On Tuesdays when I need to be on campus early for a meeting, I’ll generally sit in the student union and watch most of a Champions League match while grabbing a bite to eat and reading before class. You can’t help eavesdropping since the tables are relatively close and there’s not enough ambient noise to drown out other conversations and, since I’m alone, it’s hard to ignore.
Last time this happened I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard. A couple American guys were watching Liverpool thump Besiktas one table over, and an African student came over and introduced himself and they started talking footie. The African guy’s English wasn’t great but they managed to converse well enough about the groups, who played who, etc. Surprisingly, the American guys knew players, teams, tournament scenarios. Delightful, I thought. The world’s game bringing people together and maybe the US is finally starting to get into the conversation.
Flash forward to this Tuesday. Two guys and a woman sat one table away and the conversations was as random as can be (to the woman’s credit, she hardly said a word). The guys started with the justification for using profanity, their logic/attempts at humor being quite painful as their main arguments were lifted from a chain email everyone on the planet saw six years ago.
Then the conversation turned to the footie match on the big screen, and they launched into the typical argument that soccer is boring. “Basketball is popular because the score is always like 100 to 100,” one reasoned. “Hockey has the slap shot, basketball has the slam dunk, baseball has the home run,” the other one answered. “But what does soccer have?” Seconds later, they both admired a clearance from one of the defenders. “You gotta say though,” the second guy said, “they can kick the ball pretty far. I couldn’t kick a ball fifty yards.”
Thankfully the conversation turned once again, this time to gun control. “Do you ever wonder what the world would be like if there were no gun laws? I mean, would you try to steal a car or hijack a plane if you didn’t know who around you had a gun?” Irrefutable logic. Then they went on to agree that Clinton benefited from Reaganomics for eight years and that a president has no control over the economy while in office because it’s all due to the prior administration.
Finally the woman, who had not said a word to this point, got a text message that she was answering when one of the guys called her out. “I hate it when people answer their phones while we’re having a conversation,” he said. “It’s basically telling me that what I’m saying isn’t important, that you’re just waiting for something better to come along.”
And in case you were wondering, no, it wasn’t me texting her.
Current Mood: Feh | 
5 Comments
“Do you ever wonder what the world would be like if there were no gun laws? I mean, would you try to steal a car or hijack a plane if you didn’t know who around you had a gun?”
This is straight out of Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: “An armed society is a polite society.” A beautifully turned phrase that is pure nonsense. Sort of like Tolkien’s, “He who breaks a thing to understand it has left the path of reason.”
I don’t own a gun, and a world where everyone carries makes nervous. However, a number of states have passed concealed-carry laws in recent decades, and before-and-after studies do not show worsening, or improvement, in gun violence.
The relationship between guns and murder is not simple. Countries with few guns, like Japan, have few murders. But countries with lots of guns, like Switzerland, also have few murders. In the US, guns are omnipresent in rural areas, where hunting is religion. Murder rates are low. In urban areas, fewer people own guns, but those who do are more likely to be criminals, and murder rates are high. Laws don’t seem to have much effect: D.C. has draconian gun laws, and a very high murder rate. During the Troubles, Belfast was had the strictest gun laws of any city in the free world. My impression is that gun laws are an emotional reaction to a high gun violence rate — hardly surprising — but aren’t very effective.
Yeah, I won’t deny that gun control is a tricky issue, one that I don’t have strong opinions on. The problem is keeping the guns out of the hands of the people who shouldn’t have them while not making life overly difficult for people who want to use them responsibly. Then again, I don’t understand the huge fuss over waiting periods or why you need an AK-47 to hunt deer. But super strict gun laws won’t make high crime places like DC, Baltimore, Detroit, etc. any safer.
My brother just moved to Switzerland and he said that every 18 year old male spends a mandatory year in the military and then gets to keep his gun when he goes home. That kind of “everybody has a gun” scenario doesn’t frighten me as much because those users will have had proper training and know what it means to fire a gun. That, and I think these aren’t handguns you can carry to the supermarket.
Concealed weapons laws are a hot topic in Wisconsin. They’re currently illegal but there’s a strong lobby to overturn that. The people who make proper use of a concealed gun probably are responsible owners as well but in conjunction with booze and human nature, it’s not hard for envisioning a scenario where things go Very Badly very quickly. Most “drunken idiot shoots best friend who shoots back” stories seem to emanate from Texas, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
The issue reminds me a bit of revoking a drivers license. It’s just a slip of paper. If you still have keys, the car, and a way to fuel it, there’s nothing stopping you from driving. I think the same holds for a gun.
I’m not convinced that the genius mentioned in the original post had thought all of this out. He didn’t quite seem the type.
a president has no control over the economy
Of course not. It is every individual’s patriotic duty to heap their earnings and credit on the altar of the economy, for which each receives a widescreen TV and all that lattes you can drink. Come on, guys. That’s Economics 101. No wonder the young woman wasn’t paying any attention to you.
Oh, to be 19 again, reveling in omniscience.
My favorite is the idea that Reagan and the elder Bush took 12 years to get the economy going, Clinton rode an eight-year wave of their good work, and now Shrub has been paying for Clinton’s mismanagement of the economy; which didn’t take effect until after he left office, of course.
Look, I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t know much about economics but I am overly familiar with sophistry ,and that particular line of reasoning seems awfully convenient, dunnit? I mean, I don’t think things are cut dried since it’s true that Clinton presided over the dot-com bubble and Shrub the burst, and then there was that whole 9/11 thing, but c’mon. Really?
I give Clinton credit for not screwing up the Reagan economy — although his tax hike in 1993 slowed it down for a couple of years — and for going along with the Gingrich Congress’s balancing of the budget and drastic welfare reform. The recession did begin on Clinton’s watch: economists date it from mid-2000. It was well underway by 9/11/2001, which didn’t help.
Clinton is not to blame for the recession. Nor is Bush. It was a result of the dot-com stock market bubble, one of many stock market bubbles (see: the Nifty Fifty computer/tech bubble of the late 1960’s and early 70’s) and vast overbuilding in the telecoms. Of the 2 million jobs lost in the US, fully half were in a single industry, telecommunications. Note that blaming any US president for the crash is absurd: it was world-wide. Telecoms in Europe were going belly-up, too.
To everyone’s credit, though, the recession was very mild — unemployment never even reached double digits — and it wasn’t due to government meddling, as the awful, perpetual-recession economy of the late 1970s was.
The president doesn’t have fine control over the economy. He has a bully pulpit, for what it’s worth, and if he has a willing Congress he can try to pass bills that will help the economy or hurt it. The Federal Reserve has far more control than President or Congress, and they aren’t elected. Which is a good thing. Comparisons between nations have shown that there is a correlation between degree of control of the central bank by elected officials, and inflation. In other words, legislators, if they are able, force their central bankers to tinker with the money supply to produce an expansive economy. This results in inflation, which the legislators then blame on foreign speculators, the Gnomes of Zurich, witches, and Jews.