child abuse and society

You're becoming even more irrational than I am. Your citation of my quote isn't even vaguely parallel. I'm talking about people with guns, not the entire population of which they're a reprehensible component. All of the gun owners in the Middle East can go off and shoot each other. That would leave the rest of the population safer.

The figure keeps dropping but it's still around 25%. Way too many.

There are various ways of counting that and various estimates, but in round numbers it was about one million. Three percent of the U.S. population! It still stands out as one of the bloodiest wars in all human history.

This means that most people were only two degrees of separation from someone who was killed in that conflict. If it wasn't somebody you knew, it was somebody whom somebody you know knew. In contrast, even right here in the Washington region, only a few miles across the Potomac River from the Pentagon (which is actually in Virginia), the average resident is six degrees of separation from one of the victims. Your boss's neighbor's kid's friend's teacher's boyfriend partner. Eleven years later, people are still haunted by it.

I submit that this is why there is still so much animosity in the U.S. stemming from the Civil War.

• Animosity between "Yankees" and "Rebels." Because their grandparents still had photos up of family members who had been killed by the Rebels or the Yankees and they still don't trust them. There are some incredibly inflammatory, insulting bumper stickers on cars around here. Frankly I keep thinking about publishing my own: "Deport the Rednecks, keep the Mexicans. Better food, cooler music, hotter chicks. And they speak English almost as well."
• Animosity between Euro-Americans ("white" people) and Afro-Americans ("black" people). The Civil War wasn't entirely about slavery, but that was arguably the primary issue and it's the only one that still makes sense to us today. Everyone--Euro-, Afro- Northerner, Southerner--basically believes that the Civil War was fought on behalf of Afro-Americans. In our legend that was simplified from the real event, we think that the reason Great-Granduncle Homer died was so that black people would be magically endowed with all the rights and comforts that white people have, and that they'd be kissing our feet in gratitude for it. Instead, half of them live in ghettos, still angry that we haven't made good on our promise. (Americans have a terrible sense of history so almost nobody knows that Reconstruction barely endured for a decade before white people everywhere replaced it with Jim Crow, which was still widespread in both North and South in my childhood.)

This is what large-scale killing does to people. It warps their outlook on the universe so they are no longer rational creatures qualified to run a civilization.

It only took the 3,000 deaths of 9/11 to turn Americans into sheep who meekly surrender all of their rights every time they walk into an airport. Those "security" protocols are so badly crafted and so badly practiced that they'll never catch a terrorist, but they make us feel safe.

Of course there are a few who are so well-grounded and disciplined that they will never use their guns in anger or confusion, and they will never be stolen. But we don't know which ones they are. Even they don't know. So the answer to your question is, in aggregate, yes.

Hard to say. We'd have longer life expectancies and within a generation or two we'd get over some of our fears and nightmares. But for those of us who are alive right now, hell we all have friends who own guns. Everyone is complicated and everyone does something stupid that we don't like, but we still don't want to see them dead. My wife owns a gun, which is (from my perspective) safely locked away in a safe in the family home in California, which I visit once or twice a year. I doubt that my relief at waking up one morning in a world free of guns would compensate for my grief over becoming a widower.

I have enough empathy to realize that most people have this problem, so I wouldn't really want them to suffer the grief either.

But that's a strawman argument anyway. We don't have the technology to terraform Mars and ship hundreds of millions of people there to live until they kill each other. The options available in reality are less draconian, but also less satisfying. About all I can offer is that, even as a pacifist, I wouldn't complain if the people who run the NRA were found at the bottom of a well tomorrow morning. These are the people who have so much influence that the government of the United States of America, the most powerful nation in history, is afraid to anger them. They're the retards who think that the solution to every problem is more guns. To kill them would be uncivilized, and I wouldn't participate in the endeavor, but if somebody else did it my criticism would be pretty mild. Situational ethics, and all that. Sure, they all have wives and children, but my sympathy is not limitless and anybody who could love such an evil man gets none of it. If their families would simply stand up for what is right (no sex until you melt down your guns, as in Lysistrata), they might stop being so evil.

• A gun in a home is four times more likely to be used to kill or injure a loved one in an unintentional or accidental shooting than it is to be used for self defense. (Brady Campaign cited in "Ask Amy" 2011-11-10)
• The U.S. average is 10.34 gun deaths per 100,000 population per year. [With a population of approximately 30 million, that comes to approximately 30 thousand per year, slightly more than road accidents as safer cars and safer roads have steadily reduced that figure.] In Arizona, the figure is 14.97 gun deaths per 100,000 per year. [I'm sure glad I don't live there anymore.] (Washington Post 2010-08-23)
• From 1986 to 1996, people who kept guns in their homes for self-defense did not gain protection. They have almost three times greater risk of homicide and almost five times greater risk of suicide. (New England Journal of Medicine, cited in the Washington Post 2012-12-31)
• There are 12,000 gun killings in the USA every year—four times the death toll of 9/11. If suicides using guns are added in, the toll is 30,000, ten times as many. (Concerned Citizens Against Gun Violence, cited in the Washington Post 2013-03-10) [And why shouldn't suicides be added in? My favorite uncle had bouts of depression but he came out of them. But since he had a gun in his desk, it was easier to pull the trigger than to think rationally.]

I often cite Wikipedia myself. But that's quaternary research. If it's available, I'll give preference to the secondary research in one of the world's most respected newspapers any day. After all, I have written Wikipedia articles.

Absolutely. I'm sure I already posted in this thread the recent death of a local teenager who was drunk and confused and walked into the wrong house because it looked just like his--it's one of those cookie-cutter developments and his family hadn't lived there long enough for him to get his bearings. To add to the coincidence, the same window he had sneaked out of was unlocked in this house too. The gun-totin' Redneck asshole who lived there shot him dead. This is a textbook-perfect example of what I've been saying all along: A gun acquired for self defense is more likely to be used to murder an innocent victim. What do we tell this kid's parents, friends and teachers, much less the neighbors of both families? Because of the Castle Doctrine this worthless scumbag won't even be arrested, much less prosecuted, much less punished. (This is in Virginia, which is still in the Stone Age and practices capital punishment.)

Let me guess: You also think that George Zimmerman should not have been arrested either, right? Every parent in America teaches their children to fight back as viciously as possible if they're stalked and accosted by a creep. But Trayvon was killed for fighting back, because the stalking creep had a fucking goddamned GUN. A child murderer! And he has supporters! If they threw him into a Viking wolf pit I wouldn't complain.

Except more often than not, cops have reasonable evidence that the people they're pursuing have actually done something wrong. Soldiers wipe out entire villages to kill one person.

I try to stay out of their way and I don't socialize with them because we don't have much in common. There are certainly some really bad cops in this country, including a few jurisdictions where the majority of them are bad. But on the balance, no. I hate many of the laws they enforce but they do a lot of good, and they didn't write those laws anyway. Asset forfeiture, in particular, is nothing but a blatant way for police forces to punish people without even prosecuting them.

I'm not a country, I'm an individual. In any case, I don't recommend that the U.S. abolish its armed forces like Costa Rica. But I strongly object to the way those armed forces have been deployed since the end of the Korean War. Their purpose is to increase the profits of the weapons manufacturers and the consulting firms who support them, and lately to protect the treasonous Bush family's Saudi friends by misdirecting our attention toward other people and countries. Backward Baby Bush should have been court-martialed for posing for a photo holding hands with King Abdullah, the man who could have delivered bin Laden's head to the White House service entrance within 36 hours after 9/11. He was the commander-in-chief of the entire U.S. military, does that mean that the military justice system has jurisdiction over him?

Yes. Some people, and some countries, have not been reading their memos. The next war will be fought in cyberspace. And our guys are so far behind that we'll lose it. Tiny Estonia could probably black out Washington. The Chinese could probably take down the nation's entire power grid.

Men love their fucking goddamned guns so much that they want to keep playing with them, even when their enemies have much more effective weapons. The only reason we don't have to be quaking in our shoes over the prospect of China attacking us is that it would destroy their economy. Their programmers are probably clandestinely improving the computer security of every corporation and government agency they hack into, so the Russians or Iranians can't take down the USA, making the bonds they hold worthless.

I have no problem with that. I can even understand that a lot of people felt that way about Vietnam, although the dozens of Vietnamese refugees I've met said they were full of shit. It was the U.S.-backed government that was ripping them off, not the Communists. But except for Grenada, none of our opportunistic wars have had anything to do with aiding someone who has been attacked. Kuwait may have started out with that excuse, but it quickly turned into George I's opportunity to punish Saddam for not having defeated Iran during the seven years that he was our beloved ally, trying to crush the country that had embarrassed the U.S. by seizing our embassy after 25 years of living under the Shah that we installed.

One of my dearest friends was married to a wonderful, sensitive, loving man whom she worshipped. But he had taken the calculated risk of joining the Army reserves to pick up some extra cash, and as luck would have it, he was mobilized and sent to Iraq. When he came back he was a stranger. Screaming, smashing things around the house, terrifying her children. He started hitting her and she had to move out to protect the kids. When the kids grew up she ultimately had to move out here from California to put enough distance between them. He essentially destroyed her house so she lost her investment.

Not all of us. Just folks like Trooper.

As I've noted before, with every passing decade the number of people killed by government violence keeps dropping precipitously. We're at a point now that when twenty people are killed in a battle, it's front page news and we all weep. In WWII that would have been a really good day.

I think the Congo civil war was the last war with a seven-figure body count.

 

On what particular points do you disagree with Fraggle?

Or is this just a cheap personal attack?

 

That whole "community property" thing has never worked with us. She's in charge of everything. It works very well so I don't complain. I manage to do plenty of things that she doesn't like so I put up with the gun. She has agreed that when and if I ever move back home, she'll get rid of it. This certainly illustrates my point that the whole gun issue is all psychological. I'm 69, was never much of an athlete, and am recovering from a couple of orthopedic surgeries. I would be no help against an attacker--feline, ursine or human.

I've never seen it. I don't have the combination to the safe. When I'm home I try to forget that it's there. I would assume that it's loaded because her primary reason for having it is to stop a bear or a mountain lion, and they move much faster than humans. Although since I "abandoned her" (there are no jobs there so I "abandoned" her in order to feed her and pay the mortgage) she does worry about break-ins. It would take the sheriff's deputies twenty minutes to get to our place. My take on that is that we were idiots to buy a house so far from town and we should consider moving back to civilization. Her take is to buy a fucking goddamned gun.

Much of it is simply an expression of anger. That's okay in a place like this because the abuse is all verbal and we're all (presumably?) adults who long ago learned to laugh off abusive language, or just return it and see who can come up with the best bullshit.

But it's not okay in a home, among the people you share it with, because the relationships are stronger and make up a much larger segment of their reality. Being yelled at several times a day by someone you love is far more harmful than reading a couple of paragraphs from some anonymous asshole like me on an internet board. It's even worse for children, because you're the center of their universe. If you constantly express hatred and anger to them, they begin to believe the reason is that this is what they deserve because they're not worthy of your love.

My mother was a screamer and I lived in fear of her for years. It took the failure of my first marriage to learn that this is not the proper way to treat people you love. Since then, I very seldom yell at people in real life. But I do occasionally let loose on SciForums, and by the standards of this place my rants are hardly noteworthy.

My insult to Trooper about her parenting competence was based on the assumption that anyone named "Trooper" must be a man, so I thought I was insulting a father who didn't do his job because one of his sons would be happy to kill people. When I discovered my mistake I apologized. Obviously she's still angry since, after all, I did insult her husband. People who are insulted have every right to fight back, whether or not the insult was accurate or deserved. We all have our dignity. So she can continue to insult me back. Half of you think I deserve it anyway.

Everything I hear, see and read leads to the inescapable conclusion that, in the USA in the 21st century, guns are evil and make us all statistically less safe, and that people who don't understand that are simply fools or bullies, or have been brainwashed by the Army or the NRA. This is my own safety and the safety of the people I love that we're talking about here, not some abstraction that I can contemplate serenely in my easy chair. Every gun owned by each of you who lives in the USA has decreased the life expectancy of everyone I know by something like fifteen seconds. (Sorry, actuarial math is not easy.)

Thirty thousand Americans every year. In a slow year, is that more people than are killed in the whole world by wars? I can't find that statistic.

So yes, I get angry and scream at those of you who take that position. You are threatening my life!

 

The Wikipedia article on Mills does not mention the phrase. The Wikipedia article on Military Industrial Complex says that he referred to the concept, but it does not cite the phrase as being from his 1956 book. Furthermore, others came up with the concept before him, including Hayek in 1944. Apparently Eisenhower's speechwriters get the credit. One historian claims that it was originally "war-based industrial complex" and another says "military-industrial-congressional complex," and in either case (or both) it was shortened in later drafts.

There was a brief article about that in the Washington Post a few years ago. An abused husband showed up at a spousal-abuse clinic. He was the only male there and the females booed him out of the room. It wasn't clear whether they simply didn't believe him, or just thought he was a pussy for not being able to fight off his wife. Whatever the case, they sure didn't want him listening to their stories.

Now that I can understand.

 

It isn't my kicking and screaming that makes my position correct. It is the statistical evidence. What have you testosterone-crazed Uzi-lovers got for evidence? So far it's almost all anecdotal evidence, which ain't worth diddly squat.

This is not a "belief" or a "possibility." For starters, you misquoted me. I said life expectancy, not lifespan. I can't predict my life span with any accuracy. But I can estimate my life expectancy much more accurately: the average lifespan of American men of my age, health history, disposition and habits.

And it is an incontrovertible fact that our life expectancy is shortened by you folks owning guns. What makes this all the more pathetic is that it is also shortening your life expectancies. For every one of you whose life is saved by your gun or that of another civilian, six of you will be killed by one of those guns. This is bonehead arithmetic, not rocket science.

Of course. But the odds are six to one that a gun will terminate my life instead. What person in his right mind would take those odds???

Once again, for the logic-impaired and the reading-impaired:

Even though guns save lives, they terminate six times as many as they save.​

So far none of you gun apologists has responded to this rather stark truth.

This is not a debating team or a law school. We're not here to learn how to advocate positions we don't hold. I trust you to honorably provide evidence and arguments to support your position. So far you have been honorable, but so far neither your evidence nor your arguments have stood up to statistical examination. In fact you’ve all pointedly ignored the statistics.

If this were a religion website I’d just chalk it up to the innumeracy and the weak reasoning skills that allow them to proudly and joyfully violate the Rule of Laplace every day of their lives. But this is a science website.

Don't blame me, blame biology. For the couple of hundred thousand years during which our species evolved, and in fact for about seven million years before that, after our ancestral species became fully bipedal (beginning with Ardipithecus), males have been the primary food providers while the females have remained behind with the children in a location (hopefully) safe from predators.

In Ardi’s day, when they were still herbivores with long digestive tracts, bipedalism allowed an individual to carry in his arms enough food for a family. After the later species became obligate carnivores, it allowed him to use his hands to carry and use weapons, and bring back the food. The females spent much of their lives pregnant or nursing or simply caring for the young back at camp, which was also easier with two hands. Later they used those hands to gather digestible fruits, nuts, herbs and seeds, which didn’t require such long travel and could be more-or-less safely accomplished with the kids in tow.

Of course the Agricultural Revolution changed all that. Both sexes could now stay close to home to participate in the farming and herding, both sexes could provide childcare, and it’s easier to defend an established village from predators than a nomadic band or a campsite--especially with the help of the dogs who had happily domesticated themselves and could see in the dark.

But that only happened 12,000 years ago, merely a few hundred generations of human breeding. That’s simply not long enough for the mutations and natural selection necessary for a major reprogramming of our psychology. (In contrast, that was several thousand generations for the dogs, and their psychology is considerably different from wolves--they’re better adapted to civilization than we are!) Deep down inside, there’s a hunter inside each man and a gatherer inside each woman. The evidence is enormous, for example, men see motion much better, so we can track our prey, whereas women can distinguish subtle colors that look the same to us, so you can pick the ripe fruit and the non-poisonous herbs.

Sure, our enormous forebrain gives us a unique ability to override instinct and programming, and we’ve done plenty of that. But the override is not complete. Many of us still feel a natural, unbidden hostility to strangers, even though we no longer need to fight over our hunting range. We just do our best to channel that hostility to very distant strangers like the Iranians, so we can cooperate and build a magnificent civilization on our side of the planet.

And it’s still true that on the average, women feel somewhat more drawn to the hands-on aspects of parenting, while men are more content to “bring home the dead mammoth for dinner,” and start spending more time with the kids when they’re ready to learn how to herd the cattle, build an irrigation ditch for the pomegranates, and fire the bricks to build the house.

Almost all of us can adapt to the other side of life, many of us do, and quite a few of us rather like it and are happy to trade places. I can fold a fitted sheet and iron a silk blouse, while Mrs. Fraggle races across our five acres on her own two-handled professional lawnmower. (When I’m home, anyway.)

In summary, it’s not unreasonable to say that in aggregate men have certain propensities and so do women. You mentioned that you were weeping (I can’t remember the exact verb) over your son’s choice of career, which struck me as a downright stereotypical female reaction, so I figured you as having a fairly traditional set of maternal traits. If I’m wrong, I’m (once again) sorry, but surely you can understand how I reached that conclusion. If you divided all the people on Earth into two groups, one with dreams, talents and attitudes that are traditional for their gender, and the other with the opposite set, don’t you think the first group would be about ten times as large? Even in the USA it’s gotta be at least three to one.

I think I deserve some slack for the still-unusual situation of living on opposite coasts and only seeing each other a couple of times a year. She’s good with money so she’s in charge of it. She likes having a big spread so she maintains it. I’m good at earning money so I’m the gastarbeiter working far from home and sending home the money, something men have been doing at least since the days of the pyramid construction projects. (Those Jews weren’t slaves, they were braceros.)

I already responded to that. To ignore my response and repeat the same comment is dishonest arguing. Either move the discussion forward or change the subject. Maybe I’m wrong, but your disingenuousness does nothing to prove it.

Don’t I get to indulge in hyperbole like everybody else? It’s rather obvious that neither I nor the U.N. could actually ship all the gun enthusiasts to another planet. One primary reason is that no habitable planets are known and we have no technology to terraform one. The other is that we don’t have enough materials and energy to transport more than a tiny fraction of them even to Mars, much less to an exoplanet that might be discovered with an earthlike environment.

So let it go as a snarky comment. I can tell from your rhetoric that you’re smart enough to distinguish a wise-ass remark from a genuine suggestion. Many of us have flown off the handle a few times on this thread, but if you’d rather we try to stay attached to our handles, why not lead by example?

As much as I hate guns, and as hostile as I am to gun enthusiasts, I really don’t want to see them all die. There’s got to be a better way to solve the problem of too many guns and too many gun deaths.

I feel the same way about religion--particularly the cancer of monotheism. I have more than once advocated gathering up all the Christians, Muslims and Jews, and sending THEM off to a planet of their own, where they’d be free to kill each other off. I don’t really want to do that, EITHER.

Sure, except that they mean it and I’m just shooting off my mouth. As I said, I know you’re bright enough to understand that.

Pick any war and you’ll find several different estimates of the body count. I’ve seen 625K, and I’ve also seen 1M. A difference of less than one order of magnitude is hardly going to refute my point: the American Civil War is regarded by all historians as one of the bloodiest wars in history. Even if it only killed two percent of the country’s population instead of three. It’s in the same category as WWII, and it made that list without automatic weapons, poison gas, tanks, airplanes and atom bombs. Pretty impressive. I think you have to go all the way back to Genghis Khan to find another conflict that killed such a large percentage of the people who could be reached with the transportation technology of the era. (As far as I know he gets the prize: ten percent!)

You’re in way over your head here. The Neolithic Revolution (farming and animal husbandry, the twin technologies that comprise agriculture), put us on that road around 12KYA. For starters, it created the first food surplus the planet had ever seen, so there was no more need to kill off rival tribes for wanting to steal our food during a drought. But beyond that, our ancestors quickly realized that economies of scale and division of labor make a larger community much more productive (per person) than a small one. It was to everyone’s advantage to invite nearby clans into the village in order to make it larger and more efficient.

The second Paradigm Shift was the building of cities about a thousand years later. Larger “villages” of more permanent, specialized buildings, allowed new kinds of activities to be performed. And economies of scale and division of labor continued to increase the efficiency of food production to the point that a significant number of people could specialize in other professions, such as cobblers, glazers, brewers, ceramicists and explorers. This required people to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with complete strangers, but they managed to override their Paleolithic instincts and do it. A new institution, government, helped, but it also created a complex hierarchy of citizens, instead of the traditional Elder leading the whole tribe.

The Bronze Age took this a step further. Tin and copper ore are almost never found in close proximity, so cities had to establish peaceful relations in order to trade these essential commodities. Inter-city commerce resulted in long chains of time-delayed transactions among people who didn’t know each other, so it became imperative to keep records. The first accounting symbols soon evolved into writing, and suddenly it was possible for people to communicate with each other, not just over long distances, but over time. These advances continued to chip away at our mutual hostility.

Actually best evidence strongly indicates that the technology of language was invented about 70KYA, in the distant Paleolithic Era or “early stone age”--nomadic hunters and gatherers. This is when archeologists find evidence of complex, sophisticated, coordinated activities that couldn’t possibly be performed while also using their hands for signaling.

We’re already pretty certain that language goes back at least 15 thousand years because we’re almost positive that the Na-Dene language family of western North America is related to the Yenisei language of Siberia. This was still the Paleolithic Era. There was plenty of art and music, but no slavery.

That’s certainly a pessimistic attitude. If you look back over history and contemplate all the amazing things that we’ve accomplished, I think the only reasonable comment is, “Wow, it looks like humans can do just about anything once they decide to do it.”

Fair enough. But throughout most of my life, perhaps since WWII but certainly since Korea, we have been fighting immoral and unnecessary wars, not preparing for moral and necessary wars. For the USA and the USSR to use the Middle East as a chessboard for our stupid little exercise known as the “Cold War” was criminal. There is absolutely nothing that can be said to excuse it.

Didn’t you just upbraid me for making a sexist comment?

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Hey, you’re preaching to the choir here. Abrahamic religion is probably the worst thing that has happened to the human race. Christian armies destroyed two entire civilizations (Aztec and Inca) because they were “heathens.” There is no sin greater than that, no way future Christians can ever atone for it.

I’m not arguing that point, even if perhaps I disagree with some of the minutiae. What I’m arguing is that for six decades the USA has used its military might for two illegitimate purposes:

• 1. To increase the profits of the “defense” industry corporations.
• 2. To support Israel in its campaign to punish the Palestinians for the Holocaust.

Nonetheless, the stark, incontrovertible reality is that your .357 is six times as likely to be used to kill yourself or some other innocent, than a predatory animal.

I don’t know how far out in the boondocks you live, but we actually live in the boondocks, on land that’s zoned for timber where the nearest neighbor is almost too far away to see, much less hear. Yet even there, the predators who feel comfortable venturing that close to civilization are the ones who have become camp-followers, taking up the easy life of scavenging the trash of civilization -- just like the first lazy wolves who decided to become dogs. These animals have no desire for confrontation. They know when people are home and only come around when they’re not. It doesn’t even take a very large dog to keep them at bay.

Well okay, then you’re a professional and (for the godess’s sake hopefully) have had rigorous training and discipline. Meaning that you’re very unlikely to misuse your gun in anger or confusion, and that you guard it well enough to prevent it from being stolen by a burglar or found by a child or an angry spouse.

So many guns are not that well tended and so many gun owners are not that well disciplined.

Obviously the cops and the troops will have guns. You’re basically a private cop.