I'm confused...

 ...by people who, bemoaning the recent Dobbs decision, try to draw parallels between that "no, the Burger Court did not justify its claim that abortion is implicit in the Bill of Rights) and other non-fascist facts about our country like a lack of universal health care, universal child care, government regulated time off, and so on.  People who post such a laundry list and say it's proof that the people who don't want abortion or government control of health care and so on, are really just interested in "control."

Bish, who is in control under a regime of universal health care?  Who is in control when child care and work benefits are managed by the federal government?  When there is no monopoly on ownership of firearms (along side other means for committing violence, like riots and arson and vandalism, which we're now told is a necessary part of desperate democracy).

Do you even know what "control" is?

Since it's pride month, here's something to reconsider.

According to the recent documentary "What is a Woman?" the average person undergoing transsexual medical treatments represents a $1.3 million payday to pharmaceutical companies.

Those of you who have rattled the bars of socmed griping about the evils of so-called capitalism and market forces and the bourgeoise and whatnot, keep that in mind.

At the grocery store I frequent, in between the Muzak they have ads for special sales they have, convenient but obscure services they provide, and other trendy things.

"Trendy things" might just be about holidays.  Like, leading up to Memorial Day, they talked about grilling hot dogs and how you'll need buns for them and beer to wash it all down, but they also praised our soldiers for their sacrifices.

In that same vein, one of the ads is about their cooperation with some outfit called something like the Fluid Foundation.  It's apparently about providing gender-neutral clothing so people can express themselves through fashion in a non-binary way.

Meanwhile most people can describe their casual outfits as something like "jeans and a t-shirt," and the uniform for that grocery store's employees, whether male or female, masculine or feminine, is a blue polo shirt and black or tan pants.

Sure, there are variations available for civilians as well as employees, but it's all down to personal preferences, see?

Like it always was.

This foundation or whatever the clothing company is calling itself isn't doing something innovative or groundbreaking.  It's repackaging what you were already getting into something trendy.

Why?  So you'll spend more money on the fad in your rush to get on the bandwagon.

They were only half right when they said "No service is free; if you're not paying for it, you're the product."  There are also movements you're encouraged to buy into but it's like brand loyalty with a moral dimension--or rather, a facade, something just painted on top.  The movement itself is the product, but if it reaches its destination, its goal, it will no longer need to exist, and the "movers" will be out of a job.  They might say they look forward to that day, but for most humans, big money that easy is too great a temptation.

So those movements "move," all right; but they don't go anywhere.

Gun controllers aren't seriously interested in public safety. They're interested in public control.

This is why they openly admit, in the wake of a mass shooting, that we as a nation need to rise up and pass new rights-surrendering legislation while emotions are still high. 

But when cooler heads finally prevail, they don't persist in their crusade.  They don't look around, see the urgency starting to flag, and say "Okay, well, let's at least sit down and take the time to figure out something that works." They give the idea lip service, but for the most part they just give up and pursue tyranny by other means.  They tried it with the Brady Bill, and Biden's weepy exhortations notwithstanding, it wasn't effective enough to reinstate when it lapsed; there was no surge in "gun violence" that made everyone go "oh no, letting the Brady ban lapse was a mistake; we have to put these fires out before things get worse than they were before."

"Gun violence."  What a canard.  They talk about it, but they want to eliminate guns in the hope that the violence will just stop happening.  Meanwhile, we have knife crime increasing when gun access drops--say what you want about stabbings being less deadly than GSWs, they're more personal and they prove that you haven't solved the violence problem at all--and people turn to even less discriminate means when numerous deaths are their goal, as we saw in Bath, Michigan and Oklahoma City.  They talk about gun violence like it's something special, like childhood cancer--like other kinds of violence aren't just harder to commit but are really less offensive, like someone stabbed or beaten to death or thrown off a balcony is just not as morally important.  And they act that way.

It's savvy to recognize you should never let a crisis go to waste.  But if all you're doing is skipping from the crest of one crisis to the next, you aren't going to accomplish anything except maybe filling your own coffers.  So what use are you to the electorate?

21 deaths is certainly a tragedy (unless you're making a point like "tragedies are horrific accidents and natural disasters; this was categorically worse;" fair enough).  But that same weekend in Chicago, there were something like 46 shootings, six of which proved fatal according to my source at the time.  The other forty aside--which it's not fair to dismiss, but for the nonce--six deaths is fewer than twenty-one.  But that twenty-one was one event.  Chicago, a city with some of the toughest gun laws in the nation, has bad weekends...every weekend.  So we're not going to be able to factor out many of the mass shootings people want to say is endemic to America thanks to the Second Amendment.

Doesn't that tell us something?

Does the Uvalde shooting prove that "a bad man with a gun is stopped by a good man with a gun" is false?  Well, no; not at all.  There, the security plan that had been in placed was relaxed due to activities going on at the school, and once the shooting started, police focused on stopping anyone from doing something proactive instead of being proactive themselves.

Here is a case where it did work.  Here is another--I'll tell you now, this one is about an aborted church shooting in Texas, so you remember that "armed churchgoer keeps the body count from being higher than it would have been" is common enough to be a cliche and a good thing no matter how you personally feel about Texans or Christians.  And since some people understandably feel weapons in a house of God to be, at best, tacky, here is one more going back several years but is interesting because a customer at a shopping mall stopped a shooter without himself having to fire his pistol.

So we're not in a "you're just doing what socialist apologists do when they say real communism has never been tried" situation.  

We're actually in a "don't trust the government to solve your problems for you because if they choose not to, you have no recourse" situation.