The Solution to Hate Speech is More Speech That Tells the Truth

You will notice that the subtitle to this blog is "The Truth Has No Agenda," a quote from the always remarkable Glenn Beck.  While I have believed that that there is something called absolute truth, even if man may not know it in its entirety, I also have believed that if one seeks the truth assiduously, one will get closer to finding it.

Yesterday, Don Fisher, Jr. published a piece at the American Thinker entitled The Time I Got Punished for Hate Speech. The article describes Fisher's being put in what he calls Facebook Jail for not using the correct pronouns to describe a transgendered individual. I can sympathize.  But to do so, let me tell you a story.

As a kid, we moved into a large house that would accommodate our large family.  But the house had been owned by something of a recluse, and was surrounded by 10 foot high Floribunda Rose bushes on all sides.  Slowly my father got the roses cut down, and burned (yes, back then you could burn excess vegetation...the horror.)  Now, my Dad was immune to poison ivy.  To this day, I get small rashes that itch, but go away within a week or two.  So, my Dad had no idea that my sister was deathly allergic to the lectin in poison ivy.  He had cut down a number of bushes which also contained a fair amount of poison ivy.  My sister, as were all of us kids, was out playing when he set it on fire.  Within an hour of the small amount of smoke to which she was exposed, her entire body was blown up, her eyes shut, and it even invaded her esophagus.  Now, she survived, but has been very careful to avoid poison ivy her entire life.

Was it my sister's  job to protect herself, or was it everyone else's job to protect her?  Let me tell you another story.

As a child, very few children had peanut allergies.  A number of us brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to school every day.  Peanut butter was cheap, compared to other things.  My mother made strawberry jam every year, so that was fairly cheap also.  Indeed, for a number of years, my mother also made bread for our sandwiches.  I have seen a statistic that something like 0.6 % of children may have been allergic to peanuts. Currently, only 4% of people apparently have any kind of food allergy whatsoever.  And yet, we can not have peanuts on a plane because someone somewhere may possibly be allergic.  In other words, it has now become society's problem, in this case the airlines, to protect people with peanut allergies, rather than the people who have these allergies.

Is it society's job to protect these people, or is it up to those who have a peanut allergy to protect themselves by speaking up?  If someone on a given flight indicates an allergy, out come the pretzels.  Otherwise, passengers can have a variety of snacks.

When we met, Mrs. Polykahr had a friend, a coworker, who was married to an Air Force careerist.  Upon retiring from the Air Force, he began to exhibit a desire to "become" a woman.  He indicated he had always felt like a woman, and was sure there was a woman inside, waiting to come out.  Naturally, he had no female characteristics, and in fact, when dressed as a woman, simply looked like a man in drag, exhibiting masculine mannerisms.  I refused to call him by his adopted female name, instead calling him by his birth name, and I refused to refer to him as a "she."  Clearly this guy was confused, and I did not see any reason to go along with the charade.  Giving in to his delusion would not help him in any way.

Is it my duty to call an individual who is confused about himself or herself by that person's preferred pronoun?   I don't think so, and it is not "hate speech" to tell the truth.  There are two genders, and we have a set of pronouns to describe each within the English language.  No need to make up any new ones.

In fact, what all these and, indeed, the entire PC movement have in common is the notion that we would rather protect individuals from the sometimes painful truth, so we are going to play along with them.  It is even now considered unchristian to tell the emperor he has no clothes.  Social media has reinforced the notion.  But, and Christians take notice, kindness, is a virtue only when you can be kind and tell the truth.  Telling the truth may be the kinder thing to do though. It is not "hate speech" to tell the truth.

We all recognize hate speech, or we used to.  Indeed, people who advocate for abortion are demonstrating hate, because the original purpose of abortions was to eliminate the people Mrs. Sanger believed were undesirables: blacks, the Irish, the Italians...well...Sanger had a long list.  She and the KKK would find a lot of common ground.   I doubt the motives of pro-abortionists has changed much either.  Leftists, who want desperately to change society, want government to enforce their ever changing notions of what hate speech is, or lacking that, have a big brother corporation like Facebook do it for them.  Either way, it is censorship, and we can not have that.  Here's the truth:

The truth is that the solution to bad speech, even to hate speech, is more speech.  Cut the PC crap.    .   

Gun Rights are Women's Rights

Katie Pavlich has a video over at Prager University entitled Gun Rights are Women's Rights. Go see the video.

The best line is when she points out that: "...if no one owned a gun, every one would be safer.  Yes.  And it would be nice if cheese cake was a diet food."  Heh.

A sharp young woman is Katie Pavlich.

Deerfield "Assault Weapon" Ban Temporarily Blocked

A judge has blocked the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, IL from enforcing its new "assault weapon ban," at least temporarily.  Over at Townhall.com, Matt Vespa has a rather hopeful post entitled You Can't Take 'Em: Judge Blocks Chicago Gun Ban Hours Before Going Into Effect   The Ban covers so-called "assault weapons."  But clearly there are no such weapons.  A weapon can be used for either aggression or defense.  So, and AR-15 is an "assault weapon" in the public's hands, and a "patrol rifle" in the police's hands.  This is just blatant hypocrisy.  Oh, and according to the new ordinance, handguns carrying more than 10 rounds are also "assault weapons."

The title is of course overly hopeful.   The Judge has issued a temporary restraining order, which means that later he can change his mind, and allow Deerfield to go ahead with its unconstitutional ordinance.  Still, I will take it, for now.  It seems to me that the judge could have, and should have found the ordinance grossly unconstitutional and simply thrown it out.

I have to run, but go read the whole thing.

Confessions of a Former Smoker

I smoked a pipe for about 20 years.  I enjoyed smoking a pipe.  I found relaxation in it as well as time to think.  I had largely stopped smoking the pipe when we moved to Raleigh, NC, but I still attended a pipe club meeting once a month until the restaurant that hosted the meetings went non smoking as well.  While I enjoyed the company, the idea that I can not smoke at a pipe club meeting, or at a tobacconist shop, is irritating to me.  This smoking ban took place ironically in a state where tobacco is grown in huge fields. 

Now, I can not defend smoking as an activity, and therefore I will not.  Nor will I claim that the anti smokers do not have a point that smoking leaves a lot of debris and detritus that no longer seems to pollute the streetscape.  Rather, let me state that just as anti marijuana laws are reviled because, after all, shouldn't an adult be allowed to consume what he or she wishes, so one must be consistent and revile anti smoking laws.  Except anti smokers are not consistent.  While condemning the cigarette smoker as a low class, trailer trash types, will themselves smoke a joint as if that were any better.  It is not.  Then of course, because the people doing the banning know little of what they ban, pipes and cigars, which are not inhaled, get thrown into the ban as well.  Remind you of anything?  Read on.

Today, at the American Thinker, Robert Hoffman asks whether  Smoking Bans and Mirrors. Is it about Health? Or Control?. Back when smoking bans were being enacted, each state trying to one up the last state that had enacted a ban, and even localities seemed to be getting into the act with even more stringent bans of their own, I read a number of articles citing studies that showed no actual causation between second hand smoke and lung cancer. These were roundly ingored. As note at Slate.com in their article Second Hand Smoke Isn't As Bad As You Thought:

Early arguments for smoking bans at least paid lip service to the idea that restrictions were necessary to protect unwilling bystanders’ health. But as bans have grown ever more intrusive even as the case for expanding them has withered, that justification has been revealed as a polite fiction by which nonsmokers shunted smokers to the fringes of society. It was never just about saving lives.

Indeed, I have always believed that to many, such as Stanton Glantz, who enjoyed a hey day during the tobacco wars performing biased research, smoking is a vile habit, and in his mind, and it turns out, many others, the habit must be stamped out by any means necessary. From the start, the war on tobacco used Alinsky's rules for radicals, naming the "enemy" freezing it, and attacking it from all sides. Of course, smokers, always a minority, were caught in the middle. But the anti smokers learned valuable lessons which they are using today on gun owners.  It isn't about health, it is about control.

The argument for smoking bans fell of deaf ears until the anti smoking zealots hit on just the right thing: second hand smoke.  Many smokers who were married to non smokers realized they would have to give up smoking for their spouses sake, if what they said about second hand smoke was true.  But as it turns out, it wasn't true.  Glantz and others had been doing biased research in an effort to make the public believe it was true.  Anti smoking groups exaggerated the claims even further.  Now, the Left thinks it has found the formula for getting rid of guns: school shootings.  While no one can defend the indefensible, like smoking, we can certainly  point out that banning guns is not the solution to school shootings.  We don't have a right to smoke, but we do have a right to bear arms for our protection and the protection of those we love. 

Buy Ammunition. You never know ho much you will need

Here's a post from 2016 by Kurt Schlichter entitled Buy Ammo. Schlichter gives a number of reasons to buy ammunition, not the least of which is because:

Buying ammo is a no-lose proposition. Look, the worst thing that happens if you buy more ammo is that you have more ammo. Plus, much of our consumer ammo is made by hardworking Americans, and many of those ammo makers are located in red states where the right to keep and bear arms is celebrated and respected. So you’re helping fellow conservative Americans, which is good. And you’re infuriating people like that sanctimonious, Second Amendment-hating incompetent infesting the White House, which is great.

Remember that Schlichter was writing this during the Obama years. But, you should always keep on hand a number of rounds that you rotate as you use them up. In other words, as you use up the rounds in your stash, you buy more. Or, if you are a reloader, you make more, and then buy more components. The Obama years were a time of shortages of ammunition, which then spurred panic buying. I remember seeing men coming out of the gun show carrying big boxes filled with .223 Remington on their shoulders, that probably amounted to 1000 rounds each. I did not have to panic buy because I had sufficient rounds on hand, and sufficient components on hand, to weather 8 years of Obama.  I could buy strategically.

Schlichter does not give us a fixed number of rounds we should have per gun.  I am reluctant to as well, because each person must evaluate his or her own situation.  In the final analysis, the number of rounds on maintains is an arbitrary number.  You may need exactly 0 rounds, or the end of the world as we know it (abbreviated TEOTWAWKI) may happen, and you will be scrounging for anything you can throw at your enemies.  But start buying now, in whatever amount you think you might need.

I am cognizant of the fact that during the last election, the Democrats expected to win big, and they became over self confident.  Today, we are hearing everywhere that the "blue wave" will not materialize, and that the Republicans will actually take more seats.  Between you and me, I don't believe it.  I may be wrong, but if the Democrats win, even by a small margin, they will consider it a landslide, and the gun grabbers will be out in force.  If the elections turn out as the polls say they will, well, see above..

It doesn't work unless you work it

It seems to always come down to the fault of a human being.  Today we learn from Mairead Mcardle at NRO that Florida skipped background checks on concealed carry applications for a year. I have been guilty of pointing out that concealed carriers were some of the most vetted people in the country, certainly more than a certain former President.  Now we find that:

Over a month after Lisa Wilde, the employee in charge of conducting background checks, found that she could not log into the NICBC system, she reported it to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, but did not follow up or fix the problem. Another employee finally noticed that the department was not receiving any denial notices and reached out to the FDLE to get to the bottom of the mystery, according to the June 5, 2017 state investigation report obtained by the Times.

Wilde, who said claimed she worked in the FDACS mail room until 2013, said she “didn’t understand why I was put in charge of” conducting the background checks. She has since been fired.

How does the saying go? It works if you work it. Contrarily, it doesn't work if nobody inquires of the system whether an applicant might have a disqualifying record.

Note that I am not a supporter of either requiring a permit to concealed carry, or of the NICS.  Anyone is allowed to walk around at large in society should be allowed to carry a weapon, and if a person can not be trusted with a weapon, he should not be allowed to walk around at large.  The Leftist idea that prisoners are there for political reasons, while the citizenry should at all times be treated like prisoners is balderdash.  But since we find ourselves in this situation, we have to make the best of it, and the permit system combined with NICS seems to be the best we can currently do.  We need, however, to do better.

Hogg SWATed

From Mike at Cold Fury we learn that someone has called in to authorities SWATing the Hogg...that's David Hogg, the loudmouthed know nothing of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School fame, who goes about the country accusing NRA and the millions of legal gun owners who had nothing to do with the shooting of being somehow complicit in the murders there.  How this is supposed to work is not entirely clear, but never mind for Hogg goes for evoking emotion rather than logic.  No one will accuse this gun grabber of using logic.

On the one hand, we don't like it when one of us gets SWATed.  It is dangerous, and at least one person has been killed after being SWATed.  It is also illegal.  On the other hand, it is hard not to harbor a sense of schadenfreude over it.  Well, I am a Christian, not a saint.  It could not happen to a nicer guy after all, and its nice to see it happen to someone on the left for a change.

I am glad nobody was hurt.