That sounds like incredible hyperbole. Have you watched Dana Loesch’s NRA videos? The “clenched fist of truth”?
One doesn’t exclude the other. Dana Loesch’s videos are mostly bullshit bomb throwing to energize the base and keep up the fervor. Still bullshit though.
So how is Bloomberg “pseudo fascist”? What has he said or done comparable to the “clenched fist of truth” bomb throwing?
This is what I came here to say. Protests are a public relations and marketing exercise, invented in a time long before the internet and social media enabled a message to reach millions of people instantaneously. In some extreme cases, a protest might win a moral victory if authorities attempt to disburse it in a heavy-handed manner.
The effectiveness of a protest is in making people aware of an issue and that there are significant numbers of people who have a strong opinion on it. Maybe it influences people to vote for different politicians or support different policies.
I failed to see what Wayne Lapierre should be “shitting his pants” about.
Aside from violence, the only other thing that he should be in the least concerned about is declining NRA memberships, and I have yet to seen no evidence that this is happening, I’ve seen the opposite.
One potential measurement that can be made of a protest:
What risk are the protesters taking by participating? (Emphatically not “what societal risk do the protesters wish to draw attention to by making their protest” - I’m talking about how badly things could turn out for a person just for showing up.)
Tiananmen Square was a different kind of protest from some others, for example.
People who show that they’re willing to take a personal risk may be taken more seriously. They may also be derided as idiots or accused as criminals.
If pro-gun people held a pro-gun rally, and those pro-gun people got in touch the the NRA and other pro-gun groups, would that mean that they’re puppets of the NRA?
The NRA is effective, not because it tells pro-gun people what to think and what to do, but because it REPRESENTS millions of pro-gun people. The pro-gun people tell the NRA what to do, not the other way around.
Yes, the NRA is a propaganda organ. The clenched fist of truth, you’ve heard of it? But it’s propaganda aimed at people who are already pro-gun. Even astroturf groups have to actually recruit people.
The NRA isn’t powerful because they raise a lot of money from pro-gun billionaires. They are powerful because they have millions of members of consistently and militantly vote pro-gun.
Well, guess what. There are millions of anti-gun voters, and they’re organizing. And Bone is exactly correct that a big part of the strategy is to interrupt the transmission of gun culture to the next generation. Kids who went hunting with their Dad every fall turn into pro-gun adults. Hunting and target shooting seems normal to them.
But turn guns into something weird and dangerous and the chain is broken. That pro-gun adult might want to take his kid hunting this fall, but Mom thinks hunting is barbaric and weird and won’t allow the kids to go, so Dad goes by himself. And the kids don’t grow up thinking hunting is a normal thing normal people do, it’s something strange people do.
And as urbanization increases, fewer and fewer kids are going out hunting with their Dad. It’s no longer normal. When the only exposure you have to guns is reading in the newspaper about how another guy with a gun massacred another school full of kids, what happens?
This is why the NRA’s “clenched fist of truth” strategy is such a loser. You really want to double down on turning guns into something for only racist old white guys?
Anyway, the point is that marches in 2018 don’t accomplish anything directly. The purpose of a march is to get supporters to self-identify as people who support the cause. Turn the person who was committed enough to donate $10 to Cause X into someone committed enough to march for Cause X. They march for Cause X, meet a bunch of people who support Cause X, and go home and tell everyone about Cause X. The point is to radicalize and intensify support for Cause X, not to create it.
Of course this doesn’t work if nobody gives a shit about Cause X.
It may in fact be the best strategy for the NRA; if so, it would be because racist old white guys are the only ones who still might listen to the NRA.
Loesch to this point is exercising speech - a lot of it stupid, but speech none the less. Bloomberg as mayor attempted to enact a ban on drink size cups in an effort to modify behavior regarding sugary drinks in his capacity as chief executive of New York City. Thankfully, this was blocked by the Appellate Divisions of the Supreme Court of the State of New York as an overreach of regulatory authority. And that’s independent of his gun control aspirations. Clearly Bloomberg can outspend all gun advocacy groups combined - it’s only the fact that his message and efforts are essentially paid for rather than the real grass roots efforts of groups like the NRA that the less well funded could continue to resist.
So banning large sodas is fascism now?
Mussolini tortured political opponents and kidnapped wives and children to hold as ransom.
Franco sent spies into universities and tortured and murdered student activists.
Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust.
But step aside, small-timers, because BLOOMBERG SAID IF YOU WANTED 40 OZ OF SODA YOU WOULD HAVE TO ORDER TWO CUPS!!!
(in the interests of accuracy, I think I’m conflating two things here: he definitely sent spies into universities and purged universities of opponents, and he definitely had opponents tortured and murdered, but I’m having trouble finding any evidence that he had opponents removed from universities AND tortured AND murdered.)
If you think drink-size regulation is psuedo-fascism, then your fascism-meter is kaput.
Seriously, calling it that is right-wing-radio fantasy land stuff. Maybe it’s a silly policy, but silly is not psuedo-fascist.
I use the term synonymous with authoritarian so if replacing that is less distracting that’s fine with me. Thinking that it’s appropriate to control people’s choices in diet to the degree that represents is incredibly invasive and authoritarian. But it’s not just that. Supporting the extension of term limits while in office so Bloomberg could continue to serve as mayor, implementing and defending the unconstitutional stop and frisk program, saying that to save lives, police should seize guns from male minorities aged 15-25, and to do so they should be thrown against a wall and frisked - yeah he’s an authoritarian and I’m comfortable calling him a pseudo fascist.
jesus, I’m a socialist and I think Bloomberg was way off piste. That’s the realm of public health and public policy. As mayor, Bloomberg needed to make the subway trains run on time. Oh.
Applying such language to drink-size regulations is ridiculous hyperbole. It’s much more reasonable for stop-and-frisk, but why didn’t you use that example? Is it because the NRA has never condemned stop and frisk (or any similar policies), from what I can find, and by my reading online, most prominent 2nd amendment supporters also supported stop and frisk? Do you believe that mayors who are with you on the 2nd amendment but support policies like stop and frisk can reasonably be characterized as psuedo-fascist or authoritarian, and if so, do you oppose such policies as strongly as you oppose Bloomberg’s positions on gun control?
That might have been the case once, but not currently. The NRA Claims to have 5 mil. members; opponents Claim that a lot of that number is dead Wood (false bookkeeping). Even if it were true, for a Country of 270-300 mil. inhabitantas (and were Kids can sign up to NRA), this isn’t much.
The NRA used to Lobby for sensible gun laws, in order to protect the full intent of 2nd amendment - the well-regulated milita, as in: a citizen’s army for defense, not a Standing army used by the People in power recklessly.
Then an internal coup brought extreme ideologues to power in the NRA; and today, the Money flows from the gun manufacturers to the NRA to the politicans. The NRA fights against all gun laws, even senible ones, because they want to stoke fear in the Extremists who are their members. Because the numbers Show that after each massacer, the fear of “They will take our guns away!!” leads to more Money spent on buying more guns; yet 3% of Population of US owns 70% of all the guns.
So the NRA doesn’t speak for the (silent) majority of gun owners, given that polls Show that most of the Population are in favour of reasonable gun laws; they speak for the gun manufacturers who want to make Money by stoking irrational fears.
That is a good Point why demonstrations were so much more important before social media, and why often outside Forces were sent in to break them up (Soviet Russian soldiers during the Eastern Europe Spring; rural soldiers under drugs for Tien-na-men) - to have less sympathy with the cause of the protests, and easier believe they were “paid by foreign Agitators to damage our beloved home Country”.
Still, it was because the East German Regime could feel breaking up and because Gorbachow was less inclined to just sent tanks that the demonstrations could Keep going in 1989, but not in 1953.
Thank you, RickJay. I was disappointed with some of the earlier responses and am glad to see you refute them.
If any member of a political movement has an opinion that disagrees with yours, the entire movement is discredited. Got it! Any other choice excerpts from your newsletter?
The most informative piece of your post was the admission of where you get your news from.
I’m not discouraging this discussion. But I got interested in the subject and started a tangential thread on externalities here.