Except this - even in places where everyone but felons are allowed to carry without any fuss - never happens. It's a cartoon fantasy from the anti-liberty types, and disconnected entirely from reality.
Actually, guns are used for protection hundreds of thousands of times a year in the US, almost always without firing a shot, and virtually never in the "gunfight" scenario you're fantasizing about. Your blathering on the subject has no relationship to reality.
I live in Europe and I can walk safely anywhere without fearing to be shot by some random asshat.
So? I live in the US and also don't worry about it, because - other than a few cities run by liberals that have especially bad crime problems - you're far more likely to get hit by lightning than you are to be shot by some "random" person. I see that despite living in Europe where hundreds of people have been shot dead by "random asshats" and stabbed to death and run down in the street, you're not worried about it happening to you, just like I'm not worried about it happening to me here in the US.
Its traditional interpretation is that the ultimate goal of gun ownership is protecting the liberty of a state from a power grab by the federal government.
No, that's simply not true. The ACTUAL purpose of the 2nd amendment (just like the rest of the Bill of Rights) was to prevent government (at ANY level) from stripping away existing, natural rights. Like the right to speak your mind, defend yourself, assemble in groups, not be locked away on a whim, etc.
The founders considered your individual right to self defense (and of course, by extension, the means to do so) to be elemental. They included the 2nd Amendment's protections to make sure that nobody in government would use the excuse of having a professional standing military (even at the local militia level) to take away one of a citizen's inalienable personal freedoms: the right to their own self defense. They'd just got out from under a government where that liberty HAD been stripped away, and they considered that an intolerable bit of tyranny, and made sure it would be clear in the new nation's charter that it wouldn't be allowed ever again.
The overriding issue here is SELF DEFENSE. Some governmental figure trying to do something tyrannical enough that individual citizens might have to defend themselves against that is just a special case of self defense. The need for self defense didn't go away after the 1700's - there are still murderers, rapists, crazy people, criminal gangs, terrorists, robbers, insane ex-spouses, and countless other things that make self defense every bit as important now as it was 200 years ago or 2000 years ago. The notion that the founders were thinking only of allowing for a fight against government tyranny is a common (but completely incorrect) rhetorical device used by those who don't think people should be able to defend themselves against anything.
It is very hard to see what other objective value is there in an unrestricted "right to bear arms"
Who says it is or ever was unrestricted? The founders were very clear: if you're not a law-abiding citizen, you don't enjoy the protection of that right. Many of the Bill of Rights' protections evaporate when you breach the citizen's social contract, and act criminally.
Strangely enough, that right was granted when guns took about 30-60 seconds to reload, and they only shot one round at a time.
You're (deliberately, I presume) completely misunderstanding the entire purpose of the Bill of Rights. IT DOES NOT "GRANT" ANYTHING. It's based on the fact that some rights are inalienable (your rights to speak, to defend yourself, to gather in groups, to not be locked away without due process) and that since there will always be people who will try to use their power in government to attempt to take away those rights, that the nation's very charter must PREVENT the government from doing so. Every piece of the Bill of Rights limits the government's power to take away fundamental rights. That includes the personal right to self defense, and means by which to do that. They were SO certain that people like you would come around and try to weasel things right back to the way that King George had it (taking away everyone's personal arms, and saying that the only self defense they'd ever need was his professional army living in their homes), that they even stressed that particular topic in the 2nd Amendment. In more modern phrasing, essentially: "Our free nation will inevitably have to have a professional military to defend it, but nobody in government can use that as an excuse to infringe on an individual's personal right to keep and bear their own arms."
The notion of self defense is independent of the particular tool. The founders considered it entirely reasonable - and not open for government limits - for individuals to own and bear the same sorts of personal arms that a militia member would personally carry. The Bill of Rights doesn't "grant" this or any other right. It PROTECTS those existing rights from the same sort of tyranny the colonists had just rebelled against. Read some history, perhaps, and let it soak in.
Not really, even the US constitution explicitly sets the context of bearing arms - and it is not individual liberty, but a well regulated militia.
Have you even read your constitution? It seems you haven't.
No, YOU have it exactly, perfectly backwards. And clearly haven't read either the Bill of Rights (especially its preamble) nor any of the volumes of transcripts, letters, and essays by the people involved in writing and ratifying the Bill of Rights generally and the 2nd Amendment specifically.
As nicely explained by those who wrote it, you've got it wrong. They (the colonists, and then new owners of a new nation) had just lived through existence under a government that said that the only defense people would need would be the professional army run by the crown, and thus it was reasonable for the crown to make everyone in the colonies surrender their personal arms (swords, guns, etc). The king's excuse for this was that there was a standing army, so no farmer, no traveler on a remote road, no inn keeper, no family would need to be able to defend themselves. This was absurd, of course, because that army couldn't be there to defend every person from every thief, murderer, bear, or drunk. Regardless, the founders were very wary of allowing a standing military of any kind - even at the local militia level - to exist. Because local commanders and politicians have a bad habit of using the existence of such to limit other people's liberty.
But the founders realized that a new and growing country with rivals and pirates and other problems WAS going to eventually have to not only tolerate but support a professional, well-trained ("well regulated") military. They certainly weren't initially thinking of some large federal force, but of at the very least, professional local militias. Principle is the same, regardless. And they realized that without fail, there would be people (just like you) who would inevitably use the excuse of the existence of such to try to - just like King George did - strip away the personal liberty to defend oneself, family, and the like. Knowing there would be people like you, some of them reaching political power at the local, state, or even federal level, they wisely tackled this topic in the Bill of Rights. Note that the Bill of Rights is entirely, at every step, about limiting the government's ability to remove individual freedoms. The preamble makes this crystal clear.
But just in case you still don't get it and can't manage to parse the clearly written Bill of Rights in the tone and vocabulary of the time, here's something like it would sound like in modern conversation: "Since it will certainly become necessary to have a professional military to defend our free nation, it's important to be clear that the existence of that military can't be used as a reason for those at any level of government to infringe on the individual's right to keep and bear their own arms."
If YOU had read the constitution and all of the supporting documents that make this clear, you'd know this is what the amendment means (and it's what courts have, on studying all of that, helped you to understand, even though you're ignoring that). I suspect you DO know that, but you're one of those people that prefers the idea of a powerful government and less individual liberty, and hope that lying about the constitution will further your political agenda. So, you're either ignorant about it (so, stop talking about it until you read up), or you're PRETENDING to be ignorant about it, in which case: stop it - because I'm sure your next "misunderstanding" of the constitution will result in you saying the first amendment's protections only apply to people of whom you like.
It's a video. Of George Will talking about baseball. You know, on YouTube. Where they have videos. Unless you're looking for one that features someone like George Will, in which case it's pretty well hidden and flagged as dangerous. Because, you know, he doesn't obey and speak only in leftist terms, as YouTube now prefers.
Why would you assume he's joking? Sites like YouTube are now doing things like flagging a George Will commentary about baseball as possibly dangerous speech and suppressing it in search results... because George Will isn't a progressive cheerleader. He even hates Trump! Doesn't matter. He's vaguely conservative, so he must be silenced on social media.
You're confused. You're thinking that the handful of idiots who walk around with tiki torches and fantasize about a long-dead political organization are actual Nazis in any way that actually matters. They're universally scorned and/or laughed at, and on the rare occasions they actually break the law, the get busted and prosecuted. What you're thinking of are the modern day brown shirts - the actual foot soldiers of totalitarian fascism. That would be antifa. Black uniforms, masks, weapons at "peaceful" demonstrations, spoken desire to kill political opponents and leaders, destruction of property and beating people bloody when there's any sense that someone, somewhere may not agree with their violent world view. And of course, they generally do NOT get in any legal trouble for bringing weapons into no-weapons-allowed areas and hurting people. They're all about intimidation, silencing people, and terrorizing those they don't like. And they're cheered on by the statists who now run the left side of politics in the US. There's your contemporary Nazis.
And yet, indeed, many people are deficient. And they've got ANOTHER doctor that cooking their skin in the sun is a pathway to melanoma and a possible miserable death.
No it's the same. When you sleep you are unconscious and dream. When you are near death you are also unconscious and dream. It's the same thing. The only difference is that maybe your heart stopped for a few minutes but before and after that you where in a unconscious state.
Really? You're THAT ignorant about the wild things your body does when the brain or heart tissues are deprived of oxygen? A body that is moments away from death (especially from a large trauma, blood loss, cardio/pulmonary failure) is NOT doing business - chemically, neurologically, metabolically, hormonally - the same way as a sleeping body is. How are you not aware of this?
How ignorant do you have to be to understand the parent is not arguing about anything other than the unnecessary usage of the term NDE? We already have a valid term to describe this; it's called a dream.
Is it physically painful to be so angry while also totally missing the point?
The difference between a typical dream and what the medical community calls a near death experience... is that you have a dream while you're asleep. You have an NDE while you're nearly dead. There are profound physiological differences. The brain is under significant stress. All sorts of things are happening, chemically, that are not happening when you're going through our normal sleep cycle. All of which you know, which means you're just ranting because it makes you feel good, anonymous coward that you are.
Yes because its not near death people are alive and they just had a dream.
How close would you consider yourself to have to walk next to a cliff, or a head of lettuce, or a parked car to consider yourself to be near those things? You sound like someone who has never been near anything, ever. If you're in the next room, you aren't near the chair in front of your computer. Later, you're sitting IN that chair. Is there really no time, in your world, where in between being in the other room and sitting in the chair, that you were... near the chair, but not actually in it? Seriously: yes or no question.
Now while saying there was no foreign interference, Trump is...
That's NOT what he's said, ever. He's been - the whole time - referring to the lefty canards that either he worked with the Russians to interfere with something, or that Russian activity actually changed the outcome of the election. That's substantially different than saying that the Russians didn't, in 2016, do exactly the same sort of dicking around in our public discourse just like they always have here and elsewhere.
The investigators working this have now said, more than once, that the Russian activity didn't change the outcome of the election. And there hasn't been a single scrap of evidence that Trump was "working with the Russians" on anything remote connected to any of this. There is, though, now substantial evidence that the DNC and Hillary machine very much DID work with (and pay) foreign entities to work against her opponent, and that the fictional fruit of that effort was then used to launch surveillance on the Trump campaign under the direction of highly partisan DoJ/FBI management and others.
For those people, the original statement holds true- "the reason a given person isn't prosperous, is because someone else is"
But still not really true. When Boko Haram blows up a truck full of food and people starve, it's NOT because Boko Haram is eating, and because they personally have food to eat, someone else doesn't. It's because they want people to die for political/religious/tribal reasons. It's not that they're the local "rich" people and there is just enough local food to feed either them or the village that's starving. They're not eating what the village would have eaten. They're simply using threats of violence to prevent people they don't like from getting the food that's intended for them. That's not about "greed" for the food, not even close. It's about tribal or religious animosity or good old fashioned gang style intimidation. When Saddam was starving out the ethnic minorities in the southeast of Iraq, it's not because he was greedy for their food, it's because he wanted them to die.
But, there continue to be people so poor that they die, solely because the people who do have the resources and wealth to keep them alive, don't share.
No, that's not true. Most of the places where people literally starve to death are suffering from violence and corruption so bad that even those who are willing to bring in truck loads of "free" food and potable water are prevented from doing so because they don't want to die, or have given up because everything they very much ARE willing to share is promptly stolen. That's a lot different than the eeeeeevil rich people with the food being mean and not sharing. It's pretty much the exact opposite of that.
One of the core tenants of capitalism is that if you work hard and do your best you win.
>
No, that is not and has never been a core tenet (not "tenant!") of capitalism. You're deliberately leaving out the part where you have to work at something that someone else needs or wants enough to pay you for it. That's why working really, really hard at knowing everything classical Russian poetry doesn't pay you as well as being a reasonably competent but not very hustly plumber. If "the system" were as you describe it, that would be different. But you didn't describe it correctly.
No, the people who came before them benefited from a brief period in world history when the rest of the world was still in third world shithole status (either because they were already there, or got themselves into wars that put them BACK there). When nobody else much competes with your bustling economy, you get an easier shot at prosperity. So we gave those other economies a bunch of advantages so they could get on their feet. Those trade advantages have been propped up and left to linger for decades too long, and they're finally getting addressed. Which is a good thing, because it will, once the dust settles, rebalance at least some of what's been working against things like manufacturing in the US.
When you got millionaires and billionaires putthing themselves ahead at the expense of the public, people are not going to have a positive opinion of capitalism.
I know, right? I mean, the total amount of prosperity available was fixed at a permanent size back in 1776. And ever since then, the rich people have simply taken the prosperity they want, leaving less prosperity for everyone else.
Which is, of course, complete crap. The pie doesn't get carved up into smaller and smaller pieces, the pie grows (when it's allowed to - something collectivists abhor). The lowest income people today live like kings compared to their counterparts in the past. But they aren't living in lower income brackets because someone else has a good paying job - that entire notion is pure BS. If we collected ALL of the income - 100% of it - from those evil one-percenters, it wouldn't even pay for the budget deficit through spring each year. But some people seem to think that if we only just prevented a small number of people (who pay most of the taxes!) from being wealthy, that everyone who walked away from high school to sell drugs, or who refuses to learn English, or can't get a job because they have a criminal history for beating their kids, or, or, or would suddenly be on the path to a comfortable middle class life.
People who have a poor opinion of market economics do, indeed, get mad when nobody gives them anything. After all, how can it be a good system if you have to produce something in order for other people to want to give you what they made?
The income disparity is exactly why it is NOT working for a lot of people.
So, you're saying that the reason a given person isn't prosperous is because someone else is? Or are you saying that even though people - even in the lowest income brackets - live better now than in any time in human history, they're not doing well because there are some people who are living better? I presume you'd be happy if we could just tear down the wealthy people so that there's no 1% to resent and hate. Of course then everyone would just hate the 2%. Or the 20%. Or anyone that spends their day doing something that provides a more comfortable lifestyle than anyone else. The only answer is government controlled wages and lifestyles so that nobody can lie awake at night worried that the guy who works twice as hard is having a better chicken for dinner than anyone else is.
And you seem to be thinking that there's no moral or practical distinction between totalitarian governments in Russia and China and the rest of the free world. If you can't get your moral relativism under control, there's no point even getting involved in the conversation.
The difference is that we have actual reality to work with on defensive firearm use. So I'm not sure what point you think you're making, since you're talking BS. Throwing up that sort of nonsense without addressing the CDC's research is a pretty good sign that you're just angry that I'm right.
And on your last point, that's a complete load of crap. Situations where firearms are used in self-defense or to prevent crime are rare. They're at least an order of magnitude less common than suicides
You know you're wrong, and deliberately getting the "order of magnitude" thing precisely backwards. We have, what... well under 20,000 suicides that way per year? Gary Kleck's academic research into the matter found defensive personal gun use occurring over 2 million time per year. A separate CDC study essentially duplicated his results. But let's say they're off by a whopping 90%, and people defend their lives with guns only a tenth as often as the CDC's study says actually happens. That's over 200,000 times a year. Far more than ten times as often as anyone uses a firearm in a suicide. If you think that guns are only rarely used in self defense, then you must be thrilled that they're used even more (far more) rarely in suicides, right? No, you don't care about actual facts. That takes the fun out of your talking points.
Slashdot Mirror
Except this - even in places where everyone but felons are allowed to carry without any fuss - never happens. It's a cartoon fantasy from the anti-liberty types, and disconnected entirely from reality.
Actually, guns are used for protection hundreds of thousands of times a year in the US, almost always without firing a shot, and virtually never in the "gunfight" scenario you're fantasizing about. Your blathering on the subject has no relationship to reality.
I live in Europe and I can walk safely anywhere without fearing to be shot by some random asshat.
So? I live in the US and also don't worry about it, because - other than a few cities run by liberals that have especially bad crime problems - you're far more likely to get hit by lightning than you are to be shot by some "random" person. I see that despite living in Europe where hundreds of people have been shot dead by "random asshats" and stabbed to death and run down in the street, you're not worried about it happening to you, just like I'm not worried about it happening to me here in the US.
Its traditional interpretation is that the ultimate goal of gun ownership is protecting the liberty of a state from a power grab by the federal government.
No, that's simply not true. The ACTUAL purpose of the 2nd amendment (just like the rest of the Bill of Rights) was to prevent government (at ANY level) from stripping away existing, natural rights. Like the right to speak your mind, defend yourself, assemble in groups, not be locked away on a whim, etc.
The founders considered your individual right to self defense (and of course, by extension, the means to do so) to be elemental. They included the 2nd Amendment's protections to make sure that nobody in government would use the excuse of having a professional standing military (even at the local militia level) to take away one of a citizen's inalienable personal freedoms: the right to their own self defense. They'd just got out from under a government where that liberty HAD been stripped away, and they considered that an intolerable bit of tyranny, and made sure it would be clear in the new nation's charter that it wouldn't be allowed ever again.
The overriding issue here is SELF DEFENSE. Some governmental figure trying to do something tyrannical enough that individual citizens might have to defend themselves against that is just a special case of self defense. The need for self defense didn't go away after the 1700's - there are still murderers, rapists, crazy people, criminal gangs, terrorists, robbers, insane ex-spouses, and countless other things that make self defense every bit as important now as it was 200 years ago or 2000 years ago. The notion that the founders were thinking only of allowing for a fight against government tyranny is a common (but completely incorrect) rhetorical device used by those who don't think people should be able to defend themselves against anything.
It is very hard to see what other objective value is there in an unrestricted "right to bear arms"
Who says it is or ever was unrestricted? The founders were very clear: if you're not a law-abiding citizen, you don't enjoy the protection of that right. Many of the Bill of Rights' protections evaporate when you breach the citizen's social contract, and act criminally.
Strangely enough, that right was granted when guns took about 30-60 seconds to reload, and they only shot one round at a time.
You're (deliberately, I presume) completely misunderstanding the entire purpose of the Bill of Rights. IT DOES NOT "GRANT" ANYTHING. It's based on the fact that some rights are inalienable (your rights to speak, to defend yourself, to gather in groups, to not be locked away without due process) and that since there will always be people who will try to use their power in government to attempt to take away those rights, that the nation's very charter must PREVENT the government from doing so. Every piece of the Bill of Rights limits the government's power to take away fundamental rights. That includes the personal right to self defense, and means by which to do that. They were SO certain that people like you would come around and try to weasel things right back to the way that King George had it (taking away everyone's personal arms, and saying that the only self defense they'd ever need was his professional army living in their homes), that they even stressed that particular topic in the 2nd Amendment. In more modern phrasing, essentially: "Our free nation will inevitably have to have a professional military to defend it, but nobody in government can use that as an excuse to infringe on an individual's personal right to keep and bear their own arms."
The notion of self defense is independent of the particular tool. The founders considered it entirely reasonable - and not open for government limits - for individuals to own and bear the same sorts of personal arms that a militia member would personally carry. The Bill of Rights doesn't "grant" this or any other right. It PROTECTS those existing rights from the same sort of tyranny the colonists had just rebelled against. Read some history, perhaps, and let it soak in.
Not really, even the US constitution explicitly sets the context of bearing arms - and it is not individual liberty, but a well regulated militia.
Have you even read your constitution? It seems you haven't.
No, YOU have it exactly, perfectly backwards. And clearly haven't read either the Bill of Rights (especially its preamble) nor any of the volumes of transcripts, letters, and essays by the people involved in writing and ratifying the Bill of Rights generally and the 2nd Amendment specifically.
As nicely explained by those who wrote it, you've got it wrong. They (the colonists, and then new owners of a new nation) had just lived through existence under a government that said that the only defense people would need would be the professional army run by the crown, and thus it was reasonable for the crown to make everyone in the colonies surrender their personal arms (swords, guns, etc). The king's excuse for this was that there was a standing army, so no farmer, no traveler on a remote road, no inn keeper, no family would need to be able to defend themselves. This was absurd, of course, because that army couldn't be there to defend every person from every thief, murderer, bear, or drunk. Regardless, the founders were very wary of allowing a standing military of any kind - even at the local militia level - to exist. Because local commanders and politicians have a bad habit of using the existence of such to limit other people's liberty.
But the founders realized that a new and growing country with rivals and pirates and other problems WAS going to eventually have to not only tolerate but support a professional, well-trained ("well regulated") military. They certainly weren't initially thinking of some large federal force, but of at the very least, professional local militias. Principle is the same, regardless. And they realized that without fail, there would be people (just like you) who would inevitably use the excuse of the existence of such to try to - just like King George did - strip away the personal liberty to defend oneself, family, and the like. Knowing there would be people like you, some of them reaching political power at the local, state, or even federal level, they wisely tackled this topic in the Bill of Rights. Note that the Bill of Rights is entirely, at every step, about limiting the government's ability to remove individual freedoms. The preamble makes this crystal clear.
But just in case you still don't get it and can't manage to parse the clearly written Bill of Rights in the tone and vocabulary of the time, here's something like it would sound like in modern conversation: "Since it will certainly become necessary to have a professional military to defend our free nation, it's important to be clear that the existence of that military can't be used as a reason for those at any level of government to infringe on the individual's right to keep and bear their own arms."
If YOU had read the constitution and all of the supporting documents that make this clear, you'd know this is what the amendment means (and it's what courts have, on studying all of that, helped you to understand, even though you're ignoring that). I suspect you DO know that, but you're one of those people that prefers the idea of a powerful government and less individual liberty, and hope that lying about the constitution will further your political agenda. So, you're either ignorant about it (so, stop talking about it until you read up), or you're PRETENDING to be ignorant about it, in which case: stop it - because I'm sure your next "misunderstanding" of the constitution will result in you saying the first amendment's protections only apply to people of whom you like.
Why would a George Will article be on YouTube?
It's a video. Of George Will talking about baseball. You know, on YouTube. Where they have videos. Unless you're looking for one that features someone like George Will, in which case it's pretty well hidden and flagged as dangerous. Because, you know, he doesn't obey and speak only in leftist terms, as YouTube now prefers.
Why would you assume he's joking? Sites like YouTube are now doing things like flagging a George Will commentary about baseball as possibly dangerous speech and suppressing it in search results... because George Will isn't a progressive cheerleader. He even hates Trump! Doesn't matter. He's vaguely conservative, so he must be silenced on social media.
You're confused. You're thinking that the handful of idiots who walk around with tiki torches and fantasize about a long-dead political organization are actual Nazis in any way that actually matters. They're universally scorned and/or laughed at, and on the rare occasions they actually break the law, the get busted and prosecuted. What you're thinking of are the modern day brown shirts - the actual foot soldiers of totalitarian fascism. That would be antifa. Black uniforms, masks, weapons at "peaceful" demonstrations, spoken desire to kill political opponents and leaders, destruction of property and beating people bloody when there's any sense that someone, somewhere may not agree with their violent world view. And of course, they generally do NOT get in any legal trouble for bringing weapons into no-weapons-allowed areas and hurting people. They're all about intimidation, silencing people, and terrorizing those they don't like. And they're cheered on by the statists who now run the left side of politics in the US. There's your contemporary Nazis.
The audience for this debate are British.
Or, the audience for this debate is American.
And yet, indeed, many people are deficient. And they've got ANOTHER doctor that cooking their skin in the sun is a pathway to melanoma and a possible miserable death.
So what you're saying is that you're unable to actually read. Why didn't you just say so in the first place?
No it's the same. When you sleep you are unconscious and dream. When you are near death you are also unconscious and dream. It's the same thing. The only difference is that maybe your heart stopped for a few minutes but before and after that you where in a unconscious state.
Really? You're THAT ignorant about the wild things your body does when the brain or heart tissues are deprived of oxygen? A body that is moments away from death (especially from a large trauma, blood loss, cardio/pulmonary failure) is NOT doing business - chemically, neurologically, metabolically, hormonally - the same way as a sleeping body is. How are you not aware of this?
How ignorant do you have to be to understand the parent is not arguing about anything other than the unnecessary usage of the term NDE? We already have a valid term to describe this; it's called a dream.
Is it physically painful to be so angry while also totally missing the point?
... is that you have a dream while you're asleep. You have an NDE while you're nearly dead. There are profound physiological differences. The brain is under significant stress. All sorts of things are happening, chemically, that are not happening when you're going through our normal sleep cycle. All of which you know, which means you're just ranting because it makes you feel good, anonymous coward that you are.
The difference between a typical dream and what the medical community calls a near death experience
Yes because its not near death people are alive and they just had a dream.
How close would you consider yourself to have to walk next to a cliff, or a head of lettuce, or a parked car to consider yourself to be near those things? You sound like someone who has never been near anything, ever. If you're in the next room, you aren't near the chair in front of your computer. Later, you're sitting IN that chair. Is there really no time, in your world, where in between being in the other room and sitting in the chair, that you were ... near the chair, but not actually in it? Seriously: yes or no question.
Now while saying there was no foreign interference, Trump is ...
That's NOT what he's said, ever. He's been - the whole time - referring to the lefty canards that either he worked with the Russians to interfere with something, or that Russian activity actually changed the outcome of the election. That's substantially different than saying that the Russians didn't, in 2016, do exactly the same sort of dicking around in our public discourse just like they always have here and elsewhere.
The investigators working this have now said, more than once, that the Russian activity didn't change the outcome of the election. And there hasn't been a single scrap of evidence that Trump was "working with the Russians" on anything remote connected to any of this. There is, though, now substantial evidence that the DNC and Hillary machine very much DID work with (and pay) foreign entities to work against her opponent, and that the fictional fruit of that effort was then used to launch surveillance on the Trump campaign under the direction of highly partisan DoJ/FBI management and others.
For those people, the original statement holds true- "the reason a given person isn't prosperous, is because someone else is"
But still not really true. When Boko Haram blows up a truck full of food and people starve, it's NOT because Boko Haram is eating, and because they personally have food to eat, someone else doesn't. It's because they want people to die for political/religious/tribal reasons. It's not that they're the local "rich" people and there is just enough local food to feed either them or the village that's starving. They're not eating what the village would have eaten. They're simply using threats of violence to prevent people they don't like from getting the food that's intended for them. That's not about "greed" for the food, not even close. It's about tribal or religious animosity or good old fashioned gang style intimidation. When Saddam was starving out the ethnic minorities in the southeast of Iraq, it's not because he was greedy for their food, it's because he wanted them to die.
But, there continue to be people so poor that they die, solely because the people who do have the resources and wealth to keep them alive, don't share.
No, that's not true. Most of the places where people literally starve to death are suffering from violence and corruption so bad that even those who are willing to bring in truck loads of "free" food and potable water are prevented from doing so because they don't want to die, or have given up because everything they very much ARE willing to share is promptly stolen. That's a lot different than the eeeeeevil rich people with the food being mean and not sharing. It's pretty much the exact opposite of that.
One of the core tenants of capitalism is that if you work hard and do your best you win.
>
No, that is not and has never been a core tenet (not "tenant!") of capitalism. You're deliberately leaving out the part where you have to work at something that someone else needs or wants enough to pay you for it. That's why working really, really hard at knowing everything classical Russian poetry doesn't pay you as well as being a reasonably competent but not very hustly plumber. If "the system" were as you describe it, that would be different. But you didn't describe it correctly.
No, the people who came before them benefited from a brief period in world history when the rest of the world was still in third world shithole status (either because they were already there, or got themselves into wars that put them BACK there). When nobody else much competes with your bustling economy, you get an easier shot at prosperity. So we gave those other economies a bunch of advantages so they could get on their feet. Those trade advantages have been propped up and left to linger for decades too long, and they're finally getting addressed. Which is a good thing, because it will, once the dust settles, rebalance at least some of what's been working against things like manufacturing in the US.
When you got millionaires and billionaires putthing themselves ahead at the expense of the public, people are not going to have a positive opinion of capitalism.
I know, right? I mean, the total amount of prosperity available was fixed at a permanent size back in 1776. And ever since then, the rich people have simply taken the prosperity they want, leaving less prosperity for everyone else.
Which is, of course, complete crap. The pie doesn't get carved up into smaller and smaller pieces, the pie grows (when it's allowed to - something collectivists abhor). The lowest income people today live like kings compared to their counterparts in the past. But they aren't living in lower income brackets because someone else has a good paying job - that entire notion is pure BS. If we collected ALL of the income - 100% of it - from those evil one-percenters, it wouldn't even pay for the budget deficit through spring each year. But some people seem to think that if we only just prevented a small number of people (who pay most of the taxes!) from being wealthy, that everyone who walked away from high school to sell drugs, or who refuses to learn English, or can't get a job because they have a criminal history for beating their kids, or, or, or would suddenly be on the path to a comfortable middle class life.
People who have a poor opinion of market economics do, indeed, get mad when nobody gives them anything. After all, how can it be a good system if you have to produce something in order for other people to want to give you what they made?
The income disparity is exactly why it is NOT working for a lot of people.
So, you're saying that the reason a given person isn't prosperous is because someone else is? Or are you saying that even though people - even in the lowest income brackets - live better now than in any time in human history, they're not doing well because there are some people who are living better? I presume you'd be happy if we could just tear down the wealthy people so that there's no 1% to resent and hate. Of course then everyone would just hate the 2%. Or the 20%. Or anyone that spends their day doing something that provides a more comfortable lifestyle than anyone else. The only answer is government controlled wages and lifestyles so that nobody can lie awake at night worried that the guy who works twice as hard is having a better chicken for dinner than anyone else is.
And you seem to be thinking that there's no moral or practical distinction between totalitarian governments in Russia and China and the rest of the free world. If you can't get your moral relativism under control, there's no point even getting involved in the conversation.
The difference is that we have actual reality to work with on defensive firearm use. So I'm not sure what point you think you're making, since you're talking BS. Throwing up that sort of nonsense without addressing the CDC's research is a pretty good sign that you're just angry that I'm right.
And on your last point, that's a complete load of crap. Situations where firearms are used in self-defense or to prevent crime are rare. They're at least an order of magnitude less common than suicides
You know you're wrong, and deliberately getting the "order of magnitude" thing precisely backwards. We have, what ... well under 20,000 suicides that way per year? Gary Kleck's academic research into the matter found defensive personal gun use occurring over 2 million time per year. A separate CDC study essentially duplicated his results. But let's say they're off by a whopping 90%, and people defend their lives with guns only a tenth as often as the CDC's study says actually happens. That's over 200,000 times a year. Far more than ten times as often as anyone uses a firearm in a suicide. If you think that guns are only rarely used in self defense, then you must be thrilled that they're used even more (far more) rarely in suicides, right? No, you don't care about actual facts. That takes the fun out of your talking points.