Republican Women With Guns: Greene and Boebert

There is a trend in the Trump years to promote "patriotic" people to politics. A simple way to do that is to go for gun rights. But it would not work so well for men. A mother with a gun, that's the symbol they want to use. Lauren Boebert comes from Rifle, Colorado. The name is old, and refers to an actual rifle found there: The city of Rifle gets its name from a local story, that a trapper had once left his rifle along a creek in the region; from then on, the city has been known as Rifle. Founded by Abram Maxfield in 1882.

                                    

The county is not as Republican as the people of Rifle would make it look.

Wikipedia: Garfield County has primarily voted for Republican Party candidates in presidential elections throughout its history, with the county only failing to back the Republican candidates six times from 1912 to 2016. Although the county includes the relatively liberal city of Glenwood Springs, this is outweighed by the extremely conservative city of Rifle, as well as the nearby towns of Silt, Parachute, and Battlement Mesa. Until 2020, the most recent Democratic win was by Bill Clinton in 1992, but Republicans were held to a plurality of the county's votes in half of the six following presidential elections prior to 2020. Notably, Barack Obama lost the county to John McCain by two votes in 2008.

Nevertheless, with Trump enthusiasm, Boebert won an election, planning to go to Washington to change the world with Trump. But Trump lost. Now she is left with gun tricks to demonstrate, such as taking a gun to work, or attempting to. But her voting will be simple. She just has to vote against anything Biden or Democrats propose.

Then from Georgia, we get a building contractor and conspiracy enthusiast entering politics.

Marjorie Greene has added quite a bit of QAnon beliefs and conspiracy theory to the pro gun mix.

I am not quite sure how seriously to take all this. On the one hand both women have entered politics with sound bites and dog whistle terms to get crowds excited. These crowds do not wish to understand politics on a deeper level, they just want to get rid of Democrats in politics and attack "foreigners" and other Trumpian targets. On the other hand, they will add to guns and violence. They promoted the attacks on the Capitol and aided the insurrectionists. They can be charged with aiding and abetting domestic terrorists.

The actual gun issues will play out in the Supreme Court, so we will have to watch that for the next two years.

The Supreme Court decided on District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008. There were some other decisions in modern times. It would seem that the original amendment was rather limited in scope, and dealt with the relationship of the federal government and the states. It mentions a militia, giving the states the right to have such organizations. It does not plainly state that the federal government has any further say on arms. Going along that, it would seem the peace keeping and owning of guns, or prohibition of certain guns if such an issue came up, was left to the states.

The constitution is a brief document that left a lot of power to the states. Even federal taxation needed an amendment.

America is broken? Well, people of all sort feel powerless, but...

I have never had much hate directed towards me in any situation. I may disagree with many people, but as an immigrant and an atheist, I have learned, for decades, to keep quiet for my own safety. I actually believe in government, so I prefer to act through voting, anonymously. I would be reluctant to runs for an office.

But there are millions of angry, disgruntled people out there.

I can't say I am patriotic. I left a country a long time ago, and adjusted to the new one. I've been an upstanding citizen and paid my taxes etc. I was never disgruntled. But, still, I never felt completely at home in a country whose politics have always been to the right of me. And the silly patriotism of supporting the military, that I have never supported. Yes, there have been wars we had to engage in, but the spreading of democracy around the world by force, that rarely works. I am not into forcing our culture or politics on other countries. Sure, free press and all that, and I don't support authoritarians, but that is the extent of it. I do not think this mission is worth dying for. Defend what you have, but stay there.

There are many people who supported Trump, because none of the other culture and tradition appealed to them. Many were racists. There was a sense of powerlessness. They had given up trying to affect things through normal politics. Trump gave them the sense that they could actually punish foreign countries and bring jobs back. That is not going to happen. Globalism has gone too far, manufacture is world wide.

The point I am trying to get to is that the recent events, storming of the Capitol mainly, has weakened our trust in the US government. It buckled a bit. And it did not protect politicians from a lynch mob. We liberals felt weak for the first time. Through the four years of Trump we had a firm belief in normalcy returning. We believed in our country prior to Trump, despite all the problems we have. We were able to keep order. The world was not perfect. Too many blacks were in jail, too many low income people had no healthcare. But the day to day workings of the country were still working. There were even people like Fauci in power, able to function for the common good despite Trump.

I look at a few extremist web sites once in a while, and I see a good number of people "down the rabbit hole" on Reddit. There are a large number of people who no longer are able to weed through information on the Internet to get any facts. They have organized life around the belief in a conspiracy. Life is easier that way,  no more seeking. All the people you chat with agree with you on most things. They have a mission. Most missions are to "put things back to the way they were." So the change they want is a conservative change. Not a progressive one.

Looking at all this, I still have one choice only. I believe we can deal with it. I believe in the system. If the state that I live in completely breaks down and goes full Trump for decades to come, I may need to pack up and move. But I am so far in the middle of the land, that a short move would not change much. I would need to sell a house and move into a tiny condo somewhere where the state is able to maintain the country as I have known it since 1976. That is when I decided to accept it as my own, once we were done with Nixon.

Jumping to 2021, the US dealing with COVID in a responsible way (vaccinating those willing to believe in science) and our return to normalcy by the end of summer will go a long way in convincing the majority of us that we need government. But we now know the number of people fallen off the main stream and stuck in the disgruntled world of conspiracies and libertarianism is significant.

Moving On From Trump

Trump is history. He will fly off Wednesday with a little parade or something. The impeachment? Who knows. The politicians here in the prairie are not going to help with that. They got voted in by the same people that voted for Trump. No need to make them angry. There were a lot of disgruntled people who thought Trump was their solution to jobs and prosperity. Or maybe just to stop "Democrats from giving stuff to poor people." Where is Trump going to be in half a year? And these people?

They are not people interested in politics. They are racists, white nationalists and conspiracy theorists. They are not interested in tax rates and all that with any passion. Possibly a vague "small government" or libertarian feel. But they do not really hold opinions on regular matters for long. Flint water? That's a Michigan problem. They are only interested in their stuff. They also distrust science, vaccines, masks and all that.

These people are going to be there, but they will not be a political force in 2022 or 2024. Neither will Trump. If he were able to run, he no longer has funds to muscle his way into the primary. What will we get in 2024? The old resistance. McConnel types, tea party types. People fed up with the federal government in a general way. Not the conspiracy way.

[Leaving post as it was, but I was wrong on basically how long a populist can last. If selfish enough, 12 years or more.]

The future of a connected world, according to Kevin Kelly

With rather windy weather, we are stuck indoors sometimes three days at a time. I will only go out to shovel 3 inches of snow today, in rather windy weather. 

This is what I have been reading. 

It describes the future based on what we have know, in his world. It is quite different in the rural areas of the prairie, where we do not have high speed internet. We do have a GPS signal everywhere, so farming equipment will be operating based on that, had irrigation and fertilizer application will undergo a revolution soon. Seeds themselves are high tech product that you license from seed producers. You do not own the entire crop you own anymore. They are sort of renting your land and paying labor, you sell the product back to big corporations that are all connected, seed to product on the market. Or even ethanol.

Back to the book:

A rather "soft" review of technology and how it affects your life. The author is connected to Wired magazine and lives a life where he does not own a car or a home. He just pays to use goods and services that make life simple. He owns no physical books or music.

On page 170 Kevin Kelly gets to echo chambers. We are currently experiencing a bit of a shake up with right-wingers and libertarians, the militant type, having no place to scream their loss of a leader who expressed the outrage they had for the left, or even the mainstream of politics.

This sort of negative stuff about the Internet is mainly left out of the book. The chapters are well thought out, so you will find this sort of tracking by those who track (gov't et al) listed in the chapter titled Tracking.

Technology has reached most of the world, though we in the developed world have a much bigger quantity available to us. The farmer in India, as mentioned in the book, may not have running water, but he does have a cell phone.

Crowd sourcing in promoted in the book, as is free software. The communities in the world are connected and are creating a lot of this stuff you borrow from the internet. You do not own much of it, you share.

Examples of crowd sourcing and everyday life are listed, connecting the on-line world to the real world. We are experiencing some of it as we pick up groceries during the pandemic, after ordering it on line. I hope my vaccination will be similarly organized, as we drive though to get vaccinated. If the pandemic drags on, band will start giving concerts on line, with you donating a few dollars of your choosing to hear the concert. Some bands already give out free music, with you deciding what

I said the book is light on the hardware part. It explains what is possible in a connected Internet world, how servers are connected to give you a streaming feed without interruption. But little is explained about technical side and its vulnerabilities. As independent as we are, we are still dependent on internet providers and our phone provider to keep in touch with the world.

I use an iPhone and I use Windows computers. I still pay for those. I am even stuck using them, as I cannot stand how the cursor and typing works on Android devices. So the free stuff in the book may or may not arrive. We may even see the lower income people lose some services as the rest of us keep paying for our instant news and entertainment.

The future is not really mapped out that well in the book. The fact that you could carry all the music ever produced in your pocket 20 years later may be true (he says to keep it in the cloud) but other aspects of the real world will rule what we get in ten years. You would need an economist as well as a biologist to flesh out the physical world a little better. What happens to homelessness, food supply and all that?

Still, it did help for him to focus on the positive. it will be necessary to just go along with these changes. Otherwise you will be stuck in some resistance echo chamber and will not be able to keep up with the world and interact with it in a normal way. There is a democratic aspect to being and creating in the Internet that the author keeps pointing out. And he believes is inseparable from what we have. Let us hope it stays that way.