Los Links 5/6

Once again, Yahoo ate all of my beautiful links.  This time, I haven’t got the time to track back through my Twitter feed and try to resurrect them.  Which rather brings me to a question: are these Los Links posts doing anybody any good?  Do you wish me to continue?  Because if Los Links is of limited value to you, my dear readers, then we should move on.

Right.  Moving on.  Here are at least a few links of interest, for those interested parties.  The really big news of the week, o’ course, was bin Laden’s ass getting killed.

Decrepit Old Fool: Motion to adjourn.  This is it.  This is everything I would have said about it, said much better than I could have done.  Read this.  Then go read his one on climate change.  Now.

Hullabaloo: Ten Years On.  Great retrospective/introspective by Digby on the whole bin-Laden-is-dead thing.

Observations of a Nerd: How do you ID a dead Osama anyway? Three things to love about this.  First, adore the science spin on a major current event.  Second, this happened in a matter of hours after Bora put out a call for posts on the topic on Twitter.  Third, got to learn things about DNA testing I hadn’t known before.  WIN!

And now for an assortment of other things worthy of your attention.

Scientific American: Extrasensory Pornception: Doubts About A New Paranormal Claim.  For one thing, the study “proving” ESP has been debunked.  So if you hear folks blabbing on about it, tell them to shaddup already.

ERV: Women and woo: Do women hate vaccines? The answer may surprise you.  Or not.  Depends on what kind of nonsense you’re willing to believe about women.

Highly Allochthonous: The many faces of earthquake triggering.  Wanna know how one earthquake can set off another? Read on! Simon Winchester, take especial note.

Reading the Washington Landscape: Dunite – Decorative, Heat Resistant and CO2 Sequestration. This stuff is teh awesome. And we’ve got whole mountains made of it. Woot!

Glacial Till: Meteorite Monday: Or not…  For a post that’s supposedly not a post, this one contained some very neat info!

Uncovered Earth: Sunday Science Photos, April 24 – 30.  I’m super-excited about this series, and I hope Michael keeps it up!

Mountain Beltway: Pamukkale 1. Turkish travertine!  Yum!

Looking for Detachment: Cross-Bedded.  Finally, someone jumped on the Sedimentary Sentiments meme bandwagon! And it’s gorgeous.  ZOMG so beautiful!

Greg Laden’s Blog: A multiplicity of strategies is better than infighting when addressing creationism and related problems.  This is a meta-post that contains links to pretty much every post I wanted to highlight from Almost Diamonds and Butterflies and Wheels, plus great stuff from Why Evolution is True and Pharyngula.  So there we are!

I’m missing a ton of outstanding stuff, and it kills me, but outta time.  If there’s an especial favorite post from this past week I’ve missed, put it in the comments so all of us can have a read!

Los Links 5/6
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Cantina Quote o' The Week: Steven Pinker

It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it “evil”.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate

All these years I chased after a definition of evil, struggled to determine what true evil is, and here comes Steven Pinker with a simple and true definition, justlikethat.  That’s as good a working definition of evil as I’ve ever found.

He’s also a fascinating writer who can make language utterly entrancing.  I had no idea he existed before I bought a mis-shelved copy of The Language Instinct on a lark.  It turned out to be one of the best books I’ve ever read, and helped me appreciate Tolkien much more deeply.

Cantina Quote o' The Week: Steven Pinker

The Morality of Religion: If This Is Morality, I'd Rather Be Immoral

I’ve been planning a set of posts on atheism and morality for some time now, but kept kicking the can down the road because I’ve had easier things to write about.  I’m still busier than a one-legged woman in an arse-kicking competition, but it’s time to open me gob on the whole subject.  Consider this the prelude.

There’s this perception among too many people that being religious automatically equals being moral.  Do yourself an experiment: hit random people up with a scenario.  They’re on a jury, and have to decide who is the most convincing character witness for the accused.  Would they place more weight on the testimony of an atheist or a pastor?  Based on how atheists are viewed in other surveys, I’d be willing to be the vast majority of the public would plump for the pastor.

They shouldn’t.

Being religious doesn’t automatically make you moral.  We’ll explore that in some depth in upcoming posts.  But for now, I just want to present a case study.  This is what one of the big theological thinkers had to say about genocide, infanticide, et al:

By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable.  It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity.  God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel.  The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God. 
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation.  We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy.  Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites?  Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement.  Not the children, for they inherit eternal life.  So who is wronged?  Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli[sic] soldiers themselves.  Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children?  The brutalizing effect on these Israeli [sic] soldiers is disturbing.

This comes only after William Lane Craig claims God “has no moral duties to fulfill.”  And an enormously long passage of nonsense that snipes at Richard Dawkins apropos of nothing, presents one of the lamest “logical” arguments for God’s existence ever put forth by someone who purportedly possesses a functioning brain, and then childishly claims atheists have proven God exists if they say the God of the Old Testament did something morally reprehensible in commanding the Israelites to slaughter every man, woman and child in Canaan.  William Lane Craig has proven my (and my Christian best friend’s) point that too much prayer completely rots a person’s brain.

Now, better thinkers than me have given William Lane Craig’s reprehensible “reasoning” the disrespect it deserves.  Greta Christina sums up his argument succinctly and without all of the flowers and frills that might make it look attractive to someone trying to reconcile the violent, jealous fuck of a rat bastard deity evident in the Old Testament with the loving, compassionate God they think exists:

And he said that as long as God gives the thumbs-up, it’s okay to kill pretty much anybody. It’s okay to kill bad people, because they’re bad and they deserve it… and it’s okay to kill good people, because they wind up in Heaven. As long as God gives the thumbs-up, it’s okay to systematically wipe out entire races. As long as God gives the thumbs-up, it’s okay to slaughter babies and children. Craig said — not essentially, not as a paraphrase, but literally, in quotable words — “the death of these children was actually their salvation.”

That’s what he’s saying.  And the reason why he’s saying it is because the Bible is supposed to be inerrant, and God is supposed to be good, ergo there must be some reason why God can order genocide without being placed in the same category as Hitler, Pol Pot, and Milošević, among other homicidal maniacs of history, and still be considered anything approaching good, much less perfectly good.

If you are an honest person, this is impossible.  If you’re a lying fucktard or a believer desperate to believe, then you come up with this ridiculous shit.  And then you go on to feel sorry for the poor, pathetic killers:

Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children?  The brutalizing effect on these Israeli [sic] soldiers is disturbing.

PZ responds:

No. No, I can’t imagine that. I can imagine parts of it: I can imagine a long, heavy piece of sharp metal in my hands. I can imagine a frightened, unarmed woman in front of me, trying to shelter her children. The part I can’t imagine, the stuff I’m having real trouble with, is imagining voluntarily raising my hand and hacking them to death. I have a choice in that situation, and I know myself well enough that if have to choose between killing people and letting them live, I’d let them live, not that it would be a difficult decision at all. I also have no illusion that, in this imaginary situation where I have all the power and my ‘enemies’ are weak and helpless, I am the one who is being wronged.

That’s the morality of an atheist, as opposed to the morality of a Christian theologian.  Which do you believe is the more moral?

Really, what it comes down to for believers is this question: is the kind of God who would tell you to pick up a weapon and hack a baby to death because that infant would supposedly cause you to turn away from God if allowed to grow up really a God worth worshiping?  Do you have a moral obligation to obey such an order?  Will you be able to salve your conscience by saying, “I was just following orders?”

Can you trust the “morality” that emerges from such a deity?  How?

Eric MacDonald is right: “Cruelty does not become something else, just because it is imagined to be the command of a god.”  And if you have to perform such contortions, if you have to twist morality until it breaks and bleeds to get it to fit your concept of a loving, good god, then you’re following the wrong damned god.  And you are destroying your own moral foundation in the process.

I’d like to finish out this post with another bit from Greta Christina’s post (although I suggest you read it in its entirety):

See, here’s the thing. When faced with horrors in our past — our personal history, or our human history — non-believers don’t have any need to defend them. When non-believers look at a human history full of genocide, infanticide, slavery, forced marriage, etc. etc. etc., we’re entirely free to say, “Damn. That was terrible. That was some seriously screwed-up shit we did. We were wrong to do that. Let’s not ever do that again.”
But for people who believe in a holy book, it’s not that simple. When faced with horrors in their religion’s history — horrors that their holy book defends, and even praises — believers have to do one of two things. They have to either a) cherry-pick the bits they like and ignore the bits they don’t; or b) come up with contorted rationalizations for why the most blatant, grotesque, black-and-white evil really isn’t all that bad.

William Lane Craig plumped for option b.  Too many believers do.  And the results are horrifying.  Far too much evil gets done because people believe God is on their side.

 As Blaise Pascal said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

I’ve seen religious morality.  If that’s what morality actually is, I’d rather be immoral.

The Morality of Religion: If This Is Morality, I'd Rather Be Immoral

Wellsprings of Inspiration Part II: Movies and Teevee

One of the cardinal rules of writing is read, read, read.  Read broadly and deeply.  Read everything you can get your hands on.  And there’s this sense that, unless you’re writing scripts, you should really turn off the teevee, avoid the theater, and just read.

But you know something?  This is weird, maybe, but I didn’t really start improving as a writer until I started watching.  I hit a plateau and stayed there for a bit.  Yeah, friends and family thought I was some shit, but they’re my friends and family – of course they liked my stuff.  Or at least were kind enough to say they did.

I think my problem was that I had a hard time visualizing things.  I’d have a few visual images, but a lot of what happened in my scenes was abstract to me.  But then I stopped watching movies and teevee as entertainment and started viewing it as work.  Really fun work, but work nevertheless.

A perfect storm of things came together when I was writing the novel inspired by C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire trilogy.  I wanted to write an anti-hero.  Not a hero in tarnished armor, but a really truly true anti-hero.  Didn’t have any idea where to find one in my story world.  Then my best friend came out for an impromptu visit caused by his girlfriend’s parents breaking up with him.  He brought the best of  Highlander.  He introduced me to Methos.  Something went bing! in my mind.  I watched a few episodes in a sort of stupor and then, while Garrett slept, went out for a walk in the dark.  And a voice started speaking to me, telling me the story of his life in a cultured British accent.  I’d found my anti-hero.  He’s got Peter Wingfield’s voice, Methos’s survival instinct, and no real morals to speak of.  Readers loved to hate him and, by the end, hated to love him.  Perfect.

Don’t ask me why, but Mission; Impossible II ended up being a huge goad to creativity while I was writing that book.  I had a routine established while I was finishing the book: get off work, go to the theater to see MI2, go home and write my heart out.  None of the characters are anything like my anti-hero.  None of the situations were even close.  But there was something about it that made the words flow.  The Muse is an odd duck.

But it really all began with…

Buffy and Angel.  A friend of mine moved in, bringing his collection with him.  I hadn’t had cable for years at that point, had barely watched a movie, much less a television show, and didn’t intend to watch this.  When he asked if I minded if he put it in, I humored him.  Yeah, sure, why not, if it’ll make you happy?  Well, he knows me too well.  He put in that episode where Spike’s up on a rooftop making fun of Angel, and it was all over from there.  Totally hooked.  I watched all available seasons for both series start to finish in the course of a couple of months.  I bought all of the DVDs.  I barely slept.  Because it wasn’t just a couple of shows to me, it was a seminar.  Joss Whedon’s a brilliant man.  He knows how to tell stories.  And if you listen to the commentary, he’ll tell you how to tell stories, too.

I wrote his words o’ wisdom down on notecards.  I took what I’d learned and applied it to my own writing.  Scene-blocking came much more easily.  The romantic bits that had to be there for the plot stopped feeling so awfully stilted.  The Big Bad (yes, I ripped that term from him) started looking a little less cliche.  I can point to that period in my life as one where everything changed.  My writing took off in a new and necessary direction.

Then came Firefly.  I’d needed some science fiction.  Sure, it’s space cowboy stuff, but it’s outstanding space cowboy stuff, and it’s Joss Whedon.  That is all I need to say.

Even with Buffy and Angel’s influence, though, I still sucked at the passionate stuff.  Until Alias.  Watching the way J.J. Abrams worked the romantic angles in to very face-paced storytelling helped immensely.  And another thing I learned from him that’s proven hugely valuable: don’t be afraid to reference off-camera events.  Do it.  Let your characters talk about things the viewer (or reader) will never directly see and won’t really figure out.  It gives the sense of a whole huge world that exists when the viewer isn’t viewing.  It makes the whole thing feel more real.  As long as you don’t make a big deal over it, it’s a great trick for fleshing out the world, and telling the audience your characters have lives that go on out of their sight.

I don’t watch Alias anymore unless I’ve got a few months free, because I know what happens: I’ll be working on the later books in the series.  There’s just something about it that really unleashes the Muse on that time period.

But even Alias didn’t do half as much for me as The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I knew Tolkien had inspired very nearly every fantasy writer out there, but I had no use for him.  Too wordy, too archaic, and I really didn’t like Hobbits.  I went to see Fellowship because a coworker had no one to go with, and I’d heard it was good.  Came out of it hyperventilating.  That.  That.  That was it.  The sum total of everything I’d ever hoped to accomplish: the drama, the richness of the detail, the compelling characters and tough decisions and impossible odds, the beauty, the darkness….  I went out and got my hands on every book on Tolkien I could find, finally read The Lord of the Rings for myself, and tore down my world in order to rebuild from the ground up (a project still ongoing).  Seeing the differences between the books and the movies showed me a thing or two about revision.  There’s no part of my writing that those movies, books and all the rest hasn’t affected.  And yes, when you see pictures of me and see that ring around my neck, that is indeed the One Ring.  I wear it because I made a promise, and because it reminds me of what’s most important in my life: the stories.  Always the stories.

Yes, I know.  I’m a tremendous geek.  Well, you would be, too, if your whole life had got changed like that.

Believe it or not, Batman Begins is the real driving force behind one of the most important characters in the series.  I’d loved Batman for a long time, mind you.  The idea of a fully-human superhero definitely informs my main character, who’s got all of these amazing powers not by virtue of being born that way, but because, like Bruce Wayne, she works her ass off.  They’re quite a lot alike, those two, and I’ve always known it.  But that was comic book Batman.  When I saw Batman Begins, it felt like looking at Sovaal in a mirror.  When you see the trajectory of his life and what he is now, you might catch an echo of it, too.  Their lives have been very, very different, but that melancholy intensity Christian Bale brought to the character of Batman is Sovaal to a T.  And, considering the series is, at core, all about Sovaal, that’s important.  The movie gets him talking.  Considering how rarely he talks, that’s an extraordinary gift.

I want to state something for the record right now: I wasn’t watching House when I wrote up some of my main character’s habits, like her propensity for scribbling on markerboards and hounding people for ideas.  I’d already written that scene when, one night, ill with labyrinthitis, I collapsed on the couch and decided to see what my roommate had on the DVR.  It turned out to be an episode of House, and I watched in slack-jawed amazement as Dr. House did the things Dusty does.  I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised.  Both of them are somewhat isolated geniuses and Sherlock Holmes fans.

Later, House inspired the psychiatrist character who occasionally pops in for a bit of perspective and random comic relief.  And the show has validated my markerboard scenes.  I shall let them stand, even though I’ll be accused of imitation.

Finally, we come to the reason why I’ve spent a week pre-loading a month of blog posts in an effort to clear my calendar: Doctor Who.  And I would, once again, like to state for the record that I was not a Doctor Who fan and had never seen a single episode of the show when I was writing many of the scenes in which my main character displays a smart-ass sense of humor whilst leaping into chaos with manic delight.  Yes, she sounds very much like the Doctor, so much so that when I read out a few bits to my best friend a few weeks ago, he gasped in shock and then started howling with delighted laughter.  As he says, she is the Doctor for her universe.  That wasn’t intentional.  It just happened.

That said, I’m finding enormous inspiration in this show.  The storytelling is so compelling that it feels simultaneously like an addiction and like falling in love at first sight.  And the reason it compels me so is that it’s prompted me to look at my universe with new eyes.  The Doctor’s eyes, even so.  Which has forced me to question long-

held assumptions.  There are many bits I knew were weak, many places where there was a lot of hand-waving and a hearty, “That’s just the way it is!” in place of a valid explanation.  There were assumptions I didn’t even know needed questioning until I started viewing things through the Doctor’s eyes.  It’s poured new life into the stories I want to tell.  It’s given me a new passion for storytelling, for figuring things out, for doing the hard thinking.  And I can no longer claim to be an atheist, as I am busy worshiping Steven Moffat. 

There are other shows and movies that have inspired bits and pieces, but the above are the main drivers.  They’re the ones I can point to and say, “They made me a far better writer.”  They keep me writing.  They allow me to experience my story worlds with all my senses.  And that, my dear flummoxed friends, is why I’ll sit here obsessively watching them dozens of times over.  It’s not entertainment so much as education.

Not to mention the most important thing: inspiration.

Wellsprings of Inspiration Part II: Movies and Teevee

Kaibab

I feel like waxing sentimental about sediments again.  And one word, just one, is all it takes to put me in an altered state:

Kaibab.

Just say it: kye-bab.  Short.  Slightly exotic.  Maybe it doesn’t roll off your tongue.  Maybe it sounds a bit hard, truncated, abrupt.  It’s a Paiute word that means “mountain lying down” or “mountain inside-out.”  It’s a good name, appropriate for a formation from which you can see a mountain that blew itself inside-out.

In a land of black volcanics, red beds, and tan dirt, it’s a dramatic snowy-white in certain light, shading to a pale golden beige.  It was my first experience with the ocean.  It’s astonishingly beautiful.

Promontory of Kaibab Limestone, with ruins in the distance

Here we are, at Lomaki Ruin.  Look at the crumbling Kaibab.  Long, long ago, this area was submerged under a shallow tropical sea.  Two hundred and fifty million years later, Sunset Crater laid down a sea of cinders, which you can see lapping against the promontory.  The limestone shrugged off the young volcanic upstart here.  The Sinauga used it to build their homes, perched on cliffs of it.

Box Canyon Ruin, San Francisco Peaks, and the Box Canyon

You can see its bedding planes here in the canyon walls, with the San Francisco Peaks forming the backdrop.  Fishes swam here once.  Brachiopods, mollusks, sea lilies, and corals went about their lives in shallow warm waters, generations of them.  There was a time when oceanfront property in Arizona wasn’t a joke.  Depending on how you view matters, it still isn’t.  The ancient peoples who lived here probably never knew it, but they had ocean views.

Lomaki Ruins, with the Painted Desert in the distance

Look at that bright line of rock, far in the distance.  That’s the Painted Desert.  You can sit on the Kaibab here and look over ages, laid out in delicate, sweeping colors in the far distance.  That’s the kind of land this is.  Everywhere you turn, there’s a new scene.  And I didn’t know it as a young college student, reading about karst landscapes for the first time, it turned out I’d been living in one all along.  My old house backed onto a forest filled with limestone cliffs.  Just down the road from here is an enormous sinkhole, which we shall visit sometime soon.  The land beneath us is riddled with caverns, and in one utterly magical place, the wind blows from underground.

It was in a shallow pond at the bottom of a Kaibab canyon that I caught my first tadpoles.  The first (and only) time I shot a rifle, I was standing on a ledge of the Kaibab, aiming at a fallen log across that self-same canyon.  Hit it, too, which pissed off the boys I was shooting with – they who couldn’t hit the damned thing to safe their lives.  The shot echoed off the ancient sea walls, and a little puff of dust went up from the log, and the boys gasped and then grumbled, because a girl had just outgunned them.  They got over it.

Later, we’d ride our horses down those blocky limestone walls, finding a sure path down.  Lichen grew in shades of gray-green and brilliant orange and delicate yellow on the old stones.  Sometimes, you’d come across a surface many people had walked over, and it gleamed, polished and smooth and cool to the touch.  We had an old white-and-gray boulder of it in the middle of our yard.  It had defeated my dad, who’d had delusions of neat and tidy landscaping.  When he mowed down the weeds, he’d have to leave a little island around that boulder, which in turns became my own personal mountain to climb or a throne to perch upon, depending on what imagination required that day.  And if you turned over bits of it, you might find a nest of spiders or some really brilliant velvet ants, which would scream a squeaky sound like “help!” if you flipped them gently onto their backs with a stick.  Those were amazing creatures, black with their furry abdomens in bright shades of scarlet or orange.  They stood out like little drops of fire against the serene cream stone.

The Kaibab provided a solid foundation for excellent childhood memories.  And so you can understand why I grinned so widely, coming across a spectacular outcrop of it at the Grand Canyon:

Mi con Kaibab, snapped by my intrepid companion

Beautiful stuff.  And now that I’m older, and while perhaps not wiser but at least more well-read, I can sit upon it, gaze out over the rolling hills toward distant mountains, and dream of wine-dark seas.

Kaibab

Sometimes It's Hard

I just found out that one of my favorite characters will die.  Oh, it hurts.

This is something only writers truly understand.  Yes, you can grieve for someone you’ve created, who exists only in your mind and on the page.  No, there’s nothing you can do to save them.

I once had someone, an acquaintance from long ago, give me a strange look and a smile that’s hard to describe – something between a smirk and confusion – when I told them I’d reached the point in the story where I had to write up the death of someone I’d come to like very much.  It was going to hurt like hell, I said, trying to steel myself for it.  And she, poor, sweet, innocent thing, gave me that weird little smile and said, “Well, you’re the writer.  You don’t have to kill him.  You can just write him alive.”

Forgive me, but I’ve never come so close to hitting someone.  I tried to explain it’s not that easy.  When you’re writing a war, it’s not just the bad guys who die.  Good people, necessary people, die, sometimes horribly, and you can’t flinch away from that no matter how hard it hurts you.  You sit down.  You put your fingers on the keys.  And you do them justice.  Then you weep, and you go on.

This is something non-writers too often don’t get.  Yes, writers have choices.  We have some measure of control over a story.  But if we’re writing honestly, we don’t get to pick and choose who lives and who dies.  And those story people are so real to us that we mourn them as if we’d just lost a friend.

If I can’t cry, how will you, dear reader?

Sometimes It's Hard

Dojo Summer Sessions

Technically, the winter writing season’s over.  This means the Dojo’s going in to summer sessions.  We’ll have little snippets of writing-related things, but none of the epic-length how-to posts you’ve come to know and, hopefully, at odd times, love.

It shall return full-force in the fall.  This summer season, I’ll be writing up some awesome new stuff.  We’re going to have a series on lessons learned from teevee writers, for one, and who knows what else.  Plenty of topics we haven’t covered yet.  Speaking of topics, have you got some?  Any matters writing-related you’ve been dying for me to opine on, but I haven’t yet obliged?  Let me know, and I’ll get round to them for ye.  Fiction, non-fiction, whatever you like.  I can research absolutely anything.  I might even be able to say something useful about it afterward.

And if any of you have written something about writing and would like it featured prominently here, this is your time.  This is your chance.  This is Ms. Opportunity knocking.  If you’ve posted it to a blog, send me the link.  Yahoo knows me as dhunterauthor.  If you haven’t got a blog, but have some advice you’d like to share with the rest of us, you can send it on and I’ll do it up all nice and bloggy for you.

Now it’s time for me to put my flame-retardant suit on and leap back into the fire, because while the winter writing season is technically over, my Muse doesn’t quite see it that way.  Rule #1 of writing: your best-laid schemes will gang aft agley.

Dojo Summer Sessions

Taking it Personally

The party of “life” strikes again:

House File 1467, which ought to be called “Shoot First,” will be heard in the House Public Safety Committee this Thursday. It would allow the killing of anyone who enters another’s yard, even when the person is unarmed and posing no threat; and it would allow the killing of anyone in a public place who seems threatening — again, even if the person is unarmed, and even if walking or driving away is a safe option. 

This is how cheap the Republicans in Minnesota think life is.  This is how little they value it.  What this bill would mean is that no one, anywhere, is safe at any time.

Think about what kind of society that is.

Back when I worked at a bookstore in the Phoenix metro area, a woman came into the store.  She needed a book on grief.  Could I recommend any?

I was too young to know what grief is, not even twenty.  I’d only suffered a few losses: my grandmother died of breast cancer when I was seven, my grandfather of complications from diabetes a few years later, my uncle the same way when I was fourteen.  But they lived half a continent away.  I’d felt pain, briefly, but their loss hadn’t been a constant hole.  What did I know about grief and mourning?  Nothing.  I took her over to the proper section, tried to make a few recommendations based on what other people had bought, rang up her purchases.

That’s when she told me why.

She’d had a son.  A little younger than me, just a teenager, on his way home one evening.  He took a shortcut through a neighbor’s yard.  He knew the neighbor, didn’t think it would be a big deal, nothing he hadn’t done before.  But that night, the neighbor picked up a gun.  Went to the door.  Didn’t bother with a warning, didn’t bother to identify, just shot.

Her son died.  The neighbor faced no consequences.  The kid had been on someone else’s property, after all, and it didn’t matter to the fine people of Arizona that he was a kid who hadn’t done a single threatening thing.  I believe there was a trial, but the jury wouldn’t convict.

And if the Republicans in Minnesota had their way, there wouldn’t even be that much.

What do you say to a woman whose son had been murdered, shot down by someone they knew, and who had been denied justice by a jury of their peers?  What will you say to the people who will lose loved ones, because their “crime” was stepping on the wrong bit of property or maybe looking too closely at some trigger-happy shit at the local park?  What will you say when the person who pulled the trigger walks away without facing a single instant of jail time for taking a human life?

But that’s not all:

Also buried in this bill is a loosening of concealed-carry permit laws to recognize all other state’s pistol permits in Minnesota, even states with lax background checks that issue permits valid for life. It also makes it harder for local law enforcement to prevent prohibited purchasers from getting permits to buy guns, and limits law enforcement’s ability to confiscate weapons in domestic violence situations. 

So that means guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.  And guns in the hands of abusers.

Basically, what the Republicans are saying is, if the police get called out on a domestic, they can’t take the guns away from the very upset, demonstrably violent person who might then decide to reassert his (or, less probably, her) dominance by taking one of those non-confiscated weapons and putting a bullet or few through the head of the person they’ve been busy abusing.  According to the Republicans, this is right and good and how things are supposed to be.

Am I taking it personally, despite the fact I don’t live in Minnesota?  You betcha.  Not only are there people in Minnesota I quite like and would prefer to see survive, but Republican insanity has a distressing tendency to spread to other states.  It’s like measles, or smallpox, and there appears to be no vaccine.  There are plenty of people in the great state of Washington who think living in the Wild West is an ideal, not a problem.

So, Minnesotans, make sure your reps know you don’t agree that life is so fucking cheap.  And as for the rest of us, we’d best be on our guard.

We’d better be taking it personally.

Taking it Personally

Accretionary Wedge #34: Call for Posts

And this time, it’s gonna get weird.

Not just because I’m hosting, although that’s weird enough.  But we’re talking about Weird Geology.

Let’s face facts, people.  Geology can be strange.  Outrageous.  Bizarre.  I’m sure you’ve all run into formations and landscapes and concepts that have left you scratching your head.  Maybe they got less weird later.  Maybe they stayed strange.  But however transient or permanent that weirdness was, it got weird.

So tell us about it.  Hit us with the strangest stuff you’ve got.

And then throw me a link in comments here, or at the main Accretionary Wedge site.  Let’s say, oh, by May 27th, so that I can have us all weirded out by the 29th.

Accretionary Wedge #34: Call for Posts