"May I Respectfully Ask How Many Times You've Been Shot at?"

In the course of a debate on gun control--if you can call it a "debate" when one person takes an informed position and a half-dozen others with no expertise on the topic pile on calling him an idiot--somebody asked me if he could respectfully ask me how many times I've been shot at. Following is my reply.

O Canada

 

Back when slavery was still legal in the United States, runaway slaves used to flee to Canada. Then in the 1920s, when alcohol was outlawed in the United States, people smuggled booze in from Canada or went there to drink. During the Vietnam war, some American men who wanted to avoid the draft sought amnesty in Canada. In 1985, Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, a novel depicting a dystopian future in which an oppressive theocracy took over in America, and Americans defected to Canada. During the Bush II and Trump years, we often heard liberals saying they planned to run away to Canada, fearing that a Handmaid's Tale-style police state was soon to follow. In recent decades, since America has grown increasingly inhospitable towards the world's tired, poor, and huddled masses, Canada has stepped up to welcome them. If the United States is the Mother of Exiles, Canada is the exiles' cool aunt who they stay with when Mom is mad. I've heard that when savvy American backpackers are traveling abroad, they stick a Canadian flag patch on their backpacks, because so many people around the world hate Americans but feel warmly toward Canadians. Canada appeared to be the last bastion of liberty, the last place people could bug out to when even the Land of the Free was no longer free enough.

But things have changed.

 

 

Gun control in Canada has gotten increasingly restrictive, starting with handgun registration in 1934 and proceeding through to their banning AR-15s and many other types of guns in 2020. Jordan Peterson was an unknown Psychology professor from Toronto who became internationally famous in 2016 when he had the audacity to say that his government shouldn't mandate that people say certain words. And now, in response to protests from truckers and other "essential" workers who have survived COVID-19 while being required to work for the past two years (while their taxes supported everyone else staying home), the Canadian government is seizing the bank accounts of anyone connected to the protests. They're using laws intended for fighting terrorism to suppress political dissent. Police are reportedly going door to door among businesses in downtown Ottawa, the nation's capital, checking business licenses, driver's licenses, etc., and kicking people out--even people who aren't protesting--if the police don't feel that those people have a legitimate need to be there. The level of coercion that Canada is using to silence its people, to punish them for having spoken up in the first place, and to force them back to work is on a scale we typically associate with the likes of Vladimir Putin, not Justin Trudeau.

I once heard a story about a man who had come to the United States from Cuba, or perhaps from the Soviet Union. After he related how bad things had been in his home country, he said that Americans were in an even worse situation, because unlike the people in his country, Americans don't have anywhere to run to if tyranny rears its head here. But we did--Canada. I'm reminded of this story now, looking at how oppressive the Canadian government has become. It's true--we don't have any freer place to run away to anymore. The American people are backed into a corner. If our government tries to suppress us, our only options will be to comply or fight. Let's hope it never does anything so foolish.

Drop It Like It's Hot

 

I've noticed something that may be of interest to linguists or pop culture geeks. You know how there are some words that mean both one thing and its opposite? Like the word "sanction"--it can mean both to officially endorse, encourage, sponsor, etc., and to prohibit, discourage, or penalize. It can mean either officially allowing or officially disallowing. I don't know what these words are called, but if I were naming them, I might call them "autoantonyms."

Anyway, I've discovered a new one that's the result of evolving slang. I don't mean like how "bad" still retains its original definition in formal speech but means "good" in AAVE. This one has crept into usage among journalists. My wife suggested that perhaps it was just lingo peculiar to that field, but I'm seeing more widespread usage of it than just that.

The word is "dropped." It still retains its original definition of allowing something to physically fall (or causing it to fall). That hasn't changed. But in addition to that, we used to use "dropped" in a figurative way meaning "to abandon or discontinue," as in "The deadline for dropping classes without penalty is next Tuesday," or, "My boyfriend hit me, so I dropped him like a bad habit." (...which is kind of a weird expression itself, given that bad habits are not usually dropped suddenly or permanently.)

But the new figurative use means nearly the opposite. It means "to introduce, to present." I've heard pundits say, "The New York Times just dropped a headline..." which to me, means they retracted it, deleted it, refused to print it, or otherwise decided not to use it. But that's not the meaning the speaker intended. They meant, "The New York Times just published a headline," the idea being that "dropped" conveys a suddenness and powerful impact. This leads me to believe it may have come from "mic drop" or from a common origin with that expression.

Another example is one I just encountered in a magazine article. The author was telling a story about an online interaction with her friend. The friend sent her a link to a Substack, but she related this as "She dropped a link..."

I suppose in that sense, it might also come from video games. In many multiplayer games, you can't actually hand an item from your character to another player's character. To make such a transfer, you have to "drop" the item from your inventory, letting it fall on the ground, where it can then be picked up by someone else. So perhaps the author meant "dropped" in the sense of "She had this thing, but intentionally let it fall to the ground for me to find, like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread crumbs."

Disputing Reality

 

I'm active on a Quora group about homelessness, and one of the most frequent and maddening statements I find myself arguing against on there is "Most homeless people choose to be homeless. It's a lifestyle thing." I tell these people they're wrong. Most people who are homeless are so because they don't have enough money for housing. The reason I fight back is because it seems they're denying that involuntary poverty even exists, and my rage trigger is people contradicting empirical reality.

"You can't see me!"

 

It's like that old Judge Judy line, "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining." So many things coming from identetarians that I object to, and that cause other progressives to tag me as a conservative, are about this. Like when a black, multimillionaire politician says that they're oppressed and that a white welfare recipient living in a trailer park is oppressing them and has greater privilege. 

Patriarchy

 

Or when a criminal literally attempts to murder a police officer, they fight, the assailant loses, and then people say, "The police killed him for no reason but being black." 

 

"You're saying I did what now?"

 Or when a guy puts on a dress and people say, "He's an actual, biological woman now, he's always been a woman from the day he was born, and if you don't believe that, you're a bigot." There's this creepily Orwellian formula to it: 1) Make a false assertion that can be easily disproved, 2) Aggressively demand that others accept your assertion as reality, 3) Punish and ostracize anyone who refuses to accept it. 

 

"Right?"

 

It's like the Wokester version of the Spanish Inquisition. One of the big things the Inquisitors went after people for was blasphemy, and one of the articles of faith they insisted on was the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. For those who aren't theology geeks, that's the belief that the bread used in a Catholic mass to represent the body of Jesus during the sacrament of Communion (where they ritually re-enact the last meal Jesus had with his followers before his execution) literally, physically BECOMES the actual flesh of Jesus during the ritual, as opposed to just being a piece of bread that symbolizes his body. Another one was that they required everybody to believe that Mary was actually a virgin. 

 

 

Oh, hey, we were just talking about you.

 

 

These are pretty far-out things to expect a person who's not schizophrenic to believe, yet the Inquisitors were so insistent about it that they'd actually torture and kill anyone they didn't feel was sufficiently enthusiastic in the expression of their belief in these things. 

"This is your last chance--tell me I'm a pretty, blue pony and say it like you mean it!"

 

That's my top pet peeve. When a person (or worse, multiple people) who are completely unhinged from reality bully others into playing along with their self-serving delusions, I can't just ignore it. I paid attention to "The Emperor's New Clothes." You don't pretend to believe in bullshit just because powerful people insist on it.

So anyway...

LGBT folks are way overrepresented among the homeless. The explanation has always been that angry parents kick out their queer teenagers, leaving them homeless. I always accepted this narrative. I felt bad for the kids and felt resentment towards their parents.

But I'm seeing conversations among trans people on Twitter and there's this running theme of "My mom kept a picture of me from when I was a kid" or "My grandma deadnamed me" and so on--basically "My family regarded me as being the same person they've known my whole life"--followed by "...so I cut off my whole phobic family and haven't talked to any of them in years." This is met with much cheering and encouragement, and general disparagement of anyone who won't play along with their delusions.

I see a LOT of that. I've yet to run across a single account of "my parents kicked me out for not being what they wanted." I'm not saying that has never happened. I'm saying that, at least from what I'm seeing, the voluntary runaways vastly outnumber the ones who were put out of their parents' home onto the street against their will.

 

"Misery loves company. If you can't make peace with your own family, encourage other people to abandon theirs."

 

I recognize that my perception may be a bit skewed because of the possibility that the kids who are homeless might have less access to the internet. Maybe there's some hidden economic dynamic where the people who cut themselves off from their families voluntarily are more likely to have internet access, while the ones that were kicked out are less likely to. I'm not saying I think that's true or that I've seen any evidence of it--I'm just leaving the door open to the possibility of something I could be overlooking.

But it doesn't look that way. It seriously looks like they're the ones being jerks and making ultimatums, and then crying that they've been victimized when they haven't been. As I've told right-wingers for years, "No, not getting to force people to do what you say isn't a violation of your rights."

On one of these discussions, I saw trans people complaining about not being able to change their birth certificate in some states. Why on Earth would you change a birth certificate? The whole point of it is to make a permanent record of facts that actually happened. You were born in a certain place. Your parents were particular people. You were born at a definite time and date. In most cases, you were born with a clearly identifiable sex. None of these things change over time. Even if you get adopted, it doesn't change your genetics. History isn't to be erased and rewritten because we didn't like how it went. I'm 5'9". I can't just demand that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles change my driver's license to say I'm 6'4". I can't become a citizen of Canada just by changing my birth certificate to say that I was born in Ottawa. I'm 49 years old. I can't just have my vital records changed to say I'm 19. It doesn't matter how intensely I feel like a tall, young Canadian. I'm not one, and lying about it on official records is--and should be--a crime. 

" I identify as being 21. Gotta problem with that?"

So now I've got to reevaluate my position on whether most homelessness is really involuntary. I need actual data so I have numbers to crunch. Are most homeless people just really, really poor, or were they all kids who ran away from home because Grandpa called them by their birth name?