Month: December 2012

Firmin Debrabander uses political theorist Hannah Arendt to consider the primacy of free speech in democratic life – and the way an armed society can undermine it:

[G]uns pose a monumental challenge to freedom, and particular, the liberty that is the hallmark of any democracy worthy of the name — that is, freedom of speech. Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech.

This becomes clear if only you pry a little more deeply into the N.R.A.’s logic behind an armed society. An armed society is polite, by their thinking, precisely because guns would compel everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening. The suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly — not make any sudden, unexpected moves — and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend.

As our Constitution provides, however, liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be. 

More readers round out the discussion:

There are about 90,000 elementary schools in the United States.  Let’s say you pay one single-shift guard about $60,000 including benefits, taxes and overhead.  You’ve just spent $5.4 billion to do what? 

It wouldn't ensure any safety either. Unless you're talking about the traditional one-room schoolhouse in the country, it's a fantasy that one armed person could protect schools with multiple buildings that are the norm. My wife is a first grade teacher on a school campus with more than a dozen buildings and many more classrooms. People who advocate for an armed guard at the school act as if the gunman is going to alert them beforehand as to which building and classroom he intends to enter to inflict his carnage.

Another asks:

And who will pay for putting an armed guard in every school in America? Surely not the Republicans, who oppose putting more teachers in every school in America.

Another:

Imagine if instead of asking for "trained volunteer" armed guards at all the schools that the NRA asked for trained volunteer workers for the mentally ill and for parents with problem children. Or if they asked for, say, a small tax on guns and ammo to provide for hospitals for the mentally ill.  If "guns are not the problem; people are," then why don’t they back up their rhetoric and start helping people?

Another dissents:

I watched LaPierre’s press conference in its entirety and did not once perceive a desire for "government agents" in every school.  I also did not perceive his call for Congress to pass legislation for school security as that, either.  He called instead for an appropriation of funding.  He also called for retired military or policemen, or others in the security field to fulfill the role of security.  The NRA’s proposal utilizes their assets such as their connections to law enforcement and firearms training, which even most of their critics acknowledge as useful if not excellent.  They are crafting a plan with their money, their assets, and their connections, and hope to work in conjunction with local districts.  I do not see anything Orwellian about that.

And I see nothing "deranged" about it either.  LaPierre didn’t call for the arming of teachers, but rather qualified personnel.  If that is "deranged," do you also find deranged the security that already exists in the other districts across the country that employ school resource officers?  My wife has one such individual in her school who is a county policeman.  He is used in drug busts, fights, bullying, etc. – not just as a bouncer.  His presence is appreciated.

What is baffling to me is the complete refusal to recognize that a school is an easy target, and that adjustments have to be made.  Gun control, in my view, won’t work.  I am a teacher and don’t want to work in a prison (and not too willing to carry a gun at this point, even though I own a few); but, when such violence was directed at other institutions, things changed.  I accept LaPierre’s point.  For those who scoff at it, I challenge Congress to give up their armed security, ask people to re-envision a President in an open-air motorcade in a regular convertible, ask people to fly without an armed U.S. marshal, ask people if drug dogs should not be used in schools, and on, and on.  I’m sure people never thought these things would come, but they did.  You remark on your blog several times that part of conservatism is accepting reality.  Well, this is it, unfortunately.

(Chart: Slate is keeping track of the country's gun deaths since Sandy Hook)

Megan Garber passes along a video:

[A]rtist/designer Helmut Smits demonstrates the mother of all post-apocalyptic IKEA Hacks: a MacGyvered method of sparking flame. The better to survive in a newly-wild world once the power — and everything else — has gone out. IKEA, though it sells pretty much everything else, does not sell matches or lighters — so Smits has devised a means of fire-starting using things that IKEA does carry: hangers, ropes, kitchen knives, wine racks, egg cups, napkins, floral arrangements. And his work is, in all seriousness, amazing to see. 

Zooming out, Joshua Rothman discusses the various depictions of the apocalypse:

These sorts of visions are thrilling to contemplate in a purely aesthetic way. And they aren’t, necessarily, despairing visions; in a way, they’re fortifying. They put me, at least, in a broadly existentialist frame of mind. If the things we care about—goodness, love, beauty, intelligence, friendship, humanity, and so forth—exist only for a little while, and only for us, then that’s a reason to take them even more seriously than usual. If our lives are islands of meaning amidst a rising ocean of meaninglessness, then we ought to mean as much as possible to ourselves, and to one another.

(Image: From a collection of IKEA monkey memes)

This post has just blown up on Facebook. A reader writes:

Nice piece, and all too true. But what it made me think is, none of this surprises me, because none of it is new. The right wing crazy we see now masquerading as “conservative” is simply the same old underbelly of right wing crazy I knew growing up in the flyover Midwest 50 years ago. The only difference now is that the inmates are in charge.

I liken the current situation on the right to a boil coming to a head: unpleasant, but necessary. History will lance it, and with the infection cleaned out, we have some chance of healing enough to address the real issues we face.

I also recommend Frum’s typically shrewd assessment. Another writes:

The really sad part is I cannot vote for my Republican congressman, someone I have known since we met in elementary school 47 years ago. He’s not a bad guy, I generally agree with him, he’s not a crazy and described as a low key member. I have called his office for services (passport snafu) for a friend and was treated well. But I cannot vote to maintain the Republican majority.

Another:

Completely tangential to the discussion of budget talks, the phrase “Plan B” is the elliptical way my wife and I refer to oral sex in the presence of kids. We’re gonna have to come up with a new phrase lest images of Speaker Boehner ruin our foreplay.

And another:

I just saw part of the press conference and something about LaPierre reminded me so much of the Catholic bishops whenever they are forced to speak about the sex abuse cases or the treatment of the women religious. They are just so in their own bubble that the arguments they make must sound perfectly reasonable if you are in that bubble, but of course sound absurd outside of it.

After extending sympathy to the families, the first point LaPierre made was that gun-free school zones are the problem. I mean, how insulated do you have to be to not see that, politically, that is going to be a losing argument? That you don’t want to go on national television and literally LEAD with this point?

I remember listening to a Terry Gross interview with the bishop in charge of beating back the nuns, and naturally the question of ordaining women arose. And he had this sort of gleeful moment when he thought he caught Terry in some logical trap by saying, “But St. Paul talks about Christ being the groom, and the church being his bride!” Well, duh! So women can never be priests because of some turn of phrase that is not even in the Gospels. Gotcha, Terry! But he must have truly thought that was a compelling argument,just as the NRA must truly think their arguments are going to be compelling to a national TV audience.

Sad.

(Photo: Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) (R) speaks during a press conference as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) (L) looks on at the U.S. Capitol December 21, 2012 in Washington, DC. By Win McNamee/Getty. Lost elephant by Getty as well.)

Christopher Robbins investigates:

More often than not, it means in a mass grave with 850,000 others in the world's largest publicly funded cemetery, Hart Island. … Prisoners on Rikers Island perform the burials for 50 cents an hour, and the deceased are stacked atop one another, 150 to a pit, in a practice carried over from the 19th century. "Sometimes they dig up portions of earth that already have bodies in them," notes Frank Clark, a former Rikers inmate who now works with PTH. That procedure has been disputed by the DOC, but Clark says he has firsthand knowledge of the practice. "I know they do that, because I worked the detail. It's true."

Making the King of Pop proud:

(Hat tip: S. Abbas Raza)

Babbage reveals a major reason why flight attendants have to nag you about it during takeoff and landing:

The problem is that the current [FAA] guidelines require each airline to test every make and model of each gizmo it wants the FAA to approve for use on its flights—and then to do the same for every type of aircraft in its fleet. The airlines have baulked at such a monumental task because of the cost. The FAA is now looking for ways to bring airlines, aircraft manufacturers, electronics makers and other interested parties together to streamline the certification process at least for tablets, e-readers, game machines and a few other popular gadgets.

But do not expect such easing to extend to phones. One reason is that, with the enormous number of makes and models in existence, getting all mobiles approved for use on board aircraft would be prohibitively expensive. Another is that the ground-based interference problem has still to be resolved.

The head of the FCC has even urged the FAA to allow more portable devices. Meanwhile, flight crews are exempt from the restrictions:

[F]light crews have had permission from the FAA to use portable computers called "electronic flight bags" in the cockpit since the early 1990s. Today, they carry iPads and other tablets as replacements for the bulky aircraft operating manuals, flight-crew manuals and navigation charts. These portable electronic devices are in much closer proximity to the aircraft’s avionics than anything passengers are likely to bring aboard, and remain switched on throughout the flight.

Previous Dish on the topic here, here and here.

J.J. Gould reports on the contemporary trade:

The leading demographic accounts of contemporary slavery project a global slave population of between 20 million and 30 million people. Most of these people are in sedentary forms of slavery, such as hereditary collateral-debt bondage. But about 20 percent have been unwittingly trafficked though the promise of opportunity by predators through varying combinations of deception and coercion, very mobile, very dynamic, leveraging communications and logistics in the same basic way modern businesses do generally.

After the earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti, Hispaniola was quickly overrun with opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell into domestic slavery or brothels. Others are children literally sold by parents or relatives in order to pay off debt or to lessen their economic burden. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are from South and Southeast Asia, along with China, Russia, Albania, Belarus, and Romania. There is a significant slave presence across North Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon. There is also a major slave trade in Africa. Descent-based slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of slaves are passed on to their slave-holders' children. And the North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000 people, is essentially a constellation of slave-labor camps.

(Photo: In 2009, Prom Vannak, pictured in a Washington, D.C., hotel June 17, 2012, jumped from a Thai fishing boat on which he was a slave and swam for freedom in Borneo. In Washington on June 19, he was recognized as one of the world's heroes in the fight against human trafficking. By Cliff Owen/MCT via Getty Images)

Derek Thompson notes that "in 2006, Google made $60 billion less than U.S. newspapers and magazines. Now it makes more ad money than all of U.S. print media combined":

The scariest thing about the newspaper business is the idea that digital newspaper advertising is theoretically "alive" and "the future" even though it's growing at 1/50th the pace of print's decline. In the last five years, we've basically figured out one big thing about digital advertising — the power of search — while banner ads, native ads, and sponsored ads, and other non-search-advertising innovations haven't been rich enough to pay for anything except the most shoe-string of journalism budgets. Basically, the digital ad business for newspapers stinks.

He also passes along Emma Gardner's end-of-the-year roundup of charts that analyze digital publishing. Previous coverage here.

Between the humiliating and chaotic collapse of Speaker Boehner's already ludicrously extreme Plan B and Wayne La Pierre's deranged proposal to put government agents in schools with guns, the Republican slide into total epistemic closure and political marginalization has now become a free-fall. This party, not to mince words, is unfit for government. There is no conservative party in the West – except for minor anti-immigrant neo-fascist ones in Europe – anywhere close to this level of far right extremism. And now the damage these fanatics can do is not just to their own country – was the debt ceiling debacle of 2011 not enough for them? – but to the entire world.

Those of us who have warned for years about this disturbing trend toward ever more extreme measures – backing torture, pre-emptive un-budgeted wars, out-of-control spending followed, like a frantic mood swing, by anti-spending absolutism of the most insane variety in a steep recession, vicious hostility to illegal immigrants, contempt for gay couples, hostility even to contraception, let alone a middle ground on abortion … well, you know it all by now.

But the current constitutional and economic vandalism removes any shred of doubt that this party and its lucrative media bubble is in any way conservative. They aren't. They're ideological zealots, indifferent to the consequences of their actions, contemptuous of the very to-and-fro essential for the American system to work, gerry-mandering to thwart the popular will, filibustering in a way that all but wrecks the core mechanics of American democracy, and now willing to acquiesce to the biggest tax increase imaginable because they cannot even accept Obama's compromise from his clear campaign promise to raise rates for those earning over $250,000 to $400,000 a year.

And this is not the exception. It is the rule. On abortion, the party proposes that it be made illegal in every state by amending the Constitution. Torture? More, please. Iran? It should be attacked if it merely develops the technological skill to make a nuclear bomb, let alone actually make one. Israel? Leading Republicans don't just support new settlements on the West Bank. They show up for the opening ceremonies!

Gun control? A massacre of children leads to a proposal for more guns in elementary schools and no concession on assault weapons. Immigration? Romney represented the party base – favoring a brutal regime of persecution of illegal immigrants until they are forced to "self-deport" – or rounding as many up as they can. Climate change? It's a hoax – and we should respond by shrieking "Drill, Baby, Drill!" Gay marriage? The federal constitution should be amended to bar any legal recognition of any gay relationships, including civil partnerships. Their legislative agenda in this Congress? To "make Obama a one-term president." Not saving the economy, not pursuing new policies, not cooperating to make Democratic legislation better. Just destroying a president of the opposite party. And, of course, failing.

Then there is the rhetoric. In just the last fortnight, House Republicans have asserted that secretary of state Clinton faked her recent fall and concussion at home in order to get out of testifying on the Benghazi consulate attack. And then the Weekly Standard quotes a Senate Republican staffer saying: "Send us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite."

Enough. This faction and its unhinged fanaticism has no place in any advanced democracy. They must be broken. But the current irony is that no one has managed to expose their extremism more clearly than their own Speaker. His career is over. As is the current Republican party. We need a new governing coalition in the House – Democrats and those few sane Republicans willing to put country before ideology. But even that may be impossible.