#BlackLivesMatter and the politics of force

There’s an episode of "Doug" from 1993 called Doug’s Big Brawl where Doug Funnie and another boy get into a situation where they’re both expected to fight each other and Doug’s dad tells him:

"Show me a man who resorts to violence, and I'll show you a man who's run out of good ideas.”

With that in mind, I turn your attention to last Saturday’s disruption of a political rally where Bernie Sanders was prevented from speaking by several Black Lives Matter protesters. In this case there was no violence, but there was indeed a great amount of force.

My preference for political change is to reason with people and convince them with words. I understand that people reach a lot of their opinions through selfish justification and emotions, but I still feel that better arguments and better ideas are the morally superior approach and the one I support.

Black Lives Matter activists regularly uses force as their primary tactic, such as disrupting a symphony, an award ceremony for WWII vet and even shutting down highways. They are not trying to reason with people, but get their attention or intimidate them by using force.

But let’s not kid ourselves, Black Lives Matter embraces violence and destruction along crude utilitarian lines. It gently refers to riots as “uprisings” and while its members only occasionally directly instruct people to riot, the activists openly defend and justify violent riots. The “No justice no peace” slogan is not merely a threat of noise pollution.”

Black activists tried to convince us for years that there is a widespread problem with American police killing not just violent black men, but upstanding young black men too. The problem was finding an example and they seized on the death of Michael Brown to make their case. A family member called him a "gentle giant" and one Deadspin article specifically said "By all accounts, Brown was one of the good ones."

That famously blew up in their faces when the early credulous, alarmist reports fell away and the public learned about Brown’s strong-arm robbery just before he put down while trying to kill a police officer. The foundation of the Black Lives Matter campaign turned out to be a hoax.

While paragons of humility like Jonathan Capehart took back their initial embrace of the Michael Brown narrative and admitted they were wrong, Black Lives Matter instead chose to keep telling the same lie and keep chanting “Hands up Don’t shoot” and act like nothing ever happened.

A Rasmussen poll released on Aug. 13 showed 53% of respondents believe the Ferguson riots are mostly criminals taking advantage of the situation, not actual protests.

Black Lives Matter activists failed to convince the public of the importance of their message with compelling arguments, but have had some success through the use of force. That was firmly on display on Aug. 8 at the Seattle event where Bernie Sanders was supposed to speak to the crowd.

As you can see from the footage and the transcript, the activist pulled themselves on stage and immediately started hurling threats like “If you do not listen to her, your event will be shut down right now! Right now!” She later bragged about shutting down a Christmas tree lighting celebration, claimed the shooting of Michael Brown was really a murder and called the crowd racists and white supremacists for booing her obnoxious, blubbering rant.

The American left was in disarray following the Seattle disruption, as two of its large factions were put in direct conflict. Initially, some people on official-looking Black Lives Matter social media accounts claimed the Seattle protesters were not legitimate members of Black Lives Matter, but those same accounts later took those statements back and said they were not authorized to speak. 

The Sanders campaign originally promoted that angle before the correction came in, as it nullified any need for left-wing soul searching. Some people still insist they were not legitimate protesters, or were enemy agents hired by the right. That’s conspiracy-theory nonsense, but even if it were true it would be irrelevant because most Black Lives Matters leaders and sympathizers have embraced the Seattle disruption.

This also puts me in a tough spot, because I have a handful of black friends on Facebook who have embraced the hashtag from time to time. Every last one of them is gracious, gentle, kind person, and I’m puzzled why this group resonates with them.

Especially since Black Rights Matter is very much a movement against civil rights.

Before we go any further, I need to address the limits of what is and what is not a free speech issue. Free speech is commonly defined by educated people as freedom from government restrictions on speech, but not one of private limits. The most common example is if someone stops someone else from commentating on their blog or Facebook page, that is not a violation of the person’s freedom of speech. I completely agree with that example, but I do think private entities can do certain things that is on par with opposing free speech.

The obvious example is using illegitimate force to block a speaker from sharing ideas with an audience, which is exactly what we saw a mob of 100 people do at the University of Toronto in 2012, such as physically blocking the doors to the venue, pulling the fire alarm and making noise to keep people from hearing a lecture.

Which is exactly what happened in Seattle. The novice observer believes that Sanders was the victim of the Black Lives Matter protesters, while the more experienced observer understands that the audience’s right to listen to Sanders was violated, and the activists are 100% guilty of violating the civil rights of a very large group of people.

Which has been pretty consistent with the loathsome tactics used by the Black Lives Matters goons. While a lot of the focus has been on the police officers murdered and horribly wounded by Black Lives Matters activists and supporters, the group’s victims also include a lot of innocent bystanders who were just trying to drive to work, attend a public event or take an ambulance ride to the hospital.

I am not saying that Black Lives Matter has failed to have any influence, as there are a lot more police body cameras in operation today. I’m also not saying their actual influence is always negative, as I see the police body cameras to be a good thing. I am saying their influence comes from their willingness to use force on people who don’t deserve it and I don’t consider the death, destruction and violation of rights they have caused to be an acceptable trade-off.

In a particularly craven move, Sanders caved in to their demands, announcing the hire of a Black Lives Matter activist and adding some of their issues to his campaign platform. He and the staff at the Seattle event were unwilling to stand up to the activists, but I don’t think it’s because of who they are.

Sanders seems to be morally opposed to having hecklers and disruptors dragged out of his events, such as his superhuman tolerance for several rabid anti-Israel shouters at a town meeting event last year. I suspect he doesn’t want to see people cuffed or dragged away, which is too bad for his actually supporters who want to hear him speak uninterrupted.

Contrast that with Bill Maher’s legendary response to a group 9/11 Truthers who started shouting from his audience, where he told security to pull the riff riff out and ended up storming into the crowd to get lend a hand. That is what leadership looks like, not hand-wringing and instant surrender.

There was a recent episode in Utah where animal rights protesters attempted to use force to shut down a pig wrestling event by standing in the ring. A pig wrestler picked up one of the protesters and dumped them over the fence. I can understand why the police were considering charging the pig wrestler with assault, but to be honest I find it to be a superior response than giving the protester the microphone like Sanders did. Twice.

I don’t think Sanders is competent to serve on a municipal zoning board, let alone be president of the United States, but the principles at stake here are the issue, not the details of this example. That’s why I find it incredibly irksome to see so many arguments putting down the disruption by saying Sanders was an unworthy target and the activists should have done the same thing to other politicians.

Ken White recently reminded us that embracing vile tactics against our political opponents is not only immoral, but it also gives your opposition permission to use the same tactics back on you.

Don't think for a second that Black Lives Matter protesters would accept being on the receiving end of disruptions. Look at last month's Ohio incident where reporter Brandon Blackwell ignored an order for all white people to leave their event. Not only did the activists threaten him and make a scene, their supporters moaned that he was disrespectful and should have left the event when told to.

Pardon me, I think my irony levels are getting dangerously high.

Black Lives Matter activists don't use force because they have had a hard time getting their message out to the public or because they are beaten-down serfs with no other possible course of action. They do so because they don't have a strong enough case to convince people through legitimate means. The use of force comes from a place of weakness, not of strength.

The worst defense I hear for the brute tactics of Black Lives Matter protesters is that nothing else works. That's not true for most other causes. Perhaps the reason mainstream tactics don't work for Black Lives Matter is that their ideas are flawed. To return to what Doug’s father said, their embrace of force is an open admission that they are out of good ideas.

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A college administrator nails free speech

One of the criticisms lobbed at old-school journalism is that corrections never get as much attention as the original stories. Well, that rule applies to the blogosphere as well and I want to do my part to give an important update.

I also want to give credit to a college administrator for bucking the trend and making a real contribution to the public discussion of free speech.

Last week a letter to students from U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks drew ire from first amendment circles because it seemed to say that he thought free speech needs to be civil. Well, Dirks read that criticism and issued a second statement to clarify his position.

My message was intended to re-affirm values that have for years been understood as foundational to this campus community. As I also noted in my message, these values can exist in tension with each other, and there are continuing and serious debates about fundamental issues related to them. In invoking my hope that commitments to civility and to freedom of speech can complement each other, I did not mean to suggest any constraint on freedom of speech, nor did I mean to compromise in any way our commitment to academic freedom, as defined both by this campus and the American Association of University Professors.

Bravo.

I'm used to seeing college administrators go the wrong way on free speech issues, and Dirks made some great nuanced points.

Hat tip to free speech crusader Ken White for the link.

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The worst rape straw man argument

I was just reading over another generic Huffington Post link defending the claim that drunk sex is a form of rape, and I saw the same tired dodge that comes up whenever this claim is criticized.

Author James R. Marsh, who claims to be a lawyer, was responding to a piece defense attorney Matthew Kaiser wrote in TIME. Kaiser did a pretty good job of summing up why two drunk college students agreeing to have sex with one another should not be assumed to be a case where the male student raped the female student.

I say Marsh claims to be a lawyer because he made a strange criticism of Kaiser that the man provides legal counsel to people accused of crimes. Marsh does not seem to understand the notion of innocence until proven guilty or that the right to an attorney is extended to all people in America accused of crimes, even terrible crimes.

Kaiser, it should be noted, has built part of his career around profiting off of sexual predators. He solicits putative pedophiles and child molesters on his law firm's website... Kaiser sells his ability to protect the "good name" of people who watch, distribute, and produce child pornography. There is no evidence that his college client is different. Indeed, Kaiser never says his client didn't have sex with the victim. He instead makes the baffling claim that the rape (which he acknowledges happened) somehow doesn't count as rape.

I can understand a member of the general public being this clueless on legal philosophy, but not someone who introduces them self as an "internationally recognized lawyer."

But I do take Marsh's word for it that he was "baffled" by what Kaiser wrote. I think he is baffled a lot because he trots out the same tired cliche response that fails to address the criticism of the "consent" standard to separate sex from rape.

Specifically, Kaiser (and me, and many other people) are saying that it is not rape when two people choose to get intoxicated and then choose to have sex. Kaiser even took the time to clarify:

Of course, if someone has sex with an unconscious woman, that’s sexual assault. And if a woman is drunk and another person forces sex on her because she’s vulnerable because she’s drunk, that’s also rape.

But Marsh, like nearly every other "consent" defender I have witnessed, shot back with an oblivious statement. Early in the statement he acknowledged that Kaiser isn't saying that drunk women are free to be raped, but then later he went on to say just that:

Drinking does not mean someone is "asking" to be raped. Drinking does not make it okay to attack another person (something most men are perfectly capable of not doing). 

This is such a tired straw man argument. No one, absolutely no one, is saying that drunk or unconscious people are free to be attacked and raped. He is making a big leap of faith by calling wanted sexual activity enjoyed by a wide-awake person "rape" and describing it as an attack.

I see this exact same argument trotted out again and again when someone is asked to defend their position on consent, and it shows how weak their positions really is when they can't address the real arguments, like the idea that both partners would be considered both rapists and victims by their definition.

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The obnoxiousness of open carry

I'm a gun owner and I have a concealed weapons permit that I use occasionally. I generally support gun rights and oppose many gun control measures.

That being said, I don't understand the activists who insist on openly carrying long guns, such as magazine-fed rifles and shot guns.

Recently an NRA staffer penned an online post criticizing the practice, calling it "weird" and adding, "Using guns merely to draw attention to yourself in public not only defies common sense, it shows a lack of consideration and manners."

I agree, but the NRA officially does not. After a Texas open carry group got upset the NRA retracted the statement. They said was only one person's opinion and the organization disagrees with it.

Look, I can understand open carry for a handgun, as sometimes it's cumbersome to try to cover up my weapon with a loose shirt or jacket, such as during the summertime. It makes sense to have holstered handguns available as an option.

But what doesn't make sense is carrying an AR-15 across one's back and pretending to go about one's day as if it's perfectly normal.

The ability to posses a weapon for one's own protection is a human right that I believe strongly in, but this is just showboating. What happens when you try to sit down somewhere or drive? This is not a casual item one throws on loosely.

Open carry long gunners are the gun rights equivalent of gay pride parade dudes in speedos and platform shoes. Yes, they have a right to do so, but must they do that in public?

It's revolting to see police punish people for actions that are legal, and it's also revolting to see political fanboys giggle with evil glee as Americans are illegally arrested because the police fail to understand the law. But as Ken's Law states, just because one group is obnoxious doesn't mean the other side is clean. Open carry advocates are being unfairly targeted by the police AND they are inconsiderate freaks.
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America leads by example

I often hear anti-gun folks say that the Founding Father's idea of enshrining gun rights is outdated because America's modern military is too advanced to be overthrown by civilians with rifles.

I reject that idea, and I think a decade in Iraq has shown us just how formidable an enemy with rifles and no tanks or jet fighters can be. I also know that the effort to fight a civil war is a problem the government wants to avoid even if it expects it would win.

But what's not up for debate is that armed civilian uprisings in another nations stand a damn good chance against their militaries. Venezuela comes to mind, assuming they can be armed.

If America really did try to ban the possession of "war weapons" like magazine-fed rifles, wouldn't that promote a universal ban of those weapons in other nations, and make justified revolutions in other nations that much harder?

Being able to possess and carry a weapon for ones own protection is a universal human right, and America needs to continue to set an example for the rest of the world by protecting that right.
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Fred Phelps Film update

It turns out "Fall from Grace: The story of Fred Phelps" will have a twist ending. The heroic Jim Crow-fighting lawyer who becomes a human slug biopic ends with the protagonist being excommunicated from his own church. Somehow.

Will Phelps change his tune before his last wheezy breath and become our generation's Anakin Skywalker? The suspense will soon end because Phelps is now near death.

As an aside, I decided to look and see if there is already a movie called "Fall from Grace," which is something I just came up with when I first wrote about Phelps non-evil past. It turned out there is, and it's also about Phelps. Oops.
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A lesson we never learned

It's very difficult to make it through this week without learning that today is the 50 year anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

There's a big misconception that JFK was an important civil rights leader, and that that may have cost him his life. This is very wrong for two important reasons.

Despite what folk songs tell you, Kennedy did not consider the civil rights of black Americans a priority and did little to help them. He was much more concerned with the future of the Democratic party and as a senator in 1957 he voted against civil rights legislation. In the words of the BBC's Nick Bryant, he was a bystander on civil rights for the first two and a half years of his three years in office. The only contributions he made were in words, not actions:

At times, however, his rhetoric was considered inadequate. James Meredith, whose determination to register as the first black student at University of Mississippi led to one of the climactic battles of the civil rights era, submitted his application in anger at Kennedy's failure during his inaugural address to denounce the evil of segregation... 

On civil rights, his early inaction as president led white segregationists to believe they could prolong segregation, and prompted black protesters to adopt more provocative tactics and make more radical demands.

The other big reason why Kennedy should not be considered a civil rights martyr is that we know what motivated his killer. For reasons I won't get into here, it's well established that Lee Harvery Oswald assassinated the president. Oswald was a communist and Kennedy focused a lot of his energy on fighting communism.

A recent New York Times piece about the political climate in Dallas in 1963 as compared to today tried to blame right-wing extremism on Kennedy's death, but it had to admit that Oswald was to the left of Bernie Sanders with this reluctant paragraph:

Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and not a product of right-wing Dallas. But because the anti-Kennedy tenor came not so much from radical outcasts but from parts of mainstream Dallas, some say the anger seemed to come with the city’s informal blessing.

"Some say" being reporter lingo for "A point I wanted to make in the story but couldn't find anyone to say it for me."

Kennedy was behind the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, went through the tense Cuban Missile Crisis and was a friend and defender of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. His policy of containment and reversal for communist influence was called the Kennedy Doctrine.

In his book "Death of a President" William Manchester quoted JFK's wife Jackie as saying "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights... It had to be some silly little communist."

Kennedy's murder is a tragedy, and a tragedy we should learn from, but we can't ever learn anything if we hide behind myths and stories. Something Steven Pinker said tells us exactly what that lesson is:

...there are ideologies, such as those of militant religions, nationalism, Nazism, and Communism, that justify vast outlays of violence by a Utopian cost-benefit analysis: if your belief system holds out the hope of a world that will be infinitely good forever, how much violence are you entitled to perpetrate in pursuit of this infinitely perfect world? 

Well, as much as much as you want, and you're always ahead of the game. The benefits always outweigh the costs. Moreover, imagine that there are people who hear about your scheme for a perfect world and just don't get with the program. They might oppose you in bringing heaven to earth. How evil are they? They're the only things standing in the way of an infinitely good Earth. Well, you do the math.

Kennedy was a martyr in the battle against communism, a battle that we may have to fight again one day. Let's make sure we learn before history repeats itself.

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Are you part of an Internet lynch mob?

We know lynch mobs are a bad thing. As a nation that believes in giving criminals a fair trial, a team of vigilantes who murder a suspect upsets and overturns the civil rights of the accused. Even when that person is guilty, lynch mobs violate important aspects of civilization and have no place in our society.

But is it fair to compare them to Internet lynch mobs, where people post scathing criticisms and personal information about a supposed criminal? I maintain that it is. While they are not using actual violence against their target, they are doing everything they can to demolish that persons life.

In some cases, they reveal home addresses in order to enable others to commit actual violence on the target.

I imagine most people who join these crusades think they are on the side of justice. After all, because of activists in the Steubenville case who spread the names of both those accused of a sexual assault and those accused of witnessing it but not reporting it, it's reasonable to believe that public pressure lead to the case going to trial and the suspects were found guilty.

But that's not the only case of Internet vigilantism, and if they had been found innocent their reputations would still be ruined.

What about all of the pictures of people in the crowd holding bags at the Boston Marathon Bombing that self-appointed Internet detectives passed around? It wasn't just the New York Post that spread photos of potential victims and labeled them suspects; that was vigilantism and it hurt innocent people.

Lynch mobs often get their facts wrong, as could be seen by the major revisions and reversals in the Trayvon Martin shooting.

Then there's the online activism around the sad story of Rehtaeh Parsons that managed to "name and shame" an innocent person and advanced a narrative that may have been fictional. From the Edmonton Journal:

What they had was a complainant whose evidence was all over the map, independent evidence that supported the notion that any sex was consensual, and no evidence that Rehtaeh was so drunk that she couldn't consent: The case was a mess. 

But the names of four boys are online anyway - one a boy who wasn't even at the party and who went public to defend himself last week.

Online activism has a potential to do a lot of good, and you probably have the noblest of intentions when get involved with a public shaming. However, when you declare a person is guilty based on limited information or third-hand knowledge and then act upon it in a life-destroying manner you are playing on primitive emotions wrapped in ones and zeros.
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Fall from grace

I've got an idea for a movie:

A man in his mid 30's gets a law degree and starts his own law firm in 1960's Kansas fighting Jim Crow laws. He becomes a popular civil rights attorney and is frequently harassed and threatened by segregationists and white supremacists.

In the 1970's he starts to lose his way. He freaks out on a woman in the court system who failed to provide him with some documents and attempts to sue her, making her sit on the stand for a week so he can badger her and bring out any embarrassing details of her personal life. He ends up getting disbarred for it.

He starts getting into politics and runs for governor and the senate as a Democrat but can never pull it off. He starts to focus on opposing gay-rights and becomes head of his own church with a focus on how gays are ruining the world and inviting the wrath of God.

He ends up completely deranged and his church becomes a doomsday cult. They start seeing every tragedy as proof of God's anger for tolerance of gays and the church begins harassing victims of popular tragedies and even holding rallies outside the funerals of American soldiers. This leads to a freedom of speech case that goes before the supreme court which he wins, completing a full circle for his role in establishing the parameters of civil rights.

My working title: Fall from Grace: The story of Fred Phelps.
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Mass errors about mass shootings

It's a scene we've all watched over and over in countless movies. Dangerous brutes are closing in on a mother and her infant children corned at the end of a cold, dark alleyway. She defiantly holds up a broken piece of wood in front of her hoping to ward off her attackers, but the threat is laughed off. Her children close their eyes as they wait for the assault to come.

But wait, a hero emerges from the streets. He is going to do everything he can to save the innocent woman and children the only way he knows how. With legislation.

This un-dramatic scenario is what you get when you boil down all the current cries for more gun control following the shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary School where 20 children and six adults were murdered last week. However, as emotionally pleasing as it is to make calls for action, any action, the specific ideas for action I've seen emerging are nonsensical and ignore the facts.

The biggest misstatement is the claim that we are seeing more mass shootings over time. This idea is being advanced by writers at Mother Jones and the Washington Post, but has been refuted by criminologists. From the Associated Press:

"There is no pattern, there is no increase," says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston's Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices. 

The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer. 

Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.

Violence itself is going down, as most people should be aware. The pattern has been very steady for four decades.

There's a clip being passed around of semi-conservative Joe Scarborough citing this phony increase in mass shootings and violence as his reason to make vague anti-gun platitudes, along with calls to censor Hollywood and video games. It's all for the sake of the children, of course, even though we know that entertainment does not cause violence.

There are calls to ban certain types of guns, which people are erroneously referring to as "assault rifles." Assault rifles are fully-automatic. There is an artificial political term called "assault weapons" that uses arbitrary details of weapons to make certain semi-automatic weapons sound deadlier. This is a term used by activists, not gun experts. The requirements include things like a pistol grip (who cares) and bayonet mounts (ever heard of someone getting bayonetted? The president hasn't). One problem with calls to bring back these bans to prevent mass shootings is that some states already have them, including Connecticut where the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took place.

Handguns, not assault weapons were used at Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, the Wisconsin Sikh Temple, and the Tuscon shooting that targeted Gabrielle Gifftords. The Columbine shooters used several shotguns and one TEC-9. The Auroro 2012 shooter used an AR-15 that would meet the ban, but he also had a shotgun and two pistols. The flawed Mother Jones report that erroneously claimed mass shootings are  on the rise also said weapons that fit the fake "assault weapon" category were only used in a third of the mass shootings.

The fact is, guns that could be used for a killing spree have been available since the 19th century. Just look at this video comparison of the AK-47 and a Winchester Model 1894:



There are some people who oppose gun control who made the mistake of listing a mass stabbing of children in China that happened the same day as an argument that we will still have killing sprees even without guns. The problem is that no one died in the Chenpeng Village Primary School stabbing spree, and it proved a point gun control advocates make, that it's easier to outrun a blade than a bullet.

While gun control in England has brought the horror of "knife crime," guns and pointed weapons are not the only tools mass killers have on hand. This is a false dichotomy. The killer in the Akihabara massacre rammed people with a truck before switching to a knife, killing seven total. The Happy Land fire killed 87 people from a single can of gasoline. A staggering 18 other people were injured inside a high-ceiling Walmart when a woman poured two common cleaning products on another woman to try to kill her. Be glad she didn't mix those chemicals in a smaller space when no one was watching. What about the 9-11 attacks where 3,000 people were killed with airplanes hijacked with box cutters? Are we going to ban blades, van rentals, fuel and cleaning products?

One idea that's being floated around is to limit the size of magazines. This seems like symbolic legislation because reloading is an incredibly fast, easy maneuver. I honestly don't think my life would be worse off if I was unable to buy a 100-round drum magazine, but there's a big misunderstanding to how useful they are. The military doesn't use them, partially because they jam easily, and surprise surprise that's exactly what happened in the Auroro shooting. Of course, none of the gun controls advocates are trumpeting that important detail. If someone isn't good at changing magazines, they can always switch to another weapon, something people have been doing for ages.

Nate at CongressShallMakeNo Law likes to remind us that 3-D printers will eventually make gun control obsolete. It will be much easier to fashion a high-capacity magazine than a full firearm, so don't expect this restriction to change anything.

Some moderate positions include more gun registration procedures and in-depth background checks. These wouldn't have stopped the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting because the killer stole the guns from his mother, but if people want to be opportunistic with the momentum from this tragedy, they do have to come to grips with how any effort to make guns harder to get legally will affect the peaceful, non-violent majority of gun users as well.

I cringe when pro-gun advocates make the simplistic argument that criminals don't follow the law, so why bother making guns laws. Right or wrong, these laws do make it harder for people to get their hands on guns. It just so happens that any major gun restrictions or legal hoops to jump through will disproportionately affect people that follow the law, and encourage the odds that an armed criminal will encounter an unarmed victim.

The anti-gun advocates have a big advantage because they can make emotional arguments centered around victims. Well, we have people like 18-year-old mother Sarah McKinley of Blanchard, Oklahoma who shot and killed a knife-wielding attacker who had been creeping her out for days while her husband died of cancer. When he finally came for her, she was on the phone with police for 21 minutes and had barricaded herself and her child inside their home. Two men broke in and she shot one and the other ran.

Imagine if she wasn't allowed to have that gun, or if her ability to have a gun was delayed. That is the scenario gun control advocates are fighting for. A brutal, stone age world where young gay men, old women and people in wheelchairs are at the mercy of big thugs. That would be a primitive, dangerous world.

As a famous essay said, the gun is civilization:

The gun is the only weapon that's as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn't work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily employable.When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone.

Being able to defend oneself empowers people. Waiting around helplessly for a hero to save you does the opposite. The ability to possess a weapon is a human right, and not just because it is enshrined as one in the Bill of Rights. It is unjust and immoral to rob innocent people of that right. Gun ownership is, and always will be, a civil rights issue.

There's a rather silly article being passed, mostly to mock it, that claims shooting sprees reveal something evil inside white males. Don't expect the diversity police to come to our aid, but did these people miss Virginia Tech, Fort Hood and the DC sniper attacks? Do they really want to start that conversation in a country where blacks are seven times more likely to kill someone than whites? It's not a road anyone wants to go down.

If you want to be an advocate for gun control than you have a responsibility to learn some basic facts about guns and gun violence. Otherwise, you are attempting to legislate from emotion, not reason, and nothing good comes from that.


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Gay marriage in Maine

While I will be voting in Massachusetts to legalize medical marijuana and doctor assisted suicide on Tuesday, my former neighbors in Maine have a vote to legalize gay marriage.

I understand some people think of this as redefining marriage. I think that is correct to an extent and it's also why we need to pass this law. Everything I wrote about this issue back in 2009 is true today when it was last on the ballot.

I confess to suspecting a lot of things about homosexuality, but only knowing two of them for sure: Gays exist, and they are not going to go away. 

With those two points in mind, we need to make sure our laws coincide with reality. Right now in Maine there are thousands of romance stories between people of the same gender that will be here on Nov. 4 no matter what the outcome.

Our current views of marriage are outdated and passing Question 1 will give them a needed update.
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Idiot hunting with the Southern Poverty Law Center

The self-appointed taxonomists of hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center released a list of Men's Rights websites they consider to be the work of hatemongers, and have idiot hunted the issue to prove that only bigots can care about injustices men face.

M-Hawkins did a good take down of some of the nonsense, and even referenced a classic post I wrote about the feminist shell game, where criticism of modern feminist causes like affirmative action is misrepresented as opposition to older victories like voting rights.

He did a great job of showing the polarizing impact modern feminists can have. Feminist caricatures like Gloria Allred say if you don't mimic her exact goals and tactics for reaching them, then you are an evil bigot. There is nothing in between, she says. By the Southern Poverty Law Center's logic, her existence should disprove feminism as a legitimate movement.

It's also Allred's with-us-or-against-us thinking that leads to nonsense like this. Some of the examples on the list of Men's Rights deserve harsh criticism and are belligerently sexist, but then there are descriptions of pages like the MensActivism blog:

This website tracks news and information about men’s issues from around the world, with a focus on activism — and outrage. Par for the course are lurid headlines like this one: “Pakistani wife kills, cooks husband for lusting over daughter.” The site also runs stories like the one it headlined “Australia: Girl, 13, charged after taxi knife attack” that involve no abuse accusations, but are merely meant to undermine what the site claims is “the myth that women are less violent than men.”

What's the problem here?

Here's the kicker for the SAVE Series page

The site trumpets as a “key fact” that “[f]emale initiation of partner violence is the leading reason for the woman becoming a victim of subsequent violence,” even though a study shows that approximately twice as many women as men are injured during incidents of domestic violence.

That's poor reasoning. The Southern Poverty Law Center is trying to sweep male domestic violence victims under the rug, and their broken logic assumes they can judge who started a fight by who reported an injury afterwards. This is a basic failure in logic, but it's presented like some kind of trump card.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is guilty of idiot hunting. They have found some idiots on the web, an easy task no doubt, and used those anecdotal examples to "prove" that a civil rights cause is illegitimate. Shame on them, as Men's Rights advocates have shown a lot of potential.

I've learned a lot from Warren Farrell over the years and his brand of masculinism is truly a quest for gender equality.

Farrell declared we live in a bi-sexist society, where both genders have their own problems. That's not a way of saying men and women have an equal amount of problems, nor is it a wish to undue the progress women have made. Instead it's a desire to bring both genders forward with more progress.

The good feminists are out there fighting for gender equality, and by their own admission they have left a gap to be filled for men's issues.

False rape accusations, domestic violence and custody laws are real issues that need to be addressed, and I'm glad to see civil rights activists are out there tackling them. It's terrible that some jerks who want to turn back progress have made some idiot blog posts, but that doesn't disprove the important work other people are doing.
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Pretty pretend guns are not a right

Lately my fellow bloggers have been writing about the importance of rights, like the right to a trial in relation to the safety of the public over at Congress Shall Make No Law, and fictional rights that fools cherish, such as the right not to be offended as Popehat and For The Sake of Science both did a great job of hammering out.

So with that in mind, I'm going to tackle the issue that really matters to me - the false claim that Gears of War 3 players have a natural right to pretty guns.

Gears of War 3 is an Xbox game that retails for $60. In some online multiplayer modes, there are some purely aesthetic customizations one can make to their character, the relevant one here being "weapon skins," where the guns players uses can have different paint jobs or animated graphics to make their pretend guns dazzle. Some of these weapon skins are unlocked by completing specific tasks in the game, but a set of 22 was made that players have to pay real money to use.

For $3, you can unlock a static paint scheme like tiger stripes or a flower pattern for all five starting weapons. For $4, you get an animated graphic, like an ocean ripple, for all five. For $15, you can unlock all 22 skins for one of the five weapons, and for a poorly-spent $45 you can unlock each and every one of them.

Predictably, there has been a lot of complaints on the Internet, most of it whiny. The best articulated criticism I have seen is from a level-headed competitive player named K.L. who made a very reasonable video saying this isn't the end of the world, but he doesn't like the policy of incorporating money-making tactics normally reserved for freemium games into a retail game. He hit all the normal points, such as making people pay to use content on the disc, something I don't have a problem with.

Let me start by saying K.L., or "arCtyC" as he likes to be called, has hit upon a gut feeling I share. There is something disappointing about having to pay to use these fun weapon skins. He also does a good job of stressing that this is an entirely voluntary transaction.

Paying to make your pretend guns prettier goes beyond voluntary and satisfies all of the criteria of Michael Munger's "euvoluntary" or "truly voluntary" criteria. Epic Games created the skins, has the legal right to sell them and customers know what they're getting. The weapons skins have no impact on weapon performance, and there are still zero-dollar unlockable weapon skins, so players are not punished for failing to buy them. There is no coercion vaguely associated with this transaction.

So that leaves one criteria to be considered euvolunary. How terrible is the Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement, or BATNA? If not buying a product will result in the death of a consumer, the BATNA differential is said to be very large.

I have trouble imaging a smaller BATNA than not being able to use a pretty pretend gun without paying $3. Sure, it's foolish for most people to pay $45, and I imagine most people chose not to, but a lot of people paid an extra $90 to have their copy of the game bundled with a cheap desk statue, a few trinkets, fake documents and a few different weapon skins and aesthetic downloads. For some reason, offering special editions of games and movies to consumers doesn't draw the same complaints, but the same elements are all there.

I gave it some thought and paid $3 to have the pretty flower imagine at the start of this post put on some of my pretend guns. This small price acts as a barrier, preventing every other player from having an obnoxious arsenal, and as a result I haven't run into anyone else with the same pretty guns.

There is no way to know if Epic Games planned to include the weapon skins, and later decided to charge for them, or were simply looking for another source of revenue and put a little bit of work into creating these for-pay paint jobs. The intent is irrelevant. The weapon skins are a fun addition to the game that I was happy to pay a small amount of money for, and in result, I received exactly what I wanted.
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Will military recruiters be allowed back on campus?

As mentioned before, now that Don't Ask Don't Tell is no longer the law of the land, universities will have to find another excuse to chase away military recruiters.

Peace activist and academic Colman McCarthy has answered that call with a recent op-ed piece:

ROTC and its warrior ethic taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace.

The piece is more of a swan song than a rallying cry, as McCarthy does not reveal an actual loophole, just an anti-military sentiment. In fact, this piece shows why McCarthy is a liability to the campus anti-military movement, not a valued ally. His penultimate paragraph contained a line he will never live down:

To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America's or the Taliban's: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home.

This kind of loose-cannon extremism is the last thing peaceniks need to hone their image, and distancing themselves from McCarthy should be on the top of their list right now. He is the living embodiment of the "peace at any price" extremist that Ronald Reagan caricatured in his 1964 A Time for Choosing speech:

There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace and you can have it in the next second – surrender. ...From our side [Nikita Khrushchev] has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he would rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain.

McCarthy revealed in a 2008 interview that his opposition to all wars makes no exception for World War II, and that "Hitler could have been waited out."

If this is the kind of leadership emerging to keep the recruiter ban, then that side has already lost.
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Prediction: TSA to scale back searches

My biggest regret for January 2009 was I never got around to making a video of me predicting President Obama was going to be the next Jimmy Carter; that he was hyped up by the public and had no idea what he was getting himself into, and would fail to meet his central campaign promises.

It's one thing to make predictions, it's another to publicly record them. Since I didn't make that video, I really can't take credit for being right. In that spirit, here's a specific prediction:

The search methods of Transportation Security Administration will be scaled down within a year. What's more, this is the peak of airport screenings, and there will not be an increase in the level of searches. If this prediction fails, and searches becomes more intense, then the public outcry will force it to be reversed within six months. In the first scenario, we will still be unable to bring liquids on board airplanes. If the second scenario occurs, that rule will be omitted.

Maybe I'm old fashion and believe the whim of the public can influence our laws for the good, but I feel we're at the breaking point of this issue. The TSA really has set itself up to lose by givings customers the ultimatum of being photographed naked or allowing a stranger to touch their genitals. People are standing up to this, and the TSA is foolishly making martyrs of them.

Hint: If you get taken to court by the TSA, ask for a jury trial.

We've silently accepted that flying is a privilege and not a right and that no cost is too high to be a little bit safer, but now the public is learning why that's wrong.

Let's examine that concept, that being safer is always better and costs don't matter. If that were true, I have an easy solution to improve automobile safety - drive a dump truck.

When you drive a dump truck, hitting a tree is a much safer occurrence - you might not even notice when you do it. Same with a deer or a tool shed. The safety of drivers and passengers go up when you're in a lumbering metal monstrosity.

But the costs would be high. Even a hybrid dump truck would be a gas hog, and finding a parking spot would be a real pain. In a typical accident between a regular car and a dump truck, the occupants of one vehicle walk away and the others get covered with a tarp. Hitting a house with a car can be deadly, but imagine what a a larger vehicle would do. Add on to that the horror of being too big to use the drive-through window at a Burger King and you can see there are some costs that just aren't worth additional safety.

Safety and freedom are on opposite ends of a sliding scale, and increasing one can reduce the other. Safety is a wonderful thing, but it's not the only thing that matters. You can be too careful, and we shouldn't just assume our current level of security is optimal. I'm willing to accept a little more risk in exchange for a lot more freedom and sensibility in our airports, and I believe America is learning that lesson right now.


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