Saturday, July 28, 2012

He's A Gun Correspondent


ONCE AGAIN, with explanatory reports of those strange Americans’ attitudes toward guns filling Australian newspapers, our fine media organisations’ US-based reporters are hunting up just the right interview subjects to illustrate your typical redneck’s baffling reverence for the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms. This is a familiar exercise, repeated every time the latest nutcase opens fire on an assembly of dutiful and disarmed citizens, who have been stripped by law and local ordinance of the means to return fire. When intended victims are packing the means to defend themselves, well that never gets reported on this side of the Pacific, as such incidents ruin the narrative. Americans are just plain crazy, as every newly posted Australian foreign correspondent knows, so the journalistic obligation is to find just the right person to illustrate how very mad they really are. After all, we have never seen an armed lunatic in Australia. Well, not all that many, anyway.

Newly installed Fairfax correspondent, Nick O’Malley, has obviously studied the Correspondent’s Book of Standard Storylines & Protocols, because he ticks every required box in today’s report. His gun-loving nutcase is an elderly gent from Kennesaw, Georgia, with an unkept Santa Claus beard, a pistol on each hip and ready line in racist invective. Perfect! There are some 300 million Americans, and Dent Myers is O’Malley’s pick to represent them all.
 Representative American gun owner Dent Myers

Just how representative is Myers? Why not listen to the man O’Malley quotes and make up your own mind. Be warned, though, Myers’ language is salty in the extreme and many will find the racial slurs he uses as a form of punctuation to be deeply offensive. If you have a strong stomach click here and take it all in.

O’Malley isn’t quite done with his check list. Having illustrated what American gun owners are like, he then explains the pernicious philosophy that produces them:
In the American imagination, government does not grant certain rights to individuals, rather individuals grudgingly cede some of their God-given rights in order to allow a limited government to be formed.
One should not draw too long a bow in seeing O’Malley’s version of the individual’s relationship with the state as entirely representative of the Fairfax mindset. Probably, somewhere in the company, there is someone, possibly a cleaner or cafeteria worker, who believes governments should answer to citizens and not the other way around.

But still, you have to wonder. It was just recently that media chieftains put their signatures to a letter opposing the Yabby’s plans to place further restrictions on free speech – a letter Fairfax conspicuously declined to sign. At the time, the suspicion at the Billabong was that the ailing company did not want to rile the government and jeopardise the possibility of some nice handouts to support that “quality journalism” stuff (like O’Malley’s, for instance).

Now, though, there seems method to Fairfax’s craven refusal. When leaning on media execs to fire troublesome reporters is no longer sufficient and speech restrictions are introduced, O’Malley will be able to re-visit the racist Myers and cite him as an example of that other American evil, the First Amendment. As government grants us our rights, expect him to be just fine with having even more of them withdrawn.

A FURTHER THOUGHT: If O'Malley needed an example of America's wicked gun culture, why didn't he visit the little kid who takes an AK-47 to show-and-tell? Opinion page contributor David Hirst would have been happy to give him the number to call. 

17 comments:

  1. With apologies to The Expat:

    In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

    In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

    In 1935 China established gun control. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

    In 1938 Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

    In 1956 Cambodia established gun control. From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

    In 1964 Guatemala established gun control. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

    In 1970 Uganda established gun control. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

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  2. PhillipGeorge(c)2012July 28, 2012 at 3:10 PM

    Prof if some young white couple were to walk into a jungle, clear some forest, build a primitive one room hut, home birth and home school six children and live off the land, it would all be right wing extremism and an unacceptable carbon footprint. They would be recklessly endangering the life of their babies. [the same babies that could have been legally aborted just months earlier - but only at the hands of medical "experts" and health care professionals].

    But if natives are are living the subsistence life somewhere already it is in sacred harmony with their totem spirits.

    Sacred and Right are just 'undefinable' relativisms. Human rights are just whatever the United Nations feeds down to us, or what academics discover through their celebrated insights.

    Prof. Unless Jesus Christ rose from the dead language, philosophy, science, has no basis or future.

    It is all about that one man Prof. I've come at this from every tangent, and angle available in either Euclidean or Riemannian space. That's what's nice about the Gospel, its intrinsically metaphysical, arriving here from a direction perfectly orthogonal to anything inside these ordinary spacial points of reference.

    Prof, I'd like to continue with Churchillian superlatives if is isn't too late; yet the West seems lost.

    One cannot tax people into improved living. Those patriarchal straw-less brick makers had to come to a decision on big Government and ultimate human responsibility.

    cheers across the blogosphere; where cyber rubber meets the cyber road.

    keep it up.

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  3. Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.July 28, 2012 at 4:01 PM

    So - by way of contrast, in O'Malley's imagination, government gives us all of our rights because we start from no-where, having none at all to begin with.

    What about human rights, muffinhead? Labor luvvies are usually solidly on the trail when it comes to those? Is nothing self-evident? No inalienable rights? No life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Only control and nannyism and and do-what-we-sayism and you-shut-the-f-up if you don't like it? The ESSENCE of democracy is that we voluntarily CEDE to governments, for a limited term, the right to make laws, and if we don't like them, we can kick them out (as believe me, we will, we certainly will). Get with the program, please, man who hasn't got a clue about American foundational history or how Americans cherish their personal independence from government to this day. This cherishing, and acting on it entrepreneurially, in fact is what made America great and a beacon to freedom for the world. I know that my words present a ringing endorsement of a worldview that may stick in the socialist craw, but it needs to be said face-to-face to socialists everywhere: your way does not work. Finding worse-case examples to bolster your prejudices blinkers you to some fundamental realities. For real they are.

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  4. Don't be fooled. Great interview with Dent Myers on YouTube.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcIj_16G8Dg

    He's hardly the "crazed racist" that the press like to make him out to be.

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    1. THX for the link. What is interesting is the fizzing popping hatred for him in the comments section. Some kind of straw man "I dunno why would anyone give me a hard time ? I aint done anything" ..replies.. "symbol of everything people love to hate"). Interesting also his response to the "Why do so many of you Southeners feel like it's important to keep fighting the civil war ? (turn around and cave) " (paraphrase) type question. So ignorant but he was graceful. "Cave to what ?" Absolute Gold.

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  5. Thanks for keeping up the ridicule of these so called journalists, Prof, and thanks for that list, TOS. Didn't see much reported in the Aussie media but gun sales went up after this massacre. People are learning how to deal with nutters.

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    1. "gun sales went up after this massacre. People are learning how to deal with nutters."

      Gun sales went up not so much as a result of the Aurora shooting, but as a result of the stepped-up anti-gun rhetoric and the fear that an Obama second term, in which he brags he'd be able to be "much more flexible," would see the sale of guns either highly restricted or even banned.

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  6. Just guessing, but perhaps Nick is the sort of quality problem Gina sees at Fairfax that needs fixing.

    If Nick wants to run his agitprop in the newspaper maybe the shareholders would appreciate him buying a half page ad?

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  7. O'Malley clearly believes governments should rule over people, not for them. What hope for free speech in Australia when a senior journalist holds such medieval views. Still, the upside is that Fairfax is still writing to impress its shrinking inner-city green-left readership. Such elitism can only hasten its demise.

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  8. "In the American imagination, government does not grant certain rights to individuals, rather individuals grudgingly cede some of their God-given rights in order to allow a limited government to be formed."

    It's not "in the American imagination," it's "in the American reality." Whether or not some intolerant Statist xenophobic bedwetting pansy-ass hoplophobe from a former British prison colony with fewer citizens than Texas likes it or not.

    I almost feel a little bit sorry for men like O'Malley. So insecure, so weak, so afraid of the great responsibility "freedom" lays on the shoulders of citizens of a free country, that he'd just rather pre-emptively give up and subcontract everything to the State. For instance, it's far easier to demand the State silence those with whom you disagree than to be forced to make a reasoned argument as to why they're wrong, ay?

    If you are not born with any natural freedoms or rights save what the State decides you're allowed to have, you are not born free at all. It confounds me that some people think this is A Good Thing. To me, it's like the slave defending the plantation owner. But there ya go - diversity. I hope that men like both Meyers and O'Malley will be free to speak their minds forever.

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  9. UN Arms Treaty ends without agreement

    All budding world government types will probably be disappointed.

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  10. [URL]http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/07/operation-fast-and-furious-botched-justice-department-operation-standoff-over-executive-privilege[/URL]

    Is interesting in that it deals with other uses of firearms. It is being framed as a partisan issue but shouldn't be, as aparently simialar stings have been used in the past by other administrations but less messily.

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  11. O'Malley's writing demonstrates the differences that exist between Libertarians and Statists. In his view, it is quite wrong that people should have rights which they “grudgingly cede” to form a limited government.

    From a historical perspective, in the English speaking world, these differences can be traced back to the inherent differences in the Declaration at Arbroath vs. the Magna Carta. In the former, all rights lie with the individual and are transferred upwards to the elected ruler; in the latter, all rights are vested in the permanent ruler, and are bestowed downwards according to the whim of the ruler.

    It is not a coincidence that the American population came primarily from northern England & Scotland (together with the German migration of the Saxons still in Germany) who were different from, though closely related to the Angles. And it was always thus, from the Saka Scythian federation on the Black Sea to the Russian Steppes, with their southern neighbours in the great Parthian Kingdom, and before that back to Samaria and the two Tribes of Joseph; Manasseh and Ephraim.

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    Replies
    1. Libertarians must eventually disappear up the ahole of the Anarchists.

      Libertarians have many default post modernist commonalities.

      Maybe try ....."the differences that exist between Sovereign Individuals and Statists."

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