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[Ben-San]

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.

[AugustWest]

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.

[Arachno-capitalist]

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.

[AugustWest]

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.

[wombat]

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.

[littlefallsmets]

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.

[theinevitable]

I mean... take that thing and replace America with something about "the human race" and I think it is pretty legit.

[Doc]

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 (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 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.

[littlefallsmets]

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.

[oball]

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.

[Doc]

It's the ciiiiiiiiiiiircle of liiiiiiife.

[Drastic Action]

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.

[jaydub]

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.

[Ben-San]

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.

[littlefallsmets]

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.