Shut up, Bill Keller

You can’t get much more tone deaf than this: Bill Keller uses Martin Luther King Day to…

Somewhere in all this worthy commemoration we should pause to pay homage to a conservative white Republican named William Moore McCulloch.

McCulloch sounds like a guy who did some good things for civil rights, so no criticism of him…but is this really an appropriate time to say we should take a break from praising that black dude and spend a little more time talking about a conservative white Republican? They get all the attention the other 364 days of the year, a black civil rights hero can’t even get one day to be recognized?

I take it back. David Brooks belongs on the NY Times op-ed pages

He serves the needs of the upper class so well — he’s such a perfect lickspittle. His latest column deplores all this leveler talk of economic inequities: don’t you peons realize that a widening gap has two parts, the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, and the two have absolutely nothing to do with one another? Oh, sure, there are some perverse compensation schemes on Wall Street, but mainly wealth is perpetuated because rich marry rich and pass on their money to their rich kids, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that, so let’s skip over that issue with one sentence and spend the whole column blaming the poor. Let’s focus on poor people! And that doesn’t mean raising the minimum wage, oh no. We have to resist the temptation to reduce everything to simple causes, therefore he proposes that the problem is simply a lack of social mobility. Just fix that. We can close the gap by closing our eyes to the sight of the 1% skittering off rapidly to the right and a world that laughs at obscene wealth and embraces pornographically hardcore wealth, and instead just tell all the poor people to start plodding off in that same direction. That’s how we’ll close the gap!

Shorter David Brooks: If the poor would just stop begging for bread and start eating cake, rather than blaming looters and exploiters and profiteers and that whole infrastructure of privilege, why, everything will be hunky dory in no time at all.

OK, let’s try it. How about giving Naquasia LeGrand a column in the NY Times, too?

[Read more…]

Gun culture in America

Write one post about gun control, and guess what happens? Your inbox fills up with crap from people who love their guns. Just love ’em. It’s everything from calm descriptions of existing gun laws, and aren’t they onerous enough already (no, obviously, they aren’t) to veiled threats to show me how useful concealed handguns are in putting down enemies of Liberty. After reading enough of them, I’ve decided that it is inappropriate and inaccurate for me to always be mentally referring to these people as gun nuts. Sorry, you’re not gun nuts at all, which is unfair to people who are mentally ill; you’re gun assholes, instead.

For example, on Twitter I’ve got this person who is quite insistent about ‘refuting’ me, giving me these lovely anecdotes taken from gun asshole sites to prove how wonderful guns are at helping people.

Tweet Child O’ Mine @EwwMoist
.@pzmyers – Concealed carry permit holder stops mass shooter. bearingarms.com/concealed-carr…

Really? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if now and then in the flurry of flying bullets, someone managed to shoot a bad guy — although I do kind of object to the idea of living in an atmosphere of hurtling chunks of lead — but then I read the story, and it isn’t even an accurate summary.

Police on Sunday afternoon said they believe the gunman went in and started shooting, hitting the three victims. As he was on his way out, somebody at the bar shot him.

The actual story is that a gun asshole, angry at being denied entrance to a “Gentleman’s Club”, shot three innocent people, and then as he was leaving, another gun asshole shot the first gun asshole.

I count that as 4 people getting shot by two gun assholes. No one won. And this is an argument against gun control…how?

The other argument this @Ewwmoist person keeps flinging at me is that there are 300 million guns floating about in this country, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and therefore there’s nothing that can be done. That’s about the dumbest argument for maintaining a state of destructive lawlessness I’ve ever heard.

Hey, the US consumes 300 metric tons of cocaine every year. I guess we should just give up and install vending machines in the public schools. Hey, 7500 gallons of an industrial chemical just tainted the drinking water in West Virginia. Looks like a great argument for less regulation of chemical storage! Hey, we’re pumping almost 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Time to give up! (That last one is actually a serious argument used by many Republicans.)

I don’t know about you, but when I spill toothpaste on my countertop, I don’t enshrine it as a new fixture of my bathroom decor, and I don’t decide to squirt even more on top of the blob. I clean it up. And it looks like we’ve got a very big cleanup job in the US. Thanks, gun assholes!

Meanwhile, what are we liberals doing? We’re basically performing surreal Portlandia skits. That link is to a story about a couple going out to dinner and seeing that someone in a neighboring table has a handgun stuffed into the waistband of his pants. What to do, what to do? They eventually tell their concerns to their server as they’re leaving (who dithers about not knowing what to do either), and then they write a blog post asking whether their reaction was appropriate.

What the fuck? The restaurant has a sign prohibiting firearms inside. There is no argument, no second guessing, no hesitation. The instant you see a gun asshole carrying in such a place, you go up to the manager, and you say, “I suspect there’s a gun asshole over there with a deadly weapon; I don’t feel safe here, and I expect you to do something about it or I’m leaving.” That’s it. And you don’t freakin’ feel guilty about having a reasonable expectation of safety in a public place.

And that’s gun control in America. The gun assholes orgasm over shootouts in strip clubs, while the liberals tiptoe about, afraid to ask if we can get a little relief from the gun culture at a restaurant.

Die, banks, die

When I got home last night, I saw something ominous. Leaning up against my door was one of those overnight letters from Fed Ex. This:

bankamerica

I thought, uh-oh, who’s suing me now? Because there’s nothing I’m doing that requires the urgency of an overnight letter (it even announced on the back in big bold orange letters “EXTREMELY URGENT!”) right now. Then I saw it was from the Bank of America. They hold my mortgage — which I pay promptly every month, also kicking in a little extra on the principal — so I thought maybe it had to do with something essential about that.

You know where this is going. I opened it, it contained a one page letter offering an appointment to refinance my mortgage. Absolutely nothing urgent about it, and also something I’m absolutely uninterested in doing, since we got in at a good interest rate and already have an affordable payment. This is Morris; we’re buying our house with payments that are two thirds of what we paid in rent for an apartment in a Philadelphia suburb.

But I’m getting annoyed at the persistence and lies. You know this wouldn’t be something to my advantage; the banks aren’t really at all interested in helping me pay them less, and this thing promised me an average reduction of about 20% in my monthly payment. They’re already constantly dunning me with requests to refinance every week in regular mail, requests that get dumped in the trash unopened, but this is a new attention-grabbing low.

I’ll tell you what, Bank of America. You want to save me money and altruistically reduce my payments? Easy. Unilaterally credit me $5/month and stop wasting money sending me these stupid letters. You’ll save more money than that on printing and postage, I’ll have less trash and save a little bit each month, we both win. Alternatively…eat shit and die.

<groan>

A week from Tuesday, UMM will host a distinguished visitor whose anti-war work I respect, but who otherwise is a raving nutcase. And wouldn’t you know it, his talk is specifically centered dead on the topic in which he is an ignoramus: Chris Hedges will be lecturing us on The New Atheists as Secular Fundamentalists. Promising title, yes?

You know, I’ve already heard this same stupid song before, and I didn’t like it then. I suppose I’m going to have to go listen to this product of the Harvard Divinity School rant about it again, and I’m not going to enjoy it.

I would have enjoyed hearing him dissect the war culture in America, but listening to him blame the atheists for both the terror and the war on terror is going to be annoying.

Poor put-upon wingnut flings silly accusations

Last semester, I wrote about our vile, racist, ‘alternative’ campus newspaper, the North Star. I seem to have annoyed its editor, John Geiger, who slipped a complaining letter (pdf) under my door last night. In it, he comically accuses me of stealing their November print run (his evidence? The distribution locations smelled like chloroform and other sciency things.), and ploddingly goes through his calculations of how much it was worth, adding things like 20% interest and a 40% “charity tax”, to demand that I immediately pay him $4,017.

Ho hum. Right wing humor.

I suggest that he chalk it all up to the White Man’s Burden that afflicts him so, and just hit up the far right dink-tanks that subsidize these awful papers all across the country. Forward the letter to the Koch brothers, I’m sure they’d respond with sympathy and cash.

From me, though, he demands checks, cash, paypal, debit, credit, bitcoin, appreciating assets (such as real-estate or valuable time-pieces), and tangible assets (like gold and silver). I don’t see eye-rolls or mocking laughter on the list, so I guess he’s out of luck.

America has a disease

A man and his wife are out on a movie date, and before the show starts, he talks to his 3-year-old daughter at home on his cell phone. And apparently he was doing some texting, too. Clearly, our big problem is our dependency on these ubiquitous little telecommunications devices…

Wait, no, that’s not it. The problem is that sitting nearby was Curtis Reeves, 71, a retired police officer, who resented the chatter before his movie came on, and Mr Reeves was carrying a goddamn fucking gun in the theater, and argued with the talkative father and eventually shot him dead and wounded his wife.

The Tampa police seriously “considered if this could be a ‘stand your ground’ case but decided the criteria did not apply.” Obviously not. The victim was white. But holy shitballs, they considered this? An armed asshole guns down a man over some noise during the movie previews and they contemplated letting him go?

Then, minutes after I read that, aghast, I get a little beep, and someone sent me this link.

reddit-rifle

Reddit is selling personalized guns with their logo.

Personal privacy is prized among Redditors, most of whom participate on the site anonymously. A fervent pro-gun constituency among them makes the market opportunity for gun dealers all the more attractive. The primary subreddit on the topic, /r/Guns, currently has more than 154,000 subscribers, and GunsForSale, created in March 2011, has doubled in size in the last year, with more than 7,200 subscribers. Gun dealers using the site indicate that they’ve enjoyed a spike in demand in the past year, after the Sandy Hook massacre ignited a national debate and pro-gun activists whipped up fears about a regulatory crackdown.

Yeah, that’s the big worry with a bunch of dead kids — someone might grow a spine and a brain somewhere and take steps to regulate guns. They needn’t have worried: this is America, we’re aspiring to mutual bloody annihilation among the citizenry.

And christ, reddit.

They’re always hucksters at heart

When I heard about Eben Alexander’s I-died-and-went-to-heaven story, my first reaction was dismissive: I’ve heard these stories so many times, and they always turn out to be confabulation. When the brain is rebooted after trauma, especially if the process is prolonged as in Alexander’s case, it tries to reconstruct the continuity of experience by building memories (heck, even in normal healthy brains, memories are constructed). What I would have condemned Alexander for is extreme gullibility, unforgivable in a highly trained neurosurgeon.

I did not assume he was making stuff up for a payday. But not so fast; an Esquire reporter did some digging into Eben Alexander’s background, and also checked the details of his claims in his book, and it looks like we ought to be more suspicious.

When Alexander got sick in late 2008, he hadn’t practiced surgery in a year and faced a $3 million malpractice lawsuit. He now has a best-selling book and a movie deal.

Not just a malpractice suit, which are fairly common, but a whole string of malpractice suits that made him the subject of the highest number of such suits in his state. He’d similarly faded out of practice in Massachusetts, first, and then moved to Virginia to restart, where he then lost his surgical privileges at his hospital after a succession of screwups in spinal surgery…and after altering surgical records to cover his tracks.

Whoops.

Oh, well. When you’re a venal fuckup, you can always find a loving home in the Christian community by lying about Jesus a lot.

Why is S.E. Cupp always on TV?

Actually, I could turn on the TV right now and find a dozen pseudo-authorities who don’t deserve to be in the spotlight. S.E. Cupp is just particularly annoying to me because she presents herself as an atheist (a self-loathing one, though) and intellectual, yet as Amanda Marcotte says, she may be the dumbest pundit working.

I think we have a winner in the Dumbest Pundit Alive Olympics. At least until Ross Douthat starts thinking about vaginas again.

David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Glenn Beck, anyone associated with Politico, Richard Cohen, Peggy Noonan, Erick Erickson…jeez, we can’t possibly crown just one. It’s like a whole dumb hack circus out there. I can’t even turn on the TV on Sunday morning ’cause I can’t afford to replace it after I throw my tea mug through it.

And not just Sunday morning. One of the things I can’t stand about Bill Maher is that he uses his show to give these clowns a forum.

I have something in common with Ally Fogg

I knew I wasn’t alone in this. The most common dismissive argument I get from the men’s rights crowd gets repeated to me on a daily basis. It’s tired and old and stupid, and is a prime example of projection. Ally Fogg gets the same thing.

So what is this rancid little snotbubble of idiocy? It’s the tedious cliche that says any man who says or writes something which could be perceived to be sympathetic to women or feminism must only be doing so in the hope of getting a shag.

My critics usually follow up with something about how I’m also fat and old and have a beard and am boring and look hideous. Apparently, I’m so desperate because of my appalling unattractiveness that I’ve had to stoop to feminism to try and get laid.

It’s all wrong. Well, not the old homely part, but the rest is stupidly false. I’m not interested in having sex with anyone but my wife — I have, surprisingly, had a few outside invitations which I have politely, respectfully, and with much appreciation turned down. I have a good strong relationship with my wife so such suggestions only make me uncomfortable. It’s like I have been dining every day on gourmet meals prepared by an attentive chef, and someone offers me a delicious pastry on the side…I’m not at all hungry, it’s pretty easy to demur.

But feminism is good for one thing. It may not get you a quicky shag, but it turns out that respecting another human being as a person and treating them as an equal might sometimes get you into a long term mutually happy relationship.

I also like to point out that with 7 billion people on the planet, half of them women, you’re going to have sex with an infinitesimal fraction of them, no matter how much of a Don Juan you are. If you only see people through the lens of your penis, you have lost sight of the overwhelming majority of human possibilities.