Green makes sense, actively creating global panic to push green initiatives doesn't make sense. It also leads to failed green policies because people are in too much of a panicked rush to take the time to accurately predict the results of the changes they want to make.
In the long term, the AGW argument still matters on this front, because if it turns out to be all for nothing (global warming doesn't cause huge problems) and we're all ass deep in a bunch of failed half-assed green policies it's going to be detrimental to the green movement in many ways.
So yes, I love the green idea. Hitching its wagon to the global warming issue is not the best way to get it done.
Their predictions were wrong. It's melting faster than anyone anticipated. That's fine, how does this get to "it's exactly what we said was gonna happen but worse!" when it should be "we were wrong and we obviously don't have an accurate way of predicting these things."
I think you've thought about this nonsense entirely too much.
I don't really ascribe any rights to hypothetical beings however I do like to plan for their eventually if it seems likely.
Basically, I don't care about your offspring, but I do care about mine, and 200 years from now they don't need geezers like you're gonna end up being hanging around stinking up the joint with all your antiquated and burdensome ideas about life, liberty, religion, or whether or not a black person constitutes property if you get my drift. They'll have their own thing going, and you're just gonna drag them down cus you're too selfish and too cowardly to let go of life.
I won't be there so I guess I don't care too much, but just hear this: if you decide to live forever I'm sure my future offspring will eventually come to see you as some freakish vampire thing and kill you in a way that will make you wish you just agreed to keel over when the time came like everyone else
Extending the lifespan significantly seems to have all kind of benefits for the individual and all kinds of negative consequences for society and the species in general.
You're fucking over your kids and grandkids, who probably won't be allowed to be born for reasons of overpopulation while you selfishly hog the great tit of life.
And to end it all I imagine that within the first few hundred years of having pretty much the exact same population existing on earth bacteria will have advanced so far past us that it'll just wipe us all out in one massive wave of the worst pestilence imaginable unleashing an extremely cruel death on every human alive
...come to think of it I don't see why we deserve any better. I wholeheartedly support this initiative.
Actually the U.S. military has over a million service people in it. Given that there's only 300 million americans that means it's a ratio of 1/300. that 300 includes children, women and disabled people, none of whom have any kind of legal right to own the ordinance one would need to take on a battle tank with realistic chances, let alone shoot down an aircraft.
So while guns are nice, ultimately your mostly relying on your hope that the American military wouldn't allow itself to be manipulated and used by a tyrant, which really, I hope is true, but doesn't do anything to advance the argument that guns are gonna protect you from tyranny.
They are indeed, but lots of research has gone into this and higher ethical/moral concerns get left in the dustbin in the face of pressure form authority(a la Milgram experiment), or the corrupting nature of power (Stanford Prison experiment).
I'm not saying they are any worse than anyone else on the planet, but the military trains them to obey, and is designed by necessity to limit the ability of the troops to question their orders. If any of us was in the military the pressures of such unity would cause to do things we wouldn't normally do.
Honestly, I think that a trained, professional army deciding enbloc to defy the Constitution, their Oaths, and the Uniformed Code of Military Justice to attack their friends, neighbors, and families in any meaningful way is utterly ridiculous.
1)While i'd like to agree with you years of psychological research stands against you. Not to mention Americans had no qualms about defying their oath and killing their own brothers/cousins in the Civil war.
2) That isn't the scenario that has been given. If you are trying to argue that your guns protect you from the government "rounding you up" then you're talking about a military action, replying to an assertion that the military would kick your ass with "well the military would be on our side" pretty much defeats the entire purpose of the argument anyway.. if the military was really so reliably on your side then you wouldn't need guns and the fact that you had them wouldn't matter!
As for your "...average Joe Americans with handguns and rifles...", many of them are veterans of military service. I would even hazard a guess that the number of average Joe American veterans probably outnumber our active duty personnel.
It is not as cut and dried or black and white as you seem to think.
Fine and dandy, unless said vets have javelin and stinger missiles in their basement(which would be illegal btw), their training isn't going to make that hunting rifle do any better against an m1a1 tank, not to mention air force jets and choppers. It will be ineffectual. Any form of organized resistance would require more than random collection of citizens that no how to use guns. It would require equipment you don't have, organization that isn't set up, and training that can't be provided in the given timeframe.
The real protection against tyranny that the second amendment offers is in that bit about state militias, which y'all gave up a loooong time ago. Your guns are NOT going to do you any good, and I suspect many people cling to them because they still want to feel like they're ultimately in charge in spite of the fact that this government has been systematically fucking them out of their rights for the last 60 years.
Good job on the whole adding something new to this discussion front.
I'll respond the same way, you're just romanticizing a collection of past proxy wars. Get a grip, please try to understand that they are first and foremost exceptions, and secondly unique that in EVERY SINGLE one of those cases the supposed rag tag rebels had vasts amount of training and military support from greater powers.
You're presuming a level morality doesn't exist in my opinion. It's a lot easier to kill dirty rebels with guns when you think of them as dirty liberals/evil conservatives. It's also easy to lie about your own military about what is occurring.
Rebellions tend to calm down after you've kill enough people. For every successful rebellion you read about there are hundreds of failed ones.
It's also interesting that all of these "our guns will save us from tyranny" arguments seem to rely heavily on political taboos against killing civilians to make their scenarios work.
Yeah, that uprising happened when the majority of German troops and equipment were trapped in Russia.
It's not about numbers, it's about which side pisses it's pants and runs first. Hint: in the many Irish rebellions it wasn't uncommon for two or three Royal Constables to disperse armed mobs of hundred by firing a few shots into the them.
What makes you people think that if someone takes over it's going to be crystal clear and everyone is going to be on the same side? That's ridiculous historically it happens by creating divisions and courting groups of people.
You can die on your feet without a gun. While I agree I would like to fight, the thought that you'd win the fight is utterly ridiculous and doesn't prevent any abuse of power.
Stopping tyrants implies that politicians either aren't in charge or indifferent to the consequences of killing you.
A million people gathered anywhere seems like a good target for a HE cruise missile to me.
The military are trained to follow orders, any defection there would be a split at best, in my opinion, and that doesn't even take into account ideological private armies like blackwater.
I learned a lot from Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan:
The Chinese, Russians, and Americans respectively are more than happy to use you as a proxy if it serves them. Please note that in any of these wars the resistances were completely ineffectual until they were given some real military hardware and training by a benevolent greater power.
Iraq isn't over yet, and any tyrant with balls wouldn't bat an eye over 4 thousand troops dead in 5 years. That hardly qualifies as a nuisance. Stop fooling yourself on this, if a tank rolled into your town your guns wouldn't help you with anything. Any resistance without serious outside support would be futile.
Actually this is the gun violence chart the other one wasn't per capita.
Which pretty much has no recognizable relationship between gun laws and gun violence. If you were to offset the population issues I don't think you'd get anything meaningful either.
what a wash.
Actually you're right. But per capita comparisons of homicides seem dubious at best, it's not really a coincidence (in my opinion) that the top 4 on that list are the 4 most populous states in the union. Denser populations lead to more crime. I'd like to see some stats weighted for this fact.
Also, it seems states with less gun control laws have a spike in suicides/police shooings?
the nutjobs in Washington couldn't as easily send the army or blackwater into Detroit to round up all the Arab Americans there as they could if there were no guns in private hands
Honestly, I think this whole notion that a bunch of average Joe Americans with handguns and rifles is going to stand up to a trained professional army in any meaningful way is utterly ridiculous.
So tell me how you, as a criminal, would even know who was armed and who wasn't? If I was a mugger who lived in an area where a victim was likely to be armed I'd probably just shoot the guy in the back of the head before he had a chance to defend himself. But I'm sure most criminals aren't the amoral calculating types like me.
While I agree in principle with the decision, the argument that gun ownership restriction make the public less safe is ridiculous. It just isn't really supported by the numbers. Which show that aside from the few exceptions, in general states with more liberal gun ownership laws tend to have a significantly higher rate of gun deaths.
But all of this is completely besides the point because the right to own a gun is stated clearly in the bill of rights and that should be enough. At least of the courage to stand by that fact and not make disingenuous arguments about how it's actually better for society on some vague level.
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Green makes sense, actively creating global panic to push green initiatives doesn't make sense. It also leads to failed green policies because people are in too much of a panicked rush to take the time to accurately predict the results of the changes they want to make. In the long term, the AGW argument still matters on this front, because if it turns out to be all for nothing (global warming doesn't cause huge problems) and we're all ass deep in a bunch of failed half-assed green policies it's going to be detrimental to the green movement in many ways. So yes, I love the green idea. Hitching its wagon to the global warming issue is not the best way to get it done.
Their predictions were wrong. It's melting faster than anyone anticipated. That's fine, how does this get to "it's exactly what we said was gonna happen but worse!" when it should be "we were wrong and we obviously don't have an accurate way of predicting these things."
That sort of attitude worked brilliantly with the whole Ethanol fiasco so why not keep it going?
I think you've thought about this nonsense entirely too much.
I don't really ascribe any rights to hypothetical beings however I do like to plan for their eventually if it seems likely.
Basically, I don't care about your offspring, but I do care about mine, and 200 years from now they don't need geezers like you're gonna end up being hanging around stinking up the joint with all your antiquated and burdensome ideas about life, liberty, religion, or whether or not a black person constitutes property if you get my drift. They'll have their own thing going, and you're just gonna drag them down cus you're too selfish and too cowardly to let go of life.
I won't be there so I guess I don't care too much, but just hear this: if you decide to live forever I'm sure my future offspring will eventually come to see you as some freakish vampire thing and kill you in a way that will make you wish you just agreed to keel over when the time came like everyone else
What exactly do you mean by other?
Hrm, did I miss the part where humanity stopped being stupid?
Extending the lifespan significantly seems to have all kind of benefits for the individual and all kinds of negative consequences for society and the species in general.
You're fucking over your kids and grandkids, who probably won't be allowed to be born for reasons of overpopulation while you selfishly hog the great tit of life.
And to end it all I imagine that within the first few hundred years of having pretty much the exact same population existing on earth bacteria will have advanced so far past us that it'll just wipe us all out in one massive wave of the worst pestilence imaginable unleashing an extremely cruel death on every human alive
...come to think of it I don't see why we deserve any better. I wholeheartedly support this initiative.
agreed. luckily for me I can save face and say that means the idea that gun control makes us less safe is also invalid.
Actually the U.S. military has over a million service people in it. Given that there's only 300 million americans that means it's a ratio of 1/300. that 300 includes children, women and disabled people, none of whom have any kind of legal right to own the ordinance one would need to take on a battle tank with realistic chances, let alone shoot down an aircraft. So while guns are nice, ultimately your mostly relying on your hope that the American military wouldn't allow itself to be manipulated and used by a tyrant, which really, I hope is true, but doesn't do anything to advance the argument that guns are gonna protect you from tyranny.
They are indeed, but lots of research has gone into this and higher ethical/moral concerns get left in the dustbin in the face of pressure form authority(a la Milgram experiment), or the corrupting nature of power (Stanford Prison experiment). I'm not saying they are any worse than anyone else on the planet, but the military trains them to obey, and is designed by necessity to limit the ability of the troops to question their orders. If any of us was in the military the pressures of such unity would cause to do things we wouldn't normally do.
2) That isn't the scenario that has been given. If you are trying to argue that your guns protect you from the government "rounding you up" then you're talking about a military action, replying to an assertion that the military would kick your ass with "well the military would be on our side" pretty much defeats the entire purpose of the argument anyway.. if the military was really so reliably on your side then you wouldn't need guns and the fact that you had them wouldn't matter!
Fine and dandy, unless said vets have javelin and stinger missiles in their basement(which would be illegal btw), their training isn't going to make that hunting rifle do any better against an m1a1 tank, not to mention air force jets and choppers. It will be ineffectual. Any form of organized resistance would require more than random collection of citizens that no how to use guns. It would require equipment you don't have, organization that isn't set up, and training that can't be provided in the given timeframe.
The real protection against tyranny that the second amendment offers is in that bit about state militias, which y'all gave up a loooong time ago. Your guns are NOT going to do you any good, and I suspect many people cling to them because they still want to feel like they're ultimately in charge in spite of the fact that this government has been systematically fucking them out of their rights for the last 60 years.
Good job on the whole adding something new to this discussion front.
I'll respond the same way, you're just romanticizing a collection of past proxy wars. Get a grip, please try to understand that they are first and foremost exceptions, and secondly unique that in EVERY SINGLE one of those cases the supposed rag tag rebels had vasts amount of training and military support from greater powers.
You're presuming a level morality doesn't exist in my opinion. It's a lot easier to kill dirty rebels with guns when you think of them as dirty liberals/evil conservatives. It's also easy to lie about your own military about what is occurring.
Rebellions tend to calm down after you've kill enough people. For every successful rebellion you read about there are hundreds of failed ones.
It's also interesting that all of these "our guns will save us from tyranny" arguments seem to rely heavily on political taboos against killing civilians to make their scenarios work.
Yeah, that uprising happened when the majority of German troops and equipment were trapped in Russia.
It's not about numbers, it's about which side pisses it's pants and runs first. Hint: in the many Irish rebellions it wasn't uncommon for two or three Royal Constables to disperse armed mobs of hundred by firing a few shots into the them.
What makes you people think that if someone takes over it's going to be crystal clear and everyone is going to be on the same side? That's ridiculous historically it happens by creating divisions and courting groups of people.
You can die on your feet without a gun. While I agree I would like to fight, the thought that you'd win the fight is utterly ridiculous and doesn't prevent any abuse of power.
Stopping tyrants implies that politicians either aren't in charge or indifferent to the consequences of killing you.
A million people gathered anywhere seems like a good target for a HE cruise missile to me.
The military are trained to follow orders, any defection there would be a split at best, in my opinion, and that doesn't even take into account ideological private armies like blackwater.
I learned a lot from Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan: The Chinese, Russians, and Americans respectively are more than happy to use you as a proxy if it serves them. Please note that in any of these wars the resistances were completely ineffectual until they were given some real military hardware and training by a benevolent greater power.
Iraq isn't over yet, and any tyrant with balls wouldn't bat an eye over 4 thousand troops dead in 5 years. That hardly qualifies as a nuisance. Stop fooling yourself on this, if a tank rolled into your town your guns wouldn't help you with anything. Any resistance without serious outside support would be futile.
Actually this is the gun violence chart the other one wasn't per capita. Which pretty much has no recognizable relationship between gun laws and gun violence. If you were to offset the population issues I don't think you'd get anything meaningful either. what a wash.
I for one welcome our new linguistic overlords.
Actually you're right. But per capita comparisons of homicides seem dubious at best, it's not really a coincidence (in my opinion) that the top 4 on that list are the 4 most populous states in the union. Denser populations lead to more crime. I'd like to see some stats weighted for this fact.
Also, it seems states with less gun control laws have a spike in suicides/police shooings?
So tell me how you, as a criminal, would even know who was armed and who wasn't? If I was a mugger who lived in an area where a victim was likely to be armed I'd probably just shoot the guy in the back of the head before he had a chance to defend himself. But I'm sure most criminals aren't the amoral calculating types like me.
I wonder why an easily concealable weapon is more dangerous than an assault rifle in a giant urban environment. We may never know....
While I agree in principle with the decision, the argument that gun ownership restriction make the public less safe is ridiculous. It just isn't really supported by the numbers. Which show that aside from the few exceptions, in general states with more liberal gun ownership laws tend to have a significantly higher rate of gun deaths. But all of this is completely besides the point because the right to own a gun is stated clearly in the bill of rights and that should be enough. At least of the courage to stand by that fact and not make disingenuous arguments about how it's actually better for society on some vague level.
Last Time I was in CA traffic court the rule was it can't be in view of the driver.