Door Number Three

I had an "Aha!" moment yesterday, and I'm feeling unsettled by it. It may be something that seems both obvious and not at all unsettling for many reading this, but understand--until this realization, I had always felt that the political left and right in the United States took precisely the opposite positions on gun control from what they should have taken, if they were being intellectually consistent. It seemed obvious to me that the "do your own thing," revolutionaries committed to equality and empowering the downtrodden should be arming minorities, women, the elderly, the disabled, and so on. And it seemed just as obvious to me that the folks who practiced the civic religion of worshiping the flag, the military, and the police, and who were always calling for harsher punishments of criminals and crueler treatment of the poor would be the ones wanting to strip the weapons away from the populace to make it easier for the government to maintain order and compliance.

It truly baffled me why this was not the case. I chalked it up to being some combination of the Left's embrace of pacifism in the latter half of the 20th century, and the media playing the two sides against each other. Plenty of people disagreed with me, but none bothered to educate me. Those on the Left simply ran away and stuck their heads in the sand when they saw the word "gun." The Right verbally abused me for being stupid and unpatriotic, but couldn't provide an explanation that made any sense, because most of what the Right believes about the Left is wrong*.

I get it now, though. The key for me was looking at some of the arguments on the Left about other issues--arguments I myself have made on unrelated topics, like universal healthcare.

"It is scandalous that on the richest nation on Earth, we have people dying of treatable diseases."

"Why is there hunger in a country that throws away millions of pounds of food every day?"

They see resources as being something we all own (or should own) collectively. They feel that these resources are being misallocated, and that this is why some people don't have enough. The thinking is, "There's plenty to go around. The government should take some away from people who have too much, and give it to the people who don't have enough."

The conservatives respond, "I don't need the government to give me anything. I could take care of myself just fine if only the government would keep its mitts off my money and leave me alone."

They take the same approach to public safety. The conservative says he can defend himself just fine if only we'd let him arm himself as he pleases. The liberal wants the government to provide protection services. She wants to ride a public bus or train so she doesn't have to own a car, and she wants the police to be her bodyguards so she doesn't have to fight for her own survival.

I get it now, but I'm not entirely comfortable with either of these views. The conservative view is sensible, within the tiny bubble of concerns it considers, but it is myopic. Yes, maybe your business pays you enough to buy what you need for a comfortable life. But how comfortable will you be in a world full of thieves and beggars because the masses are left poor for the benefit of a handful of billionaires? There's a certain amount of psychopathy inherent in conservatism--an attitude of, "Screw you, I got mine," as though your neighbor starving or being victimized has no affect on your own life.

Liberals, though, are naive. I've heard them say things like, "I shouldn't have to take precautions against getting raped, because it's the rapists' responsibility not to rape me." Also, "If a robber threatens you, just give him what he wants. You don't have to fight," as though criminals haven't killed people just for thrills, from today's gang initiations back to Vikings killing unarmed monks. Tell Emmit Till that he should have just given his attackers what they wanted.

I don't like either of these views. We shouldn't have to choose between being an antisocial island or being dependent infants with no autonomy. I'm not comfortable with the dystopia that either of them presents as their utopia. Instead, I'd like to do what may sound impossible: marry these two views into a single vision that should appeal to both sides. To me, that would look something like this:

It is your civic duty to be as useful as possible. You can be a hero to your community by having skills and resources to share with them. Take pride in empowering others. "Teach a man to fish," if you can. If you can't, then share your fish with him so he can be free to do other things for you and your community.

I want you to learn to safely handle guns and keep one in your home, not because I want my neighbors to shoot each other or so you can wreck our society by overthrowing the government. Rather, I think the day may come when our government needs your help defending us all. Our military could be crippled and our leadership compromised. If we get to that point, I don't want it to be every-gunman-for-himself, with the gentle people left to perish. I want people of conscience, who care about their communities, to be available to grab their personally owned weapons and assemble into an ad hoc defense force to repel invaders. I want neighbors to take care of each other such that the police can just come when called instead of patrolling our streets like an occupying army. That's my vision for America--a nation of Minutemen Hoplites, not survivalist hermits or cities of sheep.

And it's not all about guns. I want as many of you as possible to know as much as possible about how to do everything necessary for survival. I want you to know how to grow food and how to process, preserve, and cook it. I want you to know how to fix each other's homes and furnaces and pipes and cars. I want you to know how to rig up a water purification system and electricity generation, whether it's your family, your neighbor, or your whole town who needs it. I want you to respond to tariffs on imports by saying, "So what? We can make that here." And I want the most celebrated people to be the ones who can help the most people in the biggest ways.

I want liberals to be more independent, and conservatives to be more empathetic. I don't think that puts me in the middle or makes me a watered-down thing we call a centrist because of its fear of choosing sides. This is option "C," where people show their love for their community by strengthening all individuals.


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*I was going to insert a link here, but I can't find it now. Cards Against Humanity did a poll to find out what Democrats and Republicans believe about each other. Both sides had many errors, like Republicans overestimating the percentage of Democrats who were gay, or Democrats overestimating the percentage of Republicans who were white supremacists, but the Republicans polled were generally more wrong than the Democrats were. That is to say, while both sides believe inaccurate stereotypes, the Republicans were more likely to have a view of their opponents that bore no actual resemblance to reality.

Mother of Exiles

714,984

That was the population of Columbus, Ohio, when I moved here in 2000. In 2018, the population was estimated at 879,170. That means that in just 18 years, this city has grown by 164,186 people. It wasn't because the birth rate exceeded the death rate by that much. It's because people came here from other places...people like me.

I'm an immigrant. I'm not what you probably think of when you hear that word. I was born in the United States. I'm a citizen. I'm white (with some Seminole and very distant African ancestry). English is my first language. The language spoken by the largest non-English speaking minority in my birthplace was German (Deitsch, specifically). But I'm not from here. I wasn't born in Columbus, not even in Ohio. I didn't need a passport or a visa to come here. No guards stopped me at the edge of the city. Nobody in the government of Ohio or Columbus or Franklin County gave me permission to come here, and I didn't have to risk my life swimming across a river to sneak in.

Like most immigrants to Columbus, I came here looking for a better life. My mother, widowed at the age of 22, brought me to Ohio from our hometown in Pennsylvania as she pursued an education in Cincinnati. Like so many immigrants, she found a new spouse in this new place and started a business--multiple businesses, actually. After moving around to a couple different places in the eastern and northeastern parts of the state, we finally settled in a deeply impoverished part of southern Ohio, a former boom town that fell into ruin when the steel mill and shoe factory both closed. The Appalachian accent was so alien to my ears that I struggled in school my first year there because I couldn't understand the teacher. I was mocked by other students for "talking funny."

I found myself ostracized not just because of my accent, but also because of my parents being "rich" (ie., not on welfare), and for being Catholic in an area dominated so heavily by a handful of Protestant denominations that it was a commonly held belief there that Catholics are no more Christian than Buddhists or Hindus are. Like many immigrants who "refuse to integrate," my mother moved me to a Catholic school and indoctrinated me in the belief that we were culturally and intellectually superior to the natives.

Twenty years later, after being immersed in Appalachian culture, marrying one of the natives, spending my twenties either unemployed or underemployed, and finally watching my marriage end, I fled to Columbus for a better life. I'd made new friends who offered me a place to stay and referred me to a job opening. I went from making $6.35/hr at a Wal-Mart in southern Ohio after having worked there for a year and a half to making $9.50/hr on my very first day as a maintenance mechanic in a distribution warehouse in Columbus, and got a one-dollar-an-hour raise after just a month.

Let me repeat that: For my own selfish financial advancement, I immigrated to Columbus without permission and deprived a Columbus native of a job that paid 65% more than I could earn back home. Like so many immigrants, I sent much of the money I earned back home to support my children, while I slept on the floor of an overcrowded apartment I shared with three other people. A few years later, I married another immigrant and we had a couple "anchor babies" born in a Columbus hospital.

Over a period of 18 years, 164,186 of us did this. Some of us came from poorer parts of Ohio, some of us from poorer states outside Ohio, and some of us from Mexico, India, Somalia, Nepal, and many other countries, all for the same general reason: to flee a bad situation and take part in the prosperity of Columbus. This city has not suffered for it. Rather, we have fueled its economy, labored in its businesses or started new businesses of our own, and helped the city to prosper and grow.

When people immigrate to the United States from other countries, they don't come to settle in some stateless, city-less area belonging solely to the federal government. They come to cities in states, cities they aren't from, just like I did. I didn't have to ask the federal government for permission, even though I crossed state lines to come here, and nobody else should have to, either. Even if my mother had had a criminal record, we wouldn't have been denied entry to Ohio. Nobody even checked. She didn't have to show proof of income or have an Ohio employer jump through any hoops to get us here. Had she been convicted of a crime in Ohio, she would not have been deported back to Pennsylvania. It should be no different for anyone moving to Ohio from Sonora or Ontario.

My point here, in case it's not yet crystal clear, is that if a new neighbor moves in next door to me, the effect on me, on the rest of the neighborhood, on the rest of the city, and on the rest of the state, is no different at all whether that person comes from California or Honduras. The only difference is a legal fiction, a difference that can vanish with the stroke of a pen. People favoring strong immigration enforcement will talk about the sanctity of "the rule of law." This argument reminds me of a scene in the movie "Labyrinth." The protagonist is stopped on her journey by a guard who says, "None may pass without my permission!" She simply asks the guard's permission, and he, somewhat confused, grants it. If the gravest offense of illegal immigration is simply that it's a violation of the law, all we have to do is repeal that law. Voila! It's no longer illegal! Think of how much money we could save by eliminating the Border Patrol, most of ICE, and that ridiculous wall project!

Culturally, economically, environmentally--in every way you might name, immigrants from California or Honduras impact us the same. It's one more person, taking up one more person's worth of space, eating one more person's worth of food, generating one more person's worth of garbage. Domestic immigrants, be they from Pennsylvania or Portsmouth, are every bit as much a burden as are immigrants from other nations, yet we don't restrict, regulate, or even monitor their immigration at all. Coastal flooding or some other disaster could cause a couple million displaced American citizens to suddenly seek asylum in Columbus, and we could not and would not do anything to stop them. In fact, the U.S. Constitution prohibits it. Rather, we might ask the federal government for help providing accommodations for the newcomers. More likely, we would just have a boom of new construction and businesses coming to the area to take advantage of the increased labor pool. Remember, in 1800, the population of New York City was just 60,000. In 2018, it was estimated to be close to 4.8 million. Did such growth bankrupt and destroy that city? Quite the opposite!

We let American outsiders move into our cities without raising an eyebrow. There is no moral or practical reason for it to be any different with newcomers from different countries.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows worldwide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

                                     - Emma Lazarus, 1883

More Alike Than We Realize

In a comment thread on Facebook, I saw a commenter named Craig say, "Anti second amendment people simply aren’t very bright, just look at the nonsense they believe." That prompted me to reply with the following:

Craig, that's simply not true. I know several very intelligent, highly educated people who favor some degree of gun control. What they all have in common, besides being compassionate people who frown on any sort of violence, is that they've never had to rely on weapons to defend themselves or anyone else. In every instance they've personally experienced, when weapons were used against a human being by someone other than the police, they were generally being used to CAUSE trouble, not resolve it.

There's an old saying that a conservative is just a liberal who's been robbed. I think that's what's going on here. These people have been safe. Or if they have encountered danger, they felt helpless to do anything to counter it. They're not trained gunfighters, and they believe an untrained person trying to use a gun for self-defense is about as safe and effective as an untrained person performing brain surgery. (And when it comes to a firefight against skilled tactical shooters, they're absolutely right, like it or not.) What they don't understand--from lack of exposure--is that a civilian CAN become a competent gunfighter without joining the police or military, just as surely as one can become proficient in martial arts without becoming a Shaolin monk.

But let's be honest--most of us cling to that "shall not be infringed" like it cancels out the "well-regulated" part. And yes, I know what that term means and how the Founders used it. They made it crystal clear in the Militia Acts of 1792. So how many overweight armchair warriors would be comfortable with their right to bear arms being contingent on turning out for drill and doing PT on the courthouse parking lot once a month? How many of us would be comfortable with "big government" REQUIRING us to buy an M-4, grenades, Kevlar, night vision, and all the other kit commonly used by infantry troops today? How many would like to be fined for failing inspection? Or jailed for missing drill or failing to report to muster when summoned? Imagine having no police patrol, and instead, whenever your sheriff needs help serving a warrant, he'd draft random gun owners into helping him, and they'd get in trouble for ducking out of it the same as if they failed to report for jury duty. (I can already hear the Libertarians whining, "But that's SLAVERY!") This is what it means to have a well-regulated militia. I wish we still had one (instead of the standing army we ended up with), but I'm guessing the vast majority of pro-2A people don't agree with me on that.

The problem isn't that the anti-gun people are unintelligent. It's that, like everyone else, they suffer from normalcy bias. They want to think of themselves as reasonable and rational. They don't want people to see them as wild-eyed lunatics ranting about paranoid delusions, so they automatically dismiss possibilities so far outside their day-to-day experience that it sounds like science fiction. Some people react that way to warnings of environmental harm, while others react that way to warnings of civil unrest, robbery, or military invasion. They dismiss it as fantasy until it happens to them or someone close to them, and by then, it's too late to prepare.

How do you feel when you're aware of grave danger and others dismiss your concerns as ridiculous "conspiracy theories" or pointless worrying? You might get quite emotional pleading with them to see reason, right? That's how the gun-control folks see us when we react to their proposals to limit gun rights: "gun nuts," mentally unhinged, paranoid freaks who probably shouldn't be trusted with a gun. And of course, that just amplifies our fear that we're about to be disarmed, so we get even more emotional and even belligerent. They do the same thing when we respond to their fear of getting shot by suggesting that the answer is to have even more bullets flying around from more directions. Calling each other stupid isn't going to get us anywhere. It just shuts down conversation.

Failure to Persuade

All these racists suddenly emerging out of nowhere reminds me of the George R.R. Martin quote:

“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

At some point between the 1970s and now, the left moved from being a bunch of pacifist flower children spreading a message of colorblind love, to being a bunch of authoritarian post-modernists closely policing what people say and who's allowed to say it, and ostensibly eschewing labels while at the same time continually issuing brand new ones.

I can see how that happened, if not precisely when. The roots, I believe, lie in pacifism, and specifically in non-violent resistance. If your strategy for gaining power rests entirely on casting your enemy as a bully so the rest of the world will feel sorry for you, it leads to embracing hypoagency as being a moral good. This ethic gives rise to victim culture, or as I used to call it, "dueling dysfunctionals." Whomever can prove that s/he had the most tortured, most persecuted existence wins, and the winner gets to define reality, unchallenged, for everyone else. If Jenny wins the prize for being the most victimized, and she says that the biggest problem facing the world today is alien space lizards bent on world domination and disguising themselves as spiders, then we are all commanded by the gods of academe to believe, repeat, and act on that very idea...which is bound to really, really suck for the spiders. If anyone dissents, they're accused of hating Jenny and being in league with the spiders.

But what did that shift from lovers to despots accomplish? Did it make the world more loving and inclusive? Apparently, it just cowed the racists into silence without actually winning their hearts or changing their minds. Do you know why that is? It's because screaming accusations at somebody doesn't tend to be an effective method of persuasion.

To persuade someone, you first have to get them to stop actively resisting having their mind changed. You need to make them feel comfortable enough to let their guard down so, rather than clinging to their position like a drowning person clinging to a bit of flotsam, they're comfortable stepping back with you to look at their position and yours with a more objective eye. To accomplish this, you first have to stop attacking them and make it clear that you're not waiting for just the right moment to pounce and start attacking them again. Then, you have to acknowledge their lived reality. They might be dead wrong about the state of affairs, but even if they perceive things differently than they actually are, that doesn't completely negate the value of their perception. They simply have an incomplete or skewed picture. It's not wrong so much as only right within a very narrow frame of viewing. Stand with them in that place, looking out at the world from their little arrow loop of a window, and show them how to push the boundaries to allow for a wider, more complete view.

This, I feel, is why the left has failed to convert more people away from racism--it never dared to listen to the racists' concerns. It never bothered to acknowledge the racists' anxieties. It just pointed fingers and screamed, "Racist! Nazi! Sub-human filth!" browbeating them into silence. So when the racists, for example, look at the national crime statistics and see that blacks commit about half the murders in America despite being only about 13% of the population, and they fallaciously infer that black people are therefore more inherently violent, the left doesn't acknowledge the statistic and explain why things are that way. They just scream, "You can't say that! That's racist!" The racist shuts up if enough people ostracize him intensely enough, but he remembers that he read the facts and that the leftist failed to refute them or offer any explanation that would negate the racist's (incorrect) conclusion. In his mind, his perception is the truth, backed up by hard, scientific numbers, and the leftist simply says that you're not allowed to speak the truth because it might hurt someone's feelings, and victims' feelings trump facts. Instead of slowly coming around to at least partially accepting the leftist's point of view, he instead decides that leftists are unreasonable and duplicitous, and he withdraws from contact with them, instead seeking the company of others who will echo and validate his racist views.

A friend of mine recently said that Americans need to start taking responsibility for their opinions. That's clearly true among the racists who have been committing random acts of violence against minorities (or encouraging others to do so), but I think it's also true of leftists who can't wrap their minds around the idea of someone daring to do something so heretical as having a different opinion than theirs.

That Old, Familiar Feeling

Reading all these opinion pieces about the violence in Charlottesville has me feeling something I recognize. It's a feeling I felt before, just about a month shy of 16 years ago. At that time, so far as we know, some Islamist extremists hijacked some planes and deliberately crashed them into the World Trade Center. They were bad people, and they should not have done that. No argument.

But while I saw that, I also saw that this didn't happen in a vacuum. It wasn't a matter of some Muslims sitting around in the Middle East saying, "So, Mohammad, who should we attack next? I've got it--how about these people way on the other side of the world, not doing a thing to us?" Nor is it like someone who tries to establish street cred by going into a biker bar and punching out the biggest guy in the bar. The United States actually did some stuff to provoke that reaction.

But there was a time when saying that out loud was considered treason by many. I remember that time. I remember the chill. Just because there was a clear provocation doesn't mean that the attack was justified, and it sure as hell doesn't mean that any of the victims deserved their fate. I'm not saying any of that. But people who are in an emotional state lose the ability to make such fine distinctions. 

When I went to New York after the attack, it was all tears. Well, mostly tears. Now and again, someone would be out there with their anger, but often as not, it was anger at bigots who were acting out against anyone they thought was Muslim. A good 90% of the people I saw and met in Long Island were just interested in consoling each other. They didn't want revenge. They wanted the hurt to stop. They wanted the revenge-seeking to have not happened in the first place.The wanted the violence to end there. As we drove around, I saw groups of people gathered out on the sidewalks and front yards here and there, holding candlelight vigils and prayer circles and hugging each other and crying.

And then I came back to Ohio, and I heard a lot of angry people, red in the face, fuming and expressing hate. They said we needed to nuke Mecca. They said we needed to turn the entire Middle East "into glass." They said lots and lots of things that made them feel like badasses for saying it, things that deliberately and hatefully disregarded the humanity of the people they were saying them about. Islamists attacked us, but the blowback here was against Muslims, not just Islamists. Against Middle Easterners--heck, against foreigners, period. It was raw hate, and the people feeling it felt justified. And it was the majority view. It was made clear--by the people saying these things, by the ones nodding in silent assent, by the media, by the President, and even by people you had expected to know better--that anything more tolerant or even-handed than that would not be countenanced. If these angry-speaking rabble-rousers heard anyone speak in more moderate, less hateful tones, they turned on the speaker as though they'd just uncovered an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell. That was a very scary thing to witness, and to try to avoid being on the receiving end of, and to realize that these people are out of their minds and beyond being reasoned with, and that you have to just take shelter and let it blow by, like a storm. There's no point arguing with a hurricane. You will not make it see reason or calm down.

The thing I want you to hear now is the same thing I was screaming into the storm back then: THEIR BEING WRONG DOESN'T MAKE YOU RIGHT!!!

Just because your enemy went and threw away whatever moral defensibility they may have ever had doesn't mean that you can now go raping dead puppies and call it virtue. Wrong is still wrong even if both sides do it. The ref can call fouls on both sides.

The nazis in Charlottesville are foul. That's undebatable. Trying to explain the reason for their existence is every bit like trying to explain the existence of radical Islamists. That the hateful rhetoric they spew and the violent acts they commit are wrong is also undebatable. 

And that's it. There ends the list of subjects under this topic on which we are not allowed to disagree. The clash in Charlottesville wasn't a debate where, if you can make your opponent lose his cool and start yelling, you win. Nobody wins this. Somebody is dead. Nobody wins dead. I'm going to say it again, because this new generation of liberals seems to have a hard time with the concept of objective reasoning. THEIR BEING WRONG DOESN'T MAKE YOU RIGHT. The fact that the nazis have no credibility does not mean you can say whatever you want and have it go undisputed. Their killing somebody does not mean you win the prize of getting everybody else to shut up and let you be in charge now. Calling a foul on you doesn't mean the ref favors the other team, so quit saying that anyone who disagrees with you is endorsing the nazis. The messed up worldviews of the far left and the far right aren't the only two options. As much as we can liken the white supremacists to the Nazis of WWII, we can liken you guys to the Stalinists of the same era, and the rest of us are Poland, stuck in the middle and screwed if either of you win.

The nazis in Charlottesville were wrong, and you were wrong about Ferguson. A person who robs a store deserves to be arrested for it, no matter what color his skin is. A person who walks up the middle of the street and refuses to move to the sidewalk when ordered by the police deserves to be stopped by the police, no matter what color he is. A person who reaches into a police car and tries to grab a cop's gun will get shot and deserves to be, no matter what color he is. A person who has already been shot by police and makes a second charge at the cop who shot him will be put down, and he has it coming, no matter what color he is. Having brown skin or any other "pity me" marker is no excuse. You keep telling each other over and over until you believe it that blacks are given less leniency and held to a stricter standard by law enforcement. But whether that's true or not, what you have been demanding since at least as far back as the Jenna Six in 2006, is that black people be given more leniency than anyone else, that police give them a wider berth, that they be held less accountable for crimes they do actually commit. You have either denied the existence of black crime or made excuses for it and attacked the enforcers, not just when they act inappropriately, but even when they act appropriately. You have been wrong on this the whole time, and some harebrained racists in Charlottesville killing somebody doesn't mean your wrongness now gets crowned as the unassailable truth.

The nazis in Charlottesville were wrong, and you were wrong about the non-existence of reverse racism. I've heard liberals claim that it's not true that less qualified blacks and latinos are not shown preferences over better qualified whites and Asians under Affirmative Action. Vijay Chokal-Ingam found otherwise.  

"I studied the statistics and data made public by the Association of American Medical Colleges and came to a surprising conclusion. The data suggested that an Indian-American with my grades (3.1 GPA) and test scores (31 MCAT) was unlikely to gain admission to medical school, but an African-American with the same grades and test scores had a high probability of admission. While I wasn’t able to pin down the exact number, I reasonably calculated that African-American or Hispanic applicants had as much as a 30 to 40 percent better chance of acceptance than I."

Liberals are fond of saying that racial minorities can't be racist, because for someone to be racist, they must both be bigoted and exercise institutional power. The only way one could think that ends the conversation, though, is to presume that no person-of-color has every wielded institutional authority in this country. Such a claim would come as a shock to President Obama, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Bureau of Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr., and any number of non-white generals, admirals, governors, mayors, commissioners,council members, trustees, board members, superintendents, principals, chiefs, directors, sheriffs,judges, and so on.

A Chinese-American dean at Yale University, Dr. June Chu, recently lost her job for making openly mocking remarks about people she referred to as "white trash." Who do you imagine exercised greater institutional power--Dr. Chu, or the white people she looked down on? We've nearly come full circle, where it's now whites who must bow their heads and walk on eggshells so as not to offend haughty, high-class, powerful minorities, instead of the other way around. I'm not saying that white supremacy should be the norm, but I am saying that when it no longer is, you need to quit claiming that it still is. You want to know how to radicalize an already marginalized people? Oppress them and then claim publicly that they're the ones oppressing you, while you obviously enjoy privileges that they do not. That pushes people's buttons. That's how you get the kind of blowback we saw on 9/11 and on Election Day last year.

 

The nazis in Charlottesville were wrong, and you were wrong about white privilege. Every discussion of white privilege in America makes the mistake of conflating race and class. Checklists of white privilege like those in Peggy McIntosh's famous essay, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, are composed almost entirely of privileges enjoyed only by affluent white people (and some affluent people of other races), but not by poor whites. This is a simple matter of logic: if some red vehicles are planes while other red vehicles are cars, it is incorrect to say that all red vehicles fly. If some people with white skin enjoy the privileges of affluence and other people with white skin do not have access to these privileges, it is incorrect to say that all people with white skin have these privileges.

If you listen to people defend the notion of trans-class, white privilege, the "evidence" they offer nearly always follows the formula of a personal anecdote followed by baseless conjecture. 

"When my black friend walked into the hardware store carrying a backpack, they asked him to check it at the register, like he was some kind of thief. You know if he were white they wouldn't have done that." [We know no such thing, and neither do you.]

"My white friend got stopped by the police for having a brake light out, and they let her go with just a verbal warning. You know if she were black, they probably would have shot her on the spot just for reaching for her license." [No, nobody knows any such thing. You think it, and statistics say you're wrong.]

These are wild speculations, nothing more than ghost stories told around a campfire, eaten up and retold by eager listeners who accept them as factual proof that people of color are the good guys and the white people of the world are actively, if unconsciously, conspiring against them in an evil plot to rule the world. It's bullshit, and the fact that some horrible people killed someone in Charlottesville doesn't mean your bullshit gets to go unchallenged.

The nazis in Charlottesville were wrong, and you were wrong about the gender pay gap. The claim that women make 22-cents on the dollar or thereabouts less than men has been so thoroughly and repeatedly debunked it's not even funny anymore. Feminists appear to be taking a page from the Nazis' own playbook, with the advice that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it. Economists have solidly demonstrated that the disparity between men's and women's average earnings is due to women opting to work less, in lower-paying fields, in lower-paying positions. The National Organization for Women's response to this has been to fall back on female hypoagency, claiming that women can't be expected to be held accountable for their own choices. Nevertheless, women account for two-thirds of all consumer spending worldwide and 80% of consumer spending in the US. If women are earning so much less than men, how are they spending so much more? Whose money do you figure they must be spending? 21st century, Western feminism has become a princess riding in a golden carriage and complaining that the horse is oppressing her. 

The nazis in Charlottesville were wrong, and you were wrong about rape culture. Culture is the set of shared values, attitudes, customs, social conventions, goals, practices, and beliefs of a group. To say that a culture is based on something is to say that all those values, attitudes, etc. have that thing as their foundation. That foundational thing is celebrated, even revered as sacred, and it filters into all aspects of life within that culture. For example, many anthropologists have identified the Scotch-Irish culture of the Appalachian settlers as being an "honor culture," arising from pastoral agriculture, where one's wealth is portable and must be defended against thieves and predators. That idea of not letting a slight go unpunished originated from the need to defend livestock, but it ended up filtering into other aspects of human relations such that we ended up with bloody feuds like the one between the Hatfields and the McCoys. In an honor culture, nobody lets an abuse slide. Respect is both expected and demanded, regardless of whether you own any livestock.

Likewise, we can say that the United States has a gun culture. There are large parts of the country where only a minority of the people actually own guns, and people might panic at the mere sight of one. But even in those places, the police carry guns. People watch movies and play video games where the heroes use guns to rescue victims and defeat villains. Children shoot water and foam darts at one another with toy guns. Even people whose objections to guns are so strong that they deliberately avoid these things still use phrases in their everyday speech like, "shot in the dark," "lock, stock, and barrel," "loaded for bear," and "flash in the pan," possibly having no idea that this is all early firearms terminology. This is what a gun culture looks like.

It stands to reason, therefore, that a rape culture would be a culture in which rape is celebrated and institutionalized. Rape would be a common punishment, perhaps meted out by the courts or schools and employers. The heroes of our dramas would be rapists. We would have songs, traditions, and holidays all centering around the glorification of rape. There would be civic organizations promoting rape and political activist groups lobbying the government to encourage more people to become rapists, or perhaps using public monies to subsidize rape. Characters in children's cartoons would rape each other. Interior design motifs would feature images of rape. That's what a rape culture would look like. 

There's always an exception, isn't there?

We don't have that. We don't have anything even close to that. Believe it or not, we actually prohibit rape and severely punish people who do it! If an entertainer makes light of rape, we treat it as a scandal. The mere accusation of rape can drag a person's reputation from celebrity to pariah. That is not a rape culture.

 
Rape cultures do exist. There is certainly a culture of rape in American prisons, where prisoners--both men and women--use various forms of sexual assault as a means of dominance and social control. But contrast prison culture against mainstream American culture, and it becomes clear that we do not have a culture where we base our shared values, customs, traditions, and beliefs on the practice of rape. The whole notion of rape culture is just another example of radical feminists overstating problems to create the illusion of a patriarchal conspiracy. (Link goes to a 4:44 video.) This allows them to claim the status of victims, which in turn enables them to cast all who disagree with them as co-conspirators who support rape.

The nazis in Charlottesville were wrong, and you were wrong about illegal immigration having no effect on wages. Just as the cost of products and services are controlled by the law of supply and demand, so too are wages. If there's a strong demand for computer programmers who know a particular computing language, and there are only a couple hundred programmers nationwide who know that language, those programmers are going to be in high demand. Employers will compete to get them by offering high wages. Conversely, if somebody needs their lawn mowed or their leaves raked, and there are a few thousand unemployed, capable people desperate to earn some money, the owner of that lawn can pay as little as the law will allow--or less, if they think they can get away with it, say, by employing people who won't go to the police because their very presence in this country is illegal.

Opponents of immigration restrictions, fearing that this fact undermines their position, try to deny it by saying that the only jobs filled by illegal immigrants are the jobs that poor Americans refuse to do anyway. To prove their point, they cite the brutal, farm labor jobs done by migrants for low pay. But these aren't the only jobs done by undocumented workers. They also fill jobs in construction, lawn care & landscaping, child care, other domestic services, maintenance, food processing, and food preparation. These are jobs that low-income Americans do fill, when they can. Without competition from foreigners who will work cheaper, wages would rise.

This is just simple math, and because it is so easy to demonstrate, opponents of immigration restriction tend to derail the debate with accusations of racism, claiming that this very solid argument is just a facade that racists use to conceal their true motivations for wanting to close the borders. But acknowledging the effect of surplus labor on wages doesn't make one a racist, and you don't have to be a racist to acknowledge the effect of surplus labor on wages. There's no correlation between those two things.

Personally, I favor going in the opposite direction. I want to let anybody into the country who wants to come here (barring what felons and terrorists we can stop). I want to make the path to citizenship as easy as possible. America became great in part because we are a melting pot. Unlike the Trump administration, I believe firmly in the words written by Emma Lazarus in "The New Colossus." (You know at least part of it--the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty about "bring me your huddled masses.")

So how do I square that with acknowledging the wage-destroying effect of surplus labor? Not by denying basic facts or by slinging around accusations of racism. Instead, I look for other variables in this equation. If we allow the supply of labor to increase, how do we increase the demand for it accordingly? There are several things we could do. We could put restrictions on remittances of US currency sent abroad, so immigrants will bring their families with them and support them here, spending their earnings on goods and services in the US, instead of sending their money over the border. We could remove a lot of bureaucratic barriers to entry for new businesses, too. It should not be a Herculean task for a poor person--immigrant or not--to start his own business having a hotdog cart on the sidewalk or selling bottles of cold water on a street corner. Remove those barriers and make micro-loans for small businesses more readily available, and you'll not only cause wages to rise, you'll reduce poverty. 

At the same time, we could impose heavy penalties on companies that offshore their manufacturing. "Factory jobs are never coming back--they can be done by robots now," I hear people say. Well, they can have the robots make the stuff here, then. I'd rather those robots be serviced by one, well-paid, American union worker than have that person put out of work by a hundred sweatshop workers in Bangladesh. Likewise, impose protectionist measures to give American companies building things in America a competitive advantage over cheap imports produced by unethical, unsustainable practices. If we do these things, we can increase the number of jobs, increase wages, increase our talent pool here in America, and do it all without cruel deportation policies that terrorize hardworking families.

The point here is that you don't get to change the reality of mathematics just because you're afraid of losing an argument. Don't bully. Be creative. You don't get to tell everyone to shut up and swallow your lies just because people you don't like did something evil.

The nazis in Charlottesville were wrong, and you were wrong about gun control keeping people safer. Before the National Firearms Act of 1934, people in this country owned machine guns. You could even order them through the mail. The Ithaca Auto & Burglar Gun--basically a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun--was an especially popular weapon among truck drivers, security guards, and those wanting a weapon for home defense. Such weapons were widely available and practically unregulated...yet nobody was shooting up schools. People weren't going postal at work (unless they were gangsters). Even after the NFA was passed, you could still order non-prohibited guns through the mail. I remember in the 1970s, looking through the Sears Christmas catalog, and seeing rifles for sale. Even dynamite was commonly sold in rural feed and hardware stores, as farmers commonly used it to blow tree stumps out of the ground, and no one batted an eye. It was no more alarming or out-of-place than seeing rat poison for sale in your local grocery store today. Even with all these guns and bomb making materials being so easy for anyone to get their hands on back then, we just didn't see mass murder on the scale we have since the 1980s. 

There was one, big school fire started by a bomber in 1927. Bath, Michigan. The guy killed his wife, blew up his own farm, blew up a school, then killed himself by blowing up his own truck. To date, that's the deadliest school attack in US history. 44 dead, mostly kids, and 58 other people injured. But that didn't set off a rash of school bombings, and they didn't stop selling dynamite. Then no more huge massacres until 1966, when a man in Texas killed his mother and his wife, went up a clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin, and killed 14 more people and wounded another 31 before police finally killed him. They didn't stop selling hunting rifles after that. Like I said, I saw them for sale through the Sears catalog 12 years later, and it didn't lead to an epidemic of random sniper massacres. There were a couple other mass killings in '66, in Chicago and Mesa, Arizona, but there was no great moral panic leading to the banning of firearms. There were a few other notable incidents in the '70s, but the biggest body counts came from police and soldiers shooting protesters on college campuses.

But then in the 1980s, a guy shot a bunch of people in his office in California. Then there were a few other multiple homicides at workplaces. Somebody shot up a McDonald's. Somebody else shot up a daycare. In 1986, postal workers started going nuts and shooting up their workplaces. There were some school shootings with large numbers of people hurt, but not many killed--notably in Los Angeles (1984), Detroit (1985), Cokeville, Wyoming (1985), Winnetka, Illinois (1988), Greenwood, South Carolina (1988), and Stockton, California (1989). Not all of those were by students. There still wasn't a clear pattern to tie all these mass murders together, but it happened often enough at postal facilities that we now had a new term: "going postal." It was a phenomenon that really hadn't existed before the 1960s (with the sole exception of a teacher in Pasadena who "went postal" and shot seven co-workers when he got fired in 1940).

In 1990, Congress passed The Gun-Free School Zones Act, and in 1994, they passed the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, more commonly known as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). The same things you're pushing to have banned today--"assault rifles" and "high capacity" magazines--were banned from 1994 to 2004. Your gun control dream actually happened. It was law for ten years, and the Gun-Free Zones are still law today. You know what happened?

1997, Paducah, Kentucky--a boy took some guns to school and shot eight kids.

1998, Springfield, Oregon--a boy murdered his parents, then went to school and shot 25 more people.
1998, Jonesboro, Arkansas--two boys filled a van with guns, food, and camping supplies. They set up a firing position in the woods outside their school, pulled the fire alarm, and then shot 15 people coming out of the school. The boys fled in the van and were caught by police.
1999, Littleton, Colorado--two boys made a whole bunch of bombs, got a hold of some handguns, and sawed off a couple shotguns to make them concealable. They had planned to continue to the airport and wreak havoc with their bombs after finishing their killing spree at school, but they didn't make it that far. They shot 33 people, exchanged fire with the SWAT team, and then killed themselves.
2001. Santee, California--a boy shot 15 people at school.
2004 - Assault Weapon Ban expired. Attempts to renew it failed.
2005, Red Lake, Minnesota--a boy killed his grandparents, then went to school and shot 14 more people before killing himself.
2006, Nickle Mines, Pennsylvania--a man shot up an Amish school--5 dead, 5 wounded--before killing himself.
2007, Virginia Tech--a lone, mentally ill student, who was armed with two handguns he purchased legally after passing a background check, killed 32 people and wounded another 23 before killing himself.
2008, Northern Illinois University--a student with a shotgun shot 26 people before killing himself.
2010, University of Alabama, Huntsville--a female professor went postal and shot six of her colleagues.

2010, University of Texas--only one person was hurt in this one before the shooter killed himself, but I mention it because it's one of the rare cases in which the assailant actually used an "assault rifle"--an AK-47.

2012, Chardon, Ohio--a student opened fire in his high school cafeteria, killing three and wounding three.

2012, Newtown, Connecticut--a man killed his mother, took her guns, went to an elementary school, and shot a whole bunch of people, mostly first graders, before committing suicide. Final casualty count: 28 dead, 2 wounded.
2013, Santa Monica, California--a man killed two of his family members and then went on a shooting spree ending at Santa Monica College. He killed five people and shot 4 more before dying in a gunfight with police.
2014, Marysville, Washington--another high school cafeteria shooting. This one killed four students and wounded another before killing himself.

2015, Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, Oregon--a student killed nine people, wounded nine others, battled police, then shot himself.

And those are just the school shootings with high body counts from random killings or workers killing co-workers. I left out lots of school shootings where there were only a few casualties or where the shootings appeared to be connected to gang violence or another fight between aggrieved individuals. The ones I listed are mostly where somebody went into a gun-free zone--a school--and shot as many people as they could, like they were trying to rack up a high score. We still don't fully understand why they're doing this, or why they're doing it now when they didn't used to do it, but we know that's what they're doing--trying to kill as many as they can--and we know that they go to schools to do it, because that's where there are a lot of unarmed, vulnerable victims concentrated in large numbers in one place with nobody to protect them.

The gun-free zones have been law for 27 years now, and they haven't worked yet. They were counterproductive. You might as well replace the words "gun-free zone" with a sign depicting a fish in a barrel. Your policies failed spectacularly, and many, many innocent people are dead now because of it. The American cities with the highest murder rates are also the ones with the tightest weapons restrictions. They aren't working. If anything, they're making it worse, leaving the victims unarmed while doing nothing to disarm the criminals. Reason dictates that it's time to drop the smug, "we-know-best" attitude, swallow your pride, and admit that your conservative opponents are less wrong on this issue than you are. You're afraid of guns. We get it. But your being afraid isn't keeping anybody alive. It's just making them vulnerable. Give honest people a fighting chance and let them fight back, especially where we gather our precious children together in one place like a shooting gallery for psychos. It makes no sense that liquor stores and supermarkets should be guarded better than our schools are.

The nazis are wrong to spew hate. That doesn't mean you know everything. Quit saying that everyone who calls you on that fact is in league with the nazis. It's getting to be where you're almost as bad as they are, just different.

A Massive Undertaking

Critics of American gun policies, especially critics from outside the US, often wonder why, with the number of gun-related deaths in America, we don't simply ban guns like Australia did.

Setting aside for a moment that such a ban would be unconstitutional, and that it's far from certain that it would reduce violent crime, and that it could actually cause a greater number of people to be killed because they'd be less able to repel an attacker...setting aside all those things, let's just consider the enforcement of such a ban.

America has a long and unsuccessful history of banning things and then having those bans skirted. When the American colonies were still under British rule, and the Crown imposed too many taxes on the colonists, the colonists simply stopped paying. During the Revolution, even though desertion carried a death sentence, soldiers still deserted anyway, to the point that General Washington started having deserters executed by their own best friends. After the Revolution was fought and Congress disbanded the new country's military forces, they kept a few Navy ships in service to catch smugglers, because there were a significant number of merchants willing to sneak goods into the country illegally rather than obeying the law and paying the required taxes.

In the 1920s, in response to a nationwide epidemic of alcoholism, Congress passed the 18th Amendment, which banned alcohol. That ban lasted just shy of 15 years. The battles between police and alcohol traffickers, not to mention the battles between the criminals themselves, cost countless lives. By some reports, alcohol became even more available during Prohibition because there was no regulation of production or distribution, and the profit motive was greater. In 1971, President Nixon declared a War on Drugs. Forty-six years later, we're still at it. The drugs are still there, people's lives are ruined as much by overzealous enforcement as by the drugs themselves, and nobody's benefiting but the private prison industry. Forty-six years later, the drugs aren't gone, and the states, one by one, are starting to decriminalize drugs in defiance of federal law.

My point here is that Americans have a long history of looking at legal prohibitions as being "helpful suggestions" more than absolute moral codes. The very founding of our nation was a defiance of the law.

This is important to keep in mind when envisioning what enforcement of a gun ban in the United States would actually look like. Given that many gun owners see their guns as quasi-religious talismans representing liberty itself, and that even less idealistic gun owners often see their guns as necessary, lifesaving, safety equipment, many say they would fire on anyone who tried to seize their guns. G. Gordon Liddy infamously advised his radio audience that when the ATF showed up to seize their guns, "Just remember, they’re wearing flak jackets and you’re better off shooting for the head.”

As with firearms, many Americans also have a patriotic, sentimental attachment to fireworks, which they set off in celebration of Independence Day on the 4th of July each year. Unlike guns, nobody sees these fireworks as being necessary for self-preservation. Nobody is relying on fireworks to protect their family from criminals. Nobody's counting on fireworks for protection against a violent ex-spouse. They aren't stockpiling fireworks to fend off invading armies or government tyranny. It's just for fun.

Fireworks regulations vary from state to state. In Ohio, adults are allowed to possess sparklers, smoke devices, and "bang snaps"--tiny noisemakers that explode when thrown against a hard surface. But the state bans residents from purchasing firecrackers, Roman candles, bottle rockets, and fountains without signing an affidavit promising to transport them out of the state within 48 hours. It requires any Ohioan possessing aerial burst fireworks to be a licensed pyrotechnician. The Ohio State Fire Marshall's Office says it seizes about 15,000 pounds of illegal fireworks annually. Violations--including falsifying paperwork, illegal possession, and exploding fireworks in-state--are usually 1st degree misdemeanors, carrying a punishment of up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for a first offense. With all of this in mind, listen to this video I recorded in my back yard in Columbus, Ohio, on the Fourth of July this year. Neighbors in every direction were shooting off not just firecrackers and bottle rockets, but professional aerial display fireworks. (You'll get a few, brief glimpses of these in the video, but otherwise it's all dark. Just listen to the sounds.) Each pop you hear is a violation of the law that could get a person locked up for six months. Turn up the sound and have a listen to how much people care about the threat of fines and imprisonment getting in their way of having a good time celebrating their nation's founding.

Despite the ease of tracking down who's making giant explosions over their back yards, police make little attempt to enforce the fireworks ban simply because non-compliance is overwhelming. If they actually attempted to arrest every illegal fireworks possessor, they'd be doing nothing else but that, and they'd still fail to catch all violators.

If Americans will willfully defy the law on this scale to obtain and very conspicuously explode illegal fireworks just for fun, imagine how much greater the defiance would be to possess something they see as protecting their lives and ensuring all their other rights.

So that's one reason we don't ban guns here. There just wouldn't be any point. We'd have to create a massive, new law enforcement agency with incredible powers to do unannounced, door-to-door searches just to make a dent in the number of privately possessed firearms. And a lot of the gun owners would shoot back. It's estimated that there are more than 300 million guns in America. How many law enforcement officers would it take to seize them all by force? We would essentially need to employ an army to invade and occupy our communities. We would be turning our own homeland into Iraq, with troops fighting door to door in our streets. Millions would die, forcing us to reconsider what the point of banning guns was in the first place.

Black America: You Are More Likely to Be Struck by Lightning Than to Be Shot by Police While You're Unarmed

It's bad enough that I stayed up 'til 5:00 a.m. to write this. I'll get around to linking my sources later. Proofreading, too. Most of the data are from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, but there are some from newspapers, too. Anyway...

A friend of mine posted this helpful video on Facebook to explain why anyone who has any objection to anything said or done by Black Lives Matter should just STFD & STFU. It's short--about four minutes. Watch it before reading on. Notice how compelling it is, how "truthy." Sorry I don't know how to embed Facebook videos here. Just follow the link.


Franchesca Ramsey refutes 4 remarks BLM disapproves of

This would be great except...

-3:35 "This assumes that the black community isn't worried..."

Wrong. Black Lives Matter is not "the black community." It is a specific organization with founders, leaders, local chapters, a written agenda, and a website where you can learn these things. What's being criticized is BLM, specifically. Trying to divert that to be a criticism of the black community, as a whole, is intellectually dishonest. It infers that anyone who disagrees with the group is racist, which is a tactic used to silence the group's critics. It's also a setup for a straw man argument. She can make a great case for how "the black community" and Cease Fire (a whole separate organization) are doing what BLM is being criticized for NOT doing...but that doesn't let BLM off the hook.

-3:19 "It's about the lack of consequence when black lives are taken at the hands of the police."

This statement presumes that all police killings of black people are cases of wrongful death. Most of them aren't. The vast majority are legitimate cases of self-defense. Why should a legitimate act of self-defense have "consequences?" If an armed robber shoots at people and the police return fire and kill the robber, the only consequences for the officers should be that they get some sort of recognition, maybe an award of some sort.

And in the cases of wrongful shootings, where consequences are appropriate, why should those consequences be limited to just killings of black people and not all people wrongfully killed by the police? Again, the inference we're supposed to absorb unchallenged is the idea that when the people getting shot by police are black, they're less often deserving of it than people who aren't black.

-3:16: "When a civilian has committed a violent crime..."

Again, she's conflating legitimate uses of force with criminal cases of excessive force. The message we're supposed to get is that every time a black person gets hurt in a conflict with a police officer, the police officer was the one in the wrong. Apparently, black people are supposed to enjoy some sort of special immunity from police use of force when they resist arrest or fight police.

I want you to stop and look at your own thought process for a moment, because BLM has really put a lot into drumming this particular message into people's heads over the past couple years. Coca-Cola should seriously look into hiring these people. When you hear numbers of black people injured or killed by police, your emotional reaction is based on the presumption that every one of those injuries and deaths was unprovoked and undeserved. When you recoil in horror at whatever number it is, you're not thinking, "OMG, why are black people so violent? Why are they being violent towards police officers at such a higher rate than everyone else is?" No, you're presuming each death was a murder, each injury a criminal assault, and that it was all motivated by racist police going out hunting black people for sport. That idea has no basis in fact, so why is it something you take for granted without even thinking about it anymore? That's the power of marketing and peer pressure.

-3:12: "Conversely, there's a lot of evidence that it's very rare to secure an indictment against a police officer for excessive force."

No, that's not a converse relationship. A true contrast would have been to look at how civilians who commit violent crimes are treated relative to police officers who commit violent crimes. But it wouldn't have been much of a contrast, because generally speaking, cops who commit violent crimes get prosecuted for them just like anyone else. You could fill a whole book with instances of cops who've been prosecuted for assault, stalking, domestic violence, all the way up to murder. I just heard of an Atlanta officer who's being tried for murder because of a shooting he was involved in on-duty. And the South Carolina officer who killed Walter Scott--he's been indicted for murder. He goes to trial this October. The officers in Baltimore who were involved in Freddie Gray's death were all charged with crimes and stood trial.

But none of that supports the narrative she's selling, so instead of contrasting criminal acts against criminal acts, she compares legitimate uses of force to criminal acts. She's right--it IS very rare to secure an indictment against a police officer for excessive force, just as it's very rare to secure an indictment against a police officer for bank robbery or blowing up a school or hijacking an airplane, and for the same reason--it's very rare that there's a case that warrants an indictment.

But, but...that would mean law enforcement officers are generally law-abiding people! We can't allow that conclusion! It doesn't support the theme here, which is: All police force against black people is excessive. No police officer ever has any reason to put his or her hands on a black person, and if they do it, it's a crime. And when the police don't get penalized for these "crimes," it's because the system is corrupt, not because the police did nothing wrong. All black people are innocent. And if you don't believe it, it's because you're a racist.

-3:01: "Black-on-black crime isn't a thing."
Oh, really? Despite the fact that blacks are only 13% of the population, they commit slightly over HALF of all murders in America...and most of their victims are black. If it's not a thing, then why was she just saying at the beginning of the video about how concerned about it "the black community" and Cease Fire are?

But most of you who are eating up her words don't even know what the Uniform Crime Report IS, let alone what it says, so she can claim whatever she wants, and you'll believe it so long as it paints all black people as angels and cops as the boogeyman.

-2:34: "But the truth is black people are not more violent or more likely to commit crimes than anyone else."

PANTS ON FIRE!!! In 2012, according to the FBI, 28.12% of all violent offenders were black. At only 13% of the population, that means blacks are committing slightly over TWICE their "share" of violent crimes.

Now, to be clear, this doesn't mean that any particular individual is more likely to be violent. It could well be (and likely is) that a very tiny portion of that population is committing most of those crimes. This woman may be trying to sanctify an entire race of people, but just because I disagree with her doesn't mean I'm trying to demonize an entire race. But the numbers tell us that either violent individuals are more common among blacks; or that they're no more common among blacks than anyone else, but the ones who are violent are drastically more violent than the violent people of other races. We really can't say which from the data available, but it's one or the other.

-2:30: "The reality is, because of the history of institutional racism..."

Here she gives some very good reasons for the higher rate of violence among blacks...the violence she just claimed doesn't exist. "I didn't hit him, officer! And besides, he provoked me."

-2:22: "(Black communities)...are more likely to be targeted by police."

If by "targeted" you mean more patrol units are assigned to the precincts where the most crimes are being reported, yes. Why shouldn't they be? When you report that your house is on fire, you don't expect the fire engines to go instead to an address twelve blocks away where there's no fire, just so you can avoid feeling stigmatized. The cops go where the crime is--and most residents get upset if they don't.

-2:05: "Becoming a police officer is an occupation. It's a choice."

So is religion. By her logic, it's less wrong to oppress Jews than to oppress blacks, because Jews have the option of converting if they want to. So quit yer crybaby whining about the Holocaust, I guess, 'cause people of color have claimed king-of-the-hill status as Supreme Victims. Nobody else is allowed to complain when people RANDOMLY KILL THEM simply for belonging to a group.

Moreover, if police officers were to try to please BLM, it would basically mean not fighting back when someone attacks them anytime the attacker is black. Police, apparently, should just let black criminals shoot them. That sure as heck sounds like they think blue lives don't matter.

-1.43: "...this movement is not saying black lives matter more than anyone else's."

It is most certainly saying, however, that black people's concerns matter more than anyone else's. In the organization's early days, when people of other races, marching in solidarity, would try to include themselves in the cause by carrying signs saying "Black & Brown Lives Matter" or "All Lives Matter" (yes, that was initially a slogan of the organization's sympathizers, not its opponents), BLM leadership shut them down and told them to get their own slogan instead of trying to steal the spotlight from black people. Sympathizers of other races were told that making it a multi-racial, multi-cultural movement would dilute the message.

The message that cops shouldn't hurt people when they're not supposed to...right? How is that message "diluted" by getting a huge cross-section of America on board? See, this isn't about ending wrongdoing by the police. It's about black identity, and making cops afraid to lay a hand on black criminals.

-1:35: "It's totally okay for a movement to focus on issues specific to one marginalized group."

So excessive use of force by the police is happening only to one, specific, marginalized group, eh?

-1:27: "A breast cancer walk isn't unfair to other forms of cancer."

Well, it is, actually. Breast cancer is big business, what with Pinktober and all, and other cancers that are just as lethal get underfunded trying to compete, but that's off-topic. Instead, let's bring this back to the point I was just making about black concerns mattering more than others. Suppose instead of being a breast cancer walk, it was a "Redheads with Breast Cancer" walk or a breast cancer walk only for women whose first names start with the letters A through L, and there's not another one scheduled for M through Z. Does that strike you as being very just? Or compassionate? Or inclusive? Do justice and compassion and inclusion matter?

See, just as breast cancer affects more than just women with names starting with A through L, police violence--and more precisely, unjustified police violence--affects people of all races, not just black people. But yet, the demand is that people of all races get behind muzzling the police...but only for the benefit of blacks.

-1:15: "Because of the brutalizing and killing of black people at the hands of police..."

Again, pushing the idea that we aren't talking about self-defense against black criminals who fight the police, or about justified use of force to effect an arrest of someone who's resisting, but just illegal attacks of any random, innocent black person. This is a total misrepresentation of the situation. When a lie this big is repeated this often, it behooves us to ask whom has what to gain by having people believe it.

-0:56: "...but when you look proportionately within the populations, black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers."

YES, and that figure correlates very closely with blacks' higher likelihood of committing violent crimes! Blacks are only 13% of the population but account for about 25% of all people shot by the police AND for 28% of violent criminals AND over HALF of all murderers! You can only hide for so long from the fact that most of the people getting shot by police are the same people SHOOTING AT police and others.

This next part was brilliant. I betcha whoever wrote this part has it framed somewhere. This is a resumé builder:
-0:46: (Graphic still says "Black men make up just 6% of the nation's population.") "...but of all the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015..."

My, that's mighty specific. Unarmed. Shot by police. Died of their wounds. 2015 and only 2015. That's got to be a fairly tiny sample Where's she going with this?

Keeping in mind, of course, that when she says, "unarmed," that's a dog whistle that's supposed to make you think, "not dangerous, not capable of killing someone with their bare hands, not trying to grab the officer's gun" as well as "a completely unjustified shooting, a murder." When she says, "shot by police," you're supposed to think, "wrongfully shot by police."

-0:42: (Ta-daa! The graphic now says, "Black men make up just 6% of the nation's population. But 40% of police killings in 2015." The 40% is printed extra large, and there was even a sound effect that went along with presenting it.) "...FORTY percent of them were black men."

A good magician can tell you what he's doing even as he's doing it, and you'll still miss it, so let me tell you what you just missed there in case you didn't catch it.

That black men make up 6% of the population is not an Earth-shattering statement all by itself, and by itself, it's not really even relevant to the discussion. But it still gets its own graphic as she reads it word for word. This is to hold your attention on the graphic. While you're holding your attention on the fact that black men are 6% of the population, she rattles off something about unarmed people, something your subconscious interprets as meaning "wrongful shootings by the police."

Then, riiiip! Look what the graphic now says. It doesn't say that black men, that 6% of the population, made up 40% of some relatively tiny number of people. It says that black men, 6% of the population, make up 40% of police killings. All of them. There's nothing up there about "unarmed," and you've probably forgotten about that part by now anyway, right? You're just thinking, "Wow, 40% of all people unjustly killed by police were black!"

According to the Washington Post, in 2015, police fatally shot 965 human beings. 564 of those people were armed with a gun. 281 were armed with some other weapon. (That's a total of 845 armed out of 965 total.) Ninety were unarmed. That doesn't mean non-aggressive, not presenting a threat, necessarily. They could have been sitting on an officer's chest, beating her head into the concrete for all we know. Or it could have been a negligent error on the officer's part, like some innocent bystander catching a stray bullet during a gunfight, or an officer thinking someone was reaching for a weapon. And in a very few cases, that might actually rise to the level of criminal negligence, where a cop will do time because he shot someone who was no threat at all for reasons even the officer himself is unclear about.

40% of 90 is 36. Now that's nothing to sneeze at. That's three a month. We don't know exactly what portion of those were innocent, non-aggressive people, or even aggressive people who maybe could've been handled without deadly force. It wasn't all of them, despite BLM wanting us to think that, but it was probably more than one or two, and those people's lives matter. It is a tragedy that they were killed, and the causes need to be addressed.

But let's also get a little perspective. In a country of 318,900,000 people, about 42 million of whom are black, with close to 800,000 cops working in 17,895 law enforcement agencies, 36 unarmed black men got shot in a whole year, and only a portion of them shouldn't have been.

This is the "genocide." This is what's making people so angry they kill cops two and three and five at a time--any cops, not even ones being aggressive toward black people. This is what a handful of radical feminists are using to manipulate everyone into agreeing with anything they say or risk being discounted as racist. That maybe 30-some people got accidentally killed with a weapon that kills pretty quickly and effortlessly, even by mistake, is what's making the black community afraid to death to encounter a police officer.

36 out of 42 million. That's a one-in-1,166,667 chance that you'll be shot to death by police while unarmed. You are LITERALLY MORE LIKELY TO BE STRUCK BY LIGHTNING than to be shot by a cop while you're unarmed. I looked it up.