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0 karma · joined June 29, 2018
You know if you just scale up the numbers above, Mark could justify what he's doing the same way Acton justifies his actions yet somehow Acton thinks there's a difference. You just have to laugh at that.
Sorry, but I think it just sounds unintelligent.
Exactly this. It can be tough but you pick up your load and move valiantly forward.
This is personal for me because it is the most profound thing I've ever read. For someone to come and refer to it as sexist is demeaning.
Savor it and quit being so wound up is all I'm saying. There's a place for everything and this was ill-placed.
This is precisely it. You fight it continuously and always assume you are going to mess things up even when you think you're 'finally' strong enough. Just being constantly paranoid about slipping back into old habits. It's no joke and there's no panacea.
Just talking about it with other people going through the same thing helps a lot. It's almost always worked for me and I tend to get a hold of things before the spiral further out of control.
Best of luck mate. IWNDWYT
TIL about this. Thanks.
This Rousseauian vantage point on the general nature of people is something that's debatable to me. I think that under specific conditions this rings truer (or more false depending on how you look at it) than in other conditions. This whole debate leads to an even deeper rabbit hole that entails things such as the necessity of religion(not to be conflated with fundamentalism / fanaticism). I am more of a Maistrean in my view of humans i.e. that people aren't good at first but under the right conditions, people can behave in a desirable manner that ensures chaos is staved off.
> Cato
I no longer believe Cato represents true conservative ideology and it is not necessarily the most authoritative source on matters conservative policy. It is weak on a lot of issues and infiltrated by people who don't necessarily embody its founding principles. When it was formed by the Kochs, they eventually broke away from another group who thought that they(Kochs/Cato) had sold out their mission for more mainstream appeal. This group was led by Murray Rothbard, and I guess I could say I left with them(Miseseans).
Just concluding the book, Sons of Wichita, and despite the Kochs being viewed as the embodiment of conservative/libertarian ideology in America, I don't think they take it far enough. They're weak on immigration. Very weak. They've built an amazing corporation that their father, Fred, would have been proud of (despite the family feuds) but he most certainly would have disapproved of their politics. He of course came up in the era of communism and saw it as the greatest threat that existed at the time.
Anyway, Tempestn, been a great discussion. I'd like to continue this later via mail as per your profile so I'll be reaching out. You've been great; typically these discussions tend to get out of hand with a lot of name calling but there was none of that here. Kudos for the survivalist initiatives you've undertaken - I don't even know what to say about that except I hope you never need to employ them. :)
That's obviously very ill informed (I'd like a link to this or a pointer to such incidents if you don't mind).
However, could there be more to the story? If there's a threat that the individual(s) might have been radicalized (and there are enough instances where this has been the case), then Americans might have to be smarter about whether they can allow you back into society without severe scrutiny or even detainment where evidence supports it (curious if there's sufficient legislation to resolve this though).
Well obviously this isn't very useful and may need to be rethought if true. I don't know much about this claim though so I'll read more on it.
> Trump employed a policy sledgehammer
Look, these things aren't easy. May be it is a disproportionate response but I've lived through a period of fear when muslim terrorists bombed/shot up malls and universities in my country. In one incident, two armed civilians (an Israeli and a native) were able to shoot some terrorists and save some innocent lives. A once safe country ended up with us having to lock our offices during the day when business should be conducted. I am a lottle biased on the issue and that's why I took such a hardliner position on it.
I'd say that that's a valid I'd concern even as a Trump supporter. All governments are capable of copious amounts of nastiness. Today, my guy could be in power, tomorrow someone else's will be. Therefore, systems that take this into account would perform better than those that don't.
Why, thank you!
> Currently there are over 30,000 gun deaths in the US every year.
Interesting stat. I'll look into this more and see where the rabbit hole leads me. But as I gather so far, the data supports my claims more than yours. Case in point from Wikipedia:
In 2012, 64% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides.
This again points to mental health issues more than guns being the problem. These obviously unwell individuals would have found other ways to exit a world they no longer could bear being in. Sad affair but true. So unless the mental health is addressed, if your goal was to prevent deaths, you would not solve much by taking guns away.
> It is incredibly unlikely that the US government would morph into a murderously tyrannical regime.
Funny that you say that because these same words echo what I heard a holocaust survivor said in a WWII documentary I was watching less than a week ago. The Jews did not think that nazi Germans would ever do what they did to them. They kept saying that Hitler was a passing fad and that in no time (3-4 yrs), he'd be out of power and normalcy would resume. I'd like to think that at the rate with which polarization is happening today, it isn't unfathomable that a murderous regime COULD take power. Even if they weren't murderous, there are other ways to exercise tyranny making death seem a more befitting (or may be even noble) endeavor as opposed to living on one's knees, so to speak.
It never seems dangerous at first. I'd posit that that's why we get insured; we assume that things can be calamitous even when there's little evidence to suggest the same.
That's the difference between my view point and yours. I have a theory on how this ties in to why most preppers are right leaning as opposed to left leaning i.e. perception of risk but I won't get into that right now. The point is, even if there's a small chance of that occurring, because the downside of not being ready is so huge, we must pull all stops to remain safe.
> opposing any restrictions on ownership whatsoever seems an untenable position to me.
I'm glad you see it that way, but a non-trivial number of anti-gun proponents don't see it that way and instead want guns taken away from the bulk of current owners if not all(civilians that is).
I had to disable it because videos would not play for long without freezing either on the browser or vlc. Only a hard restart of the machine would resolve this.
Sounds reasonable to me. I would however, also ask you to consider that excessive control leading to difficulty in accessing guns for personal protection is dangerous as well. The question becomes how much power do you want to give government over this issue.
A lot of gun owners cite the concerns that they have over the emergence of a tyrannical government. With guns, these citizens can protect themselves more adequately.
You don't want a scenario where the government of the day rounds up a bunch of deplorables/undesirables and sets out to massacre them. This has happened before and I'd bet that guns in the hands of each of these individuals would have accorded them a fairer chance at defending themselves.
As far as deaths go, governments have killed more people than a few gun toting individuals who clearly have mental issues have. Governments are more dangerous.
I knew it from the get go. I also know most people here are left leaning but that people haven't really thought about why they take the positions they take. There is a lot of indoctrination. This is by no means an attack on OP or you personally. Survey most people here (HN) without bringing up guns and they will agree with what OP said; people are the problem and not the tools.
Bring up the issue of guns and because it is the 'progressive/liberal/democrat' thing to do, guns(tools) become the problem. If we weren't polarized politically and instead took time to think about issues for ourselves, then our convictions would be consistent and hold true across the board.
I am a black non-american who absolutely agrees with and loves Trump. I look at the data on economics and what he's done for America and wish more people could see the same and forget about what the media says about him. His policies on immigration are common sense and exactly what I would want for my country; people have to come in the right way and some places have to have more scrutiny than others. That doesn't mean I hate humans but rather that I understand that people are different and some worse than others.
Not all video players are created equal. It's really hard to make a good video player. Case in point, look at all the crappy video players created by news sites that don't want to embed the YT player. Some can't even pause properly using the space bar or even let you select your preferred video quality.
Side note: I'm pretty sure we've interacted somewhere else online. Either on HN or reddit.