Guns, Penises and Revenge

American culture seems obsessed with revenge, guns and dicks. Masculinity is increasingly tied to packing a gun (substitute penis) and the bigger the better, of course. One of the most prolific and politically active arms of the military industry are gun manufacturers. Decades of lobbying and ads and cultural manipulation have led to more guns sold than ever, despite the decrease in the overall crime rate gun owners supposedly need protection from. Hell, everyone from Mother Jones to CNN has the ad from the Bushmaster rifle the shooter in Conecticut had:

Lovely, right? Aside from the sexism, this ad is a blatant promotion of the violent revenge fantasies played out in every action movie and television show. Americans want to be the vigilante, avenging perceived wrongs. Most won't act on them, but I don't think the ones who do are all that different from the ones who don't. Maybe they just got pushed a little too far, were a little to isolated or were a little on edge from life events. Think how many regular office employees with no history of violence get laid off and show up armed.

But we as a culture cannot face our own demons. When a white gunman kills 20 children in a school his mother worked at, we call him "crazy" and a "lone nut." We stigmatize mental illness and then blame it. Now the man in question may or may not have had some diagnosed disorder, but it is statistically irrelevant. The rate of violence among the "crazies" is the same as the "normal" people. It is just an excuse, a dodge from actually examining our gun laws and violence obsessed culture. We have spent too long building arms and worshipping war and revenge to simply fix it, but it would be nice to at least talk about it. A little introspection goes a long way.

Instead we have Fox claiming that it is too early to talk about gun control, then five seconds later saying guns couldn't be to blame because crazy people and because other ways to die exist. They bring up various bombers and such while ignoring the rarity of such incidents. We always fall back on absolutism. If something doesn't work 100% of the time then it may as well never work, right?

There has been a lot of examination on why blaming mental illness is a terrible thing, on why we call out white terrorists as "lone nuts" while simultaneously calling non white terrorists what they are. But at its heart, the problem really lies in our inability to talk about the problem itself. Any way to otherise the violence and defensively fall back to our culture of gun worship we will take. We have problems. And they are very closely tied together. The same military complex that gave us the cold war, the Iraq war, the missile buildup and gun culture gave us these shootings. It gave us our religiosity and fundamental fear of science and distaste for environmentalism and feminism and every other positive ism. It leads even self identified skeptics to be irrational and in the end, it prevents us from introspection. It all ties to that. We cannot look inwards.

Logic Priest

Edit: Read the hell outta this.

Who Let the Paulbots Off their Leashes?

Now this one tickles me in a way that if... anyways. This woman seems to genuinely believe Ron Paul can win not just the GOP nomination with almost no delegates, but that he could then win in a general election. Despite his continuous losses, despite a lack of delegates, despite the fact that outside of Paulbots and the people they harass (read: the atheist community for some reason) they have a negligible chance of winning votes. Most people don't even know who he is, people with money refuse to be associated with him, and aside from his unchanged but rabid base no one likes him. Libertarians don't like him because he is an evangelical Christian. Republicans don't like him because he claims to challenge the centralized power both the GOP and DNC support. Other evangelicals don't like him because he is anti-war. In fact, aside from a select group of privileged white people and the occasional confused stoner college kid, no one likes him.

Ron Paul has been connected to white supremacists, anarchists, libertarians, evangelical conservatives, pro marijuana protestors, anti war protestors and in general too many eclectic groups to present a solid face. His supporters of course go on about him being the best/only choice, they claim that using magic he will both eliminated debt AND taxes. He wants to slash social spending more than Ryan does, and is an open fan of Ayn Rand, despite his evangelism. College liberals occassionaly think they like him because he voted against the invasion of Iraq and thinks the federal government shouldn't illegalize drugs, but they either realize he is a social nutcase who does want the fed to control women's bodies or they grow up and support someone mainstream. Other young people support him because they see his anti federal stance as close to anarchy, failing to realize he wants the power to go into the hands of private corporations.

Ron Paul's actual policies, as a refresher, would eliminate all but social laws from the federal level. He would outlaw abortion and gay marriage federally, despite his claims of wanting a non invasive fed. The real point, however, is that he isn't against someone controlling your life, he just wants it to be private corporations. He espouses a belief that you are absolutely free in an absolute free market, ignoring the inevitable consequences like indentured servitude, corporate interference in your private life and a total police state controlled by said corporation. Just in case anyone was considering liking him. Ron Paul is the ultimate stopped clock. By virtue of his absolute freedom (for corporations) belief structure he is anti war and federal drug control so young people sometime flock to him. This of course ignores private wars and employee drug testing, which he is all for since you are an "at will" employee. The only people who can support his real policies are Objectivists, always heroes in their own minds. People born to privilege love him because he tell them they earned it via a free market and no one has any right to touch that. Except those with more privilege.

But my favorite thing is the rabid support Ron Paul receives from his Paulbots. They are gifted at lying to themselves. They already convinced themselves they are privileged due to their own labors, despite being universally white and middle class and above. It was only a small step past that to delude themselves, every time into thinking Ron Paul would somehow, with no financial or popular support, take the GOP nomination. Every time they claim the GOP fears him but will somehow support him. Every time they claim his technical but unimpressive wins early in the primaries means he will magically come out on top. It is objectivism at its finest. Convince yourself you earned everything as some sort of microcosm of awesome. Convince yourself that you are the hero, the winner, and that you would come out on top in an anarchy. Then convince yourself the rest of the world fears and needs you so that you must triumph. They must be the best mental gymnasts in the world to reconcile their confidence before the nomination each election with the reality afterwards.

Logic Priest

Honesty in the GOP?

To steal a quote from Firefly "I appreciate the honesty. Not, you know, a lot but..." With the Pennsylvania rep openly admitting the voting ID law was to "win Pennsylvania for Mitt Romney" and now this.

I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban -- read African-American -- voter-turnout machine...

Holy fuck. This man feels comfortable saying, out loud, that he doesn't feel like the disenfranchisement of a class of Americans is important. Ohio and Pennsylvania, along with Florida are some of a few Republican dominated states at the local level but swing states in federal elections. As such they are doing anything they can to ensure Romney wins. This is even worse than the 2000 Supreme Court fiasco where judges appointed by Bush Sr chose Bush Jr to win the election. The GOP has no qualms about cheating but the fact that they do it so blatantly makes me feel like I live in a single party dictatorship. The GOP has dropped all pretense of cooperating with the Democrats unless it is in the expansion of federal power to spy on and incarcerate US citizens. They demonize Dems not just as wrong, but as "anti-American" and unpatriotic and socialist/communist/Muslim/atheists. If they want to play this game the rest of us should be ready to tear the GOP down and stomp it into dust. The Democratic party betrays us constantly but occasionally gets things right, while the GOP openly wants an oligarchy run by rich and powerful men built on exploiting the middle and working classes. While this isn't sustainable in the long run and would hurt them too, eventually, I would like to skip the really miserable interim where the economy collapses and millions starve to death.

Logic Priest

Academics

PZ Meyers has a post and link up that is frankly upsetting. Yet another way the US is falling behind due to privatization: higher education. We all hear the crap about public education failing, and that now includes public universities. Republicans have pushed for school vouchers to gut the primary and secondary education of our country, now they funnel funds to over priced and under qualified for-profit schools like Devry and Pheonix, where graduation rates are terrible, hiring rates are worse, and they cost as much as an ivy-league school.

The over political nature of faculty jobs, the remaining funds universities have going to coach salaries and non academic president's salaries have led to good scientists and educators leaving the system to make money elsewhere. Even as the states and the fed cut primary and secondary education funds, even as states and the fed funnel money out of them to tax breaks and for-profit schools, we have science funding under attack. There seems to be an all out war on education, on science, on intelligence in general. The US lead the world in science and technology for years but now we have an entire political party who cuts funds from and even demonizes education and research, the basis of such leadership. They think that private corporations will advance the world? Even while the private corporations suppress inventions that threaten their monopolies and sue each other over vague patents to keep innovation out? It seems like every card is stacked against an intelligent generation. From kindergarden to a PHD it costs more and more for less, with no prospect of a good job or even the ability to start a new company, since it will be sued out of business the second a tech giant sees it as a threat, the US is headed for a new stone age. The oligarchical nature of the Republican party isn't just about making as much money from bribes and insider trading and outsourcing as possible, it seems to be actively working towards making a new peasant class, blindly following the conservative march towards destruction.

Logic Priest

Depressing Statistics

Ok, so not exactly new but new to me, according to Gallop twice as many people self identify as conservative than liberal. That is depressing as hell. Some 40% of Americans openly claim they like the world how it once was, in some murky and ill defined past. They preferred more blatant discrimination,  less equality, more racial violence. They liked the world when we live in constant fear of global annihilation and we spent trillions of dollars building monuments to phallic pride designed to murder the population of earth. They openly admit, are even proud of the fact that they don't like change. I know most people are conservative, in the sense that they fear change, but I thought most would at least try to think ahead. I really didn't know that so many were so proud of being regressive assholes bent on making shit worse.

Fox news and its affiliate hyper conservative media love to equate liberalism with fascism and other blatant fear mongering,  so I didn't expect these people to call themselves liberals, but at least moderate or unsure or something less blatantly anti progress. Various psychological holes make people think the past was better, even to the point of thinking the past they didn't live in was, but fuck man, do they really think it was awesome for non white males in the 50s?

I guess I really shouldn't be so shocked. The average human fears change, and is easily manipulated by it. Without strong leaders, intelligent alpha personalities, they won't move or revolt in even the worst conditions. How else are there so many brutal dictatorships? It isn't even about that stupid poem everyone quotes against each other, with "they came for the jews" etc. People don't take action because they prefer to stay still, to hide, over doing things, over making decisions.

On the other hand, at least they take some position. Moderates are in some ways worse, being unwilling to even label themselves as having anything. They are almost universally conservative, but they build their identity over the golden mean fallacy. Both sides of an argument, if there only two, are not always or even likely to be equal.

Logic Priest

Pushing the Blame

Mitt Romney and the Republican party have recently taken to demonizing the half that "don't pay taxes" in the US. Besides ignoring payroll, Social Security, sales and property taxes, this doesn't mean much since that half doesn't make much. Income inequality is so bad right now that the top ten percent own nearly all the wealth earned, even more so when counting disposable (as in not debt based) income. Now we can see that they, in turn, pay far less. In an article on the New York Times website, the wealthiest Americans pay far lower than the rest of us. Partly due to capital gains maxing out at 15%, partly from tax shelters and deductions, even in bad years the wealthy make money. In 2009, for example, the richest 400 paid little to even zero in taxes, using quirks of the system obviously designed for them to exploit:

The data show that the ultrarich typically pay low tax rates every year, but 2009 was a special case. In 2008, people with large stock portfolios and other less liquid assets were disproportionately hit with large losses on paper. One of the oddities of the tax code is that capital gains taxes are discretionary, since they must be paid only when gains are realized. And they can be offset by losses. The silver lining in a bad year like 2008 for wealthy people is that they can “harvest” losses by selling assets, then use those losses to offset any gains. They can also carry forward the losses to offset gains in future years.

Apparently the ones who actually have money are the ones avoiding the taxes. Romney himself reportedly only paid 13.6% or so, under the rate that people considered in poverty by the US government pay, which is 15% or so. The ones who pay the highest percent are the middle class, and while true the wealthy pay the most in taxes by amount, they disproportionately make the most money to begin with. Demonizing these imaginary welfare queens and lazy poor people is beyond dishonest. The so called half who don't pay taxes work over 40 hours a week to afford housing and food, yet the Republicans dare to claim they don't pay their fare share? The exact people demonizing the poor pay less in taxes by amount earned than they do, and they will never even use that much money. When you live paycheck to paycheck, any amount paid is a big deal, but when you hold millions in secret accounts how much does it hurt you to pay some out for social programs?

The best, most ironic part is that a good portion of these bottom 50% people will go to the polls and vote for the people who rob them and blame them for it. They will show up and yell about Obama ruining the country with welfare and go collect their food stamps and Social Security checks. They will complain about the lazy poor (Read: black people/immigrants "others") while being poor. Tragic irony.

Logic Priest

Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand

Mitt Romney has cemented his position as a Koch/Murdoch puppet. He wants power at any cost, up to and including picking Paul Ryan, a man known for Objectivist and severe budget plans, to suck up to Fox News and the Teabaggers. Aside from his complete lack of moral compass, obvious by one of the most dishonest campaigns in the history of television ads, Romney is sucking up to the people who were going to vote for him anyways. Hopefully this alienates him even further from the "moderates" in swing states.

The Republican Party has sold the same old trickle down bullshit for decades now, and the choice of Ryan only confirms their commitment to a known bad economic policy. Unfortunately they have been really good at convincing middle and working class people to vote against their own interests by either appealing to racist and sexist ideologies for the Christian Right or by lying about entitlement programs. America, as I have mentioned before, has bought into a nearly Objectivist philosophy of self reliance and selfishness, as can be seen by the blind backlash against Obama simply saying we build things within a community. A short three years since trickle down policies combined with war mongering collapsed our economy, and that of the world, the Republicans are trying to blame Obama for "socialist" programs and entitlement programs. They go on about the impending collapse of Social Security, which is actually where much of the debt has been borrowed from rather than for, and Ryan wanted to end medicare as it currently exists, something politifact actually got wrong for once. Ryan is even an admitted Objectivist, praising Ayn Rand almost religiously.

This new, openly elitist party, run by Fox rather than running Fox, is hilariously inept at economics. They are simply thinking short term, running the country into the ground to keep a bit more of their tax money and to pay off their friends in the military industrial complex, but at the cost of long term economic health. They fail to realize that consistent degradation of the middle class, the increased concentration of wealth is a good way to devalue their own holdings, and possibly even collapse the money they think they have. While many will survive, just as many will lose it all in the crisis, eventually. Ryan is one of the worst short term thinkers, working against the tide of social progress in his moral views while trying to implement the largest takedown of the New Deal in decades. He and his ilk demonize the working class, not just the imaginary welfare queens of Reagan's era, but the working and middle classes. They keep citing mangled statistics about less than half pay taxes, which is great when you only talk about federal income tax and ignore the unemployment problem caused by his type of policies. Ignoring social security, payroll, state and property taxes while blaming those hurt the worst by the recession for the recession and debt is not just immoral but stupid. These unemployed have plenty of time to vote, and while most American voters are easily led, enough will, this time at least, see through the charade when it is so thinly veiled.

I am glad Romney chose Paul Ryan. They are out in the open now, rich white men who only care about other rich white men. Millionaires bloated on shitty policy and corruption so openly pushing for more corruption that the most fearful of unaffiliated voters will realize the danger of voting for them. Ryan appeals only to the authoritarian Republican base that was going to vote for anybody opposing Obama no matter what. They hate Obama because he is on the other team. They believe any bullshit about the recession, even when the Republican commercials blatantly lie about the order of events and the causes. This season's blatant lies are beyond the normal mudslinging and truth massaging of the past , this election has gone into full blown insanity. Demonizing the voters you hope to win, appealing only to the ones who would always vote for you, lying so obviously even the mainstream media notices. This is going to be a painful and annoying season, but barring full scale economic collapse in the next few months, Obama will win and the Republicans will continue to blame him for everything that ever went wrong.

I really wish the voting public would learn how to separate cause and effect, as well as truth and fiction.  Until they do, until our education and culture push for rational thought and empirical analysis, we will continue to be lied to by politicians. Obama is nothing the Republicans say, but he is still in bed with corporations. He still caters to "intellectual property" owners over creators and consumers. He still expands the federal power to unreasonable levels with spying on US citizens and drug wars and assassinations, but he did not magically cause an economic collapse from before he was in office or start two massive wars that created our debt. If we could hold all politicians accountable for their actual ills, we wouldn't need to invent any. If we could watch and remember past policies, we could stop repeating failed ones. If people could actually pay attention to Romney's lies, even conservatives couldn't vote for him.

Logic Priest

Violent Country

America is a violent country. So much that we only notice when someone kills a half dozen or more. In all the tens of thousands of "normal" murders each year we see nothing out of the ordinary. We as a country constantly resort to violent rhetoric in politics, we believe in a "right" to own weapons and we look the other way when people kill each other. The only time Americans seem to notice is when a brown person kills good, white, Christian Americans. Then they are terrorists, and we invade a country they may or may not have some relation to.

A Sikh temple was shot up, but still the news is cautious to call it terrorism. White supremacist shoots a group often confused with Muslims, our mortal enemies, and they wait on the FBI to call him a terrorist. It isn't just racism that is an issue here, it is the fact that Americans don't see it as an attack. Unless we can otherize the violence, it is just par for the course here.

Americans don't just kill each other, either. Our response to the deaths of three thousand was to invade an entire country, and then a second one on top of that. Hundreds of thousands dead in those countries, and no one bats an eyelash. People complain about the money it costs, which is an issue, or the soldiers on our side who die, which again IS a big deal, but they fail to mention or notice the thousands of civilians we murder in the name of patriotism. Americans don't see war as bad, they just hope for "just" war and cheap wars. Everyone looks to World War 2 as a "just" war because it is easy to otherize the Nazis, it is easy to play the good guys. They ignore the atrocities we as a nation committed and romanticize the war itself. In Europe, the world wars left a bitter taste that lasts to this day, making the vast majority of European nations hesitant to commit to any violent action, whether we call it a war or peacekeeping mission. They let go of their colonies for fear of military action, they dismantled their militaries, while the US immediately looked for more wars to fight. We are involved in major actions at least twice a generation now.

We kill each other with guns, we execute those people in retaliation. We kill nations of people who are different, and we glorify weaponry itself. We allowed, even encouraged a massive military industrial complex to be built up because we sat in anticipation of another world war, secretly hoping for it. American culture is very violent. We demonize war protestors as unamerican and unpatriotic, and dismiss them as radicals, hippies, and idealists. Talking about gun laws is tantamount to treason in our culture.

American culture may be consumed by our dark side, our lust for violence, or at least our acceptance of it. We are desensitized to death, showing temporary outrage at murder only to demand more murder to "fix" it. This may be in part from cultural manipulation by those with their profits on the line, namely the military industrial complex built by the second world war and the Cold War, but we are part of it too. We have bigger issues than "control" of guns. We need to find out how to fix our culture itself.

Logic Priest

Not as Far as you Might Think

I was floating around the internet the last few days and I found, once more, horrifying proof that things are not as far along as people like to pretend. I'm talking about equality, progressive attitudes, and rationality. One of the biggest arguments against equality these days seems to be that we are already equal, it's all done, thanks have a good life. An interesting conundrum, I say. No, really I use the word conundrum. So there.

It is understandable that the privileged don't like the idea of equality, at least the reactionary ones, but what always gets me are the people of the given oppressed class who support the status quo. They make excuses for it or claim that it is the way it was intended, alternately by god or nature, depending on the speaker. I saw a blog post today claiming Sally Ride, the recently deceased first American woman in space, was pointless. They claimed that she had no effect on women, that women didn't want to do science or be astronauts and that men naturally excelled at such jobs. This is an old claim that Sally would have had to fight back in her day, but one would hope she helped remove such sentiments, at least from other women, as the blogger in question claimed to be. No, I refuse to link because someone like that would take that as a sign she was influencing people. That decades later Sally Ride was being diminished so is a terrible sign, a sign that we haven't actually come that far. 

In the 1980s when the feminists from the civil rights movement pushed for an equal rights amendment, their former allies in the black male leaders of civil rights almost unilaterally abandoned them, having gotten (they thought) what they wanted and not willing to give up the privilege they did have, that of being male. In turn, it did not pass, excuses were once more made about women being equal already, and two decades later women still make less money for the same positions and are heavily underrepresented in traditionally male fields like science. So much for equal. Again, excuses are made, such as imaginary differences in mental make up making women less capable at math, something directly denied by grades in high school and undergrad, or that the fields are less attractive. Well the second one is true, at least, but no due to biology. Women are less attracted to certain fields because they are systematically made to feel unwelcome within those fields. Technical fields are, at the top, still dominated by men, who in turn discourage female students and employees, who deny them deserved promotions in place of men, who pay women less for identical positions. 

Conservatives of course cite women taking family time off, another social requirement, not biological, and miss the fact that the pay statistics aren't based on age but on position. It doesn't matter that a women got to a certain level later in life because she had children, the point is that she is paid less for the same level of responsibility. Alas, logic is not the strong suit of the conservative. Base emotional appeals, reactionary responses and claims of persecution are the strengths of the conservative. 

This issue is not at all limited to feminism. Women fight feminism, PoC (people of color, for some of you) fight for racism, homosexuals build gay conversion camps, etc. The status quo is comfortable, familiar and you are rewarded socially for supporting it, even as it hurts you. The worst part, though, is that in the long run, such discrimination hurts the privileged classes too. I am a cisgender, white male and patriarchy hurts me too. Racism hurts me too. It all hurts all of us. It makes us irrational, it forces us into postions we don't necessarily want to be in, and it makes it hard to defend anything we do. It destroys anyone's image of being rational, and it just doesn't make sense. While I of course don't claim to be hurt as bad as maligned classes, such enforced social roles are bad for everyone. A great example is the ERA, mentioned before. When black political leaders ditched women, especially black women, because they thought they had what they wanted, they got to watch what they had slip away. An excuse to discriminate against one class is an excuse to spread discrimination. The Reagan era "welfare queen", as invented by the conservatives in the Republican party, became an excuse to discriminate against all African Americans, and all PoC. The rights black men thought they had earned dissappeared as the War on Drugs started, becoming a system wide excuse to jail young black men, while young black women were expected to get pregnant and be abandoned so they could go on welfare and cost poor white people money. 

So it confuses me when one class of discriminated people encourages the status quo for another, but then I see the same people encouraging discrimination against themselves. We have not come so far when women justify gender inequality, when so called civil rights "leaders" abandon their own, when people say that X people are equal now. The only real way forward is for everyone supporting any equality to support all equality. Rational thought only forces us to. 

Logic Priest

Democracy

Democracy is a singularly unimpressive system. It tends to be just as oppressive for those who don't represent the ethnic, religious and cultural majority, especially women and children, and it tends to be built around a strong upper class. Democracies or republics, whichever you prefer for terminology (they are one in the same, regardless of what your grade school teacher claims) support the status quo just as much as any given monarchy or military run country.

Our democracy, in the US, is just a facade on top of an oligarchy. There always arises a class of wealthy, powerful people who overwhelmingly control policy, and sometimes it isn't even a bad thing. Sometimes the influence of the wealthy, as in the United States, can bring a measure of equality to marginalized groups who otherwise would remain marginalized forever. Usually this is for their own benefit, as well, but still some good can come from the oligarchy. For example, slavery only ended because the industrialized businesses of the Union preferred the cheaper, lower liability labor of poorly paid employees to the hassle and, in the long run, uneconomical slavery. The civil rights movement had some, if not much, success in part because it was beneficial for America to look less hypocritical when fighting for "freedom." International business was growing, and cooperation was difficult when at home the people you tried to deal with were less than human in your society. Civil rights was not well supported by the public, who preferred the status quo of women and non whites serving them.

The public, on the other hand, is even more attached to the status quo than the wealthy it helps. Change is hard, and it is frightening, and if a minimum level of comfort is maintained, the masses prefer to avoid change. The majority oppose civil rights and abortions and efforts to demarginalize non majority religions and the irreligious. The majority opposes acceptance of the "strange" such as transexuals and homosexuals or anything outside of the easy to understand social constructs of sexuality. The majority wants prayer in school, they dislike the idea of critical thought and changes, even ones which would help them, are opposed. And this is what makes them easily manipulated, easily led, easily lied to and what makes them follow the obvious oligarchy into oblivion.

This oligarchy is also incredibly bad for the majority, when it becomes overly short sighted. Of course policy will reflect some way to increase or maintain their power and wealth, but sometimes at the cost of their own long term health. Much of the changes in the industrial age were brought about by those better fit to think long term, who built up regulations and protected industries to avoid the crippling losses of the Great Depression. Many of the wealthy survived the crash in 1929, but many of them banded together and supported FDR in creating regulations, in spending government monies in order to rehabilitate the economy, and it positioned the US as the largest economy on earth. This long term thinking is rare, though. For the last several decades policy, against both self interest and majority opinions and interests, has been all about deregulation and moving away from a progressive tax structure. The wealthy have made themselves into victims, tried to convince the populous they are somehow blessed, as with the "divine right" of monarchs to rule.

These wealthy are only going to destroy themselves in the long run. Even a stupid majority will eventually notice, and even if they never revolt, a wrecked economy from the over concentration of wealth is no good for those who run it, either. If I have all of the money, it becomes worthless, and if I destroy industry to make money for myself, once more the currency becomes worthless and the economic collapse from stagnation and destruction don't help even the wealthiest. This kind of short sighted money making led to the Great Depression and will again, where many of the wealthy lost it all, too.

But aside from policy favoring the wealthy, aside from the gullibility and easily led nature of humanity, democracy makes little sense to begin with. It is however, ever so slightly better than monarchies, where one selfish monarch can destroy a nation, in democracies it takes many wealthy to do so.

Logic Priest

"Rights" and More American Exceptionalism

Once more, with the issue of mentally ill and isolated individuals going on murder sprees, we hear the "debate" (read: shouting match) about gun rights etc. No amendment in the US is as ardently defended as the second. I'm really not sure why. It's not like a bunch of untrained civilians with pistols and assault rifles can take on the US military, should it turn on us. We already can't own tanks and bombers. So that argument is complete nonsense. But, in the spirit of fuck you NRA, let us take a look at the other amendments we lose out on, assaulted by the same pro gun politicians the NRA keeps supporting.

1st Amendment: This one at least has a few lobbies, such as the ACLU (demonized by the GOP) and the EFF. But mostly we can't say certain things or be labeled terrorists, unpatriotic, evil, etc. Non Christians (and some Jews) are shoved around constantly at the state and local level, and blatantly illegal theocratic laws are pushed and passed even at the federal level. Wonderful. On top of the abuse of the Occupy protestors, who are literally beaten for their right to assemble.

5/6th: So much for due process. Guantanamo bay, Private Manning's illegal detainment, horrific lawsuits over copyright, the historic expansion of the Fed's wiretapping into all traffic, foreign and domestic, almost never with a warrant. Fantastic.

13/14/19th: Voter suppression laws in states like Florida, where they de-registered millions of minority voters and put up barriers like arbitrary limits and fines on registering "wrong" in order to discourage low income, minority and young voters because they tend to vote Democrat.

These all can get their own books, much less posts, but this was just an overview. Fuck you NRA, fuck you gun rights activists. We have bigger problems than your "right" to have a weapon designed only to kill other citizens.

Logic Priest

Rand and How America Was Not Self Made

One of the most confusing philosophers in American history was Ayn Rand. Not to say her works were complex or hard to understand, she made damn sure the explicit monologues brayed by her shallow characters got the point across. What always confused me about Rand was the fact she had followers.

The only thing I could think of was her psychotic selfish philosophy, built around the idea that there were self made supermen and everyone else was a parasite really resonated with the American fantasy about being self made. One of the greatest, most prolific fictions in the American culture, right up there with White Jesus and Gun Toting Jesus. The American people, even progressives, believe that America was built by self made men, visualizing small frontier forts and homesteads in a barren landscape.

This myth is beyond just the everyday life. Americans live in a modern, civilized society that, with strange exceptions like healthcare, has a very socialized state. Combined efforts built roads and cities, regulate the entire EM spectrum, allowed for the construction of what was once the best telecom and information network, and allowed us to jump into world wide wars virtually unscathed. Somehow, all the people benefitting from this, benefiting from a prestigious school system and easy transport and communications, much of which was pioneered by public effort in this country and Europe, like to consider themselves self made. This causes most Americans to view poverty not as a shitty situation but as a sin, somehow brought on oneself. This causes Americans to ignore the past advances made by public efforts, by government sponsored construction and research, by group effort and claim that they made the predatory millions off of the death of production is all because they were so fantastic.

It really does go back to our foundation. Americans imagine an untamed wilderness, conquered by whites, with silly primitives scattered about and conquered. The reality is very different. The English, one of the last to get on the transatlantic Imperialism, landed to find entire cities and towns, farms and infrastructure abandoned by a heavily thinned out Native American population. Even then, half of the English colonies died off or were killed by the remaining natives. Going south, the English lucked out into older Spanish lands and trading ports, like New Orleans. Americans then managed to annoy the English enough that they pulled anchor to go deal with the French, at the time a major empire.

Due to the lower population, America managed to steal thousands of brilliant minds from countries ravaged by the European wars. Rand like industrialists nearly destroyed America then and there, and only through massive socialization was the country saved. American history is one of luck, cooperation, and external help. The self made image is entirely imaginary, even historically.

But the conservatives in this country don't care much about reality. They are made up of people who hide in ignorance, who desperately want to be the superman, imagining their weaknesses are other people's faults and failing to realize they would be the downtrodden masses in the Randian Utopia. It smacks of racism and xenophobia, of wanting the world to give them everything while complaining about the few dollars from their paychecks that go to the roads they use, or to the people born to poor families. These people are born middle class and above, and they love the idea that they deserve it somehow, as if they earned it in the womb.

Rand is popular because a huge chunk of Americans are pathetic assholes looking for some excuse for their awfulness. The part that really gets me is this simultaneous blame of society for fucking them over, and the adamant declaration that everyone is self made and thusly cannot be society's fault. If YOU fail it must have been socialism or the welfare state or liberals or whatever demons you can find. But when THEY fail it was because they were not the supermen, they were the dirt beneath the supermen's heals.

Logic Priest

PS: Good article on Rand more specifically: http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=130609

PPS: On a personal note, I really hate when individualist or existential/nihilist philosophers get dragged into the muck with Rand. Nietzsche is especially maligned, with many calling Rand's Objectivism a progression of Nietzsche's superman. In the sense that Rand had obviously skimmed over some of Nietzsche's works and liked the very poorly understood version of what she thought he had said (keep in mind she was damaged, emotionally and intellectually) and she used many of the same key words, like superman. However, she utterly failed to comprehend even the most basic aspects of Nietzsche's works, even skipping over the bullshit philosophy freshmen love to spout off before they really understand anything they say. She somehow attaches the idea of a philosophic superman with a sociopathic business tycoon. She relates the fact that morals have no absolute definition to 'there should be no morals'. She takes Nietzsche's call to reevaluate morals and ethics without the superstition and self loathing as a call to be a dick, really. Nietzsche had his own philosophical issues (which he actually admitted within his works, making them into open questions) alongside issues like sexism etc, but he also never claimed to offer a perfect system. He in fact said that a new generation of supermen would need to arise in order to seek such a moral/philosophical system. Rand was little more than a traumatized, selfish child seeking unwavering approval at the expense of friends or sanity. She was a cult leader, nothing more.