Guns have an almost supernatural potency to change the people who possess them into unethical agents.
Trace (@teamtrace)
Tweeted on April 22, 2019
[I suppose it’s technical possible. People who possess guns are inclined to be more self-reliant. In the mind of the authoritarian this would be considered an “unethical agent”. It all depends upon your ethical framework.
However, I’m of the opinion that if @teamtrace believes this then they should invoke their own supernatural potency to protect themselves.
I would like to suggest the first thing they protect themselves from is extraordinary stupid ideas.—Joe]
You shouldn’t deny their lived experience, Joe.
I’m 100% willing to believe that certain individuals perceive malevolent mind control waves from weapons. That includes hammers, too, the moment they consider a hammer an object suitable for causing harm. They are telling us what is going on inside their head when they are in the presence of a thing identified as a weapon.
I mean, would you call someone who can perceive the difference between red and green ‘crazy’ just because you and everyone you know are all color-blind? I can hear in the 15.75 KHz range. Back in the days of widespread NTSC cathode-ray televisions, I could do a trick of walking down the hallway in hotels and tell you which rooms were occupied. This worked because the cheap TVs bought by hotels (and schools!) had flimsy construction and shielding, and the magnetic field that controlled the horizontal sweep of the electron beam would rattle the metal. The bigger and cheaper the TV, the louder the sound that most people couldn’t hear. Sports bars with nobody in them but staff sounded to me like the deck of an aircraft carrier because of all the huge, cheap-ass TVs all turned on with the speakers turned off.
But NTSC CRTs were not telling me to kill people.
We should accept that there exist people who are perceiving moral-adjusting emanations from firearms. Whether you want to call that crazy or not is a side issue. I think ‘afflicted’ might be a kinder phrasing. It’s even possible that there are people who perceive such things, but are unmoved by it.
What we should do, from an objective point of view, is diagnose such people and bar them from ever possessing a weapon, ever. 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4) is a perfectly suitable and currently existing law that can be used for that purpose. What makes this an mental illness, a mental defect, is that they perceive such emanations strongly enough to feel the influence, and this influence is so strong that they cannot conceive that everyone else doesn’t perceive and be moved by it.
Mental health professionals, help me out: what’s the DSM IV category for the kind of mental illness where a person perceives influence from inanimate objects, particularly influence towards violence or self-harm? A form of schizophrenia, either a delusion or a form of hallucination of perceiving influence without audio or visual components?
I believe it would be a classic symptom of schizophrenia.
Nice try, Tirno, really, but I’m not taking the bait. I’m not going to cede authority to government to determine preemptively who may or may not be “fit” (as the 19th and 20th Century authoritarians put it) to exercise a fundamental right.
See how this works, People? Someone will “take our side”, doing a fabulous job (really nice, by the way) of excoriating some leftist as a total whack job, then call for opening the door to universal preemptive intervention by government as the answer! Brilliant!
Stand up and take a bow, Tirno. You deserve it, that is, if such was your intent. If such was not your intent, then you’ve got to make an effort to throw off that programmed-in notion (which we’ve all had foisted upon us) of looking to increased government power-of-intervention as the “solution” to problems.
You’re not opposed to a massively intrusive government, having what amounts to a “Department of Pre-Crime”. You merely show a desire to have the totalitarian system working for “your side” (the pet dragon fantasy). That is a characteristic, or defining, Republican Party trait, and so you’re in the company of millions at least.
And anyway, assigning what can only be described as a “spiritual power” to weapons or other inanimate objects, it could be argued, is a “religion” or a “religious belief” and thus protected under the first amendment.
It could then lead to the argument that certain religions must not be protected, as they pose a peculiar threat to peace and security, thus leading to the notion of a “Universal Church” under an ecumenical system, administered by the King of authoritarians himself, the pope, the god-king, Pontifex Maximus. And in fact the United Nations, as we speak, has a council working on that very idea.
AND SO, your argument, whether intentionally or by default of cultural programming, and any such argument like it, further establishes, expands and reinforces the global authoritarian system. It is decidedly “New World Order” in character.
The perfect law of liberty on the other hand says, look to the fundamental law (the Ten Commandments would be a good start, and in fact the Decalogue is sufficient in itself). It says you’re innocent until proven guilty, no matter what other dumb stuff you might be temporarily thinking.
If someone believes that evil spirits are inhabiting guns and sending out “crime rays” (something we’ve long accused the left of believing, and which now apparently they’re admitting) then maybe we should seek an argument counter to such Spiritism and other pagan/heathen religions. Maybe we just help them.
Also, if there are “crime rays” being emitted anywhere they’re coming from the news and entertainment media, which glorify violence, and foment chaos, enmity and frustration. They promote enmity, and then uphold authoritarianism as the answer to the enmity they’ve been promoting! So they are in effect accusing guns of doing what they themselves have been doing.
The opposite of authoritarianism, on the other hand, is NOT some other flavor of authoritarianism which happens to beat down YOUR opponents for some time being. The opposite of authoritarianism is liberty.. It’s best we remember it.
Would it have helped if I lead the comment with, “I have a modest proposal…”?
I am frequently Swiftian when confronted with statements that require the acceptance of absolute nonsense to consider even a bare fraction of it as possibly true.
Skimming through the article referenced in the tweet, it is based on anthropological interviews in Haiti. If there is a more dysfunctional society on the face of the earth, I don’t know what it would be. Maybe the social attitudes on display are more of a problem than the guns. From my limited knowledge of Haiti I would guess that it is a place where only the criminals have guns.
I read the article. The anecdotal basis of the article, a story of 3 persons who each died while in possession of a specific handgun, is about 3 gangbangers who were each killed while gangbanging. I suggest that the local folks of course aren’t going to say, “Those asshole gang members who can kill me without a thought got themselves killed while shooting up parties.” It is much, much safer to say to the lovely American anthropologist that the 3 people who handled the gun were killed because of “evil” from gun ownership. Much less likely the story teller will be killed by gang members that way.
What a surprise!
The problem is that the anthropologist who wrote the article, schooled in the Ivy League, should write such from the viewpoint that she apparently believes in the moral agency of an inanimate object.
This is the medieval superstition of the ‘Deodand’ .
A thing can exert influence over the human mind.
That an Ivy League (Dartmouth College) “scientist” would write such a paper says much to the current disreputable state of higher academic education and the lack of oversight by the agencies that dole out research money.
This twit has sponged off this lack of oversight for the past 12 years or so.
Deodands were a thing because the item that supposedly caused the problem – a ladder that someone fell off of, a cow that stomped its owner – were taken away by the local landowner or the local baron or the local king, for “safekeeping” of course. Deodands were in large part a form of taxation that also served to stop feuds among the lower classes over a horse biting a neighbor’s kid.
It’s nice in that it brings up Spiritism, possibly suggests Markley’s Law with the word “potent” in American parlance, and it blames the guns (making them deodands) and spreads fear of the gun owners at the same time. It hits all the left’s doctrinal points in one sentence.
“…more self-reliant. In the mind of the authoritarian this would be considered an “unethical agent””
Yes, or a heretic (from Greek hairesis meaning “choice” or haireomai“choose”, i.e. one who thinks, evaluates, discerns and decides for himself.
In the Bible, a heretic is one who rejects the word of God in favor of some man’s fabricated law or Man’s religion, whereas in the papacy a heretic is one who disagrees with the pope (rejecting Man’s law in favor of God’s). So there are two opposite meanings there, and @teamtrace is applying the latter definition in the form of “unethical agent”.
That, or he’s just all kinds of confused, but either way it has the necessary effect, and the left will eat it up.
One day I must write a thesis on this “self reliant” business. In short; one who desires liberty also desires unmolested interaction and cooperation with others. No matter how extensive his set of skills, knowledge and abilities, he knows he is better off in a society of free men and women than he is on his own. So let’s not get too worked up on the notion of “individualism” and suchlike.
“Individualist” and “self reliance” should be taken to refer to the mind only. Then it makes sense. We wish NOT to be the mind-controlled zombies of some “universal” church or of the media or the state, and we wish NOT to have those institutions attempt to interfere with our peaceable, voluntary trade, behaviors, properties, ideas and interactions.
If wishing to have no acts of aggression perpetrated against us make us “individualists” or “self reliant” then so be it, but those are rather silly terms, and I believe; like as not they’re made up by authoritarians as epithets. They can’t say “those who wish to be left unmolested”‘ so they make up “individualist” or “separatist” or “self reliance fundamentalist” or any such. Whatever it takes to avoid truth.
Same goes for the word “capitalism”. No, Sweetie; it’s called “liberty”. It means one thing only; that you don’t get to assault me or anyone else without suffering legal consequences, and in return, no one gets to assault you either. See? It isn’t the same thing as the worship of mammon which makes one a slave to mammon (and a tyrant), but the authoritarian would conflate the two so as to undermine liberty.
That mindset is what a fair percentage of Leftists live with. Talk long enough with them and they will voice the thought that if they had a gun they would kill someone that annoyed them. Often this thought is stated as: I could never own a gun. I would shoot the bastard that took my parking space, or similar idiocy. The problem is that they think the rest of humanity thinks the same way as they do, which makes them very anti-gun. From their warped perspective, this is a very logical position to take.
They are quite willing to call for a man with a gun (a cop) to come fix a problem, but can’t imagine a normal citizen doing the job, in most cases.
The man with the gun who has been anointed with the fairy dust of government approval. THEN it’s safe for him to carry a gun. Rogue cops,to use the common parlance are each unique to himself and not a data point to prove anything about the fallibility of men, and likewise the armed citizen who prevents a mass murder doesn’t prove anything about the benefits of armed citizens.
But conservatives and “fundamentalists” are the ones who are rigid thinkers, brain damaged, and hew too close to the belief in following a law.
The Tom Cruise “War of the Worlds” has a scene in which a man buys a gun and then runs out into the crowd of people fleeing the Martians, shooting people wildly. THAT is what Leftists depict as the result of gun possession without strict government oversight. This plays into the emotionally unstable fellow traveler’s concerns about what others will do with a gun, while obscuring the real danger to the Leftist elites, epitomized by the cry of the German soldiers guarding the Warsaw Ghetto, “The Jews have weapons!
Speaking of “supernatural”, this seemed apropos;
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-25/satanic-temple-has-evolved-anti-trump-movement-and-leftists-are-flocking-it
You can believe anything you want so long as you hate Trump, Christians and conservatives (and you’ll get tax exempt status).
The masks are indeed beginning to come off.
Oh, mein Gott, there couldn’t be a better way to ensure that Trump locks up 47 states than to have the Church of Satan formally on the other side.
If this wasn’t growing organically I’d say someone was setting up a theological honey-pot. Remember, it’s not entrapment if you’re doing what you would have done anyway!
Next move is to WHOOPS, we accidentally left a digitally signed copy of the entire membership roster unsecured and in otherwise plaintext on the church website. Annnnnd someone points out that opposing Trump and pledging their immortal soul to Satan was a package deal.
(Lyle, to avoid another misunderstanding: Swiftian irony.)
Yet another instance of the psychological phenomenon called ‘projection’. It’s where alleges or assumes another person will behave exactly as they would in a specific situation. Many gun grabbing panty wetting lefties truly feel that if they
had a gun they would lose all self control and act out their violent inner fantasies….and it’s quite possible that many of them WOULD act out violently if they possessed a lethal weapon. The problem is they make the assumption that since THEY can’t trust themselves with a gun then NOBODY should be trusted.
Liberalism….it’s a MENTAL DISORDER. These people are actually truly mentally ill.
I remember Kevin Baker quoting some other dolt in this vein. Something about how carrying a pistol would devour the poor boy’s sanity like radiation eroding flesh.
I just… can’t get my head around this way of thinking. It’s a tool. Granted, it’s a tool that falls into what I call the ‘BE CAREFUL’ bucket for me, but it shares company with chainsaws, power drills, and heavy equipment in said bucket. I tend to be a little wary, and that’s a GOOD thing.
This mindless terror just makes me wonder how these people survive.