Years ago, while I was extremely tight on money (how tight? Tight enough I didn’t know where the mortgage payment was coming from. Two mortgage payments, since we’d moved [for good and sufficient reasons, among them, because it’s impossible to sell/stage a house infested by cats – but there were others.] and not yet sold the other house. For those sitting at the edge of your seat, two months worth of mortgages and a little extra materialized in the mail from Jim Baen, and in those two months the other house sold) a friend who is known to sign contracts and then wonder how to fulfill them, called and offered me half of his advance if I wrote a grossly overdue novel for him.
I know a lot of you are going “What?” but this has a long tradition in the field, and at least, unlike Leslie Charteris, this man was known to pay on time. (He’s also no big name, but about at my level, so chances you’ve heard of him are low.) I’ve done this type of work for hire (though normally more private, as in “write my mom’s biography for a small printing just the family”) before, when extremely pinched, though thank heavens (I hate it. What if this is what sells and does so extremely well that I’m forced to watch my work go out into the world and become famous, while I starve) not in the last few years.
So I sighed and asked my friend when, how long and what. The when was a month, so doable, for something that would never have my name on it and therefore didn’t engage my personal vanity. The how long was 80k words which was more than doable. Then we got on the what. He’d told me it was a thriller, and it turned out it was one of those “in the corridors of power” thrillers, where a Senator is doing something that will “change everything” and another is trying to stop him and… I no longer remember if organized crime was involved, but you know what I mean.
I stared in bafflement at his outline and then told him that as much as I needed the money, as much as I wanted to help him (he’s a generally nice guy,) I just couldn’t DO it. Not with the best will in the world.
Explaining why took longer. See, he knew I could research enough about DC and lobbyists and stuff to see how things worked and make that part convincing (part of the reason he’d come to me.) and the book was non-political (not that he had an inkling of my real politics. I think. Who knows. Re-reading my old stuff it’s amazing how my beliefs came through when I thought I was being vewy vewy quiet. In some ways I suspect I was like those gay people who come out at thanksgiving, after thirty years of agonizing in the closet and the family goes “oh, we’ve always known. Pass the potatoes.”) which sounds odd for this type of book, but truly was – the whole thing being legislation for or against some non-existent shadowy threat. (Non existent in our world.) Or perhaps it was just something wholly uncontroversial (it’s been a long time. I don’t remember) like legislation that won’t cost any more money, but will make every child better able to learn. (Funny, I don’t remember its being fantasy.)
At any rate, the problem wasn’t the plot. I’ve written more unlikely ones, particularly for hire, where people insist on stuff like that. The problem for me was that I couldn’t believe in what made the novel exciting, for people who read this sort of novel: I couldn’t believe that one legislator really can “change the world” or that one piece of legislation can be that vitally important, long term. Oh, it can khak things – look at the health care bill and what it will do to unemployment – but make the world better at the stroke of a pen? Not a chance. Not immediately, not without resistance and certainly not without unintended consequences.
(Take civil rights legislation, possibly the least controversial legislation in retrospect, which rather than anything it was supposed to do/be seems to be the “law for making our schools work mostly for the benefit of white females – who aren’t even a minority by ANY stretch and who might or might not be – still are, some places – historically repressed, depending on time and place, and due mostly to biology, but none of whose numbers alive today and born and raised in the US – unless very old – have been held in a position of unwilling subjugation EVER [at least not by legislation. Private relationships are a whole other ballgame].)
So the whole god-like legislator and the opponents who were unredeemably evil and the piece of legislation that was so consarned important left me mehish. And if I was mehish, then it would come across in the book. (I don’t know whom he got to do it, or if he did it himself, but I’ve never to my knowledge come across the book anywhere, so maybe he just gave up on it.)
It wasn’t until yesterday, while the guys were arguing computers in the car (it’s almost impossible for me not to tune out after a while) that I found myself touching the “Why.”
The why goes like this – the world is composed of two types of people. Those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don’t. No. Though that’s true, too. The world is full of an infinite variety of individuals. BUT when it comes to their attitude to government or even – and this is what I realized yesterday – large, faceless entities like any large-enough company, sect or association, there are two kinds of people: those who believe most individuals, given half a chance, will do what’s best not just for themselves, but morally. Or at least that most individuals won’t go out of their way to hurt, crush or thwart other human beings to no purpose. (This might or might not be true, but we’ll go into this later.) Then there are those who believe that humans, in a group, particularly when given some magical attribute – divine right of kings, election, ivy league degrees – are necessary to watch over normal individuals to make sure they don’t all kill, rend and maim each other on the streets.
If I understood what Older Son told me yesterday, which might or might not be what he actually said, there is a movie coming out whose trailer, at least, implies that if all government services stopped for a day (forget that this isn’t one government in the US but at least three levels and sometimes more) and there were no police, etc, people would be killing each other on the streets and there would be mass mayhem.
If I understood Older Son properly, Hollywood should stick to superhero movies. It’s clear they have somehow got the very bizarre idea that the only grantor of decent and civilized behavior is the government. I’ll go into the giant, gaping flaw in this mind set later – but first let me point out if that were the case, if government at whatever level were the only thing keeping any normal average Joe from pulling out a gun and mowing down passerbyes from his car window during his morning commute, we’d already all be dead.
There is no government large and powerful enough – not even China, not even North Korea, where you need a permit to breathe out and they tell you when to breathe in – to keep that sort of mayhem at bay. There is no police force large enough. One per citizen wouldn’t be enough, because policemen have to use the bathroom sometimes. And, as has been mentioned in book after book, if someone is absolutely determined to kill you, you WILL die, no matter how many bodyguards you hire, or whether you immure yourself in a walled compound.
Also – and this is the gaping flaw – if human beings are that inherently out of control and ill-intentioned, then surely either the police and other government services are from Mars (or heaven) or how come there aren’t police to watch over them TOO? How come they don’t kill everyone in THEIR path? It can’t be the magical power of groups, because in the end, it’s the individual officer, out there, on the street.
The truth is that most individuals don’t want to go on a rampage. Most individuals don’t even particularly want to defraud their fellow man. Morals aside, there is the danger of shredded reputation and/or the problem of having to live with oneself. My friend Dave Freer assures me that morals – the basis of universal human morals, insofar as those exist “do onto others” if you prefer – are observable and enforced in ape groups. This makes sense since that sort of give and take is essential to keeping a band functioning and, again, (if it needs saying) humans are social animals, who therefore tend to favor those individuals who work towards group cohesion, and those groups who are most successful at it. (The reason that Robert and I joke that the gene for “Odds” is not just recessive but possibly anti-survival. As I said, a tribe of us would starve to death because the moment the chief said “Today we hunt mammoth” half of us would stomp off to look for berries and the other half go set traps for lizards, or become absorbed in learning basket weaving just to “not give him the satisfaction.”)
Most humans don’t want to kill and eat their neighbors (libertarian scenarios of government collapse, always seem to default to this too.) In fact, most humans if all government were removed tomorrow would go on more or less in the same manner.
Does this mean that government is unnecessary? Well, no. There are aberrant, criminal or – if you’re of the soft and fuzzy school – emotionally maimed and hurt individuals out there who will do the worst unless someone watches over them every minute. They create problems all out of proportion with their number. The police (and laws, and governments in general) exist on the calculus that if we make it unpleasant/difficult enough for these individuals, they’ll behave, rather than do what they please and hurt others. (The fact this allows them to stealth and pass on their genes is something else. I’m not going into Minority Report territory.) Also, government official or not is necessary to deal with other governments, official or not. The tendency of an hominid group to bash another hominid group on the head to get their territory/dinner/mates remains unabated and ICBMs haven’t made it any less difficult to deal with.
However, the duality remains. I’m more likely to believe in the lone genius coming up with some way to improve society (say a dramatic new power source) and government trying to thwart him (not out of malice, even, but out of its breaking all regulations) than in a piece of legislation that makes it possible for someone to invent a new power source, by funding his research (removing regulatory burdens is something else.)
I believe government is necessary, but that the balance of power should rest with the individual. In the end, the individual is the ONLY arbiter of what is best for him. And even the “necessary and just” functions of government, where say a police officer exists to make sure one of the rare, aberrant individuals doesn’t kill a bunch of others, can be corrupted by giving it too much power. Because part of what keeps individuals in check is belonging to the group and being afraid of like treatment by their peers, if they go overboard. When you give someone the power of a faceless group and make them immune from prosecution, you get… well, you get no knock raids to the wrong house that kill a veteran who thought he was defending home and family.
There’s a lot of room there for a lot of play on where the needle goes between “group and government” but the needle is never all on the side of the government – not in a sane society – and removing government will never mean murder, mayhem, cats and dogs sleeping together, the end of the world!
In other words, not only did you build that, you build that every day, day by day, a little at a time. If the majority of us decided to say “forget that” and give up on civilized behavior, not even the best equipped enforcement in the world could keep us in check.
The weird thing – and I think because of the people attracted to this sort of profession – is that right now both sides of the isle probably believe that stupid movie. They’re both somehow convinced that government must interfere at a very minute level, to keep individuals from being savages – not the rare individual, not the aberrant, but all of us. Their areas of focus are different, but both sides seem to believe daddy knows best, and they MUST watch over all of us unruly children every moment.
And that, unfortunately, is what I fear will eventually lead to “there is no police force large enough to hold us in check.” Because they’ve proven over and over that they do not know best. Because the very mechanics of politics leads those who believe in the relevance of political power over the fundamentals of economy and every day individuals to rise to power.
Which tilts “daddy government” more and more out of kilter. “If you kids back there don’t shut up, I’ll come back there and give you whatfor” doesn’t work very well, when daddy is driving full speed towards the abyss.
UPDATE: Because I’m a very great dits (I know that shocks you, right?) I forgot to remove my stories from the last quarter of last year from Amazon exclusive. That is, I forgot to uncheck the little box that says “remove automatically at expiration” You can’t do it when you setup the book, and with the holidays and all things went nuts. They’re mostly expiring late April/May now. There’s nothing I can do about that, and frankly it only matters because I hope to establish a Kobo account this month. BUT anyway because I got another five days of “free promo” I’m cycling those stories through free again, before the period ends. So, if you missed it the first go round, An Answer From The North and Superlamb Bananaare free right now. I’ll be cycling a free short story every five days, for the next month or so, so if you look for my name on Amazon and sort by price, you should get it, if I forget to tell you.
According To Hoyt 
“Cuis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
Juvenal’s on the money. A society where the balance of power lays with the watchman is a corrupt society that works haltingly at best. A society where the balance of power lies in a bazillion honest individuals beats that by a mile, every time.
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Been playing with an idea for a tattoo based on that phase since high school….
Thing is, the HONEST INDIVIDUALS part is what’s important– if the mob is inclined to the wrong, it’s as bad/worse than the too-powerful watchman.
Yeah, it’s a corrupt society, but it can survive; there’s a reason I like the “republic” form best philosophically.
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“Culture Counts.”
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Eye with a (celtic?) cross in the center, for personal choice– if I were a better artist, it’d be done by now…..
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The problem is never Daddy government, because Daddy’s too busy tinkering in the garage to get involved. Daddy government is Founding Fathers government: do a couple of basic things to keep everyone alive, then intervene only when absolutely necessary; otherwise leave everyone alone to figure it out for themselves.
The problem is MOMMY government, where every single situation is “You’ll put your eye out–stop that” or similar. Mommy government is also snooping–how many times will you hear a father say, “I was looking around in the kid’s rooms, and guess what I found?” Mommy government is controlling, intrusive, has an abiding belief that chlidren (aka citizens) need to be controlled and told to do what’s in their own best interest, because… Mommy knows best.
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Well, okay, but in the metaphor mommy is rarely driving. These things are really, really, really out of date, like jokes.
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One reason I like this bunch, “First let’s argue the metaphor!”.
Fred
MOLON LABE
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Makes sense to me– if the model doesn’t work, why keep using it? *grin*
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I prefer “Nanny.” It implies that the person/government ought to know an employee’s proper place.
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Ask the global warming cultists.
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Ah, wrong sort of model– the entire theory there is “something is wrong, give us power to do what we’ve been urging for generations.” It’s the exact same solution to every single problem…..
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When you’re a hammer . . .
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Hey! I resemble that remark.
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When all you want is to get a hammer, you insist that everything is a nail.
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That’s because they’re trying to work backwards. The entire point is to give themselves power. They’re just trying to find an excuse enough idiots will buy. They’re little more than highly desperate – and highly dangerous – used car salesmen.
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The obvious solution to that problem is to give them power to do what they’ve been urging for generations.
Like the scorpion of fable, they are admirably consistent.
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Oooh! I can’t remember the context, but:
“every long-term problem has a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong.”
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“There is always an easy solution to every human problem–neat,
plausible, and wrong.”
H. L. Menken, “The Divine Afflatus,”
“Usually quoted as ‘every complex problem has a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong.'”
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Probably the quote they were paraphrasing– assuming he wasn’t paraphrasing, himself.
(I seem to pick up a LOT of quotes that are paraphrases of paraphrases or popularizations– like the famous one that’s something like “if you’re not liberal before you’re 25, you have no heart, and if you’re not conservative after you’re 30, you have no brain.” I seem to remember the oldest form was in support of socialism or something similarly out there….)
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I always preferred, “A conservative is a liberal who has been raped.”
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I usually hear “mugged.”
A couple of months back, there was a PJ Media article that had three famous former-liberal folks and their reason for converting– one poor guy was fond of… I think it was the black panthers, and suggested an accountant to them. Said accountant was brutally murdered by whatever “activist” group it was.
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I think that would be David Horowitz, whose biographical works are well worth the reading. Try Radical Son.
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But I don’t want to get stung to death.
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“Mommy is rarely driving”
One time when I was trying to go to the grocery store, and my sons were fighting in the back seat, I slammed on the brakes, and pulled over. Then turned around and told both (severely shaken) kids that if someone had rear-ended us when I hit the brakes, they would have been hurt worse than I would have and it would have served them right. At least they quit squabbling for the rest of that trip. *sigh*
Today my son (now 29) apologized to me for having been a kid! He has a going-on 7 year-old daughter and now understands.
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LOL. I did almost the same thing once. But in these metaphors it’s always the 1950s
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Back when I studied Sociology and before the “science” went completely off the rails (or perhaps it was Cultural Anthropology — the two fields tend to blend and I studied both) it was a basic premise of the field that society had customs, norms, mores and laws, more or less in that order (I may have jumbled this a bit; I recall there being only three levels, but it has been thirty-odd years and I’m not going to dig out the notes.)
The basic idea was that each level represented a stronger and more stringently enforced behavioral expectation, built upon the lower levels. (MUST have been Soc; had it been Anthro the word “taboo” would be in the set.) The thing is, unless an act was contrary to a lower level stricture, higher level rules would be honored mostly in the breach. Thus, because (for example) drinking alcohol was NOT contrary to custom, normative behaviour or mores (although drunkenness was) then laws banning consumption of outlaw would never be effective. The culture must underlay the legal structure.
We can see an example of this in the ongoing debate over “gay marriage.” Through widespread, repeated exposure to sympathetic treatment of gay characters in popular media they have been rendered friendly and nonthreatening. Thus acceptance of them into the broader cultural structures comes more easily. Had society spent the last few decades propagating depictions of gays as bitter, resentful and predatory (watch some Peter Lorre performances from the Thirties) we would not now be entertaining the concept of “gay marriage.”
This is what the academic debate over “othering” a group is based upon. This is why people who accept their religious strictures against homosexuality are being othered as bigots and homophobes, just as gun owners are being othered as potentially homicidal “gun nuts.”
It is also why no “stroke of the pen” can radically improve the society. Either the necessary change has already been absorbed into the culture’s norms and the law merely ratifies the acceptance, or it is alien to the culture and will be widely disobeyed, fostering corruption and eroding governmental legitimacy.
That said, there probably is a single, costs no money act we could take that will make every child better able to learn. Eliminate the Department of Education. (I got others; for one thing eliminate graduation requirements, focus instead on admission criteria — but that’s a hobby horse of a different colour and I think it may be dead.)
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That said, there probably is a single, costs no money act we could take that will make every child better able to learn. Eliminate the Department of Education.
Yeah Baby!!!!!!!
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Yeah — this was a legislation to ADD to government, not reduce it.
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We digress, sorry.
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Digressions are a feature, not a bug, on this blog. Sometimes they become the main feature, other times they are more of a creature feature.
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…just as gun owners are being othered as potentially homicidal “gun nuts.”
Heh. Just a couple of days ago, a friend of mine posted a recent meme on Facebook, pointing out the dichotomy between tighter gun restrictions and gun crime statistics, with Chicago as the example, and someone commented that letting people have more guns was just going to make it worse. Her words, in more than one comment, were “More guns, more dead”.
I replied that this comment implied that she was of the mindset that all who carry guns were criminals, because it implied that there was no such thing as a responsible gun owner, and pointed out the utility of making the criminals worry about being the recipient of gun violence rather than the perpetrator. She hasn’t replied.
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Her words, in more than one comment, were “More guns, more dead”.
Well, that IS rather my goal– beats pissing on myself in hopes that a rapist will find that just too gross to assault me, or my daughters.
Not all deaths are the same… not that gun-grabbers believe that, since they include 19 year old gang members killed during a crime in the “kids killed by guns” stats.
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Not to mention inflating homicides with suicides. Regardless of the moral stance one might have, gun control activists won’t acknowledge the contradiction between the right to control one’s self and claiming that suicides justify gun control legislation.
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Regardless of the moral stance one might have, gun control activists won’t acknowledge the contradiction between the right to control one’s self and claiming that suicides justify gun control legislation.
Don’t even have to go that far– there are WAY too many ways to commit suicide for it to be rational to suppose removing a single weapon will do much; guns are just fairly quick and make it easier to control exactly where your body is found, providing the highest impact on whoever the suicide wants to hurt. Sort of like hanging yourself in your boss’ office. (They’re also highly publicized– shocker, mentally unstable folks can be influenced by the news banging to death a news story.)
From the “step in front of a bus” to “pain killers, cold medicine and alcohol,” there are a LOT of ways to kill yourself quickly if you’re not trying to get an emotional impact on a specific person. (Supposedly, part of why the Navy switched to motrin is that when you OD or mix it with alcohol, you just get a killer bellyache.)
For a while there was a big fad for the “slit wrists in a warm bath with dramatic lighting,” about the time the “Cutting” fad started, that even got to my sister– thank God, most of the girls that tried it couldn’t find a vein with a biology textbook and a magnifying glass.
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Years ago, when I was commuting to law school by train, each week someone would decide to suicide by jumping in front of the train – thereby delaying it for quite a long time while LEO investigated. Never generated much sympathy for the deceased among the passengers, and large deductions of points for lacking neatness.
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Makes you very, very dead, though– it’s not like “consideration for others” is high on the list when killing yourself.
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Well, usually not, given how often the act is a form of passive aggression against friends/family. But we’ve done a couple of probates lately where the suicide appeared to me to be attempting to be “neat” in their way. Sad in its way.
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Of course some of them are twisted enough to think they are being considerate of others. I had a friend in high school whose father used to say that once her younger brother graduated high school they wouldn’t need him any more. So, he was going to go out in the backyard, sit under a tree, smoke a joint (which always confused me since he didn’t touch drugs or alcohol, and was very disparaging of those who did) and blow his brains out. He thought he was being considerate by waiting until his kids graduated, in reality, telling them what he was going to do when they graduated was extremely inconsiderate.
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More sides than a circle, and more layers than an onion… every self-styled martyr to work I’ve worked for spent a LOT of time doing stuff that needed to not be done, usually while stepping on the folks who’d done it the first time and would have to re-do it when they were done… they thought they were being “helpful,” too.
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“More sides than a circle”
You do know that a circle has 2 sides?
Inside and outside. ;)
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Those are two of them! Then there’s the top side, the bottom side, the left and right, front and back, and then you start looking at all the points on the circle itself….
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I assumed she was talking about an alternate mathematical definition: The limit, as n approaches infinity, of a regular polygon of n sides.
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*interest* Is that one way that “circle” has been defined? It seems…delightfully elegant, in a way I haven’t seen in math since before they put in a new textbook series. :)
It would seem to overlap with the “infinite number of points on a circle” one, without being quite the same.
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I’m not sure if it’s an official definition, but I have seen it described that way before, by professors.
It’s been (mumble) years since I was actually paying attention to such things, too.
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I try to be fliply facetious and you go taking me seriously.
;p
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Ah, the wonders of plain text communication.
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LOL– yea, I met many of those girls in the Navy– ugh–
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You left out “suicide by cop.”
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Some things I’d class as “natural causes” in the Pratchett sense– walking into a dwarf bar and asking for a short pint, etc.
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Well, actually, once upon a time, the leading means of suicide in Britain was to turn on the gas. When coal gas gave way to natural gas, which you couldn’t do that with, the rate of gas suicides plummeted. So did the overall rate of suicide.
Similarly, on a smaller scale, putting up nets to make a bridge difficult to jump from did not increase, even slightly, the suicide rates from another bridge. Painting a bridge bright blue can also vastly decrease suicides from it.
The problem with being rational about suicide is that most people considering suicide are not rational.
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bright BLUE????
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Can’t do *what* with natural gas? It will kill you just as dead as any other.
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Owing to the lesser quantities of carbon monoxide, not as well.
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So they don’t know that you’re NOT supposed to light the burner? Ok, one instance where dumber is SAFER.
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lol
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Blue?
I can see cutting down on impulse suicides– and, to be cynical, “suicides”– but what on earth is there about blue bridges that would have effect? Harder to see from a distance?
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yes, that was my curiosity too.
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There’s a mood modifier effect in the color blue.
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Hm…. that’d explain why a nice, bright, gemstone blue is my favorite color…I thought it was just that I liked the color!
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Into the woo-woo stuff– turquoise is considered a protective stone. So it makes sense to me. ;-)
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Yup. Also, painting the rooms where they kept suspects bubble-gum pink cut down on the amount of violence in them. (I forget whether it was a courthouse or a police station.)
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painting the rooms where they kept suspects bubble-gum pink cut down on the amount of violence in them.”
Ooookay, confine me in a room and paint it pretty pink, and your more likely to incite violence.
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There are three bridges in Lewiston, one of them is blue. I can’t recall anyone jumping off of any of them, although a guy did drive a stolen car off the blue one a year or so ago in an attempt to elude the police (they caught him when he swam to shore, and there was some sort of kerfuffle because he swam out on the far side, and it was a different state, out of the cops jurisdiction). Somehow I don’t believe the color of the bridge had any bearing on his choice of bridges to drive off of however.
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Infallible, it isn’t.
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You’d never catch me jumping off of a blue bridge. Embarrassing it would be.
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Liberals won’t acknowledge the contradiction where they think suicide is a good thing (if Physician-assisted) or a bad thing (if done with a gun). What happens if a physician assists you in suicide with a gun?
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Charge both of you, whomever sold the gun, and pass new gun control laws, because MOAR LAWS IS BETTAR!!
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“If one drink makes me feel this good, ten drinks should make me feel ten times as good.” Benjamin Hardaway III
The fallacy that more is always better.
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Not all deaths are the same… not that gun-grabbers believe that, since they include 19 year old gang members killed during a crime in the “kids killed by guns” stats.
“He was just starting to turn his life around!!”
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I think you’d like this:
http://www.salisburyreview.com/blog/Blog_Theodore_Dalrymple/Entries/2013/4/2_Murder.html
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I don’t want to take this thread too far from Sarah’s original post, but today’s Day by Day by Chris Muir … wow.
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Yeah. He’s been on a tear this week.
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Oh, yeah. Saw it last night before going to bed.
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Some of the evil words: “The government should (paste inane idea here) .”
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the government should stop coming up with crazy ideas! (runs.)
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I’ll vote for just, “the government should stop”
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But when you examine them with the proper perspective they aren’t crazy at all. Governments are organisms, and like any other organism have a strong sense of self preservation. Those “crazy” ideas looked at in context invariably foster growth and security of the government entity.
It’s only when one assumes that government exists for the sake of the governed that so many of their actions seem crazy.
The whole point of our constitution was to keep government small and weak. Sadly, we’ve been going away from that since almost the beginning of the republic. Certainly since 1791 with the Whiskey Rebellion.
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The cry of “well, we’ve got to do something” should strike fear in the hearts of the masses. There is nothing worse for society than a group of people with good intentions and absolutely no idea what they’re doing.
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my response is often “Doing nothing is too often far better than doing something wrong”
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There ought to be a law?
Unfortunately that law will not only go for that idiot next door, sooner or later it will also cross you, or somebody you think is in the right. But that is, I suppose, easy to forget when you are mad at somebody or something.
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So, if you missed it the first go round, An Answer From The North and Superlamb Banana are free right now. I’ll be cycling a free short story every five days, for the next month or so, so if you look for my name on Amazon and sort by price, you should get it, if I forget to tell you.
Oh goody!
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I know I have said this before lol– all legislation should expire. Plus all legislators should only be allowed two political terms period. (No term as dogcatcher, then Senator, then another two for Congressman– ;-)… no only two… I guess I am getting very upset with what is happening now… )
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Plus I like what NV does. Congress in the State is only open for four plus or minus months and only once every two years.
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I think maybe a review committee that re-looks all laws every so often(ten years?) and makes a determination on whether or not it should continue.
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Too much power imho. Expires, then they have to go through the whole thing over again to get it through the legislature. Amendments, of course, already have a pretty good rules for ratification, etc.
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The problem is that there are some laws that should be no brainers. I think it would take up a little too much time voting every few years to renew laws against murder and rape.
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I see what you are saying- (got a gray area mind too), but when you give certain legislators an inch they take a mile, a State, a Country– keep ’em busy, I say with important stuff so they don’t have time to make power bases.
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I understand the thought. Unfortunately, we all know that our legislators would use such things as an excuse to not look at the laws that are truly out of date.
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So it wouldn’t be too different than today except the out-of-date ones would be expired. ;-)
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That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
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Aye, the more time they spend re-upping the laws against rape and murder the less time they have to think up things like Dodd-Frank and Obamacare.
If I had my way, every law would expire at midnight, Oct. 1. unless specifically passed in the preceeding 12 months, each law had to be specific (i.e. no “U.S.C. Section umpty-squat is hearby renewed”), and no bill could be longer than 300 pages.
Eventually the evil of Congress would be limited by the clock and human biology.
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What happens when they let the deadline pass and child molestation becomes legal for a couple of days?
I get the sentiment, I really do, but I also know the folks in our society and thoes in Congress wouldn’t have the common sense to renew the real laws and would get caught up on minutae about what kind of box lobsters shipped in from Honduras have to be in.
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What happens when they let the deadline pass and child molestation becomes legal for a couple of days?
Then the state gets to charge them.
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Incidentally, pedophile behavior has been pushed towards normalization since I was in high school– National Association for Man/Boy Love or whatever. That was in the mid 90s, I can’t believe it’s been any less promoted in the meantime… and pedophilia by women against boys is something that the victims would be harassed for protesting, while teenage girls being victimized by adult men is a revenue stream for Planned Parenthood.
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Then everyone who let the deadline pass gives their opponents in the next election a huge gift. The political system would ensure that the “real” crimes; murder, rape, etc. would get taken care of first while the BS crimes such as putting too much plant food in the air, or making too much money would have to wait.
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Sounds great on a libertarian level…right up until some enterprising lawyer gets hold of it.
I agree with reviewing laws that are stupid, abused by overzealous prosecutors, and out of date, but the system for review has to be thought out as well. We need to be careful that in closing one Pandora’s Bo, we aren’t opening three more.
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Until some enterprising lawyer gets hold of it and does what, exactly?
I’m not being snarky or sarcastic. If you see a failure mode I’d like to know about it. I should be clear that I think these restrictions should only apply at the federal level. States can be trusted with more power because people have the option of fairly easily voting with their feet.
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Laws against releasing classified material lapse…and Bradley Manning gets out of jail. Laws against kidnapping lapse…and a guy gets off b/c he took his charge into another state. Some bigot decides to have separate eating counters again b/c the CRA of 1964 lapses.
Those are just off the top of my head. Silly? Perhaps, but I never underestimate the maniacal ability of lawyers to manipulate things. Review? Yes, but under control and not just a free for all. Anarchy is no better than rigidity.
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Pardon if I don’t see someone that really, really wants to separate customers by race being able to make that public. Beats the hell out of the current “I’ll turn a blind eye while people are assaulted” setup.
Again, assumes the federal laws are the only one around, and that various crimes only have one applicable law. (While I dislike most redundancy in laws, there are lots of ways to get someone for kidnapping– especially if each crime has to be passed as a separate law. Ditto for releasing classified material, which is usually breach of contract, as well as treason, which would be a constitutional matter. Oh, and committing a crime then going to a state where it isn’t a crime? Mentioned in the constitution, too– extradite the SOB.)
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” Some bigot decides to have separate eating counters again b/c the CRA of 1964 lapses.”
Er… as much as some of those in power want to claim, there isn’t that much racism (especially by whites) left in this country. Yes there is some, but most of it is too mild a form for a businessman to hurt his own business to satisfy his slightly racist feelings, and such a decision would hurt business. Yes there probably would be one here and there that might at least think about such a move if the laws were to lapse, but they would be rare, and most would simply go out of business, because to many customers would go to the café down the street that didn’t segregate, instead.
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YEP
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Lunch counters were not segregated because of the bigots running them. They were segregated because of the bigots who passed laws requiring it.
Take the bus boycott. The seating was legally required. And the way the city had gotten the bus companies to obey the law was by randomly stopping buses and arresting the driver if he had let it be violated.
Prejudice is free. Discrimination costs. Even law-mandated discrimination has often been a dead-letter.
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Nyah – they’ll just roll it al together into a “Continuing Resolution” and pass it in bulk, same way they’ve been doing budgeting for five years now.
They will use the no-brainer laws, like those barring murder, rape, theft, fraud the way make-up artists use foundation and blusher, to conceal those things nobody in their right mind would accept. Review the history of earmarks and special loopholes and argue otherwise.
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That’s why the laws need to be original language, not renewals, and bills are limited in size. Try an add too many special interest onto the rape bill and you just send it back to committee to be broken up and start all over again. Since nobody wants to run against ads saying “Congressman Schmukatelli allowed the legalization of rape” they’ll try and keep the important bits as clean as possible. And the more time they spend jockeying to put their favored pork on the “must pass” bill the less time they have to break things.
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They should also be required in the text of the law to provide proof that each and every clause is related to the main Bill.
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I’d rather see 300 Congressmen and 25 Senators work to get their pet legislation attached to the popular bills, then have the conference committee strip most of them out to meet the size limit (I’m willing to admit that 300 pages may be too generous). The wailing and gnashing of teeth? CSPAN would actually become entertaining.
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All regulation must be legislated.
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In the absence of a two-thirds majority vote of both houses, the budget from the previous year shall be deemed passed and renewed.
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But only that exact budget.
Of course, the situation we’re in right now IS that sort. Still, it’d limit the damage.
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First I would pass a law that says that any department that can’t pass its audit get exactly the budget that it could account for last year.
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Personally I think I would prefer that to read– all legislators should expire.
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I like that one lol
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Glenn Reynolds’ trope of the libertarians taking over and dictatorially letting everyone do what the hell they want comes to mind.
The problem dramatically, of course, is that if someone wrote a “government collapses and life goes on” story, there’d be nothing to make a plot out of.
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Actually no– you suspense the story up with all the armeggedon rhetoric, and (Simpsons did this in one of their cartoons) then after a few days of fighting, people realize it is better to cooperate lol. No one needs to be saved– they are saving themselves. I can see a story.
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Use the model of the Hurricane Sandy aftermath, with elements of Katrina: the greatest harm is suffered by those who follow government directives (go thou and gather at the football stadium) or are crippled by government attempts to “help” while those who anticipated, prepared and cooperated do best.
Very black comedy potential.
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Or those who prepared and behaved responsibly are “helped” and thus suffer– such as the gun confiscation orders, which left them vulnerable to the folks who were TRYING to use the break in enforcement to “enrich” themselves.
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Actually, the story has been written. It is “Alongside Night” by J. Neil Schulman. In fact it is coming out as a movie this year.
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You mean like Vernor Vinge’s Across Realtime?
M
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In the absence of big government, people form small government. Ie., they self organize. They get together and protect each other, look for people who need help, and help them.
It happens all the time in various scales of natural disaster, although I’m always surprised how often the media falls to cover those stories.
And as for the absence of police being an instant, trigger to anarchy and mass violence, sometimes the opposite is true.
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Edit the post!
You don’t want “credit” for sending to free books– if they outnumber your paid book referrals, Amazon won’t pay you!
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Er? What? Oh. Actually, Glenn says it’s the “while I’m here, I’ll buy…” Whatever.
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It is, but they sent out a letter in the last….um… sometime since Christmas that had that nasty little point in it.
Since the free books are only one-click-buy, I believe you don’t get credit for the “while I’m there” effect anyways, because it’s different orders.
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“Associates who we determine are promoting primarily free Kindle eBooks and meet both conditions below for a given month will not be eligible for any advertising fees for that month within the Amazon Associates Program. This change will not affect advertising fees earned prior to March 1, 2013.
1. At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks
2. 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links.”
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Okay then. Don’t think I”ll get nearly that much.
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Would that even matter? I thought you said earlier you weren’t able to do the Amazon Associates thing anymore (at least with your own books? I wasn’t clear on that one).
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Ah. well. Let’s say that one can have an out of state friend get a code and we work out a private contract arrangement for the code. Whose business is it, but ours?
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Were that the case I would ALWAYS enter Amazon for buying stuff from a link embedded on your site. Not that I – harumph – would approve of such subterfuge, of course, harumph.
So, just as a matter of curiosity, with absolutely zero interest in side-stepping onerous oppressive and idiotic governmental policies, is such a link on this site? Hidden in your book covers, perhaps?
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I shall put one up. Not yet, but I shall put one up, as soon as I discover how to do it!
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To digress slightly, you mention in several places that the function of the police is to protect us from the bad people that would otherwise hurt us. This is incorrect and the spread of this idea is one of the things that is destroying police trust along with the drug war.
The purpose of the police is to prevent vendettas by investigating crimes that have already been commited and capturing the criminals for prosecution, thus relieving the victim or their friends from doing so (and possibly getting it wrong, setting off another round of the cycle). It is our own responsibility to protect ourselves from bad people as the police cannot be there by anything other than chance when we need their protection. In fact when they respond to a call for help, they far too frequently hurt the good guys because they have fractions of a second to make the life or death decision of who is the bad guy when they encounter a crime in progress.
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Suggested compromise:
“enforce the law.”
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what I meant by protect is that if there’s expectation of being caught it makes it less likely the bad actors will do it. (Not a lot less likely, but somewhat.)
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Same way “my victim may be armed” is a deterrent to murderers, even though there’s only a fraction of a chance of being able to identify that someone is trying to kill you, get your weapon out and shoot them before you are dead.
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yep.
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It’s more of a deterrent to other violent crimes, which are, after all, more frequent. Also murder is often the culmination of other crimes, so it helps there, too.
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When employed correctly it is also an excellent deterrent of repeat offenses. The death penalty, whether administered by a justice official so directed by a court of law, or by a citizen in a dark parking lot; is the one 100% effect deterrent of repeat offenses by the criminal.
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Yep, the courts have consistently found that law enforcement has no legal obligation to protect individuals, only society as a whole, and only after a law has been broken. IOW you can’t sue the cops for failing to protect you. Which is why the anti gun crowd is not only misguided, but evil, as their constant claim that the law will protect you is a flat out lie.
But then when pressed to their position’s logical conclusion they will insist that a woman raped and strangled with her own panty hose is somehow morally superior to a live woman standing over the cooling body of her attacker with a smoking gun.
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Ah, you’ve been listening to Congresswoman Diana DeGette?
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What horrifies me is that a parody campaign from a pro gun site picked up support at anti-gun sites– it’s a picture of a college age girl, huddled into herself, crying, with the words “RAPE LASTS FOR MINUTES– MURDER IS FOREVER” or something like that.
Course, saw that shortly before those political idiots started talking about how a woman might start shooting guys because she’s too dumb to know if her life is in danger for real or not…..
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Indeed. You know, there are a lot of very stupid, very naive people among gun control activists’ ranks – but there is also a core of people among them with some very sick ideas.
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There are also a lot of folks who don’t know the special definitions in use– I’ve had several arguments with relatives who wouldn’t believe when I explained what the phases meant when gun control folks used them. (No, not unpacking them– things like “assault weapon,” or calling simi-automatics “military type.”)
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Its deliberate that the terms used by gun control activists are confusing and misleading.
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They really hate it when you point out that “argument by special definition” is a fallacy.
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*snort– it is a liberal tactic to rename things so that they sound much worse than they are– and make their causes sound lily-white. Programming at its best (or worst).
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“. You know, there are a lot of very stupid, very naive people among gun control activists’ ranks ”
Oh you mean the Colorado congresswoman who had this to say about banning high-capacity magazines?
“What’s the efficacy of banning these magazine clips? I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them. And so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high-capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available.”
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DeGette is a moron but on top of that her flack tried “clarify” by making an equally stupid substitution of “clips”. Then DeGette had Denver Post publish a response from her about how bad it is that she is soooo picked on, in the midst of which she repeated state rep Fields’ lie about her son being killed with an “assault weapon”.
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Yes, I especially liked the clarification (when they had time to look up her gaffe, instead of an off the cuff answer) when they stated she actually meant clips, not magazines… because of course clips are ammunition, and can’t be reused.
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Which amused those of us who actually paid good money to buy stripper clips for 7.62x39mm, 7.5x55mm (although the Swiss call them “chargers” ), .30-06 enbloc clips for the Garand (the Greek ones made by HXP aren’t bad) , and a bunch for my Mausers …
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You did get them loaded, didn’t you? Because I have it on excellent governmental authority that they are useless once used.
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And yet, somehow loading ammo into those clips was accomplished by me. A technical exercise beyond the ken of ordinary man.
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D*mn… if you talk to rape victims– (I know of one who was tortured too), rape is a wound that lasts the life of the victim. It takes a lot of work to get over– death of the perp sure helps though.
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I don’t know if it helps. But my theory is: It can’t hurt.
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Personally I have not experienced that degradation– thankfully. Of course it helps to have a reputation lol
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Twenty three years ago I was “only” assaulted by multiple males in the hallway of a public school, during the lunch period. It was 4 years before I could be in the cockpit with someone who belonged to the same ethnic group as the lead assailant without having a panic attack, and to this day I still go to DEFCON 1 when I see a group of teenage males laughing at something. I would have been a lot better off mentally as well as physically if I’d been able to defend myself in ANY way.
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I am sorry to see this– it must have been horrible.
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I go DEFCON 1 as well after seeing what males can do (karate and military). They have to prove themselves before I trust– includes family members as well. ;-) That’s why I feel so lucky with the hubby.
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Any group of teenagers is equivalent to a pack of feral animals. Not being judgmental, its just a fact of human nature.
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Robert, Marshall, and their friend Jake? Well, maybe, if you’re either a burger or a video game…
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Well, Robert’s not a teenager any longer … but my comment was not an attack on any particular teenager. Just an observation about how teenage humans behave in groups.
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There’s a reason that boot camp focuses on removing individualistic tendencies– and young adults are especially vulnerable to it.
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It was horrible. It won’t happen again. This little sheep has excellent situational awareness and some nasty surprises hidden in her wool. *bares teeth in what is not a smile*
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Good for you– make it painful
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This little sheep has excellent situational awareness and some nasty surprises hidden in her wool. *bares teeth in what is not a smile*
Glad to hear it!!
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And this — Sarah says — not all the feminism in the world can fix. We’re smaller. We’re physically weaker. Thank G-d there’s a gun for that.
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Barring the element of surprise and the attacker not expecting any resistance at all, amen.
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This is why Mrs. Dave and I are working to see to it that the young women in our lives learn to shoot, and that their parents understand why. Why Mrs. Dave has the concealable handgun (my big wheelgun is really only concealable under my greatcoat), and why our daughters (should we be so blessed) will learn young to keep their pencils sharpened, and then receive more ballistic deterrents when the time is right.
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” why our daughters (should we be so blessed) will learn young to keep their pencils sharpened”
It’s a real shame hats and hatpins have went out of style.
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I carried a hatpin for years. No hats, but grandma had a hatpin. I positioned it strategically poking out the book bag. In my day Portuguese men (a certain TYPE of Portuguese man) thought frottage against teen girls was included in the bus fare. I developed the ability without turning to position the bag just so and SHOVE HARD. The scream was reward enough.
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frottage
Good word. It’s a new one for me.
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N.B. – the word is of French origin. Meaning the practice was sufficiently common to generate a specific linguistic referent.
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Mrs. Dave usually has hair long enough for decorative hair stabbies, and they need to come to clean points so as to not catch and pull the hair. Some of them are metal, or reinforced plastics. Also, sturdy pens, flashlights, belts, decorative knotwork . . .
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This seems a suitable spot for my point: remember, according to liberal/feminist theory, rape is not a sexual crime but a tool of oppression for the patriarchy.
Thus, anybody saying “Rape lasts for minutes” is anti-woman, supporting a patriarchal state. They are waging a “war on women” by demanding they make their bodies available to any man with the interest and opportunity to take them. Talk about your 50 shades!
Talk about your incoherent world views!
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@kilteDave –
Decorative knotwork? The rest of the items on your list are effective enough weapons in a pinch, but decorative knotwork doesn’t seem like it would be sturdy enough to make an effective weapon. Unless it’s knotwork in leather or something. What kind of decorative knotwork are you talking about?
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Specifically, a monkey fist around a steel ball bearing about an inch or so in diameter, preferably at the end of a line long enough to get a good grip on. Something like a keychain in paracord or (perspicacious, thou) latigo strap. Even hemp manilla can produce a serious enough knot to deter the unwary, though in the paracord or leather could easily end up as a stopper for a belt.
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When I was in Vietnam, I made friends with a ROK Marine NCO (I walked up on him in combat boots, and he didn’t hear me coming — he was so surprised he almost killed me!). He taught me some NASTY things to do to people who might attack me. His first suggestion in hand-to-hand fighting was ‘always go for the eyes – a blind man can’t even shoot you’. It’s good advice. I had someone grab me around the throat once. They managed to put his eyes back in his head, but he never was able to see well again. He also taught me a few other things I won’t share, because they make popping people’s eyes out sound pleasant. Just remember — there’s no such thing as a dangerous weapon, only dangerous people. If you work at it, you can get so dangerous others will leave you alone. It also SHOWS, even when you don’t try to show it.
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Only thing that has really happened (physical, I have gotten yelled at a couple of times) to me happened when I was so young any factual self-defense by me would not have been really possible, besides I didn’t even realize it was something he shouldn’t have been doing, just that I didn’t like it. Male relative who was touchy feely in the wrong way. He never went that much over the lines, without the one time it got a touch more blatant I would not have been able to name the whole thing even when adult, just suspect – and he could control himself, after a very short while he left, very fast, and I think he avoided me for several days after that, and he did stop the lesser ‘tickling’ he had been doing after that too.
But it did leave me with something of a dislike for blond men. And generally wary of sexual advances by any man, perhaps a bit too wary.
Yet the current hysteria over pedophiles makes me sad, because now it seems that pretty much no man dares to touch a child, any child that isn’t his, and not always even then, at all without risking being accused of that.
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I believe that was the point of the original parody– “not even THOSE idiots would actually go this far” kind of thing.
Of course, when you redefine “rape” to include “I got drunk and seduced him, then thought it was a bad idea,” it is more understandable. Still sickening, but more understandable.
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I don’t include those idiots– it is the feminist idea of remorse– “we’ll call it rape” — idiots
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Part of what makes this “The Crazy Years” is that you almost can’t write parody any longer. You can’t distinguish reality from The Onion today.
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Someone got me with an Onion article recently– I truly believed it had happened because of the crazy things that are happening now. Don’t ask me what it was… I have a brain-wipe every few days so I can remember important things like time to take my meds. ;-)
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I think the definition you were thinking of is “I got drunk and woke up with him … and he didn’t call me two days later.”
It is consistent with the premise that “women are always and in all ways victims of men, and we’re doing our damndest to see they stay that way.”
I can’t recall anybody ever endorsing “testosterone poisoning” as a disability, but it might make an amusing test case for the courts.
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Nah, it’s a disability– so bad that one in five victims need medication. (or something like that– the ADD/ADHD stats are horrifying)
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Nah, my example is based off of some cases in the Navy where the gal was actively hunting, and just choose another drunk that wasn’t as attractive when she’d sobered up.
I also had a roommate that accused a guy of raping her because she wanted to hurt his girlfriend. Thank God, he was out of state and in front of a bunch of officers at the time the assault supposedly happened.
I am VERY big on there needing to be good levels of proof for any rape accusation, before punishment and public shaming.
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I agree with the proof too– I saw two cases when I was in the Navy where the girl accused and it was really “morning after blues.” I do know of an actual rape in a war-zone– and the woman who told me was not one of the flighty ones so I believed her. She didn’t report it though– because of the problem of “wolf-rapes” (boy who called wolf story) some of the real rapes are not given the serious attention they should be given.
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A warzone is also a very, very bad place to be if there’s someone who has reasons to wish that you not talk. (An additional reason I really don’t like how women have been integrated into the military! Well behind the “some women really like using their bodies to get advantage, and it’s set up to let them,” though.)
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This was a problem years ago, when I was trying to explain to a young girl (now a bestseller writer, so I won’t mention names) why her BRILLIANT idea that there had been great woman fighters throughout history but men had rewritten history not to mention them was stupid. I mean, first, let’s ignore the fact that ALL the men on Earth conspiring on ANYTHING is daft. I don’t know what her father and brother were/are like, but my males couldn’t conspire not to tell me where they hid the chocolate. (Periodically they try. It’s so cute.) And there’s only three of them, and they’re all related and LIKE each other, not millions from often inimical countries.
But even if you grant her the “great male conspiracy” — opposing fighters could kidnap this woman or pay someone to seduce her or rape her and get her pregnant. End of great fighter, or an attempted abortion by middle ages methods, likely to kill her. (THIS without considering body strength differentials and sizes, etc.)
Yes, there were always women who fought in wars (often disguised as men.) BUT not many, outliers, and certainly not “famous fighters.” However, this young lady, about seven years younger than I, had an excellent education. So she refused to believe me. (After all, I must be a high school drop out. I was married, had kids, and — OMG — did whitework crochet.)
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Someone didn’t have brothers. Or did, and had the most insanely controlling parents on earth, or the brothers were total wimps… it really is startling how much stronger a guy is.
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This is what comes of believing that what you see in movies* and on television** is real. An appalling % of the population seems to share that delusion.
*Supply your own examples
**See *
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Buffy. Every female human character besides the title one…. (hey, they had Handwavium!)
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or she had younger brothers. I quit arm-wrestling with one of my brothers when I barely beat him. He was thirteen and I was eighteen.
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Yea– just another way to be a camp follower– etc, etc.
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Drives me nuts– if it were done correctly, there is so much potential, and I know I gave value, loved doing the job and was improved by my time in; I believe you did similarly.
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YES– but you know many of the men complained that I took away a shore billet even though I had to go through some really accelerated electronics schools, plus I was outside the US for most of the time I was in the Navy. ;-)
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I happen to like the ‘Xena-type’ characters, but they are totally unrealistic, and you better give me at least a fig leaf to help suspend my disbelief, such as Honor being a gen-modded heavyworlder, martial arts expert. Women have played an important role in many battles and wars, whether it be in intelligence or support, or last ditch defense (someone has to reload, after all) but not on the front lines.
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I was involved in a karate group when I was in my mid twenties. The best fighter was a woman just over five feet tall. However, even though she won award after award, she refused to fight men. Now I was always put with the teenage boys because I could hit hard.
I learned quickly that the full-grown male could kick my butt all over the place. lol I could fight the teenagers, but they were easy to bait so they would quit thinking. I have dropped a couple of guys, but I never use fairness– being quick, and using leverage helped every time. Also when a guy is running and you slip around a corner, but your arm up, he runs into it, will drop a full-grown male and leave no marks on the stealthy female.
However– because of the differences in strength etc (between males and females) that is why you see women use poison or kill men when they are asleep. I know where you sleep is an effective threat.
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Athena is not only gen modded, she thinks fighting fair is for sissies.
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Considering her size, I don’t blame her (as long as she doesn’t start the fight). [Wink]
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Fighting fair is for public contests with rules and such. Fighting fair when it’s your life on the line is just stupid.
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Hey, can you send that as a letter to every so called “right wing” leader in this country? Thanks.
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I was just paraphrasing any number of people who have written essentially the same thing, and have more intellectual clout than I, so I doubt it would make much difference.
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If you are fighting fair you aren’t actually fighting, you are playing at fighting.
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me too– ;-) And my hubby says that he has never lost an ambush. lol
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“If you are in a ‘fair fight’, your tactics suck”.
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YEP– do you know there is a lot of people who can’t see possibilities when their bodies are on the move? I take advantage of that–
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Ah, women and strength. Here’s a sample. A 17-year-old shacked up with a violent burglar, who took an overdose after he went to jail, and a doctor trying to persuade her that staying with him is unwise:
Full essay here:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_oh_to_be.html
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Their minds are made, up don’t confuse them with the facts.
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Mary– so true and a very enlightening article.
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It has been a very long time, but somebody (Silverbob, I think, but wouldn’t make book on it as it also seems like something Harrison or Reynolds might have told) about a small New England town where aliens make first contact, only to have the town’s “vermin-exterminator” shoot their visitor on the grounds that it is “vermin” — which forces the town fathers, facing the impending arrival of national media and dignitaries, to review the civic code and carefully define “vermin.”
Under the revised and clarified law, the town’s previous vermin-exterminator is declared vermin and exterminated.
I have no problem with making rape a capital offense, although I would probably require a very strict definition and high standard of proof (unlike those members of the Duke Faculty who convicted the lacrosse team of the crime of white privilege.)
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Agreed.
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Thirded.
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I’m in favor.
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#waronwomen.
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Our weapon is chivalry! Chivalry and respect! Our two main weapons are chivalry, respect, and unstinting dedication to the furtherance of the species!
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First time I read that, my brain corrected to “propagation of the species.”
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This is a weapon that needs to be wielded more successfully by our side. By the way, when is your newest weapon due?
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24th, and I really hope they don’t show up early, it’s so hard to accept delivery without proper cover-fire…. ;)
Dear husband, after our first child, gave me a double gift- a tshirt that says “we’re not trying to overpopulate the earth, just out breed the idiots” and… he got it so tiny I could barely fit in it, because “I saw a girl about your size, asked her what size she wears, and got it one larger just in case.” Love him dearly for many, many reasons!
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Evidently near-sightedness is one of those reasons … ;-)
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Love is blind, you know!
Honestly, I’d guess the girl was about the size I was when we first met, rather than the size I was after 9 months of pregnancy and 20 pounds of eating cheap… but it was still very sweet!
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They have done studies. Your husband will continue to see you as you were when he married you. I think this explains my husband’s dazed look… ;)
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I was banned from buying clothing for a girlfriend for that very reason. Well, that and that I have no dress sense apparently.
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Oh yea– hubby bought me an outfit that was several sizes too small. Made me smile. lol
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For that shirt? *I* love your husband.
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They? I missed that the first time around, does that mean you are having twins?
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Nah, just trade-off between the neutral “him” and the singular “they” because I can’t call a child of mine “it.” Not that I think folks who do are bad, I just… can’t.
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“bundle” — it’s what we called Robert.
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*laughs* All three have had their own nicknames, but I don’t want to make it TOO easy for folks to connect me to my legal name!
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KiltieDave, you’ve been talking to Grim Beorn (Grim’s Hall) and Kim d. T. again, haven’t you? :)
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Not … um, not unless I’ve been doing it in my sleep . . .
Why?
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Consider that most gun control is predicated on the assumption that your fellow citizens cannot be trusted with mechanisms of lethal force. Or at least access must be controlled by stringent rules and regulations to filter out those of bad temper or questionable stability.
Now consider that any day one chooses to go for a drive on the public streets they will meet literally thousands of their fellow citizens operating two ton bludgeons known to kill tens of thousands of people a year. Should any one of them go off their nut and decide to swerve into oncoming traffic they could easily kill a number of folks. And the only restrictions on them are a laughably easy test of their operating skills, passing familiarity with the traffic rules, and some basic insurance which only kicks in after some accident occurs.
But then I have yet to meet a liberal who was ever troubled by any sort of foolish consistency in their beliefs. It is however a great treat to point out to them where two or more of their closely held “truths” turn out to be mutually exclusive. Does tend to spin them up and I have seen more than one turn violent, so be warned.
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Fortunately, they are unarmed.
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unfortunately, all to many of them don’t believe the laws apply to them.
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One might wonder what element of selection and training and discipline they imagine makes police officers, alone of all fellow citizens, trustworthy to wield a monopoly on lethal force. Then ask them about “stop and frisk” policies, Rodney King (well, okay – they could have shot Rodney but exercised restraint) and various similar issues.
What alchemy makes a person who is untrustworthy to own a gun as a citizen, trusted to use it as a cop or bodyguard? What alchemy makes that cop lose such trust upon retirement, or the bodyguard untrustworthy when off the clock?
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I believe there’s actually a special gun license for retired cops– my brother got a similar one for special forces and associated folks.
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Not usually, if they’re rich enough– they just arm themselves by hiring someone else to hold the gun.
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Compare with MSNBC – children belong to the village that raised them. – Consider the sneaking away from the Eurozone in Portugal with a dual currency system. The Courts will decree what’s fair.
On the issue of serve and protect there was a case dealing with a female hostage who got loose and ran toward the police who had the hostage site surrounded. Turned out to be blueblack suicide for the hostage to appeal for help to a SWAT team. Legally no obligation, no harm no foul.
It’s been said that all government is ultimately rule by force and so rests on the fraud of effective force – and maintaining the fraud takes reinforcement. Intermittent reinforcement is the best kind.
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My experience and readings have shown that most people do not behave morally in situations where they don’t believe they’ll be caught and punished. Theft and fraud rates would increase tremendously if government disappeared. (During ariot there is no effective government and theft is rampant.) Luckily, most people retain the ‘thou shalt not kill or maim others’ morality even when the risk of being caught is zero.
Anarchy would require people to always defend their property. This is very inefficient and would lower productivity so much that the economy would fail. Anarchists fail to recognize this. Libertarians understand the need for an organization (not necessarily a government) to protect people and their property
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What a lot of Libertarians fail to understand is that any organization capable of protecting people and their property *is* a government.
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No, they don’t agree with your classification. There are some interesting works by libertarian thinkers on the issue – see David Friedman’s writings.
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If it has feathers and lays eggs the %$^ thing is a bird. I don’t care if someone classifies it a flugelhorn, it doesn’t change the properties. You can debate the merits of chickens vs. ducks all day, but you’re still talking about avians.
I’ve read some of Friedman’s stuff, and had extensive discussions with a former shipmate who is an acolyte. I am unconvinced. He falls into the same trap of ignoring failure modes that plague the likes of Ron Paul, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi.
For example, here’s one of his laughably false assumptions “…Tannahelp and Dawn Defense are both profit-making corporations, more interested in saving money than face.” Anarchism has as much chance of working as communism, and for the same reason. They both assume the human condition to be other than it actually is.
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No. I got that. See DSR.
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I will, I promise. Just as soon as the furloughs are over and I can come out of base survival mode. Maybe sooner.
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Self government is small scale and just dandy. Government as it should be. What we object to is the State, capitol Ssssss.
Government arises naturally in any group, as you point out. The State is a contrived parasite.
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So what differentiates a government from a Sate?
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Government (if I get where möbius is going) becomes definitional: how a group regulates itself. A state in that sense would have to be all accretion of apparatus that surrounds it: bureaucracy, body of regulations, enforcement agencies, the mythology of that particular state, etc.
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In that case government is nothing more that the platonic ideal of the state. The real world requires things like bureaucracy and regulations to govern it. And without enforcement agencies a government might as well not exist.
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coercion
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So a government has legitimate power over me only so long as I consent to it? What happens if I categorically reject the concept of your property and take what I want from your home?
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What we object to is the State, capitol Ssssss.
When you write “Ssssss”, what comes to my mind immediately is Minecraft; specifically, the monster known as a “creeper”. It’s a nasty critter that has a habit of sneaking up behind you, then exploding violently, ruining your day and probably ruining whatever it was you were trying to build. And your only warning is the brief “ssssss” sound, which sounds like air leaking out of a tire, right before they explode.
… Huh. You know, that’s actually a pretty darn good analogy to government, now that I look at it.
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think geek advertised marshmallow “peepers” and it was a joke. If it had existed, we’d totally have to it for our younger son (the only one who can have carbs.) Yep, they were “creepers” made in the shape of peeps.
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The recipe: http://whatscookingamerica.net/Candy/MarshmallowPeeps.htm
Now we just need someone to make a creeper-shaped cookie cutter, and this is do-able…
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Robert and I have been trying to figure how to make low-carb marshmallow. I know this sounds insane, but I have a marshmallow thing and — sigh — I miss my fix.
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http://www.starwest-botanicals.com/_search.php?page=1&q=marshmallow
Marshmallow recipe
2 egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon powdered marshmallow root
Substitute any sweetener that survives cooking for sugar, in appropriate proportions.
Whip egg whites until they form peaks. Add vanilla and whip. Whip in sugar one, one teaspoon at a time. Add marshmallow and whip again. Place by teaspoonful on cookie sheet. Bake in 325 oven for 1 hour.
I’ve had them needing to come out sooner than that; cooking time may not be consistent.
Made this way, they come out tan and they usually squish. They’re great with peanut butter. They also absorb moisture from the air, if it’s humid; in a couple of days they get sticky but still taste fine.
You can make mayonnaise with the egg yolks.
The marshmallow powder has a flavor; it doesn’t taste just like whipped sugar. It reminds me of a very light infusion of molasses.
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oooooh.
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… Huh. You know, that’s actually a pretty darn good analogy to government, now that I look at it.
LOL I’d say!
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Impossible to measure– all we can actually know is that the rate of cheaters when they believe there is zero chance of being caught (ie, the “no-one would ever know” situation) is much, much higher than other situations.
I say it’s impossible to measure because it’s a matter of how many dogs aren’t barking in a cement room with a few hundred dogs– no idea how many– and you can’t see the dogs. More than very few will seem like “most.”
A lock only stops an honest thief. There’s a reason that tempting people to sin is a sin…..
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Theft and fraud rates would increase tremendously if government disappeared. Consider this is the 35th anniversary of the Mirage Tavern q.v. articles – I don’t know how it would net out but I do know some theft and fraud would go away.
During ariot there is no effective government and theft is rampant As noted define your government.
KING CASE AFTERMATH: A CITY IN CRISIS : Looters, Merchants Put Koreatown Under the Gun : Violence: Lacking confidence in the police, employees and others armed themselves to protect mini-mall.May 02, 1992|ASHLEY DUNN | L.A.TIMES STAFF WRITER
YMMV
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There wasn’t any effective gov’t, and theft WAS rampant– the Korea Town folks were just able to defend a small area.
It was a great moment arguing that they were very American– as opposed to the feral pack attacking– but I really don’t want to know what those areas outside of the defensible perimeter looked like.
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Inter arma enim silent leges The insurgency in LA used individual tactics very much like those used against the RUC and other Brits in Ireland with women targeting and distracting LEOs for sniping and other attacks. But once again when the mob rules maybe that’s the government?
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Their families were not protected, their homes were not protected, their own LIVES were not protected by anything but being just threatening enough to ward the mob off for softer targets– it wasn’t, in any real sense, an organization able to defend the people involved and their property.
If it were, you’d have to be taking Jeff to say that my husband, by himself is a government– for a very short time, he can protect himself and his property, heck and even the girls and I, just by not being as soft of a target.
The way that most of the vocal libertarians I know would object to the thing that drew the Korean shopkeepers together– family and a sense of duty-to-employer, rather than a formal contract– is kinda a side issue.
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My bad. I should have said when the mob rules maybe the mob is the government?
One side or the other surely must be at least a if not the government?
On the other hand I’d have real trouble thinking of a time and place and an organization able to defend the people involved and their property as opposed to avenging the people and property. Maybe once upon a time in Northfield MN? Surely not Lawrence Kansas in 1863?
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One side or the other surely must be at least a if not the government?
No. Why would you think that?
On the other hand I’d have real trouble thinking of a time and place and an organization able to defend the people involved and their property as opposed to avenging the people and property
“If you do this, you will most likely be caught and punished” is a form of defense. Same way that being known for hitting back is a defense against being punched.
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Also: “able to defend” does not mean “able to offer a perfect defense.”
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This.
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Read Cyril M. Kornbluth’s novel The Syndic. Then read everything else he wrote, including shopping lists.
Not even in your wildest dreams are you more cynical than Kornbluth.
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I liked the Syndic.
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The purpose of a government is to provide for a framework to do your business in and to provide a basic level of security while you do it.
Please note, this does not mean setting out lookouts while you rob a liquor store. It does mean deciding on what appropriate basis for conducting voluntary business over goods, services and money, and having either a method of redress in case of dispute or being able to raise enough force to disuade the next individual who decides to force involuntary business by intitiating force. When a mob can do that it might be a government. If it cannot, it is still a mob.
If you argue that the mob has the right to decide who to violate because there are more of them than Korean shop owners, then you need to show how this rule-of-law of yours was decided on and what its basis is; also you have to accept that if the rule is “majority of force takes what it wants” then you have to allow the Korean shop owners the right to shoot anyone (bring majority force) to bear in thier response. If not, then you do not have rule of law, but oppression.
When Ewing Young died intestate in 1840 in the Oregon Territory (at that point Congress hadn’t gotten off its collective thumb to figure out what to do about the territory, but the problem of slavery was involved), a probate court was set up to resolve his estate and debts. From that beginning, mostly in response to various issues, within 5 years they had developed a provisional government, a provisional constitution, and regular meetings to resolve further issues.
It happened because the community needed the functions that the government could do. There was no violence involved. Would that count as a society building a government to protect the interests and business of the memebers?
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Being threatening enough for a mob to go look for a softer target is a successful defense.
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I don’t think she is argueing it isn’t successful, but rather that it isn’t a government.
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Yep.
I really dislike fallacies of ambiguity.
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I would have to agree with the so-called fallacy that it is unsafe to jog in your pickup truck :)
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That’s what the treadmill is for!
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that’s why I don’t ask for directions since I started driving an F150; somebody told me to go a ways and jog left once and I figured that wasn’t safe. Different in a Bronco where jogging – left and right – is common.
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That’s what the treadmill is for!
Your PU fits on your treadmill?
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At the moment, that’s a philosophy question… can two non-existent items have relative sizes?
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Bah. I get my cardio by lifting faster.
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Not one that will work for longer than the soft targets are around, or if the mob really didn’t have a time limit.
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Well, that’s why one needs to have not just obvious teeth but sharp teeth.
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Argument by tautology. I prefer the Texas adage: one riot one ranger.
Instead of looking only at venues where (by definition) civil order collapsed, look at those communities where there was no effective government yet communities united and committed self-governance.
Of course, those incidents are not considered “newsworthy” … which should give an intelligent person cause to ponder the definition of newsworthy.
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You’re not talking a normal healthy society. Those rioters are lifetime entitlement nanny state sheep. The best example they have is the Nanny, not humanity’s best and brightest.
You don’t see that crap outside of urban soma slums.
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“. Theft and fraud rates would increase tremendously if government disappeared. (During ariot there is no effective government and theft is rampant.) ”
Very true, but this doesn’t necessarily prove ” that most people do not behave morally in situations where they don’t believe they’ll be caught and punished.”
While theft is rampant in a riot, how many more thieves are there than in the normal population? I suspect it is a small percentage, there are not a lot more thieves in a riot than there are in the same population when not rioting, they just do A LOT MORE thieving when they don’t believe they will be caught or punished.
A riot is also a short term affair, so there is not a lot of time for the balancing of the scales effect. Riots are normally either put down by government, or peter out on their own, if either of those to don’t happen, at least in America (culture has a huge effect on this) they are put down by the residents. After a bunch of thieves get shot, the survivors learn that they will punished, regardless of there being any LEO’s present. This is generally localized, and could be argued by some to be a type of government, although I think they are reaching.
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Anarchists don’t believe in Property (“Property is theft”), at least not until you try to take their stuff.
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I use to growl about libertarians being anarchists who like to get paid.
Then I had extensive exposure to the “anarcho-capitalist” branch of libertarianism, courtesy of a fellow who goes by Fred Cole over at Ricochet…..
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A poor grade of anarchist, that.
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a) Goodness, is not, I think, an inherent property of humans, or of the human systems they create.
b) A true lasting lack of government would probably involve populations of individuals too dysfunctional to do any other than prey on each other. (Insert comment here about how this is the only real way to get a classless society.)
c) Human social activity allows us to work together, to have interactions with each other that do not involve predation. Or for a group of humans to cooperate in order to more effectively prey on others. Anyway, various social groupings, like family, tribe, people, party, and nation exist because they are useful. Some of them are so useful that the become very common.
d) A person being able to function in these groups is able to do so because of some combination of upbringing, culture, aptitude, values, and so on and forth.
e) Some groups require a critical mass of individuals with appropriate qualities to form.
f) Dominant weapon technologies, and their distribution, and use, are extremely influential in what kind of military/warrior groups, and hence, governments, can form.
fb) Yes, firearms and the United States.
Governments that are not continually recreated by the population that they apply to will always get to the point of tyranny and constant screw ups. The population and society that is able to continually recreate the government doesn’t need the government to exist to do so. Yes, if it exists, it can be a template and save energy and stuff.
Healthy societies can heal over much damage. Unhealthy societies, dysfunctional messes, do not have much in the way of easy powerful fixes.
The gun control issue can be understood as different factions in the population trying to build the government off of two different templates of government. The gun control faction is in my eyes most likely working off of, ultimately, the white supremacist Jim Crow template. The faction opposed to gun control is using as templates various forms of American government incompatible with Jim Crow.
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A true lasting lack of government would probably involve populations of individuals too dysfunctional to do any other than prey on each other.
True– that’s the only thing that would keep folks from banding together to form basic forms of gov’t. You’d have to even break down the very basic family, or you’ll end up with tribes, and Lord knows that those have multiple levels of gov’t.
(In my family, on both sides, the women ran things other than actual armed conflict and Sgt stuff {Officer test: how do you get a flag off a hill surrounded by enemies? Turn to your sgt and say “get me that flag.”} It’s just that some of them were more obvious than others, bigger or smaller orders, and more or less micromanagement. In one case, the order consisted of “We are moving to America. You two go first.”)
The gun control faction is in my eyes most likely working off of, ultimately, the white supremacist Jim Crow template.
Extra points for historical literacy.
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Earlier, a family was a political faction, a business, a school, and a government. As societal trust increases, it becomes possible to create more specialized, more efficient organizations to carry out some of the activities.
But nothing has ever really matched family at early childhood education, which is the foundation of so much else. Thus why anything done at the level of government, schools, and business will sabotage itself if it sabotages family.
A historical, and perhaps future, level of trust permitting, constraint on marriage relates to this. If one can only trust blood related family, the only way to form new business relationships is by a marriage that produces children blood related to both sides.
The general common cause I can find between the Nazis and the Commies is stressing the population and and individuals enough that maybe, if fully completed, rather than the dream they promise, the survivors might be too dysfunctional to rebuild, maybe even to the point of ‘classless society’. Basic strategy being screwing up kids and delegitimizing institutions through rampant misuse.
Re: gun control: I was actually going a little further than the well attested fact that gun control in America was, in its current form, originally to help murder former slaves. This week or so I’ve been mulling over a related, but more suspect thesis. When the refugees from the Jim Crow South moved to the cities, perhaps they brought with them the idea of local and state government and politics under Jim Crow as ‘the way things are’. So that, maybe as a matter of identity, when and where they had substantial influence over what kind of government would happen, that government would be cosmetically altered, but like Jim Crow at heart. It makes a disturbing amount of twisted sense to me, not to mention being simpler than my other explanations.
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BTW:
“both sides of the AISLE”
and DITZ
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Oh, pfui! ;)
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You write on no caffeine, Mr.
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As it happens, this appeared today at National Review Online’s “Human Exceptionalism” blog and applies to this discussion:
Regardless of your opinion of the “morning after pill” the way in reach the decision is reached should be cause for alarm … unless you agree that the end justifies the means, in which case I have a length of rope and a lamp-post regarding which I am confident you have no valid ethical objection.
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In other words your suggesting they are getting very close to reaching the end of their rope?
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I do believe that the ends justify the means, but not in the normal way. A clearer version of my version would be “Good intentions do not excuse bad results.” And, to be charitable, we’re seeing an awful lot of bad results in the name of good intentions in the world. (And naked power grabs by those manipulating the good intentions.) Notice we never hear that road to Hell is paved with good intentions anymore…
This entire administration needs a lesson in that. But then again, these people who once tried to teach me that morality was an endless set of greys now look at the world in stark black and white.
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That is the natural consequence when you are the Light-bringer; higher contrast.
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Ah, Light Bringer, son of the morning, how hast thou fallen?
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Glad someone else made that connection….
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A group I sang with did a piece entitled “Bright and Morning Star” that always had me wondering if the lyricist had really read Isaiah. That or someone had a very warped sense of humor and wanted to see how many Christians realized the joke.
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I should add that yes, I’m familiar with “Wie Schön Leuchtet der Morgenstern” (How Brightly Beams the Morning Star). The modern piece had no tie to the old imagery. Or so I was told.
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Revelation 22:16 is much more likely. Given that it’s a title, not a name, it can indicate more than one person.
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The point of course is that Venus is both the brightest star in the heavens, and (as morning star) the forerunner of dawn. So it’s a good term for describing some brilliant celebrity like an enemy king or Satan before the fall; but it’s also a good term for Christ, the Sun of Justice Whose Second Coming we seek in the East, and the fore-indicator to us of the brilliance of life eternal in the new heaven and new earth. (And the bit in Peter’s letter about the morning star of hope rising in our hearts.)
And yeah, a lot of Biblical titles and images come with good and bad applications
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If your ends do not justify your means you did a piss-poor job of defining your ends.
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I believe what you are trying to say is not, that the end justifies the means, but that the means do not necessarily justify the end.
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It is unfair to burden the lamp post with my weight. Might I suggest dragging instead?
Seriously, I have no objection to your objection to this event.
a) I really agree that process can be very important.
b) As for contraception, when I was that young I figured that one could just not have sex until one was ready to start raising children. By my reckoning back then, to think otherwise was to be on the side of sexual predation and child molestation. I was very glad that the kink for children seemed to be so rare, aside from the sex ed program types, making the job of dodging such easier than it could be.
Note that this is probably the same rare as when I was talking about serial killers being relatively rare. In others words, far too much for my comfort, but not nearly so common that it happens to everybody.
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Read _Liars and Outliers_ by Bruce Schneier for a more-thorough treatment of the topic.
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Hm. Got me to thinking, actually. All government stops…what happens?
OK, let’s posit the worst case scenario: all functions of life controlled by any entity funded through taxes are shut down, all at once, with no notice, and everyone immediately knows it.
Well, there would be riots. Definitely. Large sections of major cities would probably burn to the ground, and lots of people would die. But the people dying would mostly be the people doing the rioting. (They always burn their own neighborhoods first.)
Getting from downtown to the expressway on surface roads without traffic lights would probably take a very large multiple of the typical time…but not nearly as long as it’d take the rioters to reach downtown with public transit being turned off. (And no, we’re not going to say that the roads wouldn’t work. Roads last for decades.) And that’s assuming they’d make it there at all, which is probably unreasonably pessimistic.
In a situation of civil unrest in the cities, I suspect most employers would be willing to at least temporarily suspend their irrational and counterproductive prejudice against telecommuting, so we could still work.
Air travel would have to stop until someone stepped up to build a private traffic control system. Might take months. But it’d happen, if it needed to.
On the downside, my mother’s social security checks would stop. On the upside, since I wouldn’t have to pay taxes anymore, I could easily replace them with my own money, so I could still keep her from moving in with me, and my wife and I could still have sex.
Those presently reliant upon the state for support would have to either learn a useful trade, or die. Either way, that problem would also take care of itself eventually.
Frankly, other than deterrence of foreign aggression and the eventual need to resurface the roads, I can’t really see much downside to government going away _forever_. For a day? Forget about it…the worst consequence of that would be what would inevitably happen when it came back.
Oh. Wait. Bank runs. Yeah, that’d be a problem. The financial system is completely and utterly addicted to government protection, and we kinda need that. But even with that, I’m not sure it wouldn’t be a net win in the long run.
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Suppose that all more most of the currency also magically goes poof. Bit be a bit of a pain until replacements get worked out. Of course, as is, there is a chance of that happening anyway.
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I’d be more worried about there not being any electricity, phone, etc.
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There are probably enough private large generators for some electrical capacity. I admit the lead time for more is long, but probably not so long as with the current governmental interference. That said, sudden no notice changes in the load and supply on the electrical grid are not a good thing.
I’d imagine the private equipment on the phone/internet is such that some level of service could be restored as soon as power is sorted out. They also probably have a fairly good supply of back up generation capacity.
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If we’re going to posit the roads not going “poof” then the generators and the grid will still exist. There will be some disruptions, especially in those areas highly infested with the green disease, as the grid reorganizes. But the fundamental infrastructure is durable and rather self-protecting.
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most power is from Power Companies. i.e. private not gov’t but some are gov’t (like say the TVA) and some metros are gov’t administered but private supplied.
The same areas likely to get really stupid with riots etc. are also by not so coincidence, areas with gov’t run power services.
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It’s not an issue of the stuff to carry the juice being there, it’s a matter of all the various stations that monitor it– and many of the places that produce it– not having people THERE anymore.
A year or two back, the feds decided to “save” money in the budget by reducing how strict they are with power fluctuations, I can’t remember when it starts, but the feds are horrifically deeply entwined in the power industry and all shipping.
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But if the demand is there, and the means to supply that demand exist, then the people who currently meet that demand will continue to do so. Loss of the government may mean the source of their compensation changes, and that may result in a short term disruption, but some kind of corporation will form. Some areas, such as most of California and the more rural regions, which rely on imported power will see longer outages, but I think the necessary regulating bodies will self-organize. Now, if things go down for a generation or so you can kiss all of that goodbye.
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You have a MUCH higher view of human reason than I do– especially in places like Washington, the activists will take the chance to vandalize and destroy unapproved sources of power, and in Cali the wires won’t survive the time that they’re not electrified.
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No, I just have an accurate, and low, opinion of the people who run the plants. A significant number of the operators in WA are ex-Navy nukes, which means they have little tolerance for BS and a rather twisted view of morality. I’d like to see activists try and shut down the Bremerton power plant. Really, it’s just at the other end of base, I know where several blunt instruments are along the way, and performing percussive maintenance on a hippie is on my bucket list.
California is boned in so many different ways it doesn’t matter if the power goes out. Which is why after I’m done fixing the hippies I have to head south to retrieve mother and the cats.
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Yep.
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Picturing the results when they finish sabotaging the dams, myself.
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The dams are safe. They’re outside EV range of Seattle and are in the part of the state populated by people who have guns and a desire for lights, TV, and to not be swept away by a 80 foot wall of water.
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No, they’re not.
I’m from that area.
Where do you think the insane but wealthy Seattlites send their little terrorists? To the vacation homes in my home valley, and in other areas.
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My worry is based off of the folks who have been moving in since my family got there about ’95– there are a LOT of trust fund babies hell-bent on being as short sighted as possible.
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Taking down a dam is also non-trivial. I have a feeling the first few attempts that don’t end up in the activist aerosolizing themselves will result in some chips and scorched concrete.
A lot of this depends on how, exactly, the government goes “poof”. If it’s sudden then the idiots will probably be caught unawares and without supplies necessary to cause much mayhem. If there is warning it give us Americans a chance to put alternative structures in place.
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“us Americans” — Mr. Gauch, I like you.
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Now I’m trying to dance around giving anyone Ideas… but I suppose something that’s been the moral of an episode of the 80s TMNTs series is probably safe enough:
You don’t have to destroy the dam head on, you just have to make it so that it can’t keep itself stable; make it stop working and there’s a good chance you’ll not get it working again.
I’m pretty sure that the local Communist group (God, I wish I were joking) has a lot of WU type fanboys, and they’ve got connections with all the trustfund baby/ organic subsidy farmers, and there have been some suspicious fires around.
I really, really, REALLY respect the power of water in large amounts.
If this theoretical “it” happened– I’m going off of “poof” in an utter lack of any specific reasons, it’s just stopped– during the right season, several of the dams would be gone just because they couldn’t regulate the water behind them fast enough, unless there was crazy-good luck on “it” happening when the water gates were fully open.
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I believe most dams are designed with either emergency spillways or the ability to resist damage from being overtopped to protect the dam in the event of a worst-case flood and failure of the active control systems. Again, I’m imagining the “poof” to be purely administrative with all of the equipment and operators still around and functional, if unpaid. In that event I think the administrative functions will be recreated locally in the order of the hierarchy of needs. I’m pretty sure “Avoid being swept out to sea” is pretty high on that list.
If G-d decides to crank up the difficulty level on life and starts modifying the laws of physics on the fly I can make no predictions.
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I know at least a couple of the dams had their emergency systems compromised by the fish-runs.
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If I had the supplies and a couple hours to work I could get rid of at least a significant enough portion of a dam to make it inoperable, but I realize that many people don’t have the knowledge, and of those that do, most would have neither the access to supplies nor the inclination to do so. However what I see more likely is the scenario that Foxfier proposes, if everything goes poof during or just before spring runoff problems will ensue, if it goes poof in July it is more likely that everything will be settled out before we hit critical time periods. I feel there is about an even likelihood of flooding and/or permanent damage being done to dams happening through neglect and ignorance as through sabotage; if everything goes poof at the wrong time. Just look at what happened to Toledo, WA fifteen years ago when the engineers didn’t open up the gates for snowmelt until after the water got high enough to threaten the integrity of the dam. Remember, “never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.”
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It only takes one to screw stuff up, and there’s one in every crowd.
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But most crowds also contain someone who thinks they’re the divine instrument to enforce the Zeroth Commandment: Stupidity shall be painful.
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Most of us aren’t fast enough, though.
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Electricity and phone are private. (Well, they’re not as private as they should be, but it’s not the government providing them…just the government making all the policies and setting rules that guarantee a fixed profit margin and no competition.) Those don’t go away just because the government goes *poof*. :)
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In theory, they’re just regulated, but I know people whose federal job is the upkeep of various stations, a lot of our sources are federal or state with heavy federal control, the actual moving stuff is state/fed, and even something as basic as power variation is federally controlled.
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That’s why I think the failure mode of the current system is going fall somewhere between the LA riots in every major city and the US civil war in severity. The vast majority of the US, in terms of surface area, will just shrug and figure something out.
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Not all air traffic control would stop. There are, oh, a hundred or so private control towers. I’d wager businesses would be willing to pool money to keep planes coming in and out, especially cargo. The greatest loss would be radar separation at big hubs, but we (airplane driver types) can go back to the stack, circle, and call descents method of spacing, as was done in Ye Olde Days. And there are scads of airports without control towers that people use every day.
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” And there are scads of airports without control towers that people use every day.”
I was going to point this out, it will be kind of like when traffic lights go out on a road. Yes it is a mess at first, but in a short time people learn to wait and take their turn, things may not move quite as quickly, but they will move fairly smoothly. Moreso since most planes (with the exception of some ‘dusters and small private planes who don’t generally use public airports) have radios and are capable of communicating with each other (kind of like truckers on the road) unlike auto traffic.
I suspect out biggest problems will be financial, government has created a false value currency, when government collapses so will the dollar, and people will be unwilling to trade things like fuel for poorly designed toilet paper.
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