Category: Scratch a Lib-Find a Moron

Virginia’s Democrat Senate Majority Leader on Why Their ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban and Magazine Capcity Limit Really Isn’t a Big Deal

If you have an assault rifle, you can keep it. If you have an assault pistol, if you have one of these pistols with a silencer on it and a pistol grip in the front. A really big, big pistol…you want to have one with a telescope on it or lasers or whatever else you want, that’s okay. You just can’t buy a new one and you can’t sell it to anybody. If you want to have a magazine with more than 15 bullets, you can keep that, too. You just can’t buy a new one.

— Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell

“blast radius”

D.C. Claims Chaos Will Ensue if Magazine Ban Disappears

Last week a three-judge panel on the D.C. Court of Appeals (which is the highest local court in the District) ruled the District of Columbia’s ban on ammunition magazines that can hold more than ten rounds violates the Second Amendment. These magazines are “arms”, the court concluded, and they are unquestionably in common use for lawful purposes, which means that they’re protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Now the District of Columbia is hoping to reverse that decision through an en banc review, and is asking the Court of Appeals to keep the ruling from taking affect while it appeals.

In its request, the District claims that the panel’s decision “has created uncertainty and chaos” and that the “blast radius of the decision is potentially massive”, arguing that the opinion also impacts “exceedingly common charges governing unlicensed and unregistered firearms.”

I think D.C.’s licensing and registration requirements are equally unsound from a constitutional perspective, but there’s nothing in the panel’s decision that impacts those statutes. The opinion released by the court deals exclusively with the District’s prohibition on commonly owned magazines, and the only uncertainty resulting from the decision is whether or not the ban is still actively being enforced.

The U.S. Attorney’s office has already declined to pursue charges against any legal gun owner caught with a “large capacity” magazine, though the D.C. Attorney General’s office has continued prosecuting possession cases.

The D.C. Court of Appeals hasn’t granted the District’s request, but the opinion will likely remain on hold while the en banc review is being considered. The court has set an expedited briefing schedule that will conclude next Wednesday, and a decision on granting or denying the en banc request could come by the end of next week.

There’s an easy way to ensure there’s no confusion over the panel’s decision: let it stand and take effect.

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This level of stupid used to be fatal

And she’s a hypocrite too, but all leftists are, so… Billie Eilish gets permanent restraining order against man who repeatedly turned up to her home.
—Metro News, June 19th, 2020.

Billie Eilish (whoever that’s supposed to be) at the Grammys: “Nobody is illegal on stolen land. We need to keep fighting and speaking up. Our voices do matter..F ICE.”

James Lindsay

Let’s talk about the opening part of this statement: “nobody is illegal on stolen land.” We can break it down, but we should also know what it is. What we are looking at is Chinese-style political sloganeering called “tifa” (提法).

Communist communications ever since Mao took over China (and the CCP before that) almost always follow this kind of formulation, called 提法 (tífǎ), which literally translates as “watchwords” or “slogans.” Literally, it means to lift up or present or highlight the core message or political principle in play through a charged slogan.

The purpose of the sloganeering is actually to do a kind of political engineering through carefully selected and weaponized words that are easily memorable and that hijack the critical thinking faculties of the people who both hear and repeat them so they’ll advance the Party line.

You can think of tifa quite literally as a form of “discourse engineering” with the intent of doing political engineering or political warfare more or less by hijacking people’s brains through mystifying slogans. (Mystification is like a more powerful form of confusion, akin to having been put under a spell.)

In his amazing analysis of the CCP in the early 1950s, just after Mao took power (in October 1949), psychologist Robert Jay Lifton referred to what amounts to tifa as “thought-terminating clichés.” That is, they’re slogans (or clichés) that have the power to turn off your ability to think clearly about what’s being said and implied and to just go along with the political messaging rather than to question it.

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Anti-ICE Protest Leader Who Invaded Minnesota Church Just Did the Dumbest Thing Imaginable

As RedState reported, a group of anti-ICE protesters crossed a redline on Sunday, storming a church in Minnesota and occupying it. Supposed journalist Don Lemon was part of the chaos, with claims that one of the pastors works for ICE being used as justification for the attack.

The scene was part of an ever-escalating war against ICE, which has increased operations in Minneapolis and the surrounding areas due to a complete lack of cooperation by state and local authorities. Despite largely targeting illegal immigrants who have allegedly committed heinous crimes, including sex crimes against children, left-wing activists have taken to the streets to obstruct, impede, and assault federal agents.

A church isn’t the streets, though. It’s a privately-owned house of worship, and activists do not have a right to invade and occupy one, no matter how deranged their motivation is. But while Minnesota authorities are unlikely to take any serious action, the federal government is a different story. DOJ civil rights division head Harmeet Dhillon has already stated that they will use the FACE Act to go after these agitators.

Don’t get me wrong, the FACE Act is garbage, and has previously been used to go after pro-life activists for simply standing outside abortion clinics, but it is currently the law. Unless the Supreme Court one day changes that, the Trump administration should use all tools at its disposal.

That’s what makes protest leader Nekima Levy Armstrong’s move after the assault on the church so incredible, and not in a good way for her. Instead of maintaining some deniability, she actually posted all the participants of the attack on Facebook and admitted why they invaded it.

One of those listed is Don Lemon, along with multiple Black Lives Matter organizations, the Racial Justice Network, and numerous individual names. It’s basically a confession wrapped neatly with a bow for the DOJ to move forward with. It’s ill-advised, but hey, let her cook.

You can understand why these people would act without fear of any consequences and flaunt their alleged crimes. For years, Minnesota has allowed these activists to run amok, violating the law and terrorizing normal people, with the George Floyd riots of 2020 being the most striking example. Perhaps Armstrong and her cohorts believed they wouldn’t be subject to any federal investigation or possible charges. She thought wrong, though.

The DOJ shouldn’t wait for Minnesota officials to keep dithering in the face of these almost certainly illegal aggressions. Go after these activists with the full force of the law while there’s still a chance.

Devon Eriksen

A vast number of humans, probably a majority, aren’t people.

They are large language models.

I’m not saying this as a generality, as a clever or funny way of saying, “they are stupid”.
No. I mean something very concrete and specific, and there are a lot of people who appear very intelligent, maybe even win awards for writing good poetry or something, who are nevertheless not people, not fully sapient, just a large language model walking around in a human body.

First, you have to understand what a large language model is.
It’s a computer (organic or inorganic), which has been trained on a data set consisting solely of language (written or spoken), and rewarded for producing language that sounds like the data set, and is relevant to a prompt.

That’s all there is in there. This is why ChatGPT and Grok lie to you constantly.
It’s not because they are somehow just indifferent to the truth — they actually do not understand the concept of “truth” at all.

For something to be a “lie”, or an “inaccuracy”, there has to be a mismatch between the meaning of words, and the state of reality.
And there’s the critical difference. You see, in order to identify a mismatch between the state of reality, and the meaning of a sentence, you have to have a model of reality.

Not just one model, of language.

This is why Grok and ChatGPT hallucinate and tell you lies. Because, for them, everything is language, and there is no reality.

So when I say someone is a large language model, I do not mean he is “stupid”. He might be very facile at processing language. He might, in fact, be eloquent enough to give great speeches, get elected president, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and so on.
What I mean is that humans who are large language models do not have a robust world-object model to counterweight their language model. They are able to manipulate symbols, sometimes adroitly, but they are on far shakier ground when trying imagine the objects those symbols represent.

Which brings us to this woman.

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Lauren Chen

I just figured out why the Minnesota ICE death is bothering me so much.

This liberal woman was willing to take on federal agents, to disrupt ICE operations, in order to protect criminal Somalis.

Obviously, she probably didn’t imagine she would be killed. But surely, she must have known that, at the very least, she could be arrested.

She has three kids. So she was willing to be separated from her kids to protect criminal Somalis.

Speaking as a mother, this is insanity. This is not rational thinking.

What it is, instead, is the result of liberal brainrot that convinces progressive women they have more of a duty to nurture and protect poor, brown (criminal!) strangers than their own country, and hell, even their own children.

I am praying for this woman’s soul and for her family. But I mean it when I say this type of thinking is almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.

Portland Police Chief Cries After Admitting Suspects in Border Patrol Truck Attack Are Tren de Aragua Associates
Portland Police Chief Bob Day knew on the first day but withheld this information from the public as leftists urged violent revenge against federal agents

Portland Police Chief Bob Day broke down and cried at a press conference on Jan. 9 after being forced to concede that DHS was right all along: the illegal Venezuelan migrants accused of trying to run down Border Patrol agents the day before in Portland have ties to the violent Tren de Aragua gang. Day admitted he hesitated to tell the public the truth.

What’s worse is that he and the PPB were aware the day prior that DHS was correct in their statement, but refused to confirm it at the initial press conference, which preceded leftist rioting outside the Portland ICE facility. PPB had the names of the couple from their investigation into a July 11 Portland shooting, where the victim said the assailants are members of Tren de Aragua.

On Jan. 8, Border Patrol agents non-fatally shot Luis David Nico Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras in east Portland after the suspects allegedly tried to ram them down with a red pickup truck during a targeted stop. Almost immediately, internal details falsely claiming it was an ICE shooting were leaked to the extremist group PDX ICE Watch by a Multnomah County first responder.

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Luis David Nico Moncada
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Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras

Instead of waiting for facts, Portland and Oregon leaders — all Democrats — rushed to stage an emergency press conference condemning federal agents, rejecting DHS’ statements, and publicly siding with the violent suspects, whom they repeatedly described as “victims.” Corporate media followed suit, misleading the public and inflaming tensions. The Portland Police chief refused to share the truth about the suspects’ Tren de Aragua ties.

At night on Jan. 8, an angry far-left mob descended on the Portland ICE facility, attempting to attack it and forcing police to make six arrests — all sparked by misinformation pushed by elected officials, activists and media.