The Liberals are arrogant???

[Agrajag]

Sorry to get to this so late, but let me point out a few things and get your take on it.

First there's this item which I've run into several times since 2000 and now updated:

http://chrisevans3d.com/files/iq.htm

Then there's the issue of many on the Right who simply cannot seem to read a complete sentence. If they could read a complete sentence then the meaning of this one simple sentence would leave no further argument:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Forgive me for taking issue with people who want to argue what that sentence means. It's like arguing with someone about whether it's Thursday.

I'm also not going to be read the riot act over my lack of morals from people who clearly should be sitting at the back of the room keeping their mouth shut about the issue. Why?

http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsUS2.shtml

So, the center of the liberal world, Massachusetts, where g-a-y marriage was the talk of the season, has the lowest divorce rate. 9 of the top 10 on that list are blue states. What's at the bottom of that list? The 13 at the bottom are all Red states. 21 of the bottom 23? Red states. And these are the people who are going to tell me that a) my morals are questionable and b) that g-a-y marriage is going to ruin the institution of marriage? Give me a break.

It reminds me of the "Contract with America" period back in the 90's when people like Newt Gingrich (who served his wife with divorce papers on her death bed), Bob Dole (who divorced his wife to marry an ex-model (Elizabeth) and Bob Livingston (the one Larry Flynt exposed for having several extramarital affairs) and many others of similar background all screaming about family values and morality. They had the gaul to slam Clinton over oral sex (more hypocrisy) and what did Clinton and Hillary (yet another target of the Right) do? They went to church, prayed and, MOST TELLING, they stayed together and worked it out. Hmm.....

(More info: http://www.ncpa.org/pd/social/pd111999g.html)

And what about love they neighbor? In 1996, the U.S. murder rate was 7.4 per 100,000 people. The rate that same year showed 12 of the 20 states with the highest murder rates were in the South.

States topping the list of murders per 100,000: Louisiana (17.5), Mississippi (11.1), Alabama (10.4), Tennessee (9.5) and South Carolina (9.0).

Then there's the issue that the Blue states pay more in taxes by a large margin than the red states do and the leading receivers of that tax money are almost always red states while the lowest recipients are the blue states that forked over the money.

Forgive me if I'm not going to put much stock in someone from a red state calling me an elitist, arrogant or who questions my morality. You know who I respect? People who earn my respect by their actions, not by their words.

I will tell you that I have a REALLY hard time respecting anyone who listens to Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh and thinks they're honest people who tell it like it is. These are hate mongers who do nothing but continue to stick the knife in every chance they get in an attempt to snow as many people as possible. In one sentence today I heard Limbaugh (yes, I actually listen to all sides instead of being critical of Michael Moore without having ever seen anything the guy has done) say that the Liberals are entirely full of themselves and then said he'd be right back to continue his excellence in broadcasting. And if I hear Sean Hannity use the terms arrogance and "Hannitized" in the same sentence once more, I'm going to scream.

95% of people believe that the things they believe are right or else they would not believe them. Those who have other beliefs are considered, by a large majority of the other side, to not only be wrong but to be arrogant in their belief.

When those of us who aren't evangelically religious get read the riot act by someone who is, you're damned right that we take it as an insult from someone we feel is being arrogant and to our way of thinking, it's not difficult to understand such motivations. To my view, evangelically religious people often believe what they believe more out of a sense of fear than anything and that's what this administration leveraged with unparalled success. Why do many evangelicals believe in God? Well, studies have shown that most people believe in God because they were raised to believe in God. They were often raised with the understanding that Satan was the alternative and damnation came to anyone who believed otherwise (fear). Many people own guns, not out of a sense of sport but out of a sense of seemingly irrational fear. Many of these people are the same people who were raised to believe that sexuality was something to be ashamed of (fear) and is it any wonder to find that the majority of these same people have difficulty coming to terms with the concept of g-a-y relationships? They don't understand them (fear them) so they're against them. As I noted previously the hypocrisy abounds in much of these positions. Life is sacred and should be saved at all costs, including that of the mother in many cases UNLESS you happen to have broken a law. Then you can be put to death and the sooner, the better. This clearly comes from a sense of fear on several levels.

Forgive me, but I will not be moved by arguments that are based on the irrationality caused by fear. I believe in a higher power. That's my business, but I believe that it's ridiculous for ANYONE to suggest they know specifically how this higher power operates and what human response should be to this higher power. Don't such people find it just a little inconvenient that they can believe in something that can only be best described as faith (given the lack of physical evidence in their beliefs) to be critical of another person's belief in a God who would provide them with 72 virgins for doing His work? To those of us who are not evangelical, these two people are not all that far removed. Don't get me wrong. We don't think an evangelical Christian is ever going to run into a building and blow himself up along with many others, but the two do have similarities in how they came to their understanding of religion. Both are based on rather flimsly faith and nothing so flimsy should ever, in our view, be the basis for such torment in the world.

I believe comprehension of our existence on a higher plane is so far beyond our comprehension that it's ridiculous to be hating and killing each other over our variable beliefs on the topic. We should be free to have these beliefs and free to DISCUSS these beliefs but we should not be free to force them on others and, in this point you're absolutely right that I believe I am in the right and if that makes me arrogant in the eyes of those who see it otherwise, so be it.

The current administration may be in power at the moment but it was less than 4 years ago that the Left was in power for 8 years. These things go in cycles and somehow I suspect when the tide turns again, the Right will be screaming from the rafters in just the same way as they're accusing the Left of doing right now.

[Joe]

http://chrisevans3d.com/files/iq.htm

HOAX. There's a thread just down the first page of N&P right now with the same thing.

[egyptfrk]

Bingo. but who says arrogance is a bad thing?

[Glocksman]

Then there's the issue of many on the Right who simply cannot seem to read a complete sentence. If they could read a complete sentence then the meaning of this one simple sentence would leave no further argument:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Educate thyself

If you wanted to know all about the Big Bang, you'd ring up Carl Sagan, right? And if you wanted to know about desert warfare, the man to call would be Norman Schwarzkopf, no question about it. But who would you call if you wanted the top expert on American usage, to tell you the meaning of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution?
That was the question I asked A.C. Brocki, editorial coordinator of the Los Angeles Unified School District and formerly senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Publishers -- who himself had been recommended to me as the foremost expert on English usage in the Los Angeles school system. Mr. Brocki told me to get in touch with Roy Copperud, a retired professor of journalism at the University of Southern California and the author of "American Usage and Style: The Consensus.

A little research lent support to Brocki's opinion of Professor Copperud's expertise.

Roy Copperud was a newspaper writer on major dailies for over three decades before embarking on a distinguished 17-year career teaching journalism at USC. Since 1952, Copperud has been writing a column dealing with the professional aspects of journalism for "Editor and Publisher", a weekly magazine focusing on the journalism field.

He's on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and Merriam Webster's Usage Dictionary frequently cites him as an expert. Copperud's fifth book on usage, "American Usage and Style: The Consensus," has been in continuous print from Van Nostrand Reinhold since 1981, and is the winner of the Association of American Publisher's Humanities Award.

[Copperud:] "The words 'A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,' contrary to the interpretation cited in your letter of July 26, 1991, constitutes a present participle, rather than a clause. It is used as an adjective, modifying 'militia,' which is followed by the main clause of the sentence (subject 'the right', verb 'shall'). The to keep and bear arms is asserted as an essential for maintaining a militia.

"In reply to your numbered questions: [Schulman:] "(1) Can the sentence be interpreted to grant the right to keep and bear arms solely to 'a well-regulated militia'?"

[Copperud:] "(1) The sentence does not restrict the right to keep and bear arms, nor does it state or imply possession of the right elsewhere or by others than the people; it simply makes a positive statement with respect to a right of the people."

It's not the 'right wing' (BTW, there are liberals who support RKBA as well) who can't diagram a sentence.

BTW, that IQ chart was debunked in another thread.

Here's some real data
And a chart

It's one thing to be arrogant, but its another to be both arrogant and incorrect.

[Agrajag]

I wasn't sure about the numbers in the chart which is why I posted it and said it was cause for concern but didn't go into it very much. I'm not sure how someone dubunked it however. Looked for the thread and came up empty.

However, I do disagree with your view on the sentence diagram. It is clearly a clause. Oh well. Disagreement is healthy I suppose. Note also that I'm speaking about gun ownership and fear and not really gun ownership and the Right.

I'm never surprised to find that 90% of the people I know or talk with that own guns own, after a bit of discussion, clearly define their reasoning for owning the guns coming out of a sense of inherent fear which is fairly unsubstantiated. In fact, a couple have been downright scary. They're certain the government will be coming some day and they're preparing. Not the kind of people I want my kids experiencing.

[Ma Deuce]

Sure Liberals are arrogant: The Liberal Party of Canada, that is .

[Glocksman]

These things go in cycles and somehow I suspect when the tide turns again, the Right will be screaming from the rafters in just the same way as they're accusing the Left of doing right now.

I'm sure you're right (pun intended).

Remember the more whacko of the right wingers yelling about Mena airport and Clinton smuggling in cocaine when he was Governor of Arkansas? There are hysterical extremists on both sides. The only difference between the DU and FR boards is that the language on FR isn't quite as profane.

However, I do disagree with your view on the sentence diagram. It is clearly a clause. Oh well. Disagreement is healthy I suppose. Note also that I'm speaking about gun ownership and fear and not really gun ownership and the Right.

I'm no English expert and I'm long out of school, but when I was in school I had to debate the 2nd in Speech class and as part of my prep, I had the teacher 'help' (read: walk me through it) me diagram the sentence and came up with the same conclusion as Copperud.

Another teacher diagrams the 2nd

Apologia pro descriptione mea: The phrase beginning with "a well-regulated militia" and ending with "a free State" is an absolute phrase, a.k.a. nominative absolute. A nominative absolute consists of a substantive (a noun or noun substitute) and a participle and has no grammatical connection with the rest of the sentence. The nominative absolute is identical with the Latin ablative absolute, except that the substantive component of the latter is in the ablative case.

I know this is an 'appeal to authority', but this is a grammatical question that requires expertise to address that I lack.

I'm never surprised to find that 90% of the people I know or talk with that own guns own, after a bit of discussion, clearly define their reasoning for owning the guns coming out of a sense of inherent fear which is fairly unsubstantiated. In fact, a couple have been downright scary. They're certain the government will be coming some day and they're preparing. Not the kind of people I want my kids experiencing.

Fear of government or fear of crime? In some areas, owning a gun is simple prudence because of the crime rate. I have an Indiana LCTH (License to Carry Handgun) and have had it for 14 years, but I seldom carry one. I've never needed a gun for defense and hopefully I never will.

As far as fear of government goes, no gun owner I know is under the illusion that he and his gun can resist the US Army. Sure there are some nuts who advocate armed resistance to jaywalking laws, but the vast majority of gun owners believe as I do. Namely that as long as the ballot box is a valid option, the cartridge box isn't a valid one.

I fully expected Kerry to win last week* and if he had, I wouldn't have thrown a magazine in my AK and gone out to overthrow the government.






*Note: I didn't support Bush or Kerry. I voted Libertarian for President as a protest against the quality of the candidates the major parties ran.

[tharkûn]

First any compilation of statewide statistics is more likely than not BS. Take for instance the murder rates, around here the major contributors to the murder rate, even after population adjustment, would be the inner cities, particularly Detroit. Detroit was Kerry's heaviest backer in Michigan, so even if Michigan has a low overall murder rate, the more crime ridden areas would be the majority who backed Kerry. Last I heard, New Orleons was the most violent place in Lousiana and a blue dot on the map; it is not only possible that a candidate could carry a "violent" state without carrying the majority of people in "violent" neighborhoods, but quite probable. Regardless of which statistic you use, every man has equal voting rights, not every man is going to have equal weight in other measures (like IQ, divorce, etc.)

Second, the country hasn't been run by the left for the last 8 years, since 1994 it has had a conservative legislature (even when Jeffords split) and moderate executive under Clinton. The 1994 elections showed fairly well what a truely left government in the US leads to - electoral backlash.

The democrats need to stop BSing and find a way to win, if you can't beat a president as vunerable as Bush or win the congressional elections in 10 years you are doing something wrong, not just your insipid candidates.

[Petrosjko]

Here's a compilation of quotes mostly relating to the right to keep and bear arms, as discussed by the framers of the Constitution. Here's a particularly good one for this discussion...

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p322.

More Jefferson-

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes...Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
-Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.

And still more Jefferson-

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
-Thomas Jefferson, Proposal Virginia Constitution, 1 T. Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950).

For variety, Alexander Hamilton

"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."
-Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-8.

More variety, this time from Zachariah Johnson.

"The people are nor to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them." -Zachariah Johnson, 3 Elliot, Debates at 646.

Now, to answer you directly...

I'm never surprised to find that 90% of the people I know or talk with that own guns own, after a bit of discussion, clearly define their reasoning for owning the guns coming out of a sense of inherent fear which is fairly unsubstantiated. In fact, a couple have been downright scary. They're certain the government will be coming some day and they're preparing. Not the kind of people I want my kids experiencing.

I don't know about the armed citizens of Jersey, but it's an entirely different matter here. The majority of men who own firearms in my part of Texas own them because their fathers owned them, and their grandfathers owned them, and now they do. Mostly they're used for target shooting, hunting, that sort of thing. It is understood as a given that they are also tools of self-defense against criminals.

Most of the women I've know who owned firearms owned them specifically for self defense, and their fears were far from unsubstantiated. For example, I went to college with a woman who carried illegally before the passage of the state concealed carry law. She had no car and walked around a mile or so each day to get to class, and one day she was chased by a man to her apartment, barely getting the door closed in time for him to pile into it full speed. After that she got a handgun, learned how to shoot it, and carried it with her everywhere she went.

Another woman I knew who carried illegally back in the day was a small business owner who closed her shop at nine p.m. and was usually out the door around ten, often with her bank drop next to her handgun in her purse.

I've known a lot of women who packed heat, and almost universally it was because of stories like the first one above, or hearing about stories like that.

[White Cat]

A well-schooled electorate, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed.

*thumbs up*

[Coyote]

I'm never surprised to find that 90% of the people I know or talk with that own guns own, after a bit of discussion, clearly define their reasoning for owning the guns coming out of a sense of inherent fear which is fairly unsubstantiated. In fact, a couple have been downright scary. They're certain the government will be coming some day and they're preparing. Not the kind of people I want my kids experiencing.

Here's the condescending, self-righteous arrogance that I mentioned in my other post on "the difference betwen left and right".

"Anyone who believes as the other side believes is clearly a moron, a loonie, or a poor duped fool led astray by clever propaganda (Who, if they were "Educated", would think "My Way," the correct way)". There is little or no room to admit that a person can have another point of view on the matter in a reasonable, educated, and intelligent manner.

And, of course, 'they're coming to get your kids'... hmmm.