities suggests what will happen after the turnover.

    Duverger’s law says that in the American electoral system there will be two Parties. For branding purposes they’ll probably continue to be named Democrat and Republican. Sociology & history say that there are always factions. But which factions group together into the two coalitions, and what policies they claim to champion, is in continual realignment.

    1. >In the early 20th century there were a lot of new theories in the physical sciences that solved new problems; quantum mechanics, relativity, and plate tectonics for example. But because the new learning disrupted old models no one who mattered was allowed to endorse them until the old guard who made their names proving the old models died.

      This is not true. It’s an ahistorical myth peddled by Thomas Kuhn.

      http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=40

  189. @GCM “A president who among a number of “your tribe” would state unequivocally runs directly counter to Christian beliefs. It would seem then principles in the end do not matter given his past conduct to those strident religious folks who voted for him.”

    You miss the point. Again, we’re voting for a president, not a pastor. Neither Billy Graham nor Mother Teresa were on the ticket. AFAICT we have not in living memory had a candidate that did not go “directly counter to Christian beliefs” to some extent. That’s the hand we’re dealt.

    Nebuchadnezzar wasn’t exactly a stellar role model, but that didn’t keep Daniel from serving him loyally (within limits) as circumstances demanded.

  190. I’m a (small-L) libertarian myself and also am seeing free-trade-globilization in a more nuanced light these days. For one, Brexit and Trump strongly suggest it isn’t sustainable as a strategy anyway, at least in full-bore absolutist form. I also just read James Scott’s ‘Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed’. Mostly that dissects disasters in urban planning and collective agriculture, but the pattern it documents of ignoring second-order effects and local conditions while pushing a top-down ideology from undemocratic institutions is pretty baked-in to the free-trade/open-borders stuff too, and that ought to give us pause.

    1. >I also just read James Scott’s ‘Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed’. Mostly that dissects disasters in urban planning and collective agriculture, but the pattern it documents of ignoring second-order effects and local conditions while pushing a top-down ideology from undemocratic institutions is pretty baked-in to the free-trade/open-borders stuff too, and that ought to give us pause.

      That is an extremely good book and I recommend it to all.

  191. Couple of thoughts (I agree with most of what you wrote).

    I don’t think this election will be enough to convince the Democrats they are wrong. My guess is that they’ll do something incredibly foolish like put Ellison in at DNC, double down on opposing Trump due to his being a “white supremacist” and end up getting destroyed by him in 2020–think McGovern but with a larger core of states that are blue under all circumstances (e.g., California).

    The bigger threat to them, though, is that Trump ends up delivering political goods to his constituency and persuadable voters. Example: just read a story about Carnival Cruise Line outsourcing their IT and forcing their current employees to train their H1-B replacements. What happens to the tech crowd votes who have been against the Republicans on social issues if/when Trump actually starts calling out companies that pull this sort of stunt and punishes them for it? Particularly when the alternative is an Ellison-aligned party with spokespersons yammering every day about “white privilege”? Or if he goes even further and sets off the political dynamite of reparations?

    One final thought; a Trump win does save the Democrats from making a political error that could have driven them in the wilderness permanently–jamming through the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing HUD initiative. I’m not sure where the party got the idea this was a good thing…but the political consequences of essentially eliminating local zoning control and forcing suburbs to cede control to central cities (which is what it would have led to) would have been truly astonishing to watch.

  192. This post fails to mention the 800 pound gorilla sitting in the corner in the Al Gore T-shirt. Environmentalism and the AGW cult in particular has done more to alienate middle America than PC culture ever has.

    1. >Environmentalism and the AGW cult in particular has done more to alienate middle America than PC culture ever has.

      I don’t think that’s true, though perhaps it should be.

  193. @Michael “You miss the point. Again, we’re voting for a president, not a pastor.”

    Consider: the GLBT movement is a reaction to the Moral Majority 1980s Christian movement. There absolutely were Right-leaning people in that era calling for government enforced morality based on their interpretation of Biblical doctrine.

    Whether that community consciously realizes it yet or not, the last decade or so has been an object lesson for them in the danger of legitimizing the use of government force to enforce sectarian social norms.

    I know that’s the lesson I’ve learned.

    1. >Whether that community consciously realizes it yet or not, the last decade or so has been an object lesson for them in the danger of legitimizing the use of government force to enforce sectarian social norms.

      I cannot resist pointing out that libertarians did not need to be mugged by reality to get this one right.

  194. “I cannot resist pointing out that libertarians did not need to be mugged by reality to get this one right.”

    You must not read Reason.

  195. “Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books.”

    This does not say “more than the number of registered voters the district”, let alone “three times as many Democrat votes as there were registered voters in the district”. Please find a citation to a reputable source that actually supports Jim’s claim. I can’t even find any article making the claim at all (though I’ve seen it in comments elsewhere), reputable source or otherwise.

  196. Ssssshhhh. Hush now.

    “Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.”
    — Bonaparte

  197. @sleevesockshoe:

    “I recall you expressing the goal of writing a “Code of Conduct” for FLOSS projects that wasn’t obnoxious SJW tripe. Unless I missed it, I haven’t seen you mention it anywhere since. […] Are you still wanting to do this?”

    Have a look at my Erbosoft Project Code of Conduct. If you like it, and you don’t mind the harsh language, you can put your name on it instead of where it says “Erbo” and “Erbosoft,” and use that. (I may have to include an explicit addendum on it as to how you can do that.)

  198. I’m not sure much structural change is necessary for Democrats at the presidential level. They seem to do quite well when they don’t nominate a stiff. And even their recent stiffs have done reasonably well (e.g. HRC and Gore didn’t lose by much).

  199. Has anyone mentioned that the current hysteria over the electoral college, over-the-top name calling, race-baiting, and outright lying about Trump’s (and his voters’) motivations seems very close to yelling fire in a crowded theater? They are weaponizing the snowflakes.

  200. I’m just LOLling it all the commenters here who still can do nothing but bash Trump and his supporters. Way to miss the entire point.

    TLB: Typical Liberal Bigotry

  201. @esr –

    > Reading about Robert Putnam’s research on how diversity erodes
    > social trust has done a lot to move me on this issue. I am now
    > cautiously in favor of immigration restrictions intended to prevent
    > net loss of social trust and capital by preferring immigrants from cultures close to ours.

    Alternatively –

    How about immigrants, regardless of their culture of origin, who come here and assimilate? They can keep their quaint traditional holidays, favorite native dishes, and harmless cultural practices –

    but, they have to learn and use English in public (including being educated in English), have to conform to the dominant social paradigm, etc., etc.

    The Ashkenazi did it. The Irish did it, and we all got St. Patrick’s Day to <STRIKE>get besotted in</STRIKE> celebrate. The Italians did it, and we all got gloppy red sauces and pasta to happily stuff our faces with. There were thousands of Slovenian and Croatian immigrants who came and settled in Cleveland in the early decades of the 20th century (my wife’s grandparents were some of them), but today, except for their last names, they are as wholeheartedly Middle American as anyone else. Other examples can be found.

    1. > Other examples can be found.

      In the past. In the present, wake me up when our primary educational system and cultural/political overclass show any actual interest in supporting assimilation.

      >but, they have to learn and use English in public (including being educated in English), have to conform to the dominant social paradigm, etc., etc.

      What? That’s raaaaaacist! Also hegemonic, white-privileged, and cisnormative. You evil white nationalist neo-nazi, you!

      People who think that way run our educational system.

      We have some housecleaning to do before the historically normal pattern of assimilation can in fact be normal again.

  202. John D. Bell: Of course there are many examples of successful assimilation. However, they happened in an age prior to the multiculturalism delusion. (E.g. Teddy Roosevelt’s attack on the concept of “hyphenated Americans.”) None of those groups were large enough to change the overall ethnic balance of the country, none of them insisted on official multilingualism, and none had any revanchist movements. (I’m looking at you, La Raza and MEChA.)

    Muslim immigration was nearly non-existent, and given what I would argue are the inherent anti-liberty aspects of that religion, I have no reason to expect their assimilation here to go any better than it has in any other country.

  203. @Random832
    “Please find a citation to a reputable source that actually supports Jim’s claim. I can’t even find any article making the claim at all ”

    Thats because there isn’t any evidence. All the Republican administrations have turned every stone to come up with evidence. They could not.

    The only thing ever turning up were (hundreds of) thousands of minority voters who’s votes did not count or who were obstructed when they tried.

  204. @Parallel “Consider: the GLBT movement is a reaction to the Moral Majority 1980s Christian movement.”

    Perhaps, but I don’t think the cause-and-effect is that clear cut. The LGBTABCXYZ push would likely have happened anyway.

    “There absolutely were Right-leaning people in that era calling for government enforced morality based on their interpretation of Biblical doctrine.”

    Yes, but such have been with us in every age. And since the government is going to enforce SOMEONE’S morality it may as well be ours. Pick your poison.

    “…the last decade or so has been an object lesson for them in the danger of legitimizing the use of government force to enforce sectarian social norms.”

    I’ve encountered no-one, save yourself, who perceives that lesson. I don’t. I think the lesson we learned is that if war is what they want then war they’ll get. It’s just another aspect of what Jay Maynard, et al commented about above.

    Thank you for the thoughts.

  205. Winter, are you willfully obtuse or simply stupid? I saw at least three posts above with detailed accounts of the fraud. Respond to those specifics instead of crowing on about there not being any examples.

  206. @PapayaSF –

    > Muslim immigration was nearly non-existent, and given what I would argue are the
    > inherent anti-liberty aspects of that religion, I have no reason to expect their
    > assimilation here to go any better than it has in any other country.

    Anecdotally, of course –

    My personal physician is a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan. As is her husband (he’s also a physician). They are among the leaders of a prominent mosque and social center in my community, which is the spiritual home of many hundreds or possibly a few thousand Muslims from the world over. Each fall they put on an International Festival highlighting the cultural traditions (and foods!) of their countries of origin, as well as giving tours of the facility to the general public.

    These Muslims have assimilated. They live in peace and friendship with the rest of the community, and the non-Muslim community supports them. (When a whacko firebombed the mosque a few years back, many Jewish and Christian community leaders took up a collection to help them repair the damage.)

    I have not personally listened to the sermons given by their imam, but I’m sure that he is a “moderate” or “reform Muslim” (if such a thing can be spoken of, like a Reform Jew). It may well be that they are, in some deep theological sense, “not conforming” to the primary teachings of their religion. But in a functional sense, they are Muslims who are fitting in well with the rest of a contemporary Western culture.

  207. Of course it’s possible for individual Muslims to assimilate, especially when they are a tiny minority. But a look around the world indicates that the higher their proportion of the population, the more trouble they are (on average). Polls of American Muslims do not give me hope, and those are the beliefs that they are willing to tell pollsters.

    Another source for my worry is the experience of France. The first Muslim immigrants from the colonies in the ’50s and ’60s were little to no trouble. It’s their grandkids who are burning cars, committing terror attacks, and joining ISIS.

    To relate this to our original topic, I suspect that Trump’s talk of stopping Muslim immigration was a large part of his appeal, and there’s little hope that Democrats or Libertarians or Greens can win while being pro-Muslim immigration.

  208. @John D. Bell
    A thought experiment … if someone were to ask them … if they had to choose, for the governance of the U.S., would they pick the U.S. Constitution or would they pick Sharia law?

    If they hesitate in the slightest to pick the constitution, then you know they have not, in fact, assimilated but are just (quite sensibly) playing the game.

  209. “How about immigrants, regardless of their culture of origin, who come here and assimilate?”

    As far as I know, “assimilation” is and has always been a multigenerational process. A process that can look to outsiders to be standing still as the pool of unassimilated first-generation immigrants from the same culture of origin is constantly replenished, even if the individual families are assimilating. You can only say “The Italians did it” because there aren’t any significant numbers of new immigrants from 19th-century Italy to make you think they didn’t.

  210. @esr –

    > >but, they have to learn and use English in public (including being educated in English), have to conform to the dominant social paradigm, etc., etc.

    > What? That’s raaaaaacist! Also hegemonic, white-privileged, and cisnormative. You evil white nationalist neo-nazi, you!

    Yup. It’s our nation – conform to that least set of common values, or GTFO!

    > People who think that way run our educational system.

    > We have some housecleaning to do before the historically normal pattern of assimilation can in fact be [normal] again.

    Regrettably all too true.

  211. > In the unlikely event that enough faithless electors materialize to deny Trump, there won’t be a civil war. The house will pick a moderate republican and life will go on.

    The Twelfth Amendment says otherwise. I quote: “… and if no person have [majority of the electoral college], then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding THREE on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately….”

    If “voted for as president” is electoral college, Trump and Clinton are the only two people who qualify”. If “voted for as president” is popular vote, I don’t know whether it’s Stein or Johnson who get added to the mix.

    Regardless, the House can not choose anyone it wants – it has to choose from a list of at most three people and those people are already known.

  212. uma on 2016-12-14 at 23:52:02 said:
    > In the unlikely event that enough faithless electors materialize to deny Trump, there won’t be a civil war.

    Go ahead. Burn the reichstaag.

  213. John D. Bell on 2016-12-16 at 15:08:01 said:
    > These Muslims have assimilated.

    Have they?

    Whenever a jihadi kills some people the press goes to his mosque to find some moderate Muslims, and instead of finding Muslims apologizing and saying ‘jihadis go to hell”,

    the press gets told “hey we are moderate muslims, and you infidels had it coming for doubting our wonderful moderation”.

  214. winter is simply a liar. Lots of episodes like this….. except that Democrat officials (Soros’ Secretary of State Project is how you get them) never allow actual investigations.

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/03/voter-fraud-california-man-finds-dozens-ballots-stacked-outside-home.html?refresh=true

    Quote: The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.

    “I think this is spooky,” Mosna said. “All the different names, none we recognize, all at one address.”

    His wife, Madalena Mosna, noted their 89-year-old neighbor lives by herself, and, “Eighty people can’t fit in that apartment.” End Quote

    Likewise the FEC never investigating Obama’s illegal donations via disabling Address Verification Software. I can personally attest that you could use a credit card number with an address and name that didn’t match in both 2008 and 2012, BECAUSE I DONATED MONEY THAT WAY. No way to tell where the money came from or whether the donation limits were exceeded.

  215. “I think the lesson we learned is that if war is what they want then war they’ll get.”

    And if this kind of incentive structure keeps up, the lesson is that if they’re scared of you they leave you alone.

    https://youtu.be/RgWIhYAtan4

  216. I don’t believe there’s a lot of voter impersonation going on, though there do seem to be cases every election of someone filling out a bunch of ballots for other people.

    The real fraud happens further back in the process, at voter registration time. I don’t know how it works in other states, but the only barrier to an ineligible or non-existent person being registered in California is the fear of signing an “under penalty of perjury” statement, when nobody ever gets prosecuted for that. You can pick up a handful, or box-full, of voter registration forms, fill them in with non-existent people, and so long as you check the correct boxes, there will be no checks done to verify the existence of the voters you created out of thin air. Much less will there be a check that they actually *are* U.S. citizens, or are actually 18 or older. If a whole bunch come in the same packet from the post office, all in the same handwriting and claiming similar addresses, someone might get suspicious. But a few minor precautions would be enough to prevent detection.

    Unless you forget to vote for them for every election over 2 2-year election cycles. (That’s usually 4 to 6 elections – municipal, statewide primary, general, two years apart.) Then the registrar will send you a postcard, marked “do not forward”. If they get it back, marked as “moved” or “not at this address”, they’ll send you another postcard, telling you that your registration will be canceled if you fail to respond. Eventually, they will cancel your registration.

    If you re-register at a different address in the same county, and put the old address on your form, your old registration will be canceled. If you don’t, there’s a chance your old registration will be canceled, and a chance it won’t be. If you move to a different county, and put your old address on the form, your new county of residence will (eventually) send your name and address, along with others from the same county, to your old county’s registrar, who may or may not actually cancel the old registrations. So even if you do everything right, there’s a chance you’ll end up registered in more than one place.

    So when it comes time to vote, you send in the forms for all your fake voters to get absentee ballots, fill out the ballots, then drop them in the mail. Nobody knows the votes are fraudulent. A non-citizen who registers, and checks the box saying they are a citizen, can show up at a polling place and not be challenged. Even on the rare occasion they’re asked for an ID, they can show their drivers’ license, which doesn’t have any indication of citizenship status, and will get to vote.

    In short, at the Registrar of Voters, nobody knows you’re a dog.

  217. Actually, Andy, the three candidates are the top three vote getters in the Electoral College – and a faithless elector can vote for whoever he damned well wants to. If 269 electors voted for Trump, 232 voted for Clinton, and the remaining 37 voted for me, then the three names the House could choose from would be Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Jay Maynard.

    (And if that prospect doesn’t frighten you, not much will.)

  218. @styrgwillidar

    They went out and won an election. Use some underhanded method of changing the rules after that- polite politics working within a party didn’t work, embracing an outsider to ‘Go out and win an election’ didn’t work– you have left them nothing but directed, well-executed and targeted political violence. They’ve run out of options.

    There won’t be any changing of the rules. If faithless republican electors don’t elect Trump and give him 270 votes and instead enough of them go rogue and put in some other republican name (e.g. Romney, Kasich etc) the house will decide the election.

    There will be blood. There will be violence. It will be politically targeted and conducted by folks who know what they are about and committed to it, and will feel morally justified in carrying it out.

    Who is going to start aiming their shotguns against whom? The Donald Trump republicans against the Megyn Kelly republicans.

  219. uma on 2016-12-16 at 23:01:32 said:
    > Who is going to start aiming their shotguns against whom? The Donald Trump republicans against the Megyn Kelly republicans.

    Trump is our weapon against the party. The democrats are the inner party, the cuckservatives are part of the outer party. Push comes to shove, we are going to kill them all.

  220. Elections are a way of not having civil wars. Ideally the election result should be indicative of who would win a civil war, so you can get to the outcome a civil war would produce without all the killing and destruction. If you allow women and blacks and people without property etc to vote, then the election result is likely to fail to reflect the likely outcome of a civil war. If women and people without property get too grabby, a civil war then is incentivized, in that white men of property would be substantially better off with the civil war outcome than the election outcome

    If one faction or the other then burns the Reichstaag, providing a schelling point on which a civil war can be started, the incentivized civil war becomes likely.

  221. ESR:>Cause it’s all well and good to say the country’s shifted to the right,

    I’m not even sure that’s true. I think our intelligentsia see it that way because they took a crazy jog in the other direction 50-60 years ago.

    The jog started about 45-50 years ago. Read this post by Charles Murray.

    Read it! It explains a huge amount of what is going on now.

    Murray analyzed data from the General Social Survey. He found that the seven major socioeconomic segments of the population were all close to centrist circa 1972. Since then six segments moved slightly to the right. The other segment (Intellectual Upper Class) moved far to the left – as far to the left as the other six moved right combined. (Murray posted his analysis in 2009; the trends he found were linear and very steady, and have probably continued for the last seven years. So the gap is even wider now.)

    Read this post!

  222. “These Muslims have assimilated. They live in peace and friendship with the rest of the community, and the non-Muslim community supports them. ”

    Have they? Or are they simply following in the footsteps of Mohammed, who when he was living in Mecca, wrote all the peaceful Suras in the Koran that he created the doctrine of Abrogation to justify replacing with the Suras he wrote in Medina after he had an army of followers to convert by force?

    http://www.inquiryintoislam.com/2010/06/what-is-abrogation-in-islam.html

    As long as we don’t allow enough Muslims into our countries to constitute a significant threat, they will probably live fairly peaceably…. as long as you consider the inevitable body count when one “rediscovers his faith” to be a price worth paying for their contributions to diversity.

  223. Andy:

    > In the unlikely event that enough faithless electors materialize to deny Trump, there won’t be a civil war. The house will pick a moderate republican and life will go on.

    The Twelfth Amendment says otherwise. I quote: “… and if no person have [majority of the electoral college], then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding THREE on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately….”

    Except they can ignore the “immediately” upon which go further into the 12th and check out the 20th Amendment’s modifications of it, the VP elect gets it for a while, and then it looks like the outcome depends on what laws they have or will pass per my tired reading of it just now.

  224. SDN:

    Likewise the FEC never investigating Obama’s illegal donations via disabling Address Verification Software. I can personally attest that you could use a credit card number with an address and name that didn’t match in both 2008 and 2012, BECAUSE I DONATED MONEY THAT WAY. No way to tell where the money came from or whether the donation limits were exceeded.

    And a lot of these in 2008 were foreign, you can tell because they have odd non-integral dollar amounts characteristic of currency conversions. I looked at the FEC reports for my own home town of 55K that’s all but totally Red, and found several of these.

  225. I think our intelligentsia see it that way because they took a crazy jog in the other direction 50-60 years ago.

    The jog started about 45-50 years ago.

    What a coincidence, that’s right around the time of the documented KGB program to infiltrate the American academy.

  226. >I think other libertarians are movable on this score. To move them, what you have to push home is the charge that they are undervaluing social trust relative to the labor input of immigrants.

    With too many libertarians I’ve encountered, if they were neurologically capable of comprehending social trust they wouldn’t be libertarians.

    But that’s just my observation, possibly an excessively bitter one.

    1. >With too many libertarians I’ve encountered, if they were neurologically capable of comprehending social trust they wouldn’t be libertarians.

      Pretty inferior grade of libertarian then. I really don’t think I know any with that problem.

  227. Jim said “If you allow women and blacks and people without property etc to vote, then the election result is likely to fail to reflect the likely outcome of a civil war.”

    This second civil war some southerners talk about is nonsense. There is no going back to only white men voting.

    Jim said “Push comes to shove, we are going to kill them all.”

    Armchair warrior much?

    Michael said, “You miss the point. Again, we’re voting for a president, not a pastor. Neither Billy Graham nor Mother Teresa were on the ticket. AFAICT we have not in living memory had a candidate that did not go “directly counter to Christian beliefs” to some extent. That’s the hand we’re dealt.”

    The point is lost on you. As a Christian, the choice was simply–neither Hillary nor Trump. Their longstanding behavior has been more than “directly countering Christian beliefs”.

  228. GCM, nobody’s talking seriously about going back to only white men voting. But the second civil war may well happen, if the people’s expressed will is overthrown by the elites who can’t stand the result.

    And “neither Clinton nor Trump” is not a viable position to take. We were going to get one or the other. If you can’t stand either choice – as I couldn’t; Trump was not in my top 10 choices – then you pick the least bad, which is what I did.

  229. @GCM “The point is lost on you. As a Christian, the choice was simply–neither Hillary nor Trump.”

    So glad you’ve got this whole Christian thing figured out. Shall I nominate your scrawling for inclusion in the canon?

    Mt 10:16 ¶ Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. (KJV)

    We voted for the mostly-friend in order to defeat the full-on-evil. Hisssssssssss!

  230. GCM, it won’t be hard: cut off the food supply running through all those red counties, and you’ll be eating each other.

  231. >Pretty inferior grade of libertarian then. I really don’t think I know any with that problem.

    Having a hard time believing you haven’t met many libertarians on the spectrum, you don’t really have what it takes to *get* societal trust, how it works, what it means and how it fails.

    In my experience they just *assume it*, and act extremely bewildered in situations where it isn’t present.

    1. >In my experience they just *assume it*, and act extremely bewildered in situations where it isn’t present.

      I see. That’s a different problem than I thought you were pointing at. What I thought you were asserting was that most libertarians are incapable of understanding the concept when presented to them.

  232. Hmm, above there should be a “who” instead of a “you” at one point.

    Also wanted to add a couple of things about Muslim immigrants and assimilation.

    There is almost certainly a self-selection effect that those who come here are more likely to be ones who *want* to assimilate, and get away from the pathologies of the old country.

    Like a friend in HS who was born in Pakistan, and for some reason was always warning us to be careful around Pakistanis, as they were crazy and dangerous.

    Anyway I’ve known personally several of both kinds – those happy with assimilating, and those who expected others to go out of their way to accommodate old world customs. So hard to generalize.

    But it is worth pointing out that social dynamics change when you get larger numbers of any one ‘type’ of immigrant. Above a certain critical mass, they can and do coccoon, and become much more resistant to assimilation (hey assimilation is difficult and disorienting, after all).

    I imagine this effect is even stronger in groups who are known to have a certain percentage among them prone to get all murdery in response to deviation from group cultural norms.

  233. @Greg “There is almost certainly a self-selection effect that those who come here are more likely to be ones who *want* to assimilate, and get away from the pathologies of the old country.”

    That may have been true in the past, not anymore. Now there is a significant contingent of La Raza types, drug gangs, criminals, ISIS fighters, and other jihadi’s of various stripes.

  234. Likely still true, but not *relevant*. See the rest of the post, especially the last paragraph.

    This is a special problem among cultures where ‘social conservatism’ comes with the belief it justifies murder.

    I once had a Muslim coworker who had a noticeable, visible fear of beards. I never had the heart to ask why, but I can imagine.


  235. GCM, nobody’s talking seriously about going back to only white men voting. But the second civil war may well happen, if the people’s expressed will is overthrown by the elites who can’t stand the result.

    If the result is overthrown it won’t be by the elites. It would be by republican electors. The elites have other means of undermining Trump while he’s president if he steps out of line, and ultimately can get him impeached.

    Trump is not the “will of the people”. He is the winner of the election as per election rules. There is a difference between the two. If the country enters into a crisis phase because of Trump it will quickly become even more clear that he is not the will of the people.

  236. >If the result is overthrown it won’t be by the elites. It would be by republican electors. The elites have other means of undermining Trump while he’s president if he steps out of line, and ultimately can get him impeached.

    Definition of elites seems to expand and contract as needed.

    No, electors of any party are part of a political elite, and if any defect it will likely be due to pressure exerted by media and cultural elites, aided by other political elites. (There was one state, iirc it was PA, where the existing state gov’t doxxed the electors, which had never been done before. Why would they do that?)

  237. >I see. That’s a different problem than I thought you were pointing at. What I thought you were assetring was that most libertarians are incapable of understanding the concept.

    No, I’m asserting that many libertarians I have known seem to be incapable of understanding the concept.

    It’s something ambient that they’ve gotten used to and take for granted, but really don’t grasp.

  238. Eric, that was a great, beautiful post. I don’t agree with all of it, but dammit dude, what a Tour De Force! With that said, I’ll take it point-by-point:

    ESR: First, your ability to assemble a broad-based national coalition has collapsed. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise by your popular vote “win”; that majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex and disguises a large-scale collapse in popular support everywhere else in the U.S. Trump even achieved 30-40% support in blue states where he didn’t spend any money.

    I’m not entirely sure this or the following paragraph is “true,” and I’ll get into the reasons later, but you’ve certainly written up a valid worst case scenario for the Democrats. Were I in charge of the Democrats, I’d be acting and thinking like your idea here is true. In large part this is what the Democrats get for firing John Dean and dumping his 50-State strategy… nobody down-ticket with the budget and organization necessary to push the Democratic POV! I think when the history of the modern Democratic Party is written, the firing of John Dean will be seen as a pivotal moment.
    .
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    ESR: Your party leadership is geriatric, decades older than the average for their Republican counterparts. Years of steady losses at state level, masked by the personal popularity of Barack Obama, have left you without a bench to speak of – little young talent and basically no seasoned Presidential timber under retirement age. The fact that Joseph Biden, who will be 78 for the next Election Day, is being seriously mooted as the next Democratic candidate, speaks volumes – none of them good.

    Agreed. Once again, note the firing of John Dean. One of the recent Democratic down-ticket candidates, someone with years of experience, commented extensively on this, reporting the lack of a contact person for downticket races, the lack of coaching, the lack of organizing help, etc., stuff which had been present years ago but wasn’t currently present, but I didn’t save the link.
    .
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    ESR: Your ideological lock on the elite media and show business has flipped from a powerful asset to a liability. Trump campaigned against that lock and won; his tactics can be and will be replicated. Worse, a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night…

    …but the brute fact is that it failed to turn out to defeat the Republican candidate with the highest negatives in history. You thought all you had to do was wait for the old white men to die, but anybody who has studied the history of immigration in the U.S. could have told you that the political identities of immigrant ethnic groups do not remain stable as they assimilate. You weren’t going to own the Hispanics forever any more than you owned the Irish and the Italians forever. African-Americans, trained by decades of identity politics, simply failed to show up for a white candidate in the numbers you needed. The sexism card didn’t play either, as a bare majority of married women who actually went to the polls seem to have voted for Trump.

    You’re right about this on a meta level, or maybe on a long-term level, but not on a practical one for this election. I should also note that Republicans are facing some very similar issues as their electorate ages out. Once again, if I ran the Democratic Party I’d take this issue very seriously going forward.

    However, for this election, I think Hillary got caught in the perfect storm, more or less as follows:

    POOR DEMOCRATIC STRATEGY, TACTICS, AND EXECUTION: You’re is absolutely right about this and I don’t plan to write any more on this subject because its so bloody obvious. Once again, note my comments on Howard Dean above.

    TWENTY YEARS OF ANTI-HILLARY PROPAGANDA: Does anyone remember “Hillary had Vince Foster Killed” Or “Crack pipes hanging from the Christmas Tree?” And from there forward for twenty-four years all the way to PizzaGate. By the time she ran for president there were people who wouldn’t have voted for her if she’d received an endorsement from God written across the sky in letters of fire.

    THE ANTI-HILLARY MEDIA: Hillary definitely had many, many weaknesses as a possible president, but if we’d heard about “three bankruptcies” or “frequently doesn’t pay people what he owes them” or any of Trump’s other negatives as frequently as we heard about “email” Hillary would be our President elect right now. (Many of us are in I.T. and we all know about C-Level types who make the occasional really bad decision about technology, so it’s not the end of the world. Slap her on the wrist and move on.)

    FOLLOWING OBAMA: For a variety of reasons Obama made it very difficult for any Democrat to win. The main issue here is his complete lack of a spine. He kept trying to play the game by Marquis of Queensbury rules while the Republicans continued their tradition of kicking the opposition in the nuts, and he clearly doesn’t understand the first rule of dealing with a bully.

    RUSSIAN INTERVENTION/FAKE NEWS: I don’t think these issues are nearly as important as the hard-core Democrats imagine them to be, but they both clearly happened and had their effects on the election.

    COMEY’S OCTOBER 28th LETTER: ‘Nuff said.

    REPUBLICAN VOTER SUPPRESSION: Also nuff’ said.

    REALLY BAD POLLING: Obviously every pollster around screwed up badly. This may or may not tie into the issue of Russian hacking. (Is Putin smart enough to hack the pollster’s computers instead of the voting machines? Interesting question…)

    If you could go back in time and make sure any two of those issues went the other way we’d end up with President Hillary. Unfortunately, Hillary didn’t get caught in that perfect storm while running against John Kasich or Mitt Romney. She got caught in that perfect storm while running against Trump, so we ended up with the greater of two evils.

    I’ll also note a couple other things in passing. First, the essentially suicidal practice of not having an auditable voting trail in all states. Not particularly for Hillary’s sake, but just because it’s so incredibly fucking stupid in every way imaginable.

    Second, I’m not sure that Obama would have the necessary spine to release a full report on Russian hacking even if it was completely necessary. He’s been a gigantic disappointment in the spine department.

    I’ll put the rest of my response on another post; I don’t want to get eaten by your moderation software


  239. > No, electors of any party are part of a political elite,

    They are not. They are your typical Joe Blow lifelong member of the republican party.

  240. ESR: But your worst problem is less tangible. Trump has popped the preference-falsification bubble. The conservative majority in most of the U.S. (coastal enclaves excepted) now knows it’s a conservative majority. Before the election every pundit in sight pooh-poohed the idea that discouraged conservative voters, believing themselves isolated and powerless, had been sitting out several election cycles. But it turned out to be true, not least where I live in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where mid-state voters nobody knew were there put Trump over the top. Pretty much the same thing happened all through the Rust Belt.

    That genie isn’t going to be stuffed back in the bottle. Those voters now know they can deliver the media and the coastal elites a gigantic fuck-you, and Republicans know the populist techniques to mobilize them to do that. Trump’s playbook was not exactly complicated.

    I’d phrase the whole thing a bit differently. The Republican Party knows how to get the lower-class Whites to vote conservatively. I’m not sure all those voters have actually “become conservative.” Note for example that polling which took place prior to the party conventions revealed that Bernie Sanders, much further left than Hillary, had a much better chance of beating Trump than Hillary. All that said, I’m not sure that our differences on this issue make much of a difference operationally for the Democrats. As you’ve noted the Democratic Party desperately needs to reach out to this demographic and Hillary completely failed to do that. For all practical purposes your advice to the Democrats on this issue is correct.
    .
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    ESR: That center is far to the right of what you would prefer. For that matter it is rather to the right of where I would prefer – but facts are facts and denying them isn’t going to help. You Democrats need to think about what it takes to be competitive on a continuum where Fox News is barely right of center, Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch liberal, and as near as I could tell the politician who actually nailed the psephological center in 2008 was none other than Sarah Palin.

    If you do not do this thing, you will continue to lose.

    Here is where I deeply disagree with you, for both moral/philosophical and real world reasons. America deeply loves the Liberal agenda, if it is presented in a poll, in neutral language, outside of an election year. I’m not talking about the leftward 1% of the Liberal agenda here, but the basics; better and cheaper health care, equality between the races/sexes, more money spent on education, higher taxes for corporations/rich people, etc. Unfortunately we have a media that responds to Hillary’s ideal of putting more money into education by reporting on emails, with the occasional “Benghazi” thrown in. It’s a little like George Wallace’s story (pardon me) about getting “out-n*gg*ered.” (For a really dark view of politics, google “george wallace outn*gg*ered”)

    If we had real news coverage it would get reported like this:

    “Today Hillary said, “I’m going to put more money into Education, particularly science and math,” while Trump said, “Vouchers are the answer.” (Note the actual comparison of the candidates positions on a single issue, which I never heard reported in the news preceding the election.)

    In the real world we get “Clinton charity possibly crooked” followed by ‘Trump said, “Crooked Hillary!”‘ followed by “Hillary said she’s not crooked and Trump’s charity is horrible.” Followed by – and this is appalling – absolutely no reporting on how organizations which rate charities grade Trump’s charity versus Clintons!

    In short, it’s not possible to make assumptions about whether the electorate is actually conservative in the absence of accurate news reporting to the people about a candidate’s actual positions.
    .
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    ESR: Before I get to suggesting some changes, I want to point out that the results of the dominance Republicans have already achieved are going to make your problems even worse than they look now. Those problems don’t end with not having a farm team. State-level control means the Republicans will largely determine redistricting in the 2020 census. Their ability to pass voter-ID laws will surely hurt you as well.

    I agree with this and the surrounding paragraphs, particularly about the farm team, but consider the implications. What Trump is really saying to the white lower-class when he talks about deporting the illegal immigrants and banishing the Muslims is “I’m going to make America great again by clearing out your competition for jobs! Labor prices will rise when 20 million U.S. residents are sent away.” But for some very complicated reasons having to do with education, demographics, and the way corporations work, this won’t solve the problems. (Maybe more on this later.)
    .
    .
    ESR: The most obvious thing is that you have to stop contemptuously dismissing the largest single demographic segment of the American electorate. Because believe me, they noticed. So did their wives and children.

    This has larger implications than you may yet understand… The whole apparatus of racial and ethnic identity politics is turning in your hand, reversing (like your old-media dominance) from an asset to a liability.

    Generally I agree here, (with my prior caveats involving poor news reporting still present as a minor counterweight to your ideas.) I also agree that identity politics are played out, and I far prefer the idea of a “melting pot” to the idea of “diversity.” Hillary did one of her famous “listening tours” before the campaign, but she clearly didn’t spend enough time in the bars and bowling alleys of the rust-belt states. I’d also note that calling Trump voters “deplorables” plus her campaign lashing out at women who voted for Bernie as “anti-woman” was very poor strategy. The “dirty tricks” campaign against Bernie also backfired badly. It got her elected in the primary, but a small percentage of Bernie voters were, quite naturally, unwilling to forgive her.

    I suspect that the best possible strategy, which Trump fell into by accident, is uniting the middle class voters who have already gotten screwed with the middle class voters who are either currently getting screwed or are up next for screwing. Now there’s a voting block!

    Continued on another post to avoid the moderation software!

  241. @ Jim Doherty


    >>And the whole civil war thing. I hope the blue states understand that the anger they saw election night was just the tip of the iceberg. There are millions of people who would love for a hot war to erupt

    And there are several billion people in the world, with unlimited number of fighting age males, who have a stake in your side losing. But none of that would be needed. The war, in the unlikely event it happens, would be short and quick and your side would be swiftly defeated.


    >> Nothing would ensure the constitution more than a hot war that would allow these people to cull the socialists out of the gene pool.

    That was tried in the past. It was the nazis who nearly got culled out of the gene pool by hybrid semi mogoloid race. If the western nations did not race against time to save what they could of Germany, that culling would have been near total. It took 45 years after that for socialism to crumble. And the only thing that crumbled in practice was socialism in its most extreme forms.


    >>And no way do we allow you to take all the ports on the west coast without a fight. So we could split peacefully, but only if we got say San Diego and the republican counties that grow a lot of your food to boot.

    The jolly good manifest-destiny imperialists such as you will be shipped back to their European homeland where they belong. They can dress in their funny wigs and imagine a world that belongs to them.. on the playstation that is. And that of course applies to those amongst you who have enough intelligence to be among the surrendered rather than the vanquished.

  242. ESR: You will not prevent this development by screaming “racism!”. Here’s a hot tip: people you dismiss as retrograde scum will not, in general, vote for you. In fact, one of the things you Democrats most urgently need to do is banish “racism” and “sexism” from your political vocabulary.

    While these words point at some real problems, they are also a trap. They lead you to organize your political pitch around virtue-signaling, exclusion and demonization. That, in turn, can be successful (though repulsive) politics when it’s used against a minority to mobilize a majority or plurality. But you’re in the opposite situation now. You were trapped by your own privilege theory. You demonized a plurality of American voters, and in return they gave you Trump.

    Yeah, pretty much. One of the most important things a political organization can do is arrange voter priorities in order by the numbers; highest at the top. Unfortunately for both Democrats and Republicans, the biggest priority for Americans is the way industries are leaving for places with cheaper labor, infrastructure, health care, and the financialization of the economy, which the money people behind the parties really don’t want to see addressed. So the Republicans signal their virtue by means of religious arguments while the Democrats signal their virtue by touting the virtues of the enlightenment, but neither party addresses the real issues, and both parties are vulnerable to tripping over this one. It just happened to the Democrats first. (Imagine Bernie Sanders throwing this one in Marco Rubio’s face!)

    This is as much an ongoing historical trend as something the Democrats are faulty on. Look back 30 years at that “horrible corporatist, fascist running dog” Ronald Reagan and how his administration handled the Savings and Loan crisis… by arresting and convicting 1100 bankers! Note how George Bush II and Barrack Obama arrested… no bankers at all! Bernie Sanders could have carried off an anti-corruption campaign, but there’s no way anyone would have bought it from Clinton.
    .
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    ESR: Speaking of virtue signaling, another thing you need to give up is focusing on peacock issues (like, say, transgender rights) while ignoring pocketbook problems like the hollowing out of middle-class employment.

    Again, this advice has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of individual peacock issues and more with a general sense that the elites are fiddling while Rome burns. For the first time since records have been kept, U.S. life expectancy went down during the Obama years, led by a disturbing rise in suicides and opiate addiction among discouraged unemployed in flyover country. A Democratic Party that fails to address that while it screws around with bathroom-law boycotts is willfully consigning itself to irrelevance.

    In some ways you’re absolutely right about this. The ways in which you’re wrong have more to do with the way this stuff is reported by the media than anything else. Let’s imagine that Obama’s Dept of Education gives two orders. The first tells schools to give more class time to STEM issues and rebudget some of their Federal money to hire more and better math/science teachers. The second order is to make it easier for transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice. Which order gets reported on Fox News?

    On the other hand, the elites are fiddling while Rome burns. If you got one thing right, this is it!

    What you’re missing, once again, is that either party could get their butt kicked on this one. What surprised me more on the whole “fiddling while Rome burns” issue is that Democrats didn’t throw the Zika issue in the face of the Republicans – that’s a mommy issue if ever there was one! The Democrats don’t just need to play better defense on this one, they need to play better offense too!
    .
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    ESR: Now we need to talk about guns…

    The Democratic line on gun policy is a perfect symbol of everything that has become disconnected about the party. It reads as corrosive disrespect for middle-Americans who like their firearms, think of themselves as a nation of armed citizens rather than cowering subjects, and use their guns responsibly. It reeks of class warfare, urban elites against flyover-country proles. It’s disempowering, not empowering. It is, in short, a perfect focus for anti-Democratic populist anger.

    Let me list the objections I have to this:
    .
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    ESR: You Democrats don’t just need to reform your gun policy, you need to reform your attitude towards the voters…

    And you bring it home. For all my disagreements, this is very good work, possibly the best thing I have read on the elections since November 9th.

  243. Troutwaxer, your remarks on the election merely repeat the various excuses and delusions that the Democrats have been peddling to avoid serious analysis of the party’s problems. None of the things you mentioned had more than a trivial effect on the voters in Pennsylvania or Michigan who gave Trump his margin of victory in the EC. Look at what moved them: the “hollowing out of middle-class employment”; the “apparatus of racial and ethnic identity politics”; even the “ideological lock on the elite media and show business”. These are not just long-term issues – they were the issues that swung this election, and the Democrats have to face them now.

    Frankly, I don’t see any way the Democrats can navigate back to the political center from where they are. Their basic concept of government as a benevolent patron handing out largesse to dependent clients hasn’t really been viable in the USA since the early 1970’s, and everything that’s happened since has only made the failure obvious. They went in for the peacock issues and identity politics to compensate for that; now that those are failing too, they are bereft. What the Democrats really need is a new guiding principle, a new conception of what governments are for – and you can’t just order one of those through Amazon.

  244. uma: “They are not. They are your typical Joe Blow lifelong member of the republican party.”

    As it happens, I know someone who was selcted a couple of times as a Republican elector for Minnesota. (Talk about always the bridesmaid, never the bride!) He’s been the Republican county chairman for my county for years. That makes him part of the party elite. He tells me that the same is true of all of them: longtime party workers who have risen to the top of the ranks and stayed there.

  245. “America deeply loves the Liberal agenda, if it is presented in a poll, in neutral language, outside of an election year. I’m not talking about the leftward 1% of the Liberal agenda here, but the basics; better and cheaper health care, equality between the races/sexes, more money spent on education, higher taxes for corporations/rich people, etc.”

    Not at all. America loves the general Democratic agenda if it is presented as a list of benefits, without mentioning the costs or explaining the policies that are supposed to lead to those benefits. When the explanations are provided America balks.

    Running through your examples, “better and cheaper health care” generally means a nationwide compulsory health insurance plan, a copy of Britain’s NHS, or the PPACA. We know from observation that these ideas do not make health care better or cheaper. “Equality between the races” means preferential treatment for some ethnic groups to compensate them for injustices to their ancestors. We know from observation that this doesn’t even lead to material equality between the favored groups and the disfavored, and if anything it stokes hostility between them.

    “More money spent on education” is a policy intended to ensure children are well-educated; in practice, however, it only allows schools to pay for administrators and equipment that don’t help students learn, and shelter schools from the wrath of parents whose children are graduating without having learned anything. And “higher taxes for corporations/rich people” founders because it leads to corporations closing factories and offices in the US and making new facilities in other countries, while rich people put their money into arcane tax shelters, foreign banks or bribes to politicians instead of funding new businesses.

    Progressive policies do not lead to the Progressives’ stated goals; this has been demonstrated for going on eighty years. It doesn’t matter whether Americans approve of the goals – what’s important is whether they approve of the policies, when they understand their real results.

  246. A lot of the current discussion is focused on Trump’s take-down of the Clinton political machine, but he first did a Sherman’s March-To-The-Sea through the Republican primaries and soundly defeated a pretty stellar (and diverse) cast of heavyweights in the GOP. Arguably, they made all the same mistake in regarding him as a buffoon and assumed that he would evaporate when confronted with traditional political tactics and lots of campaign money. Jeb Bush spent a fortune and lost so badly that he should really consider going into hiding. But they all fell, despite representing a wide range of standard archetypes.

    I think Eric is right. Trump’s election may very well be a Black Swan event and we are headed into uncharted waters now. If Trump executes a smackdown of Ryan and McConnell during the first days of his administration, he will aggrandize an enormous power base. A flame-out of the Democrats may not be the only pillar to fall, and old school GOP pols may be headed for extinction as well.

    May you live in interesting times.

  247. @Jay Maynard “That makes him part of the party elite. He tells me that the same is true of all of them: longtime party workers who have risen to the top of the ranks and stayed there.”

    I’m gonna guess there’s some variability across states and districts. One of the electors from Arkansas happens to be a close friend. He’s only been active in Repub circles for about 5 years and has risen pretty fast in their ranks. He is retired blue collar. He’s received thousands of emails, some threatening, for him to go faithless. His answer: “When hell freezes over”. He’s had a Trump sign in his yard for months now.

  248. @Jay Maynard:


    >> He’s been the Republican county chairman for my county for years. That makes him part of the party elite. He tells me that the same is true of all of them: longtime party workers who have risen to the top of the ranks and stayed there.

    By that definition, so much of the country would be be part of the “elite”.

    Try banning fractional reserve banking, and returning control of the nation’s money supply to the people for a change. That would get you in conflict with the real elites who run the show. The greek people (a nation of 11 million) have been in conflict with elites for almost 10 years. Who do you think came out on top?

  249. Troutwaxer: “In short, it’s not possible to make assumptions about whether the electorate is actually conservative in the absence of accurate news reporting to the people about a candidate’s actual positions.”

    This is the old leftist canard about how all they need is better messaging, and they’ll win. They’ve been saying it for years, and not winning. Perhaps it’s not the message, but the actual ideals, that Americans want no part of? Your poll results notwithstanding, whenever someone pounds the free-lunch socialist agenda, they lose.

  250. “winter on 2016-12-16 at 14:37:40 said:

    Thats because there isn’t any evidence. All the Republican administrations have turned every stone to come up with evidence. They could not.

    The only thing ever turning up were (hundreds of) thousands of minority voters who’s votes did not count or who were obstructed when they tried.”

    Do you ever tire of being wrong?

    Here’s a highly liberal news source citing a large study:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/24/could-non-citizens-decide-the-november-election/

    Here’s the study itself:

    http://www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/non-citizensvote/

    Here’s a couple of local news sources reporting a couple of different types of election fraud:

    https://youtu.be/2hjmKBfrycQ (an NBC affiliate)

    http://cleveland.cbslocal.com/2013/05/31/ohio-poll-worker-convicted-on-multiple-counts-of-obama-biased-voter-fraud/

    Golly, it took all of 30 seconds to find this “non-existent” evidence. But that’s ok, the NYT told you what to think, so you go on telling yourself whatever you want to hear.

    Now, go ahead and show some empirical evidence that voter ID suppresses or disenfranchises minority voting. Take your time. I’ll enjoy posting the empirical evidence which refutes that nonsense.

  251. “The main issue here is his complete lack of a spine. He kept trying to play the game by Marquis of Queensbury rules while the Republicans continued their tradition of kicking the opposition in the nuts, and he clearly doesn’t understand the first rule of dealing with a bully.”

    Troutwaxer, you are simply delusional. Period.

  252. “The war, in the unlikely event it happens, would be short and quick and your side would be swiftly defeated. ”

    https://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/what-i-saw-at-the-coup/

    “Dennis had always assumed that the combined might of our armed federal agents and their SWAT Teams, reinforced with local police and, if necessary, the National Guard or even the Army, could crush any conceivable right-wing reaction to his plan. But social network analysis couldn’t find snipers who were not part of any network. That’s when we began to hear of “The Militia of One.” In the end there were too many rifles, and too many willing shooters. A number that was constantly heard was twenty million. That was the number of Americans who supposedly went deer hunting every year, against less than 200,000 armed federal agents.


  253. >> A number that was constantly heard was twenty million. That was the number of Americans who supposedly went deer hunting every year, against less than 200,000 armed federal agents.“

    I’d wager my bet on the 200,000 federal agents with their armada, and the unlimited support from the rest of the world over your militia any time of the day.

    The reason is simple. The vast majority of your 20 million hunters (assuming they belong to your militia), will quickly cower in and make the mental transformation that “life is not too bad after all” as soon as the bullets start whizzing. For a simple factual reason. That life is not too bad indeed!. The die-hard lunatics will be far far fewer than the 200,000 federal agents.

    If we were dealing with 20 million dispossessed, sharpshooters living under extreme oppression and misery I’d be a little worried. Since we’re not, this kind of a civil war, if anything, will be swift and will result from not hearing from your side for another 100 years. By which time, demographic and economic developments in the rest of the world and here will have practically solved the problem for good.

  254. Uma, you assume that 200,000 federal agents will all simply salute and start arresting and/or shooting half the country. I’m no historian, but I don’t think that’s how civil wars work.


  255. >> Uma, you assume that 200,000 federal agents will all simply salute and start arresting and/or shooting half the country. I’m no historian, but I don’t think that’s how civil wars work.

    They won’t shoot half the country, and they won’t be the ones to fire the first bullet.

    If you’re counting on defections, that is indeed a possibility and how civil wars work. The issue at stake here (“Donald Trump”) is not exactly the kind of issue that will result in defection of entire divisions with their aircraft carriers to blockade the west coast. Donald Trump is not the kind of figure/issue who will divide honest, honorable and well-meaning army officers right down the middle.

    It will result in individual defections here and there. Sure. Which, if anything, is a good thing because the remaining force will be of one heart and one conviction.

  256. My point is that you are dreaming if you think 200,000 federal agents are going to follow orders to use force to prevent Trump from taking office. Most would think they are being asked to participate in a coup, and they’d be right.


  257. >> My point is that you are dreaming if you think 200,000 federal agents are going to follow orders to use force to prevent Trump from taking office. Most would think they are being asked to participate in a coup, and they’d be right.

    And how exactly is he going to take office if the EC then the house denies him? He will flee into tornado alley and organize an militia army to march on Washington Mao-Tse-tong style.

    What the 200,000 federal agents will do will depend on how events play out, and who the house would elect instead of Trump. If it is a competent fit-for-office republican (e.g. Romney, or Kasich), I’d have zero worries. If it was Hillary, then it would be a coup and the coup will fail, because a) She is even more hated than the Donald b) she is totally incompetent to take over the reigns of power and manage the country under such troubled circumstances.

  258. The EC won’t stop Trump, and even if they did, the House would not stop him. You are fantasizing and grasping at straws. Give it up. It’s going to be President Trump whether you like it or not.


  259. The EC won’t stop Trump, and even if they did, the House would not stop him.

    I never said that the EC would deny Trump. I said it is highly unlikely. Go back and read what I wrote again.

  260. >Oh really? Try telling one [Libertarian] that open borders aren’t an unalloyed good, and see how fast the bigot word is heard.

    If I had had more free time over the last few days, I would’ve pushed back on this. There’s only so much voluntary exchange possible with someone who comes over and thinks you might screw with him on a deal merely because that’s what he’s become used to in whatever kleptocracy he grew up in.

    Those of you with reasonable familiarity with game theory are no doubt aware of the Tit For Tat player in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. It has a lot of nice properties, not the least of which is that it seems to hit the sweet spot between being intuitive, being simple, and tending to win in the long run. It also has a nasty habit of settling into a permanent defection mode if it’s surrounded by enough other TFT players who got hit the same way.

    I don’t have to believe immigrants are lesser human beings to believe they’ll drag their destination society down; all I have to believe is that they’re tired of being screwed all the time. They’re like anyone ditching a leaky boat for a less leaky one. I take it as a point of pride that they prefer my boat, and I believe most of them by far would rather fix my boat, make it better, and consequently have it become our boat. But I also know if I take on too many at a time, this boat might sink as well, and no one will be better off.

    So, much as my libertarian side would prefer otherwise, I’m compelled to throttle the rate at which we take on newcomers, roughly to the rate at which we can bring them online as fellow boat maintainers.

    This is one of the reasons I will say I have a libertarian side, rather than that I am a libertarian. I am libertarian only contingently.

    At any rate, I see Eric beat me to it.

  261. “I’d wager my bet on the 200,000 federal agents with their armada, and the unlimited support from the rest of the world over your militia any time of the day.”

    If we look at real world examples here, this quickly becomes a poor bet. Note how the Tsarnaev brothers shut down a major American city for four days. Two poorly equipped and poorly prepared people with a pistol between them. Local law enforcement resources can be quickly overwhelmed by a handful of people. The so-called “armada” of 200k FBI agents will be completely swamped by just handfuls of people acting independently in several locations throughout several states. They are simply not equipped to deal with anything “large” scale.

    And the idea of the “world” lending assistance to the U.S. in such a scenario doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Who, precisely, do you think is even willing to lend their support, let alone prepared. The only possible countries I would think could even consider it are some of the Western Euros. But these are the countries that – when they actually do deign meet their minimum NATO requirements – routinely underperform in third world countries.

    Not that I’m promoting or relishing the idea of armed conflict within the borders, but any serious analysis that’s been performed on the subject has rather quickly concluded that it would be costly, bloody, and nowhere near easy to resolve (or determine the outcome).

  262. “Donald Trump is not the kind of figure/issue who will divide honest, honorable and well-meaning army officers right down the middle.”

    Donald Trump? Probably not. The principle that the people get to choose their government? The Constitutional order? The idea of elections being honored and not overruled by the elite? Don’t be so sure.

    As for the world intervening…extremely doubtful. World governments are extremely loath to intervene in civil wars. They’ll stand aside and let us slug it out.

    Be careful what you ask for. You may get it.

  263. Doctor Locketopus

    > …but have a look at this picture of some members of the 82nd Airborne. What do you see?

    A hard rain of chaos and pain.

  264. uma: “a competent fit-for-office republican (e.g. Romney, or Kasich)”

    You mean the kind of collaborationist that thinks the Republican Party shouldn’t argue over goals, simply means, with the Left? Such a person would be seen as little different from Hillary Clinton, although less overtly criminal. It would do little to stave off the righteous anger of the flyover-state American who thinks that he’s finally gotten to have a say in how our country is actually governed.

    Go-along-to-get-along Republicans are an endangered species. If we learn nothing else from this last election, we should learn that.

  265. To all pushing the tired argument that the US Government is unbeatable … you really have nothing to say until you’ve done a bit of reading on 4GW. Beating superpowers at their own game is a well worn path.

    I know of no-one who really wants that war. But I continue to be amazed at the number who are resigned to the fact that it’s coming. And the number who believe it’s already in motion.

  266. Michael, I’m constantly amazed at antiwar leftists who are constantly unhappy that we’re losing soldiers to asymmetrical warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet think the very same American military will crush Americans like bugs.

    But then, consistency has never been a hallmark of the Left.

  267. tz on 2016-12-15 at 16:33:50 said:
    > Brendan Eich was purged from Mozilla over that (get the Brave Browser),

    Been running it a month or so.

    It needs a bit of work to be useful.

  268. And I am resigned to that war, but I do not believe it’s coming…yet. We will know the truth of that story tomorrow.

    There are two more hurdles: the Electoral College vote tomorrow, and the Congressional certification of the results on January 3. I think it exceedingly unlikely that either will result in anyone but Donald Trump being inaugurated on January 20.
    Still, the possibility is nonzero, and I’m keeping my ammo dry and my guns clean.

  269. gmmay:

    If we look at real world examples here, this quickly becomes a poor bet. Note how the Tsarnaev brothers shut down a major American city for four days.

    More relevant, perhaps, would be the example of the vastly more competent, but not really all that competent on an absolute scale and nuts to boot Chris Dorner. When he started hunting the police, they completely lost their shit, even to the point at shooting at innocents who in no way resembled him or his vehicle (and expending 10s, probably well over 100 rounds without killing either occupant of that pickup truck). Not all police will be as grossly incompetent as the ones facing Dorner or the younger Tsarnaev brother (note how prior to that they managed one blue on blue shooting, and after, they draw their parameter inside where he was hiding, it was only after they relaxed the lockdown that he was found by a civilian, and again they engaged in contagious firing against someone who wasn’t shooting at him … and didn’t kill him).

    Now, here we’re mostly talking about the 3/4 million or so state and local police, but the Feds haven’t generally been impressive either. Sometime bumbling idiots like at the start of Waco (some, maybe all of the BATFE fatalities were own goals) or Ruby Ridge, sometimes Kill Them All (but I doubt God Will Know His Own) Einsatzgrupen when they’ve had the time to assemble overwhelming force, and note how they decided discretion was the better side of valor at the Bundy Ranch, after being put on notice there would be not more free Wacos and noticing how they wouldn’t fare well against the numbers and arms assembled against them.

    So, we’re not exactly quaking in our boots at the prospect of a civil war against these forces. The military, after their seasoning in the sandbox, is another matter, but who and on which sides they’d break is, as has been discussed, very open to question (although at long range, with personal weapons, they’d be in trouble in numbers, come to think if it, at least the Army with their chopped down M4s, and the Marines soon enough I gather). And none of these can prevent us from one form of draining the swamp, you might say, by killing big Blue cities wholesale if they get nasty enough, which would put into question just exactly who they’re fighting for as the latter’s numbers plummet.

    Few of us on my side want any of this to happen (some are so sick of our not so cold civil war they want it done and over with), but we think and prepare carefully about it because it’s very clear the other side will just not leave us alone, and their aggressions may someday leave us with no better choice.

  270. “””And there are several billion people in the world, with unlimited number of fighting age males, who have a stake in your side losing. But none of that would be needed. The war, in the unlikely event it happens, would be short and quick and your side would be swiftly defeated.”””

    First, I find it laughable to believe that one side will get all the support needed from the international community, when both the Revolution and the Civil War gave plenty of motivation to get outside help, but that outside help was *very* hard to get. If our culture war were to go hot, it would more than likely become such a steaming mess that the world wouldn’t know what to do with it.

    Also, I personally have no idea who would win a Civil War, but I do know this: one of the surest ways to start a long, bloody, drawn-out war is to have at least one side convinced that it will be quick and easy.

    And if your bravado, and the bravado expressed elsewhere is any indication, we’re well on our way to a massive, bloody, drawn-out civil war…

  271. “And none of these can prevent us from one form of draining the swamp, you might say,”

    Then there’s the other forms of swamp draining in the article I linked to.

    1. “The media lies, the media dies.” MSM shills will quickly discover just how interested they are in continuing to broadcast government propaganda when it earns them a bullet. They won’t have 24/7/365 security, and any militia can multiply the effectiveness by conspicuously leaving alone any of them that either stop lying or simply quit their jobs.

    2. Don’t target the frontline troops; target the bureaucrats who send them. The Sheriff of Nottingham may be able to hide in the castle; his Men can’t both enforce his decrees, collect his taxes, and stay hidden…. and they won’t have continuous security either. Offer them the same deal: resign and live, or stay and die. How many will stay for someone they don’t even like, say De Blasio?

    There’s another factor bozos like uma overlook: their targets aren’t just in compounds in the woods, they’re her next door neighbors. When the Hellfire missile hits, who does she think will be the collateral damage? Likewise the passthrough bullets…. and they aren’t going to let the target know what’s coming by evacuating.

  272. I’ve said this before (and it’s the reason I value hacking so highly). Macro-scale social dynamics, and the attendant evolutionary trends, are being actively modeled using a Game Theory based engine modified by stochastic mathematics. This has been ongoing since the 80s and the newest variants are inputting data from social media in real-time. Guessing based upon anecdote and conjecture is an ancient habit, but it’s not a reliable tool in the modern era.

    Our species is one of the most individualistic on the planet. That is not a trait we should aspire to lose.

  273. “More relevant, perhaps, would be the example of the vastly more competent, but not really all that competent on an absolute scale and nuts to boot Chris Dorner.”

    Absolutely. there are tons of real world examples of “trained” LEOs (at various levels of government) performing abysmally against fewer and less well-equipped belligerents. Perhaps a bit more abstract, but see how easy it is to shut down an entire airport/school/shopping center with a simple phone call bomb threat? The havoc that a small group can wreak with mere phone calls is terrifying.

    4GW is real, happening around the world, it’s effective, and anyone who doesn’t realize this is either ignorant, or denying a very clear reality.

  274. @ Michael Brazier

    Troutwaxer, your remarks on the election merely repeat the various excuses and delusions that the Democrats have been peddling to avoid serious analysis of the party’s problems.

    I think that specifically in this election there were some very special issues which Hillary tripped over. However, on a more general level, 80 percent of Eric’s advice is nonetheless very appropriate for Democrats in the long term, (and probably going back to at least 2010.) I would be absolutely, amazingly thrilled if some high person in the Democrats was reading this thread and taking careful notes on what Eric wrote!
    .
    None of the things you mentioned had more than a trivial effect on the voters in Pennsylvania or Michigan who gave Trump his margin of victory in the EC.

    Trump won several states with very low margins of victory, thus “trivial effects” could have changed the outcome of the election easily, because Trump won Michigan by 10,700 votes, Wisconsin by about 22,000 votes, and Pennsylvania by around 48,000 votes.

    The big issue is that these facts doesn’t make Eric wrong – most of the issues he raised are very valid. They just how that Trump’s victory was very fragile. A Democratic Party which paid attention to the issues Eric raises would have cleaned Trump’s clock. Trump is very lucky he was running against a weak candidate at the (hopefully) absolute nadir of the Democratic party.
    .
    What the Democrats really need is a new guiding principle, a new conception of what governments are for – and you can’t just order one of those through Amazon.

    Agreed completely, and this is one of the things that gets debated at places like Daily Kos on a daily basis. The progressive Democrats deeply desire that the party pay much more attention to paycheck issues which affect the white working class and they analyze the problems of our country in terms of jobs, infrastructure, health care, jobs, education, bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., jobs, higher taxes on corporations and wealthy people, jobs, better regulation of the banking industries, bringing Glass Steagal back, jobs, and a more appropriate distribution of wealth. Did I mention jobs?

    But that analysis doesn’t make it to the highest parts of the Party, both because of the Clintonian ideal of “triangulation” and also because the big money donors don’t want any party running under that analysis.

    Eric is absolutely correct about the other major failure of the Democratic Party, which is that the Party has no interest building more powerful state and local organizations, and they couldn’t give a fuck about down-ticket races. This lack of interest is where Democrats really lose big, because the Republicans pretty much run a candidate for every office from Dog-Catcher on up through school boards, city councils, etc., all the way up to the national level, and every one of those Republican candidates is talking up the Republican party line, frequently without any opposition at all due to the Democratic national party not giving a shit about the minor races. When I say that the firing of John Dean was a pivotal issue in recent Demoratic failures, this is what I’m talking about.


  275. >> The principle that the people get to choose their government? The Constitutional order? The idea of elections being honored and not overruled by the elite? Don’t be so sure.

    There is no constitutional order that is threatened here since there is precedence for faithless electors, and also precedence for the house choosing the president.

    People choosing their government: If that is not done according to the one man one vote principle then it is not really people choosing their president. It is something else. That something else might or might not be close to the will of the people. The electoral college vote does not mirror the will of the people in each state. It’s winner-take-all. If electors were divided according to the vote with some mechanism for breaking ties that would be closer to the will of the people while still favoring smaller states. Videos here and here on trouble with electoral college. There are even those who argue that winner-take-all rules violate the equal protection clause of the constitution.

    Donald J Trump won according to the rules. The will of the people is not Donald J Trump. I think that would be a good summary of where we are.

  276. @uma

    You crow that the Whites would be wiped out by 7 billion people with plenty of fighting age males. JAD made a good point that only people who can actually fight and win civil wars should be the ones voting. Otherwise an election is a poorly calibrated gauge. With Russian Whites (7,000 nuclear weapons) and Trump’s military supporters (another 7,000 nuclear weapons) united, the opinion of Africans and mestizos won’t matter one bit.

  277. uma: “There are even those who argue that winner-take-all rules violate the equal protection clause of the constitution.”

    Yeah, I’ve read Professor Lessig’s posts on Medium. He won’t answer the one question I ahve for hi: if the situation were reversed, would be be arguing as strenuously that the Electoral College select Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton?

    All of the leftists who screamed about damage to our democracy should Trump not recognize the results of an election he’d lose are the ones screaming that the Electoral College should now change the rules after the game was played.

    The election was won according to the rules as everyone understood them by Donald Trump. That is the will of the people, by definition. The popular vote does not matter.

    Yes, there’s precedent for faithless electors. A few, no more than five or six, total. Yes, there’s precedent for the House making the choice.

    None of those precedents apply, because none of them happened under the circumstances that now obtain.

    Thus, an Electoral College coup is just that, and will be seen as that by the people in flyover country – you know, the ones who understand the Second Amendment is not about hunting.

  278. @ Michael Brazier

    Not at all. America loves the general Democratic agenda if it is presented as a list of benefits, without mentioning the costs or explaining the policies that are supposed to lead to those benefits. When the explanations are provided America balks.

    This is, in essence, one of the “Big Lies” told by the Republican Party. The idea that the Government can’t ever help with any problem, that legislation will always make any problem worse… For any problem there is good legislation and bad legislation. Bad legislation is poorly written, doesn’t consider facts or incentives, builds in booby-traps and doesn’t include auditing, accounting, or transparency. Good legislation does exactly the opposite. (My favorite bad law is the No Child Left Behind act, signed during the Bush II era, which mandates that schools have better test scores EVERY YEAR, or else. Think about that one for a few minutes!)
    .
    I won’t bother with all of your issues, but National Health can get you either Cuba or France, depending on how it is written and implemented. Note that most of Western Europe has NHS in some form and that people live long healthy lives; somehow these countries have not turned into smoking craters. Also note that a well-implemented NHS gives people much greater freedom; they don’t have to stay with dead-end jobs or psychotic bosses to qualify for healthcare.

    Equality between the races doesn’t have to mean “forced equality of outcomes.”

    I live in California and our high taxes work just fine – we’re still a land of very high opportunity. People love living here and our infrastructure is getting better daily; lots of long-needed work is taking place now that we have a large Democratic majority in our state house and senate.

    Etc. Legislation is as good or bad as the people who write it.

  279. Troutwaxer: “…higher taxes… jobs.” Just one of the inherent contradictions in progressive thinking. Pick one.

    Uma: “There are even those who argue that winner-take-all rules violate the equal protection clause of the constitution.” LOL. More progressive delusion that the 14th amendment supersedes the rest of the Constitution. It does not.

  280. @ TomA

    A lot of the current discussion is focused on Trump’s take-down of the Clinton political machine, but he first did a Sherman’s March-To-The-Sea through the Republican primaries and soundly defeated a pretty stellar (and diverse) cast of heavyweights in the GOP.

    Trump thinks like a businessman, and he knew the Republicans were vulnerable to a hostile takeover. Right now he’s busy making soothing noises while he puts in a new management team, which might or might not have the same objectives as the old management team. Interesting times indeed.

  281. The will of the people is that their state use the electors that a majority of them choose (or, in a few cases, that it be proportional). The expressed will is that each party chooses electors, the people vote on a party, and that party’s electors vote for the President using their best judgement, which by then is understood to be very likely to be whatever candidate received that party’s nomination.

    For the people to want electors to be faithless, is to have a person vote for, say, the Republican party, and to hope that that state’s Republican electors dislike their party’s nominee so much that they vote for someone else. It’s not going to be Clinton; if that’s what a voter wanted, that voter would have voted for the Democratic elector. The best they’re presumably hoping for is someone other than Trump or Clinton, with the best case scenario being both candidates short of 270 and the decision going to the House. Right now, that would require 37 faithless electors – practically all of Texas, or a combination of other states.

    The will of the people is not that it be popular vote, or at least it hasn’t been until now. But to declare popular vote to be the will of the people now is dishonest. To quote a very astute-minded liberal friend of mine (herself a Clinton voter): you can’t vote under one system and then re-declare the rules of that system after you’ve seen the tallies. If popular vote had been the will all along, both candidates would have campaigned very differently.

  282. “I live in California and our high taxes work just fine –”

    I live in the Netherlands with even higher taxes. And our ciuntry is still fine.

  283. @ gmmay

    4GW is real, happening around the world, it’s effective, and anyone who doesn’t realize this is either ignorant, or denying a very clear reality.

    Exactly.

  284. I think we should all hope/pray/do magic… whatever spiritual acts make sense to everyone, that no large group on either side decides that a revolution is necessary. And let’s also work to make sure that nobody in power on either side decides to do some damnfool thing which makes some large group of people believe that the best solution to their political problems is to shoot someone.

    And if you do think you might take part in a revolution, don’t fucking post about it online. Ya stupid or something?

  285. [That Americans will balk if shown the cost of government programs] is, in essence, one of the “Big Lies” told by the Republican Party. The idea that the Government can’t ever help with any problem, that legislation will always make any problem worse…

    I shouldn’t have to tell you that this is itself one of the Big Lies told by the Democratic Party. But apparently I have to remind you of all the information available to any American about government cost overruns and low-quality programs. I invite you to interview local parents about what they think about the quality of their kids’ education, given what they pay in property taxes, or reports of the amount spent per student in various states, and how those states’ rank in test scores. Or visit your local DMV, particularly one in a more crowded town or city, and observe how clean it is, and how fast the service is, and how high the fees are. Or read nearly article you can find about the F-35 program, in a locale that doesn’t depend on building a part for it. Or how many people think it’s a good idea to tell you you can’t do something that you know does them too little harm to be noticed. How many examples of bad legislation do you need?

    Now, you seem to want to bypass all those examples with

    For any problem there is good legislation and bad legislation.

    But this in turn assumes we can all tell the difference between good and bad legislation, and that we all agree on it.

    Suppose I offered you the following deal: you give up all the good legislation in your locale, and in return, you also do away with all the bad… including the bad that costs you. I then remind you that you can take the resources that would have been spent on all that bad legislation, and instead spend it on enacting all that good legislation on your own. Would you take that deal? If not, why not? And do you think everyone around you would react the same way?

  286. winter:

    “I live in California and our high taxes work just fine –”

    I live in the Netherlands with even higher taxes. And our ciuntry is still fine.

    Any county in the “Western World” with more violence against political figures? Two assassinations, at least one MP who had to flee the country because the state refused to protect her, and no free expression enforced by the court system? Youth euthanasia? A total fertility rate at 1.7-8 (2.1 is simple replacement level)? A declining life expectancy?

    Yeah, the Netherlands are doing just fine.

  287. I ran across a comment the other day about Dutch housing, that suggests that “fine” depends heavily on what part you’re looking at:

    The way the Dutch system works is that you have three types of housing:

    – Rent-controlled housing
    – Free market rentals
    – Subsidized home ownership

    These are strongly linked to income/wealth. The poorest people live in rent-controlled housing, the richest buy a house and the people who fall in between are screwed (not rich enough to buy a house, but renting is actually more expensive for them than the monthly costs if they could get a mortgage). […]

    There is an increasing shortage of rent-controlled housing due to various reasons. Local governments are legally required to reserve a certain number of rent-controlled houses for refugees, based on the number of inhabitants, but independent of the actual amount of rent-controlled houses available. In some places, this means that large percentages of rent-controlled housed go to refugees.

    The result is that the people who are on the waiting list for rent-controlled housing have to wait even longer. The average wait time is 8 years, with the maximum being 21 years. In Amsterdam it is 14-17 years.

    Now, imagine divorcing or wanting to leave your parents’ house and then having to wait for these periods before you can move on with your life. This really, really, really makes people upset.

    One may of course say that housing controls have nothing to do with high taxes. But the common free-market counter to this is that in a society with high taxes coupled with high programs, these things tend to all be of a piece. The state necessarily has to put restrictions on how its services are employed in order to avoid taxes becoming overtly ruinous or services becoming overtly useless.

    Suppose the Dutch were shown how housing works in various parts of the US. They might find the rent-controlled parts of some urban centers to be too similar to justify the drawbacks of moving. OTOH, they might look at parts of flyover country, with houses that are half the price of the coasts, along with the lack of restraints on when they could move out, and decide this part wasn’t so bad. (Well, maybe only if they were allowed to homeschool.)

  288. “I live in California and our high taxes work just fine – we’re still a land of very high opportunity. ”
    You live in the West Coast metroplex – most likely, somewhere on the San Francisco peninsula – and you have a job that pays a salary in the low six figures. Don’t trouble to deny it, it’s evident just from your writing that one sentence.
    Go sometime and take a hard look at the Central Valley farms. Talk to the people living there, and see if they think California is still a land of opportunity. Or, if you can’t spare the time for the road trip, read some books and essays by Victor Davis Hanson.
    You are living a sheltered life, and you have no idea what the policies your neighbors praise are really doing to your native state.

  289. “I live in California and our high taxes work just fine – we’re still a land of very high opportunity. People love living here and our infrastructure is getting better daily; ”

    Which is why renting a U-Haul CA to TX costs 3 times what TX to CA costs. Hundreds of businesses taking off from CA every year for the last 10 years.

    You took the brown acid and are still tripping.

  290. “which might or might not have the same objectives as the old management team.”

    The reason he got a lot of people’s votes, and his Cabinet picks are proving it, is that he’s going to govern like the old management claimed it did.

  291. I’m reading these recent posts, with particular attention to the exchange in which Uma was taken to the woodshed. It’s fairly obvious that Uma has zero knowledge of Red State culture, and probably has a picture of it derived from far left hate sites.

    Uma, I realize that one of your favorite memes is the “chicken hawk” meme, in which you very selectively pick certain figures on the right who did not serve in the military, mostly for perfectly legitimate reasons, and thereby insinuate that this is pretty much universal on the right. I’m guessing that you probably think that the military are mostly antigun leftists like you, and I suspect you also think that you, by extension, are one small step away from being a war hero yourself.

    So let’s do an experiment. You should walk into a bar in Oceanside, CA, that’s frequented by active duty Marines. State loudly that all Republicans and NRA members are draft dodging cowards.

    For our entertainment, you should have a friend filming the exchange. The friend is absolutely essential, since you will be in no shape to run the camera yourself.

  292. @Alpheus:


    >> First, I find it laughable to believe that one side will get all the support needed from the international community, when both the Revolution and the Civil War gave plenty of motivation to get outside help, but that outside help was *very* hard to get. If our culture war were to go hot, it would more than likely become such a steaming mess that the world wouldn’t know what to do with it.

    Examples from more recent history would be more relevant and more representative of international dynamics. A good recent example would be the apartheid government in south Africa which was engaged in practical civil war with the non-white population there. There was overwhelming international support against the apartheid government that brought it down. Not to mention military support to factions fighting the apartheid regime. The stakes are much higher in the US.

    A civil war in the US, if it lasts for some time, will most likely play along the lines of white nationalists vs. everybody else. It won’t exactly be between two constitutionalist sides with equally nuanced readings of the constitution where a lawyer would be needed to tell them apart.

    If nuclear weapons are secured, there maybe those countries with an interest to prolong the conflict and destroy as much of the US in the process. That is a big “if” though, and under normal circumstances the rest of the world has a strong vested interest in soundly defeating the dark forces.

  293. @ Michael Brazier

    You live in the West Coast metroplex – most likely, somewhere on the San Francisco peninsula – and you have a job that pays a salary in the low six figures.

    Actually, I live about 75 miles east of LAX, and make somewhere between 60-80,000 annually depending on how often I work. I’m on call 24/7/365 except for vacation/sick days. My rental house has no garage and is about 12000 square feet. My wife’s disability pension pays substantially less than I make and doesn’t include medical benefits.

    I’m an optimist, and with good reason. I’m the great-grandchild of immigrant parents, and their descendants are all college-educated people with decent life-skills. BTW, I just bought a Prius, which gets twice the gas mileage of my previous car and damn-near pays for itself.

    On the subject of California’s infrastructure, there have been major freeway projects running since Brown got elected again, and we’re finally running a surplus in Sacramento. They just finished re-working the 15/215 intersection, and it’s beautiful. The 710, 91/15 intersection, and the 10 between the 57 and 605 are still being rebuilt. They’re working on a bridge over the 215 near Hemet, and have rebuilt that corridor extensively. In short, substantial parts of Southern California’s freeway system are being extensively rebuilt.

  294. @Jay Maynard:


    >> Yeah, I’ve read Professor Lessig’s posts on Medium. He won’t answer the one question I ahve for hi: if the situation were reversed, would be be arguing as strenuously that the Electoral College select Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton?

    I think it is better to focus on the ideas and arguments than the motives. We practically have minority government here in the US. This is because of gerrymandering, and winner-take-all electoral college. You can point your finger at democrats and suggest that they started the whole gerrymandering thing or whatever. At the end of the day, this is what we have, and you cannot claim that the minority that ends up forming the government reflects the “will of the people”.

  295. “””If nuclear weapons are secured, there maybe those countries with an interest to prolong the conflict and destroy as much of the US in the process. That is a big “if” though, and under normal circumstances the rest of the world has a strong vested interest in soundly defeating the dark forces.”””

    Yes, there’s an international interest to knock the United States down a peg or two, but I fail to see how that’s been any different than the two times that I mentioned.

    And I find it highly amusing that you think that the “dark forces” in the United States are that much different from the dark forces of the Soviet Union, or of Communist China, or of Castro’s Cuba, or of Hitler’s Germany, among so many other examples.

    I just don’t see why the world would immediately choose sides in an American Civil War when, time and time again, evil has reared its ugly head all over the world, and the typical response has always been a mixture of political quarantine, subtle behind-the-scenes political manipulation, and sanctions.

    Most countries just aren’t all that interested in being drawn into another country’s civil wars.

    That doesn’t even take into account the international economic effects that will percolate through the world as America’s economy destabilizes….

    It all depends on the circumstances of the given civil war, though. Who knows? With the debt the US is in, combined with the threat of invasion from outside countries mixed with internal bloody turmoil…the US may very well attempt to take over the world!

    Yeah, like that would ever happen, though…at least, not again…

  296. @ PapayaSF

    The problem here is that you’re blaming California’s problems on the people who are trying to fix them. (Your posts shows what depthless googling can accomplish.) The actual story goes something like this: In 1978 California’s voters passed Proposition 13, which had two effects. First, it lowered property taxes. Second, it required a 2/3 majority for both the state or the municipalities to raise any kind of taxes, including sales tax. The people who proposed the amendment were two Republican anti-tax advocates, Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann. (The problems Proposition 13 addressed were real, but it was massive overkill.)

    After Proposition 13 passed and then-Governor Brown left office, we had Republican Governors from 1982 to 2010, with the exception of Gray Davis, who got recalled 3 years into his first term after tripping over a bomb left in the law by Pete Wilson (a Republican) prior to Wilson leaving office. In short, California did not raise taxes and had a negative revenue flow for about 25 years, as we’d badly damaged our property tax base and the ability to raise taxes didn’t exist! Meanwhile, California is one of the biggest economies in the world and really needs a decent tax base.

    In short, Republicans nearly bankrupted our state and royally screwed up our educational system! Proposition 13 dropped about 20% per year off of our school budgets. In 1978 we were one of the best school systems in the nation. Now we’re number 48. We did a lot of borrowing during those years (“borrow and spend” is MUCH worse than “tax and spend.”)

    At this point we have a Democratic Governor and the necessary 2/3 democratic majority in both houses to raise taxes again… and look at my earlier post – stuff is finally getting fixed!

    Taxes are funny things. They are, in essence, your admission fee to civilization. They get you police and fire departments. They pay for inspections of food from farm to table, including restaurants and markets. They pay for building inspections and code enforcement. They paid for your education, plus museums and public libraries. They pay for roads and infrastructure and even foster care for orphaned/abused kids. They pay for national defense. But nobody wants to pay them, and the level of ignorance is so high that people don’t make the daily connection between the money that’s withdrawn from their paycheck and the fact that they receive food every day that isn’t rotten or infected, such that a minor outbreak of e coli will frequently make national headlines.

    The level of ignorance is so high the people actually want to reduce taxes below the level of viability for their own government making one of the ten largest economies in the world into a debtor state! And by the way, California Republicans, your taxes will be used to pay the interest fees on the money we borrowed so you poor whining babies don’t have to pay taxes!

  297. Eric, with all due respect, WHY would you ever want to publish this? Granted that it’s spot on, it would be far better for the cause of freedom (and anti-snowflakism) to let the DemonRat party crumble, because what replaces them is bound to be better — either the Libertaians, or Ross Perot’s Reform party or something similar, or even a new centrist party.

    Propping up the Democrats only means more New Deal welfare-statism and anti-federalism, more overregulation and overtaxation of business, more big spending, and a continuation of our present path to becoming a banana republic the same way most countries in Latin America got there. That does not help solve America’s problems. It IS America’s problems.

  298. Troutwaxer, trouble is, problems are often caused (or at least made worse) “by the people trying to fix them.” (E.g. the War on Poverty, or the $240 million/year that San Francisco spends on the homeless.) Your complaints about Prop 13 amount to: “If only property taxes could be higher.” But that prices people out of their homes. Your complaints about California education, entirely controlled by Democrats for decades, amount to: “If only we could spend more money.” But CA spends a lot per pupil, and that doesn’t correlate well with success. (Of course, part of that is our insistence on educating a large chunk of Latin America.)

    And soon, our education will take another step backward, due to a stupid proposition that makes it easier to push kids into bilingual education, which will retard English proficiency, but hey, the unions and ethnic activists are for it, and more poverty means more work for anti-poverty types, and more social division means more work for the anti-racism types, so from a leftist point of view, it’s all good.

    Taxes may pay for civilization, but California is proof that more taxes don’t necessarily make you more civilized.

  299. @ Paul Brinkley

    Why does Troutwaxer keep bringing up the Watergate guy? Am I missing something?

    The Watergate Guy was John Dean. The person I’m referring to (and I’ll be horribly embarrassed if I got his name wrong) is Howard Dean, who was the head of the National Democratic Party in 2008. He didn’t like the Clintonian ideal of “triangulation” and instead pushed for what he called a 50-State Strategy, which demanded that every House and Senate race have a Democrat running, supported by the national party. This is both because you have to spread your philosophy of government if you want to win any race – demographics change over time – and as insurance in case the Republican opponent was arrested for bribery or kiddie porn or the national Republican party did something horrible.

    Dean was responsible for Democratic gains in the House and Senate in 2006 and 2008, but Rahm Emmanual couldn’t stand him and he was ousted from his position shortly after Obama took office. (One of the many reasons I don’t like Obama much.)

    To get back to Eric’s original post, one of the reasons the Democrats fail so often is that the head of the Republican Party is aware of the Republican candidate for Dog Catcher in Bumfuck Alabama and is using the race as a training opportunity for that Republican candidate, who might run for town council or mayor or even a higher office later on. As for the Democrat in the Bumfuck Alabama Dog Catcher’s race, the national Democratic Party doesn’t give a crap. This is one of the reasons the Democrats are failing, and Dean was trying to address this issue.

    His ouster was enormously significant.

  300. @Troutwaxer “Taxes are funny things. They are, in essence, your admission fee to civilization.”

    So anyone who doesn’t pay taxes is uncivilized? Better be careful–talk like that can get you labeled racist or worse!

  301. Here’s why Democrats will likely not get their act together. While their stated intentions are to help the poor and underprivileged, they ignore important root causes, and advocate a narrow set of solutions (basically: more government).

    Over a century ago, progressives revolted against the older view of poverty, which could be summarized as a combination of “It’s God’s will” and “It’s your own fault.” Instead they talked about social forces, discrimination, and various forms of injustice. While they weren’t entirely wrong, they have now so de-emphasized the “It’s your own fault” part that they are nearly blind to important root causes. E.g. we now know single motherhood is a huge predictor of poverty, crime, drug abuse, mental illness, and a lot else.

    And yet, Democrats are loathe to admit this established fact. Instead they blame poverty and crime on capitalism, racism, sexism, colonialism, Republicans, the police, taxes that aren’t high enough, and anything else. (I’ve even seen libertarians blamed!) In other words, anybody except the individuals becoming single mothers. Then they continue to subsidize and de-stigmatize single-motherhood, making the problem worse, and say that people like me are “blaming the victim.” In their ideology, the victims have no agency, and no role in escaping their plight. They are helpless pawns of all-pervasive social forces.

    The solution to poverty is pretty well-established: finish school, get any job and keep it, save your money, don’t commit crimes, and don’t have kids until after you are married. Sure, it’s boring and old-fashioned, and not everyone can do it, things happen, but if everyone at least tried to do those things, their chances of ending up in poverty would drop dramatically. But the modern left seems congenitally unable to give up their love of government programs, and their reluctance to look at how individual choices so often cause the problems they deplore. It’s more convenient to blame often-phantom “isms.”

  302. uma: “A civil war in the US, if it lasts for some time, will most likely play along the lines of white nationalists vs. everybody else. It won’t exactly be between two constitutionalist sides with equally nuanced readings of the constitution where a lawyer would be needed to tell them apart.”

    You’re letting your leftist view of the world – that everything hinges on race – control your thinking. A civil war would be the heartland vs. the coasts. There are lots of non-white-nationalists (why didn’t you just come out and say “raaaacissts!!!” like you know you wanted to?) who will fight to stop a coup.

    And berating people for not being nuanced is just another sign of your elitism. “Nuance”, to the people of the heartland, is simply a flag that the leftist raising it is trying to tapdance around what’s right and what’s wrong and push their preferred view of the world. When someone says “nuance”, I grab my wallet and my crotch, because they’re trying to screw me or rob me.

    “This is because of gerrymandering, and winner-take-all electoral college. You can point your finger at democrats and suggest that they started the whole gerrymandering thing or whatever.”

    That’s because they did. It wasn’t until the Republicans made massive gains in 1980 that districts in Texas started to reflect the actual proportions of Democrats and Republicans in the state. Yes, the Democrats started it, and they’re reaping what they’ve sown…aided and abetted by a piece fo their own lawmaking, the section of the Voting Rights Act that forces racial gerrymandering in drawing up districts. That section was not struck down when the outdated parts of the law were.

    If you claim that Donald Trump and the Republican Congress is not the will of the people because gerrymandering, then you have to grant the same to most of LBJ’s so-called Great Society. Will you? Of course not. It’s a hard-left program, and those are always the will of the people, right?

  303. “Examples from more recent history would be more relevant and more representative of international dynamics. A good recent example would be the apartheid government in south Africa which was engaged in practical civil war with the non-white population there. There was overwhelming international support against the apartheid government that brought it down. Not to mention military support to factions fighting the apartheid regime. The stakes are much higher in the US.”

    That’s an extraordinarily inapt comparison. That was in no way a “practical” civil war by any use of the word. The population was nowhere near as armed as that of the US, nor was the culture comparable. And the international “community” certainly didn’t send in troops.

    As Alpheus points out and you admit, the stakes are much higher in the US. Any significant armed conflict in the US will send shockwaves around the world since the US supplies roughly 25-30% of the world’s wealth. Is the international community going to impose sanctions and boycotts against the US as they did with South Africa? That’s another point that doesn’t pass the laugh test.

    So please, be specific in your argument – which countries are capable of intervening, which have the will to do it, and what does that intervention look like?

    And spare your fantasy arguments about white nationalists comprising the majority of one side.

  304. @Alpheus:


    >> And I find it highly amusing that you think that the “dark forces” in the United States are that much different from the dark forces of the Soviet Union, or of Communist China, or of Castro’s Cuba, or of Hitler’s Germany, among so many other examples.

    Those are all dark forces indeed. As is the white nationalist right. There is no reason why it should be either/or.

    The rest of the questions can be easily answered by one simple answer: 1) The world today is not what it was 200 years ago. 2) Unlike what you think, many if not most, active foreign powers in the world do in fact interfere in civil wars. In the modern era, I am happy to go over every civil war with you starting with the Spanish civil war and ending with the Syrian civil war.

  305. @uma: At present, the only nation capable of sending a serious military force across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans is the United States. No one outside North America could intervene in a civil war in the USA, even if they wanted to.

    @troutwaxer: Prop. 13 passed (in a landslide IIRC) because for the previous decade, whenever California’s governments found they were running out of money, they automatically raised taxes instead of cutting expenditures. Property taxes, in particular, went so high that many people (such as retirees on fixed incomes) were being forced to sell the houses they’d lived in for decades. In effect California was consuming its taxpayers’ capital to pay for its operations before Prop. 13 passed; the initiative forced the State into (temporary) restraint.

    You should also consider that Texas, which has an economy roughly the same size as California’s, manages to maintain an infrastructure of equal quality without high taxes or massive public debt – to the point that large numbers of people and companies are moving from California to Texas. (That’s the point of those U-Haul statistics: U-Haul charges so much more to people leaving California because it often has to drive the trucks back from their destinations empty.) How is it that Texas can maintain its roads and power grid on a fairly low tax base, when California spends so much more to less effect?

  306. Troutwaxer on 2016-12-18 at 20:18:16 said:

    Hard to believe people still trot out that Prop 13 canard to this day. But it’s funny that you think anyone here hasn’t heard of that nonsense. There are plenty of analytical take-downs of that argument that most here are probably familiar with, but I did like this little gem:

    “Second, it required a 2/3 majority for both the state or the municipalities to raise any kind of taxes, including sales tax.”

    Quelle horreur! That the people should impose requirements on their elected officials! What other of those 2/3rds type requirements give you the vapors?


  307. >> So please, be specific in your argument – which countries are capable of intervening, which have the will to do it, and what does that intervention look like?

    That all depends how events play out. Countries don’t have to send in their armies. The smart ones would not. I am sure it would fairly easy to recruit million(s) of colored mercenaries if the prize was the “lebensraum” called the red states. Plenty of over-populated hell holes out there in the world who would welcome any opportunity to escape their “potatoes famines” into vast expanses of north America.

  308. Uma, you crack me up. You should be writing dystopian science fiction. Pitch it to a publisher (or filmmaker)! George Soros hires “millions of colored mercenaries” in Africa and the Middle East, and promises them the Great Plains states. Simultaneously, Carlos Slim funds a Latin American invasion to take back the Southwest. The DNC forms brigades of feminists, gays, ghetto gangs, and pajama boys. The white nationalists are outnumbered… can they survive to form even a small homeland?

    Paging Harry Turtledove!

  309. PapayaSF: “Paging Harry Turtledove!”

    For the love of all that anyone holds holy, NO!!!!!!

    I don’t want to have to slog through 6500 pages of his writing to see how it ends!


  310. >> Uma, you crack me up. You should be writing dystopian science fiction.

    Sadly I lack the talents there. My mind is little more than a pushdown automaton operating on facts and predicates


    >> George Soros hires “millions of colored mercenaries” in Africa and the Middle East, and promises them the Great Plains states. Simultaneously, Carlos Slim funds a Latin American invasion to take back the Southwest. The DNC forms brigades of feminists, gays, ghetto gangs, and pajama boys.

    You must read a lot of Ann Coulter, to think that the platoon that will pull you out of Rush Bimbo’s rear end, where you’ll no doubt be cowering in, will be made of feminists, gays, and pajama boys. Do you hear the black helicopters in the sky in your hideout? It’s time…

  311. @uma

    As an Asian, I’ll bet on the Whites winning against “colored mercenaries” (I presume you mean, blacks and Mestizos). The Whites command, and can create, most of the nuclear weapons. They are the majority of highly disciplined praetorians. They can incinerate whole continents.

    The idea that Dashawn and Shaniqua can take on nuclear armed Russia is ridiculous.

  312. I’d also note that calling Trump voters “deplorables” plus her campaign lashing out at women who voted for Bernie as “anti-woman” was very poor strategy.

    That wasn’t strategy at all. It was pique over the very idea that anyone would decline to obey her, and bewilderment that reality wouldn’t cooperate with her narcissistic world view.

    Besides all of her other faults, the woman was incompetent at campaigning. She botched it this time, pretty much the same way she did when Obama blew her out of the water with his content-free “hope and change” blather.

  313. esr on 2016-12-17 at 13:16:05 said:
    > > With too many libertarians I’ve encountered, if they were neurologically
    > > capable of comprehending social trust they wouldn’t be libertarians.

    > Pretty inferior grade of libertarian then. I really don’t think I know any with that problem.

    This will land me in the perdition of moderation, but:
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png

    I bet you don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon either.

    BTW, he said *neurologically*, not intellectually. Which tells you the sorts of Libertarians he’s talking about. I know more than a few of them myself.

  314. Taxes are funny things. They are, in essence, your admission fee to civilization.

    You can fuck right off with that idiotic cliche. Taxes are the price we pay for not standing up to those who seek to rule us.

    The price of civilization is behaving in a civilized manner: Trading with others instead of taking what you want at gunpoint.

  315. Harold:
    > (although at long range, with personal weapons, they’d be in trouble in numbers, come
    > to think if it, at least the Army with their chopped down M4s, and the Marines soon
    > enough I gather)

    I’m not *quite* sure what you’re getting at, but if you’re saying what I think you’re saying the “chopped down” M4s are still able to hit accurately (given optics) out to 350/400 yards if the rifle’s not in too bad a shape and the trigger puller’s got the mad, mad skillz to do it.

  316. Republicans nearly bankrupted our state and royally screwed up our educational system! Proposition 13 dropped about 20% per year off of our school budgets.

    Bullshit.

    In California, we’re spending vastly more per pupil than we did 20 years ago, and the results prove that throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it. Just look at that disgusting monument to bureaucracy that the LA USD built for themselves, that office building full of useless tax parasites consuming six-figure salaries and never seeing the inside of a classroom, while they fight tooth and nail, lying their asses off at our expense to try to turn public opinion against charter schools.

  317. uma on 2016-12-17 at 19:01:20 said:
    > And there are several billion people in the world, with unlimited number of fighting
    > age males, who have a stake in your side losing. But none of that would be needed.

    What they *really* have is a stake in “my” side winning. Otherwise the whole f*king world will look like Cuba, Venezuela, the poorer parts of China and Russia.

    > The war, in the unlikely event it happens, would be short and quick and your side
    > would be swiftly defeated.

    You’re delusional.

    I hope that it doesn’t happen. I *really* hope that. Because it will be a long, long fight and it will wreck the economy for a couple decades–decades that I really need to be madly pounding a keyboard to make money for my retirement, not shivering in a hide on the side of some hill somewhere[1].

    But understand this, I buy bullets by the *case*. I don’t play call of duty, I play IPSC. I don’t play Madden Football, I lift heavy shit in the gym. I don’t play dungeons and dragons, I practice with dull (but otherwise real) swords. I don’t do bong hits and go snowboarding, I strap a couple sticks to my feet and ski *up* the mountains (usually between 8 and 10 thousand feet in elevation).

    Over quickly? Yeah, thinking about it it might be.

    But not the way you think.

    See, and I keep trying to push this point home, we don’t have to fight soldiers and cops. They aren’t the problem. We can go around them.

    [1] Which I really won’t be either, as it won’t be fought out in the country side. There’s nothing there of value that can be taken and held. No, it’ll be fought in the cities and suburbs, and on the networks.

  318. Troutwaxer on 2016-12-18 at 14:06:42 said:
    @ Michael Brazier

    Not at all. America loves the general Democratic agenda if it is presented as a list of benefits, without mentioning the costs or explaining the policies that are supposed to lead to those benefits. When the explanations are provided America balks.

    Troutwater:
    > (My favorite bad law is the No Child Left Behind act, signed during the Bush II era,
    > which mandates that schools have better test scores EVERY YEAR, or else. Think
    > about that one for a few minutes!)

    So I’ll agree that it’s a dumb law, but with VERY careful manipulation of the tests and the results it could take about 30 years get from a score of 70 to a score of 72.

    Because there is aways 70.1, 70.2 …

  319. Troutwaxer on 2016-12-18 at 20:18:16 said:
    @ PapayaSF
    > … In 1978 California’s voters passed Proposition 13, which had two effects.
    > First, it lowered property taxes. Second, it required a 2/3 majority for both the state
    > or the municipalities to raise any kind of taxes, including sales tax.

    > After Proposition 13 passed and then-Governor Brown left office, we had Republican
    > Governors from 1982 to 2010, with the exception of Gray Davis, who got recalled

    Calling Schwarzenegger a Republican is technically true, but only because anyone can claim to be part of any party (I was living in CA for the first term he was in office. What a pathetic loser).

    > 3 years into his first term after tripping over a bomb left in the law by Pete Wilson (a
    > Republican) prior to Wilson leaving office. In short, California did not raise taxes and had a
    > negative revenue flow for about 25 years, as we’d badly damaged our property tax base and

    Why do tax rates need to keep going up every year?

    Why can’t politicians live within their means?

    > the ability to raise taxes didn’t exist!

    Yes, it did. You just had to convince 2/3rds of the people that whatever bit of graft or corruption you’re proposing was worth it.

    But the state would rather piss money away on bullshit social programs, protecting bait fish and building statues of shit piles. Well, technically that was the city of San Jose (srs. Google “San Jose Statue of shit”. First several links…)

    There is no reason that tax RATES have to increase every year unless there is a significant event (war, earthquake) that increases outlays.

    But California state pensions are *massively* over generous, the state government is almost as corrupt as Chicago, and they spend on *stupid* shit.

    > Meanwhile, California is one of the biggest
    > economies in the world and really needs a decent tax base.

    It has one. It also has a socialist mindset that is doing to CA what that same mindset did to Venezula.

    > In short, Republicans nearly bankrupted our state and royally screwed up our
    > educational system!

    Yes, because those mean old Republicans wouldn’t let us steal as much money as we wanted.

    Let me ask you this, if tax *rates* need to go up every year, what happens when they hit 100 percent?

  320. Uma:
    > 2) Unlike what you think, many if not most, active foreign powers in the world
    > do in fact interfere in civil wars.

    No, they do not.

    Well, not the way you imply. Russia is not involved in Syria’s civil war out of magnanimous feeling of brotherhood. It’s a way for Putin to get Russia’s foot back into the middle east and start growing Russian Empire back to what it looked like in the days of the USSR.

    To the extent that countries (generally) get involved in other nations civil wars it’s either to tear a chunk off for themselves, or like Russia claimed to do with Crimea–assert that they were there to help Russian ethnics.

    Now, if you manage to arrange to get an atrocity or two on the evening news you MIGHT get the UN to send it “peace keepers”, but all that manages to do is drive up the average cost, and down the average age of prostitutes, increase the V.D. rate in the under 12 set, and get a lot more women raped.

    No, “most” active foreign powers do NOT interfere in Civil Wars the way you are implying.

  321. @Harold
    “Any county in the “Western World” with more violence against political figures?”

    Since WWII? Yes. What happened around 2006 was rather complicated. I would say stupidity in the secret service and infighting in the ruling conservative/right wing party were at the root. Nothing of which had anything to do with taxes.

    @Harold
    “Youth euthanasia?”

    Ever sit next to a bed with a youngster dying in the most excruciating agony?

    @Harold
    “A total fertility rate at 1.7-8 (2.1 is simple replacement level)?”

    Rich people get fewer kids. EVERYWHERE in the world. It just means we are rich.

    @Harold
    “A declining life expectancy?”

    That is new to me. But maybe you mean that other countries in Europe have faster increasing life expectancy? Yeah, our governments have been lax in banning smoking and reduce drinking.

    A total fertility rate at 1.7-8 (2.1 is simple replacement level)? A declining life expectancy?

  322. > The smart ones would not. I am sure it would fairly easy to recruit million(s) of colored mercenaries if the prize was the “lebensraum” called the red states.

    History tells us that white people usually defeat nonwhite people. Eg the black regiments in the civil war were hilariously useless. Which is one more reason why it is a poor idea to give equal votes to nonwhites.

    By and large, history is white people fighting over nonwhite people, rather than with nonwhite people. Nonwhite victories are a result of white backing, typically state department proxies defeating pentagon proxies. This is true even of wars with the high IQ east Asians, though they are considerably tougher than the others.

  323. > Rich people get fewer kids. EVERYWHERE in the world. It just means we are rich.

    No. People with emancipated women get fewer kids. We have more children than very poor people with equally emancipated women.

    Similarly, Spartans failed to replace themselves, Romans failed to replace themselves, as did civilized people near the end of the Bronze age.

    In our society, rich men have more children than poor men, but highly educated women have fewer children than less educated women. If you control for education, smart men and smart women have more children than equally educated stupid men and stupid women, and similarly rich men and rich women. The problem is that educating women is disastrously dysgenic and extremely bad for fertility. Because we educate our smart women, they are failing to reproduce, which results in a major reduction of IQ every generation.

    Women should not be educated past puberty, and before puberty should be taught about being wives and mothers. They should be under the authority of their fathers until they are under the authority of the husbands.

  324. @Jim “History tells us that white people usually defeat nonwhite people.”

    The 332nd Fighter Group and the 442nd Infantry Regiment might beg to differ.

    1. >The 332nd Fighter Group and the 442nd Infantry Regiment might beg to differ.

      There are sporadic exceptions, but the racist upthread has a point. Except it isn’t one about race but about culture; “white” cultures do not in general get beaten by “nonwhite” cultures, and since the Industrial Revolution it hasn’t even been close.

      This isn’t biology as destiny, it’s the operation of a particular cultural package that combines citizen soldiers with technology-intensive warfare. Which is why the 332nd Fighter Group and the 442nd Infantry Regiment could win despite not being biologically white; both organizations are culturally white.

      Victor Davis Hansen has argued persuasively in “The Western Way of War” that this culture package originated in early Classical Greece. I think he’s a bit too cavalier about dismissing the Japanese and the Ummayyad expansion, but that over the long run his general thesis is nevertheless sound. Aristocratic horse soldiers cannot beat citizen-soldier heavy infantry. Cultures with the technical capital to build Maxim guns cannot be beaten by cultures that lack it. “White” is an accident, this is essence.

  325. @Parallel
    Usually does not mean always, quite apart from the fact that you’re citing small groups auxiliary to white people when you should be citing the Umayyad Conquest of Iberia or the like.

  326. uma, just how will your mercenary army get here WITH supplies? You see US troops being put on commercial airliners and flown over; what you don’t see are the prepositioned supplies waiting for them. Or the weapons and ammo are put on huge planes — which no other country outside of Russia has — or on ships that we’re rich enough to have just sail around waiting for nothing else…

    And the US military is just likely to unite on keeping them out and let the bureaucrats go hang. This isn’t 1917 Russia and Battleship Potemkin.

  327. > > “History tells us that white people usually defeat nonwhite people.”

    > The 332nd Fighter Group and the 442nd Infantry Regiment might beg to differ.

    Back when they were black, they were a joke. If they are your poster girl, proves my point.

  328. The 332nd fighter group got a distinguished unit citation for an incident where they were escorting bombers, and lost three fighters and two bombers to the Germans losing four fighters. Clearly the authorities were scraping to find something to give them a citation for.

  329. Giving Madame Curie not one but two nobel prizes for work that would have been completely unremarkable if a male scientist did it shows there are no great female scientists, and giving 332 a distinguished unit citation for a completely unremarkable mission shows there were no competent black units.

  330. Both those units were led by a chain of command that was considerably paler, so they don’t entirely refute his point.

    But as to his implication that there is some sort of innate military superiority in skin color: “non-white” troops with the culture and war-making philosophy Americans have “appropriated” from any number of sources do just fine.

  331. “Back when they were black, they were a joke. If they are your poster girl, proves my point.”

    Sir, you’re such an ignoramus you don’t appear to know that 442nd was composed of Japanese-Americans.

  332. esr:
    > Cultures with the technical capital to build Maxim guns cannot be beaten by cultures that lack it

    When whites invaded India, India and England were approximately technologically equal, though England was rapidly advancing while India was decadent and in decline, but a quite small number of whites still defeated Indians in a completely one sided fashion.

    US armies equipped black regiments and white regiments exactly alike, but the performance of black units was always embarrassingly bad.

  333. > > “Back when they were black, they were a joke. If they are your poster girl, proves my point.”

    > Sir, you’re such an ignoramus you don’t appear to know that 442nd was composed of Japanese-Americans.

    332nd was black. And authorities gave them, like Mary Curie, an affirmative action citation. Poster girl principle applies. If the poster girl for group X sucks, everyone in group X sucks.

    Obviously Japanese can fight and are roughly comparable to whites – but then recall that Japanese routinely defeated vastly larger Chinese armies, and that the Chinese are pretty good compared to other nonwhites.

  334. Uma, I find it hilarious that you almost certainly would mock and deride as racists the people who talk about the problem of white genocide, but here you are openly speculating about attacking some of the whitest parts of America and importing literal armies of brown people to invade and conquer them.

    And have you considered what the likely short-term results of this would be? You have not. Have you heard of the rapefugees in Germany and Sweden? Probably not. It wasn’t covered by the people who deliver your preferred (blindered) view of the world.

    And have you considered what the likely long-term results of this would be? You have not. In fifty years, a hundred tops, the fertile, well-maintained lands these armies of browns got imported to would be just as barren and worthless as the lands they left. They are incapable of maintaining the agriculture, infrastructure, etc. This is proven by the simple fact that they don’t have it now.

  335. William O. B’Livion:

    Harold:
    > (although at long range, with personal weapons, they’d be in trouble in numbers, come
    > to think if it, at least the Army with their chopped down M4s, and the Marines soon
    > enough I gather)

    I’m not *quite* sure what you’re getting at, but if you’re saying what I think you’re saying the “chopped down” M4s are still able to hit accurately (given optics) out to 350/400 yards if the rifle’s not in too bad a shape and the trigger puller’s got the mad, mad skillz to do it.

    Although those skills won’t have to be quite so mad with the transition to M4A1s with consistent semi-auto trigger pulls. But marksmanship is just not something the Army has given a damn about since sometime in Vietnam or thereabouts, and while that’s very much not true for the Marines, switching to M4s (and not M4A1 per what I just Googled) will degrade their capabilities.

    And in truth few of us with deadly sniper rifles, excuse me, scoped bolt action hunting rifles firing bigger bullets with more design margin for all things including accuracy, seriously practice at even 300 yards, and very few beyond that, for range access reasons if no other. But the greater capability in each of these weapon systems would very likely play a big role *if* the military limited themselves to their individual weapons, or are put in a posture where they have to at best.

    Of course, they have nasty things like grenade launchers, crew serviced General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMG), mortars and on-call artillery … which just means that if we play that game by their rules, we’ll lose. So of course, if it comes to it, we have no intention of doing so; rather, at worst, the US military will learn for the first time what it’s like to not have a secure rear. As others have noted. And it won’t require all that many of them to be on our side to greatly even the odds in this area.

  336. Jim”

    > > “Back when they were black, they were a joke. If they are your poster girl, proves my point.”

    > Sir, you’re such an ignoramus you don’t appear to know that 442nd was composed of Japanese-Americans.

    […]

    Obviously Japanese can fight and are roughly comparable to whites….

    If they’ve culturally learned that the non-combatant arms are every bit as vital as the combatant ones. Which makes the 442nd not directly comparable to the Imperial Japanese Army et. al., for they had “whites” supplying them with logistics, intelligence, cryptography, non-combat engineering, etc. and were trained in our cultural way of war. Which I’m sure they had no difficultly soaking up, especially with “white” superiors who bought into our way. In fact, wouldn’t most have started the process without the homeland Japanese formal inculcation in their way of war?

    They also had our superior technological base to draw upon, much greater raw industrial might, etc. Better strategy in general at all levels, and I assume little or no attachment to too clever schemes that fall apart if the enemy, who you may not understand so well, doesn’t act as you expect him to.

    How the JSDF will preform in the coming years … well, I’m afraid we’re going to learn that :-(unhappy because I don’t want war, especially in the East Pacific; if it breaks out in a big way, immediately buy your next batch of electronic toys, for there won’t be more for some time…).

    (In an odd way of exposition, this by and large covers the reasons Imperial Japan lost so badly when they started fighting us, even faster than either of us expected.)

  337. The problem is that educating women is disastrously dysgenic and extremely bad for fertility.

    It would be nice if we had data on this that wasn’t confounded with {Women who have gone through a system that is actively suppressing birthrates}. Till then, this data is worse than useless, because it pretends to be a complete answer while providing a convenient distraction from the indoctrination centers known as schools / colleges / universities.

    You and all the other Fixers Of The World would not be such laughingstocks if y’all could tell the difference between {the world as it works}, and {the world as it works when someone is deliberately sabotaging it}. You might not be so fast to put on the jackboots yourself if you did.

    If the poster girl for group X sucks, everyone in group X sucks.

    Leans that way, but the strong version of your assertion is false.

  338. jdgalt:

    Eric, with all due respect, WHY would you ever want to publish this? Granted that it’s spot on, it would be far better for the cause of freedom (and anti-snowflakism) to let the DemonRat party crumble, because what replaces them is bound to be better — either the Libertaians, or Ross Perot’s Reform party or something similar, or even a new centrist party.

    No, unless we remove the Left from the polity one way or another, and absent genetic engineering we’re nowhere near to, self-regenerating. Maybe even really hard wired into us if you think there’s something to the r/K thesis, they’re r aligned and that’s a winning formula as long as resources aren’t scarce or you tune your society for r in hard times like the Kurds do.

    So I assume ESR is assuming there will be a party of the Left, and he wants it to not be entirely pathetic. That’s one of the reasons I can see the Republican Party splitting and one wing of it becoming the new Left party, heck, Reagan styled himself as an FDR Democrat, and Trump is more in that direction than e.g. Calvin Coolidge and not all that much Alt Right. It’s just that that segment of the Left has been systematically driven out of the Democratic party since the “’60s” or so, and without successfully addressing the mechanisms that allow that, his thesis is hopeless. E.g. r style outgrouping.

  339. FooQuuxman:

    The problem is that educating women is disastrously dysgenic and extremely bad for fertility.

    It would be nice if we had data on this that wasn’t confounded with {Women who have gone through a system that is actively suppressing birthrates}.

    How about Iran in particular and much of the Islamic Middle East? There it sure seems like it doesn’t take much of an education for women to reduce their fertility rate, although you’d need to make sure there aren’t other factors “actively suppressing birthrates”.

  340. > Except it isn’t one about race but about culture; “white” cultures do not in general get beaten by “nonwhite” cultures, and since the Industrial Revolution it hasn’t even been close. This isn’t biology as destiny, it’s the operation of a particular cultural package that combines citizen soldiers with technology-intensive warfare. (…) over the long run his general thesis is nevertheless sound. Aristocratic horse soldiers cannot beat citizen-soldier heavy infantry. Cultures with the technical capital to build Maxim guns cannot be beaten by cultures that lack it. “White” is an accident, this is essence.”

    Culture doesn’t arise in a vacuum though, so I propose to split the difference. There is no essence, there is a mutual feedback loop between culture and biology. For example, “Whites” from about 500AD until recently had mostly* banned consanguineous marriage, resulting in outbred mile-wide-inch-deep networks, breaking up medium-scale “clan” solidarity in favor of varying degrees of both smaller-scale individualism and larger-scale loyalty to nations or entirely abstract principles.

    (Meanwhile in Pakistan, the majority of marriages are consanguineous, and every “inbred yokels” stereotype the left has ever had about the right would more accurately be applied to the Extended Middle East.)

    And this, among many other things which I do not mean to discount and only neglect for lack of time and space, from Hanson’s mention of Classical Greece to the British canals that helped the economic-material environment that allowed for development of the Maxim gun, is one of the factors which contributes to having nice things like technical capital and citizen-soldiers rather than aristocrats.


    *if Captain Counterexample is about to object “but the Habsburgs”, please look up “mostly” in the dictionary. Then look up “outlier” while you’re at it, and “dog bites man” (in academese, salience bias). The majority of the time I hear about the Habsburgs it’s someone bringing up Charles II of Spain who still managed to live to 39, but who spares a glance for Pakistan outdoing every last famine-stricken third-world African hellhole with its stillbirth rate of ~5%?

  341. @FooQuuxman,
    “Leans that way, but the strong version of your assertion is false.”

    Please explain how that’s a “strong version” of Jim’s assertion? It seems to be a partly overlapping different assertion. I get the impression that partisans for black soldiery hold up the 332nd as a shining example in ways that partisans for PETA don’t hold up Scott’s incident as a shining example, hence one is a poster girl and the other is rage-clickbait.

  342. @Jim
    “No. People with emancipated women get fewer kids. We have more children than very poor people with equally emancipated women.”

    Not even close. The USA has a higher birth rate than Europe and Japan because they have more immigrants that come from poor countries. It takes a generation of so for birthrates to fall. Fertility has a lot to do with the family you grew up in yourself. Education works in women because it increases the effective wealth of families (better food, better health, better housing, better child care, better finances).

    And if we go to Arab countries and Africa, there we see already falling birth rates. Increases in wealth lead to decreases in fertility. You are right in one thing: Fertility is higher when women are “slaves” of their men an in-laws. Because men want more children than women (why would that be?). However, in the end, the wealth rule even works in men.

    But we all know that slavery is good for breeding humans. There is ample historical evidence, even (especially) from the US.

  343. > > People with emancipated women get fewer kids.

    > But we all know that slavery is good for breeding humans.

    Even if coercion were necessary to keep birth rates sufficiently high for a culture to survive, which seems to be Jim’s core thesis, wouldn’t specific coercion to reproduction (or, semi-equivalently, payment to do so, funded by coercive taxes on the rest of the population) be far less of a “nuclear flyswatter” than requiring the culture to have women subservient to men in all aspects of their lives?

  344. “My favorite bad law is the No Child Left Behind act, signed during the Bush II era, which mandates that schools have better test scores EVERY YEAR, or else. Think about that one for a few minutes!” This isn’t so much a bad law as it is a bad implementation. The issue isn’t adequate yearly progress, it’s how cohorts are defined.

    The law does NOT demand that cohorts be defined by current grade level. They could be defined by the year they entered first grade. So the normal progression from grade to grade would provide AYP until the cohort reduced in size via graduation/drop outs to the point where the law doesn’t require it to be tracked. Unless it’s a truly awful school.

    The idea of defining cohorts this was was brought up on a blog (USS clueless maybe?) back when the law was being debated, but the education establishment doesn’t think that way and stupidly and universally went with grade levels. The law more or less let the Department of Education decide, and through either malice of foolishness (Hanlon’s razor isn’t always right) made the law nonfunctional.

  345. @Random832
    “be far less of a “nuclear flyswatter” than requiring the culture to have women subservient to men in all aspects of their lives?”

    But subsernience of women is not just a means to jim, it is a goal in its own right.

    (if you did not noticed, Jim’s comments are awefully much like those of our venerable advocate for the reintroduction of chattel slavery James A Donald)

  346. @Jim

    “History tells us that white people usually defeat nonwhite people.”

    History is full of counter-examples, ranging from the Crusades to the Tuskegee Airmen, to Vietnam. And didn’t Patton have a Black tank battalion that did extremely good work?

  347. @ ESR

    Which is why the 332nd Fighter Group and the 442nd Infantry Regiment could win despite not being biologically white; both organizations are culturally white.

    But the idea of “White Culture” is not entirely true. White people inherited an extremely hard-to-use system of numbers from the Greeks/Romans, and we replaced it wholesale with Arabic numerals (which derive from India) in the Middle Ages, so we got columnar arithmetic, algebra and the zero from the Arabs.* I don’t know much of the history of mathematics, but IIRC we only saved Geometry out of the Greco-Roman complex of mathematical ideas. By the time of Al-Khwarizmi (we get the word Algorithm from his name, and he’s worth googling) the Arabs were doing everything else better than we were mathematically, including Al-Khwarizmi’s corrections of Ptolemy!

    It’s also worth noting that much of our “Greek and Roman” culture was rescued from Arabic sources after they were burned in Europe by fanatical Christians as “unholy.” In other words, the idea that “White Culture” is in fact “White” is simplistic at best – there’s a ton of Arabic stuff there, but it’s generally not acknowledged.

    It’s also worth noting that the Mayans had the zero too, and did better predictive and calendrical astronomy than we did at the time (with the exception of building gadgets like telescopes.) When I reach the afterlife I’m going to kick Diego De Landa** in the nuts.

    * I don’t doubt that Roman/Greek mathematicians knew about the concept of zero; they just had trouble writing it down.

    ** Fanatical Catholic Priest who ordered the burning of the Mayan books as “unholy” before he’d actually learned to read Mayan and knew what they said.

    1. >White people inherited an extremely hard-to-use system of numbers from the Greeks/Romans, and we replaced it wholesale with Arabic numerals

      And we replaced it. Part of the “white” cultural package is that we appropriate the hell out of any culture we come in contact with. You take this kind of behavior so much for granted that you don’t realize how atypical it is and how intensely conservative other cultures generally are.

      See for example the Chinese, who launched an Age Of Exploration of their own with Zheng He…and shut it down. Or the Islamic world’s refusal to adopt the printing press until very very late because it could not reproduce joined cursive letterforms properly. Even the nuttiest conservatives in what we now call “the West” wouldn’t do this sort of thing.

      Jared Diamond is a flawed thinker, but one of his better insights is that this trait was a second-order effect of competition between polities arising from the fragmented geography of Europe.

  348. For anyone who wants to create an interesting science-fiction environment, how about a universe in which the Islamic Golden Age was not ended by the Sack of Baghdad by the Mongols. Instead, some Arabic sage invents gunpowder, the Mongols are driven off, and the resulting world is ruled by enlightened Arabs from the very cosmopolitan Baghdad of the 13th century. Google “Golden Age of Islam” and “House of Wisdom” for an introduction.

  349. @Troutwaxer
    In what if history. What if Zheng He had been a little better at marketing his explorations and the Ming had exploited South Asian trade? Say, also using Chinese gun powder technology?

  350. @Troutwaxer

    It’s not “most” of what we know about Greece. It’s “all” we know about Greece comes from Arab sources.

    Greece is a middle eastern civilization pure and simple. It is genetically middle eastern and an outpost of middle eastern civilization on the continent of Europe.

    Northern Europeans invented this “Greco Roman” hubris fairly recently. Greece and Rome are polar opposites of another. So much so that no self respecting person with elementary logical analysis faculties would even dare to combine the two into one phrase/sentence.

    Add to that that recent discoveries in Egypt seem to point out that much of what we until recently called Greek math(e.g Pythagoras) was in fact Egyptian math.

    The middle easterners, not infected with the hubris virus and DNA defects that make this condition malignant among northern Europeans, were faithful transmitters to all that survived in their libraries when they could have attributed all that shit to themselves. Modern archaeology and DNA science has utterly decimated Europeans’ narratives about themselves and their imagined “continued civilization for the last 3000 years” that even ESR mistakenly blogged about. The history of England (one of the extreme hubris infested cultures) is practically having to be rewritten after DNA analysis proved that Englishmen are hardly Germanics but instead were civilized by superior Germanics who successfully imposed their culture on them (elite dominance model).

  351. @uma

    > It’s not “most” of what we know about Greece. It’s “all” we know about Greece comes from Arab sources.

    Not quite true – unless you want to count the Byzantines and the Irish as Arabs.

    > Northern Europeans invented this “Greco Roman” hubris fairly recently. Greece and Rome are polar opposites of another. So much so that no self respecting person with elementary logical analysis faculties would even dare to combine the two into one phrase/sentence.

    There’s probably some element of truth in what you are saying (in that Greek and Roman cultures were more different than modern people are generally aware) but it is so hyperbolic as to strain credulity. I know several classicists who would probably challenge your assertion, let alone a “self respecting person with elementary logical analysis faculties.”

    > Add to that that recent discoveries in Egypt seem to point out that much of what we until recently called Greek math(e.g Pythagoras) was in fact Egyptian math.

    The Egyptians invented geometry, certainly. But for them it was merely a land surveying tool (literally “measuring the earth”). So far as I know, the idea of treating geometric shapes as abstractions, and constructing deductive proofs based off of that, was a Greek invention.

  352. @Iliamander.

    Explain to me what exactly is the new information that we gained about Greek philosophy, society, culture that comes to us via Ireland. Maybe I am ignorant on a detail or two and would love to be educated.

    As for your point about abstractions it’s incorrect. Inventing geometry to begin with starts with abstractions and abstract thinking.

  353. @ Troutwaxer

    >It’s also worth noting that much of our “Greek and Roman” culture was rescued from Arabic sources after they were burned in Europe by fanatical Christians as “unholy.” In other words, the idea that “White Culture” is in fact “White” is simplistic at best – there’s a ton of Arabic stuff there, but it’s generally not acknowledged.

    Augustine (4th-5th century AD), Boethius (6th century AD), Aquinas (13th century AD), etc. These Christian saints all built explicitly off of the Greek philosophy that was available to them, so the narrative of fanatical European Christians condemning classical philosophy as “unholy” has a few holes in it. The relationship between Islam and the classics is similarly complicated.

    As for “white culture” it’s worth remembering that Christianity itself is a Semitic religion.

  354. @uma

    With regard to the Irish, I am simply referring to the fact that Irish monks helped preserve many works from classical antiquity.

    With regard to geometry, unless you sources that I don’t, history indicates that Egyptians simply used geometry for land surveying. Yes, they were essentially creating abstractions of property boundaries, but they were not (to my knowledge) in the business of constructing proofs about the mathematical properties of right-triangles. Nor were they necessarily considering the ways in which geometry might be useful outside of land surveying.

  355. It’s not “most” of what we know about Greece. It’s “all” we know about Greece comes from Arab sources. (…) Northern Europeans invented this “Greco Roman” hubris fairly recently. Greece and Rome are polar opposites of another.

    @uma, kindly explain why, in your view, the Eastern Roman Empire had Greek displace Latin as its official language, and was called “Greece” by the Vikings.

  356. @uma
    “Greece is a middle eastern civilization pure and simple. It is genetically middle eastern and an outpost of middle eastern civilization on the continent of Europe. ”

    I would turn that around, Middle Eastern culture is a descendant of Hellenic (Greek) and other Mediterranean cultures, and so are the Romans. As the classical Greek speak an Indo-European language, I doubt that they are full descendants of the same stock as the non-Indo-Europeans that make up the Semitic, Egyptean, and Berber people

  357. @Iliamander

    We don’t know whether/not they were in the business of constructing proofs. But why assume that they weren’t when Greeks viewed themselves as little pupils when comparing themselves to Egyptians on matters of knowledge and learnedness.

    What we know about Greeks via Arab sources could in fact have even been skewed to give Greeks even more credit. This is evident to me as someone who can read the ancient Arabic texts and well versed in matters related to Islam that would explain the skew.

    Muslims had a doctrine that “the transmitter of heresey is not a heretic himself” and given that philosophers were in deed persecuted during some dark periods in Islamic history it is not inconceivable to think that many Muslim philosophers would have escaped persecution by watering down their heresies and/or attributing them to the earlier Greeks.

    Re Byzantium

    If you are referring to Syriac texts in what was Byzantium it validates what I am saying rather than negates it.

    I use the word Arab loosely to refer to middle eastern Semites. Arabian is the more accurate term (ie people of the Arabian plate)

  358. uma: “My mind is little more than a pushdown automaton operating on facts and predicates”

    Well, that would explain why your understanding is context-free.

  359. Winter:

    The middle East invented practically everything related to civilization. From agriculture to metallurgy to the wheel. From wheat to the dozen or so cows from which all modern day cows (animal food supply) are descended. From law to calendars to libraries to arithmetic to writing systems to alphabets. To assume that all higher order knowledge started with the Greeks would defy overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

    If u add to that modern day DNA evidence which definitively proves that Greeks are genetically near eastern (ie Arabian plate) +north African (largely Egyptian) and then European, the picture then becomes more more clear and complete.

  360. @Michael Brazier

    uma: “My mind is little more than a pushdown automaton operating on facts and predicates”

    Well, that would explain why your understanding is context-free.

    Not bad! Not bad indeed! Who said that angry white male savages are incapable of humor? Must have been some ugly feminist whoso only male suitors were from the savages.

  361. @esr


    >> And we replaced it. Part of the “white” cultural package is that we appropriate the hell out of any culture we come in contact with. You take this kind of behavior so much for granted that you don’t realize how atypical it is and how intensely conservative other cultures generally are.

    This is in deed just about the only redeeming qualitiy for “whites” as pertains to story of humanity’s progress. And it explains much of their success.

    “Whites” are cultural followers who excel at appropriating other people’s cultures and transformational ideas and do that with remarkable success, productivity, and benefit to their people and, to a lesser extent, the rest of humanity.

    1. >“Whites” are cultural followers

      A lot of the time we’re leaders, too. Ain’t no Arab that birthed the Industrial Revolution, even if we used their numerals to do the math. That was a genuinely new thing in the world.

      I’ve been thinking recently that one of the single most important and unappreciated facts in human history is the strange IQ dispersion of European males. It’s so much wider in comparison with other human populations that we generate more geniuses per capita than the Chinese, even with an average IQ significantly lower. Put that together with the intrastate competition fostered by Europe’s geography and the appropriationist “white” cultural package and *boom* world domination. Not clear any one or even two of those factors would have done it.

      (I learned to think this way from Jared Diamond. He wouldn’t be happy about my judgment that population genetics is a factor, though.)

  362. @Jim: For some time now, through a whole bunch of your blog postings, you can’t seem to ignore any chance you have to denigrate Mme. Curie and her work. I guess you just don’t know much about physics and how it works. Experimenters like her are just as smart and just as important as theoreticians. We need both in order to make any progress. Please Google the Solvay Conference of 1927. You’ll find a group photo where she is sitting in the front row between Planck and Lorentz, with Einstein nearby. Those people were certainly better qualified to judge her and her work than you are. STFU!

  363. Okay, so Uma, since the only smart thing whites can do is steal from other races, please tell me about the black people who invented the airplane, computers, the internet, modern antibiotics, democracy, the modern conception of civil rights? Hmmm, who were these non-white geniuses, you stupid, arrogant racist?

  364. @esr


    >> A lot of the time we’re leaders, too. Ain’t no Arab that birthed the Industrial Revolution, even if we used their numerals to do the math. That was a genuinely new thing in the world.

    There is no transformational idea there in the abstract sense of transformational ideas. More like incremental progress coupled with economic evolution there. The concept of a machine and the first machines were not invented by whites. The medieval Muslims had some pretty sophisticated machines including practically all the hydraulics later incorporated into steam engines.

    The only transformational idea to have come from whites was the printing press (re) invention centuries after it was invented in china with one exception. That it was particularly well suited to alphabetical writing system appropriated from the phinecians and resulted in the mass dissemination of knowledge and ideas and changing the destiny of humanity for good.


    >> the strange IQ dispersion of European males

    I think you attach too much importance to one test. Middle easterners are low on the IQ scale yet they are miraculously the cultural masters who invented nearly all the transformational ideas. The Mongols are 20 points higher in IQ and contributed zero to civilization. And had it not been for lower IQ Arabs who decisively beat them back the native population of Europe would have been thoroughly decimated and displaced by those Mongols who would have settled in large numbers the more attractive European lands.

    The question of human intelligence is far more complex than a stupid 10 minutes test. There are some “utterly useless” whites (in a civilizational sense, to borrow some words from immigration debates of 100 yrs past) who I am sure throught all their history have had the IQ distribution u refer to.

  365. Uma, what have Muslims (or Arabs) contributed to civilization in the last 500 years or so?

  366. @Papaya

    Not much. But the trends are going to eventually shift once the “white” advantages that resulted from their thievery of the the new world begin to disappear.

  367. And yet, it was the Scots/English that started the Industrial Revolution and the French/Germans that developed Industrial Chemistry.

    Nothing new has come from the Arabian peninsula for centuries, and they were at best the conduit for the idea of others.

  368. Uma, you sound like one of those pathetic “Black Athena” types, who think the Greeks “stole” everything from Africa, which supposedly accounts for the lack of economic development in Africa over the centuries. But ideas and cultural developments, even if “stolen,” don’t get taken away from whoever invented them, they just get duplicated.

    As for the Arab world, no, sorry, things will never shift in their direction, because they don’t read.

    As Johns Hopkins researcher Niloofar Haeri concludes in her contribution to The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (2009), throughout the Arab world educated people find reading very difficult, don’t like to do it, and do as little of it as possible—even the librarians.

    Why this uniformly strong dislike of reading?

    TL;DR: Arabic’s consonantal script means that you must first understand something before you can read it. Result: poor literacy.

  369. Racial pride is stupid. Racial shame is stupid. You aren’t a statistical average of people who look like you. Their accomplishments aren’t yours. Their follies aren’t yours. If you aspire to accomplishments of your own, learn from everyone who has made useful progress in $field, and do the work. Bragging about what someone else has done doesn’t make you superior to someone else, and who are you to say what any given person can’t accomplish if he is the one making the attempt?

    If you’ve absorbed your culture passively like a robot being programmed, that is its own problem. Treating people as if they are indelibly limited by the culture of their birth is another part of that: Humans are human because they can learn. The attitude towards adult humans is that they don’t belong to their “culture” or their race. Their culture belongs to them.

  370. I propose we lock Jim and uma in a room together and let them hold a deathmatch over the question of whether the white race is superior or inferior to the rest of humanity. All in favor?

  371. Evolution is a process, not a plan. What is extant is what worked in evolutionary timescales. Northwestern Europeans evolved high intelligence as an adaptation to their environment, which posed many difficult survival challenges related to extremes in seasonality. It’s not about arrogance or dumb luck, it’s just the natural consequence of how evolution works.

  372. “The attitude towards adult humans is that they don’t belong to their “culture” or their race. Their culture belongs to them.” should read “The attitude towards adult humans should be that they don’t belong to their culture or their race. Their culture belongs to them.”

    Anyway, individualism, self-ownership, and kleptomaniac cultural appropriation: it’s an attitude that should properly belong to anyone who wants it. :-P

  373. “Middle easterners are low on the IQ scale yet they are miraculously the cultural masters who invented nearly all the transformational ideas.”

    Uh…No…. Back when they didn’t let religious fanaticism get the best of them they appropriated the best ideas of all they were in contact with. (The ‘Arabic’ numerals came from India; there’s some evidence that the Indians got them from China.) They had copies of Greek manuscripts that they had the sense to preserve, and learn from. You can see further if you can stand on the shoulders of giants.

    “The Mongols are 20 points higher in IQ and contributed zero to civilization.”

    No again. They certainly were a nuisance when they were building their mountains of skulls, but once they were done with the conquering, for about two centuries they kept the roads open between Europe and China. The knowledge that got to Europe during that period was very important to Europe’s development.

    “And had it not been for lower IQ Arabs who decisively beat them back the native population of Europe would have been thoroughly decimated and displaced by those Mongols who would have settled in large numbers the more attractive European lands.”

    The Arabs did not beat them back and save Europe. They slammed the doors between Europe and China that the Mongols had kept open. The Europeans were forced to try to discover alternate routes by sea, which led to their ‘thievery of the New World’.

    I really wish that people would stop waving around IQ test results. I have a high IQ, and have learned that it DOES NOT MAKE ME SMART!

    Remember Ponella’s Law:”People are smart and stupid at the same time.”

    I’m 70 years old. In all that time I have not seen any evidence that any group of people, anywhere, is any smarter or stupider than any other.

  374. uma: “There is no transformational idea there in the abstract sense of transformational ideas.”

    To this, I have just two words: assembly line.

  375. Michael Brazier on 2016-12-19 at 15:47:35 said:
    > > uma: “My mind is little more than a pushdown automaton operating on facts and predicates”
    > Well, that would explain why your understanding is context-free.

    And to paraphrase the philosopher Ronald Reagan “operates on so many facts that aren’t true”.

  376. @ TomA.

    Northwestern Europeans evolved high intelligence as an adaptation to their environment, which posed many difficult survival challenges related to extremes in seasonality.

    That’s why the Arabs invented Algebra and we didn’t; because their harsh desert environment was so very difficult to live in that they have evolved to be more intelligent than us! And let’s not forget about the mighty Eskimo! Their environment is so harsh that many of them have evolved hyper-intelligence and do not die, but simply transcend!

    /snark

    (You do see exactly how ridiculous your position is, right?)

  377. Hey Paul Brinkley! Did you ever see my post about “The watergate guy?” It got stuck in moderation for awhile and you might not have seen it. I just wanted to make sure you got your question anwered.

  378. @LS:


    The ‘Arabic’ numerals came from India;

    In Arabic literature they are called Indian numerals, and Indian arithmetic (decimal arithmetic) (ie credit given where due). The Indians of course appropriated the earlier babylonian/Mesopotamian math and improved it and figured better glyphs/notation for representing the numbers.

    A group of people X do not have to be either/or (appropriator vs originator of a transformational idea). Some groups are neither. Others have strong or weak elements of both or either. In the case of northern european whites it can be safely said that they are by far the most effective appropriators, not originators, of transformational ideas, and definitely cultural followers.

    You can see examples of that in the culture of America. Jazz, blues, hiphop, R&B, rap, salsa music originate with non-whites. Whites, though, have excelled in appropriating that stuff and improving it. Some of the best rappers are white.


    The Arabs did not beat them back and save Europe.

    Of course they did. Not out of a desire of saving Europe but out of a desire of avenging Baghdad. Shortly afterwards, the Mongols fragmented into different khanates and never recovered beyond that point. All of Europe could have easily ended up part of golden horde.

    Europeans, though, being the sadistic savages they are, do have a fetish for their rapists but rarely ever appreciative of those who brought them civilization. That is why they speak with such glowing terms of the Mongols, and that is why some of those bad ideas have inadvertently worked their way into your thinking.

  379. @ Random Observer

    You can fuck right off with that idiotic cliche. Taxes are the price we pay for not standing up to those who seek to rule us.

    So let me ask you a question… do you really want to inspect everything you eat yourself for e coli or listeria? Do you know how to perform those inspections? Do you own the right equipment?

    Do you want to personally inspect every building you enter to make sure it is earthquake/hurricane/flood/tornado proof? What about the cement used in these homes and buildings? What about the plumbing? Can you prove that lead pipes were not used the drinking fountains? Do you know how to perform such an inspection? Do you own the proper equipment? Will the owner allow you to perform such an inspection?

    Do you wish to inspect every electrical appliance for proper grounding and handling of other issues which might electrocute you or someone you love? Do you have the capacity to do this safely?

    What about street lights and various forms of traffic control, such as stop lights and street signs? Do you think they appear due to magic? What about those roads? Where do they come from?

    Etc. I trust my point is not lost.

  380. @Jay

    I don’t think you understand the rules of the game you are playing. The assembly line isn’t transformational because it was invented by white people.

    @ some moron

    > It’s also worth noting that much of our “Greek and Roman” culture was rescued from Arabic sources after they were burned in Europe by fanatical Christians as “unholy.”

    Pure, unmitigated bullshit. Muslims sacked the ancient libraries and burned the books (“they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous”), and now ignorant pricks give them credit for saving the culture they tried so hard to destroy. Hundreds of years later, same story.

    Oh, and by the way, the notion that muslims invented math is a very new idea. Within the last 100 year or so, it has become popular to give arabs (or muslims, depending on the agenda of the idiot) credit for all inventions that happened in places that they eventually invaded. If you look a little, you’ll see that most of their ancient contributions came from Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations, sometimes more than 1000 years before Islam, and most of their more recent contributions came from the descendants of conquored nations. al-Khwarizmi, for example, was Persian.

    @troutwaxer

    I don’t think that even a single thing you listed is actually paid for with tax dollars. I’m not positive on a couple of them, but all of the construction ones are fee services. In most places, the electrical inspector, for example, pays the state for the privilege of collecting bribes from electricians. Ditto the plumbing inspection. Construction materials are tested by private companies. Even the standards are written by unions and then adopted by governments.

    Oh, wait, I spoke too soon. Down at the very bottom, you mention traffic signals. Those are indeed paid for with tax dollars.

    Was it you earlier that said “Taxes are funny things. They are, in essence, your admission fee to civilization. They get you police and fire departments.”? I didn’t bother writing down the name, but I think that was the start of your current line of BS.

    Whenever budgets are tight, the left goes on and on about firemen and police. And then when they get the money, they spend it on diversity consultants and bunny inspectors. And in schools, it is always the poor, underpaid teachers trotted out at budget time, and never the useless paper shufflers.

    Jerry Pournelle is fond of recalling a time when budget cuts at NASA resulted in the closure of a building or two full of administrators. None of the projects missed a beat, and within days no one could remember what any of those people were for.

    When people say they want lower taxes, they are almost always saying that they don’t want to pay for the buildings of of useless drones. No one but you thinks that we should start cutting the people that perform the useful work first.

  381. kjj:

    Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?
    The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

    –Thomas Sowell

  382. @kjj:


    I don’t think you understand the rules of the game you are playing. The assembly line isn’t transformational because it was invented by white people.

    It is not a transformational idea. And if anything it was also proven to be a bad idea in case of auto-manufacturing. Mass production, division of labor, and assembly line production were not invented by whites (google is your friend). Though they achieved their significance in post industrial revolution Europe.

    Much of the rest of your post (except the part about paper shufflers) can be dismissed as rubbish also.

  383. @ kjj

    Pure, unmitigated bullshit. Muslims sacked the ancient libraries and burned the books (“they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous”)

    That’s not true of the ancient Muslims. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad had 400,000 books!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom

    Unfortunately, Islam is currently going through a very ugly phase, mainly due to Saudi/Wahabi missionaries stirring shit up without significant opposition for 2-3 decades (at least.) But earlier in the religion’s history it was very scholarly and very approving of learning, even if the learning was not Islamic.

    On the subject of taxes, I too have a lot of arguments on how they get spent and if I ruled the world I’d definitely tweak the system. But if we’re not going to pay taxes and have the government in charge of the issues I’ve listed, how do you intend to handle them? And don’t give me the Usual Libertarian Twaddle. Every political philosophy has a weakness, and the primary weakness of Libertarianism is that it is not asshole proof!

  384. “””Do you wish to inspect every electrical appliance for proper grounding and handling of other issues which might electrocute you or someone you love? Do you have the capacity to do this safely?”””

    We have a private entity that does exactly this: it’s called Underwriters Labs (UL), and they happen to have a very solid reputation for what they do.

    I fail to see why we cannot have private organizations in other fields that would do the same things. Indeed, just because government provides it now, doesn’t mean that the private sector can’t provide it, or provide it better.

    But there’s another major fallacy that you are making: you are assuming that just because government does some good things, that all that government does is good.

    It has often been said that Cuba has a of literacy rate, and an excellent health care system. I would rather live with the bad government-school caused illiteracy rates and the “awful” health care of the US (which, in my own personal experience and observation, is still within reach of the poor, lack of insurance notwithstanding), and have what freedoms we still have left, than live in the oppressive, government-enforced poverty of Cuba.

  385. An interesting view: Trump’s Victory Is a Pivotal Turning Point in Human History

    But the best part? The Left doesn’t understand any of this, and they won’t reformulate their playbook. They will stick to the same failed script, as we have already seen just in the last few weeks since the election. Years from now, and likely even decades from now, the Left will still be trying their stealth (and not-so-stealth) propaganda/indoctrination/bullying efforts, and they will continue to fail.

  386. @ kjj

    On the subject of Muslims and their books, note the following story, in which the ordinary, non-fanatical Muslims of Timbuktu saved their priceless heritage of books, 350,000 manuscripts in all, some dating back 700 years, from Islamic fundamentalists who invaded in 2012.

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/Race-Save-Mali-Artifacts-180947965/

    Note how one group of Muslims wants to burn books. The other group of Muslims, in a major win for anyone with a sense of education or history, risks their lives to save 350,000 ancient manuscripts. And people like you can’t tell the difference between one group of Muslims and the other? I’m biting my tongue on some really cutting language!

  387. With regards to the supposed Golden Age of Islam: this was also in a time when the Islam slave trade resulted in the deaths of 100 million people (and no living descendants: between turning the boys into eunuchs and killing the children of woman slaves, the fertility rate wasn’t going to be very high), and a time of heavy taxes of those who didn’t believe in the dominant religion.

    Sarah Hoyt observed that you could tell that the Portuguese liked the Romans: they name their children after the good emperors, and their dogs after their bad emperors. They have *no* names taken from when the Muslims ruled over them. *However*, when the Muslims were driven out, and they were able to reclaim the churches that had been converted to mosques, they left the exits surrounded with the Islamic decorations: they *want* reminders of when the Muslims took over.

    As an aside, I find it an interesting coincidence that Columbus sailed the ocean blue the year that the Muslims were driven out of the Iberian Peninsula.

    In any case, this “Golden Age” was a golden age for Muslims, I’m sure…but for everyone else, I suspect it was more like the modern-day Caliphate that ISIS is working so hard to establish today.

    Come to think of it, Robert A Heinlein wrote a book about what such a golden age might look like. It’s called “Farnham’s Freehold”. I would encourage you to read it, if you haven’t.

  388. @uma
    “Europeans, though, being the sadistic savages they are, do have a fetish for their rapists but rarely ever appreciative of those who brought them civilization. ”

    Indeed, Eiropeans have always admired Sparta AND Athens. To become the most admired man in a European country, you must kill more of your compatriots than anyone else. Stalin is the most admired Russian (although he is Georgian), Hitler among Germans, Napoleon and Louis XIV in France. But they are followed by those who furthered humanity as scientists and artists.

    But on the whole, civilization is a human project. Every culture has learned the trait from another. What you call the Middle East is a mix of Semitic and Indo European cultures with North African added. Of course the Greek are genetically like the middle east. The whole of Anatolia used to be Greek. And the Indo Europeans ancestors who were one of the original developers of agriculture lived in Anatolia.

    The only cultures that do not learn from others are dead cultures.

    Oh, and all racists are fools.

    Btw, the Mongol hordes never invaded Europe because there was nothing of interest to take. Just woods and subsistence farmers. So much for European siperior intelligence.

  389. @Alpheios
    “In any case, this “Golden Age” was a golden age for Muslims, I’m sure…but for everyone else, I suspect it was more like the modern-day Caliphate that ISIS is working so hard to establish today.”

    Obviously, you did not pay attention during history classes. Or maybe schools are that bad at your place. No, the Golden Age of the original Caliphate was Golden only because it was in nothing like IS’ distortion. Many of the important names were not even Muslim. Non Muslims had more freedom in the original Caliphate than contemporary Christians had in Europe.

  390. “””Every political philosophy has a weakness, and the primary weakness of Libertarianism is that it is not asshole proof!”””

    Wow, what a coincidence! This is exactly* what’s wrong with government institutions, too!

    Which is why the Founding Fathers created such a complex system of balances, between competing Branches, competing States, and competing Individuals, it was hoped that the damage caused by jerks would be limited. Sometimes I have my doubts that they succeeded, but they have done better than most people through history….


  391. > They have *no* names taken from when the Muslims ruled over them.

    None whatsoever. Not least of which is “Fatima” the saint they worship.

    The rest of your post (especially about slavery) is about as accurate as your statement above

  392. @troutwaxer

    They had 50 years that weren’t absolute shit for everyone everywhere, out of a ~1200 year span that begins and ends with dirt poor peasants living with all of the modern technology and conveniences enjoyed by late neolithic cavemen.

    P.S. If you are about to start the sad and tired “No true Sultan would burn a library” routine, skip it.

    @uma

    I don’t seek validation. You don’t need to post just to tell me that I’m right.

  393. Esr knows, because he has written elsewhere, that blacks have lower IQ than whites, but he does not believe that this has any bearing on blacks’ ability to be fighter pilots. If blacks had aptitude at being fighter pilots, they would also have aptitude at being racing car drivers, at being engineers, at being mathematicians, and he would collaborate with lots of blacks on his open source projects.

    Esr knows, because he has written elsewhere, that blacks commit much more crime than whites, because of lower future orientation and sociability, but he does not believe that this has any bearing on blacks’ ability to stand in a line of battle, endure fire while marching, and then return disciplined volleys. If blacks were suited for 19th century warfare, they would also be suited for 20th century urban society.

    Esr is not stupid. Very much not. He knows the implications of what he believes about racial differences. The question is what he thinks he is gaining by deliberately playing dumb. This is how Progressipedia describes jim:

    “From the darker bits of the Dark Enlightenment: James A. Donald (JAD, http://blog.jim.com/ ), the guy so racist even Eric S. Raymond calls him a racist and such an asshole even Slate Star Codex regularly bans him from commenting. He comes out with such gems as “National socialism kills people not because it is nationalist, but because it is socialist” and calls white nationalism “moderate leftism”. And he has important information on the Jews. And he’s an anarcho-capitalist. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-asshole word from him, though I will credit him with enough sense to realise Bitcoin was unscalable from day one.”

    http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Most_upvoted_to_do_entries

    Jim is so racist that even noted racist esr says he is a racist. The left cannot distinguish esr’s position from jim’s position, and gives esr no credit for the distinction, while jim’s position has the benefit of being defensible and true.

  394. @Winter:


    >> Btw, the Mongol hordes never invaded Europe because there was nothing of interest to take.

    That might have been also. It is very possible they were too dumb (despite their half standard deviation higher IQ than Europeans) to realize that the dark and dingy continent offered far better land prospects than the frigid Siberian wasteland they called home.

    Nobody really fully knows why they fizzled out so quickly. I think the defeat dealt to them by the Arabs played an important role in destabilizing and factionalizing them. Possibly all of the above too.

  395. uma: “In the case of northern european whites it can be safely said that they are by far the most effective appropriators, not originators, of transformational ideas”

    Certainly not. Here are several transformational ideas – ideas that have led to radical changes around the whole world – which are undeniably of European origin:

    Calculus, and other branches of mathematics dealing with continuously varying quantities
    The use of calculus et al. to describe natural phenomena
    Heat engines (steam engines and internal combustion engines)
    Analytical chemistry
    The electrical generator and motor
    The theory of computation and information theory

    Fact is, once you get past 1500 AD it becomes difficult to find technical or cultural developments that do not originate in Europe. The achievements made in other parts of the world all appeared before that date. Over the past five centuries the world has followed where Europeans have led.

  396. @uma
    “It is very possible they were too dumb (despite their half standard deviation higher IQ than Europeans) to realize that the dark and dingy continent offered far better land prospects than the frigid Siberian wasteland they called home. ”

    No, it was a very rational decision. Mongol warfare technology was driving large armies on horseback through the countryside fast. At that time, Europe was covered with thick forests. Not really good for fast charges of 10k plus people on horseback. Then there was the food, or the lack of it. Europe was very thinly populated and food production was low. Cities were small. The average army of the Mongols was larger than some of the bigger cities in Western Europe. In short, nothing you would want to station a few hundreds of thousands of men and horses. And there was no gold left, nor anything else of worth.

    Actually, Europe at that time was economically what the Congo is now. The only export product was slaves. Even the name “Slave” comes from the name of the East European people sold to North Africa then.

  397. @uma
    “Nobody really fully knows why they fizzled out so quickly.”

    I think they were overtaken by the Turks. And the conquered countries learned and improved their technology. As a last cause, they were a minority in the conquered countries. The rest of the population simply overwhelmed them.

  398. @Michael Brazier
    “Fact is, once you get past 1500 AD it becomes difficult to find technical or cultural developments that do not originate in Europe.”

    Never wondered why that was?

    The explanation is simple, it is even covered in “The wealth of nations”, bullion silver and gold.

    Before the discovery of the Americas Europe literally had nothing they could trade with the East. There was nothing the Portuguese could sell to the people in the Indian ocean that they would want to buy. So they resorted to piracy and extortion.

    But after the mines in South America opened, the Europeans suddenly could trade for silver and gold. That kick started the economic development in Europe.

  399. @Michael Brazier:

    You clearly are not clear on what a transformational idea means. It does not refer to incremental progress. It refers to those quantum leap ideas that almost happen almost for no reason whatsoever and the change the destiny of mankind.

    What you mentioned belongs to the realm of incremental contributions after Europeans took the mantle of civilization from those before them. Inventing number theory is incremental progress. Inventing the whole notion of numbers is a transformational idea. Hope it makes sense!

  400. @Alpheus
    “As an aside, I find it an interesting coincidence that Columbus sailed the ocean blue the year that the Muslims were driven out of the Iberian Peninsula.”

    I always marvel about the depth of ignorance I encounter on the internet as a whole, but this place is a reserve on itself.

    No, it is no coincidence. Just as it is no coincidence that Jews were driven out of Spain in that year.

    The expedition of Columbus was financed with the loot of Granada (a soundbite for the simple). Note how the Spanish crown robbed both the Muslims and the Jews of Spain.
    http://sefarad.org/sefarad/sefarad.php/id/13/

  401. “I always marvel about the depth of ignorance I encounter on the internet as a whole, but this place is a reserve on itself.”

    The moron who says Europe had literally nothing to trade with the East until it pillaged the Americas in the 1500s shouldn’t talk. Or are you perhaps defining “the East” to start at Hungary, which produced a quarter of the world’s gold and silver in the 1300s?

  402. @Erik
    “Or are you perhaps defining “the East” to start at Hungary, which produced a quarter of the world’s gold and silver in the 1300s?”

    Ah yeah, and they shipped all that gold from Portugal?

    Europe had nothing to trade with the East but gold. Of which there was precious little left after Charlemagne. Whatever Hungary traded before the fall of Constantinople was by way of the Byzantine Empire. Which looked East, and not West for all its connections. After the fall of the
    Byzantine empire, trade was done by way of the Turks. Btw, the Magyar that occupied Hungary at the time are a definitely Eastern people. More like the Mongols than the “European” people around them.

    Anyhow, that is all irrelevant for those who benefited from Columbus’ expedition, but so not seem to have a clue about how it was financed.

  403. Winter: “But after the mines in South America opened, the Europeans suddenly could trade for silver and gold. That kick started the economic development in Europe.”

    What needs to be explained isn’t why Europe began generating new ideas, but why the rest of the world has not been generating new ideas.

    uma: “You clearly are not clear on what a transformational idea means.”

    No, I have no difficulty on that score. But it’s quite clear that you don’t recognize a transformational idea when you see one. For example, your mathematical education must have stopped in high school; if you had studied calculus you would never dismiss it as a merely incremental step from what came before it. The notion of functions as objects of study, and of the derivative and integral as relations between functions, is basic to calculus as it is to no part of mathematics that came before it. It’s a conceptual leap many students never make. It’s as radical as the concept of numbers as objects of study.

    Similarly, it takes a peculiar sort of ignorance to suppose that Faraday’s first dynamo was just incremental progress from some non-European ancestor. The first sustained electrical currents were produced by Alessandro Volta in 1800; his voltaic piles have no predecessor anywhere. And electromagnetic induction, the principle behind electric generators and motors, can’t be discovered without a sustained electrical current. Faraday’s experiments changed the world at least as radically as the prehistoric man who first tamed a horse, and all his debts are owed to Europeans like himself.

    Must I go on through all my examples?

    1. >voltaic piles have no predecessor anywhere

      It is just barely possible this isn’t true. There are some artifacts dating from the Parthian or Sassanid period (250-640CE) in Persia that may have been weak batteries used for electroplating fine metals. This theory is now commonly rejected, but I don’t think the evidence for it can be entirely dismissed.

  404. A liberatarian friend sent me, a proud liberal Democrat, your piece, and I’m glad he did. It contains some good points, including that the Democratic leadership is largely “geriatric,” that the Democrats have been hurt by identity politics, that liberals have sometimes shown contempt for the white working class (Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” was, like Romney’s about the “47%,” itself deplorable),that “the Center is far to he right of what you’d prefer” (though I’d strike the inaccurate “far”), and that the Democrats lost considerable ground on the state level during the Obama years.

    That said, your triumphalist tone is hard to take and your piece otherwise seems to me deeply flawed, politically (especially in terms of political demographics), conceptually, and ethically. In fact, you almost lost me in your first sentence,expressing concern “about the possibility that the U.S. might become a one-party democracy”. Sorry, Eric, but that’s ahistorical rubbish.. Yes, we Democrats suffered a surprising and fairly severe defeat. But consider that the same kind of claims were made after LBJ’s landslide in 1964 (and the GOP came roaring back in 1966), after Nixon’s landslide in 1972 (and the Democrats won the presidency in 1976), and after the Reagan landslides of 1980 and 1984 (here, it took longer, but Clinton won by significant majorities in ’92 and ”96). Significantly, every election since ’96 has been fairly close; the country remains deeply divided among liberals, conservatives, and moderates and between Democrats and Republicans.

    Of course, 2016 was anything but a landslide. Trump lost the popular vote by a close to 3 million vote margin. And a mere 90,000-100,000 vote swing (out of over 130 million votes cast nationally) would have cost him PA, WI, and MI, so that Hillary would now be naming her cabinet members . And Trump’s victory hardly negates the political demographics behind Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012. In short, this is hardly a time for Republicans, who face their own crisis of identity, to be smug.

    In 2016, the man (Trump) was right for the moment and the way he mobilized disaffected white middle-class voters was unquestionably impressive. But let’s face it: Trump also was a kind of “Rorschach test,” a blank slate who could run largely on the basis of a few slogans and very vague policy stances, as well as by belittling his opponents and . But now, Trump and the Republicans will have to do something they’ve been adverse to: actually govern. We’ll see how that goes…

    Trump also benefited from having a surprisingly weak opponent, one almost as unpopular as he was and one who ran a conceptually and strategically inept campaign — don’t expect a repeat in 2020 — with the campaign also marred by the inappropriate statements of the FBI director, by Russian interference, by particularly low voter turnout (the populace was disgusted as by no other election in my lifetime) and by successful GOP voter suppression efforts that probably made a difference in such states as NC and WI. To mention these factors is not to whine or gnash teeth; it’s simply to begin to understand how in some important ways, the 2016 election was sui generis and that it’s way premature — and I’d argue wrongheaded — to see it as marking a political “realignment”.

    You’re right: the Democratic base is in trouble. with the loss of much — but by no means all — of the white middle class. That point has been made earlier, and frankly better /more in-depth, by such liberal journalists as Thomas Frank and George Packer (I particularly like this, written before the election, by the latter: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolthttp://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt0.) But as we Democrats wrongly once wrongly believed they had a “lock” on such voters, it would be equally wrong for Republicans to believe they have such a “lock” today; there are no permanent majorities in American politics, only constantly shifting lines.

    So has the Democrats’ ability to “assemble a broad-based national coalition…collapsed”? Hardly. Where’s the demographic evidence? If the Democrats can find a candidate and a focused message that appeals more to the white middle-class in 2020, the results will be very different, especially if a significant number of those voters are disappointed by what Trump actually produces. In fact, it’s smart Republicans who continue to be anxious about their party’s long-term political appeal: Even in the “perfect storm” of 2016, the GOP lost the popular vote by 2% and basing a strategy on white nationalism is dangerous at a time when the African-American, Latino, and Asian parts of the population are becoming steadily larger.

    Your argument that Democratic appeal is limited to a few coastal “enclaves” is factually wrong. Aren’t you forgetting that the Democrats came within a sliver in Michigan (which they’ve won in other recent elections) and won Minnesota and Illinois, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada, and that even in this bad year, they were more competitive in Texas, the second biggest electoral prize, than previously, and came close in Arizona? And what’s with the dismissive tone about the coasts? They’re as much part of the “real America,” as Sarah Palin calls it, as is Alaska or rural Kansas. In fact, Republicans should be concerned by how much of their appeal is limited to states that are significantly more white and rural (like Indiana, where I live) than the national average

    Speaking of building a national coalition, it’s Republicans, not Democrats, who should be worried about their limited appeal to the electorate’s largest faction: not white men but women of all races. Even in this bad year, Clinton won the female vote by 54-42%.

    So much for demographics. I’ve got to prepare for work but will write more about the weakest part of your piece — on gun control — in a subsequent post.

  405. “Before the discovery of the Americas Europe literally had nothing they could trade with the East.”

    “Europe had nothing to trade with the East but gold. Of which there was precious little left after Charlemagne. Whatever Hungary traded before the fall of Constantinople was by way of the Byzantine Empire. Which looked East, and not West for all its connections. After the fall of the
    Byzantine empire, trade was done by way of the Turks. Btw, the Magyar that occupied Hungary at the time are a definitely Eastern people. More like the Mongols than the “European” people around them.”


    If you were going to move the goalposts anyway, you could have picked a more defensible new position.

    Europe had other goods to trade; particular ones in Hungary since we’re on that topic being silver (which one can reasonably countenance being lumped with gold) and salt (which one cannot). In Sweden there was the Great Copper Mine of Falu. Europe had plenty of gold left after Charlemagne, who lived long before the 1300s when Hungary had its aforementioned height of production. Hungary traded elsewhere than the Byzantine Empire, and in particular, both before after Constantinople fell, they traded with Italy, as can be seen in the Hungarian golden forint taking its name from the Florentine golden florin, and Hungary being the second region (at this time including Croatia) the Renaissance spread to. The Magyars having settled Hungary around the time of Charlemagne and being Christianized a century later, I am extremely skeptical of them still being “a definitely Eastern people” as well as marking another point against your trade hypothesis by the same 1300s when Hungarians began the first of about twenty wars over the next two centuries in which they were on the side of various Christian powers against the Ottoman Turks.

    Hm. Between Middle Eastern Greece, Definitely Eastern Hungary, and the inevitable Moorish Spain, I’m curious just how far down the supposed “Europe” is going to be haggled by the end of this thread. Can we reduce it to just England with sufficiently motivated reasoning, perhaps? :-D You could scratch off Scandinavia for being Eskimos and Lapps, then argue that the Lombard conquests disqualify Italy as an extension of Scandinavia, call it an English admission against interest that Ireland and Scotland shouldn’t count, generally write off everything east of the Iron Curtain as Mongoloids, and call France an English possession, perhaps.

  406. @Michael Brazier
    “What needs to be explained isn’t why Europe began generating new ideas, but why the rest of the world has not been generating new ideas.”

    But they did. The Mexicans had wheels, but no draft animals.
    http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/223/why-did-the-peoples-of-the-new-world-fail-to-invent-the-wheel

    The Chinese invented wheelbarrows, the printing press, paper money, gun powder, china, and scores of other things. Steam engines where already produced as toys by the ancient Greek.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

    The wheel and writing and growing food were invented in the middle east. Who even knows who invented the different types of ships that populated the seas. It is difficult to find a people that did not make independent (re-)inventions.

    However, an invention must be integrated in the economy to matter.

    A wheel is not worth much without draft animals. A steam engine is only useful if you have ample steel and coal and a need for large amounts of power. The industrialization of pre-industrial Shanghai was still-born due to a lack of food for labor and raw materials. In the end, the industrialization was “invented” in England in a very specific set of circumstances. It was not invented in France, nor in Germany, nor in Spain or Russia, because the circumstances there were different.

    My question to white supremacists is always:
    “If whites are so superior, what did YOU contribute to the progress of humanity?”
    Because, whenever I met a white supremacist, he was the living proof he isn’t.

  407. @Erik,

    Your examples are all of intra-European trade. We are talking of trade between European countries and “the East”. Please come up with things that were traded with Asia. No one was shipping salt to the Far East, or copper.

    The Far East had products Europeans desperately wanted. However, the Europeans had very little they could use to trade for these products. On a European scale, there was nothing to set up a lucrative trade between Europe and South Asia. As a result, the Portuguese, Dutch, and English simply conquered large swats of land and traded THEIR produce for stuff they wanted.

    The Spanish got hold of the American gold and silver mines that delivered enough bullion to set up trade routes with the Far East. Quite a lot spilled over to the other countries in Europe.

  408. @Erik
    Btw, until around 1000AD, the Europeans did trade large numbers of people as slaves to North Africa. Probably equally large numbers were simply raided by the North Africans in Southern Europe (e.g., Southern Italy and Spain).

  409. Yes, Troutwaxer, I saw your post on John Dean. Which I guess now explains a little of why you kept referring to him at first as DNC chair. (If he ever was, then I’d say that was one of their major problems.)

    Alpheus meanwhile brought up an important point that I’d like to reiterate in a different way: someone being against the government doing something is very different from that person being against that thing being done at all. I’m all for educating a child, for example, but I’m not willing to spend $100,000 to do it when there’s a $10,000 alternative.

  410. @Michael Brazier, you keep spouting facts to rhetorical minded morons. When facts are inconvenient, they are ignored. You have to know this by now.

  411. Is there a law, corollary, tactic, method, fallacy or something which states something to the effect of “Invoking Brandolini’s Law as a defense” or “creating so much asymmetric bullshit as to defy any reasonable amount of time and space to refute it”?

    I mean, the idea alone that the Muslims, Arabs, Semites, or whoever invented algebra is worthy of several paragraphs.

    I just find it comical that the ideological Lefties who usually resort to “But context!!!” as a defense seem to struggle applying it in places where it actually matters.

  412. gmmay, see my comment to Michael Brazier above. You get to a point where the mendacious bullshit is always flowing and all you can do is point and laugh. They will not be swayed by God coming down and granting them comprehension, so there is no point in arguing.

  413. @esr
    “It is just barely possible this isn’t true. ”

    But it is not relevant. Humanity evolved by tool making, which implies inventions. But when you enter the scientific revolution, inventions roll off the production line faster than you can count. This is like the difference between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon artefacts. Every Cro-Magnon site contains more (symbolic) artefacts than all Neanderthal sites ever found combined.

    Just as much, after the scientific revolution, more inventions are made every year than in the whole of pre-science history. Although the scientific process was eventually completed in Europe in the modern time, it has spread over the world.

    Yes, people will have stumbled upon voltaic piles in history, but it was Volta who perfected and communicated the technology to the world. The same for almost every other technology. Science is not bound by language or culture. Every child can learn it.

    So, yes, we can trace inventions back to inventors. But in the end, it does not matter that paper, the printing press and paper money were invented first in China. Nor is it relevant that someone in Egypt build a toy steam machine in in 100 BC.

    Unless, of course, your ideology does not allow for these “other” people to be like you.

  414. I am the real Xopher Halftongue (Christopher Hatton). This is the first comment I have posted on this website. I have used this name in many web locations; my Twitter handle is @Halftongue. If you come up to me at a convention (Arisia, anyone?), I will show you the reason for my name. Trigger Warning: really gross scar tissue.

    Thanks to my good friend Hank Griffin for bringing this to my attention. He noted that the comments from the fake Xopher Halftongue posting here don’t sound like things I’d ever say, and of course I never did say them. I’m not sure why this person is impersonating me (and btw, despite my opinions I am a white person).

    Mr. Raymond, Hank Griffin can verify that what I say is true. If I do comment here it will be from this email address; please feel free to email me if you have any further questions.

  415. @ David Szonyi

    You’re new here, so I guess you can be forgiven for not knowing Eric Raymond very well. He was being neither smug nor triumphalist is this post. Rather, he is making a genuine effort to message the leadership of the Democratic Party will sound prescriptions for improvement (which is clearly your aim also). Eric does not seek an argument with you, he just wants you to fix the problems and survive as a political counter-force to the Republicans. You do not need to come here and attack, that is not in your interest. This is how Liberals drive away rational thinkers.

  416. Winter, when someone is claiming that the Europeans have contributed nothing to the stock of human knowledge, thus implicitly denying credit for the scientific revolution to the people who were clearly responsible for it – and this is just what uma is claiming – it is necessary to protest the falsehood and set forth the facts that refute it.

    As for you, I said originally that in matters of the intellect, since 1500 AD the rest of the world has followed the European lead, and I stand by that. The Chinese record of inventions is impressive, but it stops well before the date I gave, as does the Muslim record. Since you seem to think wealth is necessary to intellectual progress, your problem is to explain why the impoverished Europeans began to make serious contributions to human knowledge and the wealthy Chinese and Arabs ceased to do so, at roughly the same time.

  417. @Michael Brazier

    Calculus is incremental progress. Algebra, is also incremental progress.

    Invention of agriculture or metallurgy isn’t incremental. It’s a paradigm shift. Humanity was something before it and became something else after it.

    The printing press changed the destiny of mankind. It resulted in mass dissemination of information and knowledge. A paradigm that humanity never experienced before.

    The printing press is fairly simple technologically. It’s significance isn’t in the mechanics of how it works (which are undoubtedly of interest to geeks). It’s significance is in the paradigm shift it created.

    Some might argue that the internet might be 2nd transformational idea to originate with whites. I am biased in favor of that viewpoint but it is far too early to judge whether it’s ultimate outcome would be a paradigm shift that would change the destiny of mankind.

  418. I get the sense that this transformational/incremental distinction is just an attempt to devalue real progress. By that argument, the Model T, the DC-3, the 747, the Mac, and the iPhone were “merely incremental.”

    But results are what really matter. Becoming rich via boring work and saving and investing is incremental, while winning the lottery is transformational, but so what?

    All this praise for non-Western cultural achievements of centuries past still makes me ask: What have they done for the world lately? What has the Muslim or Arab world contributed in the last 500 years?

  419. David Szonyi: “If the Democrats can find a candidate and a focused message that appeals more to the white middle-class in 2020”

    If.

    Note, please, that it isn’t Trump winning the Presidency, but the Democratic response to his victory, that led ESR to expect a GOP lock on the federal government. What we see in that response is a party in intellectual crisis: a party whose basic electoral strategy has just been refuted by a political naif, and which shows no capacity to understand how it was done. It does no good to prate of demographics in the face of such a failure as this.

  420. PapayaSF:

    What has the Muslim or Arab world contributed in the last 500 years?

    Falafel?

  421. uma: “Calculus is incremental progress.”

    If you think this, you know nothing about the history of calculus. Wikipedia has a decent summary of the subject – read it before you reply.

    “The printing press changed the destiny of mankind. It resulted in mass dissemination of information and knowledge. A paradigm that humanity never experienced before.”

    You admit this much because printing with movable type was first invented in China (where it had little effect, due to the logographic nature of the Chinese script.) Yet you do not admit that electric generators have changed the destiny of mankind – because that technology was invented by a European, you consider it “incremental”.

    In other words, your belief that Europeans are no more than skilful copyists of other, better cultures is not a reasoned conclusion, but a prejudice.

  422. @Papaya

    Your whining makes u look like that pathetic little kid throwing a hissy fit bcz he did not get a star.

    When looking at human progress why limit it to 500yrs? What is so special about the 500yr number?

    People like u were declaring china a lost case 30 yrs and revelling in their imagined superiority. How things have changed in 30 yrs indeed. In another century I am fairly certain they will have exacted a fair blood price in return for the opium wars that were imposed on them.

    History operates in cycles. Only blind morons fail to appreciate or see that. ESR indirectly gave u the answer to your questions. Muslims failed to appropriate the printing press until Napoleon decided to shove it down their throats. They lost 4 centuries in that process.

    The only sure thing about history is that it’s always moving. China fully developed without the resources of the new world. India is well on it’s way and the Muslims are on the way sooner than u might think. Soon the world will look like it always has and you will go back to your previous existence. Herding goats in the Scottish Highlands. Or worse: Fucking with those goats on the Welsh hills. All while the world has moved on!

  423. Ancient Greeks weren’t “Middle-Eastern”. Mencken pointed out “God made Man in his image; and Man returned the favor.” The Greek Gods were brown-haired, and some had gray or blue eyes. Those aren’t Middle-eastern phenotypes.

  424. do you really want to inspect everything you eat yourself for e coli or listeria?

    Of course not. I would delegate that service to experts, the same way I do today. Your assumption is that only government can perform this function, and that’s simply not the case. Consider the Underwriters’ Laboratories: no governmental authority, but they are nevertheless a highly effective regulatory organization.

  425. “Ancient Greeks weren’t “Middle-Eastern”.”

    Forget it. You’re trying to argue with a parody bot. One need not look past Greek sculpture to see that they weren’t middle eastern. The Lefties here are powered by pure self-loathing and are therefore stuck on stupid.

  426. re: ThomYorke

    It doesn’t work like that. California adapted open primary system whereby you’re allowed to vote for whoever you want in the primary, and the top 2 gets in. The top two happens to be Democrats. The Republicans did field more than 1 candidates, they just aren’t the top 2 finishers. Same thing with my voting district for House, both candidates on the ballot are Democrats. The joy of living in Los Angeles County.

  427. A wheel is not worth much without draft animals.

    Not true. Wheels greatly magnify the capability of human labor. Try moving a load of bricks by hand, and then try moving the same load in a wheelbarrow if you don’t believe me.

  428. @David Szonyi: What if I told you that a major contributing factor to your loss was your side’s obnoxious habit of assuming that long-windedness is impressive?

    1. >@David Szonyi: What if I told you that a major contributing factor to your loss was your side’s obnoxious habit of assuming that long-windedness is impressive?

      Long-windedness? Only a minor factor. Arrogance and projection, on the other hand, were major ones.


  429. > One need not look past Greek sculpture to see that they weren’t middle eastern.

    Origin of a people X is determined by genotypes not phenotypes.

    If a Congolese black male has mated with you mother and you were the outcome, your phenotype (hair color eye color) may well be white and you may believe you are white, but your genotype is black Congolese and that’s the way DNA scientists would view you.

    Also one would have to be blind to not spot middle eastern phenotypes in Greek statutes. But that is a whole another discussion which has been rendered irrelevant in the age of DNA science.

  430. “Also one would have to be blind to not spot middle eastern phenotypes in Greek statutes. But that is a whole another discussion which has been rendered irrelevant in the age of DNA science.”

    Looks like we can conclusively add ‘delusional’ to your substantial demonstration of ignorance. But don’t let me stop you. You’re doing so well.

  431. @uma

    “People like u were declaring china a lost case 30 yrs…”

    Bull. We were declaring communism a lost cause and we were right. China is where it is today because they shed most of it’s worst ideas.

    “China fully developed without the resources of the new world. India is well on it’s way and the Muslims are on the way sooner than u might think.”

    These countries are where they are because they’ve been financed by the globalists with the greatest wealth and technology transfer in history.

    “Soon the world will look like it always has… ”

    I dispute your credentials as a prophet.

    Oh, and you’re delusional as this post and many above illustrate.

  432. Latest Trump Tweet:

    Yes, it is true – Carlos Slim, the great businessman from Mexico, called me about getting together for a meeting. We met, HE IS A GREAT GUY!

    Roger that Ann Coulter.

    Is it a wall or a fence? No no!! It is a fence. Only a fence :-( ? Oh wait! Shoot! Not even a fence!!

  433. On gun control: Can we agree that this issue isn’t like, say, that of tax policies, that it’s literally a matter of life and death? (More Americans have died within our borders from firearms in the past 5 years than have in Iraq and Afghanistan combined in the past 15.) Can we also take a close look at the facts? It’s hard to have a rational, evidence-based discussion on gun control when the arguments of opponents, including yours, are so often counter-factual.

    We liberals and Democrats are vulnerable on this issue in one important way: We’ve sometimes spoken in an undifferentiated, sometimes contemptuous way of the culture of gun owners, as Obama did in ’08.

    But conservatives/Republicans seem to me far more vulnerable — ideologically, if not (yet) politically (though the tide is slowly turning there too) . The fact is that leaders of the Republican Party, from Trump on down, have become little more than hand-maidens of the NRA . Hell, they don’t even want to back funding for governmental research on the (considerable) effects of guns on public health.

    You argue that “Today voter support of personal firearm rights is at an unprecedented high.” Not really — despite propaganda by NRAists who oppose even the most common-sense gun reforms (e.g., background checks on people who buy weapons at gun shows or on the internet, or the widespread manufacture and use of “smart guns”) , a majority of the public, including gun owners themselves — support such reforms; see http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-agree-with-obama-that-more-gun-buyers-should-get-background-checks/

    You maintain that “less than six months [Democratic] leaders…were talking up Australian-style gun confiscation” [whatever that is; it’d be helpful if you defined it). They were?? As far as I know, not a single significant Democratic leader — not Obama, not Biden, not Hillary, not Reid, not Pelosi, not Schumer — was calling for mass gun confiscation. (If I’m wrong, please name names and provide evidence.) Otherwise, that line is from the NRA big-lie playbook and you undercut your credibility significantly by propagating it.

    Let’s look at gun facts squarely: I’m personally opposed to the recreational killing of game but I also recognize the rights of recreational gun owners. So did Hillary and do do the overwhelming majority of Democrats on the Hill.But civilians being able to purchase at will firearms for “self-defense”? No. They’re rarely successfully used for such purposes and such use is dwarfed by the use of guns for domestic and criminal homicides, suicides, crime — and then there are the myriad accidental shootings the accidental killing and injuring of children by children.

    There are now twice as many guns as people and way too many in the hands of the wrong folk.Too much of the country is “armed and dangerous” and it’s national disgrace, one in which the GOP has been totally complicit (in part based on a willful misreading of what the Second Amendment actually says). Nothing changes because of the :”gun rights” zealots, whose position is becoming ever more untenable on both policy and ethical grounds.

    Are you among them?.

    .

  434. “Consider the Underwriters’ Laboratories: no governmental authority, but they are nevertheless a highly effective regulatory organization.”

    Accurate but misleading. OSHA requires that a large number of product types used in the workplace be approved. This approval takes the form of certification by third-party organizations which must be certified by OSHA. Underwriters Laboratories is one of those organizations. So while it’s true that UL has no governmental authority, their services are mandated by the government.

  435. > So while it’s true that UL has no governmental authority, their services are mandated by the government.

    Except UL predates the mandate. And since this discussion was about the use of taxes, note that taxes don’t pay for UL.

  436. “David Szonyi on 2016-12-20 at 22:40:28 said:”

    This entire Groundhog Day screed is a wonderful example of the comment above (BassmanCO on 2016-12-20 at 10:33:40 said:) in that you can constantly rebut, dismantle, and refute every claim, but it will simply reappear tomorrow, barely altered…if at all.

    I’d just like to point out this remarkable lack of self-awareness in the following excerpt:

    We liberals and Democrats are vulnerable on this issue in one important way: We’ve sometimes spoken in an undifferentiated, sometimes contemptuous way of the culture of gun owners, as Obama did in ’08.

    Well, it’s more than “one important way,” but I just enjoyed the complete lack of self awareness which followed:

    “But conservatives/Republicans seem to me far more vulnerable — ideologically, if not (yet) politically (though the tide is slowly turning there too) . The fact is that leaders of the Republican Party, from Trump on down, have become little more than hand-maidens of the NRA .”

    GMAFB

    If you want to be taken seriously, make a serious argument. I’m sure the rest will be along shortly to present copious factual arguments for you to promptly ignore.

  437. I guess that, as the initiator of this blog, you have the right just to toss of a comment dismissing someone else’s for its supposed “complete lack of self-awareness.” It’s a way of “psychologizing” an argument rather than engaging it, a way of ignoring some basic facts that are pretty indisputable

    Anyway, exactly what is inaccurate about what I wrote? What GOP leader has backed even the most minimum common-sense gun reform?

    Meanwhile, I’m eagerly waiting for “the rest” — why not you? — to present their “copious factual arguments”. I’ve already presented some facts — unfortunate that you’ve chosen not to respond to them.

    1. >Anyway, exactly what is inaccurate about what I wrote? What GOP leader has backed even the most minimum common-sense gun reform?

      You might as well ask “What GOP leader has backed declaring squares to be circles because fuzzy kittens?” “Common sense” is not a description, it’s an attempt to emotionally load the argument by smuggling in the premise that that there is some “common” sense, the speaker knows what it is, and those who reject it are crazy/wicked/outside-the-mainstream.

      Compare the phrase “common-sense abortion restrictions”. The Democratic base would scream like stuck pigs at that that phrase, and despite the fact that I am myself pro-choice I agree that they’d be justified in doing so. It would be the same kind of attempted end-run around the merits of the issue.

      This form of argument is self-disqualifying. It’s deliberate rhetorical dishonesty, or an indication that the speaker lives so deep inside an echo chamber that he or she is totally disconnected from the very existence of other opinions among the non-evil and non-insane.

      Hillary: Australia-style gun control ‘worth looking at’ October 2016. She then lied by omission about the nature of the program, which did not merely offer a buyback but made retained weapons subject to confiscation.

      So, there’s the advocacy you were asking about – an attempt to normalize talk of confiscation by talking up the “Australian” model while (temporarily) suppressing the fact that confiscation was its endgame. By the Democratic Presidential candidate, a month before election day.

  438. @ Alpheus

    ”Every political philosophy has a weakness, and the primary weakness of Libertarianism is that it is not asshole proof!”

    Wow, what a coincidence! This is exactly* what’s wrong with government institutions, too!

    I have to apologize. My comment above was poorly phrased, so let me unpack it a bit: All political philosophies have failure modes. In the case of Liberalism, the failure modes are twofold. First, it can be hijacked by people (communists or similar) who don’t understand that whatever we decide to do politically, we need a healthy form of capitalism to pay for it. (We can argue all we want about what constitutes “healthy capitalism” but without capitalism we can’t pay for our social or moral ideals.)

    The other failure mode of Liberalism is what we observed in the recent election; abandoning economic issues, major questions of prejudice, and safety issues while concentrating on virtue-signalling through an obsession with edge cases, such as worrying more about whether it’s prejudiced to say “Black” instead of “African-American,” complaining of micro-aggressions, or raising a fuss over Transgender bathroom issues, with all this happening while actual major issues, such as the gigantic economic issues in the rustbelt states or the lead in Flint Michagan’s water supply, are ignored by the largest Liberal organization on the planet!

    The main failure mode of Conservatism is takeover by racists, facists, or religious fanatics. We’ve also seen that happen in the last year (to at least a limited extent – I assume everyone is aware that Pence is a Dominionist.) I don’t know if there’s enough resilience in the system to keep things from getting ugly, but the chances of experiencing Fourth Generation Warfare on American soil are very high, and 4GW’s emphasis on infrastructure targets and ROI makes things very ugly for civilians. (If you don’t know what 4GW is, get yourself over to John Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas and read some posts from 2004 or so. He also has a book.)

    The failure mode of Libertarianism lies in it’s belief that the marketplace will weed out bad actors (otherwise known as assholes) in a mostly unregulated environment. Does anyone really think that outlawing the minimum wage will allow wages to “float?” I think its much more likely that a group of sociopaths will reduce wages close to zero in a mad race to the bottom. Perhaps a few “special” skilled workers will be capable of negotiating wages, but anyone in a job which doesn’t require more than a few weeks of training will soon be reduced to an Oliver-like “please sir, may I have some more?”

    Does anyone think that a “good” supplier of chemicals, who spends money and effort to make sure that toxins don’t enter the environment won’t soon be underbid by some psychopath who doesn’t give a fuck about the wee little fishies?

    Etc.

    (Probably the way around this, in a Libertarian paradise, will be to price all similar goods equally, with profit available even if someone does the socially correct thing. Then people will be free to buy from those with good moral values without a loss to themselves.)

  439. @ Bryant

    But OSHA itself has a large budget. Would you like to work in a factory that’s not regulated by something like OSHA? Catwalks with no railing? Toxic chemicals without proper ventilation and storage? Staircases with slick surfaces? You taxes pay for the enforcement of health and safety laws regardless of who vets the electrical gear.

  440. David Szonyi on 2016-12-20 at 23:49:40 said:

    I guess that, as the initiator of this blog, you have the right just to toss of a comment dismissing someone else’s for its supposed “complete lack of self-awareness.” It’s a way of “psychologizing” an argument rather than engaging it, a way of ignoring some basic facts that are pretty indisputable.

    This is called projection. You’ve initiated your “argument” with your own, half-assed “psychologizing” with that objective horseshit about conservatives and Republicans being handmaidens of the NRA. Yes yes, those opposed you have only arrived at their positions through propagandistic conditioning.

    Please.

    You can’t even be fooling yourself here. If you’d like to clean your act up, I’d be happy to address your arguments point by point, but you don’t strike me as interested in arguing in good faith. In the meantime, feel free to do a site search and familiarize yourself with the 3,419 times that each point in your argument above has been refuted.

  441. @Troutwaxer:


    >> The main failure mode of Conservatism is takeover by racists, facists, or religious fanatics.

    You forgot douchebags. (Ted Cruz)

  442. “Greece is a middle eastern civilization pure and simple. It is genetically middle eastern”

    You are clinically insane. Batshit. Barking.

    Yes, modern Greeks do have a fair amount of genetic material from (what you are calling) “the middle east” (Arabs, Turks, and Iranians are NOT the same, genetically or culturally). That is because Greece was run as a Turkish slave state for hundreds of years, with the inevitable genetic mixing that accompanies such.

    Classical Greece was divided among the Dorians, Ionians, Achaeans, and Aeolians, all of whom spoke Indo-European languages (not Semitic or Turkic), and none of whom were “middle eastern” by any reasonable definition of that term.

    The Turks (source of the majority of the “middle eastern” DNA in modern Greeks) didn’t even begin their incursions into the Anatolian peninsula until the arrival of the Seljuks in the 11th Century.

    Hint: the 11th Century was over a thousand years after the end of Classical Greek civilization.

  443. @gmmay:

    Step 1) Watch this video
    Step 2) Read up on DNA science and how it works (e.g. how the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby was found — a story that will be easy for you to grasp and identify with)
    Step 3) Confirm step 1 by reading how greeks described what they looked like in their ancient literature (wooly hair, complexion between pale and dark)
    Step 4) Come back here and talk to us about “copious factual arguments”

    else

    Silence is golden. Especially when it comes to using words you don’t understand.

  444. “Not least of which is “Fatima” the saint they worship.”

    1) Fátima is a village, not a “saint”. There is no “Saint Fátima” that anyone “worships”.
    2) The apparition purportedly seen near there was of the Virgin Mary, not an ordinary saint.
    3) Catholics don’t worship the Virgin Mary, or any saint.

    As I said: you’re barking.

  445. “wooly hair”

    Arabs can have straight, wavy, or curly hair. Iranians and Turks generally have straight hair. None of the common Middle Eastern hair types would be described by a reasonable person as “wooly”.

    You’re one of those “Out of Africa” cultists, aren’t you?

    Tell us the one about how Aristotle “stole his philosophy from the Library of Alexandria”. That one’s my favorite.

  446. “But OSHA itself has a large budget. Would you like to work in a factory that’s not regulated by something like OSHA?”

    OSHA didn’t exist until 1970. Somehow we muddled through.

  447. @Wannabe Doc

    1) Read my response to your brother gmmay
    2) Fatima is the name of the daughter of Muhammad, founder of islam. First of her name to borrow some game of thrones vocabulary. Also used to name the mother of god herself, who is even more than a saint . I am not a catholic and was typing of memory. The point that I made is even more valid (Moorish names still in use in Portugal, and not least of which used to name the mother of God)
    3) Indeed they don’t. That’s is why they have a fetish for them.

    You’re butthurt. That is all.

  448. @Doctor
    “Classical Greece was divided among the Dorians, Ionians, Achaeans, and Aeolians, all of whom spoke Indo-European languages (not Semitic or Turkic), and none of whom were “middle eastern” by any reasonable definition of that term.”

    Sorry, but the Indo-European (e.g., Hitites) occupied Anatolia since prehistoric times, during which time they were one of the people to develop agriculture. Actually, the population of Europe by Indo-Europeans started in Anatolia. There were even Celts who later moved into Anatolia. And then we have not even talked about the Persians and Kurds, who have lived in the Middle east for a very, very long time.

    In classical times, Anatolia was littered with Greek colonies and people. Up to the Arab and Turkish invasions, a large part of the Middle East spoke Greek. Of course the Greek (and other Indo-Europeans) are Middle Eastern people. They were one of the groups that MADE the Middle East.

  449. @Michael Brazier
    “Since you seem to think wealth is necessary to intellectual progress, your problem is to explain why the impoverished Europeans began to make serious contributions to human knowledge and the wealthy Chinese and Arabs ceased to do so, at roughly the same time.”

    Follow the trail of scientific excellence in Europe. Over time, different countries were the leading scientific superpowers, from Italy, to Great Britain, to France, to Germany, to the USA. This trail follows the rise of their respective economies. And since a few years you see how the USA is struggling to recruit youth in science. Scientific Excellence in the USA is often born and raised in South and East Asia. The USA are now even getting an administration and congressional majority for a party that rejects science.

    So, if you want an explanation of the decline of technological progress in these countries, listen to Republican politicians, or Trump.

  450. @Troutwaxer (?) “Would you like to work in a factory that’s not regulated by something like OSHA? Catwalks with no railing? Toxic chemicals without proper ventilation and storage? Staircases with slick surfaces?”

    What a frickin small minded ignoramus. Why must current OSHA safety standards be assumed a good thing?

    During WWII the (almost exclusively white) workers at Los Alamoshad a different worker safety standard:

    If a proposed experiment was too dangerous for the academics to perform, then the uniformed military technicians would get the job.

    If the uniformed military technicians thought the experiment was too dangerous, they were free to accept an immediate transfer to an infantry unit on Guadalcanal or Saipan.

    Very few did. Go figure.

  451. Winter:

    The USA are now even getting an administration and congressional majority for a party that rejects science.

    A good measure of partisanship is when someone shows the ability to make sophisticated, sometimes overly-complex explanations of their own side’s arguments, but sees opponents in only the most over-simplified, cartoonish ways.

    Or in uma’s case, to refer to challenges as “whining,” with a descent into name-calling. Plus nitpicking. I used the figure 500 years as a nice, round number. My point was: how far back do you have to look in Muslim and Arab culture to find a significant contribution? The only examples you can come up with are even older. I claim that culture has been extremely stagnant for ages. I challenge you to come up with more recent contributions and prove me wrong.

  452. @PapayaSF
    “I claim that culture has been extremely stagnant for ages.”

    Moving goalposts here. If you scroll up, you will find many references to the white “race” as being superior, with IQ etc.. Such genetic differences do not arise in a thousand years or so. Therefore, technological innovations during the last 2 millennia from all over the world rule out any genetic basis for the differences in “innovation supremacy”.

    In the 16th century, witches and heretics were burned all over Europe, including a few scientists. So, up to that time, European culture was everything but “superior” in a scientific sense. Yes, there were good scientists, but they were living in a see of medieval superstition and intolerance. Many of the classics in science from that time were published against banns in many countries. At times, publishing a work on astronomy was dangerous.

    European culture became scientifically superior slowly only 500 years ago. That was the result of a very specific combination of circumstances, one of which was the fractioned political landscape. Had there been a single, dominant empire in Europe, it would have started to ban and persecute “heretics” at some point.

    Other “cultures” were not so lucky, and they suffered under empires that inescapably evolved towards “all change is bad, heterodoxy is a capital offense”.

    If you want to know how this works, look at the Republican party in the USA. There are always groups in that party that want to persecute scientists that say or do things they do not like. And now it looks as if one of such groups has taken over the party.

  453. “If you scroll up, you will find many references to the white “race” as being superior, with IQ etc.. Such genetic differences do not arise in a thousand years or so. “

    Setting aside for the moment the question of whether there are such genetic differences, your assertion that such genetic differences do not arise in a thousand years or so is complete horseshit. A thousand years is 40-50 generations for humans. It’s not only possible for genetic differences to arise in that time, it’s easy. To go up, say, 10 IQ points in that time, you’d need a generational change of about (x)^40 = 1.1, x = 1.0024, or less than a quarter of a percent increase.

    Working backwards, what level of environmental differences does it take to exert enough selective pressure to produce a quarter of a percent’s difference per generation? The brain is a massive energy hog, after all, so it won’t be selected for under all circumstances. Apply the breeder’s equation R = h^2*S, sub in about 0.0024 = 0.6 * S, get 0.004. (h^2 estimates in humans are a touchy topic and vary quite a bit, I’ve mostly seen 0.5 to 0.8 as main range, adjust to taste.) If you’re living in a persistently more energy-rich, intelligence-valuing environment that gets you as much as four-tenths of a percent ahead of your competitors on those scores, where the subset of a generation that gets to breed is on average that much smarter than their parents’ generation, there’s your genetic difference a thousand years later.

    Of course, you can get large effects much faster if you have greater selection strength. If we move from speculation about possible past environmental differences to some possible future footopian government, getting a 10 IQ point differential in one generation is simple: sterilize everyone under ~110 IQ, or otherwise prevent the stupidest ~three-quarters of the population from breeding. The average of the breeding population will then be ~116; regression towards the mean will make the next and subsequent generations average ~110.

    (This assumes a very great deal of ceteris paribus and a normal distribution of IQ mean 100 stdev 15, but I expect the point stands about the general magnitude involved even if the numbers require adjustment.)

  454. Scientific leadership has moved around a bit within the 100+ IQ populations but has never been held by a <80 IQ population.

  455. Uh, about that “confiscation” of of guns: Read again the very first sentence of the article in The Hill you reference: Hillary talks about a gun *buy-back”* program program. Repeating the distortion of “confiscation” doesn’t make it any more factual. If you’re going to provide something as “evidence,” make sure it demonstrates what you want it to demonstrate…

    About “common-sense: — why all the rhetorical overload? It’s an opinion, just as your “self-disqualifying” is. Now can we discuss what’s at stake? I’m saying that not every crazy person should be able to buy a gun on the internet without a background check, that that’s potentially a hazard to public health. That seems to me “common sense” so I stand behind that adjective. If you disagree, let’s have a real discussion but don’t just try to shut things down with “self-disqualifying” yada yada.

    1. As previously noted, the sting in the tail is compulsory buyback, followed by legal confiscation of retained weapons. HRC knew or should have known this before advocating the “Australian” model.

      >I’m saying that not every crazy person should be able to buy a gun on the internet without a background check,

      The counter-position is that it is “common sense” that procedural restrictions on gun purchases will suffer mission creep, eventually enlarging to include political undesirables. Exhibit A for this position is the Lautenberg Amendment. (Actually, that’s Exhibit B; Exhibit A is the Nazi gun law of 1938, which was both a legal and practical enabler of the Holocaust.)

      If your common sense says preventing crazy people from buying guns is a good that overrides all considerations of liberty and process costs, and someone else’s “common sense” says that the defense of liberty requires never letting that particular camel get its nose in the tent, what do you actually have in common? Nothing. You have value systems that aren’t commensurable.

      Neither party in this dispute is entitled to describe his position as “common sense.” The attempt is either ignorant or dishonest. Usually it’s dishonest.

      This is why I describe you as arrogant and projecting. Despite being nominally pluralist and tolerant, your “common sense” rhetoric issues from a absolutist presumption that all rival political/moral claims are not only contingently wrong but discrediting to the people who hold them. Whether it’s guns or transgender rights, the song remains the same; the “compassionate” decide, the proles must bend, and dissent is stigmatized as bigotry, truckling to the NRA, or neo-Naziism.

      Here’s a clue: to the student of history, it’s not the proles who look like Nazis.

      Welcome to Donald Trump. Your arrogance put him in the White House.

  456. David, if you read a few more sentences in that same article, you’ll see the word “compulsory” modifies the buy-back program being talked about.

  457. “Of course the Greek (and other Indo-Europeans) are Middle Eastern people.”

    “Middle East” is a modern term that includes portions of Western Asia and Egypt. Not Greece.

    It certainly wasn’t in use in classical times.

  458. “1) Read my response to your brother gmmay”

    1) Your “response” consisted of a YouTube video with no citations.

    2) Fatima is the name of the daughter of Muhammad, founder of islam

    So what? Yes, the village was named after her. No, that doesn’t mean there’s a “Saint Fatima” who is “worshiped”, as you claimed.

    “not least of which used to name the mother of God”

    Wrong. Dead wrong. By your “reasoning”, Jimmy Carter being known as “The Man from Plains” would mean that his name was “Plains”.

    Go peddle your fake history to someone else. I doubt anyone here is going to be impressed by it.

  459. “your assertion that such genetic differences do not arise in a thousand years or so is complete horseshit. A thousand years is 40-50 generations for humans. It’s not only possible for genetic differences to arise in that time, it’s easy.”

    Yep. That is what appears to have happened with Ashkenazi Jews, and over almost exactly that length of time.

  460. @David Szonyi

    “I’m saying that not every crazy person should be able to buy a gun on the internet without a background check, …”

    You are aware that NO ONE today can buy a gun on the internet? Least of all crazy people? YOU DO KNOW THAT DON’T YOU?

    Your “common sense” gun law was enacted decades ago.

  461. Step 1) Watch this video

    Ahhh, it’s on the internet, so it must be true. You’re really kicking some ass here.

    Step 2) Read up on DNA science and how it works (e.g. how the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby was found — a story that will be easy for you to grasp and identify with)

    You first, cupcake. You have yet to provide ONE single source for your (erroneous) claims. I found a few studies in about 30 seconds of searching which directly refute your claims, but everyone here is still waiting for you to show some basic intellectual competency first.

    Step 3) Confirm step 1 by reading how greeks described what they looked like in their ancient literature (wooly hair, complexion between pale and dark)

    Refer to my step two response. But I do love how your “citation” here proves something between ‘jack’ and ‘squat.’

    Step 4) Come back here and talk to us about “copious factual arguments”

    Just as soon as you provide something better than a random youtube vid, I’ll be delighted.

  462. To me, “common sense” would suggest that it’s fairly stupid to create weaker prohibitions directed toward people who are obviously prepared to ignore the strongest. That this fact makes it rather obvious that these laws only affect those who acquire their firearms legally. That, thinking logically, the only reasonable course of action after such historically ineffective measures are passed would be confiscation.

    But I realize that many people disagree with my position, which is why I don’t claim the “common sense” conceit. Unless of course you wander in and toss off such nonsense without thinking anyone notices your shitty rhetoric.

  463. @Erik
    “A thousand years is 40-50 generations for humans. ”

    A little population genetics will tell you that not much will change in the genetic distribution of a population the size of the Europe an in 50 generations. And whatever the genetic component of IQ is, it is extremely multi-locus. And then we would assume a serious selective pressure. No such selective pressure has been evident in Europe.

    The Askenazi are both a small population (founder effects) and has optimized the large non-genetic component of IQ.

    @Erik
    “To go up, say, 10 IQ points in that time, you’d need a generational change of about (x)^40 = 1.1, x = 1.0024, or less than a quarter of a percent increase.”

    Which is much smaller than the Flyn effect.

    But ANY change in a population that counts in the tens and hundreds of million of people is exceptional (even in 1000 AD there were 50M people living in Europe). And there was considerable mixing between regions and a sizeable influx of non-Europeans before modern times (Hungarians, Fins, Slavs, Arabs, Turcs). All things that would erase selection and genetic drift. If you had claimed “evolution” to avoid pathogens that kill a third of the population during each wave, probably. But for IQ, no.

    In short, there is nothing that even suggests there was a considerable change in the genetic makeup of Europeans with respect to IQ.

    1. >A little population genetics will tell you that not much will change in the genetic distribution of a population the size of the Europe an in 50 generations.

      The relevant population size is not “Europe”, it’s one segment of the Jewish diaspora, which was largely endogenous. Truncation selection can easily produce large allele shifts in small populations at that speed. It is now pretty clear that this is exactly what happened with the Ashkenazi – there’s been a lot of good recent work in this area.

      Ashkenazi genetics is actually quite fascinating. They show signs of having been selected for intelligence so hard that the genetic blueprints for their sphingolipid metabolism couldn’t keep up, so you get a high incidence of related congenital syndromes like Gaucher’s, Nieman-Pick and ML4.

  464. ” and a sizeable influx of non-Europeans before modern times (Hungarians, Fins, Slavs, Arabs, Turcs).”

    Since when are Slavs “non-Europeans”?

    As far as we know, the Slavs were inhabiting the area north of the Black Sea (i.e., in Europe) since the Bronze Age, at a minimum.

    Same with the Finns and the Hungarians. Linguistic evidence indicates that a Finno-Ugric language has been spoken in Finland since at least the Bronze Age. The Hungarians appear to have come from an area west of the Ural Mountains (i.e., also in Europe).

    1. >The Hungarians appear to have come from an area west of the Ural Mountains (i.e., also in Europe).

      Maybe. Some scholars think their heimat was the steppe areas east of the Urals; there are hints of this in the oldest Russian sources from before their invasion of the Carpathan Basin. There are linguistic reasons to believe they might have lived in Western Siberia before that; the closest relatives of Hungarian are two languages still spoken there.

  465. @Esr,
    ” It is now pretty clear that this is exactly what happened with the Ashkenazi – there’s been a lot of good recent work in this area.”

    I do not dispute genetic drift/selection effects in the Ashkenazi. That is a small, relatively isolated population where you can find genetic bottlenecks and founder effects.

    But we were talking about a genetic change in the population of Europe over the last 1000 years relative to neighboring populations. And this change had to affect a multi-locus trait, IQ. That I find rather exceptional. Exceptional claims require exceptional proof. The population of Europe over the last 1000 years was neither small, nor isolated.

    1. >But we were talking about a genetic change in the population of Europe over the last 1000 years relative to neighboring populations.

      Who’s talking about that? I’m not.

      The way I read the evidence, the genetic traits that later combined favorably with the “white” cultural package and refracted through Europe’s decentralization-favoring geography are much, much older than a millennium. One of the _later_ ones was the development of lactose tolerance around 60KYA. Whatever events produced the unusually wide dispersion of European IQs were probably much, much older than that.

  466. “””I have to apologize. My comment above was poorly phrased, so let me unpack it a bit: All political philosophies have failure modes.”””

    And I still stand by what I said. Every system has a flaw: it consists of a bunch of jerks each working towards their own self-interest. There is no way to get around that.

    “””In the case of Liberalism, the failure modes are twofold. First, it can be hijacked by people (communists or similar) who don’t understand that whatever we decide to do politically, we need a healthy form of capitalism to pay for it…The other failure mode of Liberalism is what we observed in the recent election; abandoning economic issues, major questions of prejudice, and safety issues while concentrating on virtue-signalling through an obsession with edge cases, such as worrying more about whether it’s prejudiced to say “Black” instead of “African-American,” complaining of micro-aggressions, or raising a fuss over Transgender bathroom issues, with all this happening while actual major issues, such as the gigantic economic issues in the rustbelt states or the lead in Flint Michagan’s water supply, are ignored by the largest Liberal organization on the planet!”””

    These two failure modes are actually one: the conceit that they know better than the local governments, and individuals, and businesses, what is right for them, so they must Dictate from on High in order to make sure that everything will be just. When you are the Enlightened Ruler, what you say should be done, no questions asked, and if only people will do what you say, then the world would be perfect!

    The problem with the Left is that they think that Capitalism is a bunch of Fat Cat factory owners and bankers, sitting in closed rooms, discussing how they are going to exploit the poor working masses. The reality is that capitalism is two people meeting together, negotiating a deal that would benefit both; any regulation that gets in the way of this negotiation is an interference to capitalism.

    “””The main failure mode of Conservatism is takeover by racists, facists, or religious fanatics. We’ve also seen that happen in the last year (to at least a limited extent – I assume everyone is aware that Pence is a Dominionist.)”””

    Uh, no. This is the natural tendency of all humans — to fall back on the tribes that we’re born in, and that we identify with the most. While Conservatives have always had issues with racism, their racism pales in comparison to the Liberals and Progressives: between their support for slavery before the Civil War and support for Jim Crow afterwards, their founding of the KKK (and their embrace of a leader of that same organization well into this century as avenerated member of the Senate), their support of eugenics and segregation in the 1920s and 1930s, their efforts to inject race into admissions and employment, and their continued efforts to balkanize inner cities and racial tensions, it is Liberals that have always had the greater issues with racism.

    The failure mode for conservatives is twofold: first, a strong tendency to believe the gaslighting of the Left-leaning media and Left-leaning bureaucracy and government that conservatives are in the minority and on the wrong side of history, so conservatives should give up their principles and “get with the program” of implementing Liberal ideas of having government control every little thing (in other words, to act like losers, even when they win elections); second, a conceit of their own, where they believe *they* can tell the masses what to do, because it will all work out if the right guys are in charge (with them, of course, being the right guys).

    To the degree that Conservatives have liberty on their side, conservatives have the advantage
    : this is the side where you can have fun! Just compare the over-regulation of *everything*
    in California to that of the relaxed atmosphere of Texas. But that’s a third failing of Con
    servatism: whereas the culture is saturated with liberal messaging, conservatives need to learn how to get their message out.

    “””The failure mode of Libertarianism lies in it’s belief that the marketplace will weed out bad actors (otherwise known as assholes) in a mostly unregulated environment. Does anyone really think that outlawing the minimum wage will allow wages to “float?” I think its much more likely that a group of sociopaths will reduce wages close to zero in a mad race to the bottom. Perhaps a few “special” skilled workers will be capable of negotiating wages, but anyone in a job which doesn’t require more than a few weeks of training will soon be reduced to an Oliver-like “please sir, may I have some more?””””

    By your reasoning, though, the very group of sociopaths that you expect would reduce wages close to zero in that mad race to the bottom, would hold wages near to the minimum wage. That this doesn’t happen, though, should be a hint that this mechanism that you are worried about simply doesn’t exist. Indeed, we could go so far as to complain that we need a maximum wage, because otherwise sociopath wage earners would refuse to labor until wages are pushed to infinity!

    Neither happens because there’s an inherent tension between an individual worker’s greed to push salary as high as possible, and an individual employer’s greed to push that salary as low as possible, that always finds an equilibrium. And yes, that equilibrium might be very low for certain jobs — but *why* should sweeping floors and cleaning toilets be valued the same as convincing customers to buy things or developing systems that customers would find valuable?

    When I first started work, I was paid $8/hr part time. By Liberal reasoning, that job should not have existed, because I had a wife and two daughters to support, and that wasn’t sufficient for supporting them. But after a couple of months, my employer decided he liked my work, so he raised my wage to $11/hr (I didn’t even ask for a raise — he was *that* greedy to keep me), and over time I moved on to new positions at different places with higher wages, and later salaries. Without that first job to prove myself, I doubt I would have been able to find employment, and I doubt that first job would have existed if the minimum wage was $15/hr. Now, I *could* have worked as a volunteer for a local hospital, I suppose, until I could increase my skill level to justify $15/hr…but then my wage would have been $0/hr, and I fail to see how that would have been beneficial for me.

    “””Does anyone think that a “good” supplier of chemicals, who spends money and effort to make sure that toxins don’t enter the environment won’t soon be underbid by some psychopath who doesn’t give a fuck about the wee little fishies?”””

    I do. This is because Rockerfeller, in an age where you got what you needed from oil and then dumped everything else into the river, practically founded the plastics age by employing chemists to figure out how we can use every little bit of oil, rather than waste it by dumping it in the water.

    And to be fair to the people of that age, we need to acknowledge that they didn’t fully understand the harms they were doing; nowdays, is it really that difficult to imagine a legal structure where the federal government generally stays out of the way of river dumping, but cities, communities and individuals sue the pants off anyone who dumps vile stuff into their water supply? Surely, we don’t need a federal agency that has the power to declare a farmer’s canal to be “navigatable waters” because the water eventually makes its way to large rivers, and “wetlands” because it’s wet for a ridiculously small unit of time every year (I seem to recall it being 3 days)…

    Speaking of the EPA, why should we take them seriously? When a private entity causes severe environmental damage, they get fined, and someone goes to jail. When they cause the same kind of accident, it’s “Oops, my bad! I hope everyone’s ok! By the way, we need more funding to keep these kinds of things from happening!”

    The notion that having government control would ensure that harm wouldn’t come to the environment, though, is just silly. The Soviet Union had control of *everything*, along with the doctrine that the State was more important than any one individual life. They have done *great* harm to their environment. I am going out on a limb, and make the modest proposal that a country that believes in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and in the inherent value of the individual is going to find more ways to prevent harm to the environment — and hence, to individuals — than a country that believes that the State is more important than the individual, and thus environmental resources are merely things to be exploited so that we can glorify the State.

    “””(Probably the way around this, in a Libertarian paradise, will be to price all similar goods equally, with profit available even if someone does the socially correct thing. Then people will be free to buy from those with good moral values without a loss to themselves.)”””

    This is called price controls, and it’s always a disaster whenever it’s tried. It’s hardly a Libertarian principle. And, considering that this was *essentially* what the Soviet Union tried to do, I fail to see how it would protect the environment, or the people.

  467. @Doctor
    “Since when are Slavs “non-Europeans”?”

    The Slav languages are linguistically related to Persian. But you are probably right, they lived close to the Black sea for a long time. On this time scale, geographical origins do not matter that much much anymore. All people outside of sub Saharan Africa are genetically alike anyway. And have been in contact repeatedly since pre-historic times.

  468. I decided to look up “Fatima, Portugal” and see what turned up, and the claim that this is a counter-example to my claim is somewhat laughable. According to Wikipedia:

    The name of the town and parish is a rendition of the Arabic given name Fatima ( ????? F??imah), reportedly[3] the name of a Moorish princess whom Gonçalo Hermigues and his companions kidnapped. The knight took Fatima to a small village of the recently created Kingdom of Portugal, in the Serra de Aire hills. According to the Western narrative, Fatima fell in love with her kidnapper and decided to become herself a Christian to marry him. She was baptized and given a Christian name “Oureana”. Arab sources, however, claim that Fatima -as most Reconquest captives- was forced into Christianity,[4][5] but there is no proof to support either scenarios of her conversion. (Fatimah is also the name of a daughter of Muhammad).

    So the claim that this is a popular Muslim name is sort-of right, but oddly sort-of wrong as well.

    But I’m not going to be convinced I am wrong unless Uma can show me popular native-Portuguese names (that is, factoring out Muslim immigrants and their descendants) that match up with rulers from the time the Moors ruled the Iberian Peninsula. Perhaps Sarah Hoyt’s childhood memories are flawed (she’s only human, after all!), but I would think that someone born and raised from Portugal would have a pretty good sense of what names are popular in her original culture.

  469. “””Hillary talks about a gun *buy-back”* program program. Repeating the distortion of “confiscation” doesn’t make it any more factual.”””

    Hey, it’s not our fault that Hillary and Obama like to refer to the Australian model so much. That model does include a buy-back program — but the buyback also included a threat that if you didn’t sell your guns to government, your ownership of said guns will be illegal here on out, and subject to confiscation and jail time for possession.

    If Hillary didn’t want us to conflate the two, she shouldn’t have used an example that conflates the two.

    And if Hillary honestly thinks that gun-owning Americans don’t pay attention to such tiny details, she’s delusional. After the Assault Weapon ban of 1994, gun-owning Americans have been paying attention to the tiniest of details.

  470. “””If you want to know how this works, look at the Republican party in the USA. There are always groups in that party that want to persecute scientists that say or do things they do not like. And now it looks as if one of such groups has taken over the party.”””

    Yeah, because it’s the Republicans that are calling for the jailing of people who deny climate change science, and who have prosecutors embarking on document fishing expeditions so they could sue companies for denying climate change.

  471. Re: the village of Fatima, Portugal, it was named after a Moorish ‘princess’ who converted to Christianity after being taken in a raid.

    As for ancient Greek appearances, Uma might try explaining why both Menelaus and Achilles were explicitly described as red haired or blonde, why Apollo has golden hair, why Athena is often described as blonde (sometimes black-haired in local variations) and gray-eyed. Artemis had auburn or blonde hair. Alexander the Great was a blonde. Obviously their hair color ran the gamut of Indo-European hair colors.

  472. The term “gun buyback” is almost Orwell Ian. How can the government “buy back” firearms that it never owned in the first place (except for old military surplus). But it implies that it does have an original claim on them. What Australia did was order compulsory purchase of firearms with nasty legal consequences for those who didn’t come forward. At least it wasn’t outright theft with no compensation, but it was a government seizure.

  473. “The term cobra effect stems from an anecdote set at the time of British rule of colonial India. The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi. The government therefore offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially this was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse.”

    –Wikipedia, The Cobra Effect

  474. @ David Szonyi

    Why can’t you just say “Thank you Eric for your cogent analysis of shortcomings in Democrat political strategy. We share a common goal in rectifying this problem. I will do my part in bridging this information into my community and hopefully draw some attention from Party leadership.” And then go do just that.

    Picking a fight here isn’t helping anyone. The problem is not that we are broken. The problem is that you are losing.

  475. And of course it’s relevant to mention that Australia’s confiscation program, by their government’s admission, only achieved a ~20% compliance rate.

  476. gmmay, it’s also relevant to mention the steep rise in violent crime in Australia since their buy-back program. Which of course no media here ever mention, but you can here anecdotally from Australians and local news sources.

  477. @Larry


    As for ancient Greek appearances, Uma might try explaining why both Menelaus and Achilles were explicitly described as red haired or blonde, why Apollo has golden hair, why Athena is often described as blonde (sometimes black-haired in local variations) and gray-eyed. Artemis had auburn or blonde hair. Alexander the Great was a blonde. Obviously their hair color ran the gamut of Indo-European hair colors

    That’s a valid question. But first let us agree that a picture is not only worth a thousand words but a million trillion zillion words. The pictures I linked to show how Greeks drew themselves. Written accounts are of far less significance.

    Possible explanations (I am by no means an expert) is that Greeks idolized the Slavic phenotype. They looked middle eastern (as their paintings show) but whenever the occasional Slavic phenotype showed up it was considered beautiful. This is in fact true to this very day in the middle East and possibly explains why most of the slave traded in Slavic women (that Winter posted about earlier) ended up in the middle East (which DNA evidence supports)

    It should be mentioned that European accounts of their own history are not taken seriously by those who look at hard evidence (e.g DNA). Generally speaking Europeans engaged in fabricating fairy tale histories for a variety of reasons. The Church is behind some of that corruption. Their hubris disease I mentioned earlier is another. And various other reasons that are too lengthy to get into here.

  478. uma on 2016-12-21 at 00:21:22 said:
    > @Troutwaxer:
    >>> The main failure mode of Conservatism is takeover by racists, facists, or religious fanatics.
    > You forgot douchebags. (Ted Cruz)

    Ted Cruz’s biggest problem in D.C. (I’m 2 degrees of separation from him) is that he keeps insisting on voting and pushing for the stuff that he campaigned on.

    To the Democrats this is horribly evil as it’s exactly opposite of their destructive agenda.

    To Republicans it is bad because it threatens their graft.

  479. @Alpheus


    > But I’m not going to be convinced I am wrong unless Uma can show me popular native-Portuguese names

    Names of people “Altair” — means the bird in Arabic
    Names of places “Algarve” — region in Portugal means “west” in Arabic.

    The sooner u stop regurgitating/consuming missionary accounts of history the healthier your mind will become.

    Everything that is beautiful about Iberia comes from the Moors. Everything that is ugly and savage (including fabricating la la universe history accounts) comes from the Catholic Church.

  480. Winter: The Slav languages are linguistically related to Persian.

    Yes, but so are English, German, and Italian. And Hindi, for that matter.

    uma: The pictures I linked to show how Greeks drew themselves.

    Upon closer examination of your (once again, unsourced) video, many of the “Greek” paintings in it appear to be Minoan. The topless goddess/priestess figure at 0:34 is definitive. The encaustic painting at 0:49 is from North Africa, and is Hellenistic (i.e., from a region that adopted Greek culture, like Alexandria), not Hellenic (Greek by blood).

    Those two glaring errors alone (and the lack of dates) make this video useless as evidence for anything. While I could waste a lot of time tracking down every image in the video, there’s not much point in doing so.

    The Minoans were not Greeks, but were in fact conquered by the invading Mycenaean Greeks (though not without a struggle — the tale of Theseus harks back to a time when the Minoans were able to demand tribute from the Greeks).

    As far as I can tell, there are NO studies that indicate that either the ancient Greeks or the Minoans were “middle eastern”, genetically speaking. If you have one, please cite it.

    1. >As far as I can tell, there are NO studies that indicate that either the ancient Greeks or the Minoans were “middle eastern”, genetically speaking.

      Also the linguistic evidence is against this, of course. The Greeks speak an Indo-European language.

  481. Winter wrote: “A little population genetics will tell you that not much will change in the genetic distribution of a population the size of the Europe an in 50 generations. And whatever the genetic component of IQ is, it is extremely multi-locus. And then we would assume a serious selective pressure. No such selective pressure has been evident in Europe.”

    Wrong. Polygenic selection for increased height over the past 2,000 years has indeed been inferred for the ancestors of current inhabitants of the U.K. Your ‘little population genetics’ is inaccurate and factually incorrect.

    http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-track-last-2-000-years-of-british-evolution-1.19917


  482. >As far as I can tell, there are NO studies that indicate that either the ancient Greeks or the Minoans were “middle eastern”, genetically speaking. If you have one, please cite it.s far as I can tell, there are NO studies that indicate that either the ancient Greeks or the Minoans were “middle eastern”, genetically speaking. If you have one, please cite it.

    You need to read up more on how DNA analysis works. Some companies (e.g. 23andme) offer tests. Before u understand that, you won’t understand any data. After u understand that you will simply figure it out on your own

  483. “””Names of people “Altair” — means the bird in Arabic
    Names of places “Algarve” — region in Portugal means “west” in Arabic.”””

    I asked for something very specific: popular names of people in Portugal that come from Moorish rulers. Names that are Arabic words, and place names that are directions, don’t fit this category.

    “””The sooner u stop regurgitating/consuming missionary accounts of history the healthier your mind will become.”””

    I am *not* regurgitating missionary history. I’m regurgitating a blog post written by an American citizen who was born, and spent the first twenty years of her life, in Portugal, who in turn brought up this little factoid to question the things *she* was taught in school about how enlightened Moorish rule was for Portugal. She pointed out that Portugal was on the wrong side of the Punic wars, yet embraced the names of the emperors of the Roman conquerors (and still uses the names of Carthaginian rulers)…but Arabic names are oddly absent. At the very least, “Mohammed” in some form or another *should* have survived, considering how popular the name is among Islamic folk.

    “””Everything that is beautiful about Iberia comes from the Moors. Everything that is ugly and savage (including fabricating la la universe history accounts) comes from the Catholic Church.”””

    I’m not familiar enough, personally, with Portuguese culture to say one way or another to make a comment about that I sincerely doubt that *everything* beautiful comes from the Moors, nor does *everything* ugly comes from the Catholics. Indeed, there’s a whole lot of ugly in Portugal, including fabricated la la universe history accounts, that’s the result of Marxist thought.

  484. @esr


    > Also the linguistic evidence is against this, of course. The Greeks speak an Indo-European language.

    The Cameronians speak Indo European these days. Does that make them related to Nordic Swedes? You see where u am going with this?

    1. >The Cameronians speak Indo European these days. Does that make them related to Nordic Swedes? You see where u am going with this?

      Yes. You’re being silly and should stop.

      Thank you, we now know a lot about the haplotypes of different ethic and racial groups. Changes in immunoproteins correlate with the language evidence and can be used to reconstruct old migrations.

      The evidence says that the ancestors of the Greeks entered the peninsula from the north and east, radiating from an Indo-European urheimat on or immediately north of the Pontic steppe. The older Anatolian hypothesis has been mostly abandoned because it fails to match the genetic evidence.

      There is a possibility that the migration can be traced back a stage further to what is now Armenia, but this depends on a controversial theory that would significantly alter the accepted phonology of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. I think the Armenian proposal is plausible, but I’m not a specialist in this area and my opinion probably isn’t worth much.

      Either way, none of the evidence is consistent with the Greeks being ancestrally a Semitic people. There are Semitic and Turkish elements in the modern Greek phenotype, but their long subjection to the Ottomans is sufficient to explain this. Portions of their haplotype that are more strongly conserved look IE rather than Semitic.

  485. The Ancient Greeks (Socrates, Pericles, etc.) were descended from people from the area north of the Greek peninsula, who invaded the place and drove the original inhabitants out, ca.1500 BC. (The Philistines of the Bible were probably from a group that fled.)

    There was plenty of trade between the Mediterranean nations which would inevitably lead to the spread of ‘Middle Eastern’ genes among the Greeks. No big deal.

  486. “””There was plenty of trade between the Mediterranean nations which would inevitably lead to the spread of ‘Middle Eastern’ genes among the Greeks. No big deal.”””

    This reminds me of an article I encountered a while ago, with the headline “You’ll never believe what the DNA says about the British people! Only 25% or so of the British are actually British!” and then it talked about all the Nordic, French, Germanic, and other DNA that I can’t remember off the top of my head, that can be found among the British people…

    Yeah, it was unbelievable, unless you had an even vague idea of the history of the various invasions of the British Isles…

  487. David Szonyi: “More Americans have died within our borders from firearms in the past 5 years than have in Iraq and Afghanistan combined in the past 15.”

    When you start off like this, with a demonstration of a basic misunderstanding of the cause of the problem, it comes as exactl zero surprise that the rest of your post is incoherent, with more holes in it than a shotgunned Swiss cheese.

    Hint: People didn’t die “from firearms”. People died because someone – themselves or someone else – shot them. The fault does not lie with the firearm, but the person.

    I am a proud Benefactor Life Member of the NRA. They protect my civil rights from leftists like you.

    “What GOP leader has backed even the most minimum common-sense gun reform?”

    Donald Trump has backed carry permit reciprocity between states. That is common-sense gun reform.

  488. Winter, you’re a goalpost-moving serial bullshitter of the first order. First it was “Europe had nothing to offer Asia”, and when this was rebutted with Hungarian gold, the claim smoothly morphed into “Well show me specific Hungarian-Asian trade routes”, ironically right after you claimed that Hungarian trade mostly went through Turkey. Then on the matter of potential recent change in the genetic component of intelligence, dancing between “X can’t happen”, “X is very unlikely to have happened”, and “You haven’t proven that X happened”. So when you say

    >A little population genetics will tell you

    I say, show your work in population genetics like I showed mine with the breeder’s equation. I don’t trust your word for it and I don’t trust you not to run away from the point if I do the work and find population genetics doesn’t tell me what you imagine it tells me.

  489. >If a Congolese black male has mated with you mother and you were the outcome, your phenotype (hair color eye color) may well be white and you may believe you are white, but your genotype is black Congolese and that’s the way DNA scientists would view you.

    Everything is wrong here, all at the same time.

    The mixed offspring of purebred white/black parents, will be genotypically half-half mixed. Nothing else is possible – the genetic inheritance from both parents are always equal, setting aside oddities like mitochondrial inheritance. This is not true for grandparents, however.

    Furthermore, the offspring will always be phenotypically distinct from a non-mixed white. No person familiar with how white people look will ever mistake Barack Obama for a purebred white.

    Whenever it isn’t, it is because you have the wrong biological parents. Babies get mixed up in hospitals, women cheat and people get confused and tell lies. Sometimes, the supposedly black parent is actually mixed black/white – particularly common for Afro-Americans. In my experience, even quadroons can be distinguished from whites at a glance, but counterexamples might exist.

  490. “You need to read up more on how DNA analysis works.”

    I know exactly how it works. You need to cite an actual source or STFU. Sorry to be blunt.

  491. “nor does *everything* ugly comes from the Catholics. ”

    The cathedrals alone serve as a prime counterexample, right up to the 20th century and Gaudi’s Sagrada Família (which, if you haven’t seen it, Google or Bing images and prepare to be wowed).

  492. Everything that is beautiful about Iberia comes from the Moors.

    And it’s at this point that I’m going to suggest that the intended spelling was “Ummah”.

  493. Does anyone else think the dems have become the anti-white party?

    Bill Clinton advised Hillary to say some things to appeal to white working class voters. She rejected this advice, calling it “old ideas.” Her campaign staffers even mocked Bill for suggesting this.

    Appealing to white voters is old ideas? What’s the new idea?

    Progressives openly cheer the “browning” of the country, seeing this as making it more likely they will win elections. This is why they support open borders. Look at California, where the republicans often do not even run candidates for statewide offices. What if the could do this to the whole country?

    One of my progressive friends on Facebook after the election made a comment that “If you are born white, you have nothing to complain about.” As if just by being white, you get everything handed to you on a silver platter. Meanwhile there is an epidemic of suicide among middle age whites in the midwest.

    Liberals are the ones who talk about white privilege, and openly cheer the browning of the country. But this could backfire on them; they may find in the future the base of their party is not much interested in backing white candidates, preferring blacks or hispanics. So no more Bernie or Hillary.

    Whites, and especially white males, seem to be the one group the progressive mind gives itself permission to hate.

  494. To Jay Maynard: Your argument is tired — it’s the old “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” The bottom line is that people *using guns* sometimes kill people (or themselves), and sometimes in mass killings, whom they might injure if they had less lethal weapons at hand. That’s particularly the case for impulsive, mentally unstable people.

    And Jay, please knock off the reference to “leftists,” first because you don’t know anything about my politics, second because the boring stereotype is a way of shutting down minds and just distracts from a serious discussion.

    To ESR: You’re absolutely right: The Hill article does make a single reference to “the compulsory” 1996 Australian buyback program. But what firearms were involved? 5 minutes of internet research would have provided the answer: “The 1996 “National Firearms Buyback Program” took 660,959 firearms out of private hands[2] comprising long guns, mostly semi-automatic rimfire rifles and shotguns as well as pump-action shotguns, and a smaller proportion of higher powered or military type semi-automatic rifles.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_buyback_program). So a lot of Australians were still allowed to keep a lot of guns.

    As for Hillary, the very same article that you referenced noted “She announced a gun control plan this month that did not mention a gun buyback program.” BTW, Hillary’s statement was not made a month before the election but a year and a month (The date of The Hill article is Oct. *2015*).

    Facts matter — at least for people who care about such things (I’m not interested in having a discussion with those who don’t) and so does context. So here’s some context: President Obama has been in office nearly 8 years. During those 8 years, how many proposals has he made or speeches has he given that advocate gun “confiscation.” The 114th Congress has included over 180 Democratic congresspeople and over 40 Democratic senators. How many bills have they introduced proposing such confiscation? Right: The answers are zero and zero. If I’m wrong about that, please cite some solid evidence. If I’m right, isn’t it time to acknowledge that the NRA and its allies are engaging in hysterical propaganda — to put it politely; a “big lie” is more accurate” — on the “confiscation” issue?

    Once that ,manufactured, misleading issue is put to rest, perhaps we can get to a serious discussion on the rights of gun owners versus the rights of them and the rest of the public to have safe environments.

    1. >During those 8 years, how many proposals has he made or speeches has he given that advocate gun “confiscation.”

      At least one Obama speech has echoed the praise for Australian-style confiscation, which is still confiscation regardless of how you dress it up and qualify it. Cite here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425021/australia-gun-control-obama-america

      We get a pretty steady sequence of these periodic trial balloons from Obama and the likes of Pelosi and Schumer. They’re all coyly phrased so the speakers can deny they’re talking about confiscation if pressed, because their pollsters tell them accurately that this is a third rail you don’t want to touch anywhere outside of the coastal Democratic enclaves.

      But the message is clear. Especially since we also get occasional mic drop moments from these people, talking to friendly audiences, in which the confiscation cat is let out of the bag.

      Now read this: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4912

      Once you do, you will understand why no politician with Democratic or other left-wing ties will ever be trusted on this issue.

      Nor, frankly, do I trust you.

  495. I would strongly suggest that we stop referring to ourselves as ‘white people’. We are the ‘mainstream people’. Many of us are not ‘white’ these days; you can start with President Obama and work your way down, through Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice, Dr. Ben Carson, Thomas Sowell, Herman Caine, etc. The Progressive Racist Idiots have to know that:

    1. Thanks to immigration and intermarriage, we’ll be a couple of shades darker than we are now; just wait a couple of generations.

    2. At that time we will still be here, laughing at them.

  496. David Szonyi: “Your argument is tired — it’s the old “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” ”

    Yes, it’s an old argument. It’s no less true for that. And lst you think that achieving the leftist holy grail of disarming the citizenry will stop mass killings, just look at the mass knifings that have been perpetrated in the not-at-all-distant past.

    “So a lot of Australians were still allowed to keep a lot of guns.”

    Allowed because the government didn’t actually follow through on the confiscation that the law called for. And what other civil right would you be crowing that the government allowed you to keep?

    “how many proposals has he made or speeches has he given that advocate gun “confiscation.””

    How many times did he speak approvingly of Australia’s compulsory buyback?

    “If I’m right, isn’t it time to acknowledge that the NRA and its allies are engaging in hysterical propaganda — to put it politely; a “big lie” is more accurate” — on the “confiscation” issue?”

    No. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. We’ve see what happens when we get complacent. Never again.

  497. “a serious discussion on the rights of gun owners versus the rights of them and the rest of the public to have safe environments.”

    Here’s a clue for you. In a free society, there is NO right to safety except for what you can make yourself. Anything else is just illusory, designed to lull you into signing away your liberties. The government CANNOT guarantee your safety. Not “should not”, cannot. Is not able to. It’s an impossibility. There aren’t enough cops to ensure that you won’t get harmed by a criminal who doesn’t buy into your disarmed society. He’s not going to care that you have a right to be safe. Criminals, after all, are defined by breaking laws. What’s a law against having a gun mean to them?

    If you want safety, you must create it for yourself. Buy a gun and learn how – and when – to use it.

    Nothing else will work.

  498. Eric, I think I’m ready to give the “confiscation” argument a rest, mainly because the the “evidence” you provide is so weak and unconvincing as to make me think we can’t even read words and facts the same way. That being the case, the whole “discussion” isn’t really one; it’s just verbiage being flung back and forth.

    If you or anyone else does a close reading of The National Review article, you’ll see that nowhere does Obama advocate gun confiscation; it’s just not there, even in an article by an author who wants to indict the president on the issue. What Obama does do is say the Brits and the Australians “have been able to craft laws that eliminate mass shootings” — he says nothing more and nothing less. Even the hapless author of the article is reduced to writing, “the president doesn’t exactly spell out what following the Australian model would entail.” Right, the president doesn’t — because if the author had read what the president t actually said, rather than what he wanted him to say to suit his own polemical ends, he would have noticed that the president nowhere states that he endorses “following the Australian model.”

    Then you allude to “vaguely phrased” “trial balloons” by some Democratic leaders — but don’t cite a damn thing — in short, about as vague and unfocused an argument as there is. Evidence of these trial balloons ? Anyway, my unanswered point wasn’t about “trial balloons” but about bills introduced by Democrats on the Hill, which is the way you get laws and new policies.

    Then you ask me to read what you yourself call “fiction”. OK, I did, but what does it have to do with the “confiscation” (non-) argument?

    Finally, you say you don’t trust me. To be honest, Eric, I couldn’t care less whether you do or don’t; I’m not out to win your friendship or trust. It doesn’t work that way on internet exchanges and it doesn’t matter anyway in policy terms, as neither you nor I am in power. What I do care about is talking to halfway open-minded people, fellow liberals, conservatives, and those in between, about building a better, saner society.

    1. >Then you ask me to read what you yourself call “fiction”. OK, I did, but what does it have to do with the “confiscation” (non-) argument?

      It was an explanation of why the gun culture, after being lied to repeatedly for decades, has reached a position of negative trust in people advocating soi-disant “common-sense” measures.

      You think (or claim to think) that the hints Obama and Clinton have been dropping are meaningless. Gun-culture folks know better; they’ve seen this kind of dissimulation before and they won’t be fooled again, will never relax their guard. So yes, there is one level on which this conversation is pointless, because you will never persuade them that your intentions are benign – that you aren’t, to state it bluntly, a crypto-totalitarian lying through your teeth who knows perfectly well what Obama was driving at and are trying to lull the rubes into going back to sleep.

      But on another level, I’m still answering your original question. To the extent you actually care about the matter of my original post, you should be paying very close attention to this level of negative trust whether you think it’s objectively justified or not. All the reasons you can come up with to believe it’s somebody’s Big Lie (or whatever else your dismissive theory morphs into) won’t change the fact that this is a major source of distrust of the Democrats. A large enough one to swing national elections.

      I’m here to tell you you can’t talk or wish or argue that distrust out of existence by insisting that the people who hold it are wrong or stupid or deluded by the NRA. It’s too late for that; when you take that line you feed the distrust – you dig yourself and by extension the Democratic Party deeper into its hole. You can see that in Jay Maynard’s reaction and to a lesser extent in my own.

      This has consequences. Welcome to Donald Trump.

      The Democratic Party needs to actively, fundamentally reverse itself on this issue before it will ever be trusted again by a majority of Americans outside the coastal enclaves. This means not only dropping all attempts at restricting civilian access to firearms but pushing the repeal of existing restrictions.

      Backing Trump’s proposal for nationwide concealed-carry reciprocity would be a good start. But only a start.

  499. “No. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. We’ve see what happens when we get complacent. Never again.”

    We’ve also seen that it is impossible to find a compromise short of confiscation that Democrats will actually keep their side of the bargain. They are so fundamentally untrustworthy that we can’t establish any sort of trust based society with them in it.

  500. “And Jay, please knock off the reference to “leftists,” first because you don’t know anything about my politics, second because the boring stereotype is a way of shutting down minds and just distracts from a serious discussion.”

    Projection and lack of self awareness continues unabated.

    If you want a serious debate, then be serious.

  501. @esr:


    > Either way, none of the evidence is consistent with the Greeks being ancestrally a Semitic people.

    I never said greeks are a “semitic” people. I said they are middle eastern.

    The haplogroups that determine their lineage (e.g. ydna of males) are primarily middle eastern and north african (J and E1b haplogroups). Crete (first civilization of europe) is for example more than 40% J haplogroup. Some of the J migrations (out of arabian plate) go as far back as neolithic times… well before semites. E1b, primarily found in north africa and middle east, also makes up an equally large chunk of the ydna of greek males. E1b is often associated with successful sea faring populations (e.g. Phoenicians). To this day, the sea and its activities forms a large chunk of greek economy.

    Pontic Steppe savages may have raided Greece from the North and the North East. And that shows slightly in the greek haplogroup pie chart (R1a haplogroup). However, those savages don’t have the correct biological code that correlates with civilization. Greeks may have acquired their indo-euro tongue via those pontic steppe savages, but plenty of other places did acquire indo-european via the same savages, and and those other places show not even a trace or hint of civilization.

    Biologically/DNA-wise, greeks are middle eastern and north african. Linguistically, they are indo european. Their link to north europeans is (at most) linguistic and not biological. In genetic separation terms (tens of thousands of years), my analogy (the cameronian man and the swede who both speak indo european) holds true.

    Beyond that, the geographic proximity to the middle east, for all practical purposes integrates them into the (greater) middle east. Genetically, they’re copies of their middle eastern and north african brothers. Culturally, they integrated with their genetic brothers to the east and south. That is why Aristotle and Plato were read in Mesopotamia and Egypt, not in Rome and the British isles.

  502. @Anonymous:


    > The mixed offspring of purebred white/black parents, will be genotypically half-half mixed. Nothing else is possible – the genetic inheritance from both parents are always equal, setting aside oddities like mitochondrial inheritance.

    The Y chromosome is what makes males males and gives males all their attributes. If your father is congolese and your mama is white you may look white or very close to white with white phenotypes. But your ydna is congolese. That would make you identical to congolese males. Your white phenotype is merely a statement about your father’s taste in women.

    Biologically, you are a 1/2 and 1/2 black and tan when looking at all your chromosomes. However, it is not all your chromosomes that make you male and give you those things that only males excel at (apologies to feminists for non PC speak). It is only that one chromosome full of that belittled-by-feminists junk dna -> The Y chromosome.

  503. To Eric: You’re totally correct about pointlessness: once you start carting out the heavy-duty personal rhetoric (“crypto totalitarian lying through your teeth”), you might impress yourself but let’s face it: it’s pretty meaningless. You’re wasting your time, mine, and that of your other readers because you’re not responding to my arguments; in fact, you’re not responding to me as a fellow human being anymore. You’re just talking to yourself and those who already agree with you. Maybe your blog isn’t about persuading people who think differently than you do to begin with. If I’m wrong, and you really do want to try to persuade people with my views, your rhetoric is badly sabotaging that goal.

    “The Democratic Party needs to actively, fundamentally reverse itself [on the gun control issue] before it will ever be trusted again by a majority of Americans outside the coastal enclaves.” I think your premise is wrong but what matters more: It ain’t gonna happen because we Democrats see the issue differently and with as firm a conviction as you have on the other side. In short, we’re not Republicans. Anyway, kindly stop telling Democrats what they “need” to do. It doesn’t get you or us anywhere at all. If you want basic respect for your views, then you’re going to have to reciprocate in terms of ours, no matter how strongly you dislike and “distrust” them; it’s just that simple…

    1. >because you’re not responding to my arguments

      If you came here to argue, rather than to learn, then there was no point in your coming at all. Your “arguments” are defending a losing strategy. Welcome to Donald Trump.

      >In short, we’re not Republicans.

      Fine, I’m not a Republican either.

      >we Democrats see the issue differently and with as firm a conviction as you have on the other side

      Yes, and that has lost you elections and will lose more. Do you want to marinate in your own virtue or do you want to be able to win against Republicans? Choose at most one.

      >Anyway, kindly stop telling Democrats what they “need” to do.

      You came here to ask about that. If you didn’t like the answers you got, it’s not really my problem. The Democratic Party has to either either change radically or die, and your denial will not change that reality by one iota.

      Welcome to Donald Trump. If you want to know why he won, look in the mirror.

    1. >According to an Oct., 2015 New York Times/CBS News poll, 87% of *Republicans* favor background checks on all gun buyers

      Did I at any point claim otherwise? I know this. However, I also know that support for this position collapses when the implications of “all” are explained – that is, you could be jailed for selling a gun to a family member or friend without going through NICS.

      Entertainingly, from that same article:

      There is concern among Republicans — and especially among the most conservative — that stricter gun laws will lead to the federal government trying to take guns away from Americans who legally own them.

      That anodyne formulation waves away how very, very deep mistrust of intentions about gun control runs even among Republicans who are not “among the most conservative”. And, for that matter, among the mid-American blue-collar Democrats who are now on the Trump train.

      Jay Maynard, one of my regulars here who has responded here, is quite representative of moderate Republicans. Pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, no interest at all in the religious agenda of Evangelicals – and yet on the topic of gun policy he breathes fire.

      What you don’t get is that this is everywhere now, outside the coastal enclaves. Local politicians aren’t taking marching order from the NRA when they turn may-issue jurisdictions into shall-issue, and shall-issue into constitutional (permitless) carry. They’re doing what their constituents actually want.

  504. ‘87% of ‘Republicans’ favor background checks on gun buyers’

    Google FOI card, as a reality check for the real (as opposed to self-contained rhetorical) blah blah.

  505. @Alpheus:


    > She pointed out that Portugal was on the wrong side of the Punic wars, yet embraced the names of the emperors of the Roman conquerors (and still uses the names of Carthaginian rulers)…but Arabic names are oddly absent.

    You can thank the catholic church for that. One famous Arab ruler whose name is still in use in Iberia (Spain.. not sure if it is in much use in Portugal) is “Omar”. Omar the 2nd caliph of Islam, known as the “just one”. He stands for justice and fairness in muslim eyes.

    One of the celebrated muslim princess in Iberia/Spain is the princess Wallada, famous for her outspokenness, pornographic poetry, and poems expressing jelousy. She was a blonde-hair blue-eyed princess, who was dumped by her lover for a brunette slave girl that she educated in prose. Possibly the first documented such case in history. It is a fun story for those who can read the poems in Arabic and not unlike the “blonde vs brunette” stories of this day and age. She refused to marry after her lover, and refused to take him back, even after he wrote one of the most magnificent poems written in the arabic language trying to apologize to her. For that reason, she is idolized by some feminists. I am writing off memory here so I could be off on some of the details.

  506. “The haplogroups that determine their lineage (e.g. ydna of males) are primarily middle eastern and north african (J and E1b haplogroups). ”

    You are unjustifiably assuming that the DNA of modern Greeks is identical to that of ancient Greeks, even though it is quite clear to any reasonable being that, given that Greece was run as a slave state by the Turks for 400 years, there is an obvious mechanism for middle eastern genes to enter the Greek population. It would be astounding if modern Greeks didn’t have Middle Eastern DNA, given the known proclivities for the Ottomans in dealing with the women of subjugated peoples.

    Do you have an actual reference to a peer-reviewed paper demonstrating that the genes of Greeks from the classical period wer “Middle Eastern”?

    It’s become quite obvious that you don’t. Because no such evidence exists.

    Plonk.

  507. >Your argument is tired — it’s the old “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

    His “tired” argument is winning, so why should he change it? Your tired arguments are losing.

    In case you hadn’t noticed, concealed carry is now legal in all 50 states, and 50 state reciprocity is on Trump’s agenda. I’ll be looking forward to that — my state doesn’t require a permit of any kind for open or concealed carry, but does offer one that you can get for reciprocity purposes. I’ll likely get one if Trump gets the reciprocity thing through.

  508. @uma
    “However, it is not all your chromosomes that make you male and give you those things that only males excel at (apologies to feminists for non PC speak).”

    Sorry, the Y chromosome contains little more that a testosterone switch. What makes you a man is a high testosterone level. What makes you excel at what men excel at is located on all the other chromosomes and is switched on by a high testosterone level.

    Also on the Greek being a “Middle East” people. This discussion is based on so many misconceptions that it is useless to even TRY to untangle them. Just to start, where did the idea come from that Greek people were confined to within the boundaries of modern Greece? At one point, even the ruling class in Egypt spoke Greek.

    Here is a map of Greek dialects spoken in Anatolia in 1910!
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anatolian_Greek_dialects.png

  509. @Wannabe Doc:

    Your map of mtDNA not yDNA. I told you to go and read and stop making a fool of yourself.

    mtDNA is not yDNA. mtDNA -> mother to child. yDNA -> father to son unchanged. yDNA is what determines the origin of people X not mtDNA. For two simple reason. a) a successful male can produce hundreds of children in his life. A successful woman a max of 20. Nature’s limitation. b) Females have exchanged hands frequently throughout history.

  510. @Winter:


    >> Sorry, the Y chromosome contains little more that a testosterone switch. What makes you a man is a high testosterone level. What makes you excel at what men excel at is located on all the other chromosomes and is switched on by a high testosterone level.

    They thought the y chromosome is shrinking but it turns out to be it is not. They thought the junk dna is junk but it turns out to be it is not that simple. I am sure there is some truth in your statement above but only part of the truth.

    Add to that that your statement above does not change a thing about how yDNA is used to trace the origin of a people X.

  511. @uma
    “They thought the y chromosome is shrinking but it turns out to be it is not.”

    Its current size, the fate of Y in other mammals, the evolution of “sex chromosomes” in animals, and lack of heritable traits make this pure speculation. Just come up with credible evidence of heritable traits in the Y chromosome.

    @uma
    “Add to that that your statement above does not change a thing about how yDNA is used to trace the origin of a people X”

    “The Origin”? The fact that Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA does not make the Neanderthal people “The Origin” of the Europeans.

  512. To Eric: Well, you’ve lost me some more because, actually, I did come to discuss, not just to “learn”. The best “teachers” are sometimes learners and you might consider becoming more open to that. For you, in approaching as highly controversial issue an issue as gun control, where there are legitimate arguments on both sides, to try to position yourself as only the “teacher” and everyone else as a student reduces you to a kind of dead-end close-mindedness. Welcome to the echo chamber.

  513. “If you want basic respect for your views, then you’re going to have to reciprocate in terms of ours, no matter how strongly you dislike and “distrust” them; it’s just that simple…”

    You still don’t get the fundamental point: We don’t give two shits whether you respect our views or not. You can keep right on saying we’re compensating for something, or make ammosexual jokes. Whatever.

    What we are saying is that we have a fundamental right to armed self defense, and if you try to take that right away, we’ll kill you all.

    The only reason that hasn’t happened in CA, CT, and NY is that you haven’t made any moves to actually enforce your stupidity. And a fairly high percentage of your LEOs recognize that is what WILL happen the first time you try, which is why you have the Sheriffs in NY, for example, saying they won’t help you enforce the confiscations you put on the law books there.

  514. To Eric, on your 6:07 AM posting. – Thanks for that.. At last, we’re back to discussing the issue at hand. Your “If only people were better informed, they would think differently” strikes me as a pretty weak argument. What leads you to conclude that people aren’t sufficiently iinformed on this issue? And where’s the evidence that support for background check “collapses” when the implications of background checks are explained? I keep asking for evidence because your saying so, no matter how forcefully, doesn’t make it so.

    And please consider the opposite: If the public were “informed” of the murderous effects on public safety of the out-of-control proliferation of guns, which is unique to the U.S., especially in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, support for background checks might increase further. That’s why the NRA wants to suppress research on guns and public health.

    Finally, Eric, your repeated talk of “coastal enclaves” vs. the supposed rest of the country makes you sound like an elitist and doesn’t make any sense. After all, there are plenty of people who think like you on the gun issue in New York City (the president-elect is one) and plenty of people who think like me in Nebraska (Warren Buffett is one). Let’s talk about public sentiment in the USA, of which we’re both proud to be citizens, rather than make false geographic divisions.

    1. >Your “If only people were better informed, they would think differently” strikes me as a pretty weak argument.

      That is not what I am saying. I am saying that when pro-2A voters are informed of what “universal background checks” actually means, support for it vanishes. I’m not talking about a hypothetical but an observable fact. I have seen it at the microlevel myself, and it is confirmed by opinion surveys.

      >And where’s the evidence that support for background check “collapses” when the implications of background checks are explained?

      I’m not going to do your homework for you. I might, if the question at hand were “what is the best gun policy”. It is not. It is “Why did the Democrats lose this election?”

      You keep wanting to dispute the deep distrust the Democrats have earned by posing what you think are facts. Your beliefs about gun policy, in general, factually false – but that doesn’t actually matter very much, and I’m not that interested in disputing them point by point, because even if they were true the basis of trust under which the Democratic Party could be persuasive about those claims is gone. Welcome to Donald Trump.

      You have, basically, only two choices. You can refuse to believe that I am reporting the distrustful attitudes of gun owners and middle Americans accurately, in which case we don’t have a conversation. Or you can believe me, in which case those attitudes are absolutely central facts of the political landscape. Your beliefs about the merits of gun policy are essentially irrelevant. Mine would be too, if I were talking about them. I haven’t been, because they’re not.

      (You do get that I opposed Trump before the election, right? And that I’m not a tribal conservative? If you think I’m an extreme or unrealistic partisan you really, really need to get out more. I’m getting hate comments from actual conservatives because they don’t like me throwing a lifeline to the Left.)

      It’s not much skin off my nose if you refuse. Half my Republican friends are urging me to shut up and let the Democrats die, already, and I admit the prospect is somewhat tempting. I don’t need to persuade you in any scenario; the people I want to get in sync with reality are the moneybag donors who can demand changes to the Democratic platform and get them. Recent quote from one: “I’m not putting in another dime until somebody tells me what just happened.”

      >Finally, Eric, your repeated talk of “coastal enclaves” vs. the supposed rest of the country makes you sound like an elitist and doesn’t make any sense.

      Oh? Go find a county-by-county map of the Democratic wins/losses. Look at it for a while. Then tell me “it doesn’t make any sense”, if you can do it with a straight face.

      You continue to not understand how desperate the Democrats’ position truly is. You continue to think that if you trot out the same old talking points earnestly enough, they’ll work this time for sure. Nope. It’s a different game now; you have nothing to teach me. The preference-falsification bubble has popped. Welcome to Donald Trump.

  515. >If your father is congolese and your mama is white you may look white or very close to white with white phenotypes.

    This literally never happens, unless the Congolese father is himself mixed.

    Look up pictures of the Dumas family for illustration. The famous writer matches your description if we are very generous, but he had a single black grandparent, not a black parent. His mulatto father could never have passed for white.

    You are vastly overestimating the role of the sex chromosomes in determining phenotype. For example, the genes for eye color are located in entirely different chromosomes. By far most of the features that set races apart, are common to both the men and the women of the race and have nothing to do with the Y-chromosome.

  516. To SDN’s “What we are saying is that we have a fundamental right to armed self defense, and if you try to take that right away, we’ll kill you all.” Hmn… — so your “fundamental” right includes a right to murder without due process? Count me a little scared by your extremism but otherwise very unimpressed. A threat isn’t an argument, SDN.

    To Eric: You’re of course not responsible for SDN’s point of view but your blog has hosted it, so I’m curious what you think about it.

    1. >To Eric: You’re of course not responsible for SDN’s point of view but your blog has hosted it, so I’m curious what you think about it.

      I agree with it. Self-defense against tyrants is not murder. The U.S. was founded by men and women who understood this.

  517. “Your map of mtDNA not yDNA. I told you to go and read and stop making a fool of yourself”

    I told you to either provide a citation for your claim that the DNA of ancient Greeks was “middle eastern” or STFU.

    So far said citation has not been forthcoming.

    I think it’s quite clear who the fool is here.

    1. >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016#/media/File:2016_Presidential_Election_by_County.svg

      Right, and it’s even worse for Democrats than the map looks, because many of the inland blue blotches (especially in the Southwest) are large counties with conurbations where effectively the only reliable Democratic voters are in that one city.

  518. “>we Democrats see the issue differently and with as firm a conviction as you have on the other side

    Yes, and that has lost you elections and will lose more. Do you want to marinate in your own virtue or do you want to be able to win against Republicans? Choose at most one.”

    I would have been happy to have the option of voting for someone who stood a nonzero chance of actually getting elected and wasn’t Donald Trump. The problem was that the only other choice was Hillary Clinton. She’s a gun grabber, with a long, long anti-gun record, and when she says she’s not going to take away my guns, a rational examination of that record admits of only one possible conclusion: she’s lying. Her stated litmus test for Supreme Court justices of being willing to overturn DC v. Heller, when one vacancy exists and more are highly likely, made the choice even more critical.

    I don’t like Donald Trump. His Cabinet choices are reassuring me that he’ll actually govern in a conservative manner, but I don’t trust the man. Still, he’s no gun grabber.

    This isn’t the first election that Democrats got clobbered in at least in part because of the gun issue. Remember 1994? I sure as hell do.

    “Your “If only people were better informed, they would think differently” strikes me as a pretty weak argument.”

    It is, and yet the Democrats keep trotting it out.

    “That’s why the NRA wants to suppress research on guns and public health.”

    Ah, the old argument about cutting off funds for the CDC for “gun research”. The reason those funds were cut off was that the CDC was nakedly partisan on the issue. Their “research” was blatantly skewed to advance the gun grabber narrative. They even funded anti-Second Amendment propaganda!

    “Let’s talk about public sentiment in the USA, of which we’re both proud to be citizens, rather than make false geographic divisions.”

    The problem with this is that those “false geographic divisions” are very real and very important. In many respects, we are not one country, but 50 joined together at the hip. The Founders realized that regional differences matter, and accommodated them in their design of the government. The elites living on the coasts want to rule the entire country, because they think they’re entitled to. If they push that too hard, though, they’ll find themselves in a civil war, because the people in flyover country are tired of being told by rich New York social{ites,ists} how to live their lives.

  519. @David Szonyi

    If you indeed want a “discussion”, you’d first have to acknowledge that you don’t know much of anything about the topic and evidence a willingness to learn. Above I called you out on a gross factual error about current gun law which you ignored.

    First learn, then you can discuss.

    Until then, your smugness is exactly what ESR wrote about.

  520. @Doctor
    “I told you to either provide a citation for your claim that the DNA of ancient Greeks was “middle eastern” or STFU.”

    From pre-classical times, the Greek lived all over what is now Turkey. They did so into the 20th century. So, that makes them also Middle Eastern.

    But I do not see the point of this discussion. “The Middle East” is a modern construction to describe an area that was never a separate unit before the 20th century. “The Middle East” has been part of four different empires since Plato lived. And all of these empires included large parts of the Mediterranean, if not the whole. It has also been a cross-roads between South and Central Asia with whole people moving in and out.

  521. >From pre-classical times, the Greek lived all over what is now Turkey. They did so into the 20th century. So, that makes them also Middle Eastern.

    By this argument, Native Americans are white.

  522. “Came across this piece recently, about the disproportionate influence of intolerant minorities.”
    Actually, that article completely explains why the gun-grabbers keep tiptoeing around their preferred solution of gun confiscation: They know that there are enough gun owners spread across the country who would simply start shooting them. Even if they “won”, that red / blue map indicates why the war would inflict so much damage on them that it would define “Phyrric victory”.

    Every one of those cities gets their food, water, fuel, power, and a good chunk of their communication over supply lines running through hostile territory.

    Even where they’ve passed “bans” in places like CT, when faced with a 95% non-compliance rate they haven’t actually tried enforcement, for exactly that reason.

  523. @ David Szonyi

    My first comment in this post expressed skepticism about the likelihood that Democrats would give Eric’s analysis a fair hearing, and you are case in point. You came here feigning interest in remedies for your party, but quickly transitioned into lecturing us about gun control. Are you also lecturing your peers at liberal websites about Eric’s points (e.g. at Vox, Daily Beast, e.g.)? If so, please point me to those posts. If you haven’t done this yet, please start now. Your time and effort will be far more useful.

  524. “it’s even worse for Democrats than the map looks, because many of the inland blue blotches (especially in the Southwest) are large counties with conurbations where effectively the only reliable Democratic voters are in that one city.”

    Yep. The cities, college towns, and Indian reservations are islands of blue in a sea of red. There are a few exceptions where minority populations are extremely high (the Mississippi delta and the “Black Belt” of the South, the Texas borderlands, etc.) but overall the “coastal elite” model is perfectly in accordance with actual voting data.

  525. “””Your “If only people were better informed, they would think differently” strikes me as a pretty weak argument. What leads you to conclude that people aren’t sufficiently iinformed on this issue? And where’s the evidence that support for background check “collapses” when the implications of background checks are explained? I keep asking for evidence because your saying so, no matter how forcefully, doesn’t make it so.”””

    Eric recommended that you do your own homework for this, but I can’t help but provide a few hints.

    First, look at Washington State’s Initiative 594, which is Bloomberg’s first effort in creating the “universal background checks” that Americans supposedly support at an 87% rate. Compare the percentage by which it won to the 87% rate. For bonus points, look up why gun owners don’t like the Initiative, and also break down the vote by county. (If you do that, you’ll see another bit of evidence for the “coastal enclave” that everyone is talking about.) (This was a 2014 initiative.)

    Now, observe that Nevada had a similar provision on their ballot this year. Examine the margin by which this ballot won.

    Now, observe that Maine had a similar provision on their ballot this year. Examine the margin by which this ballot lost.

    Observe that all three of these States (well, 3/4, in the case of Maine) went to Hillary Clinton this year.

    Also, keep in mind that the advantage to ballot initiatives goes to the person spending the most money, and these ballot measures are being pushed by Billionaire Michael Bloomberg. The NRA doesn’t have the funds to fight a billionaire. To the extent that these provisions are opposed, they are opposed by grass-roots efforts and word of mouth.

    Once you have done your homework on this, please report back. I’d be interested to see your conclusions!

  526. Uma, perhaps you could specify the books we’re all supposed to “read up” on, since you seem to be the only one holding this particular view. In other words: citation please.

  527. esr on 2016-12-22 at 06:07:37 said:

    I know this. However, I also know that support for this position collapses when the implications of “all” are explained – that is, you could be jailed for selling a gun to a family member or friend without going through NICS.”

    This reminds me of that ridiculous poll which stated that >90% of Americans favored banning the sale of guns to people on terrorist watch lists. Of course the poll left out that you’d have to gut the Fifth Amendment to make it happen. When you apply that obvious context to the question, support similarly collapses.

    This dishonesty is routine among the statists who are then dismayed to find that the rest of us are not only familiar with their tired old arguments, but no longer trusting their intentions.

  528. @ David Szonyi

    To Eric: Well, you’ve lost me some more because, actually, I did come to discuss, not just to “learn”.

    Hey David, I’m a Liberal Democrat who frequently disagrees with Eric, but on the subject of gun ownership I can promise you he knows whereof he speaks, and you can safely believe him on this issue. IT. IS. A. LOSER. FOR. DEMOCRATS.

  529. > Of course the poll left out that you’d have to gut the Fifth Amendment to make it happen.

    Or gut the watchlists, by requiring due process to be put on them. Something some people think should happen anyway.

  530. Frankly I’d support such a measure being passed just to see if the inevitable unconstitutionality of it takes out the no fly list as a side effect.

  531. If “Common Sense” gun laws worked Chicago would be a beacon of peace, yet the Ds want to add layer upon layer (see California’s latest insanity) blithely ignoring the observable fact that criminals don’t follow the laws on the books as it is…

    Reset Gun laws to circa 1900 THEN we can talk about “Common Sense Laws”. Otherwise the 2A supports know you are talking about taking away MORE gun rights, not less..

    Common Sense = Constitutional Carry and NO restrictions on location, especially carry in schools, malls, etc.

  532. What’s that saying, that military experts study logistics, rather than tactics or strategy?

    If all, or even most, trucks stopped runs into the cities, food would be a problem very soon.

    Power, gas, and oil lines have very obvious vulnerabilities, some of which have been news items. Others are obvious to those with a little technical knowledge.

  533. Interesting article about Trump and “The Carbon Bubble.” I don’t know if this idea is actually what’s motivating people, but I thought it might be a useful addition to the discussion. Regardless of whether AGW is “real” there’s clearly a transition in the works from fossil fuels to electric, with politicians lining up on one side or the other and the article argues that this is what’s motivating Trump and his people.

    https://medium.com/@AlexSteffen/trump-putin-and-the-pipelines-to-nowhere-742d745ce8fd#.rlwxe9rcy

  534. @Winter

    >Just come up with credible evidence of heritable traits in the Y chromosome.

    You can read the wiki page on the y chromosome where they discuss holandric (y-linked) traits. Y chromosome is not as useless as they want u to believe


    >“The Origin”? The fact that Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA does not make the Neanderthal people “The Origin” of the Europeans.

    The “origin” in the sense of tracking geographic origin of ancestors. Something that became possible only very recently as a consequence of DNA analysis technologies.

  535. “You can read the wiki page”…Aaand there went whatever microscopic amount of credibility uma had left.

  536. Indeed! Bcz a wiki page discussing y-linked traits must have been written by propagandists and paid shills. Like the ones who fabricated the pizza story about HRC.

  537. >Or gut the watchlists, by requiring due process to be put on them. Something some people think should happen anyway.

    With you there. The watchlists are deeply creepy.

  538. “Frankly I’d support such a measure being passed just to see if the inevitable unconstitutionality of it takes out the no fly list as a side effect.”

    I’m pleased to find some common ground with you.

  539. If the public were “informed” of the murderous effects on public safety of the out-of-control proliferation of guns, which is unique to the U.S.

    And since Eric didn’t bite on this one: This has been discussed and analyzed ad nauseum on this blog; read through the archives. tl;dr is that the United States has a bimodal distribution and sharp geographic boundaries that cleanly divide its violence into a segment on par with Switzerland and a segment on par with Zimbabwe. The United States is laughably nonunique in terms of overall statistics, and if you try to group the US with a selected subset of nations, you’re going to find highly inconvenient demographic disparaties.

    1. >you’re going to find highly inconvenient demographic dispar[i]ties.

      Oh, to be a fly on the wall when he notices those. Or maybe he’ll develop hysterical blindness and just blank the data out of his perceptual field.

  540. @uma
    “The “origin” in the sense of tracking geographic origin of ancestors. ”

    You are aware that using Mt and Y chromosome geneologies can lead to widely different results? Women tend to be much more sedentary than men.

  541. Something else for the Ds to ponder, that I didn’t see mentioned above: as bad as you find current Constitutional jurisprudence (2A etc.), imagine what it will be after the flood of Constitutional amendments unleashed when Rs get 34 or 38 state legislatures rather than their current 32. Yikes! Better start paying attention to those local races! In many parts of my state the Ds don’t even field candidates for the legislature…

    1. > imagine what it will be after the flood of Constitutional amendments unleashed when Rs get 34 or 38 state legislatures rather than their current 32. Yikes!

      Yes, and I’m actually a bit worried about that. There are plausible scenarios in which conservatives do very bad things with this power, especially if the Evangelicals are in the driver’s seat.

      That said, I want to propose my own constitutional amendment:

      Congress shall neither make any law, nor enable any regulation, nor grant any privilege, which uses race or gender or sexual orientation as a predicate.

      If there were a way to word it to exclude the creation of new protected classes, I’d add that, too. Of course the 14th Amendment should already forbid this sort of thing.

      Repealing the Interstate Commerce Clause would be a good thing, too.

  542. @ Michael

    Truly, what is the likelihood of anything of value being learned from an article that starts out with “You can’t understand what Trump’s doing to America without understanding …”

    I assume you’re talking about the article’s references to Global Warming. What you’re missing is the author’s point is good regardless of whether Global Warming is “real” or not. People are still building out solar and wind infrastruture very quickly, which does put those technologies at war with carbon. (Remember that there are plenty of reasons to oppose carbon fuels even if Global Warming is not real – they’re simply very messy!)
    .
    .
    @ Jess

    Thus my unhappiness with the Dems firing Howard Dean.

  543. @esr, Doctor Locketopus:
    While that map does support your arguments re: “enclaves”, I think it is perhaps a hair misleading (it does not show margins of victory, nor population counts — someone looking at the map might easily think, “Well, maybe Hillary was just slightly less popular with rural voters?”). That is why I have preferred to share this 3D map instead — both the missing factors are visualized.

    With margin of victory included, it appears the US really is fragmenting into two countries along party lines; IMO it is quite unfortunate that division being primarily urban/rural hinders a peaceful separation into two independent polities.

  544. These days when I think about Trump’s election I immediately flash on H.P. Lovecraft, himself a racist, but sensitive in some rather odd ways, running bad software on faulty heat meat, starving and cold, inventing Cthulhu while Weimar Germany slowly marinated in its own distress and hate.

  545. ESR: Surely reversing Wickard v. Filburn would suffice? Giving state governments the power to put tariffs on goods crossing their borders would be awful for the country, and it’s only the Commerce Clause that makes that impossible.

  546. @esr

    There is nothing wrong with the commerce clause that can’t be fixed with better supreme court justices. And if you push down that bubble without fixing the real problem, another will pop up somewhere else.

    I prefer Mark Levin’s method of giving the states veto power over supreme court decisions.

  547. ESR: Surely reversing Wickard v. Filburn would suffice?

    Best way to do that would be to define the Commerce Clause rather than repealing it, with a specific proviso that the police power does not pass from the states to the federal government by means of this clause. In fact, I have long thought the U.S. Constitution could use a definitions amendment…even if the definitions had to be negotiated at a convention rather than submitted to the states as a “take it or leave it” proposition.

    Used to be, you could pass a statute that said, “the maximum penalty for voluntary manslaughter shall be forty years”…and leave “voluntary manslaughter” undefined because the courts would hold to the traditional definitions. Statutes aren’t written that way anymore, at least most of them aren’t, because courts don’t work that way anymore…so they are (frequently) written with long definition sections.

  548. > That is why I have preferred to share this 3D map instead — both the missing factors are visualized.

    It seems to use population rather than population density for height (Alaska being huge is the main indicator), whereas the latter would neatly map population to volume.

    Honestly I prefer purple to white for close areas. One map I’ve always wanted, but never have managed to figure out where to get the data these things use, is a map that simply uses the value of the red and blue channels, scaled by population density. You’d need either HDR or a way to shunt excess values over 255 to adjacent pixels, though, to handle high-density areas, i suspect.

  549. You might be right that the issue of gun control is a “loser” for Democrats, Troutwaxer (or you might not) — but I strongly disagree that Eric always “knows whereof he speaks” on the subject. Even during the few days I’ve read his posts, I’ve learned that Eric has really interesting things to say sometimes…while at other times he just likes to pontificate. So, for example, he misleadingly implied that the Australian proposal involved the confiscation of “guns” when he knew, or should have, that it involved only certain limited categories of guns, and he *still* hasn’t responded concretely to my point that neither Obama nor any or of the over 220 Democrats on Capitol Hill has made a single proposal involving mass gun confiscation — all the airy rhetoric about “hints” and “trial balloons” notwithstanding.. That’s ’cause there ain’t a single, solitary presidential executive order or other proposal, or a congressional bill proposing mass gun confiscation. You know it, Eric knows it, and yet the big lie on this subject continues. So Eric is no more the ever-reliable guru on the subject than anyone else; as with me, his knowledge is limited and he most definitely has his fact-bending biases.

  550. To TomA (11:40 AM post): Oh, brother. Actually, I didn’t “feign interest” in “remedies for your party” (a pretty condescending way to put it, no?). In fact, in one of my first posts on the issue, I maintained that while Eric has some interesting things to say on the plight of the Democrats, which made me glad my liberatarian friend had called his blog to my attention, I feel the subject has been explored with far more analytic depth and insight by Thomas Frank and George Packer, among others.

    Instead, I wanted to engage Eric in certain matters he wrote about and which we both care about, including gun control, on which Eric, IMHO, wrote superficially and misleadingly. Eric might be a kind of political guru for some who follow this blog but he isn’t that for me. My assumption was that we might be able to have a sharp but civil, evidence-based discussion and each inform the other. That’s how small-d democratic dialogue works.

    Finally, in terms of my writing about Eric for other websites/blogs: I have absolutely zero intention to do so — but thanks for your encouragement anyway…

  551. To Rick T (2:43 PM). I appreciate your post and agree with your main point as far as it goes: Criminals are oblivious to gun laws. But you miss my point in an earlier post: many homicides, suicides, and serious injury-inflicting accidents that are committed using guns *aren’t* by criminals to begin with; they’re by unbalanced people with no previous criminal records. So maybe liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans can find common ground on there being more mental health safeguards that are built in to what Eric and others call the “gun culture.”

  552. >H.P. Lovecraft, himself a racist

    Lovecraft’s did engage in a lot of crimethink, by today’s standard, but mostly just by virtue of pointing out what is obvious, but nowadays forbidden to notice. Lovecraft was not a stereotypical racist who thought everybody who looks different are dumb, ugly and nasty. Then again, this sort of racist barely exists – it’s almost entirely a leftist strawman.

    Lovecraft observed that races and their cultures are meaningfully different from each other. He had much respect for East Asian people, and would not have been the least bit surprised to see the civilizations they have built. He probably wouldn’t have been surprised about how the black majority inner cities have turned out, either.

    Lovecraft was highly skeptical of all sorts of disunity – racial, linguistic and cultural. He was also critical of racial interbreeding, for basically the same reasons as with the previous forms of mixing. Putnam’s results about community trust and cohesion would have made Lovecraft remark, dryly – What else is new?

    Lovecraft was strongly in favor of diversity at a distance – homogeneous nation states realizing their own ideals and leaving others to themselves . It’s much like a scaled up version of the old principle that good fences make for friendly neighbors – because then people only have to see each other when they’re in a favorable mood. It’s the same effect that makes it much easier for friends to get along than for couples, and for couples to get along when they live apart.

    Most people who dismiss Lovecraft as a hateful bigot from times better forgotten, have little understanding of Lovecraft’s opinions. Their morals are superior to Lovecraft’s only in the same sense, that a child’s taste is superior to that of an adult, when the child wants to eat sweets for every meal.

  553. David, “mental health safeguards” are dead here too after there were calls to declare all veterans as suffering from PTSD and incompetent to own guns. We remember the Soviet Union’s weaponized psychiatrists committing opponents to the regime to mental hospitals. No thank you, there are already laws on the books that are ignored or bypassed.

    If you sincerely want to reduce the number of gun crimes the first area to address is black on black crime (as in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, etc.)

  554. misleadingly implied that the Australian proposal involved the confiscation of “guns” when he knew, or should have, that it involved only certain limited categories of guns

    Impressively dishonest. I mean, we’re talking a Politifact level of “true but but but!”

  555. Bottom line for 2A supporters on ANY gun control discussions with the Democrats is WE DON’T TRUST YOU. There isn’t any trusted common ground for engagement.

  556. When I am in a Swiftian mood, I imagine taking all the arguments made by gun controllers and applying them to HIV/AIDS. After all, that kills thousands of people every year. Why not take some “common sense measures” to control this disease? We could start with widespread official condemnation of the acts most likely to spread it, mandated training and licensing for the people who do those particular acts, and a public registration system for the afflicted.

    I imagine lots of sputtering about these restrictions unfairly burdening many innocent people simply because of a few miscreants. I’ll bet there’d be arguments that the right to secretly have and possibly spread a fatal, contagious disease is constitutionally-protected (more so than gun ownership), despite never being explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.

  557. Hey, Rick T — If you don’t trust us at all and aren’t willing to even try to find common ground, then I guess that each of us is reduced to staying inside our polemical shells and talking only to like-minded people — talk about what Eric calls “enclaves”!

    Oh yeah, do you have even a modicum of evidence of “calls [by whom? any halfway influential Democratic and/or liberal figure?] to declare that all veterans are suffering from PTSD and are incompetent to own guns.” I read widely and I’ve come across zilch that says or implies that. If you do have such evidence, please post it on this blog.

  558. David, what you call “common ground” we call “further infringement”…. If discussions included repeal of racist or ineffective current legislation there might be a place for discussion. That in the USA you MUST have a muffler on your automobile but have to pay $200 license to the BATFE to buy a muffler for a firearm is insane (that is if you can have one at all, they are banned in California).. Same thing with Saturday Night Specials (to make guns more expensive for the poor), the pending California $50 ammo license, etc.

    We are willing to stay in our enclaves but your side continues to push for more and more ineffective regulations.

  559. @Troutwaxer

    “I assume you’re talking about the article’s references to Global Warming.”

    No I was talking about the very sentence I quoted. Because of that sentence I didn’t read any farther. If I want to read some liberal moonbattery I’ll rush over to HuffPo.

  560. David Szonyi just wants to disarm White people, then use third world savages to kill the now defenseless Whites. The solution for Whites is to simply ignore these anti-White gun bans.

    He was never actually interested in “public safety.”

  561. @ David Szonyi

    You might be right that the issue of gun control is a “loser” for Democrats, Troutwaxer (or you might not) — but I strongly disagree that Eric always “knows whereof he speaks” on the subject.
    .
    Two things. First, Eric is making a very broad and important point, while you’re trying to nitpick it to death. The simple fact of the matter is that gun-owners aren’t going to trust Democrats on gun control until the Democrats stop discussing the issue for at least 20 years. Bill Clinton observed this in 1992, and it is even more true now. You can argue all you want that the Democrats should be trusted and that many of the misunderstandings held by gun owners are the result of hostile proproganda or rightwing craziness (“Abner! It’s horrible! Obama is going to steal our guns and Bibles!”) and you would probably be correct in at least some instances. But you need to understand that being right doesn’t matter. Hostile propaganda or not, right-wing craziness or not, the Democrats have lost this fight and Eric is very correct that “gun control” is a third rail. If you want to win an election, get over it.

    (On the other hand, after Trump’s inaugeration we’ll get the enjoy the fun as Republicans forget that Medicare and Social Security are also third rails, and that old folks are willing to nuke congress-critters who forget that fact, and nuke them hard!)

    Second, within the last year Eric and I have discussed the gun issue very respectfully, and Eric offered some very intelligent ideas for stopping the carnage. His ideas had nothing to do with confiscation, but they were thoughtful and educated, and he opened my eyes a little. Eric and I are on opposite sides on many issues, and we kinda-sorta semi-agree about maybe a few issues involving gun ownership, but don’t imagine for a second that he’s either stupid or uninformed about the issue. The kindest thing I can say about the issue is that you’re missing the forest for the trees!

    1. >You can argue [that] many of the misunderstandings held by gun owners are the result of hostile proproganda or rightwing craziness

      You inadvertently touch on another aspect of the blindness, or epistemic closure, that has finally caught up with the Democrats and given them Trump.

      Many people with strong pro-2A opinions are not “right-wing crazy” by any argument that doesn’t assume its own conclusion – that is, defining such opinions as crazy. The reflexive equation of “gun-rights-advocate” with “right-wing nut” cuts Democrats off from a lot of blue-collar men who in decades before this became a defining Democratic reflex might have voted voted D.

      If blogs had been a thing in 1980 I would have said even then that this was part of how the Democrats incurred their first wage of defections of their core voters to Reagan.

  562. @ Michael

    No I was talking about the very sentence I quoted.

    IMHO it would have been a much stronger article without references to Global Warming, but with reading for the economic thinking.

  563. @ Anonymous

    I was thinking far more about Lovecraft looking at Weimar Germany and inventing Cthulhu than about racism. Focusing on the racism you’re really, really missing the point. If the racism is relevant its because it increased Lovecraft’s ability to “see into” the soul of Weimar Germany.

  564. > Focusing on the racism you’re really, really missing the point. If the racism is relevant (…)

    In a sane world, I would just have called you wrong to characterize Lovecraft as a racist, but for some recent, rather Kafkaesque definitions of the word, you are technically correct.

    Instead, I pointed out some of what sets Lovecraft apart from your garden variety racist. See also the following quote:

    >Biologically, the Nordic is probably not superior to the best Mediterranean stock; or the unbroken and now almost extinct Semitic white stock; but just as the Chinese culture ought to be preserved where it is once entrenched, where the Nordic culture is once entrenched, it must be preserved.

  565. “In short, California did not raise taxes and had a negative revenue flow for about 25 years, as we’d badly damaged our property tax base and the ability to raise taxes didn’t exist! ”

    And yet California has somehow managed to achieve the sixth highest tax burden among the fifty states.

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-states-with-the-highest-taxes-2016-01-22

    Sorry, you don’t get to blame your troubles on long-ago “Republicans”.

  566. To Alpheus (12:19 PM). With all the rhetorical overload in comments on this site, including my own at times, I appreciate your pointing to concrete situations and facts. It”s late and I had a long day at work so of the three states you mention, I only had time to do a little research on one: Maine (in part because it’s such a beautiful state and because one of my best friends lives there).

    You’re of course right that the initiative for background checks lost. But note, Alpheus and Eric, that in Maine, which is not generally considered part of what you, Eric, call the Democratic “coastal enclave,” — it has a Republican (in fact, a “Tea Party”) governor and from 2005-2013 both its US Senators were Republicans too — the initiative lost by a narrow margin, about 52-48% — see https://ballotpedia.org/Maine_Background_Checks_for_Gun_Sales,_Question_3_(2016). In part, the initiative lost because of the determined opposition of the NRA, which used its usual fear tactics and expended financial resources on it, and of Governor LePage.

    The ballot defeat is significant for us Democrats, and its narrowness is significant for Republicans. Perhaps the lesson here is the opposite of what you suggest, Eric: not that the Democrats should “reverse” their position on gun control — again, that’s both undesirable from my point of view and it’s anyway highly unrealistic — but that we should put more campaign muscle and money in attempting to counter NRA fear messages and persuade more fellow voters that reasonable/common-sense gun control laws are good for public safety without impinging on the rights of responsible gun owners.

  567. To Xopher Halftongue (today, 9:15): “David Szonyi just wants to disarm white people…” — not worth responding to, other than to say these words fly riidiculously far away from anything I’ve actually thought, written, or implied — “…then use third world savages to kill the now defenseless whites.” Nothing like “spicing up” this blog with a little out-and-out paranoia and racism….

  568. @David Szonyi
    Define “racism.”

    And I note that you gave your game away by siding with deadly third world savages… thus proving that “public safety” isn’t the real reason for your support for gun bans.

  569. To Eric’s comment of 10:46 PM: I basically agree with you that proponents of gun rights aren’t “crazy” or necessarily “right-wing,” — though too many are extreme anti-government liberatarians –and that it’s both a disservice to the truth and bad politics by Democrats to portray them that way.

    But let’s drop the crude stereotypes on the other side too: that those of us who want more background checks are supposedly out of touch with American culture (by which, Eric and others, you really mean the culture that agrees with you). that we’re planning broad gun “confiscations” (a move that you, Eric, yourself have argued would be politically unviable), etc., etc. And contra the “purist” NRA approach, that opposes even the modest proposed reforms (prohibiting gun sales to those on the government’s “no fly” list), let’s balance the rights of gun owners with the public’s right to feel and be safe.

    1. David Szonyi said,

      … contra the “purist” NRA approach, that opposes even the modest proposed reforms (prohibiting gun sales to those on the government’s “no fly” list) …

      I have seen a variant which might gain acceptance among the gun community: prohibiting gun sales to registered Democrats. It’s no more a violation of Due Process than the “no-fly list” idea, and has the great advantage that most recent mass shootings have been perpetrated by registered Democrats.

  570. Sorry, Halftongue, I’m not going for the bait and getting into a pointless debate about what “racism” means. When you write about “third world savages” who want to kill all American whites, you illustrate the term perfectly and your words condemn themselves.

    Eric, does this kind of entry cause you any unease? Is it the kind of stuff you want on your blog?

  571. @David Szonyi

    And note that Szonyi refuses to define “racism,” …

    Is it getting a little too close to your genocidal early Bolshevik ancestors… eh, Szonyi?

    All those tens of millions of White Christian Russians your ancestors murdered… Including the brutal and horrific murder of Saint Czar Nicholas II and his beautiful family :(


  572. > it would be militarily nonviable.

    It would be horseshit.

    Not only it is viable. It would not need the military. All it would take is making the penalty for possessing an illegal weapon more than the penalty of possessing a few grams of heroin.

  573. The same people who enforce the drug laws once drugs/marijuana are legalized and once Obama issues a pardon for non-violent drug offenders.

    Next question. Where will they be housed?
    Answer: The vacancies created in the prison industrial complex from aforementioned pardon.

  574. Note how David Szonyi hasn’t responded awhile after I mentioned his vicious and evil ancestors that he is willing to emulate…

    @uma
    “The same people who enforce the drug laws once drugs/marijuana are legalized and once Obama issues a pardon for non-violent drug offenders.
    Next question. Where will they be housed?
    Answer: The vacancies created in the prison industrial complex from aforementioned pardon.”

    Which people would that be, uma?
    I noticed you didn’t say “police” or “military”…

  575. To JC Salomon: Oh great: a political means test for owning guns. How democratic…

    Anyway, you don’t seem to understand what “due process” means. It *doesn’t* mean that the government isn’t allowed to impose what it consider reasonable restrictions on behavior. Otherwise, things like taxes and speed limits would supposedly be a violation of due process. By your definition, the “no-fly list” would itself be a violation of due process — and so would *any* background check on anyone.

    1. David Szonyi said,

      By your definition, the “no-fly list” would itself be a violation of due process

      As currently implemented, yes it is. Why is this even remotely surprising?

  576. @uma

    Would that be the Black and Mestizo gang bangers enforcing this?

    We already had a discussion on this up thread…

    The disciplined legions of Whites (and their nuclear weapons, if necessary) would get rid of these street rats.

  577. @uma

    “All it would take is making the penalty for possessing an illegal weapon more than the penalty of possessing a few grams of heroin.”

    They have laws just like that in CT and NY. Guess what? They aren’t being enforced even though 95% of the gun owners aren’t complying. The majority of Sheriffs have flat said they won’t do it. Why? Because they understand that we are their neighbors and they’ll be easy 24/7 prey.

  578. @David Szonyi
    You still aren’t responding to my posts on your evil ancestors…
    Predictable.

    “To JC Salomon: Oh great: a political means test for owning guns. How democratic…”

    Look at JAD’s (Jim) posts on who should actually vote. (Answer: Those who could actually fight and win a potential CIVIL WAR).

  579. Next question: Why would white suburbia comply ?
    Answer: Because they are law abiding (what ESR calls “Switzerland”). It is their mentally ill kids with easy access to guns that commit mass shootings. A problem that would largely disappear when the parents comply with the laws.

  580. @David Szonyi

    Eric, I present to you David Szonyi as the prototypical example of Liberal Dogma as a psychological pathology that is functionally equivalent to an addiction. I don’t know to what extent you may have personal experience with people who suffer from debilitating addiction disorders, but it is not curable via rational discourse. AA and CA do not talk people out of addiction via discourse, but rather attempt a gradual behavior re-wiring via repetitious messaging (crude memetic reprogramming).

    I know that your intention with this post is serious intervention before the Democrats self-destruct, but the probability of success is not in your favor. Rather, I think they will become much more extreme during the next few years. Former addicts call this the death spiral.

  581. “The disciplined legions of Whites (and their nuclear weapons, if necessary) would get rid of these street rats.”

    No, jackass, you won’t use nukes, for the same reason that the military isn’t going to use Hellfires on homes in suburbia. The collateral damage would be too high a price to pay.


  582. Look at JAD’s (Jim) posts on who should actually vote. (Answer: Those who could actually fight and win a potential CIVIL WAR).

    Yes. And you and JAD will be at the forefront of the battalions. And you have nukes and will win. Next question.

  583. Dream on…. Better idea is to focus on the three most lethal groups: Blacks, Muslims, and Democrats. Disarm all three and US gun violence rates drop to nearly zero and all of the recent mass shootings would have been prevented…

    We need to do it for the children /sarc


  584. > The majority of Sheriffs have flat said they won’t do it. Why? Because they understand that we are their neighbors and they’ll be easy 24/7 prey.

    Your question was answered earlier. A white male, with a house and mortgage, a job, a wife, will not take a chance on violating the law and losing it all. Net result: Compliance. Especially if there would word gets out on violators that are made an example of.

    Sheriffs would be a bad idea to enforce these laws. Feds for sure. It is another homeland security. Good selective enforcement would do the trick and drive the message home. That our streets and schools and malls will be safe from mentally ill kids.

  585. Uma, so, you agree we need to focus on the groups where the majority of the shooters come from???

    The last rounds of shooters have been Jihadis or Democrats.

    When will you be turning in your weapons?

  586. David Szonyi on 2016-12-22 at 18:36:44 said:
    > So, for example, he misleadingly implied that the Australian proposal involved the
    > confiscation of “guns” when he knew, or should have, that it involved only certain
    > limited categories of guns, and he *still*

    I didn’t speak to your earlier idiocy because I was busy and it was buried in 500 some odd responses, but I see you’re still here peddling half truths and propaganda.

    I lived in Australia for 2 years. I was, while there, licensed by the government to shoot certain firearms (not own, just shoot. At a gun club. Which I had to join (and pay for) *before* I was allowed to get a license.)

    The current Australian laws are written specifically to discourage participation in the shooting sports, leaving fewer and fewer shooters every year–so that eventually they’ll just make it either illegal or economically infeasible for the average bloke (I suspect the latter, as the elitest pigs *do* enjoy their fine Italian doubles and potting the occasional bird or two.)

    The Australian Gun “By-back[1]” was not “certain limited categories of guns”. It was *all* guns that were NOT in certain categories. Self loading (aka “semi-automatic”) rifles were all confiscated except for owners of ranches (known as stations there) in the outback where they were allowed to be kept for animal control (Maurading camels and such. And no, I’m not joking. Camels are an ‘invasive species’ there and can be hunted year around by rifle or bow).

    If you did not have “reason” to own the firearm you had to “sell it back”. This means that the SMLE Grandad brought back from Tripoli had to either be turned in and destroyed (!!!), or de-milled. The Webley that had been in your family for generations? Gone.

    The .22 revolver that you’d used for plinking as a kid? Gone, unless you were going to join a club and participate in monthly target shooting.

    So while a lot of firearms could be kept under certain narrowly tailored and fairly restrictive rules, the vast majority of people were required by law to sell their firearms back to the government.

    You have to show cause to own a firearm *at all*, and “hunting” only gets you manually operated rifles (bolt action, lever action, pump) and shotguns. Pistols are illegal to hunt with. Self Defense is *not* a cause, and you *can not* use a firearm in defense of self and others, except for dangerous game. Which in Australia means Crocs, which you aren’t allowed to hunt because they’re endangered.

    I don’t know the full rules around acquiring a rifle to hunt with, because that was never really and interest while I was there.

    Forgive me if these are a little off, as it’s been 4 years, and the rules are slightly different in different states (I was in the NT):

    For pistols you have to be involved in a “sport”, and there are very strict rules around *just* keeping your license to shoot. For the first year or so you aren’t allowed to own a pistol (it’s actually 6 months IIRC before you can apply for your license to buy, but it takes 6 months or so to process). The rules for each sport limit what you can buy, and if you shot shooting in a particular sport you’re *required* to sell or turn in your pistol.

    If, as happened to one of the guys I shot with, you get a new job that keeps you too busy to shoot for a few months and this and that, you lose your license and have a limited time to sell your guns, or you turn them in.

    Oh, and if you do buy a gun it (at least in the NT) gets shipped to the police department, which is where you pick it up. When you pick it up you have to prove to them (sometimes by inspection, but sometimes they’ll let you get by with pictures) that you have safe storage facilities (you can also arrange to store it at someone else’s house, or the gun club that you have to belong to). Oh, and the SS…I mean the police have the authority to inspect your firearms and storage facility at “any reasonable time”.

    Ammunition is frightfully expensive, and the government imposes stringent regulations on shipping. Here in the US I can (and routinely do) order 1000s of rounds at a time and have them shipped to either my house or a P.O. box. In Australia bullets are “hazardous material” and must be shipped by a special carrier.

    So in short, you’re either ignorant, or VERY CAREFULLY lying about what happened in Australia.

    Just as you were when you said “More Americans have died within our borders from firearms in the past 5 years than have in Iraq and Afghanistan combined in the past 15.” The main killer of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has been IEDs (I was in Baghdad in 2009), and because we give our troops *good* body armor and other protections, as well as VERY aggressive first aid training and RAPID medical evacuations we lose very few soldiers (relatively). If we were to teach this sort of first aid in high schools you’d see a LOT more American lives saved.

    Of course, if you were honest about the statistics you’d have to admit that the vast majority that would be saved ranged from petty criminals to hard core gangbanging felons for whom a gunshot wound rightly falls into the category of “occupational hazard”.

    But this is why gun owners, by and large, don’t trust Democrats worth spit.

    No, that’s not true. We do. When that evil bitch from California said “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffI-tWh37UY), we believed her. We believe Josh Sugarman, who is at least honest about his goals. He lies to achieve them, but he’s honest about what he wants.

    You aren’t.

    [1] “Gun Buy Back” is a horribly Orwellian phrase, which explains why the left likes it so much. They operate from the assumption that government has the right and the authority to own and or control pretty much everything. Except abortions.

  587. We have the technology to a) Make sure that anyone who fires a gun has a permit to fire a gun (smart guns including retrofit kits that can be mandated) b) Do background checks c) conceal carry permits for individuals of good moral character including Trump’s reciprocity.

    We need all of the above. Is it feasible at this point? No, and democrats should focus on other shit (per ESR’s advice)

    1. > (smart guns including retrofit kits that can be mandated)

      I will never use a “smart gun” or accept a retrofit. I am too aware of the poor quality of firmware in most devices, and will not allow my life or that of my loved ones to be hostage to it.

  588. David Szonyi on 2016-12-22 at 20:03:28 said:
    > Hey, Rick T — If you don’t trust us at all and aren’t willing to even try to find common
    > ground, then I guess that each of us is reduced to staying inside our polemical shells
    > and talking only to like-minded people — talk about what Eric calls “enclaves”!

    There is no longer common ground.

    You and your side want to control every aspect of society.

    I, and those on my side want freedom.

    All we’re trying to do is get the undecided people in the middle to fall to one side or the other.

  589. ” Feds for sure. It is another homeland security. Good selective enforcement would do the trick and drive the message home. That our streets and schools and malls will be safe from mentally ill kids.”

    https://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/what-i-saw-at-the-coup/
    “Dennis had always assumed that the combined might of our armed federal agents and their SWAT Teams, reinforced with local police and, if necessary, the National Guard or even the Army, could crush any conceivable right-wing reaction to his plan. But social network analysis couldn’t find snipers who were not part of any network. That’s when we began to hear of “The Militia of One.” In the end there were too many rifles, and too many willing shooters. A number that was constantly heard was twenty million. That was the number of Americans who supposedly went deer hunting every year, against less than 200,000 armed federal agents.”

    Place your bet.

  590. My bet is that whites will comply with the law. And that we’ll be safe from their mentally deranged socially unadjusted kids. And that network effects, if anything, will accelerate compliance.

  591. To O’Blivion (00:47): Long email with a “nice start: a few casually tossed out ad hominen comments/insults about me. Not the way to win friends and influence people. You need a better argumentative strategy if you don’t want to lose your reader from the first paragraph. You can be right as rain but, given your tone, it doesn’t matter. You’ll be locked in your own world, like Halftongue, with his Ngrams, wild fantasies of who I and my ancestors are, and veneration of the czar.

    I skimmed what you wrote about Australia, bloke, and kind of respect what you know about the Australian gun scene. But what’s it have to do with the U.S.?? The most telling and relevant
    sentence of your long post was: “Here in the US I can (and routinely do) order 1000s of rounds at a time and have them shipped to either my house or a P.O. box.” It doesn’t exactly sound like the government’s goons are coming in the dead of night to confiscate your (or anyone else’s) guns and ammo..

    To Uma (00:53): You and Eric are involved in a futile exercise in “advising” — in Eric’s case, it’s more like directing — us Democrats on what we should focus. Sorry, guys, you don’t and won’t have a monopoly on the gun issue; you’re going to have to keep tolerating very different viewpoints than yours. In fact, it’s not at all clear you have a majority of the American people on your side. Yes. millions of Americans favor gun rights — I’m one, despite the hysterics who post on this site but sometimes don’t read very well — but only a small fraction of those favor the absolutist “gun rights” (and thus public safety wrongs) that some people on this blog advocate.

    Those of you who are conservatives and/or Republicans would do better to advise your own leaders on what they should focus on (Trump is so busy tweeting, including how he should have/could have/would have won the popular vote (“Welcome to Trump” indeed!) that he’s having a hard time focusing on much of anything and what the devil is poor Mitch McConnell going to focus on once Obama is out of office?). Enough of the unsolicited, pretty damn poor advice — make some solid arguments backed by some some facts and we can have a serious discussion.

    To TomA (::00:24): Nice of you to “present” me to Eric; now I know what it feels like either a debutante or Exhibit A (of what? An addict? People whose views you can’t tolerate are pathological addicts? And *I’m” the one who’s irrational?). But seriously, the thing is, Tom: Life is short, time is precious, and not all comments are worth responding to….

  592. @ esr

    You inadvertently touch on another aspect of the blindness, or epistemic closure, that has finally caught up with the Democrats and given them Trump.

    I do hope you read the rest of my post!

  593. Note that (((David Szonyi))) refuses to admit the culpability of his (((ancestors))) in the murdered of millions of Russians. (((David)))… Russia and her Czar, Putin, remembers…

    @uma
    “Whites will comply with the anti-gun laws (anti-White laws)”

    Several posters here have already noted that Whites are already ignoring the antigun laws in mass and their Sheriff Prætorians are ignoring these illegitimate laws as well.
    Sooner or later, unarmed Brahmins like uma and (((David Szonyi))) will be given freee helicopter rides by the Prætorians they think will enforce the illegitimate laws they pass…


  594. > Several posters here have already noted that Whites are already ignoring the antigun in mass

    – All laws are not created equal. Some laws are more equal than others.
    – I don’t trust “white perspectives” on this.
    – Ultimately, what benefits people has its way of planting its roots in the ground, and if no laws are passed that genuinely hamper (white) people’s ability to defend themselves, the die hard opposition will consist of kooks and nutjobs. The normal folk will comply. Compliance will be gradual and it will take years to drain the swamp. But it will happen.

  595. To Uma (3:51 AM): Let me get this straight: The country has just elected Trump, who sang the NRA’s song as a candidate (Remember all the stuff about Hillary supposedly wanting to “rescind” the Second Amendment?), as president; conservative Republicans now control both the House and Senate, and the GOP controls about two-thirds of the the state houses, yet you write “…if no laws are passed that genuinely hamper (white) people’s ability to defend themselves….” Huh — what’s all that premised on? I’m probably an idiot for posing the question again (but then no one came close to answering it the first time around): Who exactly is proposing anything, and what exactly is being proposed, that would hamper people’s ability to defend themselves? What gets me about some of you “gun rights” purists is how simultaneously fearful and combative you are — guess the two are related.

    Incidentally, why are you only interested in “white” people’s ability to defend themselves — what of black, brown, red, and yellow people — don’t they have a right to self-defense too? Or are gun rights in the service of white supremacy?

    To Xopher Halftongue — Nope, I’m not going to respond, ever, to the collective, largely incoherent fantasies you’ve spun about my ancestors, about whom you know a lot less than nothing. (If you did, you would be, or should be, pretty damn embarrassed by what you wrote, though maybe you’re beyond embarrassment).

    As for the “((( ))),” when all else fails, when you don’t have a real argument to make, send in the clowns — that is, the antisemites. The weird, ugly symbol doesn’t scare me but it is perfect for the echo chamber you find yourself trapped in.

    Eric, my man, where are you? We’ve now had a threat of violence (we’ll kill all the people who want to seize our guns), a little racism (third-world savages) and a little antisemitism, “((( ))),” on your blog, and that’s just in the past 48 hours — and you’ve been ineloquently silent (I take it partly back; you did endorse the threat of violence.) . Not good for the blog’s credibility, as your silence in the face of all this isn’t good for yours.

    1. > and you’ve been ineloquently silent

      I have a no-censorship policy here. I’m aware we have at least one virulent racist among my regulars, and I despise him utterly, but it is against my principles to ban for opinions I disagree with. I don’t always respond to such farragos because I think in most cases they are obviously self-condemning.


  596. > Who exactly is proposing anything, and what exactly is being proposed, that would hamper people’s ability to defend themselves?

    Smug democrats. That is how they are “perceived” by (white) people. And perception is reality until you change it in their minds, or drop the issue altogether. The problem is with the messenger (democrats) not the necessarily message (need for some common sense gun laws).

  597. ” We’ve now had a threat of violence (we’ll kill all the people who want to seize our guns)”

    You do know that everyone who’s been in the military (and many who haven’t) has taken an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

    And that a large portion of those people actually take that oath seriously?

    Just checking.

  598. “Those of you who are conservatives and/or Republicans would do better to advise your own leaders on what they should focus on”

    1) They control both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and (soon) the Supreme Court (likely for a generation… maybe two).

    2) They also control both houses in 32 states. You control both houses in 13.

    3) They hold the governorship in 33 states. You hold the governorship in 16.

    4) They have full control (either both houses and the governorship, or a veto-proof majority in the legislature) in 27 states. You hold full control in 6.

    But by all means do continue giving them advice on what they should be doing.

    “(Trump is so busy tweeting, including how he should have/could have/would have won the popular vote””

    As near as I can tell, Trump’s tweets for the last week amount to about 800 words (a little over one classic newspaper column, or say a column and a half by modern standards).

    Somehow I doubt that this has taken up a significant fraction of his time.

  599. David Szonyi: “And contra the “purist” NRA approach, that opposes even the modest proposed reforms (prohibiting gun sales to those on the government’s “no fly” list)”

    The government’s “no fly” list is extremely unreliable. All it takes to get put on it is one statement by one FBI agent who doesn’t even have to allege you’re a terrorist! Once you’re on it, getting off of it again is next to impossible. That alt-right mouthpiece The New York Times even came out against the no-fly list before it was in favor of using it to deny Americans’ civli rights.

    I guess the words “due process of law” don’t apply to gun owners.

    “It *doesn’t* mean that the government isn’t allowed to impose what it consider reasonable restrictions on behavior.”

    True. It does, however, mean that the government cannot deprive you of life, liberty, or property without doing more than simply banning it – especially foundational civil liberties, such as the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Having one bureaucrat submit your name for inclusion on a secret list without your having any way to challenge that status does not meet the tests of due process of law. Hint: just because a law is passed mandating something does not mean it’s met that test.

    “let’s balance the rights of gun owners with the public’s right to feel and be safe.”

    There is no right to feel safe. The government is not in the business of coddling your feelings. The only safety you have a right to is the safety you make for yourself.

    uma: “We have the technology to a) Make sure that anyone who fires a gun has a permit to fire a gun (smart guns including retrofit kits that can be mandated)”

    No, we don’t. So-called “smart guns” aren’t 100% reliable. Not even close. A gun must fire reliably, every time, without fail, or else it’s useless when you need one – and when you need a gun, you need it very, very badly.

    Further, what other Constitutionally-guaranteed right do you need a permit from the government to exercise? The question answers itself.

    David Szonyi again: “I skimmed what you wrote about Australia, bloke, and kind of respect what you know about the Australian gun scene. But what’s it have to do with the U.S.??”

    Why do you think that politicians speaking favorably about the Australian confiscation scheme – which William’s post clearly shows it to be – set off alarm bells?

    “It doesn’t exactly sound like the government’s goons are coming in the dead of night to confiscate your (or anyone else’s) guns and ammo..”

    Yet. They will if folks like you gain power.

    “Yes. millions of Americans favor gun rights — I’m one, despite the hysterics who post on this site but sometimes don’t read very well”

    No, you don’t. If you’re not an absolutist on the Second Amendment, you favor letting the camel’s nose farther and farther into the tent. There is no middle ground. I simply don’t trust you wheny ou say you favor gun rights but want “reasonable” restrictions, because everything hinges on the word “reasonable”, and that’s historically been used to defend everything up to and including gun bans.

    “Enough of the unsolicited, pretty damn poor advice — make some solid arguments backed by some some facts and we can have a serious discussion.”

    We’ve been trying, but you’ve handwaved away our arguments.

    “Remember all the stuff about Hillary supposedly wanting to “rescind” the Second Amendment?”

    Can any president unilaterally rescind it? Of course not. Can they effectively write it out of the Constitution? Betcherass they can. All they have to do is make Supreme Court appointments that result in the Court overturning the precedent of DC v. Heller and holding the right to keep and bear arms to be one of the government, not individuals. At that point, it might as well not exist, as with any right the courts do not enforce.

    Hillary Clinton promised to do exactly that. “Repeal”? No. Nullify? Yes.

    Eric: “I will never use a “smart gun” or accept a retrofit. I am too aware of the poor quality of firmware in most devices, and will not allow my life or that of my loved ones to be hostage to it.”

    These days, I do embedded firmware in C for a living. I wouldn’t trust my life to my code. (Fortunately, I don’t have to. The worst that might happen if my code goes south is that someone has to grab a front-end loader and clean up a bunch of spilled material.) I would demand that so-called “smart gun” firmware be developed to the same standards and using the same processes and procedures and quality frameworks as, say, implantable defibrillators.

  600. “Eric, my man, where are you? We’ve now had a threat of violence (we’ll kill all the people who want to seize our guns), ”

    In my case, he wasn’t silent; he backed me up.

    esr commented on Hey, Democrats! We need you to get your act together!.

    in response to David Szonyi:

    To SDN’s “What we are saying is that we have a fundamental right to armed self defense, and if you try to take that right away, we’ll kill you all.” Hmn… — so your “fundamental” right includes a right to murder without due process? Count me a little scared by your extremism but otherwise very […]

    >To Eric: You’re of course not responsible for SDN’s point of view but your blog has hosted it, so I’m curious what you think about it.

    I agree with it. Self-defense against tyrants is not murder. The U.S. was founded by men and women who understood this.

    Unlike you, he refuses to prefer comfort over liberty. Now, you and uma lick chains.

  601. David Szonyi on 2016-12-23 at 01:57:47 said:

    “I skimmed what you wrote about Australia, bloke, and kind of respect what you know about the Australian gun scene. But what’s it have to do with the U.S.?? The most telling and relevant
    sentence of your long post was:”

    You clearly have no idea how deep a hole you’ve dug yourself when even Trouwater tells you that you’re not getting it. So you’ve gone from wanting more information on the Australian model (engaging on the Australia point) to asking what it has to do with anything. And then you skim a bunch of relevant information (that you’ve asked for, begged for) and have the temerity to hector everyone here on rhetoric? You skim a very informative response and then think you’ve been able to isolate the most relevant part?

    You didn’t.

    You’ve completely lost yourself in the discussion and tone that YOU created. You’re dishonest, and quite frankly, not very bright. This isn’t ad hominem, it’s a conclusion based on your consistent self-beclowning in this thread alone. I’m not sure who is a better representative for the Dunning-Kruger effect here, you or uma.

    Before you try the self-righteous defense again, note that I’m only attacking your rhetorical style because it sucks. Very few people are going to give you the engagement you supposedly crave because you simply come across as an unjustifiably condescending asshole.

  602. “””In part, the initiative lost because of the determined opposition of the NRA, which used its usual fear tactics and expended financial resources on it, and of Governor LePage.”””

    There’s something very important to that you need to understand about the NRA. It wasn’t always a gung-ho preservation-of-rights organization. It tended to focus on teaching hunter safety and encouraging people to be able to hit a target; legislatively, they tended to go along with “common sense” gun laws.

    I think it was in the 1970’s that this changed, and it was taken over by people who were tired of the death-by-a-thousand-cuts whittling away of our rights, and so they managed to take over the leadership and replace it with one that was still somewhat squishy, but more likely than not, would push for gun rights. While the NRA has been getting better every year, to this day gun owners distrust the NRA, and fear that they will sell out our rights if given the opportunity.

    Now, you might say “But this is paranoid!” It’s not paranoia if they are *really* out to get you. If you’re not immersed in gun culture, and watching the political scene, you are likely unaware of the hints and subtle attacks that the Obama Administration has been making, in both word and action, that have been dropped over the last eight years.

    The thing is, gun bans aren’t about controlling crime. The Assault Weapon ban of 1994? It’s been demonstrated that it had no measurable effect on crime. And why should it? Statistics show that only around 500 people die every year from rifles of ALL types. Why should banning guns with bayonet lugs make us safer? When was the last time you’ve heard of a gangland drive-by bayonet charge?

    No, the purpose of the Assault Weapon Ban was to get Americans used to the idea of having guns banned, so that less people will get involved in the shooting sports, and so that more people would be more comfortable with banning other types of guns later. To this end, the Assault Weapon Ban backfired badly. Perhaps more than anything else, it is THE reason why Americans don’t trust Democrats on this issue. (To get a better idea why this is so, if you have ever seen the clip where Senator Barbara Boxer says “If I were able to do so, I would tell America to turn them all in”, it was when she was working to pass the Assault Weapon Ban.)

    Yet, even though Democrats now know it’s clear the Assault Weapon Ban isn’t about conrolling crime, Hillary Clinton in this campaign said she’d like to bring the Assault Weapon Ban back — and that she’d make it even stronger.

    I see you haven’t yet addressed why gun owners so vehemently oppose Initiative 594 from Washington State, and similar initiatives in Nevada and Maine. Please, go do that. And before you try to sugar-coat its effects, please make sure you *fully* understand what it is that we oppose about it.

  603. @esr


    > I will never use a “smart gun” or accept a retrofit. I am too aware of the poor quality of firmware in most devices, and will not allow my life or that of my loved ones to be hostage to it.

    What if the electronics were reliable ? E.g. by implementing everything as a formally verified state machine (all hardware solution) with fault tolerance techniques implemented in the hardware etc?

    Is the (buggy) firmware your only objection? Or would you refuse any weapon that is not purely mechanical.

    1. >Is the (buggy) firmware your only objection?

      Almost. The design and implementation would have to be open-source auditable and extremely well tested before I would even theoretically consider using it. In practice I doubt the required degree of rigor will ever be achieved.

      Also, I would have to have confidence that the enabling circuitry could not be taken out by a HERF gun. One plausible interpretation of the push for smart weapons is that law enforcement wants to be able to push a zap button and disable all nearby firearms. I am not in principle willing for them to have that power, and in practice it would swiftly be hijacked by criminals.

  604. @uma

    “What if the electronics were reliable ?”

    Adding additional failure modes can only harm reliability. It also adds additional cost, complexity, less serviceability. All for no gain. Simple things work better than complicated things.

    “Or would you refuse any weapon that is not purely mechanical.”

    I refuse to use any weapon that can be remote disabled by the government or taken out by an EMP-like device. Now, please show us how naive you are and proclaim that the government would never do such a thing!!!

    In the broader view, I do not subscribe to the techno-salvation religion.

  605. David S, you *really* need to work on reading comprehension.. We now have a threat to kill all the people who want to seize our guns

    Nobody said want, we say try.

    Response to a tyrannical act…

    Uma, why are you so focused on disarming the least dangerous demographic (in acts per 100,000) and not the two MOST dangerous? I will leave the smart gun fantasy to the talking points memo you must be working from, no one in the Real World has any expectations that technology will be available any time soon…


  606. > Adding additional failure modes can only harm reliability.

    Yes. Correct. But only partially. I have seen data on bullets that are fired with circuitry (ie electric capacitor discharge igniting the propellent) vs bullets that are fired mechanically and electronic beat mechanical in every parameter that matters (exit velocity etc). Data was limited to one gun (rifle) but was conclusive to me that having electronics used in the most important function (firing the bullet) is not bad.

    From a big picture systems engineering viewpoint, having electronics in a firearm does not necessarily result in a worse weapon. Purely mechanical is simpler, not necessarily better or more reliable.

    Having RF mechanism enable/disable the gun is a dumb idea. Something like the fingerprint sensor on smartphones would be better.

  607. “””(Remember all the stuff about Hillary supposedly wanting to “rescind” the Second Amendment?)”””

    Isn’t this believing that Hillary “supposedly wanting to ‘rescind’ the Second Amendment” based on Hillary’s own statements that she thinks Heller was wrongly decided, and that we need Supreme Court justices that will overturn (or at least ignore) Heller?

    Hillary supposedly wants to rescind the First Amendment, too: she thinks Citizen’s United was wrongly decided, but there are a lot of people who think that people who voluntarily exercise their right to free association to organize themselves as a corporation (“Citizens United”) to specifically criticize a candidate (Hillary Clinton) by making a movie (“Hillary: The Movie”) should be able play that movie during an election where that candidate is running for office (Hillary’s first run for the Presidency).

    It’s for reasons like this that I do not believe Democrats care all that much about our liberties.

  608. “””From a big picture systems engineering viewpoint, having electronics in a firearm does not necessarily result in a worse weapon. Purely mechanical is simpler, not necessarily better or more reliable.”””

    When you have to take into account electronics that can withstand recoil, be 100% and instantaneously reliant (fingerprinting is neither reliant nor instantaneous — you don’t want to wait 1 second for your gun to ID you, when a person with a knife from 21 feet can close that gap and stab you in 1.5 seconds, or 2 seconds if he has a limp), *and* be able to fit into a gun while still leaving room for 7 to 15 extra rounds…fingerprinting technology, or pretty much any smart gun technology, for that matter, isn’t ready for self-defense use.

    Combine that with (1) we have at least 80 million pistols in circulation that don’t have smart-gun technology, (2) having physical access to a gun makes it that much easier to disable and override circuitry (so it’s not going to stop criminals from using guns), (3) it’s not all that difficult to make a gun in a machine shop, it’s not at all clear that coming up with a working smart gun design is going to make the world all that much safer.

  609. @uma

    “I have seen data … but was conclusive to me”

    Proves nothing. When police and military the world over are scrambling to deploy it then I might consider it.

    “Having RF mechanism enable/disable the gun is a dumb idea.”

    Governments the world over are full of “dumb” ideas. Two words: Edward Snowden.

    “Something like the fingerprint sensor on smartphones would be better.”

    What if my hands are wet?
    Or extremely cold?
    Or extremely hot?
    Or covered by a thick glove?
    Or injured?
    Or covered with oil?
    Or covered with mud?
    Or covered with thick axle grease from the machine I was just working on?
    Or covered with a fine metallic powder from the welding/grinding I’ve been doing?
    What if I need to use my injured friend’s gun to defend the both of us?
    What if I forget to change the battery?

    No, uma, the technology will never be reliable enough. Because however reliable it is, it would be more reliable without it.

    What prevents criminals from making use of a smart gun just like anyone else? Think it won’t be hacked? Last I heard there was a thriving market for stolen smartphones.

    1. >What if I need to use my injured friend’s gun to defend the both of us?

      That’s a showstopper, right there. My position just went from “Only with provably correct firmware and HERF immunity” to “Never”.

  610. I fully intend to buy one of these digital triggers as soon as they start taking orders:

    https://youtu.be/KSyc_WfIC_8

    It would be a non-starter if the electronics couldn’t be trivially bypassed. But with the electronics you get a much better trigger feel (for accuracy) and a fire-on-pull/fire-on-release mode that increases your effective rate of fire.

  611. >It would be a non-starter if the electronics couldn’t be trivially bypassed. But with the electronics you get a much better trigger feel (for accuracy) and a fire-on-pull/fire-on-release mode that increases your effective rate of fire.

    Be VERY careful of a trigger with fire on pull and fire on release. Or in fact anything at all other than one single shot fired per complete pull/release cycle.

    Because that’s a good way to lose everything you own, your livelihood, your good name, your family, and to spend much of the rest of your unfortunate life in PMITA Federal Penitentiary.

  612. >Either way, none of the evidence is consistent with the Greeks being ancestrally a Semitic people. There are Semitic and Turkish elements in the modern Greek phenotype, but their long subjection to the Ottomans is sufficient to explain this. Portions of their haplotype that are more strongly conserved look IE rather than Semitic.

    Is everyone not aware of or ignoring, the very recent large scale (iirc it was several hundred thousand people in each direction) forcible population mutual expulsion ‘exchange’ that Greece and Turkey had around 1920 or so?

    It was done based not on ancestry, ethnicity or genetics in any way, but simply on what language people (by whatever accident of history) spoke.

  613. “Fire on Trigger Release” is a guarantee of a Negligent Discharge if anyone but YOU handles the weapon.. Shooting someone with the unexpected 2nd shot is a good route to the State lockup on a Manslaughter charge if nothing else.

    Legal? Maybe. Prudent? Not a bit IMO.

  614. >The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms disagrees, holding that pulling and releasing are two separate functions of a trigger.

    Possibly. *For now*.

    You’re also aware ATF is notorious for changing its mind, and rarely in ways that involve being more lenient. And there’s no grandfathering when they change their mind.

    Good luck.

  615. >“Fire on Trigger Release” is a guarantee of a Negligent Discharge if anyone but YOU handles the weapon.. Shooting someone with the unexpected 2nd shot is a good route to the State lockup on a Manslaughter charge if nothing else.

    Even if it’s your own gun it seems stupidly dangerous. ‘Trigger pulled’ is not a stable state, there is always a return spring that’s going to try to reset the trigger.

    What on earth do you do if you don’t want to fire that second shot?

    The manual of arms would seem to be problematic. Or at least oddly complex, with a need for complex modes of behavior in that trigger design. (Can you put it on safe with the trigger pulled? Is it really safe? How do you ‘depull’ that trigger? Would it reset without firing if you put the selector into conventional single shot mode? Do you need to add a depuller, like DA/SA designs have a decocker?)

  616. @(((David Szonyi)))
    “Eric, my man, where are you? We’ve now had a threat of violence (we’ll kill all the people who want to seize our guns), a little racism (third-world savages) and a little antisemitism, “((( ))),” on your blog, and that’s just in the past 48 hours — and you’ve been ineloquently silent (I take it partly back; you did endorse the threat of violence.) . Not good for the blog’s credibility, as your silence in the face of all this isn’t good for yours.”

    A Lügenakademischer like you are no judge of credibility. You already outed yourself by refusing to define “racism.” A normal person would have tried to define “racism.” You know it is a totally made up word invented by (((Leon Trotsky))) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=racism&year_start=1800&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cracism%3B%2Cc0

    @esr
    Note how David concern trolls you about the “credibility of your blog.” Notice the fake verbal advice he gives you – (((how typical))) – about “improving” your blog. As pointed out by the poster, “Oliver Cromwell,” people like David will still call you a racist no matter how hard you comdemn JAD.

  617. @Greg

    You hold it for 6 seconds, or you use your left hand to reach the back of the grip and press the other mode button. Or you point the gun in a safe direction and release.

    You could probably also release the grip safety. They don’t mention that one in the video, but the electronics are clever enough to enforce order-of-operations constraints on the system elsewhere.

    Without knowing more about what’s going on inside the receiver, I can’t say for sure that putting the selector in the Safe position would cancel the pending release shot.

    Also, pull/release mode is not the default, and it from the controls, it looks like you are very unlikely to put it into that mode unintentionally.

    @ David

    There isn’t much funnier in life than watching a SJW attempt to execute step 6 in the attack plan before realizing that the relevant authority is not merely un-amenable, but downright hostile. Please do keep it up, Comrade Szonyi, your antics are much more amusing than the other usual trolls.


  618. > What if I need to use my injured friend’s gun to defend the both of us?

    This is the only one of your objections that has (some) merit in that it could mirror real life self defense situations. When weighed against the benefit of having the gun only fired by the person authorized to fire it (as opposed to their mentally deranged kid) the benefits far outweigh the shortcomings.

  619. I have banned the fake Xopher Halftongue. I found his anti-Semitic raving revolting, but that was not the reason. I continue to have a no-censorship policy here, but impersonation or sock-puppeting is a crash landing. Accordingly, the fake was banned for masquerading as Christopher Hatton.

    I meant to get to it sooner, but I’ve been under time pressure. I apologize to Christopher and all who were offended by this person’s disgusting drivel.

  620. @Greg


    > Is everyone not aware of or ignoring, the very recent large scale (iirc it was several hundred thousand people in each direction) forcible population mutual expulsion ‘exchange’ that Greece and Turkey had around 1920 or so

    1) DNA evidence factors for that. It can easily determine if your male ancestors arrived on a recent migration or a neolithic era migration. DNA analysis is also performed on old skeletons etc. Add to that the statistical techniques in the analysis of the data can typically determine recent from not-so-recent migrations.

    2) Turkey, as per DNA evidence, is not made up of central asian turks, but rather middle eastern populations that were Turkified over a period of a few centuries. Their haplogroup makeup isn’t much different from that of Greece with the noted exception that the north african haplogroup (E1b) is in fact more common in Greece than Turkey.

  621. @uma “the benefits far outweigh the shortcomings.”

    To whom, asshole?

    The shortcomings of not being able to use an otherwise functional weapon to defend ones life are just about as massive as it is possible to be.

    Your pitiful paranoia and hoplophobia give you no moral right or justification to ask others to risk the shortcomings, just because you stand to gain the benefits.

  622. @esr:


    > You get to make that choice only for yourself, not others.

    1) Getting covered for every conceivable self-defense situation, is no different than being covered for every conceivable mentally deranged suburban kid situation.

    2) Your choice does not end with you. It impacts me. Your freedom (to defend yourself in every conceivable situation) ends where other people’s freedom (to be protected from your mentally deranged kid) begins.

    The best defense against the mentally deranged suburban kid is to deny him access to a weapon that he can easily fire. The second best defense is conceal carry for individuals of sound moral character. I support both.

  623. uma focuses on “mentally deranged suburban kid” AKA young white probably Republican males to the exclusion of Democrats, Muslims and Blacks, the three groups responsible for the most recent attacks, including the “Assault Truck” attacks in Nice and Berlin… The Sandy Hook shooter came from a Democratic family, as did Columbine.

    Wrong camel’s nose for this tent.

  624. Rick T beat me to it. Uma’s obsession with the dangers of “mentally deranged suburban kids” is pretty funny.


  625. > uma focuses on “mentally deranged suburban kid” AKA young white probably Republican males to the exclusion of Democrats, Muslims and Blacks

    1) I live in a “Switzerland”, and the most likely threat in a “Switzerland” will come from the mentally deranged suburban kid.
    2) Muslim violence is a real problem, but a temporary problem that will prove to be a transient phenomenon. It falls under the category of political or politically motivated violence. Once the conditions that brought it about disappear, it will simply disappear.

  626. “2) Your choice does not end with you. It impacts me. Your freedom (to defend yourself in every conceivable situation) ends where other people’s freedom (to be protected from your mentally deranged kid) begins. ”

    Except that my freedom to defend myself is innate to my existence and enshrined in the Constitution; your ability to take it away because feelings isn’t either one. If you want to try to take it away, do so. I will defend it. I may die, but you will not take away my fundamental rights without taking the same chance.

  627. “Your choice does not end with you. It impacts me. Your freedom (to defend yourself in every conceivable situation) ends where other people’s freedom (to be protected from your mentally deranged kid) begins.”

    I have no children and never will, nor are they permitted in my home. I guess yo uahve no problem with my owning any weapon I can afford, then.


  628. > Except that my freedom to defend myself is innate to my existence and enshrined in the Constitution;

    So you think the constitution treats us all as collateral damage in the name of enshrining your right to defend yourself?

  629. @uma “Your choice does not end with you. It impacts me. Your freedom (to defend yourself in every conceivable situation) ends where other people’s freedom (to be protected from your mentally deranged kid) begins.”

    How racist to refer to mentally deranged kids as the dangerous ones with guns. You’re right in line with other Democrats over the years who have used the spectre of young black males (“super predators”, HRC) to scare whites into supporting gun control.

    And you’re not just a racist asshole, you’re being a willfully ignorant racist asshole. Laws on the books already restrict gun ownership and possession from the underage and mentally ill. As you’ve already got what you claim to want, shut up and try peddling your virtue signalling somewhere else.

  630. uma: “it can easily determine if your male ancestors arrived on a recent migration or a neolithic era migration.”

    Still waiting for that cite, uma.

    Tick-tock, tick-tock.

    Rick T: “The Sandy Hook shooter came from a Democratic family, as did Columbine.”

    As did the one in the Pulse gay nightclub attack.

  631. @ Parallel
    What is with the name calling and all? Need a safe space? Coz it sounds like like you’ve been triggered.

  632. “So you think the constitution treats us all as collateral damage”

    If we’re going to start running roughshod over the constitutional liberties in the name of safety, we should start by outlawing leftist politics.

    Leftists have murdered over 100 million people in the last century — many, many orders of magnitude more than have ever been killed by privately owned guns.

  633. “your ability to take it away because feelings”

    I wanted to expand on this from David Szonyi’s comment earlier: “let’s balance the rights of gun owners with the public’s right to feel and be safe.”

    Feelings are in no way any sort of acceptable grounds on which to govern a society. Government must operate on facts and principles. That someone feels unsafe is not any sort of reason for government to do anything at all. The reason is simple: there’s no way to objectively ensure that a problem exists or can be fixed. Feelings are entirely subjective. The law must never be.

    I’ll also point out that Constitutional rights are never subjected to a balancing test. The right is subject only to restrictions that advance an essential government interest and are the minimum needed to advance that interest. Look up the term “strict scrutiny” sometime.

    The rise of trying to protect people’s feelings, and the concomitant censorship, suppression of dissent, and demonization of those who do not think in lockstep with the Left’s groupthink as it is expressed on a day-to-day basis is destructive to our society as a whole. It is a major factor – perhaps the major factor – in the rise of Donald Trump.

    You have no right to feel safe. You ahve no right to be safe, except in that you hae the right to make yourself safe by your own actions.

  634. Yep. And if you don’t like it, stay in Switzerland where there are actual automatic weapons in every home (including yours if you or your husband is a Swiss citizen).

  635. @uma

    “2) Your choice does not end with you. It impacts me. Your freedom (to defend yourself in every conceivable situation) ends where other people’s freedom (to be protected from your mentally deranged kid) begins.”

    By taking this stance you have made yourself a bigger threat than any “mentally deranged suburban kid”.

    The best defense against the mentally deranged suburban kid is to deny him access to a weapon that he can easily fire.

    You have now made the positive assertion that bans work. [Citation needed.} [Put up or shut up.]

    By way of assistance, you could start with showing how bans have kept cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana out of the hands of “mentally deranged suburban kids”.

  636. @Jay:


    > I have no children and never will, nor are they permitted in my home. I guess yo uahve no problem with my owning any weapon I can afford, then.

    Not any weapon. I wouldn’t be ok with you owning a shoulder fired stinger missile in the name of your “constitutional” and “innate” right to defend against black helicopters. But I am perfectly fine with you buying a pistol (or multiple for that matter).


  637. > You have now made the positive assertion that bans work

    Nope.

    deny != ban

    Smartguns = deny
    Smartguns != ban

  638. @uma

    deny != ban

    You evidently read ‘1984’ as some kind of how-to manual. No matter, your smartgun ban will be shot down everywhere it peaks it ugly head up.

    I already told you why it won’t work, but you are immune to facts and reason.


  639. > Smartgun requirements == bans

    Explain! How is a smart gun a ban? Noted earlier: I understand/agree-with the reliability issues esr brought up. Those are valid issues because they are based in fact (the fact that buggy, closed, non formally verified software doesn’t exactly do what you intend for it to do).

  640. Your “Smart gun” is equal parts unobtanium, unicorn sweat, and hoplophobe fantasty. Plus, it doesn’t address the 100’s of millions of guns out there now.

    California tried to mandate microstamping be added to firearms in the state so a shell casing could be traced back to the gun that fired it. The lawsuits are over, the Courts finally found the required technology is impossible to implement, and the requirement is now dead.

    Hackers have shown how to bypass most, if not all bio-metric authentication systems, your fantasy gun won’t fare any better.

  641. ” I wouldn’t be ok with you owning a shoulder fired stinger missile ”

    My constitutional rights don’t actually depend on whether or not you’re “ok” with them.

    Sorry.

    Are you aware that during the early days of the United States it was common for private citizens to own fully armed and crewed ships of war, capable of shelling and pillaging towns, and taking enemy warships as prizes?


  642. > Hackers have shown how to bypass most, if not all bio-metric authentication systems, your fantasy gun won’t fare any better.

    Why should I assume that the percentage of hacked guns will be more than the percentage hacked/jailbroken iphones? I am sure it will happen. I am not sure it will happen often enough for zero improvement to be the net outcome.

    Plus, if you go for a “pure hardware” approach for the circuitry, it can’t be hacked other than by physically tampering with the device (e.g. gunsmith gutting out all the electronics. Or some printed circuit board type hack where it ends up in forced-enabled mode)


    > Your “Smart gun” is equal parts unobtanium, unicorn sweat, and hoplophobe fantasty.

    Tell that to the gun makers developing these technologies. Save them their wasted R&D $$$, and cure them from their hoplophobia.

  643. @uma

    If you want to start inventing rights to make you feel better than two can play this game.

    I assert the right to not have my universe polluted with irrational minds. You are now required to visit your preferred psychdesigner to have the stupid edited out of your brain, or failing that, kindly off yourself.

    I can come up with a “right” for every “right” you come up with. Do you really want to try this?

    @ESR

    DRM doesn’t stop being evil just because it is attached to a physical object, if anything it becomes more eviler. And what is a “smartgun” but another manifestation of DRM?


  644. > Are you aware that during the early days of the United States it was common for private citizens to own fully armed and crewed ships of war, capable of shelling and pillaging towns, and taking enemy warships as prizes?

    Why stop there? It is your constitutional right to own and have nukes by that logic. That way you can pillage a whole continent. If y’all think that then y’all are f__kin retarded.

  645. @uma

    Hacking them will be easy. Just disable whatever actuator either is preventing striker movement or sear release.

  646. OBTW Uma, you need to work on your your talking points memo…. RF =! HERF

    Nobody above was talking about RF enable/disable of a firearm. HERF is something different. Read about nuclear EMP weapons and the Carrington Event for some examples.

    Besides, your “mentally impaired suburban male” will be able to get a non-smart gun from his local drug dealer in a matter of hours or less.

  647. @RickT


    > HERF is something different. Read about nuclear EMP weapons and the Carrington Event for some examples.

    I am aware but good point. My understanding from basic electromagnetic is that housing circuitry inside a Farady cage (metal/conductive cage) prevents external EM interference. That might be easy for the circuitry but not as easy for the fingerprint sensor. I am not knowledgeable much in this area. So I could be off. Way off!

    In case of a nuclear EMP weapon neither you nor your mechanical gun will be functional. Huge oscillating EM field will probably melt your gun (induction, the same way induction gas stoves work).

    If your idea of self defense is self defense against a Fed nuclear strike well good luck!

  648. @uma

    “If your idea of self defense is self defense against a Fed nuclear strike well good luck!”

    Troll.

  649. uma, are you aware that it’s the law in New Jersey that, upon the introduction of a smartgun for public sale anywhere int he US, all non-smart guns will be banned three years later?

    That is a ban.

    No matter how well it worsk, or doesn’t.
    No matter how reliable it is, or isn’t.
    No matter how hideously expensive it is.
    No matter how difficult it is to use.

    Any smartgun? Boom, ban.

    So long as that law stands, I predict there will be no smartguns introduced, period.

  650. @Jay :

    I am not aware. Sounds like a retarded law to me. Nobody should even mention a ban before the technology is a) there b) reliable and presents no significant disadvantages to usability c) has gained a lot of adoption d) cheap e) has the reached the point where every soccer mom in a gun-owning household is bitching to have it.

  651. Uma, you don’t know if a common attack mode can or cannot disable your device yet you bull forward demanding everyone around you be forced to purchase them to protect your feelings.

    You have forgotten what Solzhenitsyn wrote in Gulag Archipelago: “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?…”

    We have not, but that is what you are calling for with your gun ban and attempts at confiscation.

    Between your evident androphobia and hoplophobia, not to mention delusions of engineering competence, Get Thee to a Mental Health Professional….

  652. @Jay

    Thx for the info.
    Add “dumb” to the list of other known attributes of New Jerseyites.

  653. > In case of a nuclear EMP weapon neither you nor your mechanical gun will be functional. Huge oscillating EM field will probably melt your gun (induction, the same way induction gas stoves work).

    I LOLd.

  654. David Szonyi on 2016-12-23 at 01:57:47 said:
    > To O’Blivion (00:47): Long email with a “nice start: a few casually tossed
    > out ad hominen comments/insults about me.

    It was not an “attack against the man” because I was not *arguing* anything at that point.

    > Not the way to win friends and influence people.

    Ok, since you clearly didn’t get the message, I’m not interested in your friendship. I’ve got a cuban boatlift-load of people on my ‘freinds’ list, mostly from when I was younger and history was over, that are suffering from progressive rectro-cranial inversion, and another one is going to sink the ship.

    Hell, I might just sink it anyway.

    > You need a better argumentative strategy if you don’t want to lose your reader from the
    > first paragraph.

    As opposed to being a mendacious twat like you?

    > I skimmed what you wrote about Australia, bloke, and kind of respect what you know
    > about the Australian gun scene. But what’s it have to do with the U.S.??

    Well, you’re the one that asserted that “So a lot of Australians were still allowed to keep a lot of guns.” That is factually *WRONG*. The vast majority of Australians were *required* to turn in their firearms. There was massive non-compliance, but that doesn’t change what was legally required.

    And it’s that sort of crap that Obama, Hillary and (apparently) you are peddling.

    It’s bullshit.

    > The most telling and relevant sentence of your long post was: “Here in the US I can
    > (and routinely do) order 1000s of rounds at a time and have them shipped to either my
    > house or a P.O. box.” It doesn’t exactly sound like the government’s goons are coming
    > in the dead of night to confiscate your (or anyone else’s) guns and ammo..

    California just made it illegal for their citizens to cross state lines to buy ammo, and to have ammo shipped in. There have also been goons with guns (oddly enough) showing up at individuals houses to steal their property–property that the US Constitution is supposed to protect (both 4th and 2nd amendment).

    The thing is YOU DO NOT GET IT on guns. It’s not about recreation, it’s not about hunting, it’s about providing a legitimate, up front balance of force.

    You probably know who Chairman Mao is, right? Author of your favorite Little Red (maybe even read) Book (see, now THAT is an ad-hominem)?

    One of his aphorisms was “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. While this may not be *strictly* true, if one has no recourse to the tools of violence then one will be powerless those for whom violence is a *first* resort.

    Do you remember how the revolutionary war started, or are you young enough that your teachers did not tell you *why* the British were marching to Lexington?

    The right to keep and bear arms (and it is *arms*, not just bolt action rifles) was enshrined BECAUSE individual arms were all the founders of America had on hand with which to carry the fight to the British. Well, that and some privately (or town, can’t remember) owned cannon :).

    But more this shows again and again why we (Conservatives, Libertarians, Minarchists, Rational Moderates etc.) don’t trust the Democrats (and it doesn’t mean we DO trust the Republicans, it’s just that they aren’t nearly as interested in power as they are in being IN power).

    You have your agenda and will say anything to achieve it.

  655. @uma “What is with the name calling and all? Need a safe space? Coz it sounds like like you’ve been triggered.”

    Concern trolling willfully ignorant racist asshole.

    Haven’t I won the argument yet, by your rules? You know, the “first one to call the other side racist always wins” that you’ve been using to shut down debate for the last 50 years or so?

  656. The thing about “smart guns” that their largely ill-informed proponents fail to consider; the failure mode when the electronics fail must be “default permit” on any firearm not intended for strictly recreational purposes. Consumers will not accept (read: purchase) anything else.

  657. All it takes to get put on it is one statement by one FBI agent who doesn’t even have to allege you’re a terrorist!

    Not to mention that those agents have quotas.

    You hold it for 6 seconds, or you use your left hand to reach the back of the grip and press the other mode button. Or you point the gun in a safe direction and release.

    And forget you’ve activated it in the panic of actual combat and release it without remembering to safe it.

    Muslim violence is a real problem, but a temporary problem that will prove to be a transient phenomenon. It falls under the category of political or politically motivated violence. Once the conditions that brought it about disappear, it will simply disappear.

    Those conditions being, presumably, the intransigence of the infidels against submitting to the will of Allah in the Ummah.

    Unobtanium technology = ban.

    This approach has been used in practice before. On the heels of Prohibition, when it was blatantly obvious that a federal ban on a substance required a constitutional amendment, the (actually racist) marijuana ban was implemented by requiring a tax stamp on it and then somehow just forgetting to actually issue any stamps.

  658. Those gunmakers are rent seeking crony “capitalists” who are relying on there being enough useful idiots like you to guarantee them a mandated market. When Trump pulls the plug on their grants, there won’t be anyone who doesn’t have money to throw away interested.

  659. SDN, I disagree. There will be some nonzero number of Silicon Valley leftist tech millionaires who will be happy to virtue-signal by backing a smartgun effort.

  660. From Making Light:

    “Some stupid asshole has posted racist and Islamophobic comments on Eric Raymond’s blog under the name “Xopher Halftongue.” I’ve put a comment in the thread saying that I’m the real one, but I don’t really want to stick around and see what happens because the commmentariat there…skew rather to the right of where I’m comfortable, is the sweetest I can put it.

    I guess I appeared on someone’s radar, and they’re trying to discredit me. I can’t imagine why else someone would do this.”

  661. Are you aware that during the early days of the United States it was common for private citizens to own fully armed and crewed ships of war, capable of shelling and pillaging towns, and taking enemy warships as prizes?

    Oh, for a letter of Marquis and Reprisal! My inner evil capitalist is chuckling over the idea of a for-profit battleship!

  662. It’s annoying that the anti-gun people know next to nothing about firearms….. yet they expect everyone to defer to their judgement.

  663. Darrencardinal: They’re leftists, who also know next to nothing about economics, but want to redesign entire economies.

  664. “the commmentariat there…skew rather to the right”

    From my point of view, the commentariat here at A&D has essentially two main traits:

    An affection and aptitude for hacking, and

    An appreciation and self-selectivity for high intelligence.

    Beyond that, we are all over the map and all differences of viewpoint are welcome as long as you bring some modicum of intelligence into the arena.

  665. The vast majority of use cases “addressed” by “smart” guns are already solved by gun safes and retention holsters. People who allow a minor unsupervised access to a firearm that the minor uses to kill or injure someone are already committing a crime of negligence.


  666. > The vast majority of use cases “addressed” by “smart” guns are already solved by gun safes and retention holsters.

    Let’s turn this argument around. If it will take you seconds to open your gun safe to defend yourself against the burglar, why the problem with the 1 second fingerprint sensor delay?

    Anything short of a carrying a fully loaded mechanical gun at all teams and sleeping with it under the pillow will not give you the protection you “need”. Most mentally-sound people won’t do that.

  667. Wow… Your to you outlandish scenario “Short of carrying…at all teams(sic)..” is commonplace in more parts of the country than you realize, and a CCW holder is by definition mentally sound.. In most of the US you have NO idea what percentage of the adults around you are armed. Point is, neither do the criminals so they look elsewhere for prey.

    Gun Safes are for storage, and anything with an electronic lock has a mechanical lock as well to address malfunctions. A short delay while preparing to respond is one thing, but a delay or failure at the instant of need is another.

  668. @uma
    “Anything short of a carrying a fully loaded mechanical gun at all teams and sleeping with it under the pillow will not give you the protection you “need”. Most mentally-sound people won’t do that.”

    Most mentally sound people would opt for better crime control, in a broad sense.

    They talk here as if the US is like East Congo or Papua New Guinea in troubles. But those who have been there can tell you that being armed to the teeth will not save you in the long term.

  669. @winter. Want better crime control is fine, but we have to live with the current conditions: Knockout Game, Wildings in parks, Flash riots in malls, and “Guess the race” EVERY time the criminal in the news report *isn’t* white…. An optimist wants improvement, but a realist deals with conditions as they are..

    In the long run we are all dead, carrying is an attempt to make it a long run instead of short.

  670. Rick T on 2016-12-23 at 20:48:36 said:
    California tried to mandate microstamping be added to firearms in the state so a shell casing could be traced back to the gun that fired it. The lawsuits are over, the Courts finally found the required technology is impossible to implement, and the requirement is now dead.

    Not quite; the case isn’t close to a final outcome at this time. Earlier this month, a state appellate court reversed the lower court’s dismissal of the original lawsuit (National Shooting Sports Foundation v. California) and ruled that a) the plaintiff must be allowed to present evidence of the requirement’s impossibility, and b) the state’s proposed workaround for the impossibility of the requirement doesn’t comply with the law as written.

  671. @uma
    “Anything short of a carrying a fully loaded mechanical gun at all teams and sleeping with it under the pillow will not give you the protection you “need”. Most mentally-sound people won’t do that.”

    I carry a fully loaded mechanical gun anytime I leave my own property. There are multiple fully loaded firearms in short reach where I sleep. That’s what sensible, normal, prudent people do.

    I own fire extinguishers, pay insurance policies, and carry spare tires in all my vehicles because that’s what sensible, normal, prudent people do.

    And I don’t give a flying flitter whether you think me mentally sound or not.

  672. ” It is your constitutional right to own and have nukes by that logic.”

    Anyone who wants a nuke and has the money to pay for one can already get one, legality be damned. See: Kim Jong Un.

  673. if (sleeping_with_loaded_gun_under_pillow == having_fire_extinguisher_in_the_house) then
    yourPlace := mental_hospital

  674. @Troutwaxer, When we lived there in the 70’s Concord MA had at least one (possibly two or three) brass cannon that were fired in salute every April 19th. IIRC they were the proud possessions of the Concord Free Battery. Not a 105mm howitzer but period correct for 1776.

  675. @uma on 2016-12-24 at 16:39:46 said:

    if (sleeping_with_loaded_gun_under_pillow == having_fire_extinguisher_in_the_house) then
    yourPlace := mental_hospital

    You’re not even smart enough to be a good troll.

  676. @uma

    “You’re smarter. No doubt!”

    Based on your performance here, yes. I’m also wiser and with better discernment.

  677. “You’re smarter. No doubt!”

    Still waiting on that citation for the ancient Greeks being genetically “middle eastern”, Nishi.

  678. uma, sleeping with a loaded firearm under the pillow is exactly the same as keeping a fully charged and ready fire extinguisher. Both are tools for dealing with trouble, and you never need either until you need them very badly.

  679. @uma “if (sleeping_with_loaded_gun_under_pillow == having_fire_extinguisher_in_the_house) then yourPlace := mental_hospital”

    And that right there is ironclad proof that the concern trolling willfully ignorant racist asshole (CTWIRA) is engaged in pure rhetoric, not dialectic.

    Inability to empathize with others is a significant indicator of psychopathy and sociopathy. There are none so (mind) blind as those who are unwilling to see (or even consider why other rational people have different beliefs).

  680. @Wannabe Doc

    And you would suppose that a f__kin moron who thinks nukes are his constitutional right, who “pretended” he knows shit from shit on DNA, but has never heard the word haplogroup before his ass showed up here, and who posted the wrong map later. Whose head exploded with rage when the shit mommy and daddy stuffed in his head as a child about how special he and his people are turned out to be just that … shit. You’d suppose that guy understands evidence.

    Me thinks not.


  681. > uma, sleeping with a loaded firearm under the pillow is exactly the same as keeping a fully charged and ready fire extinguisher. Both are tools for dealing with trouble, and you never need either until you need them very badly.

    There are a lot of tools for dealing with all kinds of trouble. The potential consequences of keeping them them “charged and ready” at all time radically varies from tool and tool.

    It takes 2 seconds for your kid (I know you don’t have any) to do immeasurable and irreparable damage with your fully-loaded-under-your-pillow gun. Not so with your fire extinguisher. If you cannot understand and appreciate the difference you have no business being around guns.

    In my experience, the worst of the worst with guns, have similar mindset to the posers and wannabes who post here. They remind me of the micro-penis-syndromed douchebag demographic who buy F150 aluminum trucks to drive around suburbs with them. Thinking it makes them look tough and manly.

    If confiscation ever becomes the law of the land, it will be because of those shitheads. Who cannot be reasoned with. And who in a real world, awash with guns, should have nothing to fear of more than their own stupidity.

  682. My second-ever comment on this blog. Eric wrote

    I have banned the fake Xopher Halftongue. I found his anti-Semitic raving revoltting, but that was not the reason. I continue to have a no-censorship policy here, but impersonation or sock-puppeting is a crash landing. Accordingly, the fake was banned for masquerading as Christopher Hatton.

    I meant to get to it sooner, but I’ve been under time pressure. I apologize to Christopher and all who were offended by this person’s disgusting drivel.

    Thank you, Eric. I appreciate it greatly.

    Other commenters, please be aware that if you see my name elsewhere, it’s probably not the person who ranted idiotically under that name here.

  683. Attempted to post comment on this thread ~4 hours ago, after pressing post comment button, no error displayed, page reloaded without posting comment, following URL shown in address bar:
    http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7268&cpage=1#comment-1791578
    This comment is being posted from same location (ip address) but using a completely different (much newer) machine / OS / browser.

  684. @uma on 2016-12-24 at 18:26:26 said:
    … you have no business being around guns.

    Shut up. You have demonstrated conclusively that you know nothing of this topic. There is no-one reading this who will be even the slightest bit influenced by your pointless screeching. Shut up.

  685. >In my experience, the worst of the worst with guns, have similar mindset to the posers and wannabes who post here. They remind me of the micro-penis-syndromed douchebag demographic who buy F150 aluminum trucks to drive around suburbs with them. Thinking it makes them look tough and manly.

    So your sum total experience with the gun culture is what you read about it, written by its enemies. Enemies who seem to be as ignorant of the actual gun culture and its members as you are.

    The mendacious leading the blind.

  686. @Michael “There is no-one reading this who will be even the slightest bit influenced by your pointless screeching.”

    And poo flinging. Don’t forget the flinging of poo. Never go full poo flinging!

  687. Let’s turn this argument around. If it will take you seconds to open your gun safe to defend yourself against the burglar, why the problem with the 1 second fingerprint sensor delay?

    Because, once I’ve worked the locking mechanism on the safe (a purely mechanical lock, unencumbered by battery or other electronic points of failure), I am accessing a firearm with a purely mechanical firing mechanism, unencumbered by battery or other electronic points of failure.

    Because the firearm only lives there when it is not in my immediate personal possession. Since I live in a state where it is practically impossible to obtain a carry permit, that is a somewhat rare occurrence. Many of my acquaintances and friends who are permitted to carry generally, do so whenever they are dressed. For those people, the small delay inherent in the safe is more than made up for by having perimeter security (even if that is just a locked front door).

    That’s kind of the point of the safe, to secure a firearm when it cannot be secured by being on the person; to prevent unsupervised use. That’s the major use case, right? To prevent tragedy by having someone “Stumble across” an unloaded firearm?

    The use case of having a possessed firearm taken from its possessor is generally taken care of by the possessor using a proper retention holster (and secondarily by concealing).

    You avoided the question – what does a “smart gun” that has many points of failure (enough that our host has categorically refused to own one, as has EVERY firearms owner of my acquaintance) going for it that a safe and a retention holster (both of which are mature technologies that do not require fancy electronics)?

    http://www.pagunblog.com/2016/11/17/doj-smart-gun-specs-are-telling/ – that’s what the police (who actually do have a use case for “Smart Guns” say on the topic. They want a fancy retention system that in every case allows the weapon to fire when “failed.”

  688. Also, I can buy a gun safe and a retention holster today; and continue to use the safe for any firearm that catches my fancy.

  689. To Eric regarding what you wrote around on 12/23 (around 6 AM): “I have a no-censorship policy here. I’m aware we have at least one virulent racist among my regulars, and I despise him utterly, but it is against my principles to ban for opinions I disagree with. I don’t always respond to such farragos because I think in most cases they are obviously self-condemning.I have a no-censorship policy here. I’m aware we have at least one virulent racist among my regulars, and I despise him utterly, but it is against my principles to ban for opinions I disagree with. I don’t always respond to such farragos because I think in most cases they are obviously self-condemning.”

    This is both helpful and a little lame, in part because there’s more than one racist among the posters, in part because the issue isn’t about censorship; it’s about whether you and others will affirmatively respond to/distance yourself from the haters each time a hate message occurs. Much as I appreciate you barring Halftongue, he wasn’t the problem; all the silence in the face of what he wrote was.

    The haters – white supremacists, antisemites, xenophobes, Islamophobes — have come out of the woodwork since Trump’s victory; that too is part of “Welcome to Trump”. On this Christmas Eve and first night of Chanukah, the question of what you and others will do about it is at least as important — frankly, it’s a lot more so — than your advice to us Democrats.

    1. >On this Christmas Eve and first night of Chanukah, the question of what you and others will do about it is at least as important — frankly, it’s a lot more so — than your advice to us Democrats.

      There will be no value claims anywhere in this response, just mechanics.

      For a long time, Democratic accusations of not “affirmatively responding” to hatred and racism were an effective tactic for shaming and silencing their political opponents. This seldom works anymore, and the day is coming soon when it will be completely ineffective.

      This sort of tactic requires two preconditions to be effective. First, the target must feel some degree of of actual guilt about the issue in question. Second, the user must have (in the perception of the target) clean hands – not him or herself be a hypocrite on the issue, and not seen to be maneuvering for advantage without regard to whether the accusation is true or not.

      With respect to this kind of move by Democrats against conservatives and libertarians, both preconditions now usually fail.

      The guilt precondition fails because most people in the target population now genuinely believe themselves to be absent of sin on this score. Whether they actually are is irrelevant; only their self-perception affects whether they are immunized against this ploy.

      The other problem is that Democrats are no longer perceived to have clean hands. The reasons for this could fill a book, but one that will stand for all is partisan overuse. Since the 1960s we have seen this rhetorical weapon feed on its own success, being brought out for more and more trivial reasons until we are now told, for example, that not having a sufficiently diverse Nativity scene is racist.

      Another important factor is the rise of privilege theory, which implies that even the most frantic virtue-signaling no longer suffices for one to escape the category of “racist”.

      This couldn’t continue forever. If you back a frightened animal into a corner and keep pushing, it will flip from flight mode to fight mode and attack. Shaming humans only works until it induces an analogous mode-flip.

      Welcome to Trump.

    2. David Szonyi wrote,

      the issue isn’t about censorship; it’s about whether you and others will affirmatively respond to/distance yourself from the haters each time a hate message occurs.

      Thereby turning an annoyance into a DOS attack on this blog. No, you do not get to weaponize our senses of decency and wield them against us.

  690. @Ian Argent:

    The fallacy in your argument is that you assume that people are robots who ensure that their firearms are secured and pose no harm at all points in time. This of course nonesense because humans are humans. They make mistakes even if their intention is for the gun to be safe at all times. The consequences of these simple errors can be deadly.

    You also assume that people’s behavior (ie sleeping with a gun under the pillow) is, on balance, a rational and measured response to the level of threat they practically face. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. A measured response –by definition– must take into account the possible risks that come with that response (e.g. your child ending up in a pool of his blood while you’re in the bathroom) and weigh those risks against the benefits (protecting yourself from the burglar)


    > You avoided the question – what does a “smart gun” that has many points of failure (enough that our host has categorically refused to own one, as has EVERY firearms owner of my acquaintance) going for it that a safe and a retention holster (both of which are mature technologies that do not require fancy electronics)?

    No I did not. There is nothing I know of that tells me that smart guns cannot do an acceptable job (self defense). The technology (e.g. firmware) maybe shitty as we speak but there is no fundamental scientific reason why the technology itself cannot be enough-reliable. I also mentioned earlier that incorporating electronics in a firearm (e.g. electronically igniting the bullet’s propellent) can result in far more reliable and a better weapon overall (e.g. less jamming, far more consistent escape velocity, far more consistent time response etc) that increases your chances of hitting your target which is your ultimate goal.

    Safes and retention holsters do not eliminate risks due to human nature (forgetting). Fingerprint sensors (as an example) do. Therefore, the question was answered.

  691. To Alpheus, re posting of 12/23, 11:19 AM: . “While the NRA has been getting better every year, to this day gun owners distrust the NRA, and fear that they will sell out our rights if given the opportunity.

    Now, you might say “But this is paranoid!” It’s not paranoia if they are *really* out to get you. If you’re not immersed in gun culture, and watching the political scene, you are likely unaware of the hints and subtle attacks that the Obama Administration has been making, in both word and action, that have been dropped over the last eight years.”

    You’re right, Apheus, I do say “This is paranoid,” and your posting re-enforces that sentiment. Who or what is “out to get you”? I’ve asked that in post after post, and not one of you has yet provided a halfway satisfactory answer — because there is none. No one in any position of authority in the Democratic Party or among liberals or anywhere else is proposing a mass gun confiscation or anything remotely resembling the Australian mandatory buyback plan, unreasonable background checks, or anything else that threatens the rights of responsible gun users.

    Look, the Obama Administration has been in power 7 years and 11 months; it of course leaves power in a month. I’m not part of the gun culture but I very closely watch the political scene and there’s something vaporous to the point of paranoia about dark allusions to the “hints and subtle actions” of the Obvama Administration; if something significant were happening, you’d point to more than “hints and subtle actions” — you’d point to executive orders, bills, new acts, people being inhibited from owning guns or purchasing new ones. In fact, **nothing significant at all** has happened in terms of gun laws during these nearly 8 years, though there have been many mass killings, and the number of guns in circulation has increased significantly (For all of Trump’s diatribes about possible terrorism about Muslim refugees, what he and his followers should worry about a whole lot more is terrorism by people born and raised in the U.S.).

    And those gun owners who worry that even the purist, rigid NRA “will sell out our rights if given the opportunity” — well, that seems to me *very paranoid*.

    1. (Trying once more, without any links at all. This time for sure.)

      David Szonyi wrote,

      No one in any position of authority in the Democratic Party or among liberals or anywhere else is proposing a mass gun confiscation or anything remotely resembling the Australian mandatory buyback plan, unreasonable background checks, or anything else that threatens the rights of responsible gun users.

      […] if something significant were happening, you’d point to more than “hints and subtle actions” — you’d point to executive orders, bills, new acts, people being inhibited from owning guns or purchasing new ones.

      In the conversation ensuing since you first made this argument, you’ve had presented to you ample evidence that Democrat politicians have been using fairly thin veils over their advocacy for confiscation—or speaking openly of it, if they thought they were speaking to the right audience. And yet you keep pointing to the dearth of actual pending legislation, as if that proved anything beyond, “these politicians don’t actually want to touch off ACWII”.

  692. ” that too is part of “Welcome to Trump”.”

    Trump was a Democrat forever. It’s only since he decided to run against Clinton that he suddenly transmogrified into Hitler. Just like every Republican president is Hitler.

    Nixon was Hitler.
    Reagan was Hitler.
    Bush I was Hitler.
    Bush II was Hitler.
    Trump is Hitler.

    Except that none of those people turned out to be, you know, Hitler (the absence of concentration camps and mass graves is pretty conclusive).

    The “Little Prog Who Cried Hitler” tactic doesn’t work any more. Calling anyone who disagrees with any point of your prog agenda a “racist” doesn’t work any more. Sorry.

    You guys are in a cult. Get help.

  693. A fun fact for Doctor Locketopus: Truman connected Dewey with the Nazis in the 1948 campaign.

  694. To Jay Maynard, 12/24, 5:22 PM: “uma, sleeping with a loaded firearm under the pillow is exactly the same as keeping a fully charged and ready fire extinguisher. Both are tools for dealing with trouble, and you never need either until you need them very badly.”

    Sorry, Jay, but that’s a really bad analogy. A fire extinguisher can put out a fire and thus save a human life. A gun (at least one under a pillow) is a lethal weapon whose only purpose is to injure or kill — that is, to maim or eliminate a human life; you could even fire it accidentally so that it winds up killing you.

  695. David Szonyi on 2016-12-24 at 23:49:08 said:

    “This is both helpful and a little lame, in part because there’s more than one racist among the posters, in part because the issue isn’t about censorship; it’s about whether you and others will affirmatively respond to/distance yourself from the haters each time a hate message occurs. Much as I appreciate you barring Halftongue, he wasn’t the problem; all the silence in the face of what he wrote was.”

    No one is required to dance to your tune, and I feel certain that the host here does not wring his hands over whether or not you find his actions satisfactory. Honestly, this leftist trope of vilifying people for not expressing adequate outrage at every act of idiocy is as tiresome as it is stupid.

    If you don’t approve, create your own forum and moderate it as you see fit. Everyone gets that you’re a conformist, but expecting other people to share that outlook is part of the point that you’ve missed ad nauseum.

    “The haters – white supremacists, antisemites, xenophobes, Islamophobes — have come out of the woodwork since Trump’s victory;

    No, they have not. They were always there (never, of course, to the extent people like you fantasize) and have only been given power as much as you leftists grant them in order to push your narrative of unmitigated bullshit.

    “…that too is part of “Welcome to Trump”.”

    Again – no. That’s just your fantasy.

    “On this Christmas Eve and first night of Chanukah, the question of what you and others will do about it is at least as important — frankly, it’s a lot more so — than your advice to us Democrats.”

    I can’t immediately think of anything less important than indulging your fantasies.

  696. > it’s about whether you and others will affirmatively respond to/distance yourself from the haters each time a hate message occurs.

    You do know that most of the people here have read Alinsky, right? And Vox Day? And even without the literature, we’ve seen you do this “concern” crap for decades now and we know what you are trying to do, even if you don’t.

    > On this Christmas Eve and first night of Chanukah, the question of what you and others will do about it is at least as important — frankly, it’s a lot more so — than your advice to us Democrats.

    No, not it isn’t. You’d understand that if you’d read the advice at the top of this page and made the effort to understand it. Your post is the very thing that ESR is trying really hard to warn you about. Your side lost the election because the tactics you are trying to use right now didn’t work. The potency of these attacks is not coming back. Not today, not in 2 or 4 years. Never.

    I’ll itemize a few of the failures

    Number 1, Trump is an effect, not a cause. Let me repeat that. Trump is an effect, not a cause.

    Number 2, Christians are becoming less and less interested in the opinions of atheists on Christian morality. Ditto jews re: jewish morality.

    Number 3, many of us have adopted your tactics. We have no enemies to our right. We don’t necessarily agree with everyone on our side, but as long as they are against you and willing to fight, we have nothing bad to say about them in public. You’ll still find plenty of people that will wither under your accusation that some of their allies are not nice people. Cowing them into submission will feel like winning to you, but it isn’t.

    1. >Number 3, many of us have adopted your tactics. We have no enemies to our right.

      That’s not true for me, nor for any libertarian I know. I number both right-wing racists and the tiny number of conservative theocrats among my enemies.

  697. @ David

    > I’m not part of the gun culture but I very closely watch the political scene and there’s something vaporous to the point of paranoia about dark allusions to the “hints and subtle actions” of the Obvama Administration; if something significant were happening, you’d point to more than “hints and subtle actions” — you’d point to executive orders, bills, new acts, people being inhibited from owning guns or purchasing new ones. In fact, **nothing significant at all** has happened in terms of gun laws during these nearly 8 years,

    I posted some links earlier that directly contradict your claims here. They talk directly about two instances of the thing you claim to be looking for: to wit, Obama deciding on his own to create new classes of “people being inhibited from owning guns or purchasing new ones.” To be honest, I can’t imagine how you missed these stories when they were fresh, since you “very closely watch the political scene”.

    http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7268&cpage=1#comment-1790753

  698. To KJJ,1:05 AM: 1. Trump is *both* an effect and a cause. If you don’t think his own racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and Islamophobic remarks have contributed to some of the hate speech and actions we’re seeing, you’re deluding yourself on the effect a presidential candidate can have on the body politic.

    2. An odd statement. My statement wasn’t about “Christian morality” — I’m not even sure what you mean by that: morality as practiced by Christians or writings on morality by Christian theologians and philosophers? — or Jewish morality, it was about American morality, about the tone and temper of our politics.

    3. “many of us have adopted your tactics. We have no enemies to our right.” An even odder statement. First, that’s not *my* tactic at all; I’m on the center-left and I have lots of enemies on my left (those who are anti-Zionist or who not only want to change our system of “free-market capitalism” bu overthrow it, for example). Second, you better have enemies on the right because if you embrace the worst extremists on your right flank, including haters, your credibility, and your influence on those of us on the center and left, will very quickly drop to zero.

  699. Non-ironic use of the term “Islamophobic” is self-disqualifying in my book. It’s not an irrational fear when people really are out to get you. “Xenophobic” is another tell for shallow partisanship: advocating enforcement of immigration law is not that. And of course, the old favorite, “racist.” But since illegal aliens aren’t a race, and neither are Muslim or Mexicans, it’s just sloppy thinking to apply it to Trump. David Szonyi, you are embodying the attitudes that cost Hillary the election.

  700. “A gun (at least one under a pillow) is a lethal weapon whose only purpose is to injure or kill — that is, to maim or eliminate a human life”

    Sheer unadulterated nonsense.

    A self-defense gun’s purpose is to convince an assailant to leave you alone or, better still, not bother you in the first place.

    The process of convincing the assailant to leave you alone may involve maiming or killing or it may not. Usually it doesn’t — the vast majority of defensive gun uses don’t involve anyone getting shot.

  701. To KJJ, 1:10 AM: Sorry I overlooked your posting — but I’ve now looked at it and boy was it worth overlooking.

    Your “link 1” wasn’t even to an article, but simply to links to a whole series of articles, none from a reputable paper or magazine of the left, center, or right. I tried to read one article but found it almost impossible to do because an ad ad appeared imploring me to subscribe to the site. Uh, no thanks.

    Likewise with link 2, though here I managed to click on to a site revealingly called “Govtslaves” — guess you can’t get much more on the far right fringe than this site. The article claims, with ridiculously poor documentation (as in, none), that ” the Obama White House is eyeing ways to use the Social Security Administration (SSA) as a source of records for NICS, which includes a federal database of persons prohibited from possessing or receiving firearms. In fact, it even quotes the SSA director that the government is planning no such thing. (In short, the story is a non-story; the story is nonsense).

    So this is the best you can do — wasting my time by sending me to a false claim that the Obama Administration supposedly is (or at some point in the past, was) “eyeing” a new *database* — and not of gunowners, but of people already prohibited from using guns??!! . If so, extremely thin gruel or, to switch metaphors, you’ve struck out again.

    Now let’s detail the things *you* haven’t responded to: (1) No political leader of any influence in the Democratic Party has proposed mass gun confiscation or an Australian-style mandatory buyback of certain types of guns; (2) The American people by significant margins favor certain reasonable gun control measures; (3) The number of guns in circulation during the Obama years has increased significantly.

  702. Rick T, 12:23, 00:27 “Better idea is to focus on the three most lethal groups: Blacks, Muslims, and Democrats. Disarm all three and US gun violence rates drop to nearly zero and all of the recent mass shootings would have been prevented…”

    Great idea, Rick T! I’m sure all Americans who want to disarm the Constitution, especially the 14th Amendment, will endorse it enthusiastically.

    1. >Great idea, Rick T! I’m sure all Americans who want to disarm the Constitution, especially the 14th Amendment, will endorse [disarming Blacks, Muslims, and Democrats] enthusiastically.

      You can wax sarcastic all you like, but Rick T’s observation about the statistical distribution of crime and terrorism is correct.

      Advocating the selective disarmament of these groups is strongly against my principles. But the facts do render Democratic talk of an overwhelming wave of violence from white conservatives … ironic.

  703. David Szonyi: “The haters – white supremacists, antisemites, xenophobes, Islamophobes — have come out of the woodwork since Trump’s victory; that too is part of “Welcome to Trump”.”

    Keep right on banging that drum. You’ll guarantee his reelection.

    “Who or what is “out to get you”? I’ve asked that in post after post, and not one of you has yet provided a halfway satisfactory answer — because there is none. No one in any position of authority in the Democratic Party or among liberals or anywhere else is proposing a mass gun confiscation or anything remotely resembling the Australian mandatory buyback plan, unreasonable background checks, or anything else that threatens the rights of responsible gun users.”

    Wrong. Every time they speak favorably of Australia’s confiscation, they set off alarm bells. They know they can’t come right out and propose it themselves, because they know that that’s a losing issue. They remember 1994, even if you don’t. So they blow gun-grabber dog whistles. (I bet you believe that the Republicans blow raaaacist!!! dog whistles all the time. If they do, they’re not the only ones.) So they nibble at the edges.

    There’s a reason Hillary Clinton pounded so hard on the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act: it stopped their plan to force gun manufacturers to give up in settlements of ruinous nuisance lawsuits what they couldn’t get through Congress. This isn’t just paranoia. Our esteemed host has noted that papers at the Clinton Presidential Library describe the scheme.

    “In fact, **nothing significant at all** has happened in terms of gun laws during these nearly 8 years,”

    Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

    “And those gun owners who worry that even the purist, rigid NRA “will sell out our rights if given the opportunity” — well, that seems to me *very paranoid*.”

    The NRA is neither purist nor rigid. Check out Gun Owners of America or Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership if you want “purist”. (I’d link them here, but that would drop me in the moderation queue.)

    “Sorry, Jay, but that’s a really bad analogy. A fire extinguisher can put out a fire and thus save a human life. A gun (at least one under a pillow) is a lethal weapon whose only purpose is to injure or kill — that is, to maim or eliminate a human life; you could even fire it accidentally so that it winds up killing you.”

    It’s an excellent analogy. The gun can save lives: mine and those of my loved ones. That is the only thing that matters. A criminal who offers deadly force against me or my loved ones thereby surrendered his right to live if that’s what it takes to save my own life.

    “if you embrace the worst extremists on your right flank, including haters, your credibility, and your influence on those of us on the center and left, will very quickly drop to zero.”

    Complaints like this have already destroyed your own credibility. That’s rather the point of Eric’s post.

  704. @Jay Maynard et al.
    “uma, sleeping with a loaded firearm under the pillow is exactly the same as keeping a fully charged and ready fire extinguisher. Both are tools for dealing with trouble, and you never need either until you need them very badly.”

    Statistcs show, it is more like keeping a flamethrower at hand ti combat fires.

    Protecting yourself with a gun at home, a good idea?:

    Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study
    http://m.aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full

    Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.

    So, those keeping a gun at home are more likely to die from violence . I am aware that nobody here will change their opinion just because the facts are against them.

    Trump’s campaign has shown conclusively that neither facts nor reallity matter in the mind of an American. Ideological correctness is all that counts.

  705. To Eric’s post of 4:00 AM today:

    First, if you’re going to talk about “the statistical distribution of crime and terrorism,” among African-Americans, Democrats, and Muslims, we need hard statistics on all three groups. I keep asking for evidence because there are too many opinions masquerading as would-be “facts” on your blog and some are counter-factual, as I’ve shown. You might well be able to prove that African-Americans commit crimes disproportionately to their percentage of the population. But Democrats? Muslims?

    Second, and far more important: let’s assume for the sake of argument alone that RckT is right. I was waxing sarcastic because our constitutional democracy doesn’t work the way he suggested; we don’t withdraw basic rights from certain groups. I might have taken RickT too seriously; he might have been joking — were you, RickT? But if he was serious, you, as a libertarian, shouldn’t just oppose his views on principle; you should be actively fighting them. After all if a majority of perpetrators of mass killings using guns are white males without college education, would he, and you, favor withdrawing Second Amendment rights from that group? RickT’s whole approach, if serious, might come back to bite you libertarians badly.

    Third, “Democratic talk of an overwhelming wave of violence from *white conservatives*”? There might be an occasional article or posting here and there — we have our irresponsible and off-base columnists and bloggers, as you have your — but sorry, Eric, I just don’t see it, especially among the most respected Democratic/liberal writers.

    1. >You might well be able to prove that African-Americans commit crimes disproportionately to their percentage of the population. But Democrats? Muslims?

      Blacks, at 12% of the population, commit over 50% of the murders in the U.S. You can check this yourself in the UCS database. Heightened risk for any Democrat follows, as Blacks are such a large portion of the reliable Democratic base. It is also well-known that convicted felons are disproportionately likely to vote Democratic. This, from the Annals of the American Academy of Political Science

      “[In New York] ex-felons who are registered overwhelmingly register as Democrats. Of those discharge records that match to at least one voter file record, 61.5 percent match only to Democratic voter records. In contrast, 25.5 percent match only to voter records with no affiliation or an affiliation with a minor party, while 9 percent match only to Republican voter records…

      …[R]egistered ex-felons in New Mexico tend to be overwhelmingly Democrat: 51.9 percent match to only registered Democrats, 18.9 percent match to only registered Republicans, 21.7 percent match to only individuals registered neither as Democrats nor Republicans, and 7.5 percent match to multiple individuals who affiliate with different parties…”

      Also: Jail survey: 7 in 10 felons register as Democrats

      As fur Muslims, I see no other identifiable population group involved in terrorist incidents with a casualty toll even within an order of magnitude of the jihadi ones. Further, we know why this so; the Koran tells Muslims to wage jihad in the Dar al-Harb, and the terrorists tell us that is what they are doing.

      >But if he was serious, you, as a libertarian, shouldn’t just oppose his views on principle; you should be actively fighting them.

      I’d spend the energy to fight them if I thought any such proposal had a snowball’s chance in hell of being enacted. Since it doesn’t, I can spend my time on more important things.

      >Third, “Democratic talk of an overwhelming wave of violence from *white conservatives*”? There might be an occasional article or posting here and there — we have our irresponsible and off-base columnists and bloggers, as you have your — but sorry, Eric, I just don’t see it, especially among the most respected Democratic/liberal writers.

      This makes me seriously wonder what rock you have been hiding under since the election.

  706. On Eric’s post of 4:50 AM: “For a long time, Democratic accusations of not “affirmatively responding” to hatred and racism were an effective tactic for shaming and silencing their political opponents. This seldom works anymore, and the day is coming soon when it will be completely ineffective.”

    “Shaming,” yes, because hatred of a class of people — whether whites, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, or other — is shameful and can have catastrophic consequences. “Silencing,” no; calling out group hatred isn’t meant to silence those who rationalize or condone such group hatred but the opposite — to prod them to speak out against it.

    If the day comes when such calling-0out of hatred is “completely ineffective,” then libertarians, conservatives, etc. will be in serious trouble both ideologically, politically, and morally.

    Fortunately, that day isn’t here. The accusations against hate speech and actions in the far right are hardly just coming from “Democrats;” they’re coming from independents and Republicans too, as well they should be.

    More later as time permits.

  707. Winter, you want to talk about facts not mattering? Here’s one for you: that study you cite did not even attempt to look at how many lives were saved by defensive gun uses. The academic Left won’t ever look at that, because it shreds their narrative.

  708. David Szonyi: ““Shaming,” yes, because hatred of a class of people — whether whites, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, or other — is shameful and can have catastrophic consequences.”

    As we’re seeing in Baltimore and Ferguson and Chicago, where hatred of a class of people – in this case cops – is causing dramatic spikes in murders. But the #BlackLivesMatter thugs’ hatred of cops, and the spillover into larger society aided and abetted by their enablers in the MSM and the elite Left, isn’t something the Left talks about. Interferes with the narrative, donchaknow.

    The hate is not coming from just the rightward end of the spectrum.

  709. My suggestion about disarms Blacks, Muslims and Democrats was a (yes, sarcastic) response to uma’s hysterical monomania about the risk of mentally ill suburban teenage males getting their hands on a firearm and running amok. ESR provided the analysis of the first two cases, my addition is to cover Aurora, Columbine, Sandy Hook,UC Santa Barbara, and the Gifford shooting.

  710. @Jay Maynard
    “Here’s one for you: that study you cite did not even attempt to look at how many lives were saved by defensive gun uses”

    You want to share those numbers with us? Probably not, because they do not seem to exist.

    Your words are a claim that gun owners are altruists who sacrifice their lives to save others. But that still does not explain why gun owners are more likely to die a violent death than non-gun owners. If they are killed while they valiantly save the lives of others, why aren’t unarmed people more often killed? I cannot get those numbers to add up. Or, there are no numbers to add up.

    Anyhow, having a gun at home makes you more likely to die from firearms. Those are the facts. You only need numbers that say this is not so. But all we get is “guns makes us safe, because of reasons”.

    @Jay
    “The academic Left won’t ever look at that, because it shreds their narrative.”

    And the academic Right is unable to come up with any numbers? That cannot be true. The NRA must have done their own studies showing that shooting people makes you safe.

  711. When Leftists begin accepting responsibility for, and denouncing (to my undefined degree of satisfaction) the actions of their fellow leftists/Democrats in the cases of:

    – Most mass shootings
    – Most domestic terror incidents
    – The rapes and sexual assaults from OWS around the country
    – The assassinations of LEOs
    – The deadly riots and property destruction associated with BLM and the nascent movements which led it it
    – The spate of hoax “hate” crimes perpetuated by fake Trump supporters
    – The removal of due process rights on college campuses as a direct result of Democrat policies

    Then I’ll consider searching for some sort of collective guilt concerning the pitifully small and powerless cohort of the “extreme right.”

  712. Winter, a quick Google for “defensive gun use” brings up lots of numbers, as well as studies, claimed refutations, and debunkings of those refutations. This article at Breitbart discusses Gary Kleck’s authoritative work, with links to Politico.

  713. @esr
    ”Blacks, at 12% of the population, commit over 50% of the murders in the U.S. ”

    Most violent crimes are committed by poor urban youths. In the past these were Irish and Italian etc. Nowadays, they are blacks. And nowadays, poor urban people vote Democrat. So, in the past it was Catholicism, Celts, or Mediterraneans that were blamed for crime, now its black genes. Different names, same stupidity.

    I can see why conservatives have never been able to solve any problem in society. They are obsessed with purity of blood and ideology. Both fairy tales that cannot be enforced without destroying the country. (but they will try it anyway)

  714. @Jay
    Please explain to me how this makes the numbers go away that gun owners are more likely to die a violent death? No one contests that a gun is unparalleled when you want to shoot people. But the ckaim was that a gun makes you saver.

    So, can you tell me?

  715. You want to talk about “shameful”, Mr. Szonyi? How about the fact that after Ivanka Trump was accosted on that JetBlue flight the media establishment lost the word “harassment” from it’s collective vocabulary. Look, I realize you may loathe a man, but to go after his kids? Does the “progressive” left have any shame at all?

  716. @gmmay
    I am not sure I understand this correctly. But in defensive gun use, one gun owner shoots another. So, the more defensive gun use, the more gun owners are shot?

    That means that the more defensive use of guns, the riskier owning a gun is?

    I still do not understand how this refutes the fact that gun owners are more likely to die a violent death?

  717. Winter, you OBVIOUSLY did not read the report, your base premise of defensive gun use == someone is shot is false. The last paragraph of the conclusion reads:

    This is also too serious a matter to base conclusions on silly statistics comparing the number of lives taken with guns with the number of criminals killed by victims.[100] Killing a criminal is not a benefit to the victim, but rather a nightmare to be suffered for years afterward. Saving a life through DGU would be a benefit, but this almost never involves killing the criminal; probably fewer than 3,000 criminals are lawfully killed by gun-wielding victims each year,[101] representing only about 1/1000 of the number of DGUs, and less than 1% of the number of purportedly life-saving DGUs. Therefore, the number of justifiable homicides cannot serve as even a rough index of life-saving gun uses. Since this comparison does not involve any measured benefit, it can shed no light on the benefits and costs of keeping guns in the home for protection.[102]

  718. Hrm, if most crime is the result of poor urban youth, then de-populating the cities is a solution. Happy nuclear war!

  719. Uma, Winter, and Szoni expect responsible people to own guns to trust gun control people to be sensible, knowledgeable, and honest. This worked in the 1960s, when a lot of gun experts hated guns and supported gun control. Lots of draftees hated the military. Lots of people who grew up poor and had to hunt hated hunting- they wanted to afford store-bought food.

    Volunteer military for a half-century. Hunting is a choice, and most hunters are successful middle-class people. Most people who know guns nowadays like guns. And for the last eight years Obama has been nickle-diming ammunition availability. Everyone who shoots at the range three times a year has spent eight years hosed by Obama. You’d know that, if you were at all knowledgeable about guns. But you don’t know that, because you are not at all knowledgeable about guns. You’d care if you were arguing in good faith. You don’t care because you are not arguing in good faith. You want us to trust your good faith so you can act in bad faith, as Obama has for the last eight years. We don’t trust your good faith because we’ve had eight years of bad faith from you.

  720. “For a long time, Democratic accusations of not “affirmatively responding” to hatred and racism were an effective tactic for shaming and silencing their political opponents. This seldom works anymore, and the day is coming soon when it will be completely ineffective.

    “This sort of tactic requires two preconditions to be effective. First, the target must feel some degree of of actual guilt about the issue in question. Second, the user must have (in the perception of the target) clean hands – not him or herself be a hypocrite on the issue, and not seen to be maneuvering for advantage without regard to whether the accusation is true or not.”

    The only honest and convincing response is, “The races are unequal, and Blacks are inferior to Whites in much the ways the Confederates believed.”. You seem to cautiously agree with this statement on some occasions, and violently disagree with it on others. Generally you cautiously agree when you are talking social science and details, and violently disagree when you are talking rhetoric and generalities.

    The Democrats believe that the election of Trump is one step, just one but a big one, on the road to legitimising and normalising this response. They are right to do so.

  721. Eric at 9:19 AM: “Blacks, at 12% of the population, commit over 50% of the murders in the U.S. You can check this yourself in the UCS database.”

    OK, gentlemen — are there any ladies on this site? — we’re in a very emotionally charged area so it’s important that you, Eric, and other source your statistics, and not ask me or others to “check this yourself” (If you make the argument, the burden of proof is on you, not me, to supply the evidence) and that those statistics by accurate.

    I found it surprisingly hard to find statistics on the percentage of homicides committed by African-Americans (13.7, not 12% of the population) — you can more readily find statistics on the race of victims. But here are figures from the FBI from 2011: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3. As you can see, the figure is not “more than 50%” (or half); rather, it’s 37.7% or somewhat more than a third.

    Now take a look at another statistic from the FBI: 65.2% of homicides committed in 2011 were by men. So, following your and others’ logic, perhaps we men who should be barred from purchasing firearms, that that right should only belong to women. And if my fellow Jews are under-represented in the homicide rate, perhaps we should be able to have fewer background checks and to be able to purchase firearms at a mandatory discount.

    I’m being facetious to try to point out where this insane “group” approach leads– whether it has to do with African-Amercans, Democrats, Muslims (significantly, you haven’t said a thing about the latter group), or any other group.

    But here’s a far more serious statistical issue: The important question isn’t what percentages of homicides are committed by African-Americans but what percentage of African-Americans commit homicides – and what percentage of whites? Say, for the sake of argument, it’s 1.1 % of Africans and 0.7% of whites (the figures are of course taken off the top of my head and thus fictitious). So what should be the policy implications of that? Would you bar the remaining 98.9% of African_Americans and 99.3% of white from buying guns? Can you begin to see where this manipulation of statistics is leading you? Somewhere, that, I hope, you don’t want to go.

    1. David Szonyi wrote,

      we’re in a very emotionally charged area so it’s important that you, Eric, and other source your statistics, and not ask me or others to “check this yourself” (If you make the argument, the burden of proof is on you, not me, to supply the evidence) and that those statistics by accurate.

      I’m confused.

      “Check this yourself” has a conventional meaning, incompatible with your interpretation, and it is clear and obvious that ESR was using it in that sense—especially since he pointed exactly to the evidence you’re demanding he supply.

      I don’t believe you’re actually misunderstanding him here. It’s not plausible that you’re trying to convince ESR himself that he’s requested help in making his point. It’s just barely plausible that you’re trying to make this case to others reading the blog (as Larry Correia points out, internet argument is a spectator sport), but again, his text is right here to be read so you could not expect much success there.

      You are being dishonest, that’s obvious. I’m just confused as to what purpose you’re trying to achieve with this dishonesty?

      So, following your and others’ logic, perhaps we men who should be barred from purchasing firearms, that that right should only belong to women. […]

      I’m being facetious to try to point out where this insane “group” approach leads– whether it has to do with African-Amercans, Democrats, Muslims (significantly, you haven’t said a thing about the latter group), or any other group.

      Ignoring “others’ logic” (since ESR has made it clear he allows opinions here with which he vehemently disagrees), I defy you to point to a single comment by ESR which suggests that any American’s rights be impaired on the grounds of belonging to any ethnic group—at least, any comment which is not obviously the same sort of reductio ad absurdum which you’re attempting.

      Again—you’re being so obviously dishonest, one wonders what the point is.

  722. “I found it surprisingly hard to find statistics on the percentage of homicides committed by African-Americans (13.7, not 12% of the population) — you can more readily find statistics on the race of victims. But here are figures from the FBI from 2011: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3. As you can see, the figure is not “more than 50%” (or half); rather, it’s 37.7% or somewhat more than a third.”

    Are you serious?

    There are 5,487 identified Black murderers out of 10,471 murderers of identified race, or 52.5% of murderers of identified race are Black.

    You get 37.7% by assuming that every murderer of unknown race is non-Black.

    “I’m being facetious to try to point out where this insane “group” approach leads…”

    I am sure you believe in systemic racism and other unevidenced, and unfalsifiable, group conspiracy theories that portray Whites as villains, which are then used to justify punitive policies like afirmative action directed aginst Whites. Even if you don’t, they are mainstream in US society. No one is proposing to “just forget about group differences”. They are proposing to talk about group differences always and exclusively when such talk can be used to harm Whites.

  723. It occurs to me that David Szonyi’s thesis is frighteningly, horrifyingly, and shamefully racist. He proposes that Blacks are so stupid that 100% of Black murderers are caught, and 100% of murderers who successfully evade capture are non-Black. I am a racist and not even I believe that.

  724. To Oliver Cromwell: I don’t begin to have the time to respond to all these posts, especially the dumber ones, but yours is irresistible because I’m supposedly “frighteningly, horrifyingly, and shamefully racist.”

    Oh my. And why, kind sir? It’s *really* hard to see from what you’ve written, Oliver, which is that you attribute to me that not all African-American murderers are caught [nor are all white murderers!] and that all murderers who evade capture are non-Black (huh??). Of course, I said or implied nothing of the kind. Please react to the plain meaning of the words that are actually on the screen, not to those in your fevered imagination. .

    Of course, I have my racist tendencies too, though they’re not at all in the way you think, and I appreciate your forthrightness in declaring, “I am a racist…”

  725. To Oliver, re: posting of 1:35 PM. The 37.7% figure doesn’t come from me; it comes from the FBI, so your beef is with them.

    Oliver, you need a crash course in statistics. I of course don’t assume that “every murderer of unknown race is non-Black” (you insult me by attributing to me that patently ridiculous assumption). I assume nothing about then — and neither should you — precisely because in all 4,077 cases, the race/ethnicity of the murderer is unknown. But if we made the reasonable assumption that the race were known, the distribution fell along he same percentages as that of murderers whose race/ethnicity is known, the percentage of murderers who are Black of course would remain about the same 37.7%

  726. “To Oliver, re: posting of 1:35 PM. The 37.7% figure doesn’t come from me; it comes from the FBI, so your beef is with them.”

    No it doesn’t, it comes from your misrepresentation of the FBI data. The FBI data says that 37.7% of murderers are known to be black, but that many murderers are of unknown race. More than half of murderers whose race is known are black, according to the FBI, exactly as esr claimed.

    The only way to reconcile your claim of what the FBI data says with what it actually says is to add the additional claim, not made by the FBI, that the “unknown race” category of murderers is far less Black than the “known race” categories of murderer.

  727. David Szonyi, you need that same crash course in statistics. If the unknowns break along the same proportions as the known, then the portion of the knowns that are black would remain the same for the entire population – and that’s 5486/(4729+5486+256), or 52.39%.

    The only way you get to 37.7% is by assigning the unknowns to races other than black, as in 5486/(4729+5486+256+4077).

  728. My apologies, I wrote that the FBI data shows that 52.5% of murderers of known race are Black. Jay Maynard is of course correct that the data shows that 52.4% of murderers of known race are Black.

  729. Oliver Cromwell, this is rapidly getting tiresome. The FBI includes a category called “Unknown” for a reason; it happens to be a significant number (28% of the total) and the race of its members is, uh, unknown. You can’t conclude anything at all about that category and because it is significant, you can’t conclude anything about the overall figure

    But let me concede your statistic about murderers whose race is known — that the majority is African-American What of it? I have the same questions to ask you that I asked Eric: (1)What are the policy implications of that statistic in terms of the right to purchase and own guns? As a self-proclaimed racist, and perhaps as someone who believes in the Constitution, you might want to tread carefully here. (2) As the highest percentage by far of those who commit murders is “male,” shouldn’t your biggest concern be around access to guns by men, not just by African-American men and women?

    In answering these questions, keep in mind that only a very small minority of African-Americans, whites, and men commit murders or other violent crimes to begin with. So your proposed policy should affect those who commit murderers and other violent crimes, such as rape and maybe you could argue that it should have a deterrent effect on those with a *high probability* of committing such violent crimes. I invite you to come up with such a policy, which should leave unaffected all African-Americans, whites, and men who act responsibly and are likely to continue doing so. Hint: excluding whole categories from purchasing guns — which is what started this discussion in the first place — isn’t the way to do it.

  730. I haven’t made any comment on the gun control issue. I have pointed out that the FBI endorses esr’s claim that, in so far as the data is available, a bit over half of murders are committed by blacks, which you had previously denied

    I am much less interested in making any imposition on blacks than in deflecting impositions and slanders of whites. That blacks are disproportionately responsible for murder shows that when blacks get disproportionately imprisoned and shot by the police, this is not suficient evidence of malicious treatment of blacks by police and the justice system.

  731. “…when blacks get disproportionately imprisoned and shot by the police, this is not suficient evidence of malicious treatment of blacks by police and the justice system.” Whoa, Oliver! You’ve gone far afield from talking about the race of murderers, when the race to known.

    The justice system is often an injustice system when it comes to African-Americans; they are more often represented by incompetent, are imprisoned more when committing the same crimes as whites, and receive longer sentences, among other inequities — take a look at the statistics in http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/08/racial_disparities_in_the_criminal_justice_system_eight_charts_illustrating.html Those facts might be uncomfortable for us whites to acknowledge but they are facts.

    What of “blacks shot by police”? everybody should be careful here, and that includes me. I’m not saying that the police, as a professional class, are racist; they’re certainly not, and I’m grateful to the many fine police officers out there who are taking risks every day to promote public safety. And you have to look at incidents on a case-by-case basis; sometimes, police officers shoot African-Americans in self-defense, and sometimes they act in would-be self-defense in a moment of panic, incorrectly feeling they have to shoot to kill when they don’t.

    But let’s face it: there are racist police officers who pull the trigger at a Black suspect far more readily than at a white one, and who have killed perfectly innocent African-Americans or African-Americans who deserve to be arrested and tried, but hardly killed. There’s a reason there’s a “Black Lives Matter” movement but no corresponding “white lives matter” — at least not in response to police shootings of innocent whites, which is rare to say the least.

  732. You’re trying to change the subject away from you having posted false statistics. I am not taking the bait. Given your statistics are false, your subsequent argument isn’t sustainable.

  733. Oliver, the argument is often made that we Democrats are “arrogant” and here I concede that the statistic of a majority of murderers being Black, *when their race is known,* is correct. On the issue of race of murderers,*when the race is known* you and Eric were correct; there, you have it.

    But far from changing the subject, I asked you a direct question about the original subject you, I, and others were discussing: the implications for gun ownership. I wasn’t making an “argument;” I was challenging you to come up with a policy based on this statistic, and one consistent with the Constitution. Sorry that you’re choosing not to do so.

    My own policy: As you know, I believe there should be more common-sense gun law reforms, including around background checks for buyers at gun shows and on the internet, and the more widespread manufacture and use of smart guns. That said, I believe current and new guns laws should be applied equitably, without with regard to racial, ethnic, gender, or other group considerations.

  734. @Szonyi “I asked you a direct question about the original subject you, I, and others were discussing: the implications for gun ownership. I wasn’t making an “argument;” I was challenging you to come up with a policy based on this statistic, and one consistent with the Constitution.”

    Very simple: repeal the racist laws that deter law abiding Americans of every color from owning and becoming competent in the use of self defense tools. That will shift the balance of violence toward the responsible people in every community, deterring would be criminals by increasing their risk of being wounded or killed.

  735. David Szonyi,

    I’m not American and don’t much care about its constitution. I would limit firearms ownership to property owners. This would disarm the vast majority of blacks. Those who would remain armed, I would be happy to bear arms with.

  736. I worry that David Szonyi is a typical example of liberal dogma indoctrination and may represent a mean specimen within the distribution. If so, then the probability of fracturing within our society is dangerously high. At what point do we stop trying to push back the tide and switch into self-preservation mode?

    Winter, no one here will interfere with your right to abstain from owning a firearm or choosing not to keep one in your home. Why do you insist on restricting our freedom to do so? You live in a region with a very high water table that results in many serious hazards for the population-at-large. Should you be denied the right to live there just because someone else thinks those hazards are excessive?

  737. @Szonyi: Of course we can make reasonable assumptions about those unsolved murders. A quick search finds this, regarding NYC:

    Roughly 86% of homicides involving a white victim have been solved compared to 45% involving a black victim and 56% involving a Hispanic victim. The races of 34 victims are unknown.

    Blacks have a higher percentage of unsolved murders, and since we know that most murders of blacks are committed by other blacks… well, unless you want to posit non-black criminal masterminds killing lots of blacks and getting away with it, the conclusion should be obvious.

  738. Murders of Blacks are less likely to be solved because a Black murder victim is more likely to live in a part of the US whose legal system is partially or fully extraterritorial, and is administered by a Black militia, which is indeed very likely to be the murderer.

  739. To Parallel: OK, I appreciate the clarity of what you’ve written — sort of. But exactly what “racist laws” are you referring to (and what makes them “racist”)?

    And what makes you think that even more proliferation of guns would have any significant effect in deterring criminals.? Criminals have more and better guns, and civilians usually don’t have time to wield their guns against them and when they do, to wield them successfully. In criminal actions, it’s almost always only the police who successfully use guns. The proliferation of guns does, however, lead to their use for more accidental homicides and serious injuries of innocent civilians, more suicides (the result of most gun deaths — see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/upshot/gun-deaths-are-mostly-suicides.html?_r=0) , more killing of children by adults and other children.

    The mass prolifertion of guns doesn’t make our world safer; it makes it more hazardous.

  740. David Szonyi: “Criminals have more and better guns, and civilians usually don’t have time to wield their guns against them and when they do, to wield them successfully. In criminal actions, it’s almost always only the police who successfully use guns.”

    [citation needed]…because just about every “fact” you cite is wrong.

  741. @Bruce:


    > But you don’t know that, because you are not at all knowledgeable about guns.

    What makes you think I am not knowledgeable about guns? What did I write that makes you believe that?

    If anything I am too knowledgeable about guns (the weapons). What I am not knowledgeable about is the statistics that gun advocates pull out of you know where. Statistics on how the vast majority of self defense instances with guns do not involve the firing of a weapon.

    Those statistics are off by 3 orders of magnitude as I remember from actual numbers based on police reports where use of a firearm for self defense has been documented.

    Let us picture this. Two (angry) males bikers sitting in a bar in TX get into a heated exchange (e.g. cowboys/cowshits vs steelers) and the cowshits guy gets his bubble burst. He reaches out for his concealed weapon (not drawing. just reaching out) . Well that goes down as a “self defense” incident in these statistics. And that is horseshit!

  742. To Jay Maynard, 17:17: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-guns-self-defense-charleston-20150619-story.html

    Read it and weep; better yet, read it and think think a little critically whether having even more guns around for “self-defense” really makes sense. (Hint: It doesn’t.)

    I’ve at least pointed to a well-researched article. If you and others believe my point is wrong, don’t just say so; provide some counter-evidence from a reputable source.

  743. New York Times? LA Times Opinion page? Really? You do know that the Violence Policy Center gets a lot of its funding the Joyce Foundation and both are anti-gun entities. The conclusions of the report are foregone…

    Every bogus citation you bring up reinforces a 2A supporter’s conclusion you are out to ban all guns…

  744. The LA Times site uses an ad blocker blocker. I don’t deal with such sites, on principle. (Hint: after Forbes implemented their ad blocker blocker, they were found to be serving up malware ads…)

  745. That there are fewer justifiable homicides than unjustifiable homocides also “proves” that the police and the army are weaker than criminals, not just civilian gun owners. Because if they were stronger we would expect them to have racked up a massive body count, right?

  746. uma, can you tell me what laws (if any) were broken by your battling sports fans?

    I STRONGLY doubt you can without searching for the answer, and the mere fact you post the hypothetical is interesting.

    You really need to see a Mental Health professional about the numerous phobias you have exposed by your comments here..

    PS – it is Felony to possess a firearm in a 51% establishment and a second Felony to possess a firearm while intoxicated. Self-defense or not, your scenario isn’t a lawful use of a firearm…

  747. To Rick T: So, basically, you have nothing to say about the LA Times report other than everything in it is supposedly “bogus,” right? Yawn. No counter-evidence from a reputable source, as usual; just rhetoric.
    See, this futile, pointless game can be played both ways: Donald Trump received significant funding from the NRA, *the* pro-gun group. Is everything he says about the issue “bogus”? What of the senators and congressmen who do so as well, Republican and Democratic”? Is everything they say and write bogus? As someone extremely critical of both Trump and the NRA, even I don’t believe that.

    Anyway, facts matter. Offer them. I have and I’ve even admitted I’ve been wrong sometimes. But what I don’t respect, after I offer a source, is someone like you who says in effect: your sources are biased and all your figures are thus suspect or bogus. *Your* sources (the ones you didn’t offer, that is) aren’t biased? Every source is biased — what matters is that, whatever the source, there are some creditable, well-researched figures.

    Rick, in not offering any evidence-based response, you’ve let yourself off the hook way too easily.

  748. @uma “If anything I am too knowledgeable about guns (the weapons).”

    Arrogant poo flinging concern trolling willfully ignorant racist asshole (APFCTWIRA, for those of you keeping track at home).


  749. > … about the numerous phobias you have exposed by your comments here..

    Would love to hear from you on those phobias. Do explain please!


    > PS – it is Felony to possess a firearm in a 51% establishment and a second Felony to possess a firearm while intoxicated. Self-defense or not, your scenario isn’t a lawful use of a firearm…

    1) The 51% establishment does not have a sign 2) Neither are “intoxicated” per legal definition of intoxication. 3) Firearm was neither used nor drawn.

    The point is this. Your imaginary self defense scenarios are like your imaginary threats. ie non-existent.

  750. uma, since no one has yet bothered to take your lone feather away, I’ll be your huckleberry. You said, “Why stop there [at private ownership of fully-armed warships]? It is your constitutional right to own and have nukes by that logic. That way you can pillage a whole continent. If y’all think that then y’all are f__kin retarded.”

    The government and laws of the USA grant no rights by definition. Any grant of government permission is a privilege, granted and revoked at a whim. Rights pre-exist the US Constitution (and, I’d argue, ALL governments), and the right to self-defense by keeping and bearing arms is no different. But don’t just take my word for it: ‘it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment , like the First and Fourth Amendment s, codified a pre-existing right’ via http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZO.html

    Further, the US Constitution is a grant of powers from the individual American person to the federal government, and without said grant said government would not legally exist. This means that the authority of the entire US government is a mere derivative of a single human being’s authority, at best only equal to the authority of its source. Authority does not increase in scope with increased numbers (unlike mere power), as otherwise I could, say, reimpose “legitimate slavery” by increasing the members of my kidnapping gang to an arbitrary amount. (Yes, as implied, this also means that the overwhelming vast majority of US federal government activity is outside of its authority and therefore literally criminal.)

    What all that means is this: if the US federal government actually has authority to do any given thing, so does any random free American individual. The authority for the US fedgov to design, build, and possess nuclear weapons is DERIVED from my own authority as a single individual – and as such, I also possess the right to design, build, and possess nuclear weapons. (And it was so cute seeing you thinking you’d counted coup against the right to keep and bear arms.)

    __________
    Here’s my proof, feel free to bash your head against it:
    1. All codes, regulations, laws, etc., are subordinate to higher law.
    2. The USA’s highest law is the US Constitution.
    3. The US Constitution cannot possess more authority than its source.
    3a. The US Supreme Court is a construct of the US Constitution and cannot possess more authority than its source.
    4. The US Constitution’s source of authority is that of a single human.
    4a. The US Constitution was created at the Philadelphia Convention using no authority beyond what the delegates had, which was that given to them by individual human voters.
    4b. Human authority does not increase as numbers of humans increase: a murder gang of one, or one million, is still a gang of criminal murderers.
    5. Therefore: if one human alone does not have authority to perform a given action on someone else, neither can that same human delegate authority to perform that same action to anyone else, human, person, nor government.

    Terms:
    A. Authority is the right to use power against someone else; or, the use of power without trespassing on the property of others.
    B. Power is force, violence, coercion, etc.
    C. Property includes the body and possessions obtained by a human being acting within its authority.
    __________

    (To help you sleep well tonight and on future nights, uma, and in exchange for your – now my – lovely feather, here are some search terms of interest: “grey goo” and “DNA printer”.)


  751. > See https://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html for an exhaustive treatment of how racists used gun control laws as a means to oppress racial minorities.

    When I see you (metaphoric. Don’t know much about you since you haven’t posted much), and people like you, start “charities” and using the donated money to distribute rifles to the children of El-Salvadoran immigrants, US citizens by birth, and train them on the use of those weapons, so that when Trump sends his goons and they trespass their limits they know what to do, I will start paying more attention to what people in your camp are saying.

  752. No, I don’t have anything to say to an LA Times OPINION column written by a staffer at an anti-gun foundation, beyond something about drawing water from a poisoned well.

    Let’s pull some quotes, then:

    uma on 2016-12-19 at 16:25:24 said:
    …”Not bad! Not bad indeed! Who said that angry white male savages are incapable of humor?”…

    uma on 2016-12-19 at 16:51:07 said:
    ….”This is in deed just about the only redeeming qualitiy for “whites” as pertains to story of humanity’s progress. And it explains much of their success.

    “Whites” are cultural followers who excel at appropriating other people’s cultures and transformational ideas and do that with remarkable success, productivity, and benefit to their people and, to a lesser extent, the rest of humanity.”…..

    uma on 2016-12-23 at 00:22:15 said:
    Next question: Why would white suburbia comply ?
    Answer: Because they are law abiding (what ESR calls “Switzerland”). It is their mentally ill kids with easy access to guns that commit mass shootings. A problem that would largely disappear when the parents comply with the laws.

    uma on 2016-12-23 at 01:54:25 said:
    My bet is that whites will comply with the law. And that we’ll be safe from their mentally deranged socially unadjusted kids. And that network effects, if anything, will accelerate compliance.

    uma on 2016-12-23 at 18:52:44 said:

    > uma focuses on “mentally deranged suburban kid” AKA young white probably Republican males to the exclusion of Democrats, Muslims and Blacks

    1) I live in a “Switzerland”, and the most likely threat in a “Switzerland” will come from the mentally deranged suburban kid…..

    And on, and on getting in to Smart Guns, etc.

    Looks like you are afraid of young white males…

  753. @PeaceableGuy:


    > Further, the US Constitution is a grant of powers from the individual American person to the federal government

    That is false. It is a grant of powers from the “American people” not the “individual American person” to the federal government.

    If you don’t believe me, read the first 3 works in the constitution(hint: preamble).

  754. @RickT:


    > And on, and on getting in to Smart Guns, etc.

    > Looks like you are afraid of young white males…

    Yes. Indeed, and if I live in a Switzerland with guns in every household, that is pretty much the only credible threat that I face.

    -> Inner city gangsters — no threat (ESR’s switzerland != swaziland equation)
    -> Muslims — Transient threat. Terrorism = political violence. Spiked dramatically since ISIS and the Iraq war, but will go back to “statistical noise”

  755. uma, ignoring the fact that the preamble is not law, I ask you: how many *people* need to be in my kidnapping gang before I can “legitimately” come to your house, kick in your door, and drag you away to throw in my cages? After all, “We the People” is absolutely less than 100% of “the people”. Witness the “coercive measures”: http://www.ushistory.org/us/16c.asp

    Stated another way: explain how it is wrong for one human to do a thing to another against their will, and yet not wrong for one hundred humans to impose that same act on an unwilling victim. If you can’t, then my point stands. Yay, nukes!

  756. To Jay Maynard, 12/25, 8:23: “Every time they speak favorably of Australia’s confiscation, they set off alarm bells. They know they can’t come right out and propose it themselves, because they know that that’s a losing issue. They remember 1994, even if you don’t. So they blow gun-grabber dog whistles.”

    Another swing on the confiscation issue, another bad whiff. Jay, think about what you yourself wrote: “They know they can’t come right out and propose it [Australian-style confiscation of selective classes of guns via mandatory buyback) themselves, because they know that that’s a losing issue.” Precisely! As you say, at present, gun reforms types can’t even “propose” anything resembling an Australian mandatory buyback program; they can’t because of the opposition of the NRA and the number of gun owners who think like the NRA, all of which would make this a “losing issue”. So if such reforms can’t even be proposed — and haven’t been, of course — much less pass, why the fear, the “alarm bells”? Why not calm confidence that even the most modest attempts at gun reform will be defeated again and again, as they largely have been after Sandy Hook, while the rights of gun-owners will be expanded, as they have been in many states (excepting some in those ornery, recalcitrant coastal enclaves)? Methinks the gentleman (whose own personal gun rights almost certain haven’t been restricted one iota since Obama took power in Jan. ’09) frets too much.

  757. Oh vey!

    I only believe in public safety! It’s not like I’m trying to disarm you, then import migrants to kill you. I mean, the migrants are just little boys aged 17-45. They’re not military aged males, trust me goyim!

  758. @uma “When I see you (metaphoric. Don’t know much about you since you haven’t posted much), and people like you, start “charities” and using the donated money to distribute rifles to the children of El-Salvadoran immigrants, US citizens by birth, and train them on the use of those weapons, so that when Trump sends his goons and they trespass their limits they know what to do, I will start paying more attention to what people in your camp are saying.”

    Sorry, you’re worried about the wrong US political party. It was Democrat Janet Reno that sent armed Federal agents in to tear Elian Gonzales away from his family after his mother died getting him to Florida, and who sent in the tanks to kill the children at Waco.

    Projecting arrogant poo flinging concern trolling willfully ignorant racist asshole (PAPFCTWIRA, for those of you keeping score at home).

  759. “As you say, at present, gun reforms types can’t even “propose” anything resembling an Australian mandatory buyback program; ”

    Call a spade a spade. “Mandatory buyback” is just fancy words to dress up “confiscation”. (And befpre you object that the difference is that the gun owners got paid, they almost certainly did not get paid fair market value for the guns, and in any event, a forced sale to the government is still confiscation.)

    And that they can’t formally propose it now doesn’t mean they can’t work toward that end, one bite of the apple at a time…like, say, taking away gun rights form folks on the no-fly list or requiring that someone get the approval of a faceless, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat before selling a legally owned piece of private property to someone else.

    :Why not calm confidence that even the most modest attempts at gun reform will be defeated again and again, as they largely have been after Sandy Hook, while the rights of gun-owners will be expanded, as they have been in many states (excepting some in those ornery, recalcitrant coastal enclaves)? Methinks the gentleman (whose own personal gun rights almost certain haven’t been restricted one iota since Obama took power in Jan. ’09) frets too much.”

    Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. The moment we relax our guard, some new infringement on our right to keep and bear arms will be enacted.

    Don’t you get it yet? WE DON’T TRUST YOU!

    And the more you argue that guns are evil and we shouldn’t have them, but you’re not going to try to take them, the more you reinforce your untrustworthiness.

  760. Uma wrote:
    > What makes you think I am not knowledgeable about guns? What did I write that makes you
    > believe that? If anything I am too knowledgeable about guns (the weapons).”

    What types of guns have you handled and fired, under what conditions? Have you shot on a range? Hunted?

    Book-learning “knowledge” doesn’t cut it.

  761. @Cathy:


    > What types of guns have you handled and fired, under what conditions? Have you shot on a range? Hunted?

    Guns: AKs (47s, 74s, fully automatic, authentic russian makes. Not in the US of course), Collectible guns (e.g. Mausers), hunting rifles (mainly Remingtons but also others) and pistols of course.

    Conditions: Day, night, rain, clear, shooting range, out in open. Blind-folded assembly disassembly.

    I mentioned I saw data that convinced me that electronic igniting of the bullet’s propellent compound is better. That was in fact at a facility of a gun manufacturer here in the US. In one of the red states.

    I respect guns much. Consider some of them to objects of sheer beauty. But “love them”. No. Have them around my place: “No”.

  762. To Jay Maynard, 8:36 PM: I get it fine, Jay, about not trusting me (after all, I’ve read many of our posts; no need for those ALL CAPS). But what I don’t get is that you don’t trust the power of yourself and your fellow “pro-gun”niks. After all, you now have perhaps the most powerful lobby in Washington in the NRA and a pro-gun president-elect, Senate, and House; the Supreme Court has made some rulings in your favor and so have a slew of state houses.

    From your point of view, it can’t get much better than this. What more do you want? What will relieve your anxiety hat someone, somewhere is about to take your precious guns away?

    P.S. You haven’t once heard me state or suggest that “guns are evil” — remember what I wrote about recreational gun users and how, even though I’m opposed to civilians owning guns for purely self-defense — as has been documented, the harm is often greater than the good — I respect their right to do so? I n fact, compared to some of my friends, I’m an out-and-out “pussycat

  763. >I n fact, compared to some of my friends, I’m an out-and-out “pussycat

    Welcome to Trump.

    You should thank them.

  764. winter on 2016-12-25 at 11:49:44 said:

    “I still do not understand how this refutes the fact that gun owners are more likely to die a violent death?

    It doesn’t. That’s because you’ve lost track of your own argument.

    My citation was in response to your comment:

    “You want to share those numbers with us? Probably not, because they do not seem to exist.”

    Which was in response to Jay Maynard’s comment:

    “Here’s one for you: that study you cite did not even attempt to look at how many lives were saved by defensive gun uses”

    Honestly, if you can’t keep track of an argument that’s written down, why do you bother?

  765. “What more do you want?”

    Concrete demonstrations that you are done, forever, with trying to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. No more talk of “common sense” gun restrictions. No more laudatory talk of Australia’s confiscation. No more trying to do away with the PLCA. No more promises to reverse DC v. Heller. No more talk about “my right to feel safe”. No more championing of the no fly list or any other arbitrary ways of taking away the right. No more proposals for “assault weapon” or high-capacity magazine bans. No more trying to make a felon out of a dad transferring his gun to his son without asking a bureaucrat “pretty please, may I?”.

    Roll back restrictions that only affect the law-abiding. There are 20,000 gun laws on the books, the overwhelming majority of which are enforced, if at all, only against law-abiding citizens who make honest mistakes. Do away with them. Enforce the laws that remain against all that violate them, including the government.

    Destroy every last record of a background check in the government’s files, and every other record, physical or electronic, that could identify who has firearms that can be confiscated. Shred all of those Form 4473s the government has collected over the years from gun dealers they’ve forced out of business. While they’re at it, quit forcing gun dealers out of business. Hell, just do away with the jackbooted thugs of the BATF.

    I’m willing to settle for shall-issue carry permits. (See? I’m not a total absolutist. If I were, I’d be demanding Constitutional carry in all 50 states.) But shall-issue is the minimum requirement, with reasonable requirements for obtaining a permit and attorney’s fees awarded to anyone who’s denied a permit and successfully challenges the denial in court. (This is the law in Minnesota.) And all permits are to be fully reciprocal in every state, just as driver’s licenses are.

    To sum it up: nothing short of an activist pro-gun agenda. Anything less is just the camel waiting outside the tent to stick his nose further in.

    You have to earn my trust, and it’s going to take a lot of earning. You (collectively) have screwed gun owners far too often.

    “remember what I wrote about recreational gun users and how, even though I’m opposed to civilians owning guns for purely self-defense”

    You have it exactly backwards. A firearm for self-defense is more protected as a Constitutional right than is a firearm for recreation. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. Or target shooting.

  766. @David Szonyi

    “What will relieve your anxiety hat someone, somewhere is about to take your precious guns away?”

    Such views being placed on same social footing as racism today, i.e. expressing such views publicly being grounds for dismissal with cause from any job; suppression of such views by terror.

  767. David Szonyi: “Criminals have more and better guns”

    Not around here they don’t.

    Seriously, where do you even get this stuff? Criminals typically have shitty guns, and rarely know how to use them effectively. Your average ‘banger in the hood doesn’t spend a lot of time at the range.

    Your “facts” about guns appear to be a weird melange of nonsense you’ve seen in bad television shows and nonsense you’ve read in propaganda pieces from the various “Concerned Mother” Bloomberg cutout operations.

  768. To Jay Maynard: Dream on. Your totalistic vision of total freedom from any regulation on guns isn’t how the political system in our democratic society works, which is as a battle and an ultimate compromise among competing interests (here: the legitimate rights of gun owners vs. the legitimate right of the public for safe spaces). So, to get what you want, you, and those who think like you, are going to have to overthrow the system.

    Care to engage in the political process instead? (Probably not)

    To Oliver Cromwell: I’m not sure I totally understand what you wrote (your basis for “the same social footing” comment is?) but I know enough about employment law to sense that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Employees make disparaging comments and write nasty things about other employees all the time. *No employer* would equate a disparaging comment by one individual employee about another with “racism,” especially a comment made in the heat of a dispute. Most employers that summarily fired such an employee would be opening themselves up to being sued up the wazoo for wrongful termination.

    And what’s with the “suppression of such views by terror”? Do you favor “suppression” of certain views you don’t like? “Terror”? You’re doing too good of a job of channeling your 17th century namesake, and it ain’t pretty.

  769. @David Szonyi: Imagine all the things that might happen to you if you publicly stated your belief that blacks are racially inferior. Losing your job is a certainty; they fired a Nobel prize winner for it. Your kids, your wife, your house, your friends? All probable. Death threats? Probable. Death threats carried out? Possible.

    That is what society does with unacceptable beliefs. I want disarming the yeomanry to be an unacceptable belief.

  770. David Szonyi: “Dream on.”

    You asked what I wanted. I answered.

    “an ultimate compromise among competing interests (here: the legitimate rights of gun owners vs. the legitimate right of the public for safe spaces).”

    Constitutional rights don’t work that way. They are never subject to a balancing test.

    And the public has no right to safe spaces. I keep raising that point, and you keep ignoring it.

    “Care to engage in the political process instead? (Probably not)”

    Why do you think I voted against Hillary Clinton?

  771. “Care to engage in the political process instead?”

    Don’t be daft. This IS the political process. You asked a question and received a prompt and comprehensive answer. Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.

    You’re exercising the same comical tactic of Democrats since they’ve losing historic amounts of power in the US: despite losing electorally, you expect the winners to govern according to your agenda. To reiterate what you’re in denial of – you’re losing elections with this shitty rhetoric and failed agenda.

    But hey, full speed ahead right?

  772. To gnmay: By “political process” I don’t mean responding to a comment on a private blog; that’s anything but engaging in a political process; it’s just trading opinions by private citizens. That’s way too easy and, well, private. This blog has very little or no effect on pubic policy.

    I mean the hard hard slog of fighting for legislation and regulations that you believe in and fighting against legislation and regulations that you don’t via elections, lobbying, judicial proceedings, etc. That’s what both “pro-gun” and “anti-gun” forces have been doing for years.

  773. Oy Vey!
    Shouldn’t you gun nuts have sympathy for me?
    You are required to have sympathy for me as an orphan, even though I murdered my parents… you stupid goyim!

  774. @SDN:

    I don’t know if your posts are worth the time to respond but I will try:

    First, I do not believe the state should have any business to do with marriage. Whether that is hetrosexual or gay marriage or any kind of marriage for that matter. It should not discriminate in favor or against those who are married. I believe the problem started from your side (the christians, the conservatives) who refuse to accept that the state is secular and always, in overt or covert ways, try to make laws that discriminate in favor of their world view (christian marriage). They preach small government, except when the paper-shuffling bureaucrats are installed to enforce their utopian plan for mankind.

    Second (Re your video), a lot of Muslims would probably be voting republican through and through (including these religious freedom laws like Indiana), if your party wasn’t agitating against them all the time. Despite that, a lot of Muslims seem to have voted for Trump. 3x the number of those who voted for Romney if reports are correct.

    Third, you assume that I am a democrat. I am not. Nor have I ever been left-leaning. Nor do I have any love for totalitarians (like our friend David Szonyi). Just because I don’t like right wing fucktardian logic does not automatically mean I am with the other side, or that the other side comes to the table with sensible positions and south thinking. The other side is not just as bad. Most of the time, IT IS WORSE!

    Fourth, you assume that I am a Muslim. I am not. I discussed my background a while back on this blog. No need to repeat.

  775. “Care to engage in the political process instead? (Probably not)”

    Funny, I thought that’s what we had been doing. Hence, CC now being legal in all 50 states, with 50 state reciprocity coming soon. Hence, state and local gun-grabbing laws being overturned by the score.

    We’re winning. You’re losing.

    Get used to it.

  776. Uma-‘What makes you think I am not knowledgeable about guns? …I have fired AKs(47s, 74s… collectibles, hunting rifles, pistols ..blindfold disassembly ..conditions..’

    Sounds like you’d outshoot me easily. And so far I’ve managed to disassemble and get the things back together with no time pressure in a quiet, well lit room.

    What made me think you are not knowledgeable about guns was you not mentioning Obama choking off ammunition availability for the last eight years. 22s were flatly unavailable for a while.
    Ended a month ago, when Trump won. It’s not the only thing that’s convinced the overwhelming majority of gun owners that gun control laws are like the alcohol Temperance movement, a fraud advanced to cover a total ban. Anyone who wants to see common sense gun laws passed will have to mention the last eight years of openly bad faith, and explain why their laws are advanced in good faith. Note that we already have background checks; FOI cards are a background check. And we already have waiting periods. Claiming that’s all your side wants is a great way to convince us you argue in bad faith. Or are really uninformed.

    I will convince every sensible pot smoker in America that Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just say no’ was the sensible advice of a sensible woman who’d seen a lot of hard partying, and the damage done, and should be followed by everyone at all sensible and kept the law of the land, before you convince the average American FOI card holding legal gun owner that 1) background checks are something we don’t already have, 2) waiting periods are something we don’t already have, and 3) ammunition supplies weren’t really choked off in bad faith by Obama for the last eight years. Oh, and convince us that we are crazy to doubt your good faith and knowledge.

  777. @gmmay “Honestly, if you can’t keep track of an argument that’s written down, why do you bother?”

    Because winter isn’t engaging in dialectic (discussion between two sides with differing views that are both seeking the truth). winter is engaged in rhetoric (speech intended to persuade or motivate).

    You’re never going to convince (e.g.) winter of your virtue through facts, logic or reasonableness. Many of them don’t even believe in objective truth or the scientific method, much less the dangers of fallacious argument. Instead, they believe virtue is found only in conformance with the leftist narrative of intersectional identity victimhood.

    Therefore enjoy the opportunity to tweak, point and laugh at the dishonest, emotionally irrational commenters. Taking them seriously is to give them more respect than they deserve.

  778. On “David Szonyi” at 23:48 PM (a time I was in bed)> Somebody has, for the second time, forged my name. Pretty low blow, though what was said in my name was so idiotic, and so doesn’t sound like me, that I guess it doesn’t matter all that much; most of you undoubtedly can see through the crudeness of the impersonation. With most of the people on this site, I can have honest disagreements. But a few will stoop to just about anything.

    To the person who”s doing this: please consider being yourself, and only yourself, if you can.

  779. @Bruce:


    > Sounds like you’d outshoot me easily. And so far I’ve managed to disassemble and get the things back together with no time pressure in a quiet, well lit room.

    I’d probably enjoy going hunting with you. If for no other reason than the humble demeanor I detect in your response. The best of the best with guns have exactly your demeanor. And I wouldn’t bet on getting the most kills.

  780. Trust me goys… my disagreements are totally honest. It’s not like I’m hiding my desire to have you goyim disarmed, then murdered by third world migrants!

  781. I’m unsubscribing to this site soon simply because reading all the posts and even selectively responding to some, has become way too time-consuming, I want to thank Eric for his original post and the site in general, and for all those who responded civilly and, especially, substantively to things I wrote. I also want to acknowledge that I got some things wrong and apologize to any and all whom I might have personally offended,

    Rereading Eric’s original post, I’m again struck by some of his valid points. We Democrats did suffer a serious/major defeat in 2016; we’ve been both complacent and arrogant at times and we’ve sabotaged ourselves by sometimes not running the best candidates/campaigns (and not just in 2016). (There’s no denying that we lost a massive number of seats on the congressional and state levels in 2014 and 2010.) All these factors, and many more, contributed to your valid observation and criticism that in 2016, the Democrats are in a conceptual and political hole. New Deal liberalism is passe and the Democrats have lost a lost of strength over the 8 years.

    That said, the piece also seems to me even more flawed than the first time I read it. There’s a tone of smug triumphalism that hardly seems justified. After all, Eric, your conclusions are drawn shortly (way too shortly) after a very unusual campaign — a boundlessly ugly election election featuring two very unpopular candidates. It was a campaign with a particularly cynical approach by the more unpopular candidate and a particularly inept one by the less unpopular, causing the more unpopular to win — aided by assists from the FBI director and the Russians. Trump might have inaugurated a new style of campaigning/politics but don’t bet on it continuing once he leaves office.

    Your positing a “realignment” election — never really explained — seems to be both to lack historical perspective and to be wildly premature. If you mean that the Republicans won a majority of the white working class vote, well, that happened and the claim of a “realignment” was made far more convincingly in 1980 and to some extent a full 48 years ago, in 1968, but Republicans and those “realignments” was hardly decisive or permanent. This one won’t be either, and your fears of a “one-party democracy,” made by others previously, seems unfounded. Once we know how Trump does in terms of the economy, international affairs, and building an impressive, diverse, effective team — so far, the signs aren’t at all encouraging in terms of the latter — and know what will happen in 2018 and, particularly, 2020, then and only then will we know whether a lasting realignment has occurred.

    Eric, it’s more than a little condescending/dismissive to tell Democrats to “get your act together” — there’s no “act”; the Democrats stand for a different philosophy of government than the GOP, and it’s one that has won the popular vote in 4 of the last 5 presidential elections, 2000-2016 (the one exception being 2004). And it’s more than a little presumptuous to write “The country needs you” — you hardly speak for “the country” any more than I do and, as stated, it’s the Democrats in this election who represented the country’s largest political faction (by close to 3 million votes).

    To say that the Democrats have hurt themselves in trying to assemble a “broad-based political coalition” is correct, and we’ve already had in-depth analyses of how they’ve done so, and how the Democrats have also lost votes due to demographic and other forces beyond their control. But to say that their ability to assemble such a winning coalition has “collapsed” strikes me as patently ridiculous. We did so in 2008 and 2012 with a liberal (and pro-gun control) African-American candidate, and there’s no reason we won’t do so again.

    And while we’re on the topic of broad-based coalitions, it’s perhaps the Republicans you should worry about more than the Democrats– will you ever write a similar piece on them? The Republicans still rely overly heavily on white males and failed to make significant gains among African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians, while losing the female vote by 54-42%. (True, Trump won, by a narrow majority, *married women* but a high percentage of adult women in the U.S. are unmarried.). The results in Texas alone should make complacent Republicans a little nervous.

    You repeat the conventional wisdom about “your lock on the elite media”. I have no problem with granting that liberals predominate in major newspapers and TV stations, but a “lock”? Aren’t you forgetting about, say, Fox News (probably the most recognized and popular in the U.S. today is Megyn Kelly), the plethora of often stridently conservative voices (from Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter to Mark Levin) on the radio — can you name a single stridently liberal voice out there? — and the Wall Street Journal, the evangelical Christian press and media, not to mention social media, which Trump used so effectively.

    Your most flawed point might be about “the conservative majority in most of the U,S,” that knows it’s a conservative majority. As they say in New York City, “Fuhgettabutit!” There simply is no conservative majority among voters’ there isn’t even a conservative plurality .. A CNN exit poll of voters reveals that 39% identifies as “moderate,” 35% as “conservative,” and 26% as “liberal” see http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-pollshttp://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls Trump wasn’t elected by a self-aware conservative majority in such key states as Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin; in fact, significant numbers of conservatives, including the last 2 GOP presidents, the most recent GOP presidential candidate, and a number of prominent conservative intellectuals and media outlets, beginning with National Review, disowned him. His Electoral College majority was probably provided in these and other states by non-ideological white working class voters (Some of whom also had liked the progressive Sanders) and by fickle, hold-your-nose moderates/independents. Trump and no other GOP candidate has a hold on these two classes of voters; they could re-elect him in 2020 or, just as conceivably, could abandon him in droves..

    Finally, there is that strange drumbeat about “coastal enclaves”. Eric, that’s every bit as elitist and exclusionary as Democratic talk of “flyover country”. Your allusion recalls Sarah Palin’s one about the (mythical) “real America”. (Incidentally, if Sarah Palin represented the “center” in 2008, as you, in my opinion, wrongly claim, then voters that year decisively opted for the left.) If Democrats carry LA by several hundred thousand votes and Republicans carry 100 rural counties within a 500 mile radius of LA by the same margin, the votes cancel each other out (except perhaps in the antiquated Electoral College) and LA and the 100 rural counties both are very much part of America. So, let’s stop the conceptual balkanizing of the U.S. and remember that we’re one people.

    More on the gun issue to follow today, tomorrow, or Wednesday
    .

  782. @parallel
    “@gmmay “Honestly, if you can’t keep track of an argument that’s written down, why do you bother?””

    Its Xmass and I have offline obligations that limit the time I can be involved in research and comnent formulation. I was indeed somewhat terse and amuiguous. My appologies.

    @parallel
    “You’re never going to convince (e.g.) winter of your virtue through facts, logic or reasonableness.” Etc.

    My rethorics are bad, and empirical facts as a basis of truth finding is how I make a living. But this subject is not my line of work so I am just an amateur.

    Back to the comment of @gmmay:

    I learn here that people want to keep guns at home because it makes them more safe. On my comment that statistics tell us that gun owners are more likely to die a violent death, I am inundated by statistics of how people use guns in self defense.

    But I still do not understand how all this justified self defense helps gun owners. Because, in the end, gun owners are worse off, deadly force wise. If you suggest this is pure altruism, gun owners sacrifice their lives for society, good. That is very noble. But then use that as an argument. Not being more secure.

    Or, explain to me what is wrong with my earlier staristics and show how gun owners are, against all the statistics, more secure.

  783. David Szonyi: Your basic point seems to be that the popular vote has gone Democrats’ way in Presidential elections, and that’s the proof of the basic rightness of their position. There are two objections to this.

    First, the national popular vote is meaningless. The election of a President is designed to require more than just running up the score in the most heavily populated states. It’s designed to require a broader base of support across the country. In essence, it’s not one election, but 51, and the winner can’t just win a small handful.

    Second, the large and growing majority of legislators and lower-level executive positions are Republican. The Minnesota Senate flipped to Republican control this year. Minnesota! This is hardly a hotbed of racist white nationalism. Not only that, but Wisconsin voted for Trump and reelected a Republican Senator who was widely predicted to lose.

    Eric’s absolutely correct. The country is splitting politically in two: the urban enclaves of rich elitist leftists and the poor voters they buy and pay for by giving away our tax dollars, and the folks out here in flyover country who are tired of watching that happen. To look at the popular vote is to totally ignore the latter half of the country.

    We’re tired of being ignored.

  784. “To gnmay: By “political process” I don’t mean responding to a comment on a private blog; that’s anything but engaging in a political process; it’s just trading opinions by private citizens. That’s way too easy and, well, private. This blog has very little or no effect on pubic policy.

    I mean the hard hard slog of fighting for legislation and regulations that you believe in and fighting against legislation and regulations that you don’t via elections, lobbying, judicial proceedings, etc. That’s what both “pro-gun” and “anti-gun” forces have been doing for years.”

    Which is why, in the context of this thread, it’s been pointed out to you over and over and over that the political process that the Democrats are following is losing. And it’s based on the type of rhetoric you’re exercising here. Hence this thread.

    Honestly, if you’re not going to read for comprehension or mind context, you’re wasting more of your time than anyone else’s.

  785. Parallel on 2016-12-26 at 00:33:57 said:

    Oh, I understand all of that completely.

    I also understand (as I’m sure you do too) that I’m not going to convince any of the other Lefties here, but perhaps an undecided lurker or two.

  786. > Cathy:
    >> What types of guns have you handled and fired, under what
    >> conditions? Have you shot on a range? Hunted?

    Uma:
    > [detailed list of active experience assembling and shooting]

    > I respect guns much. Consider some of them to objects of sheer beauty.
    > But “love them”. No. Have them around my place: “No”.

    I am both impressed at your experience, and sad that in spite of that you still misunderstand the typical American gun-owner position and why it is what it is.

  787. “But what I don’t get is that you don’t trust the power of yourself and your fellow “pro-gun”niks. After all, you now have perhaps the most powerful lobby in Washington in the NRA and a pro-gun president-elect, Senate, and House; the Supreme Court has made some rulings in your favor and so have a slew of state houses.
    “From your point of view, it can’t get much better than this. What more do you want?”

    In spite of all this, there is a strong feeling that we are one Supreme Court Justice away from losing it all.

  788. “In spite of all this, there is a strong feeling that we are one Supreme Court Justice away from losing it all.”

    Indeed…and more: we were in desperate danger of losing it had Merrick Garland been appointed to the Court. One major reason I voted for Donald Trump was that he’s far more likely to nominate another in the mold of Antonin Scalia than Hillary Clinton was.

    What I’m really hoping is that the other three likely vacancies on the Court – Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy – are also replaced by jurists in the mold of Scalia, who believed that the Constitution should be understood as it was written in 1789, not rewritten by reinterpretation based on modern meanings of words.

    That issue more than anything was the tipping point for me.

  789. winter on 2016-12-26 at 10:42:19 said:

    “I learn here that people want to keep guns at home because it makes them more safe. On my comment that statistics tell us that gun owners are more likely to die a violent death, I am inundated by statistics of how people use guns in self defense.

    Or, explain to me what is wrong with my earlier staristics and show how gun owners are, against all the statistics, more secure.”

    That specific point was about DGU, right?

    If the statistics show that more lives are saved through defensive use of firearms than through firearms accidents (and they do), then there’s your explanation.

    But continuing on – If someone breaks into my home or attacks me in the street, whether they are armed or unarmed, then my probability of survival increases dramatically if I am armed. There’s the statistical refutation.

    Where your argument is fatally flawed is that you’re lumping in firearm accidents (as best I can tell), in the self-defense argument. Simple category error.

  790. gmmay, both accidents and suicides. This is how gun grabbers inflate statistics, as well as running up the numbers of “children” killed by people with firearms by defining “child” as “anyone under 25” – as the CDC did in their politicized research. With the right definitions, two 19-year-old drug dealers shooting it out over turf are both “children” and “acquaintances”, and make the numbers look a lot worse than they are.

  791. Jay Maynard on 2016-12-26 at 11:33:42 said:

    I debated on whether or not to mention suicides since I thought a thin case could be made from winter’s POV on the grounds that suicide requires individual agency, but you are correct in how the CDC misuses that statistic to further an agenda. But remember, the bureaucracy is apolitical! (eyeroll)

    I’ve lost my link which showed similar rates of suicides between the US and culturally similar western European nations with far more restrictive gun prohibitions.

  792. @winter “But I still do not understand how all this justified self defense helps gun owners. Because, in the end, gun owners are worse off, deadly force wise.”

    You’re thinking of gun owners as a class rather than a set of individuals. The differences between individual gun owners far exceed the differences between many gun owners and those who don’t own guns.

    The push back you’re getting is (in no small part) a reaction to (e.g.) a college educated rural mother carrying a concealed pistol to protect her young daughters being tarred with the same cultural/policy/legal brush as unsocialized young single males with a predilection for drinking too much alcohol and acting out outrageous behavior intended to impress females.

  793. Liberals hate white people a continuing series:

    If you don’t want to click: A radical prof at Drexel tweeted that want he wanted for Christmas was white genocide.

    When called on it he of course claimed he was only joking. But I think this is a classic case of ha-ha only serious.

    But libs aren’t racist right?

  794. @Cathy:

    > I am both impressed at your experience, and sad that in spite of that you still misunderstand the typical American gun-owner position and why it is what it is.

    This may in part be because I did not grow up in the US, and moved here after high school.

    This whole cat and mouse game that seems to be going on between democrats and gun owners here, and the bitterness I always detect in the tone of some gun owners, is something that I haven’t been paying attention to, and hasn’t factored much into my thinking.

  795. Uma:
    “This may in part be because I did not grow up in the US, and moved here after high school.”

    Yes. For better or for worse, this does seem to be an example of American exceptionalism. I’m not aware of any other nation in the world that sees firearms in quite the same way we do.

  796. @Darrencardinal:


    > A radical prof at Drexel tweeted that want he wanted for Christmas was white genocide.

    His tweet: “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide”

    His tweet reads like satire intended for a specific audience (maybe his students or something): The concept of “white genocide” is a fairy tale, and he would love for that other fairy tale with the white beard (Santa) to deliver it to him for Christmas.

    It is not good satire because those on the right generally have no sense of humor, and also need their own safe space. And he should have known better. O’Reilly should have him on Fox news.

  797. To Oliver Cromwell, 9:26 AM: David Szonyi: Brevity is the soul of wit.

    That’s original, OC.

  798. @uma “This whole cat and mouse game that seems to be going on between democrats and gun owners here, and the bitterness I always detect in the tone of some gun owners[….]”

    Gun owners like me are bitter because we feel unjustly blamed for the bad actions of others, with that blame concretized into state and Federal law.

    Prior to 1934, the Sears Roebuck Company sold Thompson sub machine guns by mail order. The National Firearms Act of 1934 was a reaction to Prohibition-era violence and Giuseppe Zangara’s assassination attempt on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

    The assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 was blamed on Lee Harvey Oswald, who had purchased his military surplus rifle via mail order. Bills were introduced in 1963 and 1965 to generally outlaw mail order sales to private citizens, but failed to pass the House.

    But the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy in 1968 overcame the opposition in Congress, so the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed into law.

    We gun owners perceive that Democrats simply can’t wrap their minds around the fact that individuals like Giuseppe Zangara, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and James Earl Ray had such an impact on history. Therefore Democrats either blame the tools used in those assassinations (firearms) or the people who keep and own them.

    That bitterness is compounded by Democrats’ continuous hypocrisy. In 1995 on TV show 60 Minutes, current House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said “If I could’ve gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them — Mr. and Mrs. America turn ’em all in — I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren’t here.” In 1995 Pelosi also said in a congressional hearing “I know the sense of helplessness that people feel. I know the urge to arm yourself because that’s what I did. I was trained in firearms. I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick. I carried a concealed weapon and I made the determination if somebody was going to try and take me out, I was going to take them with me.”

    Does that help you understand our bitterness, just a little bit?

  799. To Jay Maynard, 10:43 AM: “Your basic point seems to be that the popular vote has gone Democrats’ way in Presidential elections, and that’s the proof of the basic rightness of their position.”

    No, no, no, Jay, that’s not my basic point at all, and it’s extremely frustrating when you ignore the plain meeting of what I wrote and instead react to your fantasy of what I’m thinking. Here again is the opening of my post: “We Democrats did suffer a serious/major defeat in 2016; we’ve been both complacent and arrogant at times and we’ve sabotaged ourselves by sometimes not running the best candidates/campaigns (and not just in 2016). (There’s no denying that we lost a massive number of seats on the congressional and state levels in 2014 and 2010.) All these factors, and many more, contributed to *your valid observation and criticism that in 2016, the Democrats are in a conceptual and political hole. New Deal liberalism is passe*.(emphasis added between asterisks)

    So, please, Jay, give me the respect of reading me a little more carefully next time.

  800. Correction: the last quote was actually from Dianne Feinstein, another Democrat politician from California.

  801. His tweet: “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide”

    His tweet reads like satire intended for a specific audience (maybe his students or something): The concept of “white genocide” is a fairy tale, and he would love for that other fairy tale with the white beard (Santa) to deliver it to him for Christmas.

    It is not good satire because those on the right generally have no sense of humor, and also need their own safe space. And he should have known better. O’Reilly should have him on Fox news.

    Well two can play at that game.

    I think we should have a black genocide. Blacks commit more crime than whites, and they also take more in government benefits. If we killed them off, the country would be more racially homogenous, and expenses for welfare and prisons would drop. No downside right?

    Don’t you dare judge me for this, I’m just being satirical. You do have a sense of humor right? After all the concept of a black genocide is equally as much a fairy tale as that of white genocide.

    If you think those of us on the right are asking for a safe space, you do not understand us at all. Safe spaces are an invention of you liberal pussies.

    Those of use on the right are sick and tired of you liberal prick assholes.

    Welcome to Donald Trump

  802. “Great idea, Rick T! I’m sure all Americans who want to disarm the Constitution, especially the 14th Amendment, will endorse it enthusiastically.”

    Thanks, David. You’ve just confirmed that the “common-sense gun laws” have NOTHING to do with actually reducing gun violence, and everything to do with leaving your political opponents defenseless. Again, our final word on the subject is “leave us alone or we’ll kill you.”

  803. “your influence on those of us on the center and left, will very quickly drop to zero.”

    Please understand: we’re not interested in convincing you leftists of anything except that we’re best left alone.

  804. @ David Szonyi – yeah….”I’m unsubscribing to this site”…like you expended any effort at all to be here.

    Enjoy your metrosexual latte & quiche.

  805. @SDN – people like “David” are not going to be any obstacle at all. They are faceless, placid worms. David isn’t going to come get your guns…he’s a spineless coward. He wants the other big bullies to come get our guns.

    When we kill the bullies, we turn to the cowards.

    Life will not be good for them.

    Deservedly so.

  806. @Darrencardinal – yes, your satire is fine…but it exposes something all-too-real.

    If the BLM movement (and associated baggage) want to actually ignite a race war, they may wish to consider a few things:

    1) They are black – that’s a uniform you cannot remove.
    2) The Democrats have herded them into concentrated areas
    3) We know where they are
    4) We have them surrounded
    5) We have them outmanned & outgunned.

    A ‘race war’ in America would go down in history as the shortest and stupidest war mankind ever waged…and BLM negro bullshit would be the punchline.

  807. @Dan: Unfortunately, people like David control the public school system, higher education, the mainstream media, the public employee unions, and much of the NGO/nonprofit sector. It doesn’t matter how personally cowardly they might be: they have lots of votes and money and power. They came very close to electing a president who would have appointed Supreme Court justices who would have “interpreted” the Second Amendment out of existence. I would not blithely dismiss them.

  808. @PapayaSF – I wouldn’t say I was ‘blithely’ dismissing them, but rather that I was assessing them as being a noisy, cowardly, obnoxious, crass rabble that have no understanding of what happens when you succeed in generating sufficient social impetus to thrust their demented social vision into the lives of an American people that revere freedom and independence.

    Especially so when we’re extremely well armed, trained, disciplined & patriotic.

    The thunderclap will be quite exquisite.

  809. @Darrencardinal:

    cue – “All I Want For Christmas” and “White Genocide” all capitalized.


    > If you think those of us on the right are asking for a safe space, you do not understand us at all. Safe spaces are an invention of you liberal pussies.

    Not according the website that broke the story. It is demanding a safe space for whites.

  810. @Dan: Perhaps my word was ill-chosen. However, one huge problem is that the statists work slowly and incrementally. California just passed some more gun restrictions that will do nothing but inconvenience legal owners. The frog is slowly boiled, which means no sudden movement that might produce a thunderclap reaction.

    @uma: I think you are missing the sarcasm and sauce-for-the-goose Alinskyism here. By “asking for a safe space” the writer is mocking the SJW absurdities of that term (e.g. trigger warnings on Ovid) and contrasting those demands with a professor advocating white genocide.

  811. @Dan:

    Sure it does. Quote below from linked story:

    “The university now is on the spot. Will it allow the professor to continue teaching after expressing a desire to murder his Caucasian students? Is that a forgivable offense? What about safe spaces for the Caucasians on campus?”

  812. @PapayaSF – you are correct that they work “slowly & incrementally”. There is a known ‘ratchet effect’ in government whereby small incremental changes never get rolled back, so they just keep nudging the ratchet of government control forward, quietly confident that it will go unnoticed and become a part of ‘established government furniture’.

    A huge part of the fight nowadays, has to be to shine a light on all the mold that they have incubated, and cleanse it with fire.

    I don’t have any hope this will occur, by the way….Trump is a retarded ‘pied piper’

    However, this may be an opportunity to educate people about the general toxic lie of ‘government’ and help them help themselves by rejecting the siren-song of leftist ‘social’ whateverthefuckcocksuckinghorseshit they’re rebranding this time….

  813. @Papaya:


    > @uma: I think you are missing the sarcasm and sauce-for-the-goose Alinskyism here.

    I don’t think I am. Sarcasm is the twin brother (or maybe cousin) of satire. It would involve not reading the words “too literally”. If they insist on reading the professor’s tweet so literally, why not read their words so literally?

  814. @uma – no, that’s just a comment to juxtapose the bullshit.

    You really need remedial english comprehension lessons.

  815. @esr “The intention wasn’t that of the Founders themselves. For them, the EC was a kluge to get around high communications costs, with no principled function.”

    Not correct. In point of fact, the idea of direct Presidential election was raised several times in the course of deliberations during the drafting and ratification periods of the US Constitution. It was rejected outright as too democratic, a system the Founders rightly feared. It was for this reason also that it was not specified how a State’s legislature should decide upon their slate of Electors, and it was in fact perfectly allowable under the Constitution for the Electors to simply be appointed by the legislature of that State.

    It was for this reason also that the number of Electors was decided to be that of the Representatives PLUS the Senators of that State, rather than just the number of Representatives, which clearly would have been more democratic. This was designed to give smaller states a real voice in determining the President, a position they greatly feared may one day become too powerful.

    It was not just a kludge due to poor communication abilities, and it would have shaped up somewhat differently if it had been.

  816. @Dan:


    > You really need remedial english comprehension lessons.

    I am afraid we both do (Msg to Papaya)

    All I Want For Chrithmath is White Genothide. That is the way he should have spelled it.

    The professor’s humor is “wicked”. That is why it’s lost on some.

  817. @Parallel:

    Re History of bitterness

    The same overreaction happened with the Patriot Act for example. And with the elimination of Habeus Corpus which should even be more sacred than the constitution given that it goes to Magna Carta. And it was the republicans largely responsible for those two transgressions.

    The way I see it, these kind of overreactions are just part of the way the way the system works. You would need to reform the system on the whole to fix this.

  818. Sigh. Can’t you just say “given that history I now understand why y’all are a bit skittish about gun control”? Nope, you’ve got to appeal to hypocrisy to avoid acknowledging the humanity and rationality of your opponents.

    Tu quoque arguing projecting arrogant poo flinging concern trolling willfully ignorant racist asshole (TQAPAPFCTWIRA, for those of you keeping score at home).

  819. I for one do not want this affirmative action Alfred Rosenberg fired. I want him to be promoted. He is the true face of academia, and people should be made aware of that. All he did wrong was to make his tweet private, where it risked not being seen and reported.

  820. @Parallel:

    I do see better of course. And thx for the history lesson. That is why I am here. To learn. My thinking is never static on any issue. 6-7 years ago, I was a bit more to the right on this issue than I am now. Though for very different reasons than I heard here.

    There is no “appeal to hypocrisy”. I believe you have been wronged by the system on the whole, as opposed to one entity with some kind of decades-long-running conspiracy. That’s all. The system has no dampers, and under the right circumstances reactionary (poorly thought) legislation can be passed.

  821. The supposed “joke” is that, while the alt-right is worried about White genocide by immigration and sub-replacement birth rates, he supports violent extermination of whites like in Haiti.

    In the same vein of avant garde wit, I think it’s time to start distributing smallpox-infected blankets to the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters.

  822. http://www.jffp.org/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/download/641/654

    Here the good professor explains his views on the Haitian Revolution in detail: he likes Dessalines, the perpetrator of the white genocide, more than Louverture, who tried to establish a universal republic; he thinks it is very unreasonable of some of his fellow leftists to dislike Dassalines merely because he was a genocidal dictator; and he thinks the whites had it coming.

    Again, please publish this essay in every newspaper, so people can see what the left is. Truth does not fear the light.

  823. “See, this futile, pointless game can be played both ways:”

    And this is why gun owners are refusing to play, David. We know what you want, we know you won’t admit it except when you think you’re among friends, and we don’t trust you on any subject let alone this one.

    If you think that means we consider you Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen, congratulations.

  824. Back to the original post of Eric. What I see in the comments is pure, unadulterated hate between “Republicans” and “Democrats” to the level of speculations of mutual mass murder. (claims of genocide against us are nothing but an excuse for a first strike).

    A country divided by murderous hate can not stay a democracy for long. Which means that I do not expect that there will be any other halfway free elections in the USA. You will be stuck with ONE GOP president for the rest of your lives, like Putin or Erdogan in their respective countries. That president could be Trump, if the GOP does not de idd to replace him with Pence.

  825. “Which means that I do not expect that there will be any other halfway free elections in the USA. You will be stuck with ONE GOP president for the rest of your lives,”

    Leftists said this about George W. Bush in 2006, too.

  826. @Jay
    “Leftists said this about George W. Bush in 2006, too.”

    Indeed, and rightists told us Obama would confiscate all guns and start concentration camps. Nothing happened. But that did not stop the Right from claiming it all again and again.

    Voting in the USA is difficult, and the number of laws that make it even more difficult to vote are growing. The trend is to make voting much more difficult and to change the bias more and more.

    Many People Who Wanted to Vote Could Not
    http://billmoyers.com/story/many-people-wanted-vote-not/

    Republican politicians do not even hide the fact anymore that the new voting laws are intended to hamper Democratic voters (see below). Extrapolating, I see the Republicans making voting an insurmountable problem for minorities and and other Democratic constituencies in Republican dominated states by the next elections. The comments I read above just strengthen my suspicions.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/28/republicans-admit-voter-id-laws-are-aimed-at-democratic-voters.html

    http://www.salon.com/2016/04/06/wisconsin_republican_congressman_lets_the_truth_slip_suppressive_voter_id_laws_will_help_republicans_win_in_november/

  827. @uma –

    “The professor’s humor is “wicked”. That is why it’s lost on some.”

    Nope. He’s playing the tired old game of whipping out the ‘satire’ card when he got caught with his pants down.

  828. >Voting in the USA is difficult, and the number of laws that make it even more difficult to vote are growing. The trend is to make voting much more difficult and to change the bias more and more.

    When you make ridiculous claims, from the other side of the Atlantic and a basis of ignorance, that actual Americans from direct personal experience know are almost comically false it makes us question *why*?

    None of the possible answers are good, yet you persist in the behavior.

  829. >Republican politicians do not even hide the fact anymore that the new voting laws are intended to hamper Democratic voters (see below).

    I’ll let you in on an important secret – making it harder to cheat isn’t the same as ‘disenfranchising’ anyone.

    If the Democrats weren’t so dependent on cheating to win elections this might not be such an issue. Again, no joke. The Democratic party has firm control of many notoriously corrupt political machines that are, surprise, notorious for corrupt practices.

    In general US election laws are very open and trusting, operating almost entirely on the honor system. Taking any effort to make it even a bit harder to cheat produces exactly the bleating you’ve decided to join in.

    People here are getting pretty tired of the corruption. But that’s hard for you to know, being ignorant and on the wrong side of the Atlantic and all.

  830. @Dan:

    “Nope. He’s playing the tired old game of whipping out the ‘satire’ card when he got caught with his pants down.”

    He is in earnest. He is satirising alt-rightists who think the plan is to suppress birth rates and bring in Indios and Arabs, when in fact his plan at least involves machetes.

  831. “I do. This is because Rockerfeller, in an age where you got what you needed from oil and then dumped everything else into the river, practically founded the plastics age by employing chemists to figure out how we can use every little bit of oil, rather than waste it by dumping it in the water.”

    You presume that the amount required to poison the water is an amount that is economically significant if recovered.

  832. “Nope. He’s playing the tired old game of whipping out the ‘satire’ card when he got caught with his pants down.”

    I’m not sure which is more pathetic, those who play the clown-nose-on/clown-nose-off routine, or those who believe it.

  833. >Voting in the USA is difficult, and the number of laws that make it even more difficult to vote are growing. The trend is to make voting much more difficult and to change the bias more and more.

    Voting in the USA is not difficult at all. I have voted many times and never had the slightest problem. But I did have to show some ID.

    That is the law here in KY, I can scarcely believe that is not the case in every state.

    Asking for ID is a common sense measure to prevent voter fraud. It is not disenfranchising anyone.

  834. > “I’m here to tell you you can’t talk or wish or argue that distrust out of existence by insisting that the people who hold it are wrong or stupid or deluded by the NRA. It’s too late for that; when you take that line you feed the distrust”

    This is true, but I’m surprised to see it presented as right by the man who invented the term “kafkatrap”.

    1. >This is true, but I’m surprised to see it presented as right by the man who invented the term “kafkatrap”.

      The difference isn’t obvious to you?

      Kafkatraps are based on accusations constructed to be unfalsifiable. American leftists could easily falsify the gun culture’s belief that they’re lying when they say they don’t want to confiscate weapons. All they’d have to do is (1) change their rhetorical line to a kind of decentralism that recognizes civilian weapons as “power to the people”, and (2) demonstrate that they mean it by getting behind the removal of some of the major remaining restrictions. Re-legalizing weapons ownership by felons would be an obvious one, given their position that criminals are victims of social injustice as much or more than they are wrongdoers.

      I think this will never, ever happen, for reasons that cut straight to the core of what is rotten and fake about the American left. But it is possible in principle; “we don’t trust you” could be undone. Therefore, no kafkatrap.

  835. I find it fascinating that Winter complains about voter ID requirements in the US while his own country rigorously enforces them…

  836. @Greg
    “I’ll let you in on an important secret – making it harder to cheat isn’t the same as ‘disenfranchising’ anyone.”

    And the evidence of all this cheating can be found at the end of the rainbow. So many accusations, so few people actually arrested, such ephemeral evidence. And if they catch someone, it is a Republican trying to vote twice for Trump, or a Republican aid dumping voter registration forms of Democrats.

    A tax on voting in prohibited in the USA. Almost all of the laws implement a tax on voting.

    Btw, voting in Europe is as easy as is possible. There are ample polling stations, even without early voting, there are never lines in my country, and registration is automatic. Allegations of fraud are rare and always backed by evidence. When there were doubts about the security of electronic voting, we reverted to paper ballots.

  837. “This was designed to give smaller states a real voice in determining the President, a position they greatly feared may one day become too powerful.”

    What’s not clear though is why “small states” is considered an interest group that needs to be disproportionately represented, and no other minority is. If someone were to propose, for example, that at least one elector for each state be dedicated to represent only black voters from that state, no-one would even take it seriously as a proposal, let alone consider implementing it. “You deserve to be represented less for no other reason than that there are more of you” is okay to say to residents of large states, but not to white people.

  838. @Jay
    “Jay Maynard on 2016-12-27 at 09:54:13 said:
    I find it fascinating that Winter complains about voter ID requirements in the US while his own country rigorously enforces them”

    Yes, we do. But every potential voter already has the required ID, by law. When you want to vote, there is nothing you have to do. You get a voter card send to your home which you present at a polling station near your home or in any other of a number of places. You show an ID that you have had since high school. And you vote. No lines, no hassles.

    How easy can they make it?

  839. @Winter:

    “Btw, voting in Europe is as easy as is possible.”

    What a ridiculous statement. I very much doubt you have experience voting in more than two or three countries in Europe.

  840. > I find it fascinating that Winter complains about voter ID requirements in the US while his own country rigorously enforces them…

    There’s no difference, of course, between a country that makes it mandatory to have an id (from Wikipedia, the ‘identity card’ is not mandatory, but you have to have something whether it’s this card, a driver’s license, or a passport, from the age of 14) vs one that contains states that make a deliberate effort to make it difficult to get one if you happen to live somewhere with a majority black population.

  841. @darrencardinsl
    “That is the law here in KY, I can scarcely believe that is not the case in every state.”

    There has been a court case where the judges found that a strict ID law in North Carolina had been carefully crafted to be maximally inconvenience minorities and minimally inconvenience Republucan voters. And they found hard evidence that those who drew up the law had done active research to find out how to do this.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/us/politics/north-carolina-supreme-court-voting-rights-act.html

    It is fairly easy to find many other laws that did get through. And Republicans boast about them. See my earlier comment.

  842. I have voted in Germany. I was required to show my passport and then given a ballot paper the size of a small car. None of my friends, native or ex-pat, agreed on how one correctly fills out such a thing.

    Is that typically European? It’s certainly not typically British.

  843. @Oliver Cromwel
    “I very much doubt you have experience voting in more than two or three countries in Europe.”

    I read newspapers and watch the news in several countries. We do get coverage of many more. I have never even heard of a two hour line in ANY election in ANY EU country. Voter registration and IDs have never been an issue anywhere in the EU. Even Turkey and Russia, who have no free and fair elections, make it easier to vote than the USA.

  844. Btw, my comment above was mainly focused on the intense mutual hatred between the voting blocks. That is much more dangerous to democracy than the voting shenanigans.

  845. In the German town in which I lived there was a lengthy court battle because disabled voters could not enter a polling station, and the number of disabled voters “suppressed” was at least in principle greater than the margin of victory. Did you never hear of that? Probably because Anglo media had no interest in reporting it. I have no idea how easy it is to vote in “Europe” (which is not a political unit) than in the USA (which is, in effect, also not a political unit, though more of one than “Europe”), and neither do you.

    Lack of ID for voting is an Anglo oddity, not so much because of anything related to voting itself, but because lack of mandatory ID in a society is an Anglo oddity. In Germany, it is a legal requirement to register with the state, and to be issued and carry ID. Strange to report, all of these people working three jobs somehow manage it.

    Vote ID laws suppress voting by the lazy and the stupid, not making it impossible for them, but simply imposing a burden of patience beyond their will or perhaps ability to tolerate. Good riddance. The Democrats rely on such people, and will lose offices without them? Good riddance.

  846. Winter on 2016-12-27 at 08:00:49 said:

    “Indeed, and rightists told us Obama would confiscate all guns and start concentration camps.”

    Citation please. Do you want to play a really fun game of all the batshit crazy stuff that comes out of not-so-marginal leftist’s mouths.

    “Voting in the USA is difficult,”

    Hilariously wrong.

    “and the number of laws that make it even more difficult to vote are growing.”

    Weaselly. The number of laws to protect the integrity of the electoral system are growing.

    “The trend is to make voting much more difficult and to change the bias more and more.”

    (Here, I’ll play your juvenile game.) Why is the left so biased against integrity?

    Many People Who Wanted to Vote Could Not

    Nonsense. But here goes anyway: Many of those aren’t even problems. People waited an hour to vote? Machines are a decade old? People didn’t understand the ID requirement? The voter “intiimidation” section was particularly…less than rigorous, to put it mildly. But that’s ok, Obama’s DoJ has shown that it doesn’t approach that situation equally.

    Republican politicians do not even hide the fact anymore that the new voting laws are intended to hamper Democratic voters (see below).

    Saw below. It was Salon. It was crap. You had one (1) Republican politician who didn’t say what Salon (or you) claimed. As I already posted WAY upthread for you to promptly ignore, there is ample evidence to suggest that our electoral system is compromised and that voter ID requirements will go a long way toward protecting it. Democrats (and you, for whatever reason) just conjure up this disenfranchisement bogeyman and expecting us to believe in your new gods.

    The Dailybeast article is even worse. Many of its links don’t prove what the author purports and empirical data show that there is no conclusive evidence that ID requirements suppress legal minority turnout. Georgia turnout in ’08 and ’12 is just one example that flies directly in the face of this myth.

    I posted evidence way upthread which clearly exists, despite your denials (and that awful Dailybeast column) and yet neither you nor that Dailybeast column has shown evidence that requiring ID for voting suppresses legal voter turnout.

  847. > And the evidence of all this cheating can be found at the end of the rainbow. So many accusations, so few people actually arrested, such ephemeral evidence.

    Evidence has been linked to earlier in this very thread. Since you seem to have a case of selective hysterical blindness, I don’t see how presenting more will help.

  848. Random832 on 2016-12-27 at 10:17:28 said:

    one that contains states that make a deliberate effort to make it difficult to get one if you happen to live somewhere with a majority black population.

    This requires credible evidence. Please explain in reasonable detail, or provide it. Every single time I see this line floated, it doesn’t pass the mildest scrutiny.

    Once of Winter’s sources laughably cited the $15 cost of a birth certificate as a hindrance. If these people are so poor as to not be able to afford a birth certificate or a ride to the nearest place in their county to obtain an ID, then how do they afford food, shelter, or medical care?

    Please, please respond that they’re receiving government assistance and managed to obtain it without identifying themselves.

  849. The standard liberal line is this anodyne claim that “there is no vote fraud.” However we do not trust you on this just as we do not trust you on guns.

    If it seems there is no vote fraud it is because we do not look for it. The laws against it are scarcely enforced.

    But vote fraud is real:
    http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/13/voter-fraud-real-heres-proof/ (I can’t figure out tags just copy and paste if you want to see it.)

    Winter is it your position that people should be able to vote without even showing a driver’s license?

    Requiring an ID is not racist nor is it a poll tax. It is a basic measure to protect the integrity of elections.

    “But what about people who can’t get an id? ”

    Sorry but if you don’t have your stuff together enough to have ID, you do not need to be voting. This is a requirement for a great many things, not just voting.

  850. > If it seems there is no vote fraud it is because we do not look for it.

    Why don’t you look for it? Jim says because anyone who looks for it is called racist. But the same people are called racist anyway, so what do they have to lose?

  851. > Kafkatraps are based on accusations constructed to be unfalsifiable. American leftists could easily falsify the gun culture’s belief that they’re lying when they say they don’t want to confiscate weapons.

    Yes, anyone can falsify anything by admitting defeat. However, the idea that “common sense” restrictions (however defined) are meant by their advocates a gateway to confiscation rather than ends in themselves is constructed to be unfalsifiable, and being able to falsify the belief that one’s goal is confiscation by dropping one’s advocacy for the lesser restrictions does not change that. And, frankly, this is so obvious a flaw in your argument that I almost can’t believe you tried it.

    “you can’t […] argue that distrust out of existence” is practically the definition of a kafkatrap.

    1. >Yes, anyone can falsify anything by admitting defeat.

      They shouldn’t think of it as admitting defeat. They should think of it as becoming woke to the foundational issue of people power vs. the state.

      >the idea that “common sense” restrictions (however defined) are meant by their advocates a gateway to confiscation rather than ends in themselves is constructed to be unfalsifiable,

      Huh? We didn’t construct that at all, we observed it – actually it took decades of lies and bad faith to beat us into that much cynicism, with the Bellesiles fraud as the cherry on top. I can actually remember when I still thought the “common sense” talk was halfway credible, though it takes some work. Mid-1970s, maybe.

  852. Random832 on 2016-12-27 at 11:41:00 said:

    Why don’t you look for it?

    Because the mechanisms to track it are not in place, let alone prosecute. This is the chief problem with the Brennan study so often cited by the Left. Well, that and the fact that one of the lynchpins of that study is laughably based upon semantics, despite its weak effort to head off that criticism.

  853. “Common sense” restrictions are open ended; it’s a purely rhetorical description with no real content. If leftists defined what restrictions they wanted, with logical reasons for stopping at some point less than confiscation that are clearly rooted in their foundational ideology, then it could be taken seriously that they don’t want confiscation. The reason to adopt an open ended definition of desired restrictions it to allow everyone, from the most timid to the most extreme, to jump on board the coalition. Some people who want “common sense” restrictions want total confiscation, others don’t. If “common sense” restrictions are successful enough that the only subsequent step is total confiscation, there will still be “common sense” restrictionists and by “common sense” they will mean total confiscation.

  854. Winter, in this post, Eric has expended his valuable time and intellect to help Democrats improve their messaging in the hope that they will be more successful in future elections. The correct response is to embrace this wisdom, implement it, and perhaps graciously offer a nod of thanks. Instead, you persist in the assumption that we are all screwed up here at A&D, and that you need to “fix” us so that you can be spared the necessity of altering your message. Your side is not losing because of voter suppression, your side is losing because of stubborn and intentional stupidity.

    1. >Eric has expended his valuable time and intellect to help Democrats improve their messaging in the hope that they will be more successful in future elections

      That is not true. In fact it partakes of one of the major fallacies that got them in their hole.

      It won’t be enough to change the messaging. Substance has to change, too. They have to really stop holding 40% of the electorate in contempt, not just message differently about that.

  855. TomA, he certainly has not, and no one should take strategic advice from enemy strategists. Esr has said that the Democrats should just surrender, as the Democrats were as little as three months ago saying that the Republicans should just surrender because demographic shift meant they were permanently unelectable.

    The best strategy for the Democrats is to keep doing what they’re doing: promote dysgenic immigration and fertility so that the proportion of the US that is barely functional enough to apply for a drivers’ license, already admitted to be the core Democratic demographic, continues to rapidly expand. The demographic shift strategy works and does not require uninterrupted occupation of all the offices of state.

    1. >Esr has said that the Democrats should just surrender,

      If you think that, you need to work on your reading comprehension.

      If had intended “you should surrender”, I would have addressed the Democrats’ state-centralist/Marxist tendencies. I very carefully did not do that.

  856. Winter: “And the evidence of all this cheating can be found at the end of the rainbow. So many accusations, so few people actually arrested, such ephemeral evidence.”

    You will never, ever convince me that voter fraud did not give us Obamacare.

  857. Esr: I did not say you advocated total unconditional surrender.

    Gun control is an important part of the Democratic programme because private gun ownership reduces the effective power of the state, and reduces the street level political power of militarily ineffective minorities.

  858. @uma Thank you for acknowledging our bitterness.

    @Random832 “However, the idea that ‘common sense’ restrictions (however defined) are meant by their advocates a gateway to confiscation rather than ends in themselves is constructed to be unfalsifiable, and being able to falsify the belief that one’s goal is confiscation by dropping one’s advocacy for the lesser restrictions does not change that.’

    In addition to having no obvious Schelling point short of straight up confiscation, the term ”common sense” also implicitly denigrates opponents of any such measure. After all, what reasonable person could be against “common sense”?

    As bitter as I’ve shown myself to be above, I would be willing to consider a proposal by Barbara Boxer or Nancy Pelosi to eliminate the NFA 1934 registration requirements for silencers and re-open the BATFE machine gun registry in exchange for registration of all handguns. I would look for them to say that the data shows handgun violence to be more of a public hazard than silencers or registered handguns. I would expect the NRA to bargain the additional concession that handgun registrations be for people (in the form of nationwide-valid shall-issue concealed carry permits) rather than individual handguns.

    Basically, I’m looking for any evidence at all that 1) gun control advocates aren’t just working to ratchet up regulations with a final goal of confiscation and 2) their proposals are based on something vaguely related to actual data rather than an ideological hatred for their perceived inferiors.

    1. > I would be willing to consider a proposal by Barbara Boxer or Nancy Pelosi to eliminate the NFA 1934 registration requirements for silencers and re-open the BATFE machine gun registry in exchange for registration of all handguns.

      I wouldn’t, for two reasons.

      (1) I know about the run-up to the Nazi gun law of 1938. Firearms registries are absolutely unacceptable to me – no qualifications or exceptions – because I know that the Weimar government’s intention to keep that data out of the hands of dangerous extremists backfired horribly when the Nazis took power. Kristallnacht (justified as a seizure of illegal weapons) followed.

      (2) No “bargains” until the grabbers have made a major concession to demonstrate sincerity and good faith. Repealing the ban on automatic weapons would be about the right size – let them demonstrate that they take Constitutional protection of the right to own military-grade weapons seriously before we even begin to speak of bargaining.

  859. Correction: I would look for [Boxer and Pelosi] to say that the data shows handgun violence to be more of a public hazard than silencers or registered MACHINE GUNS.

  860. esr: Kafkatraps are based on accusations constructed to be unfalsifiable. American leftists could easily falsify the gun culture’s belief that they’re lying when they say they don’t want to confiscate weapons.

    Random832: Yes, anyone can falsify anything by admitting defeat.

    esr: They shouldn’t think of it as admitting defeat. They should think of it as becoming woke to the foundational issue of people power vs. the state.

    This is not the only way to falsify the more general theory that the left has individual liberty in mind when they say they want certain gun restrictions. Another way would be for them to demonstrate that a specific regulation would result unequivocally in an increase in everyone’s personal liberty, or only at the expense of a few, who unanimously publicly and voluntarily declare that they’re willing to sacrifice that liberty for everyone else.

    If they could achieve this, I bet the left would go for it enthusiastically. To me, though, this is on the order of falsifying the theory of relativity by producing a better explanation for Lorentz contraction, time dilation, observations of Mercury near the sun, and the routine workings of GPS. Possible, but about that unlikely.

    And yet, we likewise consider the theory of relativity falsifiable, despite how hard it would be to falsify it.

  861. When you tell your enemies that they shouldn’t think of what they are doing as admitting defeat, you do so because there are very good reasons for them to think of what they are doing as admitting defeat, and you are afraid that they will continue to fight you out of sheer bloody mindedness.

    1. >When you tell your enemies that they shouldn’t think of what they are doing as admitting defeat, you do so because there are very good reasons for them to think of what they are doing as admitting defeat, and you are afraid that they will continue to fight you out of sheer bloody mindedness.

      No, in this case that’s an attitude change (treating civilian weapons as a power-to-the-people issue) that I really want to see. Before I’ll trust that their endgame isn’t to confiscate my weapons, I mean.

  862. Given Trump’s alliance with the alt-right-Nazis and Pence’s dominionist tendencies, the left could end up being very grateful for the 2nd Amendment. Hopefully things won’t get that bad, but Trump’s tendency to divide rather than unite is… problematic, to say the least.

    1. >Given Trump’s alliance with the alt-right-Nazis

      I have yet to see any evidence that this “alliance” exists outside of left-wing projection fantasies.

      I’m no Trumpbot, and am fully aware of the man’s many flaws. But this Naziism thing is nuts. I’ve studied Naziism, I’m as close to being an expert on the Nazi revolution as you get without being a specialist PhD or something. Trump is a philosemite from New York, you can hear it in his speech habits even if you don’t know he has Jewish children-in-law. A less plausible ally of Nazis would be hard to find.

  863. > Pence’s dominionist tendencies

    What dominionist tendencies? Or are you claiming that the USA was a theocracy up until about two year ago?

  864. > “Huh? We didn’t construct that at all, we observed it – actually it took decades of lies and bad faith to beat us into that much cynicism, with the Bellesiles fraud as the cherry on top. I can actually remember when I still thought the “common sense” talk was halfway credible, though it takes some work. Mid-1970s, maybe.”

    “is constructed” is a passive state, I didn’t say “was constructed [by you]”. Regardless of how you came by that belief, you believe it now, of people who are not the same individual actors responsible for those things, and by your own statement cannot be argued out of that belief. So, “is constructed to be unfalsifiable” is an entirely fair statement.

    > In addition to having no obvious Schelling point short of straight up confiscation

    This is a problem for the actual implementation of such a policy, but it does not mean that anyone advocating for it is lying. It’s entirely possible to hold a belief about how things ought to be that does not fall on a Schelling point. I think this might be where some of the perceived insincerity comes from – people who do honestly want some policy somewhere on the spectrum of being restrictive but not being an outright ban or confiscation work with people who do want total ban / confiscation, because they’re both pulling in the same direction and they expect to be able to turn on them once their perfect policy is implemented.

    1. >Regardless of how you came by that belief, you believe it now, of people who are not the same individual actors responsible for those things, and by your own statement cannot be argued out of that belief. So, “is constructed to be unfalsifiable” is an entirely fair statement.

      No, since I already stated what I’d need to see as behavior to falsify it. I don’t think that behavior will ever happen, but that’s a different issue.

  865. @Random832 “I think this might be where some of the perceived insincerity comes from – people who do honestly want some policy somewhere on the spectrum of being restrictive but not being an outright ban or confiscation work with people who do want total ban / confiscation, because they’re both pulling in the same direction and they expect to be able to turn on them once their perfect policy is implemented.”

    Therefore game theory makes it incumbent on we gun rights advocates to utterly defeat every gun control measure, until and unless the ‘people who do honestly want some policy somewhere on the spectrum of being restrictive but not being an outright ban or confiscation’ realize that allying with the gun grabbers is a losing political strategy.

  866. @ esr

    I dearly hope it is a leftist fantasy, something like the way various right-wingers moaned in 2008 about how “Obama is going to take our Bibles.”

    If it isn’t a fantasy, fascism will come to America wearing flags, crosses and Pepe buttons, not a swastika, and there’s no reason Jews can’t be involved in some kind of hypothetical “American-style” fascism. (I call the alt-right “Nazis” because of their general ugliness, not their allegiance to Hitler.)

    If you want to know where Trump is going, the bit I posted about the carbon bubble up above is worth reading. (Note that the author’s obsession with Global Warming doesn’t mean the rest of the piece is not accurate – if the financial numbers are better for Green energy, we still have a “carbon bubble” regardless of the accuracy of Global Warming predictions.)

    1. >(I call the alt-right “Nazis” because of their general ugliness, not their allegiance to Hitler.)

      Troutwaxer, that’s sloppy and stupid. If you don’t think their doctrine is Naziism you shouldn’t call them Nazis. Even if you don’t confuse yourself, others might believe you and be confused into making false predictions.

      >If it isn’t a fantasy, fascism will come to America wearing flags, crosses and Pepe buttons

      No, it’s already here, and its watchwords are “diversity”, “privilege”, “inclusion”, and “safe spaces”.

  867. @esr:
    “Trump is a philosemite from New York, you can hear it in his speech habits”

    I am *dying* to know what you’re talking about.

    1. >I am *dying* to know what you’re talking about.

      Speech rhythm, turns of phrase, phrases structures shadowing Yiddish…there’s a particular accent you sometimes hear in New Yorkers who are not Jews that tells you many of their speech models were Jewish – often Jewish comedians. Trump totally sounds like that.

  868. @ ESR – “It won’t be enough to change the messaging. Substance has to change, too.”

    My apologies for the misunderstanding. I didn’t realize that you were attempting to climb that mountain also.

    Persuading a politician to change his tune in order to get elected is not only feasible, but likely SOP. Changing the ideology of an adult with a lifetime of liberal dogma indoctrination is a Herculean task of the first order, as demonstrated by commenters like David Szonyi. I wish you well with this effort.

    The Democrats actually had a good opportunity to initiate the kind of change you are advocating. Tim Ryan, moderate rural Congressman from a district near Youngstown Ohio, ran against Nancy Pelosi for Minority Leader last month, but then lost badly. Had he been elected to this post, that would have been significant in terms of his youth, practical ideology, and building a bench for future national elections.

    I stand by my prior conclusion. The old-timer pols running the Democrat Party are stuck on stupid and not likely to be moved by rational discourse.

    1. >Is this the first A&D thread to get a thousand comments?

      I don’t think so. We don’t crack a kilocomment every day, but I’m pretty sure it’s happened before.

  869. At what point do we stop trying to push back the tide and switch into self-preservation mode?

    Early November 2016, looks like.

  870. @esr:


    > No “bargains” until the grabbers have made a major concession to demonstrate sincerity and good faith. Repealing the ban on automatic weapons would be about the right size – let them demonstrate that they take Constitutional protection of the right to own military-grade weapons seriously before we even begin to speak of bargaining.

    I doubt if even republicans would go along with this. If you remove the ban on fully automatics, the gun buying craze that will ensue will be like a tsunami. It takes firing an automatic only once (not more than once), before you’d wanna upgrade. The amount of used semi-automatics that will be offloaded to the market could also end up being enormous. Ain’t gonna happen.

  871. “So many accusations, so few people actually arrested, such ephemeral evidence”

    For the same reason that countless low level military and civilians got sent to jail while Hildebeeste skated despite far more actual proof:

    When the crooks control the investigation, the prosecution, and the reporting, crooks don’t get caught.

  872. “one that contains states that make a deliberate effort to make it difficult to get one if you happen to live somewhere with a majority black population.”

    Since you absolutely aren’t describing the United States, to which country are you referring?

    NO STATE makes it difficult, let alone impossible, to obtain ID.

  873. uma, are you seriously comparing the use of full-auto firearms to heroin?

    (Then again, I do know I fancy the idea of a high-capacity full-auto M-29 in my closet.)

  874. @esr:

    Another “complication” related to lifting the ban on fully automatics will be law enforcement. The police in the US is so heavily armed compared to police in other countries, and that is because behind every door there could be gangster with a shotgun waiting for them. What would happen if standard procedure they are to expect sustained machine gun fire instead? Would they use drones to take down criminals? Send 10x the force?

  875. uma you do not know any actual cops do you?

    The street level cops tend to be very pro second amendment, even if the higher ups spout liberal bullshit.

  876. uma, we’ve heard that same set of lies before. E.g., “If Florida passes concealed carry laws, it’ll be an endless river of red blood in the street! Florida will become the Gunshine State!”

    Literally, what’s so hard to understand about the phrase “shall not be infringed”?

  877. You forget Uma, many, many existing rifles can be converted to Fully Automatic by changing a few parts, no need to purchase a whole new weapon.

    1. >You forget Uma, many, many existing rifles can be converted to Fully Automatic by changing a few parts, no need to purchase a whole new weapon.

      That is correct. If drug gangs were going to up-gun they would already have done so.

  878. @PeaceableGuy


    > uma, are you seriously comparing the use of full-auto firearms to heroin?

    Maybe a combination of drugs and sex. It’s fun (natural-high kind of fun), and you’ll never forget that first time you’ve emptied that full 30 rounds with one pull on the trigger of your AK.

    Another thing you will quickly experience that will immediately cause a “paradigm shift” in your thinking is the less overall need for accuracy. Because with sustained fire you can get that mowing/spraying effect that you don’t get with lame one bullet at a time firing.

  879. The range I go to allows bump triggers, already legal, but without enthusiasm. Would you want a new guy you don’t know firing full auto and losing control three feet away? I don’t. Bump triggers are already legal. Just unpopular. Full auto isn’t that big a deal.

    Obama jacking with ammunition availability for eight years straight was a big deal. Ammunition back in the stores the moment Trump won is a big deal. If I was a liberal I’d stick with gun-grabber crimethink-sniffing orthodoxy. Anything else, the other crimethink-sniffers would turn on me.

  880. “Obama jacking with ammunition availability for eight years straight was a big deal. Ammunition back in the stores the moment Trump won is a big deal.”

    While I’m of the opinion Barack Obama was the best gun salesman who ever lived, and ammo was certainly hard to find and more expensive during his tenure, I’m not at all convinced the ammunition availability changes aren’t a simple case of supply and demand. In particular, I can see demand for ammo dropping dramatically the day after the election, and can’t think of anything Obama or his jackbooted thugs at the BATF could do to flip the switch suddenly – in either direction.

  881. Except for the fact that Obama has approved multiple regulations taking guns from any group, such as veterans, that he could manage without involving any other elected representative.

    And before you trot out any PTSD nonsense, we are fully aware of the Leftist practice, starting with Stalin and continuing through today in the US, of defining their opponents as crazy so as to strip their rights.

  882. @Rick T – yes, it isn’t beyond the reach of regular folk to perform some kind of modification to a semi-auto to upgrade to full-auto…but it would be very unwise to casually do so without fully understanding the exact technology and spec of the particular weapon.

    AR-15s, frex, can be easily converted with a “lightning link”, the manufacture of which is trivial. However, you need to be *very* certain that the barrel/chamber is of sufficient quality to withstand sustained high rates of fire, that the feed mechanism can keep up, and that the buffer & bolt carrier will not have timing issues.

    A lot of budget semi-auto rifles could easily become paperweights if Joe Shmoe starts fucking around with DIY full-auto conversions…after briefly being a very dangerous lead-flinging machine.

    @uma – sweet mother of Jesus…your comment about “not needing to be accurate” with full-auto fire is so fucking retarded. You have proved you know nothing about the subject matter.

  883. FWIW, removing the blatantly unconstitutional post-’86 aull-auto ban wouldn’t actually encourage me to rush to purchase an M16. It’s a rush to go full rock’n’roll, for sure, but it’s such a waste of money.

    Personally, I consider it a much more tactically surgical use of full-auto tech to have ‘burst fire’ capability (typically 3 shots)…that’s what I’d buy.

    1. >Personally, I consider it a much more tactically surgical use of full-auto tech to have ‘burst fire’ capability (typically 3 shots)…that’s what I’d buy.

      Strongly agreed. I’ve thought about this too.

  884. Almost forgot – most AR-15s sold as ‘sporting’ rifles (for the aforementioned Joe Shmoe to play soldier with and plink) do not have a full-auto capable bolt carrier. This means you cannot do a ‘legit’ full auto conversion on them without replacing the bolt carrier – 100 to 200+ bucks.

  885. Eliminating the full-auto ban would also allow innovations in fire control. An electronic fire control group on a bullpup design would eliminate one of the biggest drawbacks of that platform. But today the BATFE regulations require fire control designs to not be “readily convertible” to full auto, a vague standard at best.

    Without the “not readily convertible” design constraint, I wonder what could be done with (say) hydraulics or supercapacitors to advance the state of the art in fire control?


  886. > @uma sweet mother of Jesus…your comment about “not needing to be accurate” with full-auto fire is so fucking retarded.

    You always need accuracy. But not like with firing single shots. There is less need for accuracy overall. The AK is not a very accurate weapon, but it is “enough-accurate” for full auto and that is (one among many reasons) why it is a very good design.


    > However, you need to be *very* certain that the barrel/chamber is of sufficient quality to withstand sustained high rates of fire, that the feed mechanism can keep up, and that the buffer & bolt carrier will not have timing issues.

    Yes. Heat removal is the biggest issue. And reliability issues related to that.

  887. Uma: The area of the circle drawn by a random angular deflection of constant maximum magnitude grows as the square of the range. Past extremely close range 30 bullets fill a negligible proportion of this circle, which is large relative to the size of the target for even a small deflection. Volume of fire simply doesn’t compensate for accurate aiming, especially if you are not in the artificial environmental of a shooting range and have meaningful constraints of ammunition. Even if you don’t, you still have constraints on barrel heat which is what limits crew served machine gun fire duration.

  888. @Szonyi: if our gracious host will excuse this bit of advertising, here’s an example of a black man defending himself and the people around him from two armed robbers: https://youtu.be/c2NV6dgYom0

    I’m not connected with USCCA other than having taken a class from the founder and planning to sign up for their coverage, based on no small part on this testimonial from a black man and the people he protected and loves.

  889. @uma – utter, utter nonsense. Whether it’s a single shot, or a string, if you want to hit your target, the barrel has to be accurately aligned with it. There is nothing about full-auto that makes that task any easier…quite the opposite, actually – depending on the rifle, the recoil impulse makes the muzzle jump around (*cough* AK *cough*), and even at short range that can cause you to miss a human-size target.

    If you had any understanding of this subject, you would know that people train very hard to ‘ride’ the recoil of full-auto, to control the muzzle and *improve* accuracy to place rounds on target. You are so hilariously wrong…but hey, it’s the intertubes here, so you don’t need to take responsibility for being a fuckwit, just keep on doubling-down for our amusement.

    And FYI, any AK-variant rifle you can buy over here has excellent accuracy (can’t speak for some shit shop commie bloc specimen)….you’re just parroting CoD keyboard commando drivel.

  890. @esr –

    “Strongly agreed. I’ve thought about this too.”

    Interestingly enough, Dom Raso has a great video involving the use of full auto weapons to bound and cover, as analyzed from the movie “Heat”

    http://bearingarms.com/jenn-j/2016/12/28/raso-takes-on-heat-to-highlight-the-art-of-shoot-move-communicate/

    @uma – take note kiddo…they’re using those full-auto rifles you don’t need to be concerned about accuracy with! Oh…hang on…look what they’re doing!…why, they’re riding the auto fire and controlling their strings to deliver bursts…I wonder if that harms their accuracy? Dumbass.

  891. Jay- ‘I’m not at all convinced that ammunition shortages aren’t a simple case of supply and demand’

    Could be. ‘Guns don’t kill people, bullets do’ said Pat Moynihan, and every smart gun-grabber has supported ammunition chokeoffs as a backdoor 2nd Amendment killer. Make lead bullet manufacture illegal and then say all steel bullets are armor-piercing, call gunpowder a high explosive- Obama tried. And the boost in gun sales and hoarding is real- there’s a real supply and demand effect here. Obama does sensible gun control like Obama does health insurance.

    But, Obama came into office and ammunition availability dried up. Trump won and ammunition reappeared. Nuff said.

    Bump triggers are cheap and legal and safe and widely available and most people don’t bother. I think they are right, and I remember Jeff Cooper’s contempt for full auto, but then I can’t recall ever shooting full auto. Maybe decades ago.

  892. @Oliver Cromwell:

    What you say is correct. Only missing one detail. One bullet has no more theoretical “surface area coverage” than the surface area of the bullet. It is volume that gives you whole area coverage.

  893. Wow, this thread caught fire. Anyone can check the Official Dem Platform RE: Firearms and the Second Amendment.

    Quote:
    “To build on the success of the lifesaving Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, we will expand and strengthen background checks and close dangerous loopholes in our current laws; repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) to revoke the dangerous legal immunity protections gun makers and sellers now enjoy; and keep weapons of war—such as assault weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines (LCAM’s)—off our streets.”

    If the DNC were to drop this nonsense and change the party’s official position to one in accordance with Heller, the Popular understanding, and obvious intent of the 2nd amendment it would be a good start. Instead they lie about background checks, want the legal equivalent of holding the auto industry criminally liable for providing getaway vehicles to bank robbers, and ban (yes Ban) firearm technologies (self loading arms, box magazines) that are over a hundred years old at this point.

    Second Amendment and Firearm Rights supporters like myself don’t trust Democrats because they DO LIE about Firearms, the surrounding laws, and their political goals. This isn’t just anonymous progs on the internet, these are Democrat Political Leaders who have no excuse for not knowing better.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obamas-continued-use-of-the-claim-that-40-percent-of-gun-sales-lack-background-checks/2013/04/01/002e06ce-9b0f-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_blog.html

    http://bearingarms.com/bob-o/2014/05/08/the-forward-leaning-pistol-grip-new-shoulder-thing-goes/

    and Google “Shoulder Thing that goes Up”

  894. @Dan:

    I did not say that auto requires less skill. It requires more skill . What I said is there is less overall need for accuracy (to achieve your objectives). You confuse accuracy with skill (aiming). Skill = human. Accuracy = requirement.

    Volume fire has the effect of increasing the available surface of your target. Say you burst 5 bullets on auto-fire. The 5 bullets on a planar surface enclose some area. If that area overlaps with the target, even partially, the target is hit. A single bullet encloses no more area than the area of the bullet itself.

    AK is a machine gun first, rifle second design. It is optimized for auto. I never even bothered to look at the AK variants available here given that the AK’s most important feature (machine gun) is crippled. AK recoil is bad. But this is a side-effect of its design as a machine gun first, rifle second. It uses heavier materials which have more thermal heat capacitance needed for heat removal in sustained firing.

  895. @Cromwell “Volume of fire simply doesn’t compensate for accurate aiming”

    This assumes the purpose of the fire is to wound or kill the enemy soldiers. What about a situation where your enemy is behind cover and you’re trying to keep them fixed in place while your maneuver element is flanking them?

    (I’ve never been trained in small unit tactics, nor even played airsoft or paintball. But I’m guessing other participants in the thread have been.)

  896. @uma – keep the laughs coming, sister.

    I’m kinda curious to discover the critical mass of “full of shit” that you’re displaying.

  897. Parallel on 2016-12-27 at 18:21:36 said:
    @Random832 “I think this might be where some of the perceived insincerity comes from – people who do honestly want some policy somewhere on the spectrum of being restrictive but not being an outright ban or confiscation work with people who do want total ban / confiscation, because they’re both pulling in the same direction and they expect to be able to turn on them once their perfect policy is implemented.”

    Therefore game theory makes it incumbent on we gun rights advocates to utterly defeat every gun control measure, until and unless the ‘people who do honestly want some policy somewhere on the spectrum of being restrictive but not being an outright ban or confiscation’ realize that allying with the gun grabbers is a losing political strategy.

    As per our host’s post on the subject here.

  898. @Dan

    If you’d watch more videos, you might eventually learn. They do call it “Gun Porn” don’t they?

    Just like with the real “Porn”, some guys watch porn, others get the women. We pretty much know which kind you are.

    Now go bury yourself and don’t show me your face again.

    1. >Now go bury yourself and don’t show me your face again.

      uma, you’re close to a red line. I allow people to fling content-free insults at me, but you do not have the same liberty with other commenters (nor they with respect to you).

  899. @Troutwaxer

    “but Trump’s tendency to divide rather than unite is… problematic, to say the least.”

    Ummm, were you awake for the last eight years of Obama? Geez, the hypocrisy is amazing.

    For that matter, which candidate publicly described a quarter of the American electorate as “deplorable” and “irredeemable”?

  900. @Parallel:


    > This assumes the purpose of the fire is to wound or kill the enemy soldiers. What about a situation where your enemy is behind cover and you’re trying to keep them fixed in place while your maneuver element is flanking them?

    Even when your purpose is killing enemy fighters. Targets are not always still. Nor available all the time. Sometimes a target exposes a large surface area but for a very short period of time (e.g. group of fighters running for cover). What is needed is a combination of volume and accuracy (sniper fire) in urban situations.

    Those who think they’ll beat the government without volume fire, are idiots. Nor will they be able to hold any territory for long or sustain any kind of urban warfare that lasts long enough to translate into political gains. Light weapon urban warfare = RPGs + machine gun fire + grenades + sniper fire in that order of importance.

  901. No one doubts the military utility of machine guns and general. Uma said that volume of fire was a substitute for aiming in hitting a point target. It isn’t.

  902. “If you’d watch more videos, you might eventually learn. “

    I prefer to actually *do* various exercises, but there truly is a lot to be gained by watching experts.

    “They do call it “Gun Porn” don’t they?”

    They do. It’s great stuff.

    “Just like with the real “Porn”, some guys watch porn, others get the women. We pretty much know which kind you are.”

    *looks over at his well-stocked armory* Yep…pretty damned sure which kind I am.

    “Now go bury yourself and don’t show me your face again.”

    Is that some kind of furr’n curse? It lacks….weight.

    I need more popcorn.

  903. @Oliver Cromwell:


    > Uma said that volume of fire was a substitute for aiming in hitting a point target. It isn’t.

    Volume always –in part– compensates for accuracy (if only on probability theory alone). How much volume? That is the question. When something with shrapnel explodes near a target, it sends a huge number of objects over a very short period of time flying in all directions (random directions). Volume is there. Accuracy is not there. But your target is taken.

    1. >Volume always –in part– compensates for accuracy

      If this were true enough to matter, the world’s most effective militaries would have evolved under selective pressure to favor spray’n’pray. In fact the reverse is true; A-list militaries train for aimed fire and commonly defeat their adversaries from well beyond spray’n’pray range.

  904. > Therefore game theory makes it incumbent on we gun rights advocates [etc]

    Certainly. I practically said as much myself when I conceded “This is a problem for the actual implementation of such a policy” – but calling someone a liar merely for having a position that game theory makes awkward-to-impossible to implement (or for, with open eyes, choosing an extreme they may not actually want as the “lesser of two evils”) is just uncivilized.

  905. > If this were true enough to matter, the world’s most effective militaries would have evolved under selective pressure to favor spray’n’pray.

    Well, volume has other costs that a simple volume/accuracy tradeoff doesn’t model – first among which is the literal cost in ammunition.

    And certainly the military does have plenty of weapons that provide a lot of volume and not a lot of accuracy, from shotguns to hand grenades to submachine guns, for situations in which that tradeoff makes sense. And, in a less extreme sense, the fact that the whole army isn’t armed with sniper rifles.

    1. >And certainly the military does have plenty of weapons that provide a lot of volume and not a lot of accuracy, from shotguns to hand grenades to submachine guns, for situations in which that tradeoff makes sense.

      Yes. But you have to have a better grasp of small-unit tactics than most people do (and certainly better than uma has) to understand what those weapons are actually for.

      They’re for combat environments where you’re forced to engage at short range, typically because of interrupted sightlines. Urban warfare is the type case. Combat shotguns, for example, aren’t used in field battles; they’re for door-kickers clearing buildings in places like Mosul. That’s also the main use of grenades in modern doctrine.

      Revealingly, doctrine says you back up your doorkickers with a sniper to cover them against out-of-context threats. This is very well depicted in the movie American Sniper; top cover for doorkickers is the protagonist’s main job.

      Full auto is less useful than you might assume in this kind of environment. What subguns and the full-auto mode of a select-fire rifle are really for is intermediate-range field engagements or special situations like charging an ambush. Even there, winner militaries from cultures that support the skillset favor aimed fire with burst mode. And those militaries reliably beat the absolute crap out of troops trained for spray’n’pray.

      Americans or Israelis against any Arab-world army ever is pretty much the archetypes of this kind of fight. It never ends well for the Arabs.

  906. @esr:


    > If this were true enough to matter, the world’s most effective militaries would have evolved under selective pressure to favor spray’n’pray.

    Militaries always evolve in favor of better technology, better targeting. These days so much of that is done by computers. So much so that the human operator (skill) is practically the weakest link.

    The question of “accuracy” (the requirement) is not a boolean variable that can only assume two values (rifle-grade accuracy, or spray and pray). If that were true there would be no need for volume fire. Superbly targeted well taken single shots (snipers) would be all that is needed for victory. The reality is that throwing a wall of lead against the enemy is always good thing, even when every individual lump of lead is nowhere near as well-targeted.


    > In fact the reverse is true; A-list militaries train for aimed fire and commonly defeat their adversaries from well beyond spray’n’pray range.

    All militaries would love to defeat their adversaries from beyond their adversaries’ (spray’n’pray) range. Did that work too well in Vietnam? Or did the troops have to engage in very close combat where their range/accuracy advantage was nullified? Wars rarely play out the way they’re meant to play out. That is why despite our overwhelming advantages the results of most of the recent wars have been “inconclusive” at best.

  907. @esr:


    > Americans or Israelis against any Arab-world army ever is pretty much the archetypes of this kind of fight. It never ends well for the Arabs.

    Which fight did the US or Israel win since 1990 (Iraq war 1) ? I don’t remember any.

    In the case of the US did Iraq war 2.0 turn out to be a victory? Or did spineless Obama cut and run?

    Now let’s move to Israel wars. The only wars I remember are wars against Hizbullah terrorists. Let’s see. Hizbullah terrorists drove Israelis out of Lebanon (2000) in a manner not much different from the way the US was driven out of Vietnam.

    In 2006 Israel invaded Lebanon again. And it turned out exactly like the first time and they had to pull back to the international border.

    Wars have objectives. If you fail to achieve your objectives you lose. Irrespective of the body count on either side.

    1. >Or did spineless Obama cut and run?

      Yes. As with Vietnam, military victory victory in Iraq was achieved after the surge of 2006, then thrown away by a collapse of political will and later retconned into defeat for domestic political purposes.

      >The only wars I remember are wars against Hizbullah terrorists.

      You have a remarkably short memory. Mine includes the ’67 and ’73 wars and I’ve studied the ones in ’48 and ’56.

      >Hizbullah terrorists drove Israelis out of Lebanon (2000) in a manner not much different from the way the US was driven out of Vietnam.

      In both cases, the failure was not one of doctrine or training; those forces were not driven out by defeat on the battlefield but withdrawn due to a collapse of political will.

      >Wars have objectives. If you fail to achieve your objectives you lose.

      That is correct. But if you confuses losses due to political and strategic collapse with losses due to a failure in warfighting capability you will draw the wrong lessons, precisely as you are doing.

      The larger context is the larger context, but spray’n’pray vs aimed-fire doctrine has always been a losing proposition for the sprayers.

  908. On the subject of automatic weapons combat, see the military history of John Basilone and his machine gun crews in the Battle of Guadalcanal during WWII. Two squads of Marines held off an entire Japanese infantry regiment for nearly two days in this critical engagement. He also won the Medal of Honor for truly exceptional bravery against overwhelming odds, but a lot of credit also goes to those water-cooled Browning M1917s which burned through 125 belts without failure.

    When used properly, automatic weapons are fearsome.

    1. >When used properly, automatic weapons are fearsome.

      I wasn’t previously familiar with the Basilone case, but when you described it I made a bet with myself about what I’d find when I researched it – and I was right.

      Best way to use full-auto: entrenched position at a choke point that the enemy must get through, with a nice killing ground in front of of it. The attacker is fucked as long as the defenders have operating weapons and ammunition. Doctrine is to take out this kind of block with artillery or an airstrike.

  909. uma on 2016-12-29 at 14:59:43 said:

    Militaries always evolve in favor of better technology, better targeting. These days so much of that is done by computers. So much so that the human operator (skill) is practically the weakest link.

    So you’re saying that a majority (or even a sizable minority) of trigger pullers in ground combat are using computer sighting? Please tell me I’m getting this wrong.

    “The reality is that throwing a wall of lead against the enemy is always good thing, even when every individual lump of lead is nowhere near as well-targeted.”

    Are you speaking from experience? I’ve got experience and military training and I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re not only wrong, but full of shit. Throwing a wall of lead only makes sense in certain, very dire circumstances (final protective fire, ambush, reaction to ambush). Otherwise, you run out of ammo very quickly. You obviously play too many video games. It’s called fire discipline, and it’s a really fucking basic concept.

    “All militaries would love to defeat their adversaries from beyond their adversaries’ (spray’n’pray) range. Did that work too well in Vietnam? Or did the troops have to engage in very close combat where their range/accuracy advantage was nullified?”

    Actually it worked spectacularly in Vietnam. But you seem to think all engagements must’ve taken place in a jungle or that the NVA/VietCong won any significant tactical engagements against US Forces. Of course, the NVA and Vietcong also didn’t ‘spray and pray’ since they also generally understood fire discipline. Do you think the US military changed to select fire, three round burst with their main service rifle because it was less effective?

    uma on 2016-12-29 at 15:19:41 said:

    Do you think that any perceived failures in those conflicts was a result of Western Forces saying “Gosh, our superior fire discipline just can’t make headway against spray and pray?”

    Please tell me I’m misunderstanding this astonishingly ignorant argument.

  910. @esr:


    > Yes. As with Vietnam, military victory victory in Iraq was achieved after the surge of 2006, then thrown away by a collapse of political will and later retconned into defeat for domestic political purposes.

    If political will was the opposite, victory would not necessarily have been achieved. cue — Afghanistan, which has practically reverted under the Taliban after how many years?


    > You have a remarkably short memory. Mine includes the ’67 and ’73 wars and I’ve studied the ones in ’48 and ’56.

    48 –the Arab countries were militarily occupied by western troops and in some cases under western command (part of the post WW1 and WW2 realities). Hardly a credible or determined foe.

    56 — the soviets threatened to nuke the UK. Egypt calculated correctly. Eisenhower said he would not object to remind the brits that the price for rescuing them in WW2 was that give up their empire. That was practically the episode that made Britain our poodle (special relationship). It was a win for Egypt. A win for the Soviets. A win for the Americans, and a humiliating defeat for the brits.

    67 – was a clear cut victory for Israelis

    73 – It took the US flying “everything that flies” (airbridge) to rescue the Israelis, before the superpowers stabilized things on the ground into some kind of a stalemate. The political ramification for this was that Israel had to give up all of the Sinai (captured in 67) to achieve piece with Egypt in 79. Hardly a victory for Israel.

    Unless I am missing something, post 67 the Israelis have not won a single war.


    > But if you confuses losses due to political and strategic collapse with losses due to a failure in warfighting capability you will draw the wrong lessons, precisely as you are doing.

    Strategy and politics is part of war. And war is a continuation of politics by other means. Do you think the adversary on the ground is not calibrating their strategy based on what is happening here domestically? Of course they are. The turning of the tide in 2006 was too late. The war was already won by those who wanted to drive the US out. The defeat was part of the “tidal wave” that brought Obama into office who campaigned on “cut and run”.

    1. >Strategy and politics is part of war.

      Of course they are. But you’ve changed the subject away from your ludicrous and false assertion that volume fire is a workable substitute for aimed fire.

      Uma, even the dumbest second looie fresh out of OCS knows better than this. I’m a civilian and I know better. You can’t study small-unit tactics for any length of time and still believe this nonsense, which tells me you haven’t.

      If you don’t care that I’m telling you you’re talking like a fool, at least notice that the veterans among my regulars are saying the same thing.

  911. @gmmay:


    > Do you think the US military changed to select fire, three round burst with their main service rifle because it was less effective?

    If I were to guess, they did that for noobs. Who were quick to empty their full magazines the moment they met fire. That is my guess.


    > fire discipline

    Fire discipline and throwing a wall of lead the enemy are not mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite. The gun that the Vietcong used (AK-47) is by definition the “wall of lead” gun.

    1. >The gun that the Vietcong used (AK-47) is by definition the “wall of lead” gun

      Yes. It was designed to oppose Soviet wall-of-lead doctrine on the Eastern Front of WWII, where it did a creditable job.

      But do you know what happens when you put VC or other AK-47-wielding troops up against troops with equal morale and aimed-fire training? They die. The die a lot. And often the aimed-fire side takes only light casualties.

      You cannot win field engagements that way. The AK-47 is a great weapon for terrorizing civilians and a pretty good one for insurgents who are never forced into concentrating against line troops. As a tool for line combat it is long obsolete – arguably it was obsolete when first manufactured.

  912. “””It is not good satire because those on the right generally have no sense of humor, and also need their own safe space. And he should have known better. O’Reilly should have him on Fox news.”””

    How about we test this hypothesis? Why don’t you tweet something similar, but replace “white” with “black” or “Jewish” or “Asian” or even “Democrat”?

    My money is on this: that the above groups would display the same “lack” of humor that those on the right have on this issue.

    (Note that I deliberately didn’t create a copy of the tweet with the said substitutions in this comment: I don’t want these groups’ expressions of “humor” raining down on my head…)

  913. @esr:


    > Uma, even the dumbest second looie fresh out of OCS knows better than this.

    I think you maybe imagining that I said things I did not say. That is all.


    > You can’t study small-unit tactics for any length of time and still believe this nonsense, which tells me you haven’t.

    The Israel war against Hizbullah (2006) might be good study case for small unit tactics and opponents using very different tactics on the ground.

    Wars, and unfolding situations on the ground, create their own tactics. They bring the inventor in people. And among what is invented is new tactics. In many conflicts, Militias typically started as bunch of illiterate peasants and with time they adapt their tactics and become hardened warriors. There is no no be-all-end-all manual for tactics. If you know of one, let me know. I would very much like to read it.

  914. @ ESR – “a nice killing ground in front of of it”

    Part of John Basilone’s Medal of Honor citation describes how he ran forward into his own crew’s field of fire in order to push over stacks of bodies that were building up and obstructing their view of the riverbank below. The Japanese had conducted a long march through dense jungle and attempted a surprise attack at a rear position guarding Henderson Field. Artillery wasn’t an option for them and Marine fighters had superiority in that air space. So they just sent wave after wave across the river until almost no one was left.

  915. @esr:


    > But do you know what happens when you put VC or other AK-47-wielding troops up against troops with equal morale and aimed-fire training? They die. The die a lot. And often the aimed-fire side takes only light casualties.

    They die a lot at the beginning. When they are still a rag-tag militia and before they’ve disciplined enough. Once they’ve disciplined enough, they know when to meet you with their “wall of lead”, and when to wait … wait … wait … wait …and .. wait.

    And when they open their “wall of lead” on your unit there will be far more woundeds and casualties, than if they were to meet you with 5 sniper rifles all on one “Fire” command.

    1. >They die a lot at the beginning. When they are still a rag-tag militia and before they’ve disciplined enough.

      No, I’m talking about confrontations between field armies. Iraqis vs. U.S in Gulf War I or II, for example. The Republican Guard was plenty disciplined – they were probably about as good as it gets for the intersecting categories of Arab and Soviet client state. Crappy initiative and unit cohesion, because you don’t get that from an authoritarian regime built on a tribal society. But disciplined? Yeah.

      They were also toast. Wall of lead sucks big time if you can’t force your enemy into the optimal engagement range of your weapons. U.S. troops took them apart at longer range than they could engage effectively. It broke their morale; later in the war entire Iraqi units tried to surrender to unmanned drones.

  916. @uma

    I’m sure that’s why Iraqi insurgents switched exclusively to IED’s for purposes of ambush. Oh, wait, no, that’s not why. To say nothing of the fact that the mass proliferation of low-level optics in Western militaries has had some very unsubtle implications.

  917. The AK.47 is a select fire rifle just like other military assault rifles. It has a semi-automatic setting.

    There is no “wall of lead” gun. At 600rpm, your magazine is gone in half second, and if you are carrying own ammunition through the jungle, all your ammunition is gone in less than 5 seconds.

    I don’t know much about the VC but I have serious doubts they used the AK-47 this way, except in ambush at very close range where a Western army would do the same.

  918. >>Personally, I consider it a much more tactically surgical use of full-auto tech to have ‘burst fire’ capability (typically 3 shots)…that’s what I’d buy.

    >Strongly agreed. I’ve thought about this too.

    Just to point out, trigger control is the issue here. The best-trained troops can consistently fire bursts of arbitrary length at will, as needed.

    Most troops don’t get that much training, so three shot burst setting.

  919. Uma, even the dumbest second looie fresh out of OCS knows better than this.

    It is worse than that. Anyone who has played an FPS more modern then oh…… let’s be generous and say Quake 3 knows that the sound, flash, and recoil of your gun makes spray and pray a really fucking stupid idea.

    Even before that you still had the idea of limited ammunition.

  920. There is a reason professional soldiers study logistics… To whit: A 30 round AK-47 magazine comes in at about .75kg (found on the internet) and will sustain 3 seconds of continuous fire at 600rpm (10rps).. To maintain total seconds of fire you need 20 magazines, or 15kg of ammo burned in the first minute (or so) of an engagement. In a static location with stacked mags at each firing position AND powder monkeys (an old naval term) humping more ammo every few minutes this might work, but sustained full auto will fire a an unsupported warrior dry VERY quickly.

    Stopping to change magazines just lets the opposition fire aimed shots at you, especially when the shooter pops up to pray and spray again.

    That is why “Wall of Lead” tactics fail…

  921. Just to point out, trigger control is the issue here. The best-trained troops can consistently fire bursts of arbitrary length at will, as needed.

    Most troops don’t get that much training, so three shot burst setting.

    Which was really a solution in search of a problem. It really over-complicated the trigger group. The US Army (outside of special forces) hasn’t ever wanted to train regular troops to shoot properly like the Marines do. The idea that the armies that have been issued the AK-47 trained their soldiers to shoot to a higher standard than the US Army is laughable. How many rounds a year did they fire in training? No, they relied on “spray-and-pray” because of the low standard of training. As did the US Army in Vietnam.

    Automatic fire is best reserved for the weapons purpose-built to pump out large amounts of reasonably accurate fire: bipod and tripod-mounted machine guns. Outside of close-quarters combat, usage of automatic fire by infantrymen is worse than useless. At 100m, your first round might have a chance of hitting the target, the 2nd less so, and everything after that is merely scattered in its general direction.

  922. @esr:


    > No, I’m talking about confrontations between field armies.

    That is so passe.


    > The Republican Guard was plenty disciplined – they were probably about as good as it gets for the intersecting categories of Arab and Soviet client state.

    The last meaningful field army vs field army confrontations worthy of analysis are in WWII. For wars after WWII, you’d have to look hard and deep to find battles worthy of analysis. You’ll find some. But not many.

    WWII is the last war where you have motivated troops on both sides and an equipment/technology gap that would not make the outcome a quick and foregone conclusion. Trying to analyze the republican guards (iraq) vs. the US army, navy, air-force and that of 30 other nations, is like trying to analyze the Nazi army performance in the dying days of the war when collapse of Germany was already a certainty — both in the mind of its people, and the mind of its troops. (ie waste of time)

  923. uma on 2016-12-29 at 17:04:58 said:

    So now you’re trying to maintain a lost argument by guessing? Yeah, you’re a poster child for Dunning-Kruger.

    Then there’s this little nugget of ignorance:

    “They die a lot at the beginning. When they are still a rag-tag militia and before they’ve disciplined enough.”

    They died a lot at the beginning, yes. And also at the middle, and the end. The NVA was an experienced fighting force when the US intervened. This is a matter of record. When I first served on active duty, there were still many Vietnam vets and they, to a man, commented on how inferior the AK was, despite its higher caliber.

    And Greg’s comment is like the clueless supporting the ignorant. I’ll ask again – do you think the US adopted 3 round burst because it was less effective than full auto?

    I think I need to go back to scrolling past uma’s comments.

  924. @gmmay:


    > So now you’re trying to maintain a lost argument by guessing? Yeah, you’re a poster child for Dunning-Kruger.

    Relax. It took not more than a couple of minutes of searching to confirm that my guess was correct. Here is what the wiki page on the M16 rifle says:

    The action was also modified, replacing the fully automatic setting with a three-round burst setting.[156] When using a fully automatic weapon, inexperienced troops often hold down the trigger and “spray” when under fire.

    Pretty much what I guessed and what Greg confirmed.

  925. uma,

    Ok, let’s side aside the fact that I’m referencing professional training, experience, and eyewitness accounts and you’re citing wiki-fucking-pedia. I totally get it. Just look at your citation again. Now think.

    In case you’re still having trouble, I’ll reference you to the question I’ve now twice asked – do you think the US military switched to three round burst because it was less effective?

    Now look at your citation. Can you see the glaring problem yet?

    At this point, I’m just reading your responses out of morbid curiosity.

  926. @ esr, re: fascism

    No, it’s already here, and its watchwords are “diversity”, “privilege”, “inclusion”, and “safe spaces”.

    Sorry it’s taken so long to get to this, I’m on call 24/7 and this has been a busy week. Anyway, I’ll take it point by point over separate posts to avoid getting caught in the moderation system, and I’ll move from our minimum to our maximum disagreements:

    Safe Spaces: I’ve pretty much got to agree with you here. An obvious example might be a college class which explores the causes of World War II. Such as class should not offer “safe spaces” because it’s impossible to understand the causes of World War II without confronting some pretty ugly stuff, ranging from the repression of minorities – Jews, Gays, etc., to the “betrayed from within” narrative… one simply can’t learn about Kristalnacht and still be in a “safe space.” The same holds true for a history of the American Civil War or of Vietnam, or for discussions of what the world of medicine was like before the invention of vaccines and antibiotics. This stuff is just plain ugly and scary and if you need to be in a “safe space” instead of studying it, you won’t know a damn thing about history – and people who don’t know about history are a huge part of the problem on both sides of the political spectrum.

    The only “safe spaces” I approve of are for people who are currently recovering from recent trauma and are in a mental hospital or under the care of a therapist while staying home. “Safe spaces” are not for sane college students. Let’s file “trigger warnings” and related bullshit under the same umbrella as “safe spaces” and move on. Everyone has their shit and everyone needs to deal with their shit, and the outside world is not where you deal with your shit!

  927. @ esr, re: fascism

    No, it’s already here, and its watchwords are “diversity”, “privilege”, “inclusion”, and “safe spaces”.

    Diversity: It’s probably enough to say that I’m a “melting pot” man when it comes to the current ideal of diversity. One issue where I’d come close to agreeing with diversity advocates is in noting that the U.S. is currently about 35 percent minority, and the melting pot goes both ways regardless of how we feel. We’re mixing pho, gumbo and curry with our European soup right now and I have no problems with the combination. The real issue here is that you can accept the melting pot as it as, or you can be an asshole to a third of your fellow citizens. Yes, the melting pot is unevenly divided geographically, – far more Hispanics in the Southwest, for example – and people need to deal with that too, hopefully by resolving not to be jerks!

    Where I do agree with diversity advocates it is essentially as a mental health issue, for both individuals and our larger political brain. It would be really nice (reasoning from this point of view) if our various media reflected the reality that America is 35 percent minority, because the media instead shows us an America that’s maybe 5 percent minority, and this leads to some really bad problems with the way we think about race and nationality. For example consider Trump’s announced plans to deport illegal immigrants* and Muslims, plus Pence’s dislike of homosexuals (he supports conversion/aversion therapy) and Bannon’s comments about Asian CEOs, and then consider that racial minorities plus LGBT and Jews total approximately 136 million people – about 40 percent of the population – and you add to that the 20-30 percent of the white population who expects to stand by their Hispanic sister-in-law or their Gay kid and suddenly the combination of Trump and Pence simply seems bizarre beyond all reason.

    Further, I don’t see any need for every sub-grouping of any organization to have a designated number of Black senior citizens or handicapped Asians, or whatever. That’s just silly.

    * I suspect that “illegal immigrant” is a coded reference to all Hispanics, but even if it really does consider only illegal immigrants, we’re still talking about millions of people, and when one considers the ways an effort to remove only “real” illegals could go wrong… ’nuff said, I suspect.

  928. @ esr, re: fascism

    No, it’s already here, and its watchwords are “diversity”, “privilege”, “inclusion”, and “safe spaces”.

    Inclusion: This is a complicated one. For starters, I’ll ask you to note the article linked below, which discusses 14 important woman scientists. Three of those scientists, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Rosalind Franklin, and Chien-Shiung Wu, did work which was important enough to merit a Nobel Prize, but they were excluded in favor of their male colleagues!

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vera-rubin-and-14-other-women-scientists-you-should-know_us_5863d794e4b0de3a08f6b0eb

    That’s the positive argument for inclusion right there. We see three woman scientists getting fucked over and those injustices should never have happened. Reasoning forward, one can imagine a 20 percent injustice rate, on the matter of women getting credit alone, and the need to enforce and verify inclusion becomes thorougly obvious. Tie in the idea (and any decent Google search will bury us in cites) of injustices to Blacks, Asians or Hispanics on the same basis and now we’re in real trouble.

    The argument against inclusion goes something like this: If you’re going to join, for example, a Nobel-worthy physics team, you’d better be a properly-educated mathematical prodigy regardless of your race or gender. If you’re not a mathematical prodigy you don’t qualify to do Nobel-worthy work, and that’s the end of the matter. Done. You should find a teaching position and get over it.

    But if you are not a properly-educated mathematical prodigy, and you really want to join a Nobel-worthy physics team, and the overly-liberal institution you work at forces you onto that team… guess what? They’re not a Nobel-worthy physics team anymore, and it’s your fault! The same holds true at any level of any enterprise. There’s a minimum combination of training/education/experience/smarts needed to qualify and be able to function appropriately as a team member, and the ideal of inclusivity needs to take a back seat to this basic necessity, or everthing we do fails.

    The argument “against inclusion” is very rational. Just be aware that you’re arguing about idiotic forced inclusion rather than real inclusion.

    There’s a simple way to handle these things. It was pioneered, oddly enough, by major orchestras. They started holding blind auditions, with players auditioning behind screens (and with their shoes off – the heels were giving women away) and suddenly the gender numbers for major orchestras started changing dramatically! The point of this story is that if you want to be really inclusive, not “idiotic and forceably inclusive,” and you’d prefer not to be a prejudiced idiot, there’s probably a way to do it, somewhat similar to what the major orchestras have been doing, but suited to your profession.

  929. @ esr, re: fascism

    No, it’s already here, and its watchwords are “diversity”, “privilege”, “inclusion”, and “safe spaces”.

    And Privilege: I could make an argument, but instead I’m going to get my point across with a little fiction – though you should probably note that any single point of the narrative could come from the headlines of the last fifty years; I’ve just put all the stuff in one place so I can turn it into a (hopefully) instructive story. Read to the end – IMHO the punchline is worth the wait:
    .

    JULY 7TH, 1987:

    THE JUDGE: Mr. Cartwright, the prosecution has proven successfully that you pay the Black employees at your warehouse less than you pay the White employees, and this holds true for every type of employee you have hired, regardless of whether they are warehousemen or shipping clerks. This is racism at its worst, and you are hereby instructed to raise the pay of your black employees so that it is equal to the pay of white employees who are doing the same job and have the same seniority. Furthermore, the court would appreciate it if you could get over your racist attitudes.

    MR. CARTWRIGHT: It’s hard for an old Southern boy like myself to lose the racism, but I’ll set up a pay scale and adhere to it.
    .
    APRIL 3RD, 1990:

    THE JUDGE: Mr. Cartwright, I’m very disappointed in you. The prosecution has proved that you set up not one, but two pay scales – one pay scale for your black employees, and one pay scale for your white employees. You are hereby ordered to pay everyone according to the scale for your white employees, retroactively to July 7th of 1973, and also to set up a fair system for making sure that everyone is appropriately evaluated for their raises in a fashion which is not judgemental about their race! And you may only use one pay scale for all your employees.

    MR. CARTWRIGHT: But that’s gonna cost me a bundle!

    THE JUDGE: The alternative is to sit in jail until you obey my lawful order!
    .
    JANUARY 17TH, 2001:

    THE JUDGE: Mr. Cartwright, according to this you set up a “fair” system” for making sure that everyone was evaluated for a raise on the same scale, then you put your White foremen, Mr. Davis and Mr. Bedford-Forrest in charge of the evaluations. Somehow the White people in your warehouse have always evaluated better than the Black people.

    MR. CARTWRIGHT: Well your honor, that’s because my White employees try harder and they move more freight.

    THE JUDGE: In that case, Mr. Cartwright, you will set up a scale at every loading dock, and you will both weigh and measure the volume of the frieght moved by each employee and give raises based on a combination of both the weights and volumes moved. Each employee’s weight and volume will be checked and signed off by both a Black and White employee.

    MR. CARTWRIGHT: But a scale at every loading dock? That’s real expensive!
    .
    SEPTEMBER 23RD, 2007:

    THE JUDGE: …and the prosecution has proved that with the retirement of Mr. Davis and Mr. Bedford-Forrest, as well as the firing of your chief clerk, Mrs. Wallace, you have not considered any of your Black employees for promotion. You didn’t post the jobs and you didn’t interview any of your Black employees for the jobs.

    MR. CARTWRIGHT: My Black Employees aren’t as well educated as my White –

    THE JUDGE: – The prosecution also proved that you have paid for college classes in business and logistics for your White employees, while denying Black employees the same benefits!
    .
    MAY 14TH, 2010:

    THE JUDGE: …proved that after the recession hit in October of 2008, you laid off all your Black employees. Frankly Mr. Cartwright, this is the fifth time we’ve seen you in the last 23 years and this court is royally sick of hearing your attorneys spout the same nonsense each time we see you. This has been going on for decades, and you’re still the same substandard human-being you were back in 1987!

    You may recall, Mr. Cartwright, that the South lost the Civil War more than 150 years ago. Since then we’ve passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, we’ve ended Jim Crow, we’ve seen Black admirals and generals, and over the next month colleges around the country will be graduating Black Biologists, Black Programmers and Black Physicists, including Black people who’ve recently gained their Masters Degrees or Ph.Ds! Last year, as I’m sure your remember, we inaugerated the first Black President of the United States. So I have a very important question for you.

    Mr. CARTWRIGHT: Yes Your Honor?

    THE JUDGE: Mr. Cartwright, when are you finally going to get over yourself and give up your White Privilege?
    .
    And there it is. Anyone of sufficient intelligence can apply this story to male privilege or class privilege, or heterosexual privilege… Long story short, if you still haven’t gotten over the Civil War, or you act like you still haven’t gotten over the Civil War, then difficult questions about privilege are aimed at you – and for good reason.

    Mr. Cartwright, when are you going to get over yourself and give up your White privilege?

    If my point hasn’t been made, I’ll happily explain things to you. In very short words.

  930. @ Zaklog the Deplorable:

    “but Trump’s tendency to divide rather than unite is… problematic, to say the least.”

    Ummm, were you awake for the last eight years of Obama? Geez, the hypocrisy is amazing.

    I don’t recall Obama objecting to the race of a judge, or claiming that he would deport some group of people who numbers in the multiple millions, or deport that other group too – you know, the ones who are rapists. And none of Obama’s advisers ever declared that Asian CEOs are “uncivilized.”

    But all that is true about Trump.

    The problem Obama had is that a ridiculous number of White people panicked because he is Black, and they didn’t stop panicking for eight years, and they didn’t stop sending each other Obama-as-gorilla cartoons over Facebook for eight fucking years! If Obama was “divisive” it was only in the eyes of freaked-out Caucasians who didn’t stop to notice that Obama’s actual politics were well to the right of Richard Nixon and his political hero was Ronald Reagan. (I should have sent him a letter early in his term, something along the lines of “Not Reagan you stupid, spineless ass!. You’ve got the wrong “R.” You should be emulating Roosevelt!”)

    I’m liberal, but I’m not an Obama fan. He’s way too far to the right for me, and I’m very disappointed that he didn’t arrest any bankers or lock up Cheney for war crimes.

    As for Hillary’s “deplorable” comment, I think I’ve already agreed that it may well have lost her the election – and deservedly so!

  931. @ esr:

    those forces were not driven out by defeat on the battlefield but withdrawn due to a collapse of political will.

    In other words, a strategic defeat rather than tactical – exactly what Giap was aiming for with the Tet offensive. It doesn’t mean we didn’t loose. Our enemies had good intelligence on our national mood and used it to powerful effect. I’m not going to look it up, but I suspect that Sun Tzu had something to say about the issue. ;)

    On the subject of Iraq, one of bin Laden’s stated objectives in attacking the twin towers was to get us to attack Iraq. Why Bush did exactly what his opponent wanted him to do, despite the fact that bin Ladan had been talking about that very issue for ages is one of the great mysteries of our time. Obama wasn’t cowardly, he was attempting, albeit much too late, to revise his predecessors error. (If you think in Poker terms, Bush left Obama a lousy hand! Obama did the smart thing and laid down his cards.)

    All that being said, you’re absolutely correct about the “spray and pray” issue.

  932. I don’t recall Obama objecting to the race of a judge

    Slight difference between the race and La Raza.

  933. Troutwaxer: It is easy to prove your point in fiction, where there is no inconvenient reality to disrupt the author’s narrative. Here actual, measured, Black and White IQ distributions:

    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6JQAmm5cRAA/T6uinP4ZjWI/AAAAAAAAABk/m2EFUtV1LFk/s1600/iq5.jpg

    Do you think this might have any bearing on pay and wealth differentials?

    And we did not have to wait for this data to know so, because the story you present is not just a calumny on Whites, science, and truth, it is also a calumny on the free market. Black employees are, as you correctly point out, not Mr Cartwright’s slaves. If there were an employer offering them a better deal they would have taken it. If there were such a better deal consistent with making a profit, it would have been offered. I am a racist and I would make the offer, just as I am a a sexist but would be happy to pay women 15% less rather than 20% less “for the same work and eat everyone’s lunch – which of course iterates to 0%. The free market was already a natural experiment that proves Black labour is worth less than White labour. Any other claim is a claim that capitalists are not greedy, perhaps a claim that no one is greedy.

  934. Bush believed that all problems in Iraq were due to Saddam Hussein, and when Hussein was gone Iraq would become a prosperous American-style social democracy.

    Obama believed that all problems in Iraq were due to the US, and then US was gone Iraq would become a prosperous American-style social democracy.

    I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of either of these beliefs; both were catastrophically mistaken. The only difference is that Bush’s mistake was rubbed in his face by the US media, while Obama’s was carefully buried.

  935. Troutwaxer: “I suspect that “illegal immigrant” is a coded reference to all Hispanics,”

    NO, $DEITY->dammit, NO!!!!!!

    Why do leftists assume that we don’t differentiate between illegal immigrants and those who are here legally?!

    If you’re here legally, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re here illegally, then get your ass home before we send you there ourselves.

    Why is this so hard to understand?

    “Long story short, if you still haven’t gotten over the Civil War, or you act like you still haven’t gotten over the Civil War, then difficult questions about privilege are aimed at you – and for good reason.”

    Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, SJW. The War of Northern Aggression was not the holy cause in the service od saintliness and righteousness you SJWs claim it to be. It was dirty and ugly, and used as much to keep a rising South down as it was about freeing slaves…maybe more so.

    None of the examples you cite (I’m going to be generous and not demand citations) are exclusive to those who understand the War of Northern Aggression for what it is. There are plenty of racists in the North, too.

    “The problem Obama had is that a ridiculous number of White people panicked because he is Black, and they didn’t stop panicking for eight years,”

    You go right on claiming those of us who opposed Barack Obama are raaaaacists!!!. Keep forgetting, deliberately or otherwise, that lots of us just didn’t like his hard-left policies. You’re guaranteeing Trump and the Republican Congress and Republican stat houses’ continued re-election.

  936. “Why Bush did exactly what his opponent wanted him to do, despite the fact that bin Ladan had been talking about that very issue for ages is one of the great mysteries of our time.”

    Just because your enemy wants you to do something does not automatically make it the wrong thing to do. He’s not infallible, you know.

    “Obama wasn’t cowardly, he was attempting, albeit much too late, to revise his predecessors error.”

    Except that by the time he took office, we’d won. Obama cut and ran, and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for the sake of pleasing his leftist base. It obviously worked in that regard. Look how happy you are.

  937. >Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, SJW. The War of Northern Aggression was not the holy cause in the service od saintliness and righteousness you SJWs claim it to be. It was dirty and ugly, and used as much to keep a rising South down as it was about freeing slaves…maybe more so.

    Um, here your tribal affiliations are getting between you and rationality as much as his.

    There was nothing about the South that was *rising*. Much of the tension that led up to the war was due to the fact that the North was, in fact, rising and the South was falling (further) behind yet desperate to cling to what it saw as its rightful station.

    Of course the North, with its increasing economic, industrial, demographic, etc etc, power was having none of this. On balance, the public face of the North was dominated by a loud, horrible minority who were willing to engage in any evil, any evil at all, required for them to achieve their utopian goals. And were proud of it.

    People aren’t saints. I’d love if this could be a sign off and we could avoid either a) letting a troll lead us to go so far in the cause of contradicting him that we say foolish things, or b) refighting the Civil War.

  938. “There was nothing about the South that was *rising*. Much of the tension that led up to the war was due to the fact that the North was, in fact, rising and the South was falling (further) behind yet desperate to cling to what it saw as its rightful station.”

    To this, I have only one word to say: Reconstruction. That long-running atrocity caused damage the South is still suffering from 150 years later.

  939. The War of Northern Aggression was not the holy cause in the service od saintliness and righteousness you SJWs claim it to be. It was dirty and ugly, and used as much to keep a rising South down as it was about freeing slaves…maybe more so.

    The South were the aggressors in that war. They started by seizing about 1/4 of the Union’s sovereign territory, in flagrant violation of the Constitution. Lincoln announced in his First Inaugural that he wasn’t planning to march in to enforce federal law, and the South fired the first shots.

    There is a case to be made for the Southern cause — though I think it is a weak one — but pretending that the North were the aggressors is not that case.

  940. The argument made by South Carolina (the first state to secede) on its secession was not that states have a right to secede under the constitution, but that the Constitution had been breached by anti-slavery states refusing to enforce laws related to capturing and returning fugitive slaves required by the Constitution:

    http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

    Essentially the South accuses the North of breaking the Constitution and then says that, because some of its obligations have been rejected by other states, they don’t have to abide by other obligations they made to those states. Seems legally reasonable, whatever your moral thoughts about slavery.

    This is very relevant to modern disputes because most of what the Federal Government does that conservatives (and, more so, libertarians and neoreactionaries) object to is not permitted under the Constitution, and in a genuinely federal country competition between states would be mean that even much of the intervention done voluntarily be individual states would be unviable.

    The War Between the States established the principle that leftwing ideologues could railroad law, constitutional and otherwise, to impose their moral ideas. This trend did not stop with abolishing slavery, has been accelerating ever since, and in an honest reading has long since rendered the Constitution moot, and destroyed the US that was founded in 1776.

  941. In fact the greatest myth of American civics is that in the American Revolution people with a unified idea of what a country should be got together and founded one, and that its foundational documents reflect those ideas. The foundational documents of the US were a detente between various, mostly religious inspired, factions, that ALL favoured authoritarianism of some form.

    The limited and separated powers of the Constitution, and the guaranteed freedoms of the Bill of Rights, were not agreed upon as a destination for the country but truce lines from which the battle could be resumed after the defeat of the British. A battle that was resumed and by and large won by the North Eastern puritans.

  942. Joseph W., history is written by the winners. You completely ignore the legal and economic aggression of the North against the South. The assault on Fort Sumpter was the response to a lot of provocations; they simply pushed the South to the breaking point.

    1. >The assault on Fort Sumpter was the response to a lot of provocations;

      You mean like refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Laws or permit the extension of slavery into new territories?

      Sorry, you get zero sympathy from me on this one. Too many of the things the South wanted were evil and deserved to be destroyed in the fire of war if the South refused to give them up.

      Not least of the South’s sins was bringing discredit on the concept of states’ rights by enlisting it in a malign cause.

  943. >To this, I have only one word to say: Reconstruction. That long-running atrocity caused damage the South is still suffering from 150 years later.

    And the whole country is still suffering from Jim Crow and the KKK, and what they led to. Gun control, anyone?

    As I said, no saints.

    In any case, not sure what that has to do with the fantasy of an antebellum ‘rising’ South. Wars have consequences. The South lost. It could have been a *lot* worse, and judging by the nasty nasty ways the South tried to weasel around the consequences of *losing*, and losing *badly*, nigh utterly, that war, some might say the South deserved it.

    1. > It could have been a *lot* worse,

      Yeah, let’s take a look at that alternate world. I mean, the one is which the defeated South was treated the way the losing regions/factions in insurrections usually are.

      The Confederate political leadership and most serving officers in the CSA are hung or shot, not allowed to retire under light house arrest or re-integrated into the Union Army.

      Confederate landowners are dispossessed en masse.

      For decades afterwards, singing “rebel songs” or wearing regional costume can get you jailed, deported, or killed outright.

      The South got off lightly. The magnanimity with which it was treated has almost no historical precedent.

  944. “The South were the aggressors in that war. They started by seizing about 1/4 of the Union’s sovereign territory, in flagrant violation of the Constitution.”

    Not that I’m a defender of the antebellum South, but I’ve never really found this argument very compelling. A sovereign nation is not beholden to the laws of another. That’s like saying the colonies were in flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the British Crown. Well…yeah.

    And in a democratic move like the South’s secession (this is not a value judgment on that), the idea that the North had sovereign territory within the South’s borders is absurd.

  945. Why is this so hard to understand?

    Precisely because by dishonestly linking illegal immigrants and a racial group they can bleat that any proposition of border control is in se racist.

  946. “The magnanimity with which it was treated has almost no historical precedent.”

    What you are describing is worse than de-Nazification, itself considered an extreme example of post-war punishment. Only a few communist terrors are worse than what you describe.

    Obviously the Union got something out of it too: the cooperation of and acquiescence to the continuation of the Union by the population of the CSA.

    1. >What you are describing is worse than de-Nazification, itself considered an extreme example of post-war punishment.

      The particular historical example I had in mind was the treatment of Scotland after the Jacobite Rebellions, which was itself less harsh than the aftermath of (for example) the Fronde.

      De-Nazification can’t be a precedent for the treatment of the South, since it happened 80 years after the end of the Civil War.

  947. Sure, we judge slavery to be evil, and many in those times did also.

    However, it was also *legal*…in the Southern states…and had been for millennia. Lincoln himself said that the fedgov had no authority to outlaw slavery nationally – that it had to be a States’ issue.

    So, to claim that the North made a casus belli out of a legal practice is sheer nonsense. It was a war fought for the same 3 reasons every other war has been fought – money, land & power.

    The Northern states *were* violating the Constitutional compact that bound the several States together. As is clearly outlined in the statements of cause (the best is Georgia’s), they judged the situation to be another ‘train of abuses & usurpations’ that compelled them to dissolve the bonds of their voluntary membership in the Union. There is no Constitutional provision that forever binds member States. Secession is perfectly legal…which is why the secession was peacefully done with the stroke of a pen, and no casus belli erupted from the North.

    The North continued to build a grave & gathering threat within Confederate territory (at Sumpter), and ultimately, the Confederacy had to act. You keep poking the bear, you get bit…and it’s your fault you got bit.

    The South was absolutely right to secede…and had it not been for a final critical error by RE Lee, they would have held off the Union and ‘won’ the war.

  948. PS. and thanks to the likes of Cyrus McCormick, slavery itself would have become economically worthless in a couple of decades, had the CSA prevailed.

    1. >PS. and thanks to the likes of Cyrus McCormick, slavery itself would have become economically worthless in a couple of decades, had the CSA prevailed.

      That is probably true, but does not make the CSA less culpable for fighting to defend slavery.

  949. Yeah, it’s always amusing when Leftists who have the vapors over how we fight Islamists, or how Israel defends itself in the “occupied” West Bank, have no problems with Northern tactics that amount to actual war crimes, or Reconstruction.


  950. > American Revolution

    This term exemplifies the hubris disease mentioned earlier. Maybe “American Lover’s Quarrel” with Britain would be a more fitting term and accurate terminology. A revolution is something very very different.

  951. “The particular historical example I had in mind was the treatment of Scotland after the Jacobite Rebellions, which was itself less harsh than the aftermath of (for example) the Fronde.

    “De-Nazification can’t be a precedent for the treatment of the South, since it happened 80 years after the end of the Civil War.”

    I’ll grant the Highlands after Culloden (not “Scotland”), but then that was the fourth such rising.

    Compare to the first English Civil War: pretty much everyone pardoned or paroled, the king killed only for extreme intransigence that undermined the legitimacy of the state. Those who fought again in the second war, though, were often executed after surrender.

    Restoration wasn’t a blood bath either, reprisals largely limited to regicides.

    On a notional handful of Nazis were ever hanged. Far fewer than were *personally* guilty of serious and extraordinary crimes. And that was treating a foreign enemy.

  952. “”>PS. and thanks to the likes of Cyrus McCormick, slavery itself would have become economically worthless in a couple of decades, had the CSA prevailed.”

    “That is probably true, but does not make the CSA less culpable for fighting to defend slavery.”

    The economic value in slavery is preventing economic devastation by bands of marauding freed slaves. As indeed was later inflicted on the North, as if by cosmic revenge. Woe to the myopic.

    No doubt a less repugnant, and less indiscriminate, solution could have been found to this problem. But with about a quarter of Black men in prison or on parole or probation at any one time, and over a third lifetime incarceration rate, I’m not sure the USA has yet found it.

  953. Also, if the Highlands after Culloden counts, why not the march to the sea? The devastation of the Highlands was perceived as a military operation, just as the march to sea was conceived as a military operation, even though the opposition of a bunch of housewives hiding their property and menfolk was not all that formidable to the Hannoverian/Union armies.

  954. ‘Thanks to the likes of Cyrus McCormick, slavery would have become economically worthless in a couple decades’

    McCormick’s reapers were for grain, not tobacco or cotton. People were still picking cotton and tobacco by hand a century later. Sex slaves still sell. British Empire cotton plantations might not have been funded for decades without the Civil War cutting cotton supplies. If the North had been okay with the moral issue we might still have slaves.
    Slavery is a clear moral issue. Kidnapping, whips, chains, chasing runaways, so forth.

  955. @Oliver Cromwell:

    There are many examples of magnanimity in history.

    The example of Nazi Germany may not be a very a good one. Stalin wanted a bloodbath where tens of thousands of nazis would be executed. Churchill objected on the grounds that it would be un-Christian to do so.

    Instead of the bloodbath that Stalin wanted, the “compromise” entailed that 12 million Germans (civilians) would be ethnically cleansed from lands they inhabited for 1000 years. I don’t know if that can be called magnanimity, given that the united states was well on its way developing the maxim gun and could have probably forced better treatment of the Germans and German civilians in particular.

  956. uma, I don’t know where you are getting your history information from but you need a better source.

    Speaking about the aftermath of WWII, you said…given that the united states was well on its way developing the maxim gun….

    Seriously? The USA was working on a 19th century invention 60 years later??

    Some of your posts make some sense but then you drop a clanger like the Maxim gun that resets your credibility back to “badly informed troll”..

  957. @Bruce – “McCormick’s reapers were for grain, not tobacco or cotton.”

    Yes…which is why I said “the likes of Cyrus McCormick”.

    Why would we imagine that industrialized advances in one area of agriculture would fail to inspire advances in other areas? Combine this with the continued rise of the Southern abolitionist movement, and economic pressure from the North (if they were truly sincere about the slavery issue, and not merely posturing while profiting handsomely from the cheap produce)…and I imagine a situation where slavery would have died a natural death over the course of a couple of decades.

    Given that slavery was once simply “the way of the world” (as it had been for millennia), I think it is remarkable how swiftly – a few decades – white western civilization adjusted to seek its abolition. Heck…wasn’t the importation of new slaves prohibited nationally in the USA sometime in the 1780s? Britain finally (after a couple decades of dialing it back abroad) abolished slavery in the 1830s. These kinds of fundamental shifts take time for people, and their psychology, to change. White westerners blazed that trail. Many parts of the darker world have yet to catch on.

  958. @Troutwaxer “Safe Spaces: I’ve pretty much got to agree with you here. An obvious example might be a college class which explores the causes of World War II. Such as class should not offer “safe spaces” ”

    Whenever I’ve heard of something like that actually being implemented, it’s been limited to simply having no penalty to e.g. walking out if someone is overwhelmed in the moment, so long as they can demonstrate knowledge of the material later on.

  959. @Troutwaxer Re: Diversity

    You generalize about your 35% minority bloc as well as the remainder of the country, deliberately confuse ethnicity for race, think the only valuable characteristic of an individual is their external phenotype and that media representations should reflect this, and you go on to imply that Trump, Pence and their supporters are all racists/bigots of one stripe or another?

    Pot, meet Kettle.

    Lets not forget that Obama and co. was committed to hang the blame for Bengahzi on the first brown-skinnned middle-eastern film maker it could drum up charges against.

  960. Dan- ‘Why would we imagine that advances in one area of agriculture would fail to inspire advances in other areas?’
    ‘I imagine a situation where slavery would die a natural death in a few decades.’

    Wiki- cultivation of tobacco- ‘In 2014 Human Rights Watch released a report detailing child labor on US tobacco farms.’

    Wiki- cotton picker- ‘Mechanical cotton picking became practical in 1944, when International Harvester released the first-‘

    Manual harvesting in today’s tobacco farms, and 1944 is mature internal combustion, cheap sheet metal, the half-inch electric drill for International Harvester’s factories. Cheap labor is no incentive to mechanize. US illegal immigration has retarded capital investment in mechanized fruit picking. It’s likely that Slave King Cotton’s massive profits would fund improvements, but more than a few decades from 1860.

    The Memoirs of General Lee are very clear that Lee fought for slavery. Nobody seriously claimed the South seceded for anything else until Mosby invented the story of St Robert’s disapproval of slavery for the 1872 election- if the Secesh wasn’t for slavery, but for some hypothetical mystery, unreconstructed secesh could save face, so Reconstruction could end without another secession. Bad luck for blacks in the South, but the Confederates put a lot of Abolitionists in the ground, and slavery didn’t quite come back when the North didn’t keep occupation troops killing and dying. Grant packed Mosby off to China for a couple or four decades so nobody would pester him on details, and the story stayed in the textbooks because the South was dirt poor without slavery and mean about it until Lyndon Johnson pumped in Federal money and Northern industry went south to flee unions and predatory Rustbelt regulations.

    Sex slaves and tobacco slaves would still be profitable today, and cotton slaves until 1944. Except for the moral objection.

  961. The South did fight for slavery but not as an economic system. They fought not have to share the ballot box and the jury box with a population with an average IQ of 85 and considerably lower future orientation.

    Their belief was that this would lead to a society in which uncontrollable Black crime would drive Whites out of most settled areas, that the only stable solution would be re-segregation, this time established by the Blacks settling wherever they pleased, and terrified Whites fleeing to the periphery. They sure were wrong.

  962. @Dan on 2016-12-28 at 12:21:23 said:

    > Almost forgot – most AR-15s sold as ‘sporting’ rifles … do not have a full-auto capable bolt carrier.

    Hasn’t been the case for several years now. Back when the gun makers were worried about pissing off the ATF so they neutered their bolt carriers. Now, most AR-15s are shipping with mil-spec BCGs, literally the same parts that go into military M-4s. If you build one yourself from parts, the cheapest and most plentiful are mil-spec.

    uma on 2016-12-29 at 23:19:50 said:

    > The last meaningful field army vs field army confrontations worthy of analysis are in WWII.

    There were plenty in Vietnam. But, of course, you know this because your entire understanding of that war isn’t based on Hollywood movies. Right?

    @ everyone; Re: slavery / civil war / Lee

    The Haiti slaughter was a big topic prior to the civil war. Plenty of people in the south knew that slavery was ending sooner rather than later, but couldn’t figure out how to be reasonably sure that they could avoid a repeat of Haiti.

    Closely related was the idea that blacks were unable to govern themselves and needed masters, and before you dismiss it as historical racism, note that it is the backbone of the Democrat party platform still to this day, as well as the essence of the arguments against voter ID. (Also see how the American left reserves their most vile hate for successful black men that don’t promote abject black dependency.)

    If I, the modern me, were living in the 1860s south and my family would be in danger should Haiti repeat, I can’t promise that I wouldn’t support slavery as a legal institution even though I consider it absolutely abhorrent and repugnant both morally and practically. I might even support a civil war if people from the north who faced no immediate danger made enough noise about their desire to put my family in danger.

    Much like the exit from Iraq, a southerner supporting slavery at that late date doesn’t necessarily mean that they were in favor of it generally, or that they think it is a good idea, or that they would have started the practice if it didn’t already exist. There is a lot more to it than simple economics, and real history isn’t as simple as the Hollywood fiction that the south was full of sadists who kept black people around out of cruelty.

  963. @Dan
    ““the way of the world” (as it had been for millennia), I think it is remarkable how swiftly – a few decades – white western civilization adjusted to seek its abolition. ”

    Not White Western, but American (North and South). The sale of persons was abolished in Christian Europe at the end of the middle ages. Slaves could only be sold and held outside Europe. The political fight for abolition in the UK was for slaves in the colonies.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline

    1. >The sale of persons was abolished in Christian Europe at the end of the middle ages.

      You didn’t even read the timeline you cited correctly. To cite one counterexample, chattel slavery remained legal in parts of the Balkans until the mid-19th century. And this is not on the timeline: bound slaves worked Scottish coal mines until around 1800 and a slightly weakened form of bond indenture survived to around 1860.

      Broadly speaking, slavery was abolished early where the economy was dominated by small freeholders and late where it was dominated by latifundia and other large landholdings. This is the observed pattern worldwide and is more predictive than geographic or political distinctions.

  964. Not that I’m a defender of the antebellum South, but I’ve never really found this argument very compelling. A sovereign nation is not beholden to the laws of another.

    The Constitution created a government, not a league. The federal government was (and still is) sovereign over the entire territory; if you seize any government’s sovereign territory, even if you’re living on it, you can and should expect violence in response.

    You completely ignore the legal and economic aggression of the North against the South. The assault on Fort Sumter was the response to a lot of provocations; they simply pushed the South to the breaking point.

    Because this tern “legal and economic aggression” is a metaphor and a weak one. Being outvoted on policy is not the same as being attacked (that is one reason anti-Trump riots were completely unjustified). And one thing the Union had never done was to try to abolish the South’s “peculiar institution”…in fact, on admitting new states, they entered compromises that kept the number of slave states large, and the Supreme Court had stretched its powers to the limit to protect slavery.

    But what I really should have responded to, what most bothered me about your comment (especially as I agree with so many of your political posts), is this:

    To this, I have only one word to say: Reconstruction. That long-running atrocity caused damage the South is still suffering from 150 years later.

    I’m an Alabama native and Virginia resident, who hasn’t seen any sign of that. But supposing you can detect it, I still adjure you: don’t respond to SJW ideas by entering the “victimhood sweepstakes” with them. We have enough people who think the United States is eternally tainted with evil because of 19th century slavery, or territorial expansion, or “patriarchy,” or what have you…the solution is not for Southerners to become another victim group demonizing their own country over historical grievances. That way lies suicidalism. We’re finally about to see the back of a president who went to the “God Damn America” church; don’t let’s open a new branch with a different accent.

  965. Yes, there is quite a lot of fraud in elections. But approximately 0.000% of that is in-person voter fraud, which is the only kind of fraud voter ID requirements can prevent. As such, what is the point? It can only be to suppress turnout in favor of the party that passes these laws, the GYP. Q.E.D.

  966. Voter ID means that the scheme Hilary’s campaign described on video, to bus the same person to different precincts on Election day, fails. You are simply a liar.

  967. The argument made by South Carolina (the first state to secede) on its secession was not that states have a right to secede under the constitution, but that the Constitution had been breached by anti-slavery states refusing to enforce laws related to capturing and returning fugitive slaves required by the Constitution:

    That was similar to their argument for Nullification (per the Andrew Jackson statement I link to one post above). They “nullified” a federal tax on the theory that it wasn’t allowed under their interpretation of the constitution. But that rule — everyone abides by the Constitution, but only his own interpretation of it — defeats the whole purpose of the Union and the Constitution itself. That is why the judicial power is vested in the Supreme Court, rather than in the state governments.

    As you can see from the South Carolina statement you linked, S.C. was still adhering to the “league” or “compact” theory of the constitution…which is manifestly not how the document is written. And when you start looking at the specific “breaches” South Carolina claims, you see how weak their claim would be even if that view were true:

    (1) “Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution.”

    The first part is about their opinions, and the second at most about what they did within their own borders…not that they’d ever tried abolishing slavery in the slave states. And the Dredd Scott decision had limited what they could manage even in their own borders against slavery; the majority thought it was a due process violation to deprive a slaveowner of slaves just because he brought them into a free state….

    (2) “they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection. ”

    All of this is a way of saying, “They have allowed their citizens the freedom of speech.” There’s nothing in the Constitution that says states can’t do this.

    (3) “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”

    Again, nothing in the Constitution says the President can’t be hostile to slavery. These “violations” really amount to, “Our guy lost the election, so we want to leave.” (Nowadays it’s mostly celebrities who take that attitude, only they don’t ever seem to keep the promise.)

    But the “compact” theory is fundamentally weak for the reasons Jackson pointed out…it leaves the country as no country, but as a very temporary league. Imagine, for example, if every controversial war was followed by all the states that opposed the war “nullifying” the taxes that paid for it, or leaving the Union in protest (don’t worry, you could find someone to argue that the proposed war, or maybe all war, was unconstitutional). We wouldn’t last a decade.

  968. (Response to Oliver Cromwell is in moderation. I’m puzzled as to why; normally I only go into moderation when I have links, and this response has no links.)

  969. The Constitution created a *confederation of states*, not some amorphous blob. Despite the change in title, the “Articles of Confederation” were the conceptual blueprint for the revised compact. The similarities are pronounced.

    Many individual, sovereign States came together under a Constitutional banner to further their shared interests in promoting the American ideal. In essence, the USA is a coalition of nations.

    Nothing about the ratification of that union forbade the exit of any State.

    The secession of the CSA was entirely legitimate. Slavery was legal. Lincoln’s War was entirely political (venal?) and craven.

    Judging the past through our 21st century eyes is nonsense. We must strive to look through historical eyes to understand the true context of what was happening, and what was provoked.

    In case it needs to be said – for the inevitable race-baiting cherubs out there – I am not racist, I abhor slavery, and I am utterly critical of the South for resisting abolition…..yet I cannot fault the South for its actions. Had I been alive during those times, I would have been an abolitionist Southerner supporting secession…as many were…and taking up arms to defend same.

  970. EMF: Voter fraud gave us Obamacare. Al Franken, the vote that gave the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority, was elected with a margin of 312 votes. Over 200 people were found to have voted as ineligible convicted felons. It’s a certainty they didn’t catch all of them.

    Voter ID would have stopped that.

  971. kjj- ‘Plenty of people in the south knew slavery was ending sooner rather than later, but couldn’t figure out how to avoid another Haiti.’

    The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the Bleeding Kansas stuff don’t show a southern consensus that slavery was ending sooner rather than later.
    Can you give me a single instance of anyone in the 1860 south saying ‘we secede because we are scared of being massacred like in Haiti?’ The Fire-Eaters weren’t scaredy cats.

    Dan- ‘The secession of the CSA was entirely legal. Slavery was legal. Lincoln’s War was entirely political (venal) and craven.’

    Not even the 1860 Richmond Examiner believed secession was entirely legal. They thought they’d get away with it, which is different, and they pointed to the de facto secession of New England in the war of 1812 as ‘you’re another’, but they knew that was illegal too. Slavery might have stayed legal for decades or till now without secession. Lincoln’s War was not Lincoln’s idea. Craven? For sooth? He might have been impeached, or not, if he had tried to force acceptance of secession. His chances of getting killed in a civil war were higher.

  972. “later in the [Gulf]war entire Iraqi units tried to surrender to unmanned drones”

    Eric, can you recommend a good objective book that covers the Gulf Wars in detail? I would love to read one. There are so many details like this that I have never heard.

    Cathy

  973. EMF on 2016-12-31 at 20:33:17 said:

    It gets really tiresome posting credible evidence of significant voter fraud, while waiting for similar evidence which proves that requiring ID suppresses legal turnout.

    I’m afraid I’m going to need an explanation of how an ID requirement won’t help at all in the verification of legal voting status. Your word doesn’t quite cut it.

  974. Joseph W. on 2016-12-31 at 20:06:40 said:

    “The Constitution created a government, not a league. The federal government was (and still is) sovereign over the entire territory; if you seize any government’s sovereign territory, even if you’re living on it, you can and should expect violence in response.”

    I’m perfectly well aware of that argument, and generally agree; however it is not unassailable: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-secession-legal/

    I think there are a host of better arguments against the South and just that the idea of sovereign northern “territory” inside the south – having just democratically declared their independence – would be as absurd as British claims on land within the borders of the new United States.

  975. The secession of the CSA was entirely legitimate. Slavery was legal.

    Not only that, slavery was enforced by the federal government under the Fugitive Slave Act.

    One of the greatest surprises I found when I started studying the War of Northern Aggression on my own after high school was learning that slaves escaping across union lines weren’t freed, they were captured and held as “contraband of war” (IE, confiscated rebel property).

    Besides that, it was a shock to learn that Lincoln made multiple offers during the war to let the south keep slavery in perpetuity, safe even from constitutional amendments, if they would surrender and pay the tariff.

    The south seceded for several reasons including their fear of the north supporting a slave uprising, but the north strongly denied that their purpose in reconquering the south was to end slavery.

  976. @Joseph W:

    I won’t dispute the truth of the South’s claims that the North had breached the constitution, because you are making a much stronger argument that doesn’t matter if the North had breached the constitution:

    “That was similar to their argument for Nullification (per the Andrew Jackson statement I link to one post above). They “nullified” a federal tax on the theory that it wasn’t allowed under their interpretation of the constitution. But that rule — everyone abides by the Constitution, but only his own interpretation of it — defeats the whole purpose of the Union and the Constitution itself. That is why the judicial power is vested in the Supreme Court, rather than in the state governments.

    “But the “compact” theory is fundamentally weak for the reasons Jackson pointed out…it leaves the country as no country, but as a very temporary league. Imagine, for example, if every controversial war was followed by all the states that opposed the war “nullifying” the taxes that paid for it, or leaving the Union in protest (don’t worry, you could find someone to argue that the proposed war, or maybe all war, was unconstitutional). We wouldn’t last a decade.”

    The US Supreme Court is a politically appointed legislature, so in your theory of government the states really have no power and no guarantees whatsoever, even those explicitly made in the constitution. All they have is federal favour that may or may not be extended as a matter of courtesy and expedience. That is how the US is now governed. I don’t think that is how people viewed it at the time and I don’t think it is the only interpretation possible (I agree it is one possible interpretation).

    I have a question for you: if the federal government had sent troops to disperse the Supreme Court after Dredd Scott and appointed a new one by fiat, would you *then* believe secession is legitimate?

  977. EMF on 2016-12-31 at 20:33:17 said:

    > Yes, there is quite a lot of fraud in elections. But approximately 0.000% of that is in-person voter fraud

    Actually, this is the kind of voter fraud that is impossible to detect without voter ID laws. See the videos of Democrat operatives discussing the specifics of how they have committed exactly this type of fraud in the past and how they intend to keep doing it.

    Those videos aren’t proof in the legal sense that would support convictions, but they certainly are proof in the political sense of demonstrating the need for voter ID laws. There is other evidence too, irregularities in registrations, registration changes and voting that indicate that the Democrats actually are doing what they said they were doing.

  978. Most decisions are mistakes, especially in war. Bush invades the wrong country, Lyndon Johnson bombs South Vietnam to fight north Vietnam, the New York Times spends the Cold War on the Venona Transcripts, the South secedes- why? Every goal they had was better achieved without secession. If they thought slavery was ending anyway, why secede because Lincoln won on a platform of no new slavery in the Western Territories? If they were scared of a massacre like Haiti, why not maintain an army in the South to prevent it? If they were worried about an 85-IQ population unfit to govern themselves, why not maintain the army and militia in the South they already had? And it’s worth mentioning that a lot of blacks think white power is untrustworthy. If they had legal views on state’s rights, buy some more judges.

    They screwed up because the D party in the South made the secesh a loyalty oath. Like calling an ex-D party candidate who runs a Dick Gephardt 90s campaign, supports Planned Parenthood, and avoids war Literally Hitler- which side are you on. Pious fraud works great for loyalty tests but awful for decisions.

  979. KJJ:
    > Actually, this is the kind of voter fraud that is impossible to detect without voter ID laws.
    If you assert this, I’d like some claims to back it up. Politifact disagrees with you.

    Jay:
    > How? Driver’s licenses don’t give status as a felon, and those people obviously voted under their own names or no-one would have found that out, so how exactly would voter ID laws help? Furthermore, Minnesota law does not disenfranchise those who have served their sentences. (Source: MN secretary of state.)

    G. M. May:
    > I’m afraid I’m going to need an explanation of how an ID requirement won’t help at all
    > in the verification of legal voting status. Your word doesn’t quite cut it.
    Here’s the reason: An ID requirement only proves that I am who I say I am. It doesn’t prove anything else. (Also, why is this framed as a response to me?)

  980. > An ID requirement only proves that I am who I say I am. It doesn’t prove anything else.

    That depends on what’s on the ID. Also, how about purging the voting roles of those ineligible to vote, which the democrats are also suing to stop.

  981. @Random832:

    Whenever I’ve heard of something like that actually being implemented, it’s been limited to simply having no penalty to e.g. walking out if someone is overwhelmed in the moment, so long as they can demonstrate knowledge of the material later on.

    When it’s an institutionalized “safe space”, maybe — but [as indicated with the discussion above about trusting the intent of gun control advocates], there are circumstances which could lead people to believe this is only the “camel’s nose” in some movement to a final goal which would, if presented upfront, be vehemently opposed.

    And for me, that moment was listening to either Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, or Laura Kipnis, a communications professor at Northwestern University, describe their experiences with actual complaints at their university. Their stories made it clear that students believe “safe spaces” mean more than the safety to walk out, and more than what administrations currently present it as.

    [Both videos describe the scenario in ~3 minutes, so you don’t need to watch in full; however, both also provide full “further reading” links to the articles mentioned.]

  982. > Also, how about purging the voting roles of those ineligible to vote

    By which you mean “purging the voting rolls of anyone who has the same name as a felon or has the same name as someone who lives in a different state, on the theory that all such people are in fact the same person.”

  983. @EMF on 2017-01-02 at 14:33:31 said:

    > If you assert this, I’d like some claims to back it up. Politifact disagrees with you.

    An endorsement like that from Politifact should be sufficient to demonstrate the strength of my claims.

    Did you miss the undercover videos of the Democrat operatives? They explain how they’ve been doing it for decades. They put four or five guys in a car (we are watching for buses now, don’cha know?) with a stack of fake utility bills and paycheck stubs and they drive all day from polling place to polling place in states that don’t require a state-issued photo ID. If you have ways to detect or prevent that sort of fraud that doesn’t involve checking IDs, there are about 20 states that would LOVE to hear your ideas.

  984. “””If you have ways to detect or prevent that sort of fraud that doesn’t involve checking IDs, there are about 20 states that would LOVE to hear your ideas.”””

    I’m not sure how accurate this claim is. When living in New York State, my wife knew someone who was turned away from the voting booth because, according to the records, he had already voted; she had talked to another person who, on election days, would receive various calls throughout the day saying “Go to this polling place and vote as this person for these candidates.” To the best of my knowledge, voter ID wasn’t even on the State’s radar.

    It seems to me that all the states interested in Voter ID are states where machine politics aren’t (yet, at least) entrenched, whereas the states where political machines are running smoothly (Illinois and New York State immediately come to mind), there’s almost zero interest in putting sand in the gears.

    It is my understanding that Voter ID is a basic safeguard used to prevent election fraud all around the world. If election fraud really isn’t a problem, I fail to see how adding an ID requirement is going to introduce problems; however, I can clearly see how Voter ID closes the avenue for several types of fraud. I find the fact that Democrats are so vehemently opposed to proving you are who you are before you vote to be highly suspicious.

    Having said that, as someone who is of a strong libertarian persuasion, I am particularly partial to the idea that there should be no form of State-sponsored ID whatsoever — that IDs should only be provided by organizations that have a vested interest in making sure that you are who you claim you are (such as banks wanting to make sure you are the one who opened a certain account, name and/or pseudonym and all). It would be fun to see if any Democrats would be in agreement with this proposition….

  985. It’s funny how everyone who bleats and whines about “voter fraud” also seems to think that fully one hundred percent of all “fraudulent” votes cast are cast for Democrats, without even the slightest shred of evidence.

  986. @ Oliver Cromwell:

    Here actual, measured, Black and White IQ distributions:

    If, per your chart, Black people are only 85% as smart as White people,* then assuming normal variation, something like 30% of Mr. Cartwright’s Black employees are above the national average in intelligence, meaning that they should be as good as or better than White employees. Also note that half of Mr. Cartwright’s White employees aren’t as smart as his better Black employees. Thanks for playing, but I’m pretty good at spotting number games.

    Obama believed that all problems in Iraq were due to the US, and then US was gone Iraq would become a prosperous American-style social democracy.

    Or at least a prosperous Middle-Eastern-style democracy. Nonetheless, your point is a worthy one.
    .
    .
    @ Jay Maynard:

    Why do leftists assume that we don’t differentiate between illegal immigrants and those who are here legally?!

    When someone says “illegal immigrants” I think the way it’s coded depends on the listener more than the speaker. Some speakers code it that way and some do not. The same applies to listeners. Given Mr. Trump’s other racist dogwhistles, I suspect that he means all non-white immigrants.

    If you’re here legally, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re here illegally, then get your ass home before we send you there ourselves.

    Which kind of makes my point about attitudes, right? Because how do you know if someone is illegal? I’m guessing you can’t tell in most cases. This makes Trump-competence-level efforts to send illegals home into something of a nightmare for those who are here legally!

    You go right on claiming those of us who opposed Barack Obama are raaaaacists!!!. Keep forgetting, deliberately or otherwise, that lots of us just didn’t like his hard-left policies.

    I’m debating with myself whether to classify you as one of those ridiculous right-wing crybabies. You live in the U.S. and therefore you’ve never seen a hard-left policy in your life. The worst you’ve seen is one side or another in long-running debates over race, gender, or guns. The last thing we had that remotely resembled a left-wing policy was Roosevelt and he made the necessary concessions (to the working man) to keep the commies from becoming a strong political force, then paved the way for 70 years of prosperity. My heart fucking bleeeeeeeds for you!

    Except that by the time he took office, we’d won. Obama cut and ran, and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for the sake of pleasing his leftist base.

    Jeez. You sound like a seventies Republican complaining about “those damn hippies.” Do you know who invented the “betrayed from within” narrative? If not, look it up. (I’ll give you a hint. It’s the same people who, in 1912 or so, were insisting that after the conquest, the __________ people would convert wholeheartedly to __________ culture.)
    .
    .
    @ deamon

    No. Just no. And more no. And still yet more no. Just no.

    * It always bothers me when someone throws out statistics about Black intelligence (or Black murder rates) without context. In this case, the effects of lead, poor nutrition, and poor early-childhood care on intelligence, all of which are symptomatic of poverty. It would be very interesting indeed to compare Black intelligence (or murder rates) with that of White trailer trash, or Italian/Irish/Czech immigrants at the beginning of the 20th Century, but somehow the statistics are never presented that way…

  987. >In this case, the effects of lead, poor nutrition, and poor early-childhood care on intelligence, all of which are symptomatic of poverty.

    Because it is so well known that only black people are poor.

  988. @ Greg

    If you want to impress me, read the whole footnote, including the part which reads, “It would be very interesting indeed to compare Black intelligence (or murder rates) with that of White trailer trash, or Italian/Irish/Czech immigrants at the beginning of the 20th Century, but somehow the statistics are never presented that way…”

  989. @Troutwaxer

    “If, per your chart, Black people are only 85% as smart as White people,* then assuming normal variation, something like 30% of Mr. Cartwright’s Black employees are above the national average in intelligence, meaning that they should be as good as or better than White employees. Also note that half of Mr. Cartwright’s White employees aren’t as smart as his better Black employees. Thanks for playing, but I’m pretty good at spotting number games.”

    Mr Cartwright and his employment practices are fictional. It is easy to indict people for fictional crimes, in which you play not just judge, jury and executioner, but also the defendant. A company in which the chart of Black/White pay looks like the chart of Black/White IQ would still be considered horrifyingly racist by you and others, even though there is some overlap between Black and White.

    It is very likely that this is in fact what real world company pay scales looked like prior to state intervention, not fictional sadistic down-grading for literally the same work, which implicitly assumes that the employer is a monopolist.

  990. @Oliver Cromwell > It is very likely that this is in fact what real world company pay scales looked like prior to state intervention

    What year is “prior to state intervention”, and is it your contention that racism didn’t exist in that year?

    > which implicitly assumes that the employer is a monopolist.

    Oh, wait, this is the libertarian fantasy that if one employer does something (due to either cognitive biases or outright “sadistic” hatred that there is no reason not to expect all other employers to share), someone else will step up to fill in the gap in the market. Carry on then.

    1. >Oh, wait, this is the libertarian fantasy that if one employer does something (due to either cognitive biases or outright “sadistic” hatred that there is no reason not to expect all other employers to share), someone else will step up to fill in the gap in the market.

      It’s not a fantasy. Even racists know it’s true; the infamous Jim Crow laws were a government intervention designed to prevent the market from responding in this way.

  991. >If you want to impress me, read the whole footnote, including the part which reads, “It would be very interesting indeed to compare Black intelligence (or murder rates) with that of White trailer trash, or Italian/Irish/Czech immigrants at the beginning of the 20th Century, but somehow the statistics are never presented that way…”

    You say stupid, clichéd mindless liberal dogma things you get called on it.

    A bit of high-minded (yet racist, but in a way that liberals find socially acceptable) musing at the end doesn’t magically make the rest go away, sorry.

  992. @Random832

    “What year is “prior to state intervention”, and is it your contention that racism didn’t exist in that year?”

    My claim is that social racism is primarily a response to actual biological inferiority, and not an arbitrary ideological phenomenon that causes social inferiority. In the years between the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Act, Black labour was probably compenstated in line with its productivity.

    “Oh, wait, this is the libertarian fantasy that if one employer does something (due to either cognitive biases or outright “sadistic” hatred that there is no reason not to expect all other employers to share), someone else will step up to fill in the gap in the market. Carry on then.”

    It is called economic science, not libertarianism. I don’t think any beliefs are shared by ALL people, not least as many of those people are themselves Black. Employees that underpay their workers experience destructive selection pressure; they do not have the choice you pretend they do. You, and Troutwaxer, are not describing competitive capitalism, but Soviet-style state socialism, in which managers of industries are appointed by fiat and can never be removed.

    1. >My claim is that social racism is primarily a response to actual biological inferiority, and not an arbitrary ideological phenomenon that causes social inferiority.

      There are a couple of things wrong with this theory. One is that it completely fails to explain racism directed against “superior” minorities – Jews, diaspora Chinese, Armenians, etc.

      Another is that I don’t think anyone believes racism is an arbitrary ideological phenomenon. Human being like to tribalize and racial boundaries are a really obvious ingroup/outgroup distinction. Perceived inferiority might amplify the resulting behaviors but is not necessary to explain them.

  993. @esr:

    “It’s not a fantasy. Even racists know it’s true; the infamous Jim Crow laws were a government intervention designed to prevent the market from responding in this way.”

    Jim Crow did short-circuit the market, but generally to the detriment of customers, not employees. Jim Crow forced businesses, especially White businesses, to mistreat Black customers in a way guaranteed to lose them money, in order to enforce by state fiat the sort of cartel-like behaviour that socialists like Troutwaxer and Random believe occurs naturally. It did not impose income caps on Blacks or stop them starting businesses.

  994. @eser

    “There are a couple of things wrong with this theory. One is that it completely fails to explain racism directed against “superior” minorities – Jews, diaspora Chinese, Armenians, etc.”

    In the strict formulation I used, yes. But in the sense, not at all. Jews and Chinese really are superior, biologically superior, and they are hated for the same reason that 1% is hated.

    That Jews and Chinese are hated, yet resolutely overperform anyway (Chinese in Malaysia for instance are subject to Jim Crow-type laws but still own a majority of the wealth with less than 1/3 of the population) is strong evidence that racism does not lead to underperformance, but rather that [one type of] racism is a result of forcing people to live in close proximity of obviously dysfunctional races.

    “Another is that I don’t think anyone believes racism is an arbitrary ideological phenomenon. Human being like to tribalize and racial boundaries are a really obvious ingroup/outgroup distinction. Perceived inferiority might amplify the resulting behaviors but is not necessary to explain them.”

    And there are a thousand such possible points of division, the vast majority of which either lead to no significant prejudice, or else clearly lead to no harm to the group so subjected (e.g. I come from Britain where lots of people dislike the French and Germans but strange to report they do just fine in the job market).

  995. Many individual, sovereign States came together under a Constitutional banner to further their shared interests in promoting the American ideal. In essence, the USA is a coalition of nations.

    Nothing about the ratification of that union forbade the exit of any State.

    Article VI did.

    This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

    This forbids nullification, quite explicitly. And secession is just a special case of nullification: it says the Constitution itself, and all federal law, shall no longer be supreme over the territory of this particular state. That is thus a “thing in the law of the State” that purports to defy the explicit text of Article VI. (That’s why Nullifiers and Secessionists had to import this “compact theory”…and thus pretend that Article VI couldn’t be effective once they decided it wasn’t.)

    As Andrew Jackson rightly argued, the structure of the Constitution is not the structure of a “league of nations,” but of a national government, with territory to defend and a right to defend it.

    I have a question for you: if the federal government had sent troops to disperse the Supreme Court after Dredd Scott and appointed a new one by fiat, would you *then* believe secession is legitimate?

    At that point I would believe that rebellion was justified; likewise, in a more straightforward case, I would consider rebellion justified if the President cancelled the next elections and declared a military government-for-life with himself at the head of it. That would be a real coup d’état, and a cancelling out of the Constitution itself.

    But per Oliver Cromwell’s link, the Secessionists in South Carolina seemed to think it was an offense against the Constitution to elect a President who was hostile to slavery…or to allow the citizens of the Northern states to speak out against slavery. Kind of like the professor who told her students the election of Trump was an “act of terrorism,” if she went on to say that violence was a justified response.

  996. @ Greg

    I’ll answer you by discussing a funny concept, something you’d probably see in a Weird Al video. So give a big hand for L’il Moishe, the Jewish Gangbanger! He’s a funny guy with a big schnozz and a yalmulke covered with bling!

    I’m L’il Moishe and I’m here to say,
    I sold lots of crack to be here today!
    I capped lot’s of guys, but I’m not like Shelob,
    ‘Cause I gotta pay for my sister’s nose job.”

    Very Weird Al, right? Very funny!

    But if you go back to the 1930s, Jewish gangbangers weren’t funny at all. Guys like Dutch Schultz or “Bugsy” Siegel would happily fill you with holes, the head of Murder Incorporated was a very scary Jewish dude named Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and the Jewish gangsters were the hardest and most dangerous guys around.

    Oddly enough, my family is tied into this stuff, because my great, great uncle, Albert Gordon (known on the street as “Abba da Gonif” – Abe the Thief) was killed as “collateral damage” in the famous gangland killing of Abie Loeb (Abe Wagner) in St. Paul during July of 1932.

    The point being, that just off the boat, with no formal educations, having endured pogroms and other forms of prejudice, plus bad poverty, poorly fed… the Jews of the 1930s had a murder commission rate that matched the murder rate currently found among Black gangbangers! (And possibly exceeded that rate; Murder Inc. killed something like 1500 people.) It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there were some years that Jews performed 50% of the murders nationwide.

    But three generations of assimilation… good educations, good careers, a nice network of businessmen later… you’d be hard pressed to find a Jewish gangbanger these days, and the rate of murder commission among Jews is probably among the lowest you’ll find in any ethnic group.

    And what’s the secret that makes Jews able to succeed in the way Blacks don’t? That would be white skin and losing their accents, straightening their hair and maybe changing their names like my uncle, who stopped being Steinberg and started being Stevenson* so he could get into med school. (Changing his last name was necessary to evade the med school quota system which had been set up to keep too many Jews from becoming doctors.) Unless you caught my uncle Stevenson walking into a deli you’d never know he was a Jew!

    But Black people don’t get to change their names and magically go to med school, even under a system of institutionalized prejudice like the Jews did, because even with nice accents and new names… they’re still Black and still treated as such.

    So when someone says, “Blacks commit 50% of all murders” or “the median Black IQ is 85” and there’s no context provided, I’m instantly aware that someone is trying to spoonfeed me bullshit. Context is everything here, as is knowing my history, particularly family history, because there was a time when the rate of murders committed by Jews was astronomical, and my family got caught up in the gears, then a little later we changed with the times.
    .

    * I’ve changed the names, but it was a similar transformation.

    1. >And what’s the secret that makes Jews able to succeed in the way Blacks don’t?

      Oh, I don’t know, maybe having a mean IQ higher than the Black population’s by thirty fucking points might have had something to do with it?

      That’s a huge advantage – it’s larger than the gap between a statistically average IQ and the upper bar for a diagnosis of mental retardation. Especially since low time preference seems to come with the high-IQ package.

      Let me break it down into incidence numbers for you. Average Ashkenazic Jewish IQ is up around 115. About 1 in 6 non-Jewish whites match that. But only 1 in 44 American-born Blacks do (the averages for black immigrants are slightly higher, probably due to self-selection).

      Now let’s consider a Jew who is moderately bright by the standards of his peer group – 1 STD up, around IQ 130. About 1 in 6 Jews meet that, and 1 in 44 gentile whites. Want to find a native-born American Black with that IQ? Be prepared to do some looking; that incidence is 1 in 741. (All figures from here.)

      Now you know everything you need to about why more young Black men go to jail than young Jewish men go to medical and law schools. This is not exactly rocket science.

  997. What a lot of rubbish. Medical schools and other universities had Jewish quotas to stop Jews becoming grossly “overrepresented” relative to the population, as they are today. Harvard is 30% Jewish today vs 2% of the general population; were Jews subject to affirmative action the way Whites as a whole are, Jews would be ethnically cleansed from Harvard and most top universities.

    The fact that Jews were subject to affirmative action discrimination already in the 30s proves they were already grossly “too” successful, not that they had to overcome discrimination to just match the existing population.

  998. You can join your fellow apologist here. Just realize that if you two are right, the entire black population should be exiled, and it is dangerous to pretend otherwise

    The e-mail I sent the author:

    http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/01/jonesthe-university-of-oregon-nancy-shurtz-and-the-racial-rules-that-keep-us-apart.html

    “I found your statements on how you and your fellow African Americans thought even innocent transgressions should be handled fascinating:

    “Cultural rules required the kid take a beat down for his offense no matter how much he might previously have been a member of our crew. It was a painful thing to witness, knowing that the kid thought and wanted himself to be so much one of us that he would repeat a word reserved to us exclusively. And forever thereafter was the reminder that you are not really one of us even if we do have sleepovers.”

    In which case, integration is a pipe dream, and dangerous to everyone else in America who is not your race.

    You are a perfect example of why the Chicago beating of a white teenager by four black teenagers happened. You and your Democrat cohorts both white and black enabled it. And acts like this are not rare, as your acceptance of a beat down based on race shows. Those beatings happen every day, whether uploaded to Facebook or not.

    I fully expect you to respond with some variation of “White people do it too.” Except for one crucial difference: No one is hesitant to condemn it. No one sweeps it under the rug. When Dylann Roof gets the same invitation to the White House that the leaders of Black Lives Matter got after leading mass parades of people chanting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now.”, your tu quoque might be taken seriously.

    Ten days before MLK Day, you have provided a sterling example of why his dream will NEVER come to pass: because his people don’t want it.”

  999. @troutwaxer
    “there’s no context provided, I’m instantly aware that someone is trying to spoonfeed me bullshit. Context is everything here, as is knowing my history, ”

    The same story can be told about Irish and Italian people in the US. We can tell those stories about Indonesian, Turkish, Surinam, and Caribbean people here in the Netherlands. Different people in the UK, but the same stories.

    And every single time, the genes (race) were blamed for the observed problems.

  1000. Um, Trout guy, black pathology is far WORSE now than it was 50 years ago. Does that describe any other group?

    And before the Great Society kicked off, statistics show overall outcomes for blacks were improving in line with how other groups had assimilated and moved up from the underclass. After, the trend reversed.

    Southern Italians often don’t look white at all. Hasn’t stopped them.

    Recent black African immigrants seem to follow the usual ethnic group immigrant pattern – early low status due to lack of language, skills, acculturization, a generation of menial jobs (and an ethnic mafia) then the next generation does better but is still caught somewhat between two worlds, then the next generation is just like everybody else.

    No, there’s something special about American blacks, specifically ones that can trace descent from generations of rural Southern background. (And were not subject to the Boston Brahmin led education and cultural uplift effort.)

    Northern black populations that were present in the North before the 20th century migration from the South didn’t and don’t show the same pathologies either.

    Is it genetics? Is it culture?

    Don’t think anyone can definitively say for sure. I lean heavily toward culture, with any ‘genetics’ being a result of a partial assimilation brain drain left-behind effect.

    But empirically history has shown that making excuses only makes pathology worse.

  1001. “””And what’s the secret that makes Jews able to succeed in the way Blacks don’t? That would be white skin and losing their accents, straightening their hair and maybe changing their names like my uncle, who stopped being Steinberg and started being Stevenson* so he could get into med school. (Changing his last name was necessary to evade the med school quota system which had been set up to keep too many Jews from becoming doctors.) Unless you caught my uncle Stevenson walking into a deli you’d never know he was a Jew!”””

    You would have a point, if it weren’t for the fact that blacks directly coming from Africa, speaking funny accents, don’t really see that America has racism. They also tend to succeed on their own merits.

    On the other hand, culture is a *very* important. If you live from government paycheck to government paycheck, it’s difficult to have dignity. If you live in a culture where anything you earn is automatically the extended family’s or the community’s, to use as they see fit, there’s no incentive to work hard. If you live in a culture where no one reads, then no one is going to do anything requiring reading — and no one is going to write. In order for students to be comfortable learning, it’s not unheard of for them to ask for three textbooks: one for their home, one for their locker, and one for their classroom, so that they would never be seen carrying a textbook by their friends (and thus avoid teasing and discrimination for wanting to learn!).

    It’s not uncommon that blacks from inner cities and native Americans from reservations succeed by leaving their communities behind, and cutting ties with friends and families — because otherwise, they will be bound and even poisoned by those ties. When they *do* visit the neighborhoods they left behind, they are often traitors. And for what? For learning, for earning money honestly, for “adopting white culture”. They come from a culture where making money by dealing drugs, going to prison, and defending your honor by murder, are badges of honor rather than acts of shame.

    It’s easy to look at races and say “they historically don’t do well, so it must be their race”, overlooking the fact that culture is transmitted by our parents and our communities, and it’s not uncommon for people of similar races to gather together (ie, the “tribalism” instinct that Eric mentioned before). The fact that individuals can break free of their culture and go on to be successful (or, if the individual comes from a successful culture, break free from that and crash and burn) should be sufficient proof that culture can keep entire races, indeed entire nations, in poverty.

    I’ve never really liked the “nature vs nurture” debate, because to me, it’s obvious that *both* can influence us…and I’ve always been annoyed that the debate also ignores a third factor: individual choice, where an individual can transcend their genetic tendencies and the way they were raised, and find their own way through life, both to their improvement and to their detriment.

  1002. Jews were never regarded as an inferior race. A hostile or antisocial group, perhaps, but that is different. There were Jewish gangsters but very few Jewish “gangbangers”. The view at the time was that dumb Black “stickup men” (gangbangers) couldn’t hope to match the ruthless organisation of the Jewish gangs. And they didn’t and still don’t. Black gang violence is today mostly poorly planned, and incompetently executed (see the recent news). The Jewish (and Italian) gangs pulled off military-style hits. It is like comparing Xi Jinping to Robert Mugabe and saying, well, they are both dictators, so they and their countries are essentially the same. They are not the same.

    Jews strongly identify with Blacks, and this combined with the outsized influence of Jews on society goes some way to explaining why Blacks are treated as positively as they are. But Jews are totally wrong to identify with Blacks. Jews, like the Malaysian Chinese, are intellectual elite who thrive anywhere, and fled only attempts at open murder, not least places where labour and entrepreneurship just weren’t compensated very well (you don’t have to be very oppressed to prefer Gilded Age NYC to Tsarist Russia). Blacks are not.

    Jews seem to think that everyone is like the Jews, but this is rubbish. Ashkenazi Jews are a chosen people. They have an average IQ of 115. Their experience is uniquely inapplicable to pretty much any other group, including gentile Whites (maybe diaspora Chinese).

    By the way, people in 1900 didn’t complain very loudly about “Italians”, they complained loudly about “Sicilians”. The Italians themselves complain loudly about Sicilians. If you go to Milan, and then to Naples, you will quickly see why. It really isn’t the same country, just like White and Black America aren’t the same country. You will also see that Milanese and Napolitans can be distinguished by sight, by racial characteristics, just like White and Black Americans.

  1003. >Jews seem to think that everyone is like the Jews, but this is rubbish.

    The extended family communalism that served Ashkenazi Jews so well as a survival aid, is especially destructive when they assume it scales. It *really* doesn’t.

  1004. Hey Eric, I was reminded of this old post of yours from four years ago. Sounds like you are talking about Trump.

    The charismatic who is honest and fearless brings a gift. By thinking unthinkables and saying unsayables and getting away with it – not being struck dead by lighting or instantly lynched – he offers his audience, too, a psychological release from the relentless tension of everyday lies. He gives them at least temporary permission to be more honest in their own thoughts.

  1005. My apologies for taking so long to get back to you about your latest post. I ended up working seven days straight last week and I’m a little behind. That being said, I don’t buy the argument that IQ testing has proved anything about the races (including my own, BTW.) IQ is well-known to be affected by the following:

    Infant/childhood nutrition, including the presence or absence of breastfeeding. Both the breastfeeding and other nutritional issues are huge in terms of brain health, and there’s some evidence that epigenetic issues might be at work here, which can make the problem multi-generational. This can very much be related to poverty, and various nutritional programs which have been available since the sixties may be responsible for some of the moderate gains in Black intelligence over the decades in which testing has been done.

    Lead poisoning is frequently a big problem for minorities, and lead is a well-known neurotoxin. Unfortunately, the ghetto always seems to be downwind from the refinery or similar industrial processes. In the Los Angeles area, for example, Watts is just inland from the huge Exxon/Mobile refinery in Torrancce, and the presence of lead in New Orleans has been well-known for more than a century.

    http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2016/03/drinking_water_labeled_lead_po.html

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150819-new-orleans-katrina-lead-poisoning-hurricane-children-environment-health-pollution/

    I’ll note here that lead remediation would do wonderful things for minority IQs, and also decrease their propensities for violence. It is expensive, but the end result is higher IQs and less violence for centuries!

    Child-rearing protocols are a big issue. Brain stimulation, particularly during childhood and infancy, is a big deal in terms of IQ. The White Upper-Middle-Class in the U.S. follows a very predictable protocol in making sure that kids get out to concerts and museums, that they get music lessons, are encouraged to create art, that they join a sports team and are encouraged to read for recreation. This has major positive consequences for IQ. Other cultures… not so much, frequently because parents don’t have the money/time to makes this happen.

    Lack of prejudice. One of the things I recall very clearly from my own IQ testing was when the person who tested me “nudged the needle upwards” on a particular question. Whether this put me over the top and into a Gifted program is unknown – I didn’t entirely understand what happened until I was an adult. Whether a nice Black kid would have gotten his needle nudged is an open question. Not to mention that nobody in my family has never had an encounter with the police that resulted in someone’s head meeting a billy club, which is probably not true for a somewhat larger percentage of Black people. To what extent “head meets billy-club” affects the Black IQ is not a well-studied phenomenon… The simple fact that only one or two really ugly encounters with a prejudiced authority figure are required to make sure that someone is unable to complete their education doesn’t escape me.

    So before I can take the IQ difference between Whites and Blacks very seriously, I want to see a study in which those four issues have assessed before testing begins, and testing/comparison is done in homogenous groups where those four issues are concerned. Otherwise, all we’ve really proved is that poor nutrition, poverty, environmental toxins, and enforced prejudice result in smaller IQs, and that was already obvious.

    One of my big complaints on this issue is the way results are reported, as if either White or Black populations are simple homogenous blobs which aren’t composed of multiple subpopulations of varying wealth, education, and culture. The idea that there’s a lot of similarity between the child of two Black San Jose sysadmins and a Black child of two high-school dropouts in Oakland is nothing more than lazy thinking!

  1006. On the subject of political parties, I’m curious about how you feel about Libertarian chances in a post-Trump world. The Democrats have recently suffered a series of major failures, and even Democratic stalwarts are probably vulnerable to being seduced by a better political party. Meanwhile, Republicans will soon begin betraying the faithful in droves as they do something very different than whatever the Trump voters imagine will happen next – “Make America Great Again” is a pretty ambiguous phrase.

    I’d love to see a new thread where you address the Libertarians in the same way you addressed the Democrats. What does your party need to do next?

  1007. > So before I can take the IQ difference between Whites and Blacks very seriously, I want to see a study in which those four issues have assessed before testing begins

    Most (all?) of your concerns were addressed in a large, famous book in 1994, and verified every couple of years since then. You are not the first to raise these objections, not by 30 years or so.

    In addition, the studies of twins raised by adoptive families in different environments pretty much demolish the hopes of those who zealously believe that IQ must be mostly nurture because evolution stops at the neck. Surveys of populations in multiple countries just kick the poor “theory” while it is donw.. And multigenerational studies show that the epicycles theory is also hopeless, at least on timescales that can be honestly considered as “epi”.

    Oops, did I say epicycles? Sorry, I was thinking of a different “theory” that was based on hopes and dreams instead of evidence.. I meant epigenetic.

  1008. @kjj
    “Most (all?) of your concerns were addressed in a large, famous book in 1994, and verified every couple of years since then.”

    Except that the idiocy of equating high heritability with lack of environmental influence has been debunked a long time ago, and many times since then.

    Heritability Estimates Versus Large Environmental Effects: The IQ Paradox Resolved
    https://www.researchgate.net/profile/William_Dickens/publication/11956815_Heritability_estimates_versus_large_environmental_effects_The_IQ_paradox_resolved/links/0046352bf043bd1665000000.pdf

    Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called “X”-factors: environments, racism, and the “hereditarian hypothesis”
    http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-014-9428-0

    Race differences in IQ: Hans Eysenck’s contribution to the debate in the light of subsequent research
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886916303099

    1. >Except that the idiocy of equating high heritability with lack of environmental influence has been debunked a long time ago, and many times since then.

      No, because all three of these papers are pretty bogus. The first two are just desperate statistical handwaving that do nothing to challenge the empirical evidence, e.g. from separated-twin studies. The third actually denies the evidence from those studies in its abstract, so I didn’t bother reading it further.

      Empirical reality is that the better you are able to identify and control for exogamous limits on brain development (such as poor early-childhood nutrition, environmental lead, etc.) the higher the resulting index of heritability looks. Put crudely, lots of environmental factors can make you stupider than you should be, but your ceiling is congenital.

      I say “congenital” rather than genetic because our most reliable instrument for exploring the correlation cannot distinguish reliably between genetic drivers and shared fetal environment. Nevertheless, the consensus estimate for influence of genetics – around 85% – is now actually slightly higher than it was at the time of The Bell Curve – in part because of more and better separated-twin studies, and in part because it was noticed that adoptees move towards the average IQ of their biological parents at adolescence.

      That is, environmental interventions can raise measured childhood IQ, but the effect tends to vanish at puberty when the brain prunes and rewires itself.

      There is no shortage of “scientists” willing to try to handwave the evidence away, because the pressure to produce politically acceptable (e.g. anti-hereditarian) explanations of IQ differences is so intense in academia. But facts are stubborn things, and these facts refuse to go away.

  1009. @esr
    “Empirical reality is that the better you are able to identify and control for exogamous limits on brain development (such as poor early-childhood nutrition, environmental lead, etc.) the higher the resulting index of heritability looks. Put crudely, lots of environmental factors can make you stupider than you should be, but your ceiling is congenital.”

    Eh, you really, really do not get it?

    What you describe is the definition of heritability. If you control all environmental factors, heritability is 100% by definition. If you do not understand this, try to actually understand what these papers write. And when you are at it, read up on Cyril Burt and his twin data (the Burt affair).

    What Flynn describes is that the ceiling is depending on environment, and that the optimal environment depends on genetic make-up. Also, we do not know what (pre-natal) factors affect IQ, so any claims that we know how to control the environment are false.

    For those who are still willing to think, take height. Human height has a heritability in the order of 0.80.

    Still, with 0.8 heritability, I have looked down upon my parents and grand parents, and I look up to the next generation. When I travel in the far East, I can watch over the heads of large crowds. Even in the US, most people are shorter than I am. It is pretty clear that with a heritability of 0.8, a lot can be done to improve growth in children from poor families. And when this is actually done, like in the Netherlands after WWII, you get the world’s tallest people. And if you do it wrong, relative height shrinks, like in the US. All with a heritability of 0.8.

    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-height-idUSKCN1052HG

    1. >What you describe is the definition of heritability. If you control all environmental factors, heritability is 100% by definition.

      You are obfuscating the difference between phenotypic traits that have almost symmetrical response to environmental factors and those that do not. If IQ gemetic heritability ere a mirage, you would not get the adult IQ of adjustees moving from their childhood IQ towards that of their genetic parents.

  1010. @esr
    “There is no shortage of “scientists” willing to try to handwave the evidence away, because the pressure to produce politically acceptable (e.g. anti-hereditarian) explanations of IQ differences is so intense in academia. ”

    But gullible scientists are fastly outnumbered by people on the internet that lack even a basic understanding of the concepts they fulminate about.

    Seriously, heritability is not a complex concept. Population genetics is much more complex, and that is even more important in this pseudo science debate about fairy tales of race. But I have yet to see anyone write anything sensible about human population genetics here, not even a single sentence.

  1011. @esr
    “You are obfuscating the difference between phenotypic traits that have almost symmetrical response to environmental factors and those that do not. ”

    No, that is all irrelevant.

    Heritability is the fraction of the variability explained by genetics. If you control all environmental factors, the ONLY variability that remains is genetic variability. It HAS to go to 100% if everything else is controlled.

    Of course, if you control all environmental factors, the remaining genetic variability is linked to genetic relatives. That is what genetics means.

  1012. Winter, for a guy that pretends to know a lot about nearly everything, you sure get confused easily by basic concepts.

    The separated twin studies aren’t controlling the environmental factors in the sense that they are creating identical environments for the kids like a re-run of The Boys from Brazil. If they were, then your objection that whatever is left is hereditary would make sense. Instead they take careful note of all of those factors to measure how much influence they have, compared to the hereditary component.

    What they’ve found is: Mozart in the crib and wealthy helicopter parents providing continual stimulus can boost the IQ of young kids; neglect can depress the IQ scores of young kids.

    And none of it matters all that much because by the late teens, those early scores are gone and the kids end up at an IQ level that is ~85% predictable from the IQ of their parents.

    In effect, environmental factors can help a kid reach their potential sooner, or keep them from reaching it until later. But they have little effect raising or lowering the final IQ levels.

  1013. @kjj
    Sorry, but when heritability numbers are quoted, they mean what I wrote: The proportion of variation in the population that can be attributed to the genetic variation. The proportion that can be attributed to the environment is 1-heritability.

    Twin and adoption studies are simply tools to control genetic and environmental variation. They say nothing about differences between (sub-)populations. It is all in the links.

    If you want to say something else, do not quote heritability.

    “You use that word a lot. It does not mean what you think it means.”

  1014. @ Winter – “If you control all environmental factors”

    The arrogance of that statement is staggering. Are you saying that you think it is feasible to conduct a study in which this can be achieved (or that it has already occurred)? The real world is messy and chaotic, and every individual’s journey in life is differentiated. Science is not autocratic, and you would do well to acquire some humility.

  1015. @TomA
    “The arrogance of that statement is staggering.”

    The ignorance of your statements is staggering.

    Again, heritability is by definition the proportion of the total observed variation in the study (sample) population that is explained by genetic variation in the study (sample) population. The rest, 1-heritability, is explained by environmental (==non-genetic) variation in the study (sample) population.

    So, theoretically, if you reduce the environmental variation of your study population, e.g., by only studying children of WASP parents with the same education and job, all from the same year cohort of a single school, living in a single neighborhood, having the same number of siblings, and the same birth order, and the same diseases, then you reduce environmental variation. Given the definition, heritability should go up. If you catch ALL environmental variables and are able to control for them, heritability should be 1.0, by definition.

    Obviously, this cannot be done in the real world, even if you wanted to. But it is possible to use statistical procedures to account for variation in genes and environment and pool diverse data to factor out the influence of the environment. And if you know what factors are important, you can recruit more children by ignoring the features that do not matter, say, parents do not have to be WASP, but only X and Y. That is the meaning of “control all environmental factors” in this context.

    I assumed that it would be obvious that this is not a study with guinea pigs where we lock up children in Skinner boxes. It is also obvious from the definition of heritability that such an exercise would be utterly pointless.

    Why you think this has anything to do with “Science is not autocratic, and you would do well to acquire some humility.” is a total mystery to me.

    Heritability is a measure of an observable feature in a study population. Outside of the particular study where it is calculated it is next to useless.

  1016. Ugh. I can’t believe that I fell for it. Again.

    Winter is pulling the typical Motte & Bailey tactic. We are discussing the genetic contribution to IQ, so Winter shows up and shits all over the Bailey. When we ask him what the hell he is talking about, he is only talking about the Motte.

    Here is a tell:

    So, theoretically, if you reduce the environmental variation of your study population, e.g., by only studying children of WASP parents with the same education and job, all from the same year cohort of a single school, living in a single neighborhood, having the same number of siblings, and the same birth order, and the same diseases, then you reduce environmental variation.

    That reduces to “… if you reduce the environmental variation … then you reduce the environmental variation.”

    All of his word spew is designed to hide his real tactic – he changed the subject. His Motte is “Heritability is a measure of an observable feature in a study population. Outside of the particular study where it is calculated it is next to useless.” But the Bailey that we were trying to discuss is Troutwaxer’s bullshit claim that IQ differences by race are the result of four invisible gremlins named Poor Nutrition, Poverty, Environmental Toxins, and Enforced Prejudice. (Said gremlins remain elusive despite ~70 years of industrial scale effort devoted to catching sight of them and their cousins.)

    Let me put it this way. No one cares about the academic definition of heritability within a sample. We aren’t analyzing a study, we are talking about the whole world.

    1. >Troutwaxer’s bullshit claim that IQ differences by race are the result of four invisible gremlins named Poor Nutrition, Poverty, Environmental Toxins, and Enforced Prejudice.

      To be fair, two of these are not completely gremlins. Poor childhood nutrition and environmental toxins can certainly prevent people from reaching the adult-IQ ceiling implied by their alleles. But it is also true that attempts to explain the entire pattern of interracial differences this way have never been more than wishful thinking, hopelessly inadequate to the magnitude of the mean differences.

  1017. >To be fair, two of these are not completely gremlins. Poor childhood nutrition and environmental toxins can certainly prevent people from reaching the adult-IQ ceiling implied by their alleles. But it is also true that attempts to explain the entire pattern of interracial differences this way have never been more than wishful thinking, hopelessly inadequate to the magnitude of the mean differences.

    And we return to my previous comment about it being well known that only black children can be poor.

  1018. @kjj
    Nice diversion tactic. But when you people talk about the genetic basis for IQ differences you all invariably quote the “hard” heritability numbers as evidence. And when I show that these numbers mean something completely different and are completely useless in this discussion, you change the subject.

    Back to genetics, environment, and IQ. My first comment contained three papers that explain how big the influence of the environment is. The increase of IQ test results each generation is large, 3-5 points per decade. Which is a completely environmental effect. So an average difference of 15 points can be just a lag of 40 years or so. Furthermore, there are a host of factors known to influence brain develooment, starting from the intra uterine environment to malnutrition and infections, to violence to early mental stimulation. Claiming you know what is important is just a show of ignorance.

    On the genetics side, no one here seems to even be curious about the actual genetic differences between the ethnic subgroups. So called white and black people have been able to successfully impersonate each other for extended times. So I have severe doubts about these genetic differences.

    To summarize, no one knows what causes any observed differences in IQ between ethnic groups. And even if they turn out to be genetic, a change of the environment could easily reduce them. Just as a genetic basis for height can be easily “corrected”.

  1019. @ esr

    A couple things. Once again, my apologies for taking so long to get back to this thread; things are still pretty busy and I’m in hot pursuit of overtime.

    The first is that it looks like lead exposure in childhood affects adult IQs, so there is no “brain reboot” in adulthood where the lead-affected child ends up with an IQ which resembles the adult parents IQ.

    http://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-069X-10-24

    So lead exposure would have a permanent harmful effect on children into adulthood.

    The only situation in which this does not hold true is probably one where both the parent and child were exposed to similar levels of lead – studies done in this situation might bias the results towards the situation you describe above in which parents and children end up with the same IQ.

    It’s also probably worth noting that lead exposure in adults also leads to neurocognitive problems, so an adults living in a high-lead location will also lose some IQ points, or show other deficits. (The study below had more than 500 participants.)

    http://www.neurology.org/content/55/8/1144
    .

    Second, I’ve been thinking about this issue for a couple of days and I’ve developed a theory (with particular reference to all the smart Black people I know.) The theory is that there are essentially two separate populations of Black people. One population lives in bad urban areas (in other words, ghettos) and is perpetually lead-exposed, along with some childhood malnutrition. The other population of Black people has moved out of the ghettos and into middle-class (or higher) neighborhoods. They are no longer lead-exposed, don’t suffer from childhood malnutrition, and after a couple generations their IQs are similar to that of the population at large. (I say “a couple generations” because being a fetus in a lead-lined womb is probably not conductive to good cognition later in life.)

    1. >They are no longer lead-exposed, don’t suffer from childhood malnutrition, and after a couple generations their IQs are similar to that of the population at large

      Several things do in this theory. One is the mean IQs of non-Black populations living in the same urban conditions. Another is that the IQ statistics of non-urban places in Africa where it’s not likely that Blacks have significant lead exposure at all.

      I would be happier if your theory were true, because the plausible alternatives have very depressing implications. Alas, it’s not even plausible.

  1020. @ esr

    This is such a heavily politicized issue that without a ton of cites I can’t take your assertion seriously. Let’s agree to disagree, and if you’re ever in SoCal I’ll buy you a beer (or whatever you drink.) If we hit Clifton’s at the right time we could sit at Ray Bradbury’s table.

    I’d still like to see the advice you’d give your fellow Libertarians at this time of great opportunity for a third party – certainly there are aspects of the philosophy that I find tempting. (My own suggestion would be for the Libertarians to join the Democrats en masse and manage the same kind of takeover the “hippies” managed in the sixties. IMHO we could end up with a pretty good mix of philosophies. You can leave the guy who doesn’t know where Aleppo is at Libertarian HQ to “mind the store in case we need to come back.”)

    1. >This is such a heavily politicized issue that without a ton of cites I can’t take your assertion seriously.

      Dammit, Troutwaxer, just think about the orders of magnitude. The average IQ of the natives in Equatorial Guinea is 59. They don’t have a lead-exposure problem; most of the interior doesn’t even have roads. To come up with a non-congenital explanation, you need to account for immigrant minorities in the country living in the same environment with much higher IQ means (which is why they run commerce and the infrastructure).

      >IMHO we could end up with a pretty good mix of philosophies.

      I think that might have been barely possible before your hippie takeover. Now…no, too much Gramscian damage.

  1021. Merciful $DEITY, Troutwaxer. I can’t imagine the Sandernistas and LIbertarians existing in the same city, never mind the same party.

  1022. @ jay

    I think the Democrats have lost their way on the issue of personal freedom. Libertarians, on the other hand, have never really understood how their version of liberty is vulnerable to exploitation by sociopaths. Both sides tend to get grumpy when confronted with these issues. I think it would be good for both sides, though you are correct that it would initially be rather… (very prim voice) messy.

    1. > Libertarians, on the other hand, have never really understood how their version of liberty is vulnerable to exploitation by sociopaths.

      Right, as opposed to government being a full-employment program for sociopaths. Damn you are naive.

  1023. Troutwaxer, I think the various statist ideologies are far more vulnerable to exploitation by sociopaths. The main flaw in libertarianism that I see is open borders: the more libertarian a society is, the more prosperous it is, which attracts people from more oppressive/less prosperous countries, who unfortunately often bring with them the very beliefs and cultural habits that harmed their old countries.

  1024. @esr:


    > I would be happier if your theory were true, because the plausible alternatives have very depressing implications. Alas, it’s not even plausible.

    The “depressing implications” are because a) you attach too much meaning to this one test, and think of it as the be-all-end-all authority on all things intelligence-based, when nothing could be further from the truth b) because you are all too aware of genocide/extermination being favorite tools for many of the people invoking your same line of arguments.

    I have seen kids with average IQs but with Elo scores (chess) 600 points above mine. What does it mean? It means that IQ is not such a great measure for human intelligence or human potential. The list of similar examples is huge.

    Even the point that you need a similar IQ distribution to that of whites to run a modern civilization and economy would not survive scrutiny. First, we do not know that it will end too well for whites, and in the ultimate story of human survival and progress whites could well end up being a flop. Second we have huge disparities within white populations exhibiting similar IQ profiles. Third, economic development cannot be divorced from access to natural resources. The idea that Haitians would not be better off economically if they had access to a much larger and resourceful landmass than their overcrowded island would be absurd to anyone who knows anything about how modern economies work.

  1025. @ PapayaSF

    I think the issue is what you mean by “vulnerable to exploitation by sociopaths.”

    The ideal of Liberalism, for better or worse, is that you keep sociopaths at bay my making laws. Every time a sociopath finds a loophole in the existing laws, you write a new law to patch that loophole. The problem is that you end up with everyone committing “three felonies a day,” as the popular book about too many laws described it. Eventually your laws end up like a piece of badly improved software which is in desperate need of a bottom-up rewrite, but has instead gotten patch after patch after patch when it really needs a the kind of redesign which patches whole classes of bug with a few lines of well-written code.

    The advantage of statism is that each patch stops a sociopath from doing something wrong. The disadvantage of statism is that sociopaths can spend money (in our version of democracy) and purchase brand-new, ever more effective loopholes, or even become lawmakers themselves. In other words, the real villians don’t disobey the laws. They rewrite the laws to make sure that what they’re doing is legal. Eventually the sociopaths discover that being a lawmaker is a pretty good gig, as Eric noted in his comment.

    Open borders don’t worry me. Half of the founding members of my family were immigrants (one of them probably illegal, though that was a little different in 1910) and they found that America in 1910 was a land of wonderful opportunity. I believe that America is still a land of incredible opportunity, and IMHO anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you on some kind of prejudice.

    @ esr

    “The average IQ of the natives in Equatorial Guinea is 59.”

    IQ tests are culturally sensitive to an extreme degree. An IQ test designed for a technological and industrial society presents a tribesman in Equatorial Guinea with what Banks called an “out of context problem.” The canonical story about this is the researcher who taught a gorilla sign language and gave the gorilla an IQ test. The test asked what you should do if you got hot, with choices involving “eating ice cream” and “sitting under a shady tree.” The gorilla, who might or might not have ever eaten ice cream, chose “sitting under a shady tree” and got marked down.

    IQ tests are not magic. You can’t just give one and believe the results. Before you could reasonably give natives of Equatorial Guinea an IQ test you’d have to rewrite it in their language and deal with the cultural issues and problems they expect to solve, like “how do you make an arrow if you have no access to flint” or something similar, then if there are illustrations involved you need to make sure that the tribesmen are interpreting the illustrations the same way you are. Creating an IQ test for a new set of primitive people involves multiple Ph.D level projects that probably require an entire team.

    Then your tribal IQ test might fail when applied to a tribe in Brazil, where the question of “how do you make an arrow if you have no access to flint” has an entirely different answer, probably starting with “what’s flint” because the Amazon jungle is so moist that any kind of rock is rare!

    “Right, as opposed to government being a full-employment program for sociopaths. Damn you are naive.”

    We’re shouting past each other about two sides of the same problem. SIDE ONE: Make the government too powerful and it becomes inhabited by sociopaths. As you noted, this is a big part of our current problem, (made worse by Citizen’s United.) SIDE TWO: If government is not powerful enough then it can’t restrain sociopaths. My preference is not a matter of naivette, but a default preference for restraining sociopaths, even at some cost.

    ON THE GRIPPING HAND, the reason I suggest putting Democrats and Libertarians together is because I take your critique of Liberalism seriously. Essentially, I think the Democrats and Libertarians would be a good match is because there’s probably an ideal balance between “sociopathic government” and “government which can successfully contain sociopaths.” (Also see my reply to PapayaSF above.)

    I also said, ” think the Democrats have lost their way on the issue of personal freedom. Libertarians, on the other hand, have never really understood how their version of liberty is vulnerable to exploitation by sociopaths. Both sides tend to get grumpy when confronted with these issues.”

    Thanks for proving my point about both sides becoming grumpy.

  1026. Troutwaxer, I think the devil is in the details regarding “restraining sociopaths.” Libertarians are not anarchists: we have no problem with laws against murder and rape. One problem with the statist approach is that it inevitably grows, and soon a “sociopath” is defined as someone who wants to buy an incandescent light bulb, or who doesn’t want to cater a gay wedding.

    Democrats and libertarians are fundamentally incompatible, because Democrats (at least today) can only imagine solving problems with more government, and at the highest, most centralized level possible. They are not interested in any other types of solutions.

    IQ tests are now quite sophisticated. I doubt if the ones given in Equatorial Guinea are as culture-specific as the ones given 50 years ago.

    Immigration now is different. 100 years ago, there was no government welfare, strong pressure to assimilate, and lots of demand for unskilled labor. Now we have plenty of welfare for immigrants and their kids, “multiculturalism,” communications technology that inhibits assimilation, and shrinking demand for unskilled labor.

    1. >IQ tests are now quite sophisticated. I doubt if the ones given in Equatorial Guinea are as culture-specific as the ones given 50 years ago.

      Not only is culture-neutral IQ testing now normal, I can tell you a dead-simple way to do it. You take your population and audit working-vocabulary size in each individual’s principal language. That will follow a bell curve that turns out to track Spearman’s g really closely. Then you audit with language-neutral puzzles like Raven Progressive Matrices. None of this is rocket science, and the still-widespread belief that the results are culture bound is at least four decades out of date.

  1027. @ esr

    With a little digging, I found that the conclusion about Equatorial Guinea has been thoroughly debunked:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Differences_in_Intelligence_%28book%29

    “Upon reading the original reference, we found that the “data point” that Lynn and Vanhanen used for the lowest IQ estimate, Equatorial Guinea, was actually the mean IQ of a group of Spanish children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain.”

    You’ll also note that Washington Summit Publishers, who published “Race Differences in Intelligence” has been criticized as a White Nationalist group:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Summit_Publishers

    -Sigh-

    If you read the above Wikipeda article and follow the links, you find yourself dealing with all the usual white-shoe racist policy groups including the National Policy Institute, Regnary publishing, and “Occidental Quarterly.” This is exactly why I don’t trust any racial discussion of IQ. There’s too much bad, racially motivated data out there and even the most careful researcher is bound to trip over it eventually…

    1. >“Upon reading the original reference, we found that the “data point” that Lynn and Vanhanen used for the lowest IQ estimate, Equatorial Guinea, was actually the mean IQ of a group of Spanish children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain.”

      As Jay Maynard would say…what the nickel-plated fuck? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

      Now I’m going to have to read Lynn’s book and take apart the sources myself.

  1028. @ PapayaSF

    “Troutwaxer, I think the devil is in the details regarding “restraining sociopaths.” …One problem with the statist approach is that it inevitably grows, and soon a “sociopath” is defined as someone who wants to buy an incandescent light bulb, or who doesn’t want to cater a gay wedding.”

    The devil is definitely in the details. One of the reasons I’m taking Libertarianism a little more seriously is that I am as uncomfortable with someone who “doesn’t want to cater a gay wedding” as I am uncomfortable with “punishing someone who doesn’t want to cater to a gay wedding.” *

    You may need to read the above paragraph twice.

    At the risk of brown-nosing, our society is about where NTP was when Our Gracious Host found it; poorly designed by today’s standards, patch sitting on top of patch, add-ons bolted on wherever it suited someone to put them, accommodating stuff it shouldn’t accommodate (or should accommodate only as plugins,) too complex, and vulnerable to whole classes of bugs that could be avoided through better coding practices, etc. Our society needs a rewrite, and it needs input both from those who feel that laws can restrain sociopaths, and those who worry about creating too many laws.

    Most importantly it needs input from people who can solve multiple classes of defect with small amounts of good legal code, doing for our society what OGH is doing for NTP.

    /brown nosing

    * In my humble opinion, its fine if you don’t want to cater to a Gay wedding. But then you politely say, “My catering company is already booked up for that day, let me suggest that you contact one of my competitors,” not “The Bible says faggots like you will burn, so I won’t cater your wedding.” What you end up doing is punishing people with poor social skills.

    .
    “Libertarians are not anarchists: we have no problem with laws against murder and rape.”

    The rumor about Libertarians is that you guys are fine with laws that allow a CEO to kill more people with a single business decision than a serial killer can murder in a lifetime. I’m deliberately yanking your chain, of course, but I’m doing it with a wink and a nudge, so please take this with good humor. Jokes aside, that’s how Libertarians are seen – dangerously naive about how many people can die because the head of Union Carbide decides, for example, that the Indian refinery doesn’t need MIC tank alarms. Or whatever. And rumor also has it that you guys believe the market can solve these problems… that’s the part which REALLY makes us laugh!

    The Libertarian’s very puissant critique of unnecessary laws lives or dies by that judgment, regardless of whether that judgment is true or not,* which is why I bring the issue up in the first place… if you tell me that you’re fine with making prostitution legal, (I agree with this, BTW) and you also tell me that you’re fine with the management decisions that led to Bhopal (Union Carbide should be free to buy as much or as little safety equipment as they want, right?) then maybe I should worry that your analysis of prostitution is as flawed as your analysis of Bhopal. (That’s meant to be an observation, not an insult. There’s no intent for this to sting.)

    * I get that there are lots of factions of Libertarians with lots of ideas about stuff like this. What I’m talking about here is the stereotype and what it buys you.

    .
    “Democrats and libertarians are fundamentally incompatible, because Democrats (at least today) can only imagine solving problems with more government, and at the highest, most centralized level possible. They are not interested in any other types of solutions.”

    That’s why I’d like to see both groups trying to run a political party together. The Democrats want laws which restrain sociopaths and the Libertarians want less laws altogether. I’m guessing (OK, I’ll ‘fess up. I’m fantasizing) that the inevitable conflicts will lead to some interesting new ideas about how to run a legal system. Overly hopeful? I can live with that.

  1029. Not to excuse Bhopal and other such corporate misdeeds, their total toll of suffering and death is but a molehill next to the toll of governments. I don’t just mean wars and GULAGs, I mean things like the death and suffering toll of the FDA, which makes drug development expensive, slow, and artificially limited. (Not that everything they do is bad, but they have huge downsides that are rarely acknowledged.) Plus the costs of overall waste and inefficiency.

  1030. @esr
    “To come up with a non-congenital explanation, you need to account for immigrant minorities in the country living in the same environment with much higher IQ means (which is why they run commerce and the infrastructure).”

    The underlying assumptions are that IQ can be tested culture free and that the differences are genetical. Neither have been at any level regarding the differences between the US and New Guinea.

    Making a test that will measure the same mental parameter from observable behaviors in US students and neo-lithical farmers in the woods of New Guinea is something worthy of the Nobel price. And claiming that heritability measures in US urban middle class parents extrapolates into tropical rain forrests is in the “not even wrong” category.

    Btw, an IQ of around 60 is what you get for the average britton in the 19th century if you extrapolate the Flynn effect back. That also holds for your, and my, ancestors.

  1031. @Jay
    “How many orders of magnitude separate Bhopal from Stalin’s famine?”

    Stalin ruled two decades. On a yearly basis, the number of work related deaths is over 2M. So that would be of the order of 40M people dying from industry. There are some statistical problems with the comparison, but it seems to me that the orders are comparable to what WWI/WWIi/Stalin did. Mind you, Stalin and Hitler are commonly considered exceptions. Most countries did not experience such leaders.

    Global Estimates of the Burden of Injury and Illness at Work in 2012
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4003859/

    We have estimated that globally there are 2.3 million deaths annually for reasons attributed to work. The biggest component is linked to work-related diseases, 2.0 million, and 0.3 million linked to occupational injuries.

  1032. Quit moving the goalposts, Winter. If you blame Bhopal on one man, or one company, you don’t get to suddenly generalize over all of industry worldwide.

    And I’ll do the math for you: Stalin’s famine killed roughly 4 million people. Bhopal killed 3787 people.

    That’s three orders of magnitude.

    For one corporation to kill 4 million people is flatly impossible.
    For one authoritarian government of the kind beloved of leftists to kill 4 million people is easy.

    So no, I will never agree that corporations are more evil than governments.

  1033. @Jay: Not to mention that it handwaves the complete lack of worker safety in the Soviet Union. Comparison with environmental track records makes me willing to bet that if we had accurate information more workers would have died in the Soviet Union than in all of the capitalist developed nations combined over equivalent time periods.

  1034. Wow. As a reading of this blog, I am used to a lot of handwaving and rhetorical stretches from Winter, but trying to equate Stalin’s death toll with workplace accidents… that’s a new low.

  1035. @ PapayaSF

    “Not to excuse Bhopal and other such corporate misdeeds, their total toll of suffering and death is but a molehill next to the toll of governments.”

    That’s certainly true from a statistical point of view – if nothing else war uses up a ton of lives, and not just soldiers – but that’s not the lived experience of most people, who typically have the worst days of their lives due to some kind of corporate issue; expensive drugs, crappy insurance, asshole bosses, entirely avoidable bank failures, (Bring Back Glass-Steagal!) smog, cancer from asbestos or cigarettes, accident at the plant due to inadequate safety, improperly-built airbags, etc.

    So when Libertarian types start talking about deregulating things, the average person thinks “great, now the boss can refuse to buy safety gear,” and doesn’t want to listen anymore, and when you invoke Stalin and explain that deregulation keeps us from going Commie and having 100 million people killed, that just sounds silly, right? (I used to joke that there are two kinds of Libertarians; those who aren’t aware that Ayn Rand was writing fiction, and those who aren’t aware that Heinlein was writing fiction. The joke is funny because there’s an element of truth – reductio ad Stalinum should be as much a Godwin’s law violation as reductio ad Hitlerum,right? I trust I’ve made my point about that one!)

    “I don’t just mean wars and GULAGs, I mean things like the death and suffering toll of the FDA, which makes drug development expensive, slow, and artificially limited.”

    I’m the last person who would say the current system is perfect. (You might have noticed that ;) and we could do a lot to make things better. But I’m not currently happy with the Democrats, and I’m definitely not happy with the Republicans, and it would be nice if there were less unnecessary laws for all of us to trip over… but not by reference to Stalin, which comes off as John Birch-level craziness. (And as Winter observed above, Stalin is a huge outlier!)

    But if you took the best parts of the Libertarianism (less laws, decriminalize prostitution and recreational drugs and fixed the extended legal issues accordingly) and fused it with the best parts of Democratic thinking (use laws to restrain sociopaths) I think you’d have something very productive of a good society.
    .

    @ Jay

    See my reply to PapayaSF above, I think it covers everything. But I’m not ignoring you.
    .

    @ esr

    Do me a favor and order that particular book used!
    .

    @ Christopher Smith

    “Not to mention that it hand-waves the complete lack of worker safety in the Soviet Union. Comparison with environmental track records makes me willing to bet that if we had accurate information more workers would have died in the Soviet Union than in all of the capitalist developed nations combined over equivalent time periods.”

    Statistically speaking, you’re absolutely right, even without reference to Stalin’s death camps. This is why I refer to the problem of sociopaths, not the problem of capitalism! (In both systems the plant manager is facing the same pressure from above to keep costs down.) But my comments about “Reductio ad Stalinum” above still stand. This is simply not an argument which will successfully convince a guy with an asshole boss. His problems are more immediate.

  1036. Stalin is less of an outlier than Bhopal.

    No doubt 20/20 hindsight can point to many deaths caused by carelessness or callousness on the part of private industrial management, but I think it’s an obvious fallacy to compare industrial accidents, which are, after all, accidents, with intentional famines, purges, and wars. Government has a record of carelessness and callousness as well, while private industry is comparatively much better when it comes to intentional famines, purges, and wars.

  1037. @PapayaSF
    “rhetorical stretches from Winter, but trying to equate Stalin’s death toll with workplace accidents”

    It was @Jay who compared them:
    “How many orders of magnitude separate Bhopal from Stalin’s famine?”

    I just answered him that they are of the same order of magnitude. In the end, it does not really matter whether you die in a mass killing at the hand of a psychopath politician who does not care about you, or you die in a steady state continuous killing at the hand of a psychopath boss or owner who does not care about you.

    For illustration, think of the imploding or burning sweatshops in Bangladesh that kill 1000+ workers at a time.
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3339578/Crammed-squalid-factories-produce-clothes-West-just-20p-day-children-forced-work-horrific-unregulated-workshops-Bangladesh.html

    @Christopher Smith
    “Not to mention that it handwaves the complete lack of worker safety in the Soviet Union.”

    Not to mention environmental poisoning. I am pretty sure that I have made it obviously clear several times to those commenting here that I think Communist Russia et al were a complete hell hole. But that information seems never to register. Probably because it does not fit the binary saint vs demon world view here.

    For the rest, I agree with Troutwaxer on almost all his points. Except that I have more faith in democracy than in Libertarianism.

  1038. “It was @Jay who compared them:
    “How many orders of magnitude separate Bhopal from Stalin’s famine?””

    I was comparing individual events (the Holodomor with Bhopal). You are comparing an individual event with years of them worldwide.

    How deeply dishonest can you get?

    If you’re going to compare the entire history of industrial capitalism, then I get to use the entire history of totalitarian leftism. That total is in the nine-figure range, still two orders of magnitude more than yours.

  1039. @Jay
    “I was comparing individual events (the Holodomor with Bhopal).”

    Stalin was not an individual event. Stalin was the collective failure of Soviet society over two decades (and longer). It involved over 200 million people all over the USSR. Bhopal was a single event in a long running history of criminal industrial negligence which involves millions of deaths annually.

  1040. @Jay
    “If you’re going to compare the entire history of industrial capitalism, then I get to use the entire history of totalitarian leftism. ”

    No, I was alluding to “industry” neglecting the safety of workers and people in general. I do not care about the ideology involved. You started to compare industrial “accidents” with political madmen. Then you should do it right.

    @Jay
    “That total is in the nine-figure range, still two orders of magnitude more than yours.”

    Please be more specific. Billions of people is quite a lot. I am also confident I do not agree with your definition of “leftism”.

    Also, I refuse to include wars in this death toll. Every human society in history has been involved in wars, irrespective of political affiliation or ideology. And wars have always involved depopulating large areas, whether it was Papua’s, Romans, Francs, Mongols, Medieval French, 17th century Germans, or 19th century British. The number of people killed was always only bounded by the number of people that were living between the parties.

  1041. “Stalin was not an individual event.”

    No, he wasn’t, but the Holodomor – the Ukraine famine he engineered – was. Stalin is generally accepted as being responsible for 30 million deaths.

    Nine figures is hundreds of millions, not billions. The generally accepted estimate for people killed by socialism is 150 million.

    And neither number includes wars.

  1042. I am pretty sure that I have made it obviously clear several times to those commenting here that I think Communist Russia et al were a complete hell hole. But that information seems never to register.

    Because you keep trying to special-plead Russia out of the pattern of socialism generally.

  1043. @ Winter:

    I am pretty sure that I have made it obviously clear several times to those commenting here that I think Communist Russia et al were a complete hell hole. But that information seems never to register. Probably because it does not fit the binary saint vs demon world view here.

    I understood what you were saying. It can be both a Commie hell hole and practice bad worker safety. Some people are so programmed to fight a particular battle that they don’t notice when people are fighting a different battle. I find it kind of depressing because I’m trying to talk about perceptions and everyone has assumed that I’m re-fighting the Commie vs. Capital battle.

    For the rest, I agree with Troutwaxer on almost all his points. Except that I have more faith in democracy than in Libertarianism.

    I’m still a Democrat, but there’s a good bit of Libertarianism which seems worth importing. (The parts I noted above.)
    .

    @ Jay

    That total is in the nine-figure range, still two orders of magnitude more than yours.

    Jay, I think you failed to note that the 2.3 million figure is an annual figure. So if we take one hundred years of industrial accidents per the numbers above, we’re talking about 230,000,000 deaths, also a nine-figure range, in the last century. The number may well be over 230,000,000, since the estimate was published in 2014, after hefty improvements in workplace safety all over the world. It also might be under 230,000,000 because of the increase in population over time. It’s really hard to be sure without digging into annual figures, which is more work than I want to do. Also, as Winter noted, there may be some overlap because of poor worker safety under Communism in Russia.

    But I really don’t want to get caught up in that argument, because I’m not discussing the reality of Communist deaths versus Capitalist deaths, but the perception of a modern, individual voter who’s being asked to decide whether Libertarian worries about Stalinism or Democratic worries about modern and nearby sociopaths are of more concern to their daily lives.

    The modern voter is more concerned with “that sociopathic factory owner who’s emissions are giving my kid asthma” than “Statism and Stalinism.” If you want to address my concerns, address the sentence just before the one you are currently reading. I’m talking about perceptions!

    This particular perception matters mainly in the “Democrat vs. Libertarian” comparison; there are lots of Republicans who worry about Stalinism, but they’re well-locked-down as Republican voters. I suspect that a combination Democratic/Libertarian party might peel off some of those voters as each party lost some of their worst baggage, but that’s mostly speculation.

  1044. @Christopher Smith
    “Because you keep trying to special-plead Russia out of the pattern of socialism generally.”

    We have had several socialist (labor) governments, as have many other Western European countries. France has a socialist president at this very moment. Less people are dying here or in France from the hand of government officials or other humans than in the USA. So what are you complaining about? The US even locks up far more people than whatever European government.

    So, what is your point?

  1045. As usual, there seems to be a disconnect between the libertarians and the liberals here on the meaning of the term socialism. When the libertarians use it, they mean what pretty much amounts to totalitarianism. When the liberals use it, they mean a government that guarantees health and enough wealth to survive, and maybe some more, but not much more. They mean social democracy. Thus, most European countries are socialist by the liberal definition only, while the DPRK is socialist by the libertarian definition and possibly (I’m doubtful) by the liberal definition, and Russia is socialist by both definitions – Russian healthcare is pretty good as long as the Kremlin doesn’t hate you.

  1046. @ EMF

    Agreed, though I am going to expand upon your definition: When an American Liberal speaks of socialism s/he means a form of government which taxes capitalism in order to have a good social safety net, (possibly plus racial/gender equality), including single-payer health care. (IMHO this is a good idea * – there’s lots of black propaganda against government-sponsored health care in the U.S., but talk to someone from France, for example, before you believe that propaganda.**) It’s worth noting that the communist hellhole called “France” is currently run by socialists, and it’s just like North Korea. Or maybe not… sigh. For a more American way of communicating this, imagine California with a really good single-payer system.

    When a Conservative or Libertarian talks about “socialism” they’re almost certainly talking about “Stalinism and Statism.”

    This is in part historical, because the two terms did once refer to the same thing, (though this is no longer true) and in part deliberately included in the right-wing “insult your opponent rather than communicate with them” style of politics, (which is pushing America apart in some really ugly ways.)

    But to communicate with Liberals, say “Communism” when you mean Stalinism and Statism. Say “Socialism” when you mean “California with single-payer health insurance.”

    * For each dollar we spend on health care, people in France, Belgium, Britain and Germany spend 50-60 cents on health care, and still have great outcomes.

    http://about-france.com/health-care.htm
    .

    ** A U.S. woman write about having a baby in France:

    http://www.slate.com/articles/business/dispatches_from_the_welfare_state/2014/01/french_socialized_medicine_vs_u_s_health_care_having_a_baby_in_paris_is.html

    1. >When an American Liberal speaks of socialism s/he means a form of government which taxes capitalism in order to have a good social safety net, (possibly plus racial/gender equality), including single-payer health care

      …and disarms and demonizes everyone who might oppose the unlimited expansion of state power. As long as that remains the case, I will continue to consider American-“liberal”-“socialism” to be shorthand for communism by stealth.

  1047. * For each dollar we spend on health care, people in France, Belgium, Britain and Germany spend 50-60 cents on health care, and still have great outcomes.

    Yes, since the US subsidizes their military spending, they can afford to spend more than us. Our pharmaceutical companies (not defending those bastards, just giving the facts) also subsidize European medications as they will only pay a certain amount for most drugs and the US population has to make up the difference.

  1048. > In my humble opinion, its fine if you don’t want to cater to a Gay wedding. But then you politely say, “My catering company is already booked up for that day, let me suggest that you contact one of my competitors,” not “The Bible says faggots like you will burn, so I won’t cater your wedding.” What you end up doing is punishing people with poor social skills.

    The law punishes people who say “I believe God ordained marriage to be between a man and a woman, so I’ll be happy to bake you a birthday cake, graduation cake, etc., but I won’t violate my beliefs by pretending to make a ‘wedding’ cake for a ceremony that isn’t” in the most polite terms.

    And if someone says “My religious text says God will punish you ${epithet}” right to my face, I can simply respond “I don’t believe in your religious text, so your text can’t hurt me”.

    If that text* goes on to say that its believers should participate in meting out that punishment, we have an entirely different situation. Like when someone says “refusing to participate in a ‘same-sex wedding’ should be punished by large fines” enforced by Men With Badges And Guns, my response has to be along the lines of “fsck off, fascist!”, because the second person doesn’t deserve to be treated politely.
    ___
    * I don’t care whether your religious text is the Quran or an LGBT manifesto; you don’t to coerce others into performing acts in accordance with your beliefs under threat of force.

  1049. “Say “Socialism” when you mean “California with single-payer health insurance.””

    This is not a feature. I have exactly zero interest in ever living in the People’s Republic of California, with or without their version of the failing NHS.

  1050. Jay Maynard said
    > This is not a feature…
    Fine, fine, but the advice on word usage is still good.

    @ESR

    > …and disarms and demonizes everyone […]
    I could use some examples here. FWIW, there is precious little difference (in terms of power) between a communist government and a 1920s coal company that pays only in scrip; the biggest difference is that the coal company isn’t hypocritical, and probably doesn’t attempt to infringe upon freedom of speech (though it might, if some people are planning to strike).

    1. >I could use some examples here.

      What rock have you been living under? American “socialists” is Troutwaxer’s another-word-for-left-liberal sense have made it very clear that total disarmament of civilians is one of their goals, and have been quite willing to demonize anyone who invoked that pesky Second Amendment that as a redneck racist nut-job likely to shoot up a schoolyard any second now. I’ve been watching this shit go down since the 1970s.

  1051. @EMF: 1920s coal companies did not set up fences and strips of plowed ground seeded with land mines, with towers staffed by guards with machine guns, just to keep their workers from moving away.

  1052. @ esr

    I will continue to consider American-“liberal”-“socialism” to be shorthand for communism by stealth.

    We’re really not communicating here, so please read carefully. I would certainly agree that there’s a possible ugly end-state to North American Liberalism. I might even agree that we’re heading that direction. The issue I have is that it would not be classical “Communism” in any sense, and this is why we’re miscommunicating on an essential issue of liberty.

    I’d guess that 80% of the last week’s posts have been either about how to communicate essential ideas about politics across party lines, or examples of the complete failure to do that. Your posts read like you’re not paying any attention to that particular issue.

    To address your point, IMHO the ugly end-state for North American Liberalism is not classically communist in any sense. What I’m afraid of is the nanny state run amok, with a totalitarian insistence on “best practices,” some of which would be scientific and some not scientific (or maybe scientifically designed for an outcome we’d both find abhorrent.)

    I’m imagining a kind of gilded cage where “safety” and “dignity” would be the primary concerns, with the idea that “freedom is outmoded” because the “best safety practices” and “best dignity practices” would be imposed from above (and “you’re not free if you don’t have your self-esteem,” the definition of which would also be imposed from above.) We wouldn’t teach kids the history of slavery because it might be “triggering” and “traumatic.” Consensual S&M would be illegal because of “dignity concerns.” Instead of keeping whores safe by making prostitution legal, we’d make whores “safe” by sending them to reeducation camps. Drugs and alcohol would be illegal due to “bad outcomes” despite the fact that society imposes many of those “bad outcomes.”

    It would be illegal to teach your kid gun safety because “ebil guns.” Kids would not be allowed to self-organize a baseball games because of “safety and self-esteem concerns” and you’d be ticketed if your kids did self-organize, and ticketed even worse if they teased someone about not making a catch. It would be the kind of place that claimed to have ended racism because we no longer use racist words – those are now illegal – but where a poor, black mother would be arrested because she has to work all day and her kid tries to walk home from school – and walking home from school is now illegal both because of “safety concerns” and because if a black kid has to walk home fom school while non-black kids get rides the child is being treated “unequally” and it is clearly the mom’s fault because “every child has a right to equal parenting” and if you can’t afford the nice house and nice car your child deserves “you’re stuck in your self hater” and need to be institutionalized.

    This totalitarian state’s text would not be Karl Marx but some kind of mixed-up nanny-state do-gooder’s manual which did not have the slightest idea that there are benefits to certain kinds of childhood risks. (And I say “benefits to certain kinds of childhood risks” as a parent who’s raised two kids.)

    That’s my take on the bad outcome of North American Liberalism. But when you call it “communism” it looks like you’re showing a poor understanding of what Marx was talking about, it looks like you’re showing a poor understanding of the actual direction our nanny state is heading, and it looks like you’re showing a regretable tendency to confuse “totalitarianism,” which can grow out of any philosopy, with actual “nationalize the factories” style communism.

    The really sad thing is that I don’t think you’re actually confused about any of this. The true problem is that we’re using the same words to mean different things, and you’re not really using the same version of English I use when we’re talking about politics. But I doubt you’ll acknowledge any of this; you’ll just go right back to your talking points!

    BTW, there’s an amazing blog called “Free Range Kids” which discusses nanny-state vs. parenting in depth. You might enjoy it:

    http://www.freerangekids.com/

    1. >But when you call it “communism” it looks like you’re showing a poor understanding of what Marx was talking about, it looks like you’re showing a poor understanding of the actual direction our nanny state is heading, and it looks like you’re showing a regretable tendency to confuse “totalitarianism,” which can grow out of any philosopy, with actual “nationalize the factories” style communism.

      I don’t consider the distinction between your nanny-end-state and Communism to be very interesting, and here’s why: both function mainly as a theoretical justification for the exertion of totalitarian power.

      There’s also the contingent but awkward fact that nanny-state advocates use Marxist rhetoric and, when, you dig into their background enough, often turn out to be Communists or Communist tools themselves. Consider for example Barack Obama: mentored by one revolutionary Communist (Frank Davis) launched his political career in the living room of another (Bill Ayers) and prone to hiring Communists like Van Jones.

  1053. @ esr

    To go one step further into the obvious, “communicating across party lines to someone who uses a different version of English to talk about politics” is absolutely essential to the very first post about What Democrats Should Do with which you started this discussion. It is essential both in terms of communicating your own ideas and listening to the ideas of others whom you might hope to have as political allies.

    Maybe we need a “Dictionary of Political English” which translates Liberal into Conservative and vice-versa. Hopefully without snark.

  1054. @Troutwaxer –

    To address your point, IMHO the ugly end-state for North American Liberalism is not classically communist in any sense. What I’m afraid of is the nanny state run amok, with a totalitarian insistence on “best practices,” some of which would be scientific and some not scientific (or maybe scientifically designed for an outcome we’d both find abhorrent.)

    I’m not going to claim to speak for ESR in any way, but

    I suspect that he would agree with me that the endpoints of a Nanny State or a Communist State are nearly indistinguishable and equally abhorrent. Anytime any government can use force to subjugate an individual to the will of the Group (“For the Proletariat!” “For Their Own Good!”), that government has lost its moral justification.

    Minor details about who owns what factories would be irrelevant at that point.

    1. >I suspect that he would agree with me that the endpoints of a Nanny State or a Communist State are nearly indistinguishable and equally abhorrent.

      That is correct.

  1055. @ John D. Bell

    The problem here is that “Communism” is a particular kind of political philosophy, which revolves around a human being’s relationship to economic principles. “Totalitarianism” means the ugly, anti-democratic end-state of any political philosophy taken to a fanatical extreme, complete with a dictator, secret police, etc.

    For example, Russia had “extreme Communism” at the same time as Argentina had the exact opposite political philosophy of “extreme Capitalism.” But both Russia and Argentina were extremely repressive “totalitarian” states due to their lack of personal liberty, lack of democratic process, lack of a fair justice system, etc.

    “Totalitarian” does not mean “communist.” When someone uses the words interchangeably it means that person is either not credible because they are deliberately using one of the worlds incorrectly for propagandistic purposes, or they are not credible because they don’t understand the difference in definition between the two words.

    The reason I give Eric the benefit of the doubt, noting that he his not communicating well rather than accusing him of being not-credible is because I suspect that there are nuances to his political views and his use of English which I don’t understand, so I’m trying to discuss the issue in those terms rather than making accusations.

    But “totalitarian” and “communist” don’t fucking mean the same fucking thing!

    1. >But “totalitarian” and “communist” don’t fucking mean the same fucking thing!

      True. But “Communist” implies totalitarian very strongly (I know of zero historical exceptions) and though there have been non-Communist totalitarianisms in history the ideologies that gave rise to them were either genetically so closely related to Communism that the differences are uninteresting (e.g. Italo-German Fascism) or extinct.

      Thus, except in fairly specialized discussion of historical subjects, equating the two is unlikely to lead to any serious error.

      As a separate issue, you are seriously wrong about Argentina. It has not had “extreme capitalism” since before 1901, not coincidentally the year it began to decline from one of the world’s (then) richest countries to a generic Third World basket case. The period you are probably thinking of under Peron was anti-free-market and fascist, but I use a small ‘f’ because it was sustained more by Peron’s personal nous than Fascist theory.

  1056. Argentina had “extreme capitalism”? When was this? I hope you aren’t going to say under Peron….

  1057. Reminds me of the old Cold-War era joke. Two gulag guards are talking.

    Alexei: I know many of our prisoners are here for advocating evil capitalism over glorious communism, but I must admit I don’t really know the difference. Do you?
    Boris: Is simple, Comrade. In evil capitalism, man exploits man. In glorious communism, is other way around.

    @Troutwaxer
    Your “Fascism For Your Own Good” scenario is frighteningly close to where I believe things have been going for a while. I’m not able to think of libertarianism taken to a totalitarian extreme. Maybe you could flesh out how you think that would come to exist.

    It’s true that “totalitarian” does not mean “communist”, but for communism to exist above the family or small-village level requires totalitarianism. I don’t pretend to speak for ESR, but I think I’m safe in saying he has absolutely zero problems with a bunch of hippies setting up a commune (on land they own) provided that the members’ right of exit is preserved. I know that’s my position anyway. Whenever the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall comes along, and people talk about how it “divided”, I get incensed at how they’ve completely missed the point about what made it one of the most evil institutions in human history. Unlike the promised Great Wall of Trump, it didn’t keep people out; it kept them in the Gulag writ large.

    I’m don’t think that it’s ESR’s job to learn to speak in Leftist cant (not that I think he’s incapable of it) in order to tell them what they’re doing wrong. The fact that they can’t understand vast swathes of the population, and in fact persistently say they don’t have to understand the great unwashed masses, is entirely their fault.

    This is not a symmetric situation at all. It’s not up to us to demonstrate an open mind to the people who have insulted us as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals for decades. It’s up to them to stop it if they want us to vote for them. If their reaction is what we’ve seen here, to insult us further, then they’ll keep losing.

    Before you argue any more, take a moment and read something a friend wrote about a year and a half ago. Right before the election, Michael Moore of all people came to a similar conclusion. That two people who can hardly agree on anything political would agree on this says something.

    Once you understand what he’s saying there, you understand what you’re up against.

    Telling us how Deplorable we are is what lost the last election. But keep fscking that chicken.

    1. >I don’t pretend to speak for ESR, but I think I’m safe in saying he has absolutely zero problems with a bunch of hippies setting up a commune (on land they own) provided that the members’ right of exit is preserved.

      That is also correct.

  1058. Oh, and since we’re talking Nanny State, let me reiterate The Fundamental Contradiction of the Democratic Nanny State:

    1) Individuals are deemed incompetent to exercise personal liberty (make decisions for their own lives).
    2) The same individuals, when they enter the voting booth, are mystically transubstantiated into Holy Voters, whose competence to wield political power (making decisions for everyone, either directly via initiative/referendum or indirectly by electing legislators to do it on their behalf) is not to be questioned, as to do so is raaaaacist.

    This makes zero sense. The standard of competence for personal liberty is inherently lower than that for political power, which is why sloppy talk of “rights” that are in actuality “powers” leads to nonsense.

    As Jonathan Edward put it in “Sunshine”:

    He can’t even run his own life; I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine, Sunshine

  1059. I”m going to borrow Eric’s Anthropologist hat for a moment and state a hypothesis: People on the right demonstrate their tribal solidarity by deliberately conflating totalitarianism and communism – even though they’re perfectly capable of of reading the bloody dictionary for themselves.

    Re: Argentina, I was thinking more of the 1976 military coup that threw the Peronistas out, plus the declaration of martial law, the disappearances, the rule of the generals, etc. Certainly the opposite of a communist totalitarian regime. Or the Somozas in Nicaragua. Or Chile. Or Guatemala. All totalitarian, none of them commies.

    1. >People on the right demonstrate their tribal solidarity by deliberately conflating totalitarianism and communism – even though they’re perfectly capable of of reading the bloody dictionary for themselves.

      Or they’re like me, intimately familiar with Marxism and Fascism and the history of totalitarianism, and have formed a reasoned judgment that the distinction is no longer interesting.

      Um, no. I don’t actually kid myself about this. Most right-wingers don’t know enough history to rationally reach that conclusion, because most people don’t. On the other hand, that rather exempts the right-wingers from your charge.

      >All totalitarian, none of them commies.

      You’re using the term far more loosely than I would, then. That sort of military junta, while capable of very nasty behavior, generally does not approach totalitarianism very closely. Here’s how you can tell: no thoughtcrime prosecutions. They’re very interested in preventing anti-regime behavior but don’t care much about ideological deviation.

      There’s an obvious reason for this that stems directly from differences in different regimes’ theories of power. Military juntas generally have a theory of power that reduces to “We are the true patriots” and “We rule by right of discipline and strength”. Communists and (some) Fascists (it’s complicated) derive their legitimacy from some grand World-as-Will-and-Idea theory.

      For an ideology-driven regime, thought and speech deviation is a direct threat. A junta, on the other hand, is basically unafraid of wrong thought as long as it believes wrongthinkers will submit rather than be shot or dumped out of an airplane over the South Atlantic.

      So…Pinochet, Somoza, the post-Peronists? Not totalitarian; they didn’t even make a serious stab at it. No ubiquitous surveillance, barely even any prior censorship (newspapers sometimes excepted). These are the cases where a principled distinction between “totalitarian” and “extreme authoritarian” is both possible and useful.

  1060. @ esr

    The problem we have goes something like this: I’m taking Libertarianism more and more seriously, particularly on the subject of the rising nanny state and how that relates to basic freedoms, like “what can I legally put in my body” or “can I legally allow my child to walk home from school or go to the park?” This is a vastly important issue with major consequences, right? So why do Libertarians attempting to address the issue start ranting about “Stalinism and Statism,” and complain that any attempt to restrain the impulses of a sociopath is “Communism.”

    When the talk about “Stalinism and Statism and Communism” begins I start to feel like I’m dealing with a ranting Bircher from the fifties, or maybe a Faux News editorialist, when I really want to talk to someone who’s noticed (for example) that a large feminist subgroup and the Xtians have made a rather ugly alliance against particular kinds of sexual freedom, and what should we do about that? And note that Stalin has been dead for sixty years but the ugly alliance between feminists and Xtians is very current…

    That’s when I sigh and say, “I guess I’m voting Democratic again this year.” It would be really nice if Libertarians stopped worrying about Stalin and started worrying about more current threats to liberty.

    As for the question of “Totalitarian vs. Communist” I think you’re spending a lot of time quibbling with the definition and not noticing the problem, which is that (at best) the rhetoric makes you look not current and not clueful.

    1. >[Libertarians] complain that any attempt to restrain the impulses of a sociopath is “Communism.”

      No, we don’t. If you think that, you’re either a complete dumbshit or far, far more ignorant of basic libertarian ethics than I thought. I shall be charitable and assume the latter.

      >It would be really nice if Libertarians stopped worrying about Stalin and started worrying about more current threats to liberty.

      Wow, you really don’t get it, do you? Communist memetic weapons are the greatest threat to our liberty. Stalin is dead but the program he and Lenin wrote colonized the minds of the American left, notably including that feminist subgroup you are rightly worried about. See, there was this guy named Gramsci who figured out that the most effective way to Communize a free society is (listen carefully) to destroy the cultural foundations of political liberty.

      The OGPU/NKVD/KGB-programmed Left has been executing that program faithfully ever since, and continues even though the puppetmasters are gone. Thus, third-wave feminism. Thus, postmodernism, and critical legal theory, and every form of victim studies, and the welfare state, and “gun control”, and “deep ecology” and half a dozen other symptoms. They can’t be fought effectively in isolation, but only by understanding what was done to us, and why it was done, and how, and repudiating not just the symptoms but the whole volk-Marxist disease behind them.

      Yeah, you think I’m paranoid. But the same rhetorical tropes and the same fantasies and the same enemies list continually recur in all these movements. That is what shows us where and how the memetic weapons were originally aimed – they’re the makers’ fingerprints, or more like DNA that leads straight back to Marxism – and yeah, usually quite specifically to Stalinism.

      It’s nothing as simple or as easy to fight as a conspiracy. It’s become a virus passing from mind to mind. In the judgmental language of social conservatives, it’s moral rot; they have that almost right, except that they think that appeals to religion and traditional values can cure it. In this belief they are sadly and desperately wrong; that attempt filed decisively before 1980, arguably as early as 1969.

      When we libertarians express our understanding of the uberpattern, you think we sound like “Birchers”. That’s not our blindness, it’s yours. You’ve spent your whole life hearing that it’s not hip to speak of Marxist subversion, that’s something only old fuddy-duddies do. That was part of the program.

      So, you think this is all ancient history? Here’s a test: try to find a “social justice warrior” who will say anything seriously critical about Communism. Or praise capitalism.

  1061. @ The Monster

    I’m don’t think that it’s ESR’s job to learn to speak in Leftist cant (not that I think he’s incapable of it) in order to tell them what they’re doing wrong.

    Not my point (much.) I’m just frustrated and I wish we could talk to each other about politics without taking twelve fucking posts to establish whether “communism” equals “totalitarianism” and what it means to use (or not use) those terms interchangeably. I can foresee a civil war where we fight for years then discover that the difference between Leftwing English” and “Rightwing” English was poorly understood and we actually agreed with each other.

  1062. I don’t think esr is saying that each of those groups is merely a puppet for a giant, unified, coordinated Gramscian Marxist conspiracy. I think it’s intentional communist subversives mixed in with (and manipulating) supporters of limited and valid causes, plus a lot of opportunistic virtue-signalers. We can argue about the relative proportions, of course.

    And when discussing politics, it’s always good to keep this principle in mind: things nearer to you are easier to distinguish, but when distant, they will blur together.

    1. >communist subversives mixed in with (and manipulating) supporters of limited and valid causes

      It’s actually worse than that. The Gramscian infection consumes worthy causes, chews them up and remakes them in its own pro-totalitarian image. I have seen this happen multiple times.

      But some causes were never worthy to begin with. Gun control is perhaps the most obvious example.

      For a worthy cause in the end stage of Gramscian consumption, consider the U.S. antiwar movement. It is right that we should have a vocal, principled domestic constituency against unnecessary military action. But we have no such thing.

      Instead, we have a kind of sock puppet that becomes dead silent when a Communist-indoctrinated President is in the White House, raising not so much a peep at drone-strikes a go-go or multiple failed interventions in places like Libya, or at boots on the ground right now in Iraq.

      Wars are protested only when doing so serves the purposes of the Gramscian long march. This isn’t even hidden well any more: scratch an “anti-war” demonstration and you find a Stalinist political group like International ANSWER at the bottom of it. And the mainstream media doesn’t care about this – infected themselves, they see no enemy to the left, ever.

  1063. “It would be really nice if Libertarians stopped worrying about Stalin and started worrying about more current threats to liberty.”

    While nobody around here thinks I’m a [Ll]ibertarian, I will note here that if we quit worrying about Stalin, we’re likely to get him back in one form or another…and I think it’s probably safe to say the [Ll]ibertarians will agree with me.

  1064. @Troutwaxer
    “I can foresee a civil war where we fight for years then discover that the difference between Leftwing English” and “Rightwing” English was poorly understood and we actually agreed with each other.”

    This is all old hat. See the wars about little and big endians in Gulliver’s travels:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu

    The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs. Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end; a few generations ago, an Emperor of Lilliput, the Present Emperor’s great-grandfather, had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end. The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to “six rebellions… wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown”. The Lilliputian religion says an egg should be broken on the convenient end, which is now interpreted by the Lilliputians as the smaller end. The Big-Endians gained favour in Blefuscu.

    All this word-mangling about “Socialism” and “Communism” is only done to avoid talking about the substance. Because the substance is that those pesky left-wing “near-Stalinist socialist” anti-Libertarian States are among the safest, free-est, richest, and most happy places on earth. They surely beat the US on personal safety, longevity, freedom, and happiness.

    Libertarianism has never got a foothold anywhere because the ideology never worked in practice. The one society in human history that they claim was ever “Libertarian” consisted of a bunch of isolated farmers on an isolated medieval island at the outskirts of the human habitable world. And these islanders got rid of it when they got less isolated. Even if the Libertarian Society was the happy paradise of perfect freedom they think it is, there is no indication that humans are fit to life in that paradise.

  1065. “Because the substance is that those pesky left-wing “near-Stalinist socialist” anti-Libertarian States are among the safest, free-est, richest, and most happy places on earth.”

    Tell that to a Venezuelan. Then duck.

  1066. “free-est”: Which is why the Germans can serve as a test bed for Fakebook’s censorship package.

    “richest”: Let’s talk to Greece, Italy, Portugal……. or even Germany again, where permanent double digit unemployment is the norm.

  1067. SDN:
    > Germany, where permanent double digit unemployment is the norm.
    That’s 42 per mille. It’s been lower than US unemployment since ’09. And if you’re looking at labor force participation, may I remind you that in the US it never hits 70%?

  1068. @Jay
    “Venezuela”

    Obviously, I was referring to those pesky socialist strongholds of Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Australia and so on.

    Freedom:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Freedom_Index

    Democracy:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

    Freedom of the Press:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index

    Life Expectancy:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

    Incarceration rate. Here the USA is on a completely different level to the rest of the world, only matched by the Seychelles.

    @SDN
    ““richest”: Let’s talk to Greece, Italy, Portugal”

    Italy is pretty rich, mind you. On the other hand, go north of these to the Socialists north of the Alps and you see a wholly different picture.

    Taken together, “socialist” welfare states are not necessary going bankrupt faster than the US, if they are going bankrupt at all. Not are they locking up or murdering people at levels even approaching that of the USA.

  1069. @Troutwaxer
    [Stalin]

    At the risk of being (falsely) accused of “violating Godwin’s Law” (by people who don’t even know what Godwin’s Law is), when libertarians talk about Stalin (or for that matter Hitler, because Nationalsozialismus* is still Sozi, despite Leftist insistence it’s on the Right), it’s because we don’t believe that “Slippery slope” arguments are inherently fallacious. We see people arguing that government should do ${GOOD_THING}, because ${ARGUMENT}, consult our mental maps and see that once you accept ${ARGUMENT} there is no reason it can’t be used to justify ${BAD_THING}[${I}].

    In order for us to not go to there, you have to justify ${GOOD_THING} in a way that there’s a natural stopping point before we go Full Stalin. The behavior of the Left does not indicate that they are capable of, for instance, stopping at “don’t beat up and kill gays” without going all the way to “assess fines/imprisonment to anyone who won’t sell Gay Wedding Cakes”.

    Professional entertainers are getting credible death threats for agreeing to participate in the inaugural events. Screaming mobs threatening violence shut down speeches at universities. And you think we’re nuts to see Stalin’s shadow lurking over the benevolent intentions of the Caring and Compassionate Progressives.

    ___
    *A convenient way to avoid the Boner Pill Spam Trap without typing something like “soci&zwj;alist” to produce “soci‍alist”

  1070. @The Monster
    Then why have the EU countries not yet decended into Stalinism? Fort that matter, why has Russia left Stalinism 60 years ago?

  1071. @winter

    EU countries have gotten away with “Social Democracy” because we’ve largely taken care of defense for them, but they’ve definitely descended. Freedoms US citizens take for granted simply do not exist for Europeans. You’re used to it, but we aren’t (yet).

  1072. > A convenient way to avoid the Boner Pill Spam Trap without typing something…

    Of course, that assumes you want to avoid it. I have in the past typed up a detailed response,
    realized I forgot something, edited it and resent it, then asked ESR to delete the first version in yet a third post, which finished up with just the word social.ism, to ensure he saw it.

  1073. Me> Screaming mobs threatening violence shut down speeches at universities.

    Tonight someone was shot and another beaten (the latter for wearing a Trump hat) at the University of Washington in a protest of “alt-right” speaker Milo Yiannopoulos (who is not alt-right, himself, being a gay ethnic Jew whom the 14/88 crowd despises, but wrote an article trying to explain the alt-right to people who don’t understand it). Police snuck the speech audience out through underground tunnels, and instructed people to take off their Trump hats, etc.

    And that’s on top of countless other violent acts committed by the Melting Snowflakes today, many of whom screamed about how fascist Trump and his fans are, while behaving like Sturmabteilung sans the brown shirts and NSDAP armbands.

  1074. @The Monster
    “Freedoms US citizens take for granted simply do not exist for Europeans. You’re used to it, but we aren’t (yet).”

    And vice versa. For instance, we do not lock up millions of men up and strip millions of others of their rights (together acounting for a few percent of all men). Nor does our police kill hundreds of people each year or extort large amounts of money as an extra county tax.

    It is just what people find important.

  1075. @SDN
    “The Russians didn’t leave Stalinism; they simply got a new name as a beard.”

    That word is used a lot. It doesn’t mean what you think it means

  1076. > For instance, we do not lock up millions of men up and strip millions of others of their rights (together acounting for a few percent of all men). Nor does our police kill hundreds of people each year or extort large amounts of money as an extra county tax.

    If you think I support the War on Some Drugs, you’re mistaken. However, for people who have committed violent crimes, having their liberty restricted in punishment is appropriate.

  1077. @The monster
    “However, for people who have committed violent crimes, having their liberty restricted in punishment is appropriate.”

    The land of the unfree:

    While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate

    ~3% of the population, close to 5? of men are stripped of their freedom.

    According to a U.S. Department of Justice report published in 2006, over 7.2 million people were at that time in prison, on probation, or on parole (released from prison with restrictions). That means roughly 1 in every 32 Americans are under some sort of criminal justice system control.

    And this has nothing to do with increasing crime rates:

    In the last forty years, incarceration has increased with rates upwards of 500% despite crime rates decreasing nationally.[14] Between the years 2001 and 2012, crime rates (both property and violent crimes) have consistently declined at a rate of 22% after already falling an additional 30% in years prior between 1991 and 2001.

    Such attacks on freedom are seen as unwanted in most other coutries. But as I already wrote. This is a matter of taste.

  1078. @PapayaSF
    The crime rates were falling nationally (globally), while the incarcerations increased only locally. Crime rates dropped in cities and states that did lock up more people exactly the same as in cities and states that locked up less people. There is no correlation between incarceration rate and crime rates in the US. This is also discussed in the Wikipedia article.

    That “fallacy” was defined by people that did not know their statistics.

  1079. @PapayaSF
    I think conservatives suffer from a fallacy “The rooster crows and thinks he makes the sun rise”.

    I would call it the Aztec Fallacy. The Aztecs sacrificed humans for the progression of the seasons. Lo and behold, after the sacrifices, the seasons progressed.

    In the same way, conservatives sacrifice black people to battle crime.

  1080. @Winter
    If you don’t think it appropriate to incarcerate those convicted of violent crimes, would you be OK with us sending them to live in your neighborhood?

  1081. @The Monster
    Most of those locked up did not commit violent crimes. And it is not only the number of convictiobs, but also the length of the sentences.

    Anyhoe, Canada can do with 1/7th of the USA. So, how difficult can it be?

    1. >Most of those locked up did not commit violent crimes.

      Actually, not true. The figures in this article may be of interest.

      https://www.city-journal.org/html/myth-criminal-justice-racism-10231.html

      “Today, only 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time for drug offenses—nearly all of them for trafficking. Drug possession accounts for only 3.6 percent of state prisoners. Drug offenders make up a larger portion of the federal prison caseload—about 50 percent—but only 13 percent of the nation’s prisoners are under federal control. In 2014, less than 1 percent of sentenced drug offenders in federal court were convicted of simple drug possession; the rest were convicted of trafficking. The size of America’s prison population is a function of our violent crime rate.”

  1082. @esr
    “The figures in this article may be of interest.”

    OK. But this piece is confusing, because “non-drug offense” is not the same as “violent offense”.

    The latest numbers I could find were from 2008. They say that roughly half the prison population was there as a result of a convicted for a violent crime.
    https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1763

    I wonder whether that is because of a higher rate of violent crimes or because of longer prison sentences?

  1083. Winter,, those statistics do not include those who were accused of violent crimes but plea-bargained down to a crime labeled non-violent. That number is nontrivial, but statistics are scarce precisely because the violent crime does not go on the record.

  1084. @Jay
    “Winter,, those statistics do not include those who were accused of violent crimes but plea-bargained down to a crime labeled non-violent.”

    Plea-bargains are a can of worms of grossly inflated accusations that also include plain miscarriages of justice. Unless someone comes up with credible numbers, I do not see why the “true” number of convictions for violent crimes in prison would be very different from 50%.

  1085. “Plea-bargains are a can of worms of grossly inflated accusations that also include plain miscarriages of justice.”

    Somehow, I suspect your idea of “miscarriage of justice” in this context is greatly different from mine.

  1086. @Jay
    “Personally, I think all beings equipped with nociceptors are worthy of at least a minimum of moral consideration.”

    Could be. A plea-bargain is not part of a “fair trial” or “due process”. In many places outside of the USA it is looked upon as an unequal match for the defendant.

    If you want to see how unequal the match is see:

    Glenn Reynolds: “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime”
    http://volokh.com/2013/01/21/ham-sandwich-nation-due-process-when-everything-is-a-crime/

    This is a summary of the full paper:

    Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime
    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713

    Though extensive due process protections apply to the investigation of crimes, and to criminal trials, perhaps the most important part of the criminal process — the decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what — is almost entirely discretionary. Given the plethora of criminal laws and regulations in today’s society, this due process gap allows prosecutors to charge almost anyone they take a deep interest in. This Essay discusses the problem in the context of recent prosecutorial controversies involving the cases of Aaron Swartz and David Gregory, and offers some suggested remedies, along with a call for further discussion.

  1087. Sorry, clipboard had wrong quote. Should be:

    @Jay
    “Somehow, I suspect your idea of “miscarriage of justice” in this context is greatly different from mine.”

  1088. Ok, Winter, let me get this straight: the United States is a bad place because we try to have freedom — many of us want private insurance, run our businesses without government interference, etc — which means that the poor “can’t” get medical care and businesses are allegedly able to cause unlimited harm to employees and customers alike.

    Yet the United States is also a bad place because we incarcerate more people than any other country in the world — in addition to imprisoning violent criminals, we imprison people who use drugs, and we imprison people who are simply trying to run a business, but are guilty of some obscure regulation or law violation that has at best a marginal improvement to the overall life of the country.

    May I humbly propose that there’s as strong probability of what you dislike about the “capitalist” United States are largely an effect of how socialist/authoritarian the United States has become, largely since the time of Woodrow Wilson? And a lot of what you like about “socialist” countries are the free market rights that are recognized by European countries (sometimes even recognized more strongly than the supposedly free United States)?

    A lot of arguments made here are made as though the United States were strictly capitalist, with little to no socialist elements, and as though Europe is strictly socialist, with little to no capitalist elements, when the state of liberty overall is *much* more complicated than this.

  1089. Troutwaxer: “””When the talk about “Stalinism and Statism and Communism” begins I start to feel like I’m dealing with a ranting Bircher from the fifties, or maybe a Faux News editorialist, when I really want to talk to someone who’s noticed (for example) that a large feminist subgroup and the Xtians have made a rather ugly alliance against particular kinds of sexual freedom, and what should we do about that? And note that Stalin has been dead for sixty years but the ugly alliance between feminists and Xtians is very current…”””

    I would confess that my understanding of this is largely contained in a conservative/libertarian bubble (Instapundit in particular), but I don’t see this ugly alliance that you do. It is my impression that “Xtians” look at the situation in horror, because while we dislike sexual promiscuity (and even go so far as to consider keeping sexual behavior within certain bounds to be a shield of sorts from the shenanigans we’ve been seeing on college campuses), we can’t help but observe that (1) college males are getting railroaded without due process for behavior that, while we may consider it morally reprehensible, are nonetheless legal, and (2) when you throw out due process, the sexual purity “shield” is greatly weakened — what defense do you have when you are accused, even if you have done nothing wrong, when you have no chance to confront your accuser, get legal representation, or even see the evidence against you, before you are kicked out of your university with a big scarlet “A” that would prevent you from becoming enrolled in a new university?

    No, the current puritanical streak is strictly from the Left, pushed by the Obama presidency’s questionable interpretation of Title IX (which, in itself, is a nasty attack on freedom).

  1090. @Alpheus
    “Ok, Winter, let me get this straight: the United States is a bad place because we try to have freedom —”

    Sigh, I just explained that Europeans have different tastes and priorities than Americans. But we are compared to Stalin because we do care about public health and universal access to health care. We also do not think locking up millions of people is “Freedom”, whatever lame excuses are given.

    I do not understand why you complain about me. Your presidents and his supporters have claimed time and again that the USA are a dark hell hole, a war zone worse than post-WWII Germany. Are you saying he is lying?

  1091. Winter: “””Sigh, I just explained that Europeans have different tastes and priorities than Americans.”””

    Yes, but it is beginning to seem to me that you are condemning America because it’s free when you want it to be controlling, and controlling when you want it to be free. I would propose that most, if not all, of America’s problems stem from favoring controlling everything, when everything ought to have more freedom.

    There are a lot of people who currently are, or have been, serving time in our prisons for violating laws that have nothing to do with fraud, or with physical harm, or even with drug use. These laws are intended to control commerce, or save the environment, or some other “worthy” cause, but most of them don’t have a “mens rea” element in the conviction — that is, they were done in ignorance, without intention to harm.

    This is the result of trying to fix the world by laws.

    “””I do not understand why you complain about me. Your presidents and his supporters have claimed time and again that the USA are a dark hell hole, a war zone worse than post-WWII Germany. Are you saying he is lying?”””

    I complain about you because I’m not convinced that, while you may have the best interests of America in your heart, you don’t understand how integral freedom is in America’s success — and thus, if we were to follow your advice for our priorities, we would trample on the very things that make us who we are. This annoys me, and it annoys me in no small part because Americans have been doing it themselves for a long time, both with Europe’s help, and independent of European intellectualism as well.

    As for presidents that lie, I haven’t listened to their speeches in detail…but that doesn’t mean that the United States is in need of corrections. I did not believe Obama’s “corrections” were going to fix things, and I have been proven right in many aspects. I don’t quite know what Trump will do, but I don’t entirely trust at least some of the “corrections” he wants to make, either.

    Do our presidents lie? Well, as a general rule of thumb, I generally don’t trust politicians, even the ones I like and I vote for. The goal of any given politician, or bureaucrat, for that matter, is to increase their power over others. As a general rule, if a given politician has to choose between advancing their power, or being honest, it’s probably best to expect them to attempt to advance their power. Politicians that do otherwise are rare — but because they are politicians, they nonetheless cannot be trusted — even if I like them, and appreciate the work they do.

  1092. uma: “””The idea that Haitians would not be better off economically if they had access to a much larger and resourceful landmass than their overcrowded island would be absurd to anyone who knows anything about how modern economies work.”””

    Actually, Haiti was one of France’s most prosperous colonies before they had their revolution — but in the process of the Revolution, they destroyed most of their sugar cane infrastructure. Not that I can blame them, mind you, considering how harshly they had been treated. When they made their formal declaration of independence, though they then went on and committed genocide against everyone that was French, and that has done far more to destroy their long-term prospects of prosperity than anything else, too. And I can’t blame the rest of the world for recoiling in horror from that, either. When Southern slave-holders expressed a fear that freed slaves would kill them, they now had an example where that had happened.

    I have sympathy for the plight of Haiti, but that sympathy has been tempered by their final Revolutionary act. I find genocide, for any reason, deeply abhorrent.

  1093. @Alpheus:


    > Actually, Haiti was one of France’s most prosperous colonies before they had their revolution

    Prosperous for the whites I am sure. So much so that France valued Haiti more than Canada.


    > When they made their formal declaration of independence, though they then went on and committed genocide against everyone that was French, and that has done far more to destroy their long-term prospects of prosperity than anything else, too.

    That isn’t correct. Their economic prospects were doomed from the beginning. A plantation economy cannot be sustained by a freed population. The lack of resources due to limited landmass further doomed their prospects.

    Let us do the following thought experiment: If we were to shut down all the parasitic economic activities hosted on the island of Britain (e.g. banks and banker class) and were to ship back all the hillibillies of the south to their british homeland doubling the population on that island, what would the economy there look like? Would it resemble that of Japan? Or would it resemble the most depressed regions in the midlands?


    > I have sympathy for the plight of Haiti, but that sympathy has been tempered by their final Revolutionary act. I find genocide, for any reason, deeply abhorrent.

    What is it that you find abhorrent about their final revolutionary act? It is ok for whites to commit genocide (which is exactly what happened in Hispaniola) but when the shoe is on the other foot that is “deeply abhorrent” ?

    Another thought experiment: Let’s say the plantation owner class was not genocided. Would they have accepted the new reality and embraced becoming equal citizens on the island while holding hands with their former slaves and singing kumbaya, or would they have plotted day and night to restore slavery and french rule?

  1094. “Another thought experiment: Let’s say the plantation owner class was not genocided. Would they have accepted the new reality and embraced becoming equal citizens on the island while holding hands with their former slaves and singing kumbaya, or would they have plotted day and night to restore slavery and french rule?”

    False dichotomy. They may simply have left.

  1095. @Alpheus
    ” I don’t quite know what Trump will do, but I don’t entirely trust at least some of the “corrections” he wants to make, either.”

    Maybe you should listen to what he says. Tens of millions of people have voted for a man that tells them America is not great and the state of the nation is that of a war zone.

  1096. @Jay:


    > False dichotomy. They may simply have left.

    Leaving would have meant returning with invading force since they knew their way around the island, knew the fault lines between the different revolutionary factions, and knew how how best to re-introduce slavery on the island.

  1097. “Tens of millions of people have voted for a man that tells them America is not great and the state of the nation is that of a war zone.”

    For tens of millions of people, America is not great, not like it once was, and the inner cities are war zones.

  1098. @Jay
    “For tens of millions of people, America is not great, ”

    Indeed, but what is planned to help.

    @Jay
    “and the inner cities are war zones.”

    But the people living there did not vote much for Trump

  1099. @uma: “””It is ok for whites to commit genocide (which is exactly what happened in Hispaniola) but when the shoe is on the other foot that is “deeply abhorrent” ?”””

    I am not aware of where the whites systemically gathered together anyone and murdered them in cold blood, but if they did, then yes, I would find that deeply abhorrent. The murder of innocents is evil. As it is, I consider the slavery practices they had to be evil, which is why I don’t blame them for destroying their plantations. Arguably, they would have been better off overthrowing their masters and then make due with the plantations until they could come up with something better — and when I say “arguably”, I mean “The Revolutionaries themselves argued over whether or not they should do this” — but ultimately, we’re talking about a Revolution, and while we can speculate about what could have been done differently, the best we can do is look at what they did, why they did it, and what the happened afterward. Everything else is speculation.

    From the sounds of things, though, you clearly accept that there are times when genocide is acceptable. I’d really like to see the conditions under which you consider genocide acceptable, and the conditions where it’s unforgivable, and examples for each.

    “””Another thought experiment: Let’s say the plantation owner class was not genocided. Would they have accepted the new reality and embraced becoming equal citizens on the island while holding hands with their former slaves and singing kumbaya, or would they have plotted day and night to restore slavery and french rule?”””

    Yes, the French could have gone back home, with the warning that if they came back, they would consider it an act of war and act accordingly. THEN they could have appealed to Great Britain and the United States for trade, for loans, and for military help to repel any invading forces. If the Southern States had seen a slave revolt where the masters were granted leniency of some sort afterward, the United States would very well have likely been more supportive of Haiti’s independence, and would have been less afraid of the consequences of ending slavery in the States.

    If they were still afraid of the remaining French on the island, they could have determined who the worst slave-owners were, and killed them, after some sort of trial to justify it, leaving everyone else to go back to France. This may have inspired a desire for revenge, though, but it would have been more justifiable than killing men, women and children indiscriminately.

    As it is, Haiti suffered greatly from this genocide — and after years of suffering without any worldwide recognition, they finally started getting high-interest loans from France, which have introduced many problems of their own.

    Yes, a lot of this is hindsight. But it is what it is. And it’s also fairly clear that this particular genocide was committed out of anger, without thought of what the repercussions might be.

    “””The lack of resources due to limited landmass further doomed their prospects.”””

    Let’s do another thought experiment: let’s imagine we split the island of Hispaniola in half, and on the one side, deliberately destroy the economic foundation of the island, and then offend the world with a genocide of innocents. We leave the other side alone, to work out their own political future without destroying their economic base, and without killing people indiscriminately. I would confess that I have a lack of imagination on what might happen on this other side of the island, beyond thinking that they’ll probably prosper a lot more than Haiti.

  1100. @Alpheus

    The more the Left tries to excuse genocide committed by Persons of Color against whites qua genocide committed by Persons of Color against whites, the more voters will flock to the very Nationalist politicians they despise.

    And we’ve now gone from “Welcome to Trump” to “Bienvenue sur LePen”.

  1101. But the people living there did not vote much for Trump

    At least some did…

    And when I was in DC for the inauguration, I met two grandmotherly women, one black and one Asian, who were enthusiastic about wearing MAGA hats but told me they felt afraid to do so at home.

  1102. Winter: “But the people living there did not vote much for Trump”

    Yes, that’s true, but I also find it ironic is that the people living in these war zones have been voting for Democrats for their mayors for *decades*.

    I’m not going to lose too much sleep about a politician who points out things he thinks needs to change. After all, the only reasons I can think of for running for President (or for any position, really) are “Things are great, I’m going to leave them alone” and “Things are horrible, I’m going to fix them”. Usually a politician does both.

    As for believing what a politician says, if a politician is promising to hurt people and attack rights, I tend to believe those promises; if a politician is promising to do the right thing, to make life better and to increase freedom, I tend to be skeptical. So I am both skeptical and fearful of President Trump, and I’m prepared to do what I think I can to oppose Trump when he actually attempts harms freedom, and hold his feet to the fire when he reneges on promises to rebuild freedom. But then, I would have been even more fearful and skeptical of Hillary Clinton.

    So far, I have reasons to believe that Trump isn’t going to be as bad as I feared, but it’s really early in his Presidency, so I’m going to do my best not to let my guard down.

  1103. @Alpheus

    > I am not aware of where the whites systemically gathered together anyone and murdered them in cold blood, but if they did, then yes, I would find that deeply abhorrent.

    Jews. WWII. Shooting pits on the eastern front. Genocide does not have to take the form of cold-blooded mass murder to qualify as genocide. Systematic elimination of a group of people X by another group of people Y qualifies as genocide.

    I also do not know that referring to the massacre of whites in Haiti as “genocide” would be accurate. Whites in Haiti were not a people in their own right. They were outposts of a colonialist empire. A tiny minority in the larger group of “French whites”. French whites, neither on the whole nor in substantial part, have undergone a process of elimination from the face of the earth.


    > From the sounds of things, though, you clearly accept that there are times when genocide is acceptable.

    Genocide = not acceptable. The massacre, while not acceptable, is perfectly explainable in the historical context as an act of revenge by an aggrieved population against their tormentors. The massacres did not include non french whites on the island.


    > Yes, the French could have gone back home, with the warning that if they came back, they would consider it an act of war and act accordingly. THEN they could have appealed to Great Britain and the United States for trade, for loans, and for military help to repel any invading forces. If the Southern States had seen a slave revolt where the masters were granted leniency of some sort afterward, the United States would very well have likely been more supportive of Haiti’s independence, and would have been less afraid of the consequences of ending slavery in the States.

    You have a very high opinion of the US and Britain and their motives, and mistakenly assume that they would have been supportive of Haiti’s independence. It is part of the hubris syndrome i referred to earlier. Is the US in this day an age “supportive” of the “independence” of any country (banna republic or otherwise) in our hemisphere? Or is it acting as a hegemon?


    > Let’s do another thought experiment: let’s imagine we split the island of Hispaniola in half, and on the one side, deliberately destroy the economic foundation of the island, and then offend the world with a genocide of innocents. We leave the other side alone, to work out their own political future without destroying their economic base, and without killing people indiscriminately. I would confess that I have a lack of imagination on what might happen on this other side of the island, beyond thinking that they’ll probably prosper a lot more than Haiti.

    Haiti annexed all of Hispaniola after its independence. It was not until several decades afterwards that the Dominicans regained their independence. The economic base arguments that you’re thought-experimenting with are simply rendered null and void by how the history of Hispaniola unfolded after Haiti’s independence. Plantation economy does not constitute an “economic base” that can be reformed and built upon. Not in Haiti. Not the US south.

  1104. @Jay
    “Winter, I don’t want to hear one more fucking word out of you about how much freer Europe is than the US:”

    Nice to see some Fake News in action. You do not believe in fact checking yourself, it seems.

    But this is the Echo Room pur sang. Why didn’t you look for an English language source that also tries to represent the opinions of the proponents? Or that reported what is actually discussed in Germany?

    Say, like this:
    http://www.zdnet.com/article/can-the-law-stop-fake-news-and-hoax-spreading-bots-these-politicians-think-so/

    or this:
    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/02/fake-news-facebook-us-election-around-the-world

    or this:
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-16/facebook-germany-says-it-will-start-tackling-fake-news-in-weeks/8184436

  1105. @Christopher
    “At least some did…”

    There are people who would vote for their own execution, out of stupidity or spite. Most won’t. The numbers are pretty clear. The people living in these so called “war zones” do not believe the Donald will help them.

  1106. Winter, those articles are about “fake news” on Facebook. not one addressed the point of the Gatestone Institute article: that German businesses are being forced by government to stop advertising that winds up on sites expressing politically incorrect opinions.

  1107. No, it’s not by law…but organizations funded by the German government are behind it all. RTFA, for $DEITY’s sake.

  1108. @Jay
    “No, it’s not by law…but organizations funded by the German government are behind it all. ”

    It is widely published that certain media outlets do not have the best interests of Germans in mind, are racist, and are consistently lying to them. And then you are surprised when widely known German companies do not want to be associated with them? Maybe it comes as a surprise to you, but the German government is not universally hated by the population. This is not the USA.

    @Jay
    “Funded by the German government”

    From the link:
    “Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), BMW, Mercedes-Benz and the supermarket chain REWE”

    These are not “funded” by the German government. These are some of the most powerful companies in Germany. They are also highly profitable.

    1. >It is widely published that certain media outlets do not have the best interests of Germans in mind, are racist, and are consistently lying to them.

      Welcome to the club. Most of the American media establishment doesn’t have the best interests of Americans in mind, and constantly lies to us. We don’t consider that sufficient reason to censor them, though. We just end-run them.

  1109. > It is widely published that certain media outlets do not have the best interests of Germans in mind, are racist, …

    Maybe it would be easier for everyone if there were a way to tell someone’s a racist, so you can refuse to serve them at your business, stay out of their businesses, etc.

    I know! Make it a law that racists have to wear a little badge indicating that they’re racist. It should be a bright color that’s easy to spot, and a bold shape too. How about a yellow star?

  1110. @The Monster
    “Maybe it would be easier for everyone if there were a way to tell someone’s a racist, ”

    Germans are sensitive to such matters. Certain words and ideas make them crinch. Maybe something in their past? Although, some embrace such ideas with enthousiasm.

    @esr
    “Welcome to the club. Most of the American media establishment doesn’t have the best interests of Americans in mind, and constantly lies to us.”

    The funny thing is, there are US newspapers that are rarely found lying. They are also jnow to make an effort to double check everything they publish. But that does not stop political opponents from calling them liars and cheats.

    @esr
    “We don’t consider that sufficient reason to censor them, though. We just end-run them.”

    What censorship are you talking about? In the discussion here I have not found any censorship yet. I also do not know whether it is settled to what extend willful deception falls under freedom of expression. Maybe in the USA it is. But I wonder how this is seen elsewhere.

  1111. > Germans are sensitive to such matters

    That’s why you can’t use actual yellow stars. And it goes without saying that displaying a Hakenkreuz ist verboten. They even forced KISS to alter their logo due to similarity to the Schutzstaffel lightning bolts, which probably makes it illegal for German TV to carry certain Arena Football League games. (The idea that Gene Simmons would use Nazi symbols is laughable. I dare anyone to say it to his face.)

    So instead, the fascist policies have to be enacted under a new banner. Ironically, I’ve seen a lot of people who call themselves “Antifa” acting like Sturmabteilung thugs.

  1112. @The Monster
    “That’s why you can’t use actual yellow stars. ”

    You have lost me. Who wants to force whom to wear yellow Stars of David in modern Germany? What kind of fake news did I miss?

    What is it that you are so upset about? That many Germans do not like racism? Should they like it? Why?

  1113. >You have lost me.

    OK, I’ll break it down for you. I thought the Modest Proposal to require “racists” to wear a visible badge upon their clothing would make it clear to anyone smart enough to comment here, but I was wrong. .

    > What is it that you are so upset about? That many Germans do not like racism?

    No, it’s that they (not just Germany but others on the “left”) learned the wrong lesson. They think they can oppose fascism by employing the power of the state to suppress Bad Ideas and Bad People. It’s now widely considered OK to use violence against someone provided you scream “racist”, “fascist”, etc. at them. I fail to see a significant difference between such violence against ${EPITHET} when the value of that variable changes from “Jew” or “n****r” to the new Untermenschen.

    “What is it that you are so upset about? That many Germans do not like Jews?”

    The pattern is identical: Declare a certain group of people so Deplorable that the rules of civilized society don’t apply to them, then commit property crimes against them (including the breaking of store windows in literal reprise of Kristallnacht) and escalate to violence against the people themselves.

    And because “racist” is one of the top accusations made in Kafkatraps, the charge itself is all that is necessary to lynch someone.

  1114. @The Monster
    “It’s now widely considered OK to use violence against someone provided you scream “racist”, “fascist”, etc. at them. ”

    It is not. This is a myth perpetraited by Americans on the same level as the “war on Christma”. Violence is not tolerated, irrespective of the ideologies involved.

    @The Monster
    “And because “racist” is one of the top accusations made in Kafkatraps, the charge itself is all that is necessary to lynch someone.”

    Not in Germany. You seem to simply project your US media stupidity on Germany. I rarely hear or see Germans accuse someone of racism. Nazi would be much more relevant and even that is used rarely. Except against people who actively defend or admire Hitler.

    Reading your comments, I can only conclude that you have no idea what is happening in Germany, or Europe.

    Btw, In can understand the distorted picture Americans have of Europe. I saw a few “documentaries” about my country on Fox News. They were as informative about the Netherlands as a visit to Euro Disney Paris is about the USA.

  1115. @PapayaSF
    “Here is The Nation, a leading left-wing magazine, supporting violence against neo-Nazis”

    I cannot see how this is relevant to what is happening in Germany (or Europe). I was under the impression that The Monster was discussing the situation in Germany and, therefore, I was writing about Germany. Your link is from a US publication discussing activities in the US by US citizens.

    I know there are activists in Germany who advocate violence. And they are found at all extremes in the political field. But that is not considered OK nor is it tolerated by the police or the law, and it is not supported by the mass media either.

    But if you know better, please share your information with us.

  1116. > I was under the impression that The Monster was discussing the situation in Germany and, therefore, I was writing about Germany.

    You really need to work on your reading-comprehension skills there:

    ME> (not just Germany but others on the “left”)

    I was talking about the larger situation of Leftist ascendance. The protesters in Germany aren’t quite as bad as, say, Greece. But they do their share of glass-smashing.

  1117. @The Monster
    “I was talking about the larger situation of Leftist ascendance. The protesters in Germany aren’t quite as bad as, say, Greece. But they do their share of glass-smashing.”

    So, somewhere in the world something happens?

    You were talking about a forcing people to wear a yellow star in the context of censorship in Germany. And now we are talking about riots in Greece and racial violence in the US. Both exist for reasons that have nothing to do with censorship or the absence thereof in Germany.

    Yes, protesters smash glass in Germany. Just as do soccer hooligans. So what? This is nothing like a government organized Kristalnacht against a single minority.

    “The Left” does not exist, just as “The Right” does not exist.

  1118. Monster already pointed out your illiteracy. Me, I’ll just point out that your Comintern went underground; it hasn’t ever gone away.

  1119. @SDN
    The communist international whatever? Are there still people who believe in that? Wauw.

    @The Monster

    The pattern is identical: Declare a certain group of people so Deplorable that the rules of civilized society don’t apply to them, then commit property crimes against them (including the breaking of store windows in literal reprise of Kristallnacht) and escalate to violence against the people themselves.

    Now, please enlighten me. How does this apply to Germany, or Western Europe. For what I know, this is utter nonsense in current Western Europe. This holds for IS, and a few fringe extremist groups. Nowhere else.

    I do not see why I should get into a discission about US racial tensions as I know next to nothing about the current situation in the US.

  1120. > “The Left” does not exist, just as “The Right” does not exist.

    Bullshit.

    Everyone who has studied politics knows damn well what “The Left” means, (except for the part where they pretend that National Soc‍ialism isn’t on the left). It is a coalition of “victim groups” and their alleged protectors, who seek greater government control to redress the alleged historical harm done to those groups and punish the “oppressors” thereof.

    And “The Right” is simply “anyone opposed to The Left”. This is why they can almost-plausibly classify Nazis as Right-wing: After allying with the Soviet Communists, they turned on them, and therefore “opposed The Left” much as the Mensheviks did. To the rest of us, Nazis and Mensheviks are still “The Left” (National Soc‍ialism has a different notion of who the victims and oppressors are, but it still has them, as all Soc‍ialist movements do), but to the leaders of The Left, they aren’t Left enough, and therefore are “Right Wing”.

    By declaring opponents “right-wing” they then throw on “racist” as the cherry on top, which of course implies “we don’t have to show them any decency, much less debate their policy proposals, because they’re dirty racists”. In Europe (and in America’s coastal elites and academic communities who want to be European), this triggers the memory of the Holocaust, which has led to the irony of laws suppressing anathematized groups in order to prevent a repeat of the suppression of anathematized groups.

  1121. @The Monster
    ” It is a coalition of “victim groups” and their alleged protectors, ”

    I see you playing the victim here.

    Anyhow, this description might have value in the US, what I doubt. It does not fly in the rest of the world, where Left is aligned with Labour and Union parties.

  1122. @winter

    I’m not claiming that government must take wealth from my oppressors and give it to me, nor any variant on that theme (must hire members of my victim class in “correct” proportions).

    If you don’t think Labo(u)r defines workers as oppressed and employers as oppressors, you aren’t paying attention.

  1123. @The Monster
    Every political movement claims they are under attack from the evil others. That is not a prerogative of “The Left”. Just read Bannon and the KKK.

  1124. @The Monster
    “I’m not claiming that government must take wealth from my oppressors and give it to me”

    I do remember bosses claiming that government must jail and shoot strikers and workers who organize unions. And governments that obliged. Things that still happen in various parts of the world.

    The Left and Right are also struggles over the spoils of the economy. You seem to have a fairly simple idea about how these spoils should be divided.

    The parties involved all have their own opinions about this division of the spoils. And they all have the right to organize to make their claims. That you feel the need to demonize one side just suggest to me you lack good arguments.

  1125. “That you feel the need to demonize one side just suggest to me you lack good arguments.”

    And yet the Left demonizes conservatives every chance they get. What does that say about their arguments?

  1126. @Jay
    “And yet the Left demonizes conservatives every chance they get. ”

    Wrong is wrong. Wrong does not become right because others do it too.

    I would say that those who demonize their opponents show their lack of arguments irrespective of their ideology.

    I cannot say more as you do not specify who is calling whom what. Calling a member of the Communist party a Communist is not demonizing, just as calling a self declared white supremacist a racist can hardly be considered demonizing.

  1127. On the other hand, calling everyone who voted for Trump raaaacist!!! and misogynist and Islamophobic and all fo the other words the Left uses to demonize people, regardless of their actual reasons for voting for him, is indeed demonizing.

    That’s all right…the Left seems constitutionally unable to stop doing it, and that will guarantee his reelection.

  1128. @Jay
    What did you tell us about people who voted left in the comments above? (and during numerous other discussions)

    I stand by my earlier position: Demonizing your opponent shows a lack of real arguments. I really do not care what political or ideological position is defended. If you cannot treat your opponent as a human, you are doing it wrong.

  1129. > On the other hand, calling everyone who voted for Trump raaaacist!!!

    @Jay, you need to get the spelling right. There are always exactly five As in “raaaaacist”.

    @Winter:
    >I do remember bosses claiming that government must jail and shoot strikers and workers who organize unions

    If they’re trespassing, they’re committing a crime punishable by incarceration. If they’re also employing violence, the proper police response may in fact be to shoot them (details are pesky things here). Again, the “bosses” weren’t asking the government to take anything from the unions and give it to the bosses. The only way you can see these things as at all symmetric is if you think the purpose of government is to advance the interests of a particular class, in which case you’ve already drunk the Communist Kool-Aid.

    > You seem to have a fairly simple idea about how these spoils should be divided.

    Yep, you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. You think the profits that a business produces are “spoils” to be “divided” like booty amongst a pirate ship’s crew. The idea that someone can create wealth, which therefore belongs to him as a matter of right, does not exist in your worldview. You’re stuck in the pre-agricultural mindset that a certain amount of Stuff exists, and it’s just a matter of making sure everyone gets their fair share of the Stuff that just magically appears. You can’t comprehend the importance of seed corn, (much less machine tools) so you demand everyone get to eat some, even if it means no crop next season. (HT to the late Ric Locke for the metaphor.)

    > And they all have the right to organize to make their claims.
    The failure to distinguish between the producers’ right to be left alone and the moochers’ alleged right to take some of the producers’ stuff is to ratify piracy as equally valid as actually producing value.

    Moral Equivalence isn’t.

  1130. @Michael Brazier
    “If they’re also employing violence, the proper police response may in fact be to shoot them (details are pesky things here).”

    Indeed, details, and historical ignorance:
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States

    Look for the head: Union busting with police and military force

    “You think the profits that a business produces are “spoils” to be “divided” like booty amongst a pirate ship’s crew. ”

    Money is made, who gets what? I think that the neocon position is “Might is Right”. Which is like booty amongst a pirate ship’s crew.

    I can give you a Gedankenexperiment:
    Say, expensive robot factories can produce and transport everything cheaper than any human ever can. Everything, including the creative stuff..
    According to current neocon economics, a few persons would end up with all the robot factories, and everybody else would be out of work and dirt poor. They would essentially become slaves of the robot owners.

  1131. @The Monster
    “You’re stuck in the pre-agricultural mindset that a certain amount of Stuff exists, and it’s just a matter of making sure everyone gets their fair share of the Stuff that just magically appears. ”

    Not quite as simple. A factory combines investments, capital, and labour to produce output. The profits have to be divided between the owner of the capital, any other investors, and the workers. The dividing is done by power. The “most efficient” rule is by free market prices.

    However, the number of factory owners is small and they tend to organize against the workers. This lead to persisting abject poverty in the 19th century. Workers lived a short life on subsistence levels. The poverty was only slowly lifted after unions and labor parties formed.

    All the nice talk about an honest blue collar income is due to unions.

  1132. @Winter
    To pretend that Wikipedia is impartial on anything political is to confess one’s ignorance of how it’s governed. (This is not to say that none of it’s true. There’s always a germ of truth in the myths people tell each other.)

    > A factory combines investments, capital, and labour to produce output.
    Yes, a bunch of people get together and agree on how that’s all going to work. Those who don’t agree don’t have to participate in the enterprise. But that’s not good enough for the unions. They insist they can force employers to do things on their terms. It’s called “good-faith bargaining”, which is to say “you agree you’re going to deal with us instead of anyone else, then we’ll refuse to work unless you give us what we want.”

    > The poverty was only slowly lifted after unions and labor parties formed.

    That’s what your Marxist teachers tell you. My reading of history tells me that it was increasing productivity that allowed people like Henry Ford to pay substantially more money to get the best workers long before the UAW organized them. Unions haven’t done well organizing unskilled workers without the cooperation of governments to coerce employer compliance (or at least to get the police to look the other way when the union thugs break skulls of those who don’t honor the picket lines).

    > According to current neocon economics
    Good grief, you can’t even use your leftist pejoratives correctly. A neocon isn’t an economic conservative; he’s someone who broke with Leftist thinking over national security/foreign affairs, specifically favoring US invervention in the Middle East to fight the Muslim-majority governments antithetical to Israel.

    To answer your Gedankenfantasie I’ll need to know how expensive the Handwavium and Unobtanium are that go into building the expensive robot factories that are somehow able to do everything cheaper than humans despite being so expensive. If they can make things very cheaply, then all the humans have to do is a little bit of “artisanal” work that people buy to show off their wealth, in order to be able to afford to buy the machine-produced stuff for themselves. And of course they can trade with one another if no one forces them to buy from the machines.

  1133. The dividing is done by power.

    Only for the most vacuous definitions of “power”. It’s done by negotiation, which, absent artificial constraints, approaches supply and demand. Workers have the “power” to work somewhere else or not at all. (Note that profit itself tends down, toward the highest profit that’s below the threshold for someone else to think it’s worth the trouble to get a piece of the action. This benefits society generally by demanding efficiency.)

  1134. The Monster: “Good grief, you can’t even use your leftist pejoratives correctly.”

    Leftists started using “neocon” as an all-purpose insult to conservatives, independent of whether they actually embraced neocon beliefs or not, as part of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Apparently, the meme has stuck 8 years after GWB’s retirement from politics.

  1135. @The Monster
    “To pretend that Wikipedia is impartial on anything political is to confess one’s ignorance of how it’s governed. (This is not to say that none of it’s true. There’s always a germ of truth in the myths people tell each other.)”

    Yes I know, Wikipedia is a conspiracy to make people like you look ignorant and stupid. I must say, it works every time. Did you notice that almost every Wikipedia article has a list of references to source material? This one has too, as have the pages it links to.

    @The Monster
    “Those who don’t agree don’t have to participate in the enterprise. ”

    The famous 19th century Freedom to Starve.

    @The Monster
    “My reading of history tells me that it was increasing productivity that allowed people like Henry Ford to pay substantially more money to get the best workers long before the UAW organized them.”

    It did not appear to you that Ford might have increased wages to preempt unionizing? And that there have been rises in productivity during the 19th century that where not accompanied by rises in wages?

    @The Monster
    “To answer your Gedankenfantasie I’ll need to know how expensive the Handwavium …”

    You have no answer, so you ignore the question. You do know what a Gedankenexperiment is? To give a real life example, the British did destroy the cotton industry in all their colonies in exactly this way. The result was nothing like what you portrait. It was mass unemployment and hardship.

    @Christopher Smith
    “It’s done by negotiation, which, absent artificial constraints, approaches supply and demand.”

    In an ideal world, ideal things happen. Not so in our world. And trying to tell me that negotiations nullify power imbalances does not increase your credibility.

    @Chrisotpher Smith
    “This benefits society generally by demanding efficiency.)”

    In its pure form, it rebalances the labor market by starving enough workers to create a shortage. Luckily, the workers organized to prevent such an outcome.

    @Jay
    “Leftists started using “neocon” as an all-purpose insult to conservatives,”

    No, I was addressing neocons and their descendants. They approach the division of income/profits from a political&power perspective (Might=Right). I do know that Libertarians are different (although the outcome tends to be the same). But they are a fringe movement.

  1136. Winter:
    “Wikipedia is a conspiracy to make people like you look ignorant and stupid.”

    No, not an active conspiracy, but eaten up by leftist group-think.

    “The famous 19th century Freedom to Starve.”

    The world does not owe anyone a living. If you don’t contribute to the economy in some way, why should you be supported for free?

    “It did not appear to you that Ford might have increased wages to preempt unionizing? ”

    This is not mutually exclusive with Ford paying the best wages to get the best people.

    “No, I was addressing neocons and their descendants. They approach the division of income/profits from a political&power perspective (Might=Right).”

    No. Neoconservatives are about spreading democracy and democratic governance by forcibly overthrowing dictators. Your position is just your Bush Derangement Syndrome talking.

  1137. @Jay
    “The world does not owe anyone a living. If you don’t contribute to the economy in some way, why should you be supported for free?”

    Sorry, but this position is not shared by the fast majority of human beings. Having poor members starve to death is almost universally seen as a failure of the community. There is a wide variation in what is seen a the “community”, but in modern industrial states, the “community” is seen as the (nation) state.

    The funny thing is, this is just the point the ardent supporters of both Trump and Sanders were making: The nation does owe citizens a way to make a living. That is why Trump promised to end free trade and free movement of labor and also to create jobs with federal money.

    @Jay
    “This is not mutually exclusive with Ford paying the best wages to get the best people.”

    Still, as a counter example against the influence of unions on wages, it does not work.

  1138. > Still, as a counter example against the influence of unions on wages, it does not work.

    What unions of auto workers existed before Ford more than doubled pay from ~$2.25 to $5/day (counting bonuses/profit-sharing)? You seem to be giving the threat of unions that didn’t even exist the credit for Ford’s business decisions. Every improvement is credited to the unions, and every ill is blamed on the evil businessmen.

  1139. “Having poor members starve to death is almost universally seen as a failure of the community.”

    This does not mean that government has the right to force me at gunpoint to support my lazy bum of a neighbor.

    “The nation does owe citizens a way to make a living.”

    No, the nation owes its citizens the duty to stay the hell out of their way while they earn their own living. There’s a difference.

  1140. Eric, if you’re still monitoring this thread, you should read the following article, which I found deeply frightening. Apparently the same firm helped both Trump AND the Brexit vote, mainly due to a new take on Big Data. The level of intrusion into people’s private lives is frightening, horribly scary stuff.

    http://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump

    And you might add “Hire Cambridge Analytics” to your advice to Democrats. It looks like their take on data was enourmously helpful for both Brexit and Trump. (I don’t know what you thought of the Brexit vote, but the pound has gone down about 25% on the passage of Brexit, which speaks for itself.)

  1141. @Christopher Smith
    > Only for the most vacuous definitions of “power”.

    This is a common tactic of Leftist terminology. They equate economic “power” (the ability to create things of value) with political power (the ability to destroy things of value and/or people, combined with the willingness to do so, so that the threat of force to extort the value others have created is credible. In a moment of honesty, Mao famously said that power flows from the barrel of a gun.).

    To anyone with a functioning brain, creative and destructive “powers” are completely different things (such that using a single unadorned word to describe both collectively is either ignorant or dishonest), and the creative is far preferable to the destructive. But the Leftist insists that creative ability is evil and wrong unless and until it’s properly tamed by ever-benevolent destructive government power. (Then a Trump gets elected, and when he’s the one wielding the power, they lose their Schidt because they can finally imagine how destructive it really can be, which they can’t do when Their Guy is in charge.)

  1142. @Jay
    “This does not mean that government has the right to force me at gunpoint to support my lazy bum of a neighbor.”

    Ah, only lazy bums are poor. Luckily this never happens to the ill, old, and unlucky oned, nor to widows and orphans.

    @Jay
    “No, the nation owes its citizens the duty to stay the hell out of their way while they earn their own living. There’s a difference.”

    The Donald promized its voters the opposite, more govenment money and involvenent, and thus so did the GOP. So you seem to belong to a tiny minority.

  1143. “The monster- ‘What unions existed before Ford more than doubled pay from $2.25 to $5.00 a day?’@

    The one in New Jersey that Ford fought with a runaway shop by starting his plant in River Rouge. Don’t offhand know if it was widely affiliated or ‘just’ the workers in that shop getting together to demand higher pay.

    I agree with your larger point that the increased US living standard and raise in US tech level between 1860 and 1930 was the result of freely operating capital in a freer country. (I also agree that the slowdown in US technological advancement since has been a result of D party vandalism- for example D Jimmy Carter’s judge breaking Bell Labs.) But labor was organizing and operating before 1930. Knights of Labor, First Communist International, IWW, yes, but those are just the bloviators who tend to monopolize history books. Lots of sensible workers were smart enough to get themselves organized before it was a D party line.

  1144. @The Monster
    ” They equate economic “power” (the ability to create things of value) with political power (the ability to destroy things of value and/or people”

    Silly word play.

    There is only ine “power”, the ability to let others do what you want. It is utterly irrelevant how this power is achieved, only its limits are important. Obviously, this power can be used to change the lives of people and the bigger world for better or worse.

    @The Monster
    “In a moment of honesty, Mao famously said that power flows from the barrel of a gun.).”

    Mao’s power was to attract followers he could blind with his “vision” and then send out to terrorize the rest of the population. He lied, always. Especially in this quote. Funny that you would fall for his ramblings.

  1145. @Jay
    “No, not an active conspiracy, but eaten up by leftist group-think.”

    And you know what, reality itself is eaten up by “leftist group-think”. At least, that is what I read in all these comments and in the media adored by their writers. Every fact that does not suit them must be a lie. And reality keeps coming back with all these leftist facts that have to be denied.

    The correct definition of “alternative fact” is “fairy tale”. But alternative facts work, because an alternative name of “The Alt-Rigth” is “The Gullible”. They believe anything, absolutely anything, as long as it tells them that their darkest desires and wishes are true.

  1146. >Ah, only lazy bums are poor. Luckily this never happens to the ill, old, and unlucky oned, nor to widows and orphans.

    A widow or orphan’s poverty does not justify armed robbery, whether or not the robber happens to wear a badge.

    >Silly word play.

    If you honestly think distinguishing between the creation of value vs. threatening violence to get others to give you value is silly word play, then your worldview is irreconcilably opposed to civilized society. An agricultural society cannot function for long if farmers don’t have reasonable expectation that they’ll get to keep the crops they labor to produce simply because someone with political power can take it from them arbitrarily. Industry can’t be built without similar assurances to those who reduce their current personal consumption in order to create the tools to produce future value.

    So sell your computer and give the proceeds to those widows and orphans, because by your own stated moral code, you don’t have the right to have one. Then move into the wilderness and subsist on whatever nuts and berries you can gather and game you can hunt.

  1147. > Mao’s power was to attract followers he could blind with his “vision” and then send out to terrorize the rest of the population. He lied, always. Especially in this quote. Funny that you would fall for his ramblings.

    If you don’t think “power flows from the barrel of a gun” is true, then go to China and publicly express displeasure with the anti-democratic policies of the government. See how long it takes for those guns to be trained upon you. Go to Iran and say you don’t like the policy of hanging gays or stoning “adulteresses” (many of whom are actually rape victims). Let us know how well that goes for you.

    With a sane definition of “political power”, it’s nearly tautological that it is based on the ability of the state to coerce compliance with its dictates.

  1148. @The Monster
    “If you honestly think distinguishing between the creation of value vs. threatening violence to get others to give you value is silly word play, then your worldview is irreconcilably opposed to civilized society.”

    “Creation of value” is not power in the sense of “Making people do what I want”. Actually, it is not power at all, it is an ability or a craft.

    @The Monster
    “An agricultural society cannot function for long if farmers don’t have reasonable expectation that they’ll get to keep the crops they labor to produce simply because someone with political power can take it from them arbitrarily.”

    1) You are not living in an agricultural society.
    2) There has not been an agricultural society in historical times that did not collect taxes on farmers. As your compatriot famously stated, “but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

    @The Monster
    ” Industry can’t be built without similar assurances to those who reduce their current personal consumption in order to create the tools to produce future value.”

    On the contrary, there has never ever been an industrial society without taxes. And, currently, the most successful ones all have social welfare.

    @The Monster
    “So sell your computer and give the proceeds to those widows and orphans, because by your own stated moral code, you don’t have the right to have one.”

    I happily pay a lot of taxes so widows, orphans and all kind of poor people in my country can be supported. There is no reason to forgo the pleasure of the rest of my income. I never said I have no rights to things I consider others should be given.

    @The Monster
    ” then go to China and publicly express displeasure with the anti-democratic policies of the government.”

    I am not sure what you want to say here. The Chinese would simply send me back to my country, if they cared enough. Actually, if I do not say it in Chinese, they would not even notice. If I wanted to get into real trouble, I would have to talk about Tibet or Falong Gong, but they would still just put me on a plane. Anyhow, the Chinese in earshot would shun me as they do not like foreigners who talk politics. Guns would only come into play if I was committing violence. The same would happen in Iran, but then I would have to talk Farsi.

    The point is, neither Mao, nor the Ayatollahs carried guns. Their power was that that they could tell others to “deal with the situation”. Far down the line, someone might use violence, possibly deadly violence. But at that point, all the levers of power would already have been used. The whole point of power is that you do not have to use guns.

  1149. > The correct definition of “alternative fact” is “fairy tale”.

    Anyone who insists that Bruce Jenner and Bradley Manning are women who must be named as “Caitlyn” and “Chelsea”, referred to by feminine pronouns, and allowed into women’s restrooms, has no room to talk. And I’ve seen an awful lot of that group attacking “alternative facts” lately.

    When two sets of statements are both true, but the people who control an information source suppress one set, it’s not unreasonable that those who’d like the second set to be heard as well to use a word like “alternative” to describe that second set.

    In the industrialists-vs-unions case, one set of facts is “the union organizers are trespassing”, and you offer alternative facts like “the factory owners pay people to shoot union members”. It’s just fine when you do it, but when your political opponents try, they must be called liars.

  1150. > “Creation of value” is not power in the sense of “Making people do what I want”. Actually, it is not power at all, it is an ability or a craft.

    Creation of value gives people the “power” to trade that value with others who have created value, when the terms of the deal are agreeable to all parties involved. It is that “power” that you try to equate with political power.

    > 1) You are not living in an agricultural society.

    Funny, but when I look at Google Maps, I see a metric assload of farms. The only people who don’t live in an agricultural society are hunter-gatherers. That we’ve progressed to industry and information as economic drivers doesn’t change the fact that food production is predominantly on farms and ranches.

    > 2) There has not been an agricultural society in historical times that did not collect taxes on farmers

    A tax to cover the cost the government incurs to defend the farmer against predation is one thing. A confiscatory tax rate is another. If the tax rate gets too high, there won’t be enough farmers, and the society collapses.

  1151. > The point is, neither Mao, nor the Ayatollahs carried guns. Their power was that that they could tell others to “deal with the situation”.

    And those others carry the guns. Do you think Trump doesn’t wield power out of the barrels of the guns carried by FBI agents, soldiers, etc. just because he doesn’t personally carry a gun himself (to our knowledge)? Is this really the pretzel you want to tie yourself into to be able to claim that Mao’s statement was wrong?

    Why in the hell do they have those parades with soldiers marching, trucks hauling missile launchers, etc. if not to make the point that they have those guns and are willing to use them?

  1152. @The Monster
    Funny juggling of words. The “Power to Trade” is an empty statement. In that sentence, power is just a synonym of “opportunity”, which has nothing in common with “you do what I say or else…”.

    The rest is equally confused. When someone has female genitalia and breasts, be they artificial or not, why not call them a woman?

    If you look into mefical literature about “gender”, you will find out that quite a number of people get born without a definite “gender” (I do not like the term, but it avoids the moderation queue). They often get corrective surgery to give them a definite male/female body. Do you object to that too?

  1153. @The Monster
    “Is this really the pretzel you want to tie yourself into to be able to claim that Mao’s statement was wrong?”

    Mao’s history is evidence that it is not wielding guns that will give you power. In the 1960s, Mao was sidelined. The guns were controlled by others. He called upon the yought to defend his “revolution”. These youngsters started the cultural revolution and overthrew the sitting government. His power was in his words. The same with Khomeini in Iran.

    Trump has power, because people will fight for him. Gorbatchov lost his power when nobody wanted to listen to him anymore.

  1154. @The Monster
    “Funny, but when I look at Google Maps, I see a metric assload of farms. ”

    Which are mechanized to the roof and produce for industrial processing with government susidies. This is not what is considered an “agricultural” society.

  1155. > Funny juggling of words. The “Power to Trade” is an empty statement. In that sentence, power is just a synonym of “opportunity”, which has nothing in common with “you do what I say or else…”.

    You’re the one who said the “spoils” are divided “by power”, explicitly equating trade negotiations with governmental edicts. If you can’t make sense of it, look in a damn mirror.

    >The rest is equally confused. When someone has female genitalia and breasts, be they artificial or not, why not call them a woman?

    Last I knew, both Jenner and Manning had penises, and Our Betters insisted they be referred to as female despite this inconvenient truth.

  1156. > Mao’s history is evidence that it is not wielding guns that will give you power

    So defeating the Kuomintang in the civil war isn’t what gave the Party power?

    >He called upon the yought to defend his “revolution”. These youngsters started the cultural revolution and overthrew the sitting government.

    I don’t know whether the Red Guards had many weapons beyond the improvised sort to supplement their knuckles, but they employed lethal violence against their enemies, unopposed by the People’s Liberation Army, the main group with better weapons. The “youngsters” beat people to death, every bit as dead as someone shot by a gun.

    Your attempts to somehow refute the notion that power comes from demonstrating the ability and willingness to use violence (“the barrel of a gun”) keep bringing up examples of people … demonstrating their ability and willingness to use violence.

    The First Rule of Holes is your friend.

  1157. @Jorge

    It’s the trick of defeating a spam filter by inserting an invisible HTML Entity like Zero Width Joiner (&zwj;) into a word.

    For example, a lot of spam involves sale of the erectile dysfunction remedy “Cia‍lis”, which screws up political discussions that mention “socia‍lism” unless the trick is employed. “socia&zwj;lism” thus appears as “socia‍lism”, but doesn’t trip the trap due to the invisible character strategically interrupting the offending word. Similarly, when I simply used the word “pen‍is” up-thread without making it “pen&zwj;is”, the trap tripped and put the post into moderation.

    One day, spammers will learn this trick, at which point spam filters will start flagging anything including &zwj; in the first place. And I’ll have to figure out something new.

    __
    This comment uses the trick consistently, so it should avoid the filter.

  1158. @The Monster
    ” and Our Betters insisted they be referred to as female despite this inconvenient truth.”

    So, it would have been OK if their anatomy had been changed? That puts us into a bind. As trans people often warn: “It is extremely impolite to inquire after the state of ones genitalia”. So how do we check?

    But back to the original claim about “alternative facts”. I do not see this as a counter example. I am not aware of anyone disputing the facts about the anatomy of these people. There are just differences in how you should interpret male/female. You seem to adhere to a strict anatomical interpretation. The people you complain about see them as social labels indicating the role one is playing in society, independent of the anatomy. These are not alternative facts, but alternative uses of language labels while still agreeing about the underlying facts.

    On the other hand, if The Donald claims more people attended his inauguration than that of Obama in 2008, there is no difference in how to interpret “more people attended the inauguration”. He is simply claiming that more living people were standing there in 2016 than in 2008. These numbers can be verified empirically, and they show that The Donald is wrong. In that sense, the Alternative Facts of the Trump Administration are pure fiction, as are all other alternative facts (or else, why would they be alternative?).

    @The Monster
    “So defeating the Kuomintang in the civil war isn’t what gave the Party power? ”

    The power of individuals in peace time is something completely different from the violence of factions during a war. In the end, it is usually the powerless of a group that have to carry the guns and get killed, while the powerful might never use a gun in their life.

    We are discussing how the cash flow of enterprises are distributed regarding (negotiation) power of the participants. Now you come claiming there is no negotiation power because all power flows from the barrel of a gun. And your evidence is how civil and other wars are decided.

    That is like saying my interactions with my bank are based on gun violence because of armed bank robberies. Maybe it is different in the US, but I have never seen trade negotiations that involved guns. Even in the US, LEO’s are not supposed to use gun power unless there is a risk of life or limb. Indeed, if you do not pay your taxes, they come take your stuff, but guns are only used if you use violence to resist them.

  1159. > We are discussing how the cash flow of enterprises are distributed regarding (negotiation) power of the participants. Now you come claiming there is no negotiation power because all power flows from the barrel of a gun. And your evidence is how civil and other wars are decided.

    No, I’m claiming that y’all (sadly missing 2nd person plural in formal English) deliberately conflate two things by calling them both “power” when they are not at all the same thing. Any “negotiation power” that is based on “give us what we want or we will commit violence against you” (aka “your money or your life”) is completely different from “I’d like to trade the value I will produce for the value you will produce. Deal?” but by lumping them in together, y’all justify one to “balance” things more in favor of Approved Victim Groups when y’all don’t like how the negotiation driven by the other sort of “power” turns out.

    The Mao quote is to illustrate the crucial difference between the two kinds of “negotiation” (because “economic power” does not flow from the barrel of a gun; it comes from the freedom to innovate new ways to be productive). Because you’re so desperate to keep the conflation going, you tie yourself into knots to pretend that political power is not based on demonstrating the willingness and ability to use coercive force.

    > The power of individuals in peace time is something completely different from the violence of factions during a war.

    Mao gained power in the civil war because he had the winning army on his side. His Red Guards’ demonstrated willingness and ability to commit lethal violence to win the Cultural Revolution, nominally a time of peace, and no other faction was both willing and able to do so to oppose him.

    Were Donald Trump just an entertainer with a colorful way of expressing himself, few people would feel compelled to take to the streets to protest him. It’s because he now has the ability to command all of those guns that people are losing their Schidt.

    The power of individuals in peace time is their demonstrated ability and willingness to commit violence personally, and to command the armed forces, police, and other entities that commit violence upon their behalf. You can pretend you’re above such nastiness, but when your government enacts a law against ${X}, it is saying “If you do ${X} we will punish you, and if you don’t accept your punishment, we’ll use whatever force is necessary to make you accept it, up to and including killing you.” This is not a criticism of government: it can do nothing else, because if that threat isn’t implicitly (if not explicitly) understood by the populace, then whatever criminal is willing and able to commit violence to defend himself from the government can do ${X} with impunity, showing the government to be powerless. And no government can allow that to stand, so at some point you’re going to have to kill someone to prove you really do have that power.

  1160. @The Monster
    ” Any “negotiation power” that is based on “give us what we want or we will commit violence against you” (aka “your money or your life”) is completely different from “I’d like to trade the value I will produce for the value you will produce. Deal?””

    You assume a free labor market in equilibrium. That is when “I’d like to trade the value I will produce for the value you will produce. Deal?” would presumably hold.

    When there is an excess of labor, as there has almost always been since the start of the industrial revolution, this means that wages can drop below subsistence level. That has actually happened during the 1840’s in Europe. If you want to know how that was, Charles Dickens wrote some nice fiction about that time. The result is that enough laborers starve to bring the market back into balance. Another result was a Europe wide revolution that lead to organized labor, communism, and a start of labor laws. Your vision of “fair negotiations” are simply another implementation of the “Freedom to Starve”.

    But the labor market is not an efficient market at all. It is an oligopoly. The number of industrial employers available to a laborer are few, while the number of competing laborers are very many. The few employers always organize against the laborers (read Adam Smith about merchants and their view of free markets). Meanwhile, employers everywhere have used their considerable money and influence to prevent laborers to organize in likewise fashion (see my Union Busting link above for some of the efforts).

    So, in your free labor market scenario, on the one side are a few well organized employers who negotiate a few percent of their surplus wealth, on the other side are many more, unorganized potential workers than there are jobs. These applicants are negotiating about the life or death of themselves and their families. They were truly “Free to Starve”.

    If you do not want to call this difference a power imbalance, it still remains the same huge imbalance that determines the outcome of any negotiations. And that outcome was evident.

    By 1910, around 10% of the population of the UK lived at below subsistence level (extreme poverty), while the top 10% owned 90% of the wealth and got 45% of the income. European countries installed laws against child labor because the overworking of children left too few able young men to populate the army.

    A little reading in industrial history of the 19th century would show you that the “guns of the state” were generally trained at the workers to keep them from changing the rules of the game more to their advantage. So, if you insist on defining power exclusively as that what flows out of the barrel of a gun, then the power still sided with the owners, and not the workers.

  1161. “if The Donald claims more people attended his inauguration”

    That’s not what he claimed. What he claimed was that more people watched his inauguration than did Obama’s. This is quite a different claim, since it includes people not watching it in person.

    “So, in your free labor market scenario, on the one side are a few well organized employers who negotiate a few percent of their surplus wealth, on the other side are many more, unorganized potential workers than there are jobs. These applicants are negotiating about the life or death of themselves and their families. They were truly “Free to Starve”.”

    This is an excess of supply over demand. The answer is to start another business to soak up the supply.

  1162. @Jay
    “What he claimed was that more people watched his inauguration than did Obama’s.”

    His Press Secretary Sean Spicer begs to differ:

    Standing next to a video screen that showed the crowd from President Trump’s vantage point, Spicer insisted that media outlets had “intentionally framed” their photographs to minimize its size. After attacking journalists for sharing unofficial crowd-size estimates—“no one had numbers,” he said—he proceeded to offer a categorical claim of his own. “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” he said, visibly outraged. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/inauguration-crowd-size/514058/
    Emphasis mine.

    The crowd-size controversy began on Saturday, Jan. 21, a day after the inauguration, when President Trump claimed the media had misrepresented the number of people attending his inauguration. Trump spoke at CIA headquarters and said that “one of the networks” had shown “an empty field,” while he saw a crowd that “looked like a million-and-a-half people” and “went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/24/fact-check-inauguration-crowd-size/96984496/

    @Jay
    “This is an excess of supply over demand. The answer is to start another business to soak up the supply.”

    Somehow, either due to lack of capital, skill, or other reasons, the actual historical result is people starving to death (in the 19th century, until labor laws improved things).

    I know of few examples where mass unemployment was solved by starting new businesses, and all of them involved out-sourcing, that is, rich regions moved industries to poor regions, leaving unemployment in the rich regions constant at best.

    But maybe you can educate me about better examples?

  1163. Winter, the sentence you highlighted proves my point, not yours. In common English usage, “witness” does not imply presence, merely seeing.

    “Somehow, either due to lack of capital, skill, or other reasons, the actual historical result is people starving to death”

    A lack of entreprenurial vision? Why was Europe different in that regard from the US, which didn’t have the same Dickensian problems?

  1164. @Winter

    So all you’ve done is confirmed that you believe that your Approved Victim Groups are allowed to use the power of government to compel others to provide value to them, because of an imbalance of “power”, once again equating the power creative people have to create with the destructive power thugs have to break windows, burn vehicles, bruise, bloody, or even kill those they see as supporting the “power” of the kulaks. You aren’t refuting that it’s your belief; you’re trying to justify that it’s OK because that imbalance of “power” has to be remedied, by force if necessary. This is precisely the mindset of the rioters re-enacting Krystallnacht in the name of “antifa”.

    You are fully on record as saying that the threat of physical violence to coerce someone into a transaction against his free will is legitimate. When that bites you in the ass, you probably won’t even be able to appreciate the irony of it.

  1165. @Jay
    “In common English usage, “witness” does not imply presence, merely seeing.:”

    “in person” does mean “present”. And that matches all the talk about what Trump saw during the inauguration. This is also the interpretation used by everyone else.

    @Jay
    “Why was Europe different in that regard from the US, which didn’t have the same Dickensian problems?”

    During the 1840s? At that time the USA had a rapidly expanding population which was cultivating large amounts of arable land. Like all developing countries, the USA at that time was growing at higher rates than densely populated Europe. The US experienced something vaguely alike during the 1930s depression.

  1166. @The Monster
    “So all you’ve done is confirmed that you believe that your Approved Victim Groups are allowed to use the power of government”

    During the period I am talking about, the 19th century, the power of government was strongly on the side of the owners.

    @The Monster
    “because of an imbalance of “power”, once again equating the power creative people have to create with the destructive power thugs have to break windows, burn vehicles, bruise, bloody, or even kill those they see as supporting the “power” of the kulaks.”

    The Kulaks was in the Soviet Union, where the dictator of the time did not believe in the rule of law nor market economy.

    What I am describing is a system where workers have the right under the law to organize in unions and to strike. That does balance the negotiation power well. The experience of the last century teaches us that having unions leads to a society with much less poverty and much better social circumstances than having no unions. Also, it helps build a strong industry, witness German. So, as a social experiment, workers unions can be said to have succeeded brilliantly.

    I have no idea what “Approved Victim Groups” and “the destructive power thugs have to break windows, burn vehicles, bruise, bloody, …” have to do with organizing labor in the 19th and 20th century?

  1167. > What I am describing is a system where workers have the right under the law to organize in unions and to strike.

    But what’s been implemented is a system where workers are forced to join the union or get their heads bashed in, because unions aren’t happy with having the right to organize. They insist upon the special power to have a monopoly (enforced by some combination of their own thugs and the ones with badges employed by the government) on the provision of labor to a particular employer. The laws against monopolies have to explicitly exclude labor unions in order for the unions’ monopolies to be legal.

    > The Kulaks was in the Soviet Union, where the dictator of the time did not believe in the rule of law nor market economy.

    And when other countries decide it’s OK to go after someone who’s managed to build some wealth as if the wealth is itself evidence they’ve gotten it by unjust means, we can’t call them kulaks, because nothing we’ve learned from every other time people do that can possibly apply to the next time?

    > I have no idea what “Approved Victim Groups” and “the destructive power thugs have to break windows, burn vehicles, bruise, bloody, …” have to do with organizing labor in the 19th and 20th century

    If you don’t think thugs have anything to do with organizing labor in that timespan, you’re either ignorant or lying your ass off.

    But I’m not just talking about previous centuries. I’m talking about the thugs on the streets of US cities like Berkeley, CA, the birthplace (and ironically now gravesite) of the Free Speech Movement, just a few days ago; or a long list of other cities where various leftist “protests” have played out. Or the mobs that form in European countries when the Approved Victim Groups don’t think they’re getting their way, and decide to demonstrate their willingness and ability to employ (lethal if necessary) force to coerce compliance (aka hold power over others).

  1168. @The Monster
    “But what’s been implemented is a system where workers are forced to join the union or get their heads bashed in, because unions aren’t happy with having the right to organize.”

    Every people have their own idea on how to organize things.

    @The Monster
    “But I’m not just talking about previous centuries.”

    To bad, I am taking the longer view, not just the issues of the day. You want to change the foundations of your society based on today’s soundbites?

    @The Monster
    “Or the mobs that form in European countries when the Approved Victim Groups don’t…”

    What exactly are you talking about?

  1169. > What exactly are you talking about?

    Everyone else here knows about the mobs that break into violence when they don’t get their way. We’ve seen the videos. Funny that you, living closer to those mobs, hasn’t a clue about them.

    Funny.

  1170. @The Monster
    “Everyone else here knows about the mobs that break into violence when they don’t get their way.”

    Europe is a big place. We have had soccer mobs, squater mobs, the odd political demonstrations. And that is only the Netherlands. But union violence?

    I have no idea what they show you in the US. What I have seen of it, I would not dare to even speculate.

  1171. Winter: ““in person” does mean “present”.”

    Read the sentence you quoted again:

    “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,”

    That sentence says that the combination of in person and around the globe was the largest ever. Nothing more, nothing less. Those who claim otherwise are merely trying to use it to hit Trump over the head.

    “The US experienced something vaguely alike during the 1930s depression.”

    Except, you know, for actual starvation. Private charities handled that just fine, even after FDR deepened and prolonged the depression with his rampant government takeovers of things.

  1172. @Jay Maynard – the fact that they made excuses about ground coverings, put up comparisons of crowd pictures from different times of day, etc, is more than enough to demonstrate that they were pushing a claim that it was the largest in-person audience until it became clear that it could not be sustained.

  1173. @Jay
    ““Everyone else here knows about the mobs that break into violence when they don’t get their way.””

    That is why I wrote “vaguely alike”. People had become more civilized in the century since.

  1174. @Jay
    “That sentence says that the combination of in person and around the globe was the largest ever. ”

    I think the best word to describe a Trump supporter is “gullible”.

    1. After reading two-dozen +/- Left-Wing, immoral, stupid Democr-asses brainless, “non-Christian Like Behaviour”… (Please pardon my typing “faux pas”. I do not, normally “swear’.); I, actually, understand a little bit more as to why liberals are Democrats. They need an education and to be educated. They should not be sitting in “any” classroom high on “anything” except God, the U.S.A., family and life. Honestly, in my, approximate two-dozen liberal paragraphs, I was unable to find “just One” Commentary that was written (typed correctly). Maybe the Democrats should, first get degrees in “Linguistics”, “English” (begin with the basics : “English 101”), “Capitalism”, etc. However, they should do themselves a favour, take many Conservative courses that actually teach people “How Not to Depend on the Government” and learn to be a success all by themselves.
      NOTE : For you “under” to “uneducated left-wingers” (Dumbacrats . . . excuse me, please . . . Democrats . . . also, please excuse my redundancy regarding my aforementioned words stating,”uneducated left-wingers”), do yourselves a favour. Turn your television on to “OAN” (One American Network), sit back soberly and watch this network, for at least, four hours straight. Now I shall mention, the nearly impossible, for you “dead” cell-brained, ubiquitous, clueless, jejune, peons that exist in this world of ours; as much as I see it, “Our United States of Americans”, for those who want to better themselves. Keep your minds open and free. Do not allow any disturbances; whether it’s your families or your minds trying to play tricks on all of you. Keep your minds “clear” along with complete and utter silence, as if you are all a small part of the infrastructures in our culture. Watch “OAN Network”, unbiased and ask yourselves after four+ hours of watching the real & authentic “happenings” in this great country of ours & compare it to the miseries of other countries that were once First-World countries and are now Third-World countries because of war caused (usually) by “religion”, “greed” and “power”. Then I would appreciate a rebuttal (after the news and after all of you have taken the appropriate University classes that I am not suggesting, but demanding), if any of you, ever, want to have another “pretty, little” thought in your heads. Then maybe . . . just maybe, I might be delighted (or mortified) as to speak with you and “learn” what you “heard” and to what you, actually, “listened” to on “OAN Network” and, actually, payed attention to and, not only, listened to your professors, but “heard” EVERY Conservative word that came out of your professors mouths. Now if you and your “liberal ways”. still haven’t matured enough like President Ronald Reagan and President Donald Trump (both former Democrats; with age, comes “wisdom”), then we must ALL pray for your souls and that you’re not damned for “eternity”. Yes. There are afterlives for all of us. If my very, positive message gets out to, even, one person and that one person is saved from eternal “damnation” . . . well then, my four+/- hours of typing could, possibly, save a “soul” or more. (My daughter calls us “Technology-Challenged”.) Therefore, if I have made “any” faux pas . . . I am very sorry. Although, you have to admit “one thing” . . . I’m not too “prideful” that I, too, can and may be corrected. May GOD Bless all of you who read my letter on the “Leave a Reply” by,”And the best way to describe a Leftist is ‘evil’.”

  1175. @SDN
    Evil? If you seriously believe half of the US population and most of Canadians and Europeans are “evil”, you are indeed “gullible”.

  1176. @Jay
    I see I made an error above, pasting the wrong quote. I wanted to comment on:

    @Jay
    “Except, you know, for actual starvation. Private charities handled that just fine, even after FDR deepened and prolonged the depression with his rampant government takeovers of things.”

    That is why I wrote “vaguely alike”. People had become more civilized in the century since.

  1177. “People had become more civilized in the century since.”

    Even granting your premise – instead of, possibly, differences between American culture and European culture – that undercuts your argument that the solution to the problems requires government.

  1178. @SDN
    “Belief doesn’t enter into it. History enforces that conclusion.”

    I have not yet seen empirical evidence proving all Canadian, German, French etc. socialists are evil. Until then, this is a believe. Especially as this evilness is counter to all observations, this is a counterfactual believe.

  1179. @Jay
    ” that undercuts your argument that the solution to the problems requires government.”

    I have not seen a solution that did not involve government. The solutions I know of where all implemented by law and involved unions or government institutions.

    Please feel free to educate me.

  1180. @Jay
    “Who do you think ran those soup kitchens?”

    But that is preventing starvation, where we can ask whether everyone in need was reached.

    Unions aim at changing the distribution of the profits of comercial activities to ensure workers get a share that lifts them above subsistence level. That is completely different from preventing people from starving.

    These are the “real jobs” Trump’s voters want.

  1181. You were complaining about “the freedom to starve” nd how capitalism and free markets lead to people starving. When I show that they need not, you move the goalposts.

  1182. @Jay
    “When I show that they need not, you move the goalposts.”

    There are two parts.
    1) Without organized labor (backed by law), workers end up in subsistence jobs with a sizeable portion below subsistence. Evidence from around the turn of the 19th century the UK point to over 10% of people below subsistence. Note that in 1910, there was no European middle class. The top 10% people owned 90% of the economy and country. The other 90% owned the remaining 10%. The situation in the US at that point was different, due to the enormous growth of the population and economy.

    2) The 19th century showed that without labor laws, the freedom to negotiate is a freedom to starve. The fact that charity can and will reduce the number of people starving, at least in the 1930s, is only a stop gap for this fundamental problem. You cannot negotiate a deal relying on charity to keep you and your family alive if you fail. And we do not know how often charity failed.

  1183. David Szonyi:

    I know I’m a tad late to this party.

    Your insistence on evidence that Democrat/[re]gressive leadership has advocated or proposed any bans or confiscations of guns is unreasonable. At the least, you’re arguing sloppily. Allow me to demonstrate, and forgive the length of my windedness and the gratuitousness of my metaphors, some of which may be mixed, which would be totally disgusting.

    Your most serious culinary error in the multi-course meal you’ve prepared from your comments is the assumption you baked in that only public proposals or advocacy for outright bans and/or confiscation of firearms could qualify as evidence of Democrat/[re]gressive hostility to gun rights and Amendment the Second. More subtle indicators of Democrat/[re]gressive hostility, such as Clinton’s public admiration of Australian compulsory buy-back policy, for example, wouldn’t qualify, which is nonsense; your food doesn’t taste right. In fact, I quake in paradoxically paralyzing fear that if I consume too much of it, I’ll suffer compressed vertebrae from the resulting twin geysers of jet-propelled projectile vomit and diarrheic feces as the temple that is my body utterly rejects what you’ve served up.

    Would a U.S. governor’s speaking positively of another state’s rigorous identification standards to vote not be perceived by Democrats/[re]gressives such as yourself as evidence of hostility to “voting rights” or of amenability to “voter suppression”? Of course it would; such has been amply demonstrated by Democrat/[re]gressive resolute resistance to reasonable voter restrictions. By your reasoning, however, any Democrat/[re]gressive wariness of such a hypothetical governor’s admiration of another state’s rigorous identification standards to vote would have to be dismissed as paranoia. I suspect, in other words, that my following your heirloom logic recipe to serve you the dangerous-to-the-point-of-biohazard shit sandwich with a partially dissolved, outhouse urinal cake for dessert wouldn’t go over too well with you.

    More to the point, your baked-in assumption is actually an informal logical fallacy: false dichotomy. Even though more are possible, you allow only two options: either 1.) Democrats/[re]gressives are hostile to gun rights and Amendment the Second as can be evidenced only by public proposals or advocacy of bans or confiscations, or 2.) They are not hostile to gun rights and Amendment the Second because they do not publicly propose or advocate bans or confiscations. If your assumption rests on dismissal-as-paranoia any conclusions that Democrats/[re]gressives are hostile based on more subtle evidence, you’d also be guilty of the ad hominem informal logical fallacy. That would be the used condom mint of mucous mayonnaise added as the secret sauce to that horrific shit hoagie. Mmm, mmm, mmm!

    A deeper delve into strategy and tactics should deliver the coup de grace to your conveniently arbitrary evidentiary requirements.

    One of our most deeply entrenched metaphors is “politics is war”. In war, one of the most valuable assets is the element of surprise: you want to keep your troop movements, battle plans, weapons technology, etc. a secret so that it is much more difficult if not impossible for military adversaries to prepare for or defend against your attacks or successfully penetrate your defenses. In the war that is politics, you want to keep your intentions, strategy, tactics, and proposals a secret if you anticipate that you will be opposed by political adversaries, especially if you think their opposition would be too difficult or costly to overcome—if your intel reports to you that the risk of mission failure rises above a certain maximum threshold.

    It would be foolish, for example, to make your intentions known by publicly proposing something you have reason to believe would fail to be adopted and would weaken your position. The wiser course would be to bide your time, concealing your intentions until you believe that you can overcome or erode the opposition of your political adversaries by, for example, changing the terms of acceptable debate: shifting the Overton window.

    Overton doesn’t have just one window. He has one for each public policy in the dilapidated skypiercer that is our political discourse, a structural dirty syringe with a list of code violations longer than the combined rap sheets of, well, all rappers, living and dead. We could call this the “Overton skyscraper” to account for all of the many Overton windows. It’s got really unique and dynamic architechture with all of the windows shifting at different rates. Some of them shift more quickly, perhaps in a few years. Others shift more slowly, perhaps over generations.

    One of those windows is for health care policy. I think it’s on the 347th floor, or was it the 374th? Maybe it’s the 743rd; it’s too hard to remember. In a system of strictly limited government that respected individual liberty as the paramount political value, Overton’s building would at most be a small cottage, if that, which is all that what’s left of my simple mind is able to accommodate.

    The health care policy window is one of those that took generations to shift. [Re]gressives have for the better part of a century sought to tyrannically place individuals’ most personal sphere of decision-making and resource allocation, medicine, completely in the clenched fists of the simian state. It arguably took about that long, then, for the health care window to shift enough to give us that botched, half-measure 0bamination of the Patient “Protection” and “Affordable Care” Act. If your reasoning above is a scata-logical po’ boy, 0bamacare was a shit hurricane, a series of Biblical-caliber policy plagues set upon the farmland of freedom from which all of the healthful sandwich ingredients are harvested and raised.

    Given how long it took for that Overton window to shift, it would be ignorant to claim that any dearth of public proposals within it during the small sliver of time of a single president’s administration, for example, meant that no one sought or desired to tyrannically place medicine completely in the white-knuckled fists of the state. No less ignorant would be any cheap-shot labelling of nuanced examination of more subtle evidence as paranoia.

    Which brings us back to gun policy, whose window I know for a fact is on the Second floor of the Overton skyscraper.

    David, I’m certain you are much smarter than I am. You cannot seriously claim, therefore, that because 0bama hasn’t declared, for example, in a telepromptered speech in his 8 years on the job a desire to repeal Amendment the Second that therefore he and the [re]gressive movement he represents harbor no desire to “salami-slice” our gun rights away over a timeframe that may dwarf his own administration, that he and the [re]gressives wouldn’t rather turn up the heat gradually so that the bitterly clinging frog of Amendment the Second slowly boils to death rather than jumps out of what’s become the rusty pot to save itself before it’s too late.

    Another point: your insistence on everyone else spoon-feeding you all of the arguments and cited source material and then throwing all kinds of qualifiers out there such as “reputable”, “reasonable”, and “common-sense” is lazy and juvenile. You shouldn’t be surprised, then, when the commenters treat you as such and instruct you to do your homework.

    Your homework, by the way, is easier here than it really should be. If you paid enough attention on your way in to this rootin’ tootin’ saloon of Armed and Dangerous deplorables, you’d have noticed that even though Mr. Raymond, the proprietor (a.k.a. the eraser, ‘cause if you fuck with him, he’ll wipe you out), serves up many fine topical spirits, only four are prominently listed on the sign above the door: sex, software, politics, and firearms. Mr. Raymond, who happens to have a pet Python, the Great Beast of Malvern, to help him serve up the software (like that NTP[triple]sec) craft-brewed in the basement, actually specializes in the topic of guns. In fact, those spirits are all tagged on the top shelf for more efficient retrieval. He’s made it easy for any visitor to sidle up to bar, order a few shots, and knock back the knowledge himself until he’s tipsy with enlightenment. Your demand that Mr. Raymond or one of his regulars reach over the bar, hold up the shot glass to your lips, and tilt it back for you is, to put it politely, bad form.

    And then there’s your concern for the propriety of Mr. Raymond’s establishment: if he doesn’t divert some of his bandwidth to nannying those few patrons who might get a little rowdy, he’ll lose “credibility”. As he has alluded to, he has more important and effective uses for that bandwidth: remaining ever-vigilant against the omnipresent syndicate threat from the PFACORN*—the Progressive Facilitators and Altruistic Community Organizers of Redistribution and Networking—and brewing ever more software with his Great Beast, which resembles an elephant more than a Python when it comes to its staggering memory. *(formerly known as the RTFT: Red Thieves of Fascist Totalitarianism, the gang wizened up and retained the services of that supreme institutional message massage parlor of ideological public relations: the Academy.)

    Given all of the above, it would be difficult not to conclude at this point that you’re on the take for the PFACORN—in other words, a troll. But maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps you, David, can enlighten me, provided you do me the honor of doing more than just “skimming” my comment, interminably long as it is. Keep in mind, though, that I may be an intellectual quadriplegic, so the burden will be on you to hold that shot glass of intoxicating knowledge to my lips so I can take it in. You may need to accompany me to the commode afterward, though, to hold my hair back if I’m unable to keep it down.

  1184. > If your notion of “liberal” is so tied to hoplophobia

    Isn’t some amount of “hoplophobia” (aka “fear of weapons” for greek people like me who think using pretentious greek-derived phrases to sound smart is silly) somewhat natural for human being?

    Guns are manufactured to kill at a distance. It’s literally the only thing they are made to do. Who knows what kind of brains the person with the loaded gun carries (who doesn’t even have to get close to me to kill me if he wanted to). Even if he has passed shrink tests, he might have flipped since he got possession of the gun.

    I am not a liberal, I am small-state right-wing advocate, thank you.

    1. >Isn’t some amount of “hoplophobia” […] somewhat natural for human being?

      No. We can tell this because it usually dissipates quickly if you can get the victim to a range for some hands-on experience.

  1185. If the Democrat party does implode, that honestly might be what the Libertarian party needs to get off the ground and become a contender. Think about it. If the left fractions into two or three middling-left to far-left groups, the more centrist parts of their party could well drift over to Libertarianism. Plus, on top of that, there are a number of people – of which I am one – who live in a swing state and vote Republican for national offices, because the race between Democrats and Republicans is too close and a Democrat victory is too horrible to consider. These people, if the Democrats fractured, would be considerably more willing to vote Libertarian.

  1186. Well, we’re just a few days away from the 2018 midterms. I am hoping that the democrats have ignored ESR’s advice and will receive another shellacking. They are 100% Pure Evil ™ and deserve to be wiped out.

    1. >I am hoping that the democrats have ignored ESR’s advice

      Sadly, they doubled down on all the stupid shit. Whether it will lead to the shellacking they deserve remains to be seen, but I note that the late polls have been trending Republican.

      1. Once again, I am noticing one of the nasty aftereffects of this phenomenon: the more one side does stupid shit, the farther the other side can backslide and still remain the preferable choice.

        I struggle to think of anyone who comes out looking good these days. Ben Sasse might be one. Rand Paul, depending on who you ask. On the left, a month or so ago, I heard Claire McCaskill making noises about getting hospitals to make their prices viewable by the public, at a bipartisan hearing on health care reform. I was tempted to write her an encouraging letter, maybe get her to embrace additional reforms I’d like, or to move away from her gun control position. (She’s running for re-election now.) Not being from Missouri, though, I surely have zero standing.

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