2022 Los Angeles County Sheriff election mega thread..

[gesundheit]

Originally Posted by Bargearse

I agree. However, Luna and Villanueava are both crooks at equal playing field and LA voters will have to decide rationale in both crooks.

The lesser crook to the other one, the better for LA county.

I want to hear what Luna's policy is on keeping criminals safe from being kicked over the border. If he is for keeping ICE out of county jails, then he can go to hell also.

[7x57]

I'm sorry. Reading this thread both for the primary and now checking in for the runoff has maybe pushed me beyond my limit. I'm gonna rant. You're welcome to just skip down and ignore my little therapy session here.

<begin therapy session>

Sigh. Every election I drop by to check on gun rights issues, and every time it is the same. Lots of people yelling that they won't vote for anyone who is less ideologically pure than Col. Cooper. Call people traitors and call for hanging anyone who understand politics at the 3rd grade level and thus understand that the left got in control by being incremental. They help us into a runoff between someone who will do something incremental in return for our votes and one of Satan's little minions, in a state whose electorate is wholly owned and operated by Satan's little minions.

I'm so tired of suicidal gun owners. The frickin' founders expected politicians to try to buy votes with policy. They said so--they didn't expect a non-aristocrat to win elections, they expected the plebes to be represented by an aristocrat who was willing to do as they wished. (Classically educated all--wasn't Julius Caesar's party what passed for the populist party in the Roman senate?)

So yeah. I'm totally happy with a politician who wants to buy my vote with policy, as opposed to back-room donations. I only care about results. A politician who stays bought is predictable, and I can work with that. A politician who talks well but is unelectable or doesn't stay bought is a waste of oxygen.

That's the *design* of the system, as best as I can remember the explanation by the guy who wrote the first draft of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Because while they were idealists in principle, they were realists as far as practical results go.

Look, I love you purists, I really do. It helps remind me that nearly every single gun law I thought might be a good idea ended up being a trojan horse. And it helps remind me that I must not be satisfied so long as any law-abiding gun owner's fun is threatened, not just basic safety issues. But come elections, you guys don't know the difference between being easy to please and hard to satisfy. You guys don't understand the very well thought out and battle-tested progressive playbook for incrementally boiling the frog. They know you're there. They count on you helping them play the incrementalist game. And they know their own purists have to be kept in check until they've moved the Overton window to the point where the game is won and they can let their base loose to ravage the landscape.

Know why every modern army is effectively the combined-arms army of WWII Germany (the loser) and every modern navy that isn't effectively the WWII Japanese carrier-based navy wishes it had the money to be one? Because they had to adapt to what worked.

Here's what works: in an election, be an easy-to-please incrementalist and vote for the most electable incremental improvement or even just the least step backwards. Your vote isn't an ideological statement. It's buying a share in a candidate's actions, and has zero value unless they actually get elected.

"Act locally."

But that's for this election. Remember that when you buy shares, it's about what they've done for you lately, and messaging. What they're doing now, plus showing that you're worth pandering to because you too stay bought unless you get a genuinely better choice. So be an ideologue who is hard to satisfy--next election, you do the same thing, moderated by messaging. If someone better comes along, you invest your vote differently--but only if they're at least as electable. And you also think long-term. If someone makes an improvement, unless another candidate is genuinely better and more electable, you stick with him because you're telling other candidates that you know how it works, and your vote is worth buying. And above all, take a lesson from the left. Never, ever quit doing this. Don't accept divide-and-conquer by accepting the demonization of people who play a different game. Yes, you accept baby steps, but you never stop trying to take them, except to invest in messaging to build future equity to be cashed in. Never. Do you think anyone in 1911 thought that the Sullivan Law was the camel's nose in the tent? Not long after that, no one thought it would ever be ruled unconstitutional. Go read Don Kates on how he started arguing gun rights cases he thought he couldn't lose and lost every one because he hadn't learned what worked and what didn't. Incrementalism isn't just the left's tool. It's the one that worked for us too. The only thing. Even our big cases (Heller, McDonald, Bruen) were built on decades of hard incremental work. They are the tips of some large icebergs.

"Think globally."

Quit building trenches and battleships and start building tanks and aircraft carriers. We might have only fought to a technical draw in the Coral Sea, but Midway is coming. We need to maximize our chance of winning Midway.

One of the most awe-inspiring sights I have ever seen was the Iowa coming down the channel in the Port of LA to her final resting place. I was on a floating dock on the channel, so she appeared, seemingly tall as a skyscraper, out of the mist coming directly for us. Unforgettable, beautiful, terrifying ship. Moreso than a carrier, I'd say, nice as they are. But she and her type didn't win the war. The big E and her type did. We're just lucky they were on maneuver when the battleships were sunk at Pearl Harbor, cuz we didn't know yet what naval aviation was going to do. The pentagon knows now, and builds what works. If we care about winning instead of scoring ideological points, we'd better do the same.

<end therapy session>

OK, I feel *slightly* better now. See you guys next election, where I'm sure many of you will be arguing for building more battleships and trenches (or, for some of you, frigates and cavalry units), and I'll be thinking the same thing even if I go back to not saying anything. Or if I just can't hold it in, I'll try to remember to use guerilla tactics against a regular force as a metaphor, as it's better than the WWII one (which would have been more apropos if I'd said something about island hopping instead of seizing every little hunk of coral sticking out of the water).

In the mean time, I don't currently get to shoot much, so burn a little extra powder for me, in whatever firearm you own that CA hates most. Because incrementalism is a tactic, not the end goal. The end goal is that gun is free and without stigma. Someday. Just not this election.

Now you know I don't have much trouble deciding how to vote for sheriff. The real conundrum is whether to write in Chuck Michel in for Superior Court Judge in Office 60 since both candidates seem awful.

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[7x57]

Perhaps the purists will hate me less if I point out that since both candidates for Superior Court office #60 seemed equally intolerable, I wrote in Chuck D Michel?

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