I saw this on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/No_Slack_Delta/status/968065466739642368

That there is brilliance!!!

In the wake of the Parkland shooting, a Time magazine article from December of last year (which feels like forever ago but is only two months) has been making the rounds again.

How to Raise a Sweet Son in an Era of Angry Men

I haven’t read the article yet, but I’m already saying
“fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Hours after I gave birth to my first child, my husband cradled all five pounds of our boy and said, gently, “Hi, Sweetpea.” Not “Buddy” or “Little Man.” Sweetpea. The word filled me with unanticipated comfort. Like most parents, we knew what we’d name our son but never discussed how we’d speak to him. I was witnessing my husband’s commitment to raising a sweet boy.

I’m surprised she even calls her husband a “husband”and doesn’t have a more gender neutral term for him.

There are so many angry men among us. There are angry women, too, but they’re only beginning to claim this emotion that has long been denied them. Women’s public anger delivers deliberate messages—it’s pussy hats, reclaiming our time, and #MeToo. It’s the kind of anger that gives girls voices. Men’s anger tries to shut down the voices of others. Today’s angriest women galvanize; today’s angriest men murder.

Girl anger is good.  Boy anger is bad.  We’re just going to ignore the demonization of boyhood, the suicide rate for boys is three times that of girls, that boys are falling behind in schools, that America is failing its boys.  Being angry about that.  Or more precisely, being angry about feeling that something is wrong and not knowing how to put your finger on it is bad.

The world has turned so upside down that the most public displays of masculine vulnerability have come lately from late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel, who’s shed tears talking about children’s healthcare and gun control. It feels like another century when President Obama wept while remembering the victims of Sandy Hook — a Brigadoon of political empathy not to return during the current administration.

Here we have another woman who doesn’t understand how men process emotion.  All they know is that men don’t process it the same way as women and that is bad.

My son is now 5, and I’m also the mother of a 3-year-old girl. I’m thrilled that my daughter is growing up in a time where American girls are encouraged to be both fierce and kind, simultaneously strong and compassionate. The t-shirts that declare “Girls Rule the World” offer an empirical falsehood, but at least the aspiration is there. My daughter recently delighted me when she deemed her makeshift “kite” — a rainbow scarf tied to a stick — a fencing foil and ran about the woods parrying and proclaiming, “En garde!” But I delighted even more in my son when, at a birthday party where the balloon artist presumptuously twisted pneumatic swords for all the boys, my boy asked for a balloon heart.

She is proud that she is raising a strong daughter.  She is proud that she is raising a weak son.  This is the worst sort of woe feminism, hobbling a boy of out some perverted sense of equality.

Boys have always known they could do anything; all they had to do was look around at their presidents, religious leaders, professional athletes, at the statues that stand erect in big cities and small. Girls have always known they were allowed to feel anything — except anger. Now girls, led by women, are being told they can own righteous anger.Now they can feel what they want and be what they want.

“Boys have had it good for so long, I’m going to fix that by breaking my son emotionally.  His sister, on the other hand, I will help succeed in every way.”

There’s no commensurate lesson for boys in our culture. While girls are encouraged to be not just ballerinas, but astronauts and coders, boys—who already know they can walk on the moon and dominate Silicon Valley—don’t receive explicit encouragement to fully access their emotions. 

Fuck you.  How’s that emotion?   What does she know about fully accessing boy emotions?  Nothing.  A boy, a healthy boy gets mad or sad and fixes something, or goes for a run, or splits wood.  We don’t sit around with our friends and cry.  We turn our emotions into action.

I have a fight with my wife and I clean my truck.  I get frustrated and I go to the gym.  I once ripped the shelves out of a closet because I was pissed, then set about redoing it.

Male emotions can be constructive or destructive.  Part of raising a boy is teaching him how to use those emotions for good.  I don’t know what this woman is doing to her son, but it’s not good.

Boys are still snips and snails and puppy dog tails. We leave them behind from birth. Walk into any baby store, and you’re greeted immediately in the boys’ department by brown and neon green layettes festooned with sharks, trucks, and footballs. Onesies for newborns declare, “TOUGH LIKE DADDY.” The boy taught from infancy to be tough is emotionally doomed. (Mind you, I’m all for a onesie for any gender that announces, “RESILIENT LIKE MOMMY.”)

Oh for fuck’s sake.  Tough like daddy is a good thing.  I have battled cancer, and a compressed spinal disk.  I get up, in pain, and go to work and do a job I am proud of to take care of my family.  I fix the house, the car, and dinner.  I’m the firs one up in the morning and the last one to bed at night.  And if something goes bump in the dark, I’m the one with the flashlight and the 45 going to make sure everything is OK.  I am dad, and that is my job.  My hope is that one day my son will be that for his own family.  That isn’t emotionally doomed.

The clothes marketed to my daughter feature unicorns, rainbows, rockets, dinosaurs, and sequins in every color imaginable. They are whimsical and sparkly. My son recently asked me, “Mom, why are girls’ clothes more interesting and beautiful than boys’ clothes, and was the person who decided that a man or a woman?”

This is the wokest five-ear old ever.

Yes, they’re merely clothes, but they’re the material in which we wrap our children. A society bombarding boys with symbolism about being tough, self-contained, non-sparkly and unmagical says, “Boys will be boys, but girls can be anything.”

Our boys absorb messages about what they cannot be or do or feel.

What the fuck is this woman talking about?  She wants her son to have the option of being a weak and dependent emotional flop?  Is that really what she wants.  Some faggy* “poet” who can’t hold down a job at Starbucks?

*At this point, I want to clarify something.  I’m not a homophobe.  I don’t really care who people sleep with.  I do use the term faggy because it has a certain connotation to me.  I think the quote from Mean Girls is the most accurate description “Yeah, he’s almost too gay to function.”  Think of the character of Jack from Will & Grace.  He was so flamboyant and effete, he couldn’t hold down a job.  It’s not even a function of being gay, once upon a time people may have used the word foppish to describe it.  As best I can say, the word to me describes any male that abdicates his duties and responsibility as a man, but I wouldn’t insult women by calling him one of those.

It’s delivered by the dad in the elevator whom I watch chastise his 4-year-old son with, “Stop crying! Do you want your friends to think you’re a little baby?” Despite your lack of executive function, shut down your feelings, because kids make fun of a boy who cries. 

I tell me son to stop crying – sometimes.  I know when he is hurt or scared, and when he is making that annoying noise because he wants his way.  I turned off his cartoon to put him in the bath and cry-whines.  Nope, I’m not having any of that.  That is part of teaching responsibility, sometimes you don’t get what you want but you have to do it anyway.

It’s emailed from the mother in my daughter’s nursery school class organizing a book swap, asking for “gender-neutral books” because some 3-year-old boys “wouldn’t be crazy about princess books.” All books aren’t for everyone; boys don’t like stories that might involve an XX protagonist. 

Fuck you again.  I’ve been bombarded by the “this is the first time I saw a super hero the looked like me” about Black Panther.  I hear the same thing about every new Disney princess.  I’m told we need diversity so that everyone can have a character they can relate to.  Except the boys, fuck them, they have to like the princesses.

We don’t need to raise kids with gender neutrality or deny intrinsic differences between boys and girls. We do need to recognize that children, regardless of gender, harbor innate sweetness that we, as a society, would do well to foster and preserve.

She doesn’t want gender neutrality.  She wants her boy to be a girl.

Sweet boys grow up to be men who recognize the strength in being vulnerable and empathetic. 

Sweetness has nothing on how she is raising her son.  I predict a lifetime of therapy and emotional problems.  She has decided that everything about boyness is wrong and she is going to do it the opposite.  I can’t imagine how that is going to play out in this poor boy’s head, other than “mommy hated me because I was a boy.”

Men who aren’t threatened by criticism or perceived competition from people whom they deem “Other” — be it skin color or sexual orientation or religion or education or whatever. Sweet boys are children who’ve been given, by their parents and wider society, the permission to feel everything and to express those emotions without shame.

So men are racist, sexist, and bigoted in their natural state?  That’s not an anti-male message is it?  Again, who says that boys don’t have permission to feel?  The point of being a man is to put responsibility above emotion.

At a young age, this should be done explicitly, in organized forums for discussions at school. It must be done relentlessly and organically, in our family homes. Parents must invite their sons to be sad, afraid, hurt, silly and affectionate, and must embrace them as often as they snuggle their daughters. Sweet boys learn early on that they can defend themselves against loneliness by reaching out and asking for support rather than turning into people who, literally, grab for power. Sweet boys evolve into open-hearted men who aren’t confused about consent and sexual boundaries, because they experience women as equals. A man raised with access to the same gamut of emotions and choices as women does not say, “Women are special,” as Donald Trump recently averred after disbelieving Roy Moore’s accusers; he does not delegate sugar and spice and humility and gentleness to the ladies, while defining himself through anger, lust, and pride. Boys will not be merely boys. If we let them, boys will be human.

So boys are violent rapists unless we raise them to love pink hearts?  That is clearly an insane position.

If we’re lucky, the sweet boys and the fierce girls will grow up to save us all.

She wants her son to be weak and her daughter to be strong.  I can’t see this as anything other than she hates her son for being a boy.  She believes everything terrible in the world is do to masculinity and she is going to stomp that out of her son.

I understand now why liberals have such a hard time condemning Muslim female genital mutilation.  They secretly harbor a deep desire to turn their sons into eunuchs.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I don’t think this will make fewer school shooters but more of them.  These boys will still have boy emotions, but they won’t know how to deal with them.  They will still have boy desires but they will be crushed under the weight of terrible nurture.

One of the problems we see with boys is being raised by single mothers.  The cure is not to raise the boys as girls but to teach them how to harness what they feel for good.

I’m not saying that her son will snap and become a school shooter.  What I am saying is that if her son is ever involved in  school shooting he will sweetly hid behind a wall and cry, while other boys raised right will hide their classmates behind Kevlar barricades.

The quote from Rham Emmanuel is being played (finally) by the Florida Republicans. As you can imagine, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel is not the flavor of the month in Florida, even more so than the NRA and he has not received 1/10 of the media crap.

Scott’s office sent out a news release saying he asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to “immediately investigate the law enforcement response” to the shooting, and in a statement later Sunday, Israel welcomed the probe and pledged full cooperation.

Broward sheriff grilled on red flags during lengthy CNN interview

I have no idea if FDLE likes/hates/indifferent to Israel, but this is not a joke. The Governor can remove the Sheriff if it is found to bear responsibility on why his department’s procedures collapsed so bad with the Nick Cruz affair.

But the best use of crisis goes to Rep. Richard Corcoran, Speaker of the Florida house:

And that made me think: “Hey, the could not find a Democrat who is pissed at Israel? And where have been the Democrats other than trying to get bills to ban “assault weapons”? Come to think of it, there has been almost (or no) criticism from the Democrats against Sheriff Israel, how come?”

Never mind.

Let it be absolutely clear. The loss of a discount will neither scare nor distract one single NRA member from our mission to stand and defend the individual freedoms that have always made America the greatest nation in the world.

NRA Statement on Corporate Partnerships

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Back in 1995, Wayne LaPierre and the NRA were subjected to a similar barrage of bad press because of a letter to members where he used the term “Jack-booted government thugs”

It doesn’t matter to them that the semi-auto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.

Schumer, Feinstein, Kennedy, Owens and the rest of the anti-gunners want more and more gun control.

This was the time of an unchecked ATF raiding homes on the slightest of excuses and many times on contrived evidence. Ruby Ridge and Waco were still fresh in our minds and the mood of the country was not quite in favor of the NRA, in fact probably less so than now.

Many people announced the death of the NRA. President George H Bush made a great gesture of renouncing to his NRA Life Membership (He got one for his election campaign, he was never a long tome member) and Senator Dole (R) somberly announced to the Sunday Talk Shows that the NRA needed ” to get a little image repair job.”

A half-hearted apology was made and Intelligentsia told us about the NRA taking a hit and decreasing is waning influence. The Fake News of the time said that the membership dropped from 3.5 million to 2. 6 in 1998. Hell, we were finished! And then came the 2000 elections proving everyone that the NRA not only had not lost membership but it had increased to the point that the sure-thing Democrat candidate for the Democratic party, Al Gore lost in his own home stare thanks to the Gun Owners vote and work from the NRA.

It turned out that the Media Crap Storm for the “Jack-booted government thugs” was the biggest recruitment tool the NRA had at the time and it was painfully obvious during the presidential election and the years after that. Instead of the 2.6 million member, we now stand at over 5 million and probably growing as we speak.

Something I have seen in Twitter is the loads of people showing their NRA membership cards as way of support and demonstrating we are not being cowed by the Social Media Frenzy. But one thing I have noticed in all these demonstrations is an incredible amount of screen captures of online receipts of people becoming NRA members! And also many people who had their memberships elapse and not only renewed but became Life Members or Endowment Members. 

I think the Media-Driven lynch mob against the NRA is backfiring where it counts: Voting members. The CNN’s Children’s Crusade is already losing steam and we are still eight months away from the elections and probably by then the super angry new voters won’t even bother to go to the polls. NRA members have long memories, longer knives and will vote.

Their huge mistake was to try to blame the NRA exclusively for the Parkland Shooting even when the evidence of grave government neglect was popping out and culminating with the four BSO deputies staying outside the school when the shooting was happening. Just because the NRA is premier Gun Rights organization and favorite boogie man and punching bag, does not excuse the gigantic screw ups from every government organization that had any contact or had information about Cruz. I do believe that in the mind of many, the NRA was being treated as a scapegoat to cover the mistakes made. And the stupidly one-sided town hall meeting served to confirm that.

And to put the cherry on top, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, defender of Free Speech joins the voices demanding the shut down of NRA-TV from streaming services. How can you speak with forked tongue and not expect people to get pissed off?

In my opinion, the Left and the Press made a horrible miscalculation that is gonna have an impact in November. I just hope the GOP realizes that and does not do something stupid that may cause them problems in the long run… and medium too.

Since Trayvon Martin has been crime-free.

First off, let’s face facts: Gunblogging (and indeed, blogging of all kinds) is pretty much dead. It’s pining for the fjords of Norway. It has ceased to be, and social media is now triumphant.
-ish.

Surviving The Death Of The GunBlogosphere.

I have been trying to write about this for several days now, but current events forced me to delay it till today. The original title of this post was “GunBlogging Zombies… that would be us.” But if the traffic the blog had after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I have to say the vital signs are quite strong. I don’t share Kevin’s pessimism. In fact and after what we have seen in terms of Social Media active boycotting, Filtering and Shadow Banning, we are now again more that just relevant: we are indispensable.

The Gun Blogs that are still alive, have been for not a small a number of years. Heck, my own crappy contribution became 10 years old last month! So the first advantage over social media is we have a great amount of information collected through the years and available in one place with a simple search. Many of us go back to the Dark and Dangerous Age of Usenet when speech was not only free but brutal just one modem garble away. We remember things from that era and wrote about it All that info cannot be allowed to go to waste.

And I understand one grows tired of blogging. It is not that we cannot do it but we feel we are repeating ourselves, not being original, trendy, cool. And I believed so until I realized we have new people coming in every day and they do not know what we know. It is our responsibility/calling to pass along that  information. How many times have we corrected misinformation related to Stand Your Ground? And we need to do so because we know it may save somebody from ending up in prison.

I was amazingly lucky to have a moment of common sense and convince J. Kb. to join the blog. He is a good writer, passionate knows most of his shit and is in a path of higher learning. People like him and he has helped to spread the word to other I had not. So I would urge my old tired fellow bloggers to search for younger blood, not necessarily in age but in blogging “freshness.” Fair warning: you will have volunteers, but most of them will soon realize it is hard work and will have a change of heart. Don’t be discouraged until you have tried at least 15 different folks and don’t be too strict, we are talking new people here.

There is one problem I foresee coming: Blogger is owned by Google who also own YouTube and has begun a Sherman’s March type of banning and removing videos that are offensive to their liberal standards. If you are in Blogger, you may want to thing about having your blog moved to a paid hosting service. The other set of bad news is that you will have to transfer to other blogging platform like WordPress, but fortunately this is not as hard as it was several years ago. Plugin and Hosting Services will make the migration less troublesome.

So, pause for a second before hanging your blogging mouse forever.  Yu may feel  not as sexy as Social Media, but we are reliable. Facebook is the Blonde, Twitter is the Redhead, we are the Brunette.

We are Velma.

The NRA boycott thing ahs reached Exalted Stupid Status

So what makes this gentleman to be above the rest of the stupid? He is asking people who hate guns and don’t own guns, not to buy guns. I am not making this up. And also, not to buy in companies that sell gun-related stuff they never buy to begin with.

Some examples:

The concept behind the effectiveness of a boycott is to have people who spend money on a company, to stop doing so as way to exercise influence on them by affecting their income. If you never buy from that company, your effectiveness in boycotting is rated as zero.

Who is a company like KelTec or Remington or Crimson Trace going to pay attention to? The idiots that do not buy their products or the Gun People that do?

As I always say, Liberals can’t do math. And no I have to add that  Logic and Common Sense are esoteric  principles that Liberals cannot fathom.

Hat Tip @MalRoadkill