Reactions to Boston: The Good, the Bad, and the Batshit Loony

May 20, 2013
Bombing Victim Jeff Bauman

Bombing Victim Jeff Bauman

A senseless act of violence (or a tragedy if you will) like the Boston Marathon bombing has a way of bringing out the best in most people. A wounded veteran of combat in Afghanistan comforted an injured woman, showing her his scars and assuring her that she would survive. An intern who had just finished a 14-hour hospital shift pitched right in and began treating the wounded. Hundreds of local residents rushed from their homes to supply water and first aid, sometimes using their belts for tourniquets.

Unfortunately, such an incident also brings out the worst in some people. For the right-wing fanatics, every such occasion is a golden opportunity to do what they live for: spread hate, divisiveness and paranoia — and try to score political points by taking cheap shots at President Obama and “liberals”.  Part of the spin after this particular incident was to declare that Obama is irresponsible and incompetent with national security because he allowed 3 Americans to be killed in a terrorist strike on American soil — while Bush kept us safe because he allowed only 3000 to be killed.

These folks can’t  even display enough respect for the victims or  basic human decency to wait a few hours before launching into attack mode; they start cranking out the venom as soon as the news breaks. Nothing is more important than giving voice to their irrational,  deranged, all-consuming hatred for the guy in the White House and anyone who might possibly like him even a little bit.

Naturally, guns always figure in the mix. Right on cue after Sandy  Hook, the gun lobby went into “it could have happened with a nail file” mode,  making puerile smears against anyone who dared challenge the supremacy of the almighty gun. The ever-entertaining National Review characterized Gabrielle Giffords’ outrage over the NRA’s grip on Congress as “childish” and “an embarrassment”.  The general attitude among right-wing reactionaries toward shooting victims is that by making their voice heard they are “bullies” and “props” of the Obama administration who have no business getting involved in the discussion over guns. And while the grief in Newtown was still raw, the NRA displayed its usual classiness by targeting the community with pro-gun robocalls and other propaganda.

But the attack in Boston wasn’t a shooting. So there was no reason to even bring up guns, eh? Do you really thing they’d let a little thing like that stop them? Sure, it took Wayne LaPierre a couple of weeks to proclaim that we obviously need more guns to protect us from pressure cookers –  to invoke the bombing in incendiary pro-gun rhetoric, and to exploit violence for personal gain, while accusing the proponents of “gun control” of doing the same, of course. (In case you didn’t know, when the president responds to gun violence by supporting measures to prevent it from occurring it again, that’s called political grandstanding and suppressing freedom; when the gun lobby exploits violence to whip up paranoia and increase profits, it’s called defending liberty. Everybody clear?)

But not to worry, Arkansas legislator Nate Bell took up the slack for LaPierre’s excessive delay. While authorities were in pursuit of the attackers, he Tweeted:

I  wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?

This understandably sparked a great deal of outrage, especially among Bostonians.  Some of the responses were as crude as his comment solicited. Others were more sophisticated. My favorite was this:

I invite you to Boston. So you can witness true toughness, compassion and humanity. Toughest city on earth. No guns required.

That’s the Boston I know and love. Incidentally Bell, unlike others of his breed, at least had the decency to issue a half-assed apology — not for the “content” but for the “timing”. In other words, it appears he still believes that anyone who doesn’t hide behind a hunk of metal is “cowering”, but he realizes he didn’t select the most tactful possible time to say so.

Immediately after the bombing,  right-wing pundit Laura Ingraham seized the opportunity to ratchet up the hysteria over immigration, and Fox contributor Erik Rush suggested of Muslims, “Let’s kill them all.” Mind you, both of these responses were delivered before ANYTHING was known about the suspects.  After the suspects were identified, and one of the alleged bombers and three of his acquaintances were discovered to be students at University Of Massachusetts-Dartmouth,  Bill O’Reilly concluded that there must be a “huge problem” with the school itself.

The Westboro Baptist Church also weighed in, blaming the violence on Obama, abortion and gays. Makes perfect sense if you snort gunpowder and Bibles long enough.  At least a couple of right-wing gun fanatics declared that “liberals” love it when things like this happen. (If anybody “loves” it, it would have to be the people who seek occasions to make idiotic utterances like that.) And dear old Rush Limbaugh concluded that the bombers were obviously influenced by the “liberal elite intellectual thought” in Boston. Can’t allow any of that intellectual thought, it’s quite dangerous — among other things, it might damage Rush’s ratings.

In fact, it appears the terrorists were influenced by rabidly right-wing slime merchant Alex Jones, whose tin hat delusions have been mainstreamed by Republicans in Congress (not the first time a terrorist has been a fan of his). Jones, who is gifted with an extraordinary capacity to find a sinister conspiracy in every leaf and snowflake, didn’t disappoint this time around.  Within MINUTES of the news from Boston, he was Tweeting things like this:

Our hearts go out to those that are hurt or killed #Boston marathon – but this thing stinks to high heaven #falseflag

Explosions at the Boston Marathon. Don’t that the FBI [sic] has been behind virtually every domestic terror plot in the US, as NY Times reported.

A False flag, in case you’re still unfamiliar with the term after all the batting about it’s been getting in the last few years,  is an incident in which a government attacks its own people (or even an individual fakes an attack on himself/ herself) in order to cast blame on someone else.  It has become an automatic response among the Alex Joneses of the world to declare that any terrorist attack, any disaster, any act of mass violence must have been staged by the Obama administration for some reason or other. The existence of emergency preparedness drills that utilize “crisis actors” is all the proof these folks need that the victims of actual disasters are merely faking it. There are people out there who believe that nobody really died in Boston, in Newtown, in Aurora, or even in the World Trade Center. And whenever you encounter such an individual,  the odds are excellent that he’ll be a fawning fan of Alex Jones.

It’s also an excellent bet that he’ll be a big fan of Alex’s chief rival for the Kool-Aid Crown, Glenn Beck — who also was true to form.  He declared not only that Obama was behind the bombing, but that he was shielding a Saudi who had carried out the deed at his behest. Furthermore, the Beckster gave the president an ultimatum to come clean by April 22, or else he would “expose” the administration big time. Don’t look now, Glenn, but April 22 has quietly come and gone, and you still haven’t exposed anyone but yourself — and most Americans are really wishing you’d zip it back up. By the way, don’t you and AJ even talk to each other enough to get your stories straight? Did the president orchestrate a real attack or a hoax? Sheesh!

Granted, some people also suspected initially that the culprits were connected with a radical Tea Party faction. (I was among them, but I exercised the discretion not to voice that suspicion in public.) After all, the attack occurred on tax day, and one of the primary objectives of the Tea Party is, supposedly, to protest taxes. It occurred in Boston, site of the real Tea Party. And Tea Party rhetoric tends to be incendiary, and often is laced with subtle and not-so-subtle exhortations to violence.  These are all solid facts, not just “evidence” pulled out of the ass of someone who’s been fed a steady diet of ideological frenzy. In any case, there’s a difference between entertaining suspicions and turning them into presumptions, paranoia, propaganda and perfidy.

The most sickening trope to make the rounds, for my money at least, concerned Jeff Bauman, who lost both of his legs to terrorism. The wingers circulated a graphic photo of him at the scene, falsely identifying him as a vet who’d lost his limbs in combat, and suggesting that he’d been fitted with prosthetics that day so he could add a touch of realism to the elaborate hoax. (As Snopes mentions, it’s a common tactic among perpetrators of such rumors to find a Person B who bears a superficial resemblance to Person A, and declare that they’re one and the same.)

In our own universe, however, Bauman’s legs were intact until April 15. But he did become a hero of sorts by assisting in the identification of the suspects. Heavily medicated in the hospital, and unable to speak, he nonetheless grabbed pen and paper and scribbled a note to indicate that he had seen one of the bombers. and the information he provided proved useful in zeroing in on the alleged terrorists.

This, surely, is Boston at its best. It’s what men like Jeff Bauman do while other people are using him as a prop to circulate nutty rumors about the president. And demonstrating their “patriotism” by venting their obsessive loathing for half of their fellow Americans.

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Posted by P.O.P.

Shades Of Subjectivity

April 18, 2013

Among those individuals who feel compelled to attack me because my writing challenges their beliefs, the most common refrains are along these lines: “You’re promoting your own ideology”; “You’re just as biased as the people you’re criticizing”; “You’re just expressing your opinion”; “You’re called The Propaganda Professor because you’re trying to teach propaganda”. These knee-jerk comments are not particularly worth responding to in themselves, but taken as a whole they reveal some interesting misunderstandings about subjectivity that we might as well try to clear up.

Here’s a sampling from my mailbag:

Like all propagandists, you’re just too quick to remind your readers that you’re somehow immune from bias. “Aw shucks, I’m just a home plate umpire who simply calls balls and strikes”…No educated person over thirty is unbiased or impartial. …. By the time one reaches your age, unless you’re a moron incapable of reason, or have been living in a vacuum, you’ve acquired a specific set of beliefs like anyone else. To suggest otherwise, like you do, is delusional.

Wow. It’s always amusing to hear form those people (total strangers) who claim to know me better than I know myself. I can only assume that they’re not only professing to be extremely gifted psychoanalysts, but also extremely gifted psychics. I must inform them, however, that their Ouija boards are very much in need of a trip to the shop for an overhaul. It’s hard to imagine a more knotted tangle of misconceptions than that above, which all came from a single reader.

One problem I keep seeing is that there is often a tendency to bundle bias, opinion, ideology, distortion and propaganda into a single entity — and then to demonstrate confusion about what each one really is. They’re all quite distinct, however, though they all are indicators of subjectivity. Let’s take a look at the different types, or shades of subjectivity if you will, and some examples of each.

1. Objectivity (“The ice cream parlor sells chocolate as well as vanilla.”)

This is simply a straightforward reporting of the facts, with absolutely no intrusion of personality or judgment. Or is there? Why are the flavors listed in that particular order? Are there also other flavors that have been omitted? Why does the speaker feel compelled to say “as well as”, as if there would be any question about it? Why “as well as” instead of “both…and” or just “and”?

The truth is that aside from such very fundamental propositions as “two plus two equals four” or “the earth orbits around the sun”, it’s virtually impossible to maintain total objectivity. Nor is there necessarily any reason why we should in many cases. Subjectivity does not by any means automatically compromise accuracy.

When I first began writing this blog, I had the intention of striving for as purely an objective a tone as possible. I soon abandoned this criterion for two reasons: first, staying behind that line is so difficult that even balancing on it could be perceived as a failure to adhere to my objective; and second, subjectively presented material is just more fun and interesting both to write and to read.

2. Normal Subjectivity (“Fortunately, the ice cream parlor sells chocolate and vanilla.”)

So if we can’t have pure objectivity, then naturally our observations are tinged with our own likes and dislikes.  The speaker of the above comment feels that it’s a good thing that both chocolate and vanilla are being sold, and says so. Notice that this does not alter the accuracy of the central fact being related: the two flavors are still being sold, whether it’s fortunate or not.

Quite often, it’s a matter of what labels or adjectives are applied to a particular person, group of people or thing.  Note the difference, for example, between “gun rights advocates”, “gun culture” and “gun nuts”. They all might refer to the same group of people, but the individuals doing the referring are exhibiting very different attitudes. Or note the difference between “environmental activists”, “elite environmentalists” and “tree huggers”.

Again, these are examples of what we call “normal” subjectivity. There is no distinct dividing line on the scale of subjectivity that separates the “normal” from the extreme or calculated forms of subjectivity. The scale isn’t like a guitar fingerboard, where frets mark the distinct gradations. It’s more like the board on a violin, where the steps aren’t conspicuous, but are still evident when heard by a trained ear.

Yes, I exhibit subjectivity of my own. I find it very difficult, for example, to speak of Dick Cheney without the same snarl he displays when anyone dares challenge his supremacy. But that doesn’t mean that I lie or distort the facts when I’m discussing him. There’s no need to.

3. Bias (“The ice cream parlor sells chocolate and other flavors.”)

Here there’s a very strong indication that the speaker favors chocolate over the “other flavors”. And that’s generally what bias boils down to: a manifest preference for one thing over another.  And it’s usually expressed in one of two ways: how much coverage you give one thing versus another, or how favorable or unfavorable that coverage is.  Bias tends to be quite consistent within a given source, whereas “normal” subjectivity may or may not be.

Yet bias itself is not undesirable, nor does it necessarily indicate inaccuracy or falsehood. People sometimes call Fox “the most biased name in news”, which is certainly true enough if you actually classify the network as a news source, but the complaint is not particularly relevant. The problem with Fox is not that it’s biased; the problem with Fox is that it relentlessly lies and distorts, and passes off propaganda as legitimate news. These are not always functions of bias.

In sharp contrast, Media Matters for America is also quite biased. But unlike Fox, it makes no effort to conceal the fact, loudly proclaiming that it exists specifically to combat “conservative misinformation”. Yet Media Matters is excruciatingly thorough and accurate, and indeed more fair and balanced than Fox will ever be in its wildest nightmares. It also comes about as close as humanly possible to a purely objective journalistic voice.

4. Opinion (“The ice cream parlor sells chocolate and vanilla, the two best flavors.”)

Opinion entails not only expressing your preferences, but your beliefs.  Such opinions frequently are conclusions based on a subjective definition of terms or subjective interpretation of facts. The conclusion, for example, that chocolate and vanilla are the “best” flavors might be based on the fact that they are the most popular — which in turn might be defined by sales volume.

But even opinion does not necessarily signal inaccuracy or dishonesty — not unless the speaker tries, as in the above example, to pass off those opinions and beliefs as fact. I probably don’t have to tell you that his happens constantly in the media and in politics.

Certainly, you’ll find an occasional opinion in my writings, but not that often. And only about minor matters — not as the main thrust of the discussion. This is not a blog of opinion but of facts. And when readers declare that I’m just expressing my opinion, they’re almost always confused.

A good example is the following statement from my post The Myth Of Hitler’s Gun Ban.

Given all of this, it’s pretty hard to make a case that “gun control” played a significant role in Nazi conquest.

Which also I paraphrased elsewhere by saying that “there is no reason to believe” it would have made a difference had the Jews been better armed. This, the Psychic Psychoanalysts proclaim, is mere opinion; and they just know that with a few more weapons, the Jews could have avoided their fate.

But in fact it is they who are expressing an opinion, and they have damn little to support it. It is a historical fact that oppressed minorities have usually fared poorly in armed conflicts against their oppressors, and nobody has yet presented any reason to believe that Jews in Germany would have been an exception — no reason except, “they just would have, that’s all”.

Now if I’d said instead that “it would not have made any difference had the Jews been better armed”, then you might get away with calling that an opinion, albeit a highly informed one. But when I say “there is no reason to believe…” any such thing, I am not being speculative or opinionated but realistic.

5. Propaganda (“The ice cream parlor sells chocolate, which raises your IQ, and vanilla, the favorite of terrorists.”)

Propaganda, as we define the term here (and as it’s almost always defined in contemporary society) is deliberately manipulating, distorting or misrepresenting the truth in order to persuade other people to believe or disbelieve a certain thing. This is the sin that reactionary detractors love to accuse me of, since it’s the very thing I decry. But they have yet to produce any instances of my doing so.

Certainly, I have beliefs of my own. I believe that the earth orbits around the sun, that Paris is a city in France, and that my eyes are blue. But unlike most other people (certainly most Americans) I don’t crave having beliefs, and will do everything I can to avoid them; it takes a great deal to get me to believe anything.

Perhaps what the commentator meant to say was that I have values and principles of my own. This is true as well, of course. Indeed, I have probably more or less the same values and principles you do: justice, fairness, honesty, tolerance, love, truth, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But we don’t all always have the same concept of what constitutes these things or how best to achieve them. Thus ideologies are born.

And contrary to rumor, I don’t have any ideology of my own. An ideology, as we commonly use the term,  is not just a set of principles, values and/or beliefs. It’s a standardized set of beliefs. I am not a Democrat, a Republican, a communist, a fascist, a socialist, a capitalist, a Libertarian, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist or a Scientologist. My practice is to see the positives and negatives in all such ideologies, and to weigh each issue on its own merits rather than how it fits into a preconceived template.

Yes, it requires more effort. But it’s worth it.

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Posted by P.O.P.

Circular Firing Squad; the Gun Culture’s Curious Campaign of Irony, Hypocrisy, Contradiction and Self-Abasement

April 3, 2013

Let’s be clear: most gun owners are (to the best of my knowledge) rather sane and reasonable individuals. But the public forum has never been dominated by sanity or reason. Instead, it’s dominated by those who are the loudest and most obnoxious; thus, gun issues are perennially represented by what we call the gun culture –  meaning those to whom guns are not only important, but are a way of life. It’s a relatively small cult, but its members are mad as hell about… well, something. Always. They’re loud, they’re obnoxious, they’re confrontational, and — quite often — they’re self-sabotaging and downright cannibalistic.

I probably don’t have to tell you how they reacted when the President of the United States uttered the following:

“While we recognize that assault-weapon legislation will not stop all assault-weapon crime, statistics prove that we can dry up the supply of these guns, making them less accessible to criminals.” And “Certain forms of ammunition have no legitimate sporting, recreational, or self-defense use and thus should be prohibited.”

And you surely can guess how they screeched when the head of the nation’s foremost gun control organization declared this:

“I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons… I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

“Nazi”? “Communist”? “Terrorist”? “Frenchman”? Actually, it might surprise you to learn that they said none of these things. I tricked you. The president quoted above wasn’t Barack H. Obama, but Ronald W. Reagan.  That’s right: The Gipper was an outspoken, if not entirely consistent, advocate of “gun control”, even before he had a personal stake in it.  (And incidentally, in the photo above, taken just before he was shot, he’s surrounded by armed and highly trained gunmen whose sole responsibility is his safety. Which casts a very long shadow of doubt on the gunsters’ prime tenet that surrounding yourself with fire power necessarily makes you safer.)

This is a cause of considerable cognitive dissonance among gunsters, many of whom desperately want to paint the debate over guns as a “liberal” vs. “conservative” conflict, and to peg  “gun control” as being a matter of “them librulz want to take away our guns, but I’m gonna fight off a whole army of them.” But in fact many “liberals” (specifically, about 25 percent of Democrats) own guns and many “conservatives” support “gun control” — even those measures pushed by President Obama, whom they’ve been conditioned to oppose at every turn. This despite the fact that some polls frame the issue as  “gun control” versus “the right to own guns”, which is a bullshit stacked-deck question — the two are by no means mutually exclusive.

Michael Moore is a lifetime member of the NRA. James Brady, lest we forget, was a (Republican) member of Reagan’s staff before he became an activist after the reality of gun violence struck too close to home.  In other words, “gun control” is not the most suitable of lenses for those wishing to view the world in black and white, and it appears the gun culture is intentionally alienating people whom they could very much use as allies. The evidence suggests that for the past three decades, the NRA’s primary focus has been promoting reactionary politics rather than promoting responsible gun ownership.

Not only most gun owners, but most members of the NRA support one or more gun control measures. The NRA leadership, however, routinely battles any and every measure to regulate firearms in any fashion. In so doing, they are countering the wishes of most of their followers. Yet their followers continue to be loyal; if that isn’t characteristic of a cult, what is?

It was not always thus. Remember that quote above from the leader of the most prominent “gun control” organization? We don’t mean James Brady. Those words were spoken by Karl Frederick, an Olympic shooter who at the time he made this statement was president of the NRA. Yes, that NRA.  For the first century of its existence, the NRA was the foremost advocacy group for “gun control” in the nation. But that was before it discovered that there are much heftier profits to be made by vilifying “gun control”  and its proponents, and whipping up hysteria among impressionable tin hat right-wingers. But by ferociously battling “gun control”, LaPierre and company are not only spitting in the faces of their constituents, but spitting upon their organization’s own heritage.

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, and the NRA was still in its “gun control” phase, “conservative” politicians were very much in favor of placing heavy restrictions on firearms. One reason was that, in California at least, they were facing what they perceived as a threat to public safety posed by, um, certain armed citizens:

Black-Panther-Party-armed-guards-in-street-shotguns

This even led to the passage of a law in the state, the Mulford Act, which was signed into effect by Gov. Reagan, who commented that he saw ”no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”  And the NRA, by the way, helped fashion similar legislation in other states. Its own actions weren’t necessarily motivated by racial concerns; remember, it had been a champion of firearm regulation all along. For Reagan and other right-wing politicians, however, it’s hard not to conclude that they were dirtying their drawers not just because of armed citizens, but armed citizens of a particular ethnic flavor.

I don’t mean to suggest that race plays a significant role in right-wing “gun control” politics or anything. I’m sure that if a bunch of armed white guys showed up at a public gathering, the NRA and The Tea Party would be just as concerned and outraged. Wouldn’t they?

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Well, they have yet to demonstrate it. And they have yet to demonstrate that they’re as concerned about deranged mass murderers with guns as they are about African-American activists with guns.  Yet today’s NRA diehards, while denying any racist bent to their own motivations, often declare that racism has always been a prime motive for “liberal”- inspired “gun control” — in large part because over 150 years ago, unarmed slaves had a hard time fighting for their freedom. Yes, seriously.

Despite its ill-informed elevation of Ronald Reagan to figurehead status, one could make a case that the gun culture really didn’t have a warm and cuddly bedmate in the White House until Bush. The younger Bush. His father, though he had the backing of the NRA during his initial run for president in 1988, pissed them off so much during his term that they opposed him during his second run. Three years later he renounced his lifetime membership in the cult when Wayne LaPierre (who at that time was its executive vice president) called ATF agents “jack-booted thugs” who were “scarier than the Nazis”. The NRA is a group that likes to portray itself as super-patriotic, doncha know.

Bush had been personally acquainted with several agents, including one who died in the Oklahoma City blast, which was fueled by NRA-flavored contempt for “the government”. And while I don’t know how many federal agents had been NRA boosters before McVeigh and LaPierre detonated their respective bombs, I’m willing to bet that there were considerably fewer subsequently. Way to rally those troops, Wayne.

Then along came Bush the Younger, and the gun lobby was in hog heaven. Oh, he didn’t do quite as much ass-kissing as they would have liked, and on occasion he even paid lip service to stricter gun laws. But on the other hand he appointed two Supreme Court justices who were willing to essentially rewrite the Second Amendment to the gun lobby’s liking. You can’t hope for much more than that.

And Dick Cheney, who was vice president (at least according to the Supreme Court) openly indulged in passionate lovemaking with the NRA, even speaking at its convention. And here’s where something really interesting happened. While addressing an assemblage of a cult that had become devoted to the maxim that any kind of restraint against firearms was pure evil (no word on whether he consulted his hunting partners on that), Mr. Cheney exercised the most extreme form of “gun control” of all: attendees had to check their hardware at the door.

I know, I know: it was really the Secret Service who insisted on this, and not the Mr. Cheney-who-never-thinks-about-his-flaws himself. But c’mon: he was the second most powerful human on the planet (many would say, with good reason, that he was actually the first). You mean to say that he couldn’t have overridden their orders if he hadn’t considered his own safety more important than that of the average citizen affected by the presence of guns? He and the NRA had a golden opportunity to practice what they preached, and send a message to the nation about just how sincere they were in standing against “gun control”. But they blew it big time.

Am I suggesting that the prohibition against the audience being armed at an appearance by the putative vice president is the same as the type of “gun control” that is applied to society at large? Not at all.  Society at large is made up of all kinds of people in all kinds of situations. The annual gun cult gathering is a highly controlled environment, and for Cheney’s appearance, it was patrolled by a top-notch security force. It was attended by people who are allegedly responsible, law-abiding gun owners — most of whom believe that an armed society is a polite society and guns make you safer and guns don’t kill, people do. But when confronted with the chance to put their barrels where their mouths are, Cheney and his NRA accomplices essentially told the faithful to go Cheney themselves, and did exactly what so many of them falsely accuse Barack Obama (and Adolf Hitler) of doing: they took away everyone’s guns.

And that brings us to the present, and to the chief executive who, for some reason or other, is even more of a godsend for the gunsters — not because he gives them everything they want, but because they can get away with pretending that he’s trying to take away everything they have. In the real world, Obama is no more restrictive on guns than was Reagan; and for that matter, he’s only slightly more “liberal”. Yet the gun culture deifies one and demonizes the other. Which leads one to suspect rather strongly that his complexion might be a factor — particularly when one considers that the gunsters are even far more hostile toward Obama than they were toward Clinton, even though the latter was at least as gung ho about “gun control”, at least as “liberal”, and was a Democrat to boot.

We’ve already given far, far FAR more attention to the Obama-Hitler meme (here, and here and here) than it ever deserved. Unfortunately, it’s still bringing in the lion’s share of page views and comments on this site. No wonder; it’s a trope so misguided, so hateful, so deranged, so monumentally idiotic that it was bound to become a solid fixture in the gunster gospel. The “thinking” goes like this: because Obama is trying to outlaw guns (which he isn’t) that makes him just like Hitler (who also didn’t), whose nonexistent gun ban made the Holocaust possible.

These are the same folks who love to proclaim that “gun control doesn’t work”, yet they also declare that “gun control” was nonetheless responsible for the quintessential tyranny and genocide in world history. When I point out this contradiction to them, the response I tend to get is “You fucking moron! This is different!” Oh. Now I’m really confused. Is Obama a Hitler clone or isn’t he? Does “gun control” work or doesn’t it? What’s that you say? Ah. “Gun control” doesn’t work to reduce crime, but it does work to enable a dictator to control the populace. So it always works to try to eliminate all guns, but it never works to try to eliminate just a few of them. Got it.

It has become an automatic response from gunsters to “defend” guns and all the harm they do by claiming that more people are killed by knives and/or blunt instruments. Both of which are irrelevant. Not to mention not even close to being true.  And of course, they absolutely must point out that more people are killed by automobiles. Which actually is true, but probably not for long. True or not, it’s a breathtakingly inept attempt at defense. Automobiles are designed for a constructive purpose rather than for killing, and are in use constantly, everywhere. Furthermore, their use is rather strictly regulated. Gunsters are being sarcastic when they suggest that those deadly cars should be regulated like guns; but I doubt if any advocates for gun regulation would have any problem with taking that quite literally.

The Second Amendment crowd particularly has its thong in a bunch over the president’s drawing a bead on assault weapons. It isn’t just that they don’t think assault weapons should be restricted; they don’t think there’s any such thing as an assault weapon. It is, they assert, just a fuzzy term made up by the media and other assorted libruls as an excuse to deprive them of their liberty.

Really? Looks like somebody forgot to pass that memo along to the Merchants of Death themselves:

Welcome to Assault Rifles For Sale DOT COM

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What’s that? “There’s a difference between assault rifle and assault weapon, you fucking commie Nazi gun-grabbing librul moron”? Oh. Sorry.
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Okay, let’s see if we can sort it all out. It’s forbidden for those outside the cult to use the A-word, even though those inside do. It’s mandatory to point out that automobiles kill more people than guns, but taboo to suggest that maybe guns should be regulated at least a fraction as much as automobiles. “Gun control” always fails, except for when it always succeeds. Obama is just like Hitler, except for when he’s totally different.  Obama is an enemy of the Second Amendment for wanting to ban assault weapons, but Reagan was a champion of the Second Amendment for wanting to ban assault weapons, certain types of ammunition, and armed civilians in the streets. Guns make you safer in the streets, but they can’t be permitted in a controlled environment — at least not if a right-wing VIP is making a speech. “Gun control” is racist when proposed by “liberals” because slaves were prohibited from owning guns (along with many, many other things) more than 150 years ago; but just ignore those instances of genuinely racist gun regulation 40 years ago, because they were crafted by the NRA and right-wing politicians, who are never guilty of such things. Everybody up to speed now?
But there’s even more to the tale. In a snit over new proposed gun laws, some American firearms companies, like spoiled schoolyard brats who take their bats and go home if everyone doesn’t play by their rules, have started refusing to sell their products to law enforcement agencies that support the restrictions; and members of the gun culture consider this very cute and clever.  What they may not realize is that many law enforcement agencies already had been planning to boycott firearms manufacturers that didn’t clean up their act. In any case it’s an excellent illustration of just how warped the gun culture mentality is when gun companies think they can teach police departments a lesson by cutting off  40 percent of their own revenues. There are plenty of foreign gun companies that are quite willing to do business with American law enforcement agencies. And if it becomes necessary for a substantially larger number of them to do so, it probably will result in greater expense to those agencies, which eventually will be passed on to citizens in the form of higher taxes and fees. And chances are the gun culture, being composed largely of rabid anti-government types, will not consider that very cute and clever.
But seeing long-term consequences is not exactly their strong suit. So for the time being, giddy from inhaling Second Amendment helium, they’re hellbent for leather on shooting themselves in both feet. And sticking both feet in their mouths.
(NOTE: As you’ve probably noticed, “gun control” is, like “liberal” and “conservative”, one of those terms I invariably enclose in quotation marks. There are mainly two reasons for this: (1) the expression has been co-opted by the gun culture as a term of derision; (2) it was never very accurate in the first place. Guns in the U.S. are WAY beyond “control”, but at least they can be regulated to some extent.
Incidentally, some gunsters object on similar grounds to the term “gun culture”, which is actually rather precise and appropriate. In any case, I’ve never known any of them to provide an alternative — much less a satisfactory one. I’m open to suggestions.)

11 Comments | Culture, Guns, Politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by P.O.P.

Mother Jones Shoots Down Rambo

March 25, 2013

In case you missed it, the April issue of Mother Jones features a short but potent piece called “10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down”. These 10 myths include the favorite mindless canards you so often hear parroted by the gun culture, including “They’re Coming For Your Guns”, “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People” and (my favorite) “An Armed Society is a Polite Society”.

Needless to say, the NRA took notice and started “debunking” this debunking. Subsequently, MJ has run a debunking of the debunking of the debunking, which holds up to scrutiny much better than the NRA’s attempted ambush or a similar one run by National Review.

No matter how heavily armed you are (or think you are), it’s not a good idea to mess with Mother.

5 Comments | Guns, Myths | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by P.O.P.

More on the Myth of Hitler’s Gun Ban, Part 2

March 10, 2013

historical-photos-rare-pt2-hitler-gustav-railway-gun

( a continuation of the previous post which was the continuation of a prior post)

Salient Point # 3: Yes, the Jews fought back. So what?

Of all the statements I made in my original post, the one that seems really to stick in the craw of the gunsters the most was this:

But the concept of a handful of citizens armed with hunting rifles and Saturday night specials fending off an army is delusional hubris peculiar to gun addicts.

That was just too much reality for some of them to take, and so they accused me of being not only full of bovine fecal matter, but of being (somehow) disrespectful to the victims of the Holocaust. One “rebuttal” even characterized my research as “outrageous” and “disturbing” (unlike, say, having a bunch of deranged individuals playing with loaded weapons).  Because, as some of them hastened to point out, some of the Jews did fight back, and did so most valiantly. And in particular the gunsters point to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as proof that my “opinion” is dead wrong.

Sometimes I really need a crowbar to pry my jaw off the  floor. I can’t imagine a more vibrant example of people arguing against their own position.

Yes, the Jews fought back, in Warsaw and many other places. They staged more than 100 acts of armed resistance, according to Wikipedia. Sometimes they did some damage, and a few of the perpetrators even lived to tell about it. And guess what? All of these insurgencies combined still failed to stop the Holocaust. So explain to me again exactly how mentioning them is supposed to discredit my conclusion?

I don’t mean to suggest that the Jews should not have resisted somehow, even violently. Desperate times call for desperate measures. But the odds were overwhelmingly against them, just as they are overwhelmingly against any group of armed citizens facing off against an armed government. Considering that their score was zero out of 100-plus at preventing the Holocaust, how can anyone believe that their acts of armed resistance prove the odds were in their favor?

Oh, wait. There’s something I forgot to include. The gunsters also maintain that even though the Jews were, in some cases, armed, they just didn’t have enough arms. If only the Jewish resistors could have gotten their hands on more hardware, they assert, the tide would have turned. They’re not even speculating about this; it’s something they absolutely and unequivocally know to be true.

Time out.

Could these possibly be the same gunsters who proclaim, loudly and at every opportunity, that “gun control doesn’t work”? And yet in the next breath they declare that beyond a shadow of a doubt, “gun control” is the one thing that made the Holocaust possible? Which is it, folks? Does “gun control” work or doesn’t it? Are you saying that it only works on Jews?

No, wait, it must work on any other oppressed people as well. Because according to the Gunster Gospel, the first thing a dictator does when seizing control is to take away people’s guns (even though an armed populace can effectively resist tyranny) and then he can commit genocide and do whatever else he pleases because the people are unarmed and therefore powerless (even though “gun control” doesn’t work). Everybody clear now?

If, as the gunsters so often insist, people who are sufficiently motivated to get their hands on guns will do so no matter what kind of laws they are violating, then one must assume that the Jews were armed to the teeth. What more powerful motivation could there possibly be than survival? But no matter how adequate or inadequate their arsenal may have been, one thing is for certain: the Nazi arsenal was far superior.

Likewise, the gun nuts who are itching for a chance to take down Uncle Sam in a showdown at the corral seem to be convinced that if they only could acquire more and bigger toys, then the momentum would shift in their direction. Sorry, gun nuts; you will always be pitifully outnumbered and pitifully outgunned.

Salient Point # 4: The exceptions really aren’t.

It appears I may have goofed again. A moment ago, I stated that when a small band of armed citizens defend themselves against armed government forces, the odds are overwhelmingly against them. What I probably should have said instead was that the odds of their success are essentially nonexistent — at least if history is any guide. Because I can’t think of a single unequivocal exception to this rule.

The gunsters, however, are convinced that they can.  There are several examples in particular that they keep lobbing in my direction: Afghanis against Soviets, the South Vietnamese against the North Vietnamese and even (I kid you not) the American Revolution. But none of these qualifies as an instance of a small contingent of armed citizens defending themselves against their government.

In each of these conflicts, the insurgents formed an army and/or were aided by outside forces; in the first two, it was the United States supplying much of the firepower. In the Revolution, the colonists formed their own organized and trained army (not just a band of armed citizens) and they were substantially aided by other armies — most notably, that of France. (Sorry, gun nuts. I know many of you love to believe that the French are anti-American socialist pussies; but the truth is that to a very large extent you owe to them the liberty you so fervently claim to cherish.) In each of these wars, moreover, the defenders were warding off invaders on their home turf — which was not the case in Germany.

And what about the French Revolution? Yes indeed, those brie-nibblers did have their own revolt and it was indeed successful, but it was a multi-pronged social upheaval rather than just a military action. And it wasn’t fought by just a small group of people, but by a large contingent of revolutionaries, including soldiers, against a corrupt aristocracy.  Note also that they were on the offensive rather than the defensive end of the clash.

Such also was the case with the successful Cuban revolution, which probably stands the best chance of providing a solid exception. The victorious revolutionary force was quite small, but it employed guerilla tactics quite effectively, essentially assuming the character of a military unit. (As I’ve mentioned before, the dividing line between civilian and military factions is sometimes blurry.) Perhaps most significantly, the Cuban guerillas had the support of the people, who were fed up with the Batista regime.

Support is crucial in such situations, which is one of many reasons why the Tea Partiers would be crushed like bugs if they ever attempted to emulate Castro’s success by storming Washington. Not only would government forces have them woefully outnumbered and outgunned, but few citizens would have their back. Most Americans would rather stick with a duly elected president, even if they don’t particularly like him, than line up behind the likes of  Wayne LaPierre.  By the way, history failed to repeat itself in Cuba only a couple of years later, when a counter-revolution failed to overthrow Castro (who is yet another dictator whom the gun culture falsely accuses of banning guns).

Which brings us back to the Jews in Germany. Some detractors have suggested that it really wouldn’t have been necessary for them to win in a conflict with the Nazi troops; just by attracting the attention of the rest of the world, they could have drawn sympathetic reinforcements that could have toppled Hitler. In other words, if they’d fought back — which they did, many times over — with better weapons — which they were prevented from acquiring by “gun control” — which doesn’t work — then it would have prevented the Holocaust — which may or may not actually have happened, depending on which gunster you ask. Such a presumption, however, ignores the most crucial factor of all.

Salient Point # 5: Hitler had a more potent weapon.

It could be found even on the other side of the world, on the seat of every new Ford motor car that rolled off the assembly line, in the form of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, an apocryphal tome detailing how the Jews were supposedly scheming to take over the world. Henry Ford, a virulent anti-Semite, felt that every citizen (or at least every citizen who could afford to buy one of his automobiles) should have a complimentary warning about the Jewish menace.

It wasn’t just this one book that made the difference, by any means. Ford spread calumny about the Jewish people in other ways as well; he compiled his own anti-Semitic book, ran anti-Semitic rants in a newspaper he owned, and even supplied financial backing for the Nazi cause. Nor was he the only prominent American to do so. Numerous American tycoons and businesses provided financial and/or rhetorical support to Hitler and his conquest. Among them were William Randolph Hearst and a banking firm connected to Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W.

With that kind of bankroll, fueled by poisonous rhetoric, in support of the Nazis worldwide, it’s staggeringly naive to suggest that a small band of Jewish rebels, or even a large number of small bands of Jewish rebels, could have gained enough international traction to help them topple Goliath — particularly given that the Nazis controlled the media in Germany, and could censor and spin the news at their discretion.  And all the while, they were convincing people that in fact it was the Jews themselves who dominated the media. Thus they circulated illustrations like this one:

nazi propaganda

The Nazis were masters of propaganda, which saturated every level of their society at every age stratum. We’ve previously mentioned that the nursery rhymes their children were taught glorified weaponry. Additionally, the math problems they learned dealt with killing their enemies, invalids and other “undesirables”. Propaganda is arguably the most powerful weapon on earth, depending on how one defines power. The Nazis had one of the most potent arsenals of it in history; and the Jews were its prime target.

In sum, the notion that resistance by the Jews could have averted their fate — or that “gun control” was crucial to Nazi dominance – is wild speculation at best. There is scarcely a drop of evidence to support either conclusion. And an ocean of evidence to contradict them both.

A Parting Irony

And in concluding (I hope) the discussion of this topic that has dragged on much longer than I ever planned, I can’t help noting how ironic it is that the smears comparing President Obama to Hitler invariably come from right-wing extremists.  Because they themselves have much more in common with Nazism than does the president. No no no, I am not saying that they are Nazis (except for those who actually call themselves Nazis — we’ll allow them that privilege if they want it) but they at least lean in that general direction. Enough so that their likening Obama to Hitler is rather akin to the whoopee cushion calling the football flat.

Of course, if you want to play the reductio ad hitlerum game, you can always find some way in which Hitler resembles absolutely anyone. Even me; although I find Nazism detestable and see nothing the least bit admirable about Hitler, I have brown hair and a mustache and I’m a vegetarian and a writer and an amateur artist. Just like Adolf. Perhaps if you dug into his biography deeply enough, you might find that he once had a pet rabbit and raised underwear on his high school’s flagpole just as I once did.

But when we speak of the ideological kinship between Nazism and contemporary American “conservatism”, we’re referring to values that are far more fundamental: jingoistic nationalism, hawkishness, corporatism, patriarchalism, strong alliance between church and state, and “traditional values”.  Not to mention a raging hard-on for firearms. If you look at the list of Americans and American firms who aided and supported Hitler, you’ll find that they were almost entirely right-wing. And years later, it was a Republican president who honored Nazi soldiers.

Additionally, both Nazism and “conservatism” revolve to a great extent out of demonizing the others; moreover, they largely even target the same scapegoats: communists, secularists, homosexuals, university intellectuals, unions, religious minorities, and assorted “liberals”. And like the Nazis, the “conservatives” also saturate the media with accusations that those whom they most despise are really the ones who manipulate the media:

bigjournalism-20110314-antisemeticimage

This is a cartoon intended to depict how “liberals” supposedly control the media. Notice anything familiar about it? It was used no fewer than three times on the popular right-wing website Breitbart.com. (The man is gone but his brilliant legacy lives on.) It was eventually removed from two of the posts in question, but the last I heard, the bright folks at Breitbart still have not apologized for what might charitably be termed a dire lapse in judgment.

I may have said this before, but it bears at least one reiteration. Whenever group A wages an intensive campaign to demonize group B, it’s wise to be more suspicious of the former than the latter. If there’s one lesson the Holocaust really should have taught us, that’s it.

70 Comments | Guns, History, Myths | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by P.O.P.

More on the Myth of Hitler’s Gun Ban (Part 1)

February 18, 2013

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Thanks to a routine gun massacre at a school, a plug of this blog by Randi Rhodes, and the routine level of rabidly hateful insanity spewing out of the Second Amendment crowd, my previous post on The Myth of Hitler’s Gun Ban, written more than a year ago, has suddenly been catapulted through the stratosphere, at least by my readership’s usual standards: more than 32,000 hits in one day alone. And I’m pleased to see that, for the most part, the new comments have been civil, informed, and sometimes thought-provoking. This even applies to many individuals who chose to challenge my research.

And then there are the others: the gun fanatics who resent being deprived of one of their pet myths, and come out with hardware blazing in an effort to hold onto it. Some have accused me of being “misleading”, though they haven’t been able to tell me exactly how I’ve misled. Some have suggested that I’m an admirer of Hitler myself; or that I want to take away their guns like he didn’t; or that I’m anti-Semitic for pointing out that the Jews were unable to resist Nazi oppression.

For some of these folks, it’s very, very important to believe that Hitler banned guns, because their window on the universe looks something like this: (1) President Obama is trying to ban guns; (2) Hitler banned guns; (3) therefore Obama is Hitler reincarnate; (4) therefore we need to prepare for the day when he’ll come banging our door down and dragging us off to a FEMA concentration camp, where we’ll be either converted to Islam, or will be tortured and killed; (5) thus, we must stockpile as many weapons as possible and coincidentally stack up some healthy profits for Lord LaPierre and company.

“The first thing a tyrant does”, they often say, “is take away people’s guns”.  Whereupon they point to a string of historical dictators who supposedly did just that, and proclaim that President Obama belongs in that nefarious procession himself. They’re quite mistaken on every count (for one thing, tyrants seldom attach as much significance to “gun control” as gun nuts do), but as one gathers from their frequent attempts to politicize the gun debate to the nth degree, it doesn’t matter whether you have the right facts, so long as you have the right ideology.

I recommend reading the comments on the original post, but the following is an attempt to address objections, shed some additional light, and summarize and reiterate some salient points:

Salient Point # 1. Hitler did NOT ban guns. Did not, did not, did not.

No amount of devious spin can alter that fact. Sorry. Get over it, already.  Even GunCite (a pro-gun website that, unlike other pro-gun websites, generally does some solid research) acknowledges as much. The Nazis inherited a system of firearm registration and regulation that was already quite strict, though it also did not, by any means, amount to a gun ban. And the gun law they passed in 1938 actually loosened those existing regulations considerably.  Regulations were still stringent. But to call it a “gun ban”, is… well, misleading at the very least.

Okay, I admit it: I may have goofed. In debunking the popular Hitler gun “quote” (you know, the one beginning “This year will go down in history”), I noted that he did say this:

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.”

From which I deduced:

So it’s fair to conclude that he believed “gun control” had its uses.

Okay, but a great deal depends on what you  mean by “gun control”.  I may have goofed by cutting Der Fuhrer off too soon. Just a couple of sentences later, he added this:

“So let’s not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.”

This suggests that his real concern about “conquered peoples” having arms was really about them having organized armed forces, not merely armed citizens. And he was referring specifically to governing the conquered “Eastern peoples” (i.e., Russians) rather than Germans.

The Nazis loved their guns. They loved guns almost as much as today’s American Gun Worshiping Cult that compares Obama to Hitler. They loved guns so much, they taught children to march and drill with them, starting as early as five years of age. The nursery rhymes these children heard encouraged them to play with guns. Does that sound like something Nazis wanted to outlaw?

While I’m hesitant to consult white supremacist organizations on anything, it’s interesting to note that the National Alliance, which has a certain amount of reverence for both firearms and fascism/white nationalism, has this commentary ,which lays out some of the specifics of the 1938 law. It’s excerpted from a book that includes the complete text of the law, both in English translation and in the original German.  For what it’s worth, the commentary concludes with the declaration that it was not Hitler, but his enemies, who advocated for “gun control”. Quite the reverse of the claim made by gun enthusiasts who (presumably) do not admire Hitler.

Salient Point # 2: Yes, the Jews were barred from gun ownership. So what?

They were barred from a lot of things. Like voting, owning businesses, working in professions, attending schools, patronizing cinemas or theatres, and visiting public parks or “Aryan” areas. Jews were not considered citizens in Nazi Germany (and in a very real sense they weren’t even considered human), and gun ownership was one of the perks of citizenship. The fact that the gun culture considers the Jews’ lack of guns of more consequence than their lack of far more basic civic rights says a great deal more about the gun culture than it does about the Nazis or the Jews. And even when they get it right about what the German gun laws did or didn’t do, they misrepresent the significance and consequences of those laws.

And we say laws in the plural because there were indeed more than one. We’ve been discussing primarily the German Weapons Act of 1938, passed in March of that year, which as we’ve noted before, significantly deregulated firearms. It also prohibited Jews from manufacturing and selling them; one gets the impression that the intent was to prevent Jews, whom the Nazis regarded as subhuman, from handling the sacred implements of power that they later would touch with their own hands. Even so, note that this law itself did not expressly ban Jews from owning guns.

It wasn’t until November of that year that a different law, The Regulations Against Jews’ Possession Of Weapons, did what its name suggested. That’s right: even though they’d subjected the Jews to just about every form of degradation and brutal oppression possible, it took the Nazis  five years before they actually got around to barring Jews from owning guns. Gives you some indication just what an all-consuming priority it was, doesn’t it? Furthermore, this law was passed only after Kristallnacht, which might have given Jews an incentive to retaliate violently.

“Aha”, says the gun fanatic, “so obviously the Nazis were concerned about the threat of an armed populace”. Well sure, to some degree; but let’s not blow it out of proportion. Just because they wanted to prevent a few of their own from getting killed or wounded in the line of duty didn’t mean they gave any credibility to the Tea Party wet dream of a small contingent of armed citizens overthrowing their government. As one of my readers so astutely observed, if they’d encountered armed resistance at the first two houses they came knocking at, then at the third house they would have stopped knocking and just started shooting.

In a statement issued by the Anti-Defamation League, national director Abraham Foxman, a survivor of the Holocaust (you know, the one that didn’t really happen), said:

“The idea that supporters of gun control are doing something akin to what Hitler’s Germany did to strip citizens of guns in the run-up to the Second World War is historically inaccurate and offensive, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families.”

The ADL statement also says:

“the small number of personal firearms in the hands of the small number of Germany’s Jews (about 214,000) remaining in Germany in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.”

But hey, just because someone was there and actually lived through it doesn’t mean they can match the expertise on the subject exhibited by Glenn Beck or Ann Coulter, does it? Incidentally, the ADL has politely urged people to refrain from using Hitler as a political scarecrow. Do you really think anyone’s gonna listen?

(More to come on this, alas.)

12 Comments | Guns, Myths | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by P.O.P.

Propaganda Prop # 6 : The Straw Man

February 10, 2013

straw man

Once upon a time when I was a teenager and didn’t know any better, I got into a discussion (i.e. argument) with a relative on a topic that he had strong beliefs about. That topic was the hazards posed by certain chemicals used in growing and processing food — a hazard which, he was convinced, was nonexistent, but was merely a fraud concocted by devious scientists, or the government, or some other “them” who couldn’t be trusted. At one point, he said to me, ” if it wasn’t for chemicals, you couldn’t live.” Although I wasn’t even familiar with the term at the time, this was my first real awareness of the straw man tactic, which is the sixth in our series of propaganda techniques.

A straw man is an oversimplified substitute for an actual issue or another person’s actual position on an issue.  Although the term’s origins are unclear, the apparent idea is that metaphorically, someone constructs a cheapened likeness of another person (or position) and knocks it down, then claims to have struck down the real person (or position). I’d never said that all chemicals are harmful; I was perfectly aware, in fact, that the human body is made of them. What I was saying was that it’s a good idea to be informed about what chemicals are harmful and to avoid them if possible.  That’s an argument that’s much harder to dismiss than the watered-down version my relative threw back at me.

You’ve surely had plenty of straw men thrown in your face; there’s not much way to avoid it. If you mention to anyone, for example, that you’re opposed to the war (any war) you’re quite likely to hear someone say “How can you not support the troops?” Or “Why do you hate America so much?”. Or something like that. Mention that you favor reproductive choice, and you’ll surely be labeled “pro-abortion”, and you may even hear someone say that you support “killing babies”.  Either of which constructs a straw effigy in front of the real problem of how to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

In April 2010 the state of Arizona passed Arizona Senate Bill 1070, putatively aimed at curbing illegal immigration. Many citizens, not only Arizonans, expressed concern and outrage because some provisions of the bill opened the door to harassment of legal immigrants or even natural-born citizens of darker complexion.  (Do you suppose it’s just a coincidence that the bill has connections to white supremacists?) But ideological extremists who spoke of opponents to the bill almost uniformly characterized them as being anti-immigration reform, or pro-illegal immigration, or some other such straw personage, often even suggesting that those bleeding-heart libruls who didn’t like the bill should just invite all the filthy scum illegals to come and live in their neighborhoods. Now it’s certainly possible that some of these people honestly don’t know the difference between objecting to a specific law and objecting to the broad objectives the law supposedly addresses (I’m glancing in your general direction, Ms. Malkin). But some of them did a deliberate switcheroo, replacing substance with straw. Well, after all, they were taking their cue from the straw twins embedded in the bill’s official name: The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, which implies that law enforcement officials strongly support the measure, and that brown people from south of the border are responsible for higher crime. Both of which are, to say the least, unsupported conclusions.

Chances are that at some time during the past few months you’ve seen this graphic making the rounds on the Internet:

OWS hypocrisy

The idea, of course, is to suggest that the participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement are sniveling hypocrites for being anti-corporation when, like the rest of us, they use products manufactured by corporations. Trouble is, the Occupy movement was not organized to protest against corporations. It was organized to protest against corporate greed, corporate crime and corporate domination of government policy. Those are things that many Americans are concerned about, including many who revile OWS.  But it’s a lot simpler and a lot more effective just to dumb down the OWS position as being “anti-corporation”. Don’t strike a match with so much straw flying around.

Almost every criticism/ attack I’ve heard directed at OWS has been a straw man. Indeed, if you’re one of those who are generally classified as “liberal”, you surely get attacked by scarecrow platoons on a regular basis.  “Liberalism” is a rather broad and nebulous concept — much more so than “conservatism”, which is itself a rather imprecise label. And since the lifeblood of propaganda is oversimplification, it makes sense that those who smear “liberals” will dumb down their talking points and employ vast hordes of straw figures to make their case. (“Conservatives”, by the way also tend to invoke reverse straw men to present their own convictions — which is to say they oversimplify them in a positive direction. They might attire their belief, for example, in a supposed Second Amendment right to own guns as “supporting the Constitution”. What they mean in is that they support their own dubious interpretation of one little segment of the Constitution.)

In fact, my absolute favorite single source of straw men is Liberal Logic 101, which has the avowed mission of pointing out the inconsistencies and stupidities of “liberals”; but the site would be more accurately called Straw Man of the Day. Let’s look at a couple of recent examples of its wit and wisdom:

liberal-logic-101-325

This one’s a double whammy: it suggests, first that “responsible adults” are the main target of firearm regulation, and second that it really matters whether teenagers “think premarital sex is okay”.  Comparing an innate biological drive with a culturally conditioned addiction,  this cutesy graphic sidesteps two genuine issues: (1) The dividing line between “responsible” and “irresponsible” adults (as if adults were the only ones affected by guns) is often crosshair-thin; and a gun blurs that line faster than just about anything else in the known universe, and (2) Teenagers already think sex is pretty okay; and they’re going to go on thinking it’s okay unless adults inflict some extremely heavy psychological damage; and it just might be prudent to be more concerned with preventing pregnancy and potentially fatal disease than with trying to reprogram their hormones. It’s an artificial dichotomy (something straw-sculpting propagandists just love) to suggest that one must choose between discouraging premarital sex or being prepared for lapses in judgment.

Here’s another gem:

liberal-logic-101-309

Is there really anybody out there who honestly doesn’t realize that President Obama has been subjected to more “background checks” than the Pope? Apparently so; and this straw men seems to be an attempt to recruit more devotees to birtherism. Or any of the other Photoshop conspiracy theories accumulating around the president. If gun owners were scrutinized with a microscope even a fraction as big as the one that has been trained relentlessly on Barack Obama, gun regulation advocates would be ecstatic. And chances are that just about everyone would be a lot happier, because there’d probably be far less gun crime.

Gosh, these are like eating peanuts — once you get going, it’s hard to stop. Let’s try one more for good measure:

liberal-logic-101-313

The notion that “Obamacare” entails the government “making medical choices for you” has been a heavily used straw man since day one, and not one sliver of its straw has worn off. “Government takeover” is the straw phrase of choice that has been brandished against the Affordable Care Act ever since “socialized medicine” started wearing thin.

These priceless bagatelles from Liberal Logic 101 always end with the observation that “Yes, they are that stupid.” Well, it does appear that somebody is trying very hard to be “that stupid” — or else just very crafty. In any case, I recommend perusing the pages of that website if you’re seeking some textbook examples of straw men.

But really, you don’t have to seek them out at all. They’ll seek you out instead. It seems that straw men are breeding faster than mosquitoes in a swamp. I seem to hear more and more and more of them all the time. Ironically, I also seem to hear more and more instances of “phantom” straw men — i.e., people falsely claiming that someone else has used a straw man.  (See, for example, the attack on one of my previous posts at TheTruthABoutGuns.com and/or my response to it.) Yes, we’ve reached that bizarre point in the so-called evolution of our species when the concept of a straw man has become itself a straw man.

9 Comments | Props | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by P.O.P.

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