Misfire, part III

Much of owen's blog attacking the perfectly reasonable proposition that the West Bend Library be off-limits to concealed carry of deadly weapons hinges around a slippery-slope argument. It is tricky to understand, but seems to go like this: "I have a preconceived idea of what the 2nd Amendment means, that it guarantees my individual right to carry a deadly weapon anywhere I want and any objections by the community are trumped by my individual right." Therefore, anyone who asks for just a little space to be left alone, the way it was, after the radical expansion of deadly weapons pushed on all of us by [i'm with stupid] is a tyrant seeking to limit freedom.

This is what passes for conservatism in West Bend. My freedom is dependent on my right to carry a deadly weapon at all times and in all places. That is how they do things in texas apparently, where owen is from. So it follows to ask the question why so many Wisconsin natives take this foreigner with radical ideas seriously? It should also be noted that the freedom of speech these radicals scoff at for anyone protesting the radical inequality or other injustices in our society is taken very seriously when making anonymous ad hominem attacks on their enemies.

Taken this morning in front of the Slinger Piggly Wiggly

If owen saw this, I'm sure he'd just wave his hand if confronted and dismiss it as "not what he believes" but this is your side's doing buddy, own it. Given the rigid structure of gun-maniacs beliefs about deadly weapons, I imagine they would be hard-pressed to disagree with rep. Allen "80 card-carrying communists in congress" West's recent statement that government should force everyone to buy a deadly weapon or be "taxed."




Face it owen, your side and your beliefs about guns are ridiculous. If your logic says you should be able to carry a gun anywhere, especially when children are around, then get on board with this massive, "liberal" expansion of government.

I for one will contine to enjoy the ability to walk down the street unarmed. "When being unarmed is outlawed..." Owen and all the gun-maniacs always seem to forget that if they can carry and everything up to actually pulling the trigger is legal, it goes both ways. The "bad guys" they seem to fear almost as much as paying a cent more in taxes, will enjoy that right too. Show me an instance where more guns meant less crime. When your beloved ronald reagan was shot he was surrounded by some of the best-trained gunmen in the world, it didn't stop the guy.

"The blade itself incites to violence."

Misfire, notes

I had a feeling Al was stepping into a trap from the first lines of his column. Opening with a straw man when the radical impulse behind the decision to take down the "no guns allowed" sign in the library would be self-righteously asserted as common sense despite its ridiculous premise was an unfortunately poor start. Al's prose is in quotation marks, Owen's responses are in red.

"Are we really going to allow firearms in the library where our children go for Story Time, to study and do projects?"

Yes.

"Do guns in the library align with our conservative values?"

Yes.

"Hunting with friends or older children might be a family value,

Might? It is.

but morphing that into guns in the library doesn’t make any more sense than guns at work, guns in the hospital or guns in church."

Since the premise of gun rights being based in hunting is false, the conclusions aren’t valid.

Instead of demolishing the straw man, Al not only abandoned it but legitimized the absurd premise of his first statement. Owen, shameless fascist that he is, endorsed the absurd part and then was freed from what should have been a stigmatizing statement to dilute a shocking mix of guns and children. "Our conservative values?" Whose? By drawing the unacceptable into the acceptable, Al has already lost. The first rule when debating sociopaths must be "do not expect a rattlesnake to stop being a rattlesnake." I am sure Al was making his case to the large number of self-described conservatives in West Bend who actually respect tradition and are skeptical of change, but it only takes one fascist in conservative's clothing to blunt this case.

The problem here is one of definition. What does conservatism mean? Now I am not a conservative but I have studied the ideology going back to Edmund Burke. Fancy book learning, not fly by my gut and accept what those in authority spoon-feed me. It is probable that back when Al was on the rifle team "conservative" meant what he thinks it means, but today's conservative movement of which Owen is openly a part of really shares little of those assumptions. The audience he was trying to reach probably feels the same way, but buy into the redefinition of conservatism that was painstakingly engineered over many decades. Conservative today no longer means, respect for tradition and not wanting things to change, accepting authority of government and that society is made up of many groups, not simply a collection of separate individuals that owe nothing to each other. In other words, a conservative would question why this change to library policy is necessary and would be skeptical of simple assertions that guns around kids is something parents should desire. A real conservative would ask why, when there is no problem with violent crime in the library, do we all of a sudden need the right to carry concealed weapons in the library or anywhere else the individual who owes nothing to his fellow citizens desires.

Unfortunately, Al began with a rhetorical question real conservatives could follow, skepticism about consequences, but dropped it to focus on bigger social issues.

Owen's rejection of hunting as the base of gun "rights" speaks volumes about his conception of these rights. He can blather on about the constitutionality of the right to bear arms, but really it is about his right to feel secure at your expense. For years, the central argument of gun "rights" people was the reasonable proposition that they wanted to hunt, Owen just evicerated that reasonable idea. Let's get down to the lowest common denominator here, a gun is a tool of violence, it is nothing else. I will repeat Homer's aphorism that "the blade itself incites to violence," a truism of the ancient world that has not lost its validity today. The current "mania," that Al rightly identifies but Owen waves away with a snooty retort about the constitution while wishing away the first and more poignant part of the 2nd Amendment, is about power and domination, not defence or security.

The State of our Schools

An apology

Education in West Bend district deserves nothing less

WARING
FINCKE

My last column sparked an attack request for an apology from West Bend School District Vice President Bart Williams. As is often the case with those critical of my positions, Williams’ attack was not about the issues I discussed, but directed at me personally. Rather than respond in kind, I offer an apology to the citizens of our community about the state of public education in our school district.
I am truly sorry that we have a school district that has allowed itself to abdicate its responsibility to provide our children with the best education possible. The School Board has approved all of the following, either tacitly or by choice.
We no longer have librarians in any of the elementary schools. There is one for the two middle schools and two in the high schools who cannot leave their buildings while students are present, yet are responsible for all the elementary school libraries. Elementary school librarians helped kids learn to read and research, while instilling a love of books and libraries.
We no longer have any school social workers. With more and more kids from families with multiple needs, our need for social workers to bring much needed assistance to help keep kids in school is greater than ever.
Our high school guidance counselors have been given the workload of the social workers, without any of their training or skills, on top of their own responsibilities to help kids with schedules, college applications and financial aid. They have been limited to 15 minutes per kid for senior planning conferences with students and their parents.
We now have two police officers assigned to the high schools. During the past three years, they have been involved, on average, in more than two incidents per day resulting in citations. Some teachers are apprehensive about going into the hallways during class changes because students, echoing community vilification of and lack of respect for educators, have verbally assaulted them. Discipline is ineffective and it appears that no one has realized that social workers might have been able to avert some of these problems before police intervention was required. The kids who have learned to disparage teachers at home feel free to express it at school knowing there will be no consequences.
Recent class-size increases and the addition of more classes taught have greatly reduced the amount of time teachers can spend with individual students, much less their own families. Specialty teachers, paid by the classes taught, have taken a pay cut through reduction in the number of classes taught while having an increased work load because they have more students per class.
Our superintendent does not have the usual credentials or licensure for his position. He does not live in the district and his own children do not attend public schools, much less our own. His chief operating officer sends one of her children to private school as well. What does it say about the quality of our system when its leaders choose not to send their own children to the schools they lead?
The superintendent’s end of the year thank you staff email was interesting, not just because it was sent out after many had left for the year. In it, he acknowledged not having sufficient resources for teaching supplies by thanking teachers for using their own money to make up the shortfall. He thanked them as well for the unpaid time spent on weekends calling parents and grading papers, and for coming in early and staying late to get their work done.
The district lost more than 20 teacher positions, unfilled after retirement and resignations, this year and also lost programs such as the middle school house system and Avid, which helped at-risk students stay on course. Our superintendent is misleading the community by claiming that the new reforms have allowed a balanced budget without “significant” program losses or staff layoffs.
I am truly sorry for the state of public education in our community and that our School Board has let it come to this. No improvement is in sight, as next year’s projected budget does nothing to fix any of it. Mr. Williams, you have my apology.
(Waring R. Fincke practices law and politics in the town of Barton and is vice chair of the Washington County Democratic Party.)


This is what you get when extremists are allowed to sneak into local office, The Public sphere is starved, Public servants are scorned and demonized, incompetents are appointed. The arrogance is breathtaking, people who have no business running a school system turn around and make ad hominem attacks on anyone pointing this out. Get ready Wisconsin and the US, this is what awaits us unless we can come together and keep these incompetent saboteurs away from our schools.

(Zombie) Guns in the library

My efforts to wake up the Kraken have been unsuccessful, short of poking him with a stick I don't know what to do. That would be really dangerous. Not as dangerous as this potentially is, but still, those tentacles really hurt.



It was only a month ago that he posted about the new board members, whose only qualification to oversee the library was their zeal to overturn the eminently reasonable idea that guns do not belong in the library, and we now see how fast things can move when zealots are running things.

I do not really have anything insightful to add, the sheer ridiculousness of it should be enough.

A simple observation though, whenever a tragedy occurs where some raging psychopath shoots up a public area and these gun-happy meatheads assert that it could have been prevented by someone there with a gun, does it ever occur to them that there was, in fact, someone with a gun there?

And so it begins

 Found in a West Bend, WI mailbox this morning.

Previously, they were smashing Barrett signs in the middle of the night in drive-bys. Can you envision doing something like this? I cannot, but I am not a Right Wing Authoritarian Follower.

This is straight Mob stuff. Intimidation tactics. And coming in the middle of the night, delivered by night riders, it has no other purpose that to cause fear. "We know where you live and we do not appreciate your opinions, we will go to great lengths to silence you." The political nature is reminiscent of another group of night riders and I will be so impolite as to name them. The ku klux klan.

Still think I'm crazy? Still think we are not headed for civil war? Think this election settled anything? I'll admit, I did not think that threats would materialize if the fascists stole it won.