One year is too short a time for a lot of laws, especially ones that have been around a long time and have a high level of agreement -- it's a waste of effort to renew laws against murder, burglary, and arson every year.
For any law that passes, the sunset duration should be the subject of a separate vote, where each legislator picks a duration (from say 1 to 20 years), and they use the mean duration, rounded to the following January 1st. So if a bill is signed into law on June 15th 2007, and the sunset vote says 3.4 years, that adds to around November 2010, and would round up to January 1st 2011.
That way, even legislation which must pass RIGHT NOW may still need to be revisited soon if those who voted for it think that it might only be needed in the short term.
Not all legislation makes sense for sunset provisions, of course, like budget bills, which specify a one-time event anyway (they essentially have an implicit sunset).
Ironically, my belief that macro/microevolution were terms coined by creationists was from something I read years ago in the talk.origins archive:) But apparently I misunderstood or misread. Thanks for the clarification:)
As I understand it, they're only used because biologists these days so frequently find themselves responding to silly creationist claims;) And really, "the distinction between what happens when two populations can interbreed vs. when they can" is pretty much covered by the term "speciation," isn't it?
There *is* a distinction between microevolution and macroevolution.
Not really, no. The terms didn't exist before creationists came up with them; scientists didn't bother with a distinction because there isn't a need for one.
Since you seem to be pretty convinced that you're right, though, then riddle me this: At what point does a change become macroevolution instead of microevolution? Imagine those stronger arms you speak of begin to have tiny, tiny little bony growths emerge from the back side. The growths don't really do any good for a few thousand years, though they do get longer and longer. Eventually they're long enough and solid enough that they're a defensive mechanism; anything attacking the creature from that side is likely to get jabbed with sharp bony spikes. (Keep in mind that their efficacy as defenses isn't consistent across the population, and grows slowly over thousands of years.)
Meanwhile, the area of skin where the bones erupted starts growing hairs to keep some exposed nerves warm. These hairs evolve to be pretty stiff because the bones, while sharp, are also fairly thin and tend to break off, and the hairs help keep the exposed break from getting too much dust and other crap on it. Over time the hairs grow longer and longer and form a membrane between them so as to further protect the bone stubs when the spurs break off.
Over the next many thousands of years, the hairs start turning into feathers because the creatures have migrated into a windier environment, and feathers keep the cold wind out better than hair. Meanwhile the bone spurs continue growing longer and thicker. The density of these bones is fairly low because the creatures tend to stick to trees, and being able to jump from branch to branch is easier if you're lighter. Also, there's another similar species nearby that has similar feathers but no bone spurs; predators have learned that creatures with feathers like that sometimes have sharp, painful bone spurs, and the spurless creatures are starting to out-compete the spurred ones, because they spend less biochemical energy growing the bone spurs. Some of the spurred creatures adapt by growing substantially longer and thicker spurs, the additional defense from which compensates for the extra energy the spurless creatures can spend on reproduction instead of defense.
The spurred creatures, by this point, have arms that stretch a fairly long span, thin membranes forming a wing-like structure extending back from the arm along the bony spurs. The ones with the longest, thickest, most developed structures find sometimes that they can escape from predators by leaping off a branch and gliding to the ground a distance away. After another several thousand years, they develop muscles that are good at raising the wings up and down quickly enough to provide a little list, letting them glide farther and farther.
As time goes on, the stronger, more evasive individuals develop the muscles enough to provide so much power that they can glide for miles, and eventually gain lift. Now, finally, after a couple hundred thousand years, they're flying.
So tell me: Where along that process did macroevolution occur, exactly? At what completely arbitrary point did microevolution become macroevolution? You might claim that macroevolution is what occurred between the beginning and the end (no wings -> wings), but so what? What use is that term? It doesn't really tell us anything. Macroevolution could then be applied to any large change. If a change as large as amoebae evolving into tigers over 3 billion years, or as small as tigers evolving wings, can both be called macroevolution, then the term is so broad as to be useless. You have to pick a point at which "microevolution" becomes "macroevolution" and any such point is arbitrary and, it turns out, useless.
Pfft, everyone knows the best sort is random sort. Randomize the list. Is it sorted? If not, randomize it again! You'll hit it eventually!
Re:Isn't that what they want?
on
DRM Causes Piracy
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· Score: 2, Interesting
they'll have no idea why
Get off your ass and write them a letter. A real, honest-to-Godzilla ink-on-paper letter (feel free to write it on the computer and print it out, but whatever). Corporations pay orders of mangnitude more attention to paper letters than they do to email, for example.
Your one letter isn't likely to change anything by itself, and short of orchestrating a boycott and associated letter-writing campaign, it's the most you can do individually. But if enough people stop buying DVDs because of the stupid X, and tell the studios about it, they will change. It's not enough to hurt their bottom line; and you can't keep buying and bitch at them, because they'll ignore you. Vote with your wallet and tell them why.
I never said it was okay. I said it was unsurprising. Yeah, you could get revenge by killing the thugs, but wouldn't it have been a better solution to NOT fuck with them for 50 years in the first place?
Of course, at this point it's too late to undo the past, but once you get revenge on them, you can also stop dumping your garbage in other people's bedrooms in the future, which will reduce the future necessity to waste time, effort, and money on further revenge.
There once was a person who had a nice house and a nice family. One day thugs showed up and bashed in through a back window and killed a child shouting that they did it because the nice people in the house left their garbage in the thugs' bedroom, followed the thugs around hassling them constantly, bullying all the employers in the city to only hire the thugs for below minimum wage (and no benefits), and had been doing so constantly for fifty years.
The neigbor across the street looked and said, "That sucks, but what did you expect?"
Like it or not, the only reason we have anything to fear from Islamic terrorists is because we've spent decades interfering with their politics. You can't fight an idea, but you can arrange things so that people don't have any motive to blow themselves up.
I wonder what the acceptable max latency could be for 2 way communications.
Months or years. Keep in mind that people used to communicate over long distances via hand-written letters, and that was the only option.
If you mean semi-realtime communication (sitting and waiting for an answer) most people won't put up with latencies longer than a minute or so. While you're waiting for a reply you can go do something else, and at that point, you might as well just be using email.
Driving fast because you're dealing with extreme circumstances (no safe place to pull over + ambulance in a hurry behind you) is quite different from driving fast all the time just because you know you can get away with it. No matter how good your training is, the results of mechanical failure at high speeds are catastrophic, and the longer you spend driving at high speeds, the more likely you are to get into a catastrophic crash, even if you're the greatest driver in the world. It's not legal for NASCAR drivers go 150 MPH in public just because they're highly trained.
Off-duty cops (heck, on-duty cops) who aren't in a particular hurry to get somewhere don't have any business driving excessively fast either. Sirens blaring, on your way to a crime scene? Go as fast as you like, we'll get out of your way. Patrolling, with no particular destination? Or just on your way somewhere for routine business? Go with the flow of traffic. I don't care how good your training is.
The problem with the Iraqi occupation is that our soldiers are trying to defend areas while at the same time trying to pacify the insurgency. Defending makes your location and movements much more predictable, and thus much more of a target. So the obvious fascist strategy would be: don't defend bother defending anything, you just go in and blow shit up when you suspect someone is resisting you.
That... doesn't really make any sense. If they're sitting around waiting for signs of resistance so they can swoop in and blow it up, then 1) they're sitting around in a predictable location, like a base, which is a quite obvious target, 2) the "resistance" would bait them into wasting time and effort blowing up things that were inconsequential to the resistance, or worse, blowing up civilian targets and killing civilians who would increasingly turn against the government, inevitably leading to revolution.
See above. Why don't you ask the French how well their "resistance" worked against German occupation?
Analogy, how dost thee fail? Let me count the ways:
1. The Germans were an invading force from another country. The hypothetical scenario of widespread fascist oppression by the U.S. government of the U.S. populace is markedly different. 2. France is a much smaller country than the U.S. Size matters. 3. For Chrissake, you're talking about the French. You don't think the same Americans who produced this godly military you speak of would be able to do better against it than the French?
What happened in Germany already started happening here when the government forced Japanese-Americans into concentration camps.
...sixty years ago...
And again with the Administration torturing and imprisoning people without due process.
Yeah, and quite a lot of people are up in arms and doing everything in their power to fight it down. When similar things happened in Nazi Germany, most of the population either knew nothing about it (because the information and press were violently suppressed) and those who did know cheered it on. Everybody Loved Hitler. Not so with Bush.
You don't have to get all of them or even most of them. Just get rid of the ones that might be troublemakers and isolate those that you don't trust, while putting your lackeys into positions of power. If it can happen to well known officials like Colin Powell and Richard Clarke, it can certainly happen to those lower on the food chain.
And what I said still applies. Some of your "lackeys" that you put into positions of power will eventually turn on you, and you're never going to be able to ferret them all out. Not all of them will turn in the same way; some will (consciously or otherwise) make subtle mistakes or misjudgements that weaken your ability to conduct fascism; some will secretly send information to the enemy to help them out; some will leak information to the public about the secret horrors committed by those in charge.
It wont reduce their ability to continue with fascism, but it will drastically decrease the number of competent officials. Katrina demonstrated the problems with packing agencies with political cronies.
Sorry, what I meant was that it would reduce their ability to continue with fascism for very long, since as the incompetence rises the likelihood of overthrow increases.
You also wouldn't think the populace would accept torture, suspending of habeas corpus, etc etc, but it's still happening and Bush is still in office with no signs of being impeached or forced to resign.
Most of the populace doesn't accept those things, but we're letting the political process work it out instead of immediately--pardon the expression--jumping the gun. Yeah, I'm not gonna argue that there aren't a lot of pe
Even if you and your buddies are all Burt Gummers, what are your personal arsenals going to do against Apache helicopters, Abrams tanks, and A-10 Warthogs?
The same thing the insurgents in Iraq are doing. The U.S. military is excellent at conquest and abysmal at occupation.
Any local force capable of challenging the U.S. Military will simply be neutralized before they can challenge the U.S. Military.
No, they'd quite quickly form a difficult-to-detect underground, just like the insurgents have. It'd be guerilla warfare on a grand scale, and it's ludicrous to claim that it would somehow be impossible in the U.S. when it has worked just fine hundreds of times all over the world, up to and including today.
Fascism doesn't happen overnight, it happens gradually. Look at what the Bush administration has gotten away with based on the deaths of 3,000 some Americans: torture, warrantless spying, detentions with no trial, firing U.S. Attorneys and packing agencies with political cronies.
I'm quite aware of their track record. And just as fascism grows gradually, so too does resistance to it. What happened in Germany before WW2 is much less likely to happen here, for a variety of reasons (economy is much stronger here, population is much more heterogenous, land area is much larger, strong free speech, quite a lot of people agitating to keep the gov't honest, the recent midterm elections that stopped one group from having all the power, etc.).
Yes, of course it can get worse, and quite a lot of people are fighting -- with words and votes, so far -- to keep it from getting worse. As the saying goes, there are four boxes to use in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo.
However, they would have long been removed from any positions of real power or access to real resources.
All of them? Without error? I find that highly unlikely. Some of them would start out firmly on the bad guys' side, then have a crisis of conscience and decide to turn, but remain in their post undetected. There's also the issue that purging your ranks of people with strong ethical objections to fascism also tends to reduce your ranks' skillset, weakening your ability to continue with fascism.
And let's not get into the issues surrounding cult of personality, that the populace would likely never accept a suspension of the 22nd Amendment, fiendish nuke-detonating terrorists or not, etc.
I don't know why people who argue as you do always assume that the government has godlike knowledge and power; they're still a collection of fallible humans, and stronger, far more tyrannical foes have been brought down in the past. I also don't know why you think it's logical that because the government is too powerful to defeat, the citizens should therefore have more power taken away from them. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Speaking of Scott and Maye, why didn't the NRA freak the fuck out over their death/sentencing to death row?
How the hell would I know? I'm not an NRA member and don't pay attention to it.
Again, if it gets that bad and citizens get that angry, do you really think someone will stand up and say, "Hold on a minute: we can't revolt! The 2nd amendment was just repealed." From the crowd: "Awwww. Well, I guess it's time to go home then." Again, if things get that bad, what the government you're trying to overthrow says you can or can not do will be irrelevant at that point. Therefore, the sole reason claimed for the 2nd amendment to continue to exist is just silly.
Great, so everyone decides to break the law and get guns to fight back against the government -- except by that point the government already has control over gun production within the country and would be working hard to minimize any smuggled imports of weapons. It'd be an order of magnitude more difficult to get guns at that point, compared to if they'd been legal all along. And why make it illegal if everyone's going to ignore that law when the time comes?
As I said in my previous post, if civilians are armed, the government is less likely to become corrupt enough to require overthrow in the first place. Remember, governments should be afraid of their people, not the other way around;)
If your justification were instead along the lines of protecting your home against intruders, I'd buy that.
Protecting oneself against criminals is, of course, another justification for the 2nd Amendment. Of course, nothing requires that I choose only one reason for the 2nd to exist.:) I certainly believe that the failsafe argument and self-defense both apply.
But the whole "failsafe against the goverment" argument just makes no sense in this century.
You haven't yet successfully demonstrated why not. You didn't even address most of my points from the previous post.
You make several faulty assumptions in your (old, tired) "The government has nukes, you don't, therefore it's impossible to ever overthrow it" argument. In no particular order:
1. If the government gets enough out of control, then it's not going to be "you and a few hundred of your buddies," it's going to be "several hundred thousand, possibly several million angry and armed civilians."
2. You assume that "the government" is a monolithic hive-mind, rather than being an organization consisting of a few million individuals, many of whom would turn against the government if they thought it had become irretrievably corrupt.
3. You also assume that the armed forces would act as a single unit, that no one in it (not even high officers, who ARE trained to think independently, unlike the rank and file) would either openly rebel or secretly aid and abet civilian rebels.
4. The whole government simultaneously turning to the Dark Side is not the only circumstance in which civilians might rebel. Imagine a small town with a corrupt sheriff who likes to arrest people for things they didn't do. How much less likely is that to happen if the civilians are armed? An armed populace can not only overthrow the government, they can also prevent the government from becoming too corrupt.
5. Even if it were true that civilians couldn't overthrow the government, it doesn't follow that therefore civilians shouldn't be allowed to have guns.
For the record, I don't own any guns nor do I desire to own one. But I want to be able to get one if I think I'm going to need it.
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One year is too short a time for a lot of laws, especially ones that have been around a long time and have a high level of agreement -- it's a waste of effort to renew laws against murder, burglary, and arson every year.
For any law that passes, the sunset duration should be the subject of a separate vote, where each legislator picks a duration (from say 1 to 20 years), and they use the mean duration, rounded to the following January 1st. So if a bill is signed into law on June 15th 2007, and the sunset vote says 3.4 years, that adds to around November 2010, and would round up to January 1st 2011.
That way, even legislation which must pass RIGHT NOW may still need to be revisited soon if those who voted for it think that it might only be needed in the short term.
Not all legislation makes sense for sunset provisions, of course, like budget bills, which specify a one-time event anyway (they essentially have an implicit sunset).
Ironically, my belief that macro/microevolution were terms coined by creationists was from something I read years ago in the talk.origins archive :) But apparently I misunderstood or misread. Thanks for the clarification :)
Oh, it could be any number of reasons, but let's say there's a high volume of ground-dwelling predators who can't (or generally don't) climb trees.
As I understand it, they're only used because biologists these days so frequently find themselves responding to silly creationist claims ;) And really, "the distinction between what happens when two populations can interbreed vs. when they can" is pretty much covered by the term "speciation," isn't it?
Maybe "false" was as close as the poll let them get to "the Earth and Sun co-orbit their mutual barycenter" ;)
Not really, no. The terms didn't exist before creationists came up with them; scientists didn't bother with a distinction because there isn't a need for one.
Since you seem to be pretty convinced that you're right, though, then riddle me this: At what point does a change become macroevolution instead of microevolution? Imagine those stronger arms you speak of begin to have tiny, tiny little bony growths emerge from the back side. The growths don't really do any good for a few thousand years, though they do get longer and longer. Eventually they're long enough and solid enough that they're a defensive mechanism; anything attacking the creature from that side is likely to get jabbed with sharp bony spikes. (Keep in mind that their efficacy as defenses isn't consistent across the population, and grows slowly over thousands of years.)
Meanwhile, the area of skin where the bones erupted starts growing hairs to keep some exposed nerves warm. These hairs evolve to be pretty stiff because the bones, while sharp, are also fairly thin and tend to break off, and the hairs help keep the exposed break from getting too much dust and other crap on it. Over time the hairs grow longer and longer and form a membrane between them so as to further protect the bone stubs when the spurs break off.
Over the next many thousands of years, the hairs start turning into feathers because the creatures have migrated into a windier environment, and feathers keep the cold wind out better than hair. Meanwhile the bone spurs continue growing longer and thicker. The density of these bones is fairly low because the creatures tend to stick to trees, and being able to jump from branch to branch is easier if you're lighter. Also, there's another similar species nearby that has similar feathers but no bone spurs; predators have learned that creatures with feathers like that sometimes have sharp, painful bone spurs, and the spurless creatures are starting to out-compete the spurred ones, because they spend less biochemical energy growing the bone spurs. Some of the spurred creatures adapt by growing substantially longer and thicker spurs, the additional defense from which compensates for the extra energy the spurless creatures can spend on reproduction instead of defense.
The spurred creatures, by this point, have arms that stretch a fairly long span, thin membranes forming a wing-like structure extending back from the arm along the bony spurs. The ones with the longest, thickest, most developed structures find sometimes that they can escape from predators by leaping off a branch and gliding to the ground a distance away. After another several thousand years, they develop muscles that are good at raising the wings up and down quickly enough to provide a little list, letting them glide farther and farther.
As time goes on, the stronger, more evasive individuals develop the muscles enough to provide so much power that they can glide for miles, and eventually gain lift. Now, finally, after a couple hundred thousand years, they're flying.
So tell me: Where along that process did macroevolution occur, exactly? At what completely arbitrary point did microevolution become macroevolution? You might claim that macroevolution is what occurred between the beginning and the end (no wings -> wings), but so what? What use is that term? It doesn't really tell us anything. Macroevolution could then be applied to any large change. If a change as large as amoebae evolving into tigers over 3 billion years, or as small as tigers evolving wings, can both be called macroevolution, then the term is so broad as to be useless. You have to pick a point at which "microevolution" becomes "macroevolution" and any such point is arbitrary and, it turns out, useless.
It really bugs me when I hear people (usually creationists) use the term "evolutionist" as some kind of slur. And I finally figured out why:
It makes as much sense to describe me as an evolutionist as it does to describe me as a heliocentrist.
Think about it.
Pfft, everyone knows the best sort is random sort. Randomize the list. Is it sorted? If not, randomize it again! You'll hit it eventually!
Get off your ass and write them a letter. A real, honest-to-Godzilla ink-on-paper letter (feel free to write it on the computer and print it out, but whatever). Corporations pay orders of mangnitude more attention to paper letters than they do to email, for example.
Your one letter isn't likely to change anything by itself, and short of orchestrating a boycott and associated letter-writing campaign, it's the most you can do individually. But if enough people stop buying DVDs because of the stupid X, and tell the studios about it, they will change. It's not enough to hurt their bottom line; and you can't keep buying and bitch at them, because they'll ignore you. Vote with your wallet and tell them why.
I never said it was okay. I said it was unsurprising. Yeah, you could get revenge by killing the thugs, but wouldn't it have been a better solution to NOT fuck with them for 50 years in the first place?
Of course, at this point it's too late to undo the past, but once you get revenge on them, you can also stop dumping your garbage in other people's bedrooms in the future, which will reduce the future necessity to waste time, effort, and money on further revenge.
When you work for a gigantic media company, like I do (Viacom), there's quite frequently work-related reasons to be watching something on YouTube.
Your analogy is bullshit.
Try this instead:
There once was a person who had a nice house and a nice family. One day thugs showed up and bashed in through a back window and killed a child shouting that they did it because the nice people in the house left their garbage in the thugs' bedroom, followed the thugs around hassling them constantly, bullying all the employers in the city to only hire the thugs for below minimum wage (and no benefits), and had been doing so constantly for fifty years.
The neigbor across the street looked and said, "That sucks, but what did you expect?"
Like it or not, the only reason we have anything to fear from Islamic terrorists is because we've spent decades interfering with their politics. You can't fight an idea, but you can arrange things so that people don't have any motive to blow themselves up.
Months or years. Keep in mind that people used to communicate over long distances via hand-written letters, and that was the only option.
If you mean semi-realtime communication (sitting and waiting for an answer) most people won't put up with latencies longer than a minute or so. While you're waiting for a reply you can go do something else, and at that point, you might as well just be using email.
Dammit, man, use metric! How many football fields is that?
Pointy-Haired Programmers? :)
Driving fast because you're dealing with extreme circumstances (no safe place to pull over + ambulance in a hurry behind you) is quite different from driving fast all the time just because you know you can get away with it. No matter how good your training is, the results of mechanical failure at high speeds are catastrophic, and the longer you spend driving at high speeds, the more likely you are to get into a catastrophic crash, even if you're the greatest driver in the world. It's not legal for NASCAR drivers go 150 MPH in public just because they're highly trained.
Off-duty cops (heck, on-duty cops) who aren't in a particular hurry to get somewhere don't have any business driving excessively fast either. Sirens blaring, on your way to a crime scene? Go as fast as you like, we'll get out of your way. Patrolling, with no particular destination? Or just on your way somewhere for routine business? Go with the flow of traffic. I don't care how good your training is.
Computer science is fundamentally just applied mathematics. Computer science is as much a science as mathematics is, for whatever that's worth.
No argument about political "science," though. Not sure what to call it, since it's the study of politics. Political Theory? Politicology?
I guess eight would be a qubits would be a quite. Quite what, I'm not sure.
That... doesn't really make any sense. If they're sitting around waiting for signs of resistance so they can swoop in and blow it up, then 1) they're sitting around in a predictable location, like a base, which is a quite obvious target, 2) the "resistance" would bait them into wasting time and effort blowing up things that were inconsequential to the resistance, or worse, blowing up civilian targets and killing civilians who would increasingly turn against the government, inevitably leading to revolution.
Analogy, how dost thee fail? Let me count the ways:
1. The Germans were an invading force from another country. The hypothetical scenario of widespread fascist oppression by the U.S. government of the U.S. populace is markedly different.
2. France is a much smaller country than the U.S. Size matters.
3. For Chrissake, you're talking about the French. You don't think the same Americans who produced this godly military you speak of would be able to do better against it than the French?
Yeah, and quite a lot of people are up in arms and doing everything in their power to fight it down. When similar things happened in Nazi Germany, most of the population either knew nothing about it (because the information and press were violently suppressed) and those who did know cheered it on. Everybody Loved Hitler. Not so with Bush.
And what I said still applies. Some of your "lackeys" that you put into positions of power will eventually turn on you, and you're never going to be able to ferret them all out. Not all of them will turn in the same way; some will (consciously or otherwise) make subtle mistakes or misjudgements that weaken your ability to conduct fascism; some will secretly send information to the enemy to help them out; some will leak information to the public about the secret horrors committed by those in charge.
Sorry, what I meant was that it would reduce their ability to continue with fascism for very long, since as the incompetence rises the likelihood of overthrow increases.
Most of the populace doesn't accept those things, but we're letting the political process work it out instead of immediately--pardon the expression--jumping the gun. Yeah, I'm not gonna argue that there aren't a lot of pe
The same thing the insurgents in Iraq are doing. The U.S. military is excellent at conquest and abysmal at occupation.
No, they'd quite quickly form a difficult-to-detect underground, just like the insurgents have. It'd be guerilla warfare on a grand scale, and it's ludicrous to claim that it would somehow be impossible in the U.S. when it has worked just fine hundreds of times all over the world, up to and including today.
I'm quite aware of their track record. And just as fascism grows gradually, so too does resistance to it. What happened in Germany before WW2 is much less likely to happen here, for a variety of reasons (economy is much stronger here, population is much more heterogenous, land area is much larger, strong free speech, quite a lot of people agitating to keep the gov't honest, the recent midterm elections that stopped one group from having all the power, etc.).
Yes, of course it can get worse, and quite a lot of people are fighting -- with words and votes, so far -- to keep it from getting worse. As the saying goes, there are four boxes to use in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo.
All of them? Without error? I find that highly unlikely. Some of them would start out firmly on the bad guys' side, then have a crisis of conscience and decide to turn, but remain in their post undetected. There's also the issue that purging your ranks of people with strong ethical objections to fascism also tends to reduce your ranks' skillset, weakening your ability to continue with fascism.
And let's not get into the issues surrounding cult of personality, that the populace would likely never accept a suspension of the 22nd Amendment, fiendish nuke-detonating terrorists or not, etc.
I don't know why people who argue as you do always assume that the government has godlike knowledge and power; they're still a collection of fallible humans, and stronger, far more tyrannical foes have been brought down in the past. I also don't know why you think it's logical that because the government is too powerful to defeat, the citizens should therefore have more power taken away from them. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
How the hell would I know? I'm not an NRA member and don't pay attention to it.
Yeah, because heterosexuals are clearly incapable of performing anal sex or using crystal meth.
I'm not worried. At least, not until the Chinese build a massless online ID database.
Great, so everyone decides to break the law and get guns to fight back against the government -- except by that point the government already has control over gun production within the country and would be working hard to minimize any smuggled imports of weapons. It'd be an order of magnitude more difficult to get guns at that point, compared to if they'd been legal all along. And why make it illegal if everyone's going to ignore that law when the time comes?
As I said in my previous post, if civilians are armed, the government is less likely to become corrupt enough to require overthrow in the first place. Remember, governments should be afraid of their people, not the other way around
Protecting oneself against criminals is, of course, another justification for the 2nd Amendment. Of course, nothing requires that I choose only one reason for the 2nd to exist.
You haven't yet successfully demonstrated why not. You didn't even address most of my points from the previous post.
You make several faulty assumptions in your (old, tired) "The government has nukes, you don't, therefore it's impossible to ever overthrow it" argument. In no particular order:
1. If the government gets enough out of control, then it's not going to be "you and a few hundred of your buddies," it's going to be "several hundred thousand, possibly several million angry and armed civilians."
2. You assume that "the government" is a monolithic hive-mind, rather than being an organization consisting of a few million individuals, many of whom would turn against the government if they thought it had become irretrievably corrupt.
3. You also assume that the armed forces would act as a single unit, that no one in it (not even high officers, who ARE trained to think independently, unlike the rank and file) would either openly rebel or secretly aid and abet civilian rebels.
4. The whole government simultaneously turning to the Dark Side is not the only circumstance in which civilians might rebel. Imagine a small town with a corrupt sheriff who likes to arrest people for things they didn't do. How much less likely is that to happen if the civilians are armed? An armed populace can not only overthrow the government, they can also prevent the government from becoming too corrupt.
5. Even if it were true that civilians couldn't overthrow the government, it doesn't follow that therefore civilians shouldn't be allowed to have guns.
For the record, I don't own any guns nor do I desire to own one. But I want to be able to get one if I think I'm going to need it.