Franke 100% would have been doing this even without being a YouTuber. What she was doing on 8 Passengers is not all that extreme in Mormon circles, and I don’t mean just the deeply conservative ones. Yes, she went a little farther than most Mormons would be comfortable with, but the core ideas? They entirely understand where she was coming from. The commonly cited example is her refusing to bring lunch to a child (6yo?) that forgot it, saying that it’s ‘personal responsibility’; many Mormons would argue that it’s a little too young to expect a 6yo to be fully responsible like that, but if a 10yo child forgot? Or an 8yo? No problem.

For anyone that’s interested in a deep dive into what kind of shit was going on here, John Dehlin has covered this pretty extensively on his Mormon Stories podcast. Episodes 1805, 1807, 1808, 1809 (removed due to threat of a lawsuit for defamation; you’d have to find an archived copy. Adam Steed is a difficult interviewee in many ways, unless you are already deeply, intimately aware of Mormonism; his thoughts are often very jumbled and he has a hard time expressing things in a linear fashion), 1817, 1817, 1825 (tangentially; it’s about “Visions of Glory”), 1826, 1844, 1865, 1869, and 1873. It’s also tangentially related the the Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell murder cases, in that the beliefs of Jodi Hildebrant and Ruby Franke were both heavily influenced by the same apocalyptic book, “Visions of Glory”.

Keep in mind that the episodes I just listed comprise roughly around 30 hours of listening. About half of them are long-form interviews. Unless you have an an interest in cults, religious indoctrination, apocalyptic beliefs, this is probably not going to be your thing. And unless you were raised Mormon–or have listened to the other 5400 hours or so of podcasts that John Dehlin has done–it’s probably going to be a little hard to follow what’s going on.

A very, very short version is that, while Franke was always borderline abusive as a mom (and that’s pretty par for the course in Mormon families, TBH), Hildebrandt is an incredibly charismatic, persuasive psychopath that used a version of Mormon theology to induce her to be far, far worse than she would have otherwise been. If Hildebrandt had been male–because you must be male to have real power in the Mormon church–she almost certainly would have ended up leading a fundamentalist cult.

I’m broadly leftist, generally anti-authoritarian, and pro-civil rights and liberties.

…Including the rights of individuals to keep and bear arms of their choosing.

Militia service wasn’t a privilege; it was a requirement. If you were within a certain age group, your were legally obligated to show up and drill. But people that were not in the militia–due to age, or other limiting factors–still owned and used military arms at the time. Even trying to make a real distinction between military arms and non-military arms is largely an exercise in futility, given that all arms in common use started as military arms.

the militia as a community resource disappeared

In point of fact, state and local governments are trying to ban militias. Sure, that would make the threepers illegal, but it would also likely ban things like the John Brown Gun Club and Socialist Rifle association, which are much more actively community-focused than the far-right militia groups.

Other amendments - due process etc aren’t lost when you commit a crime

Yes, and that’s a problem, isn’t it? The prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure require the gov’t to make an argument to a court that they need to be able to search; they need probably cause to deprive you of that right in even a limited way. It seems reasonable to expect that felons–once they have served the term of their sentence–should have the same rights as other people, and that the gov’t should be required to make a case as to why they should be able to continue to deprive a person of those rights. Someone that’s stolen from their employer is probably a far lower risk for committing a violent act than someone that was convicted of battery.

gun owners complain like whiny children over the most basic obligations like licensure, training, etc.

Make them free to the user, covered by income taxes in much the same way that the infrastructure for voter registration is (…which, BTW, only exists because anti-immigrant political agitators stoked fears of non-citizens voting; it very much mirrors the elections fear-mongering nonsense that Trump is pushing right now). Ensure that everyone has reasonable access, which means you can’t run them only during business hours M-F. But you also can’t have a failing condition, other than simply not showing up, because otherwise I guarantee you that it will turn into literacy tests for voting. That is, if a state, county, or city is allowed to set a standard that must be met in order to exercise a right, then I promise you that some places will ensure that the standard is so high that neither Jerry Miculek nor Ben Stoeger could pass it, because they will want to effectively ban firearm ownership.

Here’s what’s going to happen.

At the end of the school year, his bishop–his local religious leader–is not going to renew ecclesiastical endorsement. Barton will be invited to ‘re-apply’. If he does re-apply, he will find that he is no longer competitive. If he’s very, very lucky, BYU-H will forward his academic records to whichever school he continues his education at.

This is the way that BYU handles students when it doesn’t want to make a scene by simply kicking them out.

Again: you’re simply wrong. Slaves, immigrants, and women were barred from all rights within the lifespan of the founders. If you extend your argument, you can say that the freedom of the press wasn’t a right either, since slaves, women, and immigrants didn’t have the right to read or publish what they wanted.

The problem with this view is that the body of the constitution already gives government the power to raise and arm and army, and to enact taxes to pay for it. There’s no need for an amendment to say that the gov’t has the right to be armed when that right was already stated. It’s redundant. You could, perhaps, argue that it’s a right that was being reserved for the states, but it doesn’t say that the states have the right to militias, it says the people. Moreover, the remaining nine amendments that form the bill of rights all concern individual rights, or individual and state rights (e.g. 10A). It would be very strange to see an amendment that not only says “people” but means “states”, and is the only amendment in the bill of rights that applies only to states.

Take, for instance, the National Firearms Act of 1934. It was originally going to be a ban on handguns, short-barreled rifles (because they were effectively handguns, and would circumvent the ban), and machine guns. It was turned into a tax because lawmakers were pretty sure that a ban couldn’t pass court review–while a tax could, since it was an enumerated power–which very strongly implies that it was recognized, even in the 1930s, as an individual right, rather than a right that existed for the gov’t.

I could probably come up with a list of references if you were interested in reading more. I would not suggest anything by Michael Bellesiles, because his historical “research” was found to be deeply flawed bordering on outright fraudulent.

In my experience–and I’m definitely on the far left–they are.

Right wing people are often more than happy to sit down and explain–with charts and (bullshit) references why their beliefs are the only morally and ethically correct ones. People on the left tend to say things like, “I don’t have to do your emotional labor”, or “you need to educate yourself”, or reply with image macros of pigs shitting on their own balls. Yes, I know that these are broad generalizations, but this is how I’ve more often than not observed things. People on the right tend to be evangelical about their beliefs. People on the left tend to treat socially/fiscally conservative ideas as though they are contagions that need to be quarantined or removed.

This isn’t always the case; I’ve definitely seen circular firing squads in alt-right circles (see also: Moms For Liberty melting down over their leaders’ sex lives and sex harassment), but I’ve seen it far more often in leftist spaces, and far more purity tests with leftist groups.

The NRA isn’t a thoroughly evil organization. The NRA does lots of good things with education and training (albeit in a fudd-y way). What you’re thinking about it the NRA-ILA, the lobbying/legislative wing. Those are the people that are generally scum.

Incorrect. It was understood not only as a right, but a requirement. The people were expected to be in the militia, and they were expected to furnish their own arms. (Or course, the founders had very different ideas about who “people” were; the rules didn’t apply to women and black/indigenous people.)

And yet, here you are, make the same kind of ass-backwards argument against something that has been demonstrated to work without attempting to undermine civil rights.

Fuck off! We don’t want more people here! And the affordable houses have been abandoned for a decade and are just foundations without any copper wiring or pipes.

I’m kinda curious. What if it was Jake with Jim, and Josie with Jill? Do both Jake and Jim get prosecuted for mutual rape, and neither Josie nor Jill do, or is it the reverse? Do neither of the men get prosecuted because men always want sex? Do neither of the women get prosecuted because women can’t commit rape? This is all so confusing.

As an aside, I[M] had a woman try to get me to go home with her at a club a few years back. She had obviously been drinking. I declined, both because she had been drinking, and also because I’m not really into hook-ups. (A date to get to know her? Sure. A one night stand? No.) But I have to wonder - maybe she really, really wanted to get laid, but was nervous about hitting on men and possibly being rejected, and used alcohol as a way of being less rejection-sensitive? Shit’s weird.

Fundamentally, yes.

I currently live in a fairly rural area. Best case scenario, cops take about 15 minutes to get to me. (Realistically, getting attacked by a bear is the most likely scenario that needs a police response.)

When I lived in Chicago–Austin, Humboldt Park, Little Village–I had to call the cops because someone was trying to kick down my front door. It took them about 30-45 minutes to show up, and then they just parked in the alley and didn’t even come check, or call me back. Literally nothing. (Come to think of it, they make have just coincidentally parked in the alley, and not been responding to the call at all.) My ex-wife called the police to report a “domestic disturbance”–implying that I was being violent towards her–and, again, it was about 30-45 minutes before they even showed up.

Cops can not protect you, and they have no legal duty to do so. If you are in a marginalized group, cops are more likely to victimize you when you need help rather than actually helping.

Must be hard to argue against something that demonstrably works. You sound like the kind of person that would also argue that abstinence is the only thing to teach kids in school, since that’s the only way to prevent pregnancy and STIs.

I’m a firm believer in addressing and correcting the underlying causes of violence rather than removing the tools. For instance, Chicago had a violence intervention program a few years back, and it was having a noticeable impact on rates of violence. It was targeting at-risk kids, and helping them get their shit together. And so, predictably, the city cut the funding for it.

That drives me crazy too. You can look at the numbers, and see that abstinence only simply doesn’t work, that kids in abstinence-only schools have sex earlier, have riskier sexual habits, are more likely to catch and spread STIs, and have higher rates of teen pregnancy. From a simple harm reduction standpoint, you’d think people would say, wow, we can actually achieve what we say our goals are by giving kids accurate advice.

I don’t get why people want to treat issues like this instead of being pragmatic and looking at the outcomes.

Because guns scary bad.

And I mean that seriously.

People in urban areas–which is most of the country’s population–almost exclusively experience firearms as being part of a criminal act. Most people that live in cities don’t know people that hunt, or compete in marksmanship, but they hear about murders and shootings in their city all the time. Why do you need training in firearms in schools when the only use–the only use they have consistent exposure to–is criminal?

You can look at electoral maps and see this; most of the geographical area is red/Republican/conservative (typically pro-2A), while most of the population centers where people actually live are blue/Democratic/more liberal. If you went back 50 or 100 years, you’d see more people living in rural areas, which ended up meaning that there were more people that were exposed to hunting, etc.

Didn’t fall for it, but I got hit with an attempt at a pig butchering scam a week or so ago.

It was fun. They texted, I acted like I knew them, and I think that they eventually got frustrated because I kept agreeing that I remembered them very well, and that it wasn’t a ‘wrong number’, oopsie I sent a photo to the wrong person tee-hee.

Okay, so, it’s not technically a scam. It’s an MLM. The salesman has to buy the stuff they want to sell up-front, and then they have to try and sell it to people. If no one wants to buy, then they’re stuck with a whole bunch of whatever–knives in the case of CutCo/Vector–and out the money that they spent. If they happen to be an exceptionally good salesperson, then they can sell everything they purchased, and use their profit to buy more, and sell more, etc.

The issue is that the knives aren’t particularly great. They’re solidly ‘okay’, and that’s about it. But despite being just kind of okay, the prices are on the higher end. That is, you can get Global or Shun for a similar price, and Global and Shun are both quite good. So if you’re a serious cook, your going to spend the same and get better knives. If you’re a typical home cook, you’re not going to see the value in spending that much on kitchen knives.

But! The real money is in convincing some poor sucker to buy his stock to sell from you. You buy from your supplier, and then you sell at a markup to some other poor schmuck that then has to sell knives at either a higher cost or lower profit margin to someone else. It’s a game of hot potato, and the person holding it at the end gets burned.

I got one of those, and they claimed to have hacked my webcam, and knew what porn I was watching, etc.

I have a webcam, but I only plug it in when I absolutely have to attend a virtual meeting. Otherwise it’s stored in a drawer.