No, what he's saying is that if you make >$75K and you're whining about being asked to contribute +$2K, then you perhaps need a little more critical perspective because, get this, you're already quite rich in relative terms.
He's not expecting to be given extra earnings, he's saying you should count yourself lucky that you are making more, rather than making $40K or less instead of expecting sympathy from the majority of society because you're so hard done-by. As a more wealthy person you, by default, use and benefit more from society, so you, as the the more wealthy person, should foot more of the bill for it.
Don't like it? Want to keep all your money? As tired a cliche as it is, perhaps you should move the Somalia? That way you'll only ever have to pay for your own needs, such as the private police force you'll require to maintain the law and order that allows you to keep the money you make.
You do realize that the political systems in Europe now and the political systems in Europe back in 1776 have not a lot to do with each other, right?
And yes, Europe's politics are better than America's. Much better. And yes, it's not just because they're Left, but because they're less authoritarian. The idea of a non-authoritarian party, and certainly a non-authoritarian leftist party, is alien to American political discourse.
It's not a matter of belief, it's a matter of refinement of the theory.
Scientists don't "believe" in the big bang or evolution, but they don't automatically revert back to Intelligent Design just because someone found out that, oh, I don't know, there's two extra types of quark or something.
I know that many "skeptics" desperately want to portray this as a black or white "religious" issue because it allows a convenient out. Of course they're adjusting the theory to fit the data because that's how science actually works.
Adobe's shitty PDF specification that allows embedded fonts to be stored in documents
There's nothing wrong with this. The intent of PDF is to make a document viewable on every platform in the same way and you can't do that without either embedding fonts or re-rendering fonts as outline drawings (which wastes a lot of space, makes text editing and markup impossible, and increases complexity).
The funny, or sad, thing is that people who want to discredit the whole theory will see things like this as "proof" that the whole theory is wrong and engage in the worst kind of TV-legal-drama-courtroom histrionics, failing to understand (or willfully ignoring) that this is how science works.
The refinement of theory isn't like Perry Mason.
Unfortunately, the latter makes better PR than the former.
Did you purposefully ignore the "First Nations" part of my comment about Canada because it made it easier to ridicule me, or because it's convenient to ignore the state of the poor in the US or Canada when arguing against socialism.
I didn't say Cuba was any great shakes, but compared to the institutionalized poor here (I'm Canadian) they're doing very well.
Actually, all of those countries do validate his point. As would Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama or Guatemala. Every single one of them has a lower standard of living than Cuba. Every. Single. One.
Hell, so do First Nations people in much of Canada. Or any number of American urban ghettoes.
Cuba isn't perfect by a long shot, but by Central American standards it's a fucking paradise for it's average citizenry.
It's not decades: the US still keeps it's boot on Cuba's proverbial neck.
Recall Helms-Burton, which was passed a little more than a decade ago. It's one of the reasons why Cuba cannot get so much as a leg up: the US will penalize, quite heavily, any company that does business in Cuba and makes use of pre-revolution assets.
Just for the record, this means just about anything in Cuba: agriculture, technology, people, anything. No corporation can do business in Cuba without risking serious penalties if they also wish to do business in the United States. This means that no one can open a mine, export sugar, fruit or tobacco, operate in a pre-1960 building, etc, etc.
It certainly means that American telcos can't run a pipe from Florida or Texas undersea. As a result, Cuban connectivity, post-Soviet, requires traffic to take backwater paths halfway around the planet via rinky-dink companies who are not and will never operate in the US.
So how, exactly, is Cuba ever supposed to do better if it can't sell so much as a sugar cube to the United States?
Interesting, isn't it, how the US will bend over backwards to do business in China or Russia, or with any number of right-wing despots all over the world, all of whom have far worse human rights records, claiming that "trade will set them free!" but get all "Think of the poor oppressed citizenry" when it comes to Cuba. You'd never think that Florida was a swing state and that both parties fall over themselves to cater to a bunch of noisy expats, the most powerful and noisy of whom were equally nasty people, but under Bautista instead.
Now, all this said, the Cuban government would probably filter and snoop on their citizen's internet traffic (they probably do now, and it's probably easy, considering the bandwidth to the whole country is exceeded by that offered to some condos in New York), but how is this different from bastions of western democracy like, oh, Australia or the UK. Or to use a less extreme example, China.
Going to a chiropractor for physical problems is a bat shit crazy thing to do
This depends highly on the country you're in. In Canada and, I think, Australia is a valid medical profession and it's practitioners are generally reasonable people who operate under sound principles. There are a few "batshit" old-schoolers still in the system, but the more recent grads (say, the last 10-15 years) are no more or less trustworthy than a physiotherapist and no "wackier" than a schooled naturopath. They cannot and will not, for example, say they're able to treat cancer or colds; they will, however, be able to help with neck, back and hip pain.
In the US, it's a mixed bag. In the UK, it's full-bore quackery: you can tell because, in the UK, they do make some fairly outrageous claims.
The problem with Ubuntu's LTS releases is, well, sometimes they throw in stuff that's barely ready for a "normal" release, let alone long-term. 8.04 saw the first cut at PulseAudio, for example, which wasn't even close to ready for prime-time.
As a result, things that are broken often stay broken. Sure, you can get unsupported backports or PPAs, but you shouldn't have to in a stability-first endeavour like the LTS releases.
This is not a bad idea, but Equallogic doesn't really have product offerings at the level. They might be able to, eventually, but it would take time to do and more time to build the reputation/
That said, commoditization of storage may make 3PAR et al irrelevant. It's getting progressively more difficult to justify the cost of first-tier stuff when Equallogic et al give you almost as much performance and reliability for a hell of a lot less money. You have to really need the features the more advanced arrays offer to ignore the price:performance/storage ratio that the next tier down offers.
That's why HP bought Lefthand: because their MSA arrays were being shown up rather badly.
Truly cringe-worthy liberals don't get enough funding to be prominent.
If you crazy and right wing, there's always certain slices of the population (eg, Big Religion and some parts of Big Business) who will underwrite you. Crazy left-wingers get support by... who again? You might get a few bucks from the Marxist-Leninist Daily and perhaps corkboard space at the local health food store, but there's just not enough money on the extreme left to raise someone to Beck's level.
Or, to put it another way: The left-wing demagogue gets airtime on college radio and open mic night at the artists' cafe; the right-wing demagogue gets airtime on Fox and at churches whose congregations runs in the thousands and tithe as much as the GDP of some African nations.
I'm not American, hence the reason I didn't say "Republican". Not that it matters in the US: the political choices run the gamut from the Right to the extreme Right anyways.
That said, it's pretty safe to make such an assumption. There aren't many actual libertarians, but a heck of a lot of greedy, curtain-twitching, closet-authoritarians in the most countries' political right.
If you want to annoy a right winger, ask them why we don't privatize the military. They'll go on at length about all the horrible things government does, and how much better it would be if they didn't---except for the military. Funny how the idea of government educating people, or healing people, or employing people, or connecting people to the internet (in this case) is evil and wrong and immoral, but paying and arming a huge body of men and women for the express purposes of maiming, killing and/or oppressing people is perfectly ok by them.
They'll also fail to notice how, unlike education or health care, the military gets funded well, regularly and uniformly at the federal level rather than through some horrific, balkanized, hamstrung funding structure. It's interesting how they do a good job, then, that the military does considering it's so well funded.
I'm a full socialist, and I think the military does deserve the funding it gets, but I find the hypocrisy to be just a little bit galling.
Google products end up in two distinct buckets: applications that are designed for the way people work, and applications designed for the way one or two propellerheads at Google work.
Gmail, Search, Maps, Chrome and possibly Android and Picasa fall into the former. Youtube and Postini do as well, even though they're not-invented-here
Apps (as a collaboration system), Wave, Bookmarks, Reader and Bookmarks fall into the latter. ChromeOS might do the same.
Wave's problem is that no one could really explain how to use it in a fashion people could understand: it solved an itch of someone's at Google, but no one was able to effective explain how to use it. I've found out more from reading Slashdot comments about how it could be used than by reviewing any of the material Google provided. That it was kind of glitchy is just icing on the cake. With some effort it could have gained acceptance, but it would have required the propellerheads to try and exhibit some empathy. Wave forced me to say "Ok, now what?" way, way too often.
In Apps it's perversely hard to share documents. You set up a shared workspace; you should be able to upload documents and have everyone see them, except that you can't. You have to explicitly share it with everyone, including users you provision later and it doesn't even show up search results. You can't even tag documents in Apps, despite the sucess of tagging in Gmail and elsewhere. Again, I ended up saying "Ok, now what?" and wondering if Apps developers ever deal with real users. That the thread in Groups about this failing is months old and pages long says everything, really.
Ditto Bookmarks. You should be able to search, tag and sync with Chrome. Except you can't. Reader I've never been able to figure out. I'm pretty sure Video would be in this boat had Google not bought Youtube, because it's still very strange. Buzz might go this route as well; it's a bit early to say.
Compare this to Search, Gmail or Maps, which just work and are used, effortlessly, by millions. Even when features are added, they're usually added in a sane, helpful way. This is where Google falls short, and where Apple usually does not: Apple doesn't, leave the end user hanging and wondering what the hell to try next. It's also a very similar feeling I get from Nokia's offerings: that someone is in love with the technology, but far too arrogant and self-centered to admit to it's failings and/or that the software is developed to scratch one person's itch and left to rot.
That's bizarre. I'm a Rogers customer as well and I'm pretty sure that BIS/BES service SIMs won't work in a non-Blackberry device ever. I'll give this a try.
I'm almost certain you cannot swap a SIM provisioned with BlackBerry data services into a non-BlackBerry phone and get data; certainly if your company has a BES. And if they're hardcore about security, they probably have BES.
What you could do is get a dual-SIM case for your iPhone. They tend to be clunky, though.
Other western nations have more government involvement in schools and don't see any of this nonsense. This is, if anything, the result of too little government involvement, especially at a high level: education, instead of being handled by professionals at a high level, is administered by local curtain twitchers with an agenda and little else.
This is what happens when you let populism stomp all over everything, and it's going to get worse as opportunistic politicians try to wield populist ignorance for their own end.
I'm not trying prove a solution, I'm trying to highlight that gun ownership is unnecessary for personal safety. Heck, I wasn't the one who brought it up: you used the example of Russia and Finland as a pro-gun counterexample, ignoring that Finland's lack of crime has everything to do with effective social programs.
You're missing the point: never mind that the all of those countries are less "armed" than the United States, and all have lower violent crime rates; they all have social programs that prevent violent crime from becoming epidemic.
Most Slashdot threads, and many pro-gun anecdotes, use the personal safety angle. The debate is raging on this very issue, and yet guns are, at best, a band-aid solution.
You're ignoring my core point entirely because I've dared criticize that fallacy. I don't care if you arm yourself to the teeth or not, but it's hypocritical in the extreme for gun advocates to use the personal safety angle and completely ignore, or worse, scorn, social programs in the first place.
It's a sick society that won't spend a dime to address the causes of crime but gleefully encourages, if not glorifies, defensive murder.
Yes, it's just you. The rest of us in the developed world actually have less government nonsense to deal with (and the added bonus of less corporate nonsense atop that), while at the same time getting better quality of care.
This fear of government involvement is mystifying, considering the counterexamples of every other western democracy. But then, the same people who are against government involvement in health care seem to have no problem with the government employing, training and equipping a military force, which in truth is far more frightening.
But perhaps that's because the rest of the developed world hasn't been so badly hoodwinked by the corporations in the US who make very good money off of poor healthcare and a well-equipped military.
Crime and gun ownership, in most western nations (Russia is not in this category) work the way I noted. Finland is an exception for obvious reasons, not the rule.
Everyone else (Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc, etc) all have lower rates of violent crime and yet less gun ownership.
I'm not condemning guns, I'm condemning the short-sighted viewpoint that views gun ownership as a solution to violent crime. Crime is not a symptom of a lack of gun ownership, it's a symptom of poor social support. Whenever someone brings up gun ownership in Slashdot, posters from the whole rest of the world sit back in horror while Americans discuss the virtue of blowing people away and never, ever discuss the actual cause of the problem.
It's simply an interesting correlation that the same kind of reactionary, testosterone-fueled idiots or hypocrites (take your pick) are for gun proliferation as well as against doing anything proactively to solve the real cause of violent crime.
As opposed to the total freedom you enjoy in the US, provided you stick to free speech zones, don't mind having your phone lines wiretapped and/or be subject to laws written for the benefit of corporations, rather than people.
Many of those "socialistic governments" actually manage to be more "free" than the US. Fascinating, isn't it, how the world doesn't fit into neat little ideological boxes.
As for health care, you forgot the proviso "if you have money". As in, the American system is the best in the world if you have money. Rich Canadians can go to the US to get an MRI in a day; where to poor and middle-class Americans go? Canada?
Arming everyone is a very American solution to the problem. Somehow, the whole rest of the western world manages to not only have less violent crime, but also less private gun ownership, much like the rest of the world manages to spend less on health care and get better quality of service, or spend less on education but score better.
Perhaps the Open Carry folk could try and think a little bit harder and try to address the epidemic poverty, horrible education and nonsensical drug policy instead of pouring more gasoline on the fire?
I'm reminded of the "cheese theory" of American socialism. In France, the government has significant regulations about how, where and under what label cheese can be made. As a result, French cheese is very good and not at all expensive. In the US, this kind of thing wouldn't fly, and the market would do better anyway, and socialism is teh evilz, but we do need something for the absolute poor, and thus we have Government Cheese, which is vile.
Slashdot Mirror
No, what he's saying is that if you make >$75K and you're whining about being asked to contribute +$2K, then you perhaps need a little more critical perspective because, get this, you're already quite rich in relative terms.
He's not expecting to be given extra earnings, he's saying you should count yourself lucky that you are making more, rather than making $40K or less instead of expecting sympathy from the majority of society because you're so hard done-by. As a more wealthy person you, by default, use and benefit more from society, so you, as the the more wealthy person, should foot more of the bill for it.
Don't like it? Want to keep all your money? As tired a cliche as it is, perhaps you should move the Somalia? That way you'll only ever have to pay for your own needs, such as the private police force you'll require to maintain the law and order that allows you to keep the money you make.
You do realize that the political systems in Europe now and the political systems in Europe back in 1776 have not a lot to do with each other, right?
And yes, Europe's politics are better than America's. Much better. And yes, it's not just because they're Left, but because they're less authoritarian. The idea of a non-authoritarian party, and certainly a non-authoritarian leftist party, is alien to American political discourse.
Get off my lawn?
It's not a matter of belief, it's a matter of refinement of the theory.
Scientists don't "believe" in the big bang or evolution, but they don't automatically revert back to Intelligent Design just because someone found out that, oh, I don't know, there's two extra types of quark or something.
I know that many "skeptics" desperately want to portray this as a black or white "religious" issue because it allows a convenient out. Of course they're adjusting the theory to fit the data because that's how science actually works.
Adobe's shitty PDF specification that allows embedded fonts to be stored in documents
There's nothing wrong with this. The intent of PDF is to make a document viewable on every platform in the same way and you can't do that without either embedding fonts or re-rendering fonts as outline drawings (which wastes a lot of space, makes text editing and markup impossible, and increases complexity).
The funny, or sad, thing is that people who want to discredit the whole theory will see things like this as "proof" that the whole theory is wrong and engage in the worst kind of TV-legal-drama-courtroom histrionics, failing to understand (or willfully ignoring) that this is how science works.
The refinement of theory isn't like Perry Mason.
Unfortunately, the latter makes better PR than the former.
Did you purposefully ignore the "First Nations" part of my comment about Canada because it made it easier to ridicule me, or because it's convenient to ignore the state of the poor in the US or Canada when arguing against socialism.
I didn't say Cuba was any great shakes, but compared to the institutionalized poor here (I'm Canadian) they're doing very well.
Actually, all of those countries do validate his point. As would Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama or Guatemala. Every single one of them has a lower standard of living than Cuba. Every. Single. One.
Hell, so do First Nations people in much of Canada. Or any number of American urban ghettoes.
Cuba isn't perfect by a long shot, but by Central American standards it's a fucking paradise for it's average citizenry.
They, and Costa Rica, are two of the most socially and physically healthy societies in Central America.
Coincidentally, Cuba and Costa Rica are also the two countries that have suffered the least American meddling in the past half-century.
It's not decades: the US still keeps it's boot on Cuba's proverbial neck.
Recall Helms-Burton, which was passed a little more than a decade ago. It's one of the reasons why Cuba cannot get so much as a leg up: the US will penalize, quite heavily, any company that does business in Cuba and makes use of pre-revolution assets.
Just for the record, this means just about anything in Cuba: agriculture, technology, people, anything. No corporation can do business in Cuba without risking serious penalties if they also wish to do business in the United States. This means that no one can open a mine, export sugar, fruit or tobacco, operate in a pre-1960 building, etc, etc.
It certainly means that American telcos can't run a pipe from Florida or Texas undersea. As a result, Cuban connectivity, post-Soviet, requires traffic to take backwater paths halfway around the planet via rinky-dink companies who are not and will never operate in the US.
So how, exactly, is Cuba ever supposed to do better if it can't sell so much as a sugar cube to the United States?
Interesting, isn't it, how the US will bend over backwards to do business in China or Russia, or with any number of right-wing despots all over the world, all of whom have far worse human rights records, claiming that "trade will set them free!" but get all "Think of the poor oppressed citizenry" when it comes to Cuba. You'd never think that Florida was a swing state and that both parties fall over themselves to cater to a bunch of noisy expats, the most powerful and noisy of whom were equally nasty people, but under Bautista instead.
Now, all this said, the Cuban government would probably filter and snoop on their citizen's internet traffic (they probably do now, and it's probably easy, considering the bandwidth to the whole country is exceeded by that offered to some condos in New York), but how is this different from bastions of western democracy like, oh, Australia or the UK. Or to use a less extreme example, China.
This depends highly on the country you're in. In Canada and, I think, Australia is a valid medical profession and it's practitioners are generally reasonable people who operate under sound principles. There are a few "batshit" old-schoolers still in the system, but the more recent grads (say, the last 10-15 years) are no more or less trustworthy than a physiotherapist and no "wackier" than a schooled naturopath. They cannot and will not, for example, say they're able to treat cancer or colds; they will, however, be able to help with neck, back and hip pain.
In the US, it's a mixed bag. In the UK, it's full-bore quackery: you can tell because, in the UK, they do make some fairly outrageous claims.
The problem with Ubuntu's LTS releases is, well, sometimes they throw in stuff that's barely ready for a "normal" release, let alone long-term. 8.04 saw the first cut at PulseAudio, for example, which wasn't even close to ready for prime-time.
As a result, things that are broken often stay broken. Sure, you can get unsupported backports or PPAs, but you shouldn't have to in a stability-first endeavour like the LTS releases.
This is not a bad idea, but Equallogic doesn't really have product offerings at the level. They might be able to, eventually, but it would take time to do and more time to build the reputation/
That said, commoditization of storage may make 3PAR et al irrelevant. It's getting progressively more difficult to justify the cost of first-tier stuff when Equallogic et al give you almost as much performance and reliability for a hell of a lot less money. You have to really need the features the more advanced arrays offer to ignore the price:performance/storage ratio that the next tier down offers.
That's why HP bought Lefthand: because their MSA arrays were being shown up rather badly.
And yes, Equallogic's gear really is very good.
Truly cringe-worthy liberals don't get enough funding to be prominent.
If you crazy and right wing, there's always certain slices of the population (eg, Big Religion and some parts of Big Business) who will underwrite you. Crazy left-wingers get support by... who again? You might get a few bucks from the Marxist-Leninist Daily and perhaps corkboard space at the local health food store, but there's just not enough money on the extreme left to raise someone to Beck's level.
Or, to put it another way: The left-wing demagogue gets airtime on college radio and open mic night at the artists' cafe; the right-wing demagogue gets airtime on Fox and at churches whose congregations runs in the thousands and tithe as much as the GDP of some African nations.
I'm not American, hence the reason I didn't say "Republican". Not that it matters in the US: the political choices run the gamut from the Right to the extreme Right anyways.
That said, it's pretty safe to make such an assumption. There aren't many actual libertarians, but a heck of a lot of greedy, curtain-twitching, closet-authoritarians in the most countries' political right.
If you want to annoy a right winger, ask them why we don't privatize the military. They'll go on at length about all the horrible things government does, and how much better it would be if they didn't---except for the military. Funny how the idea of government educating people, or healing people, or employing people, or connecting people to the internet (in this case) is evil and wrong and immoral, but paying and arming a huge body of men and women for the express purposes of maiming, killing and/or oppressing people is perfectly ok by them.
They'll also fail to notice how, unlike education or health care, the military gets funded well, regularly and uniformly at the federal level rather than through some horrific, balkanized, hamstrung funding structure. It's interesting how they do a good job, then, that the military does considering it's so well funded.
I'm a full socialist, and I think the military does deserve the funding it gets, but I find the hypocrisy to be just a little bit galling.
Google products end up in two distinct buckets: applications that are designed for the way people work, and applications designed for the way one or two propellerheads at Google work.
Gmail, Search, Maps, Chrome and possibly Android and Picasa fall into the former. Youtube and Postini do as well, even though they're not-invented-here
Apps (as a collaboration system), Wave, Bookmarks, Reader and Bookmarks fall into the latter. ChromeOS might do the same.
Wave's problem is that no one could really explain how to use it in a fashion people could understand: it solved an itch of someone's at Google, but no one was able to effective explain how to use it. I've found out more from reading Slashdot comments about how it could be used than by reviewing any of the material Google provided. That it was kind of glitchy is just icing on the cake. With some effort it could have gained acceptance, but it would have required the propellerheads to try and exhibit some empathy. Wave forced me to say "Ok, now what?" way, way too often.
In Apps it's perversely hard to share documents. You set up a shared workspace; you should be able to upload documents and have everyone see them, except that you can't. You have to explicitly share it with everyone, including users you provision later and it doesn't even show up search results. You can't even tag documents in Apps, despite the sucess of tagging in Gmail and elsewhere. Again, I ended up saying "Ok, now what?" and wondering if Apps developers ever deal with real users. That the thread in Groups about this failing is months old and pages long says everything, really.
Ditto Bookmarks. You should be able to search, tag and sync with Chrome. Except you can't. Reader I've never been able to figure out. I'm pretty sure Video would be in this boat had Google not bought Youtube, because it's still very strange. Buzz might go this route as well; it's a bit early to say.
Compare this to Search, Gmail or Maps, which just work and are used, effortlessly, by millions. Even when features are added, they're usually added in a sane, helpful way. This is where Google falls short, and where Apple usually does not: Apple doesn't, leave the end user hanging and wondering what the hell to try next. It's also a very similar feeling I get from Nokia's offerings: that someone is in love with the technology, but far too arrogant and self-centered to admit to it's failings and/or that the software is developed to scratch one person's itch and left to rot.
That's bizarre. I'm a Rogers customer as well and I'm pretty sure that BIS/BES service SIMs won't work in a non-Blackberry device ever. I'll give this a try.
I'm almost certain you cannot swap a SIM provisioned with BlackBerry data services into a non-BlackBerry phone and get data; certainly if your company has a BES. And if they're hardcore about security, they probably have BES.
What you could do is get a dual-SIM case for your iPhone. They tend to be clunky, though.
Other western nations have more government involvement in schools and don't see any of this nonsense. This is, if anything, the result of too little government involvement, especially at a high level: education, instead of being handled by professionals at a high level, is administered by local curtain twitchers with an agenda and little else.
This is what happens when you let populism stomp all over everything, and it's going to get worse as opportunistic politicians try to wield populist ignorance for their own end.
I'm not trying prove a solution, I'm trying to highlight that gun ownership is unnecessary for personal safety. Heck, I wasn't the one who brought it up: you used the example of Russia and Finland as a pro-gun counterexample, ignoring that Finland's lack of crime has everything to do with effective social programs.
You're missing the point: never mind that the all of those countries are less "armed" than the United States, and all have lower violent crime rates; they all have social programs that prevent violent crime from becoming epidemic.
Most Slashdot threads, and many pro-gun anecdotes, use the personal safety angle. The debate is raging on this very issue, and yet guns are, at best, a band-aid solution.
You're ignoring my core point entirely because I've dared criticize that fallacy. I don't care if you arm yourself to the teeth or not, but it's hypocritical in the extreme for gun advocates to use the personal safety angle and completely ignore, or worse, scorn, social programs in the first place.
It's a sick society that won't spend a dime to address the causes of crime but gleefully encourages, if not glorifies, defensive murder.
Yes, it's just you. The rest of us in the developed world actually have less government nonsense to deal with (and the added bonus of less corporate nonsense atop that), while at the same time getting better quality of care.
This fear of government involvement is mystifying, considering the counterexamples of every other western democracy. But then, the same people who are against government involvement in health care seem to have no problem with the government employing, training and equipping a military force, which in truth is far more frightening.
But perhaps that's because the rest of the developed world hasn't been so badly hoodwinked by the corporations in the US who make very good money off of poor healthcare and a well-equipped military.
Crime and gun ownership, in most western nations (Russia is not in this category) work the way I noted. Finland is an exception for obvious reasons, not the rule.
Everyone else (Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc, etc) all have lower rates of violent crime and yet less gun ownership.
I'm not condemning guns, I'm condemning the short-sighted viewpoint that views gun ownership as a solution to violent crime. Crime is not a symptom of a lack of gun ownership, it's a symptom of poor social support. Whenever someone brings up gun ownership in Slashdot, posters from the whole rest of the world sit back in horror while Americans discuss the virtue of blowing people away and never, ever discuss the actual cause of the problem.
It's simply an interesting correlation that the same kind of reactionary, testosterone-fueled idiots or hypocrites (take your pick) are for gun proliferation as well as against doing anything proactively to solve the real cause of violent crime.
As opposed to the total freedom you enjoy in the US, provided you stick to free speech zones, don't mind having your phone lines wiretapped and/or be subject to laws written for the benefit of corporations, rather than people.
Many of those "socialistic governments" actually manage to be more "free" than the US. Fascinating, isn't it, how the world doesn't fit into neat little ideological boxes.
As for health care, you forgot the proviso "if you have money". As in, the American system is the best in the world if you have money. Rich Canadians can go to the US to get an MRI in a day; where to poor and middle-class Americans go? Canada?
Arming everyone is a very American solution to the problem. Somehow, the whole rest of the western world manages to not only have less violent crime, but also less private gun ownership, much like the rest of the world manages to spend less on health care and get better quality of service, or spend less on education but score better.
Perhaps the Open Carry folk could try and think a little bit harder and try to address the epidemic poverty, horrible education and nonsensical drug policy instead of pouring more gasoline on the fire?
I'm reminded of the "cheese theory" of American socialism. In France, the government has significant regulations about how, where and under what label cheese can be made. As a result, French cheese is very good and not at all expensive. In the US, this kind of thing wouldn't fly, and the market would do better anyway, and socialism is teh evilz, but we do need something for the absolute poor, and thus we have Government Cheese, which is vile.