Sometimes you feel like shit, then..

You receive compliments and praise from people you admire. The most open bit of praise is Opinione. Although, I have seen my blog on Mudflap Bubba's and a Citizen Soldier's list and some others.

OK, Mike B, Phuck Politics, Zirgar just to name a few others. Forgive me if I miss any body else!

Or an insult post about someone that puts my post before anything he has written in the Google Search results!

I have always felt like doing a post and calling it "having a wank" about where exactly this blog fits in people's opinions: especially when I am feeling down from dealing with gun cretins.

Or that I haven't heard from Paul Treanor or Matthew White. Yet.

And Andrew Marr? Well, I'll leave you hanging on that one...

Naw,I found this Bollywood version of Ian Dury's Reasons to Be Cheerful:

Bollywood v Reasons to Be Cheerful Ian Dury & the Blockheads - Desi Video Network - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Amazingly enough, I have been hanging around the Desi community for over 30 years and just saw my first Bollywood Film (Lagaan) this past year. I guess it's the Busby Berklee type dance routines popping up in the chase scenes in a three hour film!

Wikipedia

I have to agree with Matthew White about Wikipedia in that it is intelllectual laziness to cite to it.

To use his comments about Wikipedia:

the McDonalds/Microsoft/Walmart of information. It provides reliably mediocre information at a low, low cost. This drives competitors out of business, reduces diversity, and lowers the standards all across the board. Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.

Everyone knows this already. "Checking Wikipedia" has become the information equivalent of "stopping at McDonald's". It reeks of apathy and superficiality.

On the other hand, I will point out that any compilation can be superficial. As I mentioned the last time I mentioned Matthew's comments on this The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions's Section on the Second Amendment is written by a "Second Amendment Scholar" (I think its Stephen Halbrook, but it could be Robert Cottrol). Can we bang on The Oxford University Press for "intellectual laziness"? Or is it that the people who use encyclopedias and compilations as their main source of info without investigating further are the real suffers of intellectual laziness?

When we add in the democratisation of Information then we get to the internet in general. The internet is a place where critical thinking and cite checking comes in handy. Of course, we have the democratic method on the internet where repeating the lie does make it true. Take for example the genocide figure out there that Matthew and I thoroughly trash as rubbish. Unfortunately, that one is up there and pasted all over the internet. Nevermind that it doesn't stand scrutiny.

Not to mention the comments about Nazis and gun control have been discredited at Guncite, a pro-gun website. Guncite even discredits the bogus Hitler quote! Somehow the news didn't get around and people still put Hitler's face up with a comment about him supporting gun control. And anyone who checks will find that the Nazi Party as we knew it was just formed when Britain had its system of gun registration!

Yeah, I just cited to Wikipedia for some of that info.

But like anything else: One should the it as a summary of the info out there and use that as a jumping off point for further inquiry. One should never trust any information without double checking. You can easily confirm any facts with a minimum of research and some use of the old grey matter. I'm offering you my interpretations and opinions in this blog, but obviously you should study other interpretations before you make up your own mind.

I'm not out to convince you of anything here, so you don't have to believe me if you don't want to. I created this page for my own benefit. On the other hand, I do back up what I write, which is more than I can say for some people. The fact that they don't bother following the links is their problem, not mine.

Anyway, there is the Foundation for Critical Thinking out there which I would strongly advise anyone to investigate. The have a model for critical thinking which is fairly useful. Although, I would also suggest learning about propaganda techniques when dealing with info on the internet.

In the meantime, there's this highly useful source of information on the Internet: Chickipedia!


Chickipedia Vs Wikipedia - Watch more Funny Videos

Matthew White on economics

Well worth a squiz! OK, we're probably like minded people. But Jane Wiedlin thought she would have a lot in common with Sparks until she met them and the song Cool Places is about their mutual inability to find anything they had in common.

Anyway, I was reading his stuff to find something refuting a comment along the lines of German gun control enabled the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Not that a comment like that needed any help in refuting since that's like saying Canadian gun control results in more US homicides. Matthew's Which Has Killed More People? Christianity? or Gun Control? sort of covers it. I have to admit that I cover it even more thoroughly in my astroturfed genocide post.

But not as humourously as does Matthew!

Anyway, this comes from A Billion Here, a Billion There:
If you're like me, you probably have four categories of money:

1. the price of a beer,
2. too much for a beer,
3. rent, and
4. far beyond my ability to comprehend.

He also trashes Wikipedia: "Wikipedia has become the McDonalds/Microsoft/Walmart of information. It provides reliably mediocre information at a low, low cost. This drives competitors out of business, reduces diversity, and lowers the standards all across the board. Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge. Everyone knows this already. "Checking Wikipedia" has become the information equivalent of "stopping at McDonald's". It reeks of apathy and superficiality."

Hey, wikipedia's a start sometimes, but the copy can indeed be pretty biased. On the other hand, the Oxford University Press has a book where somebody like Stephen Halbrook wrote the Section on the Second Amendment! Are we going to trash OUP for that? You betcha!

His Translations from the Italian are pretty good as well!

The acres greens are the place to be. The life of the agricultural company is the life for me. Earth that is scattered outside up to now and widely. Manhattan Conservation. Just give that side of the country. Not, New York is where rather I would remain. I obtain the feeling hay the allergic odore. Adore hardly one seen of the penthouse. Love of treasure I, but give the tree-lined avenue to me of the park. The chores, the warehouses, fresh air, chronometer of the square. You are my moglie. Good bye, life of the city. Acres greens we are here!

More Matthew White

I have to admit that I would like to meet this person since he engages in the type of speculation that I like. I just found his Surreal Histories section about alternative histories. I like his Balkanized North America Section or What America would have looked like if every separatist movement in U.S. and Canadian history had succeeded:

What is the most fragmented that North America could have been? There are several plausible scenarios (some based on different patterns of settlement from Europe, others on different fracture lines) but I chose 1787 as the point of divergence from real history. In this alternate reality, the westward expansion of the Anglo-American people proceeded pretty much as it did in our reality, but the United States government just couldn't keep up. Every national identity crisis resolved itself in favor of the separatists instead.

Although this is an extremely unlikely scenario to begin with, I didn't want to just randomly subdivide the continent. I looked for regions which either ...

1. administered themselves as autonomous nations at some point in American history, or ...
2. shed blood to achieve or maintain their independence, or at least ...
3. threatened to.

Of course, the Native American tribes throughout the continent fit all these criteria, but I limited myself to only three native enclaves.

He also has a section comparing the US to Rome.

Even more fascinating is his What if the anti-government forces of the 1990s had risen in rebellion Section. This scenario is not as totally impossible as some people might believe. In the range of improbability, it's more like a ten-to-one shot, rather than a hundred-to-one shot. In the early 1990s the USA probably came closer to open rebellion than at any time since the 1960s. The hard right seems to believe that an event such as Waco or Ruby Ridge should have been a spark for rebellion, but it's not like any militiamen rushed to relieve the siege. White believes that the most likely outcome of a war between the Feds and the extreme right is that the extreme right is crushed like bugs, even before the network news anchors can move their mobile newsdesks, satellite link-ups and tactical hairdryers out to the battlefield.

I really want to meet Matthew White!

More of the Widom of Matthew White

From his FAQ: Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the 20th Century

Q: Is government responsible for most of the deaths by violence and oppression in the 20th Century?

A: Well, yeah. Of course. Organized thugs kill more efficiently than disorganized thugs.

Wars and oppressions are collective endeavors, and whenever humans work collectively, they work through government. Whether wars are fought using citizen militia, standing armies, hired mercenaries, tribal warriors, corporate security teams, street gangs, paramilitaries or feudal levies, there's always a ruler or governing body to determine who does what to whom. Call it a cabinet, junta, council of elders, general staff, board of directors, politburo or capo de tutti capi -- it's a government.

Unfortunately, blaming war and tyranny on government is like blaming house fires on oxygen. Strictly speaking, it's true, but no fire marshal would ever get a good performance review if that's his answer to everything. To understand house fires, you'll have to look at wiring, storage, smoking, materials and cooking, and not just insist, "It's oxygen, I tell you! Oxygen is evil! Why won't anyone listen to me?"

Most attempts to blame government for democides depend on a kind of circular reasoning. They define "government" as any organization capable of mass violence, and then are amazed when all mass violence is produced by government. If they were to instead define "government" as, say, any organization that delivers mail or builds roads, then at least they would be moving away from obvious tautologies.

He makes a point that most people miss about the "militia", especially if they believe that being a part of an "Unorganised militia" qualifies them for dick. This is partially because they are ignorant that the "unorganised militia" is a draft pool of potential militia members. As I like to say, it's the equivalent of saying you are in the army because you have a draft card.

The really salient point is that the militias, especially during the War for American Independence, were under some form of government control. Despite the common criticism that they were as effective as a mob with sticks. The reality was that the militias and ultimately the Continental Army was under the Control of the Continental Congress and other forms of rebel government.

They weren't just some people who got together with weapons and beat off the British. In fact, the War for American Independence was both a civil war, in that the Loyalists had their own militias, and an actual war in that the British, French, Spanish, and various other countries were involved in fighting it.

So, you had both revolutionary miltia units and Loyalist militia units which were under some form of government control. They wern't unorganised bans of people who just struck out at "British tyranny" or "Rebel tyranny".

This puts the modern "militia" pretenders and Libertarian loonies in a quandry about the insurrection theory since how can one have tyranny in a democracy when one is technically the government? As Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951) puts points out in regard to the insurrectionist theory:

The obvious purpose of the statute is to protect existing Government, not from change by peaceable, lawful and constitutional means, but from change by violence, revolution and terrorism. That it is within the power of the Congress to protect the Government of the United States from armed rebellion is a proposition which requires little discussion. Whatever theoretical merit there may be to the argument that there is a "right" to rebellion against dictatorial governments is without force where the existing structure of the government provides for peaceful and orderly change. We reject any principle of governmental helplessness in the face of preparation for revolution, which principle, carried to its logical conclusion, must lead to anarchy. No one could conceive that it is not within the power of Congress to prohibit acts intended to overthrow the Government by force and violence. The question with which we are concerned here is not whether Congress has such power, but whether the means which it has employed conflict with the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.

So, there is no right to armed rebellion and one cannot make an argument that such a right exists where the existing structure of the government provides for peaceful and orderly change.

Got that???

astroturfed Genocide

The ridiculous "Gun Control results in genocide" "argument" is a lovely case of an specious argument astroturfing the playing field with rubbish. You know the list I'm talking about since googling "Gun Control Genocide" will turn up about 60 million results with that list reprinted verbatim. No need to give it any more power in the rankings.

On the other hand, Matthew White compiled the list Which has killed more people: Gun Control or Christianity? that begins to tear apart this argument. I reposted it at Gun control and Genocides with some additions made to the Holocaust section. I am going to add even more to show that the Guns could have saved the Jews proposition is straight off horseshit.

I am surprised that Matthew's list doesn't get the attention it deserves. The "gun cotnrol leads to genocide argument" is pretty silly when you think about it.

As Matthew points out "whoever compiled this tally has a different definition of defenseless than I do. I myself wouldn't declare the largest military machine on the planet "unable to defend itself", but by adding 20 million from the Soviet Union, this list does. After all, Stalin's most infamous terror fell heavily on the Soviet Army, culling tens of thousand of officers, and executing three out of five marshals, 15 out of 16 army commanders, 60 out of 67 corps commanders and 136 out of 199 division commanders. In one bloody year, the majority of the officer corps was led away quietly and shot. It may be one of life's great mysteries as to why the Red Army allowed itself to be gutted that way, but obviously, lack of firepower can't be the reason."

Matthew points out that "this list of alleged genocides is a pitifully weak argument against gun control, simply because most of the victims listed here did fight back. In fact, if there's a real lesson to be learned from this roster of oppressions, it's that sometimes a heavily armed and determined opposition is just swept up and crushed -- guns or no guns."

Yeah, yeah, there is the example of the Bielski partisans who were made famous by the film Defiance. You can debate as to how effective they were at armed resistance or whether they were the heros depicted by the film. The real lesson that should be learned was that it wasn't their arms that protected them, but the fact that they hid in the forests:

By the early spring of 1942, the brothers managed to form what was called an Otriad (a partisan detachment), which initially consisted of their immediate surviving relatives and close friends. Over the next three years, approximately 1200 Jews came into their Otriad. In contrast to Russian partisan units and many of the other Jewish units that restricted participation to young men capable of fighting, the Bielski’s took in any Jew who sought their help and actively helped liberate Jews from nearby ghettos to join the unit...

At its height, the Otriad camp consisted of long, camouflaged dugouts for sleeping, a large kitchen, a mill, a bakery, a bathhouse, two medical facilities, a tannery, a school, a jail, and a theater. Tailors, seamstresses, shoemakers, watchmakers, carpenters, mechanics, and experts in demolition provided the 1200-member community with necessary skills, and about sixty cows and thirty horses provided food and transportation.

Many of the men served as part of the armed contingent which secured food and engaged in sabotage and even the murder of Germans officials, while many others, including the women, the elderly, and the handicapped received the benefits of the community which protected them, despite the difficulties they presented when it was necessary to travel to new locations.

The Jewish Daily Newspaper Forward points out in its article, Bielskis vs. Hollywood that The Bielski brothers engaged in violence out of necessity, but the nobility of their enterprise is that they preserved lives:

Tuvia was fortunate in choosing the more difficult path — in fact, not a path at all, but a deep marsh — rather than a more inviting route lined with fallen logs, which proved unsafe. The greater human drama was in persevering for a week in an epic trek through the swamp, not in fighting and winning a battle at the end, as the filmmaker chose to depict in his re-creation of the story.

The awesome achievement of the Bielskis to save so many innocents otherwise doomed is cheapened by the image of Hollywood heroes mowing down the enemy, as we’ve seen before in scores of World War II movies. These real heroes had to kill at times, but their story deserves more than a war movie.

In contrast, actual armed resistance by Jews led to mass anihilation. Despite being vastly outgunned and outnumbered, some Jews in ghettos and camps did resist the Germans with force. The failure to halt the genocidal policies of the Nazis has pretty much left Jewish resistance as a footnote to the holocause. For example, The the largest single revolt by the Jews during the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was crushed by the Militarily superior German forces: Casualties and losses during this uprising were 17 Germans killed and 93 wounded Versus 13,000 Jews killed and 56,885 captured. The captured Jews were sent to Treblinka. So much for armed resistance.

Some people forget that inhabitants in the ghettos of Vilna, Mir, Lachva (Lachwa), Kremenets, Czestochowa, Nesvizh, Sosnowiec, and Tarnow, among others, resisted with force when the Germans began to deport ghetto populations. In Bialystok, the underground staged an uprising just before the final destruction of the ghetto in September 1943. Research into Jewish Resistance during the holocaust pretty much repeats the message that The Jews knew that uprisings would not stop the Germans and that only a handful of fighters would succeed in escaping to join the partisans. Still, some Jews made the decision to resist. Most of the ghetto fighters, primarily young men and women, died during the fighting. Unfortunately, this resistance did little to stop the German genocide.

We can add in that Iraqis and Afghans are armed to the teeth, yet this didn't stop the rise of Saddam Hussein or the Taliban.

Matthew has "what I call the Cold-Dead-Hands Test. If the only way to get someone's gun is to pry it from their cold, dead hands (literally or figuratively), that's not gun control. When Grant disarmed the Confederates at Appomattox, that wasn't gun control; that was taking prisoners. When the Soviets disarmed the remnants of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad, that wasn't gun control either. Mao didn't come to power in China by tricking the populace into surrendering their arms. He pummeled his well-armed opponents in a stand-up fight. There's a big difference between unable to fight back, and fighting back but losing."

It's nice being able to dream of stopping the mistakes of the past with force. It's a romantic idea to die fighting "tyranny" (whatever that means). But you have to remember that heavily armed and determined opposition sometimes is just swept up and crushed: guns or no guns. Everyone who wanted a gun already had a gun in the list of "gun control victims". The enemies of the state who were killed in that list weren't defenseless; they were just plain beaten.

Gun control and Genocides

A tip of the hat to Matthew White who compiled this list (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/gunsorxp.htm) with some additions from me.

There's an old saying: "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions", so wouldn't it be really ironic if a law created with the purpose of cutting back on the number of murders actually had the opposite effect?

Of course, there's another old saying: "Yew-juice is sovereign against snake-bite", which goes to show you that sometimes old sayings are just plain stupid. Sometimes good intentions turn out just fine, and sometimes laws don't have ironic outcomes.

But among the advocates of irony, the leading cause of 56 million needless deaths would seem to be gun control. Here's an account ledger that is reposted at several sites:

CONSIDER THIS... This is just part of the known tally ...

* In 1929 the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, approximately 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
* In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915-1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
* Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, 13 million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others, who were unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
* China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
* Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
* Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
* Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million "educated" people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

That places total victims who lost their lives because of gun control at approximately 56 million in the last century. Since we should learn from the mistakes of history, the next time someone talks in favor of gun control, find out which group of citizens they wish to have exterminated.

Well, right off the bat I can see that whoever compiled this tally has a different definition of defenseless than I do. I myself wouldn't declare the largest military machine on the planet "unable to defend itself", but by adding 20 million from the Soviet Union, this list does. After all, Stalin's most infamous terror fell heavily on the Soviet Army, culling tens of thousand of officers, and executing three out of five marshals, 15 out of 16 army commanders, 60 out of 67 corps commanders and 136 out of 199 division commanders. In one bloody year, the majority of the officer corps was led away quietly and shot. It may be one of life's great mysteries as to why the Red Army allowed itself to be gutted that way, but obviously, lack of firepower can't be the reason.

I am not sure that the assumption that Turkey's institution of "gun control" would have helped the Armenians either. One problem with "pro-gun" arguments is that they have the unspoken assumption that people owned guns prior to the enactment of these laws (such as comparisons to England and Australia). Usually, there wasn't wide spread gun ownership prior to the enactment of these laws, which is likely in the case of the Armenian genocide. Additionally, this happened during the First World War. The Armenians who were in the Ottoman Empire (which is now called Turkey) army were disarmed, but again, this sounds like what happened in the Soviet union.

The Third Reich did not need gun control (in 1938 or at any time for that matter) to maintain their power. The success of Nazi programs (restoring the economy, dispelling socio-political chaos) and the misappropriation of justice by the apparatus of terror (the Gestapo) assured the compliance of the German people. Arguing otherwise assumes a resistance to Nazi rule that did not exist. Further, supposing the existance of an armed resistance also requires the acceptance that the German people would have rallied to the rebellion. This argument requires a total suspension of disbelief given everything we know about 1930s Germany. Why then did the Nazis introduce this program? As with most of their actions (including the formation of the Third Reich itself), they desired to effect a facade of legalism around the exercise of naked power. It is unreasonable to treat this as a normal part of lawful governance, as the rule of law had been entirely demolished in the Third Reich. Any direct quotations, of which there are several, that pronounce some beneficence to the Weapons Law should be considered in the same manner as all other Nazi pronouncements - absolute lies.

A more farfetched question is the hypothetical proposition of armed Jewish resistance. First, they were not commonly armed even prior to the 1928 Law. Second, Jews had seen pogroms before and had survived them, though not without suffering. They would expect that this one would, as had the past ones, eventually subside and permit a return to normalcy. Many considered themselves "patriotic Germans" for their service in the first World War. These simply were not people prepared to stage violent resistance. Nor were they alone in this mode of appeasement. The defiance of "never again" is not so much a warning to potential oppressors as it is a challenge to Jews to reject the passive response to pogrom. Third, it hardly seems conceivable that armed resistance by Jews (or any other target group) would have led to any weakening of Nazi rule, let alone a full scale popular rebellion; on the contrary, it seems more likely it would have strengthened the support the Nazis already had. Their foul lies about Jewish perfidy would have been given a grain of substance. To project backward and speculate thus is to fail to learn the lesson history has so painfully provided.

Just a few steps down, we can trim another 20 million from our total. Take a look at China, 1935. Picture, if you will, a long, peaceful line of naive little natives queueing up to dump their guns into an industrial smelter, while off to the side, a bureaucrat with a clipboard checks their names off the list. That's the image this list would like to create. The problem is, in 1935 China was in the midst of the Age of Warlords. Even if you know nothing about Chinese history, just the name "Age of Warlords" should tip you off. It was a pistol packer's paradise, a lawless Wild West where all power flowed from the barrel of a gun.

But it's not just the ready availability of guns in China that contradicts the Big Tally. No, it's just as important what everyone was doing with all those guns -- fighting for supremacy, fighting against the Communists, fighting the Japanese. In other words, gun control or not, everyone who had a side to take had already taken sides. Everyone who wanted a gun already had a gun. The enemies of the state who were killed after 1949 weren't defenseless; they were just plain beaten.

This is what I call the Cold-Dead-Hands Test. If the only way to get someone's gun is to pry it from their cold, dead hands (literally or figuratively), that's not gun control. When Grant disarmed the Confederates at Appomattox, that wasn't gun control; that was taking prisoners. When the Soviets disarmed the remnants of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad, that wasn't gun control either. Mao didn't come to power in China by tricking the populace into surrendering their arms. He pummeled his well-armed opponents in a stand-up fight. There's a big difference between unable to fight back, and fighting back but losing.

It's just as hard to label the Cambodians defenseless when you remember that they had just spent five years and a half million lives trying to stop the Khmer Rouge. It's also hard to call the Guatemalans defenseless when it took a 30-year civil war to rack up their body count. Even most of the victims of Hitler went down kicking and screaming. The majority of the Jews and Gypsies were hunted down in countries like Poland and Russia that had been overrun in open battle, and if they were lacking guns, it certainly wasn't German laws that created the situation.

Frankly, this list is a pitifully weak argument against gun control, simply because most of the victims listed here did fight back. In fact, if there's a real lesson to be learned from this roster of oppressions, it's that sometimes a heavily armed and determined opposition is just swept up and crushed -- guns or no guns.