Blackmoor Vituperative

Republicans claim to oppose high taxes, but they vote for more Big Government — and higher taxes. The latest case in point is a U.S. Senate vote to pass an Internet sales tax bill that would force online retail outlets to start collecting taxes on behalf of state governments.

(from Republicans and Democrats vote for new Internet tax, lp.org)

I can’t tell you just how bad an idea this is. Much like some other recent legislation that died in the Senate (cough gun control cough), this is legislation that pretends to fix a problem that doesn’t exist, and actually makes a real problem worse.

The problem it pretends to fix is the failure to tax businesses that sell online. Fun fact: every American business that sells online pays sales taxes to every single state (and county, in many states) where it has a physical location. I wrote the sales tax code for DriveThruRPG, so I know for a fact that this is not a trivial amount of work for a small business. Expanding that added bureaucracy and back-end work to pay every single county in the USA is GODDAMNED INSANE (I am speaking for myself here, not for DriveThruRPG).

Adding injury to insult, it actually makes a real problem worse. The real problem is that local brick-and-mortar retailers can sometimes be undercut by online retailers. A solution to this problem would be to make sales tax lower, making the local retailer more competitive. Erecting a massive bureaucratic impediment, discouraging local brick-and-mortar businesses from selling their products online, actually makes their situation WORSE.

And, as usual, the only political party with two clues to rub together are the Libertarians.

I have another idea for a political cartoon. On the right hand side of the cartoon is a gate with the sign “Glue Factory”. A horse is on the left side of the cartoon, wearing a blanket that says “2nd Amendment”. A guy in a suit is pulling on the horse’s bridle, trying to lead it to the glue factory. The man in the suit has a voice balloon saying, “What are you worried about? No one wants to get rid of you. Just take one more step!”

“No one wants to take your guns” is bullshit, and everyone on both sides of the fight for and against that particular civil right knows it. We all know it’s a lie. It’s an insult to the intelligence of anyone that hears it, right up there with “separate but equal”.

Warning: this video is graphic. It shows dead people. You’ve been warned.

Now for my thoughts:

The first segment, on the Philippines, illustrates the scenario that I think motivates some of the anti-gun hysteria in this country. Ironically, I think that divisive rhetoric and attempts to infringe on other people’s civil rights makes that scenario more likely rather than less. I hope, really hope, that Americans wake up to that and stop with the attacks on each other. Ignorance, hatred, and irrational fear are poor foundations for public policy.

The second segment, on the Taliban and Afghanistan… that’s almost too tragic. I have trouble even wrapping my head around it. It would be easy to blame religion, but the suicide bombers aren’t even being told what their own religion says. They are lied to and manipulated by their Imams and Muftis, who are distorting their own religion to use these children as weapons. The horror of it baffles me.

I am so grateful that I live in a relatively safe, relatively sane country. I hope it stays that way.

The author of this letter to “gun control” Democrats is a left-leaning supporter of reproductive rights “who participated wholeheartedly in the Occupy movement and in the national campaign to expose ALEC”. They make six suggestions on how to better present the argument for gun control in the USA. It’s worth reading.

I had an idea for a political cartoon. There would be three people at a table, and in each panel they would each say something, expressing their opinion about a topic. The first person believes in creationism, that there’s no evidence for evolution, that evolution is a plot by satanists and atheists, etc. The other two people would follow a similar pattern, but with homophobia and “gun control”, respectively (e.g., there’s no evidence that homosexuality is natural or that guns save lives, it’s all a plot by the gay Jews in Hollywood or the gun lobby and the NRA, etc.). In the final panel, they would each say that “90% of Americans support…” their own particular brand of ignorance, hatred, and irrational fear.

It’s too wordy for a cartoon, though. Also, it strikes me as a bit unkind. Just because someone has a different opinion, even an opinion I consider hateful and ignorant, that alone doesn’t make them a bad person. It’s not that simple: even genuinely good and kind people can have genuinely horrific opinions. Human beings are complicated.

“Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.”
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

An image or “meme” equating traffic lights to restrictions on firearm ownership has been showing up recently in the usual places. I find this disappointing, because it’s such an absurd analogy.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the essential difference, that vehicles are for transportation (important, yes, but is it a basic human right?) while firearms are for defense of one’s life (an essential human right). Setting that aside, a traffic light’s purpose is to prevent an operator of a vehicle from driving their thousands-of-pounds of metal into the direct path of others’ rapidly moving thousands-of-pounds of metal, because this would be a direct and imminent danger to the lives of other people. This is completely reasonable. An equivalent (or nearly equivalent) analogy would be some form of signal intended to prevent a firearm from being fired at other people, or where other people are quite likely to be. And, in fact, we do have laws that serve this exact purpose, although they take the form of general prohibitions rather than signals. And these, by and large, are also reasonable.

The people who “like” and redistribute images like this one, alas, are anything but reasonable.

“Things have changed forever.”

We heard this after the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed. We heard it after the Virginia Tech massacre. We heard it after the Cinemark massacre. On Monday there was a bombing in Boston, and we are hearing it again.

It isn’t true. We have had bombings and tragedies before, and we will have them again. We pick up the pieces, comfort the survivors, and we move on. Nothing has changed. None of this is new. Some of the worse bombings in US history were in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The worst school massacre in US history was almost 100 years ago, using a bomb. “Things have changed forever” is nonsense. It’s delusional, in fact. Yes, bad things happen, but there is nothing anyone can do to prevent them. Fortunately, bad things of this particular nature are extremely rare. So why do we pay disproportionate attention to them?

A few people die in an explosion, and that’s major national news, but around 100 people die in car crashes the same day, and that’s barely mentioned in local news, if it’s mentioned at all. And 100 more die the next day. And the next. One-fifth of those 100 daily dead are children. No press conference are held where a sad but resolute politician vows to find those responsible. No “town halls” are gathered where politicians with private chauffeurs insist that we must place “reasonable restrictions” on car ownership.

We ignore a pile of bodies that accumulates like clockwork every single day, but we wail and gnash our teeth at rare and impossible-to-prevent tragedies and vow to implement “solutions” which have absolutely no chance of doing anything to prevent the next rare and isolated tragedy. Our reaction to these things is exactly backward.

More importantly, it isn’t true because the people who commit these crimes are not the norm. We are — the normal, peaceful people who want to live our lives in peace without being robbed, murdered, blown up, violated, spied on, or detained indefinitely. As Patton Oswalt said recently, “So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.’ “

Folks, if you are fighting to infringe on the civil rights of other people, you’re on the wrong side. That means if you are for *any* of these, you are on the wrong side: “gun control” [sic], marriage discrimination, censorship, *any* religion being given preferential treatment by the government, warrantless wiretaps, warrantless searches at airports, warrantless surveillance, detention of civilians without a trial, assassination of civilians without a trial… I’m tired of typing. You get the idea.

This is what being Southern is all about: standing up for what’s right and standing by your neighbors. It’s about doing the right thing and going the extra mile to help out people who need help. Some Yankees might not get it, and even some people who live in the South might not get it, but this is exactly what that rebel flag you see on cars and trucks down here means: standing up for the right of individuals to live their own lives.

Bravo to Quality Auto Paint & Body.

P.S. Susan asked if the guy from Quality Auto Paint & Body had a rebel flag tattoo or something. The answer is that I have no idea. That wasn’t my point.

Susan and I had a conversation earlier about Sherlock Holmes, and whether the 125-year-old character was in the public domain (it should have been in the public domain before either of us were born, but that’s another topic).

In process of researching our discussion, I turned up this article regarding a suit filed recently in federal court in Chicago. A top Sherlock Holmes scholar alleges that many licensing fees paid to the Arthur Conan Doyle estate have been unnecessary, since the main characters and elements of their story derive from materials in the public domain (as of 2004, only 9 of the 60 Sherlock Holmes stories by Doyle are still covered under US copyright).