Reading Time: 3 minutes On July 8th, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a gunman while giving a political speech in the city of Nara. Abe had become a towering figure not only in Japanese politics but in international affairs. He held the title of Prime Minister longer than anyone else in Japan’s post-war history, and […]
Gun Control
Posted inLaw
Supreme Court needs a new motto: First, do no harm
Reading Time: 10 minutes American conservativism was on alarming display in two U.S. Supreme Court rulings announced last week on abortion and guns. With these new decisions the strongly conservative Court majority, in effect, insisted that the text of the U.S. Constitution and the reactionary justices’ divining of the Founding Fathers’ original constitutional intent is far more important than […]
Posted inPolitics
Supreme Court forces taxpayers to fund religious education
Reading Time: 4 minutes “What a difference five years makes. In 2017, I feared that the Court was ‘lead[ing] us … to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment. Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.” -Justice Sotomayor’s Dissent […]
Posted inPolitics
Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert: ‘More prayers’ would stop mass shootings
Reading Time: 3 minutes During a floor speech on Wednesday, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas argued against gun safety legislation, saying that prayers to the Christian God were a better alternative to stop mass shootings. (It’s the same thing he said a decade ago after another massacre.) It’s probably not shocking to hear a Republican member of Congress reflexively […]
Posted inPolitics
Pro-gun lobby: If guns aren’t 100% the issue, then they’re 0% the issue
Reading Time: 3 minutes The gun debate is raging. Again. And all I need to really say about this scenario is encapsulated by this meme: This torturous loop continues because of the inaction of U.S. lawmakers, paid to do nothing by their lobbyists. But in these arguments, certain methods of argumentation stick out like sore thumbs. One of them, […]
Posted inThe Flare
Mass shootings in America: Why does the U.S. continue to do nothing?
Reading Time: 9 minutes Hungerford, England, 1987. 16 people were killed by a lone gunman. The Conservative government introduced the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988, making registration mandatory for owning shotguns and banning semi-automatic and pump-action weapons. There was a huge firearm amnesty. Dunblane, Scotland, 1996. 16 children died in another rare UK shooting. The Conservative government passed a ban […]
Posted inFrom the Vault
Between massacres: a uniquely American horror show in seven acts
Reading Time: 7 minutes A shooter enters a building in an American city and takes innocent lives. The name of the shooter is insignificant, while their race and gender are both significant and mostly predictable. The city is Buffalo, or Uvalde, or East Lansing, or Monterey Park, or a hundred others. In each case, the shooting serves as the prelude to a seven-act piece of socio-political theatre. Some of the acts are honest and well-meaning; others are cynical and grotesque. But the net result of the cycle is always the same: nothing of substance changes.
Posted inPhilosophy
Cargosquid and Rights. Again. Am I Not Making Myself Clear?
Reading Time: 9 minutes I know this is quite laborious, but I was wondering, am I not making myself clear? I mean, I’ve written a whole heap on this and the ideas behind what I say, and the conclusions aren’t that complex to understand, no? Of course, we’re back to my conceptual nominalism thing again. Read here if you […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Verbose Stoic and the Right to Bear Arms
Reading Time: 4 minutes Verbose Stoic (VS), who comments here and with whom I almost always have disagreements (or who has disagreements with me), and always in a thankfully civil fashion, has taken me to task in a recent post of his own at his blog here. This time, it concerned the recent argument on gun rights and the […]
Posted inGeneral
Your Foundations Are Wrong; Your Conclusion Is Wrong. Just Stop It.
Reading Time: 5 minutes I wish people would read what I write and then interact with it, rather than just posting the same erroneous conclusions on my threads. It’s really frustrating, because I have debunked their position until they can show me I haven’t. Here is Person223’s latest rehash of the same tired old baloney: People do have the […]