Regarding 1): We've had term limits in the state of Michigan for several years. It seems to have led to short-term legislators who, since they don't know their way around the system, wind up being guided by lobbyists who know the ropes (but linger forever). Think Dilbert's "bungee boss" (for the legislator, not the lobbyist).
If you can move the reps home to their districts, the lobbying problem becomes less of an issue, and they wind up being guided by the people from their districts as intended. At that point, term limits won't cause much harm (but probably won't help much, either).
Instead I'd like to see a limit on the number of *consecutive* terms you can serve in any one office (no more than two in a row, say). Maybe also a limit on the total number of years you can spend in elected office (20 sounds good - half of one's career, approximately).
That sounds like a recipe for regulatory capture, IMO.
It's easy, and I've been saying it for almost a decade now: Outlaw Congress, or at least the physical manifestation of it. If you send all of the politicians home to their districts, the cost for a corporation to lobby goes up by at least a factor of hundreds because they have to send lobbyists all around the country, and the cost for an average citizen to lobby goes down by a factor of hundreds because they need only drive a few miles to talk to their elected representatives. The corporations cease to have an advantage over ordinary citizens at that point, and the question of making the act of lobbying itself illegal becomes moot.
And the other guy looks like Michell Musso. I *knew* it. Walt Disney's antisemitic army is in league with Al Qaeda. It's the only possible explanation.:-D
Wrong on all counts. I was born and lived for the first 22 years of my life in the rural South. Even living in a college town, I'd estimate that probably about half of my Facebook friends from my high school still live within about a 100 mile radius of my home town, give or take. And historically, the percentages have been even higher than that in many parts of the south—particularly in Appalachia.
The problem is that they haven't taken the blogger threat seriously. They've knee-jerked. There's a difference. A serious response to the blogger threat would involve using bloggers as a source of tips, and seeking confirmation before they actually report things, or at the very least, making it clear which reports are unconfirmed.
Instead, their response has been to report faster and less accurately. Thus, ironically, the very actions they took in response to the blogger threat have eliminated the sole remaining advantage that they previously had over blogs, and thus lessened the news media's importance rather than increasing it.
Depends on how narrowly you define "terrorist". I would argue that Iraq's genocidal attacks on the Kurds qualify as terrorism, and that their attempts to build a nuclear program in violation of international law constitute psychological terrorism, but maybe that's just me.
Fair enough. There's definitely a line when mere possession poses an unacceptable risk of harm to others.
For example, you don't have to do anything with nerve gas for it to corrode the container it is in and kill people. You don't have to do anything with uranium for your house to collapse and cause a small supercriticality event that kills several of your neighbors, or for it to leach into the water supply and cause increased cancer rates throughout your area. And so on.
And as another person mentioned, possessing people is bad, because the act of possession inherently poses harm to others (not even risk, but actual harm).
But with the exception of owning people, those laws don't generally ban possession. They merely limit the circumstances of said possession. For example, you can buy tiny quantities of unrefined Uranium from Amazon. And companies with appropriate levels of clearance and oversight can possess radioactive materials even in large quantities.
Here's the reality that every pro-gun zealot ignores: laws that make it more difficult for criminals to get guns reduce crime.
Laws cannot prevent a truly determined person from committing a crime, but not everybody is that determined. Therefore, laws that add barriers to make it harder for the wrong people to get weapons can be effective by making it more likely that they will give up before they find a seller who is also willing to break the law.
Wrong. Things are banned where they're considered *problematic* and permitted where they're NOT considered *problematic.*
Right.
Clearly, this means that liberals have decided that fucking your cousin is A-OK, despite the fact that it increases the chance of genetic defects in the children of that union.
Wrong. Marrying your cousin is unlikely to cause problems—the risk is only slightly higher than the risk in the general population. What causes problems is repeated inbreeding of close relatives over the course of several generations.
The fundamental thing you're missing is why incest is a problem in southern states. In the South, people don't move around that much. Most of the folks you meet are third, fourth, fifth generation residents of a given town. And the ones who aren't are usually from a couple of towns over. This means that there's a very high probability of being related to many of the people you meet. Left alone, this would result in significant inbreeding problems within just a few generations. Therefore, cousin marriages are problematic.
In California, most of the people you meet are transplants from somewhere else. This means that there's almost zero probability of being related to anyone you meet. Therefore, first cousin marriages are not problematic in California, not because they won't ever be problematic if they occurred, but because they're about as likely as the Cubs winning the world series, and because the probability of multigenerational inbreeding (the real problem) is basically zero.
I think the last time I regularly read a magazine was around the turn of the century. Ditto for newspapers. Subject-specific news aggregators like Slashdot have pretty much superseded magazines in every way that matters. Newspapers, on the other hand, are still occasionally useful as packing material.
But what you are demonstrating there is an "absence of proof" fallacy. We know that it failed to stop incidents A, B, and C, but we have no data on whether there would otherwise have been incidents D, E, F, and G had those laws not prevented them. This is why proof by anecdote is basically useless for all but the most trivial premises (e.g. "No cows have horns"). If you want to prove your point logically, you must provide statistics to back up the statement. Otherwise, you're basically begging the question.
Ummm, wait a minute. Oregon has no "gun show loophole", so I guess closing the gun show loophole didn't really stop anything. Like it wouldn't have stopped the Newtown shooter from stealing guns from someone and killing people.
Nice hasty generalization fallacy. Law failed to stop [incident A] therefore law failed to stop any incidents. That's not even close to valid logic.
If 99 people lock up their guns for every 1 who doesn't, then yes, you would expect 100 times longer between incidents because 1/100th of the number of mentally unstable people contemplating harming others would have trivial access to firearms. With proper reporting and licensing, I would expect 99/100ths compliance to actually be a low estimate. Granted, it's orders of magnitude change in a relatively infrequent event, which makes it hard to measure, but the principle is sound.
Uh... we're talking about laws requiring people who have clinically mentally disturbed family members to keep their guns in safes so that those family members will not have access to them. In other words, they would make it illegal to keep guns in a manner that poses an unnecessarily high risk of abuse by other people. Please read the thread before replying. In context, your argument is a complete non-sequitur.
How fucking effective do you really believe your proposed laws would be? Good Lord, somebody WHO IS GOING TO SHOOT SOMEONE WOULDN'T FUCKING CARE THAT IT'S ALSO ILLEGAL TO NOT LOCK UP GUNS
Uh... you're conflating two different people. The purpose of such laws would be to reduce the likelihood of theft of guns that can be used by someone else to shoot people.
People are required to stop their cars at stop signs, too. They DON'T, and usually nothing happens to them.
Most people do, and even the ones who don't stop generally come close enough to get the job done. And most people do it not because they might get caught, but because the existence of those signs is an indication that safety necessitates a stop at that particular intersection. Laws don't have to work perfectly 100% of the time to be effective at reducing harm. Therefore, those traffic laws do, in fact, work as intended. I can't see any valid argument why these would not work similarly well.
The purpose of laws is not to punish people who do not follow them. The purpose of laws is to define acceptable limits for human behavior and to define punishments to encourage people to fall within those limits. Therefore, the fact that some people die before they can be punished is unimportant.
What is important is that by passing a law like this and publicizing it, the public's attention is drawn to that law on an ongoing basis, both during the legislative process (by the news media) and at purchase time (by the sellers). As a result, the vast majority of gun owners will follow such laws, which means the odds of an event like this would be lower by orders of magnitude.
Are you suggesting that if you have a family member with issues (I wanted to type "crazy", but that's derogatory IMO) then you shouldn't be able to pass a background check?
Either that or you should be required to keep the firearms locked up in a safe, and that person should not be allowed to know how to unlock said safe. Same goes for anyone with children in the house who are under the age of ten or so.
In New York vs Ferber, the ACLU advocated that the possession and distribution of child pornography is protected by the first amendment.
This is not a group that truly cares about freedom.
To play devil's advocate here, that example strongly suggests that they do care about freedom—the freedom to do what you want as long as no one is provably harmed. The victims in child porn become victims when the pictures are taken, not when the pictures are looked at (with the possible exception of situations where the person possessing it happens to somehow know the victim, but I'd expect that to be exceedingly rare).
And although it should be illegal to sell child pornography (for the same reason that it is generally illegal to profit from a crime), the arguments for laws banning its possession are basically identical to the arguments for prohibition of marijuana possession:
That the individual must be protected against any harm from his or her own choice to consume something dubious (pot/kiddie porn).
That the consumption may be a gateway towards something worse (meth/child abuse).
That being able to jail the user/distributor gives law enforcement greater ability to coerce them into giving up their distributor to eventually get back to the source.
The first argument is dubious for the same reason that bans on violent videogames are dubious. The second argument is even more dubious because it only serves to drive the abuse underground, making it harder to detect. The third argument describes a problem that could be solved more easily with obstruction and/or contempt charges, and with fewer side effects.
From a purely logical perspective, then, anyone against the war on drugs should also be against bans on child porn distribution (except commercial distribution) and possession, and for precisely the same reasons. Anti-possession laws are universally dumb, no matter how evil or heinous you might personally think the thing being possessed is. The only thing they do is satisfy the public's desire for revenge by misdirecting it against someone who played no role in harming the children in the first place.
By contrast, legalizing possession would have many of the same benefits as legalizing pot. For example, by allowing it to be distributed (without profit) freely, child porn traders would take fewer steps to anonymize their trades, which would make it easier to monitor them to ensure that they are not, in fact, harming children. It would reduce the use of child porn mixed with executable code as a vehicle for creating botnets. And so on.
So why do you think that advocating for the legalization of child porn possession makes them anti-freedom?
As I explained already, the reason so many bombings involve garbage cans (particularly in western countries) is that every other means of bombing either has a higher risk of getting caught (e.g. leaving a bag in plain sight) or requires someone to commit suicide. Neither of those problems is insurmountable, mind you, but it changes the equation significantly, particularly if the bomber is a lone nutjob rather than part of an organized terrorist organization.
And no, this isn't just speculation and hot air. It's one thing to fail to prevent something that truly could not have been predicted, such as JFK's assassination. It is quite another to fail to prevent a scenario that security experts have been warning about for years. Comments about securing garbage cans in public places against terrorist attacks might legitimately have been dismissed as 20/20 hindsight when these issues were pointed out after the Olympic Park Bombing almost two decades ago or after a few of the IRA bombings in England. Such comments might even have been dismissed as 20/20 hindsight after garbage cans were used in Madrid's train station bombings almost a decade ago. But this is just the latest in a long string of garbage can bombings in the western world, and it was at least the second such incident in the United States. I'm sorry, but that's way past 20/20 hindsight, and well into WTF territory.
It was well understood long before this latest attack that you should avoid putting garbage cans where people are likely to congregate, and that any nearby garbage cans in such places should be designed to absorb most of the force if somebody plants a bomb in them. For example, London ditched most of their garbage cans because of IRA bombings decades ago, and began testing bomb-proof garbage cans almost five years ago. New York has bomb-proof garbage cans in certain key areas as well. Chicago began the process of upgrading theirs a year ago. And so on. Heck, the issue of garbage can safety was even a well understood problem in Boston. Boston just failed to properly address the problem, and three people lost their lives as a direct result of that failure.
Sadly, the underlying reason for that failure seems to be endemic to American government. For the most part, instead of doing useful upgrades that could save lives, we've poured billions of dollars into worthless body scanners at airports and other technology that doesn't actually work. For the amount of money we've squandered on the TSA, we could have installed forty-four million bomb-proof garbage cans in cities across the country. Do the math. IMO, Napolitano should resign, and the TSA and most of Homeland Security should be dismantled, but I'm not holding my breath.
Speaking of holding my breath, why in heck did they put garbage cans right near the pedestrian barricades in the first place? Nobody wants to stand next to a smelly garbage can while watching a race. That's stupid even if you aren't worried about bombers. But I digress.
If they were triggered remotely, they would have gone off simultaneously of they were triggered by the same operation,or longer than a few seconds between explosions if they were triggered separately (I guess the bomber could have had 2 phones and dialed the bombs as the same time, but that seems overly complicated).
Speed dial the first one, then the second. It isn't particularly hard to call two phone numbers twenty seconds apart. I'm pretty sure most people could manually key in a phone number in that much time.
Laws cannot usefully restrict criminals. However, laws can usefully prevent law-abiding people from aiding them. For example, although background checks do not absolutely prevent criminals from getting guns, they can make it harder, riskier, and more expensive. Laws requiring people to report all legal sales of gunpowder, fertilizer, etc. could allow detection of unusual sudden purchases by individuals, triggering further scrutiny, which if done semi-covertly, would significantly reduce the risk of criminal use of those substances to build bombs. (Of course, if done non-covertly, it would just drive the bad guys underground.) And so on.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can move the reps home to their districts, the lobbying problem becomes less of an issue, and they wind up being guided by the people from their districts as intended. At that point, term limits won't cause much harm (but probably won't help much, either).
That sounds like a recipe for regulatory capture, IMO.
It's easy, and I've been saying it for almost a decade now: Outlaw Congress, or at least the physical manifestation of it. If you send all of the politicians home to their districts, the cost for a corporation to lobby goes up by at least a factor of hundreds because they have to send lobbyists all around the country, and the cost for an average citizen to lobby goes down by a factor of hundreds because they need only drive a few miles to talk to their elected representatives. The corporations cease to have an advantage over ordinary citizens at that point, and the question of making the act of lobbying itself illegal becomes moot.
Assuming you care about capturing the suspect, stun grenades are still better than guns or tasers. Just saying.
And the other guy looks like Michell Musso. I *knew* it. Walt Disney's antisemitic army is in league with Al Qaeda. It's the only possible explanation. :-D
Wrong on all counts. I was born and lived for the first 22 years of my life in the rural South. Even living in a college town, I'd estimate that probably about half of my Facebook friends from my high school still live within about a 100 mile radius of my home town, give or take. And historically, the percentages have been even higher than that in many parts of the south—particularly in Appalachia.
The problem is that they haven't taken the blogger threat seriously. They've knee-jerked. There's a difference. A serious response to the blogger threat would involve using bloggers as a source of tips, and seeking confirmation before they actually report things, or at the very least, making it clear which reports are unconfirmed.
Instead, their response has been to report faster and less accurately. Thus, ironically, the very actions they took in response to the blogger threat have eliminated the sole remaining advantage that they previously had over blogs, and thus lessened the news media's importance rather than increasing it.
Depends on how narrowly you define "terrorist". I would argue that Iraq's genocidal attacks on the Kurds qualify as terrorism, and that their attempts to build a nuclear program in violation of international law constitute psychological terrorism, but maybe that's just me.
Fair enough. There's definitely a line when mere possession poses an unacceptable risk of harm to others.
For example, you don't have to do anything with nerve gas for it to corrode the container it is in and kill people. You don't have to do anything with uranium for your house to collapse and cause a small supercriticality event that kills several of your neighbors, or for it to leach into the water supply and cause increased cancer rates throughout your area. And so on.
And as another person mentioned, possessing people is bad, because the act of possession inherently poses harm to others (not even risk, but actual harm).
But with the exception of owning people, those laws don't generally ban possession. They merely limit the circumstances of said possession. For example, you can buy tiny quantities of unrefined Uranium from Amazon. And companies with appropriate levels of clearance and oversight can possess radioactive materials even in large quantities.
Here's the reality that every pro-gun zealot ignores: laws that make it more difficult for criminals to get guns reduce crime.
Laws cannot prevent a truly determined person from committing a crime, but not everybody is that determined. Therefore, laws that add barriers to make it harder for the wrong people to get weapons can be effective by making it more likely that they will give up before they find a seller who is also willing to break the law.
Right.
Wrong. Marrying your cousin is unlikely to cause problems—the risk is only slightly higher than the risk in the general population. What causes problems is repeated inbreeding of close relatives over the course of several generations.
The fundamental thing you're missing is why incest is a problem in southern states. In the South, people don't move around that much. Most of the folks you meet are third, fourth, fifth generation residents of a given town. And the ones who aren't are usually from a couple of towns over. This means that there's a very high probability of being related to many of the people you meet. Left alone, this would result in significant inbreeding problems within just a few generations. Therefore, cousin marriages are problematic.
In California, most of the people you meet are transplants from somewhere else. This means that there's almost zero probability of being related to anyone you meet. Therefore, first cousin marriages are not problematic in California, not because they won't ever be problematic if they occurred, but because they're about as likely as the Cubs winning the world series, and because the probability of multigenerational inbreeding (the real problem) is basically zero.
I think the last time I regularly read a magazine was around the turn of the century. Ditto for newspapers. Subject-specific news aggregators like Slashdot have pretty much superseded magazines in every way that matters. Newspapers, on the other hand, are still occasionally useful as packing material.
But what you are demonstrating there is an "absence of proof" fallacy. We know that it failed to stop incidents A, B, and C, but we have no data on whether there would otherwise have been incidents D, E, F, and G had those laws not prevented them. This is why proof by anecdote is basically useless for all but the most trivial premises (e.g. "No cows have horns"). If you want to prove your point logically, you must provide statistics to back up the statement. Otherwise, you're basically begging the question.
Nice hasty generalization fallacy. Law failed to stop [incident A] therefore law failed to stop any incidents. That's not even close to valid logic.
No, but it is pretty much what happened with Iraq.
If 99 people lock up their guns for every 1 who doesn't, then yes, you would expect 100 times longer between incidents because 1/100th of the number of mentally unstable people contemplating harming others would have trivial access to firearms. With proper reporting and licensing, I would expect 99/100ths compliance to actually be a low estimate. Granted, it's orders of magnitude change in a relatively infrequent event, which makes it hard to measure, but the principle is sound.
Uh... we're talking about laws requiring people who have clinically mentally disturbed family members to keep their guns in safes so that those family members will not have access to them. In other words, they would make it illegal to keep guns in a manner that poses an unnecessarily high risk of abuse by other people. Please read the thread before replying. In context, your argument is a complete non-sequitur.
Uh... you're conflating two different people. The purpose of such laws would be to reduce the likelihood of theft of guns that can be used by someone else to shoot people.
Most people do, and even the ones who don't stop generally come close enough to get the job done. And most people do it not because they might get caught, but because the existence of those signs is an indication that safety necessitates a stop at that particular intersection. Laws don't have to work perfectly 100% of the time to be effective at reducing harm. Therefore, those traffic laws do, in fact, work as intended. I can't see any valid argument why these would not work similarly well.
The purpose of laws is not to punish people who do not follow them. The purpose of laws is to define acceptable limits for human behavior and to define punishments to encourage people to fall within those limits. Therefore, the fact that some people die before they can be punished is unimportant.
What is important is that by passing a law like this and publicizing it, the public's attention is drawn to that law on an ongoing basis, both during the legislative process (by the news media) and at purchase time (by the sellers). As a result, the vast majority of gun owners will follow such laws, which means the odds of an event like this would be lower by orders of magnitude.
Or they're planting a seed that will turn into an excuse to go to war with Iran. We'll know in a few months.
Either that or you should be required to keep the firearms locked up in a safe, and that person should not be allowed to know how to unlock said safe. Same goes for anyone with children in the house who are under the age of ten or so.
To play devil's advocate here, that example strongly suggests that they do care about freedom—the freedom to do what you want as long as no one is provably harmed. The victims in child porn become victims when the pictures are taken, not when the pictures are looked at (with the possible exception of situations where the person possessing it happens to somehow know the victim, but I'd expect that to be exceedingly rare).
And although it should be illegal to sell child pornography (for the same reason that it is generally illegal to profit from a crime), the arguments for laws banning its possession are basically identical to the arguments for prohibition of marijuana possession:
The first argument is dubious for the same reason that bans on violent videogames are dubious. The second argument is even more dubious because it only serves to drive the abuse underground, making it harder to detect. The third argument describes a problem that could be solved more easily with obstruction and/or contempt charges, and with fewer side effects.
From a purely logical perspective, then, anyone against the war on drugs should also be against bans on child porn distribution (except commercial distribution) and possession, and for precisely the same reasons. Anti-possession laws are universally dumb, no matter how evil or heinous you might personally think the thing being possessed is. The only thing they do is satisfy the public's desire for revenge by misdirecting it against someone who played no role in harming the children in the first place.
By contrast, legalizing possession would have many of the same benefits as legalizing pot. For example, by allowing it to be distributed (without profit) freely, child porn traders would take fewer steps to anonymize their trades, which would make it easier to monitor them to ensure that they are not, in fact, harming children. It would reduce the use of child porn mixed with executable code as a vehicle for creating botnets. And so on.
So why do you think that advocating for the legalization of child porn possession makes them anti-freedom?
As I explained already, the reason so many bombings involve garbage cans (particularly in western countries) is that every other means of bombing either has a higher risk of getting caught (e.g. leaving a bag in plain sight) or requires someone to commit suicide. Neither of those problems is insurmountable, mind you, but it changes the equation significantly, particularly if the bomber is a lone nutjob rather than part of an organized terrorist organization.
And no, this isn't just speculation and hot air. It's one thing to fail to prevent something that truly could not have been predicted, such as JFK's assassination. It is quite another to fail to prevent a scenario that security experts have been warning about for years. Comments about securing garbage cans in public places against terrorist attacks might legitimately have been dismissed as 20/20 hindsight when these issues were pointed out after the Olympic Park Bombing almost two decades ago or after a few of the IRA bombings in England. Such comments might even have been dismissed as 20/20 hindsight after garbage cans were used in Madrid's train station bombings almost a decade ago. But this is just the latest in a long string of garbage can bombings in the western world, and it was at least the second such incident in the United States. I'm sorry, but that's way past 20/20 hindsight, and well into WTF territory.
It was well understood long before this latest attack that you should avoid putting garbage cans where people are likely to congregate, and that any nearby garbage cans in such places should be designed to absorb most of the force if somebody plants a bomb in them. For example, London ditched most of their garbage cans because of IRA bombings decades ago, and began testing bomb-proof garbage cans almost five years ago. New York has bomb-proof garbage cans in certain key areas as well. Chicago began the process of upgrading theirs a year ago. And so on. Heck, the issue of garbage can safety was even a well understood problem in Boston . Boston just failed to properly address the problem, and three people lost their lives as a direct result of that failure.
Sadly, the underlying reason for that failure seems to be endemic to American government. For the most part, instead of doing useful upgrades that could save lives, we've poured billions of dollars into worthless body scanners at airports and other technology that doesn't actually work. For the amount of money we've squandered on the TSA, we could have installed forty-four million bomb-proof garbage cans in cities across the country. Do the math. IMO, Napolitano should resign, and the TSA and most of Homeland Security should be dismantled, but I'm not holding my breath.
Speaking of holding my breath, why in heck did they put garbage cans right near the pedestrian barricades in the first place? Nobody wants to stand next to a smelly garbage can while watching a race. That's stupid even if you aren't worried about bombers. But I digress.
Most people don't litter, and the ones who do litter are likely to do so whether the can is twenty feet away or seventy.
Speed dial the first one, then the second. It isn't particularly hard to call two phone numbers twenty seconds apart. I'm pretty sure most people could manually key in a phone number in that much time.
Laws cannot usefully restrict criminals. However, laws can usefully prevent law-abiding people from aiding them. For example, although background checks do not absolutely prevent criminals from getting guns, they can make it harder, riskier, and more expensive. Laws requiring people to report all legal sales of gunpowder, fertilizer, etc. could allow detection of unusual sudden purchases by individuals, triggering further scrutiny, which if done semi-covertly, would significantly reduce the risk of criminal use of those substances to build bombs. (Of course, if done non-covertly, it would just drive the bad guys underground.) And so on.