New York Tries To Shoot The NRA In The Head

     The Attorney General of New York is trying to get rid of the National Rifle Association, not by prosecuting them, but by outright dissolving the organization via civil suite, including taking their assets to distribute to charities as the state of New York sees fit. The Summons also asks to bar them from soliciting or collecting funds and void transactions entered into or proposed by defendants.

     Also, the complaint they filed has exactly 666 allegations!

     How and why?

How: New York can get away with this because the NRA was chartered in New York and can’t just reincorporate in another state, but to gain the permission of the Attorney General to dissolve and transfer its assets. They are doing this via civil suite because the threshold for guilt is lowered “from ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ to ‘a preponderance of the evidence.’”

     Why:  The leadership has been accused by people within the gun community and the NRA itself of using the NRA as a personal piggy bank and appropriating funds for their personal use. Since it appears likely that a good amount of this could be shown with “a preponderance of the evidence” the leadership has not only exposed themselves but the entirety of the NRA to punishment, including total dissolution and confiscation of assets.

     For this reason, many in the gun community are cheering on the death of the NRA! They are cutting of their nose to spite their face.

“Look, guys, the largest 2A lobbying organization in the country being dissolved is great for us! Bloomberg won’t be totally uncontested in that space now, because we like to pretend that Southern Valley Gun Enthusiasts sending one letter a year to their local state comptroller can just slide right in and take over for the NRA.

“Also, the only nationwide training certification organization going down will be nothing but great for gun owners. Not to mention all those ranges closing because they just lost the entity that provided them the start-up loan and insurance!

“But most of all, what we really want to celebrate here is that a rabidly anti-gun state can ultimately succeed at dismantling a nationwide organization when their other attempts – such as prohibiting insurers licensed in the state from doing business with the organization – fail. That’s the kind of power we want anti-gun states to have.”

     There are complaints, of course, by people who think the NRA does nothing, always caves, and otherwise doesn’t push hard enough for gun rights. This ignores that the NRA is more than just fighting political fights and has the breadth, history, and prestige that no other organization has.

     How bad is this?

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Racism As Health Crisis

     It would make sense health care dealt with actual health issues such as diseases. We are living in an age, however, where the biggest health crisis is… “racism”.

     The Governor of Michigan has declared “racism” to be a public health crisis, and that the problem is “systemic racism” including promoting “equity”:

“We must confront systemic racism head on so we can create a more equitable and just Michigan. This is not about one party or person. I hope we can continue to work towards building a more inclusive and unbiased state that works for everyone.

“…

  • “The Council will act in an advisory capacity to the governor and develop, review, and recommend policies and actions designed to eradicate and prevent discrimination and racial inequity in Michigan. To accomplish this goal, the Council is charged with:
  •    Identifying state laws, or gaps in state law, that create or perpetuate inequities, with the goal of promoting economic growth and wealth equity for the Black community.
  •    Collaborating with the governor’s office and the Black community to promote legislation and regulation that ensures equitable treatment of all Michiganders, and seeks to remedy structural inequities in this state.
  •    Serving as a resource for community groups on issues, programs, sources of funding, and compliance requirements within state government in order to benefit and advance the interests of the Black community.
  •    Promoting the cultural arts within the Black community through coordinated efforts, advocacy, and collaboration with state government.
  •    Providing other information or advice or taking other actions as requested by the governor.”

     The Governor of Nevada, Governor Sisolak Sleestak, similarly declared racism to be a “public health crisis”.

     He went on to cite “[i]nstitutional and systemic racism” which will be dealt with by the Office of Minority Health and Equity. Yet again, we see not only the citation of “equity”, but the presumption that racism is “systemic”. If you thought the government making you wear a mask due to Corona-chan was tyranny, imaging the emergency measures that they could impose to “cure” racism!

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Struggle Sessions Come To Seattle

     The Struggle Sessions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution was a tool to insure ideological adherence by humiliation, torturing, and even literally cannibalizing those—including those who had been zealous revolutionaries themselves but not “enlightened” by the new days standards—deemed not sufficiently pro-revolution, and thus class enemies were forced to admit their counter-revolutionary since ostensibly for their benefit but in reality to not only strengthen the regime but bring people closer to it by privileging them due to explicit participation in sessions against the “counter revolutionaries”.   While physical punishment, executions, and cannibalism are not being (openly at least) exercise, the humiliation and forced apologetism of the Mao’s Cultural Revolution has come to the City of Seattle’s so-called “Office of Civil Rights”.

     Christopher F. Rufo, from City Journal, obtained documentation outlining just such a segregated “struggle session” aimed at all White city employees and only White city employees.

     “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” is the new woke truth to stop “racism”, ‘twould seem.

     Notice how they presume that all White people are racist, and it is only a matter of finding out the particulars?

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Anti-Science Ways Of Knowing

     One of the common ways those on the radical Left avoid explaining things or to even avoid any objective truth, is to declare that due to “different lived experiences” different people and/or genders have their own “ways of knowing” that is impossible for people of other groups to understand and that completely contradictory things can exist at the same time because each is true to their respective groups.   This is how we get the declaration that gravity is a social construct while witches can throw magical lightning bolts, or that science itself is sexist and thus wrong for countering the anti-Patriarchy™ narrative. Even the simple truth that we are a sexually dimorphic species can be rejected due to it running against the received truth of wokeness.

     Thus we can see that this is a faith that considers science to be a “received truth” that contradicts the “received truth” of radical Leftist ideology.

     However, the treating of science as “received truth”, and not a means of gaining a greater understanding, is not limited to the Left. The belief that “science” is a false faith and that learned scientists are akin to snake-oil salesmen is not usually as pronounced as when it comes from the Right, but the Right will reject science and scientists that is contrary to their “different lived experiences” and “ways of knowing”.

     One such unfortunate example comes from Richard Fernandez who typically is insightful and informative, who was prompted by an article from City Journal, which is also typically insightful and informative. Corona-chan, unsurprisingly, was what led to his rejection of the scientific faith, due to imperfect or lacking information and lack of a body of tests to support a “correct” answer. But Mr. Fernandez’s lack of faith goes beyond the usual bemoaning of “politicized science” to a decrial of a “way of knowing” that he and others don’t understand.

“What the public calls ‘science’ ‘began with Francis Bacon moving the study of Nature from haphazard experience to designed experiments, and Galileo placing scientific knowledge within the frame of mathematics, not requiring explanation in terms of human physical categories.’ For so long as a phenomenon could be mathematically modeled and predicted, it was valid even if could not be expressed in common-sense terms. Hence the expression ‘trust the science.’ This epistemology was so successful it seemed the scientific method had reached its final form even if purchased at the price of incomprehensibility.

“‘The advent of quantum mechanics in the first part of the Twentieth Century brought it to light: a theory may be preposterous from the perspective of human intelligibility but lead to predictions that agree with empirical observation—and therefore be scientifically valid. Man can possess knowledge beyond the limits of his physical understanding.’

“You just had to ‘trust the science,’ even if you could not explain it. The Galilean-Newtonian paradigm shift made the modern bureaucratic state and secular millennial movements possible by seemingly guaranteeing that scientifically informed authority could control events and thereby human destiny. It was the foundation of authority and legitimacy.”

     This isn’t just not right, it isn’t even wrong.

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     Many people are seeing the current madness of Critical Racial Theory, “anti-racist” training/struggle session, and other assorted hyper-racializations happeneing and asking whence this madness came. A Heritage Events podcast over at Ricochet does a very good job of exploring the long history of this and its sub rosa Gramsian march through the institutions that many on the left consider their Fabian moment.

“Following the death of George Floyd, books such as White Fragility rose on bestseller lists and “anti-racist” training programs saw a massive increase in demand in corporate America and governments at all levels, and concepts like ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘internalized racial superiority’ found their way into everyday conversation. What is the origin of Critical Race Theory that informs much of this training and what are its goals? And, will this new form of identity politics truly heal our nation? Join us for a discussion on the pervasive trends that, under the guise of equality, make diversity training in government, corporate America, and schools pernicious, divisive, and destructive.”

     It is highly recommended to anyone who actually wants to understand the enemy.

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Joe “Bad Touch” Biden’s Plan To Destroy Small Businesses With Wokeness

     Lawfare is when the legal process is the punishment. Large corporations, who are increasingly “woke”, can handle the expenses of lawsuits easily enough, but smaller companies and sole-propiratorships can and would be easily wiped out, which is why small companies are exempted from the draconian impositions of larger companies (and anyone who has been involved with small companies darn groks why). Joe “Bad Touch” Biden, however, wants the unwoke to suffer.

“Joe Biden released his ‘racial equity plan’ on Tuesday. Some of it deals with racial issues, like a major expansion of affirmative action and lots of race-related government spending.”

     Right off the bat you know what he is proposing is evil by the use of the word “equity”.

Pictured: Joe “Bad Touch” Biden’s plan for America.

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Institutional Privilege of the Revolution

     One of the core articles of faith in #BlackLivesMatter is that the police are agents of systemic racism who exist only to oppress—because not helping a protesters/revolutionaries control where people can travel and attacking cars that don’t knuckle under to the protesters/revolutionaries is now oppression.

     In a twitter thread, that left the protesting twit literally shaking, a woman claimed to be oppressed and tried to explain how that not being able to control where people can travel and attacking cars that don’t knuckle under to the protesters/revolutionaries makes the police and innocent motorists the oppressors.

     That twitter thread will now be fisked.

A fisking! A fisking!

     Videos are available at the Thread Reader collection of the tweets.

“Let me speak on what happened in Georgetown tonight. #DCprotest #georgetownkaren

“Tonight [REDACTED] led a siren/noise pollution protest where we blocked off streets in Georgetown. The police presence was heavy. As we blocked off streets we demanded that people turn around. This was a minor inconvenience for this affluent white neighborhood.”

     Controlling the streets and telling people turn around with the expectation that that will happen is a demonstration of actual “institutional power” and an expectation of actual “institutional privilege”.

“As we blocked streets, certain drivers got annoyed and attempted to maneuver their way around us. This particular white woman tried to cut through a gas station. Me and a couple other protestors stood in front of her car and demanded she turn around. Instead she steps on the gas.

“In the video above, she had already attempted to run us over multiple times and I had moved from the front of the car to the side and was banging on her window screaming at her to stop. Throughout this whole thing, the cops are doing nothing.”

     Surrounding and harassing someone just because they won’t blindly obey your illegal demands doesn’t put you in the right. In fact, it makes you the baddie.   The woman in the car was clearly trying to get away from these aggressive lunatics. It must have been terrifying for the woman in the car.

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News of the Week (August 2nd, 2020)

 

News of the Week for Aug. 2nd, 2020


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     I began posting old episodes of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line” in the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse—and as a pleasant way of ending the week.  It also served to help me keep posting up during slow-news periods where I didn’t have anything to add or detract from what was already being said.

     However, with so much madness since George Floyd’s death, I’ve been  publishing a lot more posts that are of a timely manner.  As such I’ll probably end up skipping posting “Firing Line” in the coming weeks or whenever posting is otherwise heavy.

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Cult Of Normalcy

     “Doublethink” is an interesting thing when applied in practice. For much of the norms of most of the world, the beliefs and thinking of the broader Left can, more or less, infiltrate societies and change them through tyranny and mutation such that the change almost seems organic and natural; in contrast, America (and to an extent the Anglosphere) the difference is so stark that inevitably one will triumph over the other. And that is the core issue of our time: at the moment we are in an apparent state of “doublethink” but in reality it is civilizational cogitative dissonance that will collapse upon itself in the worst way possible.

     Nothing better shows this than the schizophrenia of “racism” in modern America. On one hand most adult Americans believe that racism refers to discrimination by people of one race against another… regardless of which race is which. This is an encouraging finding, however there poll whereby most Americans think that American society is racist! Oh how this confusion can be the cause of misunderstanding and intra-conratry thinking.

     But what does this have to do with the question of “normalcy”?

     Perception and opinion derived therefrom.

     For most people, there is a presumption of normalcy: That most people they are around agree with them at least in some broad consensus and that is said consensus is threatened, that of course their local society at large will respond with manly force and opposition as they imagine themselves doing… and inevitably winning in some fantasy story. They ignore the slow multi-generational Gramscian march not realizing what has been lost and certainly not what will be lost.

     Such individuals have been tricked to not look, examine, and embrace those core values of America as taught from parent to child, but to focus on the superficiality of “normalcy” with the assumption that what they perceive as “normal” is the default and that any threats thereto will fail due to “abnormalcy” always losing to the emotionally satisfying and assumptive notion that one’s own beliefs and perceptions are the inevitable conclusion to any and all disruption.

     People are too invested in “normalcy”.   For that reason they will never give up life’s “little pleasures” even when such “little preasures” have been corrupted and taken over by the Gramscian march. They will allow not only their cherished institutions and superficial pleasures to be taken over but will excuse inexcusable action because they are tossed a gnawed bone of “normalcy” and for far too many, that is all it takes to pacify.

     But when that deep-seated sense of “normalcy” is interrupted, oh how many of those people who decry “soy boys” and fantasize about being the “resistance” will realize that such fantasies become untenable when they are left with no pleasures, no comfortable living, and not even the hope of “normalcy” away from the battlefield in a sane and rational country.

     Just look at how many people are losing their mind over having to wear a mask to enter a store.

     Most so-called “Patriots” who are flipping out over having to wear a mask will sell out for that sweet, sweet sense of temporary “normalcy”, no matter how much of a trap it is.

     Perhaps the root of this problem can be encapsulated “I just want to grill” meme, whereby there is a rejection of the objective threat to said sense of “normalcy” while going through the motions (John Frum style) of normalcy and protection above all else of said superficiality.

Why didn’t the soy boy β cuckservatives Inc. defeat my enemies for me so I didn’t have to be bothered while I just wanna go and grill for God’s sake!!1!

     This, as noted already, is a presumption of normalcy, which ignores the fact that America is a result of countless confluences of events that gave us a rare example of where the rules are above the rulers and where the social norms were of such virtue that broad liberty could exist and even be cherished while be protected by the sober understanding that we will not let our passions forge our fetters.

     This, as noted already, is a presumption of normalcy, which ignores the fact that America is a result of countless confluences of events that gave us a rare example of where the rules are above the rulers and where the social norms were of such virtue that broad liberty could exist and even be cherished while be protected by the sober understanding that we will not let our passions forge our fetters.

     This is not to say that those who cling to “normalcy” are cohorts in the “fundamental transformation” of America, but simply that for the vast majority who have focused in on their own live and immediate community have been distracted from the real threat by the phantom menace of overt antagonism, thus feeling that the alternatives that are different from such antagonistic demands are somehow acceptable.

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