Sorry. You're being too elliptical about what it is you are trying to say. I give up on trying to coax out a worthwhile point from the exchange.
You might or might not be Kimmi behind that VPN, but the resemblance is uncanny.
Either way, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about here. And based on that last comment, there's every reason to suspect that whatever point might be in there is grounded in both non-standard postulates about reality and fantasies about weird things that just plain didn't happen, and therefore will almost certainly be of little value to the general discussion.
Thanks anyway. (To be explicit, this last sentence is not strictly an expression of gratitude but rather a closure of at least my end of the conversation).
This turns out to be true also regarding vertical allocation of power within a state as well as vertical allocation of power as between a state and the federal government.
No one cares about where power is allocated vertically, and vanishingly few people care about where power is allocated horizontally. All they care about is their side winning, today.
Why do you say "two years ago"? Have cultural conventions about nudity changed from 2021 to 2023?
I should think context matters quite a lot when assessing the threat signalled by nudity in public. A naked guy staggering down the street in apparent intoxication, shouting at lampposts, and waving pointy objects about? Yes, that's a dangerous scenario. That would be a dangerous scenario if the guy were clothed; nudity would further indicate mental instability but it's any sort of too-erratic behavior coupled with proximity to a weapon that would trigger my spidey-sense.
A naked guy staggering down the street at a Pride parade whooping like a Nashville bachelorette party? He's almost certainly harmlessly drunk and hopefully his friends will get him home to sleep it off after the party dies down. A guy who's naked and probably stoned, tubing down a river on a hot summer day? In a lot of places the nudity part of that would be legal or at least tolerated, as long as other behaviors didn't indicate a likelihood of lewd conduct or violence. Hope you used the waterproof sunscreen, dude.
Last night, Our Tod presented another one of his marvelous spoken word shows at a local establishment and I patronized. Brought along an OT-adjacent fellow I became friends with over Tiwtter; he moved to the area a few months ago and is looking to establish his own routines and social circles, and I'm happy to help out with involving him in my own social and entertainment activities.
Tonight, I've no plans. Perhaps a good opportunity to do laundry and housework, as boring as that sounds for a Friday night, because much of the rest of the weekend is spoken for.
For me, tomorrow night is the symphony. I ought to brew another batch of beer at some point but the weather is too beautiful for me to stand the idea of spending most of the day in my basement even if it's a pleasure to brew. It'll rain one of these weekends soon enough.
Sunday is hiking day. This will be shorter than last week's, because Sunday night will be a casual dinner with Our Tod and his lovely family. His young adult sons like my homebrew so I usually make a gift of several bottles to them.
Much to think about here:
https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/05/17/a-low-income-housing-developer-swears-off-any-more-portland-construction/?mc_cid=d4fb251683&mc_eid=f9bfaa3a1b
I'm far from surprised to learn that overgrown bureaucracy is a significant impediment to mitigating our housing crisis. I doubt anyone outside of the municipal government is.
Worth noting: every bureaucrat involved would have a plausible-seeming justification of the importance of their roadblock to the process.
Also worth noting: the developer here was willing to market to low income residents, and to deal with some expenses relating to both bureaucracy and crime. He still saw a path to profit.
Finally worth noting: there appears to be a model of a solution readily available. If only the city would learn from it.
I wish we could stop paying attention to him. Unfortunately, as Anderson Cooper pointed out, he is the polling leader for the GOP nomination in 2024 and that means there's a very good possibility he'll be President again in 2025. I think we *have* to pay attention to him, like it or not. (And "not" sounds like it's the case for both you and me.)
But that doesn't mean we have to give oxygen to his antics nor that we all have to play the game by his rules. (He changes the rules unilaterally when they don't favor him, anyway, or at least whines about the rules not being such that he's got an advantage.)
That means CNN probably does have to allocate air time and journalistic effort to him. But it doesn't mean that it has to give him an audience of nothing but people who have already indicated they support him -- indeed, he probably should have an audience mixed with people who both support and criticize him. CNN mishandled that situation in obvious eagerness for ratings and relevance, and it's backfiring on them.
For me, one of the really charming things have always been the rainwater collection basins on peoples' roofs. Key West (and all of the other Keys) have no natural source of fresh water, so it can be 1) piped in from the mainland, 2) desalinated on nearby Stock Island, or 3) collected as rainwater. This being Florida, it's not clear that a lot of people in Key West are really aware of how precious fresh water is there, beyond its utility to hold freezing temperatures and make Bahama Mama Cocktails out of the slushie machines much more refreshing.
I believe the T-shirt shops are mostly apolitical. They sell the F Joe Biden stuff because the tourists buy it. They sell tickets to drag shows because the tourists buy them. If it isn't outright illegal and tourists want it, you can buy it in any of a dozen functionally identical T-shirt shops on Duvall Street. Which, who am I to talk, I still have a "Check Out My Rooster" T-shirt from my last visit that my then-GF bought whilst we were enjoying the effects of multiple sweet rum drinks. I'd have preferred a "Conch Republic" T-shirt (not just for the politics but just the whole "This is a place apart" vibe) but what we got fit the mood at the moment and that's sometimes okay too.
There are quite a few elegant houses like Hemingway's, although this one is preserved in a particular way for this particular purpose and I agree is quite romantic. It's also a change of pace from the sometimes-tacky hustle underway two blocks away.
Most disappointing, though, was the proliferation of sargassum, on the beaches and in the air. There's not a lot the locals can do about it and I noticed differences between people explaining where it comes from. A certain kind of Conch will say it blooms because of effluvium from cities in northern Brazil. Others say it's always bloomed naturally in the Gulf, but because of detergents and climate change it now periodically explodes into stinky superblooms visible from space. (They are both correct, if incomplete.) When I was there, we found only one beach that wasn't shut down from the nasty stuff.
But I'd totally go back given the chance. Three of the major airlines fly directly into Key West if you don't want to drive down from the mainland on that long bridge. If you do drive, though, keep an eye out for the adorable Key Deer!
A Turkish ban on Twitter would tell us a lot about the Turkish government, however.
Yes, but nothing we didn't already know. What we're learning is about Elon Musk, and it isn't particularly surprising either.
His understanding of free speech is that of a fedora-wearing teenager fresh off his first Ayn Rand novel, and so it isn't all that weird that when he does stick up for free speech it's on behalf of catturd2 and other trolls, and it's not on behalf of people who are actually being suppressed by their governments.
Examples? I offered specific areas above where I propose conservatives (who are today embodied in the Republican party) have used the courts to thwart the will of the people and the effects of democracy. If you're going to propose that liberals (who are today embodied in the Democratic party) are similarly guilty, the way to do that is to point to times that has happened.
What I'm going to do with whatever example(s) you come up with is look at the case law in which the liberal side won by way of getting the judiciary to overrule a statute (which presumably was enacted in accordance with democracy) and inquire as to whether the constitutional grounds invoked were done so in a good way or bad way. After all, it is possible and has happened often that things that are incredibly popular turn out to be unconstitutional and those statutes are overruled for the right reasons. E.g., Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989).
But you might find a counter-example to, say, Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), a partisan decision overruling a democratically-enacted statute at the urging of and to the cheers of conservatives, which was overruled for no constitutionally-principled reason but rather by naked judicial fiat.
I'm willing to listen, to see whether the other side has done it too. You'll have to trust that I'll be fair in so doing, but you have my word that I shall keep as open a mind as I can.
There was a moment in the mid-2010's that conservatives explored criminal justice reform and I saw cause for trans-partisan progress, hope that it could lead to a more intelligently-run system with less overall crime. What a welcome event that was.
Something happened to that moment, that spark of possibility. I honestly don't know what it was. Trump and the rise of nationalism? Maybe, but maybe not. But it's gone now. Reform prosecutors are the whipping boys and girls of local conservative political groups everywhere now.
Oh, I am. I know why they do it. And it isn't theological at all.
ETA: You might think Pharoah's cruelty was a part of God's plan to bring the Hebrews to the Promised Land, but that doesn't mean you cheer for the Pharoah like he was the good guy when the lash comes down on the laborer's back.
We needn't pretend that the Democratic Party of 2023 is the same party it was 150 years ago any more than we need to pretend that today's GOP is still the party of Abraham Lincoln. Such propositions are the sophistry I expect of a Dinesh D'Souza cheap-shot Tweet promoting his poorly-viewed cinematic screeds, but I take you, Pinky, to be smarter and more realistic than that.
The past fifty years' worth of Republican federal judicial appointees, in particular, at the Supreme Court, have not been, as a group, neutral arbiters. They are advocates against bodily autonomy, voting rights, and religious neutrality, and for expansive powers of and deference to police officers and Christian religious institutions. A party whose champion of judicial appointment strategy sat inactive on the nomination of Merrick Garland for a year and raced Amy Coney Barrett's nomination through in six weeks does not get to claim to be acting on principle nor pursuing a neutral playing field. They have been trying to achieve something, something ideological. They are ruthless about it, and they are succeeding.
For two generations, Democrats have acted like the Warren Court was somehow a national birthright and the Republican packing of the judiciary with overt opponents of abortion rights, overt dismissers of the Establishment Clause, deniers of the existence of a right to privacy, Fourth Amendment minimalists, and overrulers of voting rights legislation was anything but a historical aberration. For most of its existence, the Supreme Court has interpreted and applied the law to benefit the wealthy and powerful. We celebrate the Court in those increasingly-rare instances when it deviates from this dreary pattern. That is when the playing field of the law becomes more level, that is when our institutions bend towards the ideal of justice. (It happens enough that I don't despair, but not enough to change my default mode out of "pessimism.")
It has taken the overruling of Roe to awaken most Democrats from the luxurious dream that the courts will ultimately serve as a backstop against American democracy becoming effectively undemocratic, against their individual rights from being legislated away, and as a sentinel of equality before the law. And thanks to what they find themselves up against in the political branches, it is damn hard for someone like me to tell them they shouldn't fight fire with fire and be every bit as ruthless and ideological as what they're up against.
This. Anything that makes it even the tiniest bit of inconvenience between literally anyone and literally any weapon is met with howls of "Jack booted authoritarianism!" "You don't believe in the Constitution!" "This either ends now or at Dachau!" etc., it's hard to imagine gun rights activists agreeing to anything, ever, no matter how popular. The NRA has become a cultural advocacy organization going well beyond gun ownership rights and the tiniest shred of compromise triggers the low-trust vagus nerve.
I basically accept Jaybird's hypothesis that all these great ideas for finding common ground and sensible compromise require a high trust society, and when we are dealing with weapons and peoples' need for them, we're confronting the bases expression of their low-trust personalities. They might trust in other arenas, but not this one.
I also accept Our Tod's hypothesis that other facets of the conservative coalition prevent us from addressing violence in other ways.
https://twitter.com/RTodKelly/status/1640462152296431616?s=20
IOW, we're boxed into a political stasis between 1) advocacy groups preying on low trust about guns specifically, 2) othering preying on low trust for Democrats and their coalition partners generally, 3) "fiscal conservatism" preventing spending on anything else that might help, and 4) the vat breeding of Federalist Society clonejudges demanded by the religious faction of the GOP.
So far as I can tell, what tge GOP will pay for are more cops. Even at their ideal level of function, cops do not prevent violence, they clean up and investigate after it hapoens.
Well, it's true that Democrats can, and are, 1) using abortion rights as a rallying point in purple states, and 2) finally learning the importance of the judiciary.
But it's also true that without the religiously-animated voters powering the GOP's rank-and-file votes, none of this would be necessary. The great trick there was GOP leaders convincing such voters that they (the personally immoral, corrupt, sexually licentious leaders) were irrelevant and what mattered were the judges they'd appoint, and they delivered on that promise. In exchange, the religious will deliver votes and money to whoever the Republicans nominate. And that's a covenant that continues to thrive today.
The real trick there is to break the covenant. I don't know how to do it but if it could be done, it'd break the GOP for a generation.
There's about 1 gun for every 3 Icelanders. That seems like a relatively high amount of gun density, suggesting that most households have a weapon on hand. How readily on hand? I haven't figured that out yet, but there are suggestions that no one is sleeping with a loaded handgun under their pillow the way I've heard some Americans brag about.
The background checking involved in being "not-crazy" to standards of Icelandic governmental acceptability is substantially more intrusive than we would ever endure here in the United States. You get an interview by the sheriff who asks what it is that you want to do with the gun, you must undergo a physical and mental health examination, and you must pass a weeks-long firearms safety and skills class. The entire process of initiating official inquiries into getting a gun and then actually having it can take a year or more.
But. Iceland hasn't had a gun murder since 2007, and the only police shooting of a suspect in the nation's history was ten years ago. The chief of police apologized to the victim's family. As far as I can tell, there are almost no homicides of any sort. Comparing the total population with the posted murder rate suggests that there was one homicide in the entire country in 2019. Note that the rate shot up to five homicides in 2020, a wave of violence that had never been seen before. (Imagine what people would have said about Portland had its murder rate quintupled in one year!)
Dark Matter is probably right that there are powerful cultural factors at work here. Iceland is atypical in a lot of ways, even compared to its European counterparts.
But it's not true that almost no one has guns. The Icelanders just don't use them on each other.
On “Open Mic for the week of 5/22/2023”
This was inevitably going to happen after Rupert let them get vaccinated.
On “Shake Shack, Suspect Specie, and Sane Stewardship of the State”
Do you also think I'm wrong about #MintTheCoin leading to hyperinflation by way of rapid M1 expansion?
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 5/15/2023”
Sorry. You're being too elliptical about what it is you are trying to say. I give up on trying to coax out a worthwhile point from the exchange.
You might or might not be Kimmi behind that VPN, but the resemblance is uncanny.
Either way, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about here. And based on that last comment, there's every reason to suspect that whatever point might be in there is grounded in both non-standard postulates about reality and fantasies about weird things that just plain didn't happen, and therefore will almost certainly be of little value to the general discussion.
Thanks anyway. (To be explicit, this last sentence is not strictly an expression of gratitude but rather a closure of at least my end of the conversation).
"
As I recall, someone asked the guy what he was doing, and he said he was protesting a gun control law.
Color me skeptical.
"
I keep saying "no one cares about federalism."
This turns out to be true also regarding vertical allocation of power within a state as well as vertical allocation of power as between a state and the federal government.
No one cares about where power is allocated vertically, and vanishingly few people care about where power is allocated horizontally. All they care about is their side winning, today.
"
Why do you say "two years ago"? Have cultural conventions about nudity changed from 2021 to 2023?
I should think context matters quite a lot when assessing the threat signalled by nudity in public. A naked guy staggering down the street in apparent intoxication, shouting at lampposts, and waving pointy objects about? Yes, that's a dangerous scenario. That would be a dangerous scenario if the guy were clothed; nudity would further indicate mental instability but it's any sort of too-erratic behavior coupled with proximity to a weapon that would trigger my spidey-sense.
A naked guy staggering down the street at a Pride parade whooping like a Nashville bachelorette party? He's almost certainly harmlessly drunk and hopefully his friends will get him home to sleep it off after the party dies down. A guy who's naked and probably stoned, tubing down a river on a hot summer day? In a lot of places the nudity part of that would be legal or at least tolerated, as long as other behaviors didn't indicate a likelihood of lewd conduct or violence. Hope you used the waterproof sunscreen, dude.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Last Cherry Pie Until Autumn”
Last night, Our Tod presented another one of his marvelous spoken word shows at a local establishment and I patronized. Brought along an OT-adjacent fellow I became friends with over Tiwtter; he moved to the area a few months ago and is looking to establish his own routines and social circles, and I'm happy to help out with involving him in my own social and entertainment activities.
Tonight, I've no plans. Perhaps a good opportunity to do laundry and housework, as boring as that sounds for a Friday night, because much of the rest of the weekend is spoken for.
For me, tomorrow night is the symphony. I ought to brew another batch of beer at some point but the weather is too beautiful for me to stand the idea of spending most of the day in my basement even if it's a pleasure to brew. It'll rain one of these weekends soon enough.
Sunday is hiking day. This will be shorter than last week's, because Sunday night will be a casual dinner with Our Tod and his lovely family. His young adult sons like my homebrew so I usually make a gift of several bottles to them.
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 5/15/2023”
Much to think about here:
https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/05/17/a-low-income-housing-developer-swears-off-any-more-portland-construction/?mc_cid=d4fb251683&mc_eid=f9bfaa3a1b
I'm far from surprised to learn that overgrown bureaucracy is a significant impediment to mitigating our housing crisis. I doubt anyone outside of the municipal government is.
Worth noting: every bureaucrat involved would have a plausible-seeming justification of the importance of their roadblock to the process.
Also worth noting: the developer here was willing to market to low income residents, and to deal with some expenses relating to both bureaucracy and crime. He still saw a path to profit.
Finally worth noting: there appears to be a model of a solution readily available. If only the city would learn from it.
On “The Durham Investigation Ends with a Thud”
Yeah, sounds exactly like incompetence. Sounds exactly like what law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies do all the time.
In fact, it sounds exactly like how nearly all institutions vested with discretion in the face of complex and ambiguous facts behave, all the time.
Hanlon's Razor is among the most useful items in your intellectual toolkit.
"
Incompetence ≠Corruption
Failing to attain maximal competence ≠Incompetence
On “The Republican Party Isn’t A Political Party (Anymore)”
I wish we could stop paying attention to him. Unfortunately, as Anderson Cooper pointed out, he is the polling leader for the GOP nomination in 2024 and that means there's a very good possibility he'll be President again in 2025. I think we *have* to pay attention to him, like it or not. (And "not" sounds like it's the case for both you and me.)
But that doesn't mean we have to give oxygen to his antics nor that we all have to play the game by his rules. (He changes the rules unilaterally when they don't favor him, anyway, or at least whines about the rules not being such that he's got an advantage.)
That means CNN probably does have to allocate air time and journalistic effort to him. But it doesn't mean that it has to give him an audience of nothing but people who have already indicated they support him -- indeed, he probably should have an audience mixed with people who both support and criticize him. CNN mishandled that situation in obvious eagerness for ratings and relevance, and it's backfiring on them.
On “Elon Musk Gives In To Censorship”
See, this is how you make them vote for Trump. It's all your fault!
"
Good guesses. But my money's on "Fauci."
"
LOL what dictator do you claim I support?
"
I can't conjure a good reason for Musk to have buckled under Erdogan's pressure; I prefer to believe it is a combination of mercenary instinct and naiveté about Twitter's ability to withstand the positive law.
On “Hemingway Home: Past, Prose, & Polydactyly in Paradise”
For me, one of the really charming things have always been the rainwater collection basins on peoples' roofs. Key West (and all of the other Keys) have no natural source of fresh water, so it can be 1) piped in from the mainland, 2) desalinated on nearby Stock Island, or 3) collected as rainwater. This being Florida, it's not clear that a lot of people in Key West are really aware of how precious fresh water is there, beyond its utility to hold freezing temperatures and make Bahama Mama Cocktails out of the slushie machines much more refreshing.
I believe the T-shirt shops are mostly apolitical. They sell the F Joe Biden stuff because the tourists buy it. They sell tickets to drag shows because the tourists buy them. If it isn't outright illegal and tourists want it, you can buy it in any of a dozen functionally identical T-shirt shops on Duvall Street. Which, who am I to talk, I still have a "Check Out My Rooster" T-shirt from my last visit that my then-GF bought whilst we were enjoying the effects of multiple sweet rum drinks. I'd have preferred a "Conch Republic" T-shirt (not just for the politics but just the whole "This is a place apart" vibe) but what we got fit the mood at the moment and that's sometimes okay too.
There are quite a few elegant houses like Hemingway's, although this one is preserved in a particular way for this particular purpose and I agree is quite romantic. It's also a change of pace from the sometimes-tacky hustle underway two blocks away.
Most disappointing, though, was the proliferation of sargassum, on the beaches and in the air. There's not a lot the locals can do about it and I noticed differences between people explaining where it comes from. A certain kind of Conch will say it blooms because of effluvium from cities in northern Brazil. Others say it's always bloomed naturally in the Gulf, but because of detergents and climate change it now periodically explodes into stinky superblooms visible from space. (They are both correct, if incomplete.) When I was there, we found only one beach that wasn't shut down from the nasty stuff.
But I'd totally go back given the chance. Three of the major airlines fly directly into Key West if you don't want to drive down from the mainland on that long bridge. If you do drive, though, keep an eye out for the adorable Key Deer!
On “Elon Musk Gives In To Censorship”
Yes, but nothing we didn't already know. What we're learning is about Elon Musk, and it isn't particularly surprising either.
His understanding of free speech is that of a fedora-wearing teenager fresh off his first Ayn Rand novel, and so it isn't all that weird that when he does stick up for free speech it's on behalf of catturd2 and other trolls, and it's not on behalf of people who are actually being suppressed by their governments.
On “The Potential Return of Abortion Rights”
We can continue this at some other time, that's fine with me.
I'm not so sure that it's clear that prohibiting abortions was particularly popular in 1973.
But by all means, catch your bus, we can do this another time.
"
Examples? I offered specific areas above where I propose conservatives (who are today embodied in the Republican party) have used the courts to thwart the will of the people and the effects of democracy. If you're going to propose that liberals (who are today embodied in the Democratic party) are similarly guilty, the way to do that is to point to times that has happened.
What I'm going to do with whatever example(s) you come up with is look at the case law in which the liberal side won by way of getting the judiciary to overrule a statute (which presumably was enacted in accordance with democracy) and inquire as to whether the constitutional grounds invoked were done so in a good way or bad way. After all, it is possible and has happened often that things that are incredibly popular turn out to be unconstitutional and those statutes are overruled for the right reasons. E.g., Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989).
But you might find a counter-example to, say, Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), a partisan decision overruling a democratically-enacted statute at the urging of and to the cheers of conservatives, which was overruled for no constitutionally-principled reason but rather by naked judicial fiat.
I'm willing to listen, to see whether the other side has done it too. You'll have to trust that I'll be fair in so doing, but you have my word that I shall keep as open a mind as I can.
On “Mass Shooting Facts and Figures”
There was a moment in the mid-2010's that conservatives explored criminal justice reform and I saw cause for trans-partisan progress, hope that it could lead to a more intelligently-run system with less overall crime. What a welcome event that was.
Something happened to that moment, that spark of possibility. I honestly don't know what it was. Trump and the rise of nationalism? Maybe, but maybe not. But it's gone now. Reform prosecutors are the whipping boys and girls of local conservative political groups everywhere now.
On “The Potential Return of Abortion Rights”
Oh, I am. I know why they do it. And it isn't theological at all.
ETA: You might think Pharoah's cruelty was a part of God's plan to bring the Hebrews to the Promised Land, but that doesn't mean you cheer for the Pharoah like he was the good guy when the lash comes down on the laborer's back.
"
We needn't pretend that the Democratic Party of 2023 is the same party it was 150 years ago any more than we need to pretend that today's GOP is still the party of Abraham Lincoln. Such propositions are the sophistry I expect of a Dinesh D'Souza cheap-shot Tweet promoting his poorly-viewed cinematic screeds, but I take you, Pinky, to be smarter and more realistic than that.
The past fifty years' worth of Republican federal judicial appointees, in particular, at the Supreme Court, have not been, as a group, neutral arbiters. They are advocates against bodily autonomy, voting rights, and religious neutrality, and for expansive powers of and deference to police officers and Christian religious institutions. A party whose champion of judicial appointment strategy sat inactive on the nomination of Merrick Garland for a year and raced Amy Coney Barrett's nomination through in six weeks does not get to claim to be acting on principle nor pursuing a neutral playing field. They have been trying to achieve something, something ideological. They are ruthless about it, and they are succeeding.
For two generations, Democrats have acted like the Warren Court was somehow a national birthright and the Republican packing of the judiciary with overt opponents of abortion rights, overt dismissers of the Establishment Clause, deniers of the existence of a right to privacy, Fourth Amendment minimalists, and overrulers of voting rights legislation was anything but a historical aberration. For most of its existence, the Supreme Court has interpreted and applied the law to benefit the wealthy and powerful. We celebrate the Court in those increasingly-rare instances when it deviates from this dreary pattern. That is when the playing field of the law becomes more level, that is when our institutions bend towards the ideal of justice. (It happens enough that I don't despair, but not enough to change my default mode out of "pessimism.")
It has taken the overruling of Roe to awaken most Democrats from the luxurious dream that the courts will ultimately serve as a backstop against American democracy becoming effectively undemocratic, against their individual rights from being legislated away, and as a sentinel of equality before the law. And thanks to what they find themselves up against in the political branches, it is damn hard for someone like me to tell them they shouldn't fight fire with fire and be every bit as ruthless and ideological as what they're up against.
On “Mass Shooting Facts and Figures”
This. Anything that makes it even the tiniest bit of inconvenience between literally anyone and literally any weapon is met with howls of "Jack booted authoritarianism!" "You don't believe in the Constitution!" "This either ends now or at Dachau!" etc., it's hard to imagine gun rights activists agreeing to anything, ever, no matter how popular. The NRA has become a cultural advocacy organization going well beyond gun ownership rights and the tiniest shred of compromise triggers the low-trust vagus nerve.
I basically accept Jaybird's hypothesis that all these great ideas for finding common ground and sensible compromise require a high trust society, and when we are dealing with weapons and peoples' need for them, we're confronting the bases expression of their low-trust personalities. They might trust in other arenas, but not this one.
I also accept Our Tod's hypothesis that other facets of the conservative coalition prevent us from addressing violence in other ways.
https://twitter.com/RTodKelly/status/1640462152296431616?s=20
IOW, we're boxed into a political stasis between 1) advocacy groups preying on low trust about guns specifically, 2) othering preying on low trust for Democrats and their coalition partners generally, 3) "fiscal conservatism" preventing spending on anything else that might help, and 4) the vat breeding of Federalist Society clonejudges demanded by the religious faction of the GOP.
So far as I can tell, what tge GOP will pay for are more cops. Even at their ideal level of function, cops do not prevent violence, they clean up and investigate after it hapoens.
On “The Potential Return of Abortion Rights”
Well, it's true that Democrats can, and are, 1) using abortion rights as a rallying point in purple states, and 2) finally learning the importance of the judiciary.
But it's also true that without the religiously-animated voters powering the GOP's rank-and-file votes, none of this would be necessary. The great trick there was GOP leaders convincing such voters that they (the personally immoral, corrupt, sexually licentious leaders) were irrelevant and what mattered were the judges they'd appoint, and they delivered on that promise. In exchange, the religious will deliver votes and money to whoever the Republicans nominate. And that's a covenant that continues to thrive today.
The real trick there is to break the covenant. I don't know how to do it but if it could be done, it'd break the GOP for a generation.
On “Triple Terror In Texas”
Did some research.
There's about 1 gun for every 3 Icelanders. That seems like a relatively high amount of gun density, suggesting that most households have a weapon on hand. How readily on hand? I haven't figured that out yet, but there are suggestions that no one is sleeping with a loaded handgun under their pillow the way I've heard some Americans brag about.
The background checking involved in being "not-crazy" to standards of Icelandic governmental acceptability is substantially more intrusive than we would ever endure here in the United States. You get an interview by the sheriff who asks what it is that you want to do with the gun, you must undergo a physical and mental health examination, and you must pass a weeks-long firearms safety and skills class. The entire process of initiating official inquiries into getting a gun and then actually having it can take a year or more.
But. Iceland hasn't had a gun murder since 2007, and the only police shooting of a suspect in the nation's history was ten years ago. The chief of police apologized to the victim's family. As far as I can tell, there are almost no homicides of any sort. Comparing the total population with the posted murder rate suggests that there was one homicide in the entire country in 2019. Note that the rate shot up to five homicides in 2020, a wave of violence that had never been seen before. (Imagine what people would have said about Portland had its murder rate quintupled in one year!)
Dark Matter is probably right that there are powerful cultural factors at work here. Iceland is atypical in a lot of ways, even compared to its European counterparts.
But it's not true that almost no one has guns. The Icelanders just don't use them on each other.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268647/homicide-rate-iceland/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/iceland-gun-loving-country-no-shooting-murders-2007-n872726