The Northstar Holy War continues

Which of these things is not like the others?

  1. The North Star, the abolitionist newspaper established by Frederick Douglass?

  2. The North Star STEM Alliance, an undergraduate organization that gives minorities research opportunities?

  3. The North Star, Polaris, an important navigational guide in the Northern Hemisphere?

  4. The Morris Northstar, a right wing newspaper run by wackaloons at the University of Minnesota Morris who hate equal opportunity laws?

It’s (d). It’s an embarrassment.

I just got back from the campus police, where I was read my Miranda rights and recorded giving a statement, because the Geiger cranks have apparently made a formal complaint, accusing me of stealing their rags and adding a new charge, that I’d vandalized the latest edition, scribbling an “str” on the cover to change “right-to-life” to “right-to-strife”. So I also had to leave a handwriting sample.

It’s gone well past ridiculous. Singling me out as a scapegoat (I am not alone in my contempt for their awful paper), making baseless criminal accusations, wasting the time of the university police and lawyers…this is now in the territory of harassment.

Gun-fondler porn

Watch this video for a rather nauseating perspective on American gun culture. Whatever you do, though, don’t think about the fact that the dorks so earnestly firing their weapons in this video are showing you their “O” face, as I did — it just makes it even more icky.

So what sells this ammo is its viciousness? Sweet.

Of course, if you read the source I got it from, a military guy criticizing the dumb people who will buy this crap, you’ll also realize that its claims about the properties of their bullet are physically contradictory and obviously false. But that doesn’t matter if your market is gun-fondling idiots!

Philosophism

I have seen scientism, and it’s usually not us. The most blatant example recently was Pinker’s appalling essay in which he suggested that Hume could have used some instruction in molecular biology; I’ve seen people like Hawking and Krauss claim that philosophy is dead, killed by science. But usually the prominent atheists manage to step back from the brink and acknowledge that there is virtue to the humanities that is not dependent on science (but make no mistake, poetry is not a tool for generating new knowledge, but for communicating insights into human nature, which is fine and valuable — science is the tool we have for testing and verifying, and for acquiring new information about the universe).

Massimo Pigliucci has written a paper chastising the New Atheists for taking a turn towards scientism. But take note of my first paragraph: I’ve already given more specific examples of scientism than Pigliucci does in his entire paper. I’d also consider them illuminating: Krauss has retracted his sentiments, both Krauss and Hawking took a lot of flak for their weird ideas about philosophy (science is a branch of philosophy, so I found both rather discombobulating), and Pinker…well, I’d consider that the most damning evidence for a plague of scientism within atheism, that so many praised that blatant example of ahistorical and aphilosophical BS. Pinker isn’t even mentioned anywhere in the paper.

Pigliucci has picked his scientistic enemies: Dawkins, of course, and Harris and Stenger, adding just for the sake of completeness a couple of other scientists, me and Jerry Coyne, who also strongly criticizes the paper. Hitchens is dismissed as a mere polemicist, while Dennett, as a philosopher, causes some discomfort to his thesis, Pigliucci simply acknowledges that he can’t accuse him of scientism and moves on to his other targets.

But he can’t really defend his accusation against any of the others, either, and he doesn’t seem to care that there is a range of perspectives on philosophy even within his hand-picked sample. I consider myself to have a strong appreciation of philosophy and the humanities, and have even proposed to colleagues that a real liberal arts education ought to require learning some philosophy. Stenger’s work is full of history and philosophy; read God and the Atom, for instance, to see what I mean. I think Harris’s The Moral Landscape was all kinds of awful, but that he exercised some bad philosophy does not support his claim that the New Atheists reject it.

And look who he leaves off: Susan Jacoby, David Silverman, Hemant Mehta, Greta Christina, Ibn Warriq, Ophelia Benson. And worse, he has to explicitly deny that AC Grayling is a New Atheist! The impression I get is that what he has done is not find prominent New Atheists who endorse scientism, but prominent New Atheists who also happen to be trained as scientists, and then clumsily elided “is a scientist” into “is practicing scientism,” while also glossing over the existence of philosophers in our clan. We have a word for this: cherry-picking. It’s not a compliment.

Then he tries to define New Atheism, mentioning that nothing in it is actually “new” (a point that I think all of the New Atheists have made repeatedly! It’s a stupid name we got stuck with by a journalist writing in Wired). Here’s his definition.

Rather, it seems to me that two characteristics stand out as defining New Atheism apart from what I refer to as classical Atheism, one extrinsic, the other intrinsic. The extrinsic character of the New Atheism is to be found in the indisputably popular character of the movement. All books produced by the chief New Atheists mentioned above have been worldwide best sellers, in the case of Dawkins’s God Delusion, for instance, remaining for a whopping 51 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. While previous volumes criticizing religion had received wide popular reception (especially the classic critique of Christianity by Bertrand Russell), nothing like that had happened before in the annals of Western literature. The search for the reasons explaining such an unprecedented level of popularity is best left to sociologists, and at any rate is not really relevant to my aims here. It is likely, though, that the New Atheism qua popular movement is a direct result of the complex effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We have seen that the first book in the series, by Sam Harris, was written explicitly in reaction to those events, and I suspect that careful sociological analysis will reveal that that is also what accounts for Harris et al.’s success.

The second reason is intrinsic, and close to the core of my argument in this paper: the New Atheism approach to criticizing religion relies much more forcefully on science than on philosophy. Indeed, a good number of New Atheists (the notable exception being, of course, Daniel Dennett) is on record explicitly belittling philosophy as a source of knowledge or insight. Dawkins says that the “God hypothesis” should be treated as a falsifiable scientific hypothesis; Stenger explicitly—in the very subtitle of his book—states that “Science shows that God does not exist” (my emphasis); and Harris later on writes a whole book in which he pointedly ignores two and a half millennia of moral philosophy in an attempt to convince his readers that moral questions are best answered by science (more on this below). All of these are, to my way of seeing things, standard examples of scientism. Scientism here is defined as a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions; or alternatively that seeks to expand the very definition and scope of science to encompass all aspects of human knowledge and understanding.

So he’s got two criteria: 1) We’re popular. That’s an accusation that has me stumped; would we be more respectable if nobody liked us at all? 2) We’re scientists and take a scientific approach. Well, we’re not all scientists, and what’s wrong with looking at an issue using evidence and reason? Why shouldn’t we reject ideas that might be pretty to some people, but contradict reality? It’s not as if we can’t appreciate beauty or justice, entirely non-scientific ideas, unless they’re also counter-factual. Beauty and justice are best when they aren’t wrapped around lies and nonsense!

I’m going to start replying to these broad-brush accusations of scientism with my own accusations of philosophism. It seems to me we’ve got a plague of people who resent the success of atheism and respond by belittling it with trite claims of it being “bad theology” or “naive philosophy”. I’m about to be served with a big plumbing bill for a frozen pipe — I wonder if I can get a discount if I argue that those two guys with the big toolboxes were insufficiently appreciative of the philosophy of flowing water, and are unwarrantedly popular with homeowners this time of year. Damn plumbists.

No sympathy. None at all.

I have been harassed by Dennis Markuze/David Mabus for going on 20 years, and I have an imposing collection of filters in my email to block him. At the peak of his mania, he was dunning me with 20-30 emails a day, all repetitive, all totally nuts, and he was sending death threats and other attempts to intimidate me…which were remarkably ineffective, since everything he wrote was twisted and bizarre.

Now he’s found a way to get past my filters: he had a friend write to me!

Written on Behalf of Dennis Markuze by an old friend. Here he presents his SIDE and I think you will agree that he is right!

“I was never approached to offer me my side of the story. Here are the FACTS not the faulty information fed to you by a gang of atheists and drama producing police. Hopefully you can do an article taking my side. I am a odd character, a unique individual, who has been turned into a media monster for my strange ideas, BUT I’M RIGHT!

AFFIDAVIT OF TRUTH

On November 16, 2012, I was arrested in my own house for being on a chat room and apparently harassing Tim Farley. He tweaked and twisted my words to make them appear threatening because he knew that for me to be simply on the Internet was a crime. He reported me to the police and made fraudulent and out of context remarks on what I said. He took harmless banter and converted it into hostile hate speech. Overnight the police got a search warrant and raided my house, seizing property. Again, simply being on the internet was enough. No threats were made and no violent acts committed. He suffered no injury. He suffered no financial loss. He suffered no loss in credibility. But I have suffered all these things and more. I have no history of violence in my past. I’m a writer who engages in debate with the power of words not force of arms. I debate, sometimes hotly, with skeptics and atheists to disprove their ideas. Farley doesn’t like what I have to say about him and his organization, the James Randi Foundation. He wants to silence my right to state my ideas on religion and politics, and he and his gang have called the police whenever they suspect I’m on the Internet. All they want to do is deprive me of my freedom so as to discredit my ideas. I am being ganged up on, bullied, and marked by atheists and skeptics, and even the media is taking their side, not once asking for my side of the story. True, some of my words may be rude or tasteless such as, “I will crush you,” or, “I will be rid of you etc.” My actual ideas center upon the utter waste of intelligence used in the ideology of atheism and the importance of peace and disarmament for the planet, and the terrible costs of war. My real words can be found here not the broken fragments they produce to use as lies to condemn me:

Please spend the time to read, watch, and hear what I have to say here:

http://storify.com/deltoidmachine/how-we-won-the-james-randi-dollar-1-000-000-parano

Dennis Markuze
Montreal
January, 21, 2014″

His “old friend” is now also blocked. And no, I am not convinced. That he is having a lucid moment (and good for him, maybe he’s getting better) does not offset tens of thousands of obsessive, ridiculous emails.

Here’s one he sent as [email protected]:

I have you by the BALLS…

Dumb, right? “Harmless banter”, you think? He sent that to all of my students in my classes that term.

Or how about this one, from [email protected]?

you have NOTHING TO DO WITH CRITICAL THINKING join the socialist faith
how about you keep this one up as a TESTIMONY FOR THE TRUTH
rich millionaires with their heads up the arses
I think this qualifies as a DOS attack… for RATS IN A TRAP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wHs0vM3gRTA
you can thank RANDI
now for some SYMBOLIC TWO-DIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS!
on the TIMELINE
0 min 33 sec – Randi in the RED SHIRT – signifying the *bl..dy deed* that is about to happen
1min 18 sec – Banachek talks about respect for the claimant and then they mock “these kind” of people in the final part
3 min 20 sec – the test of the power bracelet that increases a person’s energy and balance. Notice our challenge is all about POWER & BALANCE, proving the existence of a HIGHER POWER
5 min 15 sec TEST BEGINS. Skeptics one by one stand in CRUCIFIXION POSE
1 hr 10 min 21 sec Test is ended in failure
1 hr 10 min 30 sec request is made to make change in the PROTOCOL
1 hr 10 min 51 sec Applause is made by all those who wanted him to fail from the very beginning
1 hr 25 min 39 sec Now they talk about the Nightline clip that was filmed in Manhattan, also the scene of the 9/11 event
1hr 28 min 42 sec – They talk about make-shift tests. They think that because no one can win the prize that psychic phenomena does not exist
1 hr 29 min 45 sec Banachek says “the majority of *these* people.'” A contemptuous reference that occurs repeatedly
1 hr 31 min 53 sec The reference to envelopes. Remember the 911 in Angel’s envelope!
1 hr 37 min 11 sec Swiss says he is not worried about a paranormal event happening. Little does he know what is actually taking place
1 hr 39 min 50 sec The mocking of SPIRITS!
1 hr 40 min 27 sec Reference made to the TERROR of witnessing a supernatural event, i.e, the blood leaving the face
1 hr 41 min 15 sec Reference to “these people”
1 hr 41 min 40 sec Belief in the supernatural is claimed to be a psychological defence mechanism to cope with reality. Swiss talks about how desperate the psychics become when debunked. Little does he know what is happening to the skeptics!
1 hr 42 min 11 sec WHEN PROPHECY SUCCEEDS! KABOOM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gHbYJfwFgOU
which WORLD-VIEW will not exist, sh*thead?
____________
5000 whining atheists vs the Great Prophet
how the divine pen of Michel Nostradamus crushed the international atheist movement
http://www.skepticalcommunity.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=34862
________________________
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=s3lwG4MytSI
one applicant right here…
get the POINT, Randi….
__________________________

for lies on top of lies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbmXpNEFipE

do you think you can threaten my right to FREE SPEECH?
what if I told you that I am not who you think I am….
Not Dennis Markuze – but a FAN!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvatDdOWcLw
you’re not the center of the universe!
____________________________
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yRpSNIOwA4
a dishonest liar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruQFh_TkPto
WHINE WHINE WHINE
________________________
Best Clips on Atheist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V6B9D1S4xQ – JUST A TINY SMIDGEN OF A GAP! JUST A TINY SMIDGEN OF A GAP!
______________________________

a vitally important essay dealing with the new age of madness that poses as ENLIGHTENMENT!
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
they speak for those who cannot speak…
_____________________
outside the doors of the Loto Quebec Building
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wwWr-zwUHqA
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/1967/violence.htm
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/1967/questions-answers.htm

That’s what he calls a debate. He sent me dozens of copies of that one week; in addition, he sent that same incoherent screed to my university’s department of admissions, to the chancellor, to every single faculty member on my campus. And that’s not an exceptional email; that’s pretty much the tone and content of every single goddamn rant he’s ever sent me.

And now he thinks a single paragraph in which he whimpers that he was just stating his ideas will somehow make me forget decades of spam and lies and babbling nonsense and harassment of not just myself, but of my students and colleagues? It was persistent spam under a parade of fake email addresses.

Harmless banter. Fuck you, Dennis Markuze, never send me another email, and don’t have your asshole friends act as your proxy, either.

Oh, really? You mean that accusation was serious?

Guess who just got a vaguely threatening Freedom of Information Act request demand? Me!

You may recall that bizarre letter slipped under my door by John Geiger, editor of the right wing campus rag, the North Star. In it, he blithely accused me of stealing a print run of his newspaper because the distribution locations smelled like chloroform and other sciency things, and because I’d written a post expressing my contempt for the disgusting racism he exhibited.

I thought it was a joke. But no, he has enlisted something called The Alliance Defending Freedom For Faith For Justice to come after me. They sent a letter. Here’s the relevant part:

Pursuant to Minnesota’s open records law, MINN. STAT. §§ 13.01 to 13.99, we request access to and a COPY of the following documents and data:

1. Video surveillance of all cameras near the following locations on the University of Minnesota Morris campus from 12:00 a.m. on November 22 to 11:59 p.m. on November 23, 2013:

a. In the tunnel between the Science building and the Student Center; and

b. In the Humanities Fine Arts building; and

2. Written communications, including electronic, sent or received by UM- Morris Professor Paul Z. Myers that refer to the “NorthStar,” “North Star,” or John Geiger; and

3. Written communications, including electronic, sent or received by UM- Morris Chancellor Jacqueline Johnson that refer to the “NorthStar,” “North Star,” or John Geiger.

Do we even have video surveillance cameras there? I have no idea. Anyway, I was happy to oblige, did an email search for those terms, and came up with all of…about a dozen items. Most were references to the North Star STEM alliance; one was a message to the whole campus from our chancellor deploring the allegations of fascism and racism published by the North Star, and that was actually the only correspondence at all that mentioned Geiger. Other than Geiger’s own letter, of course.

There won’t be any evidence of a conspiracy, or that I stole their dreadful papers, because there wasn’t and I didn’t…but one thing we know, wingnuts love to make noise about dreadful sneaky conspiracies against them and the American Way.

Besides, I have an alibi. I was in Benghazi, extorting money from Bill Clinton’s mistresses to invest in the Whitewater project, and also gathering fake temperature readings for Al Gore to fool everyone into believing climate change is real.

Bill Nye is to creationists as the Catholic Church is to Galileo

At least, that’s what right-wing überlöön (so metal, he deserves a 3-umlaut title) Glenn Beck. Watch his meandering monologue* in which he accuses science and science education of being on the wrong side of history, and literally accuses Nye of persecuting creationists.

*In Beck’s case, that’s redundant.

I get email — gun-fondler edition

So, so tired of the gun-fondlers in my in-box…their arguments are so bad, so stupid, so off, and they don’t see it. It’s like the creationists who write to me with their sloppy reasoning and wacky assumptions — they aren’t persuading me, they’re just convincing me how wrong they are.

Here’s the latest.

Dear Dr. Myers:

I have e mailed you before to present the other side of the issues you talk about on your blog. I would like to try to explain the concept of how firearms prevent crime.

Yeah, he’s mailed me multiple times. Every time I start reading them, go “gaah, what an idiot”, and trash them without reply. Since he’s not going away when I ignore him, time to let everyone else laugh at him.

Let me begin by assuming you have gone into a restaurant or cafe where police officers are eating. Because they are police officers, doesn’t that make you feel more at ease? But not only that, doesn’t the fact they have a gun contribute to that feeling of well being? I would venture to say the chances of the place becoming a crime scene, at least while the police are inside, are close to zero. Another example is that of an armored car. The little “ports” you see on them allow the guys inside to stick their guns out if anyone was to try something. There are also warnings on the vehicle “do not approach”. It is essentially the threat of looking down “the business end” of a gun that is the true deterrent. Wouldn’t you agree that the chances of an attempted robbery are close to zero with an armored car because of guns and the possibility of being shot? Again guns are preventing crime.

Did he just compare trained police officers with responsibilities, a uniform, and a specific role in the community to random jerkwads with a pistol tucked in their pants? That the police dissuade crime is their job; I would not feel more at ease in a restaurant if everyone was sitting there, armed. Quite the contrary.

If most of us are unarmed, relying on a few delegated officials to suppress crime, it’s true, we’re less likely to have crime scenes erupting all over the place. If everyone’s carrying a gun, we’re more likely to have criminal activity that turns into a blazing bloodbath. Not interested. Not convinced at all.

And then he goes on to suggest my daily life would be improved if I were living in the equivalent of a fucking armored car? This guy is nuts.

Now let’s take this a step further to the ordinary citizen. Do you think a criminal is going to try to commit a crime somewhere he might get shot by a law abiding citizen carrying a concealed gun? A criminal, who by definition has no regard for the law, will go and commit crimes in “Gun Free Zones” like churches, schools, hospitals and other places the local authorities deem should be “Gun Free”. Look where mass shootings like Sandy Hook and Aurora took place. Also look at places like Chicago that have a lot of gun violence, because, until recently, law abiding citizens have been unable to carry concealed firearms to defend themselves against criminals. Criminals know where they can commit gun crime without fear of being shot. I’d be willing to go so far as to say that men can be “taught not to rape” if there were the probability of being shot by the woman!

Right. Let’s trade gun-free schools, churches, and hospitals for places where we all walk in fear, just so these obsessed kooks can strut about with weapons. How about instead if we regulate guns more tightly, cut off the killers at the source, and have fewer guns in our communities? That would also reduce the problem. And that’s his solution to rape? Make women carry firearms around and shoot people? Fucking barbarian.

But oh, I forgot — this is all about giving gun-fondlers carte blanche to cling to their object of affection everywhere they go.

Of course there are no statistics on crimes that have not been committed. It is not known exactly how many crimes have been prevented by law abiding citizens carrying concealed guns. The best way to extrapolate how many crimes have been prevented is to look at the crime rate, which has been steadily falling since enactment of concealed carry laws. Just try to “think like a bad guy” with this. Our elected officials can enact all the gun control legislation they want, but that is NOT going to stop criminals one iota.

They do love that fraud, John Lott. Lott is the primary source for this claim that concealed carry laws and an armed populace reduce crime. He’s been exposed as a phony way back in 2002.

Earlier this year, Lott found himself facing serious criticism of his professional ethics. Pressed by critics, he failed to produce evidence of the existence of a survey — which supposedly found that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack” — that he claimed to have conducted in the second edition of “More Guns, Less Crime”. Lott then made matters even worse by posing as a former student, “Mary Rosh,” and using the alias to attack his critics and defend his work online. When an Internet blogger exposed the ruse, the scientific community was outraged. Lott had created a “false identity for a scholar,” charged Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy. “In most circles, this goes down as fraud.”

My correspondent is not only making a bad argument, it’s a dishonest one.

You suggest keeping a telephone by your bedside. Fine and well. By the time the police arrived, you could very well be dead. 1500 feet per second is the response time that I advocate in dealing with someone who has broken into my house. Often, just showing the gun to a perpetrator is enough to diffuse the situation.

Oh, god. The 1500 feet per second bullshit. If I’m at the point of having to outrace a goddamn bullet, it’s too late and a gun isn’t going to help. What I have to do in these situations is make it so hanging around isn’t cost effective anymore, and knowing that the police are on the way is a good deterrent.

Besides, the speed of my signal down the fiber optic line to my house is 300,000,000 meters per second. I win on that facile and stupid comparison.

Gun control advocates are quick to blame guns for high murder rates. But let me ask you; when a kid throws a rock through your picture window, do you blame the rock? Or do you blame the kid?

Does he think rational gun control advocates imagine that guns are floating about autonomously blasting away at people? Of course not. We know that the problem is that guns are in the hands of the weapon wankers. When a kid throws a rock through a window, the plan is to tell him to stop throwing rocks.

Also, you know rock throwing isn’t as casually lethal as firing a gun, right? Right? I’m not so sure these guys are that clever.

Expanding from our local communities and states to that of a National level, to namely our Armed Forces, who, with other tools use GUNS to prevent the invasion of foreign powers unfriendly to us. It is the presence of GUNS and the threat of retaliation by us that protects and defends the sovereignty of The United States. It is the presence of the very GUNS you despise that affords you the freedom to be a godless liberal. GUNS also afford you the freedom to post mindless ejaculations on the internet.

Again, this buffoon is trivializing the specific purpose and specific training of police and military forces to equate them to his fellow gun-lovin’ goons. No, I don’t rely on armed guards to be able to post on the internet, you goddamned thimble-witted gun-waving dogma-loving right wing ideologue. Fuck off and stop sending me your feeble parroting of NRA bullshit.

Shut up, Bill Keller

You can’t get much more tone deaf than this: Bill Keller uses Martin Luther King Day to…

Somewhere in all this worthy commemoration we should pause to pay homage to a conservative white Republican named William Moore McCulloch.

McCulloch sounds like a guy who did some good things for civil rights, so no criticism of him…but is this really an appropriate time to say we should take a break from praising that black dude and spend a little more time talking about a conservative white Republican? They get all the attention the other 364 days of the year, a black civil rights hero can’t even get one day to be recognized?

I take it back. David Brooks belongs on the NY Times op-ed pages

He serves the needs of the upper class so well — he’s such a perfect lickspittle. His latest column deplores all this leveler talk of economic inequities: don’t you peons realize that a widening gap has two parts, the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, and the two have absolutely nothing to do with one another? Oh, sure, there are some perverse compensation schemes on Wall Street, but mainly wealth is perpetuated because rich marry rich and pass on their money to their rich kids, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that, so let’s skip over that issue with one sentence and spend the whole column blaming the poor. Let’s focus on poor people! And that doesn’t mean raising the minimum wage, oh no. We have to resist the temptation to reduce everything to simple causes, therefore he proposes that the problem is simply a lack of social mobility. Just fix that. We can close the gap by closing our eyes to the sight of the 1% skittering off rapidly to the right and a world that laughs at obscene wealth and embraces pornographically hardcore wealth, and instead just tell all the poor people to start plodding off in that same direction. That’s how we’ll close the gap!

Shorter David Brooks: If the poor would just stop begging for bread and start eating cake, rather than blaming looters and exploiters and profiteers and that whole infrastructure of privilege, why, everything will be hunky dory in no time at all.

OK, let’s try it. How about giving Naquasia LeGrand a column in the NY Times, too?

[Read more…]

Gun culture in America

Write one post about gun control, and guess what happens? Your inbox fills up with crap from people who love their guns. Just love ’em. It’s everything from calm descriptions of existing gun laws, and aren’t they onerous enough already (no, obviously, they aren’t) to veiled threats to show me how useful concealed handguns are in putting down enemies of Liberty. After reading enough of them, I’ve decided that it is inappropriate and inaccurate for me to always be mentally referring to these people as gun nuts. Sorry, you’re not gun nuts at all, which is unfair to people who are mentally ill; you’re gun assholes, instead.

For example, on Twitter I’ve got this person who is quite insistent about ‘refuting’ me, giving me these lovely anecdotes taken from gun asshole sites to prove how wonderful guns are at helping people.

Tweet Child O’ Mine @EwwMoist
.@pzmyers – Concealed carry permit holder stops mass shooter. bearingarms.com/concealed-carr…

Really? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if now and then in the flurry of flying bullets, someone managed to shoot a bad guy — although I do kind of object to the idea of living in an atmosphere of hurtling chunks of lead — but then I read the story, and it isn’t even an accurate summary.

Police on Sunday afternoon said they believe the gunman went in and started shooting, hitting the three victims. As he was on his way out, somebody at the bar shot him.

The actual story is that a gun asshole, angry at being denied entrance to a “Gentleman’s Club”, shot three innocent people, and then as he was leaving, another gun asshole shot the first gun asshole.

I count that as 4 people getting shot by two gun assholes. No one won. And this is an argument against gun control…how?

The other argument this @Ewwmoist person keeps flinging at me is that there are 300 million guns floating about in this country, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and therefore there’s nothing that can be done. That’s about the dumbest argument for maintaining a state of destructive lawlessness I’ve ever heard.

Hey, the US consumes 300 metric tons of cocaine every year. I guess we should just give up and install vending machines in the public schools. Hey, 7500 gallons of an industrial chemical just tainted the drinking water in West Virginia. Looks like a great argument for less regulation of chemical storage! Hey, we’re pumping almost 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Time to give up! (That last one is actually a serious argument used by many Republicans.)

I don’t know about you, but when I spill toothpaste on my countertop, I don’t enshrine it as a new fixture of my bathroom decor, and I don’t decide to squirt even more on top of the blob. I clean it up. And it looks like we’ve got a very big cleanup job in the US. Thanks, gun assholes!

Meanwhile, what are we liberals doing? We’re basically performing surreal Portlandia skits. That link is to a story about a couple going out to dinner and seeing that someone in a neighboring table has a handgun stuffed into the waistband of his pants. What to do, what to do? They eventually tell their concerns to their server as they’re leaving (who dithers about not knowing what to do either), and then they write a blog post asking whether their reaction was appropriate.

What the fuck? The restaurant has a sign prohibiting firearms inside. There is no argument, no second guessing, no hesitation. The instant you see a gun asshole carrying in such a place, you go up to the manager, and you say, “I suspect there’s a gun asshole over there with a deadly weapon; I don’t feel safe here, and I expect you to do something about it or I’m leaving.” That’s it. And you don’t freakin’ feel guilty about having a reasonable expectation of safety in a public place.

And that’s gun control in America. The gun assholes orgasm over shootouts in strip clubs, while the liberals tiptoe about, afraid to ask if we can get a little relief from the gun culture at a restaurant.