Looks like the notorious gun lobbying group is having some financial issues, as Rolling Stone Reports.
If the NRA is to be believed, it will have to shut down its video streaming outlet soon. Another propaganda source bites the dust. Apparently the organization is having some troubles accessing insurance and other financial services. In this case, its financial problems stem from financial mismanagement during the 2016 campaign that got the NRA’s man in the White House and from this little scheme that got it in legal hot water with the state of New York:
The lawsuit stems from actions taken by New York financial regulators to halt the sale of an illegal, NRA-branded insurance policy. The NRA actively marketed “Carry Guard,” a policy to reimburse members for legal costs incurred after firing a legal gun. In May, the state of New York found that Carry Guard “unlawfully provided liability insurance to gun owners for certain acts of intentional wrongdoing.” The NRA’s insurance partners agreed to stop selling the policies and pay a $7 million fine.
I doubt a lot of folks in these parts will miss the NRA, and finding a sympathetic audience in court may be more difficult given recent events (e.g., Mariia Butina’s infiltration efforts on behalf of the Russian Federation).
I don’t have a lot to say here. The brand has become increasingly toxic in recent years. Its propaganda had become more unhinged. Its apologists had looked unsuccessfully for scapegoats to deflect attention from the role of firearms in mass shootings (NRA blamed violent video games, in spite of the fact that there is zero evidence to support the claim). It’s had to scrub its rating system from the Internet Tubes in order to protect politicians who’ve benefited from its largess. We may be watching what was once considered a formidable organization fall. Don’t celebrate yet, but do be aware of this recent development.
Seems about right.
I have just the drink to toast this turn of events, Russian Spy Horseradish-Infused Vodka.
I agree with Skyy; this drink is an expression of toughness, not of taste. It’s like G. Gordon Liddy putting his hand over a candle flame to show his tolerance for pain.
Their reaction is right on the money: no normal person drinks that sh*t! I can honestly say that I have never tried horseradish infused vodka. I am familiar with horseradish and yeah – that stuff is pretty foul. Really, I just try to avoid prepping dishes that require it as an ingredient. I’ll stick to The Dude’s preferred vodka drink: the White Russian – pleasant taste with just the right amount of kick.
I don’t believe it. It must be a scam to fleece the rubes.
The NRA, at its core, is a gun manufacturer lobby. That’s where they get their funding.
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And they get funds for laundering money for Putin. My guess would be 40-50% was their cut.
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They aren’t the National Ruble Association for nothin’. đŸ™‚
A certain amount of skepticism is wise. This could be a fundraising tactic, or a tactic to gain them the upper hand in an on-going legal battle (after all, NRA would love to have the NY taxpayers pay the court costs). Then again, apparently NRA really was depending on Carry Guard to fund much of its operation post-2016 election, and were, so to speak, caught off guard. There’s always the case for optimism though. If the Dems gain Congressional majorities in 2018 that should have them rolling in the dough, and if a Dem President gets elected, the aftermath of 2020 might even tempt them to refrain from laundering Russian money (ah, who am I kidding!). Personally, I do find something appealing about a life w/o the NRA. The world would be just a little less toxic.
We live in a time where liars rule, and every troll gets his chance to be King for a Day.
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The Republican party seems very anxious to defend the NRA and seems to regard it a major player in their machinery. Yes, the NRA has delivered a small but hardcore set of voters for them but still I’m wondering if the Russian money was the only money the NRA has laundered for the Republicans. Just speculating based on behavior, not referring to any particular evidence.
. . . I’m more inclined to see it as making fundraising lemonade out of financial problem lemons.
Because of course they would!
Or this could be a move like Cambridge Analytica…someone grabs what ever money is left and the whole thing just disappears.
Or simply takes the money and creates a new organization with a different name to serve the same purpose – such as Cambridge Analytica morphing into Emerdata (if I recall correctly).
Declare bankruptcy, shut down leaving taxpayers holding the bag for cleanup, then same principals/executives incorporate under a new name to wreak havoc again elsewhere. I live in “The Treasure State” where this is a long-“honored” tradition.
. . . hidden, they’d use it for fundraising.
You write:
I don’t know about “zero evidence,” D.D., and of course I suppose that you mean zero “scientific” evidence. However, since there are wildly conflicting claims of “evidence” in almost all Post-Truth era so-called scientific data (most of which is sponsored by one or another self-seeking form of corporate/politiclal hustle, right on up to the highest academic levels), I prefer my own, seat-of-the-pants view.
I am no supporter of the NRA, but…on extensive personal experience with young’uns and violent video games (add in violent movies and TV shows while we are at it)…I agree with that statement. Repeated witnessing of apparently sanctioned violence…whether in the real world or in fantasyland…has a corrosive influence on the young. It legitimizes the violence, especially among young males.
Take the guns away while continuing to legitimize violence? (If it is even possible to effectively do so…) It’d be better, but they’d still be using baseball bats, knives, fists and any other weapons that come to hand, and the most violent among them would be joining the military, the police or other gang-like forces in order to satisfy those early-experience violent fantasies and/or real life witnessings.
It is as impossible to eliminate “violence” in human society as it is to do so in the red in tooth and claw natural world. Hawks gonna be hawks and lambs gonna be lambs. But encourage that predilection to violence by massive cultural inputs?
Suicidal at best.
AG
You might want to read a book that summarizes several decades of this research authored by Patrick Markey and Christopher Ferguson, entitled Moral Combat: Why the War on Video Games is Wrong. These are individuals who have considerable credibility as researchers, and the book is both conversational and well documented. The data they cite on the availability of violent video games (some prefer the term action games) and crime rate are themselves interesting – the correlation between game sales and violent crime rate is negative. After the release of any widely anticipated FPS game or MPG violence declines (turns out that people who are busy gaming don’t have time to behave antisocially), and even the claim that these games “legitimize” violence is apparently not supportable by the available evidence (in fact quite the opposite may be occurring). Besides, by your logic, any medium “encouraging violence”, including religious texts and classic literature, should be discouraged. No more reading Hamlet for the kiddos, right?
Interesting thing about mass shooters: the percentage of them who played violent video games is well below that of the general population. That’s correlational, of course, but it does pose a question: what’s going on with mass shooters that is different from their peers? No easy answers, perhaps, but at least we can advocate searching for clues elsewhere – prior history of violence, access to firearms, mental health issues, social skills issues, etc.
These authors apparently are far from alone. And I suspect that more than a few folks cynically accuse them of being in the pocket of one industry or another – without evidence to back up those sorts of accusations. The cynical accusations fail to take into account the evidence and fail to offer a plausible alternative.
A quick internet search brings up the following interesting information. (Emphasis mine.):
Now all of this only proves that I was quite correct in saying the following:
I maintain that position.
I have no particular love for The American Psychological Association…after all, organizations like this one are primarily responsible for the plague of prescribed psychoactive drugs that is dumbing down a good percentage of the population…particularly the young. They represent huge Big Pharma interests.
On the other hand, so-called “anti-video-game” researchers…their words, not mine…represent a competing corporate entity, the also hugely profitable video game industry.
They all have something to sell. Therefore, I trust none of them.
Are you familiar with the old TV quiz show, “Who Do You Trust?” It was Johnny Carson’s gateway to fame and fortune, and it was actually quite clever.
Well…in playing my own, personal version of “Who Do You Trust?” since at east the JFK assassination/coverup, I have come to this fairly unshakeable conclusion.
I trust no one who is an integral part of the mainstream, economically-dominated cultural system of the United States. Not until they have thoroughly proven themselves, anyway.
This most often leaves me with seat-of-the-pants decisions. You would be surprised at how often those seat-of-the-pants decisions seem to work out for the best. One example that happened quite clearly here was when I went against the whole “common knowledge” thing about Trump’s chances…including almost all of the corporate-owned pundits and Booman…and predicted that he would win both the RatPublican primary and the election. I got a lot of heat for that stance…including the beginnings of the ratings war being now pursued by several posters here…but in the end, look what happened. I tried to tell you not to try to laugh him offstage, that it wouldn’t work. And it didn’t.
There are other examples in my own life. Preventing my son from going down that video road and initially channelling his natural fighting instincts…it runs in both sides of my family, bet on it…into the very well regulated and honorable fighting style of Aikido was another.
Anyway…that’s my point and I’m stickin’ to it.
I’m headed into the Trumpish hinterlands for a week of work and visiting starting this Sunday…8/5/18…the same general area where I first smelled toxic Trumpiness dominant in the air, from North Philadelphia through central NJ, eastern PA as far west as Scranton, up into Southern Tier NY and then through central NY back to NYC’s brand of (
in)sanity. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open and send some reports back.Later…
AG
that you cite and do so carefully. Also, keep an open mind to the book I recommend. The researchers I am largely relying on are ones who started out as dissidents. Their research was largely dismissed cavalierly. But the evidence kept adding in their favor. The meta-analyses this decade (those are analyses of all the available research that can generate an average effect size) are finding that even the sort of mild aggression that can be measured in the lab is very minimal, and possibly not even statistically significant once we take into account publication bias, etc. There are some issues with the types of games used, how psychologists measure aggression, and so on that I will not go into for now.
The “official” APA position is not aging well. And the researchers who have now successfully challenged that “official” perspective are not representatives of some other corporate entity. Their funding comes from oddly enough public grants – they are not being funded by the equivalent of big pharma or anything else. There is no evidence of conflict of interest.
As someone who champions dissident voices, I figured that someone like Ferguson or Markey would be your kind of people. They have been called every name in the book by the very scholars who built careers based on the the idea that video game violence (and media violence more broadly) represented an alleged serious social problem. They fought the system (APA) and are winning.
As you must.
I am not one who “champions dissident voices,” I am one wo champions those things in which I believe. Sometimes they are dissident…especially in the U.S. as it stands tod/ay…and sometimes they are not. I do not believe either side of this undoubtedly corporate-funded competition. Video games in general are a pox upon the culture, and violent ones are worse. Ditto morality-free entertainment on any level. I stand by that position…a position buttressed by 30+ years of observation…and no amount of “evidence” in any direction that has been amassed by academic system climbers will change my position.
AG
Can you give me evidence of both sides of this research area being corporate funded? I require tangible proof. If you cannot show me that, you have no leg to stand on.
In the meantime, a number of these researchers are doing something useful: debunking claims by publicizing replication failures of what were classic studies, making their data sets and analyses available via publicly available platforms, and making preprints available to the public (a lot of them really resent journal paywalls as those hinder the public’s ability to scrutinize claims), and prior to any data collection pre-registering studies so that when those interested in seeing the analyses have access, they can trust the process. The term open science is used quite a bit more these days, and it is more than a catch phrase.
Beyond that, I am not a big fan of anecdotes, but that seems to be what you will accept. If so, you may have to accept that the lived experience of those who belong to a different age cohort may not accept your perspective on gaming. I am just young enough to remember when video arcades were a thing and hanging out with friends in video arcades as well as playing video games on home consoles (think of the old Atari system or Colecovision, for example). The games I played were ones like Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pacman, etc. I even remember Pong. At one point I played Street Fighter II, and also played early FPS games like Doom and an early version of Wolfenstein. It’s been a while since I last played an FPS (first person shooter) game, but I do live with people who still play them. I don’t play MPGs (multi-player games, such as World of Warcraft or League of Legends, which are just a few of many), but someone was kind enough to walk me through how these games work because I was curious. Basically I personally know people, either at home or at work who are considerably younger than me who play contemporary games, and who strike me as very prosocial. These are people who can show up on the job consistently, vote regularly (if of age), have lasting friendships, etc. Even without the stats, I can look around and notice that there doesn’t seem to be any reason to panic. It just so happens that the stats are increasingly on my side. Disregard the data – especially a lot of the very recent data – at your own risk of being way out of touch.
After the Parkland shooting, the NRA and Drumpf tried to deflect the conversation to blame video games instead. This generally well-written opinion piece in Forbes goes through what was wrong with that approach. When California last tried to regulate video games, a case went to the Supreme Court (Brown v Entertainment Merchants Association). The Court ruled against California, and largely based on their reading of the available evidence at that time. A First Amendment right got protected largely based on the lack of valid evidence of a link between video game violence and real life violence, and quite frankly some questions about whether there was even that much of a link with more mundane forms of aggression.
For those worried of negative long-term effects, it turns out there is little to worry about. Does empathy go down? Are there long term neurological effects that would decrease empathy, etc.? The answer appears to be no. Here is one such experiment published by EU-based researchers, whose funding came from public sources and in which there are no conflicts of interest. This is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
I guess I have some strong opinions on the matter as someone who grew up with all sorts of authority figures scolding me and my peers for listening to music and playing any of a number of games (including Dungeons and Dragons) that were supposed to make us into dangerous hooligans and that these media would lead to the collapse of civilization. Our lived experience was that those scolding us were full of BS. Over time, the evidence came to support those of us who were skeptical. Heck, my parents lived in a time when comic books were supposed to lead to antisocial behavior and (gasp) homosexuality. The main authority for those claims was later found out to have fabricated his findings.
Basically, whenever I see or hear claims that the next new thing is going to be the ruin of us all, I tend to be very skeptical. That evidence must be really good to overcome that skepticism. In this case, the evidence right now suggests not worrying about the games and focusing more on whatever realistic gun regulation measures we can take. I’ve heard the anything can be used as a weapon rejoinder too many times, so spare me that. I’d much rather take my chances against a knife, baseball bat, or pimento loaf than a loaded gun – and even in our society real life violence is nothing like it was back in my youth. There is room for improvement, but those violent crime rates have been dropping fairly consistently for a while now. I don’t miss the bad old days.
I may disagree with this comment vehemently, but AG was on topic and generally stayed on point. This was actually not a trollish comment. I am sure each of us is still convinced the other is wrong. That in and of itself is not sufficient for a downrate. It is quite likely that neither of us will convince each other about the costs and benefits of mass media, including emerging media. But I think we can agree that he said nothing to me that I would find offensive, nor something violating the norms of this blog. Let’s try to be better people. Life really is too short.
The 100,000th iteration of “nothing you can read is true unless it confirms the pre-existing opinion I’ve pulled from my ass” is 99,999 times too many.
This was one of those rare occasions when AG didn’t devolve into name calling or meandering so off topic as to be unreadable, hence my rationale in this instance for giving the benefit of the doubt. He’s still wrong here, in part because of a refusal to consider that one’s personal lived experience and gut feelings only go so far (basically, not very far at all).
Skepticism is appropriate in direct proportion to the weight of the preponderance of the factual evidence for a given proposition.
When you lack basic critical reading/thinking skills or the ability to follow basic logic, and you’re a sucker for any wild conspiracy theory to come along . . . as long as it conforms to your confirmation bias . . . this is what you’re left with. And it ain’t pretty.
Quite amazingly, the entity nalbar downrated my above comment with a “1”. That is a “troll-rating” on this site.
C’mon, nalbar. If you disagree with me about what I said in that post, stand up and do so. If you do not, then you yourself are the troll. A ratings troll, as is your compatriot entity marduk.
At least centristfielddj and oaguabonita try to argue their points, although most of what they say is quite consciously-committed, lying bullshit.
Booman Tribune?
Once a truly open, progressive site where people could work things out in open discussion?
It is now rapidly becoming Booman Trollbune.
A sorry sight.
And it is entities like you that have done this.
Great work.
Well done.
AG