Finding your strength

Today Fareed Zakaria interviewed Malcolm Gladwell about his new book, 'David And Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, And The Art Of Battling Giants’. They discussed underestimated 'underdogs' including dyslexics.

The autobiographical anecdote told by one of Gladwell’s successful dyslexics fits a pattern I recognized decades ago while reading an essay about his own youth by Yousuf Karsh. A young person, usually just prior to entering adolescence, who has been struggling with rejection has a small, skill-based triumph. This triumph becomes core to their identity for the rest of their lives. It gives them the ability to tell themselves that "I can do this. I have this strength". For Karsh it was having the best snapshot among those submitted by two dozen others in his seventh grade classroom. It was one of his first uses of a camera and launched a passion and a career. He knew it was a good picture; This was not false praise, and it was the best among a group he identified as his peers.

This is why it is important for young people to make genuine efforts and receive honest feedback. Giving everyone an automatic pass or false praise does not have the desired effect. Recognition of a true success, even a very small one, lays a foundation for the rest of their lives.

A good alternative for action on Syria

Obama seems to have painted himself into a corner by drawing a "red line" last year promising dire consequences for chemical use in Syria. Horribly, escalation of the conflict seems inevitable.

Is there anything that can be done for the Syrian people or, failing that, to contain and limit the conflict? I think there may be.

Everybody says there is no good choice between Assad and the jihadists. Everybody is right. But these two extremes are not the only alternatives.

Sensible, responsible Syrians are not inside the country, fighting; They took their families and fled. Look for reasonable Syrian alternatives among the refugees.

The refugees are not just in UN camps; In fact, most are not. But wherever situated these people are in desperate need of material support. This support should be massively increased with a mandate to form self administered civil institutions: boards to arrange education and recreation for children; boards to administer health services; civic planning for temporary community infrastructure, to manage housing, sanitation, refrigeration, food and water, electricity and internet access.

Positions on the various boards should be filled by votes, not appointments. Those who prove capable and constructive would have a kind of legitimacy that no-one inside Syria currently has. The world would finally have a "good alternative for Syria".

Justice, Freedom and Iraq

I’ve been reading ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’ by Steven Pinker.

He marshals facts clearly and with authority. He makes many powerful arguments including, above all, this:  EVERY party in a dispute genuinely feels themselves to be the more aggrieved, to be the greater victim.

The only way to avoid escalating “retaliation” is to cede resolution to a neutral third party. Pinker names the growing authority of the state and with it state-mediated justice; He credits this with the global decline in violence over the last century or two.

On this, the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, it is worth applying this lesson to what happened there (Pinker’s book does not talk about politics. These are my opinions now).

When the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003 they could have removed specific individuals at the heads of institutions and left those institutions of state intact. Instead, driven by a naïve belief that their own civil society was somehow the default if government just “got out of the way”, they destroyed not only Saddam’s administration, but the very state itself.

When you turn “justice” over to gun-toting, inherently self-interested individuals this is what you get: a crippled economy, rampant corruption and, always, greater violence. Anarchy is not democratic. Anarchy is not freedom. Anarchy resolves itself into tribalism and feudal society.

Even the least inhibited (they would call themselves the “strongest”) do not have the opportunities afforded by a controlled environment; Even they are not free as they crouch, armed and trapped in their own defensive postures.

Meanwhile, the civilized cannot function in the absence of functioning civil institutions.

The state does not impede commerce and freedom, it ENABLES them. The state does not, as John Boehner recently would have it, “steal” money from its citizens.

The state delivers back tenfold and more every tax dollar gathered: By creating choices and opportunities that would otherwise not exist; By delivering peace and prosperity, safety and justice.

Fascism is too much state control; Anarchy is too little. Both defeat individual initiative. In the vast space dividing these two extremes we have many, many examples of democratic states that work well for the benefit of their people. Robust institutions legitimatized by democracy, honoring democratically formulated laws, are not enemies of freedom but the very source of freedom itself.

American guns

The best kept stats seem to be for lethal gun use. Using these as a rough proxy for the ratio of times that guns are used in a non-lethal way we find that defense counts for less than 1 in a thousand times that guns are used. For example, here are some numbers from 2010:

    

There were 30,470 deaths by firearm in USA in 2010

• 19,392 suicides  and
• 11,078 homicides, including:
• 1,923 instances of killing during the commission of a felony, of which a mere 236 were the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen

You are 14 times more likely to use your gun to kill someone you know during an argument than you are to use it to defend your home.

 

A child in your house is more likely to use that gun to kill himself or another child than you are to use it defensively.

 

And you are about a hundred times more likely to use it to kill yourself during a bad moment than you are to use it against an intruder.

 

Over the last week I've been checking the claims that gun proliferation reduces violent crime and find them to be unfounded; The reductions in violent crime following introduction of "right-to-carry" and other state laws to encourage gun presence are no greater (actually marginally less) than year-by-year reductions in crime that had already been occurring everywhere in the US since 1990. More guns are not correlated with less crime.

 

Civilization "would be a good idea" but cannot stop massacres. That can only come from limiting civilian access to weapons of extraordinary destructive power.

 

Tweeting guns

So I finally broke down and posted my first tweet just now.

I wanted to encourage the excellent reporting by DonLemonCNN. He is at the site of the Sandy Hook school massacre and is holding the line against the "Guns don't kill people..." bullshit. Good for him.

I cannot just wrap Christmas presents while this is going on. I challenge myself to find the stats (FBI?) and discover the ratio of crimes committed with a gun to "self defense" (if such a thing actually exists) using a gun.
 
This is especially real to me because my personnal ancestry investigations turned up birth registries for ancestors of mine in Sandy Hook hundreds of years ago, along with expense claims for militia call-up of other ancestors. We are a records-keeping people! It should be possible to introduce some facts to the guns control "debate" about to happen.

Cut-and-paste lies did not work!!

Why the next four years would be different

because the next four years would not start with the economy in free-fall