Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Sociotard]

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/30/1167195255/idaho-trafficking-abortion-minors-interstate-travel-criminalize

 

After clearing both legislative chambers, Idaho could become the first state in the country, according to Planned Parenthood, to criminally charge those who help pregnant minors get an abortion across state lines without parental consent.

[archer]

1 hour ago, Sociotard said:

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/30/1167195255/idaho-trafficking-abortion-minors-interstate-travel-criminalize

 

After clearing both legislative chambers, Idaho could become the first state in the country, according to Planned Parenthood, to criminally charge those who help pregnant minors get an abortion across state lines without parental consent.

 

By definition, transporting someone across state lines in order to buy medical services is “interstate commerce”.

 

The US Constitution places the power to regulate interstate commerce with the US Congress, not with state legislatures. (US Constitution, Article I Section 8 Clause 3)

 

There’s over 200 years of court cases of state legislatures who attempted to regulate interstate commerce failing. Badly.

 

Even if the medical services were given away for “free”, court precedents still say that is commerce because someone had bought the car which transported the person to the clinic, someone bought fuel for the car, the clinic pays for electricity & other utilities, someone bought the paper and clipboard for the person who’s asking for the abortion to fill out her medical information, etc.

 

And, yes, court cases have gotten that specific and picky in the past when claiming the federal government’s prerogative over regulating interstate commerce. Studied some of those cases in business law class back in the early 1980’s.

 

There’s no way for a state legislature to twist things to try to claim that interstate commerce isn’t interstate commerce. There’s just been too many attempts by state legislatures to do it...and too many failures in court as those attempts fall apart.

 

 

[tkdguy]

8 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

That's the culture wars in a nutshell. There are indeed those whose views are so fragile that the mere existence of other people with different behaviors and beliefs feels threatening to them. A great deal of their self-image, their definition of their identity and sense of worth, is tied to their beliefs being the "one true way." Knowing that there are others who believe differently threatens their certainty of their rightness. That's why they try to force such people to be invisible, so they won't be reminded they exist.

 

I wish I could say this was a new phenomenon, but this sort of thing has been going on for centuries all around the world.

[csyphrett]

Guy shot himself at Forsyth Tech. Police and Sheriffs were on the scene. Details were sketchy when I saw the story, but at that time they didn't know if he shot himself because he was getting ready to shoot up the school, or because he was fooling around in the bathroom and accidentally pulled the trigger.

CES

[Lord Liaden]

2 hours ago, tkdguy said:

 

I wish I could say this was a new phenomenon, but this sort of thing has been going on for centuries all around the world.

 

Millennia, at least. It's one explanation for a great deal of the worst of human history.

[tkdguy]

 

[DShomshak]

13 hours ago, archer said:

There’s no way for a state legislature to twist things to try to claim that interstate commerce isn’t interstate commerce. There’s just been too many attempts by state legislatures to do it...and too many failures in court as those attempts fall apart.

 

This would be more comforting if the current SCOTUS had not already shown its contempt for precedent.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

9 hours ago, tkdguy said:

 

 

What fool has been telling people that life is supposed to be comfortable?

[DShomshak]

The latest terrifying turn: Right-wing accusations of "Trans Terrorism." As usual, accusing the targets of hatred of being its perpetrators.

 

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1167511373/advocates-fear-an-escalation-of-hate-toward-trans-community-after-nashville-shoo

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

What fool has been telling people that life is supposed to be comfortable?

For straight white conservatives. The rest of us are supposed to know our place and defer to them.

 

A recent Slate article in my newsfeed suggested a common throughline from book bans to inaction in the face of school shootings: A substantial fraction of conservatives don't want public schools to exist anyway. Home schooling or private religious schooling keeps their precious children from being exposed to people and ideas that might challenge their assumed supremacy. Or going wider still, a program of state-endorsed vigilantism: see the Texas abortion law, or laws that let single students (or their parents) challenge any book or subject that makes them "uncomfortable." A deliberate erosion of the underlying democratic assumption that we must all compromise and try to get along with each other. Which in turn puts the obsession with high-powered, fast-firing weapons in an even more sinister light.

 

I am not sure I would go so far as to say beyond doubt that most conservatives (well, really, white nationalists) consciously think in terms of unraveling society to enable homicidal vigilantism against everyone they don't like. I don't think most people are that self-aware. But I do think there's a deep hostility to the legal/rational superstructure of society and desire to reassert dominance of tribal, cultural identity, even if many nationalists don't consciously think in those terms.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Cygnia]

And then they turn around and claim Teh Librulz/Democrats/Those Pesky Others are the "snowflakes" 🙄

[Dr. MID-Nite]

The response to school shootings from our elected representatives seems to be.... "Life sucks (for you). Get over it!" I'm just....so tired of it all.

Edited April 1, 2023 by Dr. MID-Nite

[Lord Liaden]

There's one faction of elected officials from whom that response is far more common and more overt.

[csyphrett]

The shooter at Forsyth Tech is said to have a ghost gun with no serial numbers. He apparently had this gun at his school, then at Tech so they are charging with two counts of weapon on premises. I might have glazed over it but I didn't see how he shot himself in the hand. The gun apparently can be put together with pieces over the internet.  Did he have it together and then shoot himself by accident, or did he shoot himself putting it together so he could assault the school?

CES 

[Pattern Ghost]

4 hours ago, csyphrett said:

The gun apparently can be put together with pieces over the internet.

 

Somewhat true. But the major components need to be finished, which in the case of the most popular handgun frames requires drilling out and/or cutting off some pieces of plastic from a mostly-finished molded frame, and drilling some holes through it for the pins that hold the actual working parts like the trigger components in. It's not quite on the level of Legos, and can be very fiddly. Mostly, people end up with ill-fitted parts that take a while to get working properly unless they've got some experience in that kind of work or something similar. I'm going to guess an 18 year old prep school student probably doesn't have the shop skills of a middle-aged fabricator, so there's a less than zero probability that whatever he'd put together wasn't really fitted well. Since he was stupid enough to cover his hand with the muzzle, I'm inclined to think he's probably fairly inexperienced around firearms.

 

4 hours ago, csyphrett said:

Did he have it together and then shoot himself by accident

 

Most likely this. He may have tried to chamber a round and had a misfeed, then ended up shooting himself because he didn't understand proper malfunction clearing.

 

 

Edited April 2, 2023 by Pattern Ghost

[Dr. MID-Nite]

14 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

There's one faction of elected officials from whom that response is far more common and more overt.

 

Perhaps, but neither side has any real interest in changing the status quo. If they would like to prove me wrong...by all means...don't let me get in the way.

[Joe Walsh]

A.R. Moxon wrote an essay I found to be worth reading: "A Good Guy With A Dinosaur"

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/a-good-guy-with-a-dinosaur

 

Edited April 2, 2023 by GM Joe

[Pattern Ghost]

1 hour ago, GM Joe said:

A.R. Moxon wrote an essay I found to be worth reading: "A Good Guy With A Dinosaur"

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/a-good-guy-with-a-dinosaur

 

 

The person who wrote that is very, very bad at analogies.

[Old Man]

Some of Nashville's Covenant school staff were armed

[Pattern Ghost]

49 minutes ago, Old Man said:

Some of Nashville's Covenant school staff were armed

Click bait:

 

"It is also not clear whether those staff members were present on campus when the shooting took place. Police have also not stated yet that any staff members at the school had a gun or fired at the shooter."

 

The headline should read: "A woman who called 911 while hiding under a desk during the shooting said to the dispatcher that one or two staff members carry guns" (Also a direct quote from the article.)

 

I will say that this:

 

“ 'We do have a school person, or two ... I’m not sure ... who would be packing, whose job it is for security. We don’t have security guards, but we have staff.' ”

 

does not strike me as a good idea.

 

It'll be interesting to see if any details come out on whether these armed staff were on campus and what their story was if they were. Hopefully, they exercised good judgement and took care of the students in their classes as their first priority. If they were there, it doesn't seem like any of them were foolish enough to try to hunt down the shooter, at least.

 

Edited April 2, 2023 by Pattern Ghost

[unclevlad]

It can also be argued that this plays into the Republican strategy of controlling the debate, by focusing on the issue of arming school personnel, rather than gun control.

 

3 hours ago, Dr. MID-Nite said:

 

Perhaps, but neither side has any real interest in changing the status quo. If they would like to prove me wrong...by all means...don't let me get in the way.

 

No interest...or no chance?  Gun advocates don't give ground, except perhaps for the most narrow and egregious issues, and the courts have overturned many efforts when they've been passed.

[Pattern Ghost]

23 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

It can also be argued that this plays into the Republican strategy of controlling the debate, by focusing on the issue of arming school personnel, rather than gun control.

 

How so? It just looks like bad journalism designed to drive traffic to the site. The article is fairly neutral in tone, albeit the headline seems to slant toward arming teachers being ineffective, which is quite the opposite of what you're positing.

[death tribble]

Elsewhere Trump and Stormy Daniels cash in on merchandise after indictment

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65143479

 

I'll take a Team Stormy one. I hope she makes a lot of money off this.

[unclevlad]

1 hour ago, Pattern Ghost said:

 

How so? It just looks like bad journalism designed to drive traffic to the site. The article is fairly neutral in tone, albeit the headline seems to slant toward arming teachers being ineffective, which is quite the opposite of what you're positing.

 

I'm not positing either side of teacher effectiveness.  My point is, the Republicans want THAT to be the topic of debate...not gun control.  The gun control advocates can't win when the agenda item isn't even on the table, and deflection is a means to do that.

[Iuz the Evil]

It’s difficult to have any level of nuance in discussion of complex issues in the public arena, and politicians are absolutely complicit in attempts to steer the conversation in line with their own interests. Whether it’s the Republicans pushing to make this an issue about perpetrator sexual or gender identity, an effort to discuss arming teachers, or avoiding discussion of reasonable restrictions on weaponry in civilian hands the playbook is self evident. Similarly, absolutist positions on “a good first step” every time there’s a restriction on second amendment rights, and ignoring case law and Supreme Court precedent in crafting new regulation restricting those rights related to firearms ownership, as well as deflection on any number of competing factors (such as criminal possession of firearms where existing laws would have been completely adequate if enforced, appeal to emotion, disingenuous descriptors of firearms and the like) are features of the Democrat playbook on this issue. Fundamentally, one group sees this as a rights issue and the other sees it as a public safety issue. It can be both, you can have an individual right to bear arms (which is not absolute as with any of the Bill of Rights, but it’s not a “second class right” either as noted in both the Heller and Bruen decisions) and there can be pressing public safety issues which need to be considered and responded to by the State. I don’t see anyone in our binary system having that discussion. Not a ton of space for moderate positions in public discourse these days.

Edited April 2, 2023 by Iuz the Evil
Other, not “order” typo