Even aside from people who want to get rid of guns entirely, there are a great many people who rightly want to keep guns out of the hands of those who would use them for evil purposes. All too often, though, these people approach mass shootings and other gun crime as problems to be solved rather than a dilemma to be managed. Predictably, all their solutions to these "problems" would create more problems than they solve. When this is pointed out to them, they get frustrated, throw up their hands, and shout, "Well what do you think we should do? Even an imperfect solution is better than doing nothing!"
That's not a foregone conclusion, however. When a proposed solution causes more harm than it prevents, it's worse than doing nothing, not better. The main reason these ideas fail is, as I mentioned above, that they treat a dilemma as a problem. Let me sketch out the difference. Let's say you don't want peanut butter on your nose, but you have a bit on it. It's not doing you any good. There's no reason to keep the peanut butter there. Removing the peanut butter from your nose will not create a worse situation than keeping it there. Removing it will cause you to have the situation you desire: having a nose with no peanut butter on it. And that's it--no downside.
A dilemma, on the other hand, is a messy, complicated situation where you have competing, mutually exclusive values to choose among. Managing a dilemma necessarily entails making sacrifices. Say, for example, that you're a recent high school graduate, and you have an opportunity to either major in Architecture at UCLA or major in Electrical Engineering at MIT. There's no way you can have both. A creative person might find ways to mitigate the losses of foregoing one or the other, but there really is no middle path. You have to choose, and reaping the benefits of the option you choose means you also have to live with the consequences of giving up the other opportunity. That's a dilemma. It's not a matter of just wiping a bit of peanut butter off your nose and making the trouble disappear. You have to weigh the options against each other and determine which option is worth sacrificing the other.
That's why I say mass shootings aren't a problem. They're a dilemma. Some of the reasons why have been so fully sketched out previously on this blog (not to mention by the NRA and other defenders of the Second Amendment) that there's no point going into any depth on them here. There's no way to just wipe the mass shootings off the end of our nose, because there's usually no identifying a mass shooter until the damage is already done, and the damage, in this case, is permanent. Both preventing the shootings and responding in such a way that would reduce the number of innocent casualties to zero would require the implementation of a police state so massive and intrusive that we might as well all lock ourselves in individual cages like battery hens, a situation I think most people would find even less desirable than living with the possibility of mass shootings.
There's another reason, though, that I've never seen anyone else address, to say that mass shootings aren't a problem. Given the present state of our technology, mass shootings are a feature, not a bug. That sounds like a horrible thing to say until you stop feeling, start thinking, and realize that a would-be mass murderer who's frustrated in his attempt to get his hands on a gun might not necessarily lower his ambitions and reach for a knife or a machete. Instead, he might build a bomb.
It's really a simple matter of utility, in the sense that economists and game theorists understand that word. Bombs kill a lot more people in one whack than guns do, so why have all these mass shooters chosen to use guns rather than bombs? The simple answer is that people are lazy. Some terrorists no doubt have built bombs, huge ones. But a lot of killers simply aren't that dedicated. They want easy, quick gratification. If they can fill out some papers and pay a few hundred dollars at a store, or steal a gun from someone else who has done so, or pay a private individual for a previously-owned gun that might well be stolen, that's a much easier method for obtaining a weapon for mass murder than trying to buy or build a bomb. Even most criminals wouldn't know where to buy a bomb, not even a small one like a hand grenade, and most wouldn't know how to build more than a small pipe bomb.
If you make it impossible to buy a gun or to steal one, then someone who wants a gun will have to make it. While building a bomb takes a great deal more skill than buying a gun does, it takes a great deal less skill than building a mass-murder-capable gun. All other issues aside, if we look only at the question of utility, I'm okay with laws that restrict the ownership of full-auto weapons and removable, high-capacity magazines, because if someone really wants those things and is willing to break the law to have them, it still requires far less skill to convert a semi-auto gun to full-auto or to build functional magazines out of scrap metal and springs in one's garage than it does to build a large, effective, safe-to-operate, concealable bomb. As such, outlawing full-auto guns and high-cap magazines doesn't put aspiring mass murderers in the position of shrugging and saying, "Eh, for all that trouble, I might as well just mix up a pallet load of TATP."
That alone, I feel, is reason enough to not try to eliminate the possibility of mass shootings. As long as they are possible, and easier to pull off than a bombing, I think we steer lazy killers away from using bombs.
---------------------------------------------
The question we should be asking then is not, "How do we eliminate the possibility of mass shootings?" but rather, "How do we mitigate the existence of mass shootings?" That is, how do we:
1. ...remove the motive for wanting to commit an act of mass murder?
2. ...minimize the opportunities for committing mass murder?
3. ...minimize the damage that can be done by a mass murderer?
Question #1 has very little to do with guns. It's more about psychology and social problems than it is about technology. It's also the biggest, most tangled dilemma in the list. We'd have to change nothing less than our culture, our economic system, our politics, our methods of raising children, and our own personalities. Aside from that--aside from producing kinder, gentler people who don't want to hurt each other--the only obvious answer I see is to make succeeding at mass murder so unlikely that people are discouraged from trying. It's like why so few robberies are bank robberies. Both the likelihood of failing and the consequences of failing make banks an unattractive target. If we can't make people be nice, at least we can aim for making them think there's no point trying to kill a lot of people.
Question #2 is largely an issue of security and sort of overlaps with question #1, because a person will be discouraged from wanting to try killing a lot of people if they can't think of any time or place they could succeed in doing so. This is the rationale behind eliminating gun-free zones and arming teachers. The thinking is that if a would-be school shooter knows that he'll likely be intercepted and killed by another armed person the moment he draws his weapon, he's far less likely to bother attempting a school shooting. But we can do even better than that. How would a killer manage to murder dozens of school children at one time if, for example, all children were homeschooled?
That's what I mean by minimizing opportunities. I'm not suggesting that all children should be homeschooled. I simply mean that if we didn't keep all the kids in one place, it's tough to conceive of a way to go to one place to kill them all. In the same way, how do you pull off a bank robbery if everybody has their money stuffed under their mattresses?
If schools were built as a campus of small, one-room schoolhouses rather than a single, large building, and all those little buildings went into lockdown the moment a single shot was fired, it would be impossible for a killer to get access to more than one class full of targets. Keep classes small and increase the number of buildings, and you minimize the damage even further. It's also possible to control movement like this within a single building; it's how prisons operate. This is the kind of thinking we need to be engaging in rather than thinking we can control the behavior of deranged individuals by passing laws. School lockdown procedures developed after the Columbine shooting already operate on the same basic principle.
Question #3 also overlaps with question #2; if a killer can't get at his victims, he can't do them much harm. In addition to that, though, we can also make responses to mass shootings faster and more effective. I'm not a fan of arming all teachers, because I've known too many teachers who didn't seem emotionally stable enough to be trusted with a gun. But I don't see a problem with schools having their teachers, or some portion of their teachers, trained to act as an on-site emergency response team. Just as some employees learn to operate fire extinguishers and AEDs without the expectation that they be fully certified firefighters, I think it's reasonable that we could put some teachers and other school staff members through police use-of-force training and active-shooter response tactics. Then, rather than having a killer walking around unimpeded for five minutes until the police show up, he'd be facing an auxiliary SWAT team within maybe 45 seconds.
Even if that team is armed only with ballistic shields and Tasers (so nobody breaks into the school's armory and gets their hands on a deadly weapon), they would still be able to engage and possibly subdue the shooter to stop him from killing any more children. There's no reason to confine this strategy to schools, either. Businesses, churches, any place people gather together and present an attractive target to terrorists, there could be a team of carefully screened volunteers who are trained to stop an attacker or at least contain him until police arrive.
It beats trying to stop suicide bombers.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Omnivorous Rex
I recently encountered a woman on Facebook asking others how she was to come to grips with the idea of killing animals for meat. She said, "Is there a way for me to get over my soft heartedness towards animals or am I just doomed to pay outrageous prices for meats?"
Here's what I told her:
Here's what I told her:
If you feel that strongly about it, you shouldn't be eating meat. Better to live a morally consistent life than to live with your head in the sand. Awareness is a good thing.
But ask yourself where you draw the line. Do you swat mosquitos? Any sympathy for ticks? Parasitic worms? Just walking outside, you may inadvertently kill any number of insects lying underfoot. If you have a functioning immune system, you're constantly killing thousands of microscopic critters just by breathing and digesting. You're a functioning part of your ecosystem; killing is unavoidable.
Even if you were to go vegan, tractors and pesticides kill wildlife, not to mention all the animals killed by trucks and the destruction of habitat caused by highways and farms.
And that's just animal life. What about the plants? With each year that passes, we discover more about the inner lives of plants. They communicate with each other and with insects. They demonstrate an awareness of their environment. They react to threats. They are sentient, if not sapient. They're as much alive as a hopping rabbit.
Even some plants kill animals for food.
So rather than trying to push the truth out of your consciousness (and into your subconscious, where it will manifest as nightmares or mental illness), embrace the truth: you are a born killer.
You have eyes on the front of your face to focus on prey instead of having them on either side of your head like prey animals do to enable them to see approaching predators from all directions. You can craft weapons to amplify your killing power. You can throw weapons...while running...in a different direction. You can make fire! You can speak to others of your species and even to dogs and horses to coordinate an attack. Walking at a normal pace for as long as you can stay awake, you can chase down any animal on four feet. (Seriously, if you just follow a deer across the open plains, never letting it rest, it will drop from exhaustion before you do.) You can even raise animals to be your food, and you won't have to chase them at all.
You are the Ultimate Predator. Get comfortable with it.
Saturday, May 2, 2015
Different Worlds
On a gun group I follow on Facebook, there was recently a post that started, "With all the talk lately about flag burning..." and I was like, "All WHAT talk about flag burning? I haven't heard a word. All the news I've been hearing is about a riot and an earthquake and a volcano and who's running for President, and how Republicans are trying to turn the whole country into a "Christian" theocracy, and 101 stories about how cops suck...unless they're Swedish."
And then I saw my brother share something from FOX (because he does that sort of thing) about how there's allegedly a flag desecration "challenge" going viral like the ice bucket challenge, where people take video of themselves stepping on American flags.
And if you look at the reaction, conservatives are homicidal over this. They are literally saying they're willing to be imprisoned or killed in order to commit acts of violence against the people using flags to express their frustrations. I look at this reaction and the intensity of it, and I'm thinking, "Wow, you know, life must be pretty sweet if the biggest thing you've got to worry about is whether people are hurting the feelings of a piece of cloth that's mass-produced in Korea."
Remember, the people getting this worked up about disrespect to a symbol of the United States government are the same people who bitch endlessly about the United States government, hate the President, don't want to pay taxes, want to secede from the Union, point rifles at federal agents, and form militias in hopes of someday violently overthrowing the government. Setting aside these glaring inconsistencies for a moment, I'd like to focus on the mental health of people getting this worked up over the well-being of an inanimate object.
If some antiquity were being abused--such as when the Taliban destroyed 1700-year-old Buddha statues in Bamiyan--I can understand people being upset over that. It's not that the statues themselves are gods--though people may be upset about violence toward the ideas those statues represent--the real tragedy of it is that those were pieces of history, tangible connections to the ancient past, now lost forever.
But these flags? Again, I understand how people could be upset about the violent rejection of ideas they believe that flag to represent (though I maintain that the people getting upset about it are actually some of the fiercest opponents of most of those ideas), but the difference between these flags and the statues of Bamiyan is that the flags are totally replaceable. They're cheap commodities, trade goods manufactured by the hundreds of thousands, with something like 94% of them coming from China. They're practically disposable. You might as well worship a paper towel. If a flag gets burned, you can just go buy another one. It's silly to cry about it, and downright psychotic to get so emotional about it that you're willing to harm other human beings and sacrifice your own freedom and safety in the process.
Given that so much that's wrong in American politics is being driven by people gripped by this lunacy, I've devised a plan for weeding them out. Have you heard of "dammit dolls?" It's not the name of a punk band. They're little rag dolls that violent people beat when they're angry. Since violence is the only way these people know to express their frustrations, they channel their aggressions into these inanimate dolls rather than risk getting in trouble by attacking a human or other living thing. So here's my plan. We get some cloth that has the American flag printed on one side, and plain white on the other. Then we use this cloth to make dammit dolls, with the flag side turned in. Then we package these dolls with an image of something that would enrage conservatives. I dunno, something like a photoshopped image of Ronald Reagan having sex with Marilyn Manson in a church. Then we send these packages out to all the conservatives in America. The easily enraged ones, upon seeing the image, will beat the hell out of the dammit doll with the flag concealed inside. A few days later, we send them a letter instructing them to open up the dammit doll to find the prize hidden inside. They'll open it up, see the flag, and it will dawn on them that they've just angrily beaten a flag.
The particularly psychotic ones will immediately kill themselves in the most horrible way they can think up, because they'll be consumed with self-hatred. The slightly less psychotic ones will be stunned by their own hypocrisy and shrink from criticizing others who abuse flags.
Of course, these are conservatives we're talking about, so I can see how this might backfire. Like closeted homosexual politicians who deal with their secret shame by crusading against gays, these people who hate themselves for beating a flag doll might project that anger out towards others, and try to deal with their own shame by passing draconian laws against others who are caught abusing flags. Still, if enough of them kill themselves or shut up, these ones who get more zealous may not have the numbers to get such laws passed.
And then I saw my brother share something from FOX (because he does that sort of thing) about how there's allegedly a flag desecration "challenge" going viral like the ice bucket challenge, where people take video of themselves stepping on American flags.
And if you look at the reaction, conservatives are homicidal over this. They are literally saying they're willing to be imprisoned or killed in order to commit acts of violence against the people using flags to express their frustrations. I look at this reaction and the intensity of it, and I'm thinking, "Wow, you know, life must be pretty sweet if the biggest thing you've got to worry about is whether people are hurting the feelings of a piece of cloth that's mass-produced in Korea."
Remember, the people getting this worked up about disrespect to a symbol of the United States government are the same people who bitch endlessly about the United States government, hate the President, don't want to pay taxes, want to secede from the Union, point rifles at federal agents, and form militias in hopes of someday violently overthrowing the government. Setting aside these glaring inconsistencies for a moment, I'd like to focus on the mental health of people getting this worked up over the well-being of an inanimate object.
If some antiquity were being abused--such as when the Taliban destroyed 1700-year-old Buddha statues in Bamiyan--I can understand people being upset over that. It's not that the statues themselves are gods--though people may be upset about violence toward the ideas those statues represent--the real tragedy of it is that those were pieces of history, tangible connections to the ancient past, now lost forever.
But these flags? Again, I understand how people could be upset about the violent rejection of ideas they believe that flag to represent (though I maintain that the people getting upset about it are actually some of the fiercest opponents of most of those ideas), but the difference between these flags and the statues of Bamiyan is that the flags are totally replaceable. They're cheap commodities, trade goods manufactured by the hundreds of thousands, with something like 94% of them coming from China. They're practically disposable. You might as well worship a paper towel. If a flag gets burned, you can just go buy another one. It's silly to cry about it, and downright psychotic to get so emotional about it that you're willing to harm other human beings and sacrifice your own freedom and safety in the process.
Given that so much that's wrong in American politics is being driven by people gripped by this lunacy, I've devised a plan for weeding them out. Have you heard of "dammit dolls?" It's not the name of a punk band. They're little rag dolls that violent people beat when they're angry. Since violence is the only way these people know to express their frustrations, they channel their aggressions into these inanimate dolls rather than risk getting in trouble by attacking a human or other living thing. So here's my plan. We get some cloth that has the American flag printed on one side, and plain white on the other. Then we use this cloth to make dammit dolls, with the flag side turned in. Then we package these dolls with an image of something that would enrage conservatives. I dunno, something like a photoshopped image of Ronald Reagan having sex with Marilyn Manson in a church. Then we send these packages out to all the conservatives in America. The easily enraged ones, upon seeing the image, will beat the hell out of the dammit doll with the flag concealed inside. A few days later, we send them a letter instructing them to open up the dammit doll to find the prize hidden inside. They'll open it up, see the flag, and it will dawn on them that they've just angrily beaten a flag.
The particularly psychotic ones will immediately kill themselves in the most horrible way they can think up, because they'll be consumed with self-hatred. The slightly less psychotic ones will be stunned by their own hypocrisy and shrink from criticizing others who abuse flags.
Of course, these are conservatives we're talking about, so I can see how this might backfire. Like closeted homosexual politicians who deal with their secret shame by crusading against gays, these people who hate themselves for beating a flag doll might project that anger out towards others, and try to deal with their own shame by passing draconian laws against others who are caught abusing flags. Still, if enough of them kill themselves or shut up, these ones who get more zealous may not have the numbers to get such laws passed.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Is There Such a Thing as Provocation?
Provocation used to be recognized in American courts. The degree to which it still is, I don't know. But presumably, once upon a time, if you got arrested for punching a guy in the nose and told the judge, "Yes, Your Honor, I punched him in the nose, but only because he wouldn't quit calling my wife a whore," there was a good chance you'd get off with a lighter sentence or none at all, because the court would recognize that you had been sufficiently provoked. It's not to say that punching people in the nose isn't wrong; just that it's too much to expect you to be a saint when someone else is working really hard at getting themselves punched. It was a recognition of two facts: 1) that humans have their limits, and 2) that sometimes victims contribute to the mental state of their attacker. Sometimes they literally ask for it. By treating provocation as a mitigating circumstance, courts were recognizing the concept of shared culpability.
We hold police officers to a higher standard of self-restraint when it comes to provocation. This is why most police academies still use a boot camp format for creating a stressful environment for cadets. The schools not only want officers to be able to work under pressure, they want them to demonstrate that they have a thick skin. It's expected that nobody wants to go to jail, and so it's not unusual for people who are being taken to jail to hurl insults and abuses at the people who are taking them. This much is expected, and a police department needs people who can handle it.
How does someone handle something like that, though, day after day? One way is that the officers set themselves above it. They take an attitude of condescension toward the person who is behaving badly. They fix it in their minds that the person hurling insults somehow can't help himself, because he's morally or mentally inferior in some respect. It's treated almost like a handicap. Just as you wouldn't lose your temper with an incontinent person for wetting himself, you don't lose your temper with criminals for acting like criminals. It's all they're capable of.
If you get into this mindset, it can make the job workable. Of course, after a few years of spending all day responding to calls of criminal behavior, it can be challenging not to see the whole of society as belonging in that mental category of human rubbish, because you're getting a skewed perspective. You have to fight back the urge to suspect the worst of everyone.
But what do you do when they don't let you? That is, what if you're trying to brighten the line in your mind that separates criminals from everybody else, so that you can still retain somewhat of a positive view of humanity in general, but the rest of humanity doesn't cooperate? What if, every time you try to be polite, friendly, and helpful to people you weren't called to arrest, they rebuff you and repay your kindness with venom? How much of that could you take? How long would you endure that before reaching the conclusion that the general public does deserve to be lumped in with the criminal element?
That's not something they teach in police academies, and it doesn't get enough attention in most police departments. Religion could play a useful role here, but being as there's a wall of separation (or supposed to be) and the fact that departments may be composed of officers from a diversity of faiths, the role religion can actually play is necessarily restricted. Psychological counseling isn't really an option, either, as simply reaching out to a mental health care provider stigmatizes an officer as being unfit for duty.
So we call these guys to come clean up society's messes, and then we dump more garbage on them for doing it, and the only support system we allow them is each other, or--off-duty--their families and churches. If divorce rates and domestic abuse rates among cops are any indicator, this is too much to expect of families. And then we're put off by the fact that the police have an "us vs. them" attitude toward the public when we, the public, created it.
Suppose you were a fire fighter, and every time you showed up to respond to a medical emergency, everybody there whipped out their cell phones hoping to get video evidence of you stealing something, despite the fact that you had never stolen anything, ever. How long would it take for that to get old? Imagine people clutched their purses and patted their wallets every time they saw a firefighter. Imagine pundits going on for years at a time and even building whole careers around pounding the message that firefighters don't respect people's property. "When the only tool you've got is an axe, every problem looks like firewood." Suppose that every time a fire broke out, there was a near certainty that the fire department was going to be sued for breaking doors and causing water damage to walls and furniture. Every other day, the news would have a story about the "reckless disregard" firefighters had for people's stuff, and they'd run stories with carefully constructed half-truths about how firefighters in other countries put out fires using waterless methods. If more fires happened in a minority neighborhood, necessitating more responses from the fire department, journalists would hold up those statistics as proof that firefighting is an inherently racist occupation.
If you felt you were continually under assault by everyone outside your fire department, just for doing your job, how long would it be before you eventually told all those jerks to put out their own fires and drive themselves to the hospital?
It's in this light that I'd like you to watch this video. In South Gate, a city in Los Angeles County, California, some plainclothes police officers in tactical gear were doing something--arresting someone, serving a warrant, we don't really know. And for some reason, there were at least two women in the neighborhood--one across the street and another maybe ten feet from them--who felt that the mere presence of these officers represented an impropriety worthy of documenting. The officers weren't apparently doing anything to either of these women, just talking among themselves. But one of the women nonetheless got very close to them, playing sidewalk news anchor with her cell phone. It's not clear from this video whether they asked her to stop or asked her to leave, but it's also not clear what business she had being there doing what she was doing.
At that point, we see one of the officers chase the woman, grab her phone, and destroy it. Make no mistake. What he did was wrong--as wrong as punching someone in the nose for repeatedly calling your wife a whore--and he should face appropriate disciplinary action accordingly. If the implication is that the recording is for the purpose of documenting criminal evidence, then the implied accusation in recording the officers' conversation is that the officers are all criminals and that their mere presence is a criminal act. How long should the people who are there to stop crime reasonably be expected to put up with that foolishness? It doesn't justify one of them assaulting a woman and destroying her property, but there's also only so much sympathy one can have for somebody who goes out of their way to kick a rattlesnake.
At some point, when adults get serious about solving a behavioral problem--whether of an animal, a child, subordinates, a class of people, whatever--they realize that you can't just punish everyone into compliance. They figure out that the people who are acting in an undesirable way are doing so as a response to certain conditions, and if you want to change the behavior, you have to change the conditions. Do you think police in this country are out of control, brutal, and corrupt? If so, are you out of control, brutal, and corrupt? If not, what's the difference? Don't just say, "they're rotten people." That's too easy. It solves nothing. They're human beings displaying human responses to a given set of conditions the best way they know how. So what conditions are they being subjected to that caused them to be more brutal, out-of-control, and corrupt than you, and what can we do to either eliminate those conditions, or to better equip the officers to deal with those conditions in a way we find acceptable? That's a national discussion that needs to happen. In the mean time, we're not helping anything by needling these guys for existing, and then crying about it when they lash out in response. It's time we did more than just demand better. It's time we created better, and that starts with recognizing our own role in creating this situation.
We hold police officers to a higher standard of self-restraint when it comes to provocation. This is why most police academies still use a boot camp format for creating a stressful environment for cadets. The schools not only want officers to be able to work under pressure, they want them to demonstrate that they have a thick skin. It's expected that nobody wants to go to jail, and so it's not unusual for people who are being taken to jail to hurl insults and abuses at the people who are taking them. This much is expected, and a police department needs people who can handle it.
How does someone handle something like that, though, day after day? One way is that the officers set themselves above it. They take an attitude of condescension toward the person who is behaving badly. They fix it in their minds that the person hurling insults somehow can't help himself, because he's morally or mentally inferior in some respect. It's treated almost like a handicap. Just as you wouldn't lose your temper with an incontinent person for wetting himself, you don't lose your temper with criminals for acting like criminals. It's all they're capable of.
If you get into this mindset, it can make the job workable. Of course, after a few years of spending all day responding to calls of criminal behavior, it can be challenging not to see the whole of society as belonging in that mental category of human rubbish, because you're getting a skewed perspective. You have to fight back the urge to suspect the worst of everyone.
But what do you do when they don't let you? That is, what if you're trying to brighten the line in your mind that separates criminals from everybody else, so that you can still retain somewhat of a positive view of humanity in general, but the rest of humanity doesn't cooperate? What if, every time you try to be polite, friendly, and helpful to people you weren't called to arrest, they rebuff you and repay your kindness with venom? How much of that could you take? How long would you endure that before reaching the conclusion that the general public does deserve to be lumped in with the criminal element?
That's not something they teach in police academies, and it doesn't get enough attention in most police departments. Religion could play a useful role here, but being as there's a wall of separation (or supposed to be) and the fact that departments may be composed of officers from a diversity of faiths, the role religion can actually play is necessarily restricted. Psychological counseling isn't really an option, either, as simply reaching out to a mental health care provider stigmatizes an officer as being unfit for duty.
So we call these guys to come clean up society's messes, and then we dump more garbage on them for doing it, and the only support system we allow them is each other, or--off-duty--their families and churches. If divorce rates and domestic abuse rates among cops are any indicator, this is too much to expect of families. And then we're put off by the fact that the police have an "us vs. them" attitude toward the public when we, the public, created it.
Suppose you were a fire fighter, and every time you showed up to respond to a medical emergency, everybody there whipped out their cell phones hoping to get video evidence of you stealing something, despite the fact that you had never stolen anything, ever. How long would it take for that to get old? Imagine people clutched their purses and patted their wallets every time they saw a firefighter. Imagine pundits going on for years at a time and even building whole careers around pounding the message that firefighters don't respect people's property. "When the only tool you've got is an axe, every problem looks like firewood." Suppose that every time a fire broke out, there was a near certainty that the fire department was going to be sued for breaking doors and causing water damage to walls and furniture. Every other day, the news would have a story about the "reckless disregard" firefighters had for people's stuff, and they'd run stories with carefully constructed half-truths about how firefighters in other countries put out fires using waterless methods. If more fires happened in a minority neighborhood, necessitating more responses from the fire department, journalists would hold up those statistics as proof that firefighting is an inherently racist occupation.
If you felt you were continually under assault by everyone outside your fire department, just for doing your job, how long would it be before you eventually told all those jerks to put out their own fires and drive themselves to the hospital?
It's in this light that I'd like you to watch this video. In South Gate, a city in Los Angeles County, California, some plainclothes police officers in tactical gear were doing something--arresting someone, serving a warrant, we don't really know. And for some reason, there were at least two women in the neighborhood--one across the street and another maybe ten feet from them--who felt that the mere presence of these officers represented an impropriety worthy of documenting. The officers weren't apparently doing anything to either of these women, just talking among themselves. But one of the women nonetheless got very close to them, playing sidewalk news anchor with her cell phone. It's not clear from this video whether they asked her to stop or asked her to leave, but it's also not clear what business she had being there doing what she was doing.
At that point, we see one of the officers chase the woman, grab her phone, and destroy it. Make no mistake. What he did was wrong--as wrong as punching someone in the nose for repeatedly calling your wife a whore--and he should face appropriate disciplinary action accordingly. If the implication is that the recording is for the purpose of documenting criminal evidence, then the implied accusation in recording the officers' conversation is that the officers are all criminals and that their mere presence is a criminal act. How long should the people who are there to stop crime reasonably be expected to put up with that foolishness? It doesn't justify one of them assaulting a woman and destroying her property, but there's also only so much sympathy one can have for somebody who goes out of their way to kick a rattlesnake.
At some point, when adults get serious about solving a behavioral problem--whether of an animal, a child, subordinates, a class of people, whatever--they realize that you can't just punish everyone into compliance. They figure out that the people who are acting in an undesirable way are doing so as a response to certain conditions, and if you want to change the behavior, you have to change the conditions. Do you think police in this country are out of control, brutal, and corrupt? If so, are you out of control, brutal, and corrupt? If not, what's the difference? Don't just say, "they're rotten people." That's too easy. It solves nothing. They're human beings displaying human responses to a given set of conditions the best way they know how. So what conditions are they being subjected to that caused them to be more brutal, out-of-control, and corrupt than you, and what can we do to either eliminate those conditions, or to better equip the officers to deal with those conditions in a way we find acceptable? That's a national discussion that needs to happen. In the mean time, we're not helping anything by needling these guys for existing, and then crying about it when they lash out in response. It's time we did more than just demand better. It's time we created better, and that starts with recognizing our own role in creating this situation.
Monday, April 20, 2015
Turning Privilege Into Oppression
Let's play a game. Think of some privilege you have, like...
"I have electrical service in my home 24/7."
That's pretty awesome! Do you know how many people DON'T have that kind of luxury? And did you really do anything to deserve it? You may have earned the money to pay your electric bill, but it's unlikely that you're personally and solely responsible for the existence of the power plant and the electrical grid in your city. If you're like most people who have electricity, you lucked out on those things. Now, take that privilege, and find a way to turn it into a complaint.
"I can't get ahead because I'm burdened with high electrical costs! Every time I try to see the sunset, all I see are wires. I worry constantly that my house will burn down or that I'll get shocked. I'm afraid to turn on the light when I take a shower. I fear that the wiring in my house puts me at special risk during a thunderstorm. I worry that all that electromagnetism coursing through the walls may be giving me cancer while I sleep. The power company conspires with manufacturers to make products that make me increasingly addicted to electricity usage. I don't want mountaintop removal or wars in the Middle East, but I don't know how I'd get by without an unlimited supply of electricity, so I keep voting for horrible people and feeling guilty about it. It's all a devious conspiracy to keep me trapped in a job I don't want working to pay for things I wish I could live without."
Wow, what a burden! Now, if you can couple that with neoteny, you...
What's neoteny? Neoteny is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. It's a biological term. In humans, females are strongly neotenous. For example, the size, shape, and sound of a twelve-year-old child of either sex are much closer to the size, shape, and sound of a grown woman than to those of a grown man. Men appear more different from children than women do. Socially, this has worked to women's advantage, because all humans--men and women alike--have evolved to nurture children and to place importance on protecting them and providing for them. So when a child--or a woman--cries, you're going to feel more biologically compelled to care than if you see a man crying. The same characteristic that would make you want to avoid a war movie where all the casualties are cute, little kid is the same characteristic that makes you listen and care when a woman talks about someone hurting her feelings.
So anyway, if you happen to possess this trait that makes everybody biologically hardwired to care about your well-being, and then you manage to re-state everything good in your life as a terrible burden, you've just learned the basics of how to be a Feminist.
Here's an example from the editors at Everday Feminism. The link goes to a cartoon called "How Society Polices Women's Clothing," that shows us just how tough it is to be an affluent, Western woman. There's just no way she can please everyone! The cartoon shows seventeen different ways a woman can dress, and how, in all but the last instance, other people are going to have opinions about it. Opinions! Uncharitable ones, even. Go on, go read the cartoon and let it soak in just how badly America treats women over something as simple as getting dressed to step outside. Terrible, isn't it?
Now go back and look at the whole cartoon again, only this time, imagine that each of the characters you see there are men, and imagine how the captions might differ. Go on and do it. I'll wait. Frame by frame, no advancing to the next one until you've wrapped your head around the idea that each one is male and expects to be regarded as such. Give them guys' names if it helps. I'll start you off: The dude with the long hair and the Daisy Dukes is Kevin. The one in the long skirt is Doug. The one in the suit and a bunch of makeup is Marcos. The one next to him in the pink dress is Frank.
I suspect the criticisms these guys would face might embody something a little harsher than just, "You should wear clothes that do more to flatter your shape." They'd be more likely to contain the word "faggot" and threats of serious bodily harm.
...to which all those compassionate feminists fighting for equal rights for all humans will just shrug and say, "If he doesn't want to get his ass kicked, he shouldn't dress that way. It's not our fault he chose to throw away his male privilege." Because it's privilege when a man is all but assigned a daily uniform and threatened with physical violence for deviating from it, but it's oppression when a woman has multiple options for every occasion and her biggest problem is that people will notice her and feel moved to say something they think is helpful.
"I have electrical service in my home 24/7."
That's pretty awesome! Do you know how many people DON'T have that kind of luxury? And did you really do anything to deserve it? You may have earned the money to pay your electric bill, but it's unlikely that you're personally and solely responsible for the existence of the power plant and the electrical grid in your city. If you're like most people who have electricity, you lucked out on those things. Now, take that privilege, and find a way to turn it into a complaint.
"I can't get ahead because I'm burdened with high electrical costs! Every time I try to see the sunset, all I see are wires. I worry constantly that my house will burn down or that I'll get shocked. I'm afraid to turn on the light when I take a shower. I fear that the wiring in my house puts me at special risk during a thunderstorm. I worry that all that electromagnetism coursing through the walls may be giving me cancer while I sleep. The power company conspires with manufacturers to make products that make me increasingly addicted to electricity usage. I don't want mountaintop removal or wars in the Middle East, but I don't know how I'd get by without an unlimited supply of electricity, so I keep voting for horrible people and feeling guilty about it. It's all a devious conspiracy to keep me trapped in a job I don't want working to pay for things I wish I could live without."
Wow, what a burden! Now, if you can couple that with neoteny, you...
What's neoteny? Neoteny is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. It's a biological term. In humans, females are strongly neotenous. For example, the size, shape, and sound of a twelve-year-old child of either sex are much closer to the size, shape, and sound of a grown woman than to those of a grown man. Men appear more different from children than women do. Socially, this has worked to women's advantage, because all humans--men and women alike--have evolved to nurture children and to place importance on protecting them and providing for them. So when a child--or a woman--cries, you're going to feel more biologically compelled to care than if you see a man crying. The same characteristic that would make you want to avoid a war movie where all the casualties are cute, little kid is the same characteristic that makes you listen and care when a woman talks about someone hurting her feelings.
So anyway, if you happen to possess this trait that makes everybody biologically hardwired to care about your well-being, and then you manage to re-state everything good in your life as a terrible burden, you've just learned the basics of how to be a Feminist.
Here's an example from the editors at Everday Feminism. The link goes to a cartoon called "How Society Polices Women's Clothing," that shows us just how tough it is to be an affluent, Western woman. There's just no way she can please everyone! The cartoon shows seventeen different ways a woman can dress, and how, in all but the last instance, other people are going to have opinions about it. Opinions! Uncharitable ones, even. Go on, go read the cartoon and let it soak in just how badly America treats women over something as simple as getting dressed to step outside. Terrible, isn't it?
Now go back and look at the whole cartoon again, only this time, imagine that each of the characters you see there are men, and imagine how the captions might differ. Go on and do it. I'll wait. Frame by frame, no advancing to the next one until you've wrapped your head around the idea that each one is male and expects to be regarded as such. Give them guys' names if it helps. I'll start you off: The dude with the long hair and the Daisy Dukes is Kevin. The one in the long skirt is Doug. The one in the suit and a bunch of makeup is Marcos. The one next to him in the pink dress is Frank.
I suspect the criticisms these guys would face might embody something a little harsher than just, "You should wear clothes that do more to flatter your shape." They'd be more likely to contain the word "faggot" and threats of serious bodily harm.
...to which all those compassionate feminists fighting for equal rights for all humans will just shrug and say, "If he doesn't want to get his ass kicked, he shouldn't dress that way. It's not our fault he chose to throw away his male privilege." Because it's privilege when a man is all but assigned a daily uniform and threatened with physical violence for deviating from it, but it's oppression when a woman has multiple options for every occasion and her biggest problem is that people will notice her and feel moved to say something they think is helpful.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
The Biggest Danger of Police Work Is Not What You Think
I may edit this later to be a proper, stand-alone article, but for now, I'm just going to paste it and give you some background. I used to be a cop, and my little brother and his wife still are. My brother's Facebook posts are pretty much limited to pictures of American flags and memes celebrating the heroism of police and military personnel. It's the kind of starry-eyed, patriotic stuff I might have posted when I was a ten-year-old Cub Scout if we'd had Facebook back then. On one of these recent posts--a video monologue by a young woman gushing about how wonderful police were and attacking anyone who felt less intensely about it than she did--one commenter dared to offer that, while police work was indeed both dangerous and noble, it wasn't the most dangerous job in the world, statistically speaking. Specifically, he cited construction work as being more dangerous. Predictably, there was a vicious dogpile as law enforcement officers and those who love them tore the man to shreds for having the temerity to share such an offensive fact. The poor guy scrambled to clarify that he had no ill will towards the police, but it wasn't enough. They got nasty, so he got nasty back, and it completely fell apart. At that point, I posted this:
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, Again
Reading a few articles over on everydayfeminism.com, I'm overwhelmed by the logical fallacies and failures of reasoning that the readers are supposed to just swallow without question. Permit me to "mansplain" one of the more problematic ones.
Let's say we have ten targets, and we line them up left to right along a wall. Standing just a few feet away, I take a bow and arrow, aim at the target furthest to the right, shoot, and hit that one target. Ten percent of the targets on that wall have now been hit by an arrow.
This does NOT mean, however, that, "If you're a target on that wall, you have a ten percent chance of being hit by an arrow." It means that the one I aimed at had a very likely chance of getting hit (the exact percentage depends on such variables as my marksmanship and the quality of the archery equipment), while the ones I wasn't aiming at were very unlikely to get hit at all. The chances that my arrow would have left the bow, taken a sharp left turn, zoomed to the target furthest to the left, taken a sharp right turn, and then planted itself in that far-left target are something close to zero percent.
And yet that's exactly the sort of assertion being made when they say that a person of color has a 44%-50% chance of going to prison or that a woman has a one-in-three chance of being raped. It presumes that there is a sole, relevant variable--in these examples, being a person of color and being a woman, respectively. For that to be true, we have to assume that because President Obama is a person of color, he has the same chance of going to prison as does a black gang member who sells crack in front of a police station, or that an old woman alone on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean is as likely to be raped as is a teenage girl in sub-Saharan Africa who's been kidnapped by enemy soldiers. That kind of claim doesn't pass the most basic of credibility tests.
Let's say we have ten targets, and we line them up left to right along a wall. Standing just a few feet away, I take a bow and arrow, aim at the target furthest to the right, shoot, and hit that one target. Ten percent of the targets on that wall have now been hit by an arrow.
This does NOT mean, however, that, "If you're a target on that wall, you have a ten percent chance of being hit by an arrow." It means that the one I aimed at had a very likely chance of getting hit (the exact percentage depends on such variables as my marksmanship and the quality of the archery equipment), while the ones I wasn't aiming at were very unlikely to get hit at all. The chances that my arrow would have left the bow, taken a sharp left turn, zoomed to the target furthest to the left, taken a sharp right turn, and then planted itself in that far-left target are something close to zero percent.
And yet that's exactly the sort of assertion being made when they say that a person of color has a 44%-50% chance of going to prison or that a woman has a one-in-three chance of being raped. It presumes that there is a sole, relevant variable--in these examples, being a person of color and being a woman, respectively. For that to be true, we have to assume that because President Obama is a person of color, he has the same chance of going to prison as does a black gang member who sells crack in front of a police station, or that an old woman alone on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean is as likely to be raped as is a teenage girl in sub-Saharan Africa who's been kidnapped by enemy soldiers. That kind of claim doesn't pass the most basic of credibility tests.
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