Posts Tagged politics

Maj Toure Interview With We The Internet

From We The Internet:

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Time To End The NRA?

From The Truth About Guns:

The National Rifle Association — America’s oldest civil rights organization — is in an existential crisis today brought on by mismanagement, cronyism, and self-dealing by its leadership. Every week brings forth a new allegation, a new bit of evidence that the that the NRA’s leaders are more interested in lining their own pockets and enjoying the perquisites of power than promoting marksmanship, gun safety, and defending the right to keep and bear arms.

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Facebook Deletes Pages Of Triple Amputee Vet

From Breibart:

Kolfage was the administrator of a number of Facebook pages, notably the pages Right Wing News and Military Grade Coffee, both of which were deleted recently as Facebook attempts to crack down on what it considers “misinformation” on the platform. Right Wing News had more than 3 million followers at the time of its blacklisting by Facebook.

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Facebook Political Purge

From Reason:

On Thursday, October 11, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy and Oscar Rodriguez, Product Manager, announced the company was shutting down 559 pages and 251 accounts “created to stir up political debate.” Allegedly, the targets were guilty of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” intended “to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing.” The targeted pages and accounts included many pages, and their administrators, who have gained popularity by voicing ideas outside the mainstream—including skepticism of violent and intrusive police tactics and support for libertarian ideas.

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The Correlation Between Democrats and Disarmament

From Slow Facts:

The carry rate varies from a high of about 15 percent down to zero in some states.  The number of us who will get our permit is determined by the issuing scheme and the costs.  These factors explain how many, but they don’t explain why.

The answer is politics.  Some states have Democrats as their governor, attorney general, and in control of their legislatures.  Others have Republicans in those positions.  The degree of Democrat control is strongly linked to the decline in carry permits.  Look at the next figure.  All the states in the upper left corner are Republican controlled while all the states in the lower right corner are all Democrat controlled.

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Gun Divide Increasing Along With Political Divide

From Patriot Post:

A new study out of the University of Kansas confirms what many have anecdotally known — a majority of gun owners vote Republican. What may be news, however, is the growing “gun gap.” That term is a reference to the disparity in the percentage of gun owners who identify with either Democrat or Republican parties. The study found that while the percentage of gun owners who vote Republican since 1973 has remained relatively constant, the number of gun owners voting Democrat has dropped significantly.

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Vet Owned Coffee Company Challenges Starbucks

From Independent Journal Review:

Starbucks grabbed headlines recently with the announcement that it plans to hire 10,000 refugees as a response to President Donald Trump’s temporary “travel ban.”

But Evan Hafer, former Green Beret and current CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company (one of the most successful, veteran-owned start-ups in America) decided to respond to Starbucks in a different way.

He fired back with a pledge to hire 10,000 veterans

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Politics Fades When You Become Friends

From Foundation for Economic Freedom:

People who favor more gun regulation are not actually motivated by taking away your liberty. And people who favor robust 2nd amendment protections do not have a higher threshold for the acceptance of violence or aggression. You’ll know this when you have them as friends, and having such friends causes the all-or-nothing arguments that make such dramatic claims about the fundamental differences between you and the people on the other side of the issue to cease to be credible.

This mistaking of differences of cultural identity for political differences, or, the erroneous idea that political differences drive different cultural identities, rather than the other way around, severely hobbles our ability to protect all of our liberties and empowers political partisans who have a vested interest in maintaining power by keeping us insolubly divided.

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Wendy Davis Only Said She Supported Gun Rights to Get Elected

From The Washington Examiner:

“There is one thing that I would do differently in that campaign, and it relates to the position that I took on open-carry,” Davis told the San Antonio Express-News on Monday. “I made a quick decision on that with a very short conversation with my team and it wasn’t really in keeping with what I think is the correct position on that issue.”

Davis added that she does support “people’s right to own and to bear arms in appropriate situations,” but fears that open carry would be used “to intimidate and cause fear.”

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What Is Political Islam?

From The CATO Institute:

The tragic events in Iraq, where the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) is currently mounting an offensive against the government of the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, certainly appears to be consistent with Blair’s concern—namely that “the battles of this century … could easily be fought around the questions of cultural or religious difference.”2 But to what extent do Blair’s claims reflect the experience of political transitions throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)?

The rise of political Islam into prominence poses important questions both for people in the MENA region and for policymakers in the West. Since 9/11, the thrust of Western foreign and security policy toward the MENA region has aimed at containing radical forms of Islam. In practice, that often meant cozying up to authoritarian regimes, as long as they were secular, since these were seen as superior to their theocratic alternatives. When the Egyptian military brought down President Mohamed Morsi in early July 2013, there was a sense of relief among many in Washington. American neoconservative commentator Bill Kristol, for example, articulated it in the following way:

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Cody Wilson Interview With The Gaurdian

From The Business Insider:

It’s a gun. It works. And any nut with access to a 3D printer can print one in the privacy of their bedroom and then … well, you get the picture. The plans include a metal shank so that it’ll show up in an x-ray scanner, but it is the work of moments to remove it. And while it is an argument that has a different resonance in the US, where any aforesaid nut can simply go out and buy a gun in a shop, and the rights of nuts to go and buy such guns is enshrined in the constitution, even there, it has caused shock waves. In Britain, where we hope our robbers carry nothing more than a big stick and arm our police officers accordingly, it’s a potential societal revolution that none of us asked for.

One must remember that the interviewer is from England and hostile to most of Cody’s ideas and most of The United States’ ideals as well.

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New Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Russia

New Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Russia is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By George Friedman

The struggle for some of the most strategic territory in the world took an interesting twist this week. Last week we discussed what appeared to be a significant shift in German national strategy in which Berlin seemed to declare a new doctrine of increased assertiveness in the world — a shift that followed intense German interest in Ukraine. This week, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in a now-famous cellphone conversation, declared her strong contempt for the European Union and its weakness and counseled the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine to proceed quickly and without the Europeans to piece together a specific opposition coalition before the Russians saw what was happening and took action.

This is a new twist not because it makes clear that the United States is not the only country intercepting phone calls, but because it puts U.S. policy in Ukraine in a new light and forces us to reconsider U.S. strategy toward Russia and Germany. Nuland’s cellphone conversation is hardly definitive, but it is an additional indicator of American strategic thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

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Why So Much Anarchy?

Why So Much Anarchy? is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By Robert D. Kaplan

Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet.” I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms — making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated. Read the rest of this entry »

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New Book On Political Islam

From Macmillan Books:

As a wave of popular unrest toppled autocratic rulers across the Middle East and North Africa, many in the West watched with growing concern as Islamists came to power. The continued prominence of Islam in the struggle for democracy in the Muslim world has confounded Western democracy theorists, who largely consider secularism a prerequisite for democratic transition. In Political Islam in the Age of Democratization, Kamran Bokhari and Farid Senzai offer a comprehensive view of the complex nature of contemporary political Islam and its relationship to democracy. With a useful theoretical framework, classification of Islamists, and rich historical context, this book is a compelling and insightful analysis of Islamism and the role that religion is likely to play in any future Muslim democracy.

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Credit Cards and Guns

From creditcards.com:

The refusal of a leading credit card payment handler to process transactions involving legal gun sales is compelling licensed dealers to hunt for alternative credit card systems, and is provoking boycotts by incensed gun enthusiasts who complain of political interference.

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