Month: September 2009

More on the WND Thing

Roberta X doesn’t like Jon Henke’s crusade against World Net Daily, because she thinks it reeks of the stuffy right worried that people are going to be programmed with wrongthink.  I can’t really speak for Jon Henke, but that’s not really my concern.  I know there’s an audience for what Joe Farrah is selling.  If there wasn’t, he wouldn’t be selling it.  That audience is really of very little concern to me, and I don’t worry all that much that there are people out there who think that Obama was born in Kenya.  I don’t worry all that much that people think they’ve been abducted by aliens.  I worry even less that folks might think that Elvis is really hanging out with JFK in an old folks home and battling the undead in their spare time.  But I am concerned with what banners the conservative movement marches under when we’re asking people to join us in helping build a governing majority.

There’s an important reason why this is a concern.  If you look at party affiliation in the United States, it looks something like this.  If votes went along straight party lines, the Democrats would never lose an election, and we’d be selling stylish, cheap furniture, boring, but remarkably safe and reliable cars, and developing a growing fondness for herring.  Yep.  We’d already be Sweden.  But we’re not.  Why?  Because conservatives enjoy an ideological advantage, in that most Americans can identify with at least some parts of the conservative platform.  But to get their votes, Republicans have to attract votes from people who are not Republicans.

Latest Gallup poll from 2009 shows that 26% of voters identify Republican, 33% Democrat, and 39% independent.  The party that’s doing the best job of attracting independents to their message at any given time is going to be the party in power.  There’s a lot of wasted ink in trying to figure out the key to winning independents, but if there’s one thing that’s probably safe to say about them, it’s that most aren’t really on board with partisan extremism.

My problem with WND and the birthers isn’t that they exist.  My problem with Joe Farrah isn’t that he makes money providing material the kooky right greedily devours.  It’s a free, capitalist country, after all.  My problem is that by trying to bring them into the coalition, and by lending Farrah and his audience legitimacy, we’re going to turn away the independent voters.  Voters who might be a little pissed off at what’s coming out of Washington these days — who might not want their taxes raised, and might not want their kids in debt to their eyeballs before they even get a job.  I don’t want them thinking that by voting for conservative candidates who might share many of these values, that they are by association endorsing the kooky ideas emanating out of the birthersphere.  The question in accepting any group into your coalition is do they bring more to the table than they drive away from it.  I think the answer with the WND crowd is no.

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Brady Problem in a Nutshell

Seth Godin I think hits on the reason the gun control movement has difficulty finding a voice today:

Enormity doesn’t mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible.

The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down.

Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.

If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.

Not fair, but true.

I think the Bradys have a big enormity problem.  Some of it isn’t their fault.  I wouldn’t discount the effect it had on the population, either consciously or unconsciously, that a handful of extremists with box cutters and a plan managed to topple two of the largest man made structures on earth, kill 3000 people, and start two wars that would kill many thousands more.  What good is gun control when you can kill thousands with box cutters?   The Bradys even pile on to the enormity problem by pointing out there that guns take 10 9/11s a year.

In contrast, our movement has gotten very adept at fighting one battle and one issue at a time, and small, achievable steps.  Godin has a good point that people don’t want to be on the losing side.

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Living on Mars

I’m surprised by how much interest there was in the Mars post.  I guess one would expect that Mars colonization would appeal to gun nuts.  What better place to go to be left the hell alone by the powers that be?   But as much as the idea of sending people off to Mars to colonize it is appealing, I think the engineering challenges of keeping people on Mars would be just as daunting, if not more daunting, than bringing them back.

Mars is an incredibly hostile planet to human life.  It has an unbreathable atmosphere that is 100 times thinner than that of Earth.  This translates into very cold temperatures, and much higher radiation levels.  Mars is also only about a tenth of the mass of Earth, which translates into about a third of the gravity .  Mars’ average surface temperature is -63 degrees centigrade, and can hit lows of -140 degrees centigrade.   Mars also has no magnetic field, so solar storms can send unsafe levels of radiation to the Martian surface.

The only way humans are going to survive on Mars is to bring along an ample supply of food, a sustainable energy source, a way to manufacture breathable air, and enough construction equipment and materials to bury a habitat underground.  And all this will have to be done while in space suits, because Mars is too hostile and too cold to just walk around with a heavy coat and breathing apparatus on.  Humans on Mars would be totally dependent on supplies from Earth. and would probably require a steady stream of materials and equipment to be launched.

And after constructing a habitat on Mars, we don’t know whether we could get crops to grow, what effect the low gravity environment would have on humans or other animals we’d need to sustain a colony.  We don’t know how easy it will be to get liquid water on Mars.

I think humans will have a colony on Mars eventually, but I think sending scouting missions, where the astronauts come back, is going to be easier as a first step than jumping right to colonization.  With current technology and costs, I’m afraid any one way trip to Mars isn’t going to be much better than a suicide mission.

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Community Service for Virginia Gun Show ND

It looks like the gents who fired off a mistakenly loaded rifle at a gun show in Virginia a while back have been sentenced to 40 hours of community service, after being charged with obstruction of justice and recklessly handling a firearm.  Given that, and this incident here, it’s probably best to follow this guy’s advice here, and not talk to the police if you have an ND in Virginia.  Especially in a case like this, where the dealer negligently brought a loaded rifle on to the show floor.

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Organizing Against World Net Daily

I couldn’t agree more with Jon Henke on this.  World Net Daily has long been a rag of a publication for a while now, and I make a point not to link to them unless the purpose is mockery, or to dispel some untruth they are peddling.

Interestingly though, I’ve heard the publisher of WND, Joseph Farrah, speak, and I found him very thoughtful and engaging.  I suspect he’s catering to an audience with his paper, and I’m sure it makes him a lot of money, but I think what he peddles isn’t adding anything helpful to the conversation.

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One Way Trip to Mars?

The New York Times ponders a one-way-trip to Mars:

There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?

Apparently there’s no shortage of people who would be willing to take a one way trip, knowing that would mean they die on Mars.  For me, a successful mission means bringing the astronauts home again.  It wouldn’t have mattered much if Christopher Columbus had sunk in the Caribbean, never returning home to tell everyone of the New World.  No, a successful mission has to bring the explorers home.  The problem is that space is full of radiation, and shielding is expensive and heavy.

I’ve pretty much lost all faith in government space initiatives.  I do think we’ll go to Mars.  But we’ll go to Mars because there’s money in it.  If someone is willing to take a one-way-trip, there’s someone else who will pay a lot of money to go and return.  All we need is for private industry to make it cheap and routine.

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New Training Focused Blog

Via Joe Huffman, John Fogh of Insight Training Center in Seattle has started to blog about training related topics, with a link to Robb.  It’s good to see folks in the training industry doing new media outreach.  One of my chief criticisms of new media efforts by established organizations in the issue has been the lack of outreach to pre-existing communities within new media that could help get them out there.  That doesn’t necessarily need to mean links, but it does mean building relationships, and links are one way to do that.  They are also a way to get the community to pay attention.  Good on Insight for starting off on the right footing.

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Manufacturing Confusion

Thirdpower points to some campaign flyers for candidates in Illinois that are basically trying to scare voters into thinking machine guns are legal in Illinois (they aren’t) and that clearly we need to ban them.

At best, Representative Kathy Ryg is completely ignorant about what she proposes to regulate, and at worst is lying and deliberately misleading her constituents.

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Impact of NRA Annual Meeting

Over at PA Gun Rights, we take a look at the potential impact of Pittsburgh throwing away the NRA Annual Meeting in 2011:

For Pittsburgh, the decision to put politics above Second Amendment rights would be a huge pain for the local economy. The last time the Steel City hosted the organization’s annual meeting, they brought in $15 million to local coffers. The NRA was the first major convention to visit the city’s new convention center in 2004 and has remained one of the largest events Pittsburgh has ever hosted. Predictions for 2011 showed that gun owners would fill approximate 9,000 room nights and draw just as many visitors to the region as the record breaking 2004 event.

Seems like a lot of money for a cash strapped and job scarce city to be throwing away over something that doesn’t even make any sense.

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