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NRA Gives Ajit Pai 'Courage Award' and Gun For 'Saving the Internet' (arstechnica.com)
The National Rifle Association (NRA) today gave its Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award to Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. "Pai was about to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland when the award presentation seemed to catch him by surprise," reports Ars Technica. "The award is a handmade long gun that could not be brought on stage, so it will be housed in the NRA museum until Pai can receive it." From the report: "Ajit Pai, as you probably already know, saved the Internet," American Conservative Union (ACU) Executive Director Dan Schneider told the audience. The ACU is the host of CPAC; Schneider made a few more remarks praising Pai before handing the award presentation over to NRA board member Carolyn Meadows. Pai "fought to preserve your free speech rights" as a member of the FCC's Republican minority during the Obama administration, Schneider said. Pai "fought and won against all odds, but the Obama administration had some curveballs and they implemented these regulations to take over the Internet." "As soon as President Trump came into office, President Trump asked Ajit Pai to liberate the Internet and give it back to you," Schneider added. "Ajit Pai is the most courageous, heroic person that I know."
The signature achievement that helped Pai win the NRA courage award came in December when the FCC voted to eliminate net neutrality rules. The rules, which are technically still on the books for a while longer, prohibited Internet service providers from blocking and throttling lawful Internet traffic and from charging online services for prioritization. Schneider did not explain how eliminating net neutrality rules preserved anyone's "free speech rights." Right Wing Watch posted a video of the ceremony.
The signature achievement that helped Pai win the NRA courage award came in December when the FCC voted to eliminate net neutrality rules. The rules, which are technically still on the books for a while longer, prohibited Internet service providers from blocking and throttling lawful Internet traffic and from charging online services for prioritization. Schneider did not explain how eliminating net neutrality rules preserved anyone's "free speech rights." Right Wing Watch posted a video of the ceremony.
Just wow. I really hope these motherfuckers have a good view of each other when they're burning in hell.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
that I honestly laughed at this. It came across so powerfully as a funny parody, and I found myself laughing both before and after I realized that they're actually fucking serious. There are no words. Stick a fork in the ass of American social discourse and turn it over, because it is well and truly done.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
What's next, a lifetime achievement award for Harvey Weinstein?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Sadly this is not off topic:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/18/trump-nra-fbi-alexander-torshin-russia-investigation
The FBI is investigating whether a Russian banker with close ties to Vladimir Putin funneled money through the National Rifle Association to support Donald Trumpâ(TM)s presidential campaign....The NRA spent at least $30m to back Trumpâ(TM)s 2016 campaign for president...News outlets have been examining ties and meetings between NRA leaders and Russia for months, including a 2015 NRA delegation to Moscow that included meetings with influential Putin allies....
You get the picture?
At first I thought this had to be an Onion piece. The two most corrupt dirtbags, in the most corrupt political system outside a third world dictatorship, giving each other a hand job at CPAC.
This is the pathetic level to which conservatives have sunk.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It should be obvious by now that guns didn't save our net neutrality, nor have they been saving us from a steady erosion of rights and freedom. Unfortunately, the fact this isn't obvious to many is the reason we have the problem. If things keep going this way, in 50 years autonomous weapon systems will render guns completely worthless with respect to resisting the government which was supposed to be the point.
AFACT, absolutely nothing, other than that they both hold policy positions that antagonize liberals.
The fact that they are giving each other awards suggests to me that the only thing holding the Republican Party together these days is their collective urge to "piss on the other team".
Fun, in a sort of Lord-of-the-Flies, junior-high-locker-room-towel-snapping sort of way, but not exactly a viable long-term philosophy for running a first-world country. Hopefully when the Republicans get their asses handed to them by voters this fall they will remember that they are expected to serve the country's interests, not just snap towels at the nerds.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I can't imagine why the NRA would do this. The NRA has a very specific purpose. Well actually there are two NRA groups, each with a specific purpose. One does gun-related safety training and such, the other defends the second amendment in the political arena. Neither has any business taking a stand on any particular regulations related to things around principles of network neutrality. It's not what they were created and funded to do.
Listening to CPAC on CSPAN today I couldn’t believe how deranged these people all seem. I really feel like the NRA was threatening armed insurrection if Donald Trump is removed from office. Core beliefs: there is no Global Warming (or doesn’t matter much); Democrats and liberals are part of a Socialist plot to take all our rights away; immigrants are destroying our culture; everyone who needs (deserves) healthcare will have it (only lucky well-paid working people deserve it); luck and privilege are not factors in obtaining wealth, only hard work is.
When Trump goes down (and he will) I fear what these groups will do. They’ve made it clear what their guns are for when push comes to shove.
Letter To Iran
Here you have it folks, a perfect example of fascism at work. Corporations slowly but surely establishing their power over governement and the people. Legislators, media, weapons, etc. All the tools necessary to enforce totalitarism.
And they'll succeed, too, because a little more than half of the population are too ignorant, clueless and gullible to see what's going on.
"All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". And these days, I see a hell of a lot of good men doing a hell of a lot of nothing.
I shot competitively for a few years and I was a member of the NRA to keep track of my progress. I didn't agree with them 100%, but I supported their defense of the 2nd amendment in principle - and on a number of their talking points - so I was fine with paying for membership. Then they started going in the direction of being a mouthpiece for the far right with shit like this.
There are many moderates and even *gasp* liberals who like guns! If my experience is an indication of the rest of the country's gun-owning-but-not-far-right population, the NRA is going to continue losing membership and support. I may consider renewing my membership if they ever go back to what they used to be, but in the meanwhile I'll direct my money and energies elsewhere.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
The NRA is owned by industry, the issue group front is just to make them more powerful lobbyist. The drug industry would love to hijack the AARP like the NRA has been.
They want you for the influence you can give them and nothing more.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
As the Marine general said the other day "Do those people not understand one company of Marines can take out an entire small city?" The only thing it's guaranteeing is your ability to shoot up your neighbors.
They really buried the lede in this story. See that part where it says the NRA gave Pai the rifle, but he couldn't bring it on stage with him at CPAC? Do you know why Pai couldn't bring his prize with him on stage at CPAC? Because CPAC, with all it's gunhumping and masturbatory 2nd Amendment cosplay is a gun-free zone.
Got that? The "Conservative Political Action Conference" with its keynote from Wayne LaPierre and wild cheering for the notion of giving schoolteachers guns and for watering the tree of liberty, and a good-guy with a gun horseshit does not allow guns at its conference.
Conservatives - there is just no bottom to their hypocrisy.
https://i.redditmedia.com/vzdl...
You are welcome on my lawn.
They have and continue to support mass murder. Any politician, from any party, who accepts their money, should be thrown out of office. Once we've purged the parasite that is the NRA, we can start working on repealing the 2nd amendment.
Yes, because kids going to school under the barrel of a gun really screams "freedom".
No, it actually screams dystopian police state nightmare. It's the very anti-thesis of freedom when kids have to go to school on the barrel of a gun of the authorities, in fact, it's probably the most un-free scenario imaginable.
The more you equip people with arms, the more people are prevented from being truly free, because they're only moments away from someone who is anti-freedom taking their life because they didn't like their opinion. This inherently kills off freedom of expression and turns everyone into compliant drones.
You think your leader is enhancing freedom and liberty, really, he's just taking it from you piece by piece - he's made sure him and his pals get more money, he's made sure people that share his view are more free to oppress others with firearms, he's killing the ability for people to spread information freely on the internet unless they can pay to do so.
This isn't freedom, this is the very definition of real, actual fascism, and you're supporting it.
They condemn the school guard who waited 4 minutes (sic) with his pistol outside.
When 2 patrolmen see 1 guy wielding a revolver in a bank full of people, the call for reinforcement, block the streets, call SWAT, FBI and whatnot... and those guys have bulletproof vests, shotguns ...
And this single guy was supposed to go against an unknown number of killing, suicidal shooters on speed, with armor, assault guns, large mags with armor-penetrating ammo with his pistol alone?
And he didn't even know where in the building they were.
Are they crazy?
Same thing for arming teachers, what are they going to do?
They will sit in a wardrobe with their .38 in hand shitting their pants and then accidentally kill the student who wants to seek refuge in the same wardrobe.
Carolyn Meadows of the National Rifle Association (NRA), who is also and member of the American Conservative Union (ACU), gave the ACU's Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award to Ajit Pai.
Irony is that by celebrating the end of Net Neutrality, they're opening up the possibility for ISPs to block the NRA!
I mean, gun owners are a fairly hard core group, so why shouldn't ISPs now create a "gun lover's package" or set of packages? Access to the NRA and other gun related forums all for another $50 a month? Less than what you spend on ammo a month!
And the NRA's cheering the guy that's making it happen...
Posting anon on purpose.
NRA doesn't seem to grasp the purpose of the second amendment, IMHO.
The sole purpose of keeping and bearing arms for the public is so they can overturn a government that doesn't serve the people.
That was fine at the time the constitution was written, but now it's not enough to own a rifle if you want to make sure the government doesn't oppress it's people.
Internet, social media and mobile phones has made mass surveillance and profiling of the entire population almost a trivial task.
Want to know who has opposing political views? Want to know who their friends are?
Want to know who they meet?
It's just a query away.
Mass surveillance is now a much more dangerous tool for those wanting to oppress a population than guns ever was. And having one yourself doesn't help at all. The Arab-spring let people to believe that social media empowered people, but that is only true if the ones that oppress do not control all platforms. Turned against the people it's a scary tool.
The NRA should not get involved on the corporate side of regulating the internet. If they want to protect the 2nd amendment and it's true purpose then they should consider who they publicly support. A guy who wants to take away the right for people to use the internet outside of the walled gardens of corporations does not have the people best internest at heart.
"The Left" is the specter named by the Fox News talking heads, and Limbaugh and Jones' two minutes of hate radio shows. It doesn't matter what's really left or right anymore- they just need a bad guy.
No idea if the corresponding media sources on "the left" are as bad about calling things "The Right", because I don't really watch that shit.. I have a nausea-inducing aversion to feeling like I'm standing in an echo chamber, and I don't really need to hear Rachel Maddow drum up stupid fucking reasons for me to be liberal, or construct dumb ass arguments for why that's better than conservative.
All I know is I don't even know if it's politics anymore... It's something sicker than that.
America has never really had a left-wing, and these guys aren't quite Nazis, yet. But they're talking more and more like them.
I believe an Axis of Fuckwittery is emerging.
Roger Stone, Trumpy advisor, already warned that getting rid of The Donald would result in Civil War.
I'm happy to call his bluff and take the chance.
is anyone else bored with this topic? The people in power do whatever they want, and when they're writing the history books they're going to say americans were overjoyed at the prospect of the usa government attempting to coup the internet with regulations or lack thereof. Same story, different headline. Yawn.
In fairness, that didn't sound like the GP's position at all. The argument generally goes something like:
NRA: "You don't need to tweak the existing gun laws, we can just station armed guards at schools, that'd be a deterrent, and will save lives if someone isn't deterred, which never happens. Nothing could possibly go wrong."
(Mass shooting. Armed guard is completely ineffectual, even more than predicted.)
Non-NRA: "Uh, that didn't work. I mean, even if he'd fucking done his job, most of the dead kids would still be dead."
NRA: "Well why don't we arm teachers then?"
Non-NRA: "A trained professional got scared, and you think arming teachers would help? And did you miss the part that the armed guard only made the decision whether to get involved after kids were already dead?"
"NRA: Uh, fake news! Those kids were coached! And they're actors! Shut up shut up!"
Here's a better idea, let's see what we can do to keep weapons that make it easy to kill large numbers of people out of, well, at least the hands of those who are likely to abuse them.
I know that's a different argument. I know that both the NRA nutjobs and Brady buffoons (who will slowly realize I'm not talking about the AWB) are already pissed enough to be furiously clicking on keyboards demanding I be hung drawn and quartered, but it really isn't that difficult.
If it's not a .22LR or similarly weak weapon, and it has a detachable magazine, or accepts more than a handful of cartridges, then you go through a REAL background check. None of this "Has he ever committed stock fraud? OMG we can't let Martha Stewart own a gun! Oh, but this teenager with anger issues is fine" BS we currently do, but a check like you'd get in Europe - letters of recommendation from professionals, a psych evaluation, consent of local law enforcement. And you need to state a reason for having one, no "I want to pose with it on YouTube" excuses.
Everyone continues to have the right to defend themselves. Everyone continues to have the right to shoot deer. But only people who are highly unlikely to shoot up a school or office or church gets to own something that could plausibly be used to shoot up a school or office or church.
And the best part is, no teachers get blamed for preventing a mass shooting because they were frozen with fear in a situation their professional training and aptitude was never suited for.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So first it's the majority of users, YouTube, and TiVo; now it's a tiny number of users and terrabytes of ripped movies. Are you coming around to the realization that your position is more defensible under the guise of preventing copyright infringement, or are you moving the goal posts for fun? How about this: say the tiny number of users moving terabytes of movies work remotely editing footage for large studios. Why shouldn't they be allowed to use that small rural ISP that just so happens to be the only one who'll service their residence? Why is your content any more important than anyone else's? It's really not between you and your ISP, it's between you and the users you claim to be holier than, and for all you know I'm one of them, which makes it between you and me.
The issue with an ISP that "has to" protect some users from the bandwidth use of others is that they're selling you something on paper that they can't provide you in reality. Here's an example that might make sense: a gas station sells 100 customers 10 gallons of gas each; but they only really have 500 gallons to give out. Half of their customers don't need a full 10 gallons to fill their tanks; on average, they need 5 gallons, so that half of the customers uses 250 gallons, which seems fine since half the customers have used half the gas, right?
Now the remaining 50 customers all do need the 10 gallons (or more, but they only bought 10 so that's all they can take) they paid for, but there's only enough left to serve 25 of them in full. Is that the fault of any of the customers? Why should any of the customers accept less than they paid for because the gas station sold more gas than they had to sell?
Why should that be any more acceptable from an ISP?
Yes, you're free to accept it from an ISP if you want, but you should have the expectation of falling on the losing side of the fight for bandwidth just as often as you find yourself on the winning side. You should also understand that the issue is the ISP selling something they don't have, and blame the ISP.
Why?
It's actually really simple.
Let's say that ISP manages to avoid all those Youtube and TiVo users and somehow prevents users from transferring terabytes of ripped movies over their service. That doesn't really free up the nonexistent bandwidth they've sold you and every other one of their customers -- because that bandwadth they sold you didn't exist in the first place. Let's say that same ISP caters exclusively to college students (ironically, the biggest users of Youtube and the most likely movie pirates, but I digress), so you can be assured that most video streaming will be the university's own content (we'll ignore that most of this is likely also hosted on Youtube, making the throttling of Youtube somewhat counterproductive to your original argument). Now, since we're back on your original argument, it's only fair that we go back to mine: that ISP has enough bandwidth to provide 128Kbps to each of their customers, but has sold each of them 5Mbps; how many of them can stream a 3500Kbps video stream simultaneously?
Since we haven't determined how many customers the ISP has, a percentage is acceptable.
SPOILER (but don't take my word for it, do the math yourself): 3500 (bitrate of video) / 128 (actual bitrate available to one user without slowing another user down) = 27.34375. That is, one 3500Kbps (the low end of a reasonable bitrate for 720p streaming content and, in fact, much less than Youtube uses) video stream used the true available bandwidth of 27.34375 of that ISP's customers. 100 (%) / 27.34375 (also %) = 3.6571428571% of the ISPs customers can stream a video from their university before there is no bandwidth left for anyone else to use.
No, kicking off the Youtube and TiVo users and getting rid of the pirates doesn't solve that. And just how do you think prioritizing traffic solves it? By your account, all of that traffic, being the s
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.