You’re Doing it Wrong – Page 65

Comparing Apples to Orangutans

The spillover of politics into circuses continues to approach the level of full retard:

Whitlock spoke out against the NFL’s handling of the aftermath of Jovan Belcher’s suicide and gun issues in his Sunday FoxSports.com column. During Martin’s podcast, he likened the NRA to the Ku Klux Klan and tied the group to the dangerous street culture that unfortunately dominates “so many black youths.”

I’m not the biggest fan of the National Rifle Association (NRA) myself but comparing them to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is, at most, a blatant attempt to use shock and awe in place of actual argumentation. Granted shock and awe is an effective strategy when one attempts to win hearts and minds but it’s a strategy that requires some subtlety and believability. When you attempt to make a connection between a group you dislike and a group that is almost universally disliked you need to find some common ground. In the case of Whitlock’s comparison he attempted to connect the NRA with the KKK by claiming the NRA is responsible for the culture that, as he says, dominates black youths. This comparison, to put it very nicely, is a stretch.

First Whitlock’s implication requires the assumption that gun rights causes the violent culture that, according to Whitlock, dominates black youths. An easy way to test this theory is to see if there are any places where gun rights are severely restricted or nonexistent that also have a high rate of youth violence. Chicago is such a place. Even though Chicago has very strict gun control laws they also have a very high rate of youth violence. Considering this it’s difficult to connect gun rights to youth violence.

Second Whitlock’s implication requires ignoring the starkly different methodologies used by the NRA and KKK to advance their causes. In the name of advancing gun rights the NRA promotes hunting, self-defense, and firearm safety education. The NRA also spends a great deal of time and money lobbying politicians and working to get proponents of gun rights elected into political offices. In other words the NRA uses mostly nonviolent (using the state is almost violent in some regard) strategies in order to advance its cause. On the other hand the KKK has a history of using violent tactics such as lynching African Americans and destroying property to promote its cause of white supremacy.

Third Whitlock’s implication requires ignoring the vastly different causes each organization is attempting to advance. The NRA’s primary goal is to advance gun rights for the entire American population while the KKK’s primary goal is to make other racial and religious groups subservient to white christians. While the NRA is working to expand liberties that KKK is working to retract liberties.

Whitlock’s implication is asinine and fails to even establish a believable connection that would assist him in his desire to use shock and awe. In his zeal to demonize guns and gun owners Whitlock lost focus of his initial cause, opposing violence, and became obsessed with an object that he associates with violence. This is a common trap individuals fall into when they become too obsessed with an object or action they associate with their initial cause. Opponents of violence become obsessed with weapons instead of acts of violence, opponents of human trafficking become obsessed with prostitution instead of sex slavery, and opponents of racism become obsessed with speech instead of the idea that one race is somehow superior to another. Losing focus of your initial cause will lead you down the path to ruin and open you up to scathing criticism from amateurs that operate blogs.

You Keep Using that Word

Do you find something amiss in this excerpt:

More than 200 women’s rights groups are calling for laws to make paying for sex a crime across the European Union.

More than 200 women’s rights groups openly acknowledge that women have many rights but having sex for money isn’t one of them. This stance seems contradictory to the advancement of women’s rights. Women’s rights groups generally fight against the idea that men own women, which is still prevalent throughout the world. One would think that a rights group fighting the idea that one person can own another would fight that idea that any entity can own a person. By demanding the state use its monopoly on violence to prohibit women from having sex for money these groups are stating that they believe the state owns women. If the state owns women then the state has the right to do with women as it pleases including transferring its ownership to another entity either temporarily or permanently. Supporting the idea that the state can own women also supports the idea that men can own women so long as the state gives its blessing.

Claiming to be a rights group while campaigning to restrict voluntary behavior through coercive force is hypocritical.

The Feel Good Legislation of the Year

Denizens of the Internet are cheering Darrell Issa’s latest piece of legislation title the Internet American Moratorium Act (IAMA). The legislation purports to put a two year moratorium on Congress passing new laws that affect the Internet. Considering the recent number of government attempts to put restrictions on the Internet this bill seems like a no-brainer. Unfortunately this bill is nothing more than feel good legislation meant to build support for Issa without actually offering anything.

On Facebook Classical Liberal pointed out that the legislation is meaningless because of the simple fact Congress can repeal any law it passes. If the IAMA passed and Congress wanted to pass a law affecting the Internet they would merely have to repeal it then pass their desired legislation. It could be done in one bill.

I then noted the lack of any punishment stated if Congress violated this legislation. What if the (IAMA) passed and Congress passed legislation that violated the moratorium? Apparently nothing at all. Without some form of punishment a law really is toothless.

As far as I can see there is no point to the IAMA other than to make supporters of leaving the Internet free feel good.

If a Story Doesn’t Fulfill Your Agenda Editorialize

Advocates of gun control spend time searching high and low for news stories that support their agenda. Unfortunately for them such stories are far and few between so they often have to resort to editorializing in order to shoehorn their agenda into an otherwise unrelated store. Take the recent shooting in Florida that AlterNet was so good to report on. Things are off to a bad start from the beginning:

Michael David Dunn, 45, was in Jacksonville, Fla., this Friday for his son’s wedding, when afterward he decided to stop at a convenience store with his girlfriend. Four unarmed teenagers were in an SUV near where Dunn parked. After Dunn’s girlfriend went into the store to buy a bottle of wine, Dunn made a comment to the teenagers about their music being too loud. An argument ensued, and then Dunn, a gun collector, pulled out his gun and fired at the SUV between eight to nine times. Two shots hit and killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis.

Emphasis mine. No evidence is given that indicates Dunn was a gun collector. He may be a gun collector or he may not be, either way the statement is not backed by any presented evidence and it has nothing to do with the story itself. Whether somebody collects guns or not has no bearing on whether or not a claim of self-defense is legitimate or not. Owning multiple firearms does not suddenly make a self-defense claim legitimate or illegitimate.

The real editorializing doesn’t come into play until the last few paragraphs though:

Davis’s death comes about a week after a Florida task force found that the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law is mostly fine as is and recommended only small changes. Florida governor Rick Scott created the task force after the death of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in April. The task force made their conclusions despite research that shows “Stand Your Ground” laws actually increase homicides.

Where should I begin? The author managed to slip to Trayvon Martin case into the story. In fact the author not only slipped the name in but also slipped in the implication that Trayvon was unjustly gunned down even though evidence supports Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. That’s some great emotional heartstring pulling right there.

Let’s consider the second implication that the stand your ground law will allow Dunn to get off. Florida’s stand your ground law states:

776.012 Use of force in defense of person.—

A person is justified in using force, except deadly force, against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or herself or another against the other’s imminent use of unlawful force. However, a person is justified in the use of deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat if:

(1) He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony; or

(2) Under those circumstances permitted pursuant to s. 776.013.

The legislation clearly states that one must have a reasonable belief that deadly force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm. If the story is accurate Dunn claims to have shot the teenager because he was listening to music that was too loud. It’s pretty unreasonable to believe loud music will cause imminent death or great bodily harm especially consider the fact that the teenagers were in the vehicle and neither dead or suffering great bodily harm.

Finally the story implies that stand your ground laws cause higher homicide rates. This claim confuses me because homicide is a criminal charge. If homicide conviction rates actually increased after the passage of stand your ground laws it would imply that more people were being successfully convicted of homicide which invalidates the claim that stand your ground laws allow people to get away with homicide. Which is it? Do stand your ground laws lead to higher conviction rates of homicide or do such laws allow people to easily get away with murder? Inconsistency from gun control advocates is par for the course.

Once again gun control advocates opt for dancing in the blood by editorializing a story so heavily that the actual story, a shooting supposedly being justified because somebody was playing their music too loud, is almost entirely lost.

Why I Stay Home on Black Friday

Black Friday is the magical day of the year where people rush the entryways of stores to combat one another over marked down goods. Those of us who don’t enjoy engaging in physical combat have learned to stay home and partake in the deals being offered online if we partake at all. Every year there is a story or two that reminds me why I stay home on Black Friday, this year was no exception:

Black Friday got off to a rowdy start at a San Antonio mall where police say one shopper pulled a gun on another who punched him in the face while they were waiting in line at a Sears store.

Why go through such stresses when discounted goods can be found online? I purchased a refurbished iPhone 5 for a good price without having to worry about getting punched in the face or having a gun pulled on me.

How the State Reduces the Cost of Making Bad Decisions

I’ve explained how the state reduces the cost of committing violent act but that’s not the only thing the state reduces the cost of. The state greatly reduces the cost of making bad decisions. Consider the state’s actions after hurricane Katrina. New Orleans, a city left devastated after Katrina, was constructed below sea level next to the sea. Normally a series of levies kept the city from flooding during natural disasters but those levies broke and the city was hammered. One might ask why building a city below sea level next to the sea is a good idea. Considering the expense of rebuilding the city and building new hopefully better levies it may not make sense. If the residents of New Orleans were forced to front the entire cost of rebuilding they may choose to relocate to a more sensible reasons. To help residents of that area avoid having to deal with the consequences of building there the federal government has chosen to sink a great deal of money into rebuilding.

After hurricane Sandy the federal government is swooping in again to help relieve people from the consequences of their bad decisions. Dauphin Island, a small speck of land in the ocean, has been destroyed by hurricanes before and Sandy didn’t show the island any special treatment. The federal government is providing funds to rebuild the island:

The western end of this Gulf Coast island has proved to be one of the most hazardous places in the country for waterfront property. Since 1979, nearly a dozen hurricanes and large storms have rolled in and knocked down houses, chewed up sewers and water pipes and hurled sand onto the roads.

Yet time and again, checks from Washington have allowed the town to put itself back together.

Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas. If history is any guide, a large fraction of the federal money allotted to New York, New Jersey and other states recovering from Hurricane Sandy — an amount that could exceed $30 billion — will be used the same way.

The state distorts reality. When common sense would lead most people to abandon dangerous property instead of constantly rebuilding it the state provides funding to alleviate people’s suffering from their bad decisions. Consequences that once seemed far too expensive to repeat the cause become bearable when the state foots a portion of the bill. This leads people to repeat the same mistakes again and again knowing that they will not be forced to deal with the entirety of consequences.

Violent Pro-Government Extremists

Shall Not Be Questioned has a post that links to an article trying to unite the various gun control advocacy groups. The article is an interesting read because I believe the author is completely unaware of the irony of what he penned. Instead of coming up with something new or unique to say about gun control the article parrots the now common anti-government fear mongering that seems to compose a majority of anti-gun statements:

But the truly stunning growth came from anti-government “Patriot”/militia movement that views the government as their primary enemy. These groups formed in the mid-1990′s based on the perception of violent government repression of dissident groups at Ruby Ridge, ID in 1992 and near Waco, TX in 1993. The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 is attributable to this movement which peaked a year after the incident and then rapidly declined. But the movement was once again energized in 2008 with the economic recession and the appearance of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate. The numbers of these groups rose from 149 in 2008 to 1,274 last year. Of these, 334 were militias. A state by state listing of these groups is provided here. A graph produced by SPLC showing the meteoric growth of such groups is displayed below.

What did the Oklahoma City bombing have to do with gun control? Who knows? Furthermore the article only managed to bring up the three commonly cited examples of violent anti-government actions. Everything else is pure fear mongering.

Let’s consider the other side of the coin. What about pro-government extremists? Democide, that is non-war murders by government, has killed six times more people than wars this century alone. Whether we discuss the gulags of the Soviet Union, the death camps of Nazi Germany, or China’s Great Leap Forward the number of deaths caused by governments is high. Gun control advocates will often stop me here and claim that such atrocities would never happen in the United States. I’m pretty sure asking Native Americans or residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6^th and August 9^th, 1945 whether or not the United States would commit democide would lead to a resounding yes.

Advocates of gun control want to strip non-state individuals of firearms. Their method of doing this is to implement laws against gun ownership and have state agents, armed with guns, kidnap or murder any non-state individual in possession of a gun. Who is the more violent extremist? Me, an anarchist who carries a gun but has never killed anybody, or somebody who wants armed agents of the state to initiation violence against people like me? I would say the latter show a much higher propensity for violence. They want to give more power to organizations that have, together, killed an estimated 262,000,000 people (and that’s not including the wars those organizations have waged). How does that make sense? How can somebody claim to oppose violence while advocating state-initiated violence? Just because a guy with a costume and a badge initiates violence doesn’t make it something other than violence.

Statists seems to have a hard time scrounging up examples of anti-government violence. They mention Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Oklahoma City bombings time and time again but in each case the number of people who died was relativel small. One other other hand I can point out many examples of pro-government violence that killed millions of people. It seems disarming the people would put them at an even greater disadvantage when faced with state aggression. Why do gun control advocates want to disarm generally peaceful individuals instead of disarming states? Why are they pro-government extremists? If gun control advocates truly opposed violence they would be demanding the governments around the world disarm.

People Take Politics too Seriously

Politics is a joke, and not a very funny one at that. Yet people take it very seriously. I had several people defriend me on Facebook (Whatever shall I do?) when the election was heating up because I was viciously ridiculing their candidates. People got to the point of screaming at me because I expressed distain for their candidates. There were even a couple of instances where I thought somebody was going to resort to physical violence because of what I said about their candidates. Matt Tanous brought yet another example to my attention of people taking politics too seriously:

Holly apparently believed that Daniel’s failure to exercise his right to vote had caused President Barack Obama to win re-election, and thought that a second Obama term would be bad for their family, according to local news sources.

Witnesses said Holly chased Daniel in her Jeep while he was on foot, all the while yelling at him.

“Daniel reportedly took refuge behind a light pole while Holly drove around the pole several times while continuing to yell at him,” the ABC affiliate reported.

Holly then struck her husband with the SUV, pinning him between the car and the light pole.

How ironic. Holly claims that Obama’s reelection will be bad for their family so she attacks her husband, who is a family member. I guess hypothetical threats to her family are more worrisome than direct acts of violence against her family.

Considering Romney received 902,831 votes in Arizona and Obama only received 713,858 votes I think it’s pretty hard to claim Obama’s victory was caused by Daniel not voting. His state went to Romney by a notable margin, his vote wouldn’t have changed anything.

Advocate of Gun Rights Who Aren’t Helping Gun Rights

When I discussed the curmudgeons in the gun rights movement who were entirely unwilling to accept people with differing ideologies this was the kind of crap I was thinking of:

Effective immediately, if you voted for Obama, your money is no good here. You have proven beyond a doubt that you are not responsible enough to own a firearm. We have just put a sign up on the front door to save you the trouble of walking all the way in here….

I took this ad out in our local paper. It will come out in the White Mountain Independent tomorrow, 9 November

Sincerely,
Cope Reynolds

Southwest Shooting Authority of Arizona

Congratulations Southwest Shooting Authority of Arizona, you’ve just effectively dissuaded a majority of voters from the gun community. I know that many people in the gun rights movement are butt hurt over the election results but lashing out at the people who voted for Obama isn’t going to help the cause of gun rights. Instead of alienating Obama’s supporters we need to reach out to them. Gun rights shouldn’t be a Republican or Democrat issue, it’s should be an all inclusive issue that accepts people from all manners of political ideologies. Statements like the one made by Southwest Shooting Authority of Arizona reinforces the stereotype that all gun owners are hardcore Republicans and therefore delegates the issue of gun rights to an “us” versus “them” debate.

Romney’s Failure

Republican Party apologists are working hard to find anybody to blame for Tuesday’s results besides the Republican Party. As usual the first target of Republican anger are the people who voted for third-party candidates. This accusation is absurd since Romney lost by more than the total of third-party votes:

Could he have picked up more Electoral College votes in other battleground states had there been no third-party candidates? In Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia and Illinois, third-party candidates were active — campaigning on a variety of issues, including the legalization of marijuana, which was approved by Colorado and Washington State voters.

However, third-party candidates drew only small percentages of the vote in those states.

In Virginia, it had been feared that former U.S. Senator Virgil Goode’s Constitutional Party candidacy would leach off enough conservative votes to give the state’s Electoral College votes to Obama. However, Obama won the state’s 13 Electoral College ballots by 54,924 votes. Only 51,802 Virginians voted for all of the third-party candidates combined — close, but not enough to matter.

What about the other states that went for Obama? Had there been no third-party candidates, would there have been 35 more Electoral College votes to put Romney over the top?

In California, the President won by 59.2 percent with 5,554,499 votes. Romney garnered only 3,613,339 votes. If he’d had every one of the Third Party candidates’ 219,425 votes, it would have made no difference. The same is true in all of the “battleground” states as well as smaller states which went for Obama: Oregon, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland, Delaware and Minnesota.

Had every third-party voter voted for Romney instead Obama would still be president. What’s even more absurd is that Romney apologists somehow expect independent minded individuals to support a candidate that wasn’t liked by his own party. Romney received less votes than John McCain, who was also disliked by much of the Republican Party base:

As the national vote total began to solidify last night, one question on the minds of Republicans was: Where are the missing voters? Last night it looked like Mitt Romney had received something like 10 to 15 percent fewer votes than John McCain had in 2008, even though his percentage of the overall vote was at least two points higher.

I think this fact is the most telling piece of information regarding Romney’s loss. Even though Obama’s approval rating during his term as president is below 50% Romney wasn’t able to get enough votes to win. While a majority of the American public doesn’t approve of Obama they approve of Romney even less. Neither Republican voters or the American public liked Romney enough to vote for him.

Third-party voters didn’t sink the Republican Party, the Republican Party sank the Republican Party. They selected a candidate that wasn’t liked by their own base and expected to win the election. Here’s a pro tip for the Republican Party in the future: if your own voter base doesn’t like a candidate nobody else will either.