Wrong and wrong, or: the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun might be a good gun

A new rifle goes on sale on Wednesday, and it's not like any other. It uses lasers and computers to make shooters very accurate. A startup gun company in Texas developed the rifle, which is so effective that some in the shooting community say it should not be sold to the public.

...

One hunter who doesn't want one is Chris Wilbratte. He says the TrackingPoint system undermines what he calls hunting's "fair chase."

"It's the traditional shooting fish in a barrel or the sitting duck. I mean, there's no skill in it, right? It's just you point, you let the weapon system do its thing and you pull the trigger and now you've killed a deer. There's no skill," Wilbratte says.

This new rifle is being released as the gun control debate continues to simmer in Washington.

Chris Frandsen, a West Point graduate who fought in Vietnam, doesn't believe the TrackingPoint technology should be allowed in the civilian world. The gun makes it too easy for a criminal or a terrorist to shoot people from a distance without being detected, he says.

"Where we have mental health issues, where we have children that are disassociated from society early on, when we have terrorists who have political cards to play, we have to restrict weapons that make them more efficient in terrorizing the population," Frandsen says.

- Mark Dewey, "A New 'Smart Rifle' Decides When To Shoot And Rarely Misses",

NPR, May 15^th, 2013.

And they're both wrong, Messrs. Wilbratte and Frandsen.  I mean, in the end: I can hardly disagree that a computerized aiming system takes the sport out of hunting or that there are people with mental problems who don't need to be using any kind of firearm at all (much less one that can autotarget).

It's just that, first of all and regarding Wilbratte, I could give a rat's ass about sport hunting, target shooting, or whatever other recreational use you want to give a tool that's designed specifically for killing and injuring things.  I'm not begrudging hunters their prey: I think one of the few legitimate uses for civilian firearms, maybe the sole civilian use for firearms, is bringing in meat (while controlling populations of  wild animals whose original predators have been displaced by human presence).  And a gun that makes it easier for hunters to bring in the meat seems to me like a better tool.  I don't much care that it's not as fun a tool to use.  I don't dispute that shooting a gun might be exhilarating; but then I hear the same thing about smoking crack, and while I'd agree that we probably ought to decriminalize cocaine abuse and treat it as a public health problem, that's a long way from endorsing free-and-easy recreational use.

Whereas re: Fransden, while I can see his concern, it doesn't seem to me that a situation in which the mentally unstable have easy access to dumb guns is any better than their having access to smart ones, whereas there's a self-evident benefit in making guns smarter than incompetent users.  I'm not going to proffer a link to every small child who's shot someone in the past month-or-so because there are just too damn many to chase them all down at the moment.  It sounds like the TrackingPoint rifle has enough steps involved in pointing and shooting to make accidents even a little less likely, even if it's as simple as having to press a button next to the trigger and wait a nanosecond for the weapon to process the shot; but what's more, it seems like it wouldn't take too many extra steps to teach a TrackingPoint weapon not to fire even in situations in which the extra button-by-the-trigger has been pressed, for example if the target is within a range boundary that suggests it probably isn't a game animal but is more likely the gun owner's foot or somebody else inside the room.

I'm not a fan of self-defense as a justification for firearms ownership, but it even seems to me you could perhaps teach a smartgun not to fire at people at all unless a safety protocol was disabled by a process brief enough not to inconvenience someone facing an attacker but challenging enough to thwart a child (however briefly) or to give a domestic abuser or aspiring suicide a few extra seconds to have second thoughts (which might be enough in some circumstances to avert a tragedy: I would think if having to think, "Wait, I'm disabling a safety protocol so I can shoot my wife" saved even one life, you could congratulate yourself; the plain fact that it wouldn't save every life is as pointless an argument as saying there's no point in having lifeboats on a ship if you can't get every single passenger off in time).

I would have to admit that there's an extent to which I probably trust technology more than people.  Probably because I'm a nerd.  It certainly isn't that technology is perfect or infallible.  Tech is only as good as the people producing it, for starters, and not even the best engineers designing for the best production lines in the world can necessarily foresee every abuse to which their finest devices might be put.  A perfectly good architectural marvel can be ruined by a couple of jetliners, for instance, or a masterpiece of applied engineering turned into an ecological disaster by an unforeseen double-whammy of earthquake and flood.  Things happen.  And then there's the fact that no plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and you can fairly call end-users the enemy in this context: people are notoriously inventive when it comes to finding ingenious new ways to break things.

On the other hand, machines don't get tired, or angry, or have notoriously poor hand-eye coordination and lack of judgement associated with biological immaturity.  Things I mention, obviously, because the point of all this is that making a tool smarter than its possible end-user is almost nearly always a good thing; I'm sure you can come up with an exception or several that tests the rule, but it's generally a good rule.

And I'm very sorry, all of you proverbial "responsible gun owners", but the fact is that there are a lot of end-users of firearms who are dumb, either generally or situationally, and this sentence may or may not be about you, whomever's reading this, but that doesn't make it any less true.  And I want to be clear that when I say there are dumb end-users of firearms, re-read that previous sentence (that may or may not apply to you) and n.b. I wrote "or situationally".  That is, you may be thoroughly clever in all sorts of respects, perhaps up to and including your appreciation of and obedience to gun safety protocols, but it doesn't mean you might be as smart as usual when you're tired, or old, or there's some other physical, psychological or environmental factor taking you down a few pegs to where you might appreciate having the lethal weapon in your hand second-guess you re: where your finger is, where your muzzle points, whether there's a round in the chamber, etc.

Now if this makes guns less exciting, somehow, that's entirely your problem.  Hammers aren't exciting; they're devices that are used to pound things.  Carpentry might be exciting for some people, but I don't think that has as much to do with how much fun it is to hit things as it does with getting into the shop, imagining what an end result ought to be, planning it, and seeing the results come together.  While I don't think much of hunting as sport, it does seem to me that a hunter with a TrackingPoint weapon still gets to go out in the woods, going through the process of tracking prey (or waiting for it in a blind--which I admit doesn't seem like sport either: "Hi, I'm just sitting here waiting for a thing to wander by randomly and I'll point a thing at it and try to kill it before it sees me, or I'll just sit here and wait some more."), cleaning game and/or taking it down to the butcher's to help you process it before bringing it home and eating well.  I.e. it seems to me you still get to engage in the general activity, you just get to do it with a safer, better hammer, or maybe a bandsaw would be a better metaphor because an old one without any failsafes can amputate fingers and limbs where a newer one is designed to make accidental amputation at least challenging if it can't be made altogether impossible.

The overall idea here being that you can't outdesign stupidity, but you can at least make it hard work.

Let's also point out one more thing about the TrackingPoint rifle that suggests an accidental but possibly nice sort-of-safety feature, which is that making a gun that doesn't want to miss the target it's locked on seems like it would make it a bit harder to shoot someone by accident while hunting.  Again, not impossible, but if a gun is refusing to fire until it's calculated a firing solution for the target the laser has fixed on, it won't be able to shoot your lawyer in the face while you're bringing the weapon up into position.  Not that something like that's ever happened before.  It's what you call a hypothetical example.

If we can't get rid of guns, or if we shouldn't, then bring on the smartweapons.  If you can build a gun that requires a shooter to sudo firing on bipedal targets, get it to market.  I realize that this isn't at all what TrackingPoint is focused on, but it's a step in the right direction.  It may take the sport out of aiming at a target--I don't care.  It may make it easier for an assassin to kill someone--but a truly dedicated assassin will, as gun advocates so often point out, surely use whatever tool's available anyway.  But it at least sounds like TrackingPoint rifles require... or at least beg for some level of intention that might make accidents and acts of passion even a little bit more challenging, and that would be a marginal improvement.  And if the software and hardware could be upgraded even more--and it's hard to see why they couldn't be--even shaving a few points from the statistics for firearms accidents, crimes of passion, and suicide could hardly be called a bad thing by anyone with an iota of sense.  Or common decency.

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Quote(s) of the day: Star Trekkin' across the universe edition

I can't decide between:

The standard line among Trek apologists is that the franchise is not just a lot of sci-fi nonsense but a meaningful exploration of what it means to be human. And among Trek’s kaleidoscope of Vulcans and androids and holograms and shapeshifters, this is a core concern. But Trek has a very particular take on what it means to be human. Part of what it means, the franchise teaches us, is participating in an ongoing progressive project of building a utopian society. Even though the bulk of Trek comes from the ’90s, the franchise launched in the mid-’60s, and the now-anachronistic spirit of midcentury optimism has remained at the heart of the franchise throughout. It’s a big part of what makes Trek great.

 

or--

 

To dismiss Kirk’s multiracial crew as blatant tokenism seems unfair, given that it piloted the Enterprise at a time when legally entrenched segregation was a subject of ongoing political controversy. Nichelle Nichols’ Lieutenant Uhura is a black woman whose name means “freedom” in Swahili and who served as an officer aboard a starship at a time—back on Earth,  I mean—when there were no female astronauts or military officers and black characters on television were more likely to be maids than professionals. Equally striking, given the political context of its era, is Ensign Pavel Chekov, navigator and proud Russian nationalist. The show asked audiences to imagine a seemingly amicable resolution of the Cold War.

 

 --both from a long piece Matthew Yglesias posted at Slate today, "I Boldly Went Where Every Star Trek Movie and TV Show Has Gone Before", which is worth a read if you care the least bit about Star Trek in any of its incarnations.

The first quote captures something I've been thinking about a lot, what with J.J. Abrams' second Star Trek movie (the ridiculously-titled Star Trek Into Darkness) being due in theatres tomorrow if you're in the U.S. (or out for weeks now if you live in the U.K. or months from now if you're in Japan, etc.).  The second quote is less punchy but serves as a pretty tough and concise defense against a common set of contemporary critiques of the Original Series.

Both--along with the rest of the Yglesias post--point to one of the biggest things I'm just not feeling about J.J. Abrams' version of Star Trek, though; yeah, I'm kind of bothered by the way the characters are being reinvented, but I'm also conflicted (after all, it's good that James Bond and Sherlock Holmes get reinvented by new actors every so often, just to pick two characters off the top of the head), and I have to disavow my 2009 review of the last Star Trek movie in retrospect because once the sugar rush from the movie wore off I was left with a nauseous empty feeling that what I'd watched lacked substance and didn't make much sense (Star Trek (2009) gave me the notion of a "cotton candy movie", something that looks bright and awesome and fluffy and huge and gives you this enormous high--followed by a sick crash when your body processes that all you've really consumed was sugar and air).  But I think the thing that hits me the most right now is how, as I get older, I find myself increasingly nostalgic for the future.

I'll cop to being snotty about it sometimes when I was a kid.  When I was in the single digits, the original Star Trek was off the air (except in reruns), but there were books and toys and View-Master discs, and any fledgling nerd knew who Captain Kirk was even if he was still pooping his pants and learning how to spell and add.  Then Star Wars came out and eclipsed Trek, perhaps mostly by not looking cheap the way Star Trek admittedly did; you didn't have to be the most sophisticated media critic in the world to notice that maybe the Tunisian desert George Lucas used as a location in the Tattooine scenes had a physicality, a presence the Styrofoam rocks Captain Kirk and the Gorn threw at each other specifically lacked, not to mention, you know, how fucking awesome lightsabers are and how cool was the Millennium Falcon or what?  The Trek movies matched the relatively big (and, later, actually big) budgets the Star Wars films had, but at that point if you were a certain age, you were almost definitely a Star Wars fan more than a Trek fan, and you might rub it in by suggesting the Trek universe was overly sterile looking or by pointing to some of the superficial clichés that Abrams Trek now seems set on enshrining as character traits (Kirk is a hotheaded playa, Scotty's a drunk, Chekov an English-mangling Russian bigot--nevermind that these were never really defining traits of the original character, just how we often remember them when we've forgotten the context of otherwise memorable scenes where they behaved this way for a few minutes or less in a particular episode).

 

And one confesses that one became more snide about it, not less, by the late 1980s when the early, nearly-unbearable first seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation went on the air (and the absence of new Star Wars material made the original trilogy glow more brightly in the receding distance with every year).

 

Of course, Next Generation got much better, and Star Wars got much worse.  Then again, phrasing it that way probably elides the fact that the Trek franchise slipped into a clutter of increasingly unwatchable series and returns on the Next Gen feature films that diminished into an utter abyss ending with a fairly terrible Wrath Of Khan remake in which things happened like an elaborate dune buggy chase written into the script primarily because in the real world, Patrick Stewart likes driving dune buggies (no, seriously).  The Star Wars prequels did offer up a chance to reevaluate the ethics of the Star Wars universe and contrast them negatively with Star Trek, though perhaps not to as withering a degree as the semi-infamous new-asshole-ripping David Brin gave to Star Wars back in 1999.

Actually, though, I think what happened more than anything was that I got old, and the real world got worse than anything approaching the Star Wars prequels or the execrable Star Trek: Enterprise.  And I find myself, as I enter middle age, feeling nostalgic: not so much for astronauts in miniskirts (though that's a notion with obvious appeal to me), but for Gene Roddenberry's postwar, New Frontier, techno-utopian future.  Which didn't happen and looks depressingly unlikely with every rolling-over of my personal odometer.

I mean, there's a certain irony to it insofar as Gene Roddenberry the writer had one script in him--the one where humans space explorers meet some kind of computer that has godlike powers and/or thinks it's God, which he recycled, I dunno, eighty-five times over the course of two Star Trek television series and the one feature film they let him work on before not-so-delicately handing the film franchise over to people who were more temperamentally suited to making summer films (which is not meant as a knock on summer films: The Wrath Of Khan and The Undiscovered Country aren't just the best entries in the Star Trek film franchise, they're solid entertainments that have held up pretty well over time and have just enough depth beneath the surface to be kind of smart summer films in their respective ways).  But Roddenberry the... I dunno, calling him "Roddenberry the visionary" seems like cheese or even cheese-food product; but however you want to describe him, the Gene Roddenberry who made Star Trek into a lifelong labor-of-love had this unshakeable sense that the ideals (though not the practices) of the Kennedy years weren't just something but were the template for the future of the human species.  We'd use science and technology and the endless hope held out by the infinite frontier of the universe to solve our problems and come together, ending poverty and racism and sexism and nationalism and the divisive parts of religion.

You might nitpick over how much of that shiny idealism survived the gantlet of NBC and, later, Paramount executives.  Go back and watch the original pilot for the show, and Roddenberry's original idea of a woman's place in the future was casting his girlfriend (and future wife) as a pants-wearing, tough-talking, no-nonsense-taking badass second-in-command deferentially referred to as "Number One" (a title restored for The Next Generation and bestowed upon that Enterprise's second-in-command).  NBC was responsible for the miniskirts and high boots, or at least they provided the fuel for it by rejecting the pilot while saying they'd reconsider a sexier re-shot alternative.  Nichelle Nichols on the Enterprise bridge was either a radical act encouraged by the greatest civil rights advocate of the era or a depressingly retro example of the only thing people thought a black lady in space could do was maybe answer phones, depending on how you want to frame it (meself, I'm deferring to Dr. King, thankyouverymuch).  But I think, really, at the most all the realities of making television for corporate America did was tarnish the silver, not take away it's preciousness.

That preciousness being what I think I most miss these days.  Odds are depressingly good I'll end up dragging myself by the hair to see the new J.J. Abrams movie because it's something Star Trek-ish, even if every preview, trailer, interview, leak, etc. all screams at me that this isn't really the Trek I want, that this is very likely another big-explodey action-adventure movie dressed in Star Trek drag (I would like to be wrong).  J.J. Abrams keeps telling people they wanted to make a Star Trek movie for everyone and not just for Trek fans as if that's a good thing; and I guess I should admit that it is a good thing insofar as fanservicing a bunch of increasingly elderly grognards is no way to make a good movie, much less a successful one (and besides, it's a mug's game, fans being notoriously impossible to please).  But where it isn't a good thing at all is that they apparently want to make one of these crowdpleasing adventure movies for everyone and no one out of stock that used to stand for something worth recovering: I don't know if you can really make a two-hour movie where people solve their problems by applying reason and their moral principles with a dash of sciencey-sounding gibberish ("We could use the deflector to invert the polarity of the tachyons!"), and I think Yglesias is probably right that Trek's natural home is on television, where you can posit a new moral quandary or science-fiction riddle every week and take your time brewing and aging your characters to a fine finish.  But just the idea that you can solve problems with science and ethics in the first place!  These days, when a major American political party seems to have declared war on science and caters to a small vocal minority obsessed with a weirdly superficial reading of a 17^th Century translation/interpretation of Iron Age texts, when all of our time seems to be taken up by folklore and conspiracy theories and effective governance is thwarted by lobbying groups peddling urban legends, these days it seems absolutely marvelous to think there was ever a time when someone might be so naive as to think someday all that would be set aside and we'd spend all of our time zooming around to places simply because nobody had ever been to them before and figuring out ways to improve ourselves and/or whomever we happened to meet out there.  Learning shit just to learn it.  Going just to go.  And if a crisis arises, thinking our ways out instead of arguing ourselves into paralysis until the bad thing happens anyway and everybody stupidly asks why didn't anyone do anything before it happened as if no one had tried.

I miss, I really, really miss the future.

 

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Dumb quote of the day: you need to go look up the word "nuance" edition

I am a much better writer than I am a speaker.  I probably would have written those things ["Decades of psychometric testing has indicated that at least in America, you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics, and then blacks. These are real differences, and they're not going to go away tomorrow, and for that reason we have to address them in our immigration discussions and our debates."] differently than I spoke them. What I emphasized was that ethnic group differences in IQ are scientifically uncontroversial. That being said, there is a nuance that goes along with that: the extent to which IQ scores actually reflect intelligence, the fact that it reflects averages and there is a lot of overlap in any population, and that IQ scores say absolutely nothing about the causes of the differences--environmental, genetic, or some combination of those things.

- Jason Richwine, as quoted by Byron York,

"A talk with Jason Richwine: 'I do not apologize for any of my work'",

The Washington Examiner, May 13^th, 2013.

 

You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride, 1987.

 

Jason Richwine, late of the Heritage Foundation, is sad.  And misunderstood.  He would like you to know he absolutely isn't a racist, he just thinks that there are differences in group intelligence which correlate with race, and that this ought to be a factor in American immigration policy.  And this conviction may or may not have anything to do with his recent contribution to a Heritage Foundation report contending that allowing more immigrants into the country will cost the United States more than it benefits the country.  But to be perfectly clear about it, he doesn't hate anyone based on race; hasn't lynched anyone nor burned a cross in anyone's yard or attended any meetings wearing a hood, armband, or brownshirt--so he obviously isn't a racist.  He just thinks Hispanics and blacks are dumber than white people.  Oh, and East Asians and Jews, who we all know are very good at math and all, right?  (Whether Richwine subscribes to the view that East Asians and Jews have other undesirable congenital character traits in which the American WASP compensates for his relative lack of intellect through superior moral virtue is a question that apparently remains unasked and unanswered).

Also, please note that Mr. Richwine publishing an article about the lesser IQ scores of certain ethnic groups when compared to "the white native population" (I'm actually not sure what that is; I believe the Cherokee and Ogala Sioux et al. might like to have a word with Mr. Richwine about that terminology, tho' I can't speak for them) on a white nationalist website is something else that shouldn't lead anyone to infer anything negative about Mr. Richwine's views towards others.  True, someone once said something about being judged by the company you keep and I think there was something else muttered along the line about lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas or words to that effect--but Mr. Richwine would have you know that he only published something on a white nationalist website because it was the only outlet open to a Harvard PhD and his then-employers at the American Enterprise Institute wanted him to, quote, "publish widely" (it should also be observed that publishing on a white nationalist blog is preferable to setting up a blog of your own because some site like Blogger will require you to pick out a blog template and choose a password, things the racist crackers at a white nationalist website will have done for you).

But really, you know, we need to talk about "nuance".  Because what Mr. Richwine really wants you to know is that he's a better writer than speaker, and in getting ahead of himself in a public presentation, he really left out all the nuances that, you know, basically invalidate the entire premise that public policy should be governed by a supposed correlation that means absolutely nothing.

After all, even if we grant solely for the sake of argument that the rather controversial studies indicating correlations between IQ scores and membership in certain broad and rather controversial ethnic categories, the subtle distinctions that Mr. Richwine should have mentioned in his public comments are that the IQ score may not measure intelligence, that alleged differences in measured IQ scores may reflect an undetermined environmental component that may be alterable (or may even be altered by the simple fact that one has changed environments, i.e. that one has emigrated to a country where one can score better on IQ tests, or one's children can), that an average score may in fact represent a wide range of scores across a population, etc.  In short, that even if we grant a correlation for argument's sake, the nuance of the correlation is such that the correlation may be completely meaningless.

 

I mean, even Richwine is conceding that any correlation "reflects averages" and the whole primary thrust of his dissertation was apparently to the effect that IQ scores ought to be considered in immigration policy by admitting higher-IQ applicants to the country--which presumably means that he'd have no problem letting in hordes of high-IQ-testing Hispanic immigrants, unless there's some other issue he has with Hispanic immigrants.  In any case, even if we assume that "Hispanic" is a meaningful label, and even if we assume for argument's sake that Hispanics as a group have a lower average IQ, that tells you absolutely nothing about any specific Hispanic individual you might point out.  So what's the point, then, in considering population IQ in setting immigration policy?  At best, Richwine perhaps is making a case that we ought to give all prospective immigrants an IQ test.

But then even Richwine admits that IQ may not "actually reflect intelligence" (another nuance).  So what, then, is the point?

I think this is as good a time as any to be candid and say that I not only am skeptical of the assertion that IQ measures anything more than one's ability to take certain kinds of tests designed to measure IQ, but also that I'm skeptical of "race" as a scientific concept at all.  I'm not sure, for instance, when Richwine talks about "blacks", whether he's talking about "African Americans" living in the United States, many of whom are partly descended from Caucasian Europeans, or whether he's talking about people from South America, Central America, North Africa, West Africa, East Africa, South Africa, Southwest Asia, Australia, Micronesia, Polynesia or Melanesia.  Or somewhere else.  And all of whom represent ethnographically distinct populations who may or may not have any particular genetic overlap after our collective departure from Africa to scatter across the globe.  For that matter, when Richwine talks about "whites", who's he talking about?

This isn't to say that race and racism aren't vital, essential issues: they are, but they're social issues, not scientific ones.  In America, "race" is a matter of class and culture, how one is discriminated against or for on the basis of literally-skin-deep distinctions, how one speaks and moves, how one has been educated and what opportunities are denied or offered.  What's amazing when one contemplates how essential race is to American culture as a whole is how arbitrary the entire scheme is; for instance, we talk about Barack Obama as a "black" President because this is a noticeable quality of his complexion, when one could just as capriciously look to his mother and the maternal grandparents who raised him and call him yet another white President.  The point here isn't really how the President self-identifies himself, though--he's merely a convenient and well-known example; the point is that this could be said of almost any American whose family goes back several generations--we are nearly all carrying the blood of West Africans, Native Americans, Northern Europeans, et al.--but we nevertheless insist as a society that the expression of melanin upon our surface layers is somehow reflective of an essential or inner quality because it's such a long and wicked historical tradition to do so that this superficial quality has become determinative in how likely you are to have the same opportunities as someone with different superficial qualities, or how likely you are to be absurdly punished for possessing different qualities.  It's a sadly undeniable fact that in America you might well be pulled over by a police officer largely because your skin is darker than that of someone else; it's also undeniable that all our blood is the same color and our bones largely the same shapes in the same places, and that the color of one's skin (here's the truly ridiculous joke of it) isn't even necessarily a good indicator of one's ancestry.

If so, how on Earth is it much of an indicator of one's intelligence?  Or one's ability to contribute to a society one wants to come and join, or visit, or work in, or whatever.

It seems fitting to close by observing that we've been here before: the kinds of issues and concerns that Richwine raises were raised by eugenicists in the early part of the 20^th Century.  Eugenicists, (ab)using data collected from Army IQ testing during WWI were instrumental in getting the Immigration Act Of 1924 passed, which created national quotas intended to lessen the number of "undesirables" admitted to the United States.  Of course, in those days the "intellectually inferior" immigrants weren't Hispanics, but were largely Southern and Eastern Europeans, including quite a lot of folks of Jewish descent we shipped back to Europe just in time for Hitler's rise to power.  There's some obvious irony here: Mr. (Not A Racist) Richwine is making much the same arguments as his intellectual predecessors based on the same kinds of data, but oddly enough he's reached rather different conclusions about who the problem people might be; where his forebears were in a twist over mentally handicapped Polish Jews, Mr. Richwine seems to believe that Jews rank somewhere over Asians (also largely blocked from entry by the Immigration Act Of 1924 for similar reasons) on the intellectual scale.  It leads one to wonder who Mr. Richwine's intellectual descendants will be calling stupid when their time comes around.

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I am confused...

Via Digby:

Via Think Progress:

JEFFREY Roobin [sic]: “This country fought Adolf Hitler. And I don’t really believe that Osama bin Laden and his group are worse or more dangerous than Adolf Hitler...We managed to defeat Adolf Hitler by following the rule of law.”

ARI FLEISCHER: They [the Germans] followed the law of war. They wore uniforms and they fought us on battlefields. These people are fundamentally, totally by design different. And they need to be treated in a different extrajudicial system.

So... Ari Fleischer thinks the Nazis, who rearmed in direct contravention of their post-WWI treaties and staged an international incident in order to illegally invade Poland followed the laws of war because they wore uniforms (including, I guess, Polish ones), and Jeffrey Toobin thinks we managed to defeat Hitler because we followed the rule of law and not by resorting to any means necessary to thwart global evil, including terrorizing civilian populations and, subsequent to Hitler's demise, conducting a show trial in which defendants were explicitly denied a basic right central to American law, the right not to be tried for an offense ex post facto.

I'm not trying to draw a false equivalency here: I think Nazism justified pretty much anything necessary to permanently erase it from the face of the Earth, however unpretty and awful it might be.  I just don't think we need to sugarcoat it, either: the Allied bombing campaign was a coordinated campaign of vicious violence against (mostly) noncombatants (however necessary and justifiable I personally think it was), and the ironic main difference between the war crimes trials that would have been held for the planners and conductors of the Allied air war and the war crimes trials held at Nuremberg is that nobody officially recognized genocide as a crime at the time the Nazis were butchering innocents, but the bombing of civilian centers was a self-evident violation of the Hague Convention Of 1907.

The real point of all of this is that the main thing I learn from the above exchange is that I'm not missing a goddamn thing by not having cable.  These people simply have no idea what they're talking about.  And it demonstrates yet again that WWII--or really the World War altogether, if you consider (as some historians do) WWI and WWII to be one long military conflagration interrupted by a two-decade armistice--is an exceptional case that doesn't scale or compare well to anything else that's ever happened before or since.  The villains were unlike anything that's quite been seen in the history of mankind, and the heroes had to do a lot of things that nobody should be proud of (and more than a few things they really didn't have to do that nobody should be proud of).  We certainly didn't defeat fascism by following any rules but the ones we had to make up as we went along, anyway, but then Al-Qaeda and its ilk have absolutely nothing in common with marauding state fascism (if that isn't a redundant expression) or any other kind of fascism (if there is any other kind of fascism), no matter how often Ari Fleischer and his ilk use the moronic neologism "Islamofascism" to characterize criminal gangs of religious extremists.

I know what Fleischer and Toobin are up to with their fatuous analogies--hell, I even approve of what Toobin's up to, thinking that torture is illegal, immoral and fatally counterproductive and that the inmates at Gitmo ought to be tried or released because, you know, habeas corpus and rule of law and all that other happy horseshit we purportedly believe in that's supposed to raise us above assholes on the evolutionary scale.  Nevertheless, they should both shut up.  Not because they aren't entitled to express themselves... no, wait: they aren't entitled to express themselves; I mean, they are as a matter of general principles because free speech and all that other happy horseshit we purportedly believe in that further raises us above assholes on the evolutionary scale; but.  But there's no benefit to anyone in high-profile idiots with a public platform totally blowing out the signal-to-noise ratio because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about but get paid to keep talking so CNN has something to broadcast 24-7.  Facile, inaccurate and intellectually dishonest blather is evidence we're reverting to assholes on the evolutionary scale, or, worse yet, talking heads babbling is a selective pressure driving us back to the primordial latrines we emerged from.

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Quote of the day: I'll work on improving myself later edition

As I procrastinated, spending more time at dinner complaining about topology than in the library doing topology, I realized that procrastination isn’t just about laziness. It’s about anxiety. To work on something you don’t understand means facing your doubts and confusions head-on. Procrastination pushes back that painful confrontation.

-Ben Orlin, "What It Feels Like To Be Bad At Math",

Slate, April 29^th, 2013.

 

Oh crap, it's that simple, inn'it?  Or, tragically, just that complicated.  Procrastination isn't about laziness (though I am, as The Stranger said of The Dude, a lazy man), it's about doubt.  It's about knowing that if you try to get to work on the project, you will have to face up to your own ignorance and incompetence.

Hence a big chunk of recent writer's block: whatever some of you (or anyone else) may say about the subject, the fact is that I know that I'm an idiot who doesn't know what he's writing about.  (To add a baffling layer to this self-doubt and put into context the value of my opinions on this, please bear in mind that I'm talking, here, about writing about things I make up, i.e. I don't know what I'm talking about re: things of my own invention.)

Does recognizing this help?  No idea.  Is this something I can face about myself, overcome, learn the self-confidence to boldly strive forward and do instead of thinking about doing (which is functionally the same as not doing)?

Eventually?

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What I'm listening to

Today's trip to the record store (because I'm trying to patronize my local brick and mortar more often these days): Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mosquito; Tame Impala, Lonerism; The Black Angels, Indigo Meadow.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Mosquito"

 

Tame Impala, "Elephant"

 

  

The Black Angels, "Don't Play With Guns"

 

 

 

 

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The song remains the same

Just for the fun of it...

Pete Townshend, "White City Fighting"

 

Roy Harper and Jimmy Page, "Hope"

 

 

No musician was harmed in the making of these songs, if you were wondering.

 

 

 

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