Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Zeropoint]

Lord Liaden, thanks for trying to keep things civil and not intending to offend.

 

Quote

(Although I admit I'm still have trouble seeing how the examples you gave aren't just minor variations on the same use, shooting at inanimate targets rather than animate ones. But that's a nitpick.)

 

I don't understand how you can have trouble seeing that a fun, friendly sporting activity where everyone goes home with all their parts intact is very different from deliberately killing people. It's always possible that we're having a massive failure of communication here and not talking about the same things. However, it's hard for me to avoid interpreting statements like that in an uncharitable light. What am I missing here?

[DasBroot]

I have to agree with that.  Almost any piece of sporting equipment  can be dangerous when used out of context: bowling balls, darts, ice skates, baseball bats - three of those things could kill in a single well placed hit and the other would still suck to be attacked with.

 

Shooting a gun well takes no less skill than any other sport or recreational activity and deserves such recognition.  Yes, it's also much more commonly used as a weapon than the above examples and that is why it is, and must be, more tightly regulated - but  this always has and always will boil down to one thing:

 

Intent.

 

As gun laws tighten I believe we will see more and more alternative weapons used - like the upswing in vehicular use.

 

Not everyone can get a gun without a background check (if the system worked properly - we all know it's not perfect) but everyone can get a car.  We're lucky one hasn't been used in the perfect context yet - I'm not looking forward to a day when someone plows a rig into an air show crowd or something.

[Ranxerox]

You do know that in first world countries with strong gun laws there are far fewer murders than here in the US, despite the fact that they still have cars, right?

[Sociotard]

But do they have fewer murders because they have fewer guns, or do they have fewer guns because there are fewer murders (i.e., people have less motive to get their own protection) (something I idly wondered the other day)

[Hermit]

I would love to see stats on how much mental health care is prioritized in each 1st world nation and see how that relates if at all to murder rates.

 

 

[Ranxerox]

 

19 minutes ago, Sociotard said:

But do they have fewer murders because they have fewer guns, or do they have fewer guns because there are fewer murders (i.e., people have less motive to get their own protection) (something I idly wondered the other day)

 

The former.  The guns aren't absent because everybody felt so safe that they weren't buy them.  The guns are absent because they put serious restrictions on gun ownership.  Now, it is very possible and even probable, that because US citizens live in a land with a lot guns and gun violence, they have a stronger desire for the protection that guns offer.   Still, make no mistake, the reason we have so many murders is because we have so many guns. Not the other way around.

 

International Comparison Of Mass Shootings

 

The above linked article is imperfect that it focuses specifically on mass shootings and not other types of murders.  However, it is still informative with regard to other theorized causes of US gun violence and why they don't stack up.

[Pattern Ghost]

11 minutes ago, Ranxerox said:

The above linked article is

 

. . . from a completely unbiased source.

 

Sorry, I can't take anything from the NYT on the subject without a massive grain of salt.

 

 

 

 

[Sociotard]

4 hours ago, Ranxerox said:

 

 

The former.  The guns aren't absent because everybody felt so safe that they weren't buy them.  The guns are absent because they put serious restrictions on gun ownership.  

Ah, but those are democracies. Did the people have the government take away guns to make them safer, or did they let the government take the guns because they felt safe enough.

 

For example, Australia had a homicide rate an order of magnitude smaller than that of the United States BEFORE the 1996 tightening of gun laws

[Old Man]

[megaplayboy]

Seems like Republicans are willing to let a LOT of things slide lately--pedophile Senate candidates, Nazis with tiki torches, occasional light treason committed by presidents--in the name of holding power/cutting taxes/sticking it to liberals.  I don't particularly lump anyone here in with all that, though.  Nihilism is an ethos, I guess, but I'm not sure it's a great path forward for one of the two major political parties in this country.  

[Lectryk]

1 hour ago, megaplayboy said:

.... but I'm not sure it's a great path forward for one of the two major political parties in this country.  

 

And the Democratic party message is more inspiring and hopeful?  I think both parties lost their respective ways forward a long time ago when they started to pander to their respective special interest groups, and lost focus on the general health of the nation.

[Old Man]

2 hours ago, eyocum said:

 

And the Democratic party message is more inspiring and hopeful?  I think both parties lost their respective ways forward a long time ago when they started to pander to their respective special interest groups, and lost focus on the general health of the nation.

 

Compared to the opposition party acceptance of Naziism, child molestation, and denying healthcare to children in order to pay for tax giveaways to the ultra rich?  Yeah, the Democratic message is absolutely better, regardless of how poorly presented it is.

[Tech priest support]

This kinf of sums up my view on most trump voters. All they cared about was giving the finger to the "libtards". 

[Tech priest support]

BTW here's a long, dry  but interesting  article on america's gradual divorce from reality. It starts out as a screed against the 60's left but goes on to show how the right appropriated the left's  disdain for empiric data and took it to new levels. So it fairly hits both sides fairly dispassionately.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/

 

My only real point of contention with the article is how it assumes America's drift away from sanity began solely in  1962. I would point out that the beginnings of America's slide to insanity began with the cold war hysteria and "commie paranoia" of the 1950's. Which the right lead.

 

[Doc Democracy]

Looking from the outside, I am not sure this is something the parties can fix.  I can see American folk, all of whom have more in common than they have that separates them, idly castigating the other half of the nation.  It is like the experiment they did separating kids into blues and greens, purely at random.

 

i can see us taking the same path in the UK, where large swathes of the country see no circumstance under which they could see themselves voting for the "other side".  I detect it in myself.

 

The initial gains for the parties are soon lost when those people don't want to vote for "their" side and "can't" vote for the "other" side.  Where do they go?  They become disillusioned with politics in general and disengage.

 

Politics therefore operates in a smaller and smaller pool of extremities but the power remains there because that is how it has been set up.  People then begin to feel politicians have no legitimacy as they pander more to their core group and engage less with the country as a whole.

 

they also look at the past through the lens of the present, attributing failures and successes to the right or left, even when those terms no longer have anything approaching the meanings they did when they were attributed.

 

It is a mess.  

 

I have no magic solutions and no actual hope that any will emerge before things become much worse....

 

Doc. :-(

[CrosshairCollie]

12 hours ago, Old Man said:

 

Compared to the opposition party acceptance of Naziism, child molestation, and denying healthcare to children in order to pay for tax giveaways to the ultra rich?

 

And don't forget 'treating women like incubators on legs' and bigotry against the LBGT populace.  Oh, and erosion of the wall of separation between church and state.  If you're not white, rich, straight, male, and christian, voting Republican is voting against your own best interests, as far as I'm concerned.

[CrosshairCollie]

In the interests of being fair ... if Moore was after teenagers, then technically that's ephebophilia, not pedophilia.  Still awful, still illegal, still disgusting, of course, and if true, he should get castrated via a pair of rusty hedge clippers for it, then his testicles shoved up his nose.

[Old Man]

[Cancer]

I'm still holding out for Giant Meteor, myself.

[Lord Liaden]

On 11/10/2017 at 4:01 AM, Zeropoint said:

Lord Liaden, thanks for trying to keep things civil and not intending to offend.

 

 

I don't understand how you can have trouble seeing that a fun, friendly sporting activity where everyone goes home with all their parts intact is very different from deliberately killing people. It's always possible that we're having a massive failure of communication here and not talking about the same things. However, it's hard for me to avoid interpreting statements like that in an uncharitable light. What am I missing here?

 

Of course it's very different. I'm not equating the intent behind those activities at all. If that's all that guns were ever intended for, then I would certainly put them in the same category as baseball bats or cars, as objects which can be twisted from their intended use in certain circumstances, to make them deadly weapons. But guns were created and designed, first and foremost, to kill. They're the most efficient killers that mankind has ever devised. At various times I've researched quite a few firearms, out of curiosity. Their specifications, their comparisons, the discussions of their relative utility, always refer back to stopping power, penetration, energy delivered to a target, effective lethal range, tissue damage done to a target. That's what they were made to do. That's what most of them are expected to be used for. Not for competitive accuracy meets, not for recreational target shooting, not to harmlessly blow off some steam.

 

Things that kill have their role to play in this world. Sometimes they're absolutely necessary for the greater good. But to broadly categorize their use as "fun and friendly," to equate them with violence done with objects not meant to kill, might, to use your expression, strike me as a little disingenuous. I believe it's an attitude that, unintentionally, contributes -- not causes, contributes -- to a wider societal lack of treating guns with the caution and responsibility they deserve. But I don't believe that's what you meant at all. I believe we're simply looking at the situation from different perspectives.

 

And I hope we can now agree on that, and let this topic come to rest.

[CrosshairCollie]

According to a poll, 29% of Alabama voters say that the child molestation allegations against Roy Moore make them MORE LIKELY to vote for him.

 

WT actual F, Alabama?

[Lord Liaden]

I've noticed many online assertions that the accusations against Moore are a politically-motivated railroad job, including by the President himself. That may motivate voters who buy that position without question to try to defend Moore with their ballots.

[CrosshairCollie]

Well, of course the p*ssy-grabber-in-chief is going to say that.

 

I remember when Reagan was called 'The Teflon President' because any attempt to call him out on his *ahem* inaccurate statements slid right off him.  Trumpty-Dumpty has him beat all hollow on that.  He's averaged 5 lies a day, of various blatancies, every day of his regime (I refuse to say 'administration') and all he has to say is 'Fake News' and it's like shaking an Etch-A-Sketch.

[Sociotard]

Is everybody following the Brett J. Talley judicial appointment?  He's one of the district judge appointments Trump has procured. The Senate Judiciary committee has not been kind (and for good reasons).

 

• The American Bar Association has voted that he is not qualified for this position.  It gets better: The vote was unanimous (14 plus one abstention). Its the first "unanimous not qualified" since 2006.
• He has never tried a case, or argued a motion, and he has practiced law for a whopping three years.  Oh, but he does have a prolific, solidly conservative blog. In case you thought the ABA was a bunch of unfair left-wingers.
• The committee approved him anyway (along partisan lines).  It's no secret that when a party is power they try to pack the lifetime appointments with young, ideologically correct judges.  I mean, generally they try to get qualified judges while they're at it, but whatever.
• He did not mention that he is married to a White House lawyer.  The questionnaire. requests relationships "likely to present potential conflicts of interest", and he didn't mention he is married to Ann Donaldson, the chief of staff to the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II. So either he lied or he messed up filling out a legal form, and I'm not sure which is worse.
• The Senate is going to vote on him soon.

Just . . . wow.

[Hermit]

Well, Brett J. Talley  sounds like a disaster waiting to happen