My goal when I started this blog was really not to devolve into some conservative curmudgeon...

...but maybe it's just that as I've moved through life, I've drifted away from places where badly formed unorthodox opinions are rampant, and toward places where underdeveloped political opinions are mixed at the deepest levels with other things I'm interested in.

I tire of it.  I don't have the power to change all the minds of everyone on the internet who thinks that Jesus wasn't real because some other yahoo on the internet made up lies that are easily disproven after five minutes spent in any grade school library's mythology section.  I have some hope when I see Copernicus mistaken for Leonardo in the debate about the two world views and someone else chimes in with "I looked into this, and that's not quite true."  I can still make my contributions but God will have to do the heavy lifting.

I tire of the same kind of crap as "astronomers calculated the positions of the stars and planets and discovered a missing day that proves Joshua 10:13."  Why people would lie about this, I don't know.  Maybe it's all false flag operations, but these things just...smell like well intentioned lies by people who don't have the foresight to ask "if they discover this isn't true, are they more likely to throw it all away in a fit of doubt than to forgive me for tricking them into getting saved/opening their eyes to scientific materialism?"

But my point was to touch on a couple semi political things and call it a night.  Today's topic:  common core.

I'm not going to go deep, just hit a couple factors.

Supporters dislike the idea of what they call "hyper localization," that is, the idea that communities even down to the county level should have a say in their own school's curriculum.  They blame that for the whitewashing of history, for such things as learning little or nothing about the history of slavery in America and the Civil Rights Movement.  They want it standardized across the nation.

Problem is, the non-academics in Washington or San Francisco who are really more interested in training compliant future high tech employees--they will admit this is their goal when they publicize their support of the program, if slightly less directly--are not in any way immune to propagating other swaths of ignorance when they develop curricula far away from classrooms.

There's no guarantee a nationwide curriculum will be any more truthful about Wilmington or Custer, because there's no reason to be.  It's easier to reinvent the past to explain away the historical artifacts you can't or haven't yet been able to destroy, than to erase it all at once and hope no one notices or remembers what came before Year One.

Typical:  see a potential problem, magnify it into a crisis, and demand federal intervention.  Sound familiar?

But all that assumes that the curriculum reinventors and textbook compilers have all the pertinent knowledge at their fingertips and are simply making different choices about what to include and what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to deemphasize, what fits into the themes they want to teach and what doesn't, what themes ought to be taught and what are too difficult or inappropriate for each grade level, how to define the words "difficult" and "appropriate" in this context.

You get enough scholars and writers together, you'll have enough people who know enough that they do collectively have this knowledge (or at least have a passing familiarity so they'll be more effective at going back to do research to clear up the ignorance they know they bear), but there's no guarantee that this happened, and there's no guarantee that there are enough participants wise and sincere enough to make the optimal choices.

I went to a pretty good school.  Mostly we had pretty good textbooks.  But the time my history book spent on the Trail of Tears was about the same as that spent on the Grange, and while I recognized that both were just specific instances of bigger things, it wasn't clear how either fit into where the publisher put those few paragraphs.  The Trail at least was connected to some things I already knew about Indian reservations that still exist, but what I remember most about the Grange is being a boy sitting with book open to that page on my desk and wondering what it had to do with anything else going on at that time.

I have digressed, but permit me to regress.  I was going to say something about the statues of Confederate Civil War officers getting torn down.  Not about that, so much.  What I see a lot of here is a push to simplify history to singular ideas and motivations.  I may have written about this long before--or maybe I have a draft I never got around to publishing; been a while now--about how people will impugn the sincerity of someone who is trying to do the right things for allegedly the right reasons because they can imagine some other good that might come of it that would personally benefit the person trying to do the right thing.  Maybe that person recognizes the benefit but didn't have it in mind, maybe the person really didn't ever think of it and was trying to be altruistic because that's what virtuous people do, but it doesn't matter: an ulterior motive can be surmised, therefore the ulterior motive must be the only true one, and thus the virtuous person is just a hypocrite.  Utter bullocks, and the last rationalization of an insecure but happy vice-enslaved person.

I recognize how it is distasteful, to put it tastefully, to continue proudly displaying things that we as a society have come to recognize were not all that great after all.  George Wallace and Orval Faubus weren't just taking a principled stand against social decay, they were just wrong.  But I'd prefer to have things like statues of Robert E. Lee and George Custer put in historical museums where their real legacies can be depicted with some context.

Claims like "It was all about ending slavery" or "it had nothing to do with slavery; that was tacked on later" are wildly oversimple.  People are complicated and life is complicated and so is history.  I'm not expecting students to go to any historical museum and come out thinking the guys on the wrong side were all vilified angels, but I do want them to come out with a sense of these complexities, and some enhanced skill at looking at a story from both sides and seeing the truth and propaganda that each side relies on.

(and I realize I appear to be foisting myself onto my own petard.  Indulge me a bit more; I am not a historian and do not want to bore you in a bog of footnotes and tangential analyses)

Not just for the sake of history, either.  Yeah, Sherman might have been a horrible person for his practice of total war and his lack of enthusiasm for abolition, but he's not a monster.  And by that I mean "a horrible person is not an inhuman monster no matter how horrible," not "he wasn't so bad."

And if we can teach our students not to write off the villains of history as monsters, but to recognize them as fellow humans with motivations that are complex and often conflicted even when not wholly erroneous, then we will be teaching the next generation real lessons in how to understand and love one another.

I was going to make this a separate post, but i think it will be more fitting to finish this one with the following.

"They asked me if I was going to let politics get in the way of my friendship.  You're damn right I will.  I will not tolerate the presence of racists and homophobes."  This in response to the criticism that certain political strains tend to make everything political, that there are people you can't have a normal human conversation with because they are always having just one conversation whether you're part of it or not.  Zeal for one's principles is nice, but there's a problem with being the kind of person Winston Churchill described as being folks who won't change the subject.  It's the same problem the Pharisees had when they criticized Jesus for supping with tax collectors and sinners.

I don't need to spell it out, do I?

"It is possible to be pro-gun and pro-gun-control. As a gun owner with a clean record and a sound mind, why would I oppose legislation that does not affect me but has the potential to keep guns out of the hands of those who pose a threat?"

1. Red flag laws.
2. "First they came for the socialists ... then they came for the trade unionists...."
3. Has the "potential?"  Now we're supposed to pass laws based on what we hope they might accomplish?  Laws have been overturned for being ineffective--recreational marijuana will probably be the next obvious example to make the history books--but we don't even have to entertain bills that have a reasonable expectation of achieving their intent with minimal side effects?  Well, I guess not; so much political posturing in Washington and the media is so ridiculous I doubt one person in twenty would believe a word of it if they got past how it makes them feel....
4. (added August 2020--can't believe I didn't think to include this originally) Being pro-gun and pro-gun-control just puts you in the same boat as politicians and celebrities who talk about how we really don't need guns, in a rather "let them eat cake" tone, but surround themselves with walls and gated communities and armed bodyguards.  That canard has been beaten to death, so I'm just going to leave it at that for you to chew on.

"If owning a gun were an effective means of self defense, insurance rates would go down, but they don't because you're more likely to shoot yourself than an attacker."

Insurance companies aren't concerned about crime, they're concerned about paying out on life and health insurance policies; if they're involved in any social engineering, you can bet it's not going to be in support of any actuarial data that show personal gun ownership stops home invaders and other criminals from causing harm, which we know is true--it's just more newsworthy to report "Joe Blow was apprehended by authorities, full stop" than "Joe Blow was arrested fleeing the home of Benny Hanna; police caught him running out the back door after hearing Hanna, 42, rack his shotgun."

My chances of drowning at home are much higher because I have a bathtub, but since my bathtub poses no political threat to busybodies and tyrants, the fact that having a bathtub provides benefits that outweigh the risks is not controversial.

"Alabama, get your act together. No state that bans abortions but is in last place for education and has had four mass shootings alone in 2019 really cares about kids."

Yet another argument based on moving goalposts and insufficient purity of intent or zeal, which will get its own treatment.

What about next to last place?  40th instead of 50th?  Second place? First? At what point will you allow us to say, O arbiter and czar of decency and liberty, “our children might not score as high as some states’, but stop shaming us for this perfectly respectable ranking, because it is not the only metric?” Education is important, even for people who may not be college material, but in a day and age where there’s a lot of training to blame capitalism (or “the heads of capitalism,” who I take to be not George Soros or Bill Gates and formerly not the Donald) for every human failure in history and conditioning to divorce personal responsibility from lifestyle outcomes, I’d be chary of making comprehensive moral judgments on the basis of a testing statistic.

I mean, really:it’s not fair to prioritize one issue, even life, and refuse to acknowledge the value of others, but you’re literally saying “the children we don’t kill do better on standardized tests than yours.”  Wow, way to set the bar, there.  It’s not like any true Scotsman would criticize the rope he was getting hanged with for being new, after all.

As for the mass shootings thing...the New York Times as of May 9 reports eight school shootings in the US, one being in Alabama.  These have resulted in four deaths and seventeen injuries. Wikipedia has some more interesting statistics:  124 events total nationwide as of May 16, with 129 fatalities and 468 injured. Three of these were at a school at one was at a church.  For comparison, it shows three mass shootings in Alabama with a total of five dead; New York only had one with one fatality, California had twelve with eleven fatalities, Texas had twelve with 21 fatalities, but the city of Chicago alone had four deaths across five mass shootings.  All these include bar fights and domestic incidents with multiple casualties, not just schools.  I'm not going to quote low-fatality statistics at you, but this should be enough for you to practice on when someone says you're not comparing apples to demographic apples.

Another sign I'm on the right side

I mean, yeah, sometimes even on the Internet I find my echo chamber pierced like a bubble and find facts and logic and decent human beings that don't fit my paradigm, and I wonder if maybe I just have a few good intentions but am largely mistaken.

But then something else happens.

A number of something elses, actually, but I'll talk about how 90% of the violence is either physically on the other side or exists only as rhetoric and accusation and invention but still is on their side later.

It’s not that both sides don’t have solipsism and myopia. It's not that both sides don't have some facts and logic to support their positions (gun violence is never a good thing, even if you can justify its necessity; rationalizing its expansion despite any consequences is inhumane and as bad as the argument that is aesthetic rather than moral that "guns are bad so it doesn't matter if they reduce violence overall").  It’s that on the libertarian side, problems tend to be self limiting; large scale benefits perpetually promised by socialism might not be possible, but neither are tyrannies that keep said promises poorly and then bring more problems.  So when I see situations as I describe below, I find them to be evidence that such beliefs are more dangerous than my own, instead of less.

A coworker of mine--I'll tell you more about him later; he's fun--was lamenting that unemployment was as low as it has been lately.  He has nothing against people working, mind you, and he recognizes that some unemployment is natural as it accounts for people who are willingly between jobs and are not suffering in any way. But his contention was that as unemployment drops below this natural level, competition for workers goes up and that translates into higher wages meant to entice job seekers. And the money for higher wages has to come from somewhere, namely, the price of whatever goods and services are sold by companies that are raising their wages. Thus we end up with inflation hand in hand with wage increases. Okay, that’s not the best situation, although on some level that’s just a tautological opportunity cost—even if the money came from nowhere, prices would go up because the supply of money was higher.

That’s why modern first world countries have the richest citizens in human history and the truly (even the marginally) destitute are not proportionately large in number.

But the kicker? He’s down with a “living” minimum wage.

That’s right. It’s not good for labor prices to rise from natural market forces because it will push inflation, but artificially raising it and letting inflation happen for the very same reason is A-OK. Whether this parallel is unimagined or there is an implicit assumption that enough wisdom and economic controls can be made implemented quickly enough to stave off a crisis, I have no faith that the outcome would be better than not interfering.

"Don't slutshame. Sex isn't meant to have kids. Children are an occasional side effect of sex."

I could say a lot here--I don't want to go off on a tangent about how to discuss things that are inherently shameful, and how shame is not a social construct--but I will restrict myself to this:

If conception is an accident, a rare coincidence, then why is failure to use contraception in 100% of sexual encounters (y'know, just in case it's that one occasion) described as "not being responsible?"

A bit heavy-handed and transparent, no?

So two years ago Trump is elected president.

Like the mirror image of Obama being awarded the Nobel prize before taking office for the great humanitarian things it was presumed he would accomplish, the usual suspects and their useful idiots started crying for Trump's impeachment before taking office for the great humanitarian crises it was presumed he would create.

This didn't go far by itself because being uncivil, being a jerk, being disliked, having differences of opinion, and even using rhetoric that is inflammatory but would have been unremarkable two hundred or a hundred or twenty years ago are not impeachable offenses.  But the Russian collusion thing quickly picked up some steam and for two years eclipsed it--they could always impeach him for that, since the "but I didn't get what I wanted this time!" wasn't working on its own here or against the Electoral College.

Fast forward through two years of investigators spinning their wheels, finding little more than a past her prime porn actress, and reminders of smoking guns found in the hands of at the wrong targets, and finally a few weeks ago they decide to acknowledge that there's no "there" there.

Immediately cue up Amendment 25 rhetoric.

Really?  President not fit to execute his office?  Did everybody just not notice before?

Everybody was sure hopeful to throw everything at the wall during early talks of impeachment to see if they could get enough to stick (as if it were a matter of quantity of dirt thrown and not actual high crimes and misdemeanors; one would have through they learned that lesson, but then came along Brett Kavanaugh and all his accusers who waited until the last minute to stage a wave of protests and then claim that that meant something above than the theatrics they so patently were).  I'm honestly surprised, looking back, that they didn't try some "he colluded because he was incompetent, not just because he was evil and too unpopular to win an honest vote" double play.

Someday some trick like this will work against some president.  And then the other side will turn that trick against them, and everybody will be shocked when another obamassiah is kept from taking office by a conspiracy that has learned that double edged knives cut in both directions.  And then we will have the world's largest banana republic.

And maybe that's what they want.

I don't know what to call it.  It's not envy because they don't want to destroy something good someone else has because they resent not having it; they want to destroy it on behalf of people who don't, except for the little bit they think will still exist for them to keep for themselves.

If the government can just print more money whenever it wants some, has a budget shortfall, recognizes a contraction in the money supply...

…why are there still taxes?


I mean, not to lessen the pithiness of that question, but where do people think money goes when it’s taxed or spent?

You know what really gets me?

It's that all the protesting, all the rhetoric, all the drama when something is built up into a crisis....they all act like we're finally on the cusp of turning human society around, how with the next judicial appointment or the next presidential election or the next symbolic bill going to the floor for general voting, everything is going to turn around, and if life doesn't just suddenly start coming up daisies, at least all our social ills will just start dissolving like a sugar cube in hot tea: rape will drop off and alpha males will suddenly start crying tears of joy, black people will stop getting murdered and will start having cushy jobs drop into their laps as white people move into the back woods and inbreed themselves to extinction, people will come out as gay or trans by the millions, and other things less obviously in the fantasy genre.

One lady quoted by an NPR reporter after the Kavenaugh confirmation: "Are we going to be out here for another 30 years? I don't have 30 years left." Lady, what were you protesting that you thought 30 years of standing in streets with signs was going to change? The Civil Rights Era was over more than 30 years ago, and sorry to say but the last few years of what amounts to "This is the same thing so let us have it!" just doesn't close the argument.  Or was there something else? Abortion? Legal more than 40 years; it's the pro-lifers who are protesting that. Something else? Something more fundamental to the human species, like the propensity to be inconsiderate, invasive, rude, predatory? Sister, no amount of legislation is going to fix nature. Schools and parents have been trying to civilize children for a lot longer than 30 years, and considering we have to start over with every generation, I am surprised you ever thought you'd live to see the day when we finally succeeded once and for all.

Megan Kelly, NBC employee...

...was somehow unwoke enough to suggest that blackface or anything short of racist fawning wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

She apologized on her show, and it wasn’t good enough.

Trump is somehow more responsible than the media who go around constantly calling half the country racist and sexist and homophobic and Islamophobic, but somehow not being responsible for the outrage that sometimes spills out into physical violence that is positively condoned in many corners of the public sphere (corners, sphere...YKWIM).

 Maybe NBC needs to reconsider how it vets its long time employees. Good luck.

Oh look, they're doing it again.

Still talking about Kavanaugh as if every accusation thrown at him is a conviction of guilt and any response on his part is an admission of same.  

I don't expect everyone against him to recant, even now, but yet again it's come down to a few people being more interested in changing what people think than they are in pursuing justice.

Which is really what's going on.  Improving the thought patterns of moral troglodytes sounds great, but in the end it's just thought policing.  

"Conservatives don't mind if Republicans lie about their sexual escapades.  It doesn't matter; they can always get away with it."  Yeah, because a couple high profile guys at Fox News lost their jobs, while Harvey Weinstein got arrested for accusations of sexual assault than any other three people I can think of, and Bill Clinton is still at large.  This isn't a partisan thing.  That's why when you hear about "rape culture" and "patriarchy" there's a lot of Marxist language but they tend to construct accusations that are barely short of universal.

Not to narrow this down to rape.  It's a narrative they're trying to maintain, using repetition and drama to crowd out uncontested facts.

When Al Gore lost to Dubya, he only demanded recounts in districts he expected better results from, and the results were more in Bush's favor every time, but now we're starting to hear that it was the other way around and Trump in 2016 just did what Bush pioneered, despite the reputation of only the other party getting extra votes from people and from dead people.  When Dubya played fast and loose with wiretaps (not to say that was okay), all you heard was "King George was shredding the Constitution."  When Obama was president, all you heard was "the Constitution is obsolete" and "there were no scandals."  Now that Trump is president, all you hear is "He's a tyrant" even though the closest thing they have to evidence is things completely within his power to do that they happen to find disagreeable; and even though they've been lambasting him since before he was elected, somehow it was his power as president he abused to cause the polarization that results in all the shootings that have been in the news this year, and not the media that have been stridently calling half the country bad names like it was going out of style.

Pro tip:  When you go to see a stage magician, don't look at his cards or his wand or what have you.  Watch his hands.

Do I have to explain this?

Women go on strike for a day and a country panics...

...men go on strike for...okay, probably for the most part men will founder on trying to cook and do laundry and manage kids a la "Mr. Mom" for a day more than anyone will suffer, with some possible exceptions, if men go on strike for a day.

But what if it's a week?

People who work outside the home and have no homemaking skills may panic immediately if they don't have someone to have their food and clothes ready--we clothe ourselves daily and eat every few hours, after all.  But these are skills than can be learned to subsistence levels quickly.

What about the stuff guys do that keeps them from being smarter about reading recipes or care tags on the back collars of shirts?

Over three quarters of professionals in transportation (something similar happened in Australia recently, so little need to speculate) and utilities, and five sixths of mineral extraction (including oil and gas, so that's almost all our electricity) are male.  That won't have much of an immediate effect in lower population density parts of the US, but in NYC where public transit is the norm, most people aren't going anywhere except on foot.  How long can you live on "I'll stay home today" when your electricity and water are in the same state as taxis, buses, and subways?

Sure, some of these jobs require certifications or formal training, so it might violate a business's insurance policy or accreditation or actually be illegal if women just stepped up to fill in the gaps..but considering almost 90% of the US police force is male, maybe there wouldn't be enough law enforcement around to stop women with pluck but no experience from flying 747s or doing thoracic surgery or taking to the streets as unregulated militia on top of juggling cooking, laundry, kids, and a day job.

But losing nine tenths of your law enforcement strength brings other problems, so good luck with that.

Stolen from a comment on YouTube:

"So I take it that the next time a black man who is wearing a uniform or flashing a badge follows me not just around the store, but OUT of the store and down the block, I should tell him 'You can't do this, because you have no institutional power over me.'"

This in response to the notion that racism is "racial prejudice" plus institutional power, therefore minorities can't be racist; that is, because a minority bigot doesn't have the collective social power to oppress anyone else, there's really nothing wrong with their attitude or the shitty way they might treat people on a personal level.

Except Kanye.  He crossed a line by agreeing with a different subset of white people, so the narrative would insist you believe, and now he enjoys not just the perquisites but all the collective guilt of white civilization.  So the narrative would insist you believe.

Of course, it also neatly obscures a double standard: whites are personally guilty of racism because of demographics and collective, historical racist stuff whether or not they personally wield or enjoy any advantage of a biased system, just like how minorities are not guilty of racism because they don't have the advantages of a large, widespread system invisibly codified to help only them, no matter how hostile they are in person to people of a different demographic or how coordinated they and others in the same demographic are in their efforts to make their encounters with a majority out-group difficult or dangerous.

And this is deliberate.

The point I'm going to make is worth its own post but I riff on it a lot these days.

Trump wants to regulate immigration, to stop people from illegally sneaking into the country and working for less than minimum wage and not paying taxes, and voting just because they live here most of the year, just like we've been talking about for decades.  These are all legitimate concerns: voting is a right and duty of citizens but not of foreign nationals who are only here for their jobs and not interested in becoming US citizens (and obviously this doesn't include the ones who do, but I shouldn't have to point that out), and other countries recognize that when Americans go abroad for work; people who work and get paid under the table make it harder for people on the IRS's radar like US citizens to get jobs, and that really sets a double standard for minimum wage arguments, and "lettuce will become expensive" is really not a compelling counterargument.  But what does everyone say about Trump?  That he just hates immigrants, and it's just because he's racist, and he's wrong because it's ironic since he's of European extraction.

This is not an argument.  This is an obfuscation.

It's also why they say Trump is "literally Hitler" even though Hitler died before he was born and Bush was Hitler before him just because he was moderately conservative by the standards of the day.  It's why they try so hard to show how there's no difference between the National Socialist German Workers' Party and moderns who either consistently vote conservative or actually are racists who just don't happen to be patronizing about it (depends on whom you ask), to the point where if Hitler were alive they'd be telling you he's secretly on the lecture circuit in Mississippi and Indiana--and the only reason alleged modern Nazis of today (not official neo-Nazis, but the ones who just get called Nazi online) get away with their attempts to distance themselves from the German political movement of the mid-20th century is Nuremberg made sure there wasn't anybody left to say today "Yeah, he's one of us."  It's why they have someone volunteer to show up at an NRA function wearing a rifle with a plastic stock and black backpack with the Stars and Bars draped over it to give the impression that the KKK was a branch of the NRA, rather than the NRA being formed partly in opposition to the KKK--you can tell it's someone doing a false flag operation because in his attempt to make a recognizable caricature of conservatives, he's the only one openly armed and is obviously trying too hard to fit in.

When they say "literally Nazis," they aren't just exaggerating.  They want you to believe that's actually true, and maybe they believe it themselves.

Even this post is going to end up used as an example of being insufficiently opposed to Nazi practices (i.e. that not being zealously opposed enough makes me one of them, like in the dying throes of every totalitarian regime of the 20th century would have it--which should tell you something about the nature and danger of their political motivations), by focusing on the argument that Trump and his voters are not all wrong, and skipping over the part where I argue that they're not literally Nazis.  They'll show a picture of Hitler saluting next to a picture of some Republican waving to a crowd and think they've made an airtight argument, and then either use that as evidence for "literally a Nazi" or use "I've proven you're literally a Nazi by ignoring all facts and logic to the contrary" as evidence that the aforementioned juxtaposition is, in whatever sense they put stock in such a thing, the truth.

The most annoying—and I mean merely annoying, but it’s high on the list—about the early 21st century is that everything is labeled as terror.
Unless it’s racism or sexism or some such, but I think terror sums it up best. 
Bully defends himself by saying it’s a joke, and you say “if the mark didn’t agree to it, it’s not a joke, it’s terror?”  No it’s not. What planet do you live on where people have to get informed consent before engaging in any interaction? How could they if attempting to request consent is unsolicited contact in the first place? It’s also not funny if you explain the joke first. Human beings know this.
But this is a bully so we don’t have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Fine; He’s not on trial. But it’s bullying; it might be abuse, it might be harassment, but it’s not terror. He’s not trying to intimidate you to get something else he wants. Or maybe he is, but he’s also treating you like shit because that in itself is what he does to enjoy himself. He’s not trying to oppress you, he just wants your lunch money. Your human dignity is so far down his list of concerns it never occurs to him that you might have any to violate
A guy shoots up a crowd?  It might be terorism, but “what else do you’d call it?” Is a dumb question. Maybe he just wants 26 people dead. Maybe he wants those 26 people dead. Maybe he’s mentally ill and his shooting up a crowd has nothing to do in his mind with 26 people dying.  Whatever his intentions, it's a mass shooting.  Calling everything an act of terrorism, domestic or otherwise, doesn't open people's eyes.  It just makes it easier for real terrorists to hide in plain sight because they don't stand out in a crowd of random people who all are stuck with that label.
Of course, that could be the point.  Try to make everything sound like the problem that everyone wants to solve and then get broad laws passed to address a now-nebulous and omnibus crisis, and profit over the disintegration of society.

If a double standard for you is a double standard for me....

So I'm watching TV and start seeing commercials for some new injustice called the pink tax.

Sure.  Make it sound like it's some institutionalized/systemic/patriarchal policy that the ever-male-dominated Congress has signed into law under Trump or some such rot.

As it goes, the notion is that women spend $1351 a year, typically, more than men do on personal stuff like bath products and underwear.

They complain that it's not fair, insulting.  Sounds unjust, doesn't it?

Funny.  A few months ago, I was hearing all about how the fragile male ego forced me to buy deodorant that didn't have pink teddy bears on them.  Now I'm hearing that, while we're all buying the exact same thing, the stuff with pink teddy bears is more expensive.

Maybe we're just being frugal.

I've seen women's bathrooms and you've seen men's bathrooms, so we both know "we buy the same stuff" is a lie.  I see cream rinse in some showers, none used solely by men, and I have no idea what it's for because I choose not to buy it and don't need to.

Are the pink teddy bears exactly the same as the blue ones?  Then buy the blue ones.  You can choose to.  No one is putting a gun to your head, or threatening jail time as if this were a real tax.

I mean, how do you think you're going to "repeal" it when it's not actually a tax on just the stuff you want?  It's just you buying more, and more expensive, stuff. How do you think you can fix that without destroying everything else? You’re talking changing prices by force of law, interfering with buying patterns, controlling what bathroom products are made and sold.

That’s going to cost society more than $1351 a head.  And I don't mean just in the pocketbook.

Was browsing Pinterest and found something vaguely political I thought I might agree with partly but seemed nuanced enough to make me willing to consider some contrary opinions. Something that I thought showcased well the inherent problems of a large and intrusive government, even if you thought such a government was a good idea in general. Usually these opportunities are in the face of half baked arguments I could have countered in high school (even considering that was decades before the current situations developed) and I hope these people pushing them also do.

So I click through to the site and discover that it was icing on a shit cake, written by someone who apparently without any sense of irony thought those particular problems were in fact the desired outcomes: the rest of it was what I was used to and what I try to avoid just to keep the anger and frustration in my life at tolerable levels.

Then I saw the caveat: no conservative opinions allowed, go to some anti communist site to bitch about us instead; liberalism is an inherently inclusive philosophy.

Oooh....yeah, swing and a miss, buddy. Maybe you got burned by some rude or angry conservatives, but this wasn’t even pretending to honor your principles.

Another case of dishonest eisegesis

Saw a video on YouTube recently about pirate trivia. A lot of it was interesting, including an item about how pirates practiced gay marriage. This surprised me a little bit because I didn't think "practicing marriage" was on the list of typical pirate activities at all. So they went on for a minute about how two pirates might decide to throw in together: they might pool their share of the spoils, if one died the other would get something for it and was responsible for making final arrangements...and they, I kid you not, would occasionally share a prostitute when they were in port. They'd share a prostitute? Kinks aside, that doesn't sound like anything that should be described as a marriage, gay or otherwise. What it sounds like is a mutual power of attorney compact between two close friends. It wasn't long ago that two men could be friends without being presumed to be lovers, and even something as seedy as splitting a prostitute wouldn't have cast doubt on that. But, anything to muddy the waters, eh? Keep this in mind next time someone makes a similar claim.

On the value and limits of emotional argumentation

This isn't supposed to be about guns so much as something I saw on social media regarding last week's shooting inspired me to write this.  I will use some relevant examples, but this is not going to be a rant against people who do nothing but pull on others' heartstrings in order to achieve some goal that makes them feel safe or righteous or wealthy and powerful.

As I said in my last post, logic and facts aren't the only vehicles to truth; you just haven't arrived at it if right reason contradicts whatever your epiphany is (setting aside cases where maybe you just don't have enough data or brainpower to navigate some conundrums; I mean no insult or condescension as this world is big and complicated enough that even our brightest sometimes disagree and even get shown up by more humble minds), then maybe the revelation you had wasn't so fully true after all.

On the other hand, it can cut through a lot of the sophistry we use to lie to ourselves to make life a little easier to bear or our sins a little easier to ignore.

That's what people are feeling when they they experience a sort of mental "waking up" after some major life or society changing event.

The only problem is, it's often misdirected or just wrong.

Actually that's not the only problem.  In a phenomenon related to confirmation bias, if one relies too strongly on emotional revelations to take shortcuts around empirical analysis and logic, one will be inclined to take shortcuts around everything, and any effort or meme that resonates with the original emotional experience will be used to attempt to further whatever the goal is.  Thus we have widely circulated "statistics" like "there have been 18 school shootings already in 2018," but you only get that number if you include shootings in the same neighborhood and shootings between people who are neither faculty nor students at times that are not during school hours but happen to be in the parking lot (how such an altercation is supposed to meaningfully contribute to students' collective sense of fear is based entirely on empty, forced association, like if I say "Ivanka Trump" and "Founders Brewery" a lot people will start connecting the two in their minds just because I did it so many times first).  The real number of school shootings in 2018 so far is 7, and 5 have resulted in casualties (not all fatalities).  That's still horrible, but it's not the epidemic people want us to think it is.  Three thousand people died on 9/11, but you don't hear anything about an epidemic of religion-motivated terror attacks, even though those still hit the news, do you?

But I digress.  I was talking about how these epiphanies people have when they're smacked in the face with a tragedy often motivate people to espouse or do something unhelpful or counterproductive or useless.  Well, I was about to make that point, anyway.

The morsel on social media that stirred me to post yet again this month went something like this:

"When I have to wonder as I put my kids on the school bus if I'll ever see them again, it's time for things to change."

So, what's your plan?  To drive the kids yourself?  Gun homicides are competitive with vehicular homicides.  Homicides in general are the cause of death for school aged children roughly one fifth as often as accidents.

Ah, but that's not really what you meant, I know.  Like I said Thursday, gun deaths are offensive, but children's deaths by other means, in any quantity, lie somewhere between acceptable and unremarkable.

When I point something like this out, the only I answer I get is something in the shape of "it's easier to ban unnecessary and dangerous things like guns than stop everyone from using the cars they need because some people can't bear the responsibility."  There's some irony there I won't unpack today, but what they're doing is describing the problem and its solution as very simple things, and then hoping you'll confuse "easy" for "simple."

So, sure, there haven't been school shootings in the UK since guns were banned.  But knifing deaths (and survived injuries) are up.  And the homicide rate is lower...wait, no it's not:  the UK reports murder rates for these things, not homicide rates.  Murder is a homicide that a court of law has conclusively determined was unlawful, and thus is a significantly smaller number even if the total death rate is comparable or potentially higher.

So, like I would ask a slacktivist who puts a Hillary 2018 sticker on his car and goes to an election party to celebrate the historical inevitability instead of participating in it at the poll:

How do you think, if someone put you in charge or asked for your suggestion like I'm doing now, we could get as a country from where we are now to a place where people prone to mass murder are unable to get this one type of tool for scratching whatever crazy itch they have that makes them do this?
Do you want the police to be armed so they can use decisive force to protect you from someone attacking you with a bat or a knife or a jar of battery acid or their brute strength and gang members?
Do you think they will be available to help you any more than they are now?  What would you do to make that happen?
If you want the whole country a gun-free zone, what are you going to do to prevent something like when Prohibition fomented a lively black market for liquor and organized crime?  Why do you think any efforts you made now for this would be more successful than what turned out to be the only Constitutional amendment to be repealed?  Sure, gunsmithing is harder than brewing beer or distilling, but there are lots of other necessary things to society that require machining equipment, and if you've got that and the raw material you'd be using anyway and a little expertise, you're a week away from arming a small militia.

Sometimes they have answers to a few of these questions, but they're all solutions that are worse than the problems.  It's someone else's job to do the hard work.  But usually that doesn't get done either; we get something slipshod hypothetically run through Congress and then everyone clutches their pearls when unrefined details turn out to be show stoppers.  Then we're buying pre-owned AKs from Mexico and pulling contraband of various calibers out from the floorboards, because we knew the bad guys were already doing that.

But that's another problem they're hoping will just go away in the sweep.

No, it actually isn't about guns.

I know they keep saying it is, and telling people who weren't there hiding or wringing their hands that they're not sympathetic enough to have a valid (let alone voiced) opinion.  But that's because describing the experience of fear is easier than being rational.

Sure, logic and facts aren't the only way to apprehend some truths, but truth and right reason cannot contradict, so if you are struggling with a contradiction, check your facts, check your logic, and check your gut; at least one and possibly all three are wrong.

I normally avoid hot political issues--okay, not abortion, but that's an old controversy and everyone is used to it from a political perspective--because it's an opportunity for social media to go crazy that am no longer young enough to find anything but tiresome and annoying and wrong, but I will make a rare exception and hopefully have the self discipline not to violate my policy...well...a third time.

I'll expand on my next point in the relative future, but without demeaning their horrific experience this week, as long as everyone is being political instead of remember our own and each other's humanity, these kids today, I tell ya...are just as dumb as we were at that age.

"A gun killed 17 students.  A gun caused all this fear."  Bullshit.  A disturbed teenager--I'll restrict my opinion about his mental health versus his snowflake status to watercooler chat at work--killed 17 students.  Or would it really have been okay to you if he just burned the school down?  Probably would have achieved a significantly higher body count; is that a fair trade in your eyes?  And fear?  Okay, the prospect of a shooter is more alarming than that of someone with a machete, Florida schools largely not resembling slasher flicks, but one generally doesn't see honest and well-adjusted people going around crying at the sight of a pistol on a cop's hip or unable to sleep because speculation about how many neighbors might have guns--even field stripped, unloaded, and locked away--in their own houses!

No.  They trot out the fear and hard cases to make hay while the sun's shining, but when the dust settles it's back to normal.  And in the end, no one cares that it was a sick young man who killed 17 children.  No one cares that Congress does not actually have the power to stop a distraught youth from coming unhinged.  But people will keep thinking it does, because they keep listening to people who keep saying it does, because they don't care about murdered teenagers or teenage murderers, they only care about what what they're going to get out of trying to corral public sentiment.

Just so we're clear...

...if someone points out that health care should be non-profit, it would behoove them to be reminded that:

1. Actual hospitals in the United States already are
2. "Non-profit" does not mean "government-run," except in the case of VA hospitals, which (alas, tragically, for our vets) are something nobody should be striving for.