Category Archives: Crap For Brains

People and especially governments do some incredibly stupid stuff. This is about those stupid actions.

Quote of the day–Andrea Harris

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It’s like dealing with a pack of five-year-olds who are so developmentally stunted that they will never be able to learn anything every day it’s a repeat of the same old simple lessons: wipe your bottom before you pull your underpants up, not after!

Andrea Harris
Uncomfortably numb
November 26th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Regarding dealing with advocates of “global warming”.
[It could just as well have been said about people in the anti-self-defense movement. Sometimes every single thing they say is wrong and/or can’t possible work. Such as in this case.–Joe]

Quote of the day—Jaime Huffman

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“Just because something is irrational doesn’t mean you don’t have to believe in it.” This single idea has a complete disregard for truth. It doesn’t matter that the world has been proven round, you can still believe it’s flat if you want to. It doesn’t matter if all evidence shows that people have the same genetic code no matter what their skin color is; you can still believe some are inferior if you want to. What this statement means is that you can believe whatever you want, it doesn’t have to be true. There are no right or wrong answers, everyone’s beliefs are equally valid.

Jaime Huffman
Speech for Comm 101
2001
From https://www.joehuffman.org/misc/LifeChange.htm

Mental problems of anti-gun people

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As I mentioned earlier today JPFO has a booklet—Do Gun Prohibitionists Have a Mental Problem?  Here are some of the mental problems mentioned in the booklet:

  1. Projection–A person cannot accept their own feelings because they are bad, wrong, or forbidden so they project them onto others.  A typical anti-gun person that uses this mechanism might have feelings of unconscious rage toward gun owners, project them onto the gun owners, then have a conscious fear of gun owners.
  2. Denial–A person refuses to accept reality because that reality is too emotionally painful.  A typical anti-gun person that uses this mechanism might believe that the police are all anyone really needs to protect them from attack by criminals or that a tyrannical government could never happen here.
  3. Reaction formation–A person turns an unacceptable feeling or desire into its complete opposite.  A typical anti-gun person that uses this mechanism might have a murderous rage toward his fellow humans and then claim to be a pacifist and believe they are “superior” to “less civilized” people who engage in “violent behavior” such as hunting or target shooting.

The booklet goes on say that pointing out the mental problems to the anti-gun person isn’t going to be very productive.  What you need to do is:

  1. Make the person feel safe, then provide experiences and information to help him understand the positive aspects of gun ownership.
  2. Be gentle.  Defense mechanism protect people from feelings they cannot handle.  If you take that protection away, you can cause serious psychological harm.  And because defense mechanisms operate unconsciously, it won’t do any good to point out to the anti-gun person that he or she is using a defense mechanism.
  3. Use the mirror technique.  Feed back what the anti-gun person is telling you, in a neutral inquisitive way.  If someone says that people shouldn’t own guns because they don’t want to be killed if their neighbor had a bad day, you might respond, “So you fear if your neighbors had guns, they would use them to murder you.  What makes you think that?“  It’s important to ask “open-ended“ questions that require an answer other than “yes“ or “no“.  Such questions require he anti-gun person to actually think about what he is saying.
  4. Don’t try to “win“ the argument.  If you are arrogant, hurtful or rude to the anti-gun person, you will only convince him that gun owners are arrogant, hurtful and rude people–who shouldn’t be trusted with guns.
  5. Respond sympathetically to the plight of the anti-gun person.  If they believe they are surrounded by people that want to kill them and their family if only those people had a gun and they could do nothing but wait for the inevitable they lead a terrified life.  Invoke your own compassion for their situation.
  6. Provide corrective experiences.  Corrective experiences are experiences that allow a person to learn that his ideas about gun owners and guns are incorrect in a safe and non-threatening way.

There is a lot more material in booklet.  Many of the JPFO “Gran’pa Jack” booklets are for giving to anti-gun people.  This one probably is better utilized by distributing it to pro-gun people.  Although I haven’t done that with this one I have purchased a few hundred of their booklets and let the local sporting goods store give them away.  I’ve also given them away at Boomershoot events and local IPSC matches.

Update: See also the more complete version here: Raging Against Self Defense.

Update October 22, 2010: See also Peterson Syndrome.

Quote of the day–Albert Einstein

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Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein

Quote of the day–Fritz Sands

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I thought the whole idea of “zero-tolerance” was to show that the problem was so serious that intelligence and common sense would not be allowed in the implementation of policy.  This serves to give a valuable lesson to students — when something is really serious, you must make sure not to think.

Fritz Sands
4/15/99 2:36 PM
Microsoft Gun Club Public Folder
Regarding zero tolerance gun policies at schools resulting in suspending kids for tiny toy guns.

Lawmakers in California are afraid of toy guns

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The California Legislature banned toy guns (probably requires that you register) in public. Okay, they sort of have a rational basis for it.  I’m all for letting Darwin take care of the problem but in a Nanny state you can’t expect that. But what really got to me was that some of the legislators reaction to the toys brought into chambers. They were told they were toy guns before they were brought into the chambers but they still were so afraid they moved away.

Before Spitzer began speaking in favor of the measure on the Assembly floor, lawmakers were told he had permission from Democratic and Republican leaders to bring replicas to the chamber. Still, the sight of realistic-looking firearms — an M60 assault weapon and a 9mm handgun replica supplied by the Department of Justice — upset some lawmakers, a few of whom moved away from Spitzer and formally objected.

Is there a way to get these people some psychiatric help? People this sick should be removed from public office.

ATFE agent calls because of puritan complaint

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Yesterday I got a call from Mike, an ATFE agent from Spokane.  AGENT, not inspector.

On December 28th of last year I took my cousin Julia on a Boomershoot Adventure at a local gravel pit.  As we were finishing up somebody that lived nearby showed up to complain about the explosions.  Ry and Lyle tried to talk to him but he wasn’t interested in listening.  He finally took down my license plate number and left.

The agent wanted to know what was going on.  I asked if he knew that I had a license to manufacture explosives.  He said no and I gave him my ATFE type 20 license to manufacture number and told him Sue (an inspector who works on the Spokane office and he knows) is coming down to inspect my new magazine next week and that she could probably give him more background on me if he wanted it.  He wanted to know what type of explosives we had and if anyone else had explosives.  I said a friend, Ry Jones, helped me mix them on site but we didn’t transport anything like that on the road.  He also wanted to know about a “boomer club”.  I told him a rough overview of the Boomershoot and directed him to boomershoot.org.  He said that the guy seemed pretty determined to try and “do something” and that we might want to find another place to set things off.  I suspect the neighbor guy didn’t get any satisfaction from the local sheriff and so he contacted the ATF.

I told him that we talked to the guy but nothing we could say could make him happy.  I also said we had talked to the owner of the pit and he didn’t have problem with it.  He thanked me for answering his questions and I told him to call me anytime something came up because I didn’t want to cause any problems and wanted to avoid stepping on people’s toes.

I decided the neighbor must be a puritan, a guy who is afraid that someone somewhere is having fun.  The ATFE guy seemed nice enough though.  The phone call was nice, much better than a visit from the SWAT team.

State regulated nursing homes

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I got a call from Barb today.  She was pretty upset.  The nursing home where her mother, Joy, lives was audited by the state of Idaho and was told they have too high a percentage of patients that have railing on their bed.  Barb’s mom was one of the residents that would have their railings removed.  Joy has fallen out of bed three times and in one of those falls broke her hip.  A railing seems to be more than just a good idea, but the state has some sort of quota system and Joy was going to pay the price.  Barb called the state inspector and was told, “You are very hostile.  Calm down.”  Barb managed to get some of the anger out of her voice but she still expressed her view of what the inspector should do in regards to the stupid regulations.  The inspector told her that maybe her mother could have her bed on the floor instead of having a railing.  For some reason this helpful suggestion was not received with as much enthusiasm as might have been expected.  Another suggestion was that we take her out of the state licensed nursing home.  This is actually a rather good suggestion if it wasn’t for the fact that the state takes so much of our money in taxes that we cannot afford private care for her.  We could have provided far better care for her if our tax rate was 1/2 of what it currently is.

I explained this is the sort of thing that happens with government “provided” anything.  They take our money from us because they know how to spend it better than we do.  They then spend it according to the whims of the “central committee” and the central committee in their infinite wisdom will come up with rules such as what we are experiencing in this case.  It happens all the time.  It’s not just health care, it’s nearly everything the central committee does.

Vote Liberatarian, the party of principle. 

Philosophy Question for the Fall of ‘97*

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Q: How do you determine right from wrong? Truth from falsity?

Do you read it in books? If so, is it the law and science books? Religious books such as the Bible, Koran, Talmud, and other sacred (to some people) writings? Or from listening to some authority figure such as your parents, teachers, government officials or religious leaders? Do you do a poll and see what the majority think is the truth or moral this week/year/decade? How do you know those sources are correct? Didn’t you have to make a determination about their correctness? And if you verified 80, 90, or 99% of some source as being correct, do you think that makes everything from that source correct? Couldn’t it just a well be the trick of someone evil to give you information that is almost correct, except in some critical item?

If you don’t know how to determine right from wrong or truth from falsity, how can you justify voting? Or rearing children? Or even giving your opinion on something. It seems this is a very critical question. Yet, when I ask this question (the short version) of people face to face, they tell me, “Yeah, I know right from wrong.” But when pressured just a little bit, they fall apart. They are completely at a loss to describe a sure-fire method of determining, what seems to me, something that is incredibly important.

A: Other than to say they read it, no one sent me email answering this question.  The answer seems very clear to me.  George Smith in his book Atheism — the Case Against God said it most succinctly:

… we may indicate three minimum requirements that must be fulfilled before any belief can claim the status of knowledge: (a) a belief must be base on evidence; (b) a belief must be internally consistent (i.e. not self-contradictory); (c) a belief cannot contradict previously validated knowledge with which it is to be integrated. If a belief fails to meet any or all of these criteria, it cannot properly be designated as knowledge.

Question your sources and your authorities on these criteria.  These three criteria will never fail you.  There may be new data which becomes available and invalidates previous conclusions, but that doesn’t mean that until that new data was available the answer you had was the best approximation to the truth that was available at the time.  And you can’t do any better than that.

*This originally appear on a web page of mine. I am moving it here for better visibility and archival.—Joe, November 5, 2010