Things to Remember, Things to Cherish

A committee in the Minnesota Senate is holding hearings about crime in MN.

Sen. Warren Limmer began the joint committee hearing with a startling statistic: 54 people under the age of 18 have been shot this year in the Twin Cities. Seven have died.

To put that in perspective, four Minnesotans in the 0-19 age range have died of COVID-19 since the very beginning of the pandemic.

Needless to say

Democratic senators objected to even holding the hearing in the first place, saying it was just another Republican attempt to “play politics.”

In other related news, Anti-police band finds stolen van after filing police report

The title is not a misspelling, it’s intentional. Bill Glahn goes through the exercise of looking at the reality of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). I’ll have to admit that this all but demolishes my argument that Mpls (or any other Big City) residents get what they deserve because they vote for it. The problems, of which RCV is but one of many, is that the electoral system is rigged.

What comes below is a mess in terms of how I like to present Twitter threads. The problem is that there’s about four threads looking at the topic but they’re not organized as threads. I don’t know how to organize these without putting in a lot of work very quickly because the Twitter ship just keeps sailing on… Anyway, Here’s the first.
Continue reading →

There are a lot of people who are concerned about rules and being nice-but-firm even when struggling against an enemy for which neither applies. Commies, for example. One of the main nice-people arguments is that “we” don’t want to use the same sorts of weapons and tactics as the commies lest we be like “them”.

James Lindsay (or @ConceptualJames) has a perspective on this:

Not becoming your enemy doesn’t mean not fighting back. It means putting down the weapons after you win.

Some of the follow-ups examine historical similarities.

I was trying to remember that word that describes a debate tactic in which someone purposely misunderstands the other’s argument and I came across this, from PsychCentral, 6 Toxic Arguing Techniques Used by Narcissists and Manipulators.

The rest of the article is below the fold. No, I still don’t know the word.

1. Arguing in bad faith
When in disagreement, a common person tries to understand the other party, listen to them, be honest, and make sure they understand where others are coming from. Sure, sometimes people can slip and become too upset or too anxious. But generally thats the unwritten guideline.

Narcissists on the other hand argue in what is sometimes referred to as bad faith. It means that they dont even care about, or try to understand, the other person. Or even worse, they are dedicated to deliberately misunderstanding and mischaracterizing others, often to the point of absurdity.

They are willingly dishonest, deceptive, and morally corrupt. Often while at the same time quick to accuse others of being dishonest, deceptive, and morally corrupt (more on that in #5).

Continue reading →

I can’t find the original tweet so no link, but the quip isn’t that long. It’s from Treacher:

When Republicans screw up, that’s the story. When Democrats screw up, the Republican reaction is the story.

I am constantly amazed at all the things I notice that I forgot to include here. In this case it’s
the article John Derbyshire wrote that got him fired from National Review.

There are at least three other sites where it can be read. This one is good. I just saved the text below. The article pointed to by the link above has links and comments and more.
Continue reading →

Guy gunned down while driving on 169 N in Plymouth. Running gun battle between two cars in downtown Minneapolis. And now:

An adult female is dead and 14 others injured in shootout inside #StPaul bar at 2xx West 7th St just after midnight this morning.

You might things are seriously getting out of control in the Twin Cities, but no, not really, the Twin Cities are punk-ass amateurs compared to Chicago:

98 people were shot last week in #Chicago, 10 fatally.

Same week last year: 96 shot, 15 fatally.

2021 YTD: 671 killed, 3,083 wounded
2020 YTD: 628 killed, 2,762 wounded

This was originally posted by Pierre Kory on his Twitter feed. Dr Kory is an “ICU & Lung Doc, Teacher/Researcher. Co-Developer of effective, evidence/expertise-based COVID Rx protocols” in Madison, WI. It was then passed on by the twitter account of Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care(@Covid19Critical – Leading critical care doctors of the FLCCC Alliance have developed MATH+ & I-Mask+ treatment protocols for COVID19).

Dr Kory:

Fun fact: Between 100-200 United States Congress Members (plus many of their staffers & family members) with COVID.. were treated by a colleague over the past 15 months with ivermectin & the I-MASK+ protocol at http://flccc.net. None have gone to hospital. Just sayin’

Followup from Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care:

***BREAKING SCANDAL***

FACT:
Between 100-200 members of Congress and their families & staffers have been treated with IVM & our I-MASK+ protocol for COVID. NO hospitalizations.

Not one of them reported that to the people.

Saved themselves & stayed silent as IVM was torched.

In answer to queries, questions, doubts and outright disdain about the source, Dr Kory responded:

To all the comments asking for sources/names for the below:

1) This came from a highly credible source inside Congress who has asked to remain anonymous
2) I would never divulge the medical treatments of individual members, nor do I know them myself

I fully stand by this tweet.

I guess we’ll see…

She’s not as witty as Jesse K, but Emerald is nearly always worth a read:

The protected need to be protected from the unprotected by forcing the unprotected to use the protection that did not protect the protected.

The zman. An entertaining and often astute writer. I won’t deny, however, that I’ve found many, too many, of his articles to be based on half-baked and/or misunderstood premises which lead to half-baked and malformed conclusions. With this article from the long suffering Takimag tho’; all is forgiven.

The two most important features of the long-running culture war in the United States are that the left has won every fight and the right has never learned from failure.

[...]

As a practical matter, [...] the conservative side comes to every dispute festooned with facts and logical arguments based on those facts. They assume that if they can make their case just the proper way, the left will have no choice but to accept their conclusions. At that point, the left will throw down their weapons, thank the right for enlightening them, and embrace them as brothers.

This never happens because the left is not motivated by facts and reason, at least not the facts and reason so pleasing to the right. Their social and political positions are rooted in the deeply held belief that they are on the side of angels or, as they prefer to put it, the right side of history. For the left, political opinion is a positional good. They hold political and social opinions to signal their moral virtue.

There’s more and it’s good too.