Gun Free Zone

TCK, one of the responders on my post about Democratic Candidates for President, made this comment:

The only thing Trump did wrong was not marching soulless inhuman demonrat filth into mass graves where it belongs.

My response was a simple, “Not cool.” I felt that anything I had said in response would put me in danger of being seen as “the dick” that we mostly try to avoid. I want to talk about why this comment bothers me so much.

My kneejerk response was of this:

There are lots of ways for us to express ourselves. Some I find distasteful, and I just walk away. You guys like to swear a lot more than I do, and use invectives that I think are inappropriate. They do not, however, come even close to the line of, “Don’t be a dick.” Whether TCK intended it or not, the words they used immediately brought images to mind of people being marched into mass graves… or into ovens. With current political climes being what they are, the thought seized my brain. Hence, not cool. So very not cool.

But WHY is it not cool? Why isn’t that statement one I just walk away from, like so many others? After all, I didn’t even flinch over “demorats,” which is something that normally makes me cringe (as you regulars know so well). It’s because I have come to love this place. I talk here about things I can’t talk about anywhere else. I learn from you, and I get the impression that you all learn from me, even when (or perhaps especially when) we disagree.

I worry that this type of comment, quoted in a public forum elsewhere, is enough to get GFZ tossed on the burn pile, banned on places like Google, and avoided even by good quality Right folk. The implication of killing off the competition, the innuendo that leads one to think of concentration camps and death to everything Not Us, is a big deal in the States right now. I will be very honest, and say that I really don’t want to be associated with a site that doesn’t find that kind of implication offensive.

It’s a random comment, probably made off the cuff. I doubt TCK intended to give the impression that they wanted to actually murder anyone not of their belief. But I don’t KNOW. Their follow up response didn’t make it any more clear, to me at least. And so I’m left wondering. Is TCK actually suggesting that we should commit genocide against people who don’t agree with the Right? Are they saying that we should kill those who label themselves Left or Democrat? Or was it a figure of speech, done to evoke an emotional response?

Why does it matter? For some who come to this site, it really doesn’t. This is one of a handful of places you visit, and what people on the outside think doesn’t matter at all. While I don’t care if people think I’m posting to an alt-right site (hell, maybe I am… the definition is so shifty that one can barely tell), I DO care if people think I’m posting to a pro-Nazi site, or a place that advocates for unnecessary violence against any who disagree with a political view.

I don’t even care so much for myself, per se. I care because it’s the kind of thing that gets you banned in so many other places. I do go to FB and TikTok and Instagram and those other sites, for a variety of reasons. I sometimes carry out messages and quotes from GFZ because they are so insightful that I feel like they must be shared (with proper attribution of course). If I can’t do that, if this becomes another insular community with no ability to interact with the rest of the internet, then it loses so much of what makes it special.

Does this mean I think we need to cowtow to the public? Not entirely. I try not to get my panties in a wad over too much. The few times I’ve had issues, I’ve walked away. Until this one. This one I brought up to AWA because I thought it had gone over the line, and I was looking for guidance. What he said is between he and I, but he suggested I write about it, and so I have.

I don’t want to kill those who don’t believe as I do. I don’t want to associate with those who do believe that. I don’t want to censure those who believe differently. I want, in fact, to learn from people of differing beliefs. It’s the only way for me to grow. When I talk to most of you, I feel a door is opened. I may or may not like what’s on the other side, but it’s an open door, and you graciously allow me to learn from you. TCK slammed a door in my face, figuratively speaking, and denied me (or anyone else) a view of what lay beyond. What was left was … well, the picture I posted above, quite frankly. An open door would have been much better, because it would have left space for questioning, for learning, for expanding knowledge. Now, though, I’m left muttering to myself.

It’s the kind of commentary that makes me want to walk away. That puts me in a crap position, because I really don’t WANT to walk away. But I find myself questioning whether it’s safe. If that makes any sense. sigh

Hagar the Frustrated

Thank you, everybody who has given me feed back on the reloading series and on my dreams of building the Casinater.

The court cases are starting to ramp up, I’ll be digging into those a bit more as progress happens.

My wife told me that when she sees an article with countless words and numerous quotes, she has to put extra time aside to read them. That reading the quotes is particularly difficult.

I’ve added some new formatting capabilities. I’m going to start highlighting important parts of quotes. I need those quotes because I want context to be available to you. I want the highlighting so that it is easier for you to follow what I consider to be significant.

The comments are open, please let us know what we are doing right and what we need to improve.

Thanks again.

I have all the raw materials in hand, as well as the motor and power supply. The 5 mm drive belt material is somewhere in the reloading supplies. It is the material I used to make a replacement belt for the wet tumbler when the original, 20-year-old belt broke.

Is this a commercial design? No. The front drive belt is there to provide a built-in safety. It will slip if there is too much drag on the system. In a finished product, I would be mounting the motor differently, behind the front plate.

In the same way, the idler shoulder bolt would be a blind hole instead of a through hole.

Finally, it is likely that a better design would use belts for driving everything instead of gears and belts.

Here’s a peek at the rear.

As soon as I get working drawings out of FreeCAD, I’ll go into the shop and make the faceplate and mount up the motor.

The next step will be to press the bearings into the faceplate. Then I’ll make the drive pulley, the cutter/driven pulley, and the three toolholders.

The last step is making the gears. I’ll be cutting a longish piece of Delrin with 22 tooth gears. That long gear will then be cut into 4 actual gears to use. The final task will be the 14 tooth idler gear and the shoulder bolt.

Exciting times.

I guess the Big Gulp and the party size bag of Cheetos are off camera.

The Seventh Circuit court ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen and decided that Illinois did nothing wrong when they held their Bruen tantrum to bass PICA.

The case got dumped back in Judge McGlynn’s lap. The plaintiffs filed motions for things to help The People.

Judge McGlynn denied them, but in writing that denial he took issue with the Seventh Circuit court. This is the same as publicly stating, “The boss told me to fill your home with concrete. I have to do it. They are wrong for all these reasons …”.

But in the meantime, the state has continued their quest to deny Second Amendment protected rights to The People of Illinois.

On December 22, 2023, the state told the court: Our attorney is super-duper busy. She’s scheduled herself out of the office from December 26 through January 9. And she’s so busy, she has other cases with deadlines, there are three holidays, she just can’t do it.

Yesterday, Judge McGlynn said, “NO. You WILL have the scheduled reply by the 19th of January.”

From following these cases, I believe that the normal scheduling is about a month, with replies due 3 weeks after and responses do a week after the reply. It feels like Judge McGlynn is going to keep the state on a short leash.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.

Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.

Harvard president quits: Claudine Gay resignation highlights new conservative weapon | AP News

In high school, I had a Literature teacher who made us do a book report which included the bio of the author, the historic time frame when the book was written, any background on why he/she wrote it and then analyzing the book itself plus our conclusions. It was to be 30% of our total grade and we had 6 months to write it. She gave us a long class on quotations including how to keep track of them and to religiously notate them. When she finished that particular class, she looked at us and said “Some of you will be tempted to plagiarize somebody, please don’t. I read a lot and I have better sources than you.”

My paper was about Orwell’s 1984 (What a surprise, huh?) and I sweated bullets trying to get any material in Spanish. The teacher was generous and shared some of her stuff, but dumped a bunch of other material in English which forced me to live with a frigging English/Spanish dictionary while working on the report. I also got and gave help to bookworm buddies when we did our research in libraries: If we bumped on a book or periodical about a book we knew somebody else was working on, we would write it down and pass it along. Dude date was about a month and a half before school year’s end, we turned it in, and we eventually forgot about it as kids do.

The last Lit class was dubbed Massacre Day.   The teacher arrived with the stack of reports and a somber demeaning. She divided the works in three sub-stacks and proceeded to call the individuals one by one to come pick up their report while announcing the grade. The big stack was mostly C’s and some D’s caused by what she said was lousy/lazy work (She was a great teacher but a heartless scorer, we knew that already.) Then came the “medium” pile and she starts to call some of the “best and brightest” of the class and announcing their collective grades: Big fat F for plagiarizing material.

At this time, I realized I had not been called and neither most of my bookworm friends. Ther was about seven of us left and she call the whole lot to stand in front of the class. I was sick to my stomach wondering how bad I fucked up to be called up and what was lower than an F.  All of the guys in front but one had scored A’s and one guy B because of misspellings (I did forget to mention, we had to turn in out paper typed, and typewriters did not come with spellcheckers.)

Her last words for us were about the dangers of plagiarism. It was intellectual theft, and you would be treated as an intellectual criminal and a dishonest human being.  That day ws probably one of my best memories of high school and a teaching moment I never forgot.

Now I am sad to see her proud standard that she branded in our spirits is nothing more than a small impediment in today’s academia.

One of the topics that was suggested I write about was the idea of who was running on the Left. Here’s what I found out.

Joe Biden

He’s the sitting president. I’m not a fan. I firmly and sincerely believe that he has some form of dementia, and that his current use by others as a puppet amounts to elder abuse. I’m not joking, and it’s not snickering. While I didn’t like him before, I thought he was relatively well spoken and somewhat amusing. Today, I am concerned that having him as a sitting president makes me an abuser. For real. Whatever platform he’s running on, Biden is not actually actively a part of it. He’s a figurehead, and at this point, not even really that. I could outline that platform, but I don’t feel the need. It’s more of the same that we’ve already had, and we all know it’s not a good plan.

Marianne Williamson

She ran in 2020, but didn’t get far. She’s far Left in her words. She specifically wants “free” college, “free” healthcare, “free” childcare. She also wants a “living” minimum wage. I know that’s a lot of quotation marks, but I really don’t think she understands what the word “free” means. None of those things are OR CAN be free. The people providing the services have to be paid. That money has to come from somewhere. And a minimum wage that is country wide will never work because of the economic disparity between the various states (for instance, $9 an hour is enough to live on in many parts of the South, but isn’t even enough to get a nice box for under the motorway in New York). She talks much about “…ending the unjust system…” (from her video on her website). She does have a handful of decent ideas, such as giving corporations less power, but they’re so scattered that they simply are not viable.

Dean Phillips

He appears to be Biden Mark II. His big statement is he agrees with most of Biden’s policies, but Biden said he’d be a “transitional president” and step down after one term. Since Biden hasn’t done that, he’s standing up. He spends most of his videos talking about how other Dems don’t like him for rocking the boat or challenging Biden. Like all Dems, he wants universal health care and a minimum wage that pays well. He wants to “fix” the cost of living (but has no definitive plan on how to actually do that). He wants to cut military overreach, though I’m not really sure what that means. Basically he wants to audit them, and says that fixing the military is “simple.” He wants to reform education, but thinks that doing so is achieved by paying more to teachers. He doesn’t talk about any other ideas for reforming education; it’s all just because teachers are underpaid.

That’s it. That’s the whole Democratic field. Biden, who we already have ample experience with to know he’s bad for the country. Williamson, who is even more Left than Biden, and is also 74 years old. And Phillips, who is all pumped up and younger (54), but really has no idea about things. If I had to vote for someone on the Left, I’d vote for Phillips, only because he’s not as extreme as Williamson, and hopefully his handlers would be able to talk some sense into him.

I wish there was a strong Left candidate. I really do. I am firmly of the opinion that Trump, while not the demon the Dems would paint him as, would do more harm than good to the country if he were re-elected. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do for the United States of America, even if my beliefs aligned perfectly with his. He’s too polarizing, and I fear that it would cause an even larger schism. Because of the cult of personality that’s developed around him (both positive AND negative, btw), he cannot effectively lead. He would be stymied at every turn. When I look at the Left field, though, there is no one who could carry the country right now.

It’s been a while since I looked at Left runners for President. The last decent runner was Hilary Clinton. Not because I like her, because I do not, but because she’d at least have been effective. That’s part of what scared me so much about her, quite frankly. She would have made a difference, and it probably would have been a horrendously bad difference. But she’d at least have done it on purpose, and with her intellect intact. Biden doesn’t have that. If he wins, it’ll be only a micron less divisive than if Trump won, and the country will go down the shitter.

So there you have it. A “more left” view of the Left candidates.

TLDR: They all suck.