Another good article from JL Wilson http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1752 contains good advice:
“I'm not saying that we should therefore give up on our goals or ideals, only that we should keep our eyes wide open. Don't assume the next election will be clean, and don't assume that your favorite candidate will do what he promised once he's in office. And think twice before you place that next bet.”
Unfortunately, a lot of folks I know won’t be in a position to heed it. I know quite a few folks who read nothing but their local paper, Sports Illustrated or Field and Stream, and old issues of People at the dentist’s office. They don’t read blogs, good magazines, or books. They watch the local news, mainly for the weather and sports scores. They listen to sports talk on the radio or to a drive time fluff show. They may watch CNN or Fox if there is some big disaster or something, but they are not regular consumers of news. They are blissfully uninformed about the world and what the politicians are up to. Sadly, the next level up from “uninformed” is “misinformed”, eg cable news viewers.
In last week’s New Yorker (link already supplanted by this week, and I can’t figure out how to access the archive), Malcolm Gladwell had an interesting piece on racial profiling in which he uses pit bull bans as illustrations of ineffective uses of generalizations. While people are sometimes attacked by pit bulls, Gladwell points out that the breed is not the stable factor in predicting dog attacks; rather, aspects of the treatment of particular dogs by their owners permits prediction. If you ban pit bulls, bad dog owners will just turn to other breeds. Racial and ethnic profiling are similarly fallacious in that any perceived connection between behavior and ethnic or racial category is usually unstable and, therefore, an unreliable basis for policing.
In the Gladwell article, a representative of the ASPCA points out that just about every breed has at one time or another killed a human being, except for beagles and basset hounds. Beagle and basset owners will be quick to point out that their dogs administer a slow death by aggravation over many years.
If Dick Cheney were a real man he would own up to his mistake in wounding his shooting companion. Mary Matalin http://www.wonkette.com/politics/katrina/daily-briefing-stating-the-obvious-154365.php claims that the VP “didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do”. Except for shooting a guy, Mary. The VP’s mistake is understandable. It can happen to any inexperienced shooter, especially if drugs or alcohol are involved. He’s not really a hunter and is mainly experienced in shooting captive animals released in his vicinity. He missed military training with its emphasis on weapon safety, and he is by all accounts a fairly inconsiderate person. He was a shooting accident waiting to happen. Unless his victim hurled himself into the trajectory of Cheney’s shot, Cheney is at fault. Every hunter and shooter in America will know at once that Cheney is a poseur and a jackass.
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