So how are we to know when the end is actually nigh, so we can, you know, confess our sins and get our "get out of hell free" card?
The point of biblical end time teaching is not so you can confess your sins just before the apocalypse. The point is that it could come at any time and that even if that doesn't happen in your lifetime you should still be morally prepared for judgement because your personal last day could happen anytime.
It's sort of like always wearing clean underwear in case you get in an accident.
Why should the church ever change if their instruction comes from god? In catholicism matrimony is one of seven sacraments, that makes their teaching on in foundational to the practice of the religion. If they admit to getting it wrong on the sacraments they may as well declare themselves to be obsolete and their religion to be false. That would be fine with me but you can see how the pope might try to avoid it since his job would be on the line. I don't think it makes sense to change a religion, if the teaching isn't true abandon it.
If you can legally possess and use firearms for self defense then you have not delegated lethal force entirely to the government. The delegation of lethal force to the government is both situational and conditional. My point remains.
The problem with the MAD doctrine is the same as the problem with the second amendment, they both assume humans will act rationally when given the power of life or death over others.
You say it's a problem with the second amendment but it's also a problem with gun bans which involve delegating lethal force entirely to the government.
That's like saying you (you, personally) shouldn't be able to trust your father because there are some fathers that have molested their children.
It's not much like saying that at all. I don't automatically trust someone with my children just because they are a father. That's more like what I'm saying.
People "in a position of trust" are, by definition, people that you should be able to trust. That trust can be abused. Nothing is absolute. But we as a society try to keep those groups trustworthy.
Thus the transparency of access to records being necessary.
There are arguments in favour of open medical records, but "auditing" isn't one of them.
I want to be able to take my records to another doctor without my current doctor's knowledge. Just because I don't have the knowledge to personally audit medical records doesn't mean I don't have a legitimate interest.
All of the financial incentives, then, are to inflate the actual cost of medical treatment, to claim medical treatments are necessary when they really aren't, and to provide treatments that don't actually fix the problem so that the people come back again later.
Except competition and goodwill (meant in the financial sense).
You don't know you can trust a doctor. Doctors have been convicted of molesting their patients. They are no different to any other people. To withhold records "for your own benefit" I find arrogant. If the government decides what you aren't allowed to know "for your own benefit" we call it censorship and it is pretty universally denounced as evil by posters on this site. How is it that this evil of governments is good if done by a doctor? Can this still hold true in countries with government health care?
Yes and I used to despair of trying to get people to understand that their browser was not their "operating system", or that the box that contains their computer is not their "hard drive". The fact that I know the difference, the fact that it makes a great difference when you are trying to solve a problem on their computer does not change the fact that they neither know the difference, or really care.
If large numbers of people start wanting legislation based on that misunderstanding it will become necessary to correct them, now it isn't really an issue. It only means that it isn't possible for them to talk meaningfully about the subject. This is not the case regarding firearms. The ONLY people I can see "mistaking" semi-autos for machine guns are people who want to ban them yet gun banning legislation doesn't refer to machine guns when it means semi-autos. If congress can figure it out, so can journalists and so can slashdot posters.
I am aware of the difference between a rifle, a semi-automatic assault weapon and a machinegun. I spent 10 years in the army. The average person doesn't know the difference, and that was my point.
I've never fired a full auto weapon, hunted as a kid and haven't handled a firearm in over 20 years. I am not an American and don't see guns in my day to day life except if I see the police. If I saw an AR15 without inspecting or firing it I could mistake it for a full-auto weapon but I'd be mistaken, not correct. Upon finding out what it was I would describe it correctly. I don't see how you can have a sensible discussion with anyone who won't take this approach.
Not so. A person may be ignorant of your context, but they don't classify without reason.
The problem isn't ignorance of my context it is ignorance of facts. When you base your thinking on ignorance of facts you don't get context, reason or become correct, you simply remain ignorant.
"X looks like Y. Y is a machine gun. Therefore X is a machine gun." is a perfectly valid line of reasoning
Magician shows look like real magic. It is not valid reasoning to conclude that magic is real. If you see a magic show and conclude that magic is real you don't have a different context, you're just wrong.
The average person is not incorrect when they say a particular weapon is a machine gun, because their context is visual appearance, not firing process.
They are still incorrect. A semi-auto is not a machine gun and emotional evaluations based on appearance don't change that fact. A botanist describing a tomato as a fruit has reasons for doing so. A chef who describes a tomato as a vegetable has reasons for doing so. A person who calls a semi-auto a machine gun has only ignorance, no reason.
The difference between being killed by an semi-automatic rifle and being killed by a machinegun (sub or otherwise) is lost on me.
If someone is specifically talking about the risk of being killed by one or the other it becomes relevant, otherwise not so much.
The average person probably thinks the categories are: pistol, shotgun, rifle, machinegun and thats pretty much it.
I aspire to more intelligent discussion than the average person I suppose. I don't see how this is possible unless words are used correctly.
When people with a political agenda of banning guns use incorrect terminology that confuses semi-auto with full auto weapons it seems like they are deliberately obfuscating the issue to exploit the average persons ignorance. That requires correction, unless you're in favor of deceiving people to sway their political opinion. I know that's a popular tactic to the point of being near universal but I always live in hope of conversing with people who prioritize truth over their own opinion.
I think the Fox News pundits have convinced a lot of people in the United States that the Democrats really are communists.
Yeah, but like Chinese communists or Putin, not the mythical pure communists that have never actually run a state. Putin has people shot or poisoned with polonium, Obama has them killed with drones.
When real communists take power they are revealed as greedy, power hungry sociopaths that will do anything it takes to grow and maintain their power..
I bet you are just fat, fattsos are rarely lethal threats. Most women with proper self defense classes (a couple jiujitsu grapples, a couple of kravmaga choke punches) can take you down without the need of piercing the massive lard body attached to your torax with a bullet.
My personal ability is not provable here and doesn't change the argument. I'm not a skilled fighter but the strength disparity would give me an advantage over most people. My wife's female jiujitsu trainer could certainly throw me yet she teaches for women faced with a large male opponents to run if possible for the specific reason that it is harder to land a disabling blow. The reality is that it takes quite a bit of training for a smaller person to overcome a much stronger one, but many attackers are not expecting resistance so if you fight back at all you can gain a surprise advantage. I don't think our laws regarding self defense should rely on the attacker to be incompetent.
So, yes, trained fighters could beat me. Maybe they form a higher portion of the population than I assume, but since that training is available to all, the advantage still lies with the strong. With weapons as a force multiplier strength becomes less relevant. Therefore banning weapons is not equitable.
In my own state they are running out of priests too. Happy days. Faced with this same situation we are homeschooling but not everyone wants to do that. There are state schools that are pretty good but too far away from us.
No, no it isn't. My original post was answering the question of whether people have a right to weapons. My claims were that (1) people do have a right to self defense and (2) disparate strength of some people means that weapons bans discriminate against the weak and are not equitable. Nothing in any of the various replies to my post refutes those points. I never claimed that people are not capable of using poison and it has no bearing whatsoever on the topic at hand. The availability of poison is unlikely to have any affect whatsoever on the ability of a weak person to defend themselves from a stronger attacker.
He's absolutely right, that whoever strikes first and is most mental will win.... So size is pretty irrelevant.
That's an interesting theory not borne out in reality. Sure, if you can land a surprise devastating blow first you have a good chance of winning, but a strong guy has a far greater chance of his blow being devastating and a greater chance of withstanding a blow from a weaker opponent. Are your military special forces the smallest guys in the military? About average? My informal observation is that they tend to be on the larger side. Why? Couldn't the military just find some skinny women, older people or children and teach them to strike first?
I know that if my wife was to attack me unarmed I would be in no real danger (so far, she's started training so next year might be different). There is no way I could argue in court that I needed lethal force to defend myself from her. The reverse is untrue.
Size and strength do not provide an insurmountable advantage but to say they don't provide an advantage is fanciful nonsense. All other things being equal the stronger wins. If the weaker has other mitigating advantages they could win. Since we are talking self defense here I'd be prepared to bet that most criminals target a weaker victim. We probably all know a smaller guy that has beaten someone bigger, it doesn't mean strength doesn't make a difference.
Take it from me, it has nothing to do with how big your big manly mussles are.
Yet boxing is divided by weight divisions. Sure the little guy can win if he's good but that's not the way to bet. I based the 80% guess on the adult population and me being the attacker (a hypothetical situation I assure you). Given half women, most of whom have no significant martial arts training and a portion of old people I think I placed myself about middle of the range for adult males, based on above average size but lack of fighting skill. I'm not going to attack large numbers of individuals for the purpose of determining the percentage more accurately, sorry for the lack of precision.
As for first striker and attacks from behind, these issues involve situational awareness more so than fighting ability. I do not overindulge in alcohol in public. I doubt I will ever be attacked by ninjas. People do not "come out of nowhere". The chance that the first thing I will know about an attack is a brick to the back of the head is pretty remote.
A woman who's a bad shot "protecting her family" with a semi-automatic rifle with a 30 round clip is by definition a social problem.
Agreed. Hopefully in such a case the intimidation factor would be enough to make discharging the rifle unnecessary. I'm not to keen on the idea of rifles being fired in urban areas, semi-auto or not. The idea that the solution to being a poor shot is more firepower indicates just as much a problem with your education system as it does with your firearms laws. To be fair, both sides of the US gun debate are riddled with stupidity. The ever popular use of "gun deaths" rather than murder and suicide rates by anti-gunners is a case in point.
Slashdot Mirror
So how are we to know when the end is actually nigh, so we can, you know, confess our sins and get our "get out of hell free" card?
The point of biblical end time teaching is not so you can confess your sins just before the apocalypse. The point is that it could come at any time and that even if that doesn't happen in your lifetime you should still be morally prepared for judgement because your personal last day could happen anytime.
It's sort of like always wearing clean underwear in case you get in an accident.
So nothing important is going to change then?
Why should the church ever change if their instruction comes from god? In catholicism matrimony is one of seven sacraments, that makes their teaching on in foundational to the practice of the religion. If they admit to getting it wrong on the sacraments they may as well declare themselves to be obsolete and their religion to be false. That would be fine with me but you can see how the pope might try to avoid it since his job would be on the line. I don't think it makes sense to change a religion, if the teaching isn't true abandon it.
If you can legally possess and use firearms for self defense then you have not delegated lethal force entirely to the government. The delegation of lethal force to the government is both situational and conditional. My point remains.
The problem with the MAD doctrine is the same as the problem with the second amendment, they both assume humans will act rationally when given the power of life or death over others.
You say it's a problem with the second amendment but it's also a problem with gun bans which involve delegating lethal force entirely to the government.
That's like saying you (you, personally) shouldn't be able to trust your father because there are some fathers that have molested their children.
It's not much like saying that at all. I don't automatically trust someone with my children just because they are a father. That's more like what I'm saying.
People "in a position of trust" are, by definition, people that you should be able to trust. That trust can be abused. Nothing is absolute. But we as a society try to keep those groups trustworthy.
Thus the transparency of access to records being necessary.
Your full work log isn't about my very personal and important issues.
There are arguments in favour of open medical records, but "auditing" isn't one of them.
I want to be able to take my records to another doctor without my current doctor's knowledge. Just because I don't have the knowledge to personally audit medical records doesn't mean I don't have a legitimate interest.
All of the financial incentives, then, are to inflate the actual cost of medical treatment, to claim medical treatments are necessary when they really aren't, and to provide treatments that don't actually fix the problem so that the people come back again later.
Except competition and goodwill (meant in the financial sense).
You don't know you can trust a doctor. Doctors have been convicted of molesting their patients. They are no different to any other people. To withhold records "for your own benefit" I find arrogant. If the government decides what you aren't allowed to know "for your own benefit" we call it censorship and it is pretty universally denounced as evil by posters on this site. How is it that this evil of governments is good if done by a doctor? Can this still hold true in countries with government health care?
the Free Software community, for instance, is very socialist ("hey, let's produce a thing, and let the public use it").
That's philanthropy, not socialism.
they're worker-owned or user-owned means of production, but they were built without the government forcing anybody to do anything.
Privately owned means of production is capitalism. Socialism does not mean all forms of sharing and cooperation.
Yes and I used to despair of trying to get people to understand that their browser was not their "operating system", or that the box that contains their computer is not their "hard drive". The fact that I know the difference, the fact that it makes a great difference when you are trying to solve a problem on their computer does not change the fact that they neither know the difference, or really care.
If large numbers of people start wanting legislation based on that misunderstanding it will become necessary to correct them, now it isn't really an issue. It only means that it isn't possible for them to talk meaningfully about the subject. This is not the case regarding firearms. The ONLY people I can see "mistaking" semi-autos for machine guns are people who want to ban them yet gun banning legislation doesn't refer to machine guns when it means semi-autos. If congress can figure it out, so can journalists and so can slashdot posters.
I am aware of the difference between a rifle, a semi-automatic assault weapon and a machinegun. I spent 10 years in the army. The average person doesn't know the difference, and that was my point.
I've never fired a full auto weapon, hunted as a kid and haven't handled a firearm in over 20 years. I am not an American and don't see guns in my day to day life except if I see the police. If I saw an AR15 without inspecting or firing it I could mistake it for a full-auto weapon but I'd be mistaken, not correct. Upon finding out what it was I would describe it correctly. I don't see how you can have a sensible discussion with anyone who won't take this approach.
Not so. A person may be ignorant of your context, but they don't classify without reason.
The problem isn't ignorance of my context it is ignorance of facts. When you base your thinking on ignorance of facts you don't get context, reason or become correct, you simply remain ignorant.
"X looks like Y. Y is a machine gun. Therefore X is a machine gun." is a perfectly valid line of reasoning
Magician shows look like real magic. It is not valid reasoning to conclude that magic is real. If you see a magic show and conclude that magic is real you don't have a different context, you're just wrong.
The average person is not incorrect when they say a particular weapon is a machine gun, because their context is visual appearance, not firing process.
They are still incorrect. A semi-auto is not a machine gun and emotional evaluations based on appearance don't change that fact. A botanist describing a tomato as a fruit has reasons for doing so. A chef who describes a tomato as a vegetable has reasons for doing so. A person who calls a semi-auto a machine gun has only ignorance, no reason.
I doubt that military killbots will be programmed by the philosophy department of a university. More likely by engineers working for generals.
The difference between being killed by an semi-automatic rifle and being killed by a machinegun (sub or otherwise) is lost on me.
If someone is specifically talking about the risk of being killed by one or the other it becomes relevant, otherwise not so much.
The average person probably thinks the categories are: pistol, shotgun, rifle, machinegun and thats pretty much it.
I aspire to more intelligent discussion than the average person I suppose. I don't see how this is possible unless words are used correctly.
When people with a political agenda of banning guns use incorrect terminology that confuses semi-auto with full auto weapons it seems like they are deliberately obfuscating the issue to exploit the average persons ignorance. That requires correction, unless you're in favor of deceiving people to sway their political opinion. I know that's a popular tactic to the point of being near universal but I always live in hope of conversing with people who prioritize truth over their own opinion.
There's not reason to let it fade into oblivion without making a lot of noise. We can't make it too easy for the bastards.
If you are difficult to oppress, do you get a higher quality dictator?
Given training most people would do it better than without training.
I think the Fox News pundits have convinced a lot of people in the United States that the Democrats really are communists.
Yeah, but like Chinese communists or Putin, not the mythical pure communists that have never actually run a state. Putin has people shot or poisoned with polonium, Obama has them killed with drones.
When real communists take power they are revealed as greedy, power hungry sociopaths that will do anything it takes to grow and maintain their power..
OMG!!!!!! REPUBLICANS ARE COMMUNISTS TOO!
I bet you are just fat, fattsos are rarely lethal threats. Most women with proper self defense classes (a couple jiujitsu grapples, a couple of kravmaga choke punches) can take you down without the need of piercing the massive lard body attached to your torax with a bullet.
My personal ability is not provable here and doesn't change the argument. I'm not a skilled fighter but the strength disparity would give me an advantage over most people. My wife's female jiujitsu trainer could certainly throw me yet she teaches for women faced with a large male opponents to run if possible for the specific reason that it is harder to land a disabling blow. The reality is that it takes quite a bit of training for a smaller person to overcome a much stronger one, but many attackers are not expecting resistance so if you fight back at all you can gain a surprise advantage. I don't think our laws regarding self defense should rely on the attacker to be incompetent.
So, yes, trained fighters could beat me. Maybe they form a higher portion of the population than I assume, but since that training is available to all, the advantage still lies with the strong. With weapons as a force multiplier strength becomes less relevant. Therefore banning weapons is not equitable.
In my own state they are running out of priests too. Happy days. Faced with this same situation we are homeschooling but not everyone wants to do that. There are state schools that are pretty good but too far away from us.
I guess I misread the expression on your face as you typed that. Sometimes I can be a bit humorless. My bad.
No, no it isn't. My original post was answering the question of whether people have a right to weapons. My claims were that (1) people do have a right to self defense and (2) disparate strength of some people means that weapons bans discriminate against the weak and are not equitable. Nothing in any of the various replies to my post refutes those points. I never claimed that people are not capable of using poison and it has no bearing whatsoever on the topic at hand. The availability of poison is unlikely to have any affect whatsoever on the ability of a weak person to defend themselves from a stronger attacker.
He's absolutely right, that whoever strikes first and is most mental will win. ... So size is pretty irrelevant.
That's an interesting theory not borne out in reality. Sure, if you can land a surprise devastating blow first you have a good chance of winning, but a strong guy has a far greater chance of his blow being devastating and a greater chance of withstanding a blow from a weaker opponent. Are your military special forces the smallest guys in the military? About average? My informal observation is that they tend to be on the larger side. Why? Couldn't the military just find some skinny women, older people or children and teach them to strike first?
I know that if my wife was to attack me unarmed I would be in no real danger (so far, she's started training so next year might be different). There is no way I could argue in court that I needed lethal force to defend myself from her. The reverse is untrue.
Size and strength do not provide an insurmountable advantage but to say they don't provide an advantage is fanciful nonsense. All other things being equal the stronger wins. If the weaker has other mitigating advantages they could win. Since we are talking self defense here I'd be prepared to bet that most criminals target a weaker victim. We probably all know a smaller guy that has beaten someone bigger, it doesn't mean strength doesn't make a difference.
Take it from me, it has nothing to do with how big your big manly mussles are.
Yet boxing is divided by weight divisions. Sure the little guy can win if he's good but that's not the way to bet. I based the 80% guess on the adult population and me being the attacker (a hypothetical situation I assure you). Given half women, most of whom have no significant martial arts training and a portion of old people I think I placed myself about middle of the range for adult males, based on above average size but lack of fighting skill. I'm not going to attack large numbers of individuals for the purpose of determining the percentage more accurately, sorry for the lack of precision.
As for first striker and attacks from behind, these issues involve situational awareness more so than fighting ability. I do not overindulge in alcohol in public. I doubt I will ever be attacked by ninjas. People do not "come out of nowhere". The chance that the first thing I will know about an attack is a brick to the back of the head is pretty remote.
A woman who's a bad shot "protecting her family" with a semi-automatic rifle with a 30 round clip is by definition a social problem.
Agreed. Hopefully in such a case the intimidation factor would be enough to make discharging the rifle unnecessary. I'm not to keen on the idea of rifles being fired in urban areas, semi-auto or not. The idea that the solution to being a poor shot is more firepower indicates just as much a problem with your education system as it does with your firearms laws. To be fair, both sides of the US gun debate are riddled with stupidity. The ever popular use of "gun deaths" rather than murder and suicide rates by anti-gunners is a case in point.