You know, if you look at the wikipedia page on “Tea Party” and click through to the national organizations claiming to be “tea party” organizations, the only one having anything like that in their platform is the one run by this guy:
[http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2010/01/wash-post-quotes-bogus-tea-party-leader][1]
I recall commenting on a blog with a larger proportion of right-wing readership about some detail of a post where a social-democrat position was erroneously described as communist, and got many responses that there was no F*ing difference between communist/progressive/liberal/social-democrat/socialist. There is certainly substantial overlap in political candidates who have gotten the most negative attention in the US national press between “tea party” support and social conservative positions, but I think it is an error to equate minarchism with 2nd-amendment-absolutism with the social-conservative version of regulatory puritanism in sexual matters.
[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2010/01/wash-post-quotes-bogus-tea-party-leader
Only 35 percent of those who strongly approve of the tea party agreed that blacks are hardworking, compared with 55 percent of those who strongly disapprove of the tea party. On whether blacks were intelligent, 45 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 59 percent of the tea-party opponents. And on the issue of whether blacks were trustworthy, 41 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 57 percent of the tea-party opponents.
The author of the article points out that the Tea Party isn’t an organization whose purpose is racist, merely an organization that has lots of racists in it; but that doesn’t alter the fact that Tea Party members tend to be “socially conservative”, to use the euphemism.
The entire premise of that claim seems to hinge on the significance of using “state” instead of “country” in 2A. That article opens with “The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment)”.
One problem: the word “country” was never used in the constitution. So how could the “real reason” that the framers didn’t use a word (that they never used) be compared to a word they did use (multiple times) as a way to show their intent of not using a word (that means something completely different than the word they did use) as a way to show their supposed nefarious purposes? It doesn’t. All it shows is that the author of that article is talking out his arse. If he bases his premise on that fiction, the rest falls along with it’s foundation.
Yes, it WAS a backronym. But even back in the 90s, we were mailing in tea bags attached to letters to Congressmen and Senators.
The modern origin, is pretty much Rick Santelli’s rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile on CNBC, railing against government subsidies to stop foreclosures. It remains a organization with a fiscally-conservative, limited government agenda. . . .
Gee, using left-of-center orgs to view a right-of center org. But if I was to use a CATO or Fox News analysis of, say, MoveOn, I would be decried as an ideologue.
NPR finds that ~81% of the Tea Party are Christians. Big surprise there, ~80% of Americans identify as Christian.
NPR goes on to say that since Tea Party people tend to be pro-life and oppose gay marriage, they’re not libertarian, but socially conservative. Ahem, there’s a bit of a stretch. Both big-L and small-l libertarians share a philosophy of limited government with the Tea Party. And, shock of shocks, a movement which pushes for lower spending and less government tends Republican. In related news, water is wet and ice is cold. . .
Looking at the Pew study, is shows that the average Tea Partier is somewhat more conservative fiscally than the “typical” Republican or Republican-leaning voter. Again, no news here.
But the big news comes later with the cross of opinions of whether Conservative Christians agree with the Tea Party, and vice versa. While Conservative Christians tend 2:1 for the Tea Party or no opinion of the Tea Party, the reverse is NOT true, For Christian Conservatives vs against or no opinion is 2:3.
Those are the numbers YOU referenced. You should remember that correlation is NOT causation. . .
If you leave out the ‘beyond bare charts, numbers, graphs, and facts’ part I’d go along.
It’s pretty easy to tweak the numbers just so to get the charts and graphs you want. A more elegant approach is tweaking the collection of the data itself, i.e. make sure you don’t get data you don’t want in the first place.
If you want to gauge how reliable statistics are you need to see the raw data and you need to know how it has been collected and processed.
And that brings me to the ‘facts’. We can only work with whatever we find in the archives etc., i.e. with whatever has been recorded. We do not know what hasn’t been recorded. If there is more than one source and if there is background information on the source itself the information is more reliable.
Recorded facts are hard facts but they are proably not objectice facts.
The mere decision to record this bit of information but not that bit of information is already an interpretation.
C’mon Kerry - the act of suicide itself is paradoxical. I don’t think there is much of a paradox behind firearm usage. People keep firearms (afaik) for reasons other than suicide. However, if one chooses to commit suicide, it is reasonable to use the most effective means at hand. So now we have an irrational act being committed with a rationally chosen tool. Where is the gun paradox there?
I am not suprised by the correlation given the United States background and history. However as a gun owner who is a “racial minority”, most of the shooters I hang with are also racial minorities, but maybe that is also a Best Coast conundrum.
My straight up score on The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale is 12.
Stop the war on freedom
(the war on technology, the war on computing, the war on drugs, the war on guns)
Exactly. Winners write the history. . . especially the ones that get disseminated. With the rise of persistent digital storage, that may TECHNICALLY change, but then you have to find and filter the information. In the end, it will likely be documented in painstaking detail, but still bound by search and indexing biases. . .
[quote=“mathew, post:105, topic:13468”]
Also, I’m surprised nobody has mentioned [the racist history of the NRA][1]. [/quote]
Soooo - did you actually read that article? Where exactly does it have the NRA supporting racists? Certainly the current NRA isn’t racist - “The new NRA was not only responding to the wave of gun-control laws enacted to disarm black radicals; it also shared some of the Panthers’ views about firearms.” They are still trying to get Jim Crow laws overturned in some states.
The NRA opened up chapters for training in the south during the civil rights movement. Probably the most famous was the one headed by Robert Williams, president of the local NAACP chapter in Monroe, NC. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/negroeswithguns/rob.html
While I agree that silly ideas, just because they are strongly held, need not be labeled as controversial, but the arguments put forward here cannot be dismissed my batting down straw-man simplifications. Even supposing that your premise were, correct, you need to address the use of the word ‘state’ in the rest of the text, not look for the word we use two centuries later. As it happens, the proposition is based not so much on the framers’ diction, as an analysis of the parties who desired this protection.
It should be remembered that much of the impetus for replacing the Articles of Confederation was an armed insurrection in the North (Massachusetts), yet it is not any Northern faction which wanted this protection for its militia, not in the original drafting, nor as an amendment. Why should those who we would think most aware of the need for the state to be able to preserve it’s privileges not even think to mention it, while those who, after just having to energetically defend their states’ institution of slavery from other states’ wishes in the Constitutional Convention, would insist that they preserve their states’ militia from Federal intrusion? Is it really so silly to infer that they did so to protect slavery from the federal government? It seems much sillier of those who, while claiming the mantle of “originalist,” to spin tales of the need to protect hunters’ rights (which absolutely no one mentions at the time) or the supposed rights of an individual citizen to own a weapon outside the requirements of a state’s militia (let alone the nonsense about unregulated access to any firearm).
The NRA supported the Mulford Act, and later supported Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was the governor of California when the Black Panthers rose to national prominence. He helped lead the charge for California’s adoption of new restrictive gun laws designed to disarm the Black Panthers, like the Mulford Act. With that law, California banned people from openly carrying loaded firearms. Ronald Reagan even said, “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
What the NRA understood is that the “citizen” being talked about was a member of the Black Panther Party walking into the State House carrying a firearm.
Now, it might of course be complete coincidence that the NRA suddenly did a complete U-turn as soon as the issue was white people carrying guns rather than black people. But I kinda doubt it, given the apparent demographics of NRA members, as also reported by another NRA member who refers to them as OFWG, “Old Fat White Guys”. (The NRA don’t release official demographic information, unsurprisingly.)
