Re: Niggling away at the edges (related to Homemade bullet proof vest)

On May 23, 1:52 pm, Bill Swears <wswe...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
I fear that this won't work, but I'm interested in the issue of minority
interest groups niggling away at the edges of established law. I'm
intrigued by Ric's strong reaction to the issue of Teflon bullets, but
not because of the bullet issue per se.

1. The earliest version of this niggling away issue that comes to my
mind is prohibition. The current state of affairs is that drinking
alcohol is legal in most places in the U.S. But there are always
teatotalling forces who work to make the consumption of alcohol seem
repugnant, or immoral. The result is an awesome lot of laws that make
the distribution and consumption of alcohol difficult and expensive.
Applications for liquor licenses require public comment periods in a lot
of jurisdictions, traffic law includes things such as issuing DUI
tickets to people who climb into the back of their vehicle to sleep,
rather than driving, because they maintained control of their keys, thus
control of their vehicles, which they decided not to operate because
they were above the legal limit. (I knew a guy in Alabama who was
busted for DUI for just this reason, and never drove an inch after his
first drink. This ended his military career).

I'm going to pick on a well intentioned but generally overblown
organization here. MADD was started for a good reason, but is now an
organization that must continue to find new ways to tickle the public
conscience in order to remain relevant. It is a perfect vehicle for
people who aren't directly concerned about drunk driving, but who are
terribly concerned about the moral deterioration of America caused by
the demon rum.

2. Gun control:

Ric Wrote: >>> "Cop-killer bullets" are not simply a myth. They are a
cynical,



damnable, palpable lie told by people with agendas they aren't revealing
to you, and repeated by the gullible. Teflon coating is illegal as a
political comprimise between the NRA and politicians anxious to be seen
to do something, whether it was effective or no -- and it is not
effective, simply PR. I think less of you for falling for it.

Zeborah wrote:
What Brenda said sounded plausible to me(1), so I "fell for" it then.
What you say in response to her sounds plausible too, so I'll now choose
to believe you. Of course for all I know, having done no research
myself, you could have been lied to as well/instead, in which case I'd
be wrong to "fall for" your arguments. But is it necessary to think
less of me for the fact that I have better things to do with my time
than to investigate a technological/political issue I don't much care
about?
(1) And does sound from what you say like it has some correlative, if
not causative, basis in the history of ammunition technology.

Ric Wrote:



I said "less", not "ill", and although I may not always succeed, I
always try to be nice in my terminology.

This particular issue is sensitive to me because I am aware that it is a
deliberate and cynical attempt at "divide and conquer" made by people I
dislike immensely. It was selected specifically because the ignorant
would find it plausible, and thereby be convinced to add their force
(or, at minimum, refrain from opposition) to movement toward a goal that
I consider, with at least some evidence, to be not merely unhelpful but
directly counterproductive. In that respect, people who believe that a
few micrograms of plastic can turn a handheld weapon of modest power
into a fearsome, bunker-busting Hiroshima-equivalent do less damage than
your mild assumption that, well, it might have /something/ to do with
it. The latter attitude predisposes you to accept further lies at face
value.

We all live in an immensely complex technological civilization, in which
all but the absolutely destitute have power available that absolute
rulers of the past could not seriously dream of having. A human being is
capable of around a quarter-kilowatt for a short time; a horse produces
just under three-quarters of a kilowatt; which means that a quite modest
automobile is the energy-equivalent of fifty to a hundred mounted
knights, /sans peur et sans reproche/ -- really more, because the car
has much greater endurance. It well behooves us to develop the
capability for kitchen arithmentic and reasonable approximation even if
we aren't interested in the subject, because we are otherwise easy meat
for demagogues and the cynically unscrupulous. I reserve the right to
think less than I might otherwise of people who will not or do not
assume that responsibility.

3. Abortion as Birth Control. Any meaningful survey of this issue would
take up too much space. Right now, abortion is generally legal up to a
certain stage, and in most states remains legal far longer in the event
of birth defects, or imminent death of the mother. But, IMO, abortion
is really just a nexus point in a larger argument about whether birth
control should be legal. It is immoral to have sex for any reason but
procreation, therefore blocking procreation turns all sex into an
immoral act. Women should have a choice about whether they spend their
lives producing and raising children, sex is not a moral issue, and
shouldn't have a huge price-tag attached.

States are now having to legislate the conditions under which a
pharmacist must dispense birth control pills because the pill murders
zygotes. Planned parenthood spends huge dollars protecting the "last
ditch" defense against unplanned parenthood, abortion, because
anti-abortion forces are really just niggling away at a woman's right to
choose.

4. Privacy: not guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution or bill of rights,
yet I have strong feelings on this issue. Because somebody blew up a
building on the other side of this continent, I am subject to somebody
monitoring my overseas calls, and if I say "Hussein makes a good point,"
in relation to a real estate deal with my Lebanese American real estate
agent, I may be subject to twenty-four seven monitoring, without a
search warrant, as a suspected terrorist. Anybody read Lacey and his
Friends? It's coming, unless we stop it.

As a tutor, I helped a guy to write a persuasive paper whose premise was
that we should use the Patriot Act to fund metal detectors at the
entrances to every school in the country.

5. Civil rights/affirmative action/gender norming. It seems to me that
a lot of the rules we make to ensure equal treatment are then subtly, or
not so subtly, modified to ensure unequal treatment. When blacks were
forcibly integrated into the military, there were efforts to ensure
separate but equal, which failed because they should fail. But when
women began the integration process, separate but equal got a whole new
workout, with both sides of the debate represented by both sexes, and a
mess the result. It's taking a heck of a lot longer to integrate women
into the military than it did racial minorities. The mental gymnastics
that lead to a woman only submarine being commissioned simply defy the
imagination.

This list could go on and on, but the point I'm making is that there are
a lot of issues that seem as though they should be dealt with head on,
decided, and then laid to rest. Instead, they become multigenerational
points of societal contention, with both sides organizing in order to
discredit each other, and both sides peripherally trying to make certain
through sideways maneuvers that the opposing side has as difficult a
time of it as possible.

And the question, if you've gotten this far, has nothing to do with
solving these issues, it's a call for a list of other issues that
provoke the same sort of backroom dealing, whether they're on the public
radar or not. See, I don't necessarily want to write about the
polarized and fossilized issues we're arguing today, but might like to
approach that sort of issue through the mechanics, without needing push
people's hot buttons.

Bill

I'm sorry, Bill, but you haven't a hope. For an illustration of why
that is, you need look no farther than your #4.

Please do not take this as an argument to be answered; it rather
illustrates the principle of "framing", whereby this sort of issue
gets to be contentious.

*****

In the first place, the reason that there is no "privacy" in the
Constitution is that it is a concept so overbroad to be meaningless.
What /can/ be treated is Government's behavior in such circumstances.
The NSA is not a law enforcement organization; nobody is going to be
"...deprived of life, liberty, or property..." within the United
States as a result of those intercepts. At most, any information
gained would have the same status as if it came from an informant --
it cannot be taken at face value for purposes of indictment of
individuals, but requires investigation (with warrants and all the
other impedimenta) leading to eventual criminal charges.

More important, the issue as framed by the Press is a Heinleinian
"third way" lie -- picking and choosing facts from the stream for
maximum effect, while leaving out important things that might detract
from The Message. The issue is this: a huge fraction of international
phone traffic passes through the United States for a host of reasons,
not least of which is the rapacity of Government Post, Telephone and
Telegraph agencies (PTTs). If a call arrives at switch A, it may not
have direct access to the destination, and must thus hand it off to
switch B, which does -- but the segment from A to B is a "domestic
call" by the NYT's definitions. Furthermore, the calls are for all
practical purposes Internet packets; it is impossible to determine
their origin and destination without packet-sniffing, which the Press
is pleased to define as "tapping the phone lines". So if the listening
point is attached to either switch, simply determining the origin and
destination of the call is "intercepting domestic communications"
under the definitions you have accepted without question.

****

Now whether or not you believe any or all of that, it has exactly the
same status as the conventionally accepted account, what I and my
friends call "teh Narrative". Nothing in it is untrue; I have simply
selected those facts which support my attitude and deprecate yours.
Makes the concept of "debate" a little nebulous, doesn't it? And your
version of the issue derives directly from an identifiable person who
has declared unrelenting hostility toward the sitting President, and
wonder of wonders! -- it tends to discredit him. Coincidence? Perhaps.

The others fall into the same category, some more subtly, some less
so. It is said, and truly, that everyone's entitled to their own
opinion, but not to their own facts. If the set of facts we choose to
expose on any issue is disjoint from those given by our opponents in
the "debate", there is little or no chance of anything resembling
resolution.

Regards,
Ric
.

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