Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms – Page 18

How Smoking Saved Bertrand Russell’s Life

Put this in your pipe and smoke it, you no good, lousy tobacco wackos!

American Digest

A tip of the New Year's hat to the proprietor of American Digest for his link to my recent post on the paradoxes of illegal immigration. Via his site I came to the Powerline post, A Week's Worth of Self-Defense. For repelling a home invasion, and separating soul from body in a manner most efficient, there is nothing quite like a shot gun loaded with double aught buck shot.

Speaking of home invasions, there was one in Mesa, Arizona recently. The invader shot to death a young mother who was alone except for her infant and her grandfather. A reporter described it as a "home invasion gone badly."

As opposed to what, a home invasion that went well? And what would that be, one in which there was only a rape, and terrorization of the occupants of the house, and property damage, and the stealing of property?

One more reason to oppose liberals is that they have a casual attitude towards criminal behavior, an attitude betrayed by the sort of egregious and widespread misuse of language just cited.

For more on the casual attitude towards crime, with a link to the inimitable Dalrymple, see Britain and the Barbarians.

Gunfire Tonight!

One of the exciting things about living out here in rural Arizona is that all too many local hombres love to greet the the New Year with a hail of gunfire aimed heavenward. It adds a nice Middle Eastern touch to the Copper State.

Part of the problem is the sad state of science education in these United States. There are people who do not understand that a falling projectile poses a threat. (I have actually met such people.) They understand that they cannot catch with their bare hands a round fired at them; but they don't understand that that same round, falling on a human head from a sufficient height, will kill the head's unlucky possessor.

Let's see if we can understand the physics. If I jump from a chair to the floor, no problem. Same if I jump from a table to the floor. But I shrink back from neighbor Bob's suggestion that I jump from my roof to the ground. "Just kick away the ladder, like Wittgenstein, and jump down." Nosiree Bob! But why should it be any different? The mass of my body remains invariant across the three scenarios. And the gravitational field remains the same. But the longer I remain falling in that field, the faster I move.

A body falling in the earth's gravitational field falls at the rate of 32 feet per second PER SECOND. Thus the body ACCELERATES.* Now the momentum of a moving object – which is roughly a measure of the amount of effort it would take to stop it from moving — is the product of its velocity and its mass. So a small mass like a bullet, left falling for a long enough time, will attain a high velocity and thus a high momentum, and so do a lot of damage to anything it comes in contact with, a human skull for example.

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*Velocity is a vector, hence has a scalar and a directional component. So it is possible that an object accelerate without 'speeding up.' Consider a satellite orbiting the earth. The scalar component of the velocity stays constant (more or less) but the object accelerates. This sort of falling toward the earth is not relevant to the case I am considering.

Cigarettes, Rationality, and Hitchens

Let's talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20 cigarettes a day, let alone 80 like Rod Serling who died at age 50 on the operating table. But long-term health is only one value among many. Would Serling have been as productive without the weed? Maybe not.

Suppose one genuinely enjoys smoking and is willing to run the risk of disease and perhaps shorten one's life by say five or ten years in order to secure certain benefits in the present. There is nothing irrational about such a course of action. One acts rationally — in one sense of 'rational' — if one chooses means conducive to the ends one has in view. If your end in view is to live as long as possible, then don't smoke. If that is not your end, if you are willing to trade some highly uncertain future years of life for some certain pleasures here and now, and if you enjoy smoking, then smoke.

The epithet 'irrational' is attached with more justice to the fascists of the Left, the loon-brained tobacco wackos, who, in the grip of their misplaced moral enthusiasm, demonize the acolytes of the noble weed. The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is tobacco. I should also point out that smoking, like keeping and bearing arms, is a liberty issue. Is liberty a value? I'd say it is. Yet another reason to oppose the liberty-bashing loons of the Left and the abomination of Obamacare with its individual mandate.

Smoking and drinking can bring you to death's door betimes. Ask Humphrey Bogart who died at 56 of the synergistic effects of weed and hooch. Life's a gamble. A crap shoot no matter how you slice it. Hear the Hitch:

Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me. So I was knowingly taking a risk. I wouldn't recommend it to others.

Exactly right.

And like Bogie before him, Hitch paid the price for his boozing and smoking in the coin of an early death at 62. Had he taken care of himself he might have kept up his high-toned ranting and raving for another ten years at least.

So why don't I smoke and drink? The main reason is that smoking and drinking are inconsistent with the sorts of activities that provide satisfactions of a much higher grade than smoking and drinking. I mean: running, hiking, backpacking and the like. When you wake up with a hangover, are you proud of the way you spent the night before? Are you a better man in any sense? Do you really feel better after a night of physical and spiritual dissipation? Would you feel a higher degree of satisfaction if the day before you had completed a 26.2 mile foot race?

Health and fitness in the moment is a short-term reason. A long-term reason is that I want to live as long as possible so as to finish the projects I have in mind. It is hard to write philosophy when you are sick or dead. And here below is where the philosophy has to be written. Where I hope to go there will be no need for philosophy.

Flash Mobs

Another indicator of the decline of the West. And another argument for concealed carry.

And of course there is a Pee Cee taboo on mentioning any of this:

The hateful murders of Matthew Shephard, who was gay, and James Byrd, Jr., who was black, were memorialized with national legislation. When similar crimes are committed by blacks against whites, they are greeted with ignominious silence. Just ask your friends how many of them are familiar with the murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome, or David Graham. How many are familiar with Hoang Nguyen, who was killed in a senseless "game" called the knock-out game, in which mostly black attackers attack mostly non-black victims?

Is Smoking Irrational?

To stymie the psychologizers, let me begin by saying that I do not smoke cigarettes. My enjoyment of the noble weed is restricted to the occasional cigar and load of pipe tobacco. What do I mean by occasional? Well, so far this year I haven't touched even one of my twenty or so pipes, and I have smoked only two or three cigars. In the interest of full disclosure I should say that I smoke the rascals right down to the 'roach' which I grip in a Bogart-like manner until such time as the finger tips protest. I swear that on only a half-dozen occasions in my life have I rammed the stub into a smoking pipe and proceeded to convert the whole of the cigar into smoke and ash. I decided that this excess of frugality and vasoconstriction was contraindicated.

But I want to talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20 cigarettes a day, let alone 80 like Rod Serling who died at age 50 on the operating table. But long-term health is only one value among many. Would Serling have been as productive without the weed?

Suppose one genuinely enjoys smoking and is willing to run the risk of disease and perhaps shorten one's life by say five years in order to secure certain benefits in the present. There is nothing irrational about such a course of action. One acts rationally — in one sense of 'rational' — if one chooses means conducive to the ends one has in view. If your end in view is to live as long as possible, then don't smoke. If that is not your end, if you are willing to trade some highly uncertain future years of life for some certain pleasures here and now, and if you enjoy smoking, then smoke.

Smoking and drinking can bring you to death's door betimes. Ask Bogie who died at 56 of the synergistic effects of weed and hooch. Life's a gamble. A crap shoot no matter how you slice it. Hear the Hitch:

Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me. So I was knowingly taking a risk. I wouldn't recommend it to others.

Exactly right.

So why don't I smoke and drink? The main reason is that smoking and drinking are inconsistent with the sorts of activities which provide satisfactions of a much higher grade than smoking and drinking. I mean: running, hiking, backpacking and the like. When you wake up with a hangover, are you proud of the way you spent the night before? Are you a better man in any sense? Do you really feel better after a night of physical and spiritual dissipation? Would you feel a higher degree of satisfaction if the day before you had completed a 26.2 mile foot race?

Anti-Tobacco Hysteria

Here is the latest example of the lunatic Left's misplaced moral enthusiasm.

Speech and Guns

How should we deal with offensive speech? As a first resort, with more speech, better, truer, more responsible speech. Censorship cannot be ruled out, but it must be a last resort. We should respond similarly to the misuse of firearms. Banning firearms is no solution since (i) bans have no effect on criminals who, in virtue of being criminals, have no respect for law, and (ii) bans violate the liberty of the law-abiding. To punish the law-abiding while failing vigorously to pursue scofflaws is the way of the contemporary liberal. The problem is not guns, but guns in criminal hands. Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my gun. The solution, or part of it, is guns in law-abiding hands.

Would an armed citizen in the vicinity of the Virginia Polytechnic shooter have been able to reduce his carnage? It is likely. Don't ask me how likely. Of course, there is the chance that an armed citizen in the confusion of the moment would have made things worse. Who knows?

But if you value liberty then you will be willing to take the risk. As I understand it, the Commonwealth of Virginia already has a concealed carry law. Now if you trust a citizen to carry a concelaed weapon off campus, why not trust him to carry it on campus? After all, on campus there is far less likelihood of a situation arising where the weapon would be needed. Conservatives place a high value on self-reliance, individual liberty, and individual responsibility. Valuing self-reliance and liberty, a conservative will oppose any attempt to limit his self-reliance by infringing his right to defend himself, a right from which one may infer the right to own a handgun. (As I argue elsewhere; see the category Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms.) And appreciating as he does the reality and importance of individual responsibility, he will oppose liberal efforts to blame guns for the crimes committed by people using guns.

Nothing I have written will convince a committed liberal. (As I have argued elsewhere, the differences are rooted in value-differences that cannot be rationally adjudicated.) But my intention is not to try to enlighten the terminally benighted; my intention is to clarify the issue.

Persuasion and agreement are well-nigh impossible to attain; clarification, however, is a goal well within reach.

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in. Herein lies the best argument for continence. The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit. You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both. But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal. Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back? How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag-team. The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses. His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self. He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in. (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandalstraps. To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all. The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.

‘Guns on the Street’

It's a liberal phrase, a silly phrase, a phrase that aids and abets thoughtlessness. Liberals speak of the 'guns on the street' and of getting them off the street. Now I've walked down many a street in
many a city in this world, but I have yet to see any guns on the street. But I have seen them in the hands of people. The liberal tendency is to blame the instrument not the agent. You hear this sort of thing all the time: Guns have killed X people in Y time. A gun can do no such thing. Do liberals know this? They must, but then why do they talk as if they don't? So maybe they don't know it.

I didn't leer at the girl, my eyeglasses did. I didn't insult my colleague, my tongue did. Tookie Williams is not responsible for brutal murders, society is. It's the same sort of nonsense.

Famous Last Words: “Don’t Worry, It Isn’t Loaded”

Life in the fast lane often leads to a quick exit from life's freeway. You may recall Terry Kath, guitarist for the band Chicago. In 1978, while drunk, he shot himself in the head with a 'unloaded' gun. At first he had been fooling with a .38 revolver. Then he picked up a semi-automatic 9 mm pistol, removed the magazine, pointed it at his head, spoke his last words, and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately for his head, there was a round in the chamber. Or that is one way the story goes.

Such inadvertent exits are easily avoided by exceptionless observation of three rules: Never point a gun at something you do not want to destroy. Treat every gun as if loaded, whether loaded or not. Never mix alcohol and gunpowder.

Guns in the Delusional World of the Leftist

Your typical leftist wants it to be illegal for a citizen to own a gun for self-defence. In recent news, an 80 year old Chicago man shot and killed an armed home invader thereby defending himself, his elderly wife and his grandson. Well done, old man, a boon service to humanity. The miscreant was a scumbag with a long rap sheet. But in Chitown it is illegal to own a handgun! That bespeaks a serious paucity of common sense in the Windy City. There ought not be any such law. But since there is, it must be enforced. Right? In the topsy-turvy world of leftist 'thought,' one enables the criminal while penalizing the decent citizen.

Laws should be few in number, rational in content, clear and concise in formulation, enforceable, and enforced. Laws should not be passed for 'feel good' purposes, to show that one is a bien-pensant 'caring' liberal. All reasonable people abhor gun violence. But the solution is not legislation that will be ignored by malefactors and serve only to hamstring the law-abiding.

The Metaphysics of the Martini

Ed Feser expatiates. I checked in at W4 to see whether there was any commentary on the the recent liberal-left hysteria over Arizona SB 1070. Nothing. But Steve Burton's E pur si muove! held my interest.

Brew 102

I asked an old friend if he remembered the huge Brew 102 sign visible from a Los Angeles freeway back in the '50s and '60s. (See photo below.) His response:

'Deed I do remember Brew 102.
Over the Hollywood Freeway.
My arm 'round a cutie in a '55 Buick
Goin' long 'ol Highway 101.

Here is my verse response which is not meant autobiographically:

'Twas Brew 102 that did me in
And got me to drownin' in liquid sin
Soon I was a rollin' down that lost highway
Where many a boy has been known to stray
On 66 I got my kicks
And on 101 I had my fun.
But now I'm here to tell you true
We ain't on this earth to booze and screw
The female ass and the whisky glass
Have brought many a man to a sorry pass.
That's my wisdom take it straight
And head while there's time for the narrow gate
It's not too late and it's not too far
As long's you don't stop at the next whisky bar.

LaLaLand in the 1950s, Hollywood Freeway, and Brew 102 sign (left-click to enlarge):

Ataraxia and the Tobacco Wacko

Near the end of the 1980's I read a paper at a multi-day philosophy conference in Ancient Olympia, Greece. After one of the sessions, we repaired to a beautiful seaside spot for lunch. We sat in the open air at long tables under a canopy. Directly across from me sat a Greek woman who had read a paper on ataraxia. A concept central to the Greek Sceptics, Stoics, and Epicureans, ataraxia (from the Greek a (not) and taraktos (disturbed)) refers to unperturbedness, tranquillitas animi, tranquillity of soul. Thus Sextus Empiricus (circa 200 A.D.) tells us in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book One, Chapter Six, that “Scepticism has its arche, its inception and cause, in the hope of attaining ataraxia, mental tranquility. (Hallie, p. 35) The goal is not truth, but eudaimonia (happiness, well-being) by way of ataraxia (tranquility of mind). A key method is the suspension (epoché , ἐποχή ) of all doxastic commitments.

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