That wistful hypothesis died when he condoned his followers' mob violence. (The first time.)
There's no logical stopping point: why not do the presidency as performance art?
Oswald Mosley's Olympia rally, 1934
Collin Brooks, was a journalist who worked for Lord Rothermere at the The Sunday Dispatch. He also attended the the rally at Olympia. Brooks wrote in his diary: "He mounted to the high platform and gave the salute - a figure so high and so remote in that huge place that he looked like a doll from Marks and Spencer's penny bazaar. He then began - and alas the speakers hadn't properly tuned in and every word was mangled. Not that it mattered - for then began the Roman circus. The first interrupter raised his voice to shout some interjection.The mob of storm troopers hurled itself at him. He was battered and biffed and hashed and dragged out - while the tentative sympathisers all about him, many of whom were rolled down and trodden on, grew sick and began to think of escape. From that moment it was a shambles. Free fights all over the show. The Fascist technique is really the most brutal thing I have ever seen, which is saving something. There is no pause to hear what the interrupter is saying: there is no tap on the shoulder and a request to leave quietly: there is only the mass assault. Once a man's arms are pinioned his face is common property to all adjacent punchers." Brooks also commented that one of his "party had gone there very sympathetic to the fascists and very anti-Red". As they left the meeting he said "My God, if ifs to be a choice between the Reds and these toughs, I'm all for the Reds".
If this continues for longer than a news cycle (and I don't think it will) the next logical step is for some Trump supporter to beat up on some random person suffering from cerebral palsy or the like.
If this continues for longer than a news cycle (and I don't think it will)
Barry, in all seriousness, why do you think it won't?
So far, Trump supporters have beaten up a Latino immigrant and he just called them "passionate." They beat up a Black Lives Matter protester and Trump said "Maybe he should have been roughed up."
They're not losing interest. They're getting more emboldened.
Also I'm entertained/horrified by his asinine reaction to being called out on anything. "Nuh UH I did NOT you just THOUGHT that's what I meant but you were SO WRONG you owe ME an apology now!" He did it with that Megyn-Kelly-is-menstruating crack, with Facebook-owns-Marco-Rubio, now with the reporter in the OP link. The main thing it reminds me of is when I was 12 and I called my sister a bitch and then got in trouble and was all "I didn't! I called her a WITCH! It just SOUNDED like bitch! How dare you accuse me of that!"
6.1 Mostly because he'll go on to say the next outrageous thing and everyone will move on. That's been his standard MO throughout this. Unless he doubles down on it like with the "thousands of Muslims cheering in Jersey City" thing. But I don't think he will. Too much risk of a backlash that would actually harm him politically - even Republicans have disabled people in their family, or are disabled themselves - unlike with Muslim bashing.
7 is so dead on to what this feels like. Having a President Trump would be like America being sentenced to 4 years of high middle school.
So much of Trump's appeal seems to me to be that he's a bully. To his supporters that comes off as strong, or dominant, and the outraged 'how dare you!' reactions he gets only cement that further as long as he responds with aggressive 'oh yeah?' type responses.* And a strong, dominant leader figure is what those people want, more than anything else. The fact that this plays easily enough into 'liberal-media/identity-politics/playing-the-whatever-card' type pictures for the hard core conservative base is a bonus.
*I think Carson's decline at the moment, which is starting to look terminal, has a lot to do with how he responded to people pointing out that his book was full of lies and that he believed absurd things. He got angry, sure, but also defensive and whiny - he's not supposed to look like he's being bullied by people, he's supposed to look like he's bullying them.
Wonder if you could get through four years of president Sanders without an uptick in antisemitism? I could see candidate Trump going there, esp. if he's way behind in the polls and feels humiliated.
So much of Trump's appeal seems to me to be that he's a bully. To his supporters that comes off as strong, or dominant, and the outraged 'how dare you!' reactions he gets only cement that further as long as he responds with aggressive 'oh yeah?' type responses.
Bingo.
I made the mistake of getting into it with a Trump supporter online a few days ago. They have their own set of facts not connected to reality, and they admire his bullying behavior.
CNN has really lost patience with Trump. The attack on the reporter seems to have been the last straw. Interestingly it's CNN hosting the next GOP debate, so there may be some fun fireworks there. Trump is certainly going to go after them no matter what.
Chris's Mosley point though, is that the reaction, the fight over the very speaking rather than whatever is actually said was the essence of the phenomenon. The people trying to interrupt Mosley weren't merely inevitable: from the fascist point of view they were necessary, and however inadvertently, contributors.
This all makes more sense if instead of asking what Trump's appeal is, you ask what the candidate of the 27% would look like. Well, he'd be a racist, fascist lunatic with a gift for shitting on liberal shibboleths. And when you put it that way, the whole "how far is too far?" question is revealed as absurd. These people would be down for roving armed gangs meting out vigilante justice to the blacks and the browns. If "burn down a liberal's house day" were a thing, they'd participate. Trump hasn't even pushed the limits of what these people will tolerate.
I wrote and then deleted a humorless comment of the historical plays subthread: as interesting as Truman Part II would be, it's an inescapable fact that no drama at any time since Lincoln (or maybe Jefferson) has been fit to beat Clinton, then Bush, and now Trump. It's not a presentist fallacy to say that we live in very interesting times.
It's funny (not really) how "OK, Trump's definitely finished now" pronouncements all over the respectable media have now become a weekly event.
It's funny (not really) how "OK, Trump's definitely finished now" pronouncements all over the respectable media have now become a weekly event.
Yeah, I have to admit I'm really confused by this. If I were in the media, after the second time I said something that turned out to make me look silly and uninformed, I would shut up until I had better data. I can't figure out whether a) they don't know how silly they sound, b) they think they DO have better data (every time!), c) or they know they sound silly, they know they don't have data, but they have so little respect for their audience that they think we won't notice.
I really hope it's not C. That would be so depressing.
(d) they're writing what their owners think their audience wants to read.
Or they just have to fill time and can't think of anything less silly and wrong to say.
19 was me.
The thing about the constant "Ok now Trump is finished." articles (and predictions like Nate Silver, and so on) is that they never actually give the important second bit of the argument. It's true that Trump did something awful, and it could hurt him even among his less brownshirty followers. Really! But there has to be a bit of the story where someone actually takes him down and his supporters move over to someone else. At this point (I think way, way before this point but definitely at this point) it can't be "Trump disappears".
And that's the part no one has managed to come up with a good story about - Cruz might be able to, though if he does I'm guessing he's waiting until it's just him and Trump. Carson is on the way out, and even though the press really has a crush on him I don't think Rubio has it in him. He's made it this far on a set of memorized speeches that he gives, but in the debates it's pretty clear that's all he's got. You can literally watch him pause before answering questions with a sort of awkward uncertain look as he picks which one he's going to deliver. If there was any serious percentage in taking him out at the moment a smart candidate could take him down just by reciting one of them right before/simultaneously with him.
The Republican party has been setting up a series of their no-hopers at the debates to go after him in the hopes that one of them would take him down (Kasich, Fiorina, Christie). But they're no-hopers for a reason and they're running out as well. At some point they're going to have to shrink the stage and right now they don't have a hope of hurting Trump if they do.
20: It's the same group of people, basically, that were writing stories in 2000-2006, so I'd go with some combination of "too dumb to realize" and "has no respect for their audience".
16 gets it right. They've been playing to the crazies for a while now. Really, it's probably why we'll keep the presidency. If they were smart enough to put up someone like Huntsman we might get crushed.
Now that I think about it, saying that X's presidential campaign is going to fail is about the safest thing you can say, unless you give an actual withdrawal date to your prediction. Nearly all presidential campaigns fail, if you wait long enough.
Nearly all presidential campaigns fail, if you wait long enough.
One doesn't.
7: Also I'm entertained/horrified by his asinine reaction to being called out on anything. "Nuh UH I did NOT you just THOUGHT that's what I meant but you were SO WRONG you owe ME an apology now!"
It's not that far off from what any number of politicians try for after committing what we've come to call a gaffe. Claim that you "misspoke"; claim that you misheard the question; explain that you were thinking of something else when you said those words; aver that the words are being taken out of context; insist that your accusers have an agenda in so willfully misunderstanding you. These are all forms of "Nuh UH I did NOT" -- Trump just leans more heavily toward vilifying his interrogators, and so many people tell pollsters that they distrust the media, it's an easy sell.
Trump's language about being treated fairly (e.g. he'll eschew a third party run as long as he's not treated unfairly) set the stage for this pretty early on: he was always going to claim, when convenient, that he's being victimized. It occurs to me, actually: the term "silent majority" has gained currency among his supporters. That's the silent (white) majority who's been victimized by all this politically correct equal rights crap.
22 and 24 seem more right to me than 21. I don't think they or their owners care about what their audience wants, unless by "audience" you mean "advertisers."
I'm mostly fascinated by this because my own record of political predictions is dismal, and what has mostly come of it is a realization that I am not accurate. These days I explicitly refuse to make predictions in a professional context,* and even in a water-cooler-esque discussion like this one I often point out how resoundingly terrible my 2008 presidential predictions were.
*Not re: presidential campaigns; no one would ask me that. But on other issues more connected to the political side of my job.
That's the silent (white) majority who's been victimized by all this politically correct equal rights crap.
Surely that's the same silent majority that Nixon was speaking to in 1969? And has been all along?
Fortunately the white Christian majority is no longer.
32. Why do you imagine that datum would affect Trump's rhetoric?
I don't, but it gets you fewer voters than it did when Nixon did it.
A time to be born, a time to tie-dye,
A time to build domes, a time to pet rocks
A time to iron your hair
A time to watch Star Wars
A guy taking "silent majority" very seriously. Seems relevant.
30.1 -- The audience cultivated for the purpose of attracting the advertisers. I'm not in it, and so I don't think the NYT is going to spend even a minute thinking of pandering to me. But the people who pay the advertisers' bills? They matter.
It's not that far off from what any number of politicians try for after committing what we've come to call a gaffe. Claim that you "misspoke"; claim that you misheard the question; explain that you were thinking of something else when you said those words; aver that the words are being taken out of context; insist that your accusers have an agenda in so willfully misunderstanding you. These are all forms of "Nuh UH I did NOT" -- Trump just leans more heavily toward vilifying his interrogators, and so many people tell pollsters that they distrust the media, it's an easy sell.
Trump's trick is to pivot almost immediately into "And if I had said/done X, I'd have been smart to do so" which is then picked up by everyone else who's not overtly anti-Trump as a signal to say "Trump was right to say/do X".
Of course, his other trick, which is considerably less rhetorically successful, is to assert "The people I've just maligned love me".
38: He added: "Some of them felt that I was being harsh or that I might be exclusionary, and that certainly was not the intention." There are rules about bearing false witness, you shitheel.
Yeah, apparently speaking in good faith has gone out the window.
In hindsight, I'm surprised no billionaire with zero political experience has ever run a nakedly fascist campaign for president before now. It seems like a natural fit, but no, America's fascists are good ole boys and our billionaires have mostly so far been either sedate Rockefeller Republicans or more harmless eccentrics like Perot at most.
Maybe it wasn't viable until relatively recently, after pretty much all the fascists were in one party.
In hindsight, I'm surprised no billionaire with zero political experience has ever run a nakedly fascist campaign for president before now.
This is a super quotable nice line.
It's too bad Vladimir Zhirinovsky's not eligible to run for president. A debate between Trump and Zhirinovsky where they compete to out-crazy each other would be awesome.
I'm guessing already being a celebrity as well as a billionaire is a large part of it. Most of the existing billionaires live in such a different world already that being.. public would feel odd to them (and probably unpleasant because it would mean stepping outside of the ring of yes men that they live in normally).
Maybe it wasn't viable until relatively recently, after pretty much all the fascists were in one party.
Not viable, I think, until white Christian America had a new identifiable enemy or two, in the form of undocumented immigrants and radical Islamists. The sheer nativism of Trump's and several of the other Republican campaigns wasn't possible until the brown other emerged as an obvious target. Or what 16 said.
47
I think most rich people probably see running for President as a waste of time and energy. When you have that much money there are more direct routes to power you can take.
47
I think most rich people probably see running for President as a waste of time and energy. When you have that much money there are more direct routes to power you can take.
Which reminds me: let's not forget how similar Trump's policy proposals, such as they are, are to those of the more mainstream Republican candidates. Bomb the shit out of ISIS. Punch Black Lives Matter activists in the face. And so on. The racism is still there. The fascism is new with Trump.
50:
Also, despite all the horror at Trump's willingness to have a "database of Muslims", let's not forget that we've been doing that sort of thing for at least a decade. He's actually kind of behind the times when it comes to this surveillance state thing.
I don't know how much different the fascism is either: the positions and appeal of Trump aren't much different than with other Republicans. It's just that he's saying the quiet part loud more than you often see, and I suspect even more that he wasn't (and still isn't) viewed as a serious candidate by press so the tone of respectfully never mentioning this didn't get applied to the reporting. And probably the fact that the RNC is desperate for something to take him down means that no one is stepping on any reporters/pundits who get out of line either.
He must really love Muslims. Romney loved women and he didn't have anything more than a few binders full of them.
52: It's just that he's saying the quiet part loud more than you often see
Certainly that's a large part of his appeal among prospective voters. For the rest, I'll have to think more carefully.
7, 10- Heh, that reminds me of one time in 6th grade gym class I said, at various points of losing some part of some game, "Shoot" and "Damn." The gym teacher made me stand up in front of the class and apologize for using bad language. I said, "I only said 'shoot'" when apparently he was upset about the "damn" part, apparently "shit" was so far beyond what he expected kids to say he was shocked by my defense.
The real question before us is whether we are going to have the mettle to follow Montel Williams into battle and take up arms against the fascists when we are called to:
http://countercurrentnews.com/2015/11/montel-williams-vows-to-take-arms/
In WWII history I have often been struck by the implausible theatricality of events that actually happened - Gotterdammerung is the last opera performed in Vienna before the Russians arrive, a colonel arrives to lead the defense of Konigsberg and takes a break to play Bach on the cathedral organ, and so on and on and on. And Goebbels is writing 'The earth will shake as we leave the scene.' I'm half-convinced the top Nazis seriously thought of themselves as characters in Wagner, not people in real life.
To OP last, I really love dinosaurs, and am sad my kids have aged out of them.
The epilogue, of course, is that based on his FB rants (mocking Obama, UN, college protestors, refugees) I'm 95% sure he's a Trump voter.
I fed some dinosaurs with my kid this afternoon.
Child sacrifice being integral to Halfordismo carnivore-worship.
As everyone says, Trump is a bully, but his supporters are people who themselves feel bullied - often with good reason. Nobody appreciates the efficacy of bullies more than people who have been beat up a few times.
And these Republicans recognize that among the people stealing their lunch money is the Republican Establishment.
Sarah Palin could have been a force in Republican politics if she had the discipline for it. Trump will continue to be formidable as long as his attention doesn't waver.
The open question about Trump is whether he's willing and able to do what's necessary to convert popularity into votes, and whether he's smart enough to recognize what is necessary. There's a limit, I think, to what free media can do for him, especially in the many states where the party machine has reasonably solid control over who gets the delegates.
As for the media, they are having the same problem with Trump that they had with Reagan - they don't believe someone who is full of shit (in this particular way) can possibly be taken seriously.
Trump is great TV, and the media's ambivalent attitude toward him only improves the show. As with Reagan, if the media's pro-reality bias starts costing them viewers, the media will adjust.
Remember that White House correspondent's dinner right after they whacked bin Laden, where Obama mocked the birther stuff with the Lion King video and then had a little go at Trump about how he could now move on to finding out who killed Biggie and Tupac and to making "the big decisions" on The Apprentice? And Trump tries to chuckle along for a while but there's a point where he just stops and his expression curdles into the same baleful glare he would wear all through Seth Myers' routine?
I figure that right there is as close as science will ever come to pinpointing the single lowest moment in the Donald's public life. And my working theory is that that moment in particular was when he decided to sell his soul for a shot at having the Presidency himself and showing the world once and for all that he's smarter and better in every way than that uppity n- uhh, than Obama.
Obama said that to Trump? I should remember to like Obama more.
Maybe I've become too sanguine thanks to various recent electoral successes, but I have a hard time seeing Trumpalumpa winning the general election, by popular or electoral vote. He's too nutty, and not in a good way like Reagan (for some values of good) -- even if Hillary gets the nomination, all the opposing campaign has to do is ask whether you trust Trump with his finger on the button, and even some of he 27%CF people are going to have a hard time voting for him. Plus, what about the evangelicals? Trump can be a lot of things to a lot of people -- a husband to every woman, and a toupee to every man -- but he sure as shit ain't no Christian, and even the stupidest evangelical is going to recognize that. I think there's a good chance that this election marks a low point in evangelical turnout.
I'd be more freaked out about the MN governor's race, except the local Republicans can barely get it together to zip up their pants after exiting the airport restroom. That "#Negroproblem" tweet is pretty anathema to even right-wing Minnesotan's conception of public decorum.
but I have a hard time seeing Trumpalumpa winning the general election, by popular or electoral vote.
Not by a longshot. He will, however, spawn a bunch of copycats that could win at the state level in an off-year.
68 That's why Cruz is so dangerous. All the bullying plus Xtian lip service and tax cuts for zillionaires. Washington hates him because he stands up for "principles" rather than going along to get along. He doesn't have the Trump 'I can get shit done' pitch, but that's probably not that big a part of the agenda. Because, really, what can Washington actually do, anyway.
Yeah, that Ted Cruz, I don't like the way he smiles. It's like Smaug smiling at the thought of burning Laketown.
Yeah, that Ted Cruz, I don't like the way he smiles.
Yeah, it's like Elmer Gantry meets up with Sam Walton, and then they both meet up with Dick Cheney. That smile is unctuous, and insincere, and up to no good; and there is more than a whiff of support for unlicensed violence in that calculated grin.
Funny the about Kai: he reads tons about dinosaurs, but almost all of his jabbering is about his various imaginary creatures, or sometimes assigning implausible characteristics to IRL creatures. But it's all delivered in a tone of matter-of-fact informativeness, as if it's pretty widely known that gingerlies mostly eat meat, but do like to eat citrus.
He has said for years that he wants to be a scientist, but I do wonder if he'll be willing to limit himself to verifiable facts.
am sad my kids have aged out of them.
Give them a year or five and they'll age back into them again.
73: He'll make a fine M-theorist
Schools pressure kids to say they want to be scientists or something. But where will the next generation of Batmans come from if all the kids want to be plausible things?
My daughter wants to be a scientist. My son wants to be a Lego ninja.
73,78: Would they still want to be scientists if they knew that they'll spend all their time writing grant proposals?
Spinjitzu. There's more than one kind of Lego ninja? Clearly I am not well-informed.
77 Batamin, like an Arabic broken plural.
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Driving home from Denver, regular posting will resume Monday.
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Things to do in Denver when the blog is dead.
Love for 83.
Re: dinosaurs, they were my sister's absolute passion as a child. A few months ago, I had dinner with close friends of hers whose kid is also very into dinos. I read his bedtime story, and they were impressed with my smooth pronunciations (my parents were sticklers who used the phonetic keys) and bonus facts. I told them about my sister's childhood love, and they were surprised . . . it had apparently never come up!
Last week, I read another friend's kid a book about the earth's layers. It ended with the fun fact that the earth's core will eventually cool, and the planet will stop rotating, and everything will die. I was a little worried about the kid's ability to sleep after that, but he was unconcerned. Me: Well, that's awfully sad. Him: Why? Me: Uh, nevermind.
My nephew has managed to maintain his enthusiasm for dinosaurs and is in the middle of his freshman year at MSU. Hoping to study with Jack Horner.
85 -- People stuck in Denver with no blog can take a yoga class from my daughter. Or go buy some marijuana from her fellow. Depending.
88 is the rare example of the inclusive 'or' in common English. (But the question arises, in which order?)
85: if you troll harder, you might end up writing for The New Yorker.
I'm standing at a desk at the airport and working. I feel very strange doing this. I've always just rested or slept or something.
93. Heh. I am tempted to give lr as a Christmas present to my bil. But probably not. (And sanctity of on blog communications would put a damper on it too.) Something Whovian would be better.
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OT bleg: I'm willing to bet the mineshaft has someone who can answer this: Did the word 'regulated' mean in the 18th century what it means now or does it mean 'equipped?' I just had someone make that claim in an argument about the second amendment, and frankly it reeks. OTOH it wouldn't be the first time a word has shifted meaning over time, so I seek your guidance.
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It may have - who knows!* - but it certainly also meant 'regulated' in the sense that we use it today and it's pretty damn unlikely that they meant it in any other sense.
*Someone! But not me.
A quick look through the rest of the Constitution itself for the word "regulate" / "regulation" seems to be enough to conclusively disprove that.
Don't argue with your relatives about gun control. It never helps.
Maybe focus on the word 'militia'?
Google sez: "late Middle English (in the sense 'control by rules'): from late Latin regulat- 'directed, regulated', from the verb regulare, from Latin regula 'rule'."
That took 30 secs. I'll look for something more authoritative in a minute.
104: that, if anything, is a worse place to pin one's hopes
There's really something incredible about 100 and what it shows about how these people think.
I've found a bunch of sources that say it means roughly "capable of doing its job" in reference to the militia, which seems plausible. I've also found a bunch of sources saying it does mean "equipped" and then citing references that say no such thing.
What's strange is that if you think about it "A well equipped Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." still seems more like a collective right than an individual one. I mean, the best you could argue there is that "keep" meant "at their homes". Putting "equipped" in there only looks like it makes the 'bearing' of the arms more tightly linked to the militia rather than less. In fact the more I look at it the more it looks like something less conducive to "everyone gets to carry a grenade launcher to the bar" style American gun nuttery than the actual one.
That Garry Wills book will have the answer, I'd guess.
One theory I prefer is that since the States individually had a whole lot of local restrictions on gun ownership at the time which were not at all affected by the 2nd Amendment, and were not intended to be, the point and purpose was not to guarantee private gun ownership, nor to retain the ability to water the tree of liberty, but simply to provide for the individual and collective ability to keep the darkies down.
Protection from and oppression of Native Americans and slaves, and damn Feds ain't gonna let em get guns or tell us in Dixie what we can shoot em with.
The etymology through regulare would be true of anyone who would have been educated through the universities or the Church, that is to say the upper classes, but the mercantile class and pretty much all of the Colonies would have understood "regulated" to mean "hung."
Getting back to science and Xmas presents, any opinions on these maker kits at Barnes and Nobel?
As far as I am concerned, the constitution grants no individual rights to arm bears. But I also think the Supreme Court hats to define the evolving meaning of the terms. And, under decades of propaganda, they recently said such a right exists. I'll defer to the lawyers.
111. I didn't realise that was even contentious from a serious historical perspective. But we're not talking about serious historians.
If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he'd be carrying a watered-down AK-47 into Chipotle right now.
Maybe it's because I've got a few beers in me but I am having a fucking blast fighting with gun fetishists on another forum. Did you know that 100,000 people a year getting shot is "just a few?" I just learned that. I love these arguments because while I'm pretty pro-gun for a liberal the fetishists can't wrap their mind around anything other than complete absence of any regulation whatsoever as being supportive of the second amendment. If you think that trying to understand and ameliorate the causes of gun violence is a good idea you obviously want to take away everyone's penis guns.
Carry on then. I thought you were sitting around with relatives.
The OED doesn't even have "equip" as any of the senses of "regulate" - definition 1 from 15C is "to control, govern, or direct, esp. by means of regulations or restrictions," and the others are variants on that. The closest I can find is 2b, "to calibrate, adjust, or control (a timepiece or other mechanism) in order to ensure accurate or proper working."
Although it isn't going to change anyone's mind, the amendment's predecessor in Pennsylvania's Declaration of Rights gives you an even clearer idea of the context - it was not about home invasions.
XIII. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would be writing New Yorker think pieces about Hamilton.
The OED doesn't even have "equip" as any of the senses of "regulate"
Of course the tyrants' dictionary doesn't have it!
The thing about the "Second Amendment wasn't an individual right" argument is that, while that was almost certainly true as of 1787, much of the rest of the bill of rights that we now interpret as providing core individual rights, including inter alia the free speech clause, the establishment clause, the eighth amendment, etc., are properly seen (as of 1787) as designed to protect collective, not individual rights. And, of course none of the Bill of Rights at the time of its enactment applied to anything but the federal government (so, the Second Amendment, at most, prohibited the federal government from regulating the arrangements for bearing arms in the states, but the states were free to set up their own regulation).
The best originalist argument for an individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment (which is a pretty good argument) is that the Second Amendment became a guarantee of an individual right not in 1787 but in 1868 when the Reconstruction Amendments incorporated the bill of rights against state governments and transformed their protections into more directly individual rights. There is a fair amount of evidence from the Reconstruction period that people wanted to use the Second Amendment (incorporated against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment) to protect the rights of blacks to own guns against state or local governments that were terrified of them doing so.
Personally, I'm not an originalist (except at some very extreme abstract level where it doesn't matter anyway) so I don't think that the Second Amendment need be or should be interpreted to protect an individual right of gun ownership, but there's a very genuine non-crazy, non-bullshit constitutional argument that it should be so interpreted.
If liberals interpreted the Second Amendment the way they interpret the rest of the Bill of Rights, there would be law professors arguing that gun ownership is mandatory.
You don't even want to know how we interpret the Third Amendment.
Speaking of guns: three people were killed at a shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado : https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/2015/11/27/ff579e40-9543-11e5-b5e4-279b4501e8a6_story.html
Wasn't lthere a recent usage of "regulate" to mean "tax" or, more accurately, "extort", when the term was used by criminal gangs?
124: Well yes. And the media is outdoing itself in being the spineless terrorist-enabling douchefucks that we've all come to know and love.
Among the lowlights:
- CNN having on a right-wing congressman who blasted PP for the "videos" and demanded they apologize if it was "random" rather than motivated.
- NYTimes describing the shooter as a "gentle loner" in a backgrounder that included info about various domestic violence and other law enforcement scrapes he had been in through the years.
- Many outlets being slow to move off of the narrative of "started as a bank thing" and just happened to end up in a PP.
- Continually referring to the PP facility as an "abortion clinic."
- Highlighting the denials from anti-abortion advocates that he was part of any group (you know, rather than mentioning the rhetoric that might inspire and already unhinged individual in this direction).
But don't worry they'll cover it well on the Sunday shows despite not one "liberal" or Dem being on the guest list this week.
ABC's "This Week" - Republican presidential candidates Ben Carson and John Kasich.
NBC's "Meet the Press" - Carson; Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump; former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
CBS' "Face the Nation" - Carson; Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
CNN's "State of the Union" - Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee; Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas.
"Fox News Sunday" - Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina; Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C.
Big catch by CBS to get John McCain!
126: Forget to mention that the CNN Republican happened while it was still an active shooting scene.
Meanwhile, in the America we all know and love:
Does anyone know how any of that turned out? I had not heard about it before.
126/7: Headline in NYT: "'No more baby parts,' suspect is said to have told police."
Text under headline: "A law enforcement official said Robert L. Dear Jr. made the statement in a rambling interview about his deadly rampage at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo., but his motive remained unclear."
Grrrrr.
Check out @ClinicEscort tweeting 100 historical acts of terrorism against clinics/doctors under #is100enough.
130: Let's not jump to conclusions; he was clearly mentally disturbed. Maybe he thought he was in his talent agent's office and was tired of being cast as famous leopards.
125
Are you referring to "Regulate" by Warren G?
Or the Lincoln County Regulators on which it is based?
Though neither is "tax" or "extort" per se. "Engage in vigilantism" is more accurate.
Or maybe he asked for baby parts and went on a rampage when nobody would sell him any.
You know how shoppers get when the store runs out of Black Friday merchandise.
Or cooks when they need that last ingredient.
I'm so out of touch with the news that I just learned Charlie Sheen has HIV.
137: No worries. You can catch up with the impending lawsuits contra Sheen, which will no doubt be in the news for the next 1 to 5 years.
Charlie can always pick up some free condoms at PP.