Anti-Gun control seems to be a big well spring of bad sloganeering lately.

BTW, if anyone knows any bad Pro-Gun Control propaganda, I would be more than willing to critique it.

It is true that criminals don't obey gun laws. They are part of a subset of other laws that criminals don't obey, which is ALL OF THEM. That is kind of why they are criminals. So the easily facile response to this is "Criminals don't obey murder laws!"

Besides there is a difference. A gun is an instrumentality. It can be used for criminal purposes, or for non-criminal purposes. So in a society where guns are outlawed, criminals, who are willing to break the law, would have the ability to pursue further criminal ends, while law-abiding citizens wouldn't have the means to pursue self-defense.

Besides, of course, there is a thing about that "OBEY THE LAW" thing. Laws aren't always enforced because people choose to obey them. They are enforced because they have enforcement. In a society where guns were truly not available, criminals wouldn't have access to guns, no matter how much they clicked their heels together.

So one of the hidden premises in this phrase is that guns will always, be, de facto, available, and that their legal status will not stop criminals from accessing them.

Which is actually a pretty good argument. But that nuance is left out of the bumper sticker version because, well, honestly, [redacted].

I haven't yet found a good metaphor for guns and their legality. Automobiles seem to be a favorite.

We could actually break this down into an equation:

Cars+Alcohol=Drunk Driving
Guns+Criminality=Gun Crimes

Which makes sense sense, although it fails on two major counts. One, alcohol is itself a product that is regulated, fairly heavily. "Criminality", or however else we want to measure what turns the controller of a gun into a criminal, is a more amorphous thing.

Secondly, while automobiles do have dangers, they also have a use that is different than the use of a gun. An automobile is used to get places. It can also kill people. A gun's primary use, however, is violence.

Thirdly...the words "sober people". Gun control would be more like making it harder for EVERYONE to own cars.

Again, I am not stupid enough to state an argument for gun control. All I am saying is that argument by metaphor and analogy is one of the weaker forms of argument.

I am likely to believe in parts of this. Even without sources, it tells a story that I can believe.

However, there is a big question that I would ask, about whether things are quite as lopsided as this would indicate.

What are the sizes of the companies in these various countries? And do each of them have the same criteria for what makes a company? If Great Britain has laws that make it easier for smaller companies to incorporate, there could be dozens of small companies to every big one in the US, drawing the average down. I could question the data many other ways like this. So while this might be true, I don't know exactly how the data would be determined.

Apparently Bill Maher is a 15 year old girl that just discovered black nail polish.

I don't know for sure, but having seen lots of maps like this, I have noticed that the choice of colors might be used to convey a message.  Red colors seem to be used to convey policies or conditions that are irrational or undesirable, while blue is used to convey rational or desirable conditions.

Other than that (possibly paranoid) guess, this seems to be fairly straightforward and useful in its presentation.

Here we have another example of two of the things propaganda does best: narrative and dichotomy. The narrative of "American Exceptionalism" is that the United States is a country with unique freedoms, history, and economic and cultural achievements. The counter-narrative is that Americans are big fat violent idiots.

Another problem is cardinal ratings. To use an example that isn't on here, the United States has the 35th highest life expectancy in the world. Which sounds pretty bad, but when put in terms of actual numbers, the US's raw number 77.71 years (77 years and 9 months) is not that far below the top nation (Japan, with 82.08 years (82 years and a month). On a bar graph, the distance between #5, Australia, 80 years, 7 months, #15 New Zealand 79 years, 7 months and #25 Great Britain (78 years, and 50 weeks) would look almost indistinguishable, especially compared to the dramatic differences in their cardinal rankings.
(http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_lif_exp_at_bir_tot_yea-life-expectancy-birth-total-years), btw

But back to the stats they did mention: they chose 9. Which allows for the cherry picking of data. Also, some of the things they collected seemed rather...dissimilar. I don't think teen pregnancy is the same as rape.

But much more simpler, lets look at some of those stats. Actually, lets just look at one of them because life is short. I actually couldn't find data for "heart attacks", but I did find data for "heart disease deaths" in 26 developed country, again on the very useful nationmaster.com. On this graph, the US is at #13. In terms of numbers, the US has 106.5 heart disease deaths per 100,000 people, significantly less than Slovakia at 216 per, significantly more than Japan at 30 per, and almost the same as Germany at 106.1 per.

If you actually look through statistics, there is not a lot of support for theories of American exceptionalism either for the bad or for the good. The US statistically usually rates about the same as other developed countries, sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse. Usually spinning the numbers into a narrative requires a) cherry picking data and/or b) using cardinal rankings to turn what might be a small discrepancy into a horse race.

One of the basic truths of a democracy is that we aren't all like each other. If we were, then we could just choose someone at random, and make them dictator, and it wouldn't matter because we all believed the same.

As mentioned previously, one of the basic techniques of propaganda is to create dichotomies. And this picture is a great example of that. Some of the distinctions drawn are somewhat exaggerated. "We struggle to survive. Romney flaunts his wealth." There are a lot of people struggling, but that "we" are struggling is creating a dichotomy: many people are, if not doing peachy keen, still not "struggling". And as for Romney flaunting his wealth, Romney isn't exactly the "flaunting" type. It might actually be better for him if he was. The last item is an especially strong blanket statement. "We've lost the American Dream. Romney killed the American Dream". While the morality of the type of corporate financing that Romney did is a very open question, both the fact that the "American Dream" has been lost, and that Romney (personally? all by himself?) killed it is a very overarching dichotomy.

Also, what is he doing on his fingers? Really counting his mansions?

But, to go back to my first point. In a Democracy, we have a variety of people with different backgrounds and beliefs, and sometimes we will support someone politically who doesn't have the same background as us. But it is also reasonable that we expect those people to have some type of understanding of us. So while the image uses some pretty base dichotomizing to paint Romney as different, it is also fair to ask whether he has the background to understand what we are going through.

Hopefully this blog won't turn into one of those things where I have a good idea and then forget about it. Or even a mediocre idea and forget about it.

There is a lot of dumb stuff on the internet still, but sometimes I don't make it a priority to point it out.

But I am back for a special Fourth of July edition!

So here we have some narrative: an important science story overlooked by a public who would rather read about Justin Bieber.
My own exception to this is that on July 4th, we shouldn't be reading about Canadians.
Anyway:

I couldn't find any mention of Just Bieber's temper tantrum on my yahoo news feed. There is mention of the Higgs Boson, although they "humanize" it up by talking about how Dr. Hawking is losing a bet. And the picture news is about BBQ sauce, which is fitting for the holiday.

Furthermore, while it is true that Yahoo's front page news tends to be slanted towards human interest stories, its also true that Yahoo's front page news is not indicative of the world or country as a whole. How would Captain Picard feel if we judged his entire life by the times he became a spokesman for the Borg?

Game, set, match.