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September 1st, 2013 #121
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September 1st, 2013 #123
September 1st, 2013 #124
I simply meant if you really had your little heart set on bamboozling me with financial jargon, start a Money thread. long words confuse me tho, b warned.
I honestly had no idea Jefferson had such strange views on personal apocalyptically powerful weapons invented long after his death being the cornerstone of freedom. are you sure you arnt quoting the Tyrant Leto II, as i was?
"Technology breeds anarchy and distributes its tools at random... the ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual"
i guess if you want to be free in the Timothy McVeigh sense, ie you get to choose when you die and how many you kill, your warped version of Jefferson's philosophy is well worth following.
If on the other hand you want to live in a society where children are not slain routinely by psychotics in their school rooms, you might consider an attitude adjustment.
September 1st, 2013 #125
September 1st, 2013 #126
oo impuning my manhood, im shrivelling palpably as i type! please dont hit me i bet youve got a right hook like a rocket!
ok lets read:
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given socio-economic context or country. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment. Any kind of object or secure verifiable record that fulfills these functions can be considered money. Money is historically an emergent market phenomenon establishing a commodity money, but nearly all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money. Fiat money, like any check or note of debt, is without intrinsic use value as a physical commodity.-Wikipedia
Kind of exactly what I said already.
I suppose some people do collect money as an object; archeologists, coin collectors who collect collections of coins, people making floors from pennies. you schooled me good.. not.
Last edited by Velocity Kendall; September 1st, 2013 at 06:26 PM.
September 1st, 2013 #127
September 2nd, 2013 #128
I told you long words confuse me, especially ones in languages I dont know. Ductape and absurdums? What you mean is you tried to make your point by saying something absolutely ridiculous, pinning it on Jefferson, I called your bluff and rather than fight the corner youd painted yourself into youre storming off in a huff. s'long.
shut the cage door on the way out please, the vast new conceptual worlds your ideas open for me are too threatening.
September 2nd, 2013 #129
Out of the respect for your disability with abstractions, I'll try not to use any abstract concepts except "power". If you have problem understanding even this concept, there's no need to proceed to the next paragraph. Instead, read only this: "Touche! You win! I stand corrected."
Jefferson's statement is about power. Not about weapons. Specifically, about keeping the concentrated power in line. He talks about state power but it's easy to see how this applies to power originating from other places, like religious or corporate power. He advocates use of any means possible to contain such power should it become corrupted. If you think the quote is about weapons because he used phrasing "let them take arms", you may be suffering from a bad case of not seeing the wood for the trees. The thing you obsessed much, namely the type of "arms" Jefferson supposedly had in mind, is not important for the gist of the idea he is presenting here. "Arms" here may as well be replaced by any type of counter-power available to the opponents of the corrupt power; words, political pressure, disobedience, musquettes, assault rifles or something entirely different. As long as it's effective in the domain of power. Try it out for yourself. Replace the word "arms" in Jefferson's quote with any of these other words. See if it affects the main idea in any way.
Weapons debate interest me only in context of this balancing game between concentrated power (state) and opposed distributed power ("the people"). I'm not interested in wallowing in the mud of prepackaged "left-vs-right" quarrel about weapons. I specifically don't care about generic "just think of the children" type of argument you're tossing around. This type of argument is manipulation-prone. It appeals to emotion and can be fudged to ban just about anything. Cannabis? It's a gateway drug to heroin. You know how many children die of heroin each year? Pornography?.. Hate speech?.. Abortion?.. etc...
So if you're willing and able to broaden the discussion framing to the problems of power - I'm in. Otherwise, I couldn't care less.
Please, reflect a bit on things instead of instantly blazing out to keyboard in a childish manner. Let me know if there were any too long words that confused you. I can simplify further.
Last edited by LaCan; September 2nd, 2013 at 03:14 PM.
September 2nd, 2013 #130
be prepared not to care less then.
You correctly pointed out these issues are subject to emotive manipulation, but then assault rifled yourself in the foot by being so desperate and obvious to use that manipulation to drag this out into wide, marshy abstract areas where one opinion is as valid as any other, value judgements are almost impossible and any debate is 100% emotional. im more interested in facts. heres some:
the examples you fired off like a Cheney on a duckshoot as no-brainer Bad Things are anything but. Cannabis being a gateway drug;? Myth. a myth propagated by people like you who fire it off without checking your facts, in fact. Fact. Youre saying its easily fudged, well, sure, so turn to the stats.
ive no idea 'how many children die from heroine' but im glad heroine is extremely illegal, or it would be many more. I think all guns should be extremely illegal too, which is why i live in a largely peaceful place where guns are banned, gun murders are niil per year locally and maybe in the double digits nationally. Im not sure what the sentence "Pornography?" is meant to mean except as an emotional trigger. Hate speech IS banned dipshit. Abortion, you literally only threw that in there as an emotional hot potato. For the record Im pretty confident in my stance that women should be allowed to control their reproductive biology as a right enshrined in law. This is after all about personal freedom isnt it?
The point being these things you feel are so easily fudged are only so because people ignore the actual social science and wander off into emotional policy.
As for your left-right divide, i also do not care which end your favourite guy eats his eggs from, theyre all as bad as eachother. I watch house of cards, im practically a doctor of political science now.
"I specifically don't care about generic "just think of the children""
it amazes me how completely ok americans are with kids being massacred in their schools. its very odd.
Power, I think i can understand. I dont ever want to own a pet I cant kill with my own two hands if I have to. Im sorry to break this to you tho, but at least in regard to gun ownership, while your power is dramatically increased vs someone unarmed ie You have total power over them, and the results are your country's horrific gun murder rate, on the other hand, having that silly gun will help you very little if the other side controls stealth bombers.
both aspects reinforce what ive been saying. Guns are useless against the government, and destructive in cities. the fact that you see assault rifles and political pressure, disobedience and words as part of the same liberty-ensuring entity is deeply disturbing.
Like several of the other americans here, you literally think owning a metal box that can accelerate a metal slug from one end to sonic speed and thence through someones face = liberty. youre sick. your country is sick.
Youve noticed quite a lot of places are peaceful prosperous and free and yet ban guns right? How do you explain this?
Id prefer to keep this to the specific topic in the title and not expand out into vague philosophical spaces where you are no doubt hoping ill follow so you can throw some fucking Kierkegaard or something at me.
Show me the stats that banning guns would cause more harm than it would prevent and you will have won a convert (as counter i present the school attack rate since Dunblaine). Otherwise LaCan it.
Last edited by Velocity Kendall; September 2nd, 2013 at 04:19 PM.
September 2nd, 2013 #131
As the future progresses, individuals are going to have more and more power to do harm. Homemade guns via 3D printers are just a tip of the iceberg. personal drones are just part of it. Here's something from Michio Kaku to think about. It makes you realize that, yes, some regulations and limits are necessary if we don't want total chaos.
September 2nd, 2013 #132
Oh my. You just generate too much noise for focused discussion. Just to clarify; I'm not American and I hate guns. Banning them would accomplish nothing though, except chipping away from individual rights versus powers that be. Same as banning drugs accomplished nothing but criminalizing people. I doubt that introducing more repression is a good way to cure sick society.
I fully understand your sentiment. Banning guns would cause gun deaths to drop. Duh! But that wouldn't make a single kill urge psycho go away. You're patching the surface instead of trying to get to the core of the problem.
Let's look at the statistics (source UNODC). Homicide rate in eastern Europe, for example, is twice as high as that in US. Most of the eastern Europe states have gun ban laws in place, US hasn't. How do you explain this if gun legality is so instrumental for murder as you're trying to imply?
September 3rd, 2013 #133
War over environmental disasters is a certainty. It's already happening. Famine and drought are the source of many conflicts. The IRA formed as a result of the potato famine. Somolian pirates were fishermen until the fish died off due to the toxic waste brought in from the canals.
Nuclear weapons will become more accessible as long as nuclear energy is desirable. I think wind and solar are on the brink of viability to becoming more cost effective than nuclear. A nuclear power plant a few miles from my house had to shut down because it was too expensive to maintain.
Natural gas companies have been fracking aggressively like the technology is about to expire.
September 3rd, 2013 #134
Firstly the formation of the IRA was not a result of the potato famine; the history of resistance to home rule goes back much further.
I won’t go into detail, although I would encourage any interest in Irish history as it is oftentimes missing from mainstream curriculums.
In regards to the Jefferson speech I find myself perplexed at the idea that those words can be applied in practical terms to today’s society, VK having already highlight the differences, which for me create a completely difference landscape, and therefore the idea that you still require the freedom to own a gun in order to defend the family against the neighbourhood Sioux settlements is nonsense.
Jefferson bringing to light this idea of power acting as an object of manipulation and leniency may be perfectly reasonable, however, I do not believe he had accepted that in order for his nation to progress socially and politically, more of this leniency would come from the general populace taking up arms.
He could not have foreseen the technological developments of the 20th century, and if he had done so, I m sure he would of altered his position in order to seek out a philosophy which expelled such ideas completely.
In today’s political arena power comes in a myriad of manifestations, therefore this idea that the population of America equating freedom with the comfort and security a firearm brings doubt to my mind.
You have all of the political devices a society requires in order to maintain democracy, you have the institution of law and freedom of speech, tell me, where do these tools fail where a gun can succeed?
September 3rd, 2013 #135
Come on, now that I started talking statistics, you gonna go back to "philosophical" argument and Kaku's bullshit speculation?
Let's keep this in the area of hard facts, as Kendall insisted. Kendall and Prince, I suppose you both live in UK, a country with relatively low murder rates (1.2 per 100000 inhabitants) which also happens to have restrictive gun policy. You contrasted this with US, having admittedly higher homicide rate (4.8) accompanied by permissive weapon policy. On the basis of that comparison, you've drawn your conclusion: easier access to guns causes more murder. However, according to available broad facts, your conclusion is plain wrong. Tiny dataset of only two countries you used to back your position is just too limited to draw a valid conclusion.
Let's look more closely at the numbers. If you take worldwide homicide rates by country (source: UNODC via Wikipedia article) and compare it with gun policies per country respectively (source: gunpolicy.org) you'll soon realize that there is no correlation. None. I encourage you to correlate this data on your own as thoroughly as possible. Preferably using customary statistical methods. Check if you can find any significant correlation. You won't find it, because there is none. I repeat: check the data for yourself. On what basis then can you conclude causality between homicide rate and gun policy? Some stirred up emotion after watching a news report?
Numbers, on which you so insist, don't back up your proposition. You don't have the case there.
(I hope you do understand concepts of correlation and causality, Kendall. If not, just say so and I'll take some time to explain them. They are not too hard to grasp nor particularly abstract.)
Let me just give you another example that counters this confined US vs UK argument. There are many others like it that can be extracted from the actual data. I provided the sources. Homicide rates in Switzerland are amongst the lowest in the world (0.7) yet Switzerland is known for having extremely permissive gun policy. More than 30% of households in Switzerland own assault rifles (source: Wikipedia article on Gun politics in Switzerland). Read that again: assault rifles, 30% of households. Contrast this with say Brazil, a country with standard highly restrictive gun regulation. Murder rate in Brazil is 30 times higher (21.0 in 100000) than in Switzerland.
So if I was going to use your flawed approach of cherry-picked comparison, I could have concluded, in the case of Switzerland vs. Brazil, that more guns, preferably assault rifles, cause less homicide. This conclusion would be wrong, of course, because I considered only a fraction of all the available data. The fraction that conveniently feeds my confirmation bias. See? It's the same error you're making in the case of US vs UK comparison.
Something definitely affects the variation in homicide rates per country. I don't know what it is but it isn't the gun policy.
So please, next time, before starting to flame me off the bat and accuse me of bluff and dishonesty, check the actual data you're so professing about. Because it might be you who's actually talking out of your ass.