Comments Elsewhere: Guns and Rape

Over at LGM, in their discussion of the abuse heaped on Zerlina Maxwell for some simple truth-telling, I made a few comments:

March 10, 2013 at 8:56 pm

Since nobody, for better or for worse, is seriously arguing that all guns should be banned…

I am, but nobody listens to me.

Hunting can be done with bow and crossbow.

Self-defence should be done with blunt and edged weapons.

Sexual coercion of all sorts should be stigmatized to the point where all rapes and sexual assaults are treated the way we treat child molestation, necrophilia.

Oh, and everyone should take a lot more history classes in college.

March 10, 2013 at 9:19 pm

Oh, and that “only criminals will have guns” thing? Yup, that’s the idea. If you’ve got a gun, and you don’t have a uniform and a badge, you’re a criminal, and should be treated like a dangerous rabid animal.

It’ll take some time to get the bulk of the guns out of circulation, yeah. But gradualism will only confuse things: Make ‘em all illegal for private ownership now, and let things get better more or less immediately, and from that point forward.

I’m open to a black-powder recreator exception for the weapons, but not for bullets: putting anything but black powder and wadding in the muzzle constitutes a felonious weapons violation.

In a different thread, I said

March 10, 2013 at 8:48 pm

According to NCVS there were 108,000 defensive gun uses in 2010. Even if we assume that half of them were someone’s fantasy, that’s 54,000 people not robbed, raped, beaten, or killed each and every year. Somehow or another all those people managed to clear leather fast enough to not be a victim.

I would assume that 90% were over-reactions or escalations that would not have happened without the presence of the gun, and that 9% were responding to the presence someone else’s unnecessary gun.

Comments Elsewhere: Voting and Morality

They're having a bit of a pile-on over at LGM about the question of voting and moral responsibility. I'm trying to stay out of it, mostly, but I did throw in a few comments (about 1% of the total offered so far) here:

This is a point I made in the last post as well, but voting does matter. It may not matter a lot, but aggregate vote totals affect ongoing political strategy (i.e. selection of battleground states; willingness of national parties and PACs to invest in local candidates) and may play a role in setting national policy (i.e. the current majority vote electoral college reform effort). It is an historic record of an opinion, and affects the way in which we understand ourselves as a society. I don't think these are merely 'psychic' benefits, but we seem to have otherwise divorced the concept of citizenship from any sense of obligation. I think we need to bring it back: membership has its privileges, and it should also have responsibilities beyond merely obeying the law.

And here:

There is no such thing as a non-battleground state. Not voting for Obama in Oklahoma, Kansas, Alabama, etc., means that these areas will continue to be viewed as non-battleground states where the minority of voters can be safely ignored, where the Democratic party will not “waste” money or other resources to aid local candidates or shift discussions, where Republicans will feel empowered to continue building their New Confederacy. There is a political battle going on EVERYWHERE, and while voting in the minority isn’t necessarily fun, it still should count for something. And people in “safe” states who would throw away votes need to remember that polling is a social science.

Arguments against voting make me very cranky. Though there are really interesting moral issues at work here. Also here:

my vote is an endorsement of the policies of the person who gets my vote ...as better than the alternatives overall. I reserve the right to disagree with candidates I vote for, and to criticize their policies after they win. And while I may bear some responsibility for policies that were discussed in the campaign, policies which were not significantly in play — or easily foreseeable — during the election are not my responsibility. How, in a two-party system — or even in a 10-party system — can anything else be true?

Romney Press Conference Expressions Meme

SEK created a meme!

(That's a quote from Flanders&Swann, by the way. Classic!)

Arrogant Worms: Wouldn't it be great if everyone had a gun?

I can't believe nobody I read has posted a link to this yet. This is in honor of Glenn Reynolds, Russell Pierce, and so many other numbskull ideologues. (No, I'm not linking. Find them yourself, but be ready for the unfunny, irony-free version.) The song is the important thing, but this version of the video is brilliantly pastiched, well worth watching.

Comments Elsewhere: Rejecting Parallelism

In response to Scott Kaufman's post obliterating right-wing complaints about the Tucson memorial, someone wrote that the complainers were stupid. I replied

It’s not intelligence, exactly, that’s the issue. I think it’s the lack of a moral compass or sense of guilt which allows them to use any and all means, including outright falsehoods, against their percieved enemies, and allows them to hypocritically do the same things their percieved enemies did (or vice versa, to accuse their opponents of wrongdoing for things which they themselves did). It’s a sheer instrumentality in which there is nothing but tactics.

They don’t even have an internalized sense of shame anymore, though they can still, at times, be shamed into some restraint if the right leverage is applied.

I realized later, that my comment here was the start of that thought.

At least they still have some shame. They don’t feel guilt anymore, we know that. But if we can still shame them, we have leverage.

Back at LGM, one of the right-wing trolls tried to play the "both sides" gambit.

I’ll admit to having my own political preferences, even some biases, but I’ve spent a long time training to look at evidence rather than guessing or making stuff up. The situation isn’t parallel anymore. The sides aren’t equal, or equivalent. I don’t see how “pox on both houses” can be anything more than a reflexive twitch or defensive crouch.

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

It's been a while since I bothered updating my Impeachment Index, partially out of exhaustion, attention to other matters, etc.

But the latest issue of Vanity Fair has An Oral History of the Bush White House which is a fairly extensive "greatest hits" based on interviews with a whole bunch of highly placed people. [via]

I'm too much of an historian not to say "take it with a grain of salt." But it's fundamentally consistent with the view we've had for years from the outside: they lied, and broke laws, and got most of the important stuff wrong over and over and over again.

My favorite two bits (though the whole thing is worth reading, despite its length):

Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor:
I was invited to a conference in Saudi Arabia on Iraq, and a Saudi said to me, Look, Mr. Fischer, when President Bush wants to visit Baghdad, it’s a state secret, and he has to enter the country in the middle of the night and through the back door. When President Ahmadinejad wants to visit Baghdad, it’s announced two weeks beforehand or three weeks. He arrives in the brightest sunshine and travels in an open car through a cheering crowd to downtown Baghdad. Now, tell me, Mr. Fischer, who is running the country?

Not only did they screw up the Middle East, they thought nothing of screwing over their own people:

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn’t use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we’d broken the Japanese code. He thought he’d broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office.

Yeah, the VP's office was spying on the NSC. I actually laughed out loud at that one.

Comment Elsewhere: Corporate Death Penalty

In response to Elle, phd's discussion of the use and abandonment of illegal immigrant workers I wrote:

I'm a believer in the death penalty -- for corporations. In a case like this, the operations and assets of the corporation should be seized and liquidated (except for brand names, which should be abandoned forever to the dustheap of history), and the operating officers of the company (at least three or four levels down the chain of command) barred from working in the same industry for a period of no less than five years (more, if it's warranted).

It's the only way to get their attention.

P.S. We had a lovely short seder, with chicken soup and matzoballs, old-fashioned charoseth and lots of nice energy. Tonight I make the traditional "Soup-Chicken Gumbo" with Passover Puffs. We blew through a dozen eggs yesterday, and if I do any dessert baking, we'll easily do the same today. Happy Pesach, y'all!

Principled Pragmatism wasn't an option....

Relativism You scored 50 Objectivism, 47 Naturalism, and 73 Cognitivism!

You believe in moral propositions, but not moral facts or reduction of moral talk. You may be a relativist. Don't be scared by the fact that "relativist" is usually an accusation, spoken with a sneer - just because it's not in vogue doesn't mean it's wrong, which you know doubt know. "The term ‘moral relativism’ is understood in a variety of ways. Most often it is associated with an empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a metaethical thesis that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons. Sometimes ‘moral relativism’ is connected with a normative position about how we ought to think about or act towards those with whom we morally disagree, most commonly that we should tolerate them."

Link: The Meta-ethical Theories Test written by jacostyle on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test [via]

I'm a little surprised by the overall result, but the components are more or less all right (which is remarkable, considering that it's only a 15-question quiz).