This is very interesting to me. One could claim that men are more rational and see the benefit of killing one tyrant so that, perhaps, millions may survive. And furthermore claim women tend to see the murder of Hitler as morally wrong and are unable to see there are exceptions to the morality code against killing.
But there are lots of other ways to look at the results of the study:
Perhaps women tend to respect rules more than men.
Perhaps the social norms in this country are such that women are taught it is better to be a victim than an aggressor even against a villain.
Perhaps women have a greater tendency to weigh the many different possibilities and come to the conclusion that maybe it might have turned out worse had someone else come to power instead of Hitler.
Perhaps women have developed a tendency toward pacifism not developed by men. This would give them an evolutionary advantage by being less likely to kill their own children because the biological cost of them creating another child is much higher compared to the biological cost for a man to create another child.
This study would seem to have implications for self-defense as well.
Take your statements about “ultraconservative,” “right wing,” “Read less white males” and “privilege,” and shove them up your ass.
Then write the story where that was a pleasurable and positive learning experience for you.
Michael Z. Williamson April 21, 2015 Challenge Delivered [Williamson’s post is worth reading for the facts presented but the last sentence, above, is what gives it the punch of humor.
I’ve read a couple of his books and enjoyed them immensely. The points he makes are indicative of something I’ve written about before. Although these type of people will seldom directly admit it, it is very clear they believe they know what you are thinking without regard to your words or actions. In this case they believe they know the contents of his book without reading them.
What more evidence do you need to conclude these people have mental problems?
No matter. There will be a lot more evidence provided. I directly experienced it for decades and no matter how much I coached them they could not change. The problem, as they saw it, was always me.—Joe]
Western civilization is experiencing a post-Enlightenment crisis.
For hundreds of years we fought the chains of doctrinaire thinking — as told to us by superstition, folklore, and the churches. In the 20th century the trappings of the churches were almost entirely cast off, and for a few decades we (the West) thought we’d finally done it. We’d liberated our collective intellect from the machinery of dispensed truth. All souls would be free to find their own truths and their own meanings, and none could gainsay another man’s or woman’s path of self-discovery. The 21st century was going to be a wonderland of abundance economics, and the melting away of nationalism, tribalism, territorialism, and all the rotten isms of history. A global village, joined by the techno-wizardry of the internet, would rise.
I particularly liked the references to Original Sin which, in essence, hypothesizes the concept of Original Sin is semi-hardwired into us. If this hypothesis is true then one might be able to rigorously show that as traditional religion fell from popularity it has been replaced with something else which has the same mindset including an updated version of the Inquisition for suppression of modern day heresy.—Joe]
Well no duh! I can hear you say. Every different community has its issues, events, and disputes. Being somewhat more than a mere spectator but less than a main combatant is an odd and interesting place to be.
The recent and ongoing kerfuffle in the sci-fi community between the SJW’s and and the Ilk of the Evil Legion of Evil has been educational, and many fascinating words are being spilled. Take, for example, Brad Torgerson, one of the principals in the whole Sad Puppies affair. His recent post titled Flaming rage nozzles of tolerance is great. Kind of long, but he does a good job of breaking down the current “we must blame ourselves for everything” SJW narrative-driven mindset as a modern secular take on Original Sin, and the competing with the free minds of people responsible for their own actions and nothing more. Well worth the read.
Glamour is undermined by mockery. People steeped in multicultural respect will find that mockery difficult. The other thing that undermines glamour is crushing defeat. The Axis had glamour of its own, until Dresden and Hiroshima.
I’m writing this after just getting off the phone with Great Big Gun Accessory Company That Everyone Knows. I’m not pissed, just a little disgusted. I got a 130 dollar tool made by that company, from an Idaho retailer, and the tool is defective.
I called the retailer about it immediately. After some vacillation (first fail) and some obvious back-and-forth amongst the person who took my call and someone else (second fail) they referred me to the manufacturer (third fail).
I then called Great Big Gun Accessory Company That Everyone Knows and got put on hold by a robot. OK; that’s sort of tolerable, as it’s a busy time of day for a busy company in a very busy industry. After only two or three minutes I got a person. I got directly to the point; I had ordered this tool and it has some bad threads.
She actually muttered under her breath at me, as though she’d been robbed few minutes ago and I had just threatened her for her wallet; “Oh, good God…” (fourth fail). She then had to put me on hold (fifth fail) to talk to someone else (sixth fail) after which she went on and on in her Eeyore/Marvin the Paranoid Android tone, (seventh fail) about oh, woe is us; we’re juuust swamped with customer service… (eighth fail) and that she’d take my name and number and someone would call me back, maybe today but probably tomorrow (ninth fail).
There’s a point to all of this, mind you. This isn’t so I can vent my frustration– I’m not frustrated. I got this tool on a lark, because I thought it would be something fun to try. Well, all the fun has been drained right out, but it’s not frustrating in any way because I really have no “need” for this item than can’t be served with tools I already have.
The point is; if you’re in business and you have a customer who has a problem, AND you’re capable of solving said problem, then DO IT, RIGHT NOW. Your customers will absolutely love you for it, and your service will have been so unusually simple and easy that they’ll tell everyone they know about you. That two or three dollars, to fifty or 60 dollars it actually cost you to SOLE THE CUSTOMER’S PROBLEM STRAIGHT AWAY will have been your cheapest and most effective advertizing ever!
The retailer could have solved my problem immediately, without even thinking about it, if they’d simply send me a new part. “No problem, Mister Keeney; we’ll get you another part out to you right now, and you’ll have it tomorrow. Sorry about the inconvenience.”
That is our goal, but we don’t always reach it (for one thing, there is internal disagreement on its merits, if you can believe that). It is an ideal, which will rarely be met in all cases, but it is none the less THE ideal.
This is so very simple, and so very obvious, that practically all businesses fail to consider it. The few who do will rule the retail world. All the rest will have every excuse in the book why they don’t do it, and they’ll all be very reasonable and thoroughly justifiable excuses.
If you HAVE THE ABILITY to solve the customer’s problem RIGHT NOW, that is an OPPORTUNUTY for you and your company. Don’t miss the opportunity.
Meanwhile, after talking to two people, at two companies, each of whom had the ability to solve my problem right then and there, each of whom had to talk to at least one other person who also had the ability to solve my problem right then and there, I’ll be waiting for a phone call (not a replacement part, mind you, not even a promise of a replacement part, but a phone call) that may or may not come in the next 24 hours.
The time it took either one of the two people I spoke with to hum and haw and consult with peers and finally get around to telling me to call somewhere else or to take my name and number for someone else to get back to me, THEY COULD HAVE SOLVED MY PROBLEM RIGHT THEN AND THERE, and so you see, it would be far MORE EFFICIENT just for them, which would free up more customer service representatives to help more customers.
The people fighting universal background checks are the people who deliberately want to be irresponsible. Plain and simple.
obvious-if-you-read-carefully
April 1, 2015
Comment to Gun background check hearing: Does bill close loophole or create unenforceable law?
[The type of people who say things like this have mental problems. It is common in some personality disorders for the person to believe they can read your mind. I’ve had them insist they knew what I was thinking and/or meant even with the words I used were written down and visible in front of them and I insisted they were completely, totally, wrong. They just knew in direct disregard for all the facts.
This is why I sometimes ask how someone determines truth from falsity with stunning effectiveness. I have literally been told, “It depends on how I feel.”—Joe]
Actually no; quite often I don’t, so why not just come right out and say it clearly and directly?
From Vanderboegh. I like it. It illustrates exactly the sort of ridiculous things I picture in my mind when most people speak, about anything.
I was listening to a caller on a talk show this morning, for example, who went on and on and, so far as I could gather, never said anything. The host caught on right away and after several unsuccessful attempts to prompt the guy into saying something he ended the call. A lot of words were coming out of the caller’s mouth, amounting to nothing.
That little anecdote describes much of my life. Many times I’ve sat through a whole hour of some video someone or other thought I should totally see, searching for one little bit of clear meaning (anything that didn’t require some inference or projection or other) to end up with nothing.
“I don’t see it like that. The way I figure, the various anti libertarian government entities are violating my rights three times per day, and more. Don’t tell me I’M the felon, see. That puts the attention in the wrong place.”
If the whole focus of your life is on getting everybody else to agree with you on every detail of your politics and adopt your plans for a perfect society, then you’re setting yourself up to be at war with most of the human race most of the time.
Which means an awful lot for the Angry Left to get angry about.
Robert Tracinski
March 26, 2015 Why Is the Angry Left So Angry?
[While this is a good start I think there is more to it than this.
Having spent a lot of years dealing with someone and their family who were angry much of the time I came to realize that anger was the primary means of communication for them. If you didn’t get angry they would not pay attention to what you were saying. I remember an instance where I coolly and calmly told this person, probably a dozen times over the course of a few days, that what they were doing was hazardous. They would agree, say they wouldn’t do it again, then, frequently, within a few seconds do it again.
Eventually I lost my cool. I yelled. They apologized, said they wouldn’t do it again, and they didn’t. Within a year I found myself getting angry with them with almost no provocation. They taught me to get angry to communicate. I finally realized this and starting thinking about what was going on. I then thought back to the first time I met this persons family. I was at the front door and the living room was chaos. Various people yelling at the same time and no one appeared to be listening to anyone else. My friend, happy to see me, walked through the chaos with a big smile. They were oblivious to the yelling and anger of everyone else.
The entire family communicated via emotions. The actual words weren’t that important. There were many times I would see different people in a conversation were talking about entirely different things but didn’t realize the other party to the conversation was “on a different channel”. Other times what they said was self-contradictory. It didn’t even make sense. Pointing this out to them was interesting. They would laugh and say it didn’t matter. I became sort of a joke to them because I couldn’t understand them. They made no sense to me but they were entirely happy with their babbling to each other and didn’t see what why I had a problem with it. “Oh, Joe, we’re just talking.” is an actual quote which came in response to my confusion about something not making sense.
When the topic of discussion was something of significant importance and it involved me I would sometimes insist they pay attention to reality and make sense. This would result in a fight. The claim was that “I had to get my own way.” But it wasn’t my way. It was forcing them to be congruent with reality and the laws of physics.
We see similar things with the left/progressives. They think they have accomplished something by holding a candlelight vigil. They demand a higher minimum wage and higher employment rate no matter how many time it is demonstrated you can’t have both for very long. They demand enhanced background checks because President Regan, Jim Brady, and a bunch of kids were shot—even though the shooters did, or would have, passed the proposed background check.
They use “hash tag diplomacy” and declare victory when bullets are the only viable option to effect change. They throw “reasons” like, “stand your ground”, and “war on women” around because they know our society requires at least some lip service be given to “reasons” even if the facts don’t support their claims. They don’t understand reason and resort to making reasoning noises. They cannot even tell you how to determine truth from falsity.
Emotion is their currency and their reality. If they feel something is true then, for them, it is true. This was driven home to me when I extreme frustration I once demanded, “How do you determine truth from falsity?” They calmly told me, “It depends on how I feel.”
I have been repeatedly told and after many decades of trying everything else I’m beginning to believe the proper approach to these people is to not get emotional. That is their “battle space”. When you get emotional it makes them happy because you become one of them. Then any emotion they care to use is justified because you are already emotional. Insist they be rational. They can’t. They only have emotions. Point out their logical and factual errors and refuse to accept their emotions as currency.
We do not share a common basis for communication or for determining reality. We share the same planet but they are in a different world. So of course they get angry with us. In their minds we are aliens in a turf war with them.—Joe]
The Democrats are totally ill-equipped to defeat him. He simply doesn’t fall for their game, and so it will require the combined efforts of Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, the American Communist Party, et al, plus Jihadists and other foreign interests, to defeat him. This will be interesting.
The predictable, or rather a common, outcome would be that someone would get to him and convince him (threaten, bribe, cajole, lie, intimidate, mesmerize, etc.) that “For the Greater Good of the Party” he should quit before he does too much damage to the 2016 prospects. That or they primary him right out.
Who are the sick women who are having children with these gun nazis? It makes me physically ill. There is something mentally disturbed about people who own more than one gun.
Shyanne, a ten year old competitive shooter, posted the picture with the following comment:
Teee Heee the first shipment of ammo from my sponsor Steel Ridge Ammunition showed up today !! So I decided to forget about snow angels and make an ammo angel instead !
VERY, VERY happy and cant wait to hit the range, thanks so much to the entire team at Steel Ridge Ammunition!
[Apparently Challenger is oblivious to the irony of calling someone a Nazi and advocates for forcing them to give up enjoying their sport and the exercise of their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.
Challenger not only wants to take away your guns. She thinks people who own guns are mentally disturbed and doesn’t think gun owners should have have a spouse or children.—Joe]
The cartoonist is not only prejudiced and has a negative stereotyped view of gun owners but is delusional. Gun ownership rates are difficult to measure but there are a lot of indicators that ownership rates are going up. The belief that gun ownership is going down is comforting to the anti-gun person. Being part of the “herd” is important to them and their “herd” getting larger provides more comfort. As Heinlein said, “Delusions are often functional.”
I am of the opinion that it is to our advantage to let the anti-gun people keep this particular delusion. For now.
And hardly anyone is noticing, apparently. This is one of the biggest power grabs regarding free speech in the history of history, and it seems to be going through without much discussion, or even much notice.
I’ve been saying for years that the left really, really MUST gain control over the internet, and right now it seems they’re just a day or two from initiating their Solution; FCC control. Goodbye Wild West. Hello Federal Department of the Internet. I hope you like your new overlords.
The university goes on to say that they’re not exhibiting any political bias. In Left-Speak that would be true of course, because “Bias” means any opposition to the Progressive authoritarian system.
Conflating crime and individual rights is a sign of hoplophobia, a serious mental illness. This calls for an intervention and medical treatment for PBS staff, not propaganda film production. Maybe they could show good faith and publicly sign up for a permanent personal felony-level gun ban, just to be safe.
I’ve only half jokingly mocked other “future weapon” designs in the past, saying that the trend is toward an ever more clownishly high sight axis. My educated guess is that this is in fact a psychological problem.
With the lower velocity of the grenade/shotgun, it would make actual sense to put it on the bottom, with the flatter trajectory rifle barrel closer to the sight axis.
The new terms like “Soldier integrated such and such” (which obviously turn ordinary warfare into something totally new and different) are also the result of psychological problems. Years ago, while reading one of the supposedly big cheese U.S. military publications, I found that such a thing as an “army” is, technically speaking, no more. No, ladies and gentlemen; we now have a “Soldier-Centric Force Structure” instead, don’t you know, which no doubt changes EVERYTHING.
The advantage you see is that people who have actual experience in stuff are no longer needed, and can therefore be safely and conveniently brushed aside. Who needs an Army General when you can have a shiny, new, Soldier-Centric Force Structure Command and Control Engineering Specialist? Hmm? Was General Patton a Soldier-Centric Force Structure Command and Control Engineering Specialist? I don’t think so. All he did was lead an Army to kill a bunch of folks and break things. Feh!
And who needs a stupid old rifle when you can have something that looks like it came out of a bad Sci-Fi movie written by an ignoramus, and having the ergonomics of a cinder block?
As I mentioned in the QOTD this morning last night I attended a presentation entitled Active Shooter Preparation by the Bellevue Washington Police department at the Newport High School.
The presenter was Officer Scott Montgomery who usually is a traffic cop but is also on the SWAT team and is a “certified active shooter instructor”.
It was a relatively small group attending. I was fairly close to the front making it difficult to see everyone and didn’t take a close inventory but I expect it was about 30 people.
At the time the Columbine massacre happened police training was that the police should secure the area and wait for the SWAT team to arrive and possibly enter the building. Of course the shooters had long since run their course by the time SWAT entered the building. This was a wakeup call and police training changed in response.
The training now has long been that the school should go into “lockdown”, people hide wherever they can, and they wait for the police to arrive. Upon the arrival of three or four police officers they would form a team and enter the building to engage the shooter. No active shooter incident has ever been stopped by such a multiple officer team.
At the Marysville Pilchuck High School shooting there were students on the football field when the shooting started in the cafeteria. The school went into “lockdown”. The people on the football field went back into the school toward the shooter because that is what you do in a lockdown situation. They were following their training.
Active shooters evolved their tactics and so both the police and private citizens need to evolve as well. The Virginia Tech shooter took advantage of the lockdown and upped it one. He brought his own lock and chain. He went into a classroom, locked the doors shut, and started shooting them.
He had practiced this. We know this because people at the gun range where he practiced reported, when interviewed after the Virginia Tech event, they he did something very odd when he was at the range. He put his targets on the ground in rows. He then walked down the “aisles” with a gun in each hand and shot the targets as he walked by.
Montgomery told us they train using Simunitions in actual schools that are about to be remodeled or torn down. He stressed that even though they train for active shooter situations in a school they cannot be there in time to prevent horrific outcomes. “You are the first responders.” he said. If you do nothing, that is wrong. Fight, flight, and freeze are very natural responses. If you have children under your care you will probably not leave them. It is against our nature to fight. Almost no one practices fighting. Hence, if you have not thought about the situation you almost for certain will freeze. You just won’t know what to do.
You need to think about these things now, frequently, and prepare yourself mentally to do something other than freeze.
What private citizens need to do is think about all the “What if?” cases and plan for them ahead of time. What will you do? What are your options? How many exits are there in your situation? Don’t just think of the doors. Windows can be broken and dropping from a second story window is probably going to result in fewer injuries than waiting for a bullet to find you as you hide under a desk.
Teachers of younger students are particularly resistant to “losing track of a child”. “What if they get lost out on the street?” He response to this is, paraphrasing, “Which would you rather have, a lost kid on the street with every cop in the state converging on the site or the kid at immediate risk of being shot? We can find the kid on the street in the next hour. We can’t protect them from a bullet in the next minute.”
He told us that in police academy they were taught there are three types of people, “Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs”. Most people are sheep. The police are clearly the sheepdogs. But you don’t have to have a uniform to protect your flock.
An active shooter is a dynamic event. Things change rapidly and the police cannot tell you what is going to be the best action to take. The people on the scene right then and there have to adapt to the situation and take appropriate action based upon the information available to them:
Know your situation
Do what is necessary to survive
Remember your responsibilities
People need to develop a survival mindset: Awareness and preparation are key:
Be familiar with your surroundings and environment BEFORE an emergency occurs.
Entry and exit points?
Areas where you can hide
Objects that can be used as weapons
Make a decision:
Run
Hide
Fight
This is the new mindset people must develop. It is not a static decision. Adapt to the changing situation.
If you have to fight allow yourself to have a “righteous anger”. You can be a “mother bear”. If you attack do it with a full commitment until the threat no longer exists. You may have to take their life.
He was generally okay with it but with some minor issues. The two issues I remember were that it portrays women, but not men, as inclined to freeze. Men freeze too. Women can and will fight. This is particularly true when defending children.
The first police to arrive will be extremely single minded. They will not be friendly. They will not help you. They may yell at you and/or push you aside. Their mission will be to engage the shooter as quickly as they can so the total number of victims can be minimized.
When you encounter the police show your hands. Don’t worry about having a cell phone in it. It is very unlikely they are going to mistake your cell phone for a gun and your cell phone may come in handy later.
They will be doing active shooter response training, similar to fire drills, with the schools. It’s not quite the same thing and the results will never be as good, but keep in mind that in the last 50 years they have been doing fire drills no student has ever died in a school fire. Training works.
Much of the presentation seemed to presume there was a single shooter. I asked something like the following, “I realize Columbine was a somewhat unique event but there were two shooters and they used explosives as an significant component of their attack. Does this change your training?”
Montgomery said 67% of the active shooters in this country have been a single person. But they train for multiple shooters and even well planned team attacks such as a terrorist group might implement. It doesn’t change the mindset of the private citizen much. Events are dynamic and you won’t have perfect information. Yes, you may be running away from a shooter into an ambush but you are running away from a known threat. Be prepared to change your actions based on new information.
I then pointed out, paraphrasing, “I think was in Arkansas in the late 1990s where two shooters pulled the fire alarm and then waited in the tree line with rifles for when the students came out into the open. A similar attack at Newport might look inviting.”
Mills also addressed this. He said that during fire drills he is not responsible for evacuation of the students. He immediately exits in that direction and looks for “anything out of place”. He said, paraphrasing, “I might be the first one shot, but we are aware of that risk and try to address it.”
I was tempted to ask about private citizens with firearms because strictly speaking the presentation wasn’t just about active shooters in schools. But I decided not to. First off it is illegal for private citizens to have a firearm on school property and this was primarily a presentation for parents and students. Secondly this is a tremendous change in attitude from cowering and waiting for the police. If this new mindset takes hold then private citizens with guns to defend themselves and their children will come naturally. The culture is changing and the law will follow.
The title is of course misleading, as is all the speech of authoritarianism. Is it to protect the possession of responsible body armor? But an inanimate object can be neither responsible nor irresponsible. Is it to protect responsible bodies with armor? If so, why does it limit said armor? Is it to protect the responsible possession of body armor? How then would body armor be possessed in an irresponsible manner? Are there hoards of people possessing their body armor in some obnoxious fashion, say, wearing orange body armor with red clothing? One is given to wonder.
With all the Progressives pretending to be concerned, to the point of hyperventilating, about all the carnage carried out with guns, you’d think the one thing they’d want to see, besides a monopoly on gun possession for criminals, is more people wearing more effective body armor. Oh wait…
Authoritarians are of course insane, so in that sense there is nothing to see here.
One has to wonder what the authoritarian Republicans will do with this. My gut tells me they’ll be very much in favor of it, but will at the same time feel uncomfortable about letting their support be known. How that will manifest itself in their political actions I cannot guess. This sort of thing is an on-going problem for them (damn those liberty-minded little Hobbits!).
Please try to avoid getting caught up in the matter of the technical details of the various classes of body armor. This has nothing to do with any of that you know.
If the truth be known (perish the thought) this is one of many signs indicating that Congress is preparing for war with the American people. Many of them are no doubt blissfully unaware of that prospect, but it must be understood that blissful unawareness, and the vehement defense thereof, is a key component of such campaigns, right up to, and through, the the very end.
