Number one: Using Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition fundraising tactics died sometime in the early 2000s. And extortion tends to be specially ineffective if you are this blatant about it.
Number 2: Out of all the gun companies in the US, you went and picked up Smith and Wesson to try to force them to go into surrendering to excessive government guidelines. You see, in 1987, S&W was bought by Tomkins a British company for $112 million, a bad time to do so with all the Anti Gun furor of the times. But being very British, in 2000 they made an agreement with the Clinton Administration. It ran the standard Gun Control sopping list of high-capacity magazines, locking devices, prohibiting dealers to sell at Gun Shows, etc. In exchange, the administration was going to help them get police contracts and select them as only providers for Federal Law Enforcement.
It went bad, really bad.
You see, there is this law that forces the Feds to take bids from different companies and go through a process to acquire goods from private companies and the same applies to most of the states and city departments. This is to avoid corruption at government levels, but being the Clintons, they thought they were above that. So that great scheme to be the only supplier went down in flames badly, but that was not the great fall, not by far: Once the deal was publicized with great fanfare, almost overnight the sales of Smith and Wesson products froze. Gun owners simply applied Wallet Warfare and stop buying Smith and Wesson products, gun stores returned their stock to the company and demanded refunds. Even Pawn Shops could not sell used S&W firearms because gun owners saw it as a brand of treason.
In May 2001, Smith and Wesson was sold by Tomkins to Safe T Lock, and American company for $15 million or basically 10 cents on the dollar. The company changed its business name and pretty much ignored any gun deal done with the Clintons.
Smith and Wesson is going through a contraction in the market and they are not that stupid to be blackmailed by a teenager supported by the same assholes that keep betting they go under. They know that the demand for 5 million and the AWB are just the beginning and they will come back for more. So unless somebody substituted the S&W board with certified morons, there is no way in hell Hogg is gonna get what he is trying to extort.
“Okay, guys,” a female coworker of mine recently began, as she addressed me and a female colleague. Then she stopped herself, said she was making an effort to use more gender-neutral language, and carried on talking.
It was a small self-correction, and a glimpse at the conflicted feelings stirred up by one of the most common greetings in the English language. Guys is an easygoing way to address a group of people, but to many, it’s a symbol of exclusion—a word with an originally male meaning that is frequently used to refer to people who don’t consider themselves “guys.”
I know the South is maligned for using “y’all” but in fact I hear “you guys” far more frequently.
There are, of course, plenty of people—including many women—who have no problem being addressed as “guys,” think the word has evolved to be entirely gender-neutral, and don’t see a reason to change their usage. But others aren’t so sure.
It really has.
“I think there’s a really serious and welcome reconception of gender lines and relationships between sex and gender going on,” says John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics at Columbia University and has written several books about language. He says “something has crested in particular over about the past 10 years”—something that has people examining their everyday communications.
In my reporting I heard from several people who said that the word is particularly troubling for trans and gender-nonconforming people. “As a transgender woman, I consciously began trying to stop using guys some years ago,” says Brad Ward, a college counselor at a high school in Atherton, California. She added, “When I’m included with a group that is called guys, there’s some pain, since it takes me back to my male days in a way that I’d rather not go.”
This is where I go from “this is an interesting debate” to just hating people.
Guys has evolved into a gender neutral term, probably because “you people” has become a dreaded phrase is interpreted as “might as well be the N-word,” regardless of context. It is a natural evolution of the language.
Now, a few people who are part of a group of people that is less than a fraction of a percent of the population are upset that a word that was never a slur doesn’t like how it makes feel, we have to forcibly change the language.
This is where any good will and acceptance goes out the window.
I also heard that guys could grate on women working at male-heavy companies. In tech in particular, some told me they saw the word as yet another symptom of a female-minimizing industry. “There are a lot of guys in tech and ‘guys’ is used all the time in my work and social environments by both men and women, but since it doesn’t resonate with me anymore, I do feel like I’m not part of the group,” says Amy Chong, a 29-year-old user-experience researcher in San Francisco.
Pro Tip: if you are going to police other people’s language because they use a term in a gender neutral way and you don’t feel included in it, you are never going to be part of the group.
As these examples indicate, there’s additional scrutiny these days on communications that happen within or emanate from organizations. This is likely why, after I put out calls for opinions on guys, I heard from many people who worked in education or customer-facing jobs. I heard from one teacher who switched to using folks after thinking about the inclusive-learning environment he’d like to create, and another who opted for peeps or scholars. Similarly, an employee at an outdoor-goods store told me that her company’s human-resources department had encouraged the use of more-inclusive terms when addressing customers. “Folks and y’all were determined to be more acceptably neutral and you guys was asked to be toned down,” she said.
I loathe the word folks because of the way it has been used by politicians. Remember how Obama was praised fro sounding “folksy” when campaigning in Middle America? Folks is the word elites use when they really mean “you ignorant, knuckle dragging rubes” but can’t say that.
I heard from people born and living outside the South who didn’t feel they could use the term naturally. “They’ll say, ‘y’all’? Are you from Texas?,” one Californian told me; another, who now lives in the Midwest, says she feels “self-conscious saying it as a non-Southerner.” And I heard from a Turkish-born woman living in Los Angeles who “felt a bit choiceless” selecting between guys and y’all after coming to the U.S., because of the gender politics of the former and because she didn’t “have the background to use the latter.” (She lamented that English lacks a gender-neutral second-person plural pronoun, unlike Turkish, her native tongue.)
McWhorter, the Columbia linguist, summed up the downside of y’all by saying, “You can’t use it at a board meeting.” Might it shed its informality if more people adopt it? “That’s not going to change,” McWhorter said, “especially because it’s associated with two things: the South and black people. And those two things are considered informal, and many people would have less polite things to say about both of those things.”
Y’all is just too informal and tainted by being “southern.”
This crowd of guys-objectors is not alone historically. People have been resisting the term for decades, and perhaps the most passionate opponent of the word is Sherryl Kleinman, a former professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In a 2002 essay in the journal Qualitative Sociology, she wrote about the problem with male-default terms such as “chairman,” “congressman,” and “mankind.” Kleinman saw them together as “another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which ‘man’ in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women.”
She reserved a special disapproval for “you guys,” which she considered the “most insidious” of these phrases, and with the help of former students made a small card that anyone could print out and, for instance, leave behind at a restaurant to communicate their dislike of the term to an employee who had used it. “When you’re talking to a group of customers, gender doesn’t really matter, so why not replace ‘you guys’ with ‘you all,’ ‘folks,’ or ‘y’all,” it reads in part.
Here is her card:
This woman is the death of the American university system personified. This has nothing to do with actually being offended and everything with trying to control the language.
Orwell explained this best in 1984.
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.”
This card exist to shame people who use language that her orthodoxy hasn’t authorized. Keep this woman away form power because I guarantee she’s criminalize language if we could.
Since this woman an her ideological peer want to police the gender out of our language, I have an alternative for gender neutral term for people like this.
Assholes.
Every human has one, regardless of gender.
“You assholes” is perfectly acceptable. A group of them are “plus assholes” and a lot is “double plus assholes.”
So listen to me you double plus assholes at The Atlantic, you can take your arbitrary policing of the language and shove it in whichever hole you identify with being the least pleasurable.
Kosher Duck sauce made by a company called Old English in New Jersey and produced with genetic engineering. Basically your Anti Palestinian, Cultural Appropriation, White Privilege, Monsanto Death product.
TAYLOR, Texas —
Three Taylor High School seniors were arrested Wednesday after officials said they made comments about committing a school shooting.
The students — all 17 years old — have been identified as Devant Davis-Brooks, Kadin Watson and Emmanuel Tejas Pina. All three were charged with making a terroristic threat.
Taylor police say while in class several students overheard the three suspects making “detailed plans” to coordinate a shooting at the school that involved explosives and firearms.
Now, how real were those plans? How much credence did the authorities give to the threat?
[Superintendent Keith Brown] says they’ll be suspended for three days, then they’ll be sent to alternative school before they can come back to class.
Does not sound so dangerous but maybe a case of kids being verbally stupid discussing or talking about stuff that would set off all the appropriate alarms.
She is now sitting at the right of Ronald Reagan. Her tweet is chock-full of not so nice replies from her followers and fellow socialists. Go take a read and have fun.
Liberals will eat themselves in the name of outrage.
In the ACLU’s view, targeting a nonprofit advocacy group and seeking to deny it financial services because it promotes a lawful activity (the use of guns) violates the First Amendment. Because we believe the governor’s actions, as alleged, threaten the First Amendment rights of all advocacy organizations, the ACLU on Friday filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the NRA’s right to have its day in court.
The state has asked the court to dismiss the case without even permitting discovery into the administration’s actions. Our brief supports the NRA’s right to discovery on its First Amendment claims. To be clear, the ACLU does not oppose reasonable restrictions on guns (you can read more about that here). Our position in this case has nothing to do with our opinions on the NRA’s policies — it’s about the First Amendment rights of all organizations to engage in political advocacy without fear that the state will use its regulatory authority to penalize them for doing so.
It is not like the ACLU suddenly found Jesus and have seen the error of their ways, bit it applies to more earthly endeavors:
Political advocacy organizations like the NRA (or the ACLU or Planned Parenthood) need basic business services, like insurance and banking, to operate. The NRA says that the state, using its regulatory powers over those industries, is threatening financial companies that do business with the NRA.
The NRA points to both public and non-public actions taken by the Cuomo administration to penalize it for its views. State officials issued press releases and sent threatening letters to banks and insurance companies, and also allegedly communicated “backchannel threats” to companies with ties to the NRA, warning that they would face regulatory action if they failed to end their relationships with the organization
The ACLU is smart enough to realize politic fluctuates and “friendly” elected officials change opinion or get removed and get substituted by other that may not take kindly ACLU’s views on things. And with Media not having the powerful political hammer blows it had once, they cannot count on public outrage to save them from the same fascist principles to be applied on them.
So, more than nuanced principles based on the Bill of Rights, we are seeing a good dose of self-preservation in action. I really don’t care one way or the other as long as they help shut down the Society of St. Tammany Mafiosi.
David Hogg is an angry empty shell. It’s clear that he is a power hungry narcissist, who knows nothing, and is willing to regurgitate any Lefty talking points that will get him more notoriety.
Says David Hogg “We we can’t… pay our teachers a livable salary.”
Beginning teachers would earn at least a $50,000 salary – starting next school year – under a bill filed this week in Tallahassee.
While the starting pay varies among districts, the state Department of Education says the average salary among all Florida teachers for the 2013-2014 school year was $47,780.
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average salary for all Florida workers is just over $41,000.
So the average teacher’s salary in Florida is $6,780 above the average for Florida workers.
A list of teachers’ salaries by city for 2018, shows that in the area where Hogg lives, Fort Lauderdale teachers make $54,921 and Pembroke Pines teachers make $53,950.
There is plenty of debate to be had that we pay our military too little for what they do, but to suggest that a teacher’s salary is not “livable” when it is commensurate with other goverment employees, is bullshit.
John Stossel broke this down on 20/20 in 2006.
Moving way from the salary argument, the Sun Sentinel has reported, and this blog has covered, just how badly the Broward County school system, teachers and administrators, handled the Cruz situation that ultimately led tom the shooting. Why would anybody in their right mind want to secure more money for the very people who lied in reports and covered their asses to fail to stop someone who was clearly a threat from killing kids?
Since giving money to incompetent and undeserving people is what the Left wants, Hogg is not just trying to get more money for teachers, he’s trying to get more money for colleges.
Let’s talk about the disaster that is the American college system.
The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures.
The disproportionate increase in the number of university staffers who neither teach nor conduct research has continued unabated in more recent years, and slowed only slightly since the start of the economic downturn, during which time colleges and universities have contended that a dearth of resources forced them to sharply raise tuition.
So make work bureaucrats are multiplying and draining all the money out of the schools.
Americans committed to better living for bosses can take heart at the fact that college and university administrators — unlike their faculty (increasingly reduced to rootless adjuncts) and students (saddled with ever more debt) — are thriving.
In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, 42 private college and university presidents received more than a million dollars each for their work. Robert Zimmer (University of Chicago) was the best-paid, at $3,358,723. At public colleges and universities, nine top administrators garnered more than $1 million each in 2012-2013, with the best-paid, E. Gordon Gee (Ohio State University), receiving $6,057,615.
Since then, it’s likely that the number of millionaire campus presidents has increased, for their numbers have been growing rapidly. Indeed, in 2012-13, the number of public university presidents receiving at least $1 million for their services more than doubled over the previous year.
This is a YUGE blind spot on the Left. The same people who chant “screw the rich” and hate CEOs and business owners never seem to care that college administrators are making bank off of rising tuition.
I’ve said it before, there is a certain salary needed to attract and retain people who have the skills to manage a large business effectively. A school president may deserve as much as a Fortune 1000 CEO if the college has as many people and a budget tantamount to a Fortune 1000 company. But that does’t explain why that school needs a dozen deans of “Diversity and Inclusion,” and an army of liaisons.
The audit took particular aim at the amount of money the system funneled towards administrative expenses. Between fiscal years 2012-13 and 2015-16, the Office of the President’s administrative spending increased by 28%, or $80 million. And 10 executives in the office whose salaries were analyzed by the audit made a total of $3.7 million in FY2014 – $700,000 more than the combined salaries of their highest-paid state employee counterparts.
But ballooning administrative costs are not unique to the University of California system. Over the last decades, the higher education world has witnessed a sharp upswing in administrative spending.
During the 1980-1981 school year, public and private institutions spent $20.7 billion in total on instruction, and $13 billion on academic support, student services and institutional support combined, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. By the 2014-2015 school year, total instructional costs had climbed to $148 billion, while the same grouping of administrative expenses had risen to $122.3 billion.
Put another way, administrative spending comprised just 26% of total educational spending by American colleges in 1980-1981, while instructional spending comprised 41%. Three decades later, the two categories were almost even: administrative spending made up 24% of schools’ total expenditures, while instructional spending made up 29%.
Too many college students were never taught the basic referents of liberal education. Most supposedly aware, hip and politically engaged students can’t identify the Battle of Gettysburg or the Parthenon, or explain the idea of compounded interest.
Many students simply cannot do the work that was routinely assigned in the past. In response, as proverbially delicate “snowflakes,” they insist that they are traumatized and can only find remedy in laxer standards, gut courses and faculty deference.
“Studies” activist courses too often are therapeutic. They are neither inductive nor Socratic, and they rarely teach facts, methods and means of learning without insisting on predesignated conclusions. Instead, the student should leave the class with proper group-think and ideological race/class/gender fervor of the professor — a supposed new recruit for the larger progressive project.
bachelor’s degree is no longer proof that any graduate can read critically or write effectively. National college-entrance-test scores have generally declined the last few years, and grading standards have as well.
Too often, universities emulate greenhouses where fragile adults are coddled as if they were hothouse orchids. Hypersensitive students are warned about “micro-aggressions” that in the real world would be imperceptible.
Apprehensive professors are sometimes supposed to offer “trigger warnings” that assume students are delicate Victorians who cannot handle landmark authors such as Joseph Conrad or Mark Twain.
“Safe spaces” are designated areas where traumatized students can be shielded from supposedly hurtful or unwelcome language that should not exist in a just and fair world.
If your major falls into the categories of Other Fields, Social and Behavioral Sciences, or Humanities, expect that chronic underemployment will be your live.
Yes, we need museum curators and researchers, we need writers and artists, we need people to add to the rich diversity of thought in Western Civilization.
However, not every art major will end up a great artist, not every literature major will end up writing a book let alone a NYT best seller, not every anthropologist will end up with a discovery in a museum. Most won’t.
Only the best of the best will do that. If you want to work to be one of those people, more power to you. If you chose that major because it sounds fun and easy, that’s a good reason not to go to college in the first place.
So what will free tuition for all do?
It won’t send more kids to vocational schools to learn electrical work, machining, CAD programming, or HVAC work. It won’t add to the number of doctors, nurses, scientists, or accountants. It will flood schools with more kids who go for the sake of going and will pick majors that sound fun, and funnel more and more money into ranks of make work bureaucrats who push identity politics.
Why? The iron law of bureaucracy, that’s why.
This is what David Hogg is attaching his name to.
It’s not going to make kids any safer. Just further damage the economy at the sake of feelgoodery.
