hunter
hunter's JournalIs the second ammendment a good thing? No. Hand me my black Sharpie marker. I'll take care of it.
I think anyone who owns a gun ought to be required to do a six week military boot camp, adapted to their physical abilities, but mentally and physically challenging in every way. Anyone who drops out, gets kicked out for anger issues, being a racist asshole, whatever... sorry, no gun license and three years before you can try again.
In addition gun owners would be required to do six weeks of national service every other year, not necessarily related to military or police types of duty, but working closely with a diverse sampling of the entire U.S. population -- white, black, young, old, immigrant, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, wealthy, poor, urban, rural, LBGT, etc. These gun owners would also be on call for military service at all times.
Licensing requirements for a very limited variety of hunting rifles and shotguns would not be so strict, but still require training and exams, rather like a driver's license.
Possessing a gun without a license would result in a mandatory one year prison sentence.
Parents often pass authoritarianism onto their children.
I was raised to "Question Authority," even to push back and disrupt it whenever it became abusive, or to flee if the fight became hopeless.
That's probably why most of my ancestors came to the United States and why they often ran into the wilderness just as soon as their feet touched the ground. Most of them didn't leave any official records of their arrival. Entire crews abandoned ship in San Francisco, for example, and many of those ships are still there buried beneath the city.
The most interesting thing to me is how religion played a part in it. Claims of human authority could be canceled out of any moral equation by direct appeal to God.
The authorities are telling me one thing, God is telling me another. I think I'll go with God here...
Mostly that worked pretty well as this God is the "love your neighbor, don't kill him or steal his stuff," sort of God, with all those rules superseded by the "you're not somebody else's stuff, you belong to God" sort of God.
Wives and children are not the property of their husbands, workers are not the property of their bosses, and slavery is evil.
One of my ancestors escaped authoritarian Europe as a mail order bride. Unfortunately she ended up in Salt Lake City as one of multiple wives. The Mormons were convinced that polygamy was okay with God, but she was not. So she ran away with a U.S. government surveyor and established a wilderness homestead.
Certainly it may have been God telling her to do that, a conflict with her own religious beliefs, but more immediately she didn't like sharing a husband with other women in a patriarchal authoritarian society. Running off with the dashing young explorer must have seemed a wonderfully romantic and exciting thing to do. It's unknown if their first kid was the offspring of temporary Mormon husband or her forever husband, and it doesn't matter.
One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is some rather twisted beliefs about punishment. Authoritarians train their children to accept punishment, and they use punishment as a tool to enforce conformity to their authoritarian social structures. Some children rebel and escape these structures, but many grow up to become authoritarians themselves.
My own childhood was more of an anarchy than anything else. Neither punishment nor reward were used as tools of behavior modification. I don't respond to either. Every day was full of random shit and random reward, true hunter gatherer style.
Some days you get the sweet berries and salmon, some days the bears chase you away. I probably would have benefited from a little more family social structure, two of my siblings ran off when they were sixteen because there was just too much chaos in the household, but I do know that an authoritarian household would have likely destroyed me or set me loose on the world as a fifteen year old street kid. (My own runaway siblings got good jobs and found neat, very quiet places to live. How boring!)
Part of any family culture is genetic and the family culture adapts to the genetics.But I also think there are some authoritarian family cultures that are malignant and abusive and passed on from generation to generation.
It's difficult enough to get me onto an airplane...
...I think before I went into outer space I'd want a body adapted to space travel.
I'd be tolerant of vacuum, temperature and radiation extremes, and photosynthetic too so I could soak up calories from sunshine. In short, I'd be tough enough to run around naked on the surface of Mars.
If the human race or our intellectual progeny survive (doubtful) they'll probably look at our visions of human space colonies and chemical rockets the same way we look at Jules Verne's moon travel by giant gun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon
If there's any future for intelligent life from Earth it belongs to our machines; machines that will quite a bit more intelligent than we are.
Humans, if we are lucky, will be living as hunter-gathers with built-in internet connections and medical kits. Telepathic communication will be a reality and people will live as long as they want to. Then they will delete themselves or upload edited versions of themselves as artificial intelligences. As artificial intelligences, smaller than grains of sand, they will occupy any sort of body they can create, and they'll be able to travel anywhere they please within the boundaries of known physics.
The universe is probably full of such entities already. It's a giant celebration that never ends, a place some primitives would label "heaven."
Occasionally someone who is still human will want to travel in space, and they will, but only as the ward of their intellectual children. Want to bounce around on the moon in a human body wrapped up in a spacesuit, just like Neil Armstrong? Sure, we can arrange that. But seriously, spearing a salmon for dinner in some Northwestern American stream, or taking your dogs for a walk on a beach, that's a lot of fun too.
Our health care system is rotten.
People who have money and cancers that are not really treatable get inappropriate medical care and die in very ugly and expensive ways, while people who have cancers that are treatable but have no money die because their cancers are not caught early or they can't afford appropriate treatment.
We desperately need a national health care system that is blind to wealth and gives appropriate and effective medical care to anyone who suffers the misfortune of needing it.
The past is as mutable as the future and we exist only in the now.
In other words, "now" shapes both the future and the past, and neither is any place you can visit.
You are free to change either the future or the past, but so is every other little bit of matter-energy in the universe, and this all collapses into a consensus of "now" which is the only thing that actually exists. There are probable pasts, and probable futures, but there isn't any "there" in the past or future to go to.
Wherever you are going, here you are, and wherever you've been, here you are. From our forward leaning cultural perspective which models the past as something immutable, an anchor of sorts in an incomprehensibly fluid universe, we say "Wherever you go, there you are."
This is a consequence of all things being energy. Energy doesn't experience time. You are energy, everything is energy, and it's all moving at the speed of light, which is the only "speed" of anything, no slower, no faster. What we see as energy, and what we see as mass, is all about perspective and relativity. The three dimensional universe + time we perceive is not the canvas upon which this universe is written.
Our perspective is a consequence of our genes and our evolution. There's no reason for minds like ours to comprehend anything not directly related to the propagation of our genes. Most of us have minds flexible enough to get beyond the simple model of a flat earth and a dome of the heavens; we can understand that the earth is spherical, and our planet is orbiting the sun, which orbits the central mass of the galaxy, etc., etc., etc. with all sorts of complications. But it's incredibly difficult for us to grasp non-intuitive things like how all the math of quantum physics, Special Relativity, Maxwell's Equations, etc., etc., fits together. There are various models of the universe, some better than others, but still no "Universal Theory of Everything," which may be beyond minds like ours for the simple reason that the universe is very big and we are very small.
Hunter doesn't leave the Church, the Church leaves Hunter.
Nope, I've never been physically removed from a church (unlike like my mom) but I still go with the attitude that I don't belong to the Church, the Church belongs to me and my community. If the Church hasn't yet been brave enough to ask me about that money they don't get from me, then I don't expect they ever will be.
I'm pretty sure they know.
My parents, and my wife's parents started using birth control after they'd birthed a few more kids than they could comfortably support. This was the 'sixties. After that they were birth control using heretics.
I'm pretty comfortable as a gay rights activist, father of only two kids, and overall heretic.
I've got a lot of the same feelings for the Church as I do the USA itself. It is an integral part of my community. Unlike the USA, I can pick and choose how I support the Church. If I stop paying my Federal taxes because I don't want them to spend my money on war then the IRS gets on my case. If I don't put any money in the collection basket, nobody asks. I'm utterly shameless about that.
I'm fortunate to live in a community with a somewhat liberal Church. I've lived in and visited places where the Roman Catholic (and even the Episcopal Churches) seem to be competing with the right wing fundamentalists to see how many people they can label as outcasts to throw under their Jesus bus. My parents used to live in a place like that. Attending Mass more than once or twice a year there was intolerable to anyone politically left of Bill O'Reilly or Newt Gingrich, even anyone still exercising half a brain. Mass was attended regularly by a bunch of Fox News watching fossils who held a secret suspicion that Vatican II was the work of Satan. My Italian great uncle, a guy who loved everyone, and everyone loved, a guy who had gay friends in Hollywood long before that was cool, a giving Christian in so many ways, got possibly the worst funeral ever. I can summarize in a single sentence paraphrasing what the fossil priest said, "This dude wasn't a good Catholic and is probably going to hell so be afraid and pray for your own soul."
Um, okay, Father. I'm not afraid of supporting civil rights and loving my neighbor. How about you? You could feel the whispering snark in the air, almost as bad as when one of my childhood friends married a fundy. "Obey your husband," the fundy preacher said. Nope, that ain't going to happen in this matriarchal community. Little do you know, husband, your bow hunting days are over. You're going to be a vegetarian like your wife. And it was so. One of my brothers ended up in a similar situation, but fortunately surfing wasn't a sin in her religion. My brother surfs while his wife and kids ride horses.
This poor Priest didn't last long at my great uncle's wake. Everyone was drinking and laughing and being very Irish. After Father left a few virgins may have been lost. If it happened in my great uncle's strawberry patch or next to his bait worm farm then my great uncle is probably still laughing about it. If you are very quiet you might hear him.
Prosperity is when everyone has enough to eat, a safe place to sleep...
... an effective public health care system, universal literacy, with liberty and justice for all.
Everything else is bling.
We can still achieve a prosperous society, but it won't be anything like our present stratified consumer society.
The USA is a wealthy nation, but it's never been a prosperous nation.
Dropping satellite and cable television made my world a much better place.
There are hundreds of excellent movies I haven't yet seen on DVD, and thousands of free or very reasonably priced books on the internet or in used book stores. (In our city the stores that sold new books are gone. The book sections at Target, WalMart, supermarkets, or pharmacy chains are limited.)
When I travel I'll sometimes turn on the hotel television, flip through a few channels, and think "Nope, I don't want this." I go weeks and weeks without seeing a single television commercial.
At best our home internet connection does 320X240 video without pausing so we don't get television that way either. We do receive the major networks over the air. Maybe once or twice a month our kids or guests will watch a sports event, but that's it.
I'd like to see a national high speed internet similar to our public streets and highway system, free for use by anyone. High capacity wireless service would be available wherever there's a public road or trail. All these scummy communication companies would be partly nationalized, and partly transformed into simple vendors, contractors, or content providers. We could take a bite out of our overstuffed defense budget to accomplish it.
The ten year old plus dog we adopted is awesome.
She radiates joy. Everything we do makes her happy. She looked so sad in the animal shelter. We couldn't leave her there. They said they were going to put her down if they couldn't find her owner. They found her owner, but he couldn't take her back, so we took her home.
I'm absolutely certain this dog is thankful we adopted her.
We didn't know it when we got her, but she's a pig hunter. That's why she's covered with scars. She's a well mannered dog in the house, she loves people, but we've learned we can't walk her off-leash in the wilderness because she'll run out and round up anything her previous owner liked to shoot, preferably something large and dangerous. Pigs, coyotes... probably bears and mountain lions too. That's why she's missing most of her tail, chunks of her ears, some teeth, and walks with a limp.
Her last encounter was with a bobcat. The cat ripped a huge gash in her scalp before it escaped unharmed. The dog came back and looked at me like I was a moron because I didn't shoot her prey, the same as our encounter with the pig. I looked at her bloody shredded head and face and decided I was never going to let her run free again. My wife is an expert with surgical glue so we didn't have to go to the vet but it was a nasty looking wound, peeled open so we could see the meat underneath. But it's healing nicely...
The only other dog we've had that was this awful was a catahoula, yet another shelter dog. She was the smartest dog I've ever had, with the same extreme enthusiasm for life, but she always had sense enough to keep her distance from whatever she was chasing which was a good thing because my wife's parents' neighbors had some adopted BLM horses that were intent on killing her when they first met, but eventually they became buddies.
This dog seems okay around horses, she seems disinterested when I've got her on the leash and they pass on the trail, but I'm not chancing it.
Much better than fishmeal.
Scooping up everything out of the ocean and turning it into fishmeal for "farmed" salmon and other industrial scale meat production is just one of the ways we are destroying the oceans.
Of course the problem with these sorts of innovations is they rarely replace environmentally destructive practices. When more salmon feed is produced we simply get more salmon farms, when more chicken feed is produced we get more industrial chicken production.
I don't think eating animals is in itself unethical. Humans have been eating animals for a very long time. Eating animals is in our genes.
As a kid most of the meat we ate was fish we caught or actual farm and ranch animals, not animals raised in factories. My dad didn't hunt but he has friends who do which is good for occasional venison, etc. I've eaten pigs and chickens and cows I've seen alive. Some pig I fed and talked to ended up in the freezer. Which is why I'm now a vegetarian most days.
When I do eat meat I know where it comes from. My mom goes so far as to thank the spirit of the animal on the dinner plate, especially the Thanksgiving turkey. (One more reason many Christian religions have shunned her...) My mom and dad also hosted a couple of vegan Thanksgiving dinners when I was a kid which my ranching and dairy family older relatives were not too keen about. So they'd compensate by serving extra dead meat when Thanksgiving was held at their homes. We'd get turkey, pork, venison, trout, beef and salmon! My mom had lots of animal spirits to thank, but mostly she did it silently.
So I wonder... if I made a meatloaf out of fly larvae could I connect to some sort of individual insect animal spirit? Mostly flies annoy me, but I was watching a little Hoverfly this morning and it seemed a little spirit was in there.
Maybe this is the sort of thing you must generalize to a God or a Great Spirit. I'll give my most non-heretical Christian friends and relatives that, that their Thank you God is a generalized "thank You to the turkey spirits You created too."
Strict vegans may disagree, but I have trouble with plant spirits too. I'm trained as a biologist. Plant's are like animals that can't run away. They might easily be much more sophisticated than insects. Therefore if you are the sort of person who thanks animal spirits, then you ought to be thanking plant spirits too...
Complications, complications....
Profile Information
Name: HunterGender: Male
Current location: California
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 38,310