It’s been three weeks in our time, so we have so much catch up tonight! Movies, TV shows, video games, books. Oh, and Tony went to the March For Our Lives, so he talks a little bit about that. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
Do you have a favourite sport? Or at least one you enjoy watching? –Anonymous
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I was correct the first time re: baseball’s opening day being the same day as the podcast. Not sure why I got so noncommittal about that…
Podcasting.
I was on the edges of the March a couple of times during the day, but I was there with my Mom who is having vision problems right now so I felt uncomfortable taking her into the thick of things. I was really inspired by what I saw, as was the rest of my family. My Mom started crying. She lives in Florida, and things there have gotten so much worse recently. She was telling me that she regularly hears things from other people about the fact that “Jews run the world.” And she told me that the Shriners club, where my stepfather had been a member, has had to change their decor because people think it looks too Middle Eastern and so refuse to rent out the space for weddings or other social events as they did in the past.
We at breakfast at “Poets and Busboys” and they were giving out free protest signs to people. And we sat with a family that was there with their teenage son to participate in the March.
We went to the African American Museum later which was awesome–I highly recommend it. I’ve been to the Native American one a couple of times and it is also really good. I didn’t realize, though, that you are supposed to get tickets in advance for the African American Museum and that the tickets are hard to come by. We got in though because it was kind of empty when we first arrived (everyone marching), and
’cause my Mom has a veteran’s card ’cause my Stepfather was a career military man.
The Cherry Blossom festival and taiko performances the next day were also really good. Drumming with a bunch of other people of diverse backgrounds often gives me that same feeling of inspiration that the March did.
I know its an echo chamber, as Tony said, but I also think we need an injection of hope at the moment, and that certainly worked for me.
I think the nation as a whole is ready to have a conversation about where to draw the line regarding which kinds of guns should/should not be generally available to the public. I think one of the guns on the banned list should be the AR-15–the gun used at Parkland. I read an article from a doctor who treated victims from Parkland, and she argued convincingly that the wounds left by this kind of gun are almost never survivable (as opposed to those inflicted by hand-guns).
Whether or not someone agrees with me about that specific policy, I think we all need more reliable information from people like this doctor and other experts (including experts on the different kinds of guns–I certainly don’t know enough about this). But this is just the kind of research that has been closed down at the CDC because the NRA opposes it:
“The CDC studied gun violence from the mid-80s to the mid-90s until a 1993 study it funded angered the National Rifle Association so much that it lobbied Congress to shut down the CDC division that researched gun violence. The study showed that keeping a gun in the home was associated with a higher risk of being killed by a relative or close acquaintance.
Three years later, Rep. Jay Dickey, a lifetime member of the NRA and a Republican from Arkansas, added an amendment to the bill that funds the CDC that said “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control” could be used to study or promote gun control. That same year, Congress stripped the CDC of $2.6 million — exactly the amount the agency had spent studying gun violence the previous year.
The message was clear: Study gun violence and risk your career and your agency’s funding. CDC researchers who used to study gun violence told me they stayed well clear of guns for fear of jeopardizing their livelihoods.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-banned-from-gun-research-by-nra-2018-2
This is one among many reasons that I have to disagree with Will’s representation of the NRA. And when I say the “NRA” I am talking about the administration and spokespeople, not the members, who I think probably have more diversity of opinion than that represented by the people in charge. The NRA not only shuts down research, they routinely distort the facts in fairly dangerous ways. Most recently the NRA stated that violent radicals were behind “March for Our Lives.” And who were those violent radicals? Why the organizers of the Women’s March, of course. And there was Wayne LaPierre’s claim at CPAC that the Democrats are Socialists who, if they come to power, will do away with the 2nd Amendment–you know, sort of like the way Obama took everyone’s guns. Oh, wait, didn’t gun ownership go way up under Obama–because people were scared that guns would be taken away? Yes, and there, to me, is the central point about the NRA. Though its members may be concerned with civil liberties–it’s administration is really about gun industry profits.
I’m not sure what representation of the NRA you’re referring to… it certainly wasn’t my intention to defend or support the NRA, or, indeed, to make any definitive statements or characterizations of the NRA as an organization. If anything, I was trying to point out a particular contradiction in their approach to background checks — namely, that the NRA does support background checks while they appear also to lobby for blocks to closing certain loopholes in background check regulation, while, to my knowledge, they don’t suggest any viable alternative measures for closing the loopholes. This approach is logically untenable.
I suppose that point could be construed as me saying that the NRA is, overall, illogical, but I doubt that’s a representation you’d object to.
For the record, I’m not a member of the NRA and I find many practices of the NRA disturbing. That said, I tend to blame Congress for things like blocking studies of gun violence (to be clear, I do support such studies). I also tend to think NRA members could do more to rein in their organization.
Like all organizations that lobby, the NRA does put pressure on politicians and it does use money in a bid to essentially buy votes. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing we can do about such entities — they’ve been a part of American politics, in one form or another, since the beginning. All we can do is hold particular members of Congress accountable for the laws they support, whatever pressures lead them to that support. Though I seriously doubt Rep. Dickey needed the NRA or their money to inspire him to oppose gun violence research.
That isn’t to say that the NRA and its activities shouldn’t be spotlighted and criticized. But I think the NRA membership, if it truly is more diverse than its leadership, ought to do their part to bring their organization to a more sensible and edifying place.
Sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. I think when you said that the NRA thinks that background checks are good, I misheard that as you characterizing the NRA as this reasonable group who really is on the same side as people like those participating in the March, at least on that issue. And then that distorted the way I was remembering other things.
Not a problem, Jas. 🙂
I very much appreciate you sharing your and your mom’s experiences at the march.
Manifesto: Will you ever publish the manifesto to TMTH? And if so will you also include complete changelogs for it? I’m pretty sure over the years you’ve said contradictory things are in it.
A Wrinkle in Time (movie): I’ve still not seen it, and I’m not planning to. Though I do plan to reread the book sometime this year.
Afrofuturism: I think Tony was talking about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin. I found it ok but it just didn’t grab me. If you read something else in this aesthetic that you really like, please be sure to mention it on the podcast. 🙂
Side note: Do either of you use GoodReads? I find it a very handy way to keep track of what I’ve read and what I plan to read.
Mountains: It’s admittedly been more than just a few years but I’ve gone on car rides through the Appalachian Mountains. I’m not sure what you’re comparing them to when you say they’re paired down, but I have clear memories of looking out and straight down from the car window and seeing the tops of pine trees way down below us.
D.C.: I have memories of being there when I was like 10 or so. It was fine, but the only place I was interested in seeing was the Air & Space museum; which we didn’t have time for. The March sounds like it was pretty impressive.
Favorite Sport: I like watching soccer, and don’t mind watching baseball but wouldn’t seek it. Like Tony I played some soccer in elementary school; but I really liked it. I just hated leaving it to move to Iowa where I nobody (in my age bracket) was playing it at the time.
Thanks Jasmine! Side note: Tony, you do know you can schedule posts in advance in WordPress, right?
I went to the march in DC. We were there for about an hour and a half before I got too tired of hearing the same rhetoric we all already agreed with. We left and finally got around to visiting the National Portrait Gallery to see the Obama’s newly unveiled official portraits. All in all a good day, and we still caught the metro home before the protest really ended and things got ridiculously crowded. I look d for Tony a little bit in faces we passed, but knew it was pretty unlikely we’d happen to run into you.
Canadian embassy steps, wearing a bright pink pussyhat!