Never Trumpers Go Home

So the "bringing the Red Army" quip was in response to Bob Cesca making a strained analogy to the second battle of Bull Run where the Union general returned a bunch of deserters from Maine back to their brigade and said, 'look, we need you to fight and we aren't going to ask any questions if you pick your rifles back up and get in line.' All analogies have points where they don't line up, but this one isn't even on the same page. The never trumpers were never on our side, they were with the Confederacy for God's' sake. You can study military history but forgetting the relevant facts that deserters are most often shot and that deserters from the other side, while interrogated thoroughly, are never just told 'okay, get a rifle and line up with the guys you were shooting at yesterday.' Would you trust a guy still wearing gray standing behind you? That's what the never trumpers are.

So in addition to asking what army the never trumpers bring with them, Driftglass asked

LOL, Bob is friends with a Navy War College professor and Jeopardy champion named Tom Nichols whom he likes to point out as a worthy never trumper to have on our side. Driftglass replied that his post about Nichols at the time was "Area drunk blames 5th DUI on the repeal of Prohibition" and added that Nichols blamed the "dumpster fire" that is the modern Democratic Party made trump possible. So yes, for all of Nichols' erudition, his scholarly poise, and intelligence when put on the spot he's as full of shit as all the rest of the gang. I'm still planning to read his book The Death of Expertise at some point because despite political disagreements, and for crying out loud my thesis advisor was a conservative so I am no stranger to the ideas of intelligent conservatives, I can appreciate his ideas separately from snarky baggage.

Bob wants to cling to this idea that we can sway moderate republicans and conservative Dems who voted for #doughfacedonny over to our side, I have to ask, who are these people? Just as Driftglass likes to say that David Brooks writes for beltway bubble cloistered rich "moderate" conservatives, who are again almost a rounding error in terms of actual numbers of votes, this vast pool of untapped moderate conservatives simply does not exist. I don't live in the cornfields anymore but I doubt those rural people have changed. You can meet them halfway on an issue... they will just move the goalposts on you. You can try to find common ground, they will not in agreement and go right back to bashing Democrats. You can prove to them, categorically, that their pet conspiracy theory is nonsense and a week later they will be right back to it.

I thought about people in my home town and how they all changed after Scott Walker showed up. The doughy, bald-spotted proto fascist didn't change them so much as activate the latent xenophobia that grows out of being in an isolated community. That happened all over small towns across the country once hate radio and fox news ramped up the fear of outsiders and scapegoat anyone to the left of Mussolini

Never trumpers are not "squeezed from both sides" they made this bed and should deal with it. Penitence should be visible and public, otherwise it means nothing. You're not praying to God for forgiveness, you are trying to get right with your neighbors.

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What Army do Never Trumpers bring?

Well, going forward, here is the blueprint for how grownups debate. How, on social media or in real life, reasonable adults who accept science, evidence, facts, and logic can have a disagreement and discuss it. Bob Cesca has a Wednesday interview show that is available on his Patreon page that is free to the public. The idea is that you will go to the Patreon page, enjoy the free content, and be moved to kick him a few dollars to help continue producing content. A great concept, this is the good side of DIY political media and we should all consider spending a little bit here and there to support independent media. And for almost the exact reason for the debate here; because mainstream corporate media is not up to the task of defending democracy and in many ways is responsible for the horrid political climate that lets republicans skate away scott free from every disaster they cause and then put them on television to cover it up and call liberals traitors, etc.

Bob had Driftglass and Blue Gal on this week. They have had a low intensity disagreement for months now over the subject of Never Trump republican conservatives. I'll give you three guesses who's side I'm on and the first two don't count. It has annoyed me to ever higher levels that Bob has taken the position that some grand coalition of liberals and never trumpers will come together to rescue democracy and get rid of #doughfacedonnny. Driftglass has intermittently called Bob out for the, God Chez Pazienza would hate me using this word, problematic nature of throwing in with never trumpers. I don't want to tear down Bob, his heart is in the right place, heck I even tried this argument before the election. "This time, just this time" don't vote republican for president, #doughfacedonny is fundamentally unfit for office in every sense of the word is what I tried to convey. But too many credulous liberals are retweeting Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, and others as though they have awoken from the multiple decades of leadership in conservative intellectual and political circles to see the error of their ways. This has to stop, these people are not your friends.

Bob clings to liberal optimistic hope that things might be, could be different this time. Hope is inherently about the future, and the future is not set. Sure it's possible that this coalition could arise, but is it likely? Is it worth the price liberals would pay by embracing people who were calling them anti-American traitors two years ago? I used to write about Bob and Chez as being akin to the subjects of my MA thesis, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr. Like them, Niebuhr died earlier than Schlesinger and it is possible that the latter would have thought and wrote in different ways if the former had lived longer. Chez was a healthy voice of skepticism in the more gregarious Bob's ear and while Bob has new co-hosts who exercise some influence on him, he doesn't have that same grounding he once had before Chez died. This is the first time in a while that DG & BG have been on Bob's show and it isn't a seamless transition because they were guests on his interview show, not co-hosts with equal weight to drive the discussion. But DG & BG did present that counterargument that has been lacking on Bob's show.

I'm not finished listening to the debate. Just wanted to get something down about the show itself. The point being that this is how adults argue. This is how sensible people can disagree on something but still be on speaking terms. It's a good demonstration of what we can do if we remember that that disembodied text commenting on something you post, or a news story on a public forum is also a human being. As for the title of this post, it was something that Driftglass said about the coalition with never trumpers. The US allied with Stalin during WWII because the Soviet Union had the Red Army and was a huge asset in fighting the common foe. What do never trumpers bring? Votes, where? The death star plans to unravel their propaganda machine and deprogram all the meatheads? Even some small assurance that we won't go back to defending against grand bargains and how much to cut Social Security again once #doughfacedonny is behind bars, as Blue Gal added. The votes from these people are a rounding error, and they are simply taking opposition seats on tv news that should go to actual liberals who have been fighting trump and the fascism he represents (and republicans embody) since the beginning.

One More Nail in the Coffin of Democracy

I just heard that #doughfacedonny has gone ahead with declaring a national emergency to fund his stupid wall. I have to keep this brief with just a knee-jerk reaction.

Why didn't he do anything while his supposed party was running everything?

Doesn't he realize this is an impeachable abuse of power?

Will media figures actually step up to refute his phoney emergency?

Is this simply the latest step in the utter subversion and repudiation of democracy?

Will so-called conservatives finally admit that they hate America as it is and want authoritarianism?

American government has basically been broken, functionally, since 1993 when Bill Jeff took the reins. Despite his New Democrat/Centrist credentials, the republicans rejected his legitimacy and waged war on him despite his election victory and reelection. Nixon tested the waters for authoritarianism and barely escaped with his freedom. Reagan buzzsawed the foundations of the New Deal configuration of the federal government and got away with it, leaving the government hobbled by debt. Dubya Bush simply extended what the Reaganites were doing and amplified both the authoritarian nature of republican ideology and that so-called party's open contempt for democracy.

The first thing: "I didn't need to do this." #doughfacedonny's own words. Mother Jones leads their story on it by writing "Merriam-Webster defines an emergency as an 'unforeseen' event that requires 'immediate action.'" So there is, by definition, no merit to #doughfacedonny's actions. He has pushed this asinine story of a crisis on the southern border. All Americans that are not republican automatons know that this isn't true, or would know that it isn't if the media did more than carry water for liars and authoritarians.

Second thing: this is exactly what the republicans want; to "prove" that normal governance is impossible and rule by decree is the only way to control this roiling society of malcontents. It's all nonsense of course, the only problem that is intractable in America is the fact that the republican party is treated as a good faith actor in our politics and not forcibly removed from power as the terrorists and traitors that they are.

Third thing: by continuing the normalization of anti-American authoritarianism, decreeing a national emergency where one does not exist will join every broken rule and violated taboo perpetrated by this death cult of human suffering. Again, there is no daylight between what #doughfacedonny does and what republicans want.

Finally: this is just the man on the bicycle continuing to pedal forward lest he fall over. Stop thinking of each travesty of justice, abuse of power, or blatant lie as covering up or distracting from something else. This is one unbroken line of chaos from the moment #doughfacedonny came down the escalator until now.

Don't for a moment believe that there is some kind of silver lining in all of this. This is not setting a precedent for a future Democratic president to get actual progressive action on public safety, climate change, income and wealth inequality, or anything else. The hypocrisy of the so-called republican party knows no limits, they do not accept any opposition as legitimate, and will not compromise or work in good faith on anything. Until they are beaten to a pulp, nothing will function normally. Bill Clinton tried to get a market-based health insurance reform through congress, he was crushed for it. He tried to balance the budget, republicans simply lied that the debt was bigger than ever. He would have been impeached on flimsier grounds than lying about an affair if that had not landed in the death cult's lap.When Dubya ramped up the tax cuts, ladled on the gravy for defense contractors, and lied us into a disastrous war, his party responded by denouncing any critics as traitors. Barack Obama was treated the same way.

Normalizing this emergency decree will only smooth the road to dictatorship even further. This is the hill worth dying on, metaphorically speaking. This is what abuse of power looks like. Democrats respond timidly to their own peril.

Howard Schultz and Twenty First Century Mugwumpism

I did not even know who the CEO of Starbucks was until he abruptly decided he would do his best to re-elect Doughface Donny by running as an independent centrist candidate for president. Every buzzword phrase has already been deployed to try and dissuade Howard Schultz from doing this. I've heard 'if you really want to set fire to a bunch of money there are easier ways.' And the President of the Center for American Progress  will call for a boycott of Starbucks to make sure that none of her money is going to re-elect Trump. Even perennial mugwump independent centrist extraordinaire Michael Bloomberg said that it was a bad idea. Not because he didn't love Schultz' positions of ultra anti-progressivism one would assume, but because the electoral college makes it an impossibility.

Now, panic might be too strong a word for real world reactions to this hypothetical two years out spoiler, but this quixotic scheme and all others like it need to be squashed as hard as possible by as many voices as possible. We have enough trouble with every Democrat with more than 1% name recognition throwing their hat in the ring already to worry about how the elite business class will sabotage the restoration of the republic. This is serious business, not something for businessmen with no political experience and ideology that only fellow CEOs could love to jump into on an insane vanity project. I am normally pretty grumpy and gloomy about politics, civilization has enough to deal with from the enemy (republicans). This third party bid feels more like sabotage, especially when Schultz makes the same inane quip that Reagan did about the Democratic Party leaving him.

I mean goddamnit! Schultz has the same stupid positions that were all in vogue during the '90s with Bill Jeff and the DLC ragamuffins. We as a country and as individuals are kind of past the flirtations with propaganda like "this is a center-right country" when it has finally become so difficult to get by that no one can intentionally have a family. Seriously, it may have flew under the radar but the CDC report that fertility has dropped below replacement levels for the country at large made my local ABC affiliate. Other things we are done with, "tax cuts spur growth", "we can't afford medicare for all", or "free college or government guaranteed jobs will kill incentives to work hard." I am done with anyone not taking climate change seriously, or espousing any of the business-friendly positions that have skyrocketed inequality and poverty beyond gilded age levels.

The fertility report is also important in another respect, beyond finally putting the lie to any scumbag republican talking about "family values", is that business has finally broken Friedrich Engels' dictum that capitalism will always have a floor for wages at replacement levels. When workers cannot have enough children to replace themselves we have finally hit the ultimate short term gain, eat your seed corn period of late stage capitalism. It is the essence of mugwumpism that Howard Schultz embodies here, his main position seems to be not wanting to pay any more taxes. He apparently likes to label progressive ideas as un-American. Josh Marshall at TPM wrote that this supposed "lifelong Democrat" is basically running as an anti-Democrat and on an anti-Democratic Party platform.

Schultz embodied, not the non-ideological centrism he claims, but the left wing of what Anand Giridharadas called "Marketworld" in his book Winners Take All. Perhaps Marketworld is the home of 21st century mugwumps, refusing to join in the messy world of politics to tinker with market-based solutions to social problems. Schultz very consciously states that he wants to run "outside the two party system" because to acknowledge that real people and their lives are affected by what happens in the dirty world of partisan politics would be to admit that his canopy view of America is completely out of touch. Oblivious to the fact that they have caused most of the problems they purportedly want to solve, modern mugwumps operate inside the fantasy that any attempt to raise taxes on the rich will cause the economy to collapse and life as we know it to end. Much better to massively cut Social Security and Medicare, thus ensuring that life will end for millions of non-millionaires. Claiming that the massive national debt (run up almost entirely by republicans and their legacies) is our greatest threat was the standard threat of republicans only a decade or so ago. You need look no further than this scolding from Investors Business Daily to understand that these are internalized ideals of the Marketworld set, completely detached from life as most of us know it.

Howard, as someone who has drunk a few Starbucks coffees and isn't fundamentally hostile to the company, please take Bloomberg's advice.

Whose Populism is it Anyway?

So, you're an eternally boyish right winger whose increasing slips into espousing white supremacist propaganda has caused advertisers to start fleeing your show, what do you do? Why, turn to economic populism of course! Just as republicans flocked to the banner of a no talent hustler and failed reality TV star who promised them a herrenvolk democracy where their white families and communities would be protected from the hell he would rain down upon the darker-skinned Americans, Tucker Carlson unleashed a monologue recently that would make Bernie Sanders or William Jennings Bryan proud (if they only glanced at the non-conspiracy theory side).

“Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

Vox posted an extensive in-depth article about the heresy to the free market faith that utterly and absolutely defines what it is to be "conservative" in America posited by Carlson and some of the debate sparked on the right by his statements. It is worth reading in full and I will try to highlight some of the salient points but you should really go check it out for yourself, because I could be completely wrong in my analysis.

My first thought was, "has Tucker Carlson ever expressed a populist thought in his preppy, bowtied life?" But I guess "the people versus the elites" is kind of his schtick.

“Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”

“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”

 My, my, does this remind you of anyone?

In [Thomas] Frank’s view, liberal policy wonks are part of the problem, members of a well-educated elite that massages its own technocratic vanities while utterly missing the big question of the day. To Frank, that question hasn’t changed much over the last few centuries. “It is the eternal conflict of management and labor, owner and worker, rich and poor — only with one side pinned to the ground and the other leisurely pounding away at its adversary’s face,” he writes. Today, polite circles tend to describe this as the issue of “inequality.” Frank prefers an older formulation. “The 19th century understood it better: They called it ‘the social question,’ ” he writes, defined as “nothing less than the whole vast mystery of how we are going to live together.”

As Frank notes, today some people are living much better than others — and many of those people are not Republicans. Frank delights in skewering the sacred cows of coastal liberalism, including private universities, bike paths, microfinance, the Clinton Foundation, “well-meaning billionaires” and any public policy offering “innovation” or “education” as a solution to inequality. He spends almost an entire chapter mocking the true-blue city of Boston, with its “lab-coat and starched-shirt” economy and its “well-graduated” population of overconfident collegians.

I guess Carlson's is a perfect corollary to Dr. Frank's scathing analysis of the technocratic elite liberals who:

In one sense, I guess, we can finally say that Americans understand this. Among the bien pensant theorists of the liberal “Resistance,” everyone talks about “populism” today, and everyone is against it. For the high-born and the well-graduated, the word is perfect—in one drive-by slur, it brings together all that is not-them: the racist and the rural; the uneducated and the left-behind; the clueless billionaire president and his adoring proletarian throngs. Today it is the dread of populism that causes the foundation dollars to flow and the murmurs of agreement to sweep the well-heeled audience at Aspen or Davos or SXSW.

But of course, Tucker Carlson is not a populist. He is at most like Otto von Bismarck, sniffing the warning smoke of impending revolution and enacting paternalistic Prussian social programs to cool the socialist ire of the people. Or maybe just an outsider, desperately trying to get his well-bred republican colleagues to cool it with the destabilizing class warfare. I don't expect this "most interesting debate in conservative politics" to actually amount to anything. We Americans could not work up the energy to mount a rebellion against the Koch brothers or Doughfacedonny that would actually cause them to worry. Carlson is inadvertently telling the truth, the MAGA hat-wearing proles really did want a Caudillo to put them back at the front of the line and put the brown people back in their place. But that 25-33% of Americans is so brainwashed at this point that they cannot connect dots, they will write Doughfacedonny off the same way they powered up the Bush-Off machine (h/t Driftglass). After all, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. The next wannabe Caudillo will not be as stupid as donny.

So what the hell is populism anyway? And who owns the genuine version? Even a cursory study of revolutions in history supplies a great deal of evidence that radical change doesn't come from the bottom. It confirms Orwell's theory that revolutions are simply the ambitious middle displacing a calcified upper class. In America race is always at the heart of reaction. So the New York Times can quote a republican secretary, the kind who would really benefit from Bismarck-style social insurance programs (the kind that can really only be done in the public sector), as saying:

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

But, "conservatism" as understood by these reprogrammable meatbags who fall for every authoritarian trope in the book, is much more informed by John C. Calhoun than Bismarck. Thus the absurdity of tea party republicans demonstrating in the streets in favor of deregulating the banks and against decent health insurance.  That was passed along by serious media commentators with straight faces as "populism" too.

Is it easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission?

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once wrote, as he was wont to do, about presidential history in times of crisis. In particular he cited Abraham Lincoln and the extraordinary measures he took during the opening months of the Civil War. That was a real state of emergency, the slave states organized with incredible speed and moved quickly to steal Federal buildings and property. Slave power propagandists in the border states printed wildly seditious stories about the North and the newly elected president. It was not a time for careful deliberation and the slow wheels of government to take action. Schlesinger wrote that it was easier for Lincoln to do what needed to be done and explain his actions later.

Other presidents have taken questionable actions in times of crisis as well, Andrew Jackson's bank war and Indian removal, John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, Wilson's roundups and deportations of revolutionary aliens, and so on. In each case, it appeared to much of the public to be a real crisis. Okay, maybe not with Jackson because he was just an asshole, but most of the time action was at least perceived to be necessary. The constitution was bypassed, the crisis resolved and officials took responsibility for their actions, most of the time anyway. It was easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. This idea isn't limited to presidents, military commanders, police chiefs, businessmen, and even parents who need to take their children to the doctor all occasionally take action and answer for it later. This has also been a core tenet of all the torture porn films and television shows, "do we torture the shit out of the guy with the location of the bomb now and take our chances on punishment later?"

I'm no leader and I hate these kind of hypotheticals but we are rapidly approaching a turning point in American democracy. Another republican president is about to declare an emergency to get some awful thing they want, as has happened at least informally, for the last half century. Let's think about a few. Nixon's operatives went on their merry way bugging opponents, blackmailing and intimidating activists, planting provocateurs in anti-war groups and others, and generally acting above the law until they finally got caught. And even then,they would have walked away laughing had it not been for the courage of democracy's defenders holding their feet to the fire. Reagan's basement conspiracy in Iran-Contra likewise just ran their clandestine operation to sell arms to one enemy so they could supply an army of terrorists in Nicaragua. A few of them got caught and did their time as just the cost of doing business. Most just laughed all the way to the bank though, including the doddering old man himself. The list of authoritarian monstrosities of George W. Bush's administration is incredibly long and would make for many posts and book fodder. Sure, there was a real attack on America, although in hindsight it is fairly clear that it could have been foiled if that band of republican hacks had tried. But the cynical opportunism of denouncing opponents as traitors, and blasting out terror warnings that most likely were exaggerated in the extreme to fearmonger and drown out news of their myriad failures certainly fits this pattern.

Doughfacedonny is widely expected to declare a state of national emergency as outlined in an Act passed by Congress after Watergate that was and is supposed to stop the pattern of doing this very thing during his TV time tonight. Why the networks are still falling for his shit is a mystery we will never fully know the answer to. No one in their right mind would give this orange disgrace permission to do anything, or forgive him afterwards. Not that he would care. He already stole the presidency with the help of monsters at home and abroad. He stole two supreme court seats now and blew up the deficit with his corporate welfare tax giveaway. Has he asked for forgiveness for any of those things? No, of course not. He and Mitch McConnell have not asked permission to reopen the damn government that they run and aren't exactly trying very hard to be forgiven for the latest mess they caused.

It has made the rounds, in liberal commentary circles anyway, the idea of a Reichstag Fire moment coming from this crowd of traitors and imbeciles. And as the meme so often points out, "it's no longer whether trump has any decency, but whether we do." Are the networks, "the enemy of the people" as doughfacedonny so often calls them, really going to go along with this? Maybe he will just go out and feebly rant and lie about immigration and walls and other such nonsense. Nothing will come of it and we can all go back to our regularly scheduled resistance. There certainly is a national emergency but it's not on the border with Mexico. It isn't a legitimacy crisis, all the evidence of Russian meddling has rendered the occupant of the Oval Office illegitimate. It isn't an economic crisis either, the stock market is tanking because of the real crisis though. It is that one major political party in the United States is a death cult of human suffering and that about 40% of the electorate supports that cult.

There may come a time when the American people are finally pushed so hard that they must collectively ask whether it is easier to ask forgiveness for destroying the death cult after the fact, or whether we sit back and civilly wait for permission from the Democrats to defeat them. If doughfacedonny does indeed declare a national emergency and fumble around stealing enough money to build the stupid wall, it won't stop there. I suck at predicting the future, I really expected death squads on day one, but this time might prove more dangerous. Donny's back is against the wall, it is no longer a whisper that he should resign and bolt while he still can. The previous crises of Republican malice gave the criminal-in-chief a path out of danger, therefore they left when their time came but will donny? You can almost trace a line in the escalation of authoritarianism in republican governance since the late 1960s, pushing but never quite closing the door on democracy. Tonight the trap might spring shut. Stay tuned.

The Kraken tries arguing on Twitter

I'm not exactly a proficient Twitter user. Something something tentacles getting in the way of the character limit etc. So I only rarely get on that platform, and even more rarely interact with people. But, occasionally I get a random shard of coral stuck in one of my arms and need to engage. Who are the most obnoxious [real] people on Twitter? My vote, as insignificant as it is, goes to the gun nuts. They are like pit bulls that just lock jaws on an argument and just never let go. I happened to see David Hogg's tweet about taxing gun sales to fund research on gun violence. Kind of like alcohol and tobacco taxes are supposed to fund health care (I don't know what those actually do except impoverish smokers). Anyway, I immediately thought of Chris Rock's famous stand up routine about making bullets cost $5000 each. And here's the result, I wasn't angry until Glen chimed in. It's only when the reprogrammable meatbags who have done a great job on internalizing gun lobby propaganda that sound like strong pillars to them but are actually made of smoke start shooting their mouths off that I go full Lakoff.

A surtax on ammunition would also be very productive.

— Tentacles of 🦑 (@TentaclesOfYest) November 29, 2018

There is already 10% federal tax on guns and ammo.

— FatCat 🙄 (@sometingfishy) November 29, 2018

Shows how much these idiots know about the subject.

— Glen Ely (@ldyvolsftbalfan) November 29, 2018

Hence the “sur” part. But strut around anyway. Really, the tears are streaming down my face.

— Tentacles of 🦑 (@TentaclesOfYest) November 29, 2018

Yes, there is a tax on firearms and cartridges already existing. It did not dissuade the Las Vegas shooter from spraying thousands of bullets into a crowd. If the idea is that making something more expensive will lead to lower consumption of that product has any merit, then a surtax on ammunition should be productive. Perhaps, if you are discussing things in good faith and your aim is actually to decrease gun violence, then this would be a conversation worth having. But:

Know what would happen? Private sales would increase, stores would decrease, and criminals would still be shooting people because they dont get their stuff legally. Just another unnecessary, unwarranted surtax that will benefit politicians.

— FatCat 🙄 (@sometingfishy) November 29, 2018

Can’t argue with that kind of stupid. Just relax, the nurse will be by with your meds shortly.

— Tentacles of 🦑 (@TentaclesOfYest) November 29, 2018

You cant argue against it because its accurate.

— FatCat 🙄 (@sometingfishy) November 29, 2018

This is an individual that wouldn't understand how arguments work if one walked up and slapped him in the face with a rifle. So I abandoned good faith and simply rejected the premise of his NRA talking points. Talking points that have obviously never been challenged by anyone after they have escaped his pie hole.

Argue against what, sweeping generalizations without supporting evidence? No, you made the assertions, you need to defend them.

— Tentacles of 🦑 (@TentaclesOfYest) November 29, 2018

Private sales would increase because taxes don't have to be paid in a private transaction. Stores would lose business because people are purchasing more via private sale. Criminals don't buy their guns from the corner gun store. Not sure what is so hard to understand.

— FatCat 🙄 (@sometingfishy) November 29, 2018

These nra talking points are nearly a century old, simply mouthing the words doesn’t make them true.

— Tentacles of 🦑 (@TentaclesOfYest) November 29, 2018

No, it’s called intellectual laziness

— Tentacles of 🦑 (@TentaclesOfYest) November 29, 2018

“If” statements are always circumspect. Why are you so interested in making it easy for those criminals to get guns? Worried that when it’s your turn to shoot up a school it might be a minor inconvenience?

— Tentacles of 🦑 (@TentaclesOfYest) November 29, 2018

Only everything.

— Tentacles of 🦑 (@TentaclesOfYest) November 29, 2018

As opposed to preening for your pal. You have been living in your own bubble so long that you don't realize how it looks to the normies. Everything you have written merely states that you don't want to inconvenience these nameless criminals and you love to see people die.

— Tentacles of 🦑 (@TentaclesOfYest) November 29, 2018

It seems that the art of arguing with gun nuts seems to be expending as little effort as possible for each line while rejecting the premise of each of their assertions. The NRA and gun propagandists have presumable spent a lot of money and time crafting these "criminals don't care" frames and injecting them into the minds of followers. If you have spent your entire life with the intellectual crutch of merely accepting these talking points and never having them challenged or even spending a moment of critical thought on them, then it makes sense that they sound like "common sense." As much as "the sun rises in the east" but never asking why it does so. Telling them that the sun isn't actually moving and it is actually the Earth rotating into view of the sun fries circuits.

Criminals don't buy guns in gun stores. They don't care about surtaxes as it won't affect them. This has everything to do with taxing law abiding gun owners for criminal behavior. You have totally changed the direction of this conversation because you lost the argument. Good day.

— FatCat 🙄 (@sometingfishy) November 29, 2018

No expert here, but I'm pretty sure when you claim to have won the argument you have really just given up. I could keep challenging him on who these criminals are, are they completely monolithic and sharing every attribute? Or is this simply a lazy, unfounded, and sweeping generalization without meaning? Most stories of gun massacres I read specifically state that the weapons and ammunition were bought legally, so I don't know what on Earth he is talking about. He sure got touchy after I deduced that he supports gun violence from his words didn't he? But I guess I will give him points for not calling me a libtard or communist.

After Glen stopped liking every reply from Fat Cat and nobody else stepped in to support the cat, his enthusiasm for making me cry started to wane. Just for future reference here is a chart of logical fallacies, it is one of many. Should we play bingo on it?

The fundamental components of argument are that the party making an assertion has to defend it. The other party has no need to prove the assertion is incorrect. To "win" your assertion must be supported with facts and evidence. Making assertions "all criminals obtain their guns illegally" without proof is called conjecture and is as hollow as regurgitating talking points without any understanding of what they mean.

Now for some obligatory book references:

Lakoff, because to negate a frame is to activate a frame (criminals don't obey laws).

Altemeyer, because gun nuts are almost by definition scared little rabbits who surrendered the ability to think critically and assess new information to fear a long time ago.

Charles, because the gun debate should have some actual facts and history.

Neiwert, because gun nuts really do inhabit a different, much more violent reality from the rest of us