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Do It Again, Only HARDER!.

Say Uncle points to another Laura Washington piece on gun control. It seems Ms. Washington wants to “energize the base,” since in her previous jeremiad she stated that she wanted to “get organized and shove tougher gun policies right down their throats.”

One of those throats, obviously, would be mine. Now she wants to “pry open those cold dead hands.”

Guess whose?

Say Uncle has done a masterful job fisking her op-ed (and I’ll get back to that), and Ahab has some things to say about it, as does Sebastian, and Countertop, and Alphecca. Since Ms. Washington states in her current piece, “Whenever I write about the plague of gun violence, I get a huge blowback from the gun lovers of America,” I thought I’d do my part as well.

Before I do that, though, allow me to bask in the pleasure that Ms. Washington took what I told her in my first email to her, and wrote an op-ed from it. I wrote previously:

Ms. Washington, you note in your piece: “(I)t seems the gun control advocates have been outmatched. Abigail Spangler acknowledges as much. Spangler is the founder of ProtestEasyGuns.com, a Virginia-based group that has been spearheading a slew of anti-gun protests around the nation.

“Gun control activists, she wrote me, ‘are TRYING HARD but they are seriously affected in state after state by lack of funding and contributions.” She recently met, she says, with the leader of Virginia’s only gun control group. “He says they may not even be able to afford any lobbyist at all soon in Virginia!'”

Ms. Washington, the citizenry will offer an opinion to anyone. Opinions are free. But activism costs money – and the anti-gun side has shown that the hearts and wallets of the general public are not really into it. Ask any hundred random people on the street if they favor stricter gun laws and most likely the majority will say “yes.” Ask them what the current gun laws are, and they won’t be able to tell you. Gun rights activists can. The gun control side of the argument has been supported for decades with money from foundations, perhaps the largest contributor being the Joyce Foundation. Look them up. Those of us who believe in the right to arms are the true grass-rooters, and there are far more of us than the mere four million that the NRA claims as members. As someone once put it so pithily: “Poor Lefties; they’ve been playing on astroturf so long that they don’t know grassroots even when fed a mouthful of divot.”

In the current piece she writes:

Through organizing, the Internet, and plunking down plenty of cold hard cash, the gun lobby has proven it is ready for primetime. Meanwhile, its opponents are languishing in the wee-hours of late-night local cable.

Right. The Violence Policy Center, the Brady Center, IANSA, the Second Amendment Research Center of Ohio State University, the Harvard School of Public Health, the…. Well, you get the idea.

Gun control advocates should piggyback on the success of online activist groups like MoveOn.org and MeetUp.com. These efforts have raised millions to promote political candidates and the antiwar movement. The money is there. Barack Obama, for one, has raised over $17 million on the Internet. Marches and protests are fine, but it is imperative to devise a response that is sophisticated and symmetrical to the gun lobby’s tactics.

She realizes her side needs money, but I don’t think she knows the mailing address for her grant application to the Joyce Foundation.

ANYWAY, back to Say Uncle’s fisk. In it, he uses one of my favorite “Uncleisms” – “Gun control is what you do instead of something.”

Ms. Washington makes two statements that I think are crucial to understand about the topic, but that almost no one on either side ever addresses. To wit:

The gun army, made up almost exclusively of white men from suburban and rural areas….

and:

According to a recent report by the U.S. Justice Department, nearly half the people murdered in the United States in 2005 were black. Most lived in cities and were felled by guns. While blacks make up about 13 percent of the nation’s population, they comprised 49 percent of all murder victims.

I am reminded of the truth of the first point every time I go to the range. While Zendo Deb, Denise, Tam, Bitter, KeeWee, Breda, and hundreds if not thousands of women, not to mention black men like Kenn Blanchard and Walter Williams, are members of the “gun army,” the overwhelming majority of us are white males, mostly suburban or rural.

But very nearly half of the victims and perpetrators of violent crime are less than 13% of the population. A very identifiable less than 13%.

Young. Urban. Black. Males.

In fact, the level of violence committed by and upon this tiny demographic skews America’s violent crime rates markedly, as I pointed out in Questions from the Audience? back in January of last year.

But whose throats does Ms. Washington want to shove “tough new gun policies” down? Whose “cold dead hands” does she want to pry open, in the apparent belief it will somehow affect the problem she herself identifies?

If you misidentify the problem, it’s no surprise that you misidentify the solution, but it’s more than a little exasperating when the other side points right at a crucial datum, and continues to make the same error. It leads one to suspect either a logical disconnect, or an ulterior motive.

“Gun control is what you do instead of something” indeed.

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Another Debate (That I’m Supposedly Terrified Of).

Yesterday Say Uncle linked to a rather hysterical (as in PSH, not ROFL) piece by someone who is, shall we say, rabidly anti-gun. Having lost two family members in separate incidents, his hatred of the tools of violence is understandable, but he’s extended that hatred out to those of us who defend the right to arms as well.

One of the posters defenders is also a blogger, and has written an invitation to debate at his blog, Unique Like Everybody. Now we just need to work out the logistics of how to do this; either trade posts at each other’s sites, or (I would prefer) post everything at both sites. I prefer to keep a record of the exchange, after The Fabulous Baker Boys debate disappeared.

JHupp, the poster at Unique Like Everybody appears to be a reasonable, intelligent person. While I doubt either of us will change our positions much, these discussions aren’t really aimed at that. They’re aimed at the audience of fence-sitters, the people who don’t have much knowledge of the topic, but who want to know more so that they can make up their own minds.

I hope he’s serious. It’s been a while since I’ve had this opportunity.

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Quote of the WEEK.

America’s health-care problem is not that some people lack insurance, it is that 250 million Americans do have it. – John Stossel

That quote is from his opinion piece Bad Medicine, published today.

Here’s the whole thing:

Bad Medicine

By JOHN STOSSEL
JFS Productions, Inc.
September 21, 2007

Almost daily we’re bombarded with apocalyptic warnings about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance. Senator Hillary Clinton wants to require everyone to have it, to require big companies to pay for it, and have government buy policies for the poor.

That is a move in the wrong direction.

America’s health-care problem is not that some people lack insurance, it is that 250 million Americans do have it.

You have to understand something right from the start. We Americans got hooked on health insurance because the government did the insurance companies a favor during World War II. Wartime wage controls prohibited cash raises, so employers started giving noncash benefits like health insurance to attract workers. The tax code helped this along by treating employer-based health insurance more favorably than coverage you buy yourself. And state governments have made things worse by mandating coverage many people would never buy for themselves.

Competition also pushed companies to offer ever-more attractive policies, such as first-dollar coverage for routine ailments like ear infections and colds, and coverage for things that are not even illnesses, like pregnancy. We came to expect insurance to cover everything.

That’s the root of our problem. No one wants to pay for his own medical care. “Let the insurance company pay for it.” But since companies pay, they demand a say in what treatments are—and are not—permitted. Who can blame them?

Then who can blame people for feeling frustrated that they aren’t in control of their medical care? Maybe we need to rethink how we pay for less-than-catastrophic illnesses so people can regain control. The system creates perverse incentives for everyone. Government mandates are good at doing things like that.

Steering people to buy lots of health insurance is bad policy. Insurance is a necessary evil. We need it to protect us from the big risks–things most of us can’t afford to pay for, like a serious illness, a major car accident, or a house fire.

But insurance is a lousy way to pay for things. You premiums go not just to pay for medical care, but also for fraud, paperwork, and insurance company employee salaries. This is bad for you, and bad for doctors.

The average American doctor now spends 14 percent of his income on insurance paperwork. A North Carolina doctor we interviewed had to hire four people just to fill out forms. He wishes he could spend that money on caring for patients.

The paperwork is part of insurance companies’ attempt to protect themselves against fraud. That’s understandable. Many people do cheat — lie about their history, demand money for unnecessary care or care that never even happened.

So there’s lots of waste in insurance, lost money and time.

Imagine if your car insurance covered oil changes and gasoline. You wouldn’t care how much gas you used, and you wouldn’t care what it cost. Mechanics would sell you $100 oil changes. Prices would skyrocket.

That’s how it works in health care. Patients don’t ask how much a test or treatment will cost. They ask if their insurance covers it. They don’t compare prices from different doctors and hospitals. (Prices do vary.) Why should they? They’re not paying. (Although they do in hidden, indirect ways.)

In the end, we all pay more because no one seems to pay anything. It’s why health insurance is not a good idea for anything but serious illnesses and accidents that could bankrupt you. For the rest, we should pay out of our savings.

The old bromide goes, “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by human stupidity.” But if you’re someone who thinks “that a coup d’etat occurred in this country on Nov 22, 1963 and the people who have more or less run this country since then have made certain that everyone either plays ball. If they don’t…well, at first they were just killed and now they are just marginalized through a variety of smear tactics and propaganda.“ then the health care “crisis” is of their making, rather than the predictable fuckup of government in cooperation with “the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

So we ought to expand government’s involvement in our health care so that everybody is covered. (Yes, I’m scratching my head at that “logic” myself.)

I guess I’m part of that vast right-wing smear machine.

When do I get my cut of Halliburton’s Iraqi oil profits?

He Earned It

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I heard about this on my way in to the office this morning:

A Beloved Professor Delivers The Lecture of a Lifetime

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor, was about to give a lecture Tuesday afternoon, but before he said a word, he received a standing ovation from 400 students and colleagues.

He motioned to them to sit down. “Make me earn it,” he said.

They had come to see him give what was billed as his “last lecture.” This is a common title for talks on college campuses today. Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted “Last Lecture Series,” in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?

It can be an intriguing hour, watching healthy professors consider their demise and ruminate over subjects dear to them. At the University of Northern Iowa, instructor Penny O’Connor recently titled her lecture “Get Over Yourself.” At Cornell, Ellis Hanson, who teaches a course titled “Desire,” spoke about sex and technology.

At Carnegie Mellon, however, Dr. Pausch’s speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months.

RTWT. There’s video of part of it, too.

UPDATE: Most of the lecture is available on YouTube, divided into ten parts. I strongly recommend you watch it.
The whole thing is also available here that runs under Windows Media Player 9 or Flip4Mac. The quality is much better, too.

Women and Wars

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At the Emmy Awards apparently Sally Field said something stupid. Rachel Lucas has (for Rachel) a rather long and worthy comment on it. Please go forthwith and read.

Back already?

I was reminded of a discussion I’ve had several times with my wife, who works at a children’s shelter, and has also worked in call centers doing international long-distance service, and roadside assistance, with many, many people, often from different cultures. She’s told me on more than one occasion that she prefers dealing with boys at the shelter and schools for the same reason she disliked working with women at the call centers: women compete. Pettily. Viciously. Constantly. They form cliques for the purpose of deliberately excluding others. They are simply mean and nasty to other women for no discernible reason. Boys tend to cooperate.

Quoth Rachel:

It starts in about 4th grade, when girls start engaging in what can only be called a war of attrition via emotional abuse. They form evil little cliques and set about utterly destroying each other’s self-esteem and pride.

—

Then you move on to the nightmare-scape called junior high school, where the females carefully hone their craft and the sabotage is raised to a whole new level of hate… Sneaky and manipulative. At least when boys pick on you, it’s all out in the open. Girls? Oh god no. They use subterfuge and reconnaissance. Girls will pretend to be your best friend just to discover your weaknesses, which they’ll then employ to bring you down.

One of the books I read last year was Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man. Ms. Vincent, a lesbian author, dressed herself up with the proper clothing and make-up and passed herself off as a man in numerous situations, some of them long-term. Her first foray into being a man was joining a bowling league. She was quite surprised at some of the things she discovered, based on her lifelong experience of being female.

Girls can be a lot nastier than boys when it comes to someone who stands in the way of something they want. They know where to hit where it’ll hurt the most, and their aim is laser precise. I went to a tennis camp in New Jersey that catered largely to rich princesses and their male counterparts. Most of them couldn’t really play tennis on more than a country-club level. Their parents had sent them there to get rid of them. They just stood around most of the time posing for one another, showing off their tans. But I’d had a lot of private coaching in tennis by that time, and my strokes were fairly impressive for my age. I took tennis pretty seriously.

As for posing, I looked like I’d been raised by wolverines.

The instructors used to videotape each of us playing, so that they could go over the tapes with us and evaluate our techniques. One day, my particular class of about twenty girls was standing around the television watching the tape, and the instructor was deconstructing my serve. He’d had a lot of negative things to say about most of the other girl’s serves, but when it came to mine he’d raved unconditionally, playing my portion of the tape over and over again in slow motion.

One of the prettiest girls in the group, no doubt exasperated by the repetition, said, loudly enough for everyone to hear: “Well, I’d rather look the way I do and serve the way I do than serve the way she does and look the way she does.”

Now that’s female competitiveness at its finest.

But with these guys and with other male athletes I’ve known it was an entirely different conflict….

These guys’ attentions were like that: fatherly. And it really surprised me coming from members of opposing teams, since this was, after all, a money league. But they seemed to have a competitive stake in my doing well and in helping me do well, as if beating a man who wasn’t at his best wasn’t satisfying. They wanted you to be good and then they wanted to beat you on their own merits.

Here’s one excerpt from that chapter that popped immediately to mind when I read Rachel’s rant, and that drew me to pick up the book and write this post:

So much of what happens emotionally between men isn’t spoken aloud, and so the outsider, especially the female outsider who is used to emotional life being overt and spoken (often over-spoken), tends to assume that what isn’t said isn’t there. But it is there, and when you’re inside it, it’s as if you’re suddenly hearing sounds only dogs can hear.

I remember one night when I plugged into that subtext for the first time. A few lanes over, one of the guys was having a particularly hot game. I’d been oblivious to what was happening, mourning my own playing too much to watch anyone else. It was Jim’s turn, and I noticed that he wasn’t bowling. Instead he was sitting down in one of the laneside chairs, just waiting. Usually this happened when there was a problem with the lane; a stuck pin or a mis-set rack. But the pins were fine. I kept watching him, wondering why he wasn’t stepping up to the line.

Then I noticed that all the other bowlers had sat down as well. Nobody was taking his turn. It was as if somebody had blown a whistle, only nobody had. Nobody had said anything. Everyone had just stopped and stepped back, like in a barracks when an officer enters the room.

Then I realized that there was one guy stepping up to the lane. It was a guy who was having a great game. I looked up at the board and saw that he’d had strikes in every frame, and now he was on the tenth and final frame, in which you get three throws if you strike or spare in the first two. He’d have to throw three strikes in a row on this one to earn a perfect score, and somehow everyone in that hall had felt the moment of grace descend and had bowed out accordingly. Everyone, of course, except me.

It was a beautiful moment, totally still and reverent, a bunch of guys instinctively paying their respects to the superior athleticism of another guy.

The guy stepped up to the line and threw three strikes, one after the other, each one met by mounting applause, then silence and stillness again, then on the final strike, an eruption, and every single guy in that room, including me, surrounded that player and moved in to shake his hand or pat him on the back. It was almost mystical, that telepathic intimacy and the communal joy that succeeded it, crystalline in its perfection. The moment said everything all at once about how tacitly attuned men are to each other, and how much of this women miss when they look from the outside in.

One of the clichés of war movies (or other conflict-oriented media) is the character who relishes having an opponent “worthy of them.” Patton relished besting Rommel, for instance, because Rommel was the acknowledged best at what he did. But when the competition is over between men, at least in most cases, it’s over, and they can set aside the conflict. The end of the Civil War is perhaps the strongest example of this.

But women? From what I have seen, Sally Field might be right. If women ran the world there wouldn’t be any more goddamned wars.

Because the first one would end in a scorched-earth policy that neither side would survive. And it would start over something petty.

I can strongly recommend Self-Made Man. It’s a damned interesting read.

UPDATE: Dr. Helen has an opinion on Ms. Field’s comment, too.

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Question of the Day.

Via Instapundit I came across a quote I’d heard about when it happened, but didn’t have a cite for. Now I do:

In December 2004, the executive director of MoveOn.org’s PAC said of the Democratic Party: “Now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.”

My question: Do you have the receipt, and what do you want to exchange it for? (No cash refunds, in-store credit only!!)

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Light Blogging.(but GREAT Comments!)

Today is the ninth day in a row that I’ve gone in to the office at 5:30AM. (Bear in mind, it’s about 35-40 minutes from my house to the office, and you can imagine what time I wake up in the morning.)

I’ve been keeping track of, and contributing to, the comment threads running here (thanks, Markadelphia!) but I’m a bit burned out in the evenings, so blogging has been and will continue to be light for a couple of days. Sorry.

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Holy. Hell. Batman!

Via Glenn, provided without further comment:

News from the Middle East

16/09/2007 17:26 PARIS, Sept 16 (AFP)
World should ‘prepare for the worst’ over Iran: France

The world should “prepare for the worst … (which) is war” over the Iranian nuclear crisis, but seeking a solution through talks should take priority, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday.

“We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war,” he said in an interview broadcast on television and radio.

“We must negotiate right to the end,” with Iran, he said, but underlined that if Tehran possessed an atomic weapon, it would represent “a real danger for the whole world.”