Sara ♥ 30 ♥ Perpetually Single ♥ Dear god help me ♥ Atheist ♥ Current Vices: fandom, gay porn, drinking
fuck it, i'm a bitch in her 30's who watches teen wolf, man.
i ship sterek, lydia/her life goals, and cora/not dying. the rest? i could give a shit
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An “armed society” may or may not be a “polite society,” but it is far from being a democratic one.
In this opinion column, Jamelle Bouie explains in detail what I have believed for a long time–that overvalued Second Amendment rights can limit First Amendment free speech rights and make the democratic underpinnings of our nation very difficult to sustain.
There is a saying, borrowed from the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein and popular among supporters of an unlimited right to own and carry firearms, that an “armed society is a polite society.” The proliferation of weapons, in other words, brings social peace.
[…]
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this belief is right. That firearms work to tame rather than inflame the passions. That, the evidence of our eyes and ears notwithstanding, guns do more to resolve disputes than escalate them.
But even if that were true, which it manifestly isn’t, peace is not the absence of conflict. And social peace in a democratic society cannot simply be a perpetual standoff among armed individuals. The reason is that democracy rests on a measure of trust and respect among citizens, what the philosopher Danielle Allen calls “political friendship.”
“Political friendship,” Allen writes in “Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education,” “is not mainly (or not only) a sentiment of fellow feeling for other citizens.” It is, instead, a way of “acting in respect to them.”
[…]
“The best one can hope for, and all one should desire, is that political friendship can help citizens to resist the disintegration of trust and achieve a community where trust is a renewable resource.”
We don’t have to like one another to govern together, but we should try to see and speak to one another as equals, so that we can debate, deliberate and disagree as members of a shared political community.
Guns, when carried as totems through public space, make this impossible. Whether they are carted to a restaurant or a grocery store, a park or a library, they send a clear message: that a disagreement might turn deadly, and that I, the gun wielder, do not respect you enough to refrain from the threat of lethal violence. This is especially true when guns are used to confront and intimidate protesters, as happened again and again during the racial justice protests and demonstrations of 2020 and 2021, according to Everytown, a gun safety organization.
The mere fact of armed counter-demonstrators brandishing guns at people they oppose is why legal scholars like Timothy Zick of the William & Mary Law School have warned that in our age of extremely permissive gun laws, the Second Amendment to the Constitution threatens to overwhelm and overtake the First. “The visible presence of firearms increases the risk of violence and death when exercising one’s First Amendment rights,” Zick and Diana Palmer, a part-time lecturer at Northeastern University, write in The Atlantic. “The increased risk of violence from open carry is enough to have a meaningful ‘chilling effect’ on citizens’ willingness to participate in political protests.”
A chilling effect on citizens’ willingness to participate in political protests is also a chilling effect on citizens’ ability to trust one another. And in the absence of trust, democracy is a hard game to play. When distrust “pervades democratic relations,” Allen writes, “it paralyzes democracy; it means that citizens no longer think it sensible, or feel secure enough, to place their fates in the hands of democratic strangers. Citizens’ distrust not of government but of each other leads the way to democratic disintegration.”
[…]
If an armed society is a polite society, it’s because an armed society is a fearful society, where we train our children in “lockdown drills” to evade shooters and go about our lives with an eye on the nearest exit. Democracy might be able to survive in that kind of society, but it will never thrive there.
Seeing reasonable people argue about whether or not a fetus is a person is driving me insane. It doesn't matter. it doesn't matter. it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
If you don't want to live in a world where the government can strap you down and force you to provide a life-saving organ transplant, you don't want to live in a world where the government can force you to carry a pregnancy to term. A person's right to life does not extend to using another person's body to survive.
I have accepted the lack of internal consistency from conservatives (you have to, to stay sane here), but ffs liberals, shut up about fetal personhood. Stop getting dragged into this debate! It is the wrong framing of the issue and I'm honestly terrified of what any "victory" under it would look like (like, increasing the mainstream acceptability of sentences like "they can't even x, therefore they're obviously not a person!" is chilling, no matter the original context.)
I don't have to donate my liver, I don't have to donate my blood, I don't have to donate my fucking uterus. It's that simple.
(could you imagine the "pro-life" conservatives meltdown if a state tried to institute mandatory blood donation?? I imagine they'd be saying "my body, my choice" pretty fucking quickly... Maybe we should actually do that 🤔)
We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste. - Call Me By Your Name (2017)
The truth about I Want To Believe’s ending finally revealed. Turns out Scully wasn’t worried about Mulder, she just really was not a fan of Justin Hawkins. [x]
I think my least favorite Hetero Trope is when the girl eats a burger or whatever and the dude is like “Wow, I like a girl who can eat” like what the fuck did your last girlfriend do, photosynthesis?
#also this isn’t news but what they mean is ‘I love a girl who can stay skinny but not annoy me with diet restrictions’ #men don’t actually love 'girls who don’t go on diets’ or 'girls who don’t wear makeup’ or 'low-maintenance’ girls #what they DO love is women who can stay thin and flawless without ever having to reveal the effort behind it #it’s baffling to me! #like some Orwellian bullshit #you can’t knowingly demand women look a certain way and then complain when they go on diets lmao (via @halffizzbin)
Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte have won four consecutive gold together in the men’s 4x200m freestyle relay event: first at Athens 2004 with teammates Klete Keller and Peter Vanderkaay, then at Beijing 2008 with Vanderkaay and Ricky Berens, at London 2012 with Berens and Conor Dwyer, and now at Rio 2016 with Dwyer and Townley Haas.
Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps take the podium together one last time after winning their fourth consecutive gold medal in the Men’s 4x200M Freestyle Relay with Conor Dwyer and Townley Haas in the 2016 Summer Olympic Games held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
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