Apologies for talking about gun issues so much lately. A while back I decided I was going to spend more time on this blog talking about tech, and given my occupation (officially “computer scientist”) you’d think that’d be relatively easy. But as I may have mentioned once or twice before, I’m really only ever moved to write when I’m furiously pissed about something. Nine times out of ten, that’s politics. This isn’t to say that I’m not going to write about tech anymore, but I gotta do what I gotta do to make the voices stop, you know?
So what’s making my dome-piece throb this morning? I decided to give myself a quick refresher on Supreme Court decisions regarding the 2nd amendment (I know, I know, I’m sorry). I was reading a summary of DC. vs Heller (the 2008 decision that overturned DC’s handgun ban), and eventually I got to the part with the majority opinion and dissent. The majority were all the conservative justices, the dissent all the liberals. No real surprise, but it sort of embodied the perpetual political argument going on in my brain.
I don’t want to sound too angsty here, but I don’t really have a political home anymore. There is no question in my mind that homosexuals should have all the same rights as heterosexuals, and that people who are opposed to same-sex marriage can’t make an argument against it that doesn’t eventually reduce to “buttsex is icky, and I don’t like it.” There is no question in my mind that we need to curtail carbon emissions, because even if you have some doubts about climate change there is no refuting the increasing acidity of the oceans, which could be just as catastrophic for life on Earth. And there is no question in my mind that I have a right as an individual to own and carry whatever weapon I can reasonably justify for my defense, and people who believe otherwise place an inordinate amount of trust in a society and social contract that are far, far more brittle than they realize.
This is pretty much the textbook definition of cognitive dissonance, and some days it really makes my head hurt.