Contributors

Monday, March 29, 2021

Hey, Lindsey

To show his NRA bona fides, Lindsey O. Graham went on Fox News to issue the standard blather the gun industry has bought and paid for:

“I own an AR-15,” Graham told Fox News host Chris Wallace. “If there’s a natural disaster in South Carolina where the cops can’t protect my neighborhood, my house will be the last one that the gang will come to, because I can defend myself.”
 
Seriously? Lindsey, this is South Carolina we're talking about. Everyone in the gang that comes to your door is gonna have their own AR-15, some of them modified for autofire. And they'll all have Glock 17s -- no, they'll probably have two apiece. And a Bowie knife. And maybe a couple of grenades. Plus a laser sight. And a silencer. And half of them will be wearing body armor. All courtesy of you and the other Republican gun-industry shills in Congress.

Come on, Lindsey! Was it really the smartest move to advertise to the entire world that you have a stockpile of AR-15 ammo? You just made your house the gang's first stop after the natural disaster exacerbated by the climate change you pretend doesn't exist.

All these Republican gun lovers imagine that they're all Rick Grimes. But it's a fantasy: they're all Negan.



Less Regulated Than Vaginas

 


Saturday, March 27, 2021

Take Your Operative and Shove It Up Your Prefatory

Gun humpers like to use this explanation of the second amendment to sound extra grammar smart. 

The second comma divides the amendment into two clauses: one “prefatory” and the other “operative.”

Invariably they say this in an online debate to make their opponent scared at their “intellect” regarding the English language. The problem is that they aren’t being truthful. Shocking, I know, that someone who has weird beliefs about guns should be so dishonest. 

Absolute clauses are indeed grammatically independent but that doesn’t mean that they are automatically unrelated. In fact, absolute clauses typically provide a causal or temporal context for the main clause. 

The founders, most of whom were classically educated, would have recognized this rhetorical device as the “ablative absolute” of Latin prose. To take an example from Horace likely to have been familiar to them: “Caesar, being in command of the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence” (ego nec tumultum nec mori per vim metuam, tenente Caesare terras). The main clause flows logically from the absolute clause: “Because Caesar commands the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence.” 

The second amendment written this way would read “Because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias that were much needed to face the standing army of the British, a horrifying concept to the people of the time. 

Explain this to the next liar who has cult-like beliefs about guns

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Hey Kevin Baker, Guard Duck and Other Traitors

Read this.

Stop fucking up our country with your nonsense. 

Friday, March 19, 2021

SUBMIT

If you are someone who pretends that racism isn't that bad...that the left is too "woke"...that people of color complain too much...that culture doesn't matter...that our horrible history with African Americans, Asians, Latin peoples, and other people of color should be denied or ignored... 

YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. AND WHY WHITE MALES WITH GUNS GET AWAY WITH "HAVING A BAD DAY." 

Your horseshit attitude about race isn't going to cut it anymore. You are aiding and abetting the enemies of equity. And the rest of us are going to force you to change your ways.

YOU. ARE. GOING. TO. SUBMIT. 





Thursday, March 18, 2021

Religious Misogyny Motivated the Georgia Murders

When eight people, mostly Asian women, were murdered at massage parlors in Georgia, a huge argument ensued: were these race-based hate crimes, or the acts of a sex-crazed wacko?

The piece of trash that did this was turned in by his parents, who gave the cops his cellphone number so they could track him down. We'll call him "PoT" instead of his real name to avoid giving him the notoriety he likely craves.

PoT's Instagram account had the following tagline: “Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God. This pretty much sums up my life. It’s a pretty good life.”

If life was so good, what was PoT's problem? Why did he do this?

Authorities said Robert Aaron Long had confessed to the killings and had told investigators he had “a sexual addiction.” Long indicated he may have frequented the spas in the past, police said, and that they were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”

In other words, PoT was a disgusting and weak animal, and "Guns and God" were the answer he chose to solve his own failings: kill the thing he desired and his temptation would go away.

We see this pattern over and over and over, in nearly all religions. In Saudi Arabia they make women cover themselves from head to toe to avoid inciting the passions of weak men. In Afghanistan the Taliban stopped girls going to school so they wouldn't tempt men. Ultraorthodox Jews in Brooklyn treat women like chattel, denying them a real education and turning them into baby machines that no man but their husbands can touch. Catholic priests worldwide crusade against birth control and abortion, denying women the most basic control over their own bodies. Southern Baptists disallow dancing and their pastors tell women that they have to look attractive because "God made men to be drawn to beautiful women," while sporting a gut that could dam the Mississippi River. And all religions have been covering up the rapes committed by their pastors, priests, rabbis and mullahs since time immemorial.

Religion gives animals like PoT license to murder. Here's how it goes. Lust is a sin. Temptation is how Satan takes us away from God. Satan is evil. You must conquer temptation. Throw in some guns and the answer is obvious. PoT was "proving" to God the strength of his faith, by destroying evil temptation at the source, killing these women.

How can I know that this was the motivation? There are literally millions of women out there to tempt him, and PoT knows that he can't kill them all. But he can pass God's "test" by killing the temptations he's met.

PoT had been in treatment for addiction, and clearly it failed. PoT's youth pastor said, “I don’t say this callously: I don’t know what’s happened in [PoT] to get to this point. What happened last night doesn’t seem in any way like the young man I knew.”

I can tell that pastor how PoT got to that point: religion screwed him up. By harping on sin and temptation and pretending that whatever force in the Universe that created the Andromeda galaxy actually cares how some bozo in rural Georgia gets his rocks off, his "faith" drove him to murder.

Religion does give legitimate comfort to some people. An old lady can die happy, thinking she'll be reunited with her long-dead husband. It can help some kids stay on the straight and narrow.

But then we saw how nearly the entire evangelical hierarchy endorsed a completely depraved and immoral man for president, despite his own bragging about how he sexually assaults women. And then they had the gall to compare him to King David (who was also a total scumbag, but one who ultimately repented). And then they sued state governments that wouldn't let them crowd their congregations into disease-filled churches so they could fill their collection plates during a pandemic. All the while claiming that they are "pro-life."

Organized religion has lost whatever moral authority it ever had. It's just another gang of greedy men grubbing for money and power.

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

End The Voting Rights Battle

I don't do this often but both sides are completely wrong in the voting rights debate. And Ross Douthat has explained why in his latest piece. 

The first study, from the Democracy and Polarization Lab at Stanford University, looks at the effects of no-excuse absentee voting on the 2020 elections — the kind of balloting that a lot of states expanded and that many Republican state legislators now want to roll back. Contrary to liberal expectations, easing the voting rules this way seemed to have no effect on turnout: “States newly implementing no-excuse absentee voting for 2020 did not see larger increases in turnout than states that did not.” Then contrary to Republican fears, the easement didn’t help Democrats at the G.O.P.’s expense: “No-excuse absentee did not substantially increase Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout.” Overall the authors argue that what drove higher turnout in 2020 was simply “voter interest” in the elections, not the major voting rule change, which “mobilized relatively few voters and had at most a muted partisan effect.” 

The second study comes from a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oregon, and it looks further back in time to assess the effects of Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court revision of the Voting Rights Act that made it easier for states to impose voter ID laws and other restrictions. Using data from six federal elections, the author finds no post-Shelby divergence between white and African-American turnout in states affected by the ruling. Indeed, if anything, the jurisdictions saw African-American turnout rise relative to white turnout in the 2016 elections, suggesting that new obstacles to voting prompt swift mobilization in response.

That should all clear it up, right? 

Bwahahaahaha!!!