Category Archives: Current Events

Anti-Gun is not Pro-Life

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[Note: I wrote this piece for another site, but since it doesn’t seem to be being published there I’m putting it here. It’s intended as a bit of a companion piece to my most recent ‘Federalist’ article].

I’ve heard some people talking about the recent student march in Washington saying things like “it’s really a pro-life march” and “gun control is a pro-life position.”

Let’s put a stop to this nonsense right now, shall we? Whatever your ideas of gun control are, anti-gun is not pro-life; it is just anti-gun. To call it pro-life is a cheap rhetorical trick, akin to saying that those who opposed Obamacare opposed all healthcare reform, or that those who are against affirmative action just hate Black people. It’s what’s called the straw-man fallacy: purposefully misstating your opponent’s position in order to make it appear weaker than it is.

To be against abortion, or euthanasia, or other such things is to be against a clear, concrete practice. It amounts to a tautology: don’t kill people and those people won’t be killed. It is a matter of principle that it should not be legal to willingly take an innocent human life for any reason because it is wrong.

To be in favor of gun control, on the other hand, does not generally mean to be against weapons in principle (few people would advocate the overthrow of the military, police, and similar institutions). It means that we believe removing or limiting privately owned firearms would reduce violence. That is, it is the idea that enacting certain laws will result in certain effects.

Now, whether or not they actually will is not the present concern; the point is that we are talking about a means to achieve a goal, not about the goal itself. The end desired is less violence; the means being discussed is greater restrictions on firearms.

You see, having fewer guns available, or even outright banning private firearms (assuming such a thing could be done) is not the same thing as reducing violence. Again, don’t think I’m saying more than I am: for the purposes of the present discussion, it may have that effect, but my point is that it is not an obvious or indisputable connection. It is open for debate. If you make abortion illegal, then quite simply there are no legal abortions. There is an essential connection between what is enacted and what is achieved. That is objectively not the case with gun-control.

The key difference is that, when it comes to guns, the thing we desire to stop is already illegal and we are only discussing ways to further discourage it. When it comes to abortion, the thing itself is what we are trying to outlaw.

In other words, one is a matter of principle, the other of strategy. One is a debate over whether to permit certain practices that by definition involve killing people. The other is a debate over whether or not certain new laws would reduce violent crime and to what extent they would infringe on legitimate individual rights. This is not a matter for discussion: that is objectively what is at stake in each case.

The distinction is further complicated by the fact that guns are often purchased and used to protect lives. The justification pro-gun advocates use is precisely that they need guns to defend themselves, their families, and their rights, and it is simply an objective fact that guns are often used in this capacity. You can debate how great a need this is and how it compares to the potential for abuse, but you cannot argue that it does not exist. Furthermore, if you intend to argue that without guns those killed by them would be alive, then you have to accept the counter argument that without guns those who have used them defensively would be dead or at the very least assaulted. I don’t think either argument is very good, but the point is that can’t accept one without accepting the other.

As this indicates, you cannot simply claim that gun-control is ‘pro-life’ because it is an open question whether it will actually lead to less violent crime. You could just as well say that being pro-gun is pro-life because guns are used to protect life and deter crime. Again, I am not currently arguing one or the other; I’m saying that they are rhetorically equivalent and thus calling either one ‘pro-life’ – equating it with opposing the legal killing of innocent people – is disingenuous. It is claiming a one-to-one progression where none exists.

More importantly, it is dishonest. To say that being pro-gun control is to be pro-life is equivalent to saying that someone against gun control is anti-life: that is, that they want more violent crime, or at least think that violent crime is a matter of indifference. You see, it’s a disguised straw-man attack, obliquely misstating the opposing position to make it appear weaker than it actually is. It is the sort of thing a con-man or snake-oil salesman does: if you doubt the efficacy of his patent blindness cure, that means you think blind people don’t deserve to see.

Do you see the point? The objection is not to the intended goal, but to the proposed method of reaching it. You cannot describe a means to an end as being either pro-life or otherwise, because ‘life’ (here meaning the reduction of violent crime) is the end goal and the debate is over how best to achieve that. Whatever your views on the issue, please have the honesty to acknowledge what is being discussed.

How Did This Happen?

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With the ongoing flood of celebrities, politicians, and people in power being accused of sexual harassment, some people are wondering how this happened? Well, there are a few things that might have factored in:

You said that sex didn’t have to mean anything.

You said monogamy was outdated and unnatural.

You said pornography was harmless fun.

You said that one’s sexual habits were an entirely private and personal affair.

You said that sexual constancy was impossible.

You elevated sexual pleasure to the level of the highest good.

You said that one’s sexual preferences were the defining feature of his personality.

You encouraged children to ‘experiment’ with sex.

You encouraged people to base their relationships on how good the sex was.

You said that adultery was ‘just another kind of marriage.’

You held up sexual predators and deviants as heroes.

You praised depictions of sexual depravity as high art.

You mocked and derided anyone who called for morality in sex.

You hailed contraception as liberation and condemned anyone who opposed it.

You hailed abortion as freedom and condemned anyone who condemned it.

You hailed pornography as liberating and raised pornographers to the status of folk heroes.

You made ‘Pimp’ a compliment.

You made contraception a fundamental human right.

You made sodomy a fundamental human right.

You made not having you sexual habits questioned or criticized in any way a fundamental human right.

You mocked and derided courtesy and chivalry.

You condemned the teaching of virtue as ‘judgmental.’

You forbade religion from the public square.

You condemned any special treatment offered to women as an insult.

You condemned anyone who pointed out that men and women are different and ought to be treated differently.

You mocked anyone who said that women should take special precautions and have special protections simply because they are women.

You repeatedly mock the idea that men should protect women.

You denied that there is even any substantial difference between men and women.

You celebrated imprudence, self-indulgence, and the exploitation of others as ‘self-discovery.’

You encouraged men and women to abandon or never start families in the name of ‘independence.’

You teach children about the beauty of sexual perversions.

You advocate for men to be able to use the women’s bathroom.

You hold personal desire up as an unquestionable good.

You deride any safeguards, precautions, or prudential habits as ‘repressive.’

You accuse anyone who suggests ways a woman can minimize her risk of being assaulted of ‘blaming the victim.’

You sneer at the customs, laws, and teachings of ages that didn’t have this problem.

You spent four generations stripping away more and more boundaries, advocating greater and greater transgressions, and claiming that you were virtuous for doing so.

You spent four generations mocking and deriding morality and elevating a person’s animal desires as the truest part of himself.

You spent four generations telling people that only they could decide what was right or true for them.

 

What the hell did you think was going to happen?

 

One Year On

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I don’t talk politics very much because it depresses me. Besides which, my own political ideas are pretty fringe at the moment and I’m not seeing anything good coming in the next few years. I typically vote Republican because the Democratic Party is absurdly evil (they literally have ‘kill babies’ as a major part of their platform), though I don’t like the Republicans that much and think they’re generally a lot of spineless cowards with little to no actual convictions and couldn’t lead a horse to a salt lick. The two political parties are like having a choice between Neville Chamberlain and Mao Zedong.

Nor do I like Trump. I think he’s a repulsive human being and an embarrassing leader. The really sad thing, though, is that I don’t see many politicians on the field I think would be much better (though one of them is actually Mike Pence, so if Trump gets impeached I think it’d be a trade up). Although I will say that I generally find the reactions people have to have to him to be much more alarming than anything he’s actually done, but that’s another story.

All that said, I was pretty sure he was going to win.

A few things made me think that. First of all was when I saw that Michigan was actually in play. The last time Michigan went blue was to vote for the first Bush, so when I realized Trump might actually win Michigan, I knew Hillary was in trouble. That’s actually why I decided at the last minute to cast my vote his way: I had been planning to vote third party, but realizing that it actually might make a difference, I gritted my teeth and signed for Trump.

Second was the mere fact that Hillary was going out of her way to alienate most of the country. Open borders, racist rhetoric about white people, doubling down on hatred of Christians and so on. You can only directly insult people for so long before they turn on you.

Then, of course, there was the whole ‘she broke the law’ thing. The more I heard people talking about it, the more that one song from ‘Hamilton’ was playing in my head: “Never gonna be President now.”

So, yeah, I knew Trump had a good chance of winning, and I was chuckling all the way as he did. Schadenfreude may be a sin, but I’m willing to indulge in it anyway. Again, going back to the ‘you can’t keep insulting people and expect them to be nice to you’ thing.

RIP Jerry Lewis

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One of the last of the great entertainers of his generation, Mr. Jerry Lewis has gone to his reward.

I confess, I’m not the best person to expound on Mr. Lewis’s career, as I haven’t seen many of his films, but of course, everyone knows his name, and that of his illustrious long-time partner, Mr. Dean Martin, with whom he was one of the top box-office draws for more than half a decade, before they unfortunately had a falling out and split as a team. Lewis himself remained a major box office draw in his own right, with films like The Nutty Professor, The Bellhop, and The Disorderly Orderly.

Like many comedians, Mr. Lewis was a consummate  professional and a very intelligent, hard-working man, in stark contrast to his nasally, child-like onscreen persona. In addition to his comedy work in films, stage, radio, and television, he was a life-long advocate for sufferers of muscular dystrophy disease, particularly children.

His appearance as a panelist on What’s My Line showed both his comedic skills and his sincere charity work:

 

Meanwhile, this rather harsh interview with him toward the end of his life, in which he bluntly refused to play along with the trite, canned questions of his interviewer shows that he maintained by his sharp mind and independent spirit up until the end.

Mr. Lewis spent his life making millions of people smile, and dedicated years of his time to helping those in need, and there are far worse legacies a man can leave behind.

May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.

The Land Before Time and the Proper Approach to Prejudice

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Over the weekend I posted my first video review, of The Land Before Time. I discovered how time-consuming such things are to make, and so I wasn’t able to address everything I wanted to. In particular, I glanced over the film’s approach to prejudice, partly because it’s actually kind of a minor theme compared to its dealings of faith and love (Cera’s the only character who evinces any real bigotry), and partly because it’s not a subject that really interests me that much. Everyone and their dog talks about the evils of prejudice these days; that and global warming constituted the main bulk of my public school education. It’s gotten to the point where I think it actually does more harm than good: people are so sick of being lectured about the evils of racism that they actually start to wonder whether the racists have a point. At least, that’s my experience.

(And for  the record, no, the racists don’t have a point. In the first place, a cursory knowledge of history shows that virtue and excellence are to be found in every race under Heaven. In the second, the Christian faith is clear both in Scripture and Tradition that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, but all are the children of one God, made in His image and likeness. And finally, any differences in accomplishment observable between the children of Europe and the rest of the world are explicable culturally and vanish to the extent that that culture is expanded. That Christendom was long limited to Europe and hence to ‘white people’ is a historical accident brought about by the Muslim conquests).

Anyway, I oppose racism, but I also oppose our chosen method of combating it, which is to view everything through the lens of race and insist that some races are naturally racist and need to own that fact, which will somehow lead to racial harmony. In other words, we fight racism with racism. Call me crazy, but I always thought that would backfire.

(By the way, if whites are ‘born racist’ wouldn’t that, by LGBT logic, mean that racism is okay? I mean, if they can’t help the way they feel, that means there’s nothing morally wrong with it, right?)

What I would propose instead is something more like what’s shown in The Land Before Time, and was a popular notion before critical race theory became the order of the day. Cera’s an unrepentant bigot for most of the film. Littlefoot responds by trying to make friends with her. He doesn’t demand she change before he’ll have anything to do with her; he just tries to be as nice to her as he can, partly because that’s just the kind of person he is, and partly because he recognizes they’re in the same boat together. Even when she’s being a complete jerk, he still shows her kindness, as when she refuses the food they’ve gathered in favor of trying to get her own, and he just tosses her down some anyway.

I’ve always been of the opinion that prejudice and bigotry ought to be met with good-will and, well, tolerance. People don’t change their convictions overnight, and they’re not likely to change if you just arbitrarily demand they do so while constantly insulting them. Instead, it’s best to prove them wrong by your own actions. What changes Cera in the end is the fact that her friends do show her great kindness despite her bad attitude. She sees for herself that she was wrong because her friends have proven her wrong; that they’ll be there for her when she needs them, even if she won’t be there for them.

The point is that you can’t just demand someone change: you have to give them a reason to. Constantly telling someone he’s a horrible person who can never change is unlikely to inspire him to reform.

RIP Haruo Nakajima

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I’ve just learned that Haruo Nakajima, the stuntman and actor who originated the role of Godzilla himself, has passed away at the age of 88 of pneumonia. Now all the major players of that greatest of monster films are gone, with the sole exception of Akira Takarada.

Mr. Nakajima was a stuntman and bit player at Toho studios (he played one of the bandits in Seven Samurai) when he was picked to play the monster in Tomoyuki Tanaka’s massive gamble Godzilla. Since they pretty much had to invent the different special effects techniques as they were making the film, the suit they designed was notoriously difficult to work with. Mr. Nakajima suffered terribly for the role, enduring temperatures up to 140 degrees and often leaving a whole cup of sweat behind him. The suit weighed over 200 pounds and included numerous bits of machinery to operate the mouth and tail. Though a trained athlete and a powerful man, Mr. Nakajima fainted more than once during the shoot.

Yet he returned for twelve films, finally retiring from the role after Godzilla vs. Gigan. In the process, he helped give Godzilla the distinctive personality that made him such a memorable figure on screen. Mr. Nakajima was known as a very good humored, playful man, and that side of him sometimes came across through the mountains of coarse latex. Those who remember Godzilla clapping his hands in mockery of King Kong, or leaping with excitement after sending King Ghidorah packing will see Mr. Nakajima’s personality shining through. At the same time, he could lend remarkable dignity and poignancy to Godzilla’s movements, as seen in the underwater confrontation at the end of the first film, or his interactions with Minya in Son of Godzilla.

Few may know his face or name, but Mr. Nakajima helped create one of the great figures of cinema, and for that he will always be remembered.

Rest in peace, sir, and many thanks.

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RIP Adam West

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More sad news: Adam West, forever immortalized in the infamously cheesy 1960s Batman show, has passed away at the age of 88 after a brief battle with Leukemia.

Mr. West was one of those actors (like Bela Lugosi) whose career was made and destroyed by a single role. He never recovered from being the Caped Crusader, especially after changing tastes caused the show itself to become infamous. At first, West descended into self-destructive depression over this fact, but later came to embrace his unique claim to fame and relished his position in the Batman legend.

Whatever you think of the show, Mr. West deserves credit for being the Batman for a whole generation. This, after all, is part of the Batman mythos as well, and even if it’s one that many fans might prefer to forget, it introduced one of the seminal characters of American comics to a whole new audience, including some of the writers and artists who did some of the best work with the character.

Happily, this very point was made in possibly Mr. West’s best post-Batman role: on Batman: The Animated Series. In the episode “The Gray Ghost Strikes,” West plays an actor made famous for playing a superhero on an old TV show, but whose career was subsequently destroyed by typecasting, and who now questions whether his life had any impact.

Adam West does some very impressive voice work as a man dealing with many of the same problems that he faced in his own life, and whose receives a truly touching vindication in discovering that he has had a positive impact, all the more so because the episode is so clearly sending that same message to Adam West himself. It’s Paul Dini and the other makers of what many regard as the very best iteration of Batman thanking the man who headed what is widely considered one of the worst for introducing them to the character they love.

By this point, I think it’s safe to say that Mr. West transcended his typecasting to become, if not a respected actor, a respected figure in the Batman fandom. Whatever you think of the 1960s show, Adam West undoubtedly inspired a generation of both fans and artists, which is something I think any actor can be proud of. May he rest in peace.