We’re bullying the manly studs with guns?

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Yesterday, I could start the day with the happy news that New Zealand had passed progressive legislation, and then burst into song. Today I have to look at my home country, and…goddamn, but we’re a dysfunctional mess. America is basically a rogue state, run by plutocrats and incompetents.

After Aurora and Newtown, there was a surge of sentiment in favor of checking the extravagant dissemination of deadly weapons in this country. It’s just a little too easy for hateful lunatics and demented haters to get their hands on weapons of mass murder, and so people proposed taking baby steps and moderating America’s addiction to guns just a little bit. So a bipartisan bill made it to the senate that would have made small changes: it would have required more background checks for gun buyers, and it would have banned assault weapons and high capacity clips. These are not terribly restrictive rules. Who could possibly want felons or people with violent mental illnesses to be able to buy guns casually? Who needs a 60-shot magazine for an assault rifle?

The bill was defeated in the Senate. No word if the attending senators rose up and were led in a rousing chorus of Wango Tango by Ted Nugent afterwards.

Take a look at the roll call for the vote. It was almost perfectly split with the Republicans voting against it (Harry Reid joined them!) and the Democrats voting for it (with John McCain!). It was a simple, common-sense bill and the Republicans united to vote it down. I think it’s way past time that we voted every damn Republican down.

Gabby Giffords agrees. In her editorial on the vote, she says,

Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.

She’s wrong about one thing: to let neglect and crime rule is the American way. We have to change it. It’s going to take more than just elections and laws, though, we’re going to have to change American culture. Because it’s ripe with assholes.

For example, one prominent right-wing, pro-gun voice is Instapundit. You might want to savor his response to Giffords.

insta-ass

Stunning, ain’t it?

He’s telling a woman who was shot in the head and saw friends gunned down to stop bullying the gun lobby. We’ve got people who want to be able to make impulse purchases of weapons designed with one purpose — killing people — and Instahack calls the victim of one of their assaults a bully because she’s trying to promote sensible gun laws.

You can’t deny it. His is one of the voices of America.

But it’s long past time for the rest of us to tell the gun-obsessed macho boy-children to fucking grow up.

Please read Brian Leiter’s very polite gutting of Instapundit. It’s a thing of beauty.

Or we could all just move to New Zealand

This is Maurice Williamson, a member of the New Zealand parliament, speaking in defense of marriage equality.

I would like him to leave New Zealand, move to anywhere in the US, run for the Senate or House, win, and bring some sense and humor to American politics. If he’s not willing to do that, can we at least have a few more Americans with that attitude replacing the pious nitwits we’ve got now?

And then the bill passes, and…everyone stands up and starts singing?

Damn. It’s so weird to see politics working and doing good. The equivalent over here would be a session opening with some loud stupid prayer, the majority of the politicians napping or skipping out, a few ludicrous bureaucrats droning pro forma over whether we should torture distant brown people or drop bombs on them, or tweaking a bill to give more money to the rich.

Then they don’t sing or express any joy at what they’ve done. I could imagine them standing up and maybe singing some grim dolorous hymn, or better yet, humming the Imperial March from Star Wars, but that’s about it.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have politicians who were pursuing their career because they wanted to make the world a better place?

Bobby Jindal opened his mouth again

He was asked about education. He replied with a tired creationist excuse.

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Bottom line, at the end of the day, we want our kids to be exposed to the best facts. Let’s teach them about the big bang theory, let’s teach them about evolution, let’s teach them — I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that people, some people, have these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about ‘intelligent design.’

The first sentence is sort of OK — yes, let’s teach the best ideas, the best evidence, the best science, the facts as we know them, and that includes good science like evolution and the big bang. But what Jindal then throws up as examples are bad science, claims without evidence, bad ideas that are contradicted by the evidence. Creationism and Intelligent Design Creationism are not the “best facts”, they don’t even cut it as “adequate facts” — they are bad and they are non-facts.

Can Jindal not tell the difference?

And since when is good education about teaching kids what their less-well-educated parents want them to know? How about if we teach them the truth, instead?

Your comparisons make me cry

When we’ve got bad news, we get comparisons that show how deluded people are on other subjects. The NRA has been doing a great job promoting less gun control, and one of their tactics has been the myth of woman empowerment by gun…when on average, women are far more anti-gun than men. But do I really need to be reminded that 29% of Americans believe in little green men?

The data on guns isn’t so good for the ladies. A 2003 study by The American Journal of Public Health found there was “no clear evidence” that owning a gun reduced women’s chances of being killed. An analysis this year by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that “in states that require a background check for every handgun sale, 38 percent fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners.” Six times more women were murdered by intimate partners than by strangers in 2010. A study published in the Journal of Urban Health in 2002 found that women were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun in states with high gun ownership than in states with low gun ownership. Of the 10 states with the highest rates of female homicide, five are in the South. Southern white men are the most likely to own guns, at 61 percent. Southern white women are the women most likely to own guns, at 25 percent. That’s 5 percent more than the percent of American women who believe aliens exist. 

Aliens: More real than the myth that more guns means women are safer.

Or how about this: we get the good news that public support for gay marriage is rising, but get reminded that belief in creationism has been steady, and right now, only 44% disapprove of gay marriage, while 46% think the earth is 6000 years old.

What is going on? The Supreme Court hearings on the challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s ban on same-sex marriage suggest barriers to legalisation will fall eventually. Growing public support for same-sex marriage is another factor: the latest poll by the Pew Research Center shows 49 per cent of Americans approve of same-sex marriage, with 44 per cent disapproving.

This number is significant, not just because it shows that the swing in support for same-sex marriage has been swift, but because – as Jon Stewart pointed out on The Daily Show this week – more Americans have an “evolved” view on same-sex marriage than actually believe in evolution. Forty-six per cent of them think the human race was created in a single day within the past 10,000 years, according to a 2012 Gallup poll. It is unclear how many of them will eventually evolve this view.

I get the message. People aren’t rational.

But I also get the promising message from the fact that we see a rise in support for gay marriage that there are tactics that work, and they involve actually touching personal and emotional and human values. The gay marriage campaign has been working because they’ve combined sound, logical arguments — how can you deny rights to one couple and give them to another? — with personal stories of people in love, and people excluded by cold regulations and bigotry.

We ought to try that more.

Can we at least fire this one media lackey?

When the revolution comes, media lackeys will not be lined up against the wall. I have a better idea, inspired by Robert Johnson of Business Insider, who actually wrote an article titled THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GITMO STRIKE: Detainees Are Treated Absurdly Well. He had the gall to write this:

While indefinite detainment without trial may be morally offensive…

Whoa, whoa, WHOA. Robert, I’m going to have to stop you right there. Indefinite detainment without trial IS morally offensive, so why are you writing a defense of it? Don’t you think that clause just brings your whole argument to a screeching halt? The “While…” tells me already that you are about to completely ignore the morality of the issue.

But go ahead, continue.

…the overriding philosophy on base these days is to treat the detainees really well. Compliant detainees enjoy a selection of six balanced meals, 25 cable TV channels, classes, and an array of electronic gadgetry and entertainment. I’m talking about a Nintendo DS for every compliant detainee, plus Playstation 3 access with a library full of video games.

OK, you seem to think that is sufficient to offset the immorality of indefinite detainment. Which is where my idea comes from: after the revolution, you, Robert, will be confined in a small room with a television, some holy books, a healthy but bland diet, and some video games. You’ll be happy, I presume? It’ll be just like a long, very long, vacation at a secluded island resort!

Except, you know, you actually wrote that the detainees are treated absurdly well, and also wrote this about the guards’ custom of taking apart copies of the Koran.

Zak demonstrated why Koran inspections are important, taking a hardcover Koran, flipping it upside down, and showing the wide opening under the spine.

Last time they stopped Koran searches, he explains, several detainees stashed medication in these tunnels of paper and then took the medication all at once in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Suicide is another effective way of getting media attention, and there remains a rumor among detainees that three simultaneous suicides would force the Pentagon to close Guantanamo — despite three suicides already happening in 2006.

It’s a bit odd, don’t you think, that while on this long vacation with good food and lots of video games, the residents are in such despair that they’re trying to kill themselves.

I’ll warn my wife. Next time I get a few days off and am lounging about eating and playing video games, it’s really a sign that I’m miserable and should be on suicide watch.

Rand Paul edumacates the black folks

So…this guy Paul is considered a likely presidential candidate?

Does he really think educated students at Howard University are completely unaware of the Southern strategy, that the racist Southern Democrats switched parties as soon as it was clear that Democrats were endorsing civil rights legislation, while Republicans were opposing it? How patronizingly ignorant.

While we’re playing games with labels, I have another question. I saw a copy of our campus’s far right wing, conservative, alternative student newspaper, the NorthStar. Inside, it has a joke (“A person with a liberal arts degree says, ‘Would you like fries with that?'” —pathetically tired, and at a liberal arts university), an article praising Andrew Breitbart, an analysis of gay marriage that concludes it would not be good for the country, an article on Zora Neale Hurston that breathlessly reveals that she was…a Republican(!!!) (in the first half of the twentieth century — see Jon Stewart, above), an article titled “True Feminism” that is basically an anti-choice tirade, and a tribute to Margaret Thatcher.

But here’s the funny thing. The paper does not call itself conservative, or right wing, or pro-Republican, or anything like that…no, the label splattered on the front page and scattered throughout is that they are “classically liberal”. OK, sure, there was and is a movement that arose in 19th century Europe that mirrors the goals of a certain current political subgroup, but the meaning of the labels have shifted in the US, so that phrase is now an attempt at obfuscation. “Classical liberalism” is basically identical to “Modern libertarianism”, and on some issues (such as the importance of capitalism) it’s farther to the right than modern conservatives, and on others (personal liberty, for instance), it makes noises about being somewhere towards the left — although a paper that decries abortion and gay marriage isn’t quite so tolerant as they’d like to claim.

Even their campus organization record makes this claim.

The NorthStar is a classically liberal monthly publication. We promote the Marketplace of Ideas and limited government principles.

What amuses me, though, is that they seem to have become embarrassed by the label “conservative”, and don’t even want to be known as “libertarian” — so they reach back into their history books and dredge up an old term that can be easily confused with the current understanding of what it means to be “liberal”. Why? Because conservatives have been tainted by their long courtship of the fringe wackaloon side of the American electorate. And now they’re trying to escape the consequences of their long romancing of the deeply racist side of American culture by trying to remind everyone of their role in the Emancipation Proclamation…a role they have most effectively repudiated in the last 60 years.

Joe Barton has data!

The Rethuglican from Texas wants us all to appreciate the diversity of causes behind climate change. It might be natural, it might be human-caused, and it might just be magic.

I would point out that if you’re a believer in in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.

Don’t just blame Big Oil! It could also be God’s fault!

Virginia is for lovers…of similar skin tone and opposite sex who don’t touch each other’s genitals with anything other than their own

The worst attorney general in the world has to be Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli, who has been on a crusade to promote a far right conservative social agenda.

The Washington Post wrote that Cuccinelli has been ”the most overtly partisan Attorney General in Virginia history” and ”has waged war on Obamacare, harassed climate-change scientists, sanctioned discrimination against homosexuals and embraced Arizona’s (now mostly gutted) immigration law.” Cuccinelli waged an all-out assault on academic freedom by using state resources to sue a University of Virginia Professor who was researching global warming, and bullied members on the State Board of Health into shutting down abortion clinics by threatening to sue them.

But I’m hoping now that he has finally crossed the line with an effort to control people’s sex lives.

Although most people think sodomy laws have been unconstitutional since the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli would like to explain why — in his view — that’s not so.

What’s more, he wants the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to agree with him and uphold the constitutionality of Virginia’s sodomy law — which makes anal and oral sex between people of any sex a crime — in the process.

Yes. Ken Cuccinelli has a platform of outlawing blow jobs. Anyone campaigning against him in the future needs to remind the Virginia electorate of that.