James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

Yeah, that digital TV thing would be comical if it weren't so sad - the government is more worried about whether people will be able to watch TV than whether they have health insurance.

Re gun control, I think the problem is a combination of overly simplified thinking (I like H.L. Mencken's quote: "For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong") and a lack of familiarity with the issue. There is a big segment of the public now that have very little or no experience with guns and are scared of them, when that fear would be more reasonably focused on a small minority of people who would be dangerous with or without guns. If we take an epidemiological approach to violent crime, which has worked better with regard to DWI, sexual assault, and domestic violence than other approaches (this is what I did for a few years as a program manager with the state health department), one of the most important guiding principles is that working to make it as likely as possible that offenders will be caught and prosecuted is effective in reducing the crime. Trying to make it impossible for people to commit the offense, or making the penalties harsher, is not effective.
Trying to stop gun crime by making guns illegal falls apart as a solution as soon as anyone becomes willing to look at it with an open mind. First, because there are already hundreds of millions of guns in circulation in America; second, because the very people that are the threat are the ones who don't care about the law. In a majority of cases, they are too young to legally possess guns anyway, or are felons who can't lega1ly have guns, or they're carrying them concealed without permits, or they're carrying them in places where it would be illegal even if they had permits. Not to mention that the assaults, robberies, etc. they're committing are felonies with or without guns. News flash, folks: THEY DON'T CARE! If prohibitive gun restrictions worked, two of the safest cities in the country would be Washington DC and LA. They aren't. NYC brought their crime rates down quite a bit in recent decades, but the principle they followed was the so-called 'broken window' doctrine, meaning that if you ignore someone breaking a window, you're sending the message that it's okay to break the rules, so you set a zero-tolerance policy toward lawbreaking in general (in other words, back to that idea that you increase the likelihood of being caught and punished rather than stiffen the punishments or try to make the crime impossible.) They do also have very harsh gun laws there, but they had them when crime rates were high, too.

The next part of the situation that doesn't make sense is the focus on particular types of weapons, namely the ones labeled 'assault weapons' and some other exotic items like .50 caliber rifles. If you look at the data on gun crimes, most of them are committed with cheap, easily concealed guns - from the viewpoint of the criminal, just common sense. Assault weapons are neither - they cost several hundred to several thousand dollars and are larger and harder to hide than the cheap, poorly made 'Saturday night special' handguns used in most crimes, and in most cases their ammunition is more expensive too. Also, the criteria that separate 'assault weapons' from other guns are arbitrary and often functionally meaningless. Example: under the 1994-2004 ban, I couldn't buy an AR-15 (the civilian semi-auto version of the M16) but I could buy a Ruger Mini-14. Both semi-autos, about the same size, both fire the same kind of ammo, both use detachable magazines, they even both have the same kind of sights. The differences? The AR-15's stock was plastic and the Ruger's was wood; the AR had a pistol-grip stock and the Ruger didn't.
And no one has ever committed any crime with a .50 caliber rifle, ever! The damn things weigh about 40 pounds and are several feet long, and the ammunition costs several dollars per shot. They're esoteric toys for rich people who like to go target shooting at extreme long range, like a mile.

I would have no problem with a requirement to register my guns if it came with an absolute guarantee that as long as I didn't use them in any crimes no one would ever try to take them away. That's the reason people resist registration - they fear that, as happened in 2000 with SKS rifles in California, the government will require registration but promise not to confiscate them, then 'change their minds' and require them to be turned in.

I saw a news story reporting that the chemical companies had come up with a changed version of ammonium nitrate that can't be used as an explosive, for fertilizer and other legitimate uses - maybe as that gets into the market they'll let you buy it to melt ice, Jim. I hope so - I agree about life getting more restrictive, and I wish more people agreed that if the threat of terrorism or crime leads to the loss of basic freedoms, then the terrorists have won anyway. In my case, my issues of greatest concern are habeas corpus/other due process matters, and gun ownership for those of us who aren't criminals. That's the one area where I'm very unhappy with Obama's history and platform.

Yes, those rights should be a given for all Americans and not just us veterans.

Looking at the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who ran for office in 2006 and 2008, the trend that stands out most is that an overwhelming majority ran as Democrats. This looks like a huge sea change developing in the military and veteran community; I think James Webb * called it in his book A Time to Fight when he said that from the Vietnam era until Bush's second term, military people identified themselves with the Republican party because they felt so used and abused by the Democrats. The clearcut lack of concern for the interests and professional judgment of service members, veterans, and their families shown by the Bush executive branch have started to reverse that alignment.

In 2006 and 2008 a majority of active duty military people voted Republican, but not as overwhelmingly so as up through 2004. I believe veterans were less inclined to stick with the Republicans than the active duty folks, which I attribute to (1) the administration's ability to control the information military people are exposed to, much more than is true with veterans (for example, military radio and TV channels offer Fox TV and radio but not PBS or Air America), and (2) the greater experience veterans have with the Bush people's cavalier indifference to how they dare after they leave active duty.

Mr. Webb warned his fellow Democrats that they have an opportunity to reclaim their role as the champion of ordinary Americans including service members and veterans, but they'd better not blow it again.

* James Webb graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968 with an award for leadership as a midshipman, fought in Vietnam as a Marine officer and was highly decorated (Navy Cross AND Silver Star, the 2nd and 3rd highest medals for valor our country has, and 2 Purple Hearts) and seriously wounded; second career as a novelist, filmmaker and journalist; went to law school; served as Reagan administration official, ending up as Secretary of the Navy, but resigned rather than carry out mandated budget cuts he felt would unacceptably weaken the Navy and Marine Corps in 1988; after a long exodus from politics, switched parties and beat Republican incumbent George Allen (Allen became infamous for calling a person of color "macaca" at a press conference and decorating his office with a Confederate flag and a noose) to become a Democratic senator for Virginia in 2006. Definitely one of my heroes.

Thanks! I suppose the Democrats could have lost this one, but they'd have had to work hard at it. I do share your view that Clinton might have managed such a loss, although she'd have had a daunting challenge if she was to neutralize the massive boost the Democratic ticket would have gotten from Palin no matter who the Dems nominated.

The main themes of the Modern Whig platform are the decentralization of fiscal and other authority from the federal government to the states; prioritizing energy independence via development of alternative sources; prioritizing public and private support for education and scientific R&D and applications; removing the government from the practice of trying to legislate morality; and full funding and support for programs serving veterans and military families (one of the main sources of new membership in the party is the military community, both active duty and veterans.)

The philosophies of the parties have changed so that each now looks more like the other did after the Civil War.

The Whig party was torn apart in the 1850s, primarily by the issue of slavery; the faction favoring abolition and other reforms became the Republican party of Lincoln. Meanwhile, the Democratic party was the pro-slavery party of bigotry and nativism, and especially after the war, the party embraced by the white South because they detested the Republicans who had put Lincoln in the White House and who were now running the Reconstruction program. In the North, the Democrats were widely seen as treasonous, and for a generation Northern Republicans could count on the campaign strategy of saying, basically, "Hey, everybody, remember the Civil War? Those Democrats killed your relatives in that war!" - also known as 'waving the bloody shirt.'

The Republicans set what must have been a record for the speed with which they let power corrupt them after the war, though, and by the time the Grant administration ended had tainted their name every bit as thoroughly as the Democrats had theirs. The two parties were both pretty sleazy for the rest of the 19th century.

When McKinley's assassination left Theodore Roosevelt as a Republican president who was not from the inner circle, a development that horrified the establishments of both parties, he pushed domestic reform fairly vigorously, earning the hatred of big business - Woodrow Wilson was able to win in 1912 only because Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate and took a lot of Republican votes from Taft.

The rampant abuses of civil liberties under Wilson during and after WWI, most spectacularly in the Palmer Raids, handed power back to the Republicans under Harding with his promise of a 'return to normalcy' (a stupid non-word that no one has been able to expunge from the language since.) Harding ran the most corrupt and incompetent administration of the 20th century, but the Republicans stayed in office anyway until public anger at Hoover's remarkably insensitive and unhelpful reaction to the Depression got Franklin Roosevelt elected - although a Democrat, FDR was a great admirer of his cousin Teddy.

At that point the exchanging of places between the parties was pretty well set. The Republicans tightened their grip on the far right of the electorate during Eisenhower's two terms with the McCarthy/HUAC witch hunts, which looked remarkably like the Democratic Wilson's Palmer Raids. The anger of bigoted white voters at LBJ's signing of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, the perception on the right that the Republicans were more patriotic because they backed the Vietnam War more strongly, and Nixon's embrace of the 'Southern strategy' embracing racism as a wedge issue made the switch of parties complete, cementing the grip of the Republicans on the South until 2008, when the aftertaste of eight years of Dubya ensured that the Democrats could have run PeeWee Herman and won (and, to their good fortune, found the first candidate who was actually a competent campaigner since Bill Clinton.)

Now we'll see whether the Democrats can handle having the executive branch and both houses of Congress without lapsing into corruption again.

The dissatisfaction of a growing number of voters with both current major parties is fueling renewed interest in other parties - we've seen how fast a third party can bump a major party into the ditch when the Republicans shoved the Whigs out of the way 150 years ago.

Interestingly, one of the fast-rising new parties is the Modern Whig party! It's really true that there's nothing new under the sun...

This is not a purely capitalist society, nor should it be. A purely capitalist society is pretty barbaric, lacking any kind of social safety net or services like public education, public health, consumer protection via the FDA and EPA, and other elements that could be called socialist.
Democracy vs. dictatorship is a separate issue from capitalism vs. socialism vs. communism. Over the years during and after the Great Depression, the American electorate opted via its democratically elected leadership to create many more socialist structures than had existed before - programs like Social Security. Actually, early in FDR's presidency a group of the wealthiest Americans decided they wanted to return to a more purely capitalist system and organized a plot to overthrow the government and install a fascist dictatorship that would get rid of these socialist programs - it was uncovered, stopped, and investigated by Congress - there's a fascinating book about it, The Plot to Seize the White House.

I think one of our problems is that some of the very rich, and many corporations, really have approached financial matters as if they were playing Monopoly - the object of that game is to take everything the other players have and leave everyone else bankrupt. In real life, that tends to lead to revolutions with the people who won the real-life Monopoly game being killed or fleeing to exile. I saw how that was working in the Philippines under Marcos, and it was terrible. I much prefer a blend of capitalism and socialism, with more socialism than the US has right now - as someone whose income is higher than average, I have no problem with paying higher taxes with a lot of that going to pay for social services I don't need (at the moment) but others do.

It's interesting that the Republicans consistently identify themselves as the party of smaller government, but under Reagan and Bush Jr., the government set records for expansion in size and budget.

I agree that corporations don't have to be antisocial, but the majority of for-profits are amoral and do treat the world as a game of Monopoly. Have you seen the film "The Corporation?" It's thought-provoking. The filmmaker examined the behavior patterns that typify large corporations and found that if an individual behaved exactly the same way, he or she would be diagnosable with antisocial personality disorder, aka being a sociopath or psychopath. The essence of it is not having a conscience.

I agree that the basic structure called a corporation can be useful to its host society, but for it to be that way it has to be much more carefully controlled and regulated than is now the case. We need to reverse the legal precedent that said a corporation has the legal status of a person - that's ridiculous. And we need to keep them out of politics - the practice of allowing corporations to dump money into campaigns is wrong.

Jim, I was in the service during the Carter years too - I was in boot camp when he was elected - and I remember those late paydays - also our pay falling farther behind inflation every year, having no blanks and having to yell "bang, bang!" during field exercises, and the NCOs passing the hat to buy condiments for the mess hall and toilet paper for the barracks.

Will, you missed one. We can also shift spending from other areas, like contracts that aren't giving the country our money's worth.
And we could move tax rates for the wealthiest couple of percent of us back to where they were before Reagan - they were doing just fine then; I don't feel sorry for people who don't want to carry their fair share of the load. Trickle-down economics have failed dismally at serving any demographic except that richest sliver of the population, who have more than doubled the share of the wealth in America they receive since 1980.

We can also change the laws to stop allowing companies like WalMart to avoid providing benefits by pushing their employees into the public sector for health care and other services (unless we decide to follow the lead of the rest of the industrialized world and treat health care as a public service the taxpayers should fund.)

When I look at the way that the just-ended administration worked for big business and the very rich while slashing services for the rest of us - cuts aimed at military service members, their families, and veterans in particular, but also at education, public health, and infrastructure upkeep - I am disgusted and angry. Republican economic policy has been ineffective, dishonest, immoral, and under the Reagan and Bush administrations, sociopathic.

The media have always been biased, but when it was less consolidated there was more room for readers to sample biases in different directions in the same place.

It seems to come back, all too often, to "follow the money" - that makes the agenda easier to see and understand. I've always found it ironic that the wingnuts like Limbaugh, Coulter, and O'Reilly bleat about the liberal mainstream media, when five billionaires, all pretty conservative, own and control all the mainstream media pipelines in the USA. Stories that make the boss or the major advertisers mad get buried or minimally covered, and even if the overwhelming majority of the experts in any given field have settled on something like the understanding that tobacco use increases the risk of cancer, or that human industry and agriculture are causing atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane to rise much faster than they would be otherwise and so are contributing to climate change, all the industries concerned have to do is trot out a few scholastitutes with letters after their names who are willing to contradict the evidence for money or ideology, and the MSM gives them equal coverage and makes it look as if both views are equally accepted and potentially valid.

Yes, it's a lot better to ask the questions and follow where they lead than to decide on the answer you want and cook the questions and the evidence to make it come out that way. I believe our foreign policy in recent years was malfunctioning the same way as the management of the big corporations that turned out to be cooking their books to look profitable when their business model wasn't really succeeding.

It would be a good thing if we made learning at least one language other than English mandatory, as most school systems do with English itself, math, and (when I was in high school in the mid-70s anyway) at least a year of a science.

I'd like to see us strike a balance, too, between immigrants assimilating and maintaining (if they chose) a strong connection to the culture from which they'd come. The status quo produces ironies - my daughter is your basic Anglo and is bilingual in English and Spanish, while her ex-husband, whose heritage is completely Hispanic, only speaks English. She's teaching her kids Spanish now, which is great.

That's a challenging balance to strike, between standardizing a society's institutions to one language (and as you note, a mass of cultural assumptions that are inevitably built into its vocabulary and syntax) on the one hand, and accepting and taking advantage of diversity with its varied strengths and greater appeal to talented and ambitious potential immigrants.

I think the book Day of Empire by Amy Chua, which I read recently, explores this well. Her theory is that societies which become powerful enough, whether militarily or economically, to dominate the world as they know it (she calls them hyperpowers), get that way by encouraging and making use of openness and acceptance of diversity, but that to endure, they also need some kind of social "glue" to meld their varied subcultures within a common identity - one of her examples is Rome, which for the functional part of its history was very accepting of varied languages, religions, and other customs, as long as they paid their taxes and didn't make trouble - but also extended Roman citizenship to the people of all those at-first conquered cultures, so that they quickly came to think of themselves as Romans and take pride in it, regardless of the language in which they said it.

She also states her belief that in every example, the hyperpower's decline is marked by rising intolerance, bigotry, and xenophobia, paradoxically coinciding with the dissolution of that cultural "glue." Of the three phenomena - declining power, intolerance, and unraveling of the common identity - she leaves the question open as to whether it's a cause and effect relationship and if so which is which is which.

In our case, I agree with her view that the key to America's power has been that we've been skimming the cream, the most determined, capable, and daring people, from most of the rest of the world for a lot of our history. We've always struggled with this tension between the "melting pot" and "salad bowl" models for how we all come together.

My grandmother was born to parents who immigrated from Czechoslavakia. She was of that generation that didn't want to be hyphenated, that just wanted to be considered American. When my mother tried to get my grandmother to teach her to speak Czech, my grandmother insisted that she'd forgotten the language, though she had to speak it sometimes to deal with her mother, the immigrant, who had decided she didn't like American culture and would pretend not to be able to speak English when she got mad.

No easy answers on this one; I remember when Arizona had its big legislative fight over English-only, and the people who were pushing for it there were running a pretty nasty and bigoted campaign on the issue; it was pretty clear that to a lot of them English-only really meant brown-people-not-wanted. That's not to say that it's driven by bigotry in this case. I don't know the particulars.

'50 Facts That Should Change the World' and '50 Facts That Should Change the World 2.0' by Jessica Williams.

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan is cautionary and relevant to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too.

The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan, by Gregory Feifer (since he's planning to step up our forces and mission there);

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas (the best book I've read yet on climate change; very well organized information)

I lost count of the times I got so bored with how slowly people were reading in school when we were taking turns reading aloud, and found myself reading ahead - then when I was called on, I had always lost my place and didn't even know what page the rest of the class was on.

Reading just an excerpt from a book drives me nuts if it's interesting - I almost always end up getting the book so I can read the rest of it.

The saddest book we read was the Diary of Anne Frank, but I'm glad we did.

I loved to read then as much as I do now, but didn't appreciate some of the books we were assigned - now I feel differently about some, not about others.
We didn't read Lord of the Flies, but we saw the film (the original version) and it had a powerful impact on me (I thought the band of boys who "went barbarian" reminded me an awful lot of many of the jocks on our school's football and wrestling teams... a bunch of junior thugs). I didn't like Crime and Punishment and still don't - reading it was like chewing sawdust. On the other hand, Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor didn't do much for me then, despite my already being fascinated with the Civil War, but has grown on me.

The most prominent problem with the one-child policy has been that, due to the much higher value placed on male children than females in China, huge numbers of infant girls have been killed by their parents so they could try for a boy again. This has gone far enough for the government to be concerned about the gender ratios being skewed in the future, affecting the availability of potential wives for men who would want to marry and start their own families.