The State of Statehood

            On November 6^th, while all eyes were fixed on Ohio and Florida, waiting to see who would win the presidential election, an often forgotten member of the United States was holding a monumental referendum.  Puerto Rico, an America territory since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, voted for the first time in its history to become a state.  This does not end the process, however, as the procedure to become a state does not often run smooth.

The Death of Peacetime

           Much is made about how the United States has not fought a war since World War Two, labeling all the other conflicts “police actions” or a myriad of other excuses.  But the reality is that the United States in the past seven decades has been one of the most bellicose powers the world has ever seen.  In the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty first, America has had thirteen presidents, and every single one of them have seen American troops on the ground in foreign nations.  The reason for this militaristic attitude is twofold:  first, because of America’s emergence as a superpower and two, because of the most astonishingly abrupt ideological shift in the history of American politics. 

Gun Control and the Supreme Court

If 1968 was the year of the assassination, with both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. falling victim to deranged assailants, then 1981 was the year of the failed assassination.  In March of that year, newly elected President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., but survived after he was quickly rushed to a hospital.  A mere six weeks later, Pope John Paul II was shot four times while in Vatican City by Mehmet Ali Ağca.  Pope John Paul, however, also managed to survive this attempt.  Despite the failure of these two assassinations, a wave of fear spread across the United States that gun violence would spill into the everyday lives of regular citizens.  Anti-gun sentiment reached a fever pitch, particularly in Chicago where the murder rate stood its highest point in years.  Mayor Jane Byrne proposed a ban on the possession of handguns, giving citizens who obtained a license before the ban grandfather-clause immunity.  The gun control law passed along with several similar laws across the nation.  It seemed as though the gun control question was settled until, in 2007, a lawsuit reached the Supreme Court and once more opened the Pandora’s box of gun control laws.

Socialism of the Wealthy

           In my experience, the most common barb levied at the Democratic Party’s desire to tax the income of the wealthiest two percent of Americans at a higher rate, as well as maintaining and increasing the capital gains and estate taxes is that such efforts are socialistic attempts to take hard-earned money from the successful to give to those who are lazy and unsuccessful.  While I believe that I thoroughly debunked the argument regarding higher income taxes, as well as the supposed laziness of the poor, I am focusing on the capital gains and estate taxes in this venture into the murky waters of economic theory.

The Two Types of Vigilantism: Political Vigilantism

If you missed Part One, concerning criminal vigilantism, check the archive to the right, as well as the post immediately below this one.  Without further ado, I give you a discussion on political vigilantism.

The Two Types of Vigilantism: Criminal Vigilantism

            I believe that there is a streak in our society of slipping into delusions of potential grandeur wherein the common man becomes some sort of action hero.  This was seen in dazzling display after the Aurora theatre shootings where several commentators on the bastion of conservatism, Fox News, lamented the fact that nobody in the theatre was carrying a firearm of their own.  They believed that if somebody had a gun, they could have used it to protect themselves and the other innocents in the theatre by shooting and stopping James Holmes before he could kill and injure as many people as he did.  While in reality, the likely result of such a scenario would be more causalities, I have wondered what gives so many intelligent people such a faulty assumption prone to a sense of vigilantly idealization.  The answer, I believe, lies deep within our nation’s history and all the way back to a medieval folk tale of the nation from which we took our independence, England. 

Israel and the International Community's Inability to End it's Exercitation of the Rights of Conquest

           With the supposed “death of war” which has accompanied the widespread rise of liberal democracies, as there is a general unwillingness of democracies to go to war, especially against other democracies, the concept of conquest has almost completely disappeared from international discourse.  In the age of kingdoms and empires, conquest was one of the most important goals of governments as can be seen by such conquering powers as the Macedonians, the Romans, and especially the Mongols.  While the issue has almost been rendered irrelevant since the end of World War Two, a lone nation still exercises the right of conquest over two territories with enormous geopolitical consequences to today’s world.