Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Jonah Hill’s apology should be required study for all public figures

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Comic actor Jonah Hill recently used in anti-gay slur in a moment of anger at a paparazzo. He went on The Tonight Show to make a public apology and fully own up to what he did and the impact of his word choice. We’re so used to people in this country giving terrible and insincere apologies that this was almost stunning to watch.

All public figures — celebs and politicians alike — should watch this video to learn how to do a sincere and meaningful apology. He doesn’t try to hide behind anything or distance himself from it or say he’s sorry if it offended people. He knows it did. He knows it was wrong. And he clearly regrets having said it (without just being sorry he got caught or that people got mad)

All people in general should especially take note of his observation that words have meaning even if you don’t mean them that way (i.e. intent doesn’t make everything ok), as well as his acknowledgment that he isn’t automatically owed forgiveness just because he apologized. Too many people assume that just saying “woops, my bad” is enough.

“Joe” the “Plumber” says aloud what the gun fanatics were thinking

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Failed Congressional candidate and inexplicable, accidental 2008 presidential campaign star Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher opened his mouth and said some charming things on the UCSB shooting that all of America’s gun fanatics were thinking anyway but didn’t have the national platform to be caught saying:

“But: As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
[…]
“In conclusion, I cannot begin to imagine the pain you are going through, having had your child taken away from you. However, any feelings you have toward my rights being taken away from me, lose those.”

You’re why we want gun control

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The 2nd Amendment hardliners say gun control is the step right before we lose the 1st Amendment Right to Free Speech.

But I’d venture that a bigger threat to Free Speech is this response to pro-gun control arguments: “U should be shot & killed. Hopefully with an unregistered gun. U r a clown.” (One of many messages we’ve already received today at my job.)

So they want to protect the Right to Free Speech by murdering those who speak out for gun control? Seems legit.

If you are about to write out a comment saying that someone who opposes guns or supports gun control deserves to be shot, just understand that you’re making the case for taking away guns from you specifically better than anyone else ever has.

“Handouts”

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Curious that there were way fewer people complaining about “government handouts” when the government was busy handing out 160 acres of free land like it was popcorn or G.I. starter houses like they grew on trees.

Of course, I guess those handouts were “ok” because they mostly only went to the “right” people — and now they’ve got theirs. Everyone else can just deal.

But in reality, no one who is complaining about “handouts” should be. As imperfect (and usually exclusionary against non-whites) as our nation’s past massive giveaway programs have been, they were one of the few moderately successful tools we’ve ever used to jump start widespread economic growth by de-concentrating wealth generation and accumulation.

The policies were also a good socioeconomic pressure valve to avoid everyone going full Reign of Terror on the 1%, as happened in so many other countries. (Of course, it should be noted that our violent land reform came in the form of taking it by force from indigenous Americans rather than from kulaks or nobility, which is not good either.)

Moreover, the rich still managed to make money hand over fist at the same time, if you realize the Robber Barons were making their initial rise at the same time as the homestead land rushes. If anything, the solution to long-term, broad-based, and sustainable economic growth is probably more handouts, not fewer.

Context: Because nothing exists in a vacuum.

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It’s convenient to act like there’s not a broader context & pattern when “individuals” / lone wolves make attacks, whether it be racial, gendered, or whatever.

But if you don’t connect the dots between ostensibly isolated incidents — like the Santa Barbara shooting and the kid a few weeks ago who stabbed a girl to death for declining his prom invite — then you don’t see the bigger picture.

It’s convenient the write the individual attackers off as “mentally ill” (no matter how offensive that is to people with mental illness who’ve never harmed a soul).

But do we really now believe that people are “mentally ill” when they follow an ideology that re-aligns their definition of “right” and “wrong”? The Rwandan Genocide wasn’t a case of a whole population being mentally ill. It was the result of an ideology that made it “ok” to kill 800,000 people in a few months.

It’s possible to have totally warped views and still be perfectly sane from a legal and medical standpoint. It’s possible be sane and yet buy into a culture that tells/allows you to regard some people as subhuman.

Writing off individual attacks as individual events, when they are in fact connected by a worldview, ideology, or source incitement (whether a diffused or point source, to use the environmental science terms), is why attacks continue.

The bad quick fix in Thailand

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Thailand has so many military coups that the Wikipedia entry for each one should have a “Next” and “Previous” button like on pages for national elections.

This coup was so poorly thought out that the Royal Thai Army instinctively suspended all but one article of the 2007 constitution, which was written by…drumroll please…the Royal Thai Army after the 2006 coup. You’d think if these coups solved anything they wouldn’t be needing another one so soon against their own constitution.

Of course, that assumes that the coup is a means to an end rather than an end itself. And judging by what we’ve heard from the opposition protesters for six months, it’s probably more a goal than a tool, to them. Unlike many mass protests around the world, it’s not that they want more democratic opportunities, it’s that they don’t want democracy at all. In that light, a coup is the destination itself, not the path to get there.

A gleeful and defiant barbarism

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With EU chemical export bans taking their toll on lethal injection death penalty capacity in the States, Tennessee just re-legalized the electric chair and pro-death penalty activists in other states are pushing to bring back firing squads.

So, is a declining America just trying to ride the bomb down to the ground like a defiant Major Kong at this point?

Columbia Pictures (1964)