I didn't say they are demanding those things now. Those things are inflicted upon them. When they ARE in a position to demand anything, what they'll demand is the absence of centrally controlled tyrannical socialist nonsense holding back in the miserable hell they're in now.
The illusion will be shattered for the citizens of NK, they will begin to demand more from their government and openess will come.
Actually, they will begin to demand less from their government. Like less defense from an imaginary pending attack from South Korea. Less in the way of starvation labor camps. Less in the way of grotesque mass-parade theater showing love for their various iterations of Great Leader, Dear Leader, etc.
What they'll want more of is a chance for people outside of that hellish place to be able to invest money, material, and people into growing some actual businesses. Or they will want that, as soon as they realize that's what generates actual prosperity.
So do you always answer your door with a gun in hand? Or do you ask the criminal to wait 5 minutes whilst you go and fetch yours?
As someone who has turned away a large disturbed person trying to bash down our door in the middle of the night by: going to fetch a gun and pointing it at him, I can say I'm glad to have had that option. The police didn't show up for 20 more minutes. I really don't care what you think, because you weren't there. I'd like to have seen how you dealt with the guy, though. 6'-4", almost 300 pounds, and very altered on controlled substances. But he didn't have the door all the way broken up before a gun was in hand. Your question is a false set of limited choices that don't always apply to reality.
Exactly! Actual communism is impossible. What we see every place it's tried is the sort of horror, misery, death and oppression that such attempts always turn into. Because the movement's ideals require that sort of tyranny in order to get things under way, and never progress past that part because... because they don't really want utopian everyone-gets-the-same-stuff-while-only-a-few-people-produce it wonderlands anyway. They just want someone else's stuff, and once they have that, they just want power.
Why do we have to respond to acts already occurred in the state?
Yes! When we're talking about incredibly rare acts of deranged people, we should never be anything but pro-active. Even if it will save just one life.
Likewise, we should be proactive about things that people use to kill thousands and thousands more people than that. Why should we be re-active when we know that proactively preventing anyone from driving until they're over 21 years old will save tens of thousands of lives every year. Also, doctors kill tens of thousands of people a year through negligence. Far more than are killed by negligent gun use. I'm sure we can find a way to stop that, by not allowing doctors to do that negligent stuff.
Just two days ago, a guy in my state killed his girlfriend and another man. That could have been stopped if we'd prevented him from using the weapon he used. A law MUST be passed to prevent such murders. He used a match and some gasoline. So, it will be inconvenient, of course, but if we can prevent one malicious death, it's definitely worth it, right?
So, an exceedingly rare thing that kills fewer people than things like being locked in a hot car... happen to have not happened... and millions of people have now lost their self-defense weapons and get a spike in daily violent crime from thugs who are now more confident they'll have defenseless victims. Excellent work.
They claim that limiting magazine sizes or assault rifles would not be effective in stopping bad guys from slaughtering tons of people
Right! Because the bad guys can use them or all sorts of other off-the-shelf-at-Home-Depot methods to kill lots of people, especially if they're willing to die, themselves (as so many of these broken people are - eager to, in fact). Pretending that fiddling with whether or not law abiding people can buy one magazine or another is going to stop someone who spends weeks or months planning to kill a room full of people is... willfully ignorant. Disingenuous, really.
but then they also demand unlimited magazine sizes and an unassailable right to buy assault rifles because they are required for effective personal defense
Actually, they can't buy assault rifles - those are military weapons that aren't available to civilians except a very small number of federally licensed people. Regardless, they "demand" the right to buy magazines because they want to have them. To shoot for fun, or because they think it makes their repeating rifle more useful to them. It's as simple as that.
In other words, assault rifles are not that dangerous when you're talking about killing some schoolkids
Who says that? Semi-auto rifles are dangerous, just like lever-action John Wayne style repeating rifles and double action revolvers are dangerous. Just like pump shotguns are dangerous. Of course none of them are dangerous at all unless someone who wants to kill a room full of kids decides to employ them that way. A few idiots in Madrid and London manages to kill trainloads of people with consumer products in their backpacks, too. Because they wanted to. That's what's dangerous - the desire to kill.
but when talking about saving their own skin, then they need the extra killing power of an assault rifle
No, they want what they want. A Ruger.223 Ranch rifle with a nice walnut stock is going to be just as deadly as a scary-looking AR-15 that shoots exactly the same rounds, just as fast, but which has an "assaulty" looking plastic stock on it. What gun owners want is for idiots to stop being completely uninformed about such stuff as they write sweeping laws impacting millions of law abiding people... over incredibly rare tragedies that such laws wouldn't stop anyway.
You also argue that some asshole can be just as lethal with a machete.
Ask the enforcers with MS-13 or the hacked-up villages full of people in Africa whether or not a machete is an incredibly brutal weapon in the hands of someone who wants you dead.
some asshole with a knife walked into a school in China and stabbed two dozen or so children. None of the children died.
Or, you could refer to the guy who walked into a school in Osaka with a knife and did kill a room full of kids. Remember that one? I'm guessing you forgot it because it takes the fun out of your rare-anecdotes-prove-my-point narrative strategy.
More people are slaughtered in the US with blunt instruments like hammers than are killed by any rifles, let alone the scary ones with black plastic on them. More kids are killed by negligent parents who cook them to death in hot cars than were killed by the son of the negligent woman who let her damaged-goods kid in Newtown have access to her gun collection.
The 2nd Amendment was written in a time when people had muskets in...
You should consider reading the actual words - page and pages of them - by the people who wrote that amendment. They go into great detail about their thoughts on the personal possession and use of firearms. They considered self-defense to be so self-evident of a natural right that there was no need to write about it in the nation's chartering documents. But just to head off any confusion, they did explicitly mention one of the things the government was not allowed to interfere with: the right to keep and bear arms. That they meant it personally goes without saying (though they did say it, a lot). But they wanted to also be very clear that the states should retain mustering rights, and not be subordinate to the feds in that regard.
Regardless, they were all for personal gun ownership and use, and said so in every way possible - even though they thought that went without saying.
Software that phones home to make sure you didn't rip it off is cheaper than software that has to be priced to take into account the fact that it can and will be ripped off. You aren't forced to use some company's phone-home software, so your concerns about law aren't grounded. What you're buying is a service that happens to involve a licensed piece of software. If you want the exact same flavor of game to run without phoning home, start up a game company that charges enough per copy to cover piracy losses, and see how it goes.
You can publish your own work anywhere you like, with a license that allows anyone to use it however they want. There, waived.
Or did you really not keep yourself a copy of your own work? Or did you submit it to someone else under licensing conditions that would prevent you from doing so? Or, are you saying that they somehow prevented you from keeping a copy, and tricked you into providing them an exclusive license?
how does that in ANY way shape or form promote sciences and the arts
It inspires other people to be creative, build their own teams of people to produce their own films and entertainment franchises. Just like so many other successful people do, every day, right now. Because, of course, you (and they) would also benefit from the same protections for your work - which you can waive any time you want if you think the rest of the world should have your work to play with as they see fit.
How is using a bot to farm millions any different than what financial companies do?
When you pay interest, or management fees, or brokerage fees, you're doing it on purpose. You've shopped around, chosen the institution you want to do business with, made the choice to use their services and to pay what it costs. You really don't understand how that differs from someone who steals money by using compromised user accounts to take money against your will and without your knowledge?
You do understand (right?) that loaning out money is one of the least important things that banks do... right? Apparently you don't.
You can run a business without being in debt. Good on you, if you can. But you can't get much done without making use of the huge and intricate network of banking services that let you get business done. Unless you're running a meth lab or a hot dog stand (and even then), you sure as hell don't want banks going under. If for no other reason than even your cash-only business will fail when all of your customers lose the ability to interact with banks themselves.
"Becoming enlightened" seems to involve supernatural goings-on, on his part. How many Buddhists are willing to say that that entire part of the narrative is BS?
And they don't realize how much worse it will be if their banks collapse. And wanting a job when there's no actual demand for what a job's output will produce IS wanting free stuff.
So instead of discussing HOW the US can continue to spend wildly more than it has, and continue to borrow huge amounts and rack up more interest payments than it can afford, you're going to call someone who points that out a mouthbreathing hick. Anything to avoid directly addressing the problem, huh? Typical.
And yet you haven't actually mentioned the mechanism by which the people who pay all of the income taxes are somehow taking money from the people who pay no income taxes.
and significantly raises the difficulty of getting enraged and killing someone
And so we have another legislative push to curtail "assault" rifles. Except... even the FBI points out that far more people are killed with hammers, and with bare hands than with rifles. It's about murderers, not tools. Guns are harder to get now than they were 50 years ago - so what's changed? Culture.
If you're right, and more control means less murder, how do you explain the recent relaxation of gun control in Washington DC, and the substantial drop in murder with guns? How do you reconcile that with very restrictive gun control in Chicago, and a very, very high murder rate? It's about people, not gun (or hammer) control.
Never mind you don't even know what that phrase means, which makes you sound like an idiot... you don't know what the hell you're talking about when it comes to the structure of the government and the recent history of the parties that participate in it. So just stop before you embarass yourself any further.
You do understand that the democrats haven't so much as proposed a budget in five years, right? You're complaining about exactly the wrong people (of course).
nd that couldn't possibly be because the GOP has systematically filibustered any piece of legislation from the democrats
No, it couldn't. Because the democrats haven't even introduced a single piece of legislation. Haven't even formally proposed a budget in five years. You do get that, right?
Why should we care about being scolded buy someone who can't understand the difference between race and religion? Being a Muslim - or member of any other group that defines itself by it's belief in magic - is a cultural thing, not a race thing. That the first thing that leaps into your brain is race shows who the racist actually is.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say they are demanding those things now. Those things are inflicted upon them. When they ARE in a position to demand anything, what they'll demand is the absence of centrally controlled tyrannical socialist nonsense holding back in the miserable hell they're in now.
The illusion will be shattered for the citizens of NK, they will begin to demand more from their government and openess will come.
Actually, they will begin to demand less from their government. Like less defense from an imaginary pending attack from South Korea. Less in the way of starvation labor camps. Less in the way of grotesque mass-parade theater showing love for their various iterations of Great Leader, Dear Leader, etc.
What they'll want more of is a chance for people outside of that hellish place to be able to invest money, material, and people into growing some actual businesses. Or they will want that, as soon as they realize that's what generates actual prosperity.
So do you always answer your door with a gun in hand? Or do you ask the criminal to wait 5 minutes whilst you go and fetch yours?
As someone who has turned away a large disturbed person trying to bash down our door in the middle of the night by: going to fetch a gun and pointing it at him, I can say I'm glad to have had that option. The police didn't show up for 20 more minutes. I really don't care what you think, because you weren't there. I'd like to have seen how you dealt with the guy, though. 6'-4", almost 300 pounds, and very altered on controlled substances. But he didn't have the door all the way broken up before a gun was in hand. Your question is a false set of limited choices that don't always apply to reality.
That. Was. NOT. Communism.
Exactly! Actual communism is impossible. What we see every place it's tried is the sort of horror, misery, death and oppression that such attempts always turn into. Because the movement's ideals require that sort of tyranny in order to get things under way, and never progress past that part because ... because they don't really want utopian everyone-gets-the-same-stuff-while-only-a-few-people-produce it wonderlands anyway. They just want someone else's stuff, and once they have that, they just want power.
Why do we have to respond to acts already occurred in the state?
Yes! When we're talking about incredibly rare acts of deranged people, we should never be anything but pro-active. Even if it will save just one life.
Likewise, we should be proactive about things that people use to kill thousands and thousands more people than that. Why should we be re-active when we know that proactively preventing anyone from driving until they're over 21 years old will save tens of thousands of lives every year. Also, doctors kill tens of thousands of people a year through negligence. Far more than are killed by negligent gun use. I'm sure we can find a way to stop that, by not allowing doctors to do that negligent stuff.
Just two days ago, a guy in my state killed his girlfriend and another man. That could have been stopped if we'd prevented him from using the weapon he used. A law MUST be passed to prevent such murders. He used a match and some gasoline. So, it will be inconvenient, of course, but if we can prevent one malicious death, it's definitely worth it, right?
So, an exceedingly rare thing that kills fewer people than things like being locked in a hot car ... happen to have not happened ... and millions of people have now lost their self-defense weapons and get a spike in daily violent crime from thugs who are now more confident they'll have defenseless victims. Excellent work.
forty percent of guns sold in the United States were sold without a background check
Citation required. Because that's a whole lot of BS right there.
They claim that limiting magazine sizes or assault rifles would not be effective in stopping bad guys from slaughtering tons of people
Right! Because the bad guys can use them or all sorts of other off-the-shelf-at-Home-Depot methods to kill lots of people, especially if they're willing to die, themselves (as so many of these broken people are - eager to, in fact). Pretending that fiddling with whether or not law abiding people can buy one magazine or another is going to stop someone who spends weeks or months planning to kill a room full of people is ... willfully ignorant. Disingenuous, really.
but then they also demand unlimited magazine sizes and an unassailable right to buy assault rifles because they are required for effective personal defense
Actually, they can't buy assault rifles - those are military weapons that aren't available to civilians except a very small number of federally licensed people. Regardless, they "demand" the right to buy magazines because they want to have them. To shoot for fun, or because they think it makes their repeating rifle more useful to them. It's as simple as that.
In other words, assault rifles are not that dangerous when you're talking about killing some schoolkids
Who says that? Semi-auto rifles are dangerous, just like lever-action John Wayne style repeating rifles and double action revolvers are dangerous. Just like pump shotguns are dangerous. Of course none of them are dangerous at all unless someone who wants to kill a room full of kids decides to employ them that way. A few idiots in Madrid and London manages to kill trainloads of people with consumer products in their backpacks, too. Because they wanted to. That's what's dangerous - the desire to kill.
but when talking about saving their own skin, then they need the extra killing power of an assault rifle
No, they want what they want. A Ruger .223 Ranch rifle with a nice walnut stock is going to be just as deadly as a scary-looking AR-15 that shoots exactly the same rounds, just as fast, but which has an "assaulty" looking plastic stock on it. What gun owners want is for idiots to stop being completely uninformed about such stuff as they write sweeping laws impacting millions of law abiding people ... over incredibly rare tragedies that such laws wouldn't stop anyway.
You also argue that some asshole can be just as lethal with a machete.
Ask the enforcers with MS-13 or the hacked-up villages full of people in Africa whether or not a machete is an incredibly brutal weapon in the hands of someone who wants you dead.
some asshole with a knife walked into a school in China and stabbed two dozen or so children. None of the children died.
Or, you could refer to the guy who walked into a school in Osaka with a knife and did kill a room full of kids. Remember that one? I'm guessing you forgot it because it takes the fun out of your rare-anecdotes-prove-my-point narrative strategy.
More people are slaughtered in the US with blunt instruments like hammers than are killed by any rifles, let alone the scary ones with black plastic on them. More kids are killed by negligent parents who cook them to death in hot cars than were killed by the son of the negligent woman who let her damaged-goods kid in Newtown have access to her gun collection.
The 2nd Amendment was written in a time when people had muskets in ...
You should consider reading the actual words - page and pages of them - by the people who wrote that amendment. They go into great detail about their thoughts on the personal possession and use of firearms. They considered self-defense to be so self-evident of a natural right that there was no need to write about it in the nation's chartering documents. But just to head off any confusion, they did explicitly mention one of the things the government was not allowed to interfere with: the right to keep and bear arms. That they meant it personally goes without saying (though they did say it, a lot). But they wanted to also be very clear that the states should retain mustering rights, and not be subordinate to the feds in that regard.
Regardless, they were all for personal gun ownership and use, and said so in every way possible - even though they thought that went without saying.
Software that phones home to make sure you didn't rip it off is cheaper than software that has to be priced to take into account the fact that it can and will be ripped off. You aren't forced to use some company's phone-home software, so your concerns about law aren't grounded. What you're buying is a service that happens to involve a licensed piece of software. If you want the exact same flavor of game to run without phoning home, start up a game company that charges enough per copy to cover piracy losses, and see how it goes.
You can publish your own work anywhere you like, with a license that allows anyone to use it however they want. There, waived.
Or did you really not keep yourself a copy of your own work? Or did you submit it to someone else under licensing conditions that would prevent you from doing so? Or, are you saying that they somehow prevented you from keeping a copy, and tricked you into providing them an exclusive license?
how does that in ANY way shape or form promote sciences and the arts
It inspires other people to be creative, build their own teams of people to produce their own films and entertainment franchises. Just like so many other successful people do, every day, right now. Because, of course, you (and they) would also benefit from the same protections for your work - which you can waive any time you want if you think the rest of the world should have your work to play with as they see fit.
How is using a bot to farm millions any different than what financial companies do?
When you pay interest, or management fees, or brokerage fees, you're doing it on purpose. You've shopped around, chosen the institution you want to do business with, made the choice to use their services and to pay what it costs. You really don't understand how that differs from someone who steals money by using compromised user accounts to take money against your will and without your knowledge?
You do understand (right?) that loaning out money is one of the least important things that banks do ... right? Apparently you don't.
You can run a business without being in debt. Good on you, if you can. But you can't get much done without making use of the huge and intricate network of banking services that let you get business done. Unless you're running a meth lab or a hot dog stand (and even then), you sure as hell don't want banks going under. If for no other reason than even your cash-only business will fail when all of your customers lose the ability to interact with banks themselves.
"Becoming enlightened" seems to involve supernatural goings-on, on his part. How many Buddhists are willing to say that that entire part of the narrative is BS?
And they don't realize how much worse it will be if their banks collapse. And wanting a job when there's no actual demand for what a job's output will produce IS wanting free stuff.
So instead of discussing HOW the US can continue to spend wildly more than it has, and continue to borrow huge amounts and rack up more interest payments than it can afford, you're going to call someone who points that out a mouthbreathing hick. Anything to avoid directly addressing the problem, huh? Typical.
And yet you haven't actually mentioned the mechanism by which the people who pay all of the income taxes are somehow taking money from the people who pay no income taxes.
Perhaps you have never understood what it is to have secure employment
What are you talking about - tenure? Otherwise, pretty much nobody has secure employment. If you pretend otherwise, you're a fool.
He was a mortal man like you and I
Right, not counting all of the magic hocus-pocus stuff he did, because he wasn't, really, right?
and significantly raises the difficulty of getting enraged and killing someone
And so we have another legislative push to curtail "assault" rifles. Except ... even the FBI points out that far more people are killed with hammers, and with bare hands than with rifles. It's about murderers, not tools. Guns are harder to get now than they were 50 years ago - so what's changed? Culture.
If you're right, and more control means less murder, how do you explain the recent relaxation of gun control in Washington DC, and the substantial drop in murder with guns? How do you reconcile that with very restrictive gun control in Chicago, and a very, very high murder rate? It's about people, not gun (or hammer) control.
this does beg the question
Never mind you don't even know what that phrase means, which makes you sound like an idiot ... you don't know what the hell you're talking about when it comes to the structure of the government and the recent history of the parties that participate in it. So just stop before you embarass yourself any further.
You do understand that the democrats haven't so much as proposed a budget in five years, right? You're complaining about exactly the wrong people (of course).
nd that couldn't possibly be because the GOP has systematically filibustered any piece of legislation from the democrats
No, it couldn't. Because the democrats haven't even introduced a single piece of legislation. Haven't even formally proposed a budget in five years. You do get that, right?
Why should we care about being scolded buy someone who can't understand the difference between race and religion? Being a Muslim - or member of any other group that defines itself by it's belief in magic - is a cultural thing, not a race thing. That the first thing that leaps into your brain is race shows who the racist actually is.