This. What most people don't understand is that safety and security do not exist on their own. They do not exist at a certain place or location. Nor are they provided by your government, your laws, or even by your local law enforcement. You, personally, create safety and security and bring them with you. Or you don't. It all depends on how prepared you are, how aware you are, and how forearmed you are. That includes pulling the wool from over your eyes and seeing that nowhere is safe, nowhere is secure, save you personally make it so.
For those that disagree, this is your responsibility. Take it or leave it, but please don't try to foist it off on someone else, blame someone else for not taking care of it, or act and think like this is not how it is. You may be able to ignore reality now because you have never truly had your life threatened by someone who is intent on killing you, or someone you love. If you did and survived it you would have learned this lesson already. It was put best to me in this way "violence is not the solution for every problem. However, for some problems it is the only solution."
With proper planning and execution, a popularly supported armed rebellion against an overreaching government in the US would only last a few moments.
Before hostilities commenced all that would need to be related to those in power is that the American people have ensured their protection by and of their government by protecting those most vulnerable to counterattack by violent factions of disaffected Americans. Namely, the relatives, friends, and close associates of every elected official. They would be taken into protective custody. In addition, all of the families, friends, and close associates of military officials, colonel and above, would also been placed in protective custody.
Hacking USAA and disclosing the names and addresses of all of those military personnel and their extended families would be a powerful deterrent to any rank and file military personnel taking up weapons against the population. I'm sure Eichmann didn't have his family and property at stake when he was "just following orders." It would streamline the decision tree for our armed forces personnel I am sure.
The lesson, if you are in our military and will attack the US people, the US people will make sure you have nothing and no one to come home to. If you are in political power and are ordering attacks on the US people, the US people will make sure your family are the first up against the wall. Not a hard decision at that point as to whether or not violence will ensue.
Driving will change more than you think once we have cars that are autonomous. For instance, there is no need to have cars always think like people do, making decisions in a vacuum and infrequently and incompletely signaling those intentions to other drivers, who then have to prepare and execute a reaction immediately. Simply networking auto-driving cars together will allow for things currently not possible with individually controlled vehicles. First and foremost you would be much less likely to be stuck in a lane with an obstacle if the other cars near you were aware of your dilemma and could react in a way that would enable your evasive maneuvers to be more effective. Cars in front of you would pass along information that was outside your line of sight, preparing the car for unexpected pedestrian activity, stopped traffic on the other side of an overpass or around a blind curve, etc.
I could also see cars programmed to constructively crash into each other in a safe and controlled manner in order to avoid mounting the curb and flattening pedestrians or to prevent a car driving off of a precipice. Traffic lights would be redundant due to coordinated pulses of traffic. You could even phalanx vehicles by size to increase the aggregate fuel efficiency of a group of cars.
An illegal alien with limited funds can travel from from Guadalajara, Mexico to Chicago, Illinois in less than 3 days, completely undetected by customs or border enforcement. Are you so naive to think that weapons won't be able to make that journey as well?
It doesn't matter if you outlaw guns. It doesn't matter if you make laws that force people to hand them in. And even if you can shit out magical Gun Fairies that will disappear all of the civilian held firearms in the US overnight, it won't matter. If you want to ban guns in America you will first have to close the border. Otherwise only those with close ties to human and drug trafficking will have access to them.
So to conclude, outlawing guns in the US will not get rid of them. It will just redistribute them exclusively to criminals.
Seriously though, I think you're obviously upset about this entire situation, just like everyone else that has a compassionate heart. But attacking the weapon won't cure the problem.
Our best defense against the random, one-in-75-million crazy person is, oddly enough, you and other people just like you. What America needs more than anything else is for every person with strong anti-gun predilections to arm themselves. The more anti-gun your mindset, the more critical, circumspect, and reserved you will be with respect to guns and the choice to use that weapon.
Who better to safeguard our population from within than those who abhor guns and the destruction they cause? If this were to happen, the only problem would be that it would be so completely successful in deterring crime that there would never be another chance to disarm the US population on a wave of national fear and disgust as a result of the violence that one armed person can commit when no one else has a weapon to stop them.
"Mass shootings are almost never stopped by an armed civilian."
Guess what a fucking police officer is at the end of the day?
I quoted this just so I would have the pleasure of reading it again whenever I look through my comments. Unfortunately I don't have the words or mod points to appropriately express my appreciation of your post. Thank you.
It actually makes sense not to have such an emoji, because it creates a dilemma whether someone using such an emoji in a message is making a threat, and whether the company, becoming aware of such a threat, has a duty to do something about it.
Obesity kills far more humans than "rifles" ever will, and yet you see no artists blocking food emojis, and no companies worrying about what do to when someone posts a cake emoji.
Gotta love the logic surrounding this bullshit argument.
I was very interested to learn that there are building, airplane, and explosion emojis. In the proper combination they could be much more offensive and threatening than a rifle. Or they could just be one of those off-color, "too soon" jokes that I can't help but send to everyone I know.
But hey, lets ban them. It will certainly prevent me from getting on yet another government watch list.
You know who we need to be tested? The people who make the laws, like the Congresswoman herself, and all of her associates. Every dollar they make, EVERY FREAKIN DOLLAR, comes from taxpayers. Their special retirement system, paid by us. Their super special healthcare benefits? Paid for by John Q. Public. So, by the same logic, and even more so as they wield so much more power than a poor person looking for help, they owe us access to their internal biological processes so we can see what they are doing all of the time, right?
Before any government official ever tests another free citizen, let all of the lawmakers submit a sample. Oh, and no-go on giving them months to prepare either, like they do when one branch of government is investigating another branch of government. Its a surprise, bitches!
Playbook classic for our elected jackasses, use class warfare and incitement tactics to keep our eyes off the ball. We should be legalizing drugs for a number of reasons, not finding new and stupid ways to invade the privacy of our free citizens.
You cant send a woman out of the church service to get you a sammich. The purpose of being in church is to learn about doctrine, even for the women who are forbidden from being teachers.
It is an interesting phenomenon in the Bible that the superiority of women is acknowledged, but by divine decree they are placed below men in the authority structure. The lessons there are infinite, but the closest, and actual direct analogy, is how Christ put himself as the least of men, washing others feet, serving others in his every moment, even giving up his life for others, all the while being the embodiment of divinity on earth. The greatest becomes the least and because of it has the greatest impact.
As for the men, they get the benefit of watching how authority is borne and ultimately the structure of operating under authority is used as a tool for personal power by a more intrinsically capable being, ie woman. What a great lesson on the attributes of deity, in microcosm.
LZ Granderson's TED talk has a hilariously frank discussion of the "Gay Agenda." He claims to have found a copy of the offending document. He then produces it from his back pocket, this secret "Gay Agenda" for which he and his LGBTQ brothers and sisters have been fighting so enthusiastically. It's a manifesto of all of the special rights and privileges that gays don't currently have but which they are dedicated to manipulating, coercing, shaming, and even forcing the US government into ensuring for all gay Americans.
The peoples wiped out by the Jews in the old testament had religious practices that included tossing their children in burning furnaces during orgies, the expressed purpose being that the screams of their dying children were an aphrodisiac and germane to the altered states sought by the participants.
Human sacrifice for the purpose of sexual gratification is a dangerous cultural expression. Even more so as a meme, transmittable and repeatable. Wiping it out does humanity a favor.
Your logic is completely backwards. The FBI already has all of the information and, ostensibly all of the leverage. Both parties need to keep that information secret from the American people. The FBI to maintain the threat, and Clinton to avoid the repercussions. Therefore, if damning evidence exists, and if the public is kept in the dark about said damning information, then and only then will the FBI be able to use it as leverage.
If the information is released to the public there is no leverage, period. This is yet another reason leaks of information to the public are a good thing. It keeps people accountable to public scrutiny and the justice system, instead of having that accountability subverted by some group or person who holds the information as blackmail fodder.
This wasn't about gays. This guy didn't have something against homosexuals because of homosexuals themselves. He had something against a group of people because of his chosen religious beliefs and his choice of religious leaders to listen to. The target could have been any number of groups that his religion states are valid targets of murder. It just happened to be homosexuals.
Therefore, this is not a homosexual acceptance issue. This is a religious issue.
The problem is that while we operate under a tenant of religious freedom, to date we have not held any religions accountable for their texts that incite violence, hate, and murder contrary to other tenants of our legal structure. I find it interesting that people are talking about banning guns, like they are the cause and solution to the problem, while an ideology that suborns murder is counted off limits for criticism and accountability.
Maybe we should license believers in certain religions, as long as those religions call for the murder of innocent people.
How, do you think, would a police officer outside the building gain entry to it when there are people stampeding out of every conceivable exit? If he did gain access, how, do you think, would a uniformed police officer look as a target in a building full of smartly dressed party people?
Now, consider armed bartenders, servers, managers, and other staff stationed inside the building. They know each other, they know the building, and they are already inside when the shooting starts. This event would have been over in only a few brief moments instead of hours, the death toll vastly lower.
I think your preconceived notions are coloring your viewpoint. I don't think those notions can be trusted to stay within the lines. They obviously need more supervision.
Your logic is incredibly small minded and you completely sidestepped the issue and thrust of his argument. If you can perceive verifiable negative effects from a certain course of action, reconsidering that course of action based on those negative effects is an i4ntelligent, solution based strategy. Continuing the course of action in spite of negative effects could be considered insanity.
You posted a combined ad hominem/genetic fallacy attack on his argument and got mod points. Well done. Still doesn't mean you're right, or even sane.
I would have preferred some specifics about how our open borders policy is helping America in every conceivable metric.
Wish I had mod points. Philosophically adroit post. Thank you for writing it.
In spite of my theist beliefs, I have always stated that agnostics hold an intellectually superior position to both theists and atheists. My explanations of this were similar, but clumsily stated, more wordy, and without rigor and the inescapable logic of your post.
So, is it self serving for me to exalt your position, as it is one that I believe, even though it undermines my position as a theist? Embrace the cognitive dissonance! LOL!
No, it can't. It is lack of belief in deities, and, by extension, the supernatural. Usually the people claiming it is a religion are religious themselves and do it because they can't handle the possibility of people having morality that lacks dependency on the supernatural.
They need to read their Bible more. The subject of morality not born of spiritual texts and beliefs is discussed at length in the Bible. It is compared to the spiritual motivations and axioms that guide the behavior of a believer.
I always find it interesting that many who stake their eternal existence on the contents of a specific book won't even take the time to decipher it systematically.
Bullshit, and fuck you. What you are saying is enabling those who are wounded and hurt the most deeply to hide from that hurt while it continues to victimize them for the rest of their life.
I lost my virginity through rape, to a woman 7 years older. I passed out from drinking, she had her way with me. When it was over, my neck, chest, torso, arms, and legs were so bruised from her that the next day one of my high school administrators took me out of class to find out if I needed help. She was concerned my family was beating and choking me, and wanted to call CPS. I couldn't find a way to explain that I passed out and was taken advantage of by a grown woman. I didn't say that, after I woke up, the woman apologized for what she had done to me; not the rape, no not that. But for all the scratches, bite marks, suck marks, and bruises she had left on my body. I didn't tell that my rapist had acted completely indifferent to how I might feel about what happened, and even went so far as to explain offhandedly that all of the bruises and marks on my body were really my fault, as scratching, biting, sucking, and hitting me was the only way to stimulate me enough while I was passed out to keep me sexually aroused while she did what she wanted with me.
So, yea, I kept my mouth shut about what happened. I was scared, embarrassed, and very confused. I can tell you without a doubt it was the exact wrong thing to do, keeping my mouth shut. The person who got hurt the most from me not talking about it? Me. Sure I wanted to get past it, sure I wanted to forget it. I was waiting for the bruises, scratches, hickies, and bite marks to fade so I could pretend the hurts didn't happen. I completely missed the point. My mind, emotions, and my "self" was hurt far worse than my body was. Not talking to someone was the worst thing I could do to myself. By not talking to someone, I made sure that I was never free from the effect of what she did to me, and how I had reflexively internalized it. I was at the effect of what happened for decades before I could even admit it was rape. It colored all of my interactions, both with sexuality and intimacy, without me even considering that it had. I packed it away in my mind, thinking I was healed just like all of the marks on my body, when in reality I was wounded so deeply I couldn't see the bottom of the hurt.
So as someone who has been raped, I will now say, fuck you, don't ever defend someone's motivation to not report what happened. Hiding the hurt inside you will fuck up your life, your experience of (or your ability to experience) joy and happiness, your ability to be truly intimate and vulnerable with the right person once they come along.
Just leave justice and retribution out of it for a moment, because that's a whole different subject. I'm talking to the people who have been assaulted and raped that haven't told someone. You need help to be free of this. You need help to heal. The first step is to tell someone that can help. Your experience of life is at stake. The rest of your life is at stake. Don't let a piece of shit rapist take the rest of your life from you. You can be free from this, but it takes help to get free. Tell someone, for your own sake. For the sake of your future self, so you can look back and see how far you have come and how free you are, rather than how this has controlled you, limited you, strangled your life right in front of you for decades and how you were powerless to face and overcome it alone. You don't know how deep the hurt goes without talking to someone. You can never get it out if you keep it all inside.
So if people are becoming increasingly concerned with the individual making the statement, rather than the statement itself, what does that mean for the level of scrutiny applied by on observer toward someone they are predisposed to like or have otherwise allied himself with? Seems like it would drop off next to nothing.
Borderless is coming, and it's coming fast. An increasing number of people are developing their networks and friendships online and they don't care what country their friends are in, but they do care that silly border laws are keeping them from meeting in person. The next generation will change how we think both about nationality and about territory-based borders.
I see the extension of the "global village" and culture blending, however, I don't see the erosion of border laws as the end result of these forces. Instead I see advances in consumer grade electronics that allow multi-party VR telepresence, haptic suits, and teledildonics to be the future for those so predisposed and privileged enough to have access.
Another way to think of this is if you have the funds and flexibility to buy an expensive plane ticket, take off of work, etc. for a vacation to go see some people you met online, you would also have the capital to invest in the above mentioned items. And, once you have the gear you have repeated access to any number of adventures with your global community of "friends."
Are you really operating under the easily discredited illusion that the president gets to write and pass legislation?
Bernie would be the most stymied president ever. Besides, his political positions and socialist agenda are not why you elect him.
You elect him to increase the political IQ of every voter in the US through the way he frames the issues, specifically not in terms of bolstering entrenched corporate and wealthy interests. You elect him for the things he would obstruct, namely the further enrichment of business interests and the wealthy.5% at the expense of everyone else.
You are conflating the politics of personal responsibility which is a by-product of conservative thinking and corporatism which is a by-product of the entrenched American oligarchy.
One serves as a guide for personal decision making and political critique. The other is a means of subverting control of the populace and funneling all wealth through a small percentage of already-wealthy business owners.
I would like to see someone with a bigger brain than mine estimate the heat generated by anthropogenic friction forces. Walking, running, biking, motorcycle tires, car tires, truck tires, machine conveyor belts, train wheels, elevators, fucking pant suits...All of it. It has to have some erg value. What is is?
Also, what is the value of heat generated by all of the combustion engines in the world? Electric engines? Etc.
Here's how it works from a previous comment (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9101743&cid=52105397):
I imagine that not only customer facing personnel will be replaced by kiosks, but food preparation, waste disposal, cleaning, and restocking will become automated as well. Accompanying this, I can see a wave of new positions available for robotics, IT, and kiosk repair technicians. I can see a busy McDonalds location staffed by as little as 2 people, there mainly for emergencies and "turning the machines off and then on again" as necessary.
Its hard not to perceive the future of fast food locations. There will be an app that allows you to order on the way to the location. You pay from your phone and a robot prepares your meal just in time for your arrival. Timing this is trivial because you share your location with them. Forecasting the next 15-30 minutes of business through the app makes for fresher food and drastically more efficient order fulfillment. A dedicated lane for app-placed orders ensures quick in-and-out drive through service. Customers are served better, orders are machine precise, profits are higher, and the only people that lose are low income workers.
Customer service rep positions are replaced with machine repair and maintenance positions. The law of unintended consequences is preserved and the inevitable slide towards machine replacement for most human tasks is moved forward. Everyone wins, except of course for the people that the higher minimum wage laws and Affordable Care Act were designed to help. They have been priced out the job market. They are just too expensive to keep on board.
Slashdot Mirror
This. What most people don't understand is that safety and security do not exist on their own. They do not exist at a certain place or location. Nor are they provided by your government, your laws, or even by your local law enforcement. You, personally, create safety and security and bring them with you. Or you don't. It all depends on how prepared you are, how aware you are, and how forearmed you are. That includes pulling the wool from over your eyes and seeing that nowhere is safe, nowhere is secure, save you personally make it so.
For those that disagree, this is your responsibility. Take it or leave it, but please don't try to foist it off on someone else, blame someone else for not taking care of it, or act and think like this is not how it is. You may be able to ignore reality now because you have never truly had your life threatened by someone who is intent on killing you, or someone you love. If you did and survived it you would have learned this lesson already. It was put best to me in this way "violence is not the solution for every problem. However, for some problems it is the only solution."
With proper planning and execution, a popularly supported armed rebellion against an overreaching government in the US would only last a few moments.
Before hostilities commenced all that would need to be related to those in power is that the American people have ensured their protection by and of their government by protecting those most vulnerable to counterattack by violent factions of disaffected Americans. Namely, the relatives, friends, and close associates of every elected official. They would be taken into protective custody. In addition, all of the families, friends, and close associates of military officials, colonel and above, would also been placed in protective custody.
Hacking USAA and disclosing the names and addresses of all of those military personnel and their extended families would be a powerful deterrent to any rank and file military personnel taking up weapons against the population. I'm sure Eichmann didn't have his family and property at stake when he was "just following orders." It would streamline the decision tree for our armed forces personnel I am sure.
The lesson, if you are in our military and will attack the US people, the US people will make sure you have nothing and no one to come home to. If you are in political power and are ordering attacks on the US people, the US people will make sure your family are the first up against the wall. Not a hard decision at that point as to whether or not violence will ensue.
Driving will change more than you think once we have cars that are autonomous. For instance, there is no need to have cars always think like people do, making decisions in a vacuum and infrequently and incompletely signaling those intentions to other drivers, who then have to prepare and execute a reaction immediately. Simply networking auto-driving cars together will allow for things currently not possible with individually controlled vehicles. First and foremost you would be much less likely to be stuck in a lane with an obstacle if the other cars near you were aware of your dilemma and could react in a way that would enable your evasive maneuvers to be more effective. Cars in front of you would pass along information that was outside your line of sight, preparing the car for unexpected pedestrian activity, stopped traffic on the other side of an overpass or around a blind curve, etc.
I could also see cars programmed to constructively crash into each other in a safe and controlled manner in order to avoid mounting the curb and flattening pedestrians or to prevent a car driving off of a precipice. Traffic lights would be redundant due to coordinated pulses of traffic. You could even phalanx vehicles by size to increase the aggregate fuel efficiency of a group of cars.
An illegal alien with limited funds can travel from from Guadalajara, Mexico to Chicago, Illinois in less than 3 days, completely undetected by customs or border enforcement. Are you so naive to think that weapons won't be able to make that journey as well?
It doesn't matter if you outlaw guns. It doesn't matter if you make laws that force people to hand them in. And even if you can shit out magical Gun Fairies that will disappear all of the civilian held firearms in the US overnight, it won't matter. If you want to ban guns in America you will first have to close the border. Otherwise only those with close ties to human and drug trafficking will have access to them.
So to conclude, outlawing guns in the US will not get rid of them. It will just redistribute them exclusively to criminals.
So you're saying that Saddam DID have WMD's!?
Seriously though, I think you're obviously upset about this entire situation, just like everyone else that has a compassionate heart. But attacking the weapon won't cure the problem.
Our best defense against the random, one-in-75-million crazy person is, oddly enough, you and other people just like you. What America needs more than anything else is for every person with strong anti-gun predilections to arm themselves. The more anti-gun your mindset, the more critical, circumspect, and reserved you will be with respect to guns and the choice to use that weapon.
Who better to safeguard our population from within than those who abhor guns and the destruction they cause? If this were to happen, the only problem would be that it would be so completely successful in deterring crime that there would never be another chance to disarm the US population on a wave of national fear and disgust as a result of the violence that one armed person can commit when no one else has a weapon to stop them.
"Mass shootings are almost never stopped by an armed civilian."
Guess what a fucking police officer is at the end of the day?
I quoted this just so I would have the pleasure of reading it again whenever I look through my comments. Unfortunately I don't have the words or mod points to appropriately express my appreciation of your post. Thank you.
It actually makes sense not to have such an emoji, because it creates a dilemma whether someone using such an emoji in a message is making a threat, and whether the company, becoming aware of such a threat, has a duty to do something about it.
Obesity kills far more humans than "rifles" ever will, and yet you see no artists blocking food emojis, and no companies worrying about what do to when someone posts a cake emoji.
Gotta love the logic surrounding this bullshit argument.
I was very interested to learn that there are building, airplane, and explosion emojis. In the proper combination they could be much more offensive and threatening than a rifle. Or they could just be one of those off-color, "too soon" jokes that I can't help but send to everyone I know.
But hey, lets ban them. It will certainly prevent me from getting on yet another government watch list.
This is a damn smoke screen.
You know who we need to be tested? The people who make the laws, like the Congresswoman herself, and all of her associates. Every dollar they make, EVERY FREAKIN DOLLAR, comes from taxpayers. Their special retirement system, paid by us. Their super special healthcare benefits? Paid for by John Q. Public. So, by the same logic, and even more so as they wield so much more power than a poor person looking for help, they owe us access to their internal biological processes so we can see what they are doing all of the time, right?
Before any government official ever tests another free citizen, let all of the lawmakers submit a sample. Oh, and no-go on giving them months to prepare either, like they do when one branch of government is investigating another branch of government. Its a surprise, bitches!
Playbook classic for our elected jackasses, use class warfare and incitement tactics to keep our eyes off the ball. We should be legalizing drugs for a number of reasons, not finding new and stupid ways to invade the privacy of our free citizens.
You cant send a woman out of the church service to get you a sammich. The purpose of being in church is to learn about doctrine, even for the women who are forbidden from being teachers.
It is an interesting phenomenon in the Bible that the superiority of women is acknowledged, but by divine decree they are placed below men in the authority structure. The lessons there are infinite, but the closest, and actual direct analogy, is how Christ put himself as the least of men, washing others feet, serving others in his every moment, even giving up his life for others, all the while being the embodiment of divinity on earth. The greatest becomes the least and because of it has the greatest impact.
As for the men, they get the benefit of watching how authority is borne and ultimately the structure of operating under authority is used as a tool for personal power by a more intrinsically capable being, ie woman. What a great lesson on the attributes of deity, in microcosm.
LZ Granderson's TED talk has a hilariously frank discussion of the "Gay Agenda." He claims to have found a copy of the offending document. He then produces it from his back pocket, this secret "Gay Agenda" for which he and his LGBTQ brothers and sisters have been fighting so enthusiastically. It's a manifesto of all of the special rights and privileges that gays don't currently have but which they are dedicated to manipulating, coercing, shaming, and even forcing the US government into ensuring for all gay Americans.
Its a copy of the Constitution.
The peoples wiped out by the Jews in the old testament had religious practices that included tossing their children in burning furnaces during orgies, the expressed purpose being that the screams of their dying children were an aphrodisiac and germane to the altered states sought by the participants.
Human sacrifice for the purpose of sexual gratification is a dangerous cultural expression. Even more so as a meme, transmittable and repeatable. Wiping it out does humanity a favor.
Your logic is completely backwards. The FBI already has all of the information and, ostensibly all of the leverage. Both parties need to keep that information secret from the American people. The FBI to maintain the threat, and Clinton to avoid the repercussions. Therefore, if damning evidence exists, and if the public is kept in the dark about said damning information, then and only then will the FBI be able to use it as leverage.
If the information is released to the public there is no leverage, period. This is yet another reason leaks of information to the public are a good thing. It keeps people accountable to public scrutiny and the justice system, instead of having that accountability subverted by some group or person who holds the information as blackmail fodder.
This wasn't about gays. This guy didn't have something against homosexuals because of homosexuals themselves. He had something against a group of people because of his chosen religious beliefs and his choice of religious leaders to listen to. The target could have been any number of groups that his religion states are valid targets of murder. It just happened to be homosexuals.
Therefore, this is not a homosexual acceptance issue. This is a religious issue.
The problem is that while we operate under a tenant of religious freedom, to date we have not held any religions accountable for their texts that incite violence, hate, and murder contrary to other tenants of our legal structure. I find it interesting that people are talking about banning guns, like they are the cause and solution to the problem, while an ideology that suborns murder is counted off limits for criticism and accountability.
Maybe we should license believers in certain religions, as long as those religions call for the murder of innocent people.
How, do you think, would a police officer outside the building gain entry to it when there are people stampeding out of every conceivable exit? If he did gain access, how, do you think, would a uniformed police officer look as a target in a building full of smartly dressed party people?
Now, consider armed bartenders, servers, managers, and other staff stationed inside the building. They know each other, they know the building, and they are already inside when the shooting starts. This event would have been over in only a few brief moments instead of hours, the death toll vastly lower.
I think your preconceived notions are coloring your viewpoint. I don't think those notions can be trusted to stay within the lines. They obviously need more supervision.
Your logic is incredibly small minded and you completely sidestepped the issue and thrust of his argument. If you can perceive verifiable negative effects from a certain course of action, reconsidering that course of action based on those negative effects is an i4ntelligent, solution based strategy. Continuing the course of action in spite of negative effects could be considered insanity.
You posted a combined ad hominem/genetic fallacy attack on his argument and got mod points. Well done. Still doesn't mean you're right, or even sane.
I would have preferred some specifics about how our open borders policy is helping America in every conceivable metric.
Wish I had mod points. Philosophically adroit post. Thank you for writing it.
In spite of my theist beliefs, I have always stated that agnostics hold an intellectually superior position to both theists and atheists. My explanations of this were similar, but clumsily stated, more wordy, and without rigor and the inescapable logic of your post.
So, is it self serving for me to exalt your position, as it is one that I believe, even though it undermines my position as a theist? Embrace the cognitive dissonance! LOL!
No, it can't. It is lack of belief in deities, and, by extension, the supernatural. Usually the people claiming it is a religion are religious themselves and do it because they can't handle the possibility of people having morality that lacks dependency on the supernatural.
They need to read their Bible more. The subject of morality not born of spiritual texts and beliefs is discussed at length in the Bible. It is compared to the spiritual motivations and axioms that guide the behavior of a believer.
I always find it interesting that many who stake their eternal existence on the contents of a specific book won't even take the time to decipher it systematically.
Bullshit, and fuck you. What you are saying is enabling those who are wounded and hurt the most deeply to hide from that hurt while it continues to victimize them for the rest of their life.
I lost my virginity through rape, to a woman 7 years older. I passed out from drinking, she had her way with me. When it was over, my neck, chest, torso, arms, and legs were so bruised from her that the next day one of my high school administrators took me out of class to find out if I needed help. She was concerned my family was beating and choking me, and wanted to call CPS. I couldn't find a way to explain that I passed out and was taken advantage of by a grown woman. I didn't say that, after I woke up, the woman apologized for what she had done to me; not the rape, no not that. But for all the scratches, bite marks, suck marks, and bruises she had left on my body. I didn't tell that my rapist had acted completely indifferent to how I might feel about what happened, and even went so far as to explain offhandedly that all of the bruises and marks on my body were really my fault, as scratching, biting, sucking, and hitting me was the only way to stimulate me enough while I was passed out to keep me sexually aroused while she did what she wanted with me.
So, yea, I kept my mouth shut about what happened. I was scared, embarrassed, and very confused. I can tell you without a doubt it was the exact wrong thing to do, keeping my mouth shut. The person who got hurt the most from me not talking about it? Me. Sure I wanted to get past it, sure I wanted to forget it. I was waiting for the bruises, scratches, hickies, and bite marks to fade so I could pretend the hurts didn't happen. I completely missed the point. My mind, emotions, and my "self" was hurt far worse than my body was. Not talking to someone was the worst thing I could do to myself. By not talking to someone, I made sure that I was never free from the effect of what she did to me, and how I had reflexively internalized it. I was at the effect of what happened for decades before I could even admit it was rape. It colored all of my interactions, both with sexuality and intimacy, without me even considering that it had. I packed it away in my mind, thinking I was healed just like all of the marks on my body, when in reality I was wounded so deeply I couldn't see the bottom of the hurt.
So as someone who has been raped, I will now say, fuck you, don't ever defend someone's motivation to not report what happened. Hiding the hurt inside you will fuck up your life, your experience of (or your ability to experience) joy and happiness, your ability to be truly intimate and vulnerable with the right person once they come along.
Just leave justice and retribution out of it for a moment, because that's a whole different subject. I'm talking to the people who have been assaulted and raped that haven't told someone. You need help to be free of this. You need help to heal. The first step is to tell someone that can help. Your experience of life is at stake. The rest of your life is at stake. Don't let a piece of shit rapist take the rest of your life from you. You can be free from this, but it takes help to get free. Tell someone, for your own sake. For the sake of your future self, so you can look back and see how far you have come and how free you are, rather than how this has controlled you, limited you, strangled your life right in front of you for decades and how you were powerless to face and overcome it alone. You don't know how deep the hurt goes without talking to someone. You can never get it out if you keep it all inside.
So if people are becoming increasingly concerned with the individual making the statement, rather than the statement itself, what does that mean for the level of scrutiny applied by on observer toward someone they are predisposed to like or have otherwise allied himself with? Seems like it would drop off next to nothing.
This would explain many things.
Borderless is coming, and it's coming fast. An increasing number of people are developing their networks and friendships online and they don't care what country their friends are in, but they do care that silly border laws are keeping them from meeting in person. The next generation will change how we think both about nationality and about territory-based borders.
I see the extension of the "global village" and culture blending, however, I don't see the erosion of border laws as the end result of these forces. Instead I see advances in consumer grade electronics that allow multi-party VR telepresence, haptic suits, and teledildonics to be the future for those so predisposed and privileged enough to have access.
Another way to think of this is if you have the funds and flexibility to buy an expensive plane ticket, take off of work, etc. for a vacation to go see some people you met online, you would also have the capital to invest in the above mentioned items. And, once you have the gear you have repeated access to any number of adventures with your global community of "friends."
Are you really operating under the easily discredited illusion that the president gets to write and pass legislation?
Bernie would be the most stymied president ever. Besides, his political positions and socialist agenda are not why you elect him.
You elect him to increase the political IQ of every voter in the US through the way he frames the issues, specifically not in terms of bolstering entrenched corporate and wealthy interests. You elect him for the things he would obstruct, namely the further enrichment of business interests and the wealthy .5% at the expense of everyone else.
You are conflating the politics of personal responsibility which is a by-product of conservative thinking and corporatism which is a by-product of the entrenched American oligarchy.
One serves as a guide for personal decision making and political critique. The other is a means of subverting control of the populace and funneling all wealth through a small percentage of already-wealthy business owners.
How do you mix those up?
I would like to see someone with a bigger brain than mine estimate the heat generated by anthropogenic friction forces. Walking, running, biking, motorcycle tires, car tires, truck tires, machine conveyor belts, train wheels, elevators, fucking pant suits...All of it. It has to have some erg value. What is is?
Also, what is the value of heat generated by all of the combustion engines in the world? Electric engines? Etc.
Could any of those items be part of the 40-50%?
Here's how it works from a previous comment (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9101743&cid=52105397):
I imagine that not only customer facing personnel will be replaced by kiosks, but food preparation, waste disposal, cleaning, and restocking will become automated as well. Accompanying this, I can see a wave of new positions available for robotics, IT, and kiosk repair technicians. I can see a busy McDonalds location staffed by as little as 2 people, there mainly for emergencies and "turning the machines off and then on again" as necessary.
Its hard not to perceive the future of fast food locations. There will be an app that allows you to order on the way to the location. You pay from your phone and a robot prepares your meal just in time for your arrival. Timing this is trivial because you share your location with them. Forecasting the next 15-30 minutes of business through the app makes for fresher food and drastically more efficient order fulfillment. A dedicated lane for app-placed orders ensures quick in-and-out drive through service. Customers are served better, orders are machine precise, profits are higher, and the only people that lose are low income workers.
Customer service rep positions are replaced with machine repair and maintenance positions. The law of unintended consequences is preserved and the inevitable slide towards machine replacement for most human tasks is moved forward. Everyone wins, except of course for the people that the higher minimum wage laws and Affordable Care Act were designed to help. They have been priced out the job market. They are just too expensive to keep on board.
Penal labor is outlawed in most states, except in very specific circumstances.