Miami Justice

Maybe the "hands up - Don't shoot" touring company should have waited to use that chant a bit longer, because the city of North Miami, Florida has acted out the scenario without needing to force anything to fit.

In what seems a perfect example of  "shoot first and refuse to answer questions later"  two officers with rifles shot an unarmed, co-operative behavioral therapist from an assisted living facility who was trying to protect and retrieve an autistic resident who had run out into the street. His concern, as evidenced in the cell phone video was to protect the severely impaired autistic man in his care from the police who showed up armed for combat because a report of a "man with a gun."

While lying on the ground, hands in the air and trying to explain to the cops what was going on and that his patient was holding a toy truck, one of them let off a three round salvo, hitting Charles Kinsey, a black man.  Asking the officer why he had just shot him (in the leg) the answer was "I don't know."

I don't know either.  I don't know why an unarmed man with his hands in view and lying on the ground defenseless would be shot by any competent police officer. Is it that he was never trained to keep his finger off the damned trigger or that he's a cringing paranoid coward? It doesn't matter, to those that frame matters in our country for us, he must only have done this because he was a racist.  Watch the video and you'll be as puzzled as I am and the man filming it was. "Why they shoot the black boy?" is heard on the recording?

Damned if I know, but we haven't heard the last of this, nor should we.

My Life as a Dog

Species dysphoria is a bitter, hopeless condition. No matter how much I know that my inner species doesn't match my outer appearance, I just can't live life as a dog. Not with two legs and no one is going to let me use any toilet or walk into a bar without a species specific birth certificate.  How then can I separate myself from that most hateful of species, the most dishonest, the most destructive, the least rational? Surgery is out of the question.

The condition is usually at it's most burdensome in election seasons like this one where the hated faces appear before us on the TV and although you can change channels or cut the audio or record and speed through them some of it gets through.

Take the ad I just now saw, telling you to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton and her lies. It's financed by a PAC with a lot of money behind it and it accuses Mrs. Clinton of taking money from Billionaires. What species of animal or vegetable will fail to see the irony of denouncing taking money from the rich and advising you to give it to the already  rich?  That's right, Humans.  So eager will you be, you bipedal fool, to jump on the rage wagon, the marching band of bullshit, that you won't ask or even accept evidence as to the alleged lying and murdering and perhaps necromancy and you won't entertain the endless proofs of Crooked Donald's lying, cheating, fraud, plagiarism, misogyny or crooked business dealings much less the strong evidence of child abuse and rape.

The guy with the 3 billion will sympathize with your concern, Mr. Laid off worker, Mr. lost it all at Atlantic city. He knows your problems, Mr. High School Dropout. Even my dog won't stay in the room when that pumpkin face appears on the screen, but you reach for your wallet.  Yes, your farm may have failed because you can't get credit, but Donald, who wants to buy it for nothing to put up a condo that is planned to go bust after he gets your deposit -- but Donald, he's your man and your man needs your money because he's just got so much of it he doesn't need it. That makes sense to you, you two-legged imbecile?

I've watched those TV  Christ - O - Crooks tell the poorest Americans to send them money because God will make them rich just like Reverend Barnum. Just like Donald Trump. You probably believe it too, you hopeless idiot, but the Democratic opponent? She made money so she must be a crook. She got paid to give a speech to rich money managers so she must know nothing about money.

Trump? People paid him to teach them how and he screwed them using plagiarized text books and fraudulent advertising. The opponent went to the best schools, Trump stole from the poor and kept every dime. And you just love it, you spawn of monkeys. Well I'm not one of you. I renounce you, I condemn you. I execrate you with all the malediction a barking dog like me can muster.  Four legs good, two legs bad and don't you dare call me human, or I'll bite you.

Plagiarize!

Plagiarize.

Let no one else's work evade your eyes

Remember why the good Lord made your eyes 

So don't shade your eyes 

But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
-Tom Lehrer-
If you're like most Americans on the Starboard side, you won't feel there's anything wrong with mocking, insulting and even threatening the wife and children of a political opponent, because if they oppose you, they're not really humans deserving of any shred of decency or respect. Hence the pictures of the Obama family as apes, Chelsea Clinton as a Cocker Spaniel and the outright threats of violence against Michelle Obama.

So what the hell, can't we show them what it's like to hear Melanoma Trump the Trophywife ripping off the educated and erudite Mrs. Obama with her foreign accent?  Plagiarize!

Trophywife Trump who bought her citizenship Faustian Style and is too lazy to learn decent Mississippi English like the rest of us?  I mean you can trust her opinion because she'd certainly risk the private jet, the private helicopter and the private 3 billion (he lies about how rich he is)  to tell you the truth about Donald Dickless and his "dream" for us all.

Leviathan

Baton Rouge. A few days ago, a word association test would have had me responding with Janis, but now it's more likely to be murder, cops, revenge and war: that Bellum omnium contra omnes Thomas Hobbes warned us about: that war of all against all.  It's a small and lopsided war. It's a big war about big principles. It's a crazy war with revenge killings and reprisals on one side and an apparently trigger-happy paranoia on the other side, but I'm trying to be careful of tendentious oversimplifications. Both sides real have grievances and there are a lot more guns than innocence in America. It's complicated and reality always is.

But it's Hobbes' observation about the "state of nature," so reminiscent of the kind of Libertarian paradise half our country seems to be longing for, that gets my attention: that repugnance for government, for authority -- that insistence that any law limits our freedom. Without that authority we have no civilization, no culture, no industry but a climate of fear and a war of all against all, said Hobbes in The Leviathan.

As it is in Baton Rouge, so is it in America. Everyone in everyone's face and at each others' throats. Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. You've heard those words many times.  Against our ruin we create the buttresses of a social contract, a moral, a civil authority and give up a part of our natural liberty that we can enjoy enough security to avoid chaos and enjoy our freedom without undue fear.. We cede some power and make it legitimate and authorize it for our own good. We create laws and we authorize the enforcement of those laws. That's an oversimplification of course but although it informs our American founding documents, that social contract is being portrayed as the cause of our ills rather than the failure of implementing that contract or defining the laws to benefit all rather than some. Some of us believe that racism will always make justice impossible and therefore authority is always to be resisted and with violence.

Is Libertarianism the gateway to Liberty?  I think Hobbes says otherwise and although we, in theory, have the power to change and improve that contract and to reform the way it's enforced, we seem for the moment at least to prefer to shoot it out in the streets and to remember when we shot it out on the battlefield 150 years ago with longing. On the TV,  today's real world, the war drums beat all day and all night, the bullets fly and the blood runs red in Baton Rouge. Police are the enemy, government is the enemy, guns are the enemy, gun control is the enemy. We're all the enemy.

Lyin' Like a Fox

Lyin' Bill O'Reilly may have to share his liar's title with Lyin' Wayne, the former Fox News "Terrorism expert"  may have been a perfect fit for the Fox Crew of liars and frauds, failed Republican candidates and propagandists for hire, but he got caught. He fraudulently claimed to have been a Special Operations Officer for the CIA when at the time he actually was working as was a nightclub doorman, mortgage broker, manager of a rent-by-the-hour hot tub business, bookie, and defensive back for the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints.  He'll have 33 months to think about it.

“Wayne Simmons is a fraud. Simmons has no military or intelligence background, or any skills relevant to the positions he attained through his fraud,” said Dana Boente, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III also tacked on three years of supervised release following his sentence. Judge Ellis also required that he surrender two firearms, pay $176,000 in criminal proceeds, and pay restitution. He joins a lost of Fox Friends who couldn't get a job as a school janitor.  But even though Neill Cavuto apologized for allowing Lyin' Wayne on his show,  Fox Folk, like Trumpsters won't notice or care as long as they continue to supply them with the outrage they need to make their miserable and nasty lives seem justified.

La Marseillaise by Edith Piaf

Without commentary, I could think of no tribute more fitting than this.

French Lives Matter

The death toll is way over 80 now, not quite up to the 130 killed last November but far worse than the January 2015 killing of 11 that had us writing je suis Charlie although we weren't much like and didn't much like Charlie and still don't.

Are we Nice now?  No, but all we talk about is the danger of being shot by one or more of the 200 million or more guns in private hands in the USA.  We've been spared attacks by foreign terrorists on that scale since 2001 when George W was keeping us safe with his "strength."  Obama is weak, of course. We've been told that since the beginning of his presidency. He's weak, and "he will be tested" and "we will be attacked."   Another one of those dire predictions we believe despite their regular failure to come true.

Will we be Nice now or will this one fail to dominate the news with the Cleveland cesspool about to open?  Do French lives matter enough to merit the full mourning, healing and closure seeking news cycle?  Will I be seeing more of those smug posters and posts and cartoons about how hypocritical and racist we are for interfering with a certain publicity campaign I'm tired of talking about? French lives matter - now there I've gone and said it.

But we need to and we certainly will search for someone to blame and Obama is already on the short list. It will be hard to blame lax gun laws in France with its level of gun control that will never be accepted in the US and that this was done with a truck will challenge us to keep the talk entirely about guns, much less "assault" weapons.  Assault truck bans are hard to propose with a straight face.

Will anyone make the case for our current administration's relative success in keeping ISIS attacks to a bare minimum when compared to all those deaths in Europe? Well, I doubt it and this awful story will be hard to fit into the formulaic assault that is our presidential campaign.  Besides there's Pokemon Go.

Call Me A Racist

In our world, in our time, there are no concerns, no problems that have no organized advocates or critics, complete with packaged opinions and talking points and etiologies and eschatologies one might compare to a cult.  Everyone is "raising awareness," placing blame and yet offering no solutions unless you consider "kill the cops" or a lynch mob (literal or metaphorical) to be a solution. Is it any wonder we don't solve problems and that we polarize and stigmatize and hyperbolize everything that happens or doesn't happen beyond the point of rational discussion?

Police shoot people every day and we rightly worry that some misunderstanding, some trigger-happy officer may have occasion to gun us down. We worry because our lives matter, those of our family and friends matter and if we're good people the lives of other people matter. It's really a cornerstone of civilization, and compassion and a concern for justice are likewise universally lauded virtues.

Yet once again yesterday I was scolded, denounced and verbally trashed for reacting to yet another BLM cartoon explaining carefully as to an idiot, that people who say that all lives matter are only covering up the bigotry they, as Caucasians possess. Do they speak for all black people, do they offer a plan of action to work for justice?  I'm wrong for asking.

So what of the cartoon in circulation explaining carefully that the man standing alone with his house on fire gets no help from the man whose house is not because that man says "all lives matter." iSo what if it's self-contradictory and slanderous? Just accept that his callous lack of concern represents those who say "all lives matter."

It contradicts itself. It makes no sense.    Compassion for life will by definition compel me to help you, not to ignore you. If one life matters it's because all life matters, one follows from the other.  To reject that is to claim that only black lives matter. To reject that "Black lives matter too"  is true is an assertion that only black lives matter. Is accepting that a requirement to call oneself a liberal?  If so, I'm certainly not.

If I refer you to the video I watched this morning of two policemen gunning down a young white man that they stopped for having burned rubber at an intersection.  Will you say his life doesn't matter? Will you call me nasty names, treat me as though I were stupid if I shed a tear for a lost life? Will you start chanting and blocking traffic? Will you write headlines about being murdered for spinning his tires?  Will you demand the officers be jailed without due process and without other facts being considered?  Think carefully, it's a test, and if you insist his case is different, you flunk.

They approached him with guns drawn before he exited his vehicle. They shot him over and over with a semi-automatic handgun and once with a pump-action shotgun at close range. He was unarmed. He was lying on the ground. He just wasn't "following orders." Will you go out in the street and chant and stop traffic and bring your home town to a stop because his life, his death mattered?  Will you dance around chanting "hands up - don't shoot?"

Life matters and if you don't think so, your life matters all the less for it.  Life is accidental in this endlessly hostile universe and it's precious and fragile and to me, sacred. I don't care about your politics or the philosophical boogaloo you need to do to make it seem otherwise.

Then I Said In My Heart That This Also Is Vanity

Perhaps nothing to do with the way we think is more demonstrated than the fact that we humans are nothing like rational beings. We're beings who use all sorts of gymnastics to justify our opinions and we fight strongly against contradiction or simply ignore it as suits our equilibrium, our party affiliation, our inherited creeds or opinions we associate with our peers. The mechanics of cognitive dissonance are well described and illustrated, but the stronger the opinion, the more intransigent, the more these mechanics are ignored by the factually challenged.

"Instead of acknowledging an error in judgement, people tend to reformulate their views in a new way that justifies their old opinions. " Writes Leon Festinger.  It's certainly been demonstrated.

Do people moderate their views when presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Not necessarily, writes Matthew Syed in today's BBC News Magazine.  He concludes, as did Festinger when he coined the term nearly 50 years ago, that experiments demonstrate that

"We use a series of post hoc manoeuvres to reframe anything inconvenient to our original position. We question the probity of the evidence, or the credentials of the people who discovered it, or their motives, or whatever. The more information that emerges to challenge our perspective, the more creatively we search for new justifications, and the more entrenched we become in our prior view." 

Experimental confirmation of this is copious and other evidence such as a study by Amazon.com some years ago showing that people who read political books never reach across the divide, sticking with those that confirm a certain mindset.

"Our reasoning, or at least that what we offer as the product of reasoning is regulated by emotion, not by dispassionate analysis and its goal is to minimize threats to the self"  Writes Mario Livio and the rampant and irreconcilable differences in opinion concerning most aspects of American life would seem to make it irrefutable. Nobody changes their mind, or at least very rarely. You'll see it at the macro and micro ends of  the scale of things. Listen to Joe Biden tell us there are more deadly shootings because "the bullets are getting bigger" when the opposite is true although part of  a fear raising agenda. To say otherwise means accepting you were wrong, your mentors are wrong and your argument is less than impeccable. So we go on restating the problem as though our pet solution were attached to it and ours alone.

But of course the size of bullets is less relevant than other factors, but to address that, to offer more rigorous analysis of a real problem risks fracking a fragile code, a rickety dogma that can raise the fear of an ontological crisis. "Who am I if all my axioms are false?"  Our defenses are sometimes  Manic, We respond with a flurry of  arguments as though to be a moving target. We respond with laughter or mockery or denunciation. I'm tempted to call up the ghost of Melanie Klein and her Manic Defense in which we downplay and minimize the threat with feelings of control, triumph and contempt. Is that what we hear from conservatives as their maxims demonstrate their fragile origins?  Perhaps I'm overreaching. This wasn't meant to be a critique of  adept but sophistical refutations of fact. It's about the sloppy street versions that sloppy street people adhere to often with violence as a response to perceived offense.

This triumphant and contemptuous banner was offered recently on the Internet and to some people it explains away a frequent criticism of the Black Lives Matter organization. It is of course an attempt at an argument by analogy using an incomplete or broken analogy. The disinterested might observe that not only is the premise that the universality of the specific argument is not an attack on its validity but rather its foundation. To say that only black lives matter is not a moral position. Universality gives it a basis. And of course our theoretical outside and dispassionate observer would inevitably notice that recognition of the universal need for food would result in those with it being required to share it, and not to withhold it. Humanists of course, by asserting universal human rights, are not denying justice to anyone nor by their belief supporting injustice. It's being perceived as an attack only because it attacks the unspoken premise that "only our group matters" Because it equates the group and only the group with working for justice.

 If saying "all lives matter" does not rectify injustice, neither does "black lives matter." Neither does chanting "hands up."  There is no refutation. Neither offers a solution anyway.  It's really not an argument but an attempt to explain contradiction by reformulating the opinion, and doing a really bad job of it. Would black lives matter if no others did? What is a "black life?" Teacher is asking, why isn't your hand up?

But you'll see that as true of false depending not on my argument or theirs but as a result of your political conditioning, group identification, propensity to feel guilt or indeed the need to feel it.  Is the cop innocent or guilty? You knew that before the trigger was pulled. How would you feel if innocence or guilt could be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt?  Would you doubt anyway would you scoff triumphantly at the evidence or launch into an excoriation of the NRA?

That our aversion to loss far outweighs the attractiveness of gain is well demonstrated. Face it, you don't want to be proven wrong which means you don't want to learn, which means you're just another dumb human ape, like all of us. You will defend the dumb argument, appending all kinds of hypothetical sophistry to it. I'll praise or smugly deny according to my a priori attitudes and I will fight till the end.

suicidaly Moral

It's inevitable that some people's first reaction to someone running amok with deadly weapons was that the police erred in using an explosive device to "neutralize" him during a long deadly firefight, from which he had been given the option to surrender.  After all, his civil rights were violated in several ways and nothing one does can ever waive such rights -- right?

No, I guess the cops should have just dragged it out, allowing him time to escape and an opportunity to kill one more victim. It's the moral way, right?

But worst of all in the pacifist mind, of course was the D word:  drone. The word obviously no longer means a male bee or a moving target used for gunnery practice and as with many words that are emotional surrogates for misunderstood things and deeds, it's a drone in and of itself.  It replaces something in order to keep it from harm. But of course just as in much of the rhetoric concerning weapons, the words themselves are rhetorical weapons. A remotely operated device is not an autonomous device without a human operator. It's not really a drone, just as the weapon used in Dallas wasn't an Assault rifle according to US Army definitions. These altered terms are devices used to protect an argument from scrutiny. Drone words.

Someone is driving this device, someone is watching and probably getting advice from superiors.  Someone is pulling the trigger. Someone is there with a microphone to say "come out with your hands up or you will be shot."
Stop calling it a drone.  It's only a cop in a suit of armor.

 Of course when neurotic pacifists describe any violent act, no matter how unavoidable, they'll say it was avoidable.  We could have arrested Hitler, for instance, we could have arrested  Osama bin Laden by sending in the police to read him his rights and using a search warrant.  Don't laugh, I've been handed that argument, smug condescension, neurotic delusion and all.

Is it that people who argue that this is wrong also hate the Dallas Police because they are police and mostly white and not because they did anything wrong?  Or is it an Americanized version of Ahimsa, the practice of self sacrifice to avoid the death of anything, including bacteria?

Sorry, again. Sending a man or woman  to die or to expose him to deadly circumstances to avoid harming an active murderer, rather than having him or her use a remotely operated device, whether  flying or walking, is not a moral act and if you think so you're wrong.