Category: Perversity of Humanity

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It’s not moral relativism to blame both sides.

I was accused of moral relativism on Facebook when I stated that both sides were to blame in Charlottesville.  This was supposedly because, by blaming both sides equally, I was entirely absolving one side from blame in the death of the young woman who was struck by the jerk in the car.

I can’t parse that, and you probably can’t either.  To me, that young woman would still be alive today if both sides had stayed the hell home.  There is indeed blame on both sides.  Both sides are full of hate and both sides espouse hate.  That one side in this particular contretemps espouses hate against non-whites, and the other side espouses hate against those who hate non-whites, seems immaterial to me.  Either side is as bad as the other.

After all, the SS blackshirts were just as bad as the SA brownshirts whom they destroyed.  But that’s history, after all, and not many people actually learn history anymore.  But the analogy holds.

I was so assaulted because I dared (in this person’s opinion, anyway) to diminish the culpability of the white supremacists who, after all, started it all by having their protest in the first place.  However, I suspect the real reason for this assault on my integrity is merely because the person who did so is a rabid neverTrumper who will never back down from his now-untenable position; I mean, come on, the guy was elected and he’s president, and he’s not a Nazi.  And by insisting that I’m letting the Nazis off by including antifa in the mix, this person is implicitly stating that antifa bears no blame whatsoever.  Does he support antifa?  I’m going to guess he’d be horrified if someone told him that.  But that’s what he’s doing by claiming it’s moral relativism to blame antifa equally with the Nazi group for the death of that young woman.

As I told him repeatedly, if antifa hadn’t shown up, that young woman would still be alive.  But it would have been even better if neither side had shown up at all.

However, the main point this person misses in the process of being all het up about spreading the blame around is that any culpability for the young woman’s death is not placed on the group — it’s placed on the person who actually ran that car down the street and killed her with it.  And that’s an important point.

In our system, the group to which that young fool belonged won’t be on trial anywhere except in the court of public opinion.  The court of law that will try said young fool for vehicular homicide isn’t going to be interested in his political views, or what hate group he happens to belong to — they will be concerned only with his disregard for the law and the consequences of that disregard.  And that is because our courts are courts of law, not courts of political justice.

Make no mistake — antifa would like nothing better than for our courts to become courts of political justice, wherein they could, in Stalinesque show trials, condemn the 1% to death and then start in on the bourgeois middle class.  Which is why I oppose antifa as much as I oppose asshole white supremacists who dress up in swastika-festooned clothing, wave the swastika flag, and play at being National Socialists just like the bunch of pin-headed, slack-jawed wanna-be Hitler Youth they are.

These two groups are two sides of the same adulterated coin.  National Socialists vs. International Socialists.  All left-wing, no matter how hard the left tries to push them off on the right (the soi-disant “alt-right” being little more than a fabrication of feverish brains on the left side of the spectrum).  All of the repugnant ideologies on parade last weekend, nay, since it became clear that Donald Trump was a serious threat to Hillary Clinton’s coronation, originated on the left.  The KKK?  A left-wing Democrat institution for many, many years.  Fascists and Nazis were both leftists, and made no bones about being leftists, despite generations of Gramscian historians who have tried to frame them as being phenomena of the far-right.  Black Lives Matter?  Left-wing anarchists with a desire to destroy the police as a force for civil order.  Name a disruptive domestic terrorist group that has been in the ascendant in the past two or three years, and every one of them is a tool of the left.  Hell, even the Southern Poverty Law Center has become a leftist tool of destruction, by tarring innocent and well-meaning right-wing organizations with the “hate group” moniker.

And they are all to blame for what happened last weekend.  Because they have weakened the social structure of this country to the point where such things not only can happen, they are happening — with great regularity.

What is most alarming about this is that the number of people actually involved in these actions is tiny in comparison to the rest of the country.  In other words, we could easily scrum ’em if we chose to.

I fear we’re coming to that.  And sooner than we think.  It’s going to be messy.

And there won’t be a damn thing that’s morally relative about it.

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Fuck that defeatist shit.

The defeatist bullshit I’ve been reading on Facebook ever since the election has reached a breaking point.

The assholes in Charlottesville yesterday do not represent the vast majority of good, non-bigoted Americans who are just trying to make it through life. In fact, they do not represent America at all.

I just read a post from an old fart like me who has, to all intents and purposes, given up and decided to watch it burn while sitting back and wishing the next generation the best of luck.

Well, to hell with you, old man. My father and uncles didn’t spend several years on a European shooting vacation so I could sit back in my old age watching everything they held dear collapse around me. I have skin in the game — two lovely grandchildren who will have to grow up in the world you’re happy to watch crumble. Well, fuck that. Wake up and fight the future, you unmitigated pussy.  What the hell are you afraid of?  Dying?  That’s coming anyway.

The world does NOT end with our death. Other people have to live in it.  So, why not fight on to the end?  It’s what we were made to do, not to go quietly into that dark night while, unopposed, the forces of evil claim the field.

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You want more Trump? Because…oh, you know the drill.

Well…that’s how you get more Trump.

Steve Scalise, aide shot in Virginia

Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., told Fox News he left just before the shooting. As he walked to his car, a man asked DeSantis if it was Republicans or Democrats practicing. About three minutes later, at around 7:15 a.m. the shooting began, DeSantis said. It reportedly last about 10 minutes.

All y’all on the left really need to start policing your folks better. The violence and threats aren’t coming from our side, and even under your Anointed One, the right always promptly disavowed anyone who talked this kind of smack.

The left has never apologized for this kind of thing, though, or done much to prevent it from escalating, and I doubt it will start now.

If the left had an actual leader who would step up and vociferously condemn what is going on, that person might actually have a chance in 2020. But the “leaders” on the left are too busy trashing Trump and trying to find ways to block his agenda.

I have said it before and I will say it again: I am not a huge Trump fan, but this kind of behavior is precisely what got Trump elected, and to let it go on continues to damage the Democrats more and more. The silent majority is not happy right now, and as we saw in 2016, plenty of them vote, and they are pretty much unpollable because they won’t talk to pollsters, whom they tend to view as slanted and dishonest. And that’s how you get an election where it’s supposedly Hillary in a walk, and then instead you get Trump as a complete surprise to the media and the establishment — but not to the people who are sick and tired of the status quo in Washington.

Ben Sasse said it best in his maiden speech in the Senate: “The people despise us all.” And he was and remains 100% correct.

The folks out there who are whinging about how Weimar-esque the US is starting to look (and that includes some folks on the right — it’s a theme that comes up regularly at Instapundit, for instance) don’t seem to understand that, contra Santayana, history really doesn’t repeat itself; it merely repeats overarching themes.  There will be no American Hitler, because the silent majority remains well-armed and unwilling to kowtow to anyone who bids fair to take those arms (and the rights they protect) away.  There may be hard and bad times coming in America, but a true dystopia seems to me to be pretty unlikely.  And of course, it will never be as bad here as it will be in the rest of the world, given it’s still true that when America gets the sniffles, the rest of the world catches cold — or worse.

The American spirit still lives in a lot of Americans.  As much crap as I throw at GenX, GenY, and millennials, there are plenty of patriots in those groups as well.  These Americans may not speak out or make their true feelings known until the feces truly impact the turbine, but they will step up when their country needs them.  Count on it.

Despite the worst the Democrats could do to us, we shrugged off a Great Depression and won a World War.  What we have today isn’t nearly what our parents and grandparents had.

We can prevail — but we need to put a stop to the turbulence on the left that is being driven by a completely irrational hatred of Donald Trump, capitalism, and classical liberal conservatism.  Put bluntly, the left wants to destroy our country, or “fundamentally transform” it as their Anointed One put it.

But there’s still a lot of us out here who have no interest in being transformed, either fundamentally or otherwise.  The left should fear us.

That they don’t — yet — speaks volumes.

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Wringing your hands and restricting freedom is not the answer.

Headline in the WSJ this morning:  “Low Tech Attacks Hard To Thwart”

(In reference, of course, to the three recent terrorist attacks in London.)

The problem is not that Islamic terrorists have resorted to “low tech” attacks.  The problem is that England has removed from its citizens the ability to defend themselves.

Give Britons the right to carry concealed, and I’ll bet the “drive a truck into a crowd and then start knifing people” attacks would have been stopped in their tracks.  A couple of concealed carriers would quickly put a stop to the carnage at London Bridge.  This is not to say that there wouldn’t have been casualties, but years of reading “Armed Citizen” columns here in the US suggests that our generally-robust 2nd Amendment protections (at least in the non-stupid states) frequently have a significant effect in lowering the total body count.  I have in mind an attempted church massacre in Colorado Springs some years back where an alert security officer stopped the murderer in his tracks.  More recently was the attempt by radical Islamists to assassinate blogger Pamela Gellar and journalist Robert Spencer Dutch politician Geert Wilders when they appeared at a gathering in Texas.  But my all-time favorite was the Appalachian School of Law incident in 2002, where the two concealed carriers who ended up stopping the rampage had to go back to their cars to get their guns because of the school’s (obviously ineffective) gun-free zone policy.  Clearly, armed citizens can make a difference, and do when they can.

While it’s unlikely that armed citizens could have stopped or mitigated the Ariana Grande concert bombing, police profiling and bomb-sniffing dogs would likely have put paid to it, or at least would have seen the bomb go off outside of the arena.  Again, there likely would have been casualties, but significantly fewer of them.

The Mayor of London, whose response to the latest tragedy was yet another riff on “We need to get used to a certain level of violence”, is an ass.  So is the Prime Minister, whose first reaction was that more Internet regulation was needed (a typical statist response from a typical statist politician, one each).  Wringing your hands and/or clamping down on freedom of speech are not useful options in a putatively-free society.  You know where the problem is, why not admit it and focus the crackdown where it needs to be focused?  Stop whinging about civil rights applying to people who would take your civil rights away (and are succeeding admirably, to date).

Let your people defend themselves.  It’s a basic human right, whether Europeans want to believe it or not.  A lot of those people fought back.  Think how much more effective they would have been with concealed weapons and training in their use.  And then ask yourselves why we don’t tend to see this sort of thing happen in the US — at least where we aren’t hobbled by blue state gun restrictions and “gun-free zones” (AKA “victim-rich zones”).  The answer is because Europe is much easier pickings and the radical Islamics are already well on the way to taking it over.

Apologies to my European friends, but y’all need to take the blinders off and start fighting back.

[Edited to correct my misremembering of who was targeted at the Garland, Texas conference.]

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Because they’re not the same thing, idiots.

So far today I’ve seen two variations on the same theme show up as Facebook memes.

First, “They give Narcan for free to drug users because it will keep them from dying.  So why don’t they give free insulin to diabetics?”

My response was

Because you only get Narcan when you OD? I mean, it’s not like you get Narcan every day. Because if you do, it’s amazing you’re not dead anyway.

My paramedic niece has related stories of being called out more than once to Narcan the same person and wondering what the point of the exercise is.

FWIW I’m going to guess that it isn’t actually free. Somebody is paying for it, if not the dopehead’s insurance (and there’s a laughable thought), then you and me when we pay our premiums and taxes.

Then I saw this one: “If methadone is free to addicts because they have a disease, why is chemo not free for cancer patients?”

I didn’t respond to that one, but it’s the same stupid question wrapped up in the same stupid logical fallacy.  You’re not talking about apples and apples here.  You’re talking about an attempt to modify an anti-social behavior versus trying to cure a fatal disease.

Plus, heroin addiction is not a disease, no matter how the proggy left wants to soft-shoe it.  Becoming a junkie required a positive (or negative, depending on your viewpoint) decision on the part of the junkie to become a junkie.  Becoming a junkie didn’t happen because of a virus or a bacteria.  Becoming a junkie isn’t like catching a cold or flu, or getting Ebola.*  And it happens regardless of any attitude on the proto-junkie’s part of “I’m strong, I can quit any time.”  Yeah.  Addiction doesn’t work that way.  The hell of it is, I was just sitting here thinking about alcoholism and how it’s considered a disease…but I don’t know of anyone who gives away free alcohol rehab the way, say, the city of New York hands out free methadone.**  And the consumption of alcohol is, at least, legal and accepted by society.

Let’s think for a moment about anti-social behavior.  Being a junkie is definitely anti-social.  Being a junkie means that you probably lie, cheat, and steal for your next high.  By the time you need treatment, in most cases you’re probably diseased, have poor hygiene, and are probably living on the streets or damn close to it.  Even if you’re not that bad, you’ve probably assured that nobody can trust you, and you’ve probably let down everyone who knows you, including your family and closest friends.

Or you’re just a fucking clueless dickhead or cuntwaffle doing meth or whatever the fuck is the drug of choice down on the Ohio River these days.  And yes, I include the long-term unemployed who have given up and turned to drugs as an escape.  You’re a bunch of fuckheads.  Man (or woman) the fuck up and make the best of your situation.  Yeah, I know, easy for me to say.  So I’ll say it again:  Stop acting like an animal and stand up like a human being, look adversity square in the eye, and say to it, “Fuck you, I’m not letting you get the best of me.”

Where was I?  Oh, yes.

I question the morality inherent in handing out these drugs to junkies for “free” in an attempt to wake them the fuck up and set the on the right path.  The standard proggie claim is that it is our moral and ethical duty to help these people.  But I do not believe it to be either moral or ethical to make me pay for a heroin addict’s methadone treatment, or for the Narcan for the stupid fucks who OD on the latest tainted shit that came out of the local dealer’s drug lab.  Because it is not moral or ethical to force me or anyone else to pay to correct other people’s stupidity.  And it is willful stupidity! You cannot say that people in this modern age aren’t aware of the dangers posed by deciding to do drugs.

My generation grew up getting the “don’t do drugs” mantra pounded into us by parents, teachers, TV, radio, you name it.  “This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs.”  Who the fuck wants to go around with a scrambled egg for a brain?  Life is a raging bitch, but we are supposed to stand tall and DEAL, not resort to booze or drugs or any other stupidity to dull the pain and make the hours pass like minutes.  We were taught that it was stupid to hand your life over to drugs or anything like them, including alcohol.  And yet, so many stupid people refused to accept that lesson even when it was being beaten into their brains on a daily basis.  Why are we coddling these people with treatments when the record shows that they almost all backslide back into addiction?***  Why don’t we just let them take their exit?  Or if you prefer stark reality to metaphor, why don’t we just let them fucking die?  It’s clearly what they seem to want.

My sense of morality is not twinged by any need or desire to succor these people, because history and common sense indicate that they will simply go right back to what they were fucking up before.  We are told that we have to break the cycle in order to cure what ails them.  But there are two ways to break the cycle, and one of them is to simply let nature take its course.  You OD’d?  Bye.  You’re a junkie?  Go ahead and sedate yourself to death.  You pussified coward.

And now we have these memes.

Because the progressives are frantic to try to find a way to force us into single-payer, so they can have that much more control over our lives.  And as usual with progressives, they are lying through their teeth to try to win us over to their point of view.

Because progressives are a bunch of fucking cuntwaffles.****

Fuck them.  Taxation is theft, and control over my life is something they can’t have.

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* It is, however, very much akin to contracting HIV if you indulge in the kind of anti-social behavior that gets you into a situation where you can contract HIV.  And by this I’m not including the people who contract it through no fault of their own, e.g., through blood transfusions, or sex with a partner who hasn’t been upfront with them about their own anti-social behavior, or any of the other ways that folks unknowingly manage to pick up HIV.  Or herpes.  Or gonorrhea.  Or syphilis.  Or chlamydia.  My, the list just goes on and on, doesn’t it?

** Yes, I understand that the methadone is handed out in a clinic situation and you have to go to the clinic to get the shot or pill or whatever, because they also don’t want you to end up addicted to methadone, which is just about as nasty a drug as heroin.  Before they figured that out, people did in fact switch from being hooked on heroin to being hooked on methadone.

*** Or go back on the streets to get another hit of what the fuck ever they did that made them OD in the first place, in the case of Narcan.

**** I just like the sound of “cuntwaffles”.

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Double blep

I made this very point to one of our sales drones yesterday — there was little utility in me responding to the upset customer when all I was going to be able to do was reaffirm what the support engineer had already told them.  The fact was that the overnight service outage the customer was upset about was not our fault; our upstream ISP blew that one by not having a spare router card in the colo when the one we were connected to lost its magic smoke.  All of our stuff was up and running and patiently waiting to speak to the ‘net.  Customer is now demanding that they should be informed when we have an unexpected outage…well…that would have been difficult, with all our mail servers sitting behind the bad card.  So yelling at us was not exactly going to accomplish much in the grand scheme of things.

It’s gotten to where people today don’t understand that it’s a miracle the Internet works at all.  Either they don’t remember or never experienced the joys of the ‘net ca. 1995-1999.  I was telecommuting daily at the time on 56k dialup, and 90% uptime for any service was a pipe dream.  I didn’t have so much as a DSL line until late 2002, and it was strictly a quasi-T1 (1Mbps down, but residential service with no SLA, so it wasn’t particularly reliable, and I think uploads were limited to 100kbps).  Today you drop for a few hours (our SLA for the service in question states that “downtime” is only counted during our normal support hours, which makes sense, because who is working nights in this business) and people spoiled by always-on, fast, “reliable” internet get all bent out of shape because they can’t send out an email blast that nobody is going to read anyway.

I honestly cannot wait to get the hell out of this business.  I hate it.  Unfortunately I made the mistake of staying too long and am stuck with it till I retire, I fear.

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It’s not a human right just because you say it is.

Health care is not a human right.

Nope.  Not even close.

Freedoms enumerated and enshrined in the Constitution?  Human rights.  The right to free speech, the right to worship as you please, the right to bear arms in defense of yourself, your family, and the nation, the right to be free of the government quartering its soldiers in your home, yeah, all those things are human rights, built into the bedrock of human experience.  That they have been violated more often than upheld is part of what makes them so precious, and worthy of defending.  But these freedoms and rights require nothing more than our eternal vigilance to maintain.  (Which is cheap at twice the price, considering the totality of human history.)

Health care is not a human right because it depends on so many other people doing things for your benefit.  If I were a doctor, I would not agree that you had a human right to demand my services for less than I believe they are worth.  (And if I priced my services too high, I’d probably go hungry a lot while my competitors lived off the fat of the land.  But that’s my right and privilege to determine for myself.)  If I were a nurse, I would not agree that just because your tummy hurts, you have a human right to force me to turn away from the cardiac patient who is coding in the next room and give you an antacid.  If I were a dentist, I would not say that you had a human right to barge into my office and demand that I immediately pull the tooth that’s been bothering you because you don’t have enough sense to take care of your own teeth, when I already have a waiting room full of patients who made appointments and also have dental issues.

And so forth.

What I’m really getting at is that the labor of another human being (either singularly or plurally) is not yours to demand as a human right, simply because you didn’t have the sense to buy insurance before you started having major health issues.  And that’s what you’re doing when you insist that health care is a human right.  You’re also demanding that my labor is yours to demand by proxy, since my tax money and my insurance premiums go to fund the abortion known as Obamacare.

We do not fight wars to restore human rights to people in other parts of the world in order that they can demand that we continue to prop them up after we’ve thrown the dictatorial and oppressive bastards out (which was the mistake we made in both Iraq and Afghanistan).  Human rights and the exercise of them are what lay down the base of a free and civilized society.  They do not provide services nor do they demand revenue.  They simply “are”.

When I write posts on this blog, they are my freely-expressed opinions.  I do not demand that someone else pay for my web hosting or domain registration, or my time and effort keeping the blogging software and the rest of the site up to date.  I don’t even ask for donations, because I don’t think my writing is worth your money 🙂  But to take the “health care is a human right” to another level, what if I and other bloggers started to take the attitude that the provision of the soapbox upon which we exercise our right to free speech should also be a human right, that all of you taxpayers out there should be forced to subsidize?

That’s a horse of a different color, isn’t it?

The argument that insurance should cover pre-existing conditions completely ignores the point of insurance.  Insurance is a gamble between you and the house (the insurance company) that you either will (your bet) or won’t (their bet) become gravely ill at some point.  Insurance generally pays for health maintenance like doctor visits and immunizations and colonoscopies and mammograms because those things are inexpensive (by comparison) hedges on their bet.  In other words, they pick up the tab because it’s like putting their thumb on the roulette wheel or using a marked deck — you’re more likely to stay healthy if you have those things, and not cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime for major medical expenses.

By definition, if you do not have insurance and you get some dread disease like cancer or lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, and then you demand that you should have insurance coverage to pay for it, you are holding up the house and trying to make off with something you did not pay for.  And that ends up making my annual bets on my own health cost more.

The running gag about the lottery is that you can’t win if you don’t play.  (In actuality, you can’t win no matter what you do; winning is a fluke, the rules and the odds are stacked against you.)  Translated to the casino metaphor I’ve used above, you can’t win if you don’t lay down a bet.  The casinos take a very dim view of that.  I would imagine sitting down at the table and placing a bet on 13 red without actually laying down a chip would get you hustled right back out to the street.

The uninsured do not have a human right to barge into my insurance company and demand that it pay for their dread disease.  Period.  I don’t care what Congress says and I don’t care what the Supreme Court or the President say, either.  Insurance is a pay-for-play deal.

Closer to home, the uninsured also do not have a human right to demand that the federal or state government care for them and levy the cost of that care onto the taxpayers.  While I would feel responsible for the health care of my own immediate family (as any civilized man or woman should), I frankly don’t have the money to waste on yours.  And it is a waste — it is money I will never see again (and never saw to begin with, because the government hoovers it out of my paycheck before I ever see it, to the tune of about two grand a month once everyone gets their cut).  That is money that I, as a responsible ant, should be putting away for my retirement and other future costs, not handing out to grasshoppers who can’t think past their young and healthy years and don’t even consider buying insurance until it’s too late — or just live on hope, that is, “I sure hope I don’t get sick or hit by a car or a falling meteor.”*

That said, I have at least one very close friend who has been buying his own health insurance for years and has had massive hospital and health care bills over the last six years.  Of course his premiums under Obamacare have skyrocketed.  And of course he’s not employed with what most of us would consider a regular job — he’s a writer and speaker.  And you cheap grasshoppers out there are part of why he’s hemorrhaging cash.

Despite my arguments above, I do not maintain that there should be absolutely no consideration for the uninsured with pre-existing conditions, but only that such consideration should be voluntary on the part of the public who will be paying for it, and not forced upon the public as a human right equivalent to the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights.  Some sort of fund to cover such people’s short-term medical expenses with the caveat that they MUST purchase an insurance policy and show proof that they have maintained it through the “pre-existing condition” period (which used to be a year for most things) is acceptable to me.  But the rules have to be clear, fair, and tough.  One year only, and only once in your life.

But again, the public ants shouldn’t be forced to pay for all those grasshoppers in the long term, and it ought to be hard to get them to pay in the short term.  Let’s face it: Eating, for instance, is not a human right.  Work or starve has been the rule throughout history, at least until modern times when the original meaning of the Constitution has been twisted to support federal welfare programs and more wallet-hoovering by the federal government.  Even the freed slaves after our Civil War were essentially told that freedom was defined as the choice between working and starving.

Housing isn’t a human right, either.  Housing generally requires other people’s labor, for which they expect to be paid.  Or it uses other people’s property, again, for which they expect to be paid.

Clothing?  Not a human right.  Lots of people in the world wear anywhere from nothing to locally-produced homespun to the cast-offs our thrift stores send to them.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written by hard-headed but fair-minded men who understood that a government could not force its citizens to be altruists.  When they wrote about promoting the general welfare, they did not mean handing out money to the indigent so they could eat, house, and clothe themselves.  They meant something more lofty than that — the general welfare of the country as a whole, which, if properly promoted, would mean that few if any people would go hungry, naked, or unroofed.  But not because such was a human right — because “a rising tide [should] float all boats”, as Ronald Reagan was fond of saying.

To claim that the Framers could not know that we would have the level of medical science that we have today and that they really meant to include universal healthcare as a basic right is to ignore the fact that the Framers were smarter than that.  Two hundred and thirty years later, there are only 27 amendments to the original plan, ten of which were ratified immediately as the Bill of Rights, one of which (smart) repealed another (stupid), and two of which (the 16th and 17th) were progressive, radical departures from the Framers’ ideal, and which have come around to bite us in the ass a hundred years later.

Bottom line:  Health care and the fulfillment of other basic human needs aren’t human rights, or the Framers would have included them from the start.

______________

* Dudes, I’ve had major medical insurance, either paid for myself or by my employer, from the time I was 24.  And life insurance, too.

 

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Millenial sensitivity in a nutshell.

Millenials not only are ruining the country, they don’t even have a sense of humor.  Found on Facebook — where else?

With the exception of rape…and maybe not rape*, there was not a single one of those subjects that were off-limit to comedians and teenage boys back when I was a kid.  Having been both the brunt and the inflicter, I can attest to that.

The offense-mongers today have taken all the fun out of things.  Berke Breathed had it absolutely right — in 1983:

We’re doomed.

________________

* To wit:

Hedley Lamarr: Qualifications?
Applicant: Rape, murder, arson, and rape.
Hedley Lamarr: You said rape twice.
Applicant: I like rape.

and

Taggart: I got it! I got it!
Hedley Lamarr: You do?
Taggart: We’ll work up a Number 6 on ’em.
Hedley Lamarr: [frowns] “Number 6”? I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that one.
Taggart: Well, that’s where we go a-ridin’ into town, a-whompin’ and a-whumpin’ every livin’ thing that moves within an inch of its life. Except the women folks, of course.
Hedley Lamarr: You spare the women?
Taggart: Naw, we rape the shit out of them at the Number Six Dance later on.
Hedley Lamarr: Marvelous!

Don’t tell me Mel Brooks wasn’t funny.

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Another meme, another blind misunderstanding

My niece posted this on Facebook:

Uh-huh.  Let’s see about that.

Actually, the “wall” between church and state is not what people think it is.  It’s based on a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a church, and the text of that letter is usually misinterpreted to mean religion and the state should be completely separate and have no influence on each other.  Which is impossible in real life.  Anyway, see Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists.  Read it carefully.  It doesn’t mean what most people think it does.

Same-sex marriage is the law of the land now, so that’s over with — not that it’s that big of a deal since the population affected is tiny; they simply scream and holler well over their weight class until people get tired of listening and another barrier is lowered.  However, the backlash is starting to cause something I have wanted to see for years — several states writing legislation to significantly reduce state control of marriage, which would in effect nullify the Supreme Court ruling regarding same sex marriage without outlawing it.  Indiana has a bill before the legislature right now to that effect.  So I’m all for anything that does that.  Why should anyone have to buy a license from the state in order to get married?*

Stem cell research goes on regardless of whether it’s funded federally or not.  The key is not the research itself, it’s whether federal money should be spent to further it.  And there have been compromises over the years to allow some federal funding.  I’m all for stem cell research as long as it’s done properly — there are some major breakthroughs coming in therapy because of stem cells.  But the original argument over the use of stem cells was that only embryonic stem cells would work, because only they are “pluripotent”, which goes back to the abortion argument.  After a lot of smoke and fire, it was discovered that adult stem cells can also be induced to be pluripotent.**  So there’s likely no pressing need to use embryonic stem cells in any case, which should mean properly-done stem cell research should bother exactly no one other than extreme Luddites.

Abortion, on the other hand, is murder in a lot of peoples’ opinion — and that’s hardly a religious question, unless you think you can only be moral if you are religious. And a “safe abortion” is a contradiction in terms anyway.  But it’s ALSO the law of the land, regardless of how you feel about the outcome of Roe v Wade.  My argument has long been that abortion needs to be removed from politics, because eventually the “Roe Effect” will take hold and it won’t be an issue anymore.***

TL;DR version:  I wish people would think about these things before they just generalize about them.  I’ve been thinking about them for over forty years, and a Facebook meme isn’t going to change my mind about any of them.

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* Of course, if people don’t vaccinate their kids, rubella is going to come back, and then the state will once again have a pressing interest in whether or not the potential mother is rubella-free.  But I’m sure that can be handled some other way.  Like by a family doctor testing her before or right after she gets pregnant.  (Before 1987, women had to have proof that they were rubella free before they could get married in Indiana.  In point of fact, even though this portion of the code was repealed in 1987, my wife still had to have a rubella test in 2000 before our county would give us the license.  Interesting.)

Also interesting is the fact that the bill in question in Indiana still prohibits polygamy.  Which is fine with me.

** I’m not going to go into this in depth, but the NIH says, “Human embryonic stem cells are thought to have much greater developmental potential than adult stem cells. This means that embryonic stem cells may be pluripotent—that is, able to give rise to cells found in all tissues of the embryo except for germ cells rather than being merely multipotent—restricted to specific subpopulations of cell types, as adult stem cells are thought to be. However, a newer type of reprogrammed adult cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells, has proven to be pluripotent.”  NIH FAQ regarding stem cells, research question #2, accessed 1/24/2017; bold emphasis mine.

*** For those who can’t reach the linked 2005 WSJ article by James Taranto,

The Roe effect, however, refers specifically to the nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion. It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents’ values. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party–that is, Republican–than they otherwise would have.

In my opinion, there’s more to the Roe Effect than whether or not a child is aborted or allowed to come to term and be born; it also depends on the consequences of education for that child.  A child can be born into a family that considers abortion to be murder, and through indoctrination in our public schools, come to the conclusion that a fetus isn’t human and can therefore be safely disposed of.  Such families also generally believe that sex should be confined to marriage and that it is a sin to have intimate relations before marriage.  Young girls from such families who find themselves fallen pregnant (a interesting term) typically believe that their best option to avoid punishment or disapprobation from their parents is to get an abortion, even though abortion is far worse than simply accepting fate and keeping the baby or giving it up for adoption — which have more consequences in and of themselves.  Perhaps the true solution is to stop telling children that premarital sex is a sin and will be punished by $DEITY, and tell them instead that sex is indeed a wonderful thing, a sacred mystery if you will, but it can lead to bad consequences for young girls who engage in it — and make it clear that even if a daughter finds herself pregnant, she’ll still be loved and accepted and everything that can be done to support her will be done.  Because I’ll bet you more girls run away from home to find an abortion when they find out they’re pregnant whose parents go all fire and brimstone on them about premarital sex than those whose parents are proactive and supportive even if the worst happens.

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