Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

14 Things Everyone Should Understand About Guns

Guns can be dangerous in the wrong hands. But so are articles about guns written by people who don’t understand anything about them.

There’s sadly no excuse to be ignorant about firearms. They’ve been around for hundreds of years. They’re owned and operated safely by tens of millions of Americans each year. Our Constitution guarantees our individual right to possess guns so that we might be able to defend ourselves from those who would violently take away our freedom. Many gun controllers, however — some of whom have bylines for major media organizations — don’t actually know the first thing about firearms.

Here’s a good example of the kind of self-inflicted injury that can result from weaponizing an ill-informed opinion about guns and gun-related paraphernalia, courtesy of Ryan J. Reilly of Huffington Post:

I believe these are rubber bullets, can anyone confirm? #Fergurson pic.twitter.com/iCsFi6qoIa

Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 17, 2014

Unfortunately, Reilly is hardly alone in his complete ignorance of how guns work. Our nation is facing an epidemic of gun-related misreporting. As a public service to those who have opinions about guns but don’t really want to spend much time learning anything about them, I’ve compiled a simple list of 14 basic things everyone should understand before writing or talking about guns.

Keep reading

New York Indoor-Dining To Resume Sept 30th, Cuomo Urges Citizens To Snitch On Violators

So what “science” changed in the last 24 hours?

Just a day after a large group on New York restaurateurs filed a $2 billion lawsuit against Cuomo and De Blasio over the ongoing COVID lockdowns, the Governor just announced that indoor-dining will be allowed (at 25% capacity) starting on September 30th.

The restaurant owners exclaimed:

“We’ve been patient, the numbers are fantastic, the COVID statistics, we don’t know what more we could do,” said one business owner.

“This is a lawsuit. We don’t wanna do this. This is not us, we are workers. We work 100 hours a week. It’s not a luxurious lifestyle. I have waiters; none of them drove here in a Ferrari today.”

And now they can open – but who decided that 25% capacity was the right number? why not 30% or 50%?

“Because compliance is better, we can now take the next step,” the governor said.

Additional restrictions would also be placed on restaurants and their patrons, including a requirement to wear face coverings when not seated.

Keep reading

Prof: “Nothing Wrong With” Murder Of Right-Wing “Fascist… From A Moral Perspective”

University of Rhode Island Professor Erik Loomis appeared to defend the murder of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, the member of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, during recent social unrest in Portland, Oregon.

In 2012, Loomis came under scrutiny after he called for NRA executive Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick“ following the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.

Just weeks later, in January 2013, Loomis said, “I know the central mission of the Republican Party is to have a membership made up entirely of old rural white people.”

Now, Loomis is once again under fire after publishing a blog post titled “Why was Michael Reinoehl killed?” Reinoehl is the man suspected of fatally shooting Danielson. Reinoehl was killed as federal authorities tried to arrest him.

“Michael Reinoehl is the guy who killed the fascist in Portland last week. He admitted it and said he was scared the cops would kill him. Well, now the cops have killed him,” Loomis wrote in the September 4 blog post.

“I am extremely anti-conspiracy theory. But it’s not a conspiracy theory at this point in time to wonder if the cops simply murdered him. The police is [sic] shot through with fascists from stem to stern. They were openly working with the fascists in Portland, as they were in Kenosha which led to dead protestors,” Loomis continued. 

In the comment section of the blog post, one reader challenged Loomis by writing, “Erik, he shot and killed a guy,” referring to Reinoehl.

Loomis responded by saying, “He killed a fascist. I see nothing wrong with it, at least from a moral perspective.” He further added that “tactically, that’s a different story. But you could say the same thing about John Brown.”

Loomis furthered compared Reinoehl to Brown who in the 1800s used violence as a means of fighting slavery. 

One reader then asked, “What’s so great about assassinating a rando fascist? And in the absence of a sound affirmative justification, it should be easy to envision the drawbacks.”

Loomis was quick to reply with, “What’s so great about assassinating random slaveholders, said liberals to John Brown.” 

In a separate comment, Loomis wrote, “the problem with violence is that it usually, though not always, is a bad idea. That I agree with.”

Loomis said in another comment, “Yes, sometimes violence is necessary, say to avoid greater physical harm, i.e. self-defense, or to defeat a literal army of fascists who are trying to kill people. But, ideologically, I think the idea that violence is good if it’s against our political enemies is a core part of fascism, and so the ideological opposition to that idea should be its opposite – that violence as a general rule is bad, unless the specific context of that situation requires a violent response.”

Keep reading