I just got forwarded a long e-mail entitled "A little gun history lesson" full of nonsense about the historical effects of gun control. I am not very much a conservative or "liberal" on this issue. But this e-mail is probably the most ridiculous collection of pro-gun arguments I have ever seen. If you want to read it first, scroll down to the blue text.

The problem I have with the e-mail is the fallacy of assuming that something that happens first is the cause of whatever happens later. Just looking at the first example: I suppose there might have been some new law about guns in 1929. But Russians were not commonly armed before then to my knowledge. Saying that that is why 20 million "dissidents" (a ridiculous term for entire population groups) were rounded up and exterminated is a bit silly. And it assumes that no "dissidents" were exterminated before then - which is not the case. And did the Soviets then liberalize gun laws in 1953 - and therefor the mass exterminations were no longer possible? Please. The Turkish example seems _at least_ if not more absurd - as if some 1911 laws disarmed an otherwise armed Armenian population by 1915. I could go on down the list. The idea that gun control prevented a Japanese invasion of the United States is probably the silliest claim of them all. I suspect the real reason the Japanese didn't invade the United States is that they were overstretched almost immediately after their early run of victories. They couldn't even take Midway, much less the rest of Hawaii. An invasion of the west coast was impossible.

Judging by the general logic and tone of the e-mail, I imagine some of it is completely made up (the dates of "gun control" for example). But I suppose all the numbers might be right - just the logic is flawed. The statistics on Australia are interesting: If gun control leads to higher crime, why does the country with the most liberal gun laws in the industrialized world have the highest rates of just about every kind of crime and the world's largest prison population to boot? Canada and Russia and India are ethnically diverse, so that can't be the reason. Is it the guns? Maybe. Maybe not.

Judging by what I can see on some internet forums, it would appear that not even all the pro-gun people are taking it seriously. Either way, it is not a serious contribution to the discussion of a serious issue.

Here's the e-mail:

A Little Gun History Lesson

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, some 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, some 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million 'educated' people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th Century because of gun control: 56 million.

It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by their own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars. The first year results are now in:

Australia-wide, homicides are up 3. 2 percent
Australia-wide, assaults are up 8. 6 percent
Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent)!

In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent. Note that while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not, and criminals still possess their guns!

It will never happen here? I bet the Aussies said that too! While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.

There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the ELDERLY. Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in successfully ridding Australian society of guns. The Australian experience and the other historical facts above prove it.

You won't see this data on the US evening news, or hear politicians disseminating this information.

Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws adversely a affect only the law abiding citizens.

Take note my fellow Americans, before it's too late!

The next time someone talks in favor of gun control, please remind him of this history lesson.


With Guns.............We Are 'Citizens'.
Without Them........We Are 'Subjects'..

During WW II.. II the Japanese decided not to invade America because they knew most Americans were ARMED !

Note: Admiral Yamamoto who crafted the attack on Pearl Harbor had attended Harvard U 1919-1921 & was Naval Attache to the. U.S.. 1925-28. Most of our Navy was destroyed at Pearl Harbor & our Army had been deprived of funding & was ill prepared to defend the country.

It was reported that when asked why Japan did not follow up the Pearl Harbor attack with an invasion of the U.S. Mainland, his reply was that he had lived in the U.S. and knew that almost all households had guns.

If you value your freedom, Please spread this anti-gun control message to all your friends!

I have posted some comments on the war in Iraq at the ProgBlog under http://tpablog.twoday.net/stories/3635955/.

On the April 15th episode of Media Matters, Benjamin Barber (author of Jihad vs. McWorld) talks at length about his new book Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole. It struck a strong chord with me. My title here refers to the fact that modern society gives us all kinds of choices - like the "liberty" to choose the toppings on our fast-food potato skins - but not about what really matters. It mirrors some of what European intellectuals have been saying for several centuries.

The central premise of the book is that market capitalism has recently (last several decades) gone sour in that our consumer identity is now winning out over our civic identity to the detriment of all. Each of us has and exercizes our individual identity as consumer and producer in the economy. We also have a civic identity as part of our community and polity. Capitalism was historically based on the idea that our personal choices as producers and consumers served civic purposes as well. Self interested participation in the system served an altruistic purpose in that we produced things that served the real needs of others and consumed what others produced, giving them a livelihood. I think professor Barber idealizes how well this supposedly functioned historically (think of capitalist slavery, for example), but he makes a strong case that it doesn't work any more: Since capitalism has essentially succeeded in providing for most all of our real, material needs, it now has to expand to create artificial needs through marketing.

This marketing moves the consumer identity to eclipse our other personae and leads to all kinds of social pathologies including the infantilization of adults and the erosion of democracy. It used to be the case that people had these first-order wants (food, shelter, sex, etc.) and then, as adults, developed second order wants - things we "want to want" - like a finer palette, a more refined taste in cultural goods, patience, thoroughness, etc. It used to be the case that societies fostered that move from childhood to adulthood (an example that occurs to me is the multi-generational household which has almost totally disappeared). Now, marketing, which gets hold of people at younger and younger ages, rears us to stay children and keep wanting buyable goods. Instead of serving our second-order needs - the discussion about what kind of things we want to want, what kind of society we want to live in - it feeds us what we now, impulsively want. It is like giving a drug addict drugs instead of what he wants when he is not high - to get off drugs and live a fuller life.

• The private logic of the consumer displaces the public logic of the citizen in that we equate freedom with consumer choices. WalMart, for example, is a great thing for consumers because it offers us an unbelieveable array of choices at very low prices. The civic externalities are the destruction of retail communities, urban sprawl, etc.
• The state is where we have a voice, in theory, but the state is deregulating and leaving everything up to private companies leading to a loss of civic, collective choices about how we want to live together. Similar tendencies are visible in education, the media, etc. Greater choices for individuals do not necessarily mean more real options.
• The generation of consumer needs fosters infantile personae. The last thing the market needs are thoughtful, prudent adults who do all kinds of things unrelated to shopping. What best serves the market are the traits of the child or teenager: impulsivity, instant gratification, low-brow tastes, constantly changing interests and fetishes, etc.
• This is evidenced in the banality and courseness of popular culture, from Spiderman to Britney Spears to fast food to talk radio.
• If all the space, in magazines, on TV, on billboards, etc. which is now dedicated to selling stuff were instead used for political or religious propaganda, we would be shocked and think that is totalitarian. But we have learned to accept from powerful corporations what we would never accept from the state. I would add that advertizing is far more effective than crude political propaganda. It is driven by profit which is precisely measureable. It is done at a much higher level of psychological sophistication than totalitarian propaganda ever was. Our behavior shows that we have accepted its logic.
• We thus move from the "nanny state" that was the big ideological project of the 1930s to 1970s to the "nanny corporations" which are now unregulated but represented by tens of thousands of lobbyists on K Street who know how to use the state. An interesting example Barber doesn't mention in the interview is the electric car, which was introduced by state action and forcibly removed from the market again by corporations despite its popularity.
• It cannot be argued that we are simply being given what we want, because if that were the case, marketing would hardly be necessary. These wants, which move in to replace the well-rounded adult persona, are being aggressively and artificially created.

Three interesting examples:

• There are more and more communities that do not allow children. Barber explains this as the need to stay a child onesself, to remain the center of attention. The hallmark of adulthood is taking on the responsilbitiy for another person, expending energy on their needs. In a community without children, we don't need to do that.
• The ever-present cult of youth is an obvious example.
• The dominance of youth culture in the cultural sphere is omnipresent.

The crux is this: While we thus abrogate our ability and responsibility (two attributes of adulthood, I might add) to the corporate elite, more and more problems which are collective in nature and require collective action are making the pathology of the system more and more obvious. Barber mentions Katrina, which showed a clear role for more government, global warming, Iraq (which is also the most privatized war in U.S. history), etc. He also mentions such fields as education and public transportation. I would add criminal justice, where more and more is being turned over to the private sector.

The point in the interview I can most closely relate to my own professional experience as an online educator was when he and host Bob McChesney talked about the three core tendences:

• easy over hard
• simple over complex
• fast over slow

The example they use in the interview is talk radio: crude and polarizing, simplistic, quickly moving from one subject to the next with simple, easy answers lacking all subtlety and complexity. It is easy to consume and believe, gratifies our hedonistic sense of self-righteousness, etc. It feeds on shock value instead of real information. It is essentially juvinile.

We can see this happening with the internet: It is about shopping, pornography, games, etc. It is becoming an electronic mall, not the new democratic community we might have thought ten years ago.

In the classroom, I note a sense of that in some areas:

• Students want to do everything at once and get it over with, without really engaging the material (two jobs, raise a kid, take three classes at once). There is no time to really get into it - or anything, for that matter.
• I like to sew ambiguity in the classroom by providing counterexamples to commonly held assumptions. Education is subversive of simple answers. This bothers some students who simply want to know which hoops they have to jump through to get to that higher pay grade. I recently had a student drop because I would not clearly-enough delineate those hoops. I want students to engage the topic - not just check off the boxes. In the subjects I teach - and in any subject properly taught, I imagine - there are rarely hard and fast answers. It is about learning and studying an approach and weighing factors, not memorizing facts.

The interview closed with what reminded me of the main thesis of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? Namely, why aren't conservatives up in arms about this? How is it that values conservatives, especially religious people, aren't mad as hell about this? Why do they continue to vote for policies that foster this? Where are the Christians who see that the unregulated market can and does threaten the communities that they want to build? Any alliance between Christians and post-1960s progressives would later have quite a fight over the spoils of any victory over the mainstream corporate-political oligarchy. But they could cooperate for several election cycles at least, I would think.

UPDATE: Ab sofort sind alle Angebote fuer die Versteigerung nachzulesen unter http://tpablog.twoday.net/stories/3201066/ nachzulesen. Dort gibt es auch Infos zum ganzen Verfahren.

Die Tuebingen Progressive Americans schmeissen eine Party im März um Geld für die Anwaltskosten von Agustin Aguayo zu sammeln. Er sitz gerade als Kriegsdienstverweigerer im Militärgefängnis in Mannheim. Wir veranstalten dabei eine Versteigerung. Möchten Sie etwas spenden?

• eine Dienstleistung
• Teilnahme an einem Ereignis
• ein Gegenstand

Gegebenenfalls bitte ich um Kontaktaufnahme. Kreativ sein ist alles. Sie können ziemlich alles anbieten, vorausgesetzt es ist in der Bundesrepublik nicht verboten!

UPDATE: Starting immediately, information on the items up for auction are published at http://tpablog.twoday.net/stories/3201066/ Go there to bid or offer a product or service even before the party.

The Tuebingen Progressive Americans are throwing a party in March to raise money for the legal defense fund of Agustin Aguayo, a conscientious objector currently awaiting trial in an American military prison in Mannheim, Germany. One of the main sources of money will be a "silent auction." If you would like to donate

• a service
• an event
• some "thing"

to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, please get in touch with me. You can get creative and offer just about anything (provided it is legal in Germany!). Some people are already offering things like home-cooked meals, translations, counseling and bicycle repair. Any ideas?

Within about one hour I was interviewed by two radio stations about my opinion on the elections. The interview with SWR1 will be broadcast later this afternoon on Aktuell. Unfortunately, I will be busy and unable to record it. Two other Americans here in Tübingen, including my friend Penny from the Tübingen Progressive Americans will also be interviewed.

The other interview was with Neue 107,7, a rock station. That one was a telephone interview. A tiny fraction of what I said was plugged into part of their news broadcast at 13:00. Listen to an mp3 file of it here.

My whole message was essentially that while I am generally quite pleased with the result, I have some reservations. It is still nearly impossible to win elected office in the U.S. as an unabashed "liberal," overwhelming support for gay marriage bans and the close-call in Missouri on stem cell research are troubling, and I am not yet confident that the Democrats will show the courage and vigor needed to hold the administration responsible for its failings and crimes.

I just blogged about a fascinating evening with an American veteran of the Iraq War over at the ProgBlog. Go there and read about the movie Gunner Palace and the perspective of an American NCO who spent seven months in the "Sandbox."

Perceptions of inherent tension in the Great American Experiment will no-doubt remain a mainstay of this blog.

As I look across the ocean at the country of my birth, the U.S., it is hard to guage the level of "enlightenment" in the general population based on news reports from over here. Recent reports are mixed. On the one hand, there are stories like the one about a man who was recently sentenced to ten years in prison for performing female circumcision. That could be read as an indication that sane limits on religious freedom are in place and the country has the guts to stand up to fundamentalism. On the other hand, that was the courts - often the last bastion of progressive policies and civil rights. Meanwhile, the campaign ads in the elections are so horrendous, so pandering to base ignorance, I am close to losing hope. As if _not_ cutting funding for sex education is somehow an advocation of pornography. That is just plain stupid - and dangerous. But people are paying for such an ad because they know it will work. That kind of media shows a contempt for the public that is self-feeding and thus seems to be deserved. A German friend of mine refers to the voting population of Germany as the Urnenpöbel - the "urn rabble." I hate to drift into intellectual elitism, but the term seems to fit for a large segment of the population on both sides of the Atlantic. At least our American Urnenpöbel get to vote for people (instead of lists of people) and for referendums - something German politicians won't let their constituencies touch - another expression of contempt for the voting public.

I see today's election as a referendum on the policies of George W. Bush and especially of the rubber-stamp congress that has totally neglected its oversite duties under the constitution. I have decided to vote off the spectrum as a protest against the total lack of concern among mainstream politicians and mainstream media for the important meta-issues of our time: media reform, election reform and campaign reform.

Nonetheless, I expect (in both senses of the word) a Democratic victory. If the Republican machine doesn't come to a grinding halt, my countrymen will have disappointed me. I have little confidence in the Democrats' ability and willingness to really clean house with the necessary vigor. But we can at least throw a monkey wrench into the gears of corruption, fear-baiting and rampant dishonesty that have characterized the past six years.

I once read that a good indicator of audience or readership is to look at the ads. If the ads are serious, the readers or viewers probably are, and that means that the content is as well. I tried this with the magazine Psychology Today when deciding whether or not to buy my wife a subscription for her birthday. Talisman and weight-loss ads were warning enough. Now many Air America doesn't seem to be much better.

• wondrous weight-loss products
• get-rich-quick schemes such as the "secrets to true internet wealth" or a free tape on how to become a "real estate guru"
• selling address and telephone lists as "sales leads" for "entrepeneurs"

Is this why Air America has gotten into financial trouble? Is this the price of not having corporate underwriters like NPR or tedious fund-drives like Pacifica? Do these ads reflect typical American radio advertizing or does Air America cater to the gullible?

Now, I would give the shows themselves mixed reviews. They certainly appeal to me more than the right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh. They seem more factual and rational than that, and have not only liberal rants but long, detailed interviews with activists and people in the know. But they are not as solid as, say, Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.

Awareness is your best defense.

We have helped millions of Americans registered offenders in their neighborhoods. Stay aware of the dangers that surround you and your loved ones.

That - combined with frightening statistics such as "one in five girls will be molested before their eighteenth birthday" - is the message of Family Watchdog, a website brought to my attention by an old friend from military school. You type in your addresss and postal code and up comes a map showing the locations of all nearby sex offenders. You click on the little markers and you get name, address, photograph, criminal record, and distance in miles (out to two decimal points) from your location of the person in question. There are also symbols for schools with information such as the distance to the nearest sex offenders. You can sign up to have regular "alerts" sent to you by e-mail.

It is no-doubt a great tool for quick and measurable social geographic research. The societal implications are myriad:

• There is obviously no such thing as a new start. Once convicted, the stigma will follow you wherever you move. Not only do you earn yourself a hole in your resume, but you get your own webpage!
• The effect of crime on real estate values is exacerbated. Anybody "shopping" for a good neighborhood - even a good block - will use this site, especially if they have children. What will be the algorythm for realtors - $10 per foot from nearest rapist?
• Since violent offenders as such are not on the site, only sex offenders, we have now learned that exibitionists are more dangerous than murderers.
• We Americans expect to be tried by "a jury of our peers," but often, to guarantee a fair trial, "our peers" are not involved. The case is taken to a distant location where nobody knows those involved. Here, with this resource, we can now socially try those who live around us, our real "peers." The sentencing will be at each individual's discretion....

Am I being too cynical if I include this in the culture of fear which seems to have overtaken much of the west - not only the United States - since "the world changed on September 11th"? No doubt the web site's claim that "millions" are "tracking" sex offenders is overblown. But something is driving the demand for a site like this.

In case those sex offenders near you don't have you scared and locked up inside, then go and sign up for one of two alert levels ("silver" for free or "gold" for $24/year) and be notified by e-mail as soon as more of them move in next door. That way, you can sit in Minot, North Dakota, nostalgic about the days when you were ground zero for a Soviet first strike aimed at the nearby U.S. nuclear arsenal, and still have something to worry about in today's post-Soviet world! (Actually, I checked and there already are four offenders in Minot.)

We recently did a unit on how not to talk to strangers at English on a Friday Afternoon, and I am a parent. I have some concern. Nonetheless, I also have concern for the values not only reflected in individual behavior, but in the values reflected by "the system" we all live with.

Here are some ideas for alternative "offender" watchdog sites we could set up:

• tax evaders
• people who say "nucular"
• people who make money off of advertizements devoid of information
• people making money off of the war
• people who write book reviews on Amazon.com without having read the book