All of these articles were pulled from fivethirtyeight.com, in the post God, Guns, and Gaydar: The Laws of Probability Push You to Overestimate Small Groups. I post them because, as some of you know, I am a gun owner, but for the most part I find the self-defense argument uncompelling*. This topic has come up a number of times with friends who, while they enjoy target shooting, as I do, also feel strongly about owning firearms for self-defense purposes.
The first two articles address the estimate of frequency of guns being used in self-defense; the third addresses churchgoing numbers.
* The first article strengthens my position on this. I generally find the defense against home-invasion case uncompelling, or self-defense while strolling around the city. I do find it a more compelling argument for women, especially for women who frequently travel alone or live alone. Women do, unfortunately, still face situations that men do not. Please note that I do not advocate blanket bans on firearms, or excessive restriction, but I am in favor of reasonable levels of regulation. I do not think that the self-defense argument forces a higher bar for justification of regulation.
To continue the trend of not writing about wingnut forwards (haven’t received any in a while), I want to address the Volcker Rule today. A financial reform bill is clearly badly needed, and one of the important items in this bill is this little piece called the Volcker Rule. On its face, it sounds like a great idea: limit the investment activities of FDIC-insured commercial banks. But those of us who bank or insure through USAA got an email last night urgently asking members to take action to modify this rule.
I guess I have not actually gotten back to the Texas education situation, though it may still happen. It’s hard to make writing here a priority. That said, I can still sometimes provide you with interesting things to read! Both of these are from FiveThirtyEight, which was one of my favorite blogs back during the 2008 election. Recently I started following the FiveThirtyEight twitter account, and so I’ve been reading more of the posts. Chances are good that most of you who actually bother to read this blog also read FiveThirtyEight anyway, but I still want to share these.
These posts are a two part response to a Jonah Goldberg piece. Goldberg is a clown; he pointed to Swarthmore as a hotbed of liberal fascism a couple years ago, which, well… Sort of isn’t worth responding to. Anyway, Goldberg is, surprise, complaining that those taxes the liberals inflict are just awful and fascist and so forth. So the first post breaks down tax burden by GDP, and also by the different types of tax:
The second article is more interesting, in my opinion. It looks at the GINI coefficient, which represents income distribution, and compares the US to other developed nations, both before and after taxes:
I really want to comment on what’s just happened in Texas, but I’m not sure where to start. For the moment, let me just point out a couple of webpages about the Texas schoolboard curriculum decisions:
I want to come back to this, but I’ll have to pick just a few items to deal with, given the scale of the politically-motivated wrongness of all of these decisions. The changes covered include a whole range of massive historical revisions from the merely stupid to the utterly absurd. If you read through these and want any in particular covered, leave a comment, and I’ll pick a few to research in depth.
I realize most of the people who read this website– if any of you are left– are probably familiar with auto-tune the news already. Still, in case you’re not, here’s the latest:
Given the last post, I feel I should note that the Andrew & Evan Gregory are both Swatties; Andrew hosted me for the invite-back weekend way back in 2001 when I confirmed that I had absolutely made the right choice in applying to Swarthmore Early Decision.
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him.
The author of this article is despairing over the failure of elite educational institutions to create the Ideal Citizen, instead creating the Self-Absorbed Entitled Citizen. In brief, the article itself is as out of touch as the behaviors it’s complaining about.
Occasionally Jon Stewart has made the comment that it’s sad that the major media outlets are getting things wrong, and it takes a comedian to call bullshit. I’m actually not convinced by that; political humor has often been a check on politicians, and it’s not unreasonable that it should also be a check on media. Comedy is good at that.
This is the latest email forward I’ve received, and they don’t get much more full of bad data and mis-attributed scholars than this. This has been covered in other places, notably at Snopes; this particular link actually points to the original 2000 version of the email. Factcheck.org also deals with the 2008 version.
I haven’t posted recently due to a conference trip to California, and I don’t have much time at the moment to write, but I wanted to post this graphic:
