Great, thank you. We might fairly judge the credibility of this report as “low”, but it would be a stupid and incorrect assertion to claim there have not been any such reports. Agreed?
As in an 89 degree list?
No. For very obvious reasons that you are choosing to ignore rather than just acknowledge that your assertion was incorrect.
So are you joining Chisquirrel in claiming that my assertion (“There have been some reports that the NRA has also recently seen a surge in membership.”) is incorrect? How would you propose going about proving your claim?
P.S. I can think of a way to disprove your claim.
You made a claim that reports exist and did not back it up with any sources. Therefore your claim is invalid. Unless you have a source for it. As it is for any claim about anything.
This nitpickery tangent seems like a reasonable use of our time. :rolleyes:
I gave a source, in post #89. Here is is again - a report:
I don’t need to know who the author’s anonymous sources are anymore than you would need to if you asserted that there were reports for something that the WaPo reported on with anonymous sources.
If Fiveyearlurker comes away with a greater understanding of how debate works, it’ll be worth it. (insert xkcd comic here)
I definitely learned something about debating with you. I feel silly that it took so long.
Are you kidding? Twelve Million Americans can’t be wrong!
Well, yes, but it would be even stupider to bring up these reports in a discussion of the royal family as though they held any relevance.
Blasphemy! All citations are legitimate!
I’ll admit I was wrong, in as much that there are BLOGGERS reporting a surge in membership, yet the NRA has failed to comment on it.
May it please the court, then, to say what the MAXIMUM distance from a school shooter a kid can be before he’s no longer allowed to speak out against the mindless proliferation of guns? Ten feet? Twenty? Give me a number.
Any kid can comment on anything they want. The rest of us decide how much credence we give to their recommendations.
It’s my opinion that the “Never Again MSD” members are labeling themselves “survivors” in a silly attempt to help their recommendations garner additional sympathy and attention than they would not merit otherwise. I suppose by some expansive definitions of “survivor” they qualify, by merit of having been students at the same school, but I think it’s a bit of a dilution of the term “survivor” in some of it’s uses (things like “rape survivor” or “cancer survivor”).
The NRA has apparently been cagey about stating exactly how many members they have, though Wayne LaPierre has apparently mentioned “five million members” in past years, and a page on the NRA’s own web site currently mentions “our nearly five million members.”
Assuming (as I think we should) that the NRA isn’t understating the size of their membership, then the source to which HurricaneDitka has linked would be suggesting that they have gained at least 10% in their total membership in the span of just five weeks. It’s possible, but I find it a little hard to believe.
I think 1994 was when the GOP became more of a consistent voting bloc. “A European-style party,” observers at the time said, disapprovingly. There seems to have long been a subset of Congressmen who seemed to be screwball loudmouths who might be happier back on the hog farm. The post-1994 regime has kept them more in line with the caucus.
But really, it’s a matter of the Koch brothers deciding to abandon the Libertarian Party and run all their efforts through the GOP, and succeeding with that strategy for decades. So, it goes back to that decision, in 1981?
A website nobody’s heard of, focused on selling red T-shirts with pictures of elephants is just as credible as The Washington Post. Got it.
You do seem to be very much in tune with news dissemination in post-rational America, Hurricane. But why bother Googling for Red Elephants? Wouldn’t it be simpler just to link to some random social media post?
I know you don’t do the pit, but if you check out the bernie bros thread, you may get a sense of what I am talking about.
There are posters there who are still bernie or busters, and insist that if we the democrats do not nominate a socialist in 2020, then they will not support the party.
I was a bit harsh on them, but came down to saying we just aren’t going to nominate a socialist. If that means that they cannot support the democratic party, then they are welcome to their own. I then made some disparaging comments about sending them cake and icecream at the kiddie table.
Those are the people that the mainstream democratic party has been pretty good at preventing from taking it over. I do feel that the republican party has not done as a good a job policing its constituents, and has been taken over by the extreme wings. You have some democrats in office who do say some foolish things, but they generally get at best a :rolleyes: reaction from the rest of the party, and often times outright dismissal or condemnation. I really don’t think that the dems have anything equivallant to Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.). And she’s just the one in the news today.
The deep state is now placing subversive office furniture orders? Thanks, Obama.
It’s not revelations that will make the GOP jump off the Trump train; it’s the threat of losing their jobs.
The unfortunate reality, though, is that much of the GOP - how much I’m not sure but a significant amount - is beholden to a plutocratic machine. That’s who writes their campaign checks. That’s the machine that funds their campaigns, their propaganda apparatus, and keeps them gainfully employed. Now some are perhaps less tethered to that machine than others. Some are tired of being enslaved by the Kochs and Mercers, so they just decided to quit. But the ones who want to keep their jobs march to this tune. Even if the polls predict losing both houses, Chuck Grassley and company keep their jobs. It’s too late for those who are running for re-election to quit now. After all, that machine also gerrymandered their districts and hyper-politicized the party in such a way that they can’t win by being centrist. It’s either “Commit to crazy” or “Retire”.
Nothing will change unless the entire Republican party gets drubbed in 2018 and 2020, and by drubbed I mean to the point of near political extinction.