Lavish wealth tolerated more for individuals than groups
news.cornell.edu
news.cornell.edu
Although they were massacred throughout history even when they were poor.
Holy shit
I think we should resurrect some old school name-damning punishment for those that perpetrated this massacre. Their grave sites should be smashed, and their remains cast into an anonymous pit. It’s too late to give them the capital punishment they deserved, but we can damn their name and memory for all ages.
He was generally more pro gun control than history remembers him for. For instance, he signed the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 which severely restricted multiple categories of firearms ownership for everyone nationwide (not just minorities).
If everybody has them, the violence against anyone carries the threat of deadly force in response. There is no greater deterrent to violence.
There’s a reason mass shootings happen in places where a swift armed response isn’t expected.
Freedom is not safe and safety is not freedom.
The world is not safe.
You have the right to self defense but the 'freedom' to own something which can kill or maim dozens of others has to be balanced against the overall good of society. I find this viewpoint and willingness to sacrifice lives for this particular 'freedom' to be a little sociopathic.
You could use your exact same argument that cars put other people in danger and we should walk everywhere. Or that it's for the collective good that we never leave our house because doing so increases other people's risk of death.
Safety is a tyrants best friend.
>>You have the right to self defense but the 'freedom' to own something which can kill or maim dozens of others has to be balanced against the overall good of society.
Society exists because men with items that can kill or maim others died to create and defend it.
I find your viewpoint and willingness to sacrifice your freedom in the name of safety.. a little unaware, ungrateful, and privileged.
This current veneer of civilization that you're so privileged to live in exists because of guns and violence and is actually a rarity in the history of humankind.
If you want to learn more about this you can go to the library and ask them for a book on the past 100,000 years of human history.
Cars are a great example, because we absolutely weigh their costs and benefits. One does not have the 'right' to drive a car. It is a licenced and regulated activity. 18 wheelers are more dangerous than cars, and thus are subject to more restrictive regulation.
>Society exists because men with items that can kill or maim others died to create and defend it.
What you're talking about here is the state's monopoly on sanctioned violence. Guns are a part of that, but not a requirement. There are plenty of 'beat cops' around the world that discharge their duties without relying on firearms.
Exactly. You're SO RIGHT about government weighing the costs and benefits.
Which is why the founding fathers made gun rights the second amendment!
Isn't it great!?
The founding fathers weighed their costs vs benefits and found that the benefits outweighed the costs to such a degree that they deserved a entire amendment.
I'm glad we're in agreement about cost vs benefits.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Right. They weighed the costs and benefits of giving every citizen the right to own a muzzle loading flintlock musket. Such a gun was a tool used to harvest game and defend the homestead.
I doubt they would make the same call today when it comes to semi auto weapons with detachable mags. They are designed to kill as many people in as short of a time as possible.
An era when private citizens owned armadas with cannons and artilly that could level entire cities
Muzzle loaders.
These guys wrote a document that created one of the greatest democracies in the history of humanity, they created a beacon of freedom through out the world that paved the way for one of the greatest improvement in quality of life that humanity has ever seen.
Why can't you just trust the experts?
“ After studying over 8,000 reports of government-caused deaths, Rummel estimated that there have been 262 million victims of democide in the last century. According to his figures, six times as many people have died from the actions of people working for governments than have died in battle.”
Firearms simply level the playing field.
Domestic violence against women is a thing because men are almost always bigger and stronger than women, meaning without access to a weapon every woman is potentially vulnerable to the violence of a man.
Sadly, it often turns out that firearms are often turned against women in a household:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9125010/
>readily available firearms place women at particularly high risk of homicide at the hands of a spouse, an intimate acquaintance, or a close relative.
It's hard to secure a firearm against one's partner.
Domestic violence against men from women is also sky high but wildly underreported. The highest rates of domestic violence are between lesbian couples.
Violence has less to do with size than willingness, exposure, snd skill.
Firearms do level the playing field, but only for skill and skill. This is why even though women benefit more from owning a gun, they very rare carry one. Most simply aren’t willing to engage. They would rather run away. This is of course the correct choice if you are unwilling to use a gun. Carrying one without will is worse than being unarmed.
Ignore the title, unpack the data.
https://mises.org/wire/guns-how-ny-times-manipulates-data
Framed a different way, there are over 400 million guns in circulation in the US. At the moment, more than the total population of the US.
Citation: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/07/13/three-mil...
If we look at 2020, the worst year for gun violence in decades in the US there were 20,000 gun homicides and 24,000 gun suicides.
Citation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shooti...
Taken together, that means that there were 44,000 gun abuses out of 400,000,000 in circulation which is annual abuse rate of 0.011%.
Inversely, that means that the annual non-abuse rate, or the safe responsible use rate is 99.989%. If I remember correctly from my statistics 101 class, 99.99% is considered "statistically perfect".
It's a pretty well known stat that violent crimes in the US have been steadily declining since 1990 all while gun ownership has been steadily increasing.
Comparing area-to-area, lots of guns to fewer guns, over the same time period, the correlations are clear both within the US and internationally.
Within the US: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/
International comparison: https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00444-0/pdf
> The number of guns per capita per country was a strong and independent predictor of firearm-related death in a given country, whereas the predictive power of the mental illness burden was of borderline significance in a multivariable model. Regardless of exact cause and effect, however, the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer
I’ll look at those links in detail but I’ll be shocked if they are any different than anything else I’ve read on the matter where word games tend to be played to frame the information to support a point of view.
All I will say is on the last quote that you posted: guns per capita as a predictor of firearm related death in a country.
Of course it is. Just as cars per capita are a predictor of automobile related deaths. The greater presence of anything the more often it will be involved than places where it’s not.
This simply doesn’t prove anything at all.
Actually, they do, and the reason for it is that in a mass shooting situation, even if you have a gun, you usually have zero idea of what to do with it, and where to shoot back.
Vegas has concealed open carry, and that didn't do a goddamn thing to stop the 2017 massacre.
Also, what do you think the SWAT team responding to a shooting is going to do to you if you are on the scene, with your gun? You may get a chance to surrender and get things cleared up, or just as likely, you may just get shot on sight.
And what else is interesting is that the shooter chose an extremely crowded music festival to do his shooting.
A fertilizer bomb or hidden IUD could have just easily killed as many people just like the Boston marathon bombing(which could just as easily had more than one nail bomb).
So should nail bombs also be illegal? Oh yeah they are!
Mass gatherings are always at risk of mass violence.
Airplanes/airports had the same issue before 9/11. Mass gathering of people and easy ingress of deadly weapons/bombs.
So too schools.
The lesson for mass gatherings is to secure a perimeter and do your best to eliminate deadly items from entering the perimeter.
Its not really a gun specific issue. Its a vulnerable crowd issue.
Glancing at this list of mass shootings, it seems like most end with the shooter committing suicide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
Most mass shootings take place in the USA, which has the most guns per capita on earth by far, double the #2 country. How many more guns would make a difference?
I don't expect a shooter to be rational, but I do expect them to self preserve when being shot at. That's not rational, that's instinct. Police have repeatedly said ever since Columbine that it is most important to engage a shooter as soon as possible for this exact reason.
"Shooting your way out of an ambush" (i.e. taking initiative when attacked) has been tactical doctrine for literally every armed group, police, military, etc, for decades.
Some blame the wealth of Jewish people for the Holocaust, too. They called themselves Nazis.
I think he's that way because he's bluffing.
It's just a class thing. They're taught not to flaunt wealth or talk about money, it's seen as crass and lower class.
When you merely inherit wealth and grow up around it all the time, you may wrestle with imposter syndrome and wonder if you still would have been just as wealthy if you didn’t start off that way. Your life may be a struggle to find your way out of the shadow of your ancestors achievements and make your own identity. This creates insecurity. Until you have made your own significant accomplishments you may not be comfortable flaunting your wealth, and even then there is a tendency to try to rewrite history to make it seem like you were less fortunate than you actually were.
4 is by no means "many."
Look at the billionaires list and say that again with a straight face:
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
> The authors ignore this nuance altogether, assuming that any individual nuance is a fallacy
The authors are talking about the 2,500 billionaries in the world (there are 22,000,000 millionaires in the USA).
It's funny listening to you tolerate lavish wealth for individuals more than groups while criticizing an article that says people tolerate lavish wealth for individuals more than groups.
It looks like you're struggling with reading comprehension, so let me make it more clear. The article takes the position that viewing individuals in the billionaire class differently based on their individual story is wrong and provides a means manipulate people into viewing them all homogeneously. I do not "tolerate lavish wealth" or think these people should have so much command over society, that is the subjective word choice of the authors to describe their interpretation of a phenomenon, but I personally do think many of these people who come from very little deserve more respect and success than wealthy scions who, at best, have every advantage, or at worst, do nothing at all with their lives and yet command extreme wealth.
Looking at a group removes the humanity from what we're looking at, makes it abstract. And abstractions are easy to hate. They don't exist in reality, they are not a reflection of ourselves. It's very easy to hate or throw stones at an abstraction.
It's possible to hate the abstraction and love the people in the abstraction at the same time. This is not self-contradictory.
The premise of the article seems to be the disconnect between the feelings the public has for group vs its constituents, when the feeling is positive for each constituent but negative for the group.
Bad billionaires aren't in the group, and I'd argue that people do hate on groups even when they love each and every individual member.
So their goal is to manipulate public opinion more effectively. This approach is backfiring, causing more and more people to lose faith in social science in general.
The focus should be on enlightening, not convincing. If real personal stories don't lead readers to the same conclusions, perhaps the premise is incorrect. People are smart enough to see through over simplified explanations.
Bezos and Musk are just dudes, if society decides that their net worth has to go to zero, then sure enough it will.
Even if they wire money out of the country you can capture the person and just like that you managed to have their net worth in effect go to zero.
That's because their 200B in Dubai have no material effect on their life in Florence penitentiary.
Social groups which are both wealthy and cohese because of say traditions , language, religion etc. they are much harder to attack with violence
Heck, to this very day, having pictures of black people up in your home will suppress its assessed value. If anything turning off the mechanism by which minorities’ wealth is held down is really hard.
That's because it's not an immediate concern due to the fact that you always have the optionality to do so , if needed be.
At no point has “well, we can expropriate the wealth of billionaires if we need to” been an opinion anywhere other than the far left, and that group really doesn’t hold a lot of power here.
The fact that it's not an opinion, doesn't mean it's not an option.
People other than the far left don't want to do it, just like people don't want to treat a paper cut with cortisone off the bat.
You always have the optionality to do it later, if needed be.
Yes, and making me dictator for life is an option, but it isn't going to happen now is it? Lots of things are an option, but we must grapple with both the probability of them happening, and the historical incidence at which similar events occurred.
In general if you're making the argument that A is easier than B, and B keeps happening at a much higher rate than A, then you're probably missing some very important detail to explain that difference. America, and the world really, has a long history of suppressing and extracting the wealth of large groups. Peasants, slaves, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, lower level laborers, and demographic minorities today have all had their wealth suppressed and extracted for the sake of someone else. Meanwhile the wealth of those elites being expropriated and given to the masses are extremely rare events[0]; much more common is elites overthrowing other elites to expropriate their wealth personally.
For my part, I think you're overly focused on the mechanical aspects of confiscation rather than the political ones. Yes, if you get the political systems in alignment it is mechanically very easy to take Bezo's wealth; just take his bank accounts or hit him with a wrench until he authorizes a foreign transfer. But actually getting that political system in alignment to do that is extremely difficult; often even getting people like Bezos to pay the same tax rate as the rest of us is too big a political lift.
As an analogy, it was pretty easy mechanically for the French to get rid of their kings. Paris was a city 650,000 strong, overwhelming the ~1,000 Swiss Guard protecting the king at the Tuileries palace and (eventually) executing the king was mechanically simple. After all, how hard can a battle be if you can muster a 16:1 advantage[1]? But while winning that battle was easy, getting to the point where the King was forced back into Paris and the mob was ready to literally kill him took a long long time to happen. The will to do things matters more than anything else.
0 - Not that you'd know that based on the amount of material produced on such events. I would argue that we're still living through the elite panic in reaction to the October Revolution, even the USSR was hardly an "expropriate the wealth of the rich in order to feed the masses" kinda place after Stalin took over.
1 - Actual order of battle for the storming of the Tuileries in 1792 was 20,000 republicans vs. 1,200 royalist guards. Generally military theorists hold up 4:1 as the tipping point where numbers overwhelm no matter the quality of leadership. At 16:1, the Swiss Guard stood no chance even though they were trained soldiers fighting a literal mob.
Visiting a prostitute is way easier than dating, how many people visit prostitutes?
Taking away a candy from a child is really easy, how many people actually do it?
Rich individuals aren't seen as a threat, because they can be easily overpowered with violence
What people see as threats are people who have a following such as politicians, thought leaders or technoutopian cult figures who also happen to be rich.
Ignoring the fact that a partner meets needs beyond sex, I think you're probably underestimating how many people actually pay for sex work. People just tend to not talk about that, because it's both illegal and heavily stigmatized.
> Taking away a candy from a child is really easy, how many people actually do it?
This implies that people treat children nicely because they're not a threat, which is a worrying implication. Personally, I think that people don't steal candy from children because they don't want to hurt children, especially over something as trivial as candy.
> Rich individuals aren't seen as a threat, because they can be easily overpowered with violence
Uhhh, what? Rich people are capable of bringing a huge amount of violence to bear, both in terms of their ability to hire armed citizens to protect them, and their ability to marshal the power of the state directly or indirectly.
I'd highly recommend you read some history about labor organization in the United States. The armed representatives of rich men machine gunning down striking workers is a pretty common occurrence. Rich industrialists also made it de-facto illegal to be a socialist in the United States for most of the 20th century.
And that's direct violence. We can also talk about the ability of the rich to starve people via blacklisting and the undermining of social safety nets.
> What people see as threats are people who have a following such as politicians, thought leaders or technoutopian cult figures who also happen to be rich.
<Insert "They're the same picture" meme here>
Less glib, I think a lot of people see these as part of the same system. Rich people pretty quickly become politically entrenched or weird cult leaders, and the thought leaders are largely subsidized by the rich people that they write on the behalf of.
First, our entire system in the US is designed to protect three things: life, liberty and property. The system is built to allow people own property and deliberately make it difficult to take property away. That is why injustice in the American system is often suppression (you can't own that) instead of confiscation (we're taking it from you).
or put another more accurate way, if you want to take money from people, you have a dehumanize them, abstract them away into a caricature instead of an actual human to be empathized with
You must dehumanize them.
"Individuals generated better tolerated than groups."
Without social connections, it's almost impossible to start a successful business nowadays. It's like a miracle when it happens because all the big capital is working against you; the easy-money-machines are constantly sucking away all the talent, all the investors, all the business connections away from you and constantly chipping away at your confidence and that of whoever decides to collaborate with you in spite of all this. The kinds of people who are willing to collaborate with a nobody on such projects genuinely believe that they will fail. They're prepared to work 50 years on something and see it fail completely. They know it's an all-or-nothing deal, the billionaires have turned the economy into an all-or-nothing scheme.
At this stage, I'm satisfied with the idea of success being "would have been a success in a world without manipulation of the monetary system." Maybe a bet you make today will pay off for someone else in 200 years; that will be success.