All of these articles were pulled from fivethirtyeight.com, in the post God, Guns, and Gaydar: The Laws of Probability Push You to Overestimate Small Groups. I post them because, as some of you know, I am a gun owner, but for the most part I find the self-defense argument uncompelling*. This topic has come up a number of times with friends who, while they enjoy target shooting, as I do, also feel strongly about owning firearms for self-defense purposes.
The first two articles address the estimate of frequency of guns being used in self-defense; the third addresses churchgoing numbers.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use/index.html
http://www.stat.duke.edu/~dalene/chance/chanceweb/103.myth0.pdf
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/07/counting_church.html
* The first article strengthens my position on this. I generally find the defense against home-invasion case uncompelling, or self-defense while strolling around the city. I do find it a more compelling argument for women, especially for women who frequently travel alone or live alone. Women do, unfortunately, still face situations that men do not. Please note that I do not advocate blanket bans on firearms, or excessive restriction, but I am in favor of reasonable levels of regulation. I do not think that the self-defense argument forces a higher bar for justification of regulation.
I guess I have not actually gotten back to the Texas education situation, though it may still happen. It’s hard to make writing here a priority. That said, I can still sometimes provide you with interesting things to read! Both of these are from FiveThirtyEight, which was one of my favorite blogs back during the 2008 election. Recently I started following the FiveThirtyEight twitter account, and so I’ve been reading more of the posts. Chances are good that most of you who actually bother to read this blog also read FiveThirtyEight anyway, but I still want to share these.
These posts are a two part response to a Jonah Goldberg piece. Goldberg is a clown; he pointed to Swarthmore as a hotbed of liberal fascism a couple years ago, which, well… Sort of isn’t worth responding to. Anyway, Goldberg is, surprise, complaining that those taxes the liberals inflict are just awful and fascist and so forth. So the first post breaks down tax burden by GDP, and also by the different types of tax:
Jonah Goldberg, Quarter Slave (Conceptually)
The second article is more interesting, in my opinion. It looks at the GINI coefficient, which represents income distribution, and compares the US to other developed nations, both before and after taxes:
Jonah Goldberg, Anti-Maldistributionist
I found these articles pretty fascinating, and it provides something to think about as the tax deadline approaches.
I really want to comment on what’s just happened in Texas, but I’m not sure where to start. For the moment, let me just point out a couple of webpages about the Texas schoolboard curriculum decisions:
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/12/texas-education-board-cuts-thomas-jefferson-out-of-its-textbooks/
http://tfninsider.org/2010/03/13/the-list-of-shame-in-texas/
I want to come back to this, but I’ll have to pick just a few items to deal with, given the scale of the politically-motivated wrongness of all of these decisions. The changes covered include a whole range of massive historical revisions from the merely stupid to the utterly absurd. If you read through these and want any in particular covered, leave a comment, and I’ll pick a few to research in depth.
Not a substantive post, but amusing, and relevant to this blog:
Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be
Occasionally Jon Stewart has made the comment that it’s sad that the major media outlets are getting things wrong, and it takes a comedian to call bullshit. I’m actually not convinced by that; political humor has often been a check on politicians, and it’s not unreasonable that it should also be a check on media. Comedy is good at that.
(Hat tip to Nick for sending this along to me)
I haven’t posted recently due to a conference trip to California, and I don’t have much time at the moment to write, but I wanted to post this graphic:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/leftvright_world.html
It’s simplifying, etc. but still interesting.