HIDE BEHIND THE CHILDREN WELL: Mainstream elites prove useless again!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Part 1—Precocious little 15:
On the front page of yesterday's New York Times, Jack Healy profiled the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

He focused on the problems with which they're dealing in the wake of the recent mass shooting at their large public school. Online, the headines above his report suggest what those problems may be:
Outspoken and Precocious, Florida Students Struggle With Loss When the Cameras Turn Off

Even as they raise millions of dollars and plan nationwide rallies to stop gun violence, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School struggle with nightmares.
As if by rule of law, the headlines say the kids are precocious. But at the start of his report, Healy went straight to the problems they face:
HEALY (2/26/18): After a gunman turned their high school into a sprawling crime scene last week, three freshman friends leapt into the student movement for tougher gun laws. They rode a bus to the State Capitol and chased down lawmakers. They vowed to march on Washington. They shouted and waved signs saying “Protect Kids” and “Stop Killing the Future.”

But at night, in the blackness that recalls the dark classroom where she hid as a gunman murdered her classmates, Samara Barrack, 15, cannot stop thinking about that afternoon, when she fled through a blood-covered hallway. Samantha Deitsch, also 15, grieves a friend from journalism class. Aria Siccone, 14, who walked past the bodies of students from her last-period study hall, feels nothing sometimes. Just numbness.

“I keep having flashbacks,” Samara said. “There’s times I want to cry and can’t. There’s times I want to have fun and am hysterical.”

This is the reality that confronts students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when the cameras turn off and the day’s rallies are over. They have won praise for their strength and eloquence on the world’s stage. But even as they raise millions of dollars and plan nationwide rallies, parse the details of assault-weapons laws and spar with politicians and conservative critics, the young survivors of the massacre are struggling with the loss of their friends and educators, and the nightmares that flood back in moments of stillness.
In his report, Healy attempts to chronicle the problems facing these three students and their three thousand schoolmates.

How accurate is Healy's portrait? We can't answer that question. But the three students with whom Healy starts are 15, 15 and 14 years old. Under the circumstances, it's almost obscene to be going around blabbing that they're "precocious."

Can we talk? The biggest problem these students confront is the relentless failure of elite adult authorities in their failing society. These failures include the noxious idea that these students, being "outspoken and precocious," strong and eloquent, are somehow supposed to solve the problem which came to their school that day.

Did we mention the fact that the three freshmen Healy cites are 14 or 15 years old? In what universe does it make sense to imagine that they will possess the "strength and eloquence" with which to address the sprawling societal problems which lay behind this latest disastrous event?

High school freshmen, aged 14, shouldn't be asked to be so "strong and eloquent." And yet, there was Dahlia Lithwick, one week later, writing that horribly accurate essay in Slate.

In her horribly accurate essay, Lithwick said that these teenagers are more capable then her own highly privileged adult cohort—an elite cohort which has failed us mightily for the past how many years.

Lithwick was certainly right about the astounding uselessness of the endlessly compromised, endlessly useless, self-dealing cohort around her. But it has been obscene to see people from that cohort pander and fawn to a bunch of kids, burdening them with the task of fixing the Lithwick cohort's failures and "mistakes."

Who the heck is Dahlia Lithwick? For starters, we'll assume that she is one of the world's nicest people. We'd be very be surprised if she isn't.

That said, she's also utterly useless, especially when you consider her pedigree and her access to lofty platforms. In saying this, we don't mean to single her out. This uselessness characterizes decades of self-dealing from various lofty cohorts and elite guilds.

It's time for them all to go. But then, that's been true for decades.

By way of illustration, who is Dahlia Lithwick? She hails from our neighbor to the north. In the ways these things are measured, she's vastly succeeded down here. The leading authority on her life tells us these things about her:
Dahlia Lithwick is a writer and journalist. Lithwick is currently a contributing editor at Newsweek and senior editor at Slate. She primarily writes about law and politics in the United States. She writes "Supreme Court Dispatches" and "Jurisprudence" and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues for Slate.

[...]

Lithwick was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and is a Canadian citizen. She moved to the U.S. to study at Yale University, where she received a B.A. in English in 1990. As a student at Yale, she debated on the American Parliamentary Debate Association circuit as a member of the Yale Debate Association. In 1990, she and her debate partner at the time, Austan Goolsbee, were runners up for the national Team of the Year.

She went on to study law at Stanford University, where she received her J.D. in 1996. She then clerked for Judge Procter Hug
on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
It's our impression that Lithwick's no longer at Newsweek. Still, in the way these things are measured, that's lofty stuff!

Goolsbee, her debate partner, went on to become "the youngest member of the cabinet of President Barack Obama." (In recent years, he's been a frequent, perfectly sensible guest on the Hannity program, on Fox.)

Judged by grasping, upper-end norms, Lithwick's history was lofty, at least through the Stanford years. Sadly, it's been downhill from there.

"She was a regular guest on The Al Franken Show," the leading authority goes on to say, "and has been a guest columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed page."

Franken was apparently grabbing women's asses at the time in question. The failures of the New York Times are legion, although, by law, these deeply destructive, serial failures can't be discussed by people of Lithwick's pedigree and place.

Lithwick is maybe 48. The people Healy describes in his report are 14, 15 and 15.

It's obscene to think that people so young are supposed to solve our society's problems, one of the largest of which is the presence of people from Lithwick's class on endless upper-end platforms. But Lithwick came close to handing them that assignment in her all-time silly Slate essay, which was sillily headlined like this:
POLITICS
The Student Teachers
The teenagers from Stoneman Douglas are fearlessly reimagining how to effect change in the Trump era.
By DAHLIA LITHWICK
The student teachers! In this latest silly, romanticized novel, the kids were behaving fearlessly! Yesterday, Healy said, "Hold on! Not so fast!"

Let's give credit where due. In her silly piece for Slate, Lithwick acknowledged the failure of her well-bred leadership crowd over the past many years. "These kids aren’t naïve," she naïvely wrote. "They are just better at this than we are." Here's the unhelpful, buck-passing way she chose to end her column:
LITHWICK (2/22/18): The kids of Stoneman Douglas really don’t much care what this president thinks, or what the NRA thinks, or even what we in the media think. The central mistake we have made this past week is trying to understand how this vast army of eloquent, purposeful, and clear-eyed students has been all-but-invisible to us until now. The better lesson we can take from them is that, thankfully, we have been almost entirely invisible to them. They are unconstrained by our norms and unmoved by our plight, and not really all that interested in our corny media tropes about childhood, suffering, and power. Good for them. It’s about time.
This was the latest romanticized tale. Over the past ten days or so, many useless adult elites have been insipidly mouthing it.

We don't have the slightest doubt that Dahlia Lithwick, perhaps 48, is one of the world's nicest people. She's also part of a self-dealing "liberal"/mainstream elite which has persistently failed those kids, their parents and everyone else over the past thirty years. They've relentlessly failed to cut to the chase, to go where the rubber meets theroad.

On the day of this latest mass shooting, several deputy sheriffs crouched behind cars in the parking lot, apparently as the shooting continued. Useless elites have been hiding behind those precocious kids from that latest gruesome day forward.

Tomorrow: Hiding behind Emma Gonzalez, who's only 17

40 comments:

  1. The biggest liberal failings are in economics and foreign policy, pursuing neoliberal globalization, global neoliberal hegemony.

    But let's give credit where it's due: liberal cultural cretinism is certainly part of it.

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  2. Really, Dahlia Lithwick has failed us all? We're not being screwed by the NRA, Republicans, the Tea Party, right-wingers and straight-up fascists, or Trump-worshippers. All the bad stuff that's happening now is strictly the fault of perfectly nice, well-meaning liberals.

    Well, Bob Somerby is none of the above. So how have you contributed to the solution, Mr. Somerby? What have you done to replace our elites with better elites? Have you even done anything but bitch, gripe, moan and complain about the failures of others?

    This can get a bit tiresome, you know.

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    1. I'm going to disagree with part of your comment. Somerby has been a voice in the wilderness about some very important issues - the MSM treatment of Gore in 2000, and the MSM refusal to challenge the Benghazi narrative starting in 2012. I think that he's done some great work, even if it's consisted of griping about the failures of others.

      But regarding Somerby, if he's somehow arguing that "elites" in the past were better than they are today, and that our institutions are failing now in a manner that they weren't before, I think that he's way wrong. Just to use his example today, where he argues that the activism of high-school kids reveals the failures of the institutional elite, let's go back to the 1960s, where kids barely out of high school made a huge fuss and, in some ways, helped change the world. It's always been this way.

      Moreover, he's the one who constantly notes how school test scores are improving, which is yet another example of "institutions" doing well.

      The media is a big problem, no doubt about it. But I wonder if it was ever any better than it is now. Bob himself has described the treatment of Ed Muskie in 1972 to suggest that the "MSM" has never been any good at all.

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  3. There seems to be a consensus developing for a ban on assault weapons. But, advocates seem to have forgotten that we already tried that in 1994, and it didn't work.

    The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
    Apocryphal quote often attributed to Einstein.

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    1. That Einstein quote assumes that the ban was done in the right way the first time and that the new proposals propose doing exactly the same thing.

      I know it feels good to say it though.

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    2. Lots of people disagree with that Einstein quote. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of practicing something until you get it right.

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    3. Actually, Einstein never said it.

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    4. Persistence is part of problem solving. You cannot abandon an approach prematurely on the assumption that it won't work, any more than you can give up on something without applying sufficient effort. The emotion of frustration motivates a change, either choosing a new goal or abandoning an ineffective approach, but it builds up slowly over time, with repeated effort.

      Platitudes attributed to famous people are not necessarily right, just because they appeal to our common sense or respect for authority. In reality, persistence nearly always pays off. There is less reason to give up on gun control than other worthwhile causes, since lives are at stake. We need to be investigating links between gun violence and suicide, domestic violence, and the alt-right, not just chalk this up to "mental illness," especially when 95%+ of the mentally ill are not violent and violence is not part of the diagnostic criteria for nearly all of the mental illnesses.

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    5. The CDC studied it in 2003 and said it couldn't find that the assault weapons ban had any effect on lowering gun deaths or crime

      https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5214a2.htm

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    6. American "gun deaths" are mostly suicides anyway, unless you count endless 'democracy promotions' and 'human rights defenses' abroad.

      I imagine killing oneself with an 'assault weapon' might be a bit awkward...

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    7. CDC hasn't been allowed to study gun deaths or anything else related to gun control since 2006. Time to change that.

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    8. Interesting thought experiment, Dimitri. You might want to try it and see.

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    9. " ...we already tried that and it didn't work."

      More fake news from - surprise - David in Cal:

      https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/assault-weapons-ban-summary

      The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was effective at reducing crime and getting these military-style weapons off our streets. Since the ban expired, more than 350 people have been killed and more than 450 injured by these weapons.

      A Justice Department study of the assault weapons ban found that it was responsible for a 6.7% decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal.
      Source: Jeffrey A. Roth & Christopher S. Koper, “Impact Evaluation of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994,” (March 1997).
      The same study also found that “Assault weapons are disproportionately involved in murders with multiple victims, multiple wounds per victim, and police officers as victims.”
      The use of assault weapons in crime declined by more than two-thirds by about nine years after 1994 Assault Weapons Ban took effect.
      Source: Christopher S. Koper, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003” (June 2004), University of Pennsylvania, Report to the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice.
      The percentage of firearms seized by police in Virginia that had high-capacity magazines dropped significantly during the ban. That figure has doubled since the ban expired.
      Source: David S. Fallis and James V. Grimaldi, “In Virginia, high-yield clip seizures rise,” Washington Post, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/22/AR2011012204046.html
      When Maryland imposed a more stringent ban on assault pistols and high-capacity magazines in 1994, it led to a 55% drop in assault pistols recovered by the Baltimore Police Department.
      Source: Douglas S. Weil & Rebecca C. Knox, Letter to the Editor, The Maryland Ban on the Sale of Assault Pistols and High-Capacity Magazines: Estimating the Impact in Baltimore, 87 Am. J. of Public Health 2, Feb. 1997.
      37% of police departments reported seeing a noticeable increase in criminals’ use of assault weapons since the 1994 federal ban expired.
      Source: Police Executive Research Forum, Guns and Crime: Breaking New Ground by Focusing on the Local Impact (May 2010)."

      It would have been even more effective if it wasn't watered down to appease David's hero Newt Gingrich and David's GOP heroes in the 1994 Congress.

      Quick question, GOP troll in chief: what political group allowed the ban to expire at the behest of the NRA and the gun-manufacturers' various shills?

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    10. Senator Feinstein is, of course, a notorious liar. Same as all liberal politicians - goes without saying. Here's the money quote from the document:
      "Our best estimate of the impact of the ban on state level gun homicide rates is that it caused a reduction of 6.7% in gun murders in 1995 relative to a projection of recent trends. However, the evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect (i.e., that the effect was different from zero)."

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    11. Yours is the cherry-picked quote. Here's where the rubber meets the road:

      "These results are perhaps to be expected. Available data from national gun trace requests to BATF, Milwaukee, and other cities indicate that assault weapons account for only 1 to 7 percent of all guns used in violent crime. Likewise, our analysis of guns used in homicides in Milwaukee suggests that a substantial majority of gun homicides (approximately three-quarters) are not committed with guns having large-capacity magazines. Further, victims killed with large-capacity magazines in Milwaukee were shot three times on average, a number well below the ten-round capacity permitted for post-ban magazines. This does not tell us the actual number of shots fired in these cases, but other limited evidence also suggests that most gun attacks involve three or fewer shots (Kleck 1991; McGonigal et al.
      1993). Finally, a faster rate of fire is arguably an important lethality characteristic of semiautomatics which may influence the number of wounds inflicted in gun attacks; yet one would not expect the Crime Act to have had an
      impact on overall use of semiautomatics, of which assault weapons were a minority even before the ban. On the other hand, the analysis of Milwaukee gun homicides did produce some weak evidence that homicide victims killed with guns having large-capacity magazines tended to have more bullet wounds than did victims killed with other firearms. This may suggest that large-capacity magazines facilitate higher numbers of shots fired per incident, perhaps by encouraging gun offenders to fire more shots (a phenomenon we have heard some police officers refer to as a “spray and pray” mentality). If so, the gradual attrition of the stock of pre-ban large-capacity magazines could have important preventive effects on the lethality of gun violence. However, our analysis of wounds inflicted in banned and non-banned magazine cases was crude and did not control for potentially important characteristics of the incidents, victims, and offenders. We believe that such incident-based analyses would yield important information about the role of specific firearm characteristics in lethal and non-lethal gun violence and provide further guidance by which to assess this aspect of the Crime Act legislation.

      One other fallacy in your comment, something they might not know in St. Petersburg - Feinstein is not a liberal.

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    12. I also notice David's tag-a-long troll cherrypicked from the original 1997 study which was published a little over 2 years after the Act's implementation and ignored the 2004 update and the 2011 study, all of which supports Senator Feinstein's position.

      Talk about dishonest.

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  4. Jonny -- as I recall the ban was allowed to expire after 10 years because people felt it wasn't effectively preventing murders. Here's one article addressing it https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/24/the-last-assault-weapons-ban-didnt-work-will-the-new-one-be-different/?utm_term=.cb04a2881cc3

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    1. I can't read the article because I'm not a WaPo subscriber. I just googled a little bit and learned that the banned assault weapons weren't taken off the street, so I'm not sure how you'd find any measurable impact in a short time frame. Of course, crime in general was declining throughout that 1994-2004 period.

      In any event, given that AR15s have been used in a disproportionate number of mass shootings recently, I'm not sure that I need a study that can be parsed 10-ways-to-Sunday to tell me that if those weapons are banned then people will be left to kill others with weapons that are less lethal.

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    2. Jonny - you have a point. But, many semi-automatic hunting rifles could be used just the way AR-15s were. So, just eliminating "assault weapons" wouldn't work IMHO.

      I'd like to see other approaches tried. I do think teachers and school administrators should be allowed to carry concealed guns (if they have the proper training), but that's hardly a complete answer. Maybe there's a better way to keep track of mentally ill people who are a threat to society. Maybe we should re-open the mental institutions. They were closed in the 1960's.

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    3. Teachers are not going to carry guns.

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    4. 37% of Americans say they or someone in their household owns a gun. That's a lot of people. Maybe some are teachers or school administrators. If none of them choose to carry guns, then allowing them to do so won't have any effect, positive or negative.

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    5. @Johnny: You can't read the WaPo? So you just take Somerby's word for it when he characterizes a WaPo story? Not a good idea, in my experience.

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    6. David, you live in CA. There are strict rules AGAINST bringing guns to campuses. That applies to faculty as well as students.

      CA has a strong teacher's union. The Cal State College system has a strong union too. Neither will support arming teachers. It is not our responsibility and it interferes with the teaching role. Plus there are workload and pay issues involved. Those unions will strongly oppose such a suggestion.

      Then there are the parents. I would not want to place my child's safety in the hands of an unknown teacher who may or may not be qualified to use a gun in a crisis situation. I believe my child would be as likely to be shot by the teacher as anyone else. And there is the possibility of the teacher's gun being stolen, or some distraught student turning the gun against the teacher or class. It would be way too dangerous to put guns in classrooms on a regular basis, so as a parent, I would strongly oppose such a move.

      People need a special license to carry a concealed weapon in CA. Making it so that teachers can carry guns to school would mean opening that door to all kinds of other occupations and people, making our whole society less safe. That isn't going to happen in CA. I won't answer for Texas though.

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    7. That's the cute thing about David in Cal. He enjoys all the strongest protections living in his gated community in sunny California, including consumer protections, environmental regulations, and gun regulations.

      You will notice none of these strict regulations and protections are so onerous to his liberties and freedom that he is forced to move his ass to Alabamy.

      No siree bob, David in Sunny California is very good thank you enjoying all those burdensome protections, but he would just like the rest to pollute ourselves a little more and loosen up the gun culture so he can watch from afar and feel so much more liberated.

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    8. AnonymousFebruary 26, 2018 at 3:21 PM - You are arguing from theory -- what you think might happen. Some states allow guns in schools. In fact, "gun-free school zones" are relatively recent. So, guns were allowed in schools all over for many years. It seems reasonable to think that some teachers and and some administrators did have legal concealed weapons in the schools, yet we haven't heard about the bad consequences that you fear.

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    9. mm - California's government has produced the highest poverty rate of any state in the nation -- worse than Alabama. There's not much national news coverage of how the many impoverished people live in this state. It isn't pretty.

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    10. Not only are you moving the goal posts, David, you're using a bullshit meme in doing it.

      Sad

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    11. "It seems reasonable that some pigs can fly."

      FTFY, NFO

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    12. There was a professor in my dept who kept a gun in his desk drawer. One day a student came in to complain about his grade. The professor took the gun out and laid it on his desk. Then he said, "Do you still want to argue about this?"

      Needless to say he was fired, quickly. The only worse story I've heard is the one about the professor who invited a few students to her home and was fired after one of them was mauled by her pet mountain lion.

      I don't think you want to trust teachers to have guns.

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    13. Oh my God, David. Not only do you suffer under intolerable oppressive onerous and burdensome regulatory state, you have endure living in mass poverty as well. How do you do it? You must be a saint.

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  5. "That said, she's also utterly useless, especially when you consider her pedigree and her access to lofty platforms. In saying this, we don't mean to single her out."

    Hahaha, except you are TOTALLY singling her out, you cranky old bat. You're excavating that Dahlia Lithwick is originally from Canada, and apparently excelled at Yale, and she is probably about 49 now.

    SO THE FUCK WHAT, BOB? What part of her life or resumé are we supposed to clang onto and discredit her with? She's been in the US excelling academically and professionally for the past 28 years, and... so what? What is your point, Bob? That a person who is Canadian and 49 cannot possibly ever understand teenagers? The very last person I would ask about Teenagers is Bob Somerby, who sort of had a wank over the dirty teenage harlots that Roy Moore harassed and abused sexually and in one case shoved out of a car roughly when she refused his advances. Bob Somerby was on Roy Moore's side for weeks and weeks.

    Dahlia Lithwick is far more credible as a reporter and journalist and someone to take seriously than Bob here will ever be. She has a long list of well regarded articles and accomplishments, she's respected, and she's not a crackpot. Unlike someone already named.

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  6. No one has disappeared the victims of these shootings before this. These kids are compelling because they are talking for themselves, but so did Gabby Gifford, and many of us still find her compelling. The parents of the Sandy Hook kids were compelling, especially to those of us who are parents. Our hearts broke listening to them. The victims in CO were compelling too. But no one listened to them, despite their obvious suffering, their obvious innocence and the wrongness of what was done to them.

    One thing that is different today is that there is a mobilized resistance to Trump that is eager to latch onto issues that can be brought against him. The pleas of these high schoolers are being supported by the wider resistance. The media is helping where it didn't before, perhaps because they smell blood in the water, or perhaps because Trump is fanning the flames and the media follows wherever he leads.

    I haven't seen anyone suggest much less demand that these kids solve the gun problem themselves. I haven't seen anyone put this on their shoulders. I have been seeing numerous people step up and support these kids, so they aren't savaged by their opposition and not left hanging in their efforts. It would be very sad if they received the same treatment as Giffords and it is easy to portray the NRA and conservative gun control enthusiasts as cold-hearted bullies if they do oppose these appealing kids. That's what is different.

    I get the note of grievance in Somerby's post but I don't understand what he thinks Lithwick and others were supposed to have done previously against the overwhelming power of the NRA and a conservative congress and a media bored with discussing guns.

    Further, I don't believe our media are supposed to become advocates. They are supposed to report news and analyze current events, not make news and lead activist movements. I am as proud of the gun control activists as I am of the tireless Planned Parenthood supporters and environmentalists who work to advance what must seem like lost causes, day in and day out, making incremental progress outside the limelight. These people are liberal heroes and I try to help with money and moral support. That isn't Lithwick's role. I hope Somerby is doing his share of that necessary work, instead of complaining online and feeling like an activist while doing nothing to help anyone anywhere (except himself).

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  7. The activities of these students are a form of coping mechanism. What they are doing is helping them psychologically, even if they never change a thing about gun control.

    A more successful model of this kind of activism by the families and survivors of violence is MADD. They succeeded in changing laws across the country and greatly reduced deaths and accidents due to drunk driving. They did it on behalf of kids and other family members who were victims of drunk drivers. Several industries changed, including those who sell alcohol and those who build cars. So there is a model for success even against some powerful interests. The public needs to get fed up enough to demand change. It may be that we are finally reaching that point and these kids were the ones who were there when it happened.

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  8. Showing respect for the suffering of a bunch of kids is now characterized as "fawning" and "pandering." People are being nice to them, for God's sake!

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  9. "It's time for them all to go."

    or as Shakespeare's Dick the Butcher said:
    "Kill all the lawyers."

    Not at all an unhinged request.

    "How accurate is Healy's portrait? We can't answer that question."
    Healy talked to the students. He quoted what they said. Why question the accuracy of Healy's portrait?

    "Lithwick cohort's failures and "mistakes."

    It's either Lithwick and her "cohort" (the press?) who are at fault or....

    'self-dealing "liberal"/mainstream elite which has persistently failed those kids'

    Ah yes. The crux of the problem. It's always the failure of liberals who have failed to create a perfect society. No one else will be criticized for THEIR failures. That's Hard Somerby Law.

    What by the way is a "mainstream elite?" Are there no non-mainstream elites to blame?

    Or perhaps: "The biggest problem these students confront is the relentless failure of elite adult authorities"...
    it's the fault of " elite adult authorities". Who would they be? Are they Lithwick's cohort? Liberal elites? Do "authorities" include police, teachers, parents, elected officials? If so, are they identical with those liberal elites and Lithwick's cohort?

    This is a societal problem. You can't express concern about it and then fail to examine the whole problem, only choosing to criticize the usual suspects, as Saint Somerby does here.

    By the way, it must be a cushy job that Somerby has chosen for himself, to criticize everyone else ("It's time for them all to go.") and present oneself as blameless, as not part of that "elite", or "adult authorities."

    Apparently, finding fault with every journalist working today, deriding liberals as dumb and pathetic, and confining oneself to repetitious "musings" is a sufficient effort for Somerby and his fans. Taking a stand? That's beneath the Howler; it's not in his self-imposed, immutable job description; that's for those stupid simpering liberals getting their hands dirty in the real world.

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    1. 'ns. Taking a stand? That's beneath the Howler; it's not in his self-imposed, immutable job description; that's for those stupid simpering liberals getting their hands dirty in the real world.'


      I disagree here. Somerby does take a stand. His stand is defense of Trump, Trump minions, attacking liberals, attacking Maddow, bitching about corporates while ignoring Fox, the Murdoch empire etc.

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  10. Well, looky here. Ms Lithwick has written rather frequently about guns and gun control. Here are a few examples (all in Slate):

    Bloody Heller
    The Supreme Court created a gun rights crisis it’s unwilling to solve.
    By Dahlia Lithwick
    Oct. 5, 2017 5:12 PM

    The Second Amendment Hoax
    How the NRA and conservatives have perverted the meaning of the right to bear arms.
    By Dahlia Lithwick
    Jun. 13, 2016 6:44 PM

    Who Has the Right To Bear Arms?
    The fight over the Second Amendment, explained.
    By Dahlia Lithwick
    Nov. 21, 2007 10:54 AM

    DEC. 4 2015 5:21 PM
    Mass Shootings Are Changing Us
    Children have never known a time without lockdowns and mass shootings.
    By Dahlia Lithwick

    Are Assault Weapons Protected by the Second Amendment?
    The Supreme Court may finally have to rule on the right to keep and bear AR-15s.
    By Dahlia Lithwick
    Feb. 5, 2016 3:14 PM

    Not in My Backyard
    The courts and legislatures won’t solve our gun problem. Maybe the free market can.
    By Dahlia Lithwick
    May. 30, 2014 4:23 PM

    Just a few of many examples. Doesn't seem to support Somerby's accusations against her. I know, I know...liberals don't care about gun control. Whatever! Fairness, thy name isn't Somerby. "Ass" is more appropriate.

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  11. Somerby keeps talking about (and blaming) "elites." Nice to know that the non-elites (i.e. Voters) are off the hook on this one.

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    1. He's just following the pseudo-progressive playbook. They love that word.

      It's a term they share with the alt right. Takes them all off the hook for doing stupid things like wasting a presidential vote by writing in a non-candidate or for voting for trump.

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