I assure you that I haven't always been thoroughly gruntled at work. There was one job that I had recurrent dreams about being rescued from. I know other people who have been much less than gruntled at work.
Make a list of possible weapons. Now, order them according to how much you'd dislike having a small middle-aged woman attack you with them. I think I know how guns would rate relative to axes and knives.
If you shoot yourself fatally, that's (a) a gun death, and (b) not murder. This is true whether it's a really dumb accident or suicide. Both murders and gun deaths are relevant statistics to this argument.
If you've got a four-person home invasion going, and a handgun or shotgun won't deter them, an AR-15 is unlikely to allow you to win. A person with an AR-15 is not a superman, and will succumb to bullets even more than Superman succumbs to kryptonite. One of them will almost certainly get you before you get all of them.
"Assault rifle" is more of a military term. It means a personal rifle that can fire automatically, at first full auto but later the three-round burst got popular. It also has to be significantly more high-powered than most handguns, and be able to fire semi-automatically. The first ones are generally considered to be late WWII German developments.
There are guns rights advocates who like to pretend they can't understand people who use anything other than the standard terminology. Essentially, they are ardent and very specialized grammar Nazis.
Were guns designed to put holes in paper targets? In general, no. (There are rifles specifically designed to be good at that task, but not that many.) There's more efficient ways to put holes in paper targets. I favor a hole punch, myself, or maybe a sharp pencil. In a pinch, I can stick a finger through.
Guns, on the other hand, were designed to be able to kill and injure people and animals. I can't kill someone with a hole punch or a finger poke, and a sharp pencil is quite difficult to use effectively in the role. Making holes in paper targets is probably the task rifles are most used for in the US, but that's not what they were designed to do.
Once you've drawn a gun with intent to use it, I think the word "peacefully" is inappropriate. Most cases of aiming a gun at someone and demanding something are felonies.
Last time a sharpened pencil got into me, it turned out to have lousy penetration. I can't even see the graphite under the skin anymore. If I'd been shot by even a low-powered gun, there would have been far more damage.
Yup. When I looked for AR-15-class guns, they cost several hundred each. I could easily afford one but, to be honest, I'd rather have a decent 3D printer.
In other words, remove all the people you don't actually care about who die, and there isn't much of a problem. Alternatively, compare the US to an active war zone and the US doesn't look too bad.
Simple access to guns probably contributes significantly to the number of suicides. Suicide is normally an impulse action, often immediately regretted when not immediately successful, and having a quick and reliable way to kill oneself is going to result in more suicides.
Depends on what you mean by a terrorist attack. If it means an attack at least partly intended to terrify, the record for a single attacking vehicle belongs to the Enola Gay.
Internet forums that don't police contributors become useless and unprofitable. This has been known since the mid-90s at latest. It hasn't changed since, and I see no reason to think it might ever change. "Common carrier" status is good for infrastructure, not platform providers. A choice of liability or common carrier status would mean that no site like YouTube could continue to exist. If it went common carrier, it would be spammed to unusability and cease to be profitable. If it went liability, it would have to either spend lots of resources on user-provided content, enough to make it unprofitable, or risk too many lawsuits to remain profitable.
You could debate either side, but you'd be wrong either way.
It very definitely isn't a First Amendment violation. "Congress shall make no law....", extended to state governments by the Fourteenth Amendment, means it's only binding on US governments. No government is involved in this.
There was absolutely nothing preventing the woman in question from putting her videos somewhere else. Only a government could enforce that. A private company has no ability to suppress videos outside their site (except for copyright violation).
It also didn't happen in a school or church or somewhere like that. Few people were injured. One was critical, but didn't die while the news was still going on. The shooter killed herself, and for some time that was the only death. Politicians didn't yell "Think of the children!" because no children were involved.
Besides, have you ever looked at homicide statistics? People get killed by guns all the time. It isn't remarkable.
Now, if you compare it to someone who walked into a school and killed seventeen students and wounded about as many more, guess which gets the media coverage?
Back when this was getting going, I thought it doubtful but worth trying. You don't always know if something is going to work out, possibly in an unexpected way.
Forces seeking an end to Constitutional government would not fare well here.
That's a matter of ballots, not bullets. Unconstitutional government, in one form or another, does have a lot of support in the US.
Moreover, I was talking about armies that march into another country, set up shop, and are harsh, demanding, and arbitrary in their dealings with the people there. That's going to attract more opposition than proposed unconstitutional governance. Nazi or Communist armies are an existential threat, and have no limiting principles (except that it's hard on troops to kill large numbers of women and children).
Ending unconstitutional government is something that can happen. It happens fairly frequently in history. Very few governments started with a constitution, and lots of them picked one up along the way. Governments will transition into and out of unconstitutional government.
If I were replying to your post in detail, there's be a lot of [Citation Needed]s in it.
Private discrimination includes lynching, which is very definitely not government-mandated, and that was significant at time over a century ago. That may be hard to grasp if you've only experienced relatively mild private discrimination.
From what I've been able to tell, the uneducated and working class are the more racist members of society. The Republican "southern strategy" was a deliberate attempt to draw racists into the Republican Party, and it didn't work by exploiting the prejudices of the educated and wealthy. Your claim that unions sought to oppress blacks because they feared competition from cheap black labor doesn't pass the smell test: if they wanted to reduce the competition, they'd have organized the blacks and brought them into unions. I don't trust what proponents of policies say on the record. Policy-makers often have hidden agendas.
Could be. My main claim to be a hipster is that I was a nerd and a geek before it was fashionable. When I want to be cool, I turn the thermostat down.
I find your "until their actions started to have an impact on society in a negative way" unconvincing, given that I don't trust the people who now use it as a perjorative to tell positive from negative changes in a way I find convincing.
I think that if you are married to a woman, you do not have to ask her "May we hold hands?......may I kiss you?..... May I hug you?.... every time I wish to engage in sex.
No, and there's nothing in your cite that says you have to. Assuming you're going by those rules, you have to get affirmative consent, which doesn't have to be verbal. In my case, a certain short hum with a sharply rising note is consent if my wife indicates, and a question if I'm initiating.
Define an intimate area.
In my state, according to the appropriate statute, it is "Subd. 5.Intimate parts. "Intimate parts" includes the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.". Touching fingers without permission can't be criminal sexual conduct in Minnesota.
What is a non-verbal consent that would hold up in a court of law if the man was being charged with rape?
Sure. In a criminal trial, it is necessary to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That means that it's up to the prosecution to show that there was no consent, or that consent was withdrawn. Rape is a difficult crime to get a conviction on, except in clear-cut cases. If there's doubt that consent existed, that's not enough for a conviction. (I'm assuming you're getting a fair trial. Actual results may vary with skin color.)
In addition, what of a young woman in college dating a townie - who's rules govern their interactions? the college cannot touch him, but the courts can. There will be test cases.
There have been. This doesn't seem to change anything off-campus. If you were worried about a rape charge before, (a) you should be worried about a rape charge afterwards and (b) you really need to rethink your approach to women.
You think about some impromptu fun with the wife, she's looking good today, you second guess it, then go out ot the garage and work on the lawnmower.
Then you take your wife to marriage counseling, and strongly consider divorce. If you're worried that impromptu fun will result in legal action, you've got an awfully dysfunctional marriage going on. I'll also suggest that you talk to someone to try to figure out how you got into that horrible state in the first place.
If I were in college now, (and single) I'd simply avoid contact with women other than that needed to complete my studies, and definitely stay away from any relationships.
I've known lots of people who did things with fellow students and didn't get into serious legal trouble. Do you have any statistics to show that this is a real problem? It looks like a real problem because you see individual cases mentioned, and therefore think there's a lot of it going on. There's a name for it: the availability heuristic, and it simply doesn't work in the modern world. There's lots of bad things that could happen on campus. You could be hit by a car. You could be shot. You could lose your wallet, and the person who finds it might try some "identity theft".
Bear in mind also that you won't get the whole story from a news source, particularly one that likes to whip up controversy. In general, when I read some startling news, if I can investigate it, it turns out not to be so startling. That guy claiming he was falsely accused of rape? Try to find some other account of what he actually did. I know it's a Slashdot tradition to believe the first story you read about something or some person and stick to it, no matter how implausible it is or whatever else you hear about it, but I'm sure you can follow things up on your own.
You figure I'd be fired for my views if I worked at Google?
Nope. You might be fired if you made a nuisance of yourself pushing your views on others, like Damore did. (I did read what the Labor Relations board concluded.)
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming that Special Relativity holds, FTL travel is equivalent to time travel. If you have one, you have the other.
I assure you that I haven't always been thoroughly gruntled at work. There was one job that I had recurrent dreams about being rescued from. I know other people who have been much less than gruntled at work.
Make a list of possible weapons. Now, order them according to how much you'd dislike having a small middle-aged woman attack you with them. I think I know how guns would rate relative to axes and knives.
If you shoot yourself fatally, that's (a) a gun death, and (b) not murder. This is true whether it's a really dumb accident or suicide. Both murders and gun deaths are relevant statistics to this argument.
If you've got a four-person home invasion going, and a handgun or shotgun won't deter them, an AR-15 is unlikely to allow you to win. A person with an AR-15 is not a superman, and will succumb to bullets even more than Superman succumbs to kryptonite. One of them will almost certainly get you before you get all of them.
"Assault rifle" is more of a military term. It means a personal rifle that can fire automatically, at first full auto but later the three-round burst got popular. It also has to be significantly more high-powered than most handguns, and be able to fire semi-automatically. The first ones are generally considered to be late WWII German developments.
There are guns rights advocates who like to pretend they can't understand people who use anything other than the standard terminology. Essentially, they are ardent and very specialized grammar Nazis.
Were guns designed to put holes in paper targets? In general, no. (There are rifles specifically designed to be good at that task, but not that many.) There's more efficient ways to put holes in paper targets. I favor a hole punch, myself, or maybe a sharp pencil. In a pinch, I can stick a finger through.
Guns, on the other hand, were designed to be able to kill and injure people and animals. I can't kill someone with a hole punch or a finger poke, and a sharp pencil is quite difficult to use effectively in the role. Making holes in paper targets is probably the task rifles are most used for in the US, but that's not what they were designed to do.
Once you've drawn a gun with intent to use it, I think the word "peacefully" is inappropriate. Most cases of aiming a gun at someone and demanding something are felonies.
Last time a sharpened pencil got into me, it turned out to have lousy penetration. I can't even see the graphite under the skin anymore. If I'd been shot by even a low-powered gun, there would have been far more damage.
Yup. When I looked for AR-15-class guns, they cost several hundred each. I could easily afford one but, to be honest, I'd rather have a decent 3D printer.
Fortunately for your argument, none of the deaths you attribute to Hitler's words had any involvement with firearms. Right?
In other words, remove all the people you don't actually care about who die, and there isn't much of a problem. Alternatively, compare the US to an active war zone and the US doesn't look too bad.
Simple access to guns probably contributes significantly to the number of suicides. Suicide is normally an impulse action, often immediately regretted when not immediately successful, and having a quick and reliable way to kill oneself is going to result in more suicides.
Depends on what you mean by a terrorist attack. If it means an attack at least partly intended to terrify, the record for a single attacking vehicle belongs to the Enola Gay.
Internet forums that don't police contributors become useless and unprofitable. This has been known since the mid-90s at latest. It hasn't changed since, and I see no reason to think it might ever change. "Common carrier" status is good for infrastructure, not platform providers. A choice of liability or common carrier status would mean that no site like YouTube could continue to exist. If it went common carrier, it would be spammed to unusability and cease to be profitable. If it went liability, it would have to either spend lots of resources on user-provided content, enough to make it unprofitable, or risk too many lawsuits to remain profitable.
You could debate either side, but you'd be wrong either way.
It very definitely isn't a First Amendment violation. "Congress shall make no law....", extended to state governments by the Fourteenth Amendment, means it's only binding on US governments. No government is involved in this.
There was absolutely nothing preventing the woman in question from putting her videos somewhere else. Only a government could enforce that. A private company has no ability to suppress videos outside their site (except for copyright violation).
It also didn't happen in a school or church or somewhere like that. Few people were injured. One was critical, but didn't die while the news was still going on. The shooter killed herself, and for some time that was the only death. Politicians didn't yell "Think of the children!" because no children were involved.
Besides, have you ever looked at homicide statistics? People get killed by guns all the time. It isn't remarkable.
Now, if you compare it to someone who walked into a school and killed seventeen students and wounded about as many more, guess which gets the media coverage?
Lots of them get recycled because they're old and flaky. Dropping a hodgepodge of unreliable units of all sorts on a village would be of dubious help.
Back when this was getting going, I thought it doubtful but worth trying. You don't always know if something is going to work out, possibly in an unexpected way.
Sanitation in general had a tremendous demographic effect. Cities became population sources, not population sinks.
The most effective way to curb population growth turns out to be to have a modern reasonably advanced society.
I'm not actually sure that Trump's homophobic, although it wouldn't surprise me. Other than that, they did.
That's a matter of ballots, not bullets. Unconstitutional government, in one form or another, does have a lot of support in the US.
Moreover, I was talking about armies that march into another country, set up shop, and are harsh, demanding, and arbitrary in their dealings with the people there. That's going to attract more opposition than proposed unconstitutional governance. Nazi or Communist armies are an existential threat, and have no limiting principles (except that it's hard on troops to kill large numbers of women and children).
Ending unconstitutional government is something that can happen. It happens fairly frequently in history. Very few governments started with a constitution, and lots of them picked one up along the way. Governments will transition into and out of unconstitutional government.
If I were replying to your post in detail, there's be a lot of [Citation Needed]s in it.
Private discrimination includes lynching, which is very definitely not government-mandated, and that was significant at time over a century ago. That may be hard to grasp if you've only experienced relatively mild private discrimination.
From what I've been able to tell, the uneducated and working class are the more racist members of society. The Republican "southern strategy" was a deliberate attempt to draw racists into the Republican Party, and it didn't work by exploiting the prejudices of the educated and wealthy. Your claim that unions sought to oppress blacks because they feared competition from cheap black labor doesn't pass the smell test: if they wanted to reduce the competition, they'd have organized the blacks and brought them into unions. I don't trust what proponents of policies say on the record. Policy-makers often have hidden agendas.
Could be. My main claim to be a hipster is that I was a nerd and a geek before it was fashionable. When I want to be cool, I turn the thermostat down.
I find your "until their actions started to have an impact on society in a negative way" unconvincing, given that I don't trust the people who now use it as a perjorative to tell positive from negative changes in a way I find convincing.
No, and there's nothing in your cite that says you have to. Assuming you're going by those rules, you have to get affirmative consent, which doesn't have to be verbal. In my case, a certain short hum with a sharply rising note is consent if my wife indicates, and a question if I'm initiating.
In my state, according to the appropriate statute, it is "Subd. 5.Intimate parts. "Intimate parts" includes the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.". Touching fingers without permission can't be criminal sexual conduct in Minnesota.
Sure. In a criminal trial, it is necessary to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That means that it's up to the prosecution to show that there was no consent, or that consent was withdrawn. Rape is a difficult crime to get a conviction on, except in clear-cut cases. If there's doubt that consent existed, that's not enough for a conviction. (I'm assuming you're getting a fair trial. Actual results may vary with skin color.)
There have been. This doesn't seem to change anything off-campus. If you were worried about a rape charge before, (a) you should be worried about a rape charge afterwards and (b) you really need to rethink your approach to women.
Then you take your wife to marriage counseling, and strongly consider divorce. If you're worried that impromptu fun will result in legal action, you've got an awfully dysfunctional marriage going on. I'll also suggest that you talk to someone to try to figure out how you got into that horrible state in the first place.
I've known lots of people who did things with fellow students and didn't get into serious legal trouble. Do you have any statistics to show that this is a real problem? It looks like a real problem because you see individual cases mentioned, and therefore think there's a lot of it going on. There's a name for it: the availability heuristic, and it simply doesn't work in the modern world. There's lots of bad things that could happen on campus. You could be hit by a car. You could be shot. You could lose your wallet, and the person who finds it might try some "identity theft".
Bear in mind also that you won't get the whole story from a news source, particularly one that likes to whip up controversy. In general, when I read some startling news, if I can investigate it, it turns out not to be so startling. That guy claiming he was falsely accused of rape? Try to find some other account of what he actually did. I know it's a Slashdot tradition to believe the first story you read about something or some person and stick to it, no matter how implausible it is or whatever else you hear about it, but I'm sure you can follow things up on your own.
Nope. You might be fired if you made a nuisance of yourself pushing your views on others, like Damore did. (I did read what the Labor Relations board concluded.)