To deep sea creatures, humans are the “aliens.” We come down out of nowhere, shine bright lights everywhere, and casually steal a couple of the inhabitants to do experiments on back on our ships
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I don’t get irritated by people who disagree with me, so long as their disagreements don’t touch upon my equality or liberty. What motivates me to counter is when people post bad information, things that are objectively false and dangerously so. It is not within my nature to let that slide. I cannot let that pass by. Too many lives are riding upon whether or not humanity understands the actual facts.
But I am human, only one person, and so I inevitably must let some things go, even though I fear that ceding the public forum to people who have poor analytical skills is going to have fatal consequences for the most marginalised in our society.
The Internet has increasingly become an echo chamber of people preaching to their respective choirs. As a singer without a circus, I know I am one of the minority who cannot live in a state of ignorance that every one I know of course agrees with me. I know for certain they do not, that only a very small proportion of my friends agree with me. And I know that every time I say something with which my friends disagree, I risk those friendships and that were they to sever, I would be the one facing the greater loss.
Systems Design is my vocation. The design and construction of metaphysical and physical frameworks that structure our lives. This is why subjects like information systems and network design (which I did professionally for over two decades), philosophy, logical argumentation, architecture, political economy, constitutional law, and many others appeal to me and capture my attention, why I am so passionate about them.
In the context of my work, I am a quintessential ITNP, a Rational Architect, but in the values which form my ideals, ethics, and goals, I am ultimately an INFP, an Idealist Healer. It is in the synthesis and intersection of these where my vocation is grounded. My INTP side will not allow me to not analyse systems and improve them; my INFP side directs me to design systems not for the sterile sake of mathematical elegance, but for the sake of people—systems which support human well-being.
It is not ever my desire to force people into good behaviour, but to ensure that the systems upon which they depend reinforce good ideas and obviate bad ideas by design.
If we are going to have a safer, kinder, better society for everyone, we need to have a more thorough understanding of catastrophic risk and the psychology associated with it, as well as the real human costs of insuring against that risk, because that is, ultimately, what a firearm is: an insurance policy. The firearm is to the individual what Amendment II is to the Constitution—an insurance policy against catastrophic risk.
Catastrophic risk is unlike normal risk, because by definition, the consequences of it are irreversible, and catastrophic risk cannot and should not be treated the same way as normal risk. Catastrophic possible consequences justify seemingly disproportionate safeguards, and it should be obvious that this is a two-way street.
We must protect against the catastrophic risk of outlier events like the possibility of the collapse of democratic-republican constitutional government; terrorist attacks like those of September 11, 2001, which killed 2996 and injured over 6000; and the 97 mass shootings of the past 36 years which have claimed 816 lives, injured 1261 people, and victimised 2003 people. These numbers, of course, are before we even begin to account for the impacts on families, loved ones, communities, and the public and civic spheres.
The nature of rights is such that they constitute concurrent and possibly competitive claims. As is often said, “Your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose.” The determination of how we enact the protection of one right claim over another is rooted in the proposition that all the living are equal in dignity, and therefore must be regarded as having equal freedom to act according to individual will, provided that no harm to others’ equal rights occurs.The very premise of social contract theory is that, in order to secure a peaceable society, we must agree not to personally enforce our individual rights claims, for fear of harm to innocent parties.
This gives rise to the idea of a legitimate public interest in prevention of harm, and over the past 242 years, our nation has done a lot of work to improve our understanding of under which circumstances it is acceptable to curtail liberty in order to forestall undesirable consequences. While the nature of natural human rights demands that we take a default presumption of liberty, nothing about the nature of liberty prevents us from taking reasonable precautions to avert tragedy, disaster, or harm. We have well-established jurisprudential standards and procedures to assess whether the precautions we might take are warranted, reasonable, necessary, and proper. It is of vital importance to the health of our society that we acquaint ourselves with how these operate. The passions of the moment might doom us to unrecoverable circumstances.
Too much of the debate concerning firearms regulations is predicated on the idea that there are no negative consequences to laws which attempt to restrict access to firearms. While negative consequences are often difficult to quantify, it is patently obvious that they exist and occur. We cannot possibly have a reasoned judgement about what and how to regulate if we remain willfully ignorant of the actual facts.
The data shows clearly that the statistical difference between the US and other nations is that firearms get used here more often, so it’s not really even that we have more victims of violence, it’s that the victims don’t tend to live through the experience as often due to the greater lethality of a firearm.
The reason why Americans prefer firearms has a lot to do with our cultural mythos, which arose out of something most of the nations to which we are so often compared never really experienced—our access to wide swaths of mostly uninhabited land. European nations have a completely different relationship to land and arms than we do in the US.
The US is the first and longest continuously functioning constitutional democratic-republican society in human history. When this nation was founded, the nations of Europe were still living under feudal monarchies, in a crowded landscape, and most did not have access to arms. In the Americas, virtually every nation exists as a result of conquering the native peoples and spreading out into the wilderness, where arms provided protection and subsistence.
The mythos of the American Rifleman has persisted in our culture for three centuries, even though the vast majority of firearms owners rarely use their weapons and have to manufacture excuses like target practice and hunting to fire them.
Something needs to be done, clearly, but liberals continue to frame the debate as being one over “common sense gun safety legislation” when we already have extensive regulation of firearms in this country. What they are really talking about is violating one of the most fundamental rights upon which this country was founded, and every attempt to do so falls most heavily upon the most marginalised in our society.
It is hypocrisy for people who will stand up (or kneel, as the case may be) for Black Lives Matter on one hand, and call for more police power which disproportionately impacts Black lives.
Not to mention people who say, “Never Again” about the Holocaust and then say, “but that could never happen here”, while actual Nazis are marching in our streets. The Nazis were not defeated by throwing bagels and bialys at them. The Nazis gassed my forebears in the LGBT community and the Japanese invaded the homeland of my ancestors just 40 years after the US did the same.
Humanity will not evolve past war and violence until humanity evolves beyond seizing private property in Nature. Until that day comes, the vulnerable must have the right to remain armed.
When I say to people, “Look, we’ve been down this road 1000 times. More “gun control” is politically a non-starter. Why can’t we focus instead on things we *can* change? Why can’t we focus on making everyone’s lives better so that disaffected people don’t end up committing mass shootings and men don’t end up committing violence against women and suicide? Why are you so persistent in pursuing a remedy that will not work?“ I get for the most part no response, at all, or if I do, the response is, “but the guns”. When I say to people that we must focus on forestalling the impetus toward violence, not the implements by which people express it, I am told in so many words that I am a baby killer. There is no room in their discourse for any other solutions until and unless they get what they want, first. And that is holding us all hostage.
We have an ongoing social crisis in this country involving the very roots of American identity—specifically, American white male identity—and that crisis is expressing itself in reactionary authoritarian religionist politics and violence.
The questions we need to ask ourselves are, “What does it even mean to be an American, in a country literally founded not on a people or a cultural tradition, but on an innovative ideal of Equality, Liberty, and Justice for All? Why do people turn to violence? Why do people kill? Why do men commit violence against women?”
If we can answer these questions, if we can solve these questions—and we can—we can make the world a better place for everyone.
People turn to violence when they lose hope that peaceful means will bring them happiness. Happy, satisfied people don’t commit murder, no matter how many guns they own. So why are so many people so unhappy, so dissatisfied, so bereft of hope?
I’m pretty sure I know what the answer is, but the answer is uncomfortable for people all over the political spectrum, because every side is complicit in the same assumptions which underpin our entire socio-cultural-economic system that is driving people to wrack and ruin for the benefit of a very few.
If this all sounds like “Why can’t we all just get along?” that’s because it is. We can’t “just get along”, because we live in a society which is designed to pit everyone against each other in conflict, not cooperation. Life is not a zero sum game. We don’t have to have “winners” and “losers”. Homo sapiens is a social species, not a solitary species.
It’s time for us to evolve past simplistic binary thinking patterns. If we don’t, human civilisation may not last very much longer. For damned sure, this country won’t, and I for one don’t want to see the American Dream die out.
Gun control isn’t going to impact most of the people who are clamouring for it, for the very simple reason that most of the people crying for gun control don’t own or use firearms, and have no desire to do so, because they don’t hunt and don’t experience threats to their lives that firearms will solve.
And that’s a great thing! I don’t want to live in a society where I feel it is necessary to carry a firearm. A firearm is a lethal weapon, so when you have control of one, you must constantly be mindful of it. Going armed is exhausting and makes people paranoid. Look how cops react, the amount of stress they are under.
But neither do I present a danger to anyone who isn’t trying to harm other people, so I don’t want the government or the public treating me like a criminal because I recognise the full extent of my rights and responsibilities.
The root of all violence in our society is a faulty conception of private property in Nature and an illogical obsession with genetic inheritance of it. Women’s reproductive capacities are the gateway to inheritance, so men created patriarchy to control women’s bodies.
Every mother knows the child she gestates and births is hers; men have no such guarantee. If you want to fix Men, fix Property by emancipating men from the need to own Nature and to measure their worth by their wealth and their women.
As Jennifer Wright recently wrote in Harper’s Bazaar:
’ Shootings, whether they’re in Parkland, Orlando, Las Vegas or Sutherland Springs, all tend have one thing in common. It’s not that they’re done by mentally ill people (there is no true connection between people with a mental health diagnosis and mass shootings, according to experts), or that they’re radicalized minorities we should place travel bans on (white men have committed more mass shootings than any other group), or any of the other rhetoric we often hear from leaders.It’s that they’re almost always perpetrated by men.
Of all the mass shootings since 1982, only three have been committed by women. While women comprise about 50 percent of the victims of mass shootings, female mass killers are “so rare that it just hasn’t been studied,” according to James Garbarino, a psychologist at Loyola University Chicago.If basically all mass shooters were women, I can assure you we’d be talking about that.So let’s start talking about the culture of toxic masculinity that makes men believe they should get a gun and shoot people with it.
We live in a culture that worships men with guns. You can probably think of many off the top of your head—John Wayne, Indiana Jones or James Bond come immediately to mind. They’re all men who get what they want. Women are all eager to have sex with them. They have the respect of their peers and their communities.
Most of the men who commit mass shootings were not those widely admired men. They were men who felt they were owed something, and that the world was not providing what they were owed.In many of these mass shootings, the desire to kill seems to be driven by a catastrophic sense of male entitlement. In some cases, the perpetrators seemed to feel that if people did not give them precisely what they wanted, then those people did not deserve to live. The only just world, in their minds, was a world they were the center of. ’
Private property in Nature is Feudalism, turns all who own no part of Nature into the property of those who do own Nature, forcing them to labor for the profit of & at the whim of those who possess unearned privilege, rather than extracting their subsistence directly from Nature.When men are severed from property in Nature and therefore from subsistence, when they lose the things to which they feel entitled, they face an existential & identity threat, and violence is the result.
Men kill and abuse because they feel powerless, not because they have guns.The solution is not to take away his last symbol of autonomy. The solution is empower him and emancipate him from patriarchy by emancipating him from private property in Nature. Make land common property, tax unearned economic privilege via Land Value Tax, use it to fund Universal Basic Income, unviersal healthcare, and universal education. Give him self-actualisation, not dehumanisation, not demonisation, not denigration.
