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Guns, Masculinity, and Insecurity

[ 211 ] December 5, 2013 | Dave Brockington

I get atypically angry — seriously pissed off — at the discourse surrounding gun control in the United States. This, in part, explains the colourful language I employed while digesting the NRA’s response to Sandy Hook, and why I’m happy that my daughter is growing up and going to school in England (note, she is proud at being half English and half American, but she is completely unaware of the gun culture in America.) I come to this anger from a position not opposed to guns in general, and I come from a family that has had (and still has) more than a few. Rather, I find it utterly astonishing that a society more enamoured with and dependent upon motor vehicles has no problem regulating the hell out of cars and those who drive them, yet cherishes a laissez fare approach to firearms.

Cars are designed for transportation (aside from perhaps the 1967 Ford Mustang that I owned for a few years in grad school, which was inconsistent at best in getting me from point A to point B, but it did have a 289, four barrel carb, dual exhaust, enhanced suspension, and it was a beautiful British racing green, so it looked great even when I was interminably broken down somewhere inconvenient), not for killing things.  However, we regulate safety features, gas mileage (somewhat), what comes out of the exhaust (again, somewhat), and the speed at which cars can be driven in various contexts. We also regulate drivers, who have to be of a minimum age, pass both a theory and practical test before allowed to drive alone, and if drivers consistently violate the laws governing the safe operation of their vehicle, can lose their license for a string of misdemeanours. There have been excesses, as one Mr. Hagar points out, but the regulations are largely justified.

Guns are designed to kill. Why is it that we have no problem regulating cars, but a significant segment of society gets paranoid, ignores empirical reality, and generally becomes apoplectic whenever we might possibly consider ever so slightly regulating these things designed to kill? Again, I am not in favor of banning all guns in America; not only do I honestly believe that the majority of gun owners are responsible and not averse to training, it’s also a stupendously impractical exercise. However, I’m completely baffled that we have no problem regulating automobiles, yet rather than accept and adopt sensible controls on freaking guns, the response to frequent massacres such as Sandy Hook is to arm the (already underpaid and overworked) teachers!

Why?

The first wave of comments to my post yesterday on the 72 year-old man with Alzheimer’s shot and killed in a stranger’s yard in northwestern Georgia touched on masculinity, control, and manliness as one explanation for the fetish of guns for a subset of gun owners. There’s a strong “no shit?” dynamic at work here, one I’ve considered, but never considered it well enough to articulate it beyond fumbling some words together to make “compensating” not sound like “small dick problem”.

Fortunately, that’s why we have Amanda Marcotte, who nailed it yesterday:

That men “prove” their manhood by having guns, by acting tough, by seeking out violence, by pretending they don’t care about anything but creating more opportunities for violence.

More critically, and mapping onto the Georgia case well (the fiancee was on the phone to the police, the man was prowling his yard, ultimately firing his Glock four times to ward off a 72 year-old):

In other words, the only way a legitimate man can “care” about people is as objects that you fantasize about bad guys trying to steal from you so that you have an opportunity to shoot them.

Obviously, this does not describe all gun owners in the US, nor does it exhaust the explanations for the paranoid response to gun control legislation, but I’m confident that it does identify the subconscious motivations for a segment of gun owners.

Yet, it still doesn’t address how we can regulate the hell out of cars (which can also serve compensatory functions for a segment of the male population) yet not guns.

(Apologies for linking to my own stuff on a regular basis in this post.  Without knowing it, I’ve written about this topic more often than I recalled).

The Jenny McCarthy Award

[ 11 ] December 5, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

Today’s winner: Katie Couric.

Judy Rodgers

[ 4 ] December 4, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

I was sad to read about the death of Judy Rodgers. The Zuni Cafe Cookbook has long been one of my favorites, and I’ve been able to visit the namesake restaurant several times (including on my honeymoon.)

Her signature recipe is for roast chicken with bread salad, which (sans pine nuts) I’ve had many times and it’s great. Tonight, though, we celebrated with my own favorite, pasta with spicy cauliflower and broccoli. I’m so confident you’ll like it that if you don’t your next year of LGM posts are free.

R.I.P.

The New Republican Platform: Life Begins at Conception, Ends at Birth, And is Resurrected by Incorporation

[ 161 ] December 4, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

I’ve been waiting for Dahlia Lithwick to take on the argument that corporations can “exercise” religion (and hence can claim exemptions from laws that don’t even significantly burden the religious beliefs of their owners) for a while. Thankfully, she now has. And she has a definitive new addition to Barney Frank’s dictum that for Republicans life begins at conception and ends at birth:

But corporations aren’t America’s only new people. States and the U.S. Congress are also attempting to expand the definition of personhood in a different direction: Anti-abortion activists are attempting to redefine “personhood” to include the potential personhood of a fertilized egg. If the so-called personhood bills and ballot initiatives across the country succeed, a day-old zygote would have the same legal status as a person, with sweeping implications for criminal law, reproductive rights, and access to birth control.

So pause for a moment with me to ponder what it means that some of the greatest civil rights battles of our era are being fought to extend personhood into the weeks prior to viability and the years after incorporation? What does it mean for actual human “personhood”—as well as for reproductive rights and corporate control—that, if the far right succeeds in stretching these two legal fictions to their illogical extremes, American “personhood” will begin at conception, diminish somewhat at birth, and regain its force upon incorporation?

[Picture Charles Foster Kane clapping, only pretend that Susan Alexander had given a brilliant performance]

Obvious Points that Unfortunately Need Re-Stating, NCAA Edition

[ 155 ] December 4, 2013 | Robert Farley

Regarding Auburn-Alabama:

If Alabama backup kicker Adam Griffith hits the 57-yard field goal, Alabama wins without having to go to overtime. The odds of that kick going through the uprights aren’t great at any level. Since 1999, pro kickers are 31-for-87 (35.6 percent) on field goals from between 56 and 58 yards out, and they’re obviously much better than your typical college kicker. The only argument in Griffith’s favor is that he, unlike some pro kickers in this situation, is not stuck kicking in a situation for which he lacks the leg. Nick Saban didn’t need to stick Griffith out there to try to win the game; he would only send out his backup kicker if he thought Griffith had a legitimate shot at making the kick. Given that Griffith nearly put the bomb through the uprights, Saban wasn’t wrong to believe in Griffith. Let’s throw a wild guess out there and suggest Griffith’s odds of making the kick were right around 18 percent…

The truth is that returning the kick for a touchdown is far from a sure thing, despite what selective memory tells us. From my count, there have been four such returns in the NFL since 2002, each of which came from a kick from a minimum of 52 yards. Even if we don’t consider the made field goals, that’s four touchdowns amid 389 missed field goals from that distance — a mere 1 percent rate of kicks returned for touchdowns. Even if you assume the odds are greater just by having a guy back there to return and you throw in the odds of a blocked field goal being returned for a touchdown, you’re never going to come to a number that’s higher than the odds of Alabama actually making the kick. Saban was right to try for the game winner. He played to win the game.

Outcome notwithstanding, Saban’s decision to challenge the clock and try the 57 yard kick was obviously correct; doing anything else at that point would have been coaching malpractice.

Also, ‘Bama fans are colossal douchebags.

…I’m flummoxed that I have to point this out, but the question “What about the odds of winning in OT” are effectively irrelevant for this question, because in the vast majority of outcomes Alabama still gets to try to win in OT. We’re not talking about a case like the OSU-UM game, where the likelihood of an OT victory is a legitimate variable. If the field goal misses and (as is the case in the vast majority of situations) an Auburn TD does not result, then we get… OT. Saban isn’t giving that up.

…Njorl makes the case:

In the NFL, hail mary’s from 40 have about a 3% chance of success give or take 1%. Attempting the FG gave them a much better chance of winning in regulation.

The question then becomes whether the kick gave Auburn an unacceptably high chance of winning compared to Alabama.

In the NFL, kickers make that kick 36% of the time.
In the NFL, kickoffs and punts that are returned go for TDs less than 0.5% of the time.
There is a greater than 50% chance that the kick (good or bad) would go out of the endzone
That’s a factor of at least 144 to 1 in Alabama’s favor, but there are obvious complications.

College kickers are worse than pro kickers.
College coverage teams are less disciplined than pro coverage teams.
Field goals teams are very poor at coverage, while the return man is every bit as good at returning them as he is at returning other kicks.

Those complicating factors don’t make up for the 144 to 1 edge in my opinion. If I thought my kicker had even a 10% chance of making it, I’d try it.

It’s possible that Saban knows his kicker could not possibly make the kick, but sent him out there anyway, but that requires one to assume that Saban is an idiot. I can accept the possibility that Saban is bad at math. I can’t accept that he’s a complete idiot.

“But if he’s out in my yard and I’ve done called the cops, I’m waiting for the cops”

[ 220 ] December 4, 2013 | Dave Brockington

Well, duh. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened last week in northwestern Georgia, where a 72 year-old, with Alzheimer’s, Deanne Westbrook, wandered into a stranger’s yard three miles from home. He twice tried to open the door, around 4am, then wandered out into the yard.  Instead of waiting for the cops, Joe Hendrix shot and killed Westbrook while still in his yard.

This latest example of the militarization of our front yards has two interesting dynamics. First, it’s white-on-white, so on the surface, there’s no racial issue. That variable is controlled for.

Second, the attitude of both the deceased’s neighbor, and his own widow, is interesting, almost as though this death is an acceptable cost of arming ourselves, and using deadly force.

Chris Brown, 50, who lives down the street from the Westbrooks, supports Stand Your Ground laws. He is well-armed and not afraid to pull out a gun if someone broke into his home or tried to steal his truck.

“But if he’s out in my yard and I’ve done called the cops, I’m waiting for the cops,” he said. “What that guy did wasn’t Stand Your Ground.”

Obviously, yes. The 72 year old man was in the yard, and Hendrix’s fiancee was on the phone to the police. There was no ground to be stood, I’d guess.  But what if he was banging on the front door?

Mr. Westbrook’s widow herself is not sure that Mr. Hendrix should be charged.

“I don’t know what his mind-set was, and I don’t know enough about the law to know,” Mrs. Westbrook said. “But that’s all over now. His life is already taken. He took the life of a real gentle man, and it’s a crying shame.”

Who cares what his mind set was? He shot a man in his yard. Not on his doorstep, not in his house, the victim was unarmed, 72 years old, not posing any sort of threat, and had no bloody clue where in hell he was.

How have we, as a society, come to a place where this shooting could so much as be considered permissible?

Of course, one thing to take away from this is never, ever knock on a stranger’s door in the United States, for any reason. Unless it’s Halloween I guess.

B. Spencer: Tacky American

[ 267 ] December 4, 2013 | bspencer

When you’re online– posting, talking to people, sharing your opinion–it’s natural to want to put your best face forward. We want people to think we like  good food, cool music, and have tastefully-decorated homes. (Not mine, of course–my house is floor to ceiling early 80’s unicorn art.) In short, we want folks to think we’re neat, which is completely understandable. Not I. I thought I would switch things up and tell you exactly how gross and tacky I am. Enjoy!

Hi, my name is B. Spencer, and I’m a tacky American.

Admit it: you kinda want one now

 

 

  • I drink artificially-flavored coffee from a pod.
  • I like Snow Babies (no, really) unironically.
  • I only use Aunt Jemima syrup on my pancakes. (No, I am not a troll.) Yes, I do like real maple syrup, but only in savory applications.
  • I’ve watched daytime soaps my entire adult life.
  • I like Christmas sweaters (again, unironically.)
  • I have a Britney Spears song in my music library. I have two Avril Lavigne songs.
  • I like to drink Lime-a-Ritas. (Doctored with real lime and margarita salt, but still…)


Now, you know. I invite you to share your own brushes with tackiness, not because it will generate interesting conversation but because I’m plagued with insecurities I desperately want to feel better about myself.

The Affordable Care Act Is Not Remotely Similar to the Heritage Plan

[ 161 ] December 4, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

As long-time readers know and new readers were reminded yesterday, I’ve long been intensely irritated by claims that the Affordable Care Act proves that Barack Obama is a hapless sellout because it was a “Republican plan.” The rather obvious problem with this line of argument is that any non-trivial number of Republicans have been willing to support the “Republican plan” when 1)massive veto-proof supermajorities of liberal Democrats put it on their desk, and 2)that’s it. Republican support for the plan might discredit it if any conservative Republicans ever wanted anything like it to pass, but of course they didn’t. The plan was a decoy, not a “Republican Plan,” so which think tank came up with it is neither here nor there.

But as stepped pryamids points out in comments, I’ve really been burying the lede. While aware that the Heritage Foundation plan was inferior, I’ve played along with the idea that the ACA was in some way comparable to the Heritage plan. But in fact, the two plans are not remotely comparable. Actually reading the famous policy document, it’s striking how little of relevance the plans have in common. Yes, both plans have a mandate, but since any means of comprehensive insurance that didn’t involve eliminating the health care industry was going to have some kind of mandate to prevent a death spiral in the insurance market, so in itself that doesn’t mean much. And this is a major issue, because that’s where the similarities end. As s.p. puts it:

The Heritage plan was an individual mandate for catastrophic coverage with a tax credit to help subsidize it. That’s pretty much it.

[...]

It’s like saying the EITC is a Republican plan because the Republicans proposed capital gains tax cuts and they’re both tax cuts.

And the Heritage plan is actually even worse than that. Where the ACA included a massive expansion of Medicaid, the Heritage plan essentially proposes to apply the principles of welfare “reform” to Medicaid, allowing states more “flexibility” (to reduce coverage) and allegedly helping the poor by eliminating state regulations requiring health insurance to have actual content. (In fairness, it does offer to give tax benefits to people who subsidize the health care of poorer relatives, so the many poor Americans with rich uncles will be in great shape!) It would have taxed health care benefits gained through employment as income, and therefore for all intents and purposes forced middle-class people into an individual market that for the non-wealthy would have offered nothing but crappy, largely unregulated catastrophic coverage. Oh, and it would have voucherized Medicare a la Paul Ryan.

To compare the ACA and the Heritage plan, in other words, is ludicrous. The ACA contains many long-standing liberal priorities — expanding Medicaid, regulating the health care industry, providing substantial subsidies for real insurance — that the Heritage plan manifestly does not. And the Heritage plan includes many horrible ideas that the ACA did not contain. But acknowledging the massive, fundamental differences between the ACA and the Potemkin Heritage plan — differences of kind, not of degree — makes it harder to advance the narrative that the flaws in the ACA result from Barack Obama’s abiding hatred of the very idea of federal intervention into the health care market. If Obama had actually proposed something like the Heritage plan, it would actually be fair to call him a neoliberal stooge. But he didn’t, and the differences between the Heritage plan and the ACA disprove the charge conclusively.

This Is Insane

[ 48 ] December 3, 2013 | Robert Farley

Gonna file this under “too crazy to be true”:

Angola is in the process of acquiring the recently-decommissioned Spanish aircraft carrier Principe de Asturias, according to one news report. The entire Angolan navy has just 1,000 sailors. The 643-foot-long Principe de Asturias needs 830 sailors to fully function….

Spain will reportedly sell Principe de Asturias to Angola along with four decommissioned patrol ships. The Angolan navy currently possesses only a handful of Russian-made attack craft each weighing in at just a few hundred tons displacement. The Spanish acquisitions, if they are truly more than rumors, will expand the Angolan fleet by an order of magnitude and compel the navy to add thousands of new sailors.

Whether Angola can recruit and train the required personnel is far from certain. It’s equally unclear whether the African state can afford to operate Principe de Asturias on more than a token basis. In 1997, Thailand commissioned a small flattop based on Principe de Asturias’ design but has found it nearly impossible to keep the carrier and her Harriers in front-line service.

I find this very unlikely, but I kinda want it to be true, if only for the social science value. Watching Angola build not only a navy but also a naval aviation branch from scratch would be remarkably interesting. They would almost certainly need to partner with a more experienced nation, but assuming that they’re interested in using the carrier mainly as a helicopter platform there are several choices, including the various European states, China, and Russia. And, as the article implies, this purchase would immediately put Angola at the head of the first rank of African states in terms of maritime capability.

Still, best thought of as “too good to check.”

The greatest Mexican baseball player of all time

[ 44 ] December 3, 2013 | Paul Campos

As a kid, I could fairly be called an obsessive baseball fan. Among many other useless pieces of information I could have told you Ted Williams’ lifetime batting average, home run total, number of batting titles, and other bits of arcana which were much more impressive to know in the days before Google. I owned a copy of The Science of Hitting. I learned, courtesy of Ball Four, that the main labeled by the Boston press (whose members he generally despised, and who generally returned the sentiment) employed a striking ritual when preparing to ply his craft:

In the bullpen tonight Jim Pagliaroni was telling us how Ted Williams, when he was still playing, would psyche himself up for a game during batting practice, usually early practice before the fans or reporters got there.

He’d go into the cage, wave his bat at the pitcher and start screaming at the top of his voice, “My name is Ted fucking Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball.”

He’d swing and hit a line drive.

“Jesus H. Christ himself couldn’t get me out.”

And he’d hit another.

Then he’d say, “Here comes Jim Bunning, Jim fucking Bunning and that little shit slider of his.”

Wham!

“He doesn’t really think he’s gonna get me out with that shit.”

Blam!

“I’m Ted fucking Williams!”

Sock!

When I put aside childish things, I read some classic essays about the man, including Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” and Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?”

Here’s what I didn’t know about Ted Williams until today: he was half-Mexican (with some Basque heritage thrown in for good measure).

It’s something that didn’t come out until a month before Ted died in 2002, the fact that he was a Mexican-American. His mother was Mexican — [she] was born in Mexico — and her parents were born and raised there as well. He was embarrassed about this and afraid that the prejudice of the day would hurt his baseball career. Even though Mexicans didn’t figure as prominently as black ball players, nevertheless he was aware of the black prejudice and feared that it could hurt him. He was advised to keep this under wraps and he did. He always spoke rather contemptuously of his extended family on his mother’s side and referred to them as “the Mexicans” in not a nice way.

There was a very telling moment in 1939 after Williams had completed his rookie year with the Red Sox and had made an absolutely smashing debut — hit well over 300 and led the league in runs batted in — and he returned to San Diego the conquering hero and was met at the train station by a gaggle of 100 or so of the extended Mexican clan. Ted took one look at them from afar and beat a hasty retreat. He didn’t want to be seen with them.

Ted Williams was one of the most famous athletes in America for 20 years, and he had to put it mildly an adversarial relationship with what used to be called “the press” and is now the media. Yet he passed with complete success; nobody outed him.

A final note: Williams’ well-known acceptance speech when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966 now becomes an even more interesting cultural moment:

Ballplayers are not born great. They’re not born great hitters or pitchers or managers, and luck isn’t the big factor. No one has come up with a substitute for hard work. I’ve never met a great player who didn’t have to work harder at learning to play ball than anything else he ever did. To me it was the greatest fun I ever had, which probably explains why today I feel both humility and pride, because God let me play the game and learn to be good at it.

The other day Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty second home run. (Note: Williams retired with 521.) He has gone past me, and he’s pushing, and I say to him, “Go get ‘em, Willie.” Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.

Green Lantern ACA Addendum

[ 252 ] December 3, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

Armando asks a common question with respect to my post from this morning:

Well, whether the ACA was literally the most that could have been obtained is unknowable. But I will say this:

  • Of course Obama had agency.  It was because of him that health care reform was the top priority, and he certainly could have abandoned it in exchange for token reforms, as his chief of staff inter alia urged him to do after the election of Scott Brown.  Again, nobody thinks that the presidency is powerless.  The question is whether Obama could have done something to get a dozen+ conservative Democrats in the Senate to vote for progressive additions to the ACA they clearly didn’t support.
  • It seems to me that given many decades of failure to pass comprehensive health reform, the burden of proof rests squarely on those who think that Obama could have gotten substantially more.  How, in concrete terms, is Obama getting Lieberman’s vote for a public option?  Then repeat for Nelson, Bayh, etc. etc.   (And, no, “end the filibuster” isn’t an answer, since there aren’t even 50 votes for that now.)
  • In particular, any counterfactual must take into account that Bill Clinton tried the strategy most commonly favored by the ACA’s left critics (develop a plan, use public pressure to get Congress to pass it), and it was an utter catastrophe that set back health care reform for a generation.  Again, the burden of proof is one those who want to argue that Obama should have repeated this strategy rather than trying to do something different, especially since Obama’s actually, you know, worked.
  • If you look at the comments thread, it’s instructive that the “Obama failed by getting unprecedented legislation passed” crowd can’t help assuming that Obama is a Westminster Prime Minister.  Did you know that Obama “let” Max Baucus take charge of the bill as a powerful Senate committee chairman?  Not if you understand anything about American politics.
  • If you want me to take your counterfactuals seriously, it’s probably best to not characterize plans that are supported by Republicans only when supermajorities of liberal Democrats would pass them anyway as “Republican plans.”

Maps and Strikes

[ 12 ] December 3, 2013 | Dave Brockington

Here is a pretty cool map of precinct-level support in three Seattle municipal races from last month: mayoral (Ed Murray v incumbent Mike McGinn), one city council seat (socialist Kshama Sawant against incumbent Richard Conlin) and support for Seattle Proposition 1, public financing for campaigns.  Murray and Sawant won, Prop 1 narrowly lost. Relatedly, if you haven’t read DJW’s excellent piece on his pragmatic ambivalence about the election of Sawant, do so.

Benjamin Anderstone, a Pugest Sound political consultant, wrote the analysis of the aggregate data. He distills Seattle politics into this takeaway: “The basic battle in Seattle is the wealthy, older center-left establishment (the “conservative bloc”) versus the younger, more urban set (the “progressive bloc.”)” It doesn’t take one steeped in Seattle politics to sort out where each resides from eyeballing the maps.

In other news, three unions combined to strike against universities and further education colleges in Britain today. I was pleasantly surprised at the turnout on the picket line at 8am this morning, considering we were just on strike on October 31. That said, it was damned cold, and optimism was thin on the ground. When we finished up, “see you next month” was common. This is, of course, getting expensive, but I no longer have the questions regarding the compatibility of withholding one’s labor as a bargaining tool (of last resort) as an academic in the context of higher education that I outlined in the final paragraph of this post from nearly three years ago. Our pay rise last year was 0.5%, and it has been well below inflation since 2008 (13% below according to the union’s calculations). Furthermore, consistent with what I’ve written about higher ed in the UK over the past nine months, late last week it was announced that one of the social science departments at my institution is facing mandatory redundancies.

And I’m still pretty pissed off that the Mariners are signing Willy “Baseball” Bloomquist, but I’ve yet to figure out how to pin that on decisions taken by the executive management team of my university.

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