Month: August 2012

So, funny story: it turns out that the mass shooting outside the Empire State Building late last week was actually one guy shooting his co-worker and nine people being wounded by police bullets while they shot at the assailant. In what can only be seen as an unprecedented show of restraint on the part of the NYPD, the two responding officers only fired sixteen rounds. Some of them even hit the intended target.

We can assume that this sorry total would have been larger and more appropriate had more officers been present to join in the contagious shooting. Still, sixteen rounds for two cops isn't half bad. When you're pulling the trigger that rapidly, who has time to aim?

Living as we do in a society filled with classic authoritarian-follower personality types it does not take long for the full time Cop Apologists to make their voices heard in the few instances in which police shootings actually get heavy news coverage. It is unavoidable; every news segment, every internet forum, and every casual hey-did-ya-hear conversation will include the same stock quotes brought up like clockwork. So let us go ahead and address them up front.

Yes, police have to respond to things under pressure. Yes, they had every right and reason to have their weapons drawn at an armed man who had just killed someone. No, I wasn't there. Are we done? Good.

We as a society create and pay the police to respond to these situations better than you or I would. The arguments about fear and pressure and "If that was you, I doubt you would have done any better" are specious precisely because those things are true. We have police for the same reason that airlines pay a pilot rather than soliciting a volunteer from coach to fly the plane. The police are supposed to respond appropriately, not in fear, panic, and ineptitude like untrained citizens would. If the police can't deal with a suspect without beating him or work a shift without taking a bribe or draw their weapon and use it appropriately, then they aren't really law enforcement. They're just a bunch of regular-guy assholes with a license to shoot at you or otherwise ruin your day. Yes, if there was a situation in which I was responsible for stopping an armed killer I would probably pull out my gun and pull the trigger until it was empty, hitting basically nothing. That's why it's a pretty goddamn good thing that I'm not entrusted with that responsibility. Or a gun.

If New York or any other city has armed officers on the street who can't do any better than Spray & Pray, even the most ardent NRA-loving, authority worshiping people among us must find that unacceptable. Right? Is there some sort of right wing paranoid argument in favor of police being lousy shots that I'm missing? If we can't do anything about police being increasingly militarized and increasingly reliant on force (which, again, appears to have been well justified in this situation) we can at least insist that they hit what they're shooting at.

Oh, and on the subject of militarization, this is a great example of why police are meant to use standard police calibers rather than the military-style "MOAR POWER!" rounds they've been gravitating toward in recent years. If a bullet misses and strikes a bystander or hits the pavement, shatters, and then strikes several bystanders, pistol-type rounds are used to reduce the odds that those unintended injuries will be fatal. Imagine the body count if these had been among the frightening number of NYPD units with .223 rifles or other quasi-military weapons designed to penetrate walls and kill people on the other side.

Although the clamoring has died down, we all will mentally associate Chik-fil-A with either "Hates the gays" or "Good, God-fearing Christian business to support" (depending on our perspective) for a long time. Those of us who are conscientious about such things now know better than to give Chik-fil-A our money.

I struggle with the logic behind that. Stick with me for a second.

The only difference between Chik-fil-A and any other fast food chain – or any other large corporation for that matter – is that we know exactly what objectionable cause our money is being put toward. The CEO has chosen to be explicit about the ways in which he is using his obscene wealth to advance a specific right wing jihad. "Unfair" is the wrong term because it's entirely fair to criticize him for whatever opinion he chooses to express if you find it offensive. But why single them out just because you know while continuing to spend money that ends up funding equally objectionable causes without your specific knowledge?

In our plutocracy corporate-dominated economy we dump our money into black boxes all day, every day without any knowledge of what happens to it down the line. Can you even imagine what the money ends up doing when you buy gas? Coke? Anything from Wal-Mart? A car? Clothing? You're funding everything from gay-bashing to Koch Bros. style Teabagging to environmental degradation here and abroad to ethnic conflicts in underdeveloped countries to child slavery. The CEO of Chik-fil-A is either brave or dumb enough to have told you the specific ways in which he is a loathsome person. But you're not naive enough to think that the others about whom you know nothing (Quick! Name Target's CEO. You can't. His name is Gregg Steinhafel and he hates the gays too) are using your money to plant flowers, feed the poor, and teach blind children how to read.

I question the logic or effectiveness of targeting a specific fast food chain with a loose boycott (which is unlikely to accomplish much) when it is merely a symptom of an entire system that is rotten to the core. Unless you're living the college activist completely-off-the-grid lifestyle you are going to continue to funnel money to awful, awful people. Most of us deal with that through willful ignorance. Can you even imagine what oil companies and their executives are doing with the billions they've made? I don't want to know, and if it's anything less than murdering endangered seals with weapons fashioned from the bones of slightly less endangered seals I would be stunned. I don't say that to guilt anyone into feeling bad about their buying habits; it is only to emphasize that cutting one head off of the hydra isn't going to kill it.

Ultimately we all do what our conscience permits in these matters and social consciousness not high on the priority list of many Americans when they spend their money. If people could learn one thing from the Chik-fil-A ordeal, "Don't eat there because they hate the gays" isn't bad, but "Oh my god, our society concentrates wealth into the hands of an implausibly small number of completely amoral people who have no sense of social responsibility, place no value on human lives other than their own, and use the money they siphon from us to make our lives more miserable" would be superior.

Bill Burr is a very funny man and he has a great bit about white sportscasters who try to comment on the disproportional racial composition of most of the popular American team sports (football, baseball, basketball, etc). Every single person who does so ends up getting fired – something of an exaggeration, but within comedic license – despite having good intentions and attempting to talk about the subject matter-of-factly.
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They bring up things like the higher density of quick-twitch muscle fiber in the average African-American, then something about slavery, then something about selective reproduction…and all the while the other announcers are slowly inching away from their self-immolating colleague. Quick cut to the next scene, a tearful white guy behind a podium apologizing and collecting his final paycheck.

The underlying truth that makes it funny is the compulsion some of these broadcasters feel to editorialize on a subject about which their knowledge is limited to bits and pieces of pseudoscience. Hell, it would take the collective knowledge of five or six different fields – sociology, biology, economics, etc. – to come close to a half-decent answer to a question like this.
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What you are going to get from a football announcer is the kind of appeal to common sense analysis that you'd find in a 200-word magazine sidebar on the topic. The bottom line, of course, is that if these guys were smart they would just keep their mouths shut. They don't know anything about the subject, their statements are likely to offend someone, and we don't tune in to a basketball game to hear a lively discussion of racial eugenics anyway.

As hard as it is to believe of a group of people who are supposed to be among the nation's elite leaders, I'm starting to think that Republican elected officials should adopt the same "Better silent than sorry" policy about anything having to do with reproduction, or perhaps the whole human body in general. For a group of highly educated people who in many cases are also quite wealthy and successful in non-political endeavors, I am not entirely confident that they'd do well as a group on a high school standardized test in science.

By now we've all heard Rep. Akin's explanation of how women cannot get pregnant if they are "legitimately" raped (The body determines whether it is being raped by looking at your clothing; if you are dressed like a whore you obviously had it coming and kinda wanted it) and my mind cannot shake the experience of listening to Rush Limbaugh explain how birth control pills work (apparently you have to take one every time you have sex).

This is about more than social conservatism, pro-life rhetoric, social stigmatizing, or misogyny – the more basic issue is that I really don't think that these two people understand how the female body works.
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I think people like Akin and Limbaugh lack the kind of 6th Grade Health Class understanding of the female reproductive system that no one should be able to leave adolescence without. I fear that for many of the ancient white guys attempting to legislate about abortion, birth control, and other similar topics, their explanations of the reproductive process would contain one or more major factual errors. Do we have any way to prove that?
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Of course not. But look at Newt Gingrich and tell me that you see a man who honestly knows what happens after he gets too drunk to pull out.

My guess is that any test of knowledge about reproduction in Congress, irrespective of party and possibly even of gender, would produce a series of responses ranging from "Hey, that's actually pretty good" to some downright medieval medical science. The most likely source of an answer including humours, bile, leeches, and a map of the human brain would be 89 year old Texas Republican Ralph Hall, although I'd pay just about any amount for the privilege of hearing John McCain's response.

The point is that an alarming percentage of these people appear to lack a junior high understanding of science or human physiology once we exclude Bible-based theories. So, you know, maybe shut the fuck up about it.