Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

I think the recent criticism of Baen’s Bar may have upset Larry Correia

Free speech is a funny old thing, isn’t it? The thing is, I don’t think anybody actually, really genuinely believes in it as an absolute. There are lots of people who say they do and then they carve out their own idiosyncratic exceptions — often contradictory ones.

Anyway, as discussed yesterday, there has been some criticism of the extremism on Baen’s Bar and even calls for people to boycott Baen Books. I should note that I’m not calling for people to boycott Baen Books because I don’t really buy any. It would be like me calling for people to boycott the Olympics or the World Cup or celery.

Larry Correia is not addressing the broader discussion directly (yet) but there have been some curious responses on his social media:

“The biggest mistake western civilization ever made was outlawing dueling.”

https://twitter.com/monsterhunter45/status/1559976678641655808

🧐

“There are some assholes in this world who are only still alive because decent people don’t want to serve time.”

https://twitter.com/monsterhunter45/status/1560026598782382080

🥸

And a little less honour culture and more litigious, on Facebook he has a different plan:

“Here is a hypothetical to see how many of you guys are interested.

Let’s say that there are certain scumbags who parasite their way around the writing business, who have many many many times said horrible libelous shit to stir up trouble for decent people in this business, but those decent people have been hesitant to sue because that’s a really expensive and time consuming process…

If some of these decent people would be willing to go to court and sue these slanderous assholes, who here would like donate to help fund some lawsuits?

This is strictly hypothetical and I am not naming any assholes but I’m sure many of my regulars will think of the same names.

And since these fuckers monitor all my social media, I’m not talking about me. I’m not decent. I’m vengeful.”

https://www.facebook.com/larry.correia/posts/pfbid021GwffXXcQ3Sqb5K1DCGYe7pscpdZRdYFrkj7aJeSxEs5z7bWvTCCqrrkG8BtsbAel

😳

Back on Twitter, this post seems more directly related to my post:

“Apparently my talking about people doing Dicken drills has upset some of my lefty critics who say I’m “inciting violence” or some shit. GOOD. I’ll post the video of me doing one again, just to spite those dork ass losers.”

https://twitter.com/monsterhunter45/status/1560288431099580419

There’s also a video in which he bravely defeats a menacing hillock.

camestrosfelapton

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90 responses to “I think the recent criticism of Baen’s Bar may have upset Larry Correia”

  1. More murder threats. Nice going, Larry. That’s the way to convince people that you and your publisher are totally harmless.

    Though I suspect what really upsets him is that several people here said Larry is all bluster and wouldn’t really shoot someone.

    Liked by 3 people

  2. Well, I can’t read that Facebook comment because Larry bravely blocks me, so it must not be me he’s talking about reading his social media. If it was, however, I’d invite him to kiss my capacious ass.

    Liked by 5 people

  3. Perhaps Larry misses the good old days of having Teddy B at his side, standing shoulder to shoulder in manly wise as they dogwhistled together attempting to figuratively make heads ‘explode.’ Bereft of that congenial company and knowing his shitstirring talents are fifth-rate in comparison to “Murdering a bunch of left wing kids and Malala is actually a great idea” Beale, he is left to the scant consolation of more literal explosions.

    Liked by 5 people

  4. Larry’s theory of mind seems to be that he has no free will, but is driven to action only in reaction to what he imagines that will upset the left. This makes him a puppet, of course, but he seems happy that way, so I encourage him never to change. He’d be terribly upset if he ever critically read the advertisements for his favorite toys, which clearly state that his masculinity is so frail that he must spend hundreds of dollars to shore it up, lest it dissipate like water in the desert (https://www.ammoland.com/2010/05/bushmaster-man-card/#axzz7cLxZsJmT) (I understand from his rhetoric that tiny amounts of soy also would overwhelm his hormonal balance – so sad).

    Meanwhile, here’s a video showing a woman handling a violent thug without any need for anatomical substitutes: https://twitter.com/i/status/1559475998697160704 .

    Liked by 5 people

  5. The dueling comment shows the thinking behind the “an armed society is a polite society” bullshit. What they imagine is people being respectful to them … or else.
    That this is a shitty system doesn’t occur to them.

    Liked by 7 people

    • If dueling were legal, Larry would have been killed a decade or more ago. He imagines himself as righteously winning duels, but the reality is that he’d have been killed almost immediately by a professional.

      Liked by 4 people

    • Heinlein’s “Beyond This Horizon” has an interesting take on dueling – in his society, dueling works, because the vast majority of people are superhumanly calm and quick-of-reflex. A young, athletic, rich white man from the 20th century is explicitly introduced to provide a comparison – and is completely unfit for dueling (it’s also of note that Heinlein has characters who have no interest in dueling – and they are the characters who have challenging worthwhile tasks to occupy their time).

      (P.S. In this book Heinlein’s take on eugenics is that people who have _not_ been genetically enhanced are providing a valuable service for society (providing a baseline that can be returned to if experimentation proves to have bad side effects) and in return for this service those people are subsidized.

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  8. Way to persuade us to not think he’s violent and not at all projecting his insecurities onto us.

    He thinks it’s good that we think he’s inviting violence?

    He thinks dueling should still be a thing?

    Joking about people murdering others only because there is a law against it is a major red flag. That is his poorest choice of words to date on the subject.

    So he wants to sue anyone who disagrees with him or thinks he may be dangerous? He would lose in court and what a thing for a free speech advocate to do.

    Larry can do as many videos of his backyard gunslinging as he wants. It’s his right. However, the more of them he makes, the more concerned I will certainly grow.

    My concern won’t be if he makes videos that show he’s good with guns. My concern will be if he shows he is good with guns and he alludes to the idea that he wants a reason to use that skill on a person.

    Liked by 4 people

  9. So Larry’s sounding out running a fundraising grift. Quelle surprise.

    When these folks aren’t talking about shooting you, they’re talking about getting those entertained by their threats of shooting to give them money. (And if they get money, declaring that to mean virtue.)

    Like I said in the previous post: “Every one of them is indeed quite happy to shoot you if they think they can get away with it….They will always threaten to shoot us. They talk about shooting us among themselves, in private, in public, in an endless frenzy of violence, some of it again to sell ads to the violent.”

    Liked by 5 people

  10. I don’t mind urging a boycott even if I buy virtually no Baen. Sometimes people don’t know about what’s going on and they need to get jolted awake. Yes, I do feel a great deal of sympathy for PC Hodgell, but I’m current with her novels (and there’s many of them) so let the chips fall where they may. Baen is not the only publisher in the world.

    Liked by 2 people

  12. Life is probably only going to get harder for Larry. If current trends continue, and demographics suggest that they will, the United States is likely to only get less religious and more liberal in the future. Given how easily triggered Larry is, I suspect that he will blow a gasket and have an aneurism or something at some point.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Not in rural Utah, it won’t. That’s going to stay white, Mormon, and right-wing for Larry’s lifetime.

      Wonder what he’s so paranoid about, then? His neighborhood’s going to stay just how he likes it.

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      • It is still going to be a rough ride for Larry. Rural Utah doesn’t set national policy, even if Larry thinks it should, and as a result, national politics are going to move further and further away from him. He’s going to become more and more irrelevant as time goes by.

        In addition, Utah will likely take a long time to shift, but I suspect that what has happened to other “rural” states will likely happen to Utah as well: The increasing urbanization of the United States will shift the state’s politics further and further left over time.

        Finally, the Mormon church, like most other churches in the U.S., will likely start losing members in the future. Other churches have been hit by this already, and while the LDS is still slowly growing overall, its growth has slowed significantly in the last decade. People are simply becoming less inclined to religion, and that trend will catch up to the LDS eventually.

        Larry and his fellow reactionaries are being left behind by the country. That is what they fear.

        Liked by 2 people

        • Why is the Mormon church still growing? Their aggressive missioning efforts? Because of all the churches in the world, the LDS church is about the last one I would want to join.

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          • My guess? A lot of it is “Mormons have lots of children”, but they have suffered less in the downturn in religiosity in the U.S. than many other denominations.

            Liked by 2 people

            • Also, they count everyone as a member who ever joined, even if 5 minutes after the missionaries leave town the new “members” go back to being Catholic or Pentecostal or pagan or atheist or whatever. There’s a whole process you have to go through to get removed, and most people aren’t going to bother.

              Liked by 2 people

              • I have heard tell from reputable sources that accepting the gifts and the baptism is very common in non-white, non-English speaking countries, just to avoid hurt feelings and to get more stuff and free labor from the boys. Entire villages “convert” every time a new set of missionaries come in, and then go about their usual ways till the next batch arrives. If white boys who don’t speak their language keep showing up, not their problem.

                Liked by 1 person

                • Actually Mormons do a pretty good job teaching their missionaries the language of the country they’re visiting. O. S. Card speaks Portuguese, which is why it appears in his writing. I can believe it about getting stuff and free labor, though — hey, I’d to the same thing.

                  Liked by 1 person

              • That’s because there is no church tax in the US. You have to formally declare that you’re leaving the Catholic or Lutheran church, too, but if you don’t, the German government will charge you church taxes, so people go through the process and the churches are bleeding members.

                I left the Lutheran church while still in college and well before I had to pay church taxes, because they wanted to charge my Dad, who’s not religious and hasn’t been a church member in decades, for my stay-at-home Mom’s and my membership, so I left. They made me pay a fee of 15 Deutschmark or so and just stamped a piece of paper. They didn’t even ask me why I was leaving or tried to persuade me to stay, which disappointed me, because I had prepared a whole speech about the church’s failings.

                BTW, whenever I actually enter a church, either as a tourist or to attend a wedding, funeral or service, I always put money in the collection box, because it’s only fair to pay for a service when I’m actually using it. But paying every month for a service I’m not using… no way, sorry.

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          • I live about a mile from a big-ass Mormon church/center. Many of the pioneer tombstones are from Mormon families.

            Yet the boys on bikes still come around to my street. I mean, dudes. We haven’t been short on your kind, ever. This bemuses all my Indian, Chinese, and other non-white neighbors. (we’re the only white folks on the block now, which is fine by me except at dinner time, when their food smells so much better than mine)

            Liked by 1 person

          • One reason I didn’t see touched on in the other replies as to why the Mormon church is growing, apparently Utah has some way to funnel social services through the church so the government has to actually spend less of its federally gifted dollars for safety nets on those safety nets. The result is that to apply for many social supports, you have to join the church, especially if you appear in some way to be, let’s say, the kind of person extant church members assume doesn’t belong in the church.

            Liked by 2 people

            • Social services linked to churches and church membership is a huge problem, which isn’t limited to Utah. Here in Germany, the Catholic and Lutheran church operates many hospitals, nursing homes, kindergartens and private schools. The hospitals, nursing homes, kindergartens and even the schools accept people, who are not members of the respective church as patients or students, but in order to work there, you often need to be a church member. The problem is made even worse, because in some regions there are no non-religious hospitals, kindergartens, schools, etc…

              I worked in the very Catholic town of Vechta for a while. The university where I worked had once been run by the Catholic church (and there were still signs of this like crucifixes in classrooms and a professor who was a bonafide nun), though the university was independent by then, otherwise I couldn’t have taught there. However, the town hospital, the student dorms and all but one school were church-run. If you wanted a non-religious school, you had to go to the neighbouring town.

              Mind you, this was a lovely town and I never had any problems with my Catholic co-workers and some good chats with members of the faculty of Catholic theology, with whom the English and German faculties shared a building. But I can imagine that the sheer Catholicness of the place might feel alienating to others.

              Liked by 1 person

        • Climate change is liable to do them in quicker — the Great Salt Lake is rapidly drying up and spreading lots of dust (including arsenic and lead) all over, plus the other water’s going away too. Life in rural Utah may become untenable and Larry’s kids might have to move to one of those dreaded urban areas, maybe even in a blue state! They’ll still have 2 Senators, but fewer Representatives and Electoral College votes… a different way of becoming more irrelevant.

          His grandkids may never understand why Grampy had a gun fetish, a thing for gasoline-powered machines and energy. and a weird religion he wasn’t even born into.

          Liked by 1 person

            • Agreed. If we ditched the EC and each state getting an equal number of senators, we’d actually have a democracy. (And we wouldn’t have had Bush Jr. or Cheeto Benito inflicted on us)

              Liked by 1 person

              • A lot of the problems with the EC could be fixed by eliminating the artificial 435 cap on the number of members of the House and moving to a system in which the number of representatives was determined by population – say one representative per 100,000 residents (which would bring the U.S. into line with most other Western democracies in terms of the ratio of representatives to constituents).

                Liked by 1 person

                • 3,300 members of the House of Representatives might be a trifle unwieldy.

                  Perhaps have multiple Houses – for different policy areas – which would reduce the need for voters to compromise when selecting a candidate. Or just change the state to one EC member for each 100,000 residents, plus two per state.

                  Or you could replace voting by state with voting by electoral constituency, or just abolish the electoral college.

                  Liked by 1 person

        • The LDS is growing (mostly in Africa, to which I say: WTF???), and very very slightly in the US, although there have been areas that have membership plummeting
          https://www.patreon.com/mormonland?utm_source=Salt+Lake+Tribune&utm_campaign=6e61cd359f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_02_23_09_27_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_dc2415ff28-6e61cd359f-12362645

          even in the US and even in Salt Lake County itself!

          Meanwhile, the fastest growing religion worldwide is Islam — another bugbear for righties — even though many people consider LDS theology very similar to Islamic.

          Liked by 1 person

  13. O.K., I’m *finally* figuring out what’s going on here. Larry’s fundraising now for a potential lawsuit against you, Cam, probably on the grounds that you libeled him when you said in the previous post that 1) he wasn’t an idiot, and that 2) he wouldn’t shoot anyone. How dare you! Without dueling, the only honorable solution is for him to drag you to court over such vile calumnies.

    Liked by 4 people

  14. Massive projection, since he and the rest of the Puppies have said awful (and demonstrably false and malicious) things to so, SO many people.

    But I guess that will let him open another round of grift for the countersuit!

    Liked by 2 people

  15. I personally wouldn’t give money to someone who states right out that they’re “vengeful”. Neither would decent people. The vengeful tend to turn against “their side” as well.

    Also, has Larry ever heard the phrase “Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord”? It’s in that book he supposedly reveres. So is he claiming to be The Lord? That’s frowned on in the same book, which also recommends turning the other cheek to your enemies.

    I’m not saying it, THE LORD commanded so, thousands of years ago.

    Liked by 2 people

  17. Larry doesn’t seem to be talking about filing a defamation suit for himself, but on behalf/funding the legal costs for somebody else who has been supposedly defamed. So he may be contemplating running a grift to fund a lawsuit on behalf of Terri/Baen or some other author/person at Baen’s Bar who he’s decided has been defamed by…having what they’re saying and writing pointed out to other people and critically condemned. Somebody whom Larry considers or at least is promoting as “decent” and hesitant to attempt to sue due to the costs.

    When they aren’t threatening to shoot you, right wingers do like to threaten to sue you, usually for defamation. Usually they have no real understanding of how defamation works, and so you end up with these SLAPP harassment lawsuits if anything goes forward. Meanwhile they’ll call you mentally ill, a pedophile, a con artist, etc., with a reckless disregard for the truth.

    For instance, Larry, Beale and the Puppies did defame many of the authors they were criticizing, lying that the authors had rigged the elections and cheated to win their Hugo noms and wins, a claim that they had no evidence for and knew was a factual lie, done with malicious intent to harm the economic situation and reputation of those authors — defamation. But that’s okay to them because they see themselves as rightful rulers, the good people who get to say what they want and whatever they say is fair. It’s not okay to them however to express the opinion that them talking about the best ways to shoot people in a book forum is inappropriate and even vicious — an opinion, not defamation.

    Liked by 4 people

    • //Larry doesn’t seem to be talking about filing a defamation suit for himself, but on behalf/funding the legal costs for somebody else who has been supposedly defamed. So he may be contemplating running a grift to fund a lawsuit on behalf of Terri/Baen //

      Yes, I saw it that way as well but I suspect that if he followed up on this, nobody reasonable would want to pursue it (and no ethical lawyer would touch it, as it is clearly would end up being a nuisance suit). Then Larry would be in the Only-I-am-tough-enough-to-survive-the-woke-attacks and become the plaintiff

      Liked by 1 person

      • Cam –

        “no ethical lawyer would touch it, as it is clearly would end up being a nuisance suit”… no further proof needed that you aren’t living in the US. These days, the right wing specializes in bullshit defamation suits. Whether it’s Devin Nunes, Sarah Palin or right-wing alleged pedophile Roy Moore, they love to sue. Even more, like Kat pointed out, they love to threaten to sue. Kyle Rittenhouse is one of several different Fox News loves who are fund-raising for suits. Who knows if those funds will ever be used for suit.

        Liked by 1 person

      • My anger is balanced ever so lightly with extreme amusement that W76 apologized for something nobody ever accused him of, and that lots of people who’d never heard of him suddenly did — and wondered who’d be enough of a dick to do that, and instantly start suspecting him of that and other things he was accused of.

        Even the famously litigious Harlan never went that far — but while a jerk, Harlan wasn’t an idiot.

        Local cons are certainly more pleasant without him after he stomped off in a rich-boy hissy fit. Persons of every age, gender, color, or sexuality — those who ever ran into him — do not miss him. The people wearing the “Famous Local Author” ribbons came in every type. But he doesn’t need to publish or even have a job; he can live off his trust fund and grifting. I presume Larry has no trust fund.

        Liked by 1 person

        • Also, with some of those trustfund babies (not just JDA, but also VD, Requires Hate and others), I wonder why they don’t use their wealth for good rather than being arseholes.

          Liked by 1 person

            • Not all rich people in the SFF community (or elsewhere) are arseholes. There are also good ones, but they’re usually the ones who actually made the money.

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              • Yeah, the people who made the money (in some non-predatory way) usually remember being poor or middle class.

                But the generations after that become assholes from birth.

                My parents’ BFFs were self-made rich (low millions) but both of them had come from more humble roots, so they weren’t jerks. They’d literally started with a small house, several young kids, and a tiny office with a bit of seed money and built up a business together. And they raised his, her, and their kids well, smacking down any entitlements. (I spent holidays with them for years and I’m still not sure which of the older kids were his vs. hers!) The kids didn’t have to worry about money, or student loans, but they all went out and got jobs and spouses, and none of them care about the family business. Which is fine with Mom and Dad. I admired them for that. They also gave a lot to charity, not for tax write-offs.

                But if you look at oligarchs, the later generations coast on their trust funds, get jobs from dad’s cronies, and generally act like The Family We Don’t Name, grifting as much as possible besides.

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                • This was the problem with the newspaper chain I used to work for. Founded by an old school newsman in the last century, it was now owned by his grandchildren who didn’t care for it as anything but a cash cow. It showed.
                  The Sackler family of oxycontin fame are an extreme case — no amount of money was ever enough and making it on the corpses of addicts they created seemed like a perfectly fair business model.

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      • He had to narrow down the suit to one plaintiff to win it and damages were reduced. It was because they banned him which he claimed defamed him and damaged him. The ruling was essentially that they accidentally defamed him (reckless disregard for the truth) through the banning, rather than actually lied about him to damage him. So yeah, it does happen sometimes you can get a bad ruling or verdict, but it’s rare. But even if the defamation claim/suit doesn’t go anywhere, gets overturned, the defendants still have to spend a lot of money defending against it and even if the defendant wins and gets compensation, the defendant might not be able to get the judgement out of the plaintiff, or vice versa.

        And since that lawsuit, he’s been banned from Twitter, Patreon and the Game Manufacturers Association for hate speech.

        Liked by 2 people

      • Um. No. He did not win his suit.

        We settled for a pittance and my public statement (which his lawyer signed off on) because going to trial was going to cost even more ridiculous amounts of money.

        Liked by 3 people

        • Ah, that’s good to hear. I knew that the court threw out all his other claims except for one defamation claim against only the organization. It was ridiculous. He made a documented and open threat of harassment that would also be an illegal act under CA law and which violated the convention Code of Conduct he agreed to follow when he bought a membership. The convention rightly revoked that membership, because he threatened the convention, to protect other attendees and the con’s liability. The convention did not defame him — they didn’t lie about his own documented and publicly witnessed statement of planned harassment. They only believed that he meant what he threatened to do.

          But of course a SLAPP suit can still be super expensive to defend in court, so I’m glad you were able to settle instead.

          Liked by 1 person

  18. Defamation suits turn out to be really hard to win. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve consulted with lawyers on potential slander/libel suits, and they always managed to talk me out of it. Here are some of the reasons for that:

    If someone makes it clear they’re just stating their opinion, it’s essentially impossible (in the US, anyway) to sue them successfully. If you say, “I think X is a [insert suitably dastardly crime here],” that’s actually protected. On the other hand, if you say “X is a convicted criminal,” then you’d better be ready to produce the police report. (The truth is an absolute defense–another point many people seem to not get; you can’t sue someone for slander if what they said was true. It’s not enough to prove that it hurt your feelings.)

    Another thing is that, in general, you have to show damages. Yeah, there’s a thing called slander per se where you don’t have to (e.g. accusing someone of a heinous crime), but one lawyer told me that any rewards you get (other than token ones) are still going to be proportional to damages you can actually prove. So if you can show that you lost your job because people believed person Y when he called you a criminal, then, yeah, you’ve probably got a strong case. But if everyone laughed and said, “No one listens to Y; he’s always saying crazy stuff,” then it’ll be harder to win very much. (Worse, the mere act of suing would draw much more attention to the claim and cause some people to think there might have be some truth to it after all.)

    Finally, sometimes the person you want to sue isn’t the one you could actually prevail against. E.g. Person Y said he thought you were a criminal, but person Z believed him and stated it as a fact. Y was malicious; Z was just dumb. But Z is probably the only one you could successfully sue.

    Again, I’m not a lawyer; the above is just my recollections of what a US lawyer told me. And I’m aware that there are other motivations for filing a suit than trying to win a monetary judgment. But, in general, when someone talks big about suing someone for slander, what they really need to do is grow up.

    Liked by 2 people

    • And to top that, if this is really about suing Cam, we have a USAmerican wanting to sue someone living in Australia. This is even more complicated, because the law is different in other parts of the world.
      Here in Germany calling someone a criminal is not only a question of civil law for example, it can be a case of criminal law.
      This is only an example, but involve other countrys and the law gets complicated. (Just from people I know one partner German the other I think American living in Switzerland, got complicated for the mariage and names)
      More complicated is that he wants to sue someone who is unknown (would make the duel also complicated).

      Liked by 2 people

      • I think the suing was intended either at Jay Blanc for his Tweets about Baen’s Bar or Mike Glyer for reporting on them or potentially he meant some kind of general legal defence fund

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      • Speaking as someone who translates these things, international requests for legal aid, e.g. summoning or questioning a witness, requesting documents as evidence for a trial, having legal documents served to someone living abroad, etc… usually take months to even get a reply and then it’s often negative.

        Liked by 1 person

    • Yep, in the U.S., you have to prove that:

      1) The defendant made a factual lie about you or repeated a factual lie with reckless disregard for whether it was true. It cannot just be an opinion that you are awful; it has to be something presented as a specific fact about you. X acts like an alcoholic is an opinion; asserting that X is an alcoholic and you have proof of it is a factual lie.

      2) The factual lie has to be made with clear malicious intent to damage your reputation and your life/income. You have to prove that the person is out to get you by spreading the lie, not just accidentally did so.

      3) You have to prove that the person actually did cause you damage, primarily financial damage (but can also be threats to your life as in the recent Alex Jones cases.) The more a famous public figure you are, the higher the bar for this proof, because lots of people will say things about famous people all the time and it won’t necessarily be believed and thus cause any real damage. The defendant has to have some real power to cause you damage and be shown to have done so with factual and testimonial evidence.

      So it’s hard to do. Sometimes it can be done, if you have enough money, and sometimes you may be judged defamed when you really weren’t under the requirements, but most defamation suits don’t succeed. In many states there are laws against filing lawsuits whose main purpose seems to be just to harass their target and drown them in legal fees, which includes falsely claiming defamation with no real cause. In that case, you could be up for a lot of damages if it’s judged you filed such a lawsuit.

      So it’s not just a matter of having enough money. Whoever the person is whom Larry is stumping for, it’s unlikely that there’s evidence for a real defamation case. But hey, you can raise a lot of money for a defamation case, spend some of it on lawyers and then, just, you know “use” the rest somewhere. That’s what Trump does all the time. He’s been fundraising off the FBI search, which happened because he refused to return the documents he had earlier agreed to return.

      Liked by 2 people

    • It was all about slavery. Slave patrols from one state rampaging in others was an issue in the young country, abolitionists were rallying, and slavers wanted armed forces on hand to be ready to deal with slave rebellions, of which there were tons. The concern was that the slave patrols and militia they used might be disbanded by federal order. So the 2nd amendment was designed to prevent the federal government from being able to do that. They wanted to be able to draft/hire volunteers into slave patrol posses and militia forces whenever they needed them, to bear arms for the state as official enforcers. That system eventually included/transferred to state police forces who could deputize citizens as needed under the 2nd amendment.

      And that’s all the 2nd amendment was about until 20th century lawsuits went against gun control laws, insisting that the amendment applied to individuals, not well-regulated militia. They added in the, “we must have the ability to rebel against the government” stuff later as they went on, even though that’s not in the Constitution and actually goes against the wording of the 2nd Amendment.

      White people view the 2nd Amendment as essentially permission to shoot their BIPOC neighbors. They just chop off the last words of the amendment. We’ve had several generations since the Civil Rights Movement brought up believing that they have to be ready to put down BIPOC civil rights movements (slave rebellions) under the claim of protecting white people and property (plantations.) They pretend that’s the same as being American Revolutionaries, but it’s just the slave patrol all over again.

      Liked by 2 people

      • Well, let’s face it, the whole arrangement of the Federal Government is to protect white people (mostly men) who own property. That’s how we get the 2nd A and the Electoral College.

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        • Yeah, the Revolutionary movement really liked continuing the idea of having the land-owning gentry class that also controlled trade (and had slaves) but they did not want the capriciousness and difficulties of having a monarch-parliamentary system. So they tried to do more of a copy of the ancient Greco-Roman land-owning republic, before it had a Caesar, and they tried to put in safe-guards to keep from developing a Caesar. The Electoral College was one of those safe-guard attempts. They were worried that if they threw the presidency election out to the general men voting populace, a popular leader they couldn’t ride herd on might be voted in by the public and become a Caesar, a king. (And indeed, that’s what happened with Napoleon in France.) So they wanted the landed gentry to have more control over the presidential election, especially in smaller states.

          Because only a limited number of people were allowed to vote and because they did not yet have that many large states, they didn’t think about what would eventually happen in a winner take them all system or what would happen if voting was expanded in who could vote among an unevenly distributed population. But rich people really like the Electoral College system because they only have to jerry-rig and bribe the system to get the bare minimum of the popular vote in a state to get all the electoral votes in that state, especially in a low population state. If you get 51% or 80% of the vote, you win the same number of electoral votes. And there are enough states with sparsely populated rural areas still to manage the 51% of the vote in them. They are losing that set-up slowly, but if they can suppress enough “urban” votes and keep non-white immigrants from being citizens, throw enough black and brown people in jail, etc., they can keep it going for awhile. And if they can control the elections in enough states — well, we’ve already seen the sort of things they are doing with that — Jim Crow 2.0 and outright illegal acts.

          I honestly don’t know if getting rid of the Electoral College would solve the problem or not. But it would mean that the 1% would have to work a lot harder to suppress votes to counter the city votes, since most of the cities in the U.S. of any decent size are “blue” for Dem voting or turning purple. What we do know is that we got a guy who tried to be Caesar — and still thinks being the president is being a caesar — through the Electoral College, not the popular vote. And it’s at least the second time that’s happened. So as a safeguard against potential “tyrants” in the presidency, the EC was not a very good one.

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          • I’ve been saying for years that the main reason the southern States joined the American Revolution to start with was because the big plantation owners were pissed at the King for not granting them the actual titles like ‘Baron’ they felt they should be accorded as they were obviously the landed nobility over here.

            Since the plantations were providing a lot of the funding for the Revolution, it’s thus no surprise that a lot of the laws were written at least in part to favour them. And most of them probably figured that obviously these Enlightenment and Democracy fads couldn’t last, and soon enough that would fall apart and they would be the ones in charge as they should be; they just had to humour folks like Franklin for a few years until that happened.

            It just took several generations longer than they had planned.

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            • I don’t know that they were against Enlightenment and democracy per se, given that Jefferson crafted a lot of it and was a slaver, and Washington led the armies and was a slaver. The main reasons that the Southern States threw in with the Revolutionaries were:

              1) They wanted to run their colonies as their own fiefdoms with less centralized government control. The Revolutionaries promised that.

              2) As part of these fiefdoms, they wanted less tax and to be the ones receiving the bulk of the taxes.

              3) Britain was in the long process of outlawing slavery on which they utterly depended for their economy. Because the other states/reps couldn’t pull off the war without their help, they were forced to agree to keep slavery legal in the new country.

              4) After the disaster and debt of the French and Indian War, Britain ceded a lot of land in the western territories to the indigenous tribes and earmarked others for themselves. The Southern states wanted that land (and to expand slavery into it) as land was then the main source of wealth in the colonies. When the Revolutionaries became too much trouble in the war for Britain to be able to keep fighting them, they declared that those lands were now forfeit to the new country, including the ones given to the indigenous, that past treaties were void. Control of western territories and the ability to have slavery there were also main causes of the Civil War a century later.

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              • Oops, I hit send before I finished. They did want fiefdoms but I’m not sure they were thoroughly against democracy and in favor of monarchy. They just had the view that democracy was what the elite land owners got — proving their right to vote. I think the Southern states were alright with some social mobility for (white) people becoming land owners who could vote and lead but they simply didn’t see democracy as really an everybody thing.

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