That sure was a pretentious way of admitting that your analogy was pure BS. Think of how much typing and hot air you could have saved by saying, "Yeah, I guess Trump isn't actually a mass murderer."
Really? I'm no Trump fan, but are you actually going to suggest that he's psychotic, like most who conduct mass murder? Would you like to compare him to the sociopathic liar that is Hillary Clinton (who has actual blood on her hands, around the world), or the hand-wavy-delusional Sanders who's selling fairy tales? What a strange person you are, that you consider the sort of mentally disturbed people who pick up guns, knives, or the keys to their car to deliberately kill as many people as they can to be so inconsequential that you'll just use them casually to score craven (and empty) political points.
conservative politicians offering 'Thoughts and Prayers' after every mass shooting (instead of doing anything to stop recurrences)
I believe you're thinking of all of the liberal politicians who use that phrase and then choose not to do anything about it (since not counting terrorist attacks a la San Bernadino, most real mass killings tend to be conducted by mentally unstable people, and it's the left's discomfort with the politically incorrect act of actually calling them that and doing something about it that results in their running around loose until they act on their delusions). No, the left wants to sue the people who make a gun that someone else chooses to use illegally (I presume they'd also sue the people who make a car or a knife that someone uses illegally, but they always want to avoid talking about that). For them, it's all about how to extract money and political power from the situation, not how to prevent violently crazy people from being out and about.
In her primary loss a couple of weeks ago, Clinton saw over 80% of young white women vote against her. Polling says it's because they consider her to be a liar. Picking from a list of words to describe her, that is the one most often chosen by women.
The "hate campaign" against her is just push-back against her entire career of corrupt manipulation and leveraging of political power to personally enrich her family. Was Australia's first female PM also a lying, corrupt person? That's the difference.
Not sure where this comes from. All evidence from people who have worked with her points to her being an incredibly caring and selfless person.
Yes, for her family and inner circle - she "selflessly" lets them in on the Clinton machine's heaps of money, power, and access (as long as they stay loyal, or don't have a fling with her husband, in which case they are publicly ruined or end up killing themselves or going to jail).
She has a long list of accomplishments that meaningfully have helped people.
Yes, she has a long list of events at which she used her position of power as Secretary of State in order to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for her family business from foreign governments that are notoriously abusive when it comes to "the people."
Seriously, on the level of politicians, who almost universally have suspect motivations, she's got to be one of the better ones.
No, not really. She's a corrupt serial liar, a poll-driven drive-by policy position holder with completely contradictory underlying philosophical premises, and would appear to be incredibly negligent if not outright criminally abusive in her handling of more-than-top-secret information while working her personal money making operation at the State Department. She looks you in the eye at public events, picks a phony accent out of her hat depending on what color your skin is, and then lies to you completely obvious ways that don't even pass the smell test. And that's who you are defending.
Bernie. He's the only one who has a sane plan and who seemingly gives a shit about liberty.
Proposing $19 trillion in new give-aways that only those who don't pay income taxes could love, and which the other half of the country (which DOES pay income taxes) won't support, is sane?
Forcing one half of the country to shoulder vastly more taxes in order to give it to the half that already doesn't pay income taxes is liberty? Forcing someone who wants to sell some shares of Starbucks in order to buy some shares of Amazon because they think that will help better position their retirement self-sufficiency to pay a new tax so that Bernie can buy votes from empty-headed young people who foolishly went six figures into debt because they really, really like the fraternity scene at a famous university... that's liberty?
What about 4 years under the people backing Hillary, who spend FAR more money on political messaging and organizing that the Koch brothers have, would, or even could if they wanted to? You understand that they're WAY down the list of money-spending agenda pushers, and that the biggest ones are all on the left... right?
But does she, really? She's got a long history of being against-things-before-she-was-for-them (and the other way around), and her main thing is her claim to be "fighting for" people... but without any real history of actually accomplishing anything except doing things like smearing the reputations of the women abused by her husband even as she claims to have been "fighting for women." Really, she doesn't actually seem to have any solid principles - she's entirely poll driven (and not in the "just working on the policies that my constituents want" way, but in the "saying the soundbites that focus groups indicate will get me in power" way).
I dislike her personality, lying, and sure-looks-criminal-to-me behavior so much that I'm not really bothered by the fact that she doesn't have any solid policy matters about which we can debate. Her main policy profile at the moment is "sound more like Sanders while it's necessary to, trying to brush off old things she said that are completely denigrating to black people, and characterizing Obama's Justice Department as part of a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that's fabricating stuff that actually happened when she tried to avoid future FOIA requests by running her official - and often extremely sensitive/classified - messaging through a server in her house. Really - which consistent, solid policy positions do you find her actually defending? It's all hand-waving "fighting for" rhetoric.
But it would have (if done early enough) have allowed the not-as-batshit-crazy opposition to have retained its momentum, and prevented hundreds of thousands of people from fleeing into other countries. It would have made the place less attractive to (and cut down on the growth of) ISIS, and would have given Putin less of a playground. We DO have a vested interest in less craziness in that part of the world.
Who said "shooting people?" We - with or without other useful parties - could have deprived Assad of his fleet of barrel-bomb-dropping helicopters after breakfast and before lunch on any given day.
He has only been a senator for 3 years, and is associated with the radical second-wave/post hijack/radical conservative Tea Party movement (not the libertarian movement).
Seemed to work out fine for Obama.
Indeed, and Rubio has been far more active in his tenure than was Obama - and also seems vastly more tuned into foreign affairs. Obama's (still!) staggering naivete on that front has been a disaster.
The point of war is to cause so much damage to your opponent that they give up whatever they were fighting for
But that is NOT the point, necessarily, of every Special Forces operation. Or the circumstances in which SWAT operators have to do their thing. I can see wanting a high-powered rifle round that is absolutely devastating at close and intermediate distances but which quickly begins to tumble and rapidly bleed off velocity down range. That feature is not inconsistent with causing "so much damage" to bad guys, but it can help preserve the lives of non-combatants that are a kilometer away.
Percentages and fractions (depending on what's trying to be visualized) are BOTH a better bet than "500 smaller than..." unless the entire point of the expression is to say "A is big, B is smaller by some amount, and C is five times smaller than that." Because in that context, A>B>C, it's the fact that C is even smaller than something else that was already small (compared to something else) that is the point of what's being said. But that's almost NEVER what the "500 smaller than" people are trying to say. They're almost always trying to say, "B is only 1/500th the size of A."
Well, there is, but that's not how most people use it. That phrase only makes sense when you're saying something like (for proper context), "The old batteries were large, at 10cm wide. The newer batteries were smaller, at 5cm. But these latest batteries are more than twice as small, at only just over 1cm." But even that construction is awkward. It's a lot easier to say, "The newest batteries are less than a quarter the size of the originals." The "X time smaller" construct only makes sense when you're comparing the size to something that's already considered small compared to something else... because it's the "er" that counts.
Cut to the chase: are you actually admitting that it's local culture, and not the existence of metal objects of specific format, that influence people's rampant murder rates? That guns don't kill people, but people do?
Did you even understand my point about a peasant thug with a gun versus an elite banker with a pen?
I understand that you're trying to do some classic SJW change-the-subject bait and switch, yes. I understand exactly what you said and, perhaps annoyingly to you, I understand why you felt the need to try that little bit of juvenile theater. Let me guess, you also think that as long as there's anybody unhappy in the world, nobody should have birthday parties.
So, the guns are widely available to everybody in Switzerland, but the guns somehow don't cause people to murder with them there. Guns on the other hand are extremely illegal in Mexico, but the ones that do show up in the hands of Mexicans cause Mexicans to commit murder? Whereas the same guns readily at hand in Switzerland don't cause the Swiss to commit murder?
So what you're saying is that you think Mexican people are so mentally weak that if you put a gun in their hands they just can't stop themselves from killing people, whereas the Swiss person can have that and ten more guns in their closet at home, but they aren't subject to the same magic spell, and don't kill people?
How does this magic actually work? Please be specific. Explain what part of the brain is different between a Swiss person who has access to a gun, and a Mexican person who has access to a gun. How is that part of the brain caused, by the gun itself, to carry out the complex act of putting on pants, going out into the world, and murdering someone?
Oh, while you're at it: does this same process also explain why so many more Mexicans per capita are beaten and stabbed to death than their Swiss counterparts? Is it the illegal guns in Mexico that cause people to use machetes on each other, but because most Swiss people don't have machetes, the guns there make them try to use butter knives, which aren't as lethal? Please shed some light on that part.
That's all kind of beside the point, when countries that don't allow guns in the first place such as Canada have far less instances of gun related homicides per capita.
If you remove three specific urban areas from the US stats, you'll find that the US murder rate is below that of 17 other modern nations. If your point is that the lack or presence of guns actually drives violence, how do you explain the vast majority of the US that has ready access to guns but a tiny, tiny fraction of the murder rate? The decision to kill somebody (which also happens routinely with bare hands, pipes, baseball bats, and knives - to say nothing of arson, poisoning, and other methods) varies from place to place without regard to the availability of legal OR illegal guns. Why is the murder rate in, say, Denver, lower than Chicago? Please be specific. It's OK to avoid worrying about political correctness - you can feel free to observe that the problem is with the local culture in places like Baltimore, Chicago, or St. Louis (because, well, that's the problem - I'm giving you permission to not feel bad by noting that).
The Swiss have ready access to high powered weapons and broad ownership from house to house. If your proposition is correct, then that place should be just swamped with murders involving firearms, right? No? Interesting, huh. Or what about Acapulco, Mexico? Guns are completely illegal there. But they have a sky-high murder rate (which frequently involve death by knife or machete). Is it possible that it's people, not weapons, that actually choose to kill people - and that local law enforcement (or the lack of it) has more to do with rampant street crime than the inanimate objects that criminals may pick up and use when they complete the killing they want to do?
So: please reconcile the Switzerland and Mexico issue for us before you continue with your proposition. It will be more coherent that way.
See the research by Florida State University criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Then, if you think their methodology (or those in dozens of follow-up studies) were wrong, assume the worst, and say they over-reported defensive gun use by a factor of ten, just for argument's sake. That still leaves the incidence of defense use dwarfing the murder rate in crimes where guns were used.
The good news is that there are actual facts on the ground to break up that round-and-round. Places like Florida saw a huge drop in violent crime as soon as they allowed concealed carry. Places with the most draconian laws preventing ownership/possession (say, Chicago) have some of the highest rates of violent crime.
The NRA has never said they think "everyone" should have/carry. They think non-criminals should have that choice.
Slashdot Mirror
That sure was a pretentious way of admitting that your analogy was pure BS. Think of how much typing and hot air you could have saved by saying, "Yeah, I guess Trump isn't actually a mass murderer."
Really? I'm no Trump fan, but are you actually going to suggest that he's psychotic, like most who conduct mass murder? Would you like to compare him to the sociopathic liar that is Hillary Clinton (who has actual blood on her hands, around the world), or the hand-wavy-delusional Sanders who's selling fairy tales? What a strange person you are, that you consider the sort of mentally disturbed people who pick up guns, knives, or the keys to their car to deliberately kill as many people as they can to be so inconsequential that you'll just use them casually to score craven (and empty) political points.
conservative politicians offering 'Thoughts and Prayers' after every mass shooting (instead of doing anything to stop recurrences)
I believe you're thinking of all of the liberal politicians who use that phrase and then choose not to do anything about it (since not counting terrorist attacks a la San Bernadino, most real mass killings tend to be conducted by mentally unstable people, and it's the left's discomfort with the politically incorrect act of actually calling them that and doing something about it that results in their running around loose until they act on their delusions). No, the left wants to sue the people who make a gun that someone else chooses to use illegally (I presume they'd also sue the people who make a car or a knife that someone uses illegally, but they always want to avoid talking about that). For them, it's all about how to extract money and political power from the situation, not how to prevent violently crazy people from being out and about.
Funny how angry old white men in America...
In her primary loss a couple of weeks ago, Clinton saw over 80% of young white women vote against her. Polling says it's because they consider her to be a liar. Picking from a list of words to describe her, that is the one most often chosen by women.
The "hate campaign" against her is just push-back against her entire career of corrupt manipulation and leveraging of political power to personally enrich her family. Was Australia's first female PM also a lying, corrupt person? That's the difference.
Not sure where this comes from. All evidence from people who have worked with her points to her being an incredibly caring and selfless person.
Yes, for her family and inner circle - she "selflessly" lets them in on the Clinton machine's heaps of money, power, and access (as long as they stay loyal, or don't have a fling with her husband, in which case they are publicly ruined or end up killing themselves or going to jail).
She has a long list of accomplishments that meaningfully have helped people.
Yes, she has a long list of events at which she used her position of power as Secretary of State in order to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for her family business from foreign governments that are notoriously abusive when it comes to "the people."
Seriously, on the level of politicians, who almost universally have suspect motivations, she's got to be one of the better ones.
No, not really. She's a corrupt serial liar, a poll-driven drive-by policy position holder with completely contradictory underlying philosophical premises, and would appear to be incredibly negligent if not outright criminally abusive in her handling of more-than-top-secret information while working her personal money making operation at the State Department. She looks you in the eye at public events, picks a phony accent out of her hat depending on what color your skin is, and then lies to you completely obvious ways that don't even pass the smell test. And that's who you are defending.
Bernie. He's the only one who has a sane plan and who seemingly gives a shit about liberty.
Proposing $19 trillion in new give-aways that only those who don't pay income taxes could love, and which the other half of the country (which DOES pay income taxes) won't support, is sane?
... that's liberty?
Forcing one half of the country to shoulder vastly more taxes in order to give it to the half that already doesn't pay income taxes is liberty? Forcing someone who wants to sell some shares of Starbucks in order to buy some shares of Amazon because they think that will help better position their retirement self-sufficiency to pay a new tax so that Bernie can buy votes from empty-headed young people who foolishly went six figures into debt because they really, really like the fraternity scene at a famous university
What about 4 years under the people backing Hillary, who spend FAR more money on political messaging and organizing that the Koch brothers have, would, or even could if they wanted to? You understand that they're WAY down the list of money-spending agenda pushers, and that the biggest ones are all on the left ... right?
At least Clinton has policy points to defend...
But does she, really? She's got a long history of being against-things-before-she-was-for-them (and the other way around), and her main thing is her claim to be "fighting for" people ... but without any real history of actually accomplishing anything except doing things like smearing the reputations of the women abused by her husband even as she claims to have been "fighting for women." Really, she doesn't actually seem to have any solid principles - she's entirely poll driven (and not in the "just working on the policies that my constituents want" way, but in the "saying the soundbites that focus groups indicate will get me in power" way).
I dislike her personality, lying, and sure-looks-criminal-to-me behavior so much that I'm not really bothered by the fact that she doesn't have any solid policy matters about which we can debate. Her main policy profile at the moment is "sound more like Sanders while it's necessary to, trying to brush off old things she said that are completely denigrating to black people, and characterizing Obama's Justice Department as part of a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that's fabricating stuff that actually happened when she tried to avoid future FOIA requests by running her official - and often extremely sensitive/classified - messaging through a server in her house. Really - which consistent, solid policy positions do you find her actually defending? It's all hand-waving "fighting for" rhetoric.
But it would have (if done early enough) have allowed the not-as-batshit-crazy opposition to have retained its momentum, and prevented hundreds of thousands of people from fleeing into other countries. It would have made the place less attractive to (and cut down on the growth of) ISIS, and would have given Putin less of a playground. We DO have a vested interest in less craziness in that part of the world.
Who said "shooting people?" We - with or without other useful parties - could have deprived Assad of his fleet of barrel-bomb-dropping helicopters after breakfast and before lunch on any given day.
He has only been a senator for 3 years, and is associated with the radical second-wave/post hijack/radical conservative Tea Party movement (not the libertarian movement).
Seemed to work out fine for Obama.
Indeed, and Rubio has been far more active in his tenure than was Obama - and also seems vastly more tuned into foreign affairs. Obama's (still!) staggering naivete on that front has been a disaster.
huffpost disagrees however
Imagine that! Part of the Clinton shill machinery says she's the inevitable winner.
Or in hostage rescue scenarios, or in close quarters urban combat in an area where there are thousands of non-combatants just blocks away.
The point of war is to cause so much damage to your opponent that they give up whatever they were fighting for
But that is NOT the point, necessarily, of every Special Forces operation. Or the circumstances in which SWAT operators have to do their thing. I can see wanting a high-powered rifle round that is absolutely devastating at close and intermediate distances but which quickly begins to tumble and rapidly bleed off velocity down range. That feature is not inconsistent with causing "so much damage" to bad guys, but it can help preserve the lives of non-combatants that are a kilometer away.
Percentages and fractions (depending on what's trying to be visualized) are BOTH a better bet than "500 smaller than..." unless the entire point of the expression is to say "A is big, B is smaller by some amount, and C is five times smaller than that." Because in that context, A>B>C, it's the fact that C is even smaller than something else that was already small (compared to something else) that is the point of what's being said. But that's almost NEVER what the "500 smaller than" people are trying to say. They're almost always trying to say, "B is only 1/500th the size of A."
What I want to know is if these robots know the difference between IT'S and ITS. Because that would be a major step forward, apparently.
No such thing as "10,000 times less."
Well, there is, but that's not how most people use it. That phrase only makes sense when you're saying something like (for proper context), "The old batteries were large, at 10cm wide. The newer batteries were smaller, at 5cm. But these latest batteries are more than twice as small, at only just over 1cm." But even that construction is awkward. It's a lot easier to say, "The newest batteries are less than a quarter the size of the originals." The "X time smaller" construct only makes sense when you're comparing the size to something that's already considered small compared to something else ... because it's the "er" that counts.
Or use an EM massless drive if it turns out to be real and not an experimental error.
it is absolutely not real.
So we have multiple experiments showing it is, but you're not linking to what debunks it. Why?
Call ne an addict!!!
Perhaps not. But I will call you one of the Knights Who Say Ne.
Did you even understand my point about a peasant thug with a gun versus an elite banker with a pen?
I understand that you're trying to do some classic SJW change-the-subject bait and switch, yes. I understand exactly what you said and, perhaps annoyingly to you, I understand why you felt the need to try that little bit of juvenile theater. Let me guess, you also think that as long as there's anybody unhappy in the world, nobody should have birthday parties.
So in other words you really can't address the point and you're trying to change the subject. Thought so.
So, the guns are widely available to everybody in Switzerland, but the guns somehow don't cause people to murder with them there. Guns on the other hand are extremely illegal in Mexico, but the ones that do show up in the hands of Mexicans cause Mexicans to commit murder? Whereas the same guns readily at hand in Switzerland don't cause the Swiss to commit murder?
So what you're saying is that you think Mexican people are so mentally weak that if you put a gun in their hands they just can't stop themselves from killing people, whereas the Swiss person can have that and ten more guns in their closet at home, but they aren't subject to the same magic spell, and don't kill people?
How does this magic actually work? Please be specific. Explain what part of the brain is different between a Swiss person who has access to a gun, and a Mexican person who has access to a gun. How is that part of the brain caused, by the gun itself, to carry out the complex act of putting on pants, going out into the world, and murdering someone?
Oh, while you're at it: does this same process also explain why so many more Mexicans per capita are beaten and stabbed to death than their Swiss counterparts? Is it the illegal guns in Mexico that cause people to use machetes on each other, but because most Swiss people don't have machetes, the guns there make them try to use butter knives, which aren't as lethal? Please shed some light on that part.
That's all kind of beside the point, when countries that don't allow guns in the first place such as Canada have far less instances of gun related homicides per capita.
If you remove three specific urban areas from the US stats, you'll find that the US murder rate is below that of 17 other modern nations. If your point is that the lack or presence of guns actually drives violence, how do you explain the vast majority of the US that has ready access to guns but a tiny, tiny fraction of the murder rate? The decision to kill somebody (which also happens routinely with bare hands, pipes, baseball bats, and knives - to say nothing of arson, poisoning, and other methods) varies from place to place without regard to the availability of legal OR illegal guns. Why is the murder rate in, say, Denver, lower than Chicago? Please be specific. It's OK to avoid worrying about political correctness - you can feel free to observe that the problem is with the local culture in places like Baltimore, Chicago, or St. Louis (because, well, that's the problem - I'm giving you permission to not feel bad by noting that).
The Swiss have ready access to high powered weapons and broad ownership from house to house. If your proposition is correct, then that place should be just swamped with murders involving firearms, right? No? Interesting, huh. Or what about Acapulco, Mexico? Guns are completely illegal there. But they have a sky-high murder rate (which frequently involve death by knife or machete). Is it possible that it's people, not weapons, that actually choose to kill people - and that local law enforcement (or the lack of it) has more to do with rampant street crime than the inanimate objects that criminals may pick up and use when they complete the killing they want to do?
So: please reconcile the Switzerland and Mexico issue for us before you continue with your proposition. It will be more coherent that way.
See the research by Florida State University criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Then, if you think their methodology (or those in dozens of follow-up studies) were wrong, assume the worst, and say they over-reported defensive gun use by a factor of ten, just for argument's sake. That still leaves the incidence of defense use dwarfing the murder rate in crimes where guns were used.
The good news is that there are actual facts on the ground to break up that round-and-round. Places like Florida saw a huge drop in violent crime as soon as they allowed concealed carry. Places with the most draconian laws preventing ownership/possession (say, Chicago) have some of the highest rates of violent crime.
The NRA has never said they think "everyone" should have/carry. They think non-criminals should have that choice.