By the time you read this I should be a parent. Either that or something dreadful has happened, but hopefully not. I hope I’m enjoying it. I’m writing this back in January, sitting at my computer with my wife ready to pop beside me. I’m a little trepidatious, but not too bad. I wonder how I’ll do as a parent. I’m pretty sure Gewel will do great. By the time you read this there should have been a solid month of changing diapers and making cute faces, and I bet it’s going to be great.
Archive for ‘fief’
Do you think it has always been so easy for the oppressors to cloak themselves in the clothes of the oppressed? I was thinking about it as I was reading a conservative commentator bleat that Dan Savage “bullied” America into accepting gay marriage, and I thought that was pretty amazing. Those big gay kids are bullying America now.
Is this a recent thing? Or has this been going on for a long time? I know it happened during World War II, that’s an obvious example. WWI America proclaimed that Germany made them do it…Spanish-American War we blamed Spain….
yep, answered my own question.
I mention it because I see a lot of accusation from gun….I don’t want to call them gun nuts, but calling them “rights advocates” falls into exactly the same problem I describe above, they aren’t advocating anyone’s rights but their own. Gun lobbyists, I guess that works.
Anyway, gun lobbyists seem to feel that we are afraid of them. But they’re the ones who are afraid. They’re afraid they are going to lose their guns. We aren’t afraid of anything. Our worst fears are happening every day. The only way the school shootings can get worse is if they happen to someone I know personally, and it is a virtual guarantee that someday they will. I’m not afraid of school shootings. I’m bored with them, and annoyed by them. That’s worse for the gun lobby than afraid. Scared people make bad decisions. Bored and annoyed people make unilateral, long-lasting resolutions.
The people who are afraid are the gun lobbyists. The gun grabbers, I like to call them. Because if you’re looking for a gun grabber, look for the guy who has all the guns. The ones who are so terrified of any sort of control being put on their hobby/fantasy that they declare any attempt to settle down these shootings to be a “slippery slope,” ignoring that the slope is slippery because it is well lubricated with, ya know. Blood. Tears. Little bits of bone.
They are painting this as a question of their rights being infringed upon. This is astonishing to me. Our right to send a child to school and have them come home alive is being infringed upon. Something has to give. Violent video games are not causing this problem, so you can mess around all you want with banning them and then you’d have to admit that method doesn’t work. The only possible result of the combination of volatile human beings with tools designed only to do harm is bloodshed. Maybe you really need your shotgun or you strongly feel you have the right to kill people under certain circumstances, whatever. Nobody really cares. Something has to give.
I got to do a super cool interview on KOOP’s Slappy Pinchbottom show with Chris Nicholas and Jeanne Thornton
and Dan Price, it was a good time.
Radio Interview on KOOP 02 24 2103
I talk a little bit about Busta/Lovecraft and my wife and our first child, who may well be born by the time you read this. Seriously, she might go into labor at any moment.
As mentioned in the interview, I’ll be at the Staple show next weekend unless Gewel is in labor or the baby is only a couple days old. We shall see. If it happens tonight I might still go for a little while. If it happens after Tuesday I doubt I’ll make it at all. Unless it happens after next Sunday in which case Gewel is going to be one uncomfortable lady for the next week.
It’s a shame that Obama has been around long enough to screw up enough. I still like the guy, but it’s an increasingly untenable position. He’s doing a better job than Clinton or any other president in my lifetime, but that’s setting the bar low.
I don’t expect him to stop the transfer of power to the executive, because the sort of person who goes for the job does not turn power down. But dagnabbit, he should have a thought to what happens after him.
Now that we know that a trillion dollar coin is a legal possibility, it is important to plug that loophole quick, before some damn fool makes use of it.
I don’t live in LA any more but I used to.
The problem I’m having with Dorner is that he makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot of logic to what he’s saying, and I certainly do believe most of his allegations. I have no doubt the LAPD treated him terribly and treats other people terribly. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, if “hands red with innocent blood” is a disqualifier then we should no more listen to the LAPD than to Dorner.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that he is clearly not dangerous to me. The police in LA, just like in the rest of America, are a privileged class. Their children are very much part of that class. I am clearly not. I’ve lived with the awareness of what it’s like to be the victim and prey of the police for a long time, and I’m not having an easy time acting super upset when one of their own turns against them for a host of reasons, all of which I find cogent. He is right, he shouldn’t have been able to get the guns he got. He shouldn’t have lost his job over whistleblowing. The LAPD should have done a much better job of screening and counseling with him, and he should have been treated for his major depression. I’ll go one further and say the Navy should never have made him into a sniper.
It is very, very difficult to not see this as rough justice coming to the LAPD for their multiplicity of sins against society, and the fact that the LAPD wasted no time making a farce of themselves and shooting innocent people does not make me feel worse for them. They have summoned up their own nemesis. It is fascinating how completely this is a LAPD screwup, and the extent to which it affects civilians (“drones,” as I hear they call us) is only the extent to which the LAPD screws up and shoots the wrong people. Again.
While I’m on the subject, it’s not Dorner that LA needs to be afraid of right now. Dorner is not going to shoot you if you are driving a truck. I would hate to be a tall black guy in LA right now, and that sucks, and that is sort of on Dorner. But when the system is this decrepit, something is going to happen. The LAPD has been killing people for a long time now.
Hope this makes sense and is not too much of a self-serving rationalization. I’m not going to waste your time reminding you that murder is bad and people should not kill people. I’m just trying to tell you why even I, a pacifist, can’t quite bring myself to condemn the guy.