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Thursday, December 12, 2013

Evil is Coming: ticking-clock Newtown video makes more sense with a pro-gun narration

A group called Moms Demand Action ("for gun sense in America") just put out a video marking the one year anniversary of the Newtown massacre. From a pro-gun perspective their video invokes some very effective imagery, using the impending sound of a ticking clock to highlight the vulnerability of a classroom full of undefended children.

That's the story of Newtown, where a psychopathic loser took advantage of the "gun free zone" at Sandy Hook Elementary School to murder two classrooms full of first graders and their teachers without being opposed by anyone equipped to defend against him. When seconds mattered the Newtown police were only 15 minutes away, but the Demanding Moms don't get it.

Their response to Newtown? They are on a nationwide crusade to create more gun-free zones. Holy cow. (Bob Owens has more on the bullying Moms here.) Still, for those who actually understand that seconds matter, that ticking clock is very evocative. It just needs the right voice over, which I have tried to provide (100% fair use):



If anyone thinks this is not the time to invoke Newtown in the gun-rights debate, tell it to the Demanding Moms. This video is a rebuttal to their ill-conceived manipulation, which should not go unanswered.


Video script

Pro-gun voice-over (by Alec Rawls):
Evil is coming, just as it came to Newtown one year ago.
Part of the original voice-over (from the Moms Demand Action "No More Silence" video):
With 26 more school shootings since that day...
Pro-gun voice-over:
Evil is coming and everyone knows it, but nobody is preparing to confront it. They want to, but they are not allowed. Denied their constitutional right to bear arms, would-be defenders can only sit and wait. 
What society in human history ever gathered its children together, then issued a public guarantee that they would be left completely undefended? How much longer will we sit by as this invitation to slaughter the most vulnerable members of our society is repeatedly accepted?
Original voice-over:
Ask yourself, is silence what America needs right now?

No, silence is not what America needs

But it is what our Democrat-controlled media systematically delivers when it comes to gun-rights understanding. A full half of the country had in unison one single immediate response to the news of the Newtown massacre: "Why the Hell wasn't there anyone on-site who was equipped to defend this entire school full of children?"

We all know the reason: because the Democrats have managed to strip whole swaths of their fellow citizens of the Constitutional right to bear arms, but we still can't help erupting in questioning anger at the sheer unmitigated perversity of it. It screams out of us every time one of these psychopaths is able to go about his evil business unopposed, yet nowhere does our Democrat-controlled media breathe a hint of what a full half of the country is thinking and saying. Our voices are silenced by a relentlessly biased media, yet it is our voices that need to be heard, because it is we who are correct.


Our dissembler in chief

At last year's Newtown prayer-vigil President Obama artfully misrepresented the pro-gun position:
Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?
But every gun rights advocate in the country knows that this violence, visited on our children "year after year after year," is not the price of freedom but is the price of our violation of freedom (the Constitutional right to bear arms). It is a price that the Democrats are willing to pay, choosing to leave everyone's children undefended in the face of repeated mass murder rather than relinquish their opposition to one of our country's founding liberties.

Conservatives are indeed willing to pay a high price for freedom in those instances where the price of freedom is high but this is not one of those instances. The freedom to bear arms makes us safer, just as all of our liberties contribute to our security and our prosperity. The price we have to pay for liberty is the price of defending it, not some supposed price that liberty itself inflicts!

This is what a moral pervert we have for a president. He sees liberty itself as a negative and strikes at the tree of liberty wherever he has a chance, socializing one sixth of our economy with Obamacare; using the power of the state (in the form of the IRS) to systematically attack his political opposition; even running "assault weapons" to Mexican drug cartels with no plan to track the guns, only a plan to use them, when they are discovered at crime scenes throughout Mexico, to ensnare America's law abiding gun industry, blaming our right to keep and bear arms for Obama's own intentional abuse of those rights.

Is there anyone in the whole country who still believes a single word that comes out of this man's mouth? He spent four years clearing the path for the Muslim Brotherhood to ascend to power in Egypt, advocating for them at every turn, often by name, only to see the Egyptian people, who had always sided with the Islamofascists against Israel and the United States and Europe, turn against the Brothers when, thanks to Obama, it was now they who were facing the Islamofascist hell. That turn against the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent organization of al Qaeda) is a bigger turn of events than Bush's victory in Iraq. It is a huge victory for liberty, and all because Obama's unbounded hatred for liberty is so extreme that it stimulates even the Islamic world's liberty-challenged immune system to vomit him out.

We have to do the same here in America. Vomit out his poisonous Obamacare and vomit out his rottingly sweet attempt to depict gun rights, not as a valuable liberty, providing crucial defense against both common and uncommon crime, but as a negative: not something to fight for but something to fight against. Vomit out this liberty-hating monster. Overthrow his every machination and hope that the low-information Democrat half of our electorate, the willful idiots who seek to curtail their own thoughts as our Democrat-controlled media wants their thoughts to be curtailed, do not stay asleep long enough to carry him over any more finish lines.

In that vein, here's hoping that the words I so jarringly put in the mouths of the Demanding Moms might be clear enough to pull even their grief-stricken heads out of the sand. After all, it is their ticking clock. Shouldn't they know better than anyone that seconds count? Come on woman in the video, show us that you have a brain in your head. Show us that a person who comprehends the horror of murderous seconds cannot really be in favor of defender-free zones!


Don't you DARE try to defend those children!

Yeah, they actually said it. In response to the Newtown massacre Professor Erik Loomis from the University of Rhode Island passed along the following message (originally penned by another angry leftist named Lee Papa, aka Rude Pundit):
"First f**ker to say the solution is for elementary school teachers to carry guns needs to get beaten to death."
They know that these murders were enabled by the state's unconstitutional disarming of all would-be defenders but they care more about their disarmament goals than about the murders and are desperate to switch the blame to those who seek to uphold a citizen's duty to be prepared to defend oneself and others.

Professor David Guth also wants death for those who believe in being prepared to defend themselves and others. More specifically, he wants death for their children:
#NavyYardShooting The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you.
And here is funny-man Jim Carrey's contempt for the lives of those who would seek to defend children:
"Any1 who would run out to buy an assault rifle after the Newtown massacre has very little left in their body or soul worth protecting."
I sent him a few responses of my own:









That butt-hole routine was sick but hilarious. Carrey's latest routine is just sick.


The purpose of liberty is to empower moral agency

The anti-gunners need to learn some moral theory. Illiberal "liberals" always think that they are the sophisticated ones but anyone who doesn't understand why gun rights make us safer doesn't understand the first thing about why liberty works.

If human beings did not have moral comprehension it wouldn't much matter if we were free. Not being cognizant of value we would not be capable of pursuing value and so nothing of value would be lost by our not having the freedom to pursue value (or "happiness" as it is listed in the Declaration of Independence). But moral agency changes everything.

Our open ended faculties of intelligence are able to follow evidence, not just about what is possible in the world, but also about what there is to value in the world. Whether this is a product of godless nature or is because god made us in his image (Genesis 1:27), what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our capacity to make progress in the discovery and pursuit of value.

What do we see to find value in? In the words of Linnaeus, "know thyself," ("homo sapiens"). There are vast catalogs of music, humor, drama, dance and sport, all with their unique attractions, discovered and explored and developed by humans questing after value. There is literature and learning. There is love of the natural world and the lesser-minded animals that need our guardianship and our husbandry.

Most basically there is our love for each other: man and woman, parents and children, friends and colleagues. We discern the lovable qualities in each unique individual just by witnessing their spirit in action, and we see their hateful qualities, where instead of acting to preserve and advance what the human mind can see to value some have a perverse desire to trample value, as if it raises them higher to bring other people and things down.

This is the difference between moral rationality and moral irrationality. Moral rationality husbands and follows all evidence of value, then acts for every discovery of value wherever it is enough at stake to be worth accounting. But moral rationality is not the only human mode. We evolved through the process of natural selection where different available human modes compete on the basis of which produces and nurtures the most offspring.

Here two main modes are possible. People can make their way in the world either by producing things that other people find valuable, then  trading or selling what they produce, or they can make their way by trying to steal what others have produced. These competing strategies are both broadly present in the human population today, but the stealers are a clear minority, essentially our criminal class, salted away in every race, making up something less than 20% of the total population.

Most people are moral. Their nature is to produce value, and this strategy (for those who follow it) is facilitated by moral rationality. If you have an eye for value, if your tendency is to follow evidence of value and to act for value then you will be better at producing value. You will be more successful in the be-productive reproductive strategy, and this seems to be the course that the bulk of mankind has followed. This is our evolutionary path. This is you, right? Know thyself.

This human nature creates a fundamental fellowship. Why are people all over the world so able to embrace each other as genuine friends, eager for each other's well being? Because when we look for what there is to value in each other we all see this same thing: that we all share this basic moral rationality that seeks to make progress in the discovery and pursuit of value. This makes us allies in our fundamental nature. We revel in each other's discovery of value, each other's talents, each other's inventiveness. We love each other's moral agency.

This is why people are willing to undertake even grave risks in defense even of unknown others. Because being morally competent, we know the worth of other people's lives, that we have this shared ability to recognize and act for value. We risk even for unknown others because we have a rational expectation that others are worth risking for.

The fact of moral agency, that our open ended faculties of intelligence are capable of apprehending value, is the key moral fact of our existence. Lower animals (with some limited exceptions) don't have moral agency, and they certainly have no capacity for moral rationality. Only the human being can recognize whether he is making a contribution to the world around or is reducing the sum of human attainment by predating upon it. We easily, even automatically, use constructs like Kant's "categorical imperative" (what if everyone were to behave the way I am behaving?) to magnify our understanding of the implications of our existence for the world around. All of which lead the moral majority to first want to be fair: to not be a cheater, but instead be one of those who makes his way by making a contribution and getting rewarded for it, not by stealing from others.

All progress in the discovery and pursuit of value comes through moral agency. That moral fact demands the empowerment of moral agency, which in turn requires maximum equal liberty rights. The pursuit of value requires freedom of action. If progress in the discovery and pursuit of value is to be maximized then moral agency must be maximally unleashed, limited only where one person's liberty interferes with similar such freedom for others.

One of the most important things people must be free to do is defend themselves and each other, because the cheaters and the stealers and the predators are still out there. When we identify them we can take away their gun rights, but it is counterproductive in the extreme to disempower the moral agency of the morally competent in this most crucial area, and this is what the anti-gunners want. They don't want to disarm just the people who have revealed a criminal nature. They explicitly want to disarm everybody except the government, proving that they have zero comprehension of the primacy of moral agency.

Listen up you liberty hating fruitcakes: all value comes through the empowerment of moral agency, which first requires liberty. To be against the empowerment of moral agency in some crucial area like saving lives is to be a wanton destroyer of value of the highest magnitude. You are Godzilla smashing Tokyo. You are a F4 tornado vacuuming up towns in the Midwest. And then to project the most tender concern for innocent life, as you work perfectly overtly to insure that there will be no defenders of the innocent, how is that even possible?

Much can be excused on account of grief but most of those who are trying to use the Newtown massacre to attack gun rights have suffered no personal loss that clouds their understanding. Like President Obama, they are intentionally misusing tragedy to misdirect blame, determined to create more of the defender-free zones that will give them more mass murders that they can use as more fodder to advance their ultimate goal of a government monopoly on power.

Evil is coming, not just in the form of broken losers, but also in the form of usurping tyrants, as regular as any "26 more school shootings," but looming a million times larger in human history. Evil is coming and half the country is actively trying to pave the way for it, using the demagoguery of misdirected blame to disempower the moral agency of a nation.


UPDATE:  Without the defender-free-zone part, Arapahoe shooter wants none of it, kills himself

From  the Christian Science Monitor:
As they investigate the latest school shooting in the United States – Friday at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. – one thing is clear to law enforcement officials there: The presence of an armed deputy sheriff on regular duty at the school was the key factor in preventing more deaths and injuries. 
As soon as he heard the first of five gunshots, that officer and the two school administrators he was talking to raced toward the commotion shouting their presence and ordering students and staff to follow the school’s lock-down protocol. 
As a result, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said at a briefing Saturday afternoon, the heavily-armed shooter realized he was about to be confronted by an armed officer, and he took his own life.
Makes it pretty obvious that that young Mr. Pierson would not have gone human-hunting in the first place if he didn't think he would have a chance to engage in unopposed slaughter, especially if, as one of his classmates suggests, the reason why he went off is because he "didn't like losing." Pierson, who was an incessant and very proud debater, had lost by getting himself kicked off the debate team. He wanted first of all to kill the debate team coach but he was armed with molotov cocktails and other implements for killing many others as well:
Senior Chris Davis, 18, was among many students Saturday trying to make sense of Pierson's shooting rampage. 
"He was a weird kid," Davis said. "He's a self-proclaimed communist, just wears Soviet shirts all the time." 
Pierson became easily aggravated, "always liked to be right" and didn't like losing, Davis said. 
"It seems realistic, now, that he did it," Davis added.
As is typical for our Democrat-controlled press, The Denver Post deliberately tried to make those who only read above the break think that this leftist was a pro gun conservative, leading off a story on Pierson's "strong political beliefs" with this quote from one of his classmates:
"He had very strong beliefs about gun laws and stuff," said junior Abbey Skoda, who was in a class with Pierson during her freshman year. "I also heard he was bullied a lot."
Since Pierson used a gun the implication would seem to be that he must have been pro-gun, not anti-gun. Only those who read to the end of the article find out what Pierson posted on facebook:
The Republican Party: Health Care: Let 'em Die, Climate Change: Let 'em Die, Gun Violence: Let 'em Die, Women's Rights: Let 'em Die, More War: Let 'em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?
The Post went on to scrub from its own article a statement from a classmate that Pierson was "a very opinionated socialist," reporting instead that the classmate had only described Pierson as "very opinionated." Liars.

Senior editor Lee Ann Colacioppo explained the change:
“We decided not to have another student apply a label to the shooter — a label the student likely didn’t even understand,”
The whole article was about the other student's views of the shooter. Only when he turns out to be a leftist like Colacioppo does this "labeling" become something pernicious that should not be credited in a news report.

So in the Post's view it is a-okay to write the article so that skimmers will wrongly think Pierson was some kind of pro-gun Tea Party conservative but evidence that he was actually a leftist has to be excised as a matter of "principle." Dirtbags.


RELATED:   Survey shows that if allowed, 13.4% of teachers would carry guns in school!
72.4% of educators say they would be unlikely to bring a firearm to school if they were allowed to do so. 36.3% of educators surveyed report owning a firearm, 37.1% of whom say they would be likely or very likely to bring it to school if allowed.
.363 x .371 = 13.4. That is far above the average rate of carry in any "shall issue" carry permit state. Florida with the highest number of CCW permits (over a million) has a permit rate of 6.2% of its adult population. Georgia has the highest CCW rate at 11% (ibid.). 13.4% is huge!

It is not surprising to me that adults who are responsible for classrooms full of children want to be able to protect them, but I expect that many anti-gunners would be surprised, if they were to learn about it. Well they had better not learn about it then. CNN reports the teachers' strong pro-gun response under the following headline:
Survey: Teachers don't want to carry guns, do support armed guards
Because you see, a majority of teachers would not carry guns. Ergo, that's the news: "teachers don't want to carry guns." Propagandist hacks.

CNN also claims that: "the survey was not a scientific measure of opinion," but nothing on the survey site suggests that this was not a controlled study:
School Improvement Network surveyed 10,661 educators from all 50 states to find out how safe our schools really are, and the best ways to keep them secure.
The survey group's summary report actually understates the pro-gun response. Check out question 6 in the detailed survey results:
How likely would you be to bring a firearm to school if you were allowed to? 
Very Likely 10.7%
Likely 6.9%
Somewhat Likely 10%
Somewhat Unlikely 7.2%
Unlikely 15.7%
Very Unlikely 49.5%
Likely and very likely sum to 17.6%!

# posted by Alec Rawls : 12/12/2013 07:11:00 PM
Comments:
The section near the end of this post on the primacy of moral agency gets close to the heart of the question of how altrusim (actions in support of the welfare of the group at the expense of one's position within the group) can possibly evolve. I had a chance to write a comment on this subject on a post about how the left is constantly focused on attacking its domestic enemies and advancing its domestic position regardless of how much damage they do to the welfare of the nation (as by intentionally losing the Vietnam and Iraq wars for perceived domestic political advantage). The left, in acting this way, is manifesting the pure evolutionary selfishness that many sociobiologists believe is inevitable in human nature. But it is not inevitable. A correct analysis shows moral rationality, and its resulting concern for the welfare of all, to have huge selective advantages. Here is that comment:

Tim - There are no books I know of that get right how it is that concern for group over place-in-group can evolve. I've written about it in various places but have not published the full analysis. To keep it simple, try a thought experiment.

Suppose that the world is divided (as it is) into makers and takers: those whose plan of survival and reproduction is to produce value (both for their own direct consumption and to trade to others for what is valuable to themselves), and those who seek to steal what others have produced.

Second, suppose that makers, being alert to where and how value can be created and secured, tend as part of their activity to apply their ingenuity to creating systems of law that greatly increase the sum of value creation by capturing, punishing, and otherwise suppressing thievery, so that the takers become less successful, including reproductively.

Arguments about the evolution of altruism generally focus on whether particular actions create advantage for the genes of the actor, but notice in the above example that the group that is advantaged by development and support of systems that suppress taking is much broader than just those who share the actor’s own particular genes. It is ALL people whose tendency is to be a maker rather than a taker, and this works both ways.

Just as maker-A’s actions in support of systems that suppress thievery create advantages for all other makers, so to the actions that other makers take in support of systems that suppress thievery will also create advantages for maker-A, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THEIR MAKER-NESS IS A PRODUCT OF THE SAME GENES. Genes that create makers while also creating in their possessors a tendency to support and contribute to systems for suppressing takers will advantage all genes that create makers.

So then the question becomes whether there is a way for genes to create makers who DON’T support the suppression of takers. These could potentially outcompete the other makers by getting the advantages of law-enforcement against takers without contributing to that taker-suppressing effort.

But if you look at what is going to create a good maker the answer is no. Maker-ness is enhanced by having a good eye for value and a drive to go get it. In contrast, not caring about the destruction of value by predation requires that a person be stupid about value, to be oblivious when it is being thrown away and not have an interest in how to go get it.

Ultimately what it comes down to is the concept of moral rationality, the open-ended capacity of open-ended intelligence to comprehend value, and in comprehending it, value it, which means wanting to act for it. This is the available mechanism that creates humanities extreme capacity for maker-ness. To be fully alert to the opportunities for value creation that redounds to self requires moral rationality: the rational husbanding and following of evidence of value and how to act for it, and anyone who has this moral rationality will through it also be alert to the opportunities for value creation that redound to society at large, and being morally rational will want to act for it. [Continued below]

# posted by Blogger Alec Rawls : 11:21 AM
 

[Continued from above] Of course there are ways to trade on the value created by the suppression of thievery. That is political leadership, which has always been a powerful avenue for people to pursue. That narrows further the window through which there could be advantage in being alert to opportunities to create value for trade without caring about value in general, but the nature of moral rationality is already going to shut that window all the way. In terms of selection, moral rationality would have to be fundamentally compromised to make a person not care about value in general, which would do fundamental damage to his ability to be an effective maker (a go-getter of value), which would on net be reproductively disadvantageous.

In terms of genes, any genes that tend to create moral rationality will advantage all other genes that tend to create moral rationality, and this is how we arrived at the human species. It is not a kin-selection thing. It is a much broader basis of effective cooperation in the natural-selection process. Kin-selection analysis, which for decades has been the standard model amongst population biologists for trying to analyze the evolution of altruism, doesn’t capture what is going on. There are a couple more recent books I haven’t read, so maybe the field has gotten to this point by now, but I have never seen it.

Human evolution towards moral rationality is obviously incomplete. While our open-ended capacities of intelligence include the open ended capacity to comprehend and follow value, and while this capacity for moral rationality creates reproductive advantage for and gets reproductive advantage from similar capacities in others, humanity is still full of a vast capacity for moral perversity, especially stemming from the tendency to predation, which is half of the natural world from which we have sprung.

Orthodox Islam is a religion of depredation, and so is the Alinsky-communism that Obama was trained in. He was actually trained in both of these evil religions, and in the racist-sexist evil that the #OnlyNon-White-MaleLivesMatter left has long pursued. It took a long train of positive evolution for moral rationality to emerge to the position of social pre-eminence that it reached with the founding of this nation but that position of control is rapidly being lost and evolution itself might well slide backwards as a result.

If the takers win control from the makers (which is Obama’s agenda in a nutshell, and the left’s agenda in a nutshell), then the selective advantage in favor of makers is gone and we start going the other direction. Never underestimate how rapidly evolution can occur. A single drought can eliminate every lungfish that can’t survive an extended period out of water. Letting the takers have the world could have devastating consequences not just for the value lost over the duration of that circumstance, but for the very nature of our species.
# posted by Blogger Alec Rawls : 11:21 AM
 
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