Sometimes after a family outing the car radio is set on the station the kids like. I don’t bother to change the station before turning off the car so that’s what’s on when I head off for work in the morning. This from thirty years ago but the first time I remember hearing it was on Kids Place Live a couple weeks ago. (How’d I manage that?) Heard it again this morning. What a great song.
Author Archives: Chris
Friday the 13th
Yesterday, Friday the 13th, was my last full day at work. At a high-level, I was tasked with “improving operational outcomes” of military actions. One of my motivations for leaving was, in the course of doing my job, seeing shit I can’t unsee – not a lot of it but if you have an allergy to something it doesn’t take much to make an impression. (That’s how I think of it. I discovered that I have an allergy. Some people can eat bags and bags of peanuts with no ill effects but others go into anaphylactic shock if they touch one – just luck of the draw. If you have a peanut allergy then don’t eat peanuts. Problem solved.) Thinking about those things every day wore me down to the point that I need to do something else. What did I see? That human beings do awful things to one another. That they spend a tremendous amount of time and energy preparing to do awful things to one another. And if you think “If we could just get [Country X] to conduct themselves humanely then all would be well.” I’ve got news for you, hippie: It’s a global problem. Why we do these things to one another I’ll never understand. What a waste. I wish I had some insight into how to get people to stop but I have no fkg clue. I’m sorry.
And He will judge between many peoples And render decisions for mighty, distant nations. Then they will hammer their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning hooks; Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they train for war. Each of them will sit under his vine And under his fig tree, With no one to make them afraid…
– Micah 4:4
Music for Sunday Afternoon
Guns into Garden Tools
My belief is that making it socially unacceptable to use weapons for entertainment will, in the long run, save many more lives than changing gun laws. (By “entertainment” I mean shooting for the hell of it. I regard hunting as a serious endeavor, not light entertainment.) I used to shoot when I was a teenager decades ago. I enjoyed it. There was a zen to it – control your muscles, control your breathing. Picking up a rifle also seemed a bit like having a wild carnivore eat out of your hand. There was danger and the potential for things to go badly wrong but I had it under control. There was a rush in that. Much as I enjoyed shooting then though, I’m done. We need to renounce shooting as recreation. Guns are not toys for grown-ups. They’re machines designed to kill.
Ban the Open Carry of Firearms
From John Feinblatt’s, Ban the Open Carry of Firearms:
When militia members and white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Va., last Saturday with Nazi flags and racist placards, many of them also carried firearms openly, including semiautomatic weapons. They came to intimidate and terrify protesters and the police. If you read reports of the physical attacks they abetted, apparently their plan worked.
They might try to rationalize their conduct as protected by the First and Second Amendments, but let’s not be fooled. Those who came to Charlottesville openly carrying firearms were neither conveying a nonviolent political message, nor engaged in self-defense nor protecting hearth and home.
Plain and simple, public terror is not protected under the Constitution. That has been the case throughout history. And now is the time to look to that history and prohibit open carry, before the next Charlottesville.
Historically, lawmakers have deemed open carry a threat to public safety. Under English common law, a group of armed protesters constituted a riot, and some American colonies prohibited public carry specifically because it caused public terror. During Reconstruction, the military governments overseeing much of the South responded to racially motivated terror (including the murder of dozens of freedmen and Republicans at the 1866 Louisiana Constitutional Convention) by prohibiting public carry either generally or at political gatherings and polling places. Later, in 1886, a Supreme Court decision, Presser v. Illinois, upheld a law forbidding groups of men to “parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized.” For states, such a law was “necessary to the public peace, safety and good order.”
In other words, our political forebears would not have tolerated open carry as racially motivated terrorists practiced it in Charlottesville. They did not view open carry as protected speech. According to the framers, the First Amendment protected the right to “peaceably” — not violently or threateningly — assemble. The Second Amendment did not protect private paramilitary organizations or an individual menacingly carrying a loaded weapon. Open carry was antithetical to “the public peace.” Lawmakers were not about to let people take the law into their own hands, so they proactively and explicitly prohibited it.
Thought for the day: March 9, 2018
We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources, and we have just reason to be proud of our growth. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone; when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted; when the soils shall have been still further impoverished, and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation.
-Theodore Roosevelt (on the merits of public lands)
Thought for the Day – February 22, 2018
Close your eyes and picture a brown man saying this in Arabic. (Trust me, you’ll thank me). https://t.co/nlxoQeeDhA
— Asma Khalid (@asmamk) February 22, 2018
Thought for the Day – February 14, 2018
Charlie Pierce observes:
The NRA argument [for gun privileges] boils down to a belief that massacres are part of the price of constitutional liberty.
Yes, let’s call it what it is. Nothing has changed since Newtown. As a society, we consider the periodic slaughter of children and other non-combatants an acceptable price to pay for the privilege of owning and using guns. The polls suggest that a significant majority support “common sense gun control” but look at who we elect to government. Americans have had opportunity after opportunity to elect representatives who would act forcefully to reduce gun violence and we don’t do it. We vote in NRA supporters instead.
Let’s recognize what we do when we do that, condemn it, and choose to act differently. Contemporary gun advocacy is not about outdoorsmen having the opportunity to hunt and it has nothing to do with self-defense. Contemporary gun advocacy is in the tradition of the genocide of Native Americans, terrorism of African-Americans, and seditious conspiracy against democratically-elected government. White supremacy is central to it. More generally, gun advocacy is part of a culture – our culture – that celebrates violence as a means of holding power over others. To be honest, I’m skeptical that more gun laws now would address the core problem. They might help but they’re secondary. Until we stop celebrating and rewarding violence of any kind, mass shootings and other gun violence will persist.
They’re salting the earth, not salt-of-the-earth
Last Friday New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote a profile of Obama-voter-turned-Trump-voter Shannon Kennedy, One Honorable American’s Love of Trump. Trump voter profiles, particularly ones which take a “forgotten man” angle and suggest that the Democratic Party needs to listen to them, are a regular thing in the Times and elsewhere. I’ve read a fair number of them. None have made me go, “Wow. I hadn’t appreciated that. I see where they’re coming from.” I get where they’re coming from. We have different values and different visions of what we’d like our country to be. What irks me about columns like Cohen’s is that they don’t acknowledge that we do hear Trump voters and we understand what they’re saying. The core problem isn’t a lack of understanding. The problem is that we want fundamentally different things for our country.
“The Left wants to give people the chance to do something with their lives, by giving them time and space away from the market.”
The Left wants to give people the chance to do something with their lives, by giving them time and space away from the market.
Many people (perhaps you) may have a difficult time believing that but it’s true. The goal is give people more control over the narrative of their lives. Robin gives a specific example: Why one might favor single-payer over Obamacare –
In the neoliberal utopia, all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives. . . . We saw a version of it during the debate on Obama’s healthcare plan. I distinctly remember, though now I can’t find it, one of those healthcare whiz kids — maybe it was Ezra Klein — tittering on about the nifty economics and cool visuals of Obama’s plan: how you could go to the web, check out the exchange, compare this little interstice of one plan with that little interstice of another, and how great it all was because it was just so fucking complicated. I thought to myself: you’re either very young or an academic. And since I’m an academic, and could only experience vertigo upon looking at all those blasted graphs and charts, I decided whoever it was, was very young. Only someone in their twenties — whipsmart enough to master an inordinately complicated law without having to make real use of it — could look up at that Everest of words and numbers and say: Yes! There’s freedom!