Bearing Arms and Dead Kids

Welcome friends!

Did you hear about the murder of those seventeen young people at a high school in the US State of Florida a few days ago?  Sad case.  Seems a troubled young teenager showed up at the school with a semi-automatic rifle, in this case something called an AR-15, which he had apparently legally obtained despite numerous brushes with the law and school expulsions and funny statements about wanting to shoot up schools and so on.  He gunned down a number of kids then apparently went for a little pick me up at the local McDonald’s hamburger restaurant and was apprehended without incident a short while later.  This type of thing is not particularly unusual here in the USA but there’s been a lot of talk this time around mostly because some of the youngsters who escaped being shot were not content to do the usual crying and graciously accepting the thoughts and prayers of ostensible well wishers routine but instead began agitating for tighter regulations on semi-automatic weapons, a move that infuriated many conservatives here in the USA.  Some right wing media pundits portrayed the kids as paid actors or unwitting stooges of “the left.”  The president of the main gun lobby group here in the USA, that would be the National Rifle Association (NRA) for my foreign readers, was in the papers arguing or perhaps raving might be the more descriptive term that people advocating for common sense gun control such as the kids presumably aren’t really concerned about gun violence at all as one might suppose but only about making people less free.  Oh my!  Can you imagine the scoundrels?  Thinking only about making people less free.  Taking advantage of the unfortunate tragedy to weave their devious designs.  Indeed, the NRA spokesman warned us about the dangers of the “socialism” he felt was being peddled by the liberal Democratic Party and urged his conservative followers to be “anxious” and “afraid” of any future political gains by the Democratic Party.  He suggested that if Democrats “seize power” I suppose by being voted into office for example then “American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever.”  Oh my goodness!  Them thar are fightin’ words!  President Trump chimed in to tell us he thinks the NRA is composed of patriots who want to do the right thing.  With national hysteria and vaguely threatening claptrap at this level I thought maybe I should take a few moments from my busy schedule to take another look at this whole issue of guns.

But first perhaps a bit of history might not be amiss.  It seems the seeds of this particular social malady were sown in the early days of the USA when the so-called founding fathers thought to include in the US Constitution the famous right to bear arms apparently specifically as a bulwark against the development here in America of what they viewed as the tyrannical government of their home country of Britain from which they had just extricated themselves.  Whether there was in fact anything particularly tyrannical about Britain at that time or whether the colonists just didn’t like the political results they were seeing is neither here nor there.  They didn’t like what they were seeing and decided they would do better on their own.  It was a closely run affair and one can readily understand their concerns that all their fighting and philosophizing and speechifying might be undone before it could take root by the devious designs of wannabe kings and queens of humble domestic pedigree.  Unfortunately this concern led them to introduce a legally awkward element into the US Constitution establishing that Americans have a constitutional right at least to the sort of weaponry they would have needed to engage the fledgling US government in armed conflict.

What makes it awkward now of course is that weaponry has long been one of the main beneficiaries of human labor and ingenuity due to our unfortunate inability to coordinate with one another sensibly and has moved on quite a bit from the old muskets, flintlock pistols, and swords of the colonial period.  As a result the sort of weapons that would really provide a level playing field if one had the inclination to embark on a private war against the US Army would now be things like automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, mortars, mines, missiles, bombs, biological weapons, jet planes, tanks, artillery, tactical nukes, ICBMs, and that sort of thing.  I’m talking about military devices specifically designed to kill a whole bunch of people really really quickly and with a minimum of fuss.  Not surprisingly no one here is really very interested in ensuring one’s fellow citizens have access to this kind of equipment because at any given moment a great many of one’s fellow citizens are likely to be high, drunk, insane, or just very angry and no one is really so deluded or optimistic as to want to take the risk of giving them control of something like let’s say a missile launcher.  But in that case what arms are we really talking about?  Which arms are the ones to which we have a constitutional right?  Hmm.  Yeah.  That’s an awkward one isn’t it?

To make a long story short some court somewhere apparently decided on what was assuredly a rather ad-hoc basis that semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 should be included in the sort of weaponry we should be allowed to obtain or perhaps I should say have a constitutional right to obtain.  This has proven a bit controversial because like some of the other sorts of weapons I just mentioned one can actually kill quite a large number of school kids or gay people or I suppose anyone really with a semi-automatic rifle.  Some people understandably have begun to suspect semi-automatic rifles was possibly not the best place to draw the line.  It doesn’t help that I suspect most people don’t know the rationale for the current line if indeed there is one.  Are we still committed to ensuring people have the weapons that would allow them to effectively battle US law enforcement or the US military?  Or are we on to something else now?  Well, let’s talk that through a bit.  Not in legal or constitutional terms of course but in terms of common sense, a commodity perpetually in short supply here in the USA particularly now the Republican Party is in charge.

Well, first I would suggest if we’re not claiming US citizens have the right to any old weaponry and instead are attempting to distinguish what’s in and what’s out we might do well to think of a rationale for that distinction.  I suggest the most obvious rationale might take account of the variety of arms that are available, their uses, and their characteristics particularly with respect to facilitating mass murder.  I would argue we should probably give up the notion we’re talking about whatever weaponry we need to effectively fight the US Army because that’s just not very realistic.  To really fight the US Army we’d need access to advanced military weaponry and I suggested earlier I doubt many people would be interested in making that sort of weaponry available to the average Joe because of the risks involved.  Fortunately I’m not at all sure that would be the only source of weaponry were we ever to actually find ourselves in the position of fighting our own government.  The way these things usually play out in other failed sates around the world is that other countries are happy to supply the disaffected factions with the requisite weaponry for one reason or another.  We should know.  We’re in the habit of supplying all manner of people with military hardware for all manner of purposes.  In the case of another civil war or large scale popular uprising here in the USA I see quite a few friends who may be willing to fund and arm patriots fighting for democracy on principle and also quite a few enemies who wouldn’t particularly mind seeing Americans killing off one another no matter the pretext so it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the necessary weaponry would not become available some old way.  In other words, I doubt we actually need to store tanks in our garages in the off chance we need them one day. This is to say nothing of the fact that events in Eastern Europe in the latter half of the last century suggest that without popular support it’s rather difficult for any government to do its own thing for too long no matter the imbalance in firepower between that nation’s army and police and its citizenry.

Another consideration is that unlike the early days of the nation we now have a rather robust, stable, mature system of democratic government with many checks and balances.  It’s frankly rather difficult to imagine anyone being able to effectively seize power and do away with democracy at least without the acquiescence of the vast majority of our people and frankly if that’s what most people come to believe it doesn’t really matter whether we have a democracy or not.  What’s the point if we’re going to turn around and elect someone like Herr Hitler to escort us all to hell?  Here in the USA conservatives have been attacking government in the abstract, including our democratic government, for many decades now and naturally President Trump and Republicans in Congress have been expressing these now traditional conservative themes by attacking many of our democratic institutions including the free press, the separation of church and state, our scientific and regulatory agencies, the intelligence community, our educational system, our justice system, and various others not to mention demonizing their liberal political opponents but as far as I can see they’re not going to be able to take the country very much farther down that road to nowhere without the majority of the American electorate coming to their senses and sending them packing.

So I find I can’t really take very seriously at all the rationale provided by the NRA and seconded by President Trump and the Republican Party that we need semi-automatic rifles to fend off socialists or really anyone but according to conservatives mostly socialists from seizing control of our government and enslaving us.  Indeed the entire scenario is so far fetched and implausible I have to wonder if anyone really buys it at all.  One has to remember that American conservatives are prone to a rhetorical and political style of expression in which they say all manner of funny things that happen to suit their purposes but don’t really correspond to anything they believe or expect others to believe.  I suppose it’s possible given the long tradition in Hollywood of there being no problem that can’t be solved at the end of a gun that some intellectually challenged people may envision themselves taking on the US army with their AR-15s but really I can’t imagine there could be too many people like that.  

I suppose rather more people may envision themselves taking on criminals with semi-automatic rifles but it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which one would need a semi-automatic rifle to take on criminals.  Violent criminals usually either walk up and pull out a gun or possibly kick in the door of one’s house while brandishing a gun.  One doesn’t typically encounter hordes of hoodlums charging at one from over the barricades or what have you.

Nevertheless it’s clear that many rank and file conservatives are very interested in owning semi-automatic rifles.  Why?  What do they want them for?  Well setting aside the paranoid and unworkable fantasies I’ve just discussed I suspect most of the people who want these weapons want them for three primary purposes: 1) to commit crimes (not just the conventional sort but racial conflict, domestic terrorism, and that sort of thing; one must remember that some people’s notion of a “police state” is basically any state where they are not allowed to do whatever they want to do for example robbing banks or dealing drugs or what have you; for many people we’re already living in a “police state” as oppressive to them as Nazi Germany of Stalinist Russia might be to normal law abiding people), 2) to play army or cowboy in their backyards, 3) to “collect” them and stick them on the wall where they can ogle and fondle them from time to time.  In the grand scheme of things I have difficulty attaching too much importance to these objectives and I certainly would not think they justify the increased risk of mass shootings at schools or anywhere else for that matter.

If we’re not drawing the line rather arbitrarily at semi-automatic rifles then where should we draw the line?  This is just the sort of thing that drives simple minded conservatives crazy.  One can hear the wheels turning: if I can’t have a semi-automatic rifle soon I won’t be able to own a teaspoon!  Well I don’t know.  Just drawing the line anyplace other than at a weapon designed to facilitate mass murder would probably be a big leap forward.

How about handguns?  Well, like semi-automatic rifles the only real reason for handguns is to kill people.  In this case no reasonable person would suppose we’re talking about an ability to take on the police or US Army so we can set that argument aside.  No, handguns are all about a sort of arms race between criminals and people protecting themselves from criminals or trying to protect themselves from criminals or imaging they’re protecting themselves from criminals.  Like all arms races there is something indeterminate about any given equilibrium.  If no one had a handgun then one would likely be able to defend oneself adequately with whatever the criminals were using instead.  Like what?  I have no idea.  Spears, swords, knives, rocks, tree branches?  Of course wielding those types of hand to hand weapons requires a modicum of strength and physical dexterity while using a handgun requires little more than an ability to point one’s arm and move one’s finger.  I can’t really see grandma taking on a ne’er do well in a knife fight but I can imagine her shooting the stranger in her front parlor with a handgun, which one may hope is a ne’er do well and not the neighbor kid come to return one of her cats or what have you.  So maybe handguns are reasonable?  Of course ease of killing people is a two way street and I suppose it’s quite likely a lot more criminals are interested in committing violent crimes if they know all they’ll need to do is point their arms and move their fingers so maybe we’d be better off overall if no one but police had handguns.  Similar considerations apply to the issue of the portability of handguns.  It’s great that people can carry them around easily but of course that applies to both criminals and law abiding citizens.  Although there are most likely cases where law abiding people have stumbled across ongoing crimes and managed to intercede including some shooting sprees I suspect this isn’t as common as one might think because a good deal of handgun violence most likely involves someone getting the drop on someone else, shooting that person, and promptly running away.  Rather difficult for a third person to contrive to be in a position to do a lot about that.  So I suspect for every person saved by law abiding people carrying handguns a much larger number of people are likely murdered by criminals carrying handguns.  One I think must wonder if the ubiquity of handguns is on balance a good thing or a bad thing.  Anyway, I think we can at least agree that handguns seem a lot more reasonable than semi-automatic rifles.  They’re a lot less useful for deranged mass murderers wanting to go on shooting sprees because they don’t fire as fast, the magazines don’t hold as many rounds, and one has to be considerably closer to one’s target to hit anything.

Other ideas?  Well, I would suggest hunting rifles and shotguns may be in a different category altogether because unlike semi-automatic rifles and handguns they have a purpose beyond killing people: killing animals.  Supposing one has a right to bear these sorts of arms makes rather more sense to me than some of the other weapons we’ve been discussing.  They have a legitimate and real (as opposed to fantasy) purpose, they’re not very well suited to shooting sprees and mass murder, and as a bonus they’re a lot more awkward to use in the commission of a crime than say a handgun, a fact which would seem to tilt the arms race back in favor of homeowners and other people with adequate space to store them.  In the old gangster movies the bad guys would often pull a sawed off shotgun from out of their trench coats or in the case of westerns I guess the varmints would pull them from out of their dusters but honestly how many people really wear trench coats or dusters these days?  And of course you have to be pretty much next to your victim for pulling a shotgun out of whatever article of clothing one happens to be wearing to make sense.  Seems a lot more awkward to use in a criminal context than a handgun for example.

So let’s summarize and wrap up or discussion of where to draw the line.  Hunting rifles and shotguns seem to me likely to be in the generally acceptable range.  Handguns are in a sort of gray area.  Pros and cons.  Might need some additional research on those.  Semi-automatic and automatic rifles, sniper rifles, and other more advanced military style weaponry appear to me to just not be worth the risk to innocent people.  Just talking out loud right now.  Not saying I have all the answers.  Personally I think we’d be moving forward leaps and bounds by just managing to sit down and discuss the issue like reasonable adults rather than small children who’ve missed their nap times.  But we all know what’s likely to actually happen after this most recent tragedy is what seems to always happen after these sorts of tragedies here in the USA.  Nothing.  Or not exactly nothing.  We’ll send out our thoughts and prayers.  Who knows, I might even get off the couch and light a candle but that’s pushing it.  And of course assuredly many people will rush out to buy more semi-automatic rifles to guard themselves against all the gun violence thus insuring the next mass shooting of school kids won’t be far away.

Before I sign off this week I thought I’d mention one other funny component of the discussion of guns here in the USA, which is a notion shared by many conservatives, Republicans, and other nutty right wing sorts not to mention common criminals, that they have what they call a “god given” right to semi-automatic rifles or really I suppose whatever weaponry they desire.  Where does that come from you ask?  You don’t remember that bit in the bible?  Jesus waxing eloquent on the AR-15?  Well, again one has to remember that the original purpose of the old colonists coming up with this particular bit of the US Constitution was apparently to allow people to fight effectively against the US government should things not turn out as planned.  But of course the US Constitution is a political and legal document implemented by institutions of the US government, so there is obviously something not entirely logically consistent going on here.  The so-called founding fathers may have been clever in some ways but they did tend toward rhetorical extremes from time to time.  Unfortunate in retrospect they didn’t have a few founding mothers around to help keep their feet on the ground.  Anyway, many conservatives particularly of the virulently anti-government including I may say anti-democratic government sort such as anarchists and so-called libertarians and other wacky groups of that ilk have apparently decided they’re talking about rights that don’t derive from the Second Amendment of the US Constitution at all but are instead issued directly from mystical beings in the next world.  In my opinion these dangerous anti-social lunatics really belong in prison along with other criminals who believe they are above the law but of course the tendency now with President Trump and the GOP in charge is to coddle and carve out special exceptions for such people.  Conservatives have argued successfully in the courts for example that although the US Supreme Court has found that the US Constitution does not allow state governments to discriminate against homosexuals in the area of marriage state officials are perfectly within their rights to choose not to process those types of marriages as long as their disregard of the law and their official duties is based on bigotry with a religious pedigree.  I’m not sure any old religion will do of course because I would be surprised if conservatives are willing to extend similar special exemptions to Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists let alone to any of the other more esoteric sorts of religions one hears about these days such as Wicca or followers of Voodoo or what have you.  No, I suspect it’s only Christians and possibly only certain sects within that general area who can choose to not follow the law if they feel so inclined at least in this area of gay people getting married.  On a positive note I believe the courts did find that the states in question would need to import someone from somewhere else at taxpayer expense who would be able to follow the law and fulfill their official functions to fill in for any state officials who decide to take an extended coffee break of this sort so at least gay people in those states can still ostensibly get their marriage papers processed by someone other than the person who would normally process them.  My point is one can very well imagine the GOP trying to exempt certain Christians from gun laws if they claim to have received special permission from the heavens to own particular weapons. All I can say is I hope none of these otherworldly entities had anything to say about nuclear bombs because honestly I think that would be taking this sort of lunacy a little too far don’t you?

Want to help school kids get through their youth without being shot by a psycho killer with a semi-automatic rifle or some similar murder tool?  Want to maintain the integrity of our democratic policy system?  Want to bring some common sense and rationality to national gun policy?  Want to confront Christian exceptionalism and bullying and maintain our American tradition of freedom of religion?  Well you know what to do my brothers and sisters.  Join liberals in fighting the conservative menace to the American way of life!  Vote Democrat in the next election!

References

NRA chief accuses Democrats of pushing 'socialist' agenda in wake of Florida shooting.  Lauren Fox.  CNN.  February 22, 2018.  https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/22/politics/wayne-lapierre-cpac-speech-nra/index.html.

NRA goes on the offensive after Parkland shooting, assailing media and calling for more armed school security.  Mark Berman and David Weigel.  Washington Post.  February 22, 2018.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/02/22/after-silence-on-parkland-nra-pushes-back-against-law-enforcement-the-media-and-gun-control-advocates/?utm_term=.6dc33a0f848b.

Trump defends the NRA as a group of ‘patriots’ who want to ‘do the right thing.’  Kaitlan Collins.  CNN.  February 23, 2018.  https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/22/politics/donald-trump-nra/index.html

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

Welcome friends!

Well that was a right royal cock up as my brothers in the UK might say or maybe might once have said.  If you recall a few posts ago I declared my intention  to change the URL and title of my little blog to add the word “secular” in front of the word “humanist” just to avoid anyone here in the USA getting confused about what we’re talking about as we’re prone to do with the slightest of provocations.  Result?  Well, apparently I didn’t set up the redirects correctly because it seems no one was able to find anything for a while there.  My most heartfelt apologies if you attempted to find one of your favorite posts only to get clobbered over the head with some weird error message.  My bad as the kids might say or might once have said.  Don’t know if I’m coming or going anymore.  Anyway I’ve put everything back where it was and as a sign of contrition I kept it at the new site as well for the benefit of anyone who actually managed to find it.  Guess I’ll just post on both locations for now.  I promise not to mess with it again unless and until I’m confident I can do it right so based on my less than formidable computer skills probably never.  The whole incident got me thinking of one of my favorite English aphorisms “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” which I’m sure must have come from somewhere and most likely has a counterpart in many other and possibly all other languages.  You know maybe the old URL and title weren’t perfect but good enough.  Of course if you’ve read my blog at all you know the way my brain works.  Once I started thinking along those lines it occurred to me that aphorism might also apply to some other things as well.  Let me explain.

You may recall the USA was recently having a good laugh at a Senate race in the deep deep southern and oppressively conservative state of Alabama, which old timers may remember as the site of a great deal of anger, agitation, and violence during the civil rights era of the 1960s and 70s.  It seems the top candidate for some time was some elderly, cowboy hat wearing, horse riding, quite possibly deranged redneck by the name of Roy Moore who as a district attorney was formerly in the habit of trolling shopping malls for teenaged girls to the extent he was apparently banned by at least one such institution... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Conservatism and the Power of Negative Thought

Welcome friends!

Every now and then I read one of the frequent articles that have been appearing in the mainstream press here in the USA recently that try to shed some light on the thoughts and attitudes of supporters of President Trump for the benefit of people like me who imagine they may have some idea of what traditional conservatives think but find the mindset of the particularly febrile and inconsistent subset of conservatives who support Mr. Trump quite a mystery.  One hears accounts of them saying all manner of curious things in interviews and focus groups and surveys including such notable utterances as they can’t think of anything President Trump could do that would make them not support him, the more people complain about him the more they support him, and if they had a choice between believing Jesus Christ or Donald Trump they would believe Donald Trump.  These kinds of rather puzzling statements don’t seem to represent an entirely rational or mature perspective on the world if taken at face value.  However, after thinking about it the requisite five minutes I think there may be one plausible explanation for this sort of behavior: these people are not concentrating so much on what they think would be helpful for others or themselves but on the other side of the coin so to speak: what they think will be annoying or damaging to others.  In the USA contemporary conservative ideology appears to be drawing largely on the perverse power of negative thinking.  As such the depressing and unrelenting negativity of current conservative ideology and rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the optimistic, pragmatic, and forward thinking philosophy of liberalism.  Perhaps it would be worthwhile to say a few words about that this week? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Dishonest Don and the Moral and Intellectual Rot of Modern Conservatism

Welcome friends!  

I was just sitting around contemplating the rather remarkable level of dishonesty issuing forth from the White House on a daily basis as well as the complete absence of concern let alone outrage on the part of our current president’s conservative base and it occurred to me that beyond merely damaging the USA in the more obvious ways, economically, militarily, politically, socially, legally, diplomatically and so on contemporary American conservatism seems intent on destroying the very soul of the USA: our moral integrity and respect for the truth.

What got me started thinking about this issue this week in particular was an article I read about our president apparently making up a story relating to a recent speech he gave at the National Scout Jamboree, the annual meeting of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), in which he rather predictably annoyed quite a few people by telling the boys Washington DC is a “sewer,” attacking Hilary Clinton, attacking the media, and basically engaging in the usual sort of lowbrow rabble rousing he has used to such great effect when speaking to his adoring army of angry redneck supporters.  The story he apparently made up about the event for the benefit of the tarted up conservative rag Wall Street Journal was that he had received a call from the “head of the Boy Scouts” who told him “it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them.”  ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

What I Liked About Conservatives Of Yore

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I’ve been so disappointed at the appalling performance to date of our new Republican administration and congress as well as their astonishingly low personal characters and near total absence of civic virtues that I find I’m beginning to develop a really rather pronounced distaste for the American conservatives mostly in the southern and central parts of the nation who installed them in office and who appear to believe they’ve been doing one hell of a good job thus far.  Of course, when I started this blog a number of years ago I mentioned my distaste for conservatives but at that time my dislike was tempered to some degree by what I perceived as the considerable overlap of conservative and liberal values. I considered many conservatives to be basically well meaning people who were perhaps just not thinking things through very carefully or who were possibly susceptible to being purposefully misled by wily rhetoricians and ideologues.  However, after observing the tenor of the social conservation since the advent of President Trump I must say I’m no longer sure I really believe that to be the case.  The conservative in the street now seems to be much more suspicious of democratic government, the free press, and the separation of church and state and much more accepting of authoritarianism and corruption in government than I think I ever really understood  before now.  They seem to also place much less significance on truthfulness, reliability, knowledge, competence, consistency, transparency, civilized discourse, and the basic attributes of what I would consider good personal character than I previously supposed.  To make a long story short the three headed monster of conservatism appears to me considerably more monstrous than formerly.  As a remedy to my rising feelings of hatred and disgust for this very ubiquitous segment of the American population I thought I might take a moment this week to try to remember some of the good things about my rapidly vanishing former foes the well intentioned, principled, and mannered conservatives of my youth... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

American Heartland Disease

Welcome friends!

Did you catch the story about the good people of the US Midwestern state of Montana electing some conservative thug named Greg Gianforte to the US Congress?  He was in the news recently for physically attacking a reporter who had asked him a question about the Republican Party health care plan and then lying about it until he found it untenable in the face of testimony from witnesses.  (He was apparently relying on some Fox News reporters to back him up but they opted to tell the truth for once suggesting some elements of the organization may have some latent professionalism and commitment to ideals beyond making President Trump and the Republican Party look good.)  The citizens of Montana are of course free to elect any sort of idiot they like to the US Congress and frankly one doesn’t expect much from a state sparsely populated by the most isolated and provincial of rural folk.  Indeed I was about to let it pass without comment as just one of those things but it did get me thinking about something I found mildly interesting: the tendency of many Americans to romanticize these flyover regions of the country by referring to them as the “heartland” of the country.  The phrase of course is a little play on words involving the notion of a heartland as the geographical center of a nation and the notion of the heartland as the portion of a nation exemplifying its true character.  The problem in this instance is that while the first bit may well be true the latter bit is most emphatically not.  As the results of the recent election in Montana so strikingly illustrate the people of the so-called heartland of the USA today exemplify mostly the effects of a sort of rot or cancer of the American character.  These hicks of the heartland appear to have thrown over our cherished ideals of democracy and free speech in favor of the rather more authoritarian small town virtues of bullying and lying.  I’m afraid it’s time to call it like it really is.  The true intellectual and moral heart of the USA is located not in the geographically central farmlands of the Midwest but in the coastal regions and the large cities where most American and in particular most educated and gainfully employed Americans actually live.

One question that occurred to me is where did this fascination with rural small town life even come from? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

The American Dream

Welcome friends!

I have to say one good thing about having a conservative like Donald Trump in the White House is that some of us are hearing a lot more from the conservative man and woman in the street now than previously.  I think in the recent past they must have been hanging out mostly in their own alternative fact universe of wacky radio shows, tacky and casual with the truth supermarket tabloids, and insane conspiracy theory websites.  I remember they were responsible for a great deal of ugliness, hatred, turmoil, and violence in my youth but recently not so much.  I thought maybe they had fallen into a great hole in the ground or gone somewhere. Kind of hard to engage with people when one can’t find them or anyway is unwilling to go where they reside.  I’ve always heard plenty from professional conservative pundits and spokespeople and so on but as I’ve explained many times in this blog those people talk such transparent rot one never knows what they really think about anything.  I always sort of wished I knew what the people who listen to such people thought they were hearing but honestly I just don’t know too many conservatives.  But they’re all coming out of the woodwork now aren’t they?  Ever time I glance at an online news comment stream there they are trying their best to explain their warped, incoherent, contradictory, horrifying worldview to the rest of us.  Fired up I suppose by having gotten their man in the White House and having taken control of both houses of Congress as well as the Supreme Court.  I suppose it is a bit disgusting in many ways but from a purely intellectual standpoint there are some interesting bits.  One interesting bit for me is that the recent debate on national health care policy has reminded me we have some pretty fundamental disagreements about what American is or should be all about. Let’s take a moment to consider the issue.

The American Dream.  We all hear about it from time to time.  But what the heck is it?  Well, I don’t know.  I think it’s different things to different people.  I’ve gradually come to understand that for many if not most conservatives it’s basically the dream of getting very rich... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

The Topsy-Turvy World of American Conservatism

Welcome friends!

I have to say conservatism here in the USA is pretty funny sometimes.  It’s so outrageously incoherent and idiotic one supposes no conservative could possibly expect anyone to take him or her literally or even seriously and yet one can never be entirely sure.  Why do they say the things they say?  Are they stupid?  Crazy?  Crafty like a fox?  After a lifetime of admittedly rather casual research I still don’t know.  What got me thinking about this issue yet again was some statements Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, delivered this year at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  In a move reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s Night of the Long Knives albeit without the knives Mr. Schneider dramatically repudiated what has become known as the “alt-right” segment of the American conservative movement and ejected one of their main spokespeople who had apparently previously been attending CPAC events without incident for some time.  Don’t get me wrong.  Seems a sensible enough public relations move now these alt-right groups have become a more visible presence in our political and cultural life.  You may recall some of these people were in the news shortly after the recent presidential election celebrating Mr. Trump’s victory at a restaurant in our nation’s capital.  On that occasion the leader I mentioned earlier in the context of being ejected from this year’s CPAC had railed against Jews, quoted Nazi propaganda (in the original German mind you), explained his belief that America “belonged” to “white” people (or in his own crazy talk version the “children of the sun” apparently not fully comprehending the genetic mechanisms historically giving rise to different skin tones), and called out the following noteworthy slogans: Hail Trump!  Hail our people!  Hail victory!  His audience enthusiastically shouted these slogans back and several over excited attendees apparently gave the old Nazi stiff arm salute.  Got the picture?  To state the obvious I’m perfectly fine with mainstream American conservatives finally cutting these people loose.  Indeed, one can’t help but wonder what took them so damned long.  But then again a little later CPAC attendees enthusiastically endorsed as a true exemplar of bona fide conservatism the man the alt-right views as championing their extremist ideals: President Donald Trump.  For his part, President Trump informed the group, “you finally have a president,” and called his victory “a win for conservative values.”  But that’s just the sort of self serving hypocrisy one expects from American conservatives.  That’s not really what I wanted to address here.  No, the most notable element of the whole affair for me and the bit I’d really like to address in this post was Mr. Schneider’s fanciful denunciation of the alt-right segment of the American conservative movement as a “left-wing fascist group.”

I feel I just addressed the close association between American conservatism and fascism the other day but since conservatives insist upon bringing it up I suppose I might as well take another shot at it... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Just Walking the Dead

Welcome friends!

Well, it’s a brand new year.  Always something a little special about this time of year don’t you think?  Like a blank sheet of paper or an empty computer screen full of promise and hope.  But ugly reality is never far away is it?  And so the good fight goes ever on.  Year after year.  Decade after decade.  But I suppose we all must play our little part.

I thought for a moment I’d start the new year by just diving right in and talking about the latest batch of outrages perpetrated by our conservative friends.  For example, I thought I might write a little something about the funny story I read in the papers in which a hospital owned by Tenet Healthcare failed to meet State of Florida quality standards for children’s heart surgery.  The firm made a two hundred thousand dollar contribution to Republican Governor Rick Scott and hey presto problem solved; two months after the contribution Florida eliminated the pesky quality standards.  How’s that for shrinking government?  Score one for the conservatives in their battle against incipient socialism.  A group of cardiac doctors raised a stink about it because they felt the decision put children at risk.  Doctors.  What a bunch of cry babies.  The kids can take their chances like everyone else, right?  Or then again I thought I could do a little riff on Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz forgetting to file a mandatory Federal Election Committee report disclosing loans he received from Citibank and Goldman Sachs he used to fund his 2012 Senate campaign.  (His wife works for Goldman Sachs by the way.  Small world, right?)  His campaign manager downplayed the apparent lapse by noting the loans amounted to “less than five hundred thousand dollars” (chump change to the wealthy fat cats that rule here in the USA) and also that “it’s a matter of semantics in terms of listing that that was a loan” (because you know sometimes a “loan” isn’t a loan at all; sometimes it’s a “gift” or a “kickback” or any number of other things).  But then it occurred to me if Republicans win at the polls next November we’re going to be seeing a lot of stories like these.  Quality standards will be dropping like flies.  Money will be changing hands all over the place and no will be able to figure out what to call it.  It’s going to get monotonous.

No, since I’m feeling a bit reflective just now I thought we could take a short break from our perpetual battle against the two headed monster of international conservatism and talk about something a little more difficult to pin down: time.  (Hey, I finally got to the point!  Three paragraphs in.  Must be some sort of record for me.)

It’s not just the new year that’s put me in this rather funny state of mind but perhaps even more significantly the recent death of the entertainer David Bowie.  Now I should mention I generally find people who make a big fuss when celebrities die somewhat tiresome... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Republicans, Nazis, and the Conservative Menace

Welcome friends!

Looks like this will be my last post for 2015.  Instead of doing an end of the year summary or clearing up any little stories I might have missed as I’ve done in the past I think one aspect of this last year was significant enough to warrant a final post all to its own.  Can you guess?  Yes, I’m talking about the rise of populist windbag politician par excellence Donald Trump; the one man who I feel most fully expresses the great garbage heap lying at the head and heart of today’s conservative movement.  What’s interesting about that?  Well, it seems to me we’ve never had a politician in this country so closely resemble one of our most despised foreign enemies from the dark days of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, and yet remain so beloved and admired by good old boy conservatives right across the USA.  It’s been an eye opener for me.  But that’s fine.  Knowledge is good.  Let’s talk about it... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Have A Supererogatory Christmas

Welcome friends!

The holiday season is upon us once again so I thought I should do some sort of special post in honor of the occasion.  I suppose I can’t talk about the manifold dangers posed by international conservatism every time out although that would certainly be easy enough.  Let’s do something Christmasy.  Of course, I should probably clarify that as an atheist and humanist what I think of as Christmasy is something relating to the brotherhood and sisterhood of all humankind (and it’s not getting any easier let me tell you) not the fabricated birthday of some ancient holy man / supernatural entity.  I’m thinking ethics not religious mumbo jumbo.  Fortunately I just read an entry in a little philosophy for common folk book I glance at now and then to pass the time entitled Fifty Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupre.  I think I’ve mentioned it before.  It’s a collection of little two page blurbs introducing various philosophical ideas from a layperson’s perspective.  Anyway, this time out I read the blurb on an issue called supererogatory acts, which is a fancy term for what one might call heroic acts or acts going beyond the call of duty.  Do you ever encounter ideas you think have BS written all over them?  Someone is blabbing way and you’re listening to be polite but in the back of your mind you’re thinking what a crock?  Well, that’s the feeling I was having.  Let’s talk about it.

The basic idea is that some people apparently suggest there’s some sort of philosophical conundrum about heroic acts based on the argument that if just taking the normal non-heroic line is perfectly ethically acceptable how can one say that certain acts that go beyond the normal non-heroic line are even better ethically speaking... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Freedom Comes to Indiana

Welcome friends!

Have you heard about what may be the latest twist on gay bashing from American conservatives?  It’s been all over the news.  The Governor of Indiana (if you don’t know don’t ask, but I think it’s one of those states in the interior of the country somewhere near Ohio and Kentucky I would imagine), a Republican of course by the name of Mike Pence, has recently signed a law some critics say would provide legal justification for businesses turning away gay and lesbian customers.  How rude you say?  Well, for Midwestern conservatives it’s all about religious freedom.  Any rudeness is purely coincidental.  Say what now?  I know, it is a bit confusing.  Perhaps I should explain.

One popular take on what’s going on here is that many conservatives in what is known colloquially as the Corn Belt region of the US feel their religion requires them to avoid fraternizing with certain groups of what they consider less godly folk, including in their estimation gay people for example, at least to the extent of refusing to do business with them if they decide to do something outrageously offensive like marry one another.  As far as I know these people don’t feel their religion requires them to tell gay people to go f__k themselves or hit gay people on their heads with baseball bats, so I don’t think this new law allows those sorts of activities, but certainly rudeness in terms of we don’t like ‘yer kind here and git the hell out.  But it’s all a matter of degree right?  The underlying principle is the same: people should be free to abuse other people if that’s what their religion recommends, at least to the extent of embarrassing them and making their lives more difficult by refusing to serve them at one’s place of business.

If you’ve read my blog before you’ll probably have some notion of what I feel is probably going on here.  Some people are opposed to what is essentially an idea, in this case the idea gay people have civil rights and should be able to marry one another, but they don’t want to leave their opposition in the realm of ideas and discussion, they want to take it out on people, in this case gay people or at least gay people who are interested in getting married.  They feel they should be free to do so because they’re just expressing their beliefs and opinions and what’s wrong with that?  A Republican senator from Arkansas, Bart Hester, expressed this all rather nicely when he claimed these sorts of religious freedom laws are about discriminating against messages (i.e. ideas) and not about discriminating against people at all, which would be fine except we’re not talking about refusing to do business with messages, we’re talking about refusing to do business with people.  Senator Hester went on to explain requiring conservatives to do business with gay couples wanting to get married is like requiring a Jewish baker to make a cake with a Nazi swastika on it.  (I know, it’s a funny analogy right?  In other words for conservatives gay people are like Nazis but without I suppose the fascism, nationalism, jingoism, racism, murder, and war mongering, while the conservative Christians who dominate political life in states like Arkansas are similar to Jewish holocaust survivors.)  Hmm.  I sort of see where he’s coming from, but I’m not sure it’s really the same thing.  Or let’s just say I’d have to think about that.  I suspect Nazi symbols might fall into some sort of special legal category because, you know, all that stuff actual Nazis got up to.  And it seems to me the postulated Nazi sympathizer with the sweet tooth could probably come up with something else to put on his or her cake in place of the offending swastika, but I’m not sure gay couples have similarly obvious alternatives to getting married.  I suppose they could join the local Baptist church and throw themselves off a bridge or something like that, but it hardly seems the same thing.

If you haven’t been around as long as I have I suppose I should mention this is all very much consistent with the traditional Midwestern American way of life circa the middle of the last century.  In the provincial small town where I grew up the local rednecks who ran the place refused to do business with all manner of people: blacks, Jews, Asians, foreigners, hippies, and so on.  Yes, they were opposed to a whole slew of messages in those days: the message that “black” people should feel free to mingle with “white” people, the message that the Jewish religion was as legitimate as the Christian religion, the message that Asian people belonged in the US as much as the ancestors of European immigrants, and so on.  All manner of messages.  Then the US government got all uppity and started all that civil rights nonsense and we lost a good deal of our freedom to abuse other people to clarify our positions on the messages they personified.  Talk about government overreach!  It was horrible.  No, wait.  What am I saying?  Actually it made the place a whole lot nicer than it used to be.  Sorry.  I got so caught up just then trying to think like a conservative I may have gone insane for a moment.  But I’m back now.  Yeah, as a liberal the freedom to abuse other people isn’t really one of my top priorities, whether it’s motivated by religion or not.  In my book it’s in the same basic category as the freedom to steal someone’s car.  I suppose it’s a sort of freedom but it suffers from the usual problem with conservative ideas about freedom: it fails to recognize the existence of other people and their countervailing claims to freedom.  But that’s conservatism all over, isn’t it?  Me, me, me.  No wonder the Me Generation laps this stuff up.

On the other hand maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick on this one.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Republicans in Indiana have been loudly proclaiming the last few days that other people just don’t understand the law.  They claim it’s basically the same thing that was passed at the federal level by President Clinton back in 1993 and that now appears in various versions in nineteen other states.  They intend to clarify what they had in mind and add language to the law establishing it does not in fact allow businesses to discriminate against gay people.  That should be very helpful for people like Governor Pence, who was on television the other day defending the law but who refused to say whether he thought it would allow businesses to deny service to gay people or not.  He was asked that question and didn’t answer.  Four times.  One suspects he thought it probably did but didn’t want to say as much.  That’s how Republicans typically operate these days.  As the undisputed masters of traditional political double talk they often say one thing in front of their more rabid supporters then turn around and shamelessly tell some other audience something else entirely or in some cases nothing at all.  But I don’t know.  Maybe the man honestly just didn’t know the answer.  I mean we are talking about the Stupid Party after all.  It certainly seems within the realm of possibility the Governor just hadn’t bothered to look into those sorts of details, not being gay himself.  He just signed the bill into law and went on his merry way.  At least, if he had thought the law didn’t support discrimination one would have thought he might have mentioned it, right?  Some people were clearly interested.  But anyway his fellow Republicans should make everything clear soon enough.  Governor Pence has apparently gotten ahead of the game and declared the fact the law doesn’t support discrimination is so obvious any suggestion otherwise represents a “smear” campaign against the law.

While we’re waiting for Indiana Republicans to explain how the law actually works I suppose we might as well spend a few moments speculating about whether it allows discrimination against gay people or not.  I mean, the law is on the books so we might as well consider what it might mean, right?  Along those lines I was just reading an interesting article that was full of fun facts and opinions on the topic.  For example, a University of Virginia Law School professor made the interesting point that as far as he knew it was already legal in Indiana to refuse to do business with gay people because unlike many other states Indiana doesn’t have anti-discrimination laws relating to sexual orientation.  (And don’t hold your breath waiting for any such laws.  Governor Pence has made it clear he opposes that sort of thing.)  So even if the law were to allow discrimination much to the surprise and consternation of its supporters (just a bit of humor to keep things light) it would apparently not be adding anything new but simply codifying existing practice.  Another interesting tidbit I gleaned from the article is that Indiana lawmakers explicitly rejected amendments that would have made clear they did not intend the law to allow discrimination and similarly refused to add an anti-discrimination clause.  Which brings up a funny story.  Apparently conservatives tried to set up one of these religious freedom laws in another conservative stronghold, Georgia, but they pulled their bill entirely when someone managed to add an anti-discrimination clause.  No wonder Governor Pence was so confused.  And then of course we have the simple fact that advocates of the Indiana law have been touting the idea the law allows businesses to refuse business relating to same sex marriages, which incidentally it seems only one year ago Republicans were still trying to amend the Indiana constitution to ban.  Indeed, as I suggested previously that appears to have been the whole point.  (Wasn’t I just saying the other day I thought one of the top priorities of the Republican Party in the next few years would be to find some backhanded way to get at gay people now their marriage bans have increasingly been found unconstitutional?  What a call!)  So what’s the answer?  Was the law meant to provide a legal justification for discrimination against gay people or not?  I don’t know.  But it smells a little fishy to me.

Addendum

I saw even more recently conservatives in the Arkansas state legislature made the national news for trying to pull the same stunt in that state.  (One might have thought they’d reconsider their timing given all the concerns about the Indiana law, but that’s how Republicans operate these days, always flying to the extremes.  Witness the motley crew of Republican presidential candidates rushing to support the Indiana law including Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.)  I was all prepared to make some hilarious comments about Arkansas, which I remember from my youth for all manner of ugly scenes involving racial issues, but the Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, refused to sign the bill and instead sent it back to state lawmakers with a request they ensure it mirrors federal law and cannot be used as a legal justification for discrimination.  Whoa!  Didn’t see that one coming!  Just when I was about to launch into my usual tirade against Republican bullying he goes and spoils the punchline.  Just joking.  It’s always gratifying to meet the honorable opposition.  You know, I have no problem with religious freedom at all.  It’s just that I think we need to consider the freedom of other people as well.  I suspect Governor Hutchinson might just agree with that.  Maybe we can get together and work something out.  I know.  It’s weird.  Do I need to amend my mental map of the US?  Has the Midwest overtaken the Deep South in terms of conservative extremism?  We have the counterexample of Georgia of course, where as I’ve already discussed conservatives dropped their support for their own religious freedom law when opponents added language making it clear it could not be used to justify discrimination, but this story about Arkansas suggests a certain amount of change may be in the air.  I’d like that.

References

Indiana's Pence to sign bill allowing businesses to reject gay customers.  Eric Bradner.  CNN.  March 25, 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/25/politics/mike-pence-religious-freedom-bill-gay-rights/index.html.

Gov. Mike Pence: Indiana “ not going to change” anti-LGBT law.  Eric Bradner.  CNN.  March 30, 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/29/politics/mike-pence-indiana-anti-lgbt-religious-freedom-law/index.html.

Indiana to ‘clarify’ religious freedom law.  BBC.  March 30, 2015.  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32121317.

Is the controversial Indiana law ‘the same’ as a law backed by Obama?  Glenn Kessler.  The Washington Post.  March 31, 2015.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/03/31/is-the-controversial-indiana-law-the-same-as-a-law-backed-by-obama/.

Indiana uses religious freedom against gays.  Tim Holbrook.  CNN.  March 31, 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/31/opinions/holbrook-indiana-law/index.html.

Arkansas lawmakers scramble to change ‘religious freedom’ bill.  Eric Bradner.  CNN.  April 1, 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/31/politics/arkansas-religious-freedom-anti-lgbt-bill/.

Anti-Islamization or Something

Welcome friends!

The recent murder spree by Muslim religious fanatics in Paris (as well as the efforts of a Muslim hostage to help some non-Muslim hostages escape the aforementioned murderous fanatics) got me thinking a bit more about those so-called “anti-Islamization” demonstrations in Germany and the amusing variety of reactions in the media.  So much confusion and most of it about words as usual.  I wonder; could we all please try to be a little more careful about how we say things so we can spend a little more time discussing the issues that divide us and a little less time talking past one another and getting unnecessarily annoyed?  Is that really too much to ask? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Merry Christmas 2014

Welcome friends!

It was a dark and stormy night.  Well, dark and cold anyway.  Yes, the winter solstice is upon us once again and that can only mean one thing: spring must surely follow.  Winter first of course.  But when the days begin to grow longer flowers and bunny rabbits are sure to arrive sooner or later.  Always a nice feeling, right?  Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy Yuletide season or as I guess they say now Christmas.

Yes, Christmas.  Such a complicated time for adults of a certain age and even more so for adults of a certain age who are humanists... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!