Firefox isn't all that great (showing how not that great the competing and mostly inferior browsers are). What does Firefox do in a year that costs $100M? It seems that a company with $5M in revenue could have done what Firefox has done in the past year, and that includes 3 "major version numbers".
If you gave me $100M I could pay a team that not only wrote an HTML4 browser (and HTTP/FTP/whatever protocol) from scratch, but also HTML5, and probably a JVM, too.
The government would just send forces from different places to hotspots around the country. Most Americans would continue working to feed themselves, as they have throughout the many crises in which government cut our rights and boosted the police state.
And even if you're right, it's the military that's far more self sufficient than the people it would be sent to suppress. Yes, the revolution would already have happened, but it certainly would be for the worse, and far from protecting anyone's rights.
But so what? It's just the actual version of the fantasy that gun fetishists would revolt against the police state they've voted for and armed. The police state that already does what the gun fetishists said they'd revolt against while insisting the police state give them more guns. It'll never happen, as is obvious because it didn't happen when it counted and might even have had a chance.
Your line in the sand is infinitely moveable. As the past decade and more have demonstrated. Meanwhile, the cut back rights and vast increase in government surveillance, detention and firepower make your puny militias look like Saddam's army.
You gun fetishists are the nut cases. Especially when you introduce some twisted babble about MAD. Just another ax you're grinding alone - the work of a nut case.
You think it'll be OK in America when it's like Afghanistan, where the locals are "winning"? The trained military has killed many thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan recently. They'll get sent around the country to shoot at other people's moms. "It's a living."
I'm not saying it's going to happen. To the contrary, the scenario we're discussing is where the gun fetishists actually revolt. You and I agree they won't; there won't be a playing out of the military to stop them. I address it only because even in that purely fantasy scenario the gun fetishists lose. And that's one reason why they won't revolt, because even these people don't want to shoot at the US military that would crush them, even if they spent generations being crushed. Instead of just empty bragging in a country where only the right to have a meaningless pistol is sacred.
But they never did. Last month an Iraq vet got shot in the face in Oakland for daring to assemble peaceably with others resisting the banker war on Americans. No new ex/military are joining the "revolt".
It's never going to happen. It's a fantasy. A fantasy created only to excuse the crazy arms buildup that panders to gun fetishists.
It's impossible to underestimate the power of American posers like you and your gun fetishists. The Afghans never accepted the Soviet invasion. The Vietnamese never accepted the French or American invaders. You gun fetishists have not only accepted them, you've voted for and donated to them.
You had your chances to do something like you said, and you didn't. You're frauds, living in a perpetual fantasy world.
I do not think that present government abuse is worthy of armed insurrection. I did not say that I'm against keeping arms for that purpose. I said that you gun fetishists always say you need them because you'll use them to protect our freedoms. But as I said, you never did, even when those freedoms were really grabbed a decade ago - by the politicians you voted for, who gave you only your guns. And gave the military you'd have to face far more guns.
What I do is vote and speak reasonably with fellow voters about the government. You gun fetishists do not.
And no comparison to Egypt or Libya is going to have anything to do with that. Especially since those actions were most convenient to US oil corps, especially in Libya which has actually changed (for now). The US government that you elected because it panders to your gun fetish is already as convenient as possible to those oil corps, so there's not going to be anything like it. To the contrary, you and the remarkable suckers in the "Tea Party" are mostly organized and pandered to by the Koch brothers and their fellow oil and coal mandarins.
You people have done nothing but make the tyranny worse. The idea that the Egyptian or Libyian revolutions this year say anything about you, except to show your complacent inaction, is nothing but your latest delusion.
Are they public universities and schools? Are they the NYC Department of Education, the largest in the nation, with many hundreds of thousands of teachers, students and staff, and an IT budget of about $2 BILLION?
I didn't think so.
The NYC DOE doesn't have to use Microsoft. But it does have a lot more serious confidentiality and accessibility policies than most schools - or most organizations, even most governments - of any kind.
What if they just escaped MS Exchange and switched to Zimbra? Isn't Zimbra a lot more scalable, and requires only installing a Zimbra MAPI connector at the client to switch to the configured Zimbra server?
They'd have to rewrite in all their legacy emails SMTP addresses instead of the Exchange X.500 addresses, or replying to them will cause the new recipient addresses to be blank. Isn't there a way to do that inside Zimbra after loading it with the old messages, rather than running something inside the overwhelmed old Exchange server?
The people with guns in New Orleans aren't protecting anyone's rights. They're shooting each other, which is the penpenultimate (behind torture and slavery) violation of rights. They confiscated some guns then, but somehow the city is awash in enough guns that it's been the murder capital of America ever since Katrina.
The key in creating that setup isn't the brief confiscation of them in an emergency in which government was conspicuous in its inaction rather than its action. The key is where the city is flooded with guns under cover of some "defending liberty" BS. Also during Katrina cops murdered people who weren't threatening anyone. And if you think the murder targets would have been safe if only they'd had guns, you don't understand the escalation that is the basic fact of using weapons to settle any difference.
By the time society crumbles, there will be even less chance for you to band together with fellow heroes to fight. You might fight to save your own life, but you won't be protecting anyone's rights but your own. That's not what you gun people said you needed the guns for. And so I don't believe now that you're one of the people who might actually fight then.
Relying on the voting power of those around you is the only thing that will work. All this macho BS about defending liberty with the ammo box has always been a lie. It's time to drop it. Nobody believes it anymore, except maybe those too delusional to realize the truth about themselves.
No, my complaint is not that "you wackos didn't just start shooting up the place".
It's that you wackos just having the guns was no deterrent, though you claimed it would be.
It's that you wackos claimed that when the government started damaging our rights despite the deterrent, you'd actually start showing more than "I'm the NRA and I vote" bumper stickers. You claimed you'd show up with guns, presumably as reasonable and orderly but opposed to the damage. You never did anything of the sort. Instead, you wackos voted for the people who scared you with "confiscate your guns" boogeyman stories about liberals, then damaged our rights.
And even the few real hardcore wackos you run of the mill wackos implied would actually just start shooting up the place never did. Because you're the kind of wackos who don't care about freedom - you care about having guns, shooting them, and scaring regular people. The authorities are your kind of guys.
I'm not complaining that you wackos never did any of those things because I wanted you wackos to do them. I'm complaining because you cowards were lying about it all. Which flooded the country with guns, which gets more people shot, without the promised deterrent to crimes high and low. And which gives the cops the excuse to treat Americans like our soldiers treat Iraqis and Afghans. All while voting for the people who damaged the freedoms you said you'd protect, if only you had completely wacko access to guns.
This is like when people complain when the "family values" Republicans you voted for, who demagogue against gay people and for the drug war, turn up with a gay whore and a bag of meth. It's not the drugs or the paid gay sex that most of us complain about. It's that they got the power to do that by stopping others from doing it, by lying against being against it. With guns, it's how you lie about being against damaging our rights to get ever more guns, but then never keep your word about using those guns one way or another to protect our rights - you use them and the people giving them to you to damage our rights.
Do you get it? I doubt it. It's not like this is the first time it's been laid out in front of you. That happens every day, and you gun fetish wackos never change.
I addressed the fake retirement scam in another reply in this thread.
I'm not encouraging constant and rapid turnover in Congress, except of those more interested in an extra $million for retiring instead of staying to actually serve. I certainly am not kicking them all out, or making any claim that newcomers are not tainted by DC or by anything else.
What I'd like to see from Republicans is accepting that the spending they vote for is better paid by taxes than by debt. Whether that reduces their spending (which is usually the worst, wasteful and beyond, like most military/intel and petrofuel spending), or allows them to increase taxes.
The representatives don't pay for their own travel out of their salaries.
And even as they're paid directly in the top 5% of national incomes, and so in the top 1% of SD incomes, they already take the $INDUSTRY rides.
The issue of corporate access and influence is a separate one, as are the problems of travel to DC outside of the airfare. They should be required to spend more hours meeting with constituents than with non constituents, and publish their 24/7 calendars. All their time meeting anyone except their family should be recorded and archived subject to subpoena.
These reps should all be required to spend the majority of each year's weeks in their constituent districts. They should vote by secure network instead of in DC. Their DC spaces should be permanent Federal housing and offices, and required to pay all their own bills including restaurant and entertainment. They should be prohibited from taking anything of value from anyone or any corp that was regulated by any committee while they were in it. And then they should be audited every 2 years for the rest of their lives.
What you just said is the theory. The reality is that you would be crushed by the forceful response you provoked by demonstrating an actual armed threat to the overwhelmingly armed and otherwise provisioned government forces.
More to the point, you never did anything of the sort, even politically, while the people you voted for transformed this country into the place where police now regularly beat and shoot nonviolent political demonstrators in the streets.
The starting point is in the past. Your violent resistance is more of an ending point.
I have been in a riot. The Occupy people and the cops have not been in a riot. To the degree that the beatings and shootings by the cops have come in something resembling a riot, you are correct that the cops have started it - every time. So where does that leave the idea that the cops won't beat and shoot their fellow citizens for no good reason? These cops don't just get told to start shooting civilians. They are told the civilians are a threat to order and property, that they're commies/nazis, that they're the spoiled college kids who get all the breaks while the cops slave for them in the streets stopping criminals, or that they're the criminals themselves. And evidently enough already believe that to beat them mercilessly.
There are plenty of people in the various armed forces in America who will take that even further, especially if the people they're beating start shooting back. That is what we're talking about in this thread: whether the people who talk about "defending liberty with the ammo box" would or could. In fact they would not, or they'd have been out with the guns they wore to Teabagger rallies during the Bush/Cheney years when the Patriot and other acts actually stripped their freedoms, not just when a half Black Democrat seemed possible to become the president, and even more when he did so. Or when the cops started beating and shooting Americans peacefully demonstrating against the thieving power Wall Street has protected by the government - instead these people side with the cops and vilify the demonstrators.
The gun fetishists are the primary target for the fear and division that gets people out to polls to vote for "Conservative" politicians who legalize and fund force to control Americans. The point is not whether they are the reason we have that kind of police state, but that they are part of its cause rather than any inhibition to it as they loudly claim. Likewise the flood of guns in America that their legislators approve is used by the police for the escalated tactics they sometimes do need to control armed gangs and armed individuals, but which is then turned on even nonviolent political demonstrations. This was all perfectly clear back when just the soap box, the jury box and the ballot box were sufficient to protect us, and as they failed the ammo box could have been invoked but never was; the gun fetishists sided with the enemy. To expect them now to succeed with the ammo box, the least likely way to protect freedom (instead of provoking ever more severe police states) is to defy everything that we actually know, in favor of the rhetoric of people who have only made things worse.
Except that I never said that Teabaggers refer to themselves as Teabaggers. I said they waved around teabags.
Changing what I said to disagree with it is a strawman that's much more serious than taking up Teabaggers on the opportunity they created to call them something they dislike being called.
Calling them Teabaggers doesn't show any ignorance of history. Indeed, I am quite aware of the history that Teabaggers invoke by waving tea bags and calling themselves a "Tea Party". Teabaggers, though, and apparently you with them, are the ones ignorant of American history. The Boston Tea Party featured American colonists throwing East India Company tea into the harbor because it was taxing them without coming with representation in Parliament. Not because it was taxed too much - Parliament had just lowered the taxes, and brought down all tea prices with it, including smuggled tea. This was also a revolt against the official monopoly granted to the East India Company. Teabaggers have never lacked any representation, voting with the majorities that have elected the Republicans who have governed America for all but the years when Teabagger activity has been proportional to the power of people Teabaggers vote against.
And Teabaggers consistently in their consumption and voting favor monopoly power, the top corporate priority; Teabaggers who actually respect no power but corporate. Why not? The Teabaggers are a creation of Fox Lies and its corporate sponsors led by the Koch brothers. True history is a stranger to Teabaggers, except when parading around in ridiculous costumes - adorned with tea bags.
BTW, "nimrod" is indeed an insult in modern America, derived from the mythical king who was said to have defied god. That you imply it isn't is fitting with your thinking some people think "Republitard" or "Dumbocrat" are actually funny, which no one does. But they are consistent with insulting a group of people because of their politics, which you also seem not to understand when the term is "Teabagger".
Your area has more people with guns than the million people in the US military, plus the millions more in the National Guard, the State Police, the state's various municipal, county and local police?
Yes, you are living in a fantasy world. A world from the 1780s, where the locals could have the same firepower and skill as the government forces, instead of little gangs facing satellite guided helicopter, plane and drone bombings and strafings, tank batallions, poison gas... Where the government forces were all from a foreign country, in terrain with no roads, mostly not populated, no databases of political affiliations...
Yes, you are living in a Teabagger fantasy world if you think the many armed Americans have any chance against the actually armed to the teeth military that's been just fine with fighting wars against "guerrillas" for many continuous decades, holding the countries in question under their power even when they're outnumbered there thousands to one by people who want them out.
In the numerous current actions by the jack booted thugs against civilians, the cops deploy someplace where they're expected to control a situation but don't suddenly find themselves in a situation where they feel threatened and over react to that threat. They go in expecting to overreact to a threat - that doesn't actually exist. None of these cops, who have violently arrested, maced without provocation, and beaten hard with clubs now thousands of people were actually threatened. If they felt threatened, it's because they refused to accept the reality happening to them. We have now had many second times, both in the same place and just across the country, for weeks and months.
It's a no huge step going from macing some trouble making punk kids (mindset of the police, mind you, not my opinion of them) to shooting them in the head. The huge step has already been taken: dehumanizing the kids enough to encourage repeated beatings of them, even as they continue to be nonviolent. The step to shooting people in the head isn't necessary - that's what the vast investment in "less lethal" weapons is designed to avoid. And it's already deployed, and already effective in keeping people down.
If a further step were taken by the people with guns to start confronting these beatings, or confronting the power the beating cops are working for, it would be a much easier step for the cops (and beyond) to start shooting people in the head. After all, they were an armed insurrection. The resulting crackdown by American forces would make Syria, Egypt and Lebanon's far worse armed, trained and alienated people look like a mere Kent State. The US is big enough to send forces who come from one place into another place they either have no connection to, or actively dislike (eg. White supremacists from Idaho into Occupy Newark). Big enough to find plenty of thugs already in the armed forces ready to kill other Americans, especially ones they see as "spoiled, lazy rich kids".
This happens all over the world. It is already happening across the moral line in the US. It has happened repeatedly in the US throughout our history. There is no reason to believe it would change radically to the reverse, and every reason to see that it is happening now.
And to my original point, it was perfectly clear that this would happen when the gun fetishists spent years voting for Republicans and Democrats who enable them who created this police state in waiting.
People who take the payment not to serve are more likely to "serve" for the money, not the service. Bribes and other perks, including just the high salaries. Why not just pay them up front, but get them out of power where they do more harm than just taking their salary.
As for the game you identify, retirement is permanent.
But even if it's not (to preserve the pool of eligible candidates for the voters to choose from), the voters would decide whether they want to vote for the guy who took the retirement bonus only a few years ago. Their opponent in the election would point out they did it. If the voters still want them anyway, that's their prerogative. Either the guy really is the best choice, despite having taken themself out of it for the cash, or the voters are stupid. You can't fix stupid.
All you can do is give incentives to reduce the advantages of incumbency. Like additionally prohibiting incumbents from spending any business hours either campaigning, fundraising, or traveling to do so.
No, the median. Why not? Why shouldn't they get paid as an average constituent, not the meaningless average income?
As for forcing retirement for votes for debt, you'd get the bad ones who didn't vote for debt when it was necessary staying, and the good ones forced to leave. Public debt is complex. It requires a suitably complex system to govern it. The many Americans who say they care about debt should find and vote for primary election competitors to their own representatives, who nearly all have voted for spending on debts, most of which isn't necessary. Just forcing out all debt voters automatically just shirks the voters responsibility for picking the ones who were right to vote for it from those who were wrong.
And there's not going to be anyone waving an ammo box at them to stop them. Even though the country is awash in ammo boxes, and people who insisted they need them to stop those government visitors.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox isn't all that great (showing how not that great the competing and mostly inferior browsers are). What does Firefox do in a year that costs $100M? It seems that a company with $5M in revenue could have done what Firefox has done in the past year, and that includes 3 "major version numbers".
If you gave me $100M I could pay a team that not only wrote an HTML4 browser (and HTTP/FTP/whatever protocol) from scratch, but also HTML5, and probably a JVM, too.
The government would just send forces from different places to hotspots around the country. Most Americans would continue working to feed themselves, as they have throughout the many crises in which government cut our rights and boosted the police state.
And even if you're right, it's the military that's far more self sufficient than the people it would be sent to suppress. Yes, the revolution would already have happened, but it certainly would be for the worse, and far from protecting anyone's rights.
But so what? It's just the actual version of the fantasy that gun fetishists would revolt against the police state they've voted for and armed. The police state that already does what the gun fetishists said they'd revolt against while insisting the police state give them more guns. It'll never happen, as is obvious because it didn't happen when it counted and might even have had a chance.
Your line in the sand is infinitely moveable. As the past decade and more have demonstrated. Meanwhile, the cut back rights and vast increase in government surveillance, detention and firepower make your puny militias look like Saddam's army.
You gun fetishists are the nut cases. Especially when you introduce some twisted babble about MAD. Just another ax you're grinding alone - the work of a nut case.
You think it'll be OK in America when it's like Afghanistan, where the locals are "winning"? The trained military has killed many thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan recently. They'll get sent around the country to shoot at other people's moms. "It's a living."
I'm not saying it's going to happen. To the contrary, the scenario we're discussing is where the gun fetishists actually revolt. You and I agree they won't; there won't be a playing out of the military to stop them. I address it only because even in that purely fantasy scenario the gun fetishists lose. And that's one reason why they won't revolt, because even these people don't want to shoot at the US military that would crush them, even if they spent generations being crushed. Instead of just empty bragging in a country where only the right to have a meaningless pistol is sacred.
But they never did. Last month an Iraq vet got shot in the face in Oakland for daring to assemble peaceably with others resisting the banker war on Americans. No new ex/military are joining the "revolt".
It's never going to happen. It's a fantasy. A fantasy created only to excuse the crazy arms buildup that panders to gun fetishists.
Since all past attempts to shut you up with reason have only provoked you to continued stupidity and insults, all there is left for you is fuck you.
It's impossible to underestimate the power of American posers like you and your gun fetishists. The Afghans never accepted the Soviet invasion. The Vietnamese never accepted the French or American invaders. You gun fetishists have not only accepted them, you've voted for and donated to them.
You had your chances to do something like you said, and you didn't. You're frauds, living in a perpetual fantasy world.
I do not think that present government abuse is worthy of armed insurrection. I did not say that I'm against keeping arms for that purpose. I said that you gun fetishists always say you need them because you'll use them to protect our freedoms. But as I said, you never did, even when those freedoms were really grabbed a decade ago - by the politicians you voted for, who gave you only your guns. And gave the military you'd have to face far more guns.
What I do is vote and speak reasonably with fellow voters about the government. You gun fetishists do not.
And no comparison to Egypt or Libya is going to have anything to do with that. Especially since those actions were most convenient to US oil corps, especially in Libya which has actually changed (for now). The US government that you elected because it panders to your gun fetish is already as convenient as possible to those oil corps, so there's not going to be anything like it. To the contrary, you and the remarkable suckers in the "Tea Party" are mostly organized and pandered to by the Koch brothers and their fellow oil and coal mandarins.
You people have done nothing but make the tyranny worse. The idea that the Egyptian or Libyian revolutions this year say anything about you, except to show your complacent inaction, is nothing but your latest delusion.
Are they public universities and schools? Are they the NYC Department of Education, the largest in the nation, with many hundreds of thousands of teachers, students and staff, and an IT budget of about $2 BILLION?
I didn't think so.
The NYC DOE doesn't have to use Microsoft. But it does have a lot more serious confidentiality and accessibility policies than most schools - or most organizations, even most governments - of any kind.
What if they just escaped MS Exchange and switched to Zimbra? Isn't Zimbra a lot more scalable, and requires only installing a Zimbra MAPI connector at the client to switch to the configured Zimbra server?
They'd have to rewrite in all their legacy emails SMTP addresses instead of the Exchange X.500 addresses, or replying to them will cause the new recipient addresses to be blank. Isn't there a way to do that inside Zimbra after loading it with the old messages, rather than running something inside the overwhelmed old Exchange server?
House Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) has been holding hearings on the corruption he accuses Obama having when Federal loan guarantees were given to Solyndra, the large solar startup that went out of business this year. Issa has also been busy denying his own work using his own power to try to get the same loan guarantees for Aptera, which is in his own district. Now Aptera has also failed. Will Issa investigate himself for corruption?
The people with guns in New Orleans aren't protecting anyone's rights. They're shooting each other, which is the penpenultimate (behind torture and slavery) violation of rights. They confiscated some guns then, but somehow the city is awash in enough guns that it's been the murder capital of America ever since Katrina.
The key in creating that setup isn't the brief confiscation of them in an emergency in which government was conspicuous in its inaction rather than its action. The key is where the city is flooded with guns under cover of some "defending liberty" BS. Also during Katrina cops murdered people who weren't threatening anyone. And if you think the murder targets would have been safe if only they'd had guns, you don't understand the escalation that is the basic fact of using weapons to settle any difference.
By the time society crumbles, there will be even less chance for you to band together with fellow heroes to fight. You might fight to save your own life, but you won't be protecting anyone's rights but your own. That's not what you gun people said you needed the guns for. And so I don't believe now that you're one of the people who might actually fight then.
Relying on the voting power of those around you is the only thing that will work. All this macho BS about defending liberty with the ammo box has always been a lie. It's time to drop it. Nobody believes it anymore, except maybe those too delusional to realize the truth about themselves.
No, my complaint is not that "you wackos didn't just start shooting up the place".
It's that you wackos just having the guns was no deterrent, though you claimed it would be.
It's that you wackos claimed that when the government started damaging our rights despite the deterrent, you'd actually start showing more than "I'm the NRA and I vote" bumper stickers. You claimed you'd show up with guns, presumably as reasonable and orderly but opposed to the damage. You never did anything of the sort. Instead, you wackos voted for the people who scared you with "confiscate your guns" boogeyman stories about liberals, then damaged our rights.
And even the few real hardcore wackos you run of the mill wackos implied would actually just start shooting up the place never did. Because you're the kind of wackos who don't care about freedom - you care about having guns, shooting them, and scaring regular people. The authorities are your kind of guys.
I'm not complaining that you wackos never did any of those things because I wanted you wackos to do them. I'm complaining because you cowards were lying about it all. Which flooded the country with guns, which gets more people shot, without the promised deterrent to crimes high and low. And which gives the cops the excuse to treat Americans like our soldiers treat Iraqis and Afghans. All while voting for the people who damaged the freedoms you said you'd protect, if only you had completely wacko access to guns.
This is like when people complain when the "family values" Republicans you voted for, who demagogue against gay people and for the drug war, turn up with a gay whore and a bag of meth. It's not the drugs or the paid gay sex that most of us complain about. It's that they got the power to do that by stopping others from doing it, by lying against being against it. With guns, it's how you lie about being against damaging our rights to get ever more guns, but then never keep your word about using those guns one way or another to protect our rights - you use them and the people giving them to you to damage our rights.
Do you get it? I doubt it. It's not like this is the first time it's been laid out in front of you. That happens every day, and you gun fetish wackos never change.
I addressed the fake retirement scam in another reply in this thread.
I'm not encouraging constant and rapid turnover in Congress, except of those more interested in an extra $million for retiring instead of staying to actually serve. I certainly am not kicking them all out, or making any claim that newcomers are not tainted by DC or by anything else.
What I'd like to see from Republicans is accepting that the spending they vote for is better paid by taxes than by debt. Whether that reduces their spending (which is usually the worst, wasteful and beyond, like most military/intel and petrofuel spending), or allows them to increase taxes.
The representatives don't pay for their own travel out of their salaries.
And even as they're paid directly in the top 5% of national incomes, and so in the top 1% of SD incomes, they already take the $INDUSTRY rides.
The issue of corporate access and influence is a separate one, as are the problems of travel to DC outside of the airfare. They should be required to spend more hours meeting with constituents than with non constituents, and publish their 24/7 calendars. All their time meeting anyone except their family should be recorded and archived subject to subpoena.
These reps should all be required to spend the majority of each year's weeks in their constituent districts. They should vote by secure network instead of in DC. Their DC spaces should be permanent Federal housing and offices, and required to pay all their own bills including restaurant and entertainment. They should be prohibited from taking anything of value from anyone or any corp that was regulated by any committee while they were in it. And then they should be audited every 2 years for the rest of their lives.
What you just said is the theory. The reality is that you would be crushed by the forceful response you provoked by demonstrating an actual armed threat to the overwhelmingly armed and otherwise provisioned government forces.
More to the point, you never did anything of the sort, even politically, while the people you voted for transformed this country into the place where police now regularly beat and shoot nonviolent political demonstrators in the streets.
The starting point is in the past. Your violent resistance is more of an ending point.
I have been in a riot. The Occupy people and the cops have not been in a riot. To the degree that the beatings and shootings by the cops have come in something resembling a riot, you are correct that the cops have started it - every time. So where does that leave the idea that the cops won't beat and shoot their fellow citizens for no good reason? These cops don't just get told to start shooting civilians. They are told the civilians are a threat to order and property, that they're commies/nazis, that they're the spoiled college kids who get all the breaks while the cops slave for them in the streets stopping criminals, or that they're the criminals themselves. And evidently enough already believe that to beat them mercilessly.
There are plenty of people in the various armed forces in America who will take that even further, especially if the people they're beating start shooting back. That is what we're talking about in this thread: whether the people who talk about "defending liberty with the ammo box" would or could. In fact they would not, or they'd have been out with the guns they wore to Teabagger rallies during the Bush/Cheney years when the Patriot and other acts actually stripped their freedoms, not just when a half Black Democrat seemed possible to become the president, and even more when he did so. Or when the cops started beating and shooting Americans peacefully demonstrating against the thieving power Wall Street has protected by the government - instead these people side with the cops and vilify the demonstrators.
The gun fetishists are the primary target for the fear and division that gets people out to polls to vote for "Conservative" politicians who legalize and fund force to control Americans. The point is not whether they are the reason we have that kind of police state, but that they are part of its cause rather than any inhibition to it as they loudly claim. Likewise the flood of guns in America that their legislators approve is used by the police for the escalated tactics they sometimes do need to control armed gangs and armed individuals, but which is then turned on even nonviolent political demonstrations. This was all perfectly clear back when just the soap box, the jury box and the ballot box were sufficient to protect us, and as they failed the ammo box could have been invoked but never was; the gun fetishists sided with the enemy. To expect them now to succeed with the ammo box, the least likely way to protect freedom (instead of provoking ever more severe police states) is to defy everything that we actually know, in favor of the rhetoric of people who have only made things worse.
Except that I never said that Teabaggers refer to themselves as Teabaggers. I said they waved around teabags.
Changing what I said to disagree with it is a strawman that's much more serious than taking up Teabaggers on the opportunity they created to call them something they dislike being called.
Calling them Teabaggers doesn't show any ignorance of history. Indeed, I am quite aware of the history that Teabaggers invoke by waving tea bags and calling themselves a "Tea Party". Teabaggers, though, and apparently you with them, are the ones ignorant of American history. The Boston Tea Party featured American colonists throwing East India Company tea into the harbor because it was taxing them without coming with representation in Parliament. Not because it was taxed too much - Parliament had just lowered the taxes, and brought down all tea prices with it, including smuggled tea. This was also a revolt against the official monopoly granted to the East India Company. Teabaggers have never lacked any representation, voting with the majorities that have elected the Republicans who have governed America for all but the years when Teabagger activity has been proportional to the power of people Teabaggers vote against.
And Teabaggers consistently in their consumption and voting favor monopoly power, the top corporate priority; Teabaggers who actually respect no power but corporate. Why not? The Teabaggers are a creation of Fox Lies and its corporate sponsors led by the Koch brothers. True history is a stranger to Teabaggers, except when parading around in ridiculous costumes - adorned with tea bags.
BTW, "nimrod" is indeed an insult in modern America, derived from the mythical king who was said to have defied god. That you imply it isn't is fitting with your thinking some people think "Republitard" or "Dumbocrat" are actually funny, which no one does. But they are consistent with insulting a group of people because of their politics, which you also seem not to understand when the term is "Teabagger".
Your area has more people with guns than the million people in the US military, plus the millions more in the National Guard, the State Police, the state's various municipal, county and local police?
Yes, you are living in a fantasy world. A world from the 1780s, where the locals could have the same firepower and skill as the government forces, instead of little gangs facing satellite guided helicopter, plane and drone bombings and strafings, tank batallions, poison gas... Where the government forces were all from a foreign country, in terrain with no roads, mostly not populated, no databases of political affiliations...
Yes, you are living in a Teabagger fantasy world if you think the many armed Americans have any chance against the actually armed to the teeth military that's been just fine with fighting wars against "guerrillas" for many continuous decades, holding the countries in question under their power even when they're outnumbered there thousands to one by people who want them out.
In the numerous current actions by the jack booted thugs against civilians, the cops deploy someplace where they're expected to control a situation but don't suddenly find themselves in a situation where they feel threatened and over react to that threat. They go in expecting to overreact to a threat - that doesn't actually exist. None of these cops, who have violently arrested, maced without provocation, and beaten hard with clubs now thousands of people were actually threatened. If they felt threatened, it's because they refused to accept the reality happening to them. We have now had many second times, both in the same place and just across the country, for weeks and months.
It's a no huge step going from macing some trouble making punk kids (mindset of the police, mind you, not my opinion of them) to shooting them in the head. The huge step has already been taken: dehumanizing the kids enough to encourage repeated beatings of them, even as they continue to be nonviolent. The step to shooting people in the head isn't necessary - that's what the vast investment in "less lethal" weapons is designed to avoid. And it's already deployed, and already effective in keeping people down.
If a further step were taken by the people with guns to start confronting these beatings, or confronting the power the beating cops are working for, it would be a much easier step for the cops (and beyond) to start shooting people in the head. After all, they were an armed insurrection. The resulting crackdown by American forces would make Syria, Egypt and Lebanon's far worse armed, trained and alienated people look like a mere Kent State. The US is big enough to send forces who come from one place into another place they either have no connection to, or actively dislike (eg. White supremacists from Idaho into Occupy Newark). Big enough to find plenty of thugs already in the armed forces ready to kill other Americans, especially ones they see as "spoiled, lazy rich kids".
This happens all over the world. It is already happening across the moral line in the US. It has happened repeatedly in the US throughout our history. There is no reason to believe it would change radically to the reverse, and every reason to see that it is happening now.
And to my original point, it was perfectly clear that this would happen when the gun fetishists spent years voting for Republicans and Democrats who enable them who created this police state in waiting.
People who take the payment not to serve are more likely to "serve" for the money, not the service. Bribes and other perks, including just the high salaries. Why not just pay them up front, but get them out of power where they do more harm than just taking their salary.
As for the game you identify, retirement is permanent.
But even if it's not (to preserve the pool of eligible candidates for the voters to choose from), the voters would decide whether they want to vote for the guy who took the retirement bonus only a few years ago. Their opponent in the election would point out they did it. If the voters still want them anyway, that's their prerogative. Either the guy really is the best choice, despite having taken themself out of it for the cash, or the voters are stupid. You can't fix stupid.
All you can do is give incentives to reduce the advantages of incumbency. Like additionally prohibiting incumbents from spending any business hours either campaigning, fundraising, or traveling to do so.
No, the median. Why not? Why shouldn't they get paid as an average constituent, not the meaningless average income?
As for forcing retirement for votes for debt, you'd get the bad ones who didn't vote for debt when it was necessary staying, and the good ones forced to leave. Public debt is complex. It requires a suitably complex system to govern it. The many Americans who say they care about debt should find and vote for primary election competitors to their own representatives, who nearly all have voted for spending on debts, most of which isn't necessary. Just forcing out all debt voters automatically just shirks the voters responsibility for picking the ones who were right to vote for it from those who were wrong.
And there's not going to be anyone waving an ammo box at them to stop them. Even though the country is awash in ammo boxes, and people who insisted they need them to stop those government visitors.
Thanks. Everyone seems to like the median income public salary. Explaining the retirement bonus is a lot harder.