also though, medical care will ALWAYS be byzantine to a lay person. Just like any specialized profession it's just way too complicated to fully educate every consumer about every decision that must be made.
and there is little benefit to doing so for the providers of such care as well.
Sure. However medical care MUST be heavily regulated, since it is so incredibly lopsided between provider and consumer. there is no possible way to negotiate from equal footing when to one person it's life and death and to another it's a paycheck. And that's about administrators of hospitals, not doctors. the doctors still have to follow hospital policy.
Other than that though I agree with you and I myself do not believe a person's right to self-medicate should be infringed. FDA approved should be a selling point and prescription only should be a recommendation, not hard and fast requirements.
right, that's just what happens now. People just opt not to get the care they need or aggressively shop providers for urgent, critical treatment. Hoping, of course that the treatment you need is not for a condition that in any way reduces your ability to reason, calculate complex cost-benefit scenarios, evaluate your situation, or in any other way compromises your ability to be the OMNISCIENT FUCKING BEING you'd have to be to navigate the byzantine world of medical care as a lay person.
Maybe you can shop your prescription drugs and your flu shot provider, but for any complex, urgent, or critical care you are likely to have other considerations higher on your mind.
and there is zero chance that there will be significant competition for that care. Certainly there is zero chance that anyone would invest the huge amounts of capital needed just to reduce the profit margins. You charge what the market will bear, and when you're looking at death, that's pretty much everything.
My health insurance is a policy intended for maine, but the company that sells it to me is not from here. they sell insurance all over the place. isn't that interstate commerce?
I understand the rape issue, and he may well be guilty. I'm not advocating for dismissing any charges or anything.
but more so than in most cases, the timing here is particularly convenient for some very connected players, and the charges themselves have come about in a very strange manner.
certainly seems just a bit fishy. So I think it would make sense for all involved to proceed very slowly and carefully and with great transparency... which is not really what seems to be happening right now.
It certainly would. except that it would seem that we are supposed to believe that Mr. Assange did it to not one, but TWO separate women in Sweden... nowhere else, with no history of this kind of behaviour... right around the same time as he demonstrated he was a real pain in the ass for several governments and had more up his sleeve.
not everywhere. but we could start making a serious dent with smart meter tech and lots of PV, right now, in sunny climates.
that's not much more than "regular" electricity costs us if you account for *any* externialities not currently captured in the price of dirty or dangerous energy.
...and making it weapons grade material that could be stolen and made into bombs much, much more easily than the low level naturally occurring radioactive material in the ground already.
but again, it's moot. by the time we could actually build any nuke plants, PV will already be at parity. with no such long term costs to be borne by taxpayers or risks.
uh, we had a spike about two years ago from speculation. it's hardly "not a realistic scenario anymore", it just happened again...
people assume we are in the middle east primarily over oil interests because for the last 50 years that has been the driver of american foreign policy in the middle east, starting with the 1953 Iranian coup we helped orchestrate. It's *also* a pretty important geographic location outside of oil interests, but it's not like oil doesn't matter. There is a reason why we had to institute regime change in Iraq and not Somalia, and it had very little to do with WMDs. Even if saddam HAD WMD's, he wouldn't have been likely to use them on us. He liked ruling a country, not a parking lot.
Iraq also now has plenty of american businesses involved in its oil industry now. good for us, even if we don't burn the oil, we (our companies) can make a ton of money off of it. wee!
Finally, if we lost access to even the relatively small amount of oil we get from the middle east, it would have a pretty big effect on us. When supply doesn't reach demand, I'm sure you can figure out the basic economics. I'm all for the price of oil rising, but I don't want it to happen all at once when, say, saudi arabia loses its pro-american power players and decides to shut us out. And having lots, and lots of military in the area helps make sure no one plays little games like that with us.
Remember, to them, it's just money they pump out of the ground. To us, it's a basic necessity for societal function. Not an equal exchange.
Oh, and nuclear will be a complete waste of time within 10 years. Not long after you could actually get any built. Check out the price of PV sometime, and energy storage seems a much cleaner and easier hurdle to cross than, say, safe nuclear waste disposal that takes less twice the current age of our fucking country to decay to safe levels. Just *haven't quite gotten there yet*, oddly enough.
employers don't have to bargain collectively. there are a lot less employers then there are workers. All they have to do is talk to each other. In fact they don't even have to do that, they just have to know what each other is paying for labor and fix similar rates as each other.
Collusion amongst employers and management is trivially easy. That's a big part of the reason trade unions were necessary in the first place. To take one example with made up numbers, if there are a dozen coal mining companies in West Virginia and 10,000 people who work the coal mines, which one finds it easier to present an organized and co-ordinated front to the other, a handful of owners or all the people in the area?
that disparity is the issue. It's possible, of course, for trade unions to get too strong as well, but it's a lot harder for that to occur.
even with testable hypotheses you cannot know if you know something, really. You could be completely delusional. You are "within the system" of your mind, which is a completely fallible instrument.
For all you know, you are sitting in a nursing home with Altzheimer's right now, remembering this interaction from 60 years in the future. So agnostics are completely right, but they are wrong to restrict their belief to that regarding God.
Assuming we aren't all complete nutjobs though, once you accept that reality, it doesn't really do much for you and so we go back to assuming that we have some kind of possible grasp on reality here and if I see something and you see it too that it's there, basically. let 's move on.
don't think there is anything really more testable about the invisible space monkey than there is about, say, God. Anything you can think of, just add a new qualifier to make it untestable. Massless, for example, to avoid looking for gravity signatures. I can make it just as untestable as any God theory. At some point, it would *become* God using this method, in fact... at some point you could add "omnipotent" to the list of space monkey qualifiers and pow, here we are talking about God again.
So I don't belong to the omnipotent space monkey belief system, does that mean I'm a member of the NO omnipotent space monkey belief system? No. technically, yes, but practically it's never useful to make that kind of a distinction, so no. same for Atheism. Point being: Atheism is technically a belief system like ALL beliefs may be a system, but it is not a belief system in any practical way just like the No Omnipotent Space Monkey (NOSM, works for the Spaghetti Monster too) is not a practical belief system of any kind and claiming it is is simple a feeble attempt to make it "equal" to believing in various omnipotent space monkeys, sky fairies, and spaghetti monsters.
Quite simply though, it's not. Belief in any of those things is completely irrational, which is to say, some kind of insane. Functional insanity, perhaps, but nothing that you can justify with any degree of real reason.
No, it isn't. he is saying atheism is a belief no more than non-belief in ALL of those other things are belief systems. They may be beliefs, like I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, but they are not belief systems.
I don't believe there is a gigantic invisible space monkey spinning the earth to give us night and day: no one claims I belong to the "no gigantic invisible space monkey" belief system. It's just obvious.
It's just as obvious there cannot be "god", unless you happen to be a believer. The only difference is whether YOU think it's a reasonable assumption. Of course, people who belong to a belief system will disagree, but they are wrong.
Agnosticism says the answer is not knowable. Technically true about every single fact you think you know: you are restricted to your own perceptions which could be completely faulty. You cannot really KNOW anything. But, not a useful distinction to make, IMHO.
the idea that any high minded or even marginally abstract ideal drives conservatism dies seconds after entering any room with more than 2 people who identify as conservative in it. beyond "taxes are bad" and "regulation is bad" there is no unifying principle. Jim DeMint just said at a rally that you can't be a fiscal conservative without being a social conservative... an amazingly ridiculous statement. And he's one of the most powerful "conservatives" in this country today. Tell me what Sarah Palin's ideology is other than "make sarah palin rich and powerful"? "Bring more God"?
some idea that conservatives are against 'change' is also badly outdated. They want change. They want the whole country to change to be like them, to the point of making it illegal to be anything else. That's a huge change, they just don't understand it, because they think everyone in america except a 'minority' are like them. Or, should be.
Progressives are not right about everything, never have been. But on civil rights they have always been on the right side. And that makes them morally superior to anything conservatism has to offer. Allowing people you think are wrong to have the freedom to live their ideals while you live yours is basic morality 101. But that doesn't mean that thinking that it's legal to be a conservative, and should be, equals thinking that conservatism is smart, or equal in its "right ness". I can respect your rights while having no respect whatsoever for your point of view.
Calling woman conservative leaders "insane" is thus totally fair game; palin and O'Donnel are definitely a few cards short of a deck. attacking them on the basis of gender roles, appearance or sexuality is not. Sadly, that does happen. Just like it's been happening to liberal female politicians for decades. See, it's not new, it just took this long for conservatives to let their women run for office to see what happens when the "masses" get to have their say.
you could say the exact same thing about life. you have no control over the other people in the world around you. they might, believe it or not, swear in front of your kids. or act like assholes. or use violent language (or even engage in violence).
As a parent, our job is to make DECISIONS about where to take our kids and how to deal with situations we don't expect. We can minimize exposure to violence and swearing, if we wish, by, say, avoiding bars and parties and spending more time at the library.
You don't get to sanitize the entire world just because you decided to reproduce. It is up to you to provide the CONTEXT your children need to deal with "accidental exposure" to things you do not think they are prepared to handle. If you absolutely do not want them to see a certain act, then your job is to make sure they only watch shows you are sure will not show that act. LUCKILY, there is a gigantic industry out there churning out electronic entertainment sanitized to an incredible degree, JUST FOR YOU! It's not that hard to make sure they are only watching appropriate shows. Unless, of course, you aren't parenting your kids.
And yes, if the collective possessive pronoun didn't clue you in, I am a parent. I just don't expect the rest of the world to do my job. I do hope that the people I choose to associate with, and most people, will behave like civilized human beings in front of my daughter. But that is not always a fair assumption.
I'm not a defender of current social norms. but neither do I think historical culture is the be all end all of a people.
there is a thing called progress. it's good. whether this is a good progress or not really depends on the impact on the country, not on some ill defined ideals of "culture" and "pride".
All cultures have always absorbed what is useful to them and attempted to reject what is not. whether conqueror or conquered the result is inescapable... sharing of ideas is contagious. Rome was changed by those it conquered and it changed them too. but not all those changes were bad or wrong.
I'm not concerned about money... IMO, it has very little to do with quality of life. I just mean peace and enjoyment of life.
maybe you just have it and it'll be helpful if needed and you think no more about it... great, if so. I hope so. I know too many people who are spending way too much time looking for disaster or threats to be healthy, that's all. Certainly not everyone with a tent in the car is that far out. But when I see one, I certainly wonder;)
I didn't say catastrophe couldn't happen. I said it was unlikely enough that living with the likelihood on your mind constant impinges your quality of life with very little chance of ever delivering a good result. An asteroid could take out the earth tomorrow too, but if I spend all of my time and money making a bomb shelter that can last through a 100 year winter, I'm probably wasting my time and money and frankly it can't be good for my mental health to have that kind of anxiety either.
Obviously survival kits are a different level of effort cost and preparation. No problem if you want to have one. But you've obviously put a lot of thought into this and I would point to that as an example of quality of life reduction that, in all likelihood, will never be helpful. There aren't too many "2 to 3 day" events out there that your survival kit would seriously help you with. In pakistan or katrina you'd still be pretty well screwed. So what you have is, primarily, a security blanket, not a truly useful hedge against disaster. Shit, you can go 2 to 3 days with nothing at all. Keep a shovel in the car (extremely useful, especially if you live in a snow climate) and dig for water if you get desperate. The best thing you can do is to leave when things start to get bad instead of riding it out in place.
I also didn't say that most firearm injuries were from the scenarios I cited. I said those scenarios where a firearm caused a problem were more likely than a scenario where having a firearm would be a benefit. That is, that having a firearm causes more potential problems than it solves. Now, the stats on that are murky at best, but that is my belief, since I've never met anyone for whom a firearm was used in self defense, but I am aware of several accidental gun injuries and deaths amongst my extended social network. admittedly anecdotal and sufferring from selection bias for my socioeconomic background... but I come from lower middle class, not the silver spoon set, so I think it's probably pretty representative for rural living.
So, another security blanket, IMO, is gun ownership. It makes you less safe, but makes you FEEL more safe.
I think we can both agree that suicide by firearm isn't really an argument either way since there are countless ways to kill yourself if that is your goal. I'm just talking about accidental death and turnabout.
Finally: I'm not saying you don't have a right to live the way you like, firearm or not. Just to be absolutely clear on that. If it gets you through the day, so be it. I just don't think it's really very rational in most cases to own a gun for self defense.
You sound like you own one primarily for hunting in a post apocalyptic wasteland. I'm not sure that's much more rational, really;)
Bush noted that our response to 9/11 was not a war against Islam. He took concrete steps to make sure he was protecting our muslim citizens. I believe he even had a muslim giving a prayer at the ceremony for the dead of 9/11... I forget exactly what it was, but it wasn't long after and it was a very big national ceremony of some kind.
And this raving liberal saluted him for it. I was incredibly impressed with his commitment to making sure that the day was not framed as a start of an "attack on Islam". I would say it was extremely presidential. I was proud we could stand tall as a people without resorting to that kind of racial or religiously fueled hatred.
Sadly, he pretty much blew it consistently after that.
if you can do it so dispassionately, good for you.
I haven't met many like that. Much more commonly I meet people for which that sort of preparedness is high on their mind far more than I would personally deem healthy.
of course, my kid will never, ever shoot herself with my gun, since I don't own one, and I will never ever accidentally shoot an innocent person, and no one will ever take a gun from me to use against me or anyone I love. Any of which is much more likely to occur, should I own a gun, then me successfully defending myself against a violent intruder with a gun, trained or not.
so "preparedness" against one threat, which is more unlikely than the risks you take being prepared, I would take as proof of the fear that you deny. I see it as similar to driving to high rates of speed to avoid being rear-ended. You avoid one threat, sure, but in doing so you open up several much more credible threats.
course, I might be wrong. so I would never ask for laws to prevent you from taking those risks. I don't live your life, don't have your experiences, and don't know what you need to make it through the day. but having a gun is not the same as putting together a survival kit. Unless, of course, your survival kit includes lethal weaponry.
i should follow up by noting i am not against gun ownership. i just think most of the reasons people have for owning guns are pretty stupid. but i do believe people should have the right own guns for self defense, even if i think they would be better off dealing with their fear instead.
Slashdot Mirror
also though, medical care will ALWAYS be byzantine to a lay person. Just like any specialized profession it's just way too complicated to fully educate every consumer about every decision that must be made.
and there is little benefit to doing so for the providers of such care as well.
Sure. However medical care MUST be heavily regulated, since it is so incredibly lopsided between provider and consumer. there is no possible way to negotiate from equal footing when to one person it's life and death and to another it's a paycheck. And that's about administrators of hospitals, not doctors. the doctors still have to follow hospital policy.
Other than that though I agree with you and I myself do not believe a person's right to self-medicate should be infringed. FDA approved should be a selling point and prescription only should be a recommendation, not hard and fast requirements.
right, that's just what happens now. People just opt not to get the care they need or aggressively shop providers for urgent, critical treatment. Hoping, of course that the treatment you need is not for a condition that in any way reduces your ability to reason, calculate complex cost-benefit scenarios, evaluate your situation, or in any other way compromises your ability to be the OMNISCIENT FUCKING BEING you'd have to be to navigate the byzantine world of medical care as a lay person.
Maybe you can shop your prescription drugs and your flu shot provider, but for any complex, urgent, or critical care you are likely to have other considerations higher on your mind.
and there is zero chance that there will be significant competition for that care. Certainly there is zero chance that anyone would invest the huge amounts of capital needed just to reduce the profit margins. You charge what the market will bear, and when you're looking at death, that's pretty much everything.
they can get ALL your money for treating you for severe illnesses. and what are you gonna do? say no and die? really?
give up the anti-government propaganda and smell the coffee.
My health insurance is a policy intended for maine, but the company that sells it to me is not from here. they sell insurance all over the place. isn't that interstate commerce?
every single fucking dime they had before they died. that's how much.
I understand the rape issue, and he may well be guilty. I'm not advocating for dismissing any charges or anything.
but more so than in most cases, the timing here is particularly convenient for some very connected players, and the charges themselves have come about in a very strange manner.
certainly seems just a bit fishy. So I think it would make sense for all involved to proceed very slowly and carefully and with great transparency... which is not really what seems to be happening right now.
It certainly would. except that it would seem that we are supposed to believe that Mr. Assange did it to not one, but TWO separate women in Sweden... nowhere else, with no history of this kind of behaviour... right around the same time as he demonstrated he was a real pain in the ass for several governments and had more up his sleeve.
at the very least it sure seems a bit fishy.
yes, tableware was an unknown commodity amongst the middle and lower classes in america, until china started making them. great point!
I'm in awe.
I consider 0.20/kwh viable. right now.
http://www.solarbuzz.com/solarindices.htm
not everywhere. but we could start making a serious dent with smart meter tech and lots of PV, right now, in sunny climates.
that's not much more than "regular" electricity costs us if you account for *any* externialities not currently captured in the price of dirty or dangerous energy.
...and making it weapons grade material that could be stolen and made into bombs much, much more easily than the low level naturally occurring radioactive material in the ground already.
but again, it's moot. by the time we could actually build any nuke plants, PV will already be at parity. with no such long term costs to be borne by taxpayers or risks.
uh, we had a spike about two years ago from speculation. it's hardly "not a realistic scenario anymore", it just happened again...
people assume we are in the middle east primarily over oil interests because for the last 50 years that has been the driver of american foreign policy in the middle east, starting with the 1953 Iranian coup we helped orchestrate. It's *also* a pretty important geographic location outside of oil interests, but it's not like oil doesn't matter. There is a reason why we had to institute regime change in Iraq and not Somalia, and it had very little to do with WMDs. Even if saddam HAD WMD's, he wouldn't have been likely to use them on us. He liked ruling a country, not a parking lot.
Iraq also now has plenty of american businesses involved in its oil industry now. good for us, even if we don't burn the oil, we (our companies) can make a ton of money off of it. wee!
Finally, if we lost access to even the relatively small amount of oil we get from the middle east, it would have a pretty big effect on us. When supply doesn't reach demand, I'm sure you can figure out the basic economics. I'm all for the price of oil rising, but I don't want it to happen all at once when, say, saudi arabia loses its pro-american power players and decides to shut us out. And having lots, and lots of military in the area helps make sure no one plays little games like that with us.
Remember, to them, it's just money they pump out of the ground. To us, it's a basic necessity for societal function. Not an equal exchange.
Oh, and nuclear will be a complete waste of time within 10 years. Not long after you could actually get any built. Check out the price of PV sometime, and energy storage seems a much cleaner and easier hurdle to cross than, say, safe nuclear waste disposal that takes less twice the current age of our fucking country to decay to safe levels. Just *haven't quite gotten there yet*, oddly enough.
employers don't have to bargain collectively. there are a lot less employers then there are workers. All they have to do is talk to each other. In fact they don't even have to do that, they just have to know what each other is paying for labor and fix similar rates as each other.
Collusion amongst employers and management is trivially easy. That's a big part of the reason trade unions were necessary in the first place. To take one example with made up numbers, if there are a dozen coal mining companies in West Virginia and 10,000 people who work the coal mines, which one finds it easier to present an organized and co-ordinated front to the other, a handful of owners or all the people in the area?
that disparity is the issue. It's possible, of course, for trade unions to get too strong as well, but it's a lot harder for that to occur.
even with testable hypotheses you cannot know if you know something, really. You could be completely delusional. You are "within the system" of your mind, which is a completely fallible instrument.
For all you know, you are sitting in a nursing home with Altzheimer's right now, remembering this interaction from 60 years in the future. So agnostics are completely right, but they are wrong to restrict their belief to that regarding God.
Assuming we aren't all complete nutjobs though, once you accept that reality, it doesn't really do much for you and so we go back to assuming that we have some kind of possible grasp on reality here and if I see something and you see it too that it's there, basically. let 's move on.
don't think there is anything really more testable about the invisible space monkey than there is about, say, God. Anything you can think of, just add a new qualifier to make it untestable. Massless, for example, to avoid looking for gravity signatures. I can make it just as untestable as any God theory. At some point, it would *become* God using this method, in fact... at some point you could add "omnipotent" to the list of space monkey qualifiers and pow, here we are talking about God again.
So I don't belong to the omnipotent space monkey belief system, does that mean I'm a member of the NO omnipotent space monkey belief system? No. technically, yes, but practically it's never useful to make that kind of a distinction, so no. same for Atheism. Point being: Atheism is technically a belief system like ALL beliefs may be a system, but it is not a belief system in any practical way just like the No Omnipotent Space Monkey (NOSM, works for the Spaghetti Monster too) is not a practical belief system of any kind and claiming it is is simple a feeble attempt to make it "equal" to believing in various omnipotent space monkeys, sky fairies, and spaghetti monsters.
Quite simply though, it's not. Belief in any of those things is completely irrational, which is to say, some kind of insane. Functional insanity, perhaps, but nothing that you can justify with any degree of real reason.
No, it isn't. he is saying atheism is a belief no more than non-belief in ALL of those other things are belief systems. They may be beliefs, like I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, but they are not belief systems.
I don't believe there is a gigantic invisible space monkey spinning the earth to give us night and day: no one claims I belong to the "no gigantic invisible space monkey" belief system. It's just obvious.
It's just as obvious there cannot be "god", unless you happen to be a believer. The only difference is whether YOU think it's a reasonable assumption. Of course, people who belong to a belief system will disagree, but they are wrong.
Agnosticism says the answer is not knowable. Technically true about every single fact you think you know: you are restricted to your own perceptions which could be completely faulty. You cannot really KNOW anything. But, not a useful distinction to make, IMHO.
that was 1.5% of the carbon of *one powerplant* for $100 million.
the cost to do 1.5% of americas entire carbon output would be... well, significantly higher.
the idea that any high minded or even marginally abstract ideal drives conservatism dies seconds after entering any room with more than 2 people who identify as conservative in it. beyond "taxes are bad" and "regulation is bad" there is no unifying principle. Jim DeMint just said at a rally that you can't be a fiscal conservative without being a social conservative... an amazingly ridiculous statement. And he's one of the most powerful "conservatives" in this country today. Tell me what Sarah Palin's ideology is other than "make sarah palin rich and powerful"? "Bring more God"?
some idea that conservatives are against 'change' is also badly outdated. They want change. They want the whole country to change to be like them, to the point of making it illegal to be anything else. That's a huge change, they just don't understand it, because they think everyone in america except a 'minority' are like them. Or, should be.
Progressives are not right about everything, never have been. But on civil rights they have always been on the right side. And that makes them morally superior to anything conservatism has to offer. Allowing people you think are wrong to have the freedom to live their ideals while you live yours is basic morality 101. But that doesn't mean that thinking that it's legal to be a conservative, and should be, equals thinking that conservatism is smart, or equal in its "right ness". I can respect your rights while having no respect whatsoever for your point of view.
Calling woman conservative leaders "insane" is thus totally fair game; palin and O'Donnel are definitely a few cards short of a deck. attacking them on the basis of gender roles, appearance or sexuality is not. Sadly, that does happen. Just like it's been happening to liberal female politicians for decades. See, it's not new, it just took this long for conservatives to let their women run for office to see what happens when the "masses" get to have their say.
you could say the exact same thing about life. you have no control over the other people in the world around you. they might, believe it or not, swear in front of your kids. or act like assholes. or use violent language (or even engage in violence).
As a parent, our job is to make DECISIONS about where to take our kids and how to deal with situations we don't expect. We can minimize exposure to violence and swearing, if we wish, by, say, avoiding bars and parties and spending more time at the library.
You don't get to sanitize the entire world just because you decided to reproduce. It is up to you to provide the CONTEXT your children need to deal with "accidental exposure" to things you do not think they are prepared to handle. If you absolutely do not want them to see a certain act, then your job is to make sure they only watch shows you are sure will not show that act. LUCKILY, there is a gigantic industry out there churning out electronic entertainment sanitized to an incredible degree, JUST FOR YOU! It's not that hard to make sure they are only watching appropriate shows. Unless, of course, you aren't parenting your kids.
And yes, if the collective possessive pronoun didn't clue you in, I am a parent. I just don't expect the rest of the world to do my job. I do hope that the people I choose to associate with, and most people, will behave like civilized human beings in front of my daughter. But that is not always a fair assumption.
it's pretty common for robber barons to become big philanthropists later in life.
You can buy a reputation you never earned, if you earn enough money.
I'm not a defender of current social norms. but neither do I think historical culture is the be all end all of a people.
there is a thing called progress. it's good. whether this is a good progress or not really depends on the impact on the country, not on some ill defined ideals of "culture" and "pride".
All cultures have always absorbed what is useful to them and attempted to reject what is not. whether conqueror or conquered the result is inescapable... sharing of ideas is contagious. Rome was changed by those it conquered and it changed them too. but not all those changes were bad or wrong.
Fuck Stasis.
I'm not concerned about money... IMO, it has very little to do with quality of life. I just mean peace and enjoyment of life.
maybe you just have it and it'll be helpful if needed and you think no more about it... great, if so. I hope so. I know too many people who are spending way too much time looking for disaster or threats to be healthy, that's all. Certainly not everyone with a tent in the car is that far out. But when I see one, I certainly wonder ;)
I didn't say catastrophe couldn't happen. I said it was unlikely enough that living with the likelihood on your mind constant impinges your quality of life with very little chance of ever delivering a good result. An asteroid could take out the earth tomorrow too, but if I spend all of my time and money making a bomb shelter that can last through a 100 year winter, I'm probably wasting my time and money and frankly it can't be good for my mental health to have that kind of anxiety either.
Obviously survival kits are a different level of effort cost and preparation. No problem if you want to have one. But you've obviously put a lot of thought into this and I would point to that as an example of quality of life reduction that, in all likelihood, will never be helpful. There aren't too many "2 to 3 day" events out there that your survival kit would seriously help you with. In pakistan or katrina you'd still be pretty well screwed. So what you have is, primarily, a security blanket, not a truly useful hedge against disaster. Shit, you can go 2 to 3 days with nothing at all. Keep a shovel in the car (extremely useful, especially if you live in a snow climate) and dig for water if you get desperate. The best thing you can do is to leave when things start to get bad instead of riding it out in place.
I also didn't say that most firearm injuries were from the scenarios I cited. I said those scenarios where a firearm caused a problem were more likely than a scenario where having a firearm would be a benefit. That is, that having a firearm causes more potential problems than it solves. Now, the stats on that are murky at best, but that is my belief, since I've never met anyone for whom a firearm was used in self defense, but I am aware of several accidental gun injuries and deaths amongst my extended social network. admittedly anecdotal and sufferring from selection bias for my socioeconomic background... but I come from lower middle class, not the silver spoon set, so I think it's probably pretty representative for rural living.
So, another security blanket, IMO, is gun ownership. It makes you less safe, but makes you FEEL more safe.
I think we can both agree that suicide by firearm isn't really an argument either way since there are countless ways to kill yourself if that is your goal. I'm just talking about accidental death and turnabout.
Finally: I'm not saying you don't have a right to live the way you like, firearm or not. Just to be absolutely clear on that. If it gets you through the day, so be it. I just don't think it's really very rational in most cases to own a gun for self defense.
You sound like you own one primarily for hunting in a post apocalyptic wasteland. I'm not sure that's much more rational, really ;)
Bush noted that our response to 9/11 was not a war against Islam. He took concrete steps to make sure he was protecting our muslim citizens. I believe he even had a muslim giving a prayer at the ceremony for the dead of 9/11... I forget exactly what it was, but it wasn't long after and it was a very big national ceremony of some kind.
And this raving liberal saluted him for it. I was incredibly impressed with his commitment to making sure that the day was not framed as a start of an "attack on Islam". I would say it was extremely presidential. I was proud we could stand tall as a people without resorting to that kind of racial or religiously fueled hatred.
Sadly, he pretty much blew it consistently after that.
if you can do it so dispassionately, good for you.
I haven't met many like that. Much more commonly I meet people for which that sort of preparedness is high on their mind far more than I would personally deem healthy.
of course, my kid will never, ever shoot herself with my gun, since I don't own one, and I will never ever accidentally shoot an innocent person, and no one will ever take a gun from me to use against me or anyone I love. Any of which is much more likely to occur, should I own a gun, then me successfully defending myself against a violent intruder with a gun, trained or not.
so "preparedness" against one threat, which is more unlikely than the risks you take being prepared, I would take as proof of the fear that you deny. I see it as similar to driving to high rates of speed to avoid being rear-ended. You avoid one threat, sure, but in doing so you open up several much more credible threats.
course, I might be wrong. so I would never ask for laws to prevent you from taking those risks. I don't live your life, don't have your experiences, and don't know what you need to make it through the day. but having a gun is not the same as putting together a survival kit. Unless, of course, your survival kit includes lethal weaponry.
i should follow up by noting i am not against gun ownership. i just think most of the reasons people have for owning guns are pretty stupid. but i do believe people should have the right own guns for self defense, even if i think they would be better off dealing with their fear instead.