Today's Headlines · 1:39am Oct 10th, 2015
Russian Cruise Missiles Miss Syria, Hit Iran
The second most-feared military in the world apparently can't even hit the right country with its cruise missiles. This is who the US was worried about?
This makes me wonder whether the Russian ICBMs would have ended up on the right continent, or if Brazil and Nigeria would have had a very bad time in case of World War III.
Tennessee officials ask God to spare them ‘His coming wrath’ over same-sex marriage
“We adopt this Resolution before God that He pass us by in His Coming Wrath and not destroy our County as He did Sodom and Gomorrah.”
USA Today Adopts New Facebook Emojii
Yes, really:
Obama Consoles Families in Oregon Amid 2 More Campus Shootings
The papers were running out of things to say about the Roseburg shootings, so maybe these two new ones will allow them more time to not report on other news.
Tory candidate Sabrina Zuniga says ground will absorb oil spills
Exactly what we want to happen, right?
In other news, I hear the Onion staff took today off.
How are you folks doing?
Oh, yes! Not quite a headline, but a recent survey found that 26% of vegetarians eat meat "fairly often", another 18% occasionally, and another 22% rarely.
So, apparently 2/3rds of vegetarians don't understand what the word "vegetarian" means.
Though this is hardly surprising, as apparently 84% of vegetarians eventually quit the diet - possibly after finding a dictionary.
They must be worried that god has Russia's precision if they are worried about begin hit by wrath against homosexuals.
Of course we are worried. If they hit Canada we're the ones that will get blamed and we're pretty sure Canada can take us in a fight. They've got all the good hockey players and the hockey big trophy is a much better weapon than any of the other sports trophies.
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Are you implying that they've taken to venerating Putin?
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Nah, just that they apparently don't think god can hit just the people he's mad at.
images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120625072618/mlpfanart/images/d/d6/Twilight_2x_facehoof.png
MLFW I read the suggestion that the fact that Russia accidentally hits the wrong country with missiles means we should be less concerned about them
The well of my shedding tears for the human race has run dry, so I think I'll go watch something cheerful, like Blade Runner, or Alien. Then maybe I'll go for a good fire-walking. That should help burn this news out of my head.
So yeah, doing great, thanks!
In other news, Titanium Dragon reads USA Today.
If I wanted to read about idiots, I'd rather scroll below a Youtube video.
Talk about your click bait headlines.
First off, they aren't Tennessee officials in the sense that they represent Tennessee. They're Tennessee officials in the sense that they're located in Tennessee, specifically Blount County (pop. 126,339).
Secondly, they aren't a they. They're a she. That is to say one—and only one—member of the Blount County commission.
The rest of the commission, who can apparently see a disaster when its heading right for them, voted to table the agenda for the evening. Thus preventing her motion from even being heard, much less voted on.
If you don't happen to live in Blount County, it's the poster child of a non-story.
3456109 ...bringing their circulation (minus the copies given away in hotels) up to double digits.
In a US/USSR nuke war, Russian missiles would have been coming in over the North Pole, so Canada could have gotten several dozen accidental craters that they might not have noticed for decades (/snark) Conventional sea-launched cruise missiles sit inside a steel tube in a saltwater environment for years before being fired¹ for a several hundred mile trip at low altitude. It's pretty amazing that as few of them failed as did, provided they *did* fail, and Putin didn't decide to have a few 'Accidental' cluster munitions fall on a few selected Iranian targets. (we can hope)
As for gun control... I live in a community where it is seemingly more common than not to have a concealed carry permit. We generally don't ask if the teachers with permits are using them. We don't have any school shootings. At work, when we were going through the "What to do if somebody comes into the office with a gun" training, I asked, "Can we return fire?" They didn't think it was very funny. They think some stickers on the doors will work just fine.
(1) In Desert Storm, there was a fairly substantual dud rate in SLCMs, leading to some really fun Youtube videos of a missile flying out of the tube... and going *splash* into the ocean as the engine fails to ignite. Not as bad as the guy from work who served a few years on a Boomer. They (unverified) had an underwater test-misfire of a ballistic missile once (where they shoot one off at the test range) The ejection charge fired, the missile rose out of the tube... and fell back onto the boat, banged a few times as the boat moved forward, and sank behind them. He said it was a very exciting few minutes.
At least Putin isn't ordering drone strikes on hospitals. Is Obama the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to bomb another Peace Prize winner?
Eastern Tennessee is a strange place that I am not convinced is part of the same state as its western counterpart.
Another headline, just found:
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School-shootings are extremely rare events. Spree killings at schools are even rarer. Almost nowhere has school shootings; there's like 130,000 schools in the US, versus a bare handful of school spree killings per year, if that.
Most school shootings are actually just straight-up murders that happen to happen at schools - there have been several dozen this year, but only 20 people total have died, including 4 people who killed themselves. Half of those were in Roseburg.
Concealed firearms are part of the American Myth of the Gun; in real life, they're actually mostly useless when dealing with violence. The problem is fourfold:
1) Most violence is sudden, meaning by the time you know bad shit is going down, you're already in trouble (and often, perforated)
2) The guy who is wandering around with a gun in a spree killing is a homicidal loon who has no reason not to shoot anything that moves, putting you at an intrinsic disadvantage.
3) If you pull out your gun, and the cops show up, they'll probably shoot you, thinking you're the spree shooter.
4) Guns aren't forcefields; having a gun doesn't stop someone from shooting you.
Firearms are occasionally useful for self-defense, but it is quite rare; more civilians kill themselves with accidental discharges every year than kill bad guys on purpose (~600 vs ~400). Having a concealed weapon may make you feel safer, but people who own firearms are actually more likely than the general population to be murdered (probably due to some combination of being more likely to own guns because they perceive there being a threat and because people who feel like guns keep them safe may be more likely to start shit and then get shot. Also, possibly their spouses/children/housemates murdering them with their own gun).
If you actually track gun ownership rate versus homicide rate on a state by state basis, there's no correlation; owning guns doesn't make it any less (or more) likely that your state will have a high or low homicide rate, suggesting that guns either have no impact on homicide rates, or that whatever positive and negative impacts they have cancel each other out.
It is worth noting that there were people on the Roseburg campus who had concealed firearms; the situation simply did not present them with an opportunity to do anything useful.
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3456256 No. Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ both won the Nobel peace prize, and Kissinger was involved in bombing North Vietnam, I think.
What Nobel peace price winner are you saying Obama bombed?
Yasser Arafat also won the Nobel peace price.
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Of course, the Nobel prize was created by the inventor of dynamite, who got depressed after people started using it to fight wars. So that seems highly apropos, actually.
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We've been through this before, and you need to stop talking about "guns" and talk only about handguns. Here in western Pennsylvania, there's very little homicide, but lots of guys own hunting rifles. You should also only compare comparable states (ones where it's equally difficult to own handguns).
I find it hard to believe that "gun" ownership isn't very strongly negatively correlated with homicide rates, because I expect gun ownership is much higher in rural areas, where homicide rates are much lower. Probably any lack of correlation is due to looking at states rather than counties. Michigan, for instance, has a high homicide rate and high gun ownership, but the high homicide rate is all in Detroit, and the high gun ownership is everywhere else. Illinois has a high murder rate, but it's probably all in Chicago. There's also confounding cultural (or maybe just "adjacency to Mexico vs. Canada") factors. Southern states have high murder rates; New England states have low murder rates.
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The US military bombed Doctors Without Borders/MSF the other day in Afghanistan.
Allegedly the Afghanis called in an air strike on one of their hospitals (which the US had the coordinates of) and... well, 22 people died. Or something like that.
Or as they like to call it in Afghanistan, Tuesday.
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The problem is that people don't differentiate between "shootings that happen in schools" and "spree killings that happen in schools". People do murder other people in schools periodically, and those, in fact, make up the majority of "school shootings". But they're not like Columbine.
There have been 20 people who were shot to death in schools in the US this year, 16 of which were homicides (4 were suicides or the suicide in a murder-suicide); of the actual victims, 9 were in a single shooting (in Roseburg). Of the remaining 7 deaths, 4 were straight up murders, and one was a fight that escalated into gunfire. We don't know if the ones from today were spree shootings or were murders, but each claimed only one victim apiece.
Of course, the media wants to put your butt in the seat. AMERICA UNDER SIEGE is a better headline than "The US kind of has a generally high homicide rate, and schools don't have magical forcefields that prevent people from committing murders there".
Sensationalism is the name of the game.
It is, of course, mostly bullshit.
Since 2012, according to the lists on Wikipedia, the US has had 8 school massacres, 1 workplace killing, 2 soldiers who started murdering people left and right, and 2 hate crime related massacres. In that same time, France has had the Charlie Hebdo attack and the Toulouse and Montauban shootings. So the US has had 13, France has had 2.
But the US has a population of 318 million people. France has a population of 66 million. So you'd expect there to be roughly 5x as many attacks in the US as France simply because the US has a much larger population. The US has a rate of about 1 incident per 75 million people per year; France has a rate of about 1 incident per 100 million. But because these are so rare, it is difficult to say that this is a statistically significant difference - Norway, for instance, had a huge incident despite having a tiny population, which meant that in that year, it had the highest per capita rate of spree killings in the developed world. But it was just one event. You have to average things out over time when you're looking at extremely rare events.
If you have an event that happens once per year per 75 million people, most countries will have 0 incidents per year most years. But that doesn't really tell us anything useful. If you compare the number of mass killings in all of Europe since 2012, there have been 11, which is not so different from the US's 13. Considering how much higher the US homicide rate is than the European homicide rate, that's not so crazy.
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Unfortunately, as far as I know, this data doesn't exist; state by state data is hard enough to come by. County by county data? I don't think anyone collects gun ownership rates by county, let alone handgun ownership rates. Rural Americans are twice as likely to own guns in general according to Gallup, but they didn't appear to ask what kind of guns folks had.
You're right that the data probably isn't granular enough to draw any really good conclusions. That said, I'm not sure it would be useful even if it existed; blacks have the lowest rate of gun ownership (19% vs 41%), but are the most likely to both commit murder and to be murdered (comprising about 50% of murderers and victims, despite being 13% of the population). Given the magnitude of the racial effect on homicide rates, I'm not sure if gun ownership effects would even be visible. And there are studies which suggest that people who own guns are actually more likely to be murdered than people who don't own guns, which just further confuses the issue, and may be an artifact of, say, gang violence and revenge killings - or maybe it isn't, and people who own guns really are more likely to get murdered because they get into violent confrontations more often, or are more likely to be killed by a family member with access to their guns.
Interestingly, in Canada, murder rates are actually slightly higher in the country than in the city. And in Alaska, Anchorage (the only city of any size) has a below-average homicide rate compared to the state at large. This bucks the overall trend in the US (urban people are 1.9x more likely to be murdered than rural people), but unlike most of the US, rural areas in Alaska aren't any whiter than the cities are.
If there is an actual causal effect from firearms on homicide rates, I can't imagine it is tremendously large.
Not the Onion Staff!
3456107 Careful. Alien might refresh that.
I'd just like to mention that from what I've heard, Russia is basically doing whatever it wants down there around Syria and is trying to pass it off as mistakes. AFAIR they've made something like 50-ish air strikes recently... Of which 2-3 were on target.
I don't remember the source and I can't guarantee that it's completely reliable, but even if it's been exaggerated, it does bring on the thought that maybe the missile was never even meant to hit Syria.
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It isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things, in the end. Did the Bath School Disaster matter? No. People barely remember it happened. Its a piece of trivia. Heck, most people barely remember the Oklahoma City Bombing, and that happened only 20 years ago.
That's not to say it doesn't suck and that it wouldn't be nice if we could prevent it. But freaking out over it is unhelpful. Overreacting is unhelpful.
It matters in the sense of the punishment which is likely to be enacted on the perpetrator.
The people who perform these acts often do have real motives in mind in doing them. Indeed, the core is pretty much identical - they want to feel powerful and hurt people/punish people. They're messed up. These sorts of people are actually fundamentally pretty similar - they don't really make sense, but they think they're making sense.
"I want to be famous" is not any less of a motive than "I want to punish someone for defaming Mohammad".
If someone is making a suicide run, in the end, they're usually not behaving rationally.
Oh, sure, you'll catch some people - and they do. But you can't catch everyone. And indeed, people stop school shooters before they do school shootings in the US.
In the end, they often show similar signals. The problem is, mostly, there are 318 million people - you can't watch them all at once. Some folks are going to slip through the cracks.
They aren't random places to the people who perform these acts. Most school shooters shoot up their own schools. The people who do these things are doing them for their own reasons. Columbine wasn't chosen at random - it was their own school. The guy who shot up a black church this year selected it because it was a black church. The guy who murdered two journalists on TV did it because he hated them and the station they worked for.
Anyone can hold a petty grudge for no good reason absolutely anywhere. That's just reality. And from an outsider's perspective, the targets of terrorists are just as insane and random, like the guy in France who shouted "God is great!" and ran over 10 pedestrians.
You mean other than the one that happened in 2012 when Mohammaed Merah shot up a school? Because that totally happened three years ago.
The three worst attacks in the US didn't even involve guns.
The #3 worst attack involved dynamite.
The #2 worst attack involved a car full of home-made explosives.
The #1 worst attack was conducted by a bunch of guys with box cutters.
Someone could easily blow up a building in France with a car bomb. It wouldn't be hard, especially if they didn't care if they survived, but even if they did, they could probably pull it off pretty easily. Someone could walk up to you tomorrow in the street and stick a knife in your heart. The only reason we're safe is because people almost never do this. Most people don't even contemplate this as being possible.
But there's nothing really stopping people from doing these things.
For all your perceived safety, the US has only had 18 terrorist attacks in it since 2010, while France, a country with a fifth of the population, has had 10 over the same period. 32 people died in the American attacks; 30 died in the French ones. And many of these attacks appear totally random to observers.
When someone shouts "Allahu Akbar" and runs people over with his car, you aren't getting any warning, and as far as you are concerned, that appears to be totally random. It makes no difference if they're doing it because they're angry about speeding tickets or about Islam to the random pedestrians they're running over.
People like to sell the idea that guns are super scary death dealing magic wands, but in the end, they're just one way to kill people - and not even necessarily the best way to wreck havoc on society.
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It is pretty unlikely they meant to bomb Iran; they just signed an intelligence sharing agreement with them and have no reason to do so, and the Iranians do have the ability to shoot down Russian planes, which would be ugly for Russian involvement.
Not to say it is completely impossible, but I doubt that any bomb that landed in Iran was supposed to do so - either they malfunctioned, or were mis-aimed. Starting a war with a random third country that isn't even politically opposed to them right now would be a pretty bizarre move on Russia's part, and from what I could tell, the Russians didn't actually hit anything in Iran, which makes it unlikely it was intentional.
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In France, you love your public intellectuals. I've never been, but I'm given to understand -- and correct me if this is more stereotype than truth -- that the more thought-provoking and challenging a theory that a public intellectual comes up, the more the French public takes to it and debates it and discourses over it. It's a nation, more often than not, that celebrates its intelligentasia.
Whereas the United States was founded on the principle of almighty Reason -- that men[1] can innately sense what's right and true and just in the world without needing an authority to tell them, a very Protestant value. In practice, however, distant in time from the fairly logical attitudes of the Founding Fathers, it's just empowered a bunch of fuckwits to think that anybody who disagrees with them is trying to drill into their heads and steal their Reason away for....reasons? That is, in fact, a major reason why there's such a backlash against gun control; without guns, how will the Christian militia of the righteous and pure at heart stop the Satanic Jewish[2] Illuminati Communist Papacy from taking over the country through Big Government?[3]
In fact, after the Sandy Hook shooting, someone -- Joe the Plumber, maybe? -- accused it of being a false flag by Obama to steal the guns away. And, of course, there's all the conspiracy theories about 9/11. Or, dig into the theories about the moon landing, and sooner or later you'll find the claim that of course a privatized space agency would never conceal evidence of alien life.
Of course, most movements are a spectrum, and there are some eminently logical and reasonable people in favor of gun rights. But there are a whole lot of crazies out there, too; the popular radio host Alex Jones comes to mind. The reigning foundational myth of the United States -- almighty Reason -- has created a nation of persecution complexes, especially among its WASP population. It also has very loose gun laws, which makes gun violence a very alluring alternative for an individual who doesn't want to or is psychologically incapable of admitting they're wrong.
[1] Not women though; they're supposed to do what their husbands tell them, of course
[2] Though after World War II, the "Jewish" part doesn't get mentioned so much anymore
[3] And, of course, gotta stockpile for the battle of Har Meggido while we're at it, because Doomsday is right around the corner and the Lord will call his flock into battle any day now
3456712 The fact that it didn't hit anything is a good point. As for starting wars with random countries, that wouldn't be without precedent (see: Ukraine).
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The main reason most Americans don't want the government to take their guns away is that they believe that the government shouldn't be able to take people's rights away in general. The right to bear arms is seen as an inalienable right because not only does it give you the ability to protect yourself and hunt for food and otherwise be independent, but also because there's no legitimate reason for the government to be taking away the guns of honest people. It is the same way that we oppose restriction of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, ect. Basically, the only way these rights can be restricted is if you're taking away someone else's rights.
The US is a very liberal country (as in, pro-liberty), and is pretty anti-authoritarian.
The US believes that you have the right to say what you want and the right to blow someone's head off if they try to take that away from you. In Europe, they don't think you have the right to say what you want, nor do you have the right to blow someone's head off for oppressing you. They're much more authoritarian, though they've been pretty significantly liberalized. Still, you can see the vestiges of that, with the idea of a right to suppress other people's speech about things that make you look bad because they took place ten years ago, or the idea of "hate speech", or the UK's strict libel laws that the US actually specifically passed a law to give the finger to.
In the US, we're supposed to be capable of self-direction, and not need authority - we're people, not sheep.
Of course, some people are, in fact, desperately stupid, but the Founding Fathers tried to build up a lot of barriers to insulate the people from their own stupidity while allowing those who possessed true Reason to not be interfered with.
The crazy Christian theocrats actually generally stand opposed to America - they don't like freedom very much. They have created an internal myth of America being a Christian Nation, and of the Constitution being based on the Bible, and a lot of other nonsense.
It is about faith, not Reason with a capital R that the Enlightenment adored. They're much more Puritanical, and obsessed with the idea of purity. Conspiracy theories cast them as good men against a sea of evil all around them, a shining beacon of light in a sea of darkness.
God, how did my silly newspaper headlines blog post end up so political? It was supposed to be funny D:
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Oh wow, I forgot about those, especially awarding Kissinger the prize while he was conducting secret bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia.
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Is worth noting that such data does not exist because congress prohibits federal funding for research on gun violence: http://www.businessinsider.com/congressional-ban-on-gun-violence-research-rewnewed-2015-7
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The idea that unrestrained freedom is good for all, despite being a constant talking point for the right, has been well and truly put to rest by now. When the nation was highly rural and made up mostly of yeoman farmers -- Thomas Jefferson's America -- it's a very noble dream indeed. But the dream is over. The industrial revolution killed it. People increasingly need to rely on others for wages, for food, for services, for products. "Self-direction" when you're working on a farm for your own sustenance is not the same as "self-direction", or the lack thereof, when you're a minimum wage worker on the verge of poverty. And that's not even getting into issues of race or ethnicity. Our court system is clearly meant for people with capital to spare, meaning private arbitration is often not worth it for the poorer sections of the populace; hence, greater government authority is inevitable[1], in order to ensure that our interactions are conducted fairly. One of those interactions is the right not to get shot in the face by an automatic weapon, a thing the Founding Fathers had no way of conceiving of.
The idea of the yeoman farmer, the archetypal American standing all by his lonesome, is not the life most people live anymore. Out in the boonies some people still live that way, but not in the suburbs or the cities, where most of America is now concentrated. It comes down to that perennial clash between the city and the country, and the inability to reconcile both ways of life.
But since this is the nation of the individual, people will continue to ignore the wider context and chalk up to the malicious hands of tyranny the fact that they have no control over these social and economic forces.
I was being kind of facetious above when I referred to a Christian militia, but it's not just Christian theocrats I was referring to. I was also referring to the militia movement, Oathkeepers, tax protesters, 9/11 truthers, Ruby Ridge and Waco, the survivalist movement in the mid-west, extreme forms of Mormonism, etc. They are all about "freedom" in a sense, and they're not exclusively Christian. But they are thoroughly American phenomenons.
[1] Inevitable in the sense that a democratic majority who would benefit from such legislation will vote to make it happen (which will then promptly be blamed on the New World Order infiltrating America by unhinged right-wingers -- cf. the Birther movement).
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The main problem is that the NRA believes that building a national database of firearm owners would be a prelude to taking everyone's guns away, which isn't helped by some people shouting loudly that they want to take everyone's guns away. If we had that kind of data, it would be possible to do the research relatively cheaply, but we can't.
And to be fair, the NRA is right in feeling that a lot of these studies have a clear anti-gun agenda behind it, and they frequently misrepresent "gun violence" as both homicides and suicides, which is deeply misleading. Suicides and homicides aren't the same thing, and show very different patterns.
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Unrestricted freedom is good for everyone who hasn't committed a crime and therefore proven that they are unworthy of it. Freedom has nothing to do with being a farmer, and indeed, is more important for non-dirt scratchers. I don't know where you got that idea, but it is unrelated to reality. Of the 1787 delegates, 35 had legal training. 13 were merchants, 7 were land speculators, 11 specialized in securities, 14 were plantation owners, 2 were small farmers, 8 of them were politicians, 3 were retired, 4 were doctors, 1 was a college president, and 2 were scientists. 35 of them had at least some legal training, had practiced law at some point, and there were a number of judges. And most of them had at some point had some form of governmental experience.
These were pretty freaking urban people. These were not a bunch of farmers, and their ideals were unrelated to people being farmers.
Indeed, freedom is more important for more compact populations, as the urge towards authoritarianism grows the more concentrated your population is - it is much harder to oppress a bunch of people who are more self-reliant than a bunch of people who are dependent on the overall structure of society to acquire their daily bread.
The worker on the edge of poverty today is much better off than that farmer was.
People are much better educated and have a much greater amount of opportunity today than they did in the past. There are more opportunities today than there were in 1790.
Court systems are intrinsically expensive because it costs money to pay lawyers and judges and have a building set aside for the practice of law and to recruit jurors and to do all those other things.
That's just reality.
You do have the right to represnt yourself in court, or, in criminal cases, you have the right to have a lawyer appointed for you by the state who has to represent you. You can also choose to pay to have someone else represent you, or even just ask someone to volunteer for it.
It isn't terribly surprising that court cases cost money, because it requires the services of multiple professionals for long periods of time.
Court might be made somewhat less expensive than it is, but it will never be cheap by its very nature.
Not really, no. Most Americans lack much need for private arbitration via the courts. Poor people lack the need for such because they lack the value necessary to make it worth doing. And only a small minority of Americans are poor.
You don'thave the right to restrict the freedoms of other people just because a tiny fraction of the population fails to behave properly.
You can't imprison all black people because black people are 7x more likely to murder people than white people are. You can't imprison all black people because 25% of black males commit crimes for which they serve at least some jail or prison time.
According to your logic, we could do that, on the basis of public safety. And indeed, should do that, because people have the right not to be robbed, assaulted, or murdered, right?
People have options. They just refuse to recognize them most of the time. The fact that most people fail to do so does not mean we should take away the freedoms of those who do recognize that they have a choice.
Not really. Most of them are about the same thing - blaming other people for their personal misfortune.
You see, if the world is corrupt and unassailable, you can be an incorruptible beacon of purity and pureness.
You can be a hero standing against the villainy and corruption of the world.
All the bad things are the world trying to push you down because you are a hero.
Because the alternative - that you're a sad, deluded individual whose failings are their own, not those of THE MAN - is just too sad to contemplate.
Ultimately, these are all the domain of people who want to be special, but who aren't, so they create a fantasy where they are special. The fantasy where they are a Mary Sue - where they are one man, standing against the awfulness of the world.
They're not really any different from the Black Lives Matter folks, when it comes right down to it.
Also, Ruby Ridge shouldn't be lumped into the others. Ruby Ridge was the government screwing up - the guy in question was sent a court order with the wrong date on it, and then they tried to go after him as a result. Seeing as he was paranoid, he felt that the government wasn't dealing with him fairly and was trying to railroad him into jail and step all over him - and to be fair, he was solicited to commit the crime he committed. He's out of jail now, AND the government had to pay his family a big fat cash settlement for wronging him.
That's not to say it wasn't partially the dude's own fault - it totally was - but the government really did screw up there.
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It's late for me and I'm tired, so I'm just going to rebut a few of these and concede the rest as a difference of opinion and/or agreement:
Objectively untrue:
"Thomas Jefferson was a leading advocate of the yeomen, arguing that the independent farmers formed the basis of republican values. Indeed, Jeffersonian Democracy as a political force was largely built around the yeomen."
-Wikipedia, "Yeoman"
The yeoman farmer was, to Jefferson, the quintessential American, the person that the United States was built for and the person he spent his political career trying to advance the cause of. He praised their independent and earthy spirit to high heaven.
I was referring to the modern farmer today. I admit I could have made that clearer. That's the price I pay for trying to be concise, I guess. Stuff gets lost in stripping the text down.
The modern independent farmer's business is his own. He farms, he reaps, he profits. He is self-directed to perform his job how he wishes. But a menial worker performs a role directed by somebody else for low wages, and due to the barriers to entry, it's highly unlikely one could make the jump to farm owner, or open another type of business, without spending years stockpiling cash, not to mention learning a completely different skillset. He is not self-directed, or is self-directed in a very limited way.
This isn't about what I want or don't want; it's a simple observation. Government intervention is inevitable because the division of labor has made urban and suburban people dependent on each other, and when one part of the chain isn't working the way a majority thinks it should, they will vote for candidates who will rectify it. It's not always nice or pretty or fair, but on a purely factual level, that's how it goes. If the majority wants tighter gun control, they will elect a candidate who will put restrictions on guns. If someone thinks that is unconstitutional, then the courts decide the matter, and have the final say.
It's a big and imperfect mess, beyond any one citizen to influence. Sometimes it gives people power, other times it just makes people feel powerless. That's what happens when you try and bridge the deep divisions among a population with one government.
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A big part of the reason we have the Constitution is to prevent people from taking away other people's freedoms. Pluralism is an essential component of democracy (as opposed to mob rule). As my cousin Ben Franklin never actually said, but it sounds good, "Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
That's why we have things set up the way we do; to prevent the majority from having its way about some things.