I think it’s the paranoid people who disturb me the most. Well, actually, it’s the people who feed paranoia to the paranoid that really bug me. I really don’t see a lot of it as any different from a straightforward incitement to violence. And even when it is not quite that, it often acts just like a memetic toxin.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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The email featured in the article is despicable. It’s disgusting on multiple levels, actually. It feeds the paranoia of gun owners and Libtards in general, it’s filled to the brim with big fat lies and misinformation, and at the end, it shows itself for what it really is: a shameless grifter asking for donations.
Why can’t they see through this shit?
I have come to the conclusion that intelligent discourse is not an effective approach to issues. It is people’s intentions and moral foundations that should be debated. Otherwise “smart” people know that they are exploiting delusional people. People have limits in expanding their knowledge or capacity to understand. But, dumb or smart, people can choose to be good or not. If you care about public safety, you will accept the fact that owning a gun makes your household less safe. If you care about our planet’s well-being you will accept the facts presented by scientists. If you care about fairness, you will see injustice. Evil, selfish, hateful people, who exploit others are the worst of our society.
Ezra’s right to question just what the upside is of Paul’s claim.
If indeed the polls stay in the majority for common sense gun control, and some kind of a Bill passes, Paul may find his 2016 NRA aspirational talking points boot him lower than his dad.
He’s not good at reading the tea leaves. Add to that his inability to persuade or lead his way through his own quagmires.
Like a terrorist, Paul seems to like to cherry pick soft targets; strike and cause mayhem, then move on to the next soft target. But he never pauses to offer up a framework to rebuild. Guess he leaves that to us lesser folk.
That’s assuming his goal is to get elected president. If his goal is to get some people killed, I think he’s on the right track.
I’d also add that, along with everything else, he just isn’t smart enough to form any kind of coherent framework for anything. Just imagine being profoundly stupid to begin with, and then being brought up by Ron Paul. It’s horrifying to think about.
The only difference between this and Paul’s anti-drone paranoia is the target audience.
Seems pretty straight-forward to me. Rand Paul is a supporter of the black market international arms trade that creates the crises to which the GOP always wants to sent US troops. And that arms trade is transacted through the too-big-to-fail megabanks along with their other money laundering activities.
That’s pretty consistent with absolutist libertarianism.
And of course, the Republican Party periodically likes to stoke the primal racism of its base with the “why’d a black President want to take your guns away?” It brings up images of the wrong kind of night riders and hoods coming to their door. In other words, there is a fear that is the residual of great unrepented guilt about how African-Americans were treated in this country. That guilt is the chip on the shoulder about accusations of racism and the basis of the “Fergit Hell” attitude. And they fear retribution. And their demagogic leaders feed that fear of retribution. It ups the intensity of the racism.
The GOP is rationally, deliberately, and cynically feeding the flames of racism in this country. Rand Paul hasn’t quite gotten the Edmund Ruffin level; he’s more sly and genteel and stupidly transparent.
There are in fact anti-American globalists plotting to overthrow the Constitution. Their weapon of choice is trade agreements, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership under their stakeholdership is turning out to be a huge trojan horse for corporate overthrow of US labor, environmental, and safety standards and imposition of corporate friendly intellectual property restraints on information.
Rand Paul and his ilk never talk about this as a threat because they are his campaign funders. It’s always distraction with the shiny object.