Well, let's see: You imply stupidity by complaining about irony while carefully avoiding the fact that his observation is accurate. If there's irony involved and you fail to illustrate why, then you're just dishing exactly the sort of patronizing snark that the GP was talking about. In effect, you've just made his point all the more astute. Then you attack him (not the point he's illustrating) by suggesting that he's using lazy rhetorical devices (you know, the thing YOU just did), again instead of even mentioning anything having to do with the subject matter. So, yeah. You've done nothing BUT attack the OP, and stay away from the substance. And now you're being defensive about it instead of taking the opportunity to, say, explain why you think the Democrats AREN'T shameless, disingenuous, hypocritical promoters and exploiters of identity politics.
Reinforcing phony narratives isn't "pointing out racial issues..."
They spotted the gullible media willingness to swallow the "hands up, don't shoot" fiction at face value, and leveraged it to further coarsen our political culture. Simple as that. They want discord, because it helps distract from their criminality. The fake BLM-style narrative is a perfect bit of leverage to that end.
Are you saying the Russians also promoted Hillary?
They didn't promote anybody. But they did work - as they have for decades - to simply muddy the waters, stir the pot, and attempt to instill division and antipathy across the board. They, like everyone else "official," had every expectation that Clinton would win - and their efforts were simply aimed at making that task as difficult as possible. Which is what they've always done, and also do throughout the world.
Regardless of whether or not there was pressure from the previous administration for health care providers to stick their noses into and make their patients feel uncomfortable about it, someone with the notion that asking a patient for the names and relationships of people who had access to guns in the house, and where and how they're kept instructed this nurse to go down that road. That pressure could have come from her own political agenda, that of her employer or nurses' association, or from insurers, or state licensing bodies, or from any of a number of federal agencies to which everyone downstream has to answer. The person delivering health services was reading from a clipboard and looking to gather that information. Her explanation as to why was suitably vague (having "to report it") as to sound meant to shut down whoever might ask about it. No doubt banking on seniors' general go-along-with-it disposition. No matter how you slice it, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Last spring my 80-something mom came back from a doctor's appointment mentioning that the nurse who checked her in and asked the usual questions about her daily health also, clipboard in hand, asked her if there were guns in the house, how they were stored, and who (including names and relationships) had access to them. Even my mom, who normally has a completely deferential reaction to authority figures ("the doctor" or "the guy directing traffic around the pothole crew" or "the assistant manager at the grocery store") was (as a girl raised in a household where everybody hunted, and guns were a normal tool found in everyday life) was so surprised at the questions that she actually pushed back and said, "Why are you asking that?"
She said she was expecting some remark about older people and suicide prevention or something, but the nurse said, "It's something we have to ask now. It's part of all the public health reporting we have to do." Considering how often some activists talk about trying to get around the Bill of Rights by treating gun ownership as a disease, I'd say that there were indeed policy fingerprints all over that one.
Let me know when they are finally able to detect the infinite amount of matter the universe actually has, as well as its infinite everything else.
You do understand, right, that in an infinite universe (with, by extension, an infinite amount of matter if you want to think of it that way) can be a thing while still not manifesting itself as an infinite amount of matter (or even hardly any matter at all) in any particular volume. Right? You get that part?
Wow, that's a lot of work to go to in order to completely and deliberately miss the point. The followers of St. Gore were telling us (the domestic, US audience) that we here in the US, especially on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, would be experiencing year after year of increasingly huge, increasingly frequent hurricane landfalls. Followed of course by the complete absence of such. But sure, go ahead, pretend you weren't noticing when the guy getting rich selling carbon offsets from his mansion didn't harp on such things endlessly, to a fan base of swooning alarmists intent on leveraging those predictions for political power and cash distribution programs.
wave after wave of Hurricane due to global warming
Whew! It's a good thing we haven't been having any global warming for so long, with that huge stretch of no major hurricanes of any kind landing in the US despite the climate alarm industry telling us year after year that THAT year was going to be the one with a huge number of record hurricanes. During which we got exact none. Year after year. Or was it that global warming was WORSE decades ago, when there were more storms landing then during all of those recent years? Gotcha.
There is no "current crisis" over $100,000 worth of across-the-spectrum noise-generating BS ads run by Russia in an election season when the Clinton machine spent or exercised on her behalf over $2 billion. It's only a "crisis" in the sense that it's one of the only absurd little threads that Clinton and her followers can still cling to as a reason she lost, short of having to finally confront the fact that she's an awful person and a worse candidate into which to invest $2 billion dollars and the phony hopes and dreams of a number of people in a couple of coastal cities.
The more that media outlets scream it's a crisis, the more you can be sure they've got nothing else to try to trot out.
What fun! More no-information snark, with a dose of ad hominem on top, the better to still try to avoid admitting you can't address the actual substance of the matter. It's a rather indirect way of admitting he's right, but thanks for making the point again.
No, you spent a moment typing some juvenile snark in order to avoid admitting he's actually correct, because addressing the fact that he's correct takes some of the fun out of your preferred narrative.
which is only true because people keep believing it to be true
No, it's only true because the third parties don't have the intellectual integrity to put forth anyone better than lazy stoners with no awareness of current events (Johnson) or anti-vaxxer doctors who believe in homeopathy (Stein). Or people who look around the world and history, but still believe that making the US into a communist state is the best way forward.
Yes. Throwing away your vote on people like that really IS throwing it away. And when doing so deprives a more viable candidate that's at least partly in line with your world view of a vote needed to get them to win, then yes, you ARE letting the other candidate win. It's because it's actually true. If third parties can come up with a non-absurd agenda, and some non-awful candidates, then they might actually make some headway.
Even though the hacking has been linked to Russia.
No, the hacking has NOT been linked to Russia. The only people who have ever had their hands on the DNC server, after the fact, was a private contractor that was hired to do work for the party. They have never allowed the FBI to to see the server. Regardless, the only evidence on the DNC email dump that we DO have has been exhaustively reviewed by teams of neutral experts, and every last bit of evidence points to the mail dump as having occurred internally, at the DNC, on a local machine writing the files to a USB storage device.
Of course, you know all of this. So the question is, why are still trotting out the debunked DNC talking points and spin? You're also, as per marching orders from the Clinton/DNC machine, going to great lengths to avoid talking about what the insider who leaked that mail was demonstrating: just how corrupt her operation was, and the degree of contempt she has for, among others, the Bernie supporter types who challenged her entitlement to the throne she and her husband demanded to have back. But you carry on: keep asserting things not only not in evidence, but shown to be incorrect. That sort of delusional foot-stamping on the subject is just going to make the problem you dislike even worse.
We should be sending flotillas of ships and boats with supplies
We are. Enormous amounts of supplies and the personnel to help put them to work. Getting things inland over trashed roads is a problem that's being addressed about as fast as it can be.
The fact that there is not more help forthcoming from the mainland is a shame.
I know, right? A few months ago when we had a different administration, they had everything Puerto Rico could possibly need all staged and ready to go, with trained personnel all set to solve exactly this problem instantly if it happened. Oh, right, that's complete BS. It IS a shame that it takes a few weeks to get this sort of relief really under way... but the people blaming the president for that reality are full of crap and they know it.
You know how I can tell I'm right and struck a nerve? Because you resort to a childish laugh instead of admitting that you've spent a moment and researched the topic and know you'll sound silly if try to actually talk about the reality and substance of the matter.
Thank you for making my point. And just like cooking and driving, the hobby of shooting is amazingly safe. There are millions and millions of people who shoot guns for fun (or use them for self defense, putting dinner on the table, etc), and relative to those numbers, they are safer than DOCTORS when it comes to deaths at their hands. And guys like this monster in LV are, statistically, less of an issue when it comes to deaths and murder than are people with baseball bats and even bare hands, compared to bad guys with rifles.
The issue is the incredibly tiny number of people who mis-use guns, pressure cookers, trucks, kitchen knives, etc.
Plus, the type of people who own guns usually don't have that much in the way of assets to be sued for
Hilarious.
Let me guess: you still can't figure out why the Democrats (who talk like that about everyone who doesn't live in NY or CA) have lost nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships, both houses of congress, the White House, by association the Supreme Court, and millions of two-time Obama voters who actually finally got tired of that sort of snarky, condescending, patronizing crap that doesn't reflect reality. If you really think that "the type of people who own guns" aren't every bit as likely to own homes, cars, mutual funds, and all the rest as people who don't, then you embody exactly the sort of cluelessness that has been governing lefty politics in this country for long enough to have trashed the left's national political power. Please, keep it up. That sort of ignorant, mocking derision is just going to help even more over the next couple of election cycles. Let me guess, you also use the word "deplorables" when talking about the people who fix your car, grow your food, or build your home, right? Stupid people in flyover country are stupid, right? Regardless, a trip to the range around here will find you mixed in with business owners using $30,000 shotguns, professionals who like to target shoot, real estate agents who carry for self defense, and the like.
If you're going to remain that ignorant, please don't endanger the rest of us by doing reckless things like voting based on what you think of other people.
Because the murderer in question didn't use handguns (again, based on what the police have said so far). Which you know, but are trying to deflect. Because your next stop is going to be to tell us (without knowing anything about the rifles used, if they were legally owned/modified, etc) that mass murders in the US would be stopped if only he couldn't have bought the rifle(s) he used. And if he'd used something else entirely (like a truck, or an IED), then you'd be focusing some completely different aspect of his lunacy, but probably not on whether we should take away trucks or pressure cookers.
Lets face it.. if killing 20 toddlers in a school did not change the laws
Right. Because it was ALREADY illegal for the crazy person who did that to have the guns, and he killed the person who legally owned them in order to take them and go kill people. You were hoping that the laws on the books that made everything about his actions illegal were made to make his actions MORE illegal? It's hard to make the fact that he murdered the gun owner and took the guns somehow... more illegal.
The US gun lobby doesn't even want to restrict sales to those who already have mental health issues.
That's just simply a lie. And you know it. So the question is, what do you hope to achieve by lying? Who are you thinking is going to be persuaded by you to do what, based on a trivially debunked bit of falsehood like that? Every industry association, trade group, owners' groups, sporting group... ALL of them... call loudly and routinely for the prevention of mentally unfit people obtaining firearms, and for the rigorous prosecution of anybody that participates in knowingly being part of providing a gun to someone like that. Which you know, but about which you're lying. So again - why lie? Who are you talking to that you think is so unable to do a little homework and recognize that you're lying?
So it doesn't bother you that the fact that no, nobody legally "freely hands guns to" criminally insane people kind of contradicts your point?
Regardless, gun advocates routinely point out that:
1) The number of people killed by ANY means (including murders with guns) has been doing down nationwide for decades, even when you include crazy mass murder attacks like this.
2) That guns are used hundreds of thousands of times every year to prevent, halt, or lessen the impact of violent crimes by other people. That's the "value" part you're asking about.
The vast majority of murders in the country that happen to involve guns are intra/inter-gang murders in a handful of specific cities that haven't acted on their gang problems.
In cases like this, where the crazy guy appears to have used rifles of some sort (we have no details about them or their provenance yet), it's worth noting that the FBI says that far more people are killed every year with knives, clubs and bare hands that are killed by ANY sort of murder involving a rifle or shotgun. That long and larger trail of death and injury is just a constant dull roar, so nobody pays attention to it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's fun to watch anonymous cowards actually doing the thing that they complain about. Thanks!
Well, let's see: You imply stupidity by complaining about irony while carefully avoiding the fact that his observation is accurate. If there's irony involved and you fail to illustrate why, then you're just dishing exactly the sort of patronizing snark that the GP was talking about. In effect, you've just made his point all the more astute. Then you attack him (not the point he's illustrating) by suggesting that he's using lazy rhetorical devices (you know, the thing YOU just did), again instead of even mentioning anything having to do with the subject matter. So, yeah. You've done nothing BUT attack the OP, and stay away from the substance. And now you're being defensive about it instead of taking the opportunity to, say, explain why you think the Democrats AREN'T shameless, disingenuous, hypocritical promoters and exploiters of identity politics.
Reinforcing phony narratives isn't "pointing out racial issues..."
They spotted the gullible media willingness to swallow the "hands up, don't shoot" fiction at face value, and leveraged it to further coarsen our political culture. Simple as that. They want discord, because it helps distract from their criminality. The fake BLM-style narrative is a perfect bit of leverage to that end.
Which is just you resorting to lazy ad hominem and not addressing the substance of the matter. Lazy, intellectual cowardice.
Are you saying the Russians also promoted Hillary?
They didn't promote anybody. But they did work - as they have for decades - to simply muddy the waters, stir the pot, and attempt to instill division and antipathy across the board. They, like everyone else "official," had every expectation that Clinton would win - and their efforts were simply aimed at making that task as difficult as possible. Which is what they've always done, and also do throughout the world.
So you're doubling down with a Red Herring and a dash of Reductio Ad Absurdum? No surprise there.
Says the guy resorting to ad hominem and carefully avoiding the substance of the matter. No surprise there.
Regardless of whether or not there was pressure from the previous administration for health care providers to stick their noses into and make their patients feel uncomfortable about it, someone with the notion that asking a patient for the names and relationships of people who had access to guns in the house, and where and how they're kept instructed this nurse to go down that road. That pressure could have come from her own political agenda, that of her employer or nurses' association, or from insurers, or state licensing bodies, or from any of a number of federal agencies to which everyone downstream has to answer. The person delivering health services was reading from a clipboard and looking to gather that information. Her explanation as to why was suitably vague (having "to report it") as to sound meant to shut down whoever might ask about it. No doubt banking on seniors' general go-along-with-it disposition. No matter how you slice it, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Last spring my 80-something mom came back from a doctor's appointment mentioning that the nurse who checked her in and asked the usual questions about her daily health also, clipboard in hand, asked her if there were guns in the house, how they were stored, and who (including names and relationships) had access to them. Even my mom, who normally has a completely deferential reaction to authority figures ("the doctor" or "the guy directing traffic around the pothole crew" or "the assistant manager at the grocery store") was (as a girl raised in a household where everybody hunted, and guns were a normal tool found in everyday life) was so surprised at the questions that she actually pushed back and said, "Why are you asking that?"
She said she was expecting some remark about older people and suicide prevention or something, but the nurse said, "It's something we have to ask now. It's part of all the public health reporting we have to do." Considering how often some activists talk about trying to get around the Bill of Rights by treating gun ownership as a disease, I'd say that there were indeed policy fingerprints all over that one.
Let me know when they are finally able to detect the infinite amount of matter the universe actually has, as well as its infinite everything else.
You do understand, right, that in an infinite universe (with, by extension, an infinite amount of matter if you want to think of it that way) can be a thing while still not manifesting itself as an infinite amount of matter (or even hardly any matter at all) in any particular volume. Right? You get that part?
Wow, that's a lot of work to go to in order to completely and deliberately miss the point. The followers of St. Gore were telling us (the domestic, US audience) that we here in the US, especially on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, would be experiencing year after year of increasingly huge, increasingly frequent hurricane landfalls. Followed of course by the complete absence of such. But sure, go ahead, pretend you weren't noticing when the guy getting rich selling carbon offsets from his mansion didn't harp on such things endlessly, to a fan base of swooning alarmists intent on leveraging those predictions for political power and cash distribution programs.
wave after wave of Hurricane due to global warming
Whew! It's a good thing we haven't been having any global warming for so long, with that huge stretch of no major hurricanes of any kind landing in the US despite the climate alarm industry telling us year after year that THAT year was going to be the one with a huge number of record hurricanes. During which we got exact none. Year after year. Or was it that global warming was WORSE decades ago, when there were more storms landing then during all of those recent years? Gotcha.
There is no "current crisis" over $100,000 worth of across-the-spectrum noise-generating BS ads run by Russia in an election season when the Clinton machine spent or exercised on her behalf over $2 billion. It's only a "crisis" in the sense that it's one of the only absurd little threads that Clinton and her followers can still cling to as a reason she lost, short of having to finally confront the fact that she's an awful person and a worse candidate into which to invest $2 billion dollars and the phony hopes and dreams of a number of people in a couple of coastal cities.
The more that media outlets scream it's a crisis, the more you can be sure they've got nothing else to try to trot out.
What fun! More no-information snark, with a dose of ad hominem on top, the better to still try to avoid admitting you can't address the actual substance of the matter. It's a rather indirect way of admitting he's right, but thanks for making the point again.
Fixed that for you!
No, you spent a moment typing some juvenile snark in order to avoid admitting he's actually correct, because addressing the fact that he's correct takes some of the fun out of your preferred narrative.
which is only true because people keep believing it to be true
No, it's only true because the third parties don't have the intellectual integrity to put forth anyone better than lazy stoners with no awareness of current events (Johnson) or anti-vaxxer doctors who believe in homeopathy (Stein). Or people who look around the world and history, but still believe that making the US into a communist state is the best way forward.
Yes. Throwing away your vote on people like that really IS throwing it away. And when doing so deprives a more viable candidate that's at least partly in line with your world view of a vote needed to get them to win, then yes, you ARE letting the other candidate win. It's because it's actually true. If third parties can come up with a non-absurd agenda, and some non-awful candidates, then they might actually make some headway.
Even though the hacking has been linked to Russia.
No, the hacking has NOT been linked to Russia. The only people who have ever had their hands on the DNC server, after the fact, was a private contractor that was hired to do work for the party. They have never allowed the FBI to to see the server. Regardless, the only evidence on the DNC email dump that we DO have has been exhaustively reviewed by teams of neutral experts, and every last bit of evidence points to the mail dump as having occurred internally, at the DNC, on a local machine writing the files to a USB storage device.
Of course, you know all of this. So the question is, why are still trotting out the debunked DNC talking points and spin? You're also, as per marching orders from the Clinton/DNC machine, going to great lengths to avoid talking about what the insider who leaked that mail was demonstrating: just how corrupt her operation was, and the degree of contempt she has for, among others, the Bernie supporter types who challenged her entitlement to the throne she and her husband demanded to have back. But you carry on: keep asserting things not only not in evidence, but shown to be incorrect. That sort of delusional foot-stamping on the subject is just going to make the problem you dislike even worse.
Germany rarely gets swamped with salt water.
We should be sending flotillas of ships and boats with supplies
We are. Enormous amounts of supplies and the personnel to help put them to work. Getting things inland over trashed roads is a problem that's being addressed about as fast as it can be.
The fact that there is not more help forthcoming from the mainland is a shame.
I know, right? A few months ago when we had a different administration, they had everything Puerto Rico could possibly need all staged and ready to go, with trained personnel all set to solve exactly this problem instantly if it happened. Oh, right, that's complete BS. It IS a shame that it takes a few weeks to get this sort of relief really under way ... but the people blaming the president for that reality are full of crap and they know it.
You know how I can tell I'm right and struck a nerve? Because you resort to a childish laugh instead of admitting that you've spent a moment and researched the topic and know you'll sound silly if try to actually talk about the reality and substance of the matter.
Both of those hobbies kill almost no one.
Thank you for making my point. And just like cooking and driving, the hobby of shooting is amazingly safe. There are millions and millions of people who shoot guns for fun (or use them for self defense, putting dinner on the table, etc), and relative to those numbers, they are safer than DOCTORS when it comes to deaths at their hands. And guys like this monster in LV are, statistically, less of an issue when it comes to deaths and murder than are people with baseball bats and even bare hands, compared to bad guys with rifles.
The issue is the incredibly tiny number of people who mis-use guns, pressure cookers, trucks, kitchen knives, etc.
Plus, the type of people who own guns usually don't have that much in the way of assets to be sued for
Hilarious.
Let me guess: you still can't figure out why the Democrats (who talk like that about everyone who doesn't live in NY or CA) have lost nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships, both houses of congress, the White House, by association the Supreme Court, and millions of two-time Obama voters who actually finally got tired of that sort of snarky, condescending, patronizing crap that doesn't reflect reality. If you really think that "the type of people who own guns" aren't every bit as likely to own homes, cars, mutual funds, and all the rest as people who don't, then you embody exactly the sort of cluelessness that has been governing lefty politics in this country for long enough to have trashed the left's national political power. Please, keep it up. That sort of ignorant, mocking derision is just going to help even more over the next couple of election cycles. Let me guess, you also use the word "deplorables" when talking about the people who fix your car, grow your food, or build your home, right? Stupid people in flyover country are stupid, right? Regardless, a trip to the range around here will find you mixed in with business owners using $30,000 shotguns, professionals who like to target shoot, real estate agents who carry for self defense, and the like.
If you're going to remain that ignorant, please don't endanger the rest of us by doing reckless things like voting based on what you think of other people.
I've noticed that you don't include handguns
Because the murderer in question didn't use handguns (again, based on what the police have said so far). Which you know, but are trying to deflect. Because your next stop is going to be to tell us (without knowing anything about the rifles used, if they were legally owned/modified, etc) that mass murders in the US would be stopped if only he couldn't have bought the rifle(s) he used. And if he'd used something else entirely (like a truck, or an IED), then you'd be focusing some completely different aspect of his lunacy, but probably not on whether we should take away trucks or pressure cookers.
Lets face it.. if killing 20 toddlers in a school did not change the laws
Right. Because it was ALREADY illegal for the crazy person who did that to have the guns, and he killed the person who legally owned them in order to take them and go kill people. You were hoping that the laws on the books that made everything about his actions illegal were made to make his actions MORE illegal? It's hard to make the fact that he murdered the gun owner and took the guns somehow ... more illegal.
The US gun lobby doesn't even want to restrict sales to those who already have mental health issues.
That's just simply a lie. And you know it. So the question is, what do you hope to achieve by lying? Who are you thinking is going to be persuaded by you to do what, based on a trivially debunked bit of falsehood like that? Every industry association, trade group, owners' groups, sporting group ... ALL of them ... call loudly and routinely for the prevention of mentally unfit people obtaining firearms, and for the rigorous prosecution of anybody that participates in knowingly being part of providing a gun to someone like that. Which you know, but about which you're lying. So again - why lie? Who are you talking to that you think is so unable to do a little homework and recognize that you're lying?
So it doesn't bother you that the fact that no, nobody legally "freely hands guns to" criminally insane people kind of contradicts your point?
Regardless, gun advocates routinely point out that:
1) The number of people killed by ANY means (including murders with guns) has been doing down nationwide for decades, even when you include crazy mass murder attacks like this.
2) That guns are used hundreds of thousands of times every year to prevent, halt, or lessen the impact of violent crimes by other people. That's the "value" part you're asking about.
The vast majority of murders in the country that happen to involve guns are intra/inter-gang murders in a handful of specific cities that haven't acted on their gang problems.
In cases like this, where the crazy guy appears to have used rifles of some sort (we have no details about them or their provenance yet), it's worth noting that the FBI says that far more people are killed every year with knives, clubs and bare hands that are killed by ANY sort of murder involving a rifle or shotgun. That long and larger trail of death and injury is just a constant dull roar, so nobody pays attention to it.