Legal equivalents

campaign spending : free speech : corporate personhood (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby) :: 
free speech advocacy of gun ownership : NRA : terrorist organization

Guns don't kill people...

There was another mass school shooting yesterday. This time in Florida with 17 dead so far. Every American knows the standard NRA/Republican Party response: thoughts and prayers; too soon to talk about gun control and the incredibly hackneyed, guns don't kill people, people kill people.

Let me offer an analogy...

Guns don't kill people in the same way the influenza virus doesn't kill people. Flu victims with strained immune systems succumb to secondary infections. In the same manner, the primary condition of being 'people' does not mean they automatically pick up any available instrument to kill other people. It's people with stressful secondary conditions such as mental illness, anger issues and other social pressures who succumb to the easy solution of readily available guns to 'solve' their problems.

So I suggest that all supporters of unlimited/unrestrained gun rights not get a flu shot this flu season. They can take their chances with the flu virus just as they inflict the gun virus on the entire country. Hopefully, their stupidity will earn them a Darwin Award to the benefit of humanity.

Arms 'Marketing'

Short video of William Hartung at TRNN describing how the MIC profits from war and government policy. My comment:

William Hartung hit the nail right square on the head. A popular meme spouted by many pro-capitalist economists is that in free markets, market forces (consumer spending/consumption) drives what gets produced. But somehow, these same economists never examine the 'market forces' of the planned military arms economy (created by governments, especially by the U.S. government). The planned military economy creates forces of lobbyists and special interests who advocate for constant war and continuous arms race. Instead of buying food, childcare, medical care, education and intact ecosystem for our children and grandchildren, American taxpayers are buying updated nuclear weapons and other military hardware, war game exercises, ill-will from hundreds of foreign military bases and global instability from waging and fomenting war. These are economic decisions and American voters need to understand the spending priorities of their government in that light. 

Another useful tool maybe to redefine what economies are. The word 'economy' has Greek roots meaning house or home. The common definition of economy is focused on production/consumption of consumer goods for the purpose of generating profit, a far cry from house/home. A much better definition would be self-organizing and self-sustaining systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that promote the well-being of all participants. This would automatically make some sectors of the modern economy 'uneconomic' because they do not promote well-being... the entire offensive arms/military industrial sector.

Name of piece: Code Pink Conference: The Arms Industry Hides Behind Euphemisms (December 29, 2017)

Wayne Lapierre's gun deaths

Comment at C&L where father of murder victim fights Wayne Lapierre and the NRA:

According to everytownresearch.org, there are approximately 12,000 gun homicides per year in this country (when suicides are included, gun deaths exceed 32,000 per year). Wayne Lapierre has been head of the NRA since 1991. A gun death wall in the style of the Vietnam Memorial Wall (a little over 58,000 names) for the period of Lapierre's reign would run 5-15 times the size of the Vietnam War Memorial; it would take 40-115 hours to read all the names. The policies promoted and advocated by Mr. Lapierre doesn't put guns in the hands of 'good guys' who disarm 'bad guys'; they put guns in the hands of gun enthusiasts, criminals and terrorists who committed those and future deaths. Under the Patriot Act, Wayne Lapierre is guilty of providing aid and material support to terrorist; under many local jurisdictions, he is an accomplice to arming criminals... he should be prosecuted as such. 

I stand with Alison Parker's father in his efforts to demote Wayne Lapierre.

Guns are anti-democratic

I written a lot about how the concentration of power is the underlying systemic imbalance in many of today's problems and how the over-sized influence of the powerful skews all policy in their economic favor. Based on my preferred definition of economy (economies are self-organizing and self-sustaining systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that promote the well-being of all participants), I've argued that guns, the military industrial complex and war are all anti-economic...

On that note, guns, the military industrial complex and war are also anti-democratic because they impose the power of the wielders onto those of the oppressed. At the smallest level, a person holding a gun can intimidate everyone in their range from any number of actions including speech and movement. This is the opposite of society where everyone is free to express themselves.

Austerity is Social Murder

Comment at TRNN at segment describing the effect of government austerity on the Grenfell Towers tragedy at social murder:

[the effects of austerity policies] is murder just as if the actions of a single individual... what happened at Grenfell Towers... is social murder. 

Capitalism is designed to transfer the wealth created by workers to owners. Austerity policies are designed to transfer wealth earned by average workers to wealthy lobbyists and their buyers. Both economic systems and government policies are social constructs; deaths caused by rampant capitalism and/or austerity politics is social murder. 

In the U.S., good examples are (1) profit driven, capitalistic gun manufacturing; NRA lobbying; defunding schools & other public services; and lax gun ownership laws/regulations, etc. (2) Profit driven, capitalistic health care delivery mediated by health insurance corporations; profit driven, capitalistic health care products manufacturers (pharma, medical devices, etc); lax (better under ACA) regulation of insurance providers; lack of transparency (especially financial - real cost of drugs, treatment, facilities, etc), etc.

Social constructs are created by people. People are enculturated to their expectations from their government(s), employers, and other institutions. In the U.S., for single-payer health care to take hold, Americans need to ingrain the expectation that health care is a right and not a privilege of wealth. Social constructs created by people are subject to change by people; it's in our hands.

Science of gun policy

Comment at Truthout article about teachers fighting for gun control in schools:

The NRA is a good example of [gun] policy by ideology as opposed to policy based on science. Science is a system of knowledge that accurately predicts the future under defined conditions (example, researchers accurately predict vaccinations can prevent most cases of target infectious disease). NRA is all about profiting from guns so they don't want accurate scientific predictions of the effect of gun proximity to violence. As a result, they are a major player in banning epidemiological research on gun violence. This allows the NRA to use ideological '2nd Amendment' arguments to advance 'gun right'. The opposition doesn't have the resources to conduct scientific studies so they are forced to use anecdotal evidence to make their case to policy makers; even when their arguments are more intuitively sound, the stridency of the gun rights lobby is overwhelming. 

The resistance needs to fight individual issue battles under the umbrella of increasing overall universal rights. Policy should be based on science, not ideology.

Unifying Resistance

A comment I posted at Truthout. It pulls together several themes I've written about here:

"Trump is upping his game, and we, as resisters, aren't ready." 

Yes. It's also time to be proactive as opposed to reactive. But we need to understand the reflex to react and how to step back and see the forest to respond proactively. It's important to understand how politics divides people in both obvious and subtle ways. DJT is a practitioner of confrontational divisiveness; he outright declares his rejection of immigrants, Mexicans, unattractive women, prisoners of war, disabled people, etc. Divide and conquer can also be achieved by more subtle tactics, such as when Republicans and Democrats specifically void the needs of the poor by leaving them out of the debate (or DJT spotlighting the educated with his 'I love the poorly educated').  

The modus operandi of the body politic is to act on the interests of the elite at the expense of the larger population by dividing the larger group. Successful opposition would require some degree of unified resistance which is not the case with single issue movements. I would suggest single issue movements make their case under the umbrella of a larger 'meta' theme for the benefit of the larger overall. For instance, demanding that all policy be based on objective evidence would mean the numbers of gun injuries and deaths factors into gun policy and definitions of corporate personhood would correct for the differential influence such policy would confer on owners. Another useful theme would be to define economies as 'production, consumption and exchange of capital for the sustained wellbeing of humanity'. 'Sustained' would entail policy makers incorporate a long view of policy outcomes - think climate change; 'wellbeing' would require some degree of universal healthcare; and the 'economics' of warfare would be completely invalidated. A final theme would be maximize information transparency. The only way a small group (elites) can concentrate power to any extent is through the control of information. They use propaganda (selective/deceptive use of information) to create divides in the larger population and amplify infighting. Information transparency inoculates against propaganda.  

The resistance movement needs to recognize that although Trump is personally repugnant and vulgar, he is only a figurehead. The real adversaries in the long fight are the power elites.

Cult of Fear

This was intended as a comment on a Truthout.org post about how politicians, especially Republicans, use fear to manipulate voters into supporting them. However, my argument got a little too complex for a simple comment, so its only appearance is here:

Marketing appeals to fear and sex to sell because human biology is programmed to respond to these emotions. Monotheistic religions capitalize on fear in two ways: (1) Religions justify fear by providing an object – women are a constant threat to the power of men; their sexuality is their most fearsome weapon and must be brought to heel and under the control of men. (2) A fearsome all powerful, all knowing being has all the answers. But those answers are too much for men’s small brains and most men can’t communicate with the big dude anyway. Only special people (kings, emperors, popes, and the like) get to translate for him.

In modern times, religion teaches believers to trust their church authority (most people don’t read primary religious texts) over what can be objectively measured (faith over science). When personal faith is imbued in the words of an authority figure, it’s easy to transfer that trust into other people who present similar absolute certainty (for example, Rush Limbaugh is never wrong). Enter right-wing media which gives self-aggrandizing braggarts enormous forums and infrastructure to in essence to form cults (like Fox News under Roger Ailes). As bad as Democrats are, they have not codified the ideological Cult of Fear that Republicans so effectively used to ensnare their followers. Republican followers are told to fear women for taking men’s jobs and dignity; fear immigrants for taking jobs; fear Muslims for terrorism; fear liberals for taking their guns (but not to fear guns); fear science/scientists for their ‘self-interested agendas’; fear President Obama for being a foreign born Muslim; fear black people for existing; fear Obamacare for insurance mandate; fear the poor for needing social services; fear veterans for using the VA… In the face of such terrifying scenarios, cultists are told Republican politicians know how to keep them safe from all these threats.

Fear is the defensive emotion to the unknown. That’s why Republicans fear science. Science is a system of knowledge that seeks to determine patterns capable of accurately predicting the future. In other words, science answers questions about the feared unknown. The question is how to stage a cult intervention on the scale of roughly half the U.S. population.

Update: Yes, evangelical cults exists and they can be difficult to escape from.

When to 'extremely vett'

Over 1200 people in the U.S. died by gun violence in 2016. Compared that to the number killed by regugees, zero.  [There may not be statistics on how many of the gun deaths are due to immigrants. At the behest of the gun lobby, the government bans funding research on gun violence.]

My critical thinking would suggest the people who most need to be vetted are gun buyers and not refugees.


Addendum - I forgot to mention the individual in greatest need of extreme vetting... I comment I left at Crooks&Liars:

Seconded! [respnse to 'I demand extreme vetting of Trump's cabinet picks!']  And I call for extreme vetting of POTUS DJT. From his health to tax records to business dealings and anything which may become a conflict of interest. If refugees fleeing with little other than what they carry are subject to extreme vetting, surely it is only just to demand the same of the 'Executive Order' signer-in-chief.

Stand your ground abortions

If a pregnant woman doesn't want to be pregnant, isn't the embryo/fetus a parasite trespassing on the bodily autonomy of its host? If that's the case, does the woman have the right to 'stand her ground' against the trespasser and defend her bodily autonomy by any reasonable, including fire power? Would doing this in her home doubly justify 'standing her ground'? - after all the 'unborn' is trespassing on both the bodily autonomy of its host and the property of its host.

Just wondering how the rights of each entity is ranked according to the law...

Privilege

When rioting broke out during the protests of Freddie Gray's death (he sustained life threatening injuries while in the custody of the Baltimore police), a mother was caught on tape disciplining her son when she found him participating in the unrest. She apparently told a reporter, “That's my only son and at the end of the day I don't want him to be a Freddie Gray." This is a prime example of white privilege... how often do white parents need to train their kids to be fully conciliatory to police under all circumstances?

And not to diminish the African-American experience, this also brought to mind a recent report of a Maryland couple getting in trouble for allow their children to 'free range'. Privilege came to mind again.

As people, young and old, we all want the privilege of safety wherever we happen to be. Women want to be free of cat calls when walking on a public street; children want to be free (of predators) to play safely anywhere they choose to; people of all stripes want to be free of harassment (police and otherwise) when they are not doing anything illegal and free of excessive force when restrained for any reason; everyone should be free of fear that they may be targeted by a gun totting second amendment 'supporter'. And we should have the expectation of freedom from electronic monitoring unless specifically and explicitly permitted through legitimate and open judicial review.

It is a poor reflection on our founding fathers that rights once conferred by the Constitution are now privileges afforded to select citizens.

A cause to police violence?

The police in the U.S. kill a lot of people. It's as if they do their jobs in a constant high state of fear. I wonder if the post-Newtown relaxation of many gun regulations has heightened the sense of siege by the police and that in combination with long standing racism has amplified their targeting of African-Americans (see here and here).

To advocates of expanded Second Amendment rights…

Regardless of your motivations, as a supporter of gun control, one of mine is to avoid accidental gunshot deaths or injuries of your children. Unfortunately the expansion of gun rights for which you advocate (stand your ground laws and open carry provisions) put all our children at risk. I would ask that you respect the lives of my children as I do yours.