Missouri’s house and senate have passed a strongly worded bill to protect Missouri citizens’ right to keep and bear arms.

Media and progressives (but I repeat myself) are calling it the nation’s “most extreme gun protection bill”. It awaits Democrat governor Jay Nixon’s signature. The same Jay that illegally shared the state’s CCW database with the DHS (and then vehemently denied it when called out on it).

Our local TV station asks us what we think. This is what I had to say:

Why was the word “extreme” chosen here? Other words would fit much better. “Strong”, for instance.

It’s also not a “gun protection” bill. It’s a “rights protection” bill. It clarifies the protection of one of our most basic natural rights – the right to protect ourselves, and our loved ones. There’s nothing extreme about it. What’s extreme is infringing on that right to the point of denial of it.

Since “gun free” zones seem to attract mass murderers, and we don’t want our kids in the center of what is a known magnet for these people, does it not make sense to at least allow the only apparent deterrent to these kinds of events? The introduction of the probability of failure?

Just remember:  The Science is Settled!(tm)

For the record, that’s Professors Bridger and Clements, of the San Jose State University Department of Meteorology and Climate Science, putting a match to a book called The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism.

They posted this picture on their departmental website.

For science.

Via, h/t.

People who think like adults argue like adults; therefore, people who want to think like adults, are obliged to argue that way. It can be tough to do sometimes. First thing to keep in mind is that you have to engage the ideas and not the people pushing them. What tends to get you bogged down here is pattern recognition: It is an entirely valid argument to say, for example, “I notice women who push the crappiest and silliest radical-feminist ideas have hyphenated names.” Certainly it is not politically correct, but if you think you’re noticing the trend because the statistics would support it, and not just because instances of the trend make a deep emotional impression on you, then it’s a valid pursuit to call it out & ponder what it might mean. But it’s teetering on a brink because the line between pointing that out, and saying some very silly things, can be fuzzy. “All women with hyphenated names have very silly and crappy radical-feminist ideas” would be an invalid generalization, clearly unfair to hyphenated-name women who happen to have sensible ideas. As well as a disservice to the person thinking it.

The salvation is to simply keep a decent and rugged tethering to the facts. Statements with “all,” “none,” “always” and “never” are to be viewed with deep suspicion, and upon receiving the inspection they deserve, will tend to wither and implode much more quickly than most others. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi said, only a Sith deals in absolutes. Of course, that in itself is an absolute statement, so…hmmmm…let’s move on.

For this reason, I don’t like observations like “liberals are stupid” or “liberals are mean.” It sounds like something a frustrated third-grader might say…and, there is the other matter that it isn’t true. Have I not met some liberals who are pretty darn smart? Of course I have. How about nice liberals? That one is a bit tougher, I’ll admit. Certainly I can round up for you a lot of liberals who like to think & say how nice they are, in short order and without putting much effort into it. But you would be well within your rights to say, Try Again Freeberg, it doesn’t count because the liberal is not as nice as he or she thinks he or she is. This would happen quite a few times, in fact you and I would eventually achieve some proficiency in recognizing this muted-down streak of effeminate-male anger, like Captain Hawkeye Pierce getting ready to explode into some self-righteous monologue about whatever. The “aggressively non-threatening NPR male” rage Harry Stein was writing about.

But, at least among the women, there are some liberals who are genuinely nice. One Aunt by marriage, on my Mother’s side of the family tree, comes to mind. These types do genuinely mean what they say when they indulge these fantasies about a “fair shake” for the latest fashionable minority/victim group. They just don’t understand the wretched ultimate effects of the policies they favor as they indulge these fantasies.

Here’s the thing about generalizations, though: Because generalizations fail so often due to their well-understood intellectual fragility, they are, in fact, extremely valuable. That would not be the case if they could be easily debunked all of the time. But contrary to popular belief, they fail often because they can be easily debunked — pay attention to this part, now, it is critical — almost all of the time. Almost. They are like the canary in the coal mine. Fragile, therefore first to expire, therefore there is meaning to be inferred from any situation in which they’re not expiring.

All too often, you take a large group and apply a generalization to it, which upon encountering reality & the facts, implodes almost instantly. But then you carve the large group into smaller groups, reapply, and after a few rounds of division you find the generalization works. Or, at least, you’re lacking in any facts that will vanquish the same generalization again, and you’ll have to allow it to survive, tentatively. This is possibly the beginning of understanding a cause-and-effect relationship. In our example of the genuinely nice liberal, who never seems to be a male, theory: It is more important to males to achieve cosmetic superiority to other specimens, than it is to females, because of the “peacock” attribute of the male psyche. And, the effort to achieve cosmetic superiority to other specimens is exactly where liberals lose their genuine nice-ness, as well as where their credo ceases to make any sense. I’ve criticized them for this many a time, and I’m not done yet: Making a perfect new world in which we’re all equal-equal-equal, to show how much more worthy you are compared to other people? The contradiction is completely devastating, completely unworkable — and not very nice at all.

All of this is a lead-in to my observation that the easiest generalizations about liberals, which crash and burn instantly when we review our factual encounters with real-life, real-smart, real-nice liberals…suddenly find new life when we divide the arithmetic set of “liberals” just a tiny bit. And my “didja notice” moment here is, the number of times we need to divide this arithmetic set in order to give the generalizations a new leasehold on life is: once, into two sets. A simple, clean bisection. I actually noticed this quite some time ago, and have since reviewed the generalization to see if it’s be knocked into the dirt by reality yet again. With that one bisection, the re-pulverizing has yet to occur. Perhaps it will later, but for now the newer set of generalizations seems to be like a good one, and it’s certainly durable.

From this exercise, I perceive two halves. I value this perception rather highly, for if it continues to hold up, it may lead in to a road-map to liberalism’s eventual defeat, at least within this chapter of American history.

You have the ones like the kindly old Aunt, along with the not-so-nice peacock males and all others who aspire to be like her. Somewhere in their hearts there are these good intentions. This is why I’m throwing truly nice people into the same pot as not-truly-nice people, melting ‘em all together and calling it a day: They all have it in common that they sincerely want other people, strangers who they’ll never meet, to have an easier time in life. Some of them have mixed motives — “I’m going to look like a better person than that other guy, over there, because I said something positive about gay people” — and others don’t. They favor policies that ultimately hurt the people they want to help. But they know not what they do. One of my favorite examples: Raising the minimum wage. I’ve explained it over and over to them, you’d think the idea would manage to get across: This does nothing to actually “raise” a wage, what it does is outlaw jobs that pay anything below a certain amount, which is being increased. Can we agree on that? I’ve been genuinely surprised to find out the answer is, YES, we can agree on that, until such time as we have to form an opinion about an issue, then the typical response is to just keep clutching to the same opinion they had before. Like a baby to a blanket.

Other examples: Affirmative action in contracting and hiring, to soothe and cool whatever residual racial tensions there may be. The predictable effect is toward the opposite. Raising taxes to cover a city’s, state’s or nation’s tax revenue and budget woes. Showing those dirty, rotten companies how ticked off we are that they are “gouging consumers,” but smacking them with a whole new layer of burdensome fees and regulation. All these policies have a predictable effect more-or-less completely opposite from what was intended, and yet these types will line up to support the same policies over and over again, thereby bringing a lot of harm to the people they claim to be helping.

People in this group claim to care, and on some level they do care. They’re just not thinking things out all the way.

Now, the other group exploits the first group. These are vicious cold-hearted bastards who know perfectly well that Barney Frank caused the housing crisis, Fast and Furious would get innocent people killed, that gun control does nothing to make a city any safer, that when it costs companies more money to bring a product to market they just pass it on to the customer. These people know all about all of this. They just don’t care.

These people are usually employed in some capacity, such that they achieve a higher level of compensation, job security, or both when the wretched policies go into effect and innocent people are hurt by them. Hillary Clinton doesn’t really think it makes no “difference” who caused the attack in Benghazi. Joe Biden doesn’t really think you’re a lot safer if you fire your shotgun twice. President Barack Obama doesn’t really think more lives would be saved by His “extra background checks.” These people are just plain liars. They know the truth is very different from what they’re saying, but they don’t give a hang.

Those are your two groups of libs: The ignorant, and the apathetic. Evidence-impervious, and scruples-devoid. No, they’re not trying to be uninformed, or to hurt people; these are not their central motivations. That’s the whole problem. Both groups have bigger fish to fry.

From all I have observed, liberalism over the last few years has been making some great progress in moving, as they say, “forward.” Battle after battle after battle, in the congressional districts as well as in the nation’s capitol, is resolved in their favor, often with the “progress” locked in somehow so that their opponents can never reverse it, even if there’s a sea-change at some future date. The gun control thing was the first notable exception, at least in the last year or two. By & large, since 2007 or so they’re winning every single argument. And if there is one single reason for this progress of theirs, I would say it is this: The division between the ignorant and the apathetic is hard to pick up. We’re living in a time in which it’s become toned-down, and subtle. It’s so hard to see, that even people who watch politics all day every day won’t notice it’s there; instead they’ll insist on calling the whole movement “liberals.” That matters. Advancing liberalism is really all about sales pitches, from the apathetic to the ignorant. And it succeeds when the ignorant agree to the purchase. The feeling right now is that these two groups are one and the same, so the ignorant have no reason to decline.

I further perceive that the winning streak will come to a stop, and reverse, if and when this division is re-emphasized, highlighted so that it is easier to see. We’re all guilty of being ignorant now and then. But who wants to buy something from some shyster who is obviously hoping you remain ignorant? Isn’t that when you hang up on the telemarketer, car salesman, real estate crook or MLM crony? That’s when liberalism stops; when the ignorant-commoners realize they are not peers with the apathetic-elites, and that the two groups do not share common goals. From that, will come the realization that the policies that are being sold to them, are not conducive to the objectives they want to achieve. But it comes only from that epiphany, which may be sudden or slow. A smooth-talking smiley-faced Republican can’t explain it to them. They have to learn, from their own experiences, that they’ve been sold a bill of goods in the years gone by, and the attempted-fleecing is still taking place.

In other words, they have to learn on their own to start taking a sensibly jaundiced view of things. It’s part of growing up.

The problem is: Too many of them think they’re already doing that, by reciting ridiculous and useless homilies about “Oh well, all politicians are crooks,” as if they are magical incantations that can somehow make bad ideas into good ones.

Cross-posted at House of Eratosthenes and Right Wing News.

Orwell once said, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

In that spirit, co-blogger Cylar asks a question:  Where the hell does this come from?

Every single thing here is silly.

I got it from Rhymes with Cars and Girls.  That blogger, the Crimson Reach, got it from Juan Cole.  Who apparently just pulled it out of his ass.  Behold the reasoning of — God help us –the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

Professor Cole argues that the violence inspired by Islam is small potatoes next to “the Christian European tally of, oh, lets [sic] say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II– though some of those were attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions more in colonial wars.)”

Let’s leave aside for the moment the 24 million supposedly attributable to “colonial wars.”  Let’s even grant for a sec the (highly problematic) notion that World War I’s 16 million dead were somehow related to Christianity.  I’m truly fascinated by this claim, that 60 million people killed in World War II were directly linked to Christians of European origin.

Where does one begin with this nonsense?  With the observation that, in Europe, the Nazis were the aggressors?  The Nazis, whose relationship with Christianity is, ahem, a bit nuanced?

Many of the Nazi elite believed that their own party doctrine and Christianity shared common themes such as the opposition of good against evil, God against the devil and the struggle for national salvation from the Jews and Marxism. This positive Christianity enfolded both Catholicism and Protestantism, for the Nazis believed that confessional disunity presented the greatest challenge to national unity.

And that’s the jacket copy of a dissertation that “argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it” (my emphasis).  N.b. to Professors Cole and Steigmann-Gall: “shared common themes” might cut it in a graduate seminar, but in the real world it’s pretty weak sauce.  (By that logic, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Ann Coulter and Michael Moore, since their work shares the common theme of American politics).

“Since my fourteenth year I have felt liberated from the superstition that the priests used to teach.” — Adolf Hitler, “Table Talk,” 1942

That aside, there’s still the matter of putting attackers and defenders on the same tab.  Sure, Poland in 1939 was a pretty Catholic place, but does Professor Cole seriously believe the Poles would’ve rolled out the welcome mat for Hitler had they been atheists?  So, too, does every Luftwaffe pilot shot down by the RAF count against Christianity; every civilian casualty inflicted by American bombers; all the collateral damage caused by the Western Allies as they fought from North Africa to the Elbe.  The Americans, British, and French were all Christians, right?  Therefore all the killing, necessary and incidental, that went into defeating the Nazis also goes in the Jesus column on the great scoreboard in the sky.

And then there’s the USSR.  It would come as quite the shock to ex-seminarian Josef Stalin to learn that Russia’s 20-odd million war dead were actually a bunch of onward Christian soldiers.  Wiki:

The Soviet Union was the first state to have, as an ideological objective, the elimination of religion and its replacement with universal atheism. The communist regime confiscated religious property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in schools.

Which is kinda what you’d expect from a regime based on the doctrines of Karl “opiate of the masses” Marx, no?

Let’s not forget the Buddhists, though, at whose feet “some” of World War II’s 60 million dead must be laid according to Professor Cole.  The low-end figure for war losses in China is ten million; Japan lost 2.12 million in battle.  That’s a lot of “some,” don’t you think?  But even that’s ridiculous, since Buddhism had even less to do with the Japanese variant of fascism than Christianity did with Nazism (the religious tradition animating the Imperial Japanese Army’s “emperor worship” was Shinto, for the record).  Chiang Kai-Shek was a Christian, it’s true, but as anyone who knows anything about Chinese history is aware, that belief hurt him considerably with his constituents (though it did net him a fair amount of Western aid); the idea that the GMD followed the cross into battle is ridiculous.  And Mao was, of course, a communist.

Pictured: Not a Christian. Also not a Buddhist. Also not European.

Which brings us to the connection between nationalism, Christianity, and violence.  Professor Cole wants us to believe that World War One was some kind of Crusade.  He writes:

Sometimes it is argued that [European nations] did not act in the name of religion but of nationalism. But, really, how naive. Religion and nationalism are closely intertwined. The British monarch is the head of the Church of England, and that still meant something in the first half of the twentieth century, at least. The Swedish church is a national church.

Leaving aside that nonsense about Sweden (which hasn’t fought a war since the Napoleonic era), Professor Cole would have us believe that the British, at least, entered World War I for religious reasons.  One could make the argument that Christianity, as a stand in for “civilization” more generally, was a part of the Britain’s motivation in that war (the victory medals were inscribed “The Great War for Civilization”), but the proximate cause for their participation was the violation of Belgium’s neutrality by Germany.  I’m sure Professor Cole has a monograph on the Jesus-y origins of the Triple Entente, but while we’re waiting, we can review the ideology of the Black Hand and its role in the… oh, wait:  They swore by God to serve the organization.  Eureka!

(That they also swore “by the Sun which shineth upon me, by the Earth which feedeth me…by the blood of my forefathers, by my honour and by my life” seems kinda important, but since we’re lumping avowedly neopagan Nazis in with Christians, we’ll just ignore that.  We’ll also ignore logic, which would seem to indicate that if the British were fighting for Christianity-as-civilization, then the Germans were necessarily on the other side.  Oh well).

Pictured: Christians?

Which brings us, sigh, to colonialism.  I’ve spared you the worst of Professor Cole’s sophistry thus far, but we can’t put it off any longer.  Brace yourselves.

First up:  Belgium, which apparently killed off 8 million Congolese in the name of religion.  Problem is, the source he cites — The New York Times’ review of Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost — doesn’t mention religion.  At all.  According to Hochschild (according to reviewer Michiko Kakutani),

Some [of the 8 million] were beaten or whipped to death for failing to meet the rigid production quotas for ivory and rubber harvests, imposed by Leopold’s agents. Some were worked to death, forced to labor in slavelike conditions as porters, rubber gatherers or miners for little or no pay.

Some died of the diseases introduced to (and spread throughout) the Congo by Europeans. And still others died from the increasingly frequent famines that swept the Congo basin as Leopold’s army rampaged through the countryside, appropriating food and crops for its own use while destroying villages and fields.

As with the British in World War I, you’d have to take Belgium’s claim of a civilizing mission –”a kind of benevolent protectorship that would bring a civilizing influence to the continent,” as Kakutani puts it — as an unambiguous call for crusade to shoehorn Congolese casualties into that silly pie chart.

And the silliness has only begun.  Apologies in advance for the length of this extract, which could be damaging to your IQ:

Or, between 1916-1930 Tsarist Russian and then Soviet forces — facing the revolt of Central Asians trying to throw off Christian (and then Marxist), European rule — Russian forces killed an estimated 1.5 million people. Two boys brought up in or born in one of those territories (Kyrgyzstan) just killed 4 people and wounded others critically. That is horrible, but no one, whether in Russia or in Europe or in North America has the slightest idea that Central Asians were mass-murdered during WW I and before and after, and looted of much of their wealth. Russia when it brutally conquered and ruled the Caucasus and Central Asia was an Eastern Orthodox, Christian empire (and seems to be reemerging as one!).

Since I took my history classes somewhere other than the University of Michigan, I actually was aware that “Central Asians were mass-murdered during WW I and before and after,” but maybe I’m the exception that proves the rule.  So let’s leave that aside.  But I do question the professionalism of any historian who would deliberately obfuscate a timeline like this.  Let me put some dates to Professor Cole’s claims.

Russia when it brutally conquered and ruled the Caucasus and Central Asia was an Eastern Orthodox, Christian empire.

This is true enough, but it happened in the 16th through 19th centuries.  Which is problematic for Professor Cole on two counts:  1) He’s getting on his moral high horse about the twentieth century; and 2) Much of that expansion took place at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, which was — ahem — an aggressively expansionist Muslim state.  If we’re counting Kazakhs killed in the 16th-19th centuries against 20th century Christians, we really need to add Russians killed by the Turks in the same time period to Islam’s tally.

Or, between 1916-1930 Tsarist Russian and then Soviet forces — facing the revolt of Central Asians trying to throw off Christian (and then Marxist), European rule — Russian forces killed an estimated 1.5 million people.

Again, true enough, but notice the dates.  In the period 1916-1930, Russia was under the rule of the (Eastern Orthodox) Romanovs for a grand total of fifteen months.  They were ousted in March 1917, and Lenin and the boys — atheists all — took over in November.  It’s also important to note that, according to Professor Cole’s own link, the “[m]illions of Central Asians…added to the empire’s population” under the Romanovs “is similar to the current demographic profile [of the successor states], due to Stalinist liquidations during which millions of Central Asians perished.”  Ooops.  Add a few more millions to atheism’s tab.

And, while we’re at it, add most any Russians killed by Turkmen to Islam’s tab.  As well as most any French killed by Algerians.  For if, as Professor Cole asserts, the “between half a million and a million Algerians [killed] in that country’s war of independence from France, 1954-1962″ count against Christianity, then French casualties count against Islam, as he has already stipulated that nationalist movements are really religious movements.

And that’s just Christian / Muslim violence.  Apparently colonialism transmutes Jewish terrorism into Christian killings.  How else to explain this nonsense?

Zionists in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists in the 1940s, from a British point of view, and in the period 1965-1980, the FBI considered the Jewish Defense League among the most active US terrorist groups….Even more recently, it is difficult for me to see much of a difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre.

Hindus go on the Christian tab too, I guess, as do Buddhists (but not the same “Buddhists” who attacked Pearl Harbor):

Or there was the cold-blooded bombing of the Ajmer shrine in India by Bhavesh Patel and a gang of Hindu nationalists….Buddhists have committed a lot of terrorism and other violence as well. Many in the Zen orders in Japan supported militarism in the first half of the twentieth century, for which their leaders later apologized. And, you had Inoue Shiro’s assassination campaign in 1930s Japan. Nowadays militant Buddhist monks in Burma/ Myanmar are urging on an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya.

I think he means the “League of Blood” (Nissho Inoue was born Inoue Shiro), the popular press term for the movement which resulted when “Inoue became convinced that national reform could be achieved only through violent confrontation with what he saw as the forces of evil: pro-Western liberal politicians and zaibatsu business interests,” but forget it, he’s rolling.  Point is, says Professor Cole, “Terrorism is a tactic of extremists within each religion, and within secular religions of Marxism or nationalism. No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.”

Which would be fine, I guess, except that all of these instances of terrorism are subsumed into “killed by Christians of European heritage” in his silly little pie chart.  And — more to the point — it leaves open a huge, glaring question:

Are Professor Cole, and the knuckleheads who cut and paste his utterly tendentious chart on Facebook, ok with discriminate violence?

Because while neither Islam nor any other religion, sacred or secular, preaches indiscriminate violence, that’s not what terrorists like the Tsarnevs are doing.  There are no “innocents” in the Wahhabi version of Islam that animates Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups.  One is either in the Dar al-Islam or the Dar al-Harb, the “House of War,” against which any and all aggression is permitted.

It’s the same all the way down the line.  There are no innocents in Marxism, either — the Revolution preached by Marx and so eagerly embraced by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others is explicitly violent; it ends with the elimination of the bourgeoisie.  If colonialists — the targets of nationalist violence — were innocent, much of Professor Cole’s argument would lose its force (and he, along with a huge chunk of the historical profession, would be out of a job).  The Crusades and the Inquisition, rightly maligned for their violence, weren’t targeted at innocents either — Muslims, Jews, and heretics were viewed as agents of evil actively attempting the overthrow of Christendom and the arrival of the Antichrist.

In other words:  None of the violence Professor Cole details is “indiscriminate.”  In the minds of its perpetrators, it’s all directed at legitimate targets.

The ideologies that “legitimate” these actions are what decent people call into question.  And to those questions, Professor Cole, and those who throw his chart around, provide no answer.

I’m sure my Californian co-bloggers are much better equipped to trash this story than I am, so I’ll just point out that politicians threatening to punish the expression of unpopular-to-them opinions is pretty much the definition of prior restraint.  Which is, of course, blatantly unconstitutional.

Not that this has ever restrained (heh heh) Our Betters in the past.  Rules are for little people.

As I’ve argued before, I don’t think they’re actively trying to provoke a rebellion… but it’s getting harder and harder to be sure.

[Confidential to my California co-bloggers:  Isn't it fairly easy to get a referendum on the statewide ballot in CA?  10,000 signatures or something?  Maybe someone ought to propose a law making conservatism straight-up illegal.  Just to see how many op-eds the People's Champions pen in its favor.  And how many knuckleheads actually vote for it.  It'd be nice to see how far in the hole we actually are].

the day we celebrate the glories of international socialism.  Be sure to censor a newspaper, torture a dissedent, and starve a kulak.  Lenin would’ve wanted it that way.

And above all, remember: you’re the bad guy.