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The hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance surrounding the gun violence in our country has reached a fever pitch this weekend. In the same 24-hour period, in the same city, two incidents of extreme gun violence occurred. The first was committed by a 27-year-old male of European descent who shot a 22-year-old female singer in the head before he turned his gun on himself. This was premeditated as he drove two hours from his home to a city where she was signing autographs specifically to kill her. The second was a 29-year-old male of Afghan descent who entered a nightclub and killed or injured over 100 people. This was also premeditated, as he was apparently upset when he saw two men kissing in front of his wife and child the day prior. What is the difference then? According to many commentators and media outlets, one man was motivated by his religion, and the other man was motivated by…something else, we’re still figuring it out apparently.

This interpretation of gun violence, that a shooter’s motivation is based on a coherent religious or ideological thought, is a bald lie we tell ourselves every time there is an incident. Yes, the nightclub shooter used Islam and even ISIS as an excuse to give his brain permission to commit this act and cast himself as a hero in the celestial struggle between Islam and the evils of the West, but focusing on this as an act of “Islamist Terrorism” is a gross absurdity. It excuses our own thinking and lets us believe if only we stamp out this one brand of radical thought we can be safer.

For some context, in the same time frame there were 43 other incidents in America involving guns, resulting in 28 deaths and 31 injuries. This is in a single 24-hour period. So far in 2016 there have been 23,158 incidents involving guns resulting in 5,931 deaths and 12,144 injuries. Of these, 134 were mass shootings (four or more shot and/or killed in a single event, at the same general time and location not including the shooter).

To focus on gun violence only when really big events happen or the motivation behind the violence (racism, homophobia, terrorism, ISIS, etc) makes for an interesting narrative fails to explain the core of a violence that is deeply rooted in our society. Rather than look at these extemporaneous “motivations”, we must understand this core if we are ever truly to reduce the amount of violence we see from guns in America.

From 2002-2012 88% of homicides (of all types, not just guns, but I am extrapolating that this number holds as roughly the same when looking at gun-only homicides) were committed by men. For mass shootings over 98% of perpetrators are male. So if we look at gun violence in America in terms of constants and variables, a certain pattern emerges, particularly in mass shootings. Guns are a means to enhance one person’s physical power over another, whether to inflict death, injury, or simply the threat of death or injury, well beyond their personal strength or physical capacity. By interpreting and focusing on this function of guns, the use of guns by males is then understood as the assertion of their power or dominance (in this case the power of life or death) in a situation they would normally be unable to assert themselves with a balance of power so extremely skewed in their favor.

In an instant a man transforms from a position where their power had been stripped from them into a man who is now more powerful by far than anyone in his immediate vicinity. So if you are a man who had your “power” stripped by a celebrity woman (or any woman) who “thought she was better than you” or didn’t realize you were her one true love or rejected your hundreds of very nice emails or called security on you when you were just trying to see her at her house or apartment you spent a lot of time tracking down, you can take that power back in an instant. Or if you are a man who had your power stripped from you when you were walking down the street of Miami and saw two men kissing in front of your wife and child, emasculating you when you were unable to do anything because you live in a society where this thing you disagree with is accepted, you can take back your masculinity and power by shooting homosexuals who are part of the group who stole it from you. Really, if you are any man who needs to express their dominance for any reason, maybe someone cuts you off in traffic, or they didn’t show you the proper respect when they walked by you, or maybe even its not a specific reason, you’ve just felt powerless for a while and need to feel powerful for once, a gun is always available to you because we live in America.

The manner of the excuse to justify violence (racism, homophobia, religion, morality, etc) is immaterial. Men will always find an excuse and even revel in putting their violence in a larger context (inciting a race war, continuing the cosmic battle between Islam and the West, fighting the American government’s “jackboot thugs” to prevent them from taking over…the America(?), stopping the reptilians from taking over humanity, etc). We must understand that the cause of violence in America is the male quest to retake their power.

And this, the root of American gun violence, is why we must reform our gun laws. Now for whatever reason we have all agreed as a nation that our founding fathers were the most intelligent people who ever lived and would be really good at making laws in 2016 even without having any knowledge of how the world worked in 2016. We also all agree, for some reason, that that they obviously had assault rifles and hand guns in mind when they wrote the 2nd Amendment, so making guns entirely illegal seems to be off the table. Additionally, people still say they feel safer when they have a gun around even because there are all these “bad guys with guns” running around out there (and apparently it wouldn’t be better to arrest them before they shoot someone…?) who are just waiting for you to lose your right to bear arms before invading your home or attacking you on the street. With that being said, I think I have an idea that might satisfy all party’s needs while still reducing gun violence.

Make guns legal, but only for women. Make it literally illegal for a man, who is not in law enforcement, to even touch a gun. And if a woman wants to own a gun, make sure she has to go through extensive training and yearly recertifications so that she knows how to use that sucker like a pro. This means that when a bad guy with a gun comes around, you, the nervous man of the house, can always rely on your female partner to competently protect you. If you’re single and scared, find a woman you can be friends with and rely on to quickly come to your aid should you need it. This would have the added benefit of perhaps also reducing the gender disparity in domestic violence/sexual assaults rates in America.

This, however, is a short term solution. The long term solution is to reform masculinity itself. Unfortunately this is a global, generational issue seen in males in nearly every culture and nation. The current definition of masculinity is toxic to our society and must adapt to modern civilization. Perhaps it served when we lived in sparse tribes who were constantly warring and defending what little they had, but it no longer has a place in our modern culture. It is a vestigial behavior currently responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the globe every year based on nothing more than feelings of hurt pride or the desire to assert of personal power. Changing the way men think about themselves is essential if we want to reduce violence. However, this is admittedly difficult to legislate and requires an overall societal sea change, one I truly hope we are pursuing as a society.

So that’s my idea to help reduce gun violence anyways, what’s yours?

The most important thing to keep in mind is that in the next 24 hours another 50 people will have their lives ripped apart by gun violence. And then in the next 24 hours after that. And then after that. And after that. Indefinitely, every month, every year. If we do not do something, anything, anything at all about gun violence in America, we should stop pretending we care when this happens and just understand it’s a price we are willing to pay for loving guns more than we love human beings.

Statistics retrieved from: http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

Great article from Sarah Chayes on corruption in the US. The linked video of Alex Pareene on CNBC talking about the corruption of JP Morgan, which is then disdainfully rejected by the HxC capitalist apologists at CNBC, is fascinating to watch from a variety of perspectives.

First, thinking about it from the point of view of a Trump voter and how the nameless entrenched elites (Clinton in particular) must be held accountable, but with an odd qualifier that rich people are exempt due their “brilliant” ability to acquire more wealth. When wealth = virtue, this sort of cognitive dissonance is understandable. So would the working class Trump voters sneer alongside the CNBC hosts when they snidely declare using the word “corruption” is hyperbolic when describing…corruption? Some would, I’m assuming, but not all. To reach these voters, we need to decouple the ideas of wealth, hard work, and virtue. There are a few routes we can take here, but demonstrating blatant corruption from banks, a point I think left-wing liberals and Trump voters can come together on, is a good place to start. While doing this, we have to be careful to not directly attack the idea of “the American Dream.” It’s all some people are clinging too and they will defend it to the death, or their own financial ruin. Rather we can phrase it in terms of elites and corruption between politicians and bankers (sorry, Sen Schumer, you’re getting thrown under the bus here) and how the system is getting rigged against the little guy (because it is). Left-wing liberals and conservatives can agree on this issue, it just takes some finagling to get there.

Second, thinking about it from the point of view of a Sanders/Stein voter, it is simply another demonstration than anyone with money or power is corrupt. Possibly true, depends on the definition of corruption, as discussed in the article. In a civil society, nearly everything revolves around legal definitions. When we contract the legal definition of corruption down to such a meaningless level, as we have, all a moneyed interest needs is the right type and number of lawyers, and they are fairly well-protected from nearly anything. The cost of court is prohibitive enough to keep unmoneyed interests from challenging anything other than their most deeply vested issues. This itself could be considered a type of corruption, though one that simply exists due to the modern monopolistic necessity of the lawyer-industrial complex. The ability to tie-down, or threaten to tie-down, something in court for years is intensely anti-egalitarian and undermines the rule of law. And it touches on all aspects of life, from easements to intellectual property to regulations. This is another area where left-leaning liberals and conservatives can come together, I believe. No one likes lawyers running things and trampling over the common people’s rights. Unfortunately on issues like Standing Rock we are phrasing the problem less in terms of corrupt corporations abusing the rule of law and more in identity politics/moral terms, which is a losing argument with potential conservative allies. These could be uniting issues, but I believe because of phrasing and focus on our side and right-wing propaganda on the other, it simply becomes another area we clash. Is it a coincidence it enables the status-quo when our groups are in conflict? It’s probably just the most self-interested course of action for elites.

Finally, the Clinton voters/supporters. I honestly don’t know where a Clinton supporter (by this I mean the hawkish neoliberal-Larry Summers/Washington Consensus type) would stand on this issue other than say it’s not ideal, but it’s the best we can do in our current democracy. So, capitalist apologist apologists. The problem is, to really fix the problem, a goodly number of establishment Democratic politicians would need to go, and this is unacceptable (to Clintonites) seeing as they still have a pretty tight hold on the reigns (see: Pelosi). So, as we saw in this election, Clinton types are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can’t condemn either political or economic corruption as a good chunk of their team is involved in either the practices themselves or culpable in the creation of the laws legalizing corruption in some way or another. Instead of making that tough first leap and cleaning up the party, Dems seem to be doubling down on their demographic game and just waiting out the US white population as that population’s numbers dwindle as a proportion of the electorate. Whether this is a long-term winning strategy is debatable as I don’t think Trump is going to end up being as objectionable to many Latinos as people predict (despite his rhetoric). In the near term, however, I think the state of the House, Senate (2018 in particular), State legislatures, Governorship’s, and Presidency speaks for itself. The GOP may be just as corrupt or even more so than the Dems, but at least they are the party of, “destroy the government because it’s corrupt.” So either the Dems take a page from their left-leaning colleagues and recognize the need to clean house, or we have to wait for the GOP to truly implode when it (I think) inevitably overplays its hand and does something that objectively and blatantly harms the little guy at the expense of moneyed interests. I prefer proactive approaches.

As I’m a fairly voracious consumer of news from all sources (including sites like Brietbart and Daily Kos. Yes I know, but I think it’s important to know what people I disagree with are going to say and why (and even empathize with them! (Also, yes I know))), I’ve noticed a very distinct and rather alarming trend on both the right and the left.

The right, for all its race baiting and sexism and classism (not from everyone and everywhere on the right, mind you, but I can say, fairly objectively, from significant portions) does an excellent job strategizing and packaging its language to be palatable to people who aren’t virulently racist or sexist or classist (if your gut reaction is to argue with me on this point aka “all Trump voters are racists and sexists,” I’m talking directly to you with this post), but aren’t active combatants in the identity politics crusade either. Frank Luntz (whose book “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear” would be useful, if painful, reading for many liberal strategists/organizers) and people like him have been instrumental on this front, transforming right wing rhetoric into snappy phrases and sound bites like “job creators,” and “death tax,” and “hardworking taxpayers.” By coding their right wing language in acceptable-sounding verbiage, the GOP is able to a) package their material in voter-friendly dressing and b) soften the resistance to their more extreme ideas by making them sound less extreme. Saying, “We want to empower job creators,” is way more acceptable to most voters than, “We want to give capitalists more power.”

The left, on the other hand, has gone the other direction on the language issue, particularly in the realm of identity politics. For many liberals, language is now a tool to prove ideological purity, as in if you don’t use the right nouns and pronouns and verbs and adjectives in the exact right order when talking about the exact right thing, you could very easily be called a racist or sexist or ableist or ageist or speciesist or classist or homophobic or transphobic or or or etc etc etc. My argument isn’t to police anger (an important phrase), erase lived experiences (another important phrase), or do anything else to tell people they’re wrong in what they’re feeling (which has replaced research and evidence in many arguments). I’m aware I’m a cisgendered white male who has duly checked his privilege, and I promise I’m not pointing out these things to make fun of the concepts or deny their importance (though saying all this does feel like going through an elaborate ritual before anyone will listen to anything I’ll say, more style and checking the block on key words and phrases than actual meaning or substance). I believe they are important and should be discussed and debated. However, when it comes to building coalitions and winning elections, using this esoteric language, which is itself ripped from the pages of important, peer-reviewed academic articles discussing the construction of identities and used out of context in pop-culture and a toxic and bullying call-out culture on social media, is detrimental to our efforts.

For example, if I want to talk to someone I don’t know about what sort of movies they like, I’m probably not immediately going to start talking about the use of shot and reverse shot in Citizen Kane or the meaning of the different lighting methods Bergman used in Seventh Seal and how they reinforce his themes of existential dread…or whatever. I’m probably going to start by asking them what sort of movies they like and tailor my language and subjects to their responses. The same goes for political rhetoric. People are going to commit “microaggressions” during conversations in which you’re trying to educate them or discuss politics. That’s a fact not because they’re overtly racist or sexist or all the other –ists (usually), but rather because the concept of a “microaggression” isn’t particularly well disseminated or explained throughout our electorate (and also sometimes the term “microaggression” gets expanded to mean “anything that makes me uncomfortable or I disagree with”…which is itself a whole other subject) Beginning the education process on where you’re coming from and you’re lived experiences and you’re perspective can’t start way down the road after your own long journey of experiences and reading and learning for someone with little prior education or exposure to the subject; it has to start at the point where you can find commonality.

This isn’t what’s happening. Instead, liberals are insisting on using a very strict structured language system with shame and penalties for making a mistake, regardless of the circumstances or background of the person who makes those mistakes. Rather than tailoring terms, understanding, or empathizing with their audience, liberals are demanding everyone they engage with already have substantial knowledge of these concepts, and then even go so far as to claim that a lack of knowledge inherently implies prejudice. It’s rather revealing when someone going to an Ivy League school, or really any school, looks out on America’s roiling, underemployed, and vulnerable rust belt electorate and tells someone to, “Check their privilege.” White privilege is absolutely a thing and must be discussed, but so is access privilege, networking privilege, economic privilege, booksmarts privilege, and opportunity privilege. Discussing privilege and oppression isn’t about a competitive ranking system and who goes where in some cosmic list; it’s about being able to empathize with other people and understanding how certain systems, constructs, or cultural norms in our society are negatively impacting them. It seems many liberals have lost sight of this idea in their pursuit of the oppression Olympics.

By using language as a) a bludgeon to proclaim moral superiority or outrage, b) the “final word” in discussions where the assumption is that if anyone disagrees even slightly, they are morally impure and must be shamed into submission, and c) an elitist academic taunt when speaking to someone with plenty of other skills and smarts, just not in that particular academic field, liberals are ceding the wide and deep American middle-ground to conservatives who will happily gobble-up those voters with their tailored rhetoric and faux empathy.

The strategy of hoping the other side will say something offensive or forget to use their coded language so that voters will see the right wing in the same way liberals see them is not proactive; it’s passive and dependent on an opponent’s mistakes. Self-righteous anger wielded through the scythe of identity politics feels like, and might be, the morally correct path to take when an enemy is defined as “too heinous to reason with”. However, by applying this broad stroke to such a wide swath of our electorate, rather than the smaller percentage that would better reflect reality, we alienate potential allies, a term I would like to redefine as “someone who generally agrees with us,” rather than its current form of “someone who says exactly what we want them to say.”

From The American Interest

From Jacobin

From Crooked Timber

For reference on the hate crime issue from the reason article, the SPLC is what most news sites are citing with their “200 incidents since the election” stat. I’m very curious to see this compared to the average number of incidents during the same time period over the last 10-20 years.

Additionally, SPLC states, “Pulling from news reports, social media, and direct submissions at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, the SPLC had counted 201 incidents of election-related harassment and intimidation across the country as of Friday, November 11 at 5pm. These range from anti-Black to anti-woman to anti-LGBT incidents. There were many examples of vandalism and epithets directed at individuals. Often times, types of harassment overlapped and many incidents, though not all, involved direct references to the Trump campaign. Every incident could not be immediately independently verified.”

I’m willing to venture that maybe 25% of the incidents are false reports, which certainly leaves a lot of hate out there. However whether this is the sign of a permanent upswing is doubtful as the SPLC stats show the number of incidents seem to have peaked and are now declining.

Anyways, I just wish people would research stuff more before they post something demonstrably false.

Class, class, class, class. Remember that when you pillory large segments of the population on social media, everyone can see it and it can be used against liberals to create a wedge between races and sexes during elections.

Creating a society with equality of economic opportunity is not an identity politics issues. If we attempt to sacrifice working class whites on the alter of identity, we shouldn’t be surprised when they fight back.

A white factory worker in the Midwest who lost their job overseas is probably going to respond negatively to being told, in fairly esoteric and abstract language, that he is a racist and a bigot and privileged for being white. Is this person privileged for being white? In some ways yes and some ways no. But if liberals want to continue to pride themselves on their empathy and understanding of suffering, they really need to “get” why white people are feeling upset about all these things right now. Some are more justifiable than others, and some are definitely rooted in racism and sexism. However, shaming them and screaming at them and making them hate you is not going to help your cause. They are still voters and their voices will be heard, as they were this election.

The world isn’t fair or easy, of which this election has been a stark reminder. Whatever race or sex or group you find yourselves lumped into might be relatively more or less oppressed than a lot of Trump supporters, and some other Clinton supporters may be way more or way less oppressed than that group. It’s not a competition and trying to make it so will only bring heartache and failure. Building equality for all starts with making our economy more equitable for all. Claiming the moral high ground based on individual affiliation muddies the waters and drives away highly necessary. if not entirely comfortable. allies. There are so many issues dealing with racism and sexism this country must address. Creating equality of economic opportunity is a way to help all communities while removing motivations for resistance from a significant voting bloc (working class whites) forces opposing racial and gender equality consistently manipulate into voting against their own interests. Order of operations.

Moral Purity and Pragmatism sit at opposite ends of a spectrum. If we’re entirely morally pure, it’s doubtful we’re getting much accomplished. If we’re entirely pragmatic, we might get lots of stuff accomplished, but we’ve traded in on our ideals in the accomplishing, meaning those accomplishments might not mean very much. Navigating between these two points is where we find effective campaign strategy. We’ve lost our way for so many reasons, not least of which is the echo chamber of corporate media and social media. But if we want to change things, we’ve got to recognize this and carve out a real and discernible strategy that includes understanding and empathizing with those who disagree with us.

Some Quick Election Postmortem Notes:

• This is not about morality, this is about winning. And we didn’t win.
• The liberal elite in America bought into the red herring that liberal politics can be built solely around identity politics and ignored the crushing problems that economic inequality, stagnant wages, and underemployment have wrought on the white middle and lower classes.
• The corporate liberal is finished (or should be).
• Neither party’s candidate nor the media explained the importance of the Panama Papers and the implications these revelations should have had during this election cycle. To me this is very revealing.
• Oppressed groups will most likely become more oppressed over the next four years. Banding together with allies and looking at the greater good is more important now than ever.
• Identity politics is important and should be part of the national dialogue, but a laser focus using academic language and purity tests will lose more votes than it wins in the current electorate.
• Yelling at white males about how awful, racist, and sexist they are is, apparently, not a very effective political strategy.
• Outrage culture, which has been erected as a tent pole in the liberal camp, pushed too hard and too fast and this is the blowback. Time to develop a new strategy.
• Posting outrage and hatred for swaths of people will most likely entrench an opponent’s opinions.
• Posting on social media is public. Temporary anger could very easily be used by an opponent to paint a side as more radical than it actually is, driving the narrative that political correctness is “out of control.”
• Knowing how to positively engage with people who disagree with you and reach some point of human understanding is very important. Understanding people who disagree with you is very important.
• The GOP now controls the House, Senate, most likely the Presidency, and soon the Supreme Court.
• Welcome to the suck, Obama liberals. Let’s talk strategy, not feelings or outrage.
• Finally, conspiracy theories and the ring-wing media machine are real forces to be reckoned with, and the liberal/corporate media must come up with a remedy. This is likely to get much worse before it gets better.