Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms – Page 8

The Contribution of Hollywood Cultural Polluters to Violence

Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. The liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their ways of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

Leftist scum need to look in the mirror before blaming inanimate objects for violent behavior.

Why Do You Need a Fire Extinguisher or a Smoke Detector?

I have functioning smoke detectors in my house and two, count 'em, two well-maintained fire extinguishers in my kitchen. One's a backup in case the other fails. But of course I don't need any of this stuff since if a fire broke out in the middle of the night I would certainly wake up in time to call the fire department.

Disagreement Runs Deep

Chris Hedges on Guns and Liberty.

Harry Kazianis, The NRA Doesn't Kill People; It Saves Lives.

Why I Carry a Gun

Mirabile dictu, not everything The Atlantic publishes these days is left-wing crap. Never-Trumper David French explains why he carries. (HT: Bill Keezer)

It is rather curious, though. Here is a guy who not only supports Second Amendment rights, but also exercises them by keeping firearms in his home and bearing them on his person. And yet he either voted for Hillary the gun-grabber or refused to vote for Trump whose conservative accomplishments have been stellar in just one year. What bloody sense does that make? You support the person who opposes your values?

Another thing that angers me about French is that before the election he published an anti-Trump piece in which he referred to the Wall of Trump as a "pipe dream." That is the kind of disgusting, supine defeatism that you would expect from a pseudo-conservative like Jeb! Bush.

'Liberals' need to understand what they are up against in their crusade to strip Americans of their Constitutional rights.

You 'liberals' are profoundly stupid and lazy. If you want fewer guns in civilian hands, stop your screeching and emoting. Study the issues. Learn the terminology. Take a course in logic. Read the Constitution. Open your minds. Shut your lying mouths. The more you lie and slander, the more you galvanize the opposition.

Why the Left Opposes Arming Teachers

Here

For a ‘Liberal,’ Gun Control = Gun Confiscation

Suppose there occurs some horrendous incident of roadway carnage. Nobody says, 'We need traffic laws.' Nobody competent in English says that because it conversationally implies that there are no traffic laws. What a person might sensibly say is that we need additional traffic laws, for example, laws outlawing texting while driving.

So why do liberals reliably say, whenever there is a school shooting, or a similar outrage, 'We need gun control'? 'Gun control' refers to gun control laws of which there are many at the Federal, State, and local levels. Why would a liberal say we need gun control when it is obvious that there is plenty of gun control?

Because, for a 'liberal,' 'gun control is code for 'gun confiscation.' It is just that they, or most of them, lack the intellectual honesty to state plainly what they are for.

One of the reasons Hillary lost to the unlikely Donald Trump is because of her mendacity on this very issue. A stealth ideologue to the core, her speeches were nothing but bromides, blather, and bushwa bereft of ideas and concrete proposals. She dared not say what she really had in mind in prosecution of Obama's destructive project of "fundamental transformation." Luckily, the Clinton dynasty is at an end as is the Bush dynasty. We can thank Trump for having put paid to both.

Sorry Hillary, It’s Not About Hunting

John Daniel Davidson:

Here it must be said that the Second Amendment was not meant to safeguard the right to hunt deer or shoot clay pigeons, or even protect your home and family from an intruder. The right to bear arms stems from the right of revolution, which is asserted in the Declaration of Independence and forms the basis of America’s social compact. Our republic was forged in revolution, and the American people have always retained the right to overthrow their government if it becomes tyrannical.

[. . .]

That might sound academic or outlandish next to the real-life horror of a school shooting, but the fact remains that we can’t simply wave off the Second Amendment any more than we can wave off the First, or the Fourth, or any of them. They are constitutive elements of the American idea, without which the entire constitutional system would eventually collapse.

The aim of the Left is to subvert the American constitutional order. This explains why leftists never miss an opportunity to attack the Second Amendment which is the concrete back-up to the First and the others. A school shooting is a wonderful opportunity for them to recruit schoolchildren and bleeding-heart know-nothings as useful idiots for their cause.

AR-15 Sales Up

Way to go, liberals! You've done it again. You've driven up gun sales and shot yourself in the foot to boot. You can talk about gun confiscation all you want, but it is not going to happen. There are just too many armed, liberty-loving Americans. You only galvanize the opposition with your emotion-driven tirades. Argumentatively, you don't have a leg to stand on, if I may be permitted to extend my shot-to-the-foot metaphor.

And then there is that pesky Second Amendment concerning which even SCOTUS finally saw the light:

District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S.570 (2008), is a landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held, in a 5–4 decision, that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home, and that Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban and requirement that lawfully-owned rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock" violated this guarantee. (Wikipedia)

You will note that the Second Amendment "protects" the individual's right. It does not confer it. That's very important. I invite you to think about it.

Please also note how idiotic, how 'Pelosian' if you will, was the D. C. requirement that firearms be kept disassembled (sic!). I'd better stop. I feel a rant coming on.

Sales are up! Reuters. Gateway Pundit.

Guns and Rights

Do you have a right to life? Yes. If you have a right to life, do you have a right to defend your life? Yes. If you have a right to defend your life, do you have the right to acquire adequate means to self-defense? Yes. Do you understand that this implies that the law-abiding citizen has a right to keep and bear arms for personal and home defense? Yes. Does this include the right to keep and bear tactical nukes? No.

Very good. You passed the test. You are worth talking to about this issue.

I go into details here.

School Shootings: It’s the Culture, Stupid

It is not guns that are the problem, but the culture that liberals and leftists have created. We've got plenty of gun control; what we need now is liberal control. The contributors to the piss-poor pages of the NYT's Op-Ed section need to STFU and listen to someone with sense such as Andrew Klavan (emphasis added):

. . . rap music with its hateful, violent and misogynistic lyrics, and video games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can have sex with a prostitute then strangle her or pull an innocent person out of a car, beat him, then steal his vehicle.

. . . a culture in which those in authority approve of and argue for things like gangsta rap and GTA — and indeed for the use of violence to silence speech that offends them — well, such a culture becomes a machine for transforming madness into murder.

[. . .]

The left wants to defend gangstas and "transgressive" art and antifa thugs — but when the shooting starts, they blame the guns.

The left wants to get rid of feminine modesty and masculine protectiveness and social restrictions on sex — but when the abuse and rape and harassment rise to the surface, they start whining about toxic manhood. Perhaps they should have listened to the Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton, who wrote about the difference between reforming society and deforming it — a passage that was neatly paraphrased by John F. Kennedy: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."

Now the left wants to legitimize disrespect for the flag and for Christianity. They want to ignore the rule of law at the border and silence protests against Islamic ideas that are antithetical to every good thing the west stands for. They should look to Europe where all that's been accomplished. And now, when European women are molested in the public square, the gormless authorities advise them to behave more modestly lest immigrants get the wrong idea. When Islamic knives come out and Islamic bombs go off, the police rush to harass — who? Those who question the dictates of the Koran.

[. . .]

For fifteen years and more, I have been complaining that the right is silenced in our culture — blacklisted and excluded and ignored in entertainment, mainstream news outlets, and the universities. But the flip side of that is this: the degradation of our culture is almost entirely a leftist achievement. Over the last fifty years, it's the left that has assaulted every moral norm and disdained every religious and cultural restraint.

The left owns the dismal tide. They don't like the results? They're looking for someone or something to blame? Maybe they should start by hunting up a mirror.

Fake News: 18 School Shootings Since January 1, 2018. The Importance of Definition

The question of how many school shootings have occurred in a given place over a given period of time is an empirical question. But to answer the empirical question, one must first have answered a logically prior question, which is non-empirical. This is the conceptual question as to the definition of 'school shooting.'

What counts as a school shooting? The supervised, safe, Saturday morning on-campus firing of BB guns at targets? The 'discharge' of a pea shooter? The shotgunning of ducks in a pond on a school's grounds? The killing of a stray deer with bow and arrow?

Suppose some punk fires a .223 round at a window of a school in the middle of the night when no one is there from an off-campus position. That could be called a school shooting too. A physical part of the school was shot at.

Or let us say that a distraught person commits suicide by shooting himself while seated in a car parked in a lot of what was formerly a school. This is an a actual case that was cited as a 'school shooting'! See linked article infra. Does this count as a school shooting? Not to someone who is intellectually honest.

Clearly, what most people mean by a school shooting is an attempted mass shooting in a school or on the premises of a school by one or more assailants armed with deadly weapons, a shooting of students or teachers or administrative personnel that causes death or injury.

That definition no doubt needs tweaking, but if we adopt something like it, then, since January 1st we have in these United States more like three, count 'em, three school shootings. Three too many, but even a liberal gun-grabber knows that 3 < 18.

Across the board, lying leftists bandy about terms without explicit definitions, or with over-broad definitions. They do this willfully to further their destructive agendas. If you are a decent human being you will do your bit to oppose them.

Now go read the Politifact article.

Is the Problem Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?

Here

Smokers as Contemplatives?

Now that's a stretch to elicit scorn, but this article does make some good points pushing back against the extremism of the tobacco wackos.

The most absurd view of smoking known to me is the one that was the party line of the Rand cult. See Is Smoking a Moral Obligation? wherein I quote Murray Rothbard.

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. [This entry is a repost from 28 December 2011. One of President Trump's many accomplishments has been to put an end to the 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 age 62 on 15 December, 2011. 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.

Edmund Husserl, Tobacco-Logische Untersuchungen

Real philosophers smoke.

Excerpt:

I. Materials (from Husserl’s letters)1

Husserl asks Johannes Daubert to order cigars from tobacconist Rennert in Munich (November 11, 1906):

For Saturday (for an evening of pleasant company) I would need a good import, say around 40 or 45 DM per thousand, but only a small box of 25. It is probably better if you, with your connoisseur’s eye, make the selection, rather than that I just write to Rennert. Size, big if possible. Would you be so kind? The following could be added, if the opportunity presents itself: 25 pieces 656 (Sumatra), 25 pieces 667 (Mexico), 25 pieces 631. Also Hermann Oldenkott 3/4 pound O, 1/4 pound W, 1/4 R, 1/4 K, as well as 200 grams of Austrian Varinas. Since this is likely to amount to a tidy sum, do you suppose Rennert will apply the usual discount?

Husserl thanks Daubert (November 18, 1906):

So, many thanks for the trouble you have taken. Of course I find everything excellent. The Upmann in particular is worthy of the Elysian Fields. To be sure, it takes nerve to deal with its potency. That my work of the last few weeks has been productive is largely thanks to your “stimulation,” which in this case means: the tobaccological stimulation of your shipment.

I couldn't find an image depicting Husserl smoking a cigar, so enjoy the following in its stead: