The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: Victoria Waterfield on October 08, 2008, 12:41:55 pm
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http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=10082008
As a Canadian, I'm just glad to be noticed.
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I could give you reasons not to move to Adelaide. Y'know, if anyone ever needs them.
So is Phillipe filling the chamberpot with things of material worth or is Lyle's plan predicated on making energy out of otter urine?
Oh I just realised what the flag is. That's pretty Lyle.
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Scooped by victoria waterfield, please delite.
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For those in the know, Onstad's facebook last night status was "If Sarah Palin wins the election[...]" but I guess opted to not go political on the strip.
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i love the idea of the hottentot venus. When I see that concept, I laugh.
suddenly it is everywhere.
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I actually DID move to Canada after Bush was re-elected. (Well, almost a year later. And for unrelated reasons.)
It's nice up here. My absentee ballot's coming soon. Haven't seen a moose eating a microphone yet, but I'm hopeful.
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I could give you reasons not to move to Adelaide. Y'know, if anyone ever needs them.
I was seriously investigating Australian immigration rules when I met my wife and started deleting that set of bookmarks. Adelaide was on the list, on the grounds of knowing a hot chick that seemed interested in having me there. I'd be interested in hearing your reasons.
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I was seriously investigating Australian immigration rules when I met my wife and started deleting that set of bookmarks
awww!
I want to meet someone who is great enough to make me delete bookmarks!
(i guess i could make a joke about porn here.)
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That's what porn mode is for.
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Process for mostly phoned-in Achewood:
1: Choose something author doesn't know much or care much about
2: Write fake Wikipedia article about how nobody else knows or cares about it either
3: Drink half bottle of whiskey
4: Add trailing sequence
5: Drink remainder of whiskey
6: Vomit
7: Wake up bleary-eyed, upload strip, start Googling for hangover cures
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Yes.
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I was seriously investigating Australian immigration rules when I met my wife and started deleting that set of bookmarks. Adelaide was on the list, on the grounds of knowing a hot chick that seemed interested in having me there. I'd be interested in hearing your reasons.
I have no reasons that would outweigh a hot chick.
To be honest I haven't been there since I was a kid, it's just kind of the Australian equivalent of fly-over country. It's a perfectly respectable city with virtually nothing to recommend it over any other major city, they used to advertise it as the 'city of churches' because there's just not much else to look at while you're there. I guess there's a decent wine industry down that way now and some people are into that and I hear living in a town of 100k means rush hour is pretty short but if I wanted to get away from people that bad I'd move to Coober Pedy, at least there you get to live underground.
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if I wanted to get away from people that bad I'd move to Coober Pedy, at least there you get to live underground.
Did the British send their unwanted mole-people to Australia too?
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I actually DID move to Canada after Bush was re-elected. (Well, almost a year later. And for unrelated reasons.)
Ha, same here (kind of ). I moved to Canadia in 2003 for non-election reasons, and lived there for four years. I loved that damn place and wish I were still there. So cold, so clean, and so much awesome beer.
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I've tendered Adelaide as a name for our daughter when she's born, as well. It dawns on me that my enthusiasm about things Australian would, if I actually lived there, make me kinda like those "If you don't love America, kiss my ass" uber-patriots that we tend to breed here.
Over-enthusiastic nationalism only works if you don't live there, perhaps.
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yeah, totally.
I think that if you lived there you would stop being that way? probably?
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Did someone ask for reasons to not go to Adelaide? (http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/adelaide/corpses_1.html)
Incidentally, I am going to Adelaide on Friday to get drunk with people I met on the internet. What could possibly go wrong?
Edit: Although I can't really bag out Adelaide for their murderous ways too much, since I live about an hour away from where this happened (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australia)).
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Did someone ask for reasons to not go to Adelaide? (http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/adelaide/corpses_1.html)
Lots of people get murdered there.... okay, so it will feel like home to an American.
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Yeah but in Oz you aren't legally allowed to carry around large calibre hand guns for self-defence.
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Y'know something?
I think that if the mythical unabated "right to bear arms" only applied to "arms" as the technology existed at the time of the Bill of Rights, it wouldn't be so bad.
Muskets and such that fire one inaccurate shot and then take fifteen minutes to load unless you are highly trained and then it "only" takes five.
I would be rad with that idea.
I think we have our compromise here.
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i started re-considering my opinion on guns when I realized they were based on my rich white-boy-who-grew-up-in-a-liberal-democracy assumption that the police would always come help me, and would always be on my side.
i wish I could say that NWA weren't a big factor, but, they were.
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Y'know something?
I think that if the mythical unabated "right to bear arms" only applied to "arms" as the technology existed at the time of the Bill of Rights, it wouldn't be so bad.
Muskets and such that fire one inaccurate shot and then take fifteen minutes to load unless you are highly trained and then it "only" takes five.
I would be rad with that idea.
I think we have our compromise here.
And freedom of speech should only be limited to the technology of the time, too. newspapers, pamphlets, they are fine. But the internet, phone lines, radio, etc, those are not covered by the right to free speech. Freedom from search and seizure, too. Cars and mobile homes are all fair game, the founders didn't intend them to be covered. Anything other than log cabin, really.
Cmon man.
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LFM, I am sorry, the original version of that post was due to the fact that I am just in a HATEFUL mood today for some reason. STBAD (sorry to be a dick)
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Y'know something?
I think that if the mythical unabated "right to bear arms" only applied to "arms" as the technology existed at the time of the Bill of Rights, it wouldn't be so bad.
Muskets and such that fire one inaccurate shot and then take fifteen minutes to load unless you are highly trained and then it "only" takes five.
I would be rad with that idea.
I think we have our compromise here.
Only if the police and army also have muskets. You can't have much of a revolution when the man has vastly superior arms compared to the people.
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Just to be fair, we're kept in line far far more by our debts and obligations than we are by anyone's guns, either way.
Our homes and cars are better ammunition against us, these days.
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I just realised I mis-read Adelaide's population as 150k instead of 1.5 million. So I guess it's not as small a town as I recall. I still say people should come to Brisbane instead. Our beaches are better and I could take you drinking.
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Hey, historical linguistics checkin' in! At the time of the document's writing, the phrase "bear arms" was used exclusively to refer to the act of serving in a military, not to the possession of weapons! In other words, what they actually wrote down was "everyone has the right to request that the government teach them how to fight, and to fight on behalf of the government", not "everyone has the right to keep a gun under his pillow".
Now, I will say that it probably just never occurred to them that someone would say they didn't have the right to own a gun - this was a time in the country's life when owning a gun was a practical "hey guys, venison for Sunday dinner!" matter rather than a "AK-47 FUCK THE POLICE" matter as it is for an unnervingly large number of gun-owners in modern America. Just sayin', none of us (in America, at least, can't speak for other nations' constitutions) actually has a constitutionally-protected right to own a gun, much less to own them without any form of regulation or monitoring as certain elements would have you believe.
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Its funny how a distrust of the very idea of government seems to be... hardwired directly into American political discourse when... that's not how it was in the beginning at all. The point of the American Revolution wasn't that governance didn't work, it was that governance from afar by birthright didn't work... and this framework for a government could work and could work well.
Where did this new line of thinking... that government is fundamentally built to oppress and is evil and must be defended against... get written in?
I mean, it's kind of transparent that it was put in there by business interests who wanted to do whatever the fuck they wanted but...
I don't know, historically, when did this fundamental rewrite of our history start?
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i mean.
considering how much you harp on how easily the american people can be duped by evil, selgiraffe, corrupt leaders, it seems pretty basic to think that sometimes the government will get screwed up and oppressive.
i mean, also like a basic examination of all the times in history governments have gotten screwed up and oppressive.
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Where did this new line of thinking... that government is fundamentally built to oppress and is evil and must be defended against... get written in?
I mean, it's kind of transparent that it was put in there by business interests who wanted to do whatever the fuck they wanted but...
I don't know, historically, when did this fundamental rewrite of our history start?
Wat?
Start with maybe reading a book. Maybe start with Hobbes Leviathan, or go to a political science class. I know you've expressed hatred for "books" and how impractical their contents are, but I promise some of them hold the answers you seek.
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Its funny how a distrust of the very idea of government seems to be... hardwired directly into American political discourse when... that's not how it was in the beginning at all. The point of the American Revolution wasn't that governance didn't work, it was that governance from afar by birthright didn't work... and this framework for a government could work and could work well.
Where did this new line of thinking... that government is fundamentally built to oppress and is evil and must be defended against... get written in?
I mean, it's kind of transparent that it was put in there by business interests who wanted to do whatever the fuck they wanted but...
I don't know, historically, when did this fundamental rewrite of our history start?
Umm, this pretty much has been hardwired since day one man. I mean, the constitution makes things as byzantine as possible so that no one person can totally run the show.
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One on one, most people are basically decent.
When you get three people together, politics begins.
A committee is an organism with six or more legs and no brain.
Once you get larger groups, the amount of useful work per person begins to decline to asymptotically approach a minumum (although the total work accomplished rises). At some critical level however, bad apples get sufficient cover to work mischief, and corruption, pettiness, and the death of common sense by 1000 cuts ensues. The larger government gets, the more prevalent the negative aspects of mob behavior become. This is why libertarians are always harping on the virtue of small government.
Remember, the ultimate government project is war. The situation in Iraq is a case study in how effective massive bureaucracies are in executing a plan.
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The revolutionaries hardly had a unified ideological stance. Thomas Paine, for one, did not seem afraid of big government.
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Remember, the ultimate government project is war. The situation in Iraq is a case study in how effective massive bureaucracies are in executing a plan.
yeah, the only thing that makes a government a government is that it is a group with a monopoly on the use of force.
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I think you're off base with pulling two words out and running to a dictionary, partner. I prefer to discuss the issue along the lines of articles like this dudes (http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/Blodgett-Ford.html) rather than just throwing up the hands and yelling 'definition winz0r'!
In other news: The Santa Ana winds have kicked in and the Angelus is on fire so the San Berdoo got scared and closed down all the fire road gates. No deer chasing for me today!
Um. If by "pulling two words out and running to a dictionary" you mean "reading an article about the application of historical linguistics to modern legal interpretation in the International Journal of American Linguistics", then I guess you're maybe right?
I mean, assuming your dictionaries are peer-reviewed journals in the field I guess.
There are a lot of uses of the phrase "to bear arms" in documents of this time, and with two exceptions (in poetry, where they're used metaphorically) all of them refer to military service; none refer to ownership of weapons. Thank you for assuming I'm pulling things out of my ass, though. I'm not saying the Founding Fathers wouldn't have wanted you to have a gun; to them, the idea of forbidding people from having one would've been bizarre. I'm saying that they were educated people who knew what the words they were writing meant, and at the time they meant something different from what they mean today.
I kind of suspect gun ownership is not constitutionally protected for much the same reason your right to maintain a well-equipped kitchen with an array of spices and knives is not: even though you could throw paprika in someone's eyes and shank him, it never occurred to them that someone might later try to ban them.
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Right, and there was a lot of discussion of it amongst them (FF) and the actual content, wording an breadth were open to debate.
Notice I didn't assault what you said but how you said it. Your second post at least carries some meat, which is what I was hoping mine would provoke.
Cool, I like days that include unreturned benefits on the internet.
My second post contains exactly the same meat as the first post. Go back and read it this time. The only thing I had in the second that wasn't in the first is a citation, which I'll grant is a lesson to me not to go around with my citation needed unzipped and flopping around.
I'm still a little pissed that you assumed I was pulling politicized lies out of my ass. Guess I thought I might've had a little bit of intellectual respect, maybe not.
Edit: Okay, that's bitchier than I intended. To clarify, where I come from intellectual dishonesty is about the lowest thing you can accuse a fellow of. Asking for a citation is one thing but assuming that the other guy's making up his facts is pretty much fighting words, and in the groups I run with that's a lot more personal hostility than I tend to expect in this group.
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I like that this is the first discussion I've seen in a while where the phrase "bear arms" was under debate, rather than "well-regulated militia". My second amendment sword is well sharpened1 on the original-intent meaning of the latter. I shall have to turn my attention to this new bauble.
1. Thanks to the Hon. George Mason (http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a4_4s9.html), along with the Federalist papers and other statements.
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I like that this is the first discussion I've seen in a while where the phrase "bear arms" was under debate, rather than "well-regulated militia". My second amendment sword is well sharpened1 on the original-intent meaning of the latter. I shall have to turn my attention to this new bauble.
1. Thanks to the Hon. George Mason (http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a4_4s9.html), along with the Federalist papers and other statements.
The two questions are related - are you engaging in military service if it is not in the context of a "well-regulated militia"?
I think the big problem here is that "bear arms" is a term that's in relatively common modern use with a changed meaning, so people think it's obvious what that phrase means. "Well-regulated militia" is no longer a common term outside Constitutional discussions, so people are more ready to accept that its meaning might not be obvious to a modern reader.
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Nah, bitch away. I slugged you in the gut to get you to defend and develop your original output. Because it's interesting and worth discussion.
People around here are (mostly) academically serious, you included. You forget I know and use this, maybe. I wanted the meat served more well done without the gun under the pillow AK-47 FTW gim-krackery. Isn't that sMets gimmick, anyways.
Okay, see, let me clarify.
You want me to make a more sober and straightforward post with citations, you ask me and I will. I'm not attached to witticisms. Well, I am, but I figure once I've posted them the first time it's enough for anyone.
If you want to look me in the eye and ask me for a fight, knuckles out and trying very hard not to think about the knife in my pocket, that's when you outright accuse me of intellectual dishonesty and making up my facts. If you think I'm being flip now, I'm not. I've mostly left that rage behind me and there are very few things that can bring it back out, but one of them is when somebody who I take seriously in an intelligent discussion makes such a claim about me. So just.. I dunno what the equivalent thing to say to you would be. Probably something about your mother and various farm animals. But please do not straightfacedly accuse me of intellectual dishonesty. We all have our own Circumstances.
edit: And just to note: the "defend and develop" consisted of making a citation about where I had read this. Every other point I made was reiterated from my original post: the change in the usage of the phrase, my personal beliefs about the Founding Fathers' beliefs, and the careful distinction between the points of "what I think the Founding Fathers believed" and "what they actually wrote down". Please do not act like you spurred some intellectual development in me like some kind of fatherly Morgan Freeman character, because what you did was invoke a sickening, gut-churning sensation that I choked down in order to calmly reiterate my points with a citation. I dunno, maybe that's what you were aiming for.
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I kind of suspect gun ownership is not constitutionally protected for much the same reason your right to maintain a well-equipped kitchen with an array of spices and knives is not: even though you could throw paprika in someone's eyes and shank him, it never occurred to them that someone might later try to ban them.
This is an interesting point nicely put. I wish I could steal it and pretend I wrote it, and since I also feel strongly about intellectual dishonesty, it takes a lot to tempt me to feel that way.
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The two questions are related - are you engaging in military service if it is not in the context of a "well-regulated militia"?
Richard Henry Lee (http://www.madisonbrigade.com/rh_lee.htm), Thomas Jefferson (http://www.guncite.com/journals/hal-lin.html#n14-1), and Tench Coxe (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1272675#), as well as Madison, Paine, and even Washington regarded the individual right to possess firearms and indeed, carry them about, as unrelated to any common obligation to armed forces.
In point of the "bear arms" phrase - while I was browsing about looking to see if I could find an easy direct link to "The Thomas Jefferson Papers" I came across the following from A Bill for Preservation of Deer (1785) The bill would have fined those who hunted deer out of season, and if within a year "[the hunter] shall bear a gun [long arm such as rifle or scattergun] out of his inclosed ground, unless whilst performing military duty," he shall be in violation of his recognizance.
So "bearing arms" at the time of the framers has more or less the same interpretation as today. Interestingly, it seems that "gun" and handgun were considered different appliances1. The fined hunter was free to move about off his land while armed with a pistol without further censure - it was carrying a rifle following his infraction that brought down the law unless he was performing military duty. This directly distinguishes the private bearing of arms as a practice as a matter of course from military duty.
1. Contrast this with the situation today, where lay persons generally speak about "guns" meaning handguns such as pistols, revolvers, and the like.
Post # 1776! How apropos!
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Richard Henry Lee (http://www.madisonbrigade.com/rh_lee.htm), Thomas Jefferson (http://www.guncite.com/journals/hal-lin.html#n14-1), and Tench Coxe (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1272675#), as well as Madison, Paine, and even Washington regarded the individual right to possess firearms and indeed, carry them about, as unrelated to any common obligation to armed forces.
In point of the "bear arms" phrase - while I was browsing about looking to see if I could find an easy direct link to "The Thomas Jefferson Papers" I came across the following from A Bill for Preservation of Deer (1785) The bill would have fined those who hunted deer out of season, and if within a year "[the hunter] shall bear a gun [long arm such as rifle or scattergun] out of his inclosed ground, unless whilst performing military duty," he shall be in violation of his recognizance.
So "bearing arms" at the time of the framers has more or less the same interpretation as today. Interestingly, it seems that "gun" and handgun were considered different appliances. The fined hunter was free to move about off his land while armed with a pistol without further censure - it was carrying a rifle following his infraction that brought down the law unless he was performing military duty. This directly distinguishes the private bearing of arms as a practice as a matter of course from military duty.
"bear a gun" and "bear arms" are different phrases. "bear arms" was a specific phrase used to refer to military service. In this case, the arms being borne are not guns, but the arms (i.e. insignia) of the military in which he is serving, as I recall.
(Warning: I do not have this specific issue available to me, so I may be misrecalling details of this part. But this is as I recall it.)
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Nah, bitch away. I slugged you in the gut to get you to defend and develop your original output. Because it's interesting and worth discussion.
People around here are (mostly) academically serious, you included. You forget I know and use this, maybe. I wanted the meat served more well done without the gun under the pillow AK-47 FTW gim-krackery. Isn't that sMets gimmick, anyways.
So you're trolling in other words.
fuck*ng troll. Get a gotdam life.
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To be honest, my gimmick is a lot less like that and a lot more like...
I say whatever my fevered heart tells my mind to say at any given moment and plunk it down.
Sometimes it is well-thought-out, sometimes it is poorly-thought-out but basically-true and sometimes it is the ravings of a man with too many words and too many issues.
Of-the-momentness, for better and for worse.
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"bear a gun" and "bear arms" are different phrases. "bear arms" was a specific phrase used to refer to military service.
Oddly enough, it appears this exact topic is examined on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms), to which I'll refer you rather than summarizing other than to point out the ratifying sessions of the Constitution in the various states (and for the constitutions of the various states) were recorded for posterity, and the debates on the Second Amendment in particular are there for anyone to read.
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I thought the second amendment was quite clear.
(http://www.demopolislive.com/gallery/images/1/1_the_right_to_bear_arms.jpg)
Also, of all the crap-flinging between the two candidates, I can honestly say the most disturbing insight, for me, into mccain is his second amendment position on his webpage. It really looks like an "anything goes" kind of policy.http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/77636553-6337-4ecd-b170-49e1c07d2fbd.htm (http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/77636553-6337-4ecd-b170-49e1c07d2fbd.htm) Not that I completely agree with Obama's position either.
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OK
Nooo!
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Oddly enough, it appears this exact topic is examined on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms), to which I'll refer you rather than summarizing other than to point out the ratifying sessions of the Constitution in the various states (and for the constitutions of the various states) were recorded for posterity, and the debates on the Second Amendment in particular are there for anyone to read.
Out of that entire article, only the Sayoko Blodgett-Ford citation even begins to address the issue I'm raising, which is that "arms" in this case is not a weapon but a term derived from heraldry referring to insignia. Since there is only one line of Blodgett-Ford citation there, and it leads to a reference to documents to which I do not have access, I am afraid I cannot address it fairly. In all other cases, "bear arms" is used in a context which makes perfect sense, in some cases more sense, if used in the sense of "carry insignia/organize as an army". (And let me note, at risk of being accused of LFMery, whatever that might be, that Sayoko Blodgett-Ford is the kind of name that makes me feel like I'm living in the future.)
The article notes that there was a longstanding English right to own a gun, which I do not disagree with. I do not believe that the founding fathers would have wanted guns to be banned in the United States, I am simply noting that this is not the right they wrote into the US constitution (although one can make a case that it is impossible to effectively bear arms as a well-regulated militia without guns, thereby making it an implicitly defended right). The right they put into the constitution is another essential right to avoid the abuse of power. As the secular government's power derives from its access to military force, the freedom of the people is endangered if the military becomes a separate entity from the people. The Second Amendment guarantees (or would if the government bothered to implement it) the right of the people to participate in the defense of their homeland rather than have all military decisions and acts carried out by an organization solely and blindly loyal to those in power.
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OK
I hereby retract my recommendation. Kindly cease all efforts at obtaining a life and return to the board.
One of us... One of us....
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Only if the police and army also have muskets. You can't have much of a revolution when the man has vastly superior arms compared to the people.
Which reminds me, I have a question. For those who oppose gun control, where is the line drawn? I mean, Ben-San's interesting and enlightening argument aside, "bear arms" seems today to mean to own handguns and rifles. So, if the right is inviolable, why draw reasonable lines at all? Shouldn't people be able to arm themselves, cost permitting, with nuclear weapons?
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Well, if the gubmint's got'em, I need'em too! You know, in case they try to make my 7 year old get an abortion...or something.
I guess one of the main fears the fringe gun-types have is that they won't be able to protect themselves against a hostile government, and I get that. But, seriously, people just aren't realistic if they think that they could actually mount a viable revolution against a hostile government with the kind of muscle ours has. You can point to Iraq, but it helps that they have unexploded military grade ordnance basically everywhere. Bubba and his .30-06 may take out a couple of the guys jumping out of the black helicopters, but he won't really last that long. In the end, it's the amendments on the rest of the Bill of Rights that will protect you from government. Having a gun is just a nice fringe benefit, that (in my opinion) is Constitutionally protected.
You can have my fissile materials when you pry them from my glowing, irradiated fingers.
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I believe the most sensible concern I've heard expressed is the concern that the present American government breaks down in one form or another, leaving America open to local military or paramilitary rule as well as foreign incursion. In such a situation, obviously having guns will help your voice be heard, but I don't think it's a sound argument for total deregulation as some people seem to think it is.
Incidentally, assuming such laws could be sufficiently enforced, my personal taste runs to making felonious the presence of guns in urban areas. I'm fine with hunters, I'm fine with defending yourself against coyotes and bears, but there is only one animal in the modern city which can be pragmatically hunted or deterred with a gun.
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there is only one animal in the modern city which can be pragmatically hunted or deterred with a gun.
This is similar to why I'm against hand guns and similar weapons, basically if something is only good for killing people and we are still as a society against killing people, let's not have that thing. Yeah I know 'only the criminals will have guns' but come on, if they're hard to get then they're not going to be in the hands of the crackheads breaking into your place to steal your tv.
As far as being able to stand up to the government I really doubt that's a practical reality and frankly there are a lot of other options to prevent that outcome so you don't need to just stockpile weapons and wait for it to happen. Whether it's the rapture or the rise of a totalitarian government or the complete failure of fiat currency (wait a sec..) some days it seems like you folks in the US of A are always just waiting for the world to end.
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I mean, i think it is because we are a country which was founded after a violent revolution.
also, it is pretty realistic to assume that a government will eventually fail in some spectacular way. especially one as big, spread out, and world-power-y as ours.
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I mean, i think it is because we are a country which was founded after a violent revolution.
Pretty much all of them are. It's just a question of how long ago.
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Yeah I know 'only the criminals will have guns' but come on, if they're hard to get then they're not going to be in the hands of the crackheads breaking into your place to steal your tv.
Washington D.C. had the most confiscatory gun laws possible, yet plenty of people still got murdered by criminals using guns. The argument would be that if we somehow swept up all the guns, and made it illegal for anyone to have them (such as in European countries) that then the criminals couldn't get them (although, oddly, we've done the same with fireworks in most States and they still flood in through smuggling from Mexico). Basically, it comes down to a balance of power - if you create a gradient of power people will work, legally or illegally, to put themselves at the top of that gradient. With guns, in my opinion, having everyone well educated on their use, sufficiently responsible to possess them, and free to either have them or not, minimizes the gradient that could exist. There is some deterrence to initiation of crime if a thug knows he could face an armed homeowner by breaking in. There is a measure of security that comes from knowing you have the means & legal clearance to deal with someone breaking into your house. And, fundamentally, there is a relationship between the people and the government that the government exists at the will of the people, not that the people exist to serve the government. Guns are symbolic of that power - if gun possession is the domain only of those in government, the relationship shifts towards the people being servants.
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Nice discussion people. I like hearing these viewpoints because they balance out the other ones I get at places where I can actually talk about hunting, woodcraft, reloading and general handgun and riflery. There's hella schism amongst those viewpoints, enough to warrant close looks.
Ben-San, if your feelings got hurt because I kicked you I hope you've moved on. Comparing me to a magical black man always give me warm fuzzies, so you and I got that going for us, regardless.
Dude, talk away. I like these things. I am a member of Uncle Sam's gun club, after all.
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Washington D.C. had the most confiscatory gun laws possible, yet plenty of people still got murdered by criminals using guns.
New York City is the same way. There is basically a express road from Virginia to New York City made for guns and straw purchases. I can buy a boat load of guns here that would immediately triple in value once I get to NYC. ( I should call my partners about this idea here...)
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Nice discussion people. I like hearing these viewpoints because they balance out the other ones I get at places where I can actually talk about hunting, woodcraft, reloading and general handgun and riflery. There's hella schism amongst those viewpoints, enough to warrant close looks.
Ben-San, if your feelings got hurt because I kicked you I hope you've moved on. Comparing me to a magical black man always give me warm fuzzies, so you and I got that going for us, regardless.
Dan, go fuck yourself.
Sincerely, Ben.
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Sorry to make you reduce your intellect like that there, bubby.
You want to keep the red-ass have fun with it.
Okay, let me spell this out for you in terms you might be capable of comprehending.
You did the discursive equivalent of saying "Hey! I caught your mom last night fuck*ng a goat," flipping the middle finger straight up in the middle of my face, kicking my shin and walking away laughing.
I called you on it.
You said "No, you don't understand! I'm MORGAN fuck*ng FREEMAN, I'm _allowed_ to do that. Because, see, it makes you a better person. You put a citation in your next post, see? God, I am such a _genius_ for figuring out to be an asshole to a guy on the Internet."
I decided, maybe you didn't know what a colossal douchebag you were being since we come from different circumstances. So I explained, in detail, what you had done to offend me.
You said "Awesome, I'm Morgan Freeman!"
I figure at this point any level of discourse above "go fuck yourself" is pretty clearly wasted on you.
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Fine, accepted. In my background and habits they were not, but in understanding of your position I've made a couple of what I consider conciliatory postings and backed the heck off of you. In my opinion and form, of course.
I must have missed the intent there given that what you actually posted was "man up, son, I'm teaching you a magical lesson".
When in fact the only lesson conveyed was "whoops, sometimes someone you thought wasn't a shitbag actually is".
Edit: Okay, little much there given that you were apparently actually trying to apologize. What you thought was an apology came off to me as "Haha, I didn't do anything wrong, I'm teaching you a lesson, see!" Assuming you're making a sincere attempt to apologize, accepted, I guess.
Edit #2: Regarding the "circumstances" I refer to: I am from a family of liberal PhDs. I am the one in the family who, instead of going to Harvard, dropped out of high school, had a nervous breakdown in the first semester of college, and is currently trying to get his head back in one piece while making it up at community college. I am also the one in the family who has felt the kind of angry where you grab someone by the neck and whack his skull into a brick wall over and over and never wants to feel it again.
Due to this particular commingling of circumstances, you managed to stumble on what it takes to make me feel that again. Is that something that makes sense to you? I sort of assumed due to what little I know of your own circumstances that it would have but fuck if I know.
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Ben for what it's worth your posts have repeatedly and impressively proved your intellectual and scholastic chops to this imaginary internet fan of talking cartoon cats.
Asherdan, I guess you're OK too. For a white boy.
Can't we all get along? You guys keep it up and people will start mistaking you for LFM and A-Cap.
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Can't we all get along? You guys keep it up and people will start mistaking you for LFM and A-Cap.
I know, seriously. If theres any sloppy make outs around here, its with me and the communist book burner.
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Guns, eh?
I'm really pretty ambivalent about the whole issue. I can see both sides. I understand the reasoning behind 2d Amendment purists and the idea that we need the ability to protect ourselves from an oppressive government. I think my position is gradually moving this direction. But I think the whole "We gotta pertect ourselves from the gubmint or they'll be huntin' us down" mindset is pretty flawed. If we learned anything from Germany in the 30's or from the past 8 years it's that a police state doesn't happen that way. It's the frog in the cookpot thing. Ramp up the oppression and loss of civil rights gradually enough and with the appropriate sort of propaganda and the masses will be thanking you and begging you to do it faster.
The other side of the coin? The price we pay in death, blood and crime for our firearm freedoms. Our policies have costs tens of thousands of innocent lives and millions and millions of dollars. It seems pretty clear to me that even if we have the right to firearms, as a society we have proved that we are not sufficiently responsible to handle that right. Sometimes it seems like we are paying a disproportionate price to stand up for a fairly meaningless principle.
I'm an extremely strong supporter of the Bill of Rights. I just wish we had a Bill of Responsibilities to go with it.
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Can't we all get along? You guys keep it up and people will start mistaking you for LFM and A-Cap.
Those two have been too well behaved lately. They've left an ecological niche open, or something.
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some days it seems like you folks in the US of A are always just waiting for the world to end.
Well, you've summed up the biggest problem with America very succinctly... the outsider's perspective, I suppose.
The intersection of American Exceptionalism and America's fundamental identity as a dumping ground for Europe's more dangerous fundamentalists and... here we are.
The subconscious belief that we are the very best ever and part and parcel of being the best is being the last.
America as the shining city on the hill BEGETS America as the second coming, America as Jesus, as seeing itself as that must die with the world to be resurrected as whichever ideological paradise the individual American imagines.
The agrarian-anarchist nightmare that the militiaman calls a dream, the sterile Star Trek Next Generation perfection-through-lack-of-need fantasy that a bleeding heart crackpot like myself desires, the literal Apocalypse that ends with the man with the tongue like silver and the eyes as unto fire wiping out damn near everything and building a city of gold that the Jesus freaks shoot for, whatever.
We're all guilty of it out here, all across the American spectrum. The impatient idealistic belief that our dream world... whichever that is... is just one vote away.
There is a little Ralph Nader in all of us Americans, left right and centre... self-involved and arrogant, idealistic but completely spoiled for instanteous results.
"Me wantee now! NOW NOW NOW! If it will take time, it ain't worth having! If it must be incrimental, it must be burned down! I'm so smart, I know what I want and I want it now! NOW NOW NOW!"
The rest of the world sees down the road for generations, you know, at least to some degree... we want it all, we want it now and if we can't have it now, fuck anyone having it.
What was the MLK riff? About having seen the mountain top and while he himself probably won't get there, that's okay, that doesn't make the struggle not worthwhile?
Yeah. MLK was the best of us. Ain't many MLKs about.
We'd all rather be John the fuck*ng Baptist, y'know.
Y'know.
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I mean... take that thing and replace America with something about "the human race" and I think it is pretty legit.
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The other side of the coin? The price we pay in death, blood and crime for our firearm freedoms. Our policies have costs tens of thousands of innocent lives and millions and millions of dollars.
See despite my previously stated aversion to firearms I don't think law is going to correct the problem that leads to all the gun violence you guys have.
Australia has very harsh gun laws, a lot of which were enacted in the mid-90s. Now it's true that gun related crime has gone down since then but it's arguable (and they do argue) whether or not it's gone down any faster compared to non-gun violent crime. My point is that while I think guns (specifically hand guns and similar things that aren't part of the whole hunting thing) should be harshly regulated I think gun violence is part of a cultural thing that changing laws isn't going to fix.
For example, just re-reading your post Jay, you speak about a balance of power with someone who can use a firearm automatically assumed to be at the top. For better or for worse western culture (and specifically american culture) has idolised the gun as something that immediately bestows power beyond that of any normal mortal. So now when people talk about taking away guns it isn't heard as 'let's take away this dangerous thing' it's 'I want to take away your safety and your best way of protecting yourself'. Of course having a gun and knowing how to use it does not automatically make one safe (maybe not even safer but I can't find any stats to back me up on that) but a lot of people seem to think it does.
I totally have your back as far as education and so on goes of course, if we're going to have guns (or anything) people should be as fully educated about them as possible.
With regard to the new york/ washington gun control thing, I'm not terribly surprised gun control doesn't work when you can drive over to the next state and buy one perfectly legally. Trying to control it at the user end is messy and difficult, it's much easier to just cut off supply totally.
Additional: Statistics for fun and profit!
In Aus at least you're way more likely to be assaulted with a knife than a gun (http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/bb8db737e2af84b8ca2571780015701e/0F60AD4ABCC13AF1CA25723500830500?opendocument) (about halfway down the page).
Going back to 1997 though which is right around the time of some major gun legislation and so before you'd expect to see any effect of gun control on violence it was pretty clear that death by firearm was going down (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/94713ad445ff1425ca25682000192af2/8F1F383829EF039FCA2570EC001B2FC4?opendocument) disproportionately to other forms of violent death anyway. Can't find one tracking violent crime in general that far back just now, the ABS site is made of suck.
I mean... take that thing and replace America with something about "the human race" and I think it is pretty legit.
I don't know, I've always seen america as being way more idealistic than other countries. Full of idealists that are convinced that compromising their principles in any way will have the most dire outcomes, which would work if you all didn't have different ideals. A lot of other places are just more laid back. I'm not exactly a good student of history or anything though so that's just my half-arsed observation, I'm more than willing to bow to the actual historians and sociologists around here.
We are having a discussion on whether owning a piece of metal for killing people is an 'inalienable right' though, the fact that this concept even exists kind of backs me up I think.
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I mean, I think there is a difference, yeah.
The Old World has continuity, has cultural memory, has places where pretty much the same people have been living for as long back as they can possibly fathom... has a collective subconscious sense of permanence.
My grandfather was born outside of Pisa, Italy and his family had been in the Italian Alps since the fuck*ng Etruscans.
My father and I were born in the Adirondacks of Northern New York State.
If I father a child any time soon, he or she will be born in a hospital fifteen miles from the Pacific Ocean.
South America has a continuity back to the Incans and the Mayans, however indirectly, filtered through a hybridized Catholicism.
Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders... were generally still very much culturally of The Empire, for whatever else you could say of them.
Even the prison colonies were culturally British criminals, through and through.
There's something distinct about a culture of fuck*ng religious extremists ejected from Europe to tame a strange land or die trying, either way, to quickly congeal into their own little parallel ruling class, wipe out one people and enslave another along the way... ever moving, ever expanding as they went. Like locusts but even more like cockroaches.
And that's the seed at our heart.
The craziest of the crazy cast out by the elite, only to reflexively form their own twisted image of that elite and kill everything that got in their way.
Sounds like Columbine, in a weird kind of way, kinda like all the reasons the only other country out there really like us is Israel, too.
There's something fundamentally different about us and it's not all good.
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Geez, I really started a clusterfuck by bringing up the topic of guns.
Funnily enough while in Adelaide my friends and I are planning on going to a shooting range. And so the thread comes full circle.
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It's the ciiiiiiiiiiiircle of liiiiiiife.
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Funnily enough while in Adelaide my friends and I are planning on going on a shooting rage.
This is how I read this at first.
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Not to rain too hard on that parade, LFM, but we pretty much inherited the idea of slavery from the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Arabs (especially the Arabs!) and pretty much the entire history of humankind. It was kind of poetic how you strung it all together though.
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Not to rain too hard on that parade, LFM, but we pretty much inherited the idea of slavery from the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Arabs (especially the Arabs!) and pretty much the entire history of humankind. It was kind of poetic how you strung it all together though.
For most of human history slavery has been "the guys who lost the most recent war" and not institutionalized on the basis of race. Then we got civilized and realized that enslaving Frenchmen or Swedes or Germans is morally wrong, so we had to write new rules about who is morally right to enslave to maintain the slave-based economy.
Having abandoned that one mostly, we're now working on new methods of achieving the same end result.
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Well, like, I was mostly talking about the intersection of secular and religious exceptionalisms cross-breeding to create a uniquely short-sighted and apocalyptic culture but...
There is something particularly unique about how slavery functioned in America.
It was one thing to, like, take war slaves... it was one thing to use slavery augment your own extant economy or to enslave the people of a newly conquered land to reap the benefits of your land or so on.
There was something particular about building half your country from the ground-up with imported slaves and maintaining that slavery in transgenerational perpetuity along strict ethnic guidelines. If ancient slavery was the local general store and the Carribean was taking up to the Woolworth level, it was the American South that took it to the level of an octopus-like Walmartery... ironically enough.
I mean, four generations after abolition, we still haven't figured out what to exactly... do... with the economy of the rural parts of the American Southeast and it was so completely integrated into the national mind, that its still a bloody shirt to wave in our political debates and our cultural wars. 150 goddamned years later.
Lowercase-s slavery and uppercase-s Slavery, y'know, the difference itself says something about us too.
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Hey, don't we split threads around here anymore?
How about those cartoon cats!
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hm.
Really, though, I feel like americans love idealism but also hate radicalism.
Cf successful or popular communist/socialist parties in european countries, radical leftist groups, etc.
Except for the weather underground, I guess.
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Really, though, I feel like americans love idealism but also hate radicalism.
Cf successful or popular communist/socialist parties in european countries, radical leftist groups, etc.
Yeah probably something to that, radical is all relative though. Plenty of right wing politicians over there at least pay lip service to ideas about abortion and the death penalty that would be fairly radical in a lot of other places.
Maybe it's just the vocal minority thing?