National Review Writer Says Conservatives Should Beat Socialism Out of Young People

I honestly wasn't sure if I should reference the quote in the title because references to violence freak me out, but there it is. Via Think Progress.

GOLDBERG: Personally, I think the voting age should be much, higher, not lower. I think it was a mistake to lower it to 18, to be brutally honest….[I]t is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth. We’re all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young. And yet there’s this thing in this culture where, ‘Oh, young people are for it so it must be special.’ No, the reason young people are for it because they don’t know better. That’s why we call them young people. [...] 

The fact that young people think socialism is better than capitalism. That’s proof of what social scientists call their stupidity and their ignorance. And that’s something that conservatives have to beat out of them. Either literally or figuratively as far as I’m concerned.

First of all, I don't think the reason they call us "young people" is because we're stupid. It's because we're young. Frankly, we're not even THAT young - we're adults. We have responsibilities, and jobs (well, some of us), and some of us are even married and/or have kids. We participate in society as much as you do, and have as much right and responsibility to make our political voices heard.

And I'd like to be all smart-sounding about this, but I really can't think of an appropriate response to the claim that SCIENCE says young people are stupid, because it's just wrong.

You know what? I think that in a lot of ways, capitalism kind of sucks. I think socialized health care would be great. And if you think that's a fair reason for violence against me than, one, that's seriously disturbing, and two, it probably means your ideas can't stand on their own value.

On Troy Davis

The first time I did National Novel Writing Month, I remember crying at the end, because I knew I'd have to kill off my bad guy. I didn't want to, but I couldn't think of any other satisfying way to end the story - the bad guy has to die, right?

There's a scene like that in the film The Princess Bride. The bratty little boy interrupts his grandpa reading to ask, "Who kills Humperdink?" When the grandpa says no one does, the boy finds it unacceptable - someone has to kill the villain.

Last week Fox News aired an interview with the mother of the victim in the Troy Davis case, Annelise MacPhail. "“They make it look like we after blood," she said, "but we are not. We are after justice."

I'm sorry, but I don't think what you got is justice. I don't think, as a country, we should have an idea of justice that ends like a story book where someone has to die at the end so the good guys can live happily ever after. I think justice is what happens when all of the evidence is examined, and if there's doubt - as there most certainly was in this case - the error is on the side of the accused, not the accuser. I would much rather the victim's family not get their 'justice,' their story-book ending, than run the risk of killing an innocent man.

Nathan Thornburgh at Time Magazine has a much more in-depth article about the idea of closure in this case that you should check out.

Liberty and Health Care and Stuff

We had a campus speaker for Constitution Day today! Ken Cuccinelli spoke to a crowd of a half-dozen supporters and about 60 protestors in our science building today, inspiring some fabulous chants like "If you don't believe in science, get out of our building!" While I disagreed or was baffled by a lot of what he said, he made one particular argument about health care that I found curious, because I'd seen it just yesterday being argued by Ron Paul.

The idea, as Cuccinelli and Paul explained it, is that back in the good old days, hospitals would provide free health care to those who could not afford it, and then the government stepped in and ruined it by making it law that they HAD to provide emergency room care to anyone who needed it. Cuccinelli argued, in particular, that not only should government completely be out of health care, so that the poor rely on generosity of hospitals, but that hospitals should be able to turn away people whose concerns weren't serious enough and only give free care to cases they deemed emergencies.

The financial problems with Paul's idea that we should get rid of Medicaid and Medicare and people should save for medical emergencies on their own is broken down in this fabulous analysis at Mother Jones, but there was something else about this idea that was just rubbing me the wrong way. Cuccinelli kept talking about how government shouldn't have the right to compel us to buy a product - that requiring people to buy health insurance is taking away our freedom. (He also said that choosing not to buy insurance isn't economic activity. I think the emergency rooms that pay for it would disagree, but that's beside the point.) That's how he kept framing it - our "liberty" to not buy a product, regardless of the consequences to ourselves or the community at large.

What I kept wondering was... is health care really a product? Or if it is, should it be? When someone is sick, I don't think about my liberty to choose what products to buy to make them better. If the means to make them better are available, I think they should have access to them. They have a right to care. (I feel weird typing that - the part of my brain that's been too long in American politics thinks, 'you don't have a right to be healthy! it's too expensive!' But I know I believe that we as a country have a responsibility to give everyone the best care we can, and that means they have a right to it.)

Thinking of health care as a product we have the choice to buy or not buy, like tea (yes, he compared it to the Boston tea party) seems contrary to how we talk about it and how we feel about it. Clearly, everyone is uncomfortable with the idea of just leaving the uninsured to die - we expect them to have some emergency care available to them, whether ensured by by the government or by charity. So we can all agree that people have some right to care, but above that bare minimum, it's a product? That just feels wrong to me. (Not to mention problematic to implement and expensive - emergency care costs more than routine care, and is higher-risk.) I wonder if, rather than fighting litigation battles over the Commerce Clause as used in the health care bill, we wouldn't be better off agreeing that health care is more than just a product. We can even disagree to what extent, but it'll be a better conversation with that as a starting point, I think.

Guns, Violence and Mental Illness

The Question of the Day over at Pam's House Blend is an interesting one: Should someone with a mental illness be allowed to own a gun?

The entire article is well worth a read, but here are the cliff notes:

There's reason to believe that the alleged shooter of Representative Gabrielle Giffords was mentally ill, and that he shot her BECAUSE he's crazy. No need to explore motive - he probably didn't have one, right? (or rather, any motive he had is taken as a symptom of the aforementioned crazy).

Like the Virginia Tech shootings a few years ago, this will probably spark a discussion about whether or not people with diagnosed mental illnesses should be able to buy or use guns.

However, it's not necessarily fair to use mental illness as a primary explanation for violence, explains Vaughn Bell over at Slate:

This presumed link between psychiatric disorders and violence has become so entrenched in the public consciousness that the entire weight of the medical evidence is unable to shift it. Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don't expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks.

Seena Fazel is an Oxford University psychiatrist who has led the most extensive scientific studies to date of the links between violence and two of the most serious psychiatric diagnoses -- schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, either of which can lead to delusions, hallucinations, or some other loss of contact with reality. Rather than looking at individual cases, or even single studies, Fazel's team analyzed all the scientific findings they could find. As a result, they can say with confidence that psychiatric diagnoses tell us next to nothing about someone's propensity or motive for violence.

But really, that's how we're talking about it, isn't it? "Oh, he was crazy, that's why he shot all those people." A Representative is talking about banning crosshair symbols of the kind Sarah Palin used to "target" Rep. Gifford's district, and he described it like this:

Asked if he believed the map incited the gunman in Tucson, he replied, “I don’t know what’s in that nut’s head. I would rather be safe than sorry.”

(Source)

"That nut". The unfathomable crazy which almost necessarily leads to violence. But there's scientific evidence that a psychiatric condition, even a serious one, doesn't say anything about whether or not someone will be violent, or why, so I'm uncomfortable dismissing the shooter's reasons and actions as the exclusive result of some incomprehensible madness.

Then again, it's more comfortable to blame the mental illness, because then, if we can just do the right screenings and keep guns out of the hands of the right people, this sort of thing wouldn't happen, right? If we caught the signs that someone was going off the deep end and got them into the hospital quick enough, such tragedies would never occur, right? But if mental illness isn't a good indicator of violence, and "sane" people are as statistically likely to commit such acts as a schizophrenic or bipolar person, then is it really fair to keep talking about mental illness as if it were the sole or primary cause for the violence, even if it's more comfortable that way...?

This is what I'm pondering as I'm off this morning to beg my way into a full psych class that I couldn't register for. Wish me luck!

EDIT: Feministe also has a really good look at the Slate article.

Freedom of Icky Speech

My favorite author and one true love Neil Gaiman has an amazing blog post up about why defending freedom of speech means defending all speech, even when we don't like it.

Okay, well, he posted it, like, two weeks ago, but you should go read it now anyway.

<3

But we voted!

Today, I got in a debate at fencing.

Eventually, I will learn that this is never a good idea, but today I accidentally did anyway, when I mentioned that The California Attorney General has urged the Supreme Court to review Prop 8.

"Psh. People need to drop it," said my enlightened friend. "We voted, it's over. If they want to change it, they should have another vote."

"Putting minority rights up for majority vote isn't really how it's supposed to work," I pointed out. "If we voted on all unpopular Supreme Court cases, we'd still be in segregated classrooms."

"Of course not. I wouldn't have voted for that," he said.

Yes. Because you, having grown up in a desegregated society in an upper-middle-class, educated household, are totally characteristic of the political atmosphere in the South in the 1950s. How could I have missed it?

But I digress.

I don't know very much about Constitutional law, but it seems to me that I've learned in more or less every U.S. history class I've ever taken that the Supreme Court is supposed to be sort of isolated from public opinion, so as to properly do their job of ensuring that the law is fair and equal, which seems to very often mean protecting minorities.

Which means "But we voted!" is not a Constitutionally sound argument.

Keeping college kids from voting?

Note to college kids in Virginia!

Crooks and Liars reports that Montgomery County put out a paper about registering to vote in state that included false information, including saying that out-of-state students who registered to vote at their college addresses could risk losing scholarships.

Obviously, completely not-true. And also obviously, Virginia is a swing state, so we want everyone to get a chance to cast their vote, so be sure to register!

It's already been pointed out elsewhere that it's college kids, who are overwhelmingly Obama supporters, whose are being discouraged from registering, so I'll just leave it at that...

Party of Big Brother

Today I was talking to my Republican friend, who said she couldn't read my blog because it would make her mad, which I fully understand and respect, but I figured if we were going to talk politics we might as well find some common ground, so I asked her about the RNC. "What do you think about all the civil rights violations and such?"

"I haven't heard about it," she said.

I gave a quick summary of the situation in St. Paul. If we'd been talking in real life instead of online, she would have been staring at me incredulously.

"The party isn't that stupid."

"Well, it's the St. Paul police, but still." I told her a few stories of excessive violence against private protestors, arrests without probable cause, intimidation of journalists, and other such fun before she had to log out. I wish she'd been able to stick around a bit longer - I found this fantastic article at Alternet on the topic.

John said he hasn't done any anti-war organizing -- "I'd like to" -- but since the arrival of the RNC and the protesters against it, he has been checking out the scene around town. "Yesterday I was just cruising around. I was in the Funk the War march -- they had this huge Gandhi statue and a globe …" But despite the mostly peaceful protests, when it comes to security, "it's been crazy." He showed me videos he'd taken on his phone while he skated around, lines of cops in riot gear -- "There was a bunch of people getting maced over there" -- and shots of the buses and unmarked minivans the police have used to detain people and take them away. I asked him if he had been read his rights. "No, they didn't read me my Miranda rights at all. ... They cuffed me, and when I complained to one one guy about the cuffs being too tight, he was like, 'Oh yeah? Well, let me tighten that up for you.'"

The scariest parts to me are the unmarked vans taking all these people away. That's just a freaking creepy mental image, something out of 1984, not an American city.

Last night, Mitt Romney called the Democrats the "Party of Big Brother." Some day, I will write a big long post explaining exactly why this is bullshit. For now, I'll leave you with a quote.

"Americans need to watch what they say, what they do." -- Ali Fleischer, former White House press secretary.

Who's the party of Big Brother again?

School and RNC fun

Today was the first day of school! I had to wake up way earlier than I have in months, but it looks like my senior year should be quite lovely.

In my AP English class, I overheard one girl whisper, "This is a very white class." She had a good point - we had maybe one or two people of color, I think just one, in the entire 20-some person class. Given that our school is very, very racially diverse, this is pretty depressing. The class was also mostly girls, which was interesting. One of the few guys came in talking about his weight lifting class - They thought they had one girl in the class, but as it turned out she wasn't actually in the class, she was an assistant of some kind. Oh, gender distribution in high school classes; I find it interesting.

I'm very excited about my Sociology class - I don't really know anyone, but the teacher seems very cool, and the topics seem fascinating. He made it very clear that gay-bashing and racism and sexism and such would not be tolerated, and I felt very clever because I was the only one in the class who knew the answer when he asked the difference between sex and gender. Since I was wearing a skirt, I got to be the example for the class of "feminine" in American culture, while a big scary football player guy was the "masculine." It was fun!

I've been trying to keep up with all the police raids and such in St. Paul, but it's just too much. There's an overview of the last day or so here that I recommend you check out!

Quick Hit: RNC Fun for Everyone

The Uptake has fantastic coverage of the RNC protests and raids. They already have lots of stories up. No one is surprised, given the Republican party's history of profound respect for civil rights.

Also, good overview of the Welcoming Committee thing and other raids over at the San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently anarchist groups across the country are conspiring to ruin everything for the Republicans, though Combat Queer assures us that anarchists are basically harmless.

RNC: The Fun Begins

Demonstrating their commitment to the Constitution, particularly freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, police broke down the door of a community center and detained small children and elderly people without charges. The space was being used to organize protests for the upcoming week.

The officers - fully armed and threatening teenagers with guns - claimed to have a warrant to look for "bomb-making materials." None of these were found, but they did steal one woman's DVD when they confiscated all the electronics - everyone had been sitting down for dinner and movie-watching at the time of the raid.

The space is being closed down due to "fire code violations." The police officers have no right to enforce the fire code at all, but this is an unimportant detail.

It'll be an interesting week, don't you think?

More over here at feministing, including updates from a Code Pink protestor who's in the Twin Cities right now.