Tyranny of the gun

 

So.

There has been YET ANOTHER mass shooting in the United States of America. This time, the target was a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and the shooter was, apparently, a Muslim-flavored homophobic religious fanatic.

For the FOURTEENTH TIME SINCE HIS INAUGURATION the President of the United States has made a public address in the wake of a mass shooting.

Every year, at least eleven thousand Americans kill each other with guns. If America were being occupied by a foreign country whose soldiers killed eleven thousand Americans at random every year, we would rise up and drive them out of our land to put a stop to such a senseless slaughter. But we can't drive out the brutal occupying army that is shooting us down in the streets every day, because the brutal occupying army is us.

The gun nuts tell us that these deaths are the price of freedom. If a foreign army was shooting eleven thousand of us every year, and we couldn't do anything to stop them, would we call ourselves free? Of course not. Yet, as long as it's our fellow Americans who are shooting eleven thousand people every year, that means we are free. Right?

Of course not. Just because the occupying army is domestic rather than foreign does not mean it is not an occupying army. We are being tyrannized, and just because we're tyrannizing ourselves doesn't make it any less of a tyranny. If some homophobic asshole decides he wants to slaughter a bunch of LGBT people, and he can walk into a gun shop and buy the means to do so, that is tyranny. If some lunatic hears Carly Fiorina spewing bullshit about black market baby parts and decides to slaughter a bunch of Planned Parenthood employees, and he can walk into a gun shop and buy the means to do so, that is tyranny. If some white supremacist decides to slaughter a bunch of black people in a church, and he can walk into a gun shop and buy the means to do so, THAT IS TYRANNY.

But, the gun nuts say, we need guns to protect ourselves from the government. Yeah, guess what? If the government wants you dead, all it has to do is target you with a drone strike, and YOU WILL BE DEAD, and all the guns in your arsenal won't be able to stop them. If President Obama had decided to take out the Bundy militia in Nevada a couple years back, all their guns wouldn't have been able to stop him. THEY WOULD BE DEAD. You know why Obama didn't just launch a drone strike on the Bundy ranch? Because he believes in the rule of law. That's what kept Cliven Bundy and all of his fellow wackaloon guns nuts alive: not their guns, but an idea.

And do you know what would happen if the President of the United States was not constrained by a belief in the rule of law? Consider, for example, Donald Trump, who has openly boasted about his plans to use the government to revenge himself on his enemies. He won't be constrained by any silly ideas about the rule of law. If he wants to carry out a drone strike on someone, he'll just fucking well do it, and anyone who objects can expect a drone strike of their own. YOUR GUNS WILL NOT PROTECT YOU from any government ruthless enough to ignore the rule of law.

But, the guns nuts tell themselves in the secrecy of their hearts, we need guns to protect ourselves from the scary black people. Well, too bad! Your racial paranoia is not sufficient reason for the rest of us to go in fear of our lives. If you don't like living in a country with scary black people, I suggest you move to someplace that doesn't have any. I hear the Kerguelen Islands are available.

Remember, folks, the Second Amendment was not designed to let anyone who wants a gun have one. It was designed to create a well-regulated militia (ie the locally-based Army Reserve units that we now call the National Guard), as the amendment itself states in the part that the gun nuts always leave out. The "personal right to bear arms" is a modern perversion of the amendment promoted by the gun industry and created by corporate-friendly right-wing Supreme Court justices. And what the Supremes giveth, the Supremes can taketh away. The tyranny of the gun is not a permanent part of the United States of America. We can change it ... if we want to.

Who is Snoke?

No need for spoiler warnings here, because I won't be talking about any particular plot points in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Instead, I'll focus on an odd bit of background: Supreme Leader Snoke, head of the evil First Order.

The most pressing question concerning Snoke is who is he? The prequel trilogy dealt with several of the older characters in the original trilogy, including both of the major bad guys: Palpatine and Darth Vader. So, say what you want about the prequels (and plenty can be said about them), at least they didn't leave us hanging about who these guys were.

Snoke, on the other hand, is just sort of there, running the First Order. His name suggests ...

You know what? I'm going to pause this analysis for a bit to reflect on what a terrible, terrible name "Snoke" is. Snoke is no proper name for an Evil Overlord. An Evil Overlord name needs to be something Greco-Latinate like Sidious or Galactus or Thanos or Davros; or else something that sounds just plain evil like Morgoth or Voldemort. But Snoke? Snoke is the name you give to the comic relief character, or at best to the plucky sidekick. You do not name the Evil Overlord Snoke.

Where was I? Oh yeah, his name (which is, I must repeat, just terrible) doesn't suggest a Sith Lord, even though he seems to be a master of the Dark Side of the Force. Maybe he's just some bush league Force sensitive bad guy who happened to luck his way into the leadership of the First Order. Or ..

Or you may be familiar with a fan theory that was making the rounds a few months ago, arguing that Jar Jar Binks was the secret mastermind behind the rise of the Galactic Empire in the prequel trilogy. Is it possible that Darth Jar Jar is Snoke? True, Snoke looks nothing like Jar Jar, but bear in mind that we never actually see Snoke in the flesh. He's always just an image, a hologram issuing orders to Kylo Ren and General Hox, and images can be manipulated, or even created from scratch. The Darth Jar Jar theory suggests that Jar Jar always operates from behind the scenes, using Palpatine as a catspaw in the prequel trilogy (and presumably in the original trilogy as well). Creating a holographic alter ego to act as the face of the First Order would be completely in character for Darth Jar Jar.

In that case, maybe the name Snoke is Jar Jar's crowning achievement: giving the presumed evil mastermind a name that's even more ridiculous than his own.

A challenge to Donald Trump

Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump made headlines yesterday when he called for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on.” Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that Trump is being such a wishy-washy, namby-pamby weakling.

Let's face it, ALL monotheistic religions are pretty frightening. How can you not be frightened when somebody declares that all gods but his own are false? History shows that every monotheistic religion has carried out wars of aggression against members of other religions, and justified their actions by claiming that their enemies worshiped false gods.

Therefore, I call on Mr. Trump to prove that he's serious about defending the United States. We need to ban all followers of monotheistic religions from entering this country until our leaders can "figure out what is going on." Anything less is just setting ourselves up for more attacks by religious fanatics.

Cold dead hands

Details are starting to emerge about the couple that went on a shooting spree in San Bernardino, California yesterday. One of the shooters was a quiet, devout county health inspector named Syed Rizwan Farook and the other was his domestic partner and the mother of his child wife, Tashfeen Malik. From what we know so far, Farook was apparently an honest, liberty-loving American who enjoyed exercising his Constitutional right to purchase and own firearms and create his own home-made remote-control-detonated pipe bombs.

Although much remains to be determined, it is clear that Farook was made the victim of Political Correctness at a holiday party he was attending along with his co-workers, and he courageously chose to Stand His Ground by applying a Second Amendment remedy to the matter. Malik demonstrated her womanly devotion to her man by standing by him during his time of trial and assisting him in implementing his Second Amendment remedy.

Afterward, the two were apparently betrayed by a freedom-hating statist who alerted the government to their whereabouts. This resulted in an appalling exercise of government overreach as officials confronted the couple in their home (or at any rate, a home), as far as we know without a warrant. The couple then once again courageously Stood Their Ground by exercising their Second Amendment rights, until they were killed by agents of the state. It can truly be said of Farook and Malik that the government was only able to take their guns from their cold, dead hands.

Meanwhile, as far as the shooting spree in Savannah, Georgia (remember that?) is concerned, we don't yet know the shooter's race, so we can't say for certain whether he was also a courageous American who was Standing His Ground, or a dangerous thug.

UPDATE: Latest report confirms that the two Patriot American Second Amendment Heroes in San Berdoo were an actual married couple and not just sinfully shacking up together. Blog post updated to reflect this important new information.

The trouble with Joe

Media critic Jay Rosen talks about why the Trump candidacy has been so confounding for journalists. They point out that he's lying, and it doesn't matter. Not only does he refuse to admit to his lies, he keeps doubling down on them, and his constant lying does nothing to reduce his popularity. In fact, it actually makes him more popular among Republicans. The reason Trump is able to do this goes back to a technique for manipulation that is known in sports as "working the refs".

Working the refs is when a team tries to intimidate the referees by constantly challenging their decisions, accusing them of making bad calls. The idea is that if you keep it up long enough, the referees will either A) start to question their own judgment, or B) decide to take the easy way out and just do what you want. Either way, the result is the same: the referees will start shading their calls to favor your team.

In a democracy, the media are our referees. Their job is to penalize politicians who break the rules. Conservatives are basically contemptuous of democracy, and constantly seek ways to subvert it, so in the early 1980s they started working the refs hard, initiating a campaign accusing newly-elevated CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather of "liberal bias". From there, the campaign expanded to include every media outlet. The finishing touch was the creation in 1996 of Fox News Channel, a conservative propaganda mill that insisted that it was unbiased, and that all of the real news organizations had a liberal bias.

And it worked like a charm. The establishment media became utterly terrified of conservative accusations of "liberal media bias", and they bent over backwards to avoid it. The way they did so was to basically stop being referees. Instead of telling the truth, the new goal of journalism was to maintain the appearance of objectivity by refusing to point out when one side in a controversy (invariably the conservative side) was lying. The result was the spread of the "he said-she said" style of political reporting, which David Roberts aptly summarized this way: "Quote this one, quote that one, opinions differ, done."

Roberts notes that conservatives gave journalists an alibi for abandoning the referee role by creating an entire alternate universe of think tanks and media outlets that journalists could quote for their he said-she said stories. This gave journalists an excuse to stop passing judgment on dishonest policy claims, and focus on trivialities like "Al Gore said he invented the internet" or the minutia of John Kerry's Vietnam War record, or Hillary Clinton's remark that she once landed in Bosnia "under fire."

What Trump has done is refuse to provide journalists with any pretext for ignoring his lies. He doesn't rely on any studies, even bogus right-wing think tank studies, to back up his claims. He simply makes them, and dares journalists to call him on them. Then journalists do, and discover that nobody cares. And the reason nobody cares is that journalists have made it their business to ignore important lies; therefore, any lie they take notice of must ipso facto be unimportant.

Rosen, meanwhile, has proposed a way for journalists to start to reclaim their referee roles. They can begin, he says, by distinguishing between realities and appearances, and between facts and arguments. Rosen created the grid at the top of this post showing how news stories can be placed into one of four categories: reality-based factual stories, reality-based argument stories, appearance-based factual stories, and appearance-based argument stories.

However, there is a flaw in Rosen's proposal which he doesn't allow for, and doesn't even seem to be aware of. The flaw is that Rosen's proposal assumes that journalists are actually capable of distinguishing between facts and arguments, and between appearance and reality. But why should they be?

If this was a new situation, it would be a simple matter for journalists who were familiar with those distinctions to resume making them. But, as I've noted, this is not a new situation. This situation has been going on for over thirty years. I would argue that in that time, a whole generation of journalists has grown up for whom the ability to distinguish between appearance and reality is not only irrelevant, but actually counterproductive. After all, a journalist who doesn't know he's doing anything wrong has an advantage over one who does know, and has to fight the desire act on his knowledge.

The canonical example of this has to be Joe Klein of Time magazine. Back in November 2007, Klein wrote a column called "The Tone-Deaf Democrats" in which he claimed that a Democratic bill to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans.” It turned out that Klein had been played by GOP Representative Pete Hoekstra. Hoekstra had fed Klein a line of bullshit about the bill, and Klein gullibly took his word for it without bothering to ask any of the bill's Democratic authors if it was true. When Klein's stupidity was exposed, he notoriously insisted that "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right."

Mr. Rosen, I hope I'm wrong about this, but I think it's too late for American political journalists to start acting like political journalists again. They don't know how.

Round up the usual suspects

Oh look, another armed white man committed another isolated act of don't-call-it-terrorism.

You know what we have to do: round up all the Syrian refugees. You know how dangerous those people are.

An open letter to Representative Glenn Thompson (R-PA)

Dear Representative Thompson,

You have been my representative in the U.S. House since I moved to Centre County, Pennsylvania back in August. As a constituent, I would like to discuss your recent vote in favor of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015. While I certainly sympathize with your desire to prevent more right-wing religious fanatics from moving to the United States, I don't think this bill was the proper vehicle for doing so. For one thing, making it harder for victims of Painful Rectal Itch to immigrate seems counterproductive, since Painful Rectal Itch is itself a fanatical right-wing religious organization, and it tends to target people because it doesn't regard them as fanatically religious enough.

For another thing, even if the act succeeded in preventing members of Painful Rectal Itch from settling in the United States, that would do nothing to alleviate the many problems caused by the tens of millions of right-wing religious fanatics who already live here, such as attacks on women's reproductive health, hindering the civil rights of LGBT people, and attempts to corrupt the teaching of science in public schools. It seems to me that instead of hindering the settlement of refugees in the United States, your efforts to protect us from right-wing religious fanatics would be more productive if you voted for legislation enforcing the civil rights of sexual minorities and rolling back restrictions on reproductive health care.

I hope you will take this advice into account in your future legislative activities.

Best wishes,

Johnny Pez
Bellefonte, PA
November 2015

A tale of two countries

In the wake of the Painful Rectal Itch attacks in Paris, the governors of various American states have been falling all over themselves in their eagerness to pander to the cowardly xenophobes who make up the Republican base. As of 6:19 PM Monday night, the governors of 27 states have announced that they will not be allowing Syrian refugees to be resettled in their states. This despite the fact that state governors have no power to dictate who can and can't move to their states.

Meanwhile, back in France ... you know, the country where the terrorist attacks actually happened ... French President Francois Hollande told a gathering of French mayors that “30,000 refugees will be welcomed over the next two years. Our country has the duty to respect this commitment,” while adding that “France will remain a country of freedom" and stating that “Life should resume fully. What would France be without its museums, without its terraces, its concerts, its sports competitions? France should remain as it is. Our duty is to carry on our lives."

All of which raises the question: who are the surrender monkeys now?

Stop the satire, the liberals want off

There's a satirical liberal Facebook group called Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off. The group seems to have decided that conservatives shouldn't have all the fun when it comes to attributing fake quotes to public figures. As Politifact notes, the group's fake quotes have been spreading among liberal FB users who think they're genuine. One of the group's fake Ben Carson quotes has even made its way into a Daily Kos piece (it's the one heading the piece).


Guys, come on, leave the fake quotes to the wingnuts. It's bad enough to have David Broder-wannabees in the media claiming that "both sides do it." Don't make it true.

The Short Goodbye

Mark Bernstein is one of the Grand Old Men of the internet, and an editor at Wikipedia. However, despite being both old and white, he has been on the side of the angels on the subject of GamerGate, chronicling the 'gaters attempt to turn Wikipedia into a weapon in their endless, mindless war on women.

Since Clare Hooper has done an outstanding job of summarizing what's happening there, I might as well just steal her summary wholesale:

A very, very brief summary is that the entry on Wikipedia about Gamergate has been the subject of weeks (running into months) of edit wars. It culminated in a decision from ArbCom, the highest user-run body of the site, to ban the five editors who were trying to prevent the page from being rewritten with a pro-Gamergate slant. According to Bernstein’s analysis, sanctions were also applied against some of the pro-Gamergate accounts — but only against a few accounts, and throwaway accounts at that.

Basically, Wikipedia has decided to hand over the keys to the henhouse to the foxes.

I myself have been contributing to Wikipedia for ten years. However, this is just too fucking much. Either the ArbCom is suffering from a massive case of the stupids, or the ArbCom is carrying water for the 'gaters. It doesn't matter which, because either one is reason enough for me to stop contributing.

So that's what I've done. Unless Wikipedia shows a sudden rush of good sense and both completely reverses this decision and issues a sincere apology that actually acknowledges wrongdoing and offers genuine contrition to the many injured parties involved, I won't be back.

Douchebro sighting

My recent attempt to attract the attention of online misogynists by insulting them seems to have paid off. The embedded music video I posted yesterday attracted an anonymous (of course) comment consisting of a copypasted misogynist rant. The rant, being the work of a copypasta troll, was without value, and was therefore deleted. The curious can see the original source of the rant at this Jezebel post.

I must say, I am immensely pleased by the success of this effort. We all like to get attention, even troubled loners like myself. I also enjoy having my belief in the knee-jerk reflexes of the onlight Right confirmed. All I have to do is keep insulting them, and they have to respond. Their feeble minds can no more resist the call of mockery than a moth can resist an open flame.

So we here at the Johnny Pez blog will definitely be doing more posts on Gamergate. Bwahahahahaaa!

All the Young Dudebros

Author John Scalzi is much better than I am at baiting 'Gaters.

Go John go!

Gamergate: Attack of the Douchebros

Two of the core principles here at the Johnny Pez blog are supporting social justice and trying to bump up our meager pageviews, so any time we can combine the two, we will. Longtime readers (assuming there are any) will remember our (unsuccessful) attempt to attract the attention of the online misogyny crowd by invoking the dread name of Rebecca Watson.

Well, if at first you don't succeed, try try again. A phenomenon that's currently making the internet even more terrible than it already was is Gamergate. As Kyle Watson (no relation, AFAIK) notes in this piece at Deadspin, Gamergate is basically a vortex of misogynistic internet gamer trolls who spend their time harrassing women and intimidating various other targets in response to an imaginary grievance. Watson points out that the 'Gaters real grievance is that video game producers, might, possibly, spend slightly less time pandering to the traditional gamer demographic of young white straight guys.

In a way, the Johnny Pez blog is in an ideal position to make a stand against the 'Gaters. It's completely obscure, and thus unlikely to attract their attention in the first place. It doesn't rely on advertising, so it can't be shut down by having its sponsors intimidated. And blogmaster Johnny Pez isn't a woman, so he can't be silenced by online sexual harrassment and rape threats.

If by some remote chance some 'Gaters do manage to find their way here, I'd just like to take this opportunity to point out what utterly worthless sacks of shit they are. They are cowards who hide behind the anonymity afforded by the internet to attack targets they know won't be able to fight back. They are overprivileged crybabies who can't stand the thought of a gaming universe that doesn't revolve around them. Being a white straight guy myself, I can state with total assurance that these assholes not only have no legitimate grievances, it would do them a world of good to suffer through some real adversity and be taken down a peg or three.

Any 'Gaters who wish to respond in comments should be aware that I will delete any that I find to be of no value. And the ones I don't delete, I will relentlessly mock.

Technical difficulties

Originally, this post was going to be the first installment of another Harl Vincent story. Unfortunately, after I spent two hours typing it in and attempted to post it, Blogger decided instead to delete everything except the first four words. Tune in tomorrow when I type the whole damn thing over again.

Deep thought for the year

Well, that decade sucked.

See you in the Washington Post

The Washington Post, home to such ornaments of the punditocracy as George F. Will, Charles Krauthammer, and William "the Bloody" Kristol, is holding a contest to find America's Next Great Pundit. The winner gets a provisional weekly column for thirteen weeks, and is paid the princely sum of two hundred dollars per column. Well, I couldn't pass that up, so I've emailed off the following entry. I'm sure they'll find it irresistible.

Paragraph about you and why you should win (100 words or less)

I think you'll find my qualifications impeccable. I hate hippies, love torture, become sexually aroused at the thought of invading other countries, and every opinion I've expressed in the last fifteen years has proven to be dead wrong. I'll fit right in.

Opinion essay on a topic in the news (400 words or less)

The fact is, trying to negotiate with terrorist states such as Iran sends the wrong message. The only thing such rogue nations understand is brute force. Any attempt to reason with them will be perceived as weakness, and will invite an attack on us (or even worse, on our Israeli ally). Real Americans like Senator John McCain understand that.

Instead of trying to use persuasion or sanctions, or relying on assistance from other countries, Barack Obama needs to make it clear to the Iranians that failure to comply with our demands will result in immediate military action, up to and including the use of America's nuclear arsenal. Not only would military action encourage the Iranian dissident movement to rise up and overthrow their current anti-American government in favor of a western-style pro-American democracy, it would also demonstrate our resolve to other unfriendly nations and make them think twice about angering us.

Unless Obama rethinks his current strategy of appeasement, America will almost certainly suffer another terrorist attack like that of September 11. For the sake of the American people, Obama needs to take a strong stand against our enemies.

I figure I'm a shoe-in. I'll let you know when my first column appears.

Litterbug

Who would throw trash out of a speeding car? I don't know his name, but I do know he drives a white Hyundai Elantra sedan with the Massachusetts plate 633 AWO.

We Sux

For twenty years, city officials in Sioux City, Iowa have been trying to get the Federal Aviation Administration to change the three-letter code by which its airport is known throughout the world and which is printed on tickets and luggage tags: SUX (an abbreviation, of course, of Sioux). In 1988, and again in 2002, the city petitioned the FAA, but to no avail. Finally, as the AP reported last week, city officials decided to give up the attempt, and embrace their inner suckiness.

SUX will now be at the center of the airport's new marketing campaign. FLY SUX will appear on souvenir caps and t-shirts, and form the URL of the airport's redesigned website, www.flysux.com.

I salute Sioux City's bold attempt to make a virtue of necessity. As airport board member Mark Bernstein notes, many airports, including some of the busiest, have forgettable three-letter codes (Providence's own T.F. Green Airport, frex, has the totally forgettable PVD), but nobody ever forgets Sioux City's code.