friendly_iconoclast
friendly_iconoclast's JournalGlad to see more than one guns rights group aren't utter bootlickers:
Except, of course, the NRA- bootlickers gotta lick boots:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-police-immunity-guns/
...Reuters found multiple cases in which courts granted immunity to cops who killed armed civilians who posed a questionable threat, including people who legally possessed guns for self-defense at home. In all the cases, officers said they acted reasonably in what they perceived to be dangerous situations...
...Cases like these are why some gun rights advocates want qualified immunity to be reined in. These cases are rare, but they shouldnt happen at all. When they do happen, law enforcement should be held liable, said Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, a Bellevue, Washington-based group that filed a brief in support of Mauck and the Scott familys failed attempt to appeal their case to the Supreme Court. Gottlieb said police officers should not be able to cite the mere presence of a gun as a threat that justifies the use of deadly force.
Another gun rights group, the Firearms Policy Coalition, based in Sacramento, California, also favors reform of qualified immunity, Director of Legal Strategy Adam Kraut told Reuters. The National Rifle Association, the most influential U.S. gun rights group, did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.
In their opposition to qualified immunity, gun rights groups, typically supportive of police, find themselves allied with a broad coalition spanning the political spectrum, including gun control advocates...
On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway: Why Is It So Hard for Democrats to Act Like They Actually Won?
Rebecca Solnit nails it, imo- The Pubbies understand that politics is a no-holds-barred rugby game, and too many Democrats it treat like an encounter group.
https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-on-not-meeting-nazis-halfway/
...The letters editor headed this section with, In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters. The implication is the usual one: weurban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian Americaneed to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that...
...Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that you cant say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now its considered bigotry. This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore fuck your feelings shirts at its rallies and popularized the term snowflake.
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if were nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists everyones feelings are valid applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
Ive spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results.
Pasco's sheriff uses grades and abuse histories to label schoolchildren potential criminals...
...The kids and their parents dont know."
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/school-data/
The Pasco Sheriffs Office keeps a secret list of kids it thinks could fall into a life of crime based on factors like whether theyve been abused or gotten a D or an F in school, according to the agency's internal intelligence manual.
The Sheriffs Office assembles the list by combining the rosters for most middle and high schools in the county with records so sensitive, theyre protected by state and federal law.
School district data shows which children are struggling academically, miss too many classes or are sent to the office for discipline. Records from the state Department of Children and Families flag kids who have witnessed household violence or experienced it themselves.
According to the manual, any one of those factors makes a child more likely to become a criminal...
Links to the manual:
https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20412738-ilp_manual012918
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20412738/ilp_manual012918.pdf
Pasco's (FL) sheriff uses grades and abuse histories to label schoolchildren potential criminals...
...The kids and their parents dont know."
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/school-data/
The Pasco Sheriffs Office keeps a secret list of kids it thinks could fall into a life of crime based on factors like whether theyve been abused or gotten a D or an F in school, according to the agency's internal intelligence manual.
The Sheriffs Office assembles the list by combining the rosters for most middle and high schools in the county with records so sensitive, theyre protected by state and federal law.
School district data shows which children are struggling academically, miss too many classes or are sent to the office for discipline. Records from the state Department of Children and Families flag kids who have witnessed household violence or experienced it themselves.
According to the manual, any one of those factors makes a child more likely to become a criminal...
Links to the manual:
https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20412738-ilp_manual012918
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20412738/ilp_manual012918.pdf
New book: "Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy"
Looks interesting. Here is the blurb from the publisher's website:
https://www.press.umich.edu/10063035/warped_narratives
Description
"The politics of gun policy in the United States are dramatic. Against the backdrop of daily gun violencewhich claims more than 33,000 lives per yeargun control groups push for stronger regulations, while gun rights groups resist infringements upon their Second Amendment rights. To illuminate the dynamics of this polarized debate, Warped Narratives examines how and why interest groups frame the gun violence problem in particular ways, exploring the implication of groups framing choices for policymaking and politics. Melissa K. Merry argues that the gun policy arena is warped, and that both gun control and gun rights organizations contribute to the distortion of the issue by focusing on atypical characters and settings in their policy narratives. Gun control groups emphasize white victims, child victims, and mass shootings in suburban locales, while gun rights groups focus on self-defense shootings, highlighting threats to law-abiding gun owners. In reality, most gun deaths are the result of suicide. Homicides occur disproportionately in urban areas, mainly affecting racial minorities. While warping makes political sense in the short term, it may lead to negative, long-term consequences, including constraints on groups ability to build broad-based coalitions and to reduce prospects for compromise. To demonstrate warping, Merry analyzes nearly 67,000 communications by 15 national gun policy groups between 2000 and 2017 collected from blogs, emails, Facebook posts, and press releases. This book is the first to systematically assess the role of race in gun policy groups framing and offers the most comprehensive examination to date of interest groups presentation of this issue."
Melissa K. Merry is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville.
The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and others of their ilk will not be disarmed, laws or no laws
At least by local cops. To believe otherwise is to embrace a Neville Chamberlain level of naivety.
All of these people will still be around January 21st, and some of them will undoubtedly be making the move from 'threatening sedition' to 'full-on sedition'
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214568298
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/donald-trump-rally-photographer-interview.html
...The real problem is, I have never seen the police ever arrest a Proud Boy. Ive witnessed multiple fights between Proud Boys and I guess you could call them antifascists, but unless youre willing to walk away after getting shoved and being spit in the face by a Proud Boy, then shit is going to happen. And theyre not the ones getting arrested. In every place Ive ever covered these fightsin Portland; Columbus, Ohio; Philadelphia; New York City; or Washingtonthe person that gets arrested is not the Proud Boy. The Republican Club in NYC was a big anomaly, but thats what generally happens...
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142337401
Police fist bump MAGA fan Proud Boys member and escort far-right group through DC streets after 4th
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Oath+Keepers%22&sitesearch=democraticunderground.com
https://upload.democraticunderground.com/1016271937
A Pro-Trump Militant Group Has Recruited Thousands of Police, Soldiers, and Veterans
We've won the Battle of Midway, but not yet the war. Onto Georgia!
There are two Senate seats to be had, and the fight for them will be a dress
rehearsal for 2022
Carefully applied witness immunity could become *very* useful come January...
...against the current nest of vipers currently controlling the Republican Party. They have little
to no loyalty to each other, much less the nation.
Not-so-gentle reminders that "the early witness gets the deal"
would help along those lines
For example, conviction for failure to register as a foreign agent carries a much lower penalty
than one for espionage.
And yes, it would mean that some would escape with little to no penalty.
I'd argue that in some cases this might be a price worth paying.
In the immortal words of Steely Dan:
"Throw back the little ones
And pan-fry the big ones
Use tact, poise, and reason
And gently squeeze them..."
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