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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
- Hits up Politics thread after three days offline.
- Sees talk of guns and jets. Nods, understanding how derails go.
- Sees scary red mod post warning everyone to get back on-topic.
- Conversation about guns and jets immediately resumes?
...
Are we at war? Did we just declare war and I missed it?
I don't want to be that guy telling everyone to stop talking about a thing everyone's enjoying talking about and not offering an on-topic alternative to discuss. That's not what I'm trying to do. I just want to know if I missed an uber-important declaration of war.
edited 13th Oct '15 3:29:25 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Just go to http://cnn.com
. The digression I was getting in people's faces over was the "Mexicans are Indian robots" thing.
edited 13th Oct '15 4:01:43 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.I know this is from a few days ago, but I'd like to highlight these:
From Le Garcon:
From Silasw:
Think about it, if guns are allowed then if you see someone with a gun you ignore it, they probably have a CC licence after all, they're just carrying it for whatever reason, it means nothing. But if guns aren't allowed, you spot someone with a gun and there's no question or doubt, that person is up to no good and you need to run like fuck and raise the alarm.
As for how often spur of the moment fights/attacks occur and who tends to be part of them, that I don't know. Though it's a fair question.
Oh and I'd just like to note how crazy it is that you guys will let an 18 year old walk around with a concealed deadly weapon, but you won't let them drink.
These are both interesting points. I'm quite ambivalent about this and I heavily sigh almost every time I see the debate about guns on college campuses. On one hand, the presence of firearms by faculty, students, the administration and mainstay security would indeed act as a deterrent for would-be shooters. Say what you want about the Fort Hood shooting, but there's a good reason why shooting sprees tend to not occur on armed facilities, especially in the presence of people who are trained to use them. Blue Ninja might have more to say on this matter.
Where I take issue is this idea that liberals are so dim-witted that they think a "No Guns" sign on a campus is going to keep terrorists and disgruntled young men from opening fire on people. There's a political cartoon from a right-wing website asserting precisely that point.
Most of the left-wing arguments I've heard for not wanting guns on campus have more to do with the emotional sensitivity of the people on the campus and the already-established presence of armed security on many campuses. Something the Columbine, Newtown, Virginia Tech, Jonesboro, etc. incidents have in common is that armed police officers (particular tactical response teams) responded in under 10 minutes, so this is starting to feel like we're trying to find ways to make the sun less hot note . Gun violence can be curbed through immediate, short-term measures like armed security and screening processes, but addressing our cultural shortcomings seems like it's the best deck on the table right now. While philosophically contentious, we currently lack the tools to change human nature on a fundamental level, but we can and should address cultural values and social practices that lead to harmful behavior.
The other problem is that we have reached a point in our society where gun violence (like police brutality and terrorism) is just a cosmological inevitability. We view gun violence as some sort of force of nature that can't be stopped with anything other than lots more guns or no guns because we've bizarrely resigned ourselves to the notion that the human psyche can't be challenged. It can and it should. As I've said before, most of the shooters we've seen are perfectly healthy men with poisonous ideologies, not people with mental illnesses. Bigotry is not a mental illness.
Last comment here. I think it's a bit contradictory and disingenuous when the same people who mock millennials for wanting trigger warnings in the classroom (and who mock professors for being liberal brain washers) are the same people who think it would be a good idea to arm those very same millennials and professors when the average American, regardless of age or political standing, has an emotional episode every time they so much as get cut off in traffic when another person merges without using their turn signal. You think kids these days are lazy, entitled and hypersensitive, yet you want them to be their own personal law enforcement officer with the ability to use lethal force at a moment's notice?
Maybe having armed classrooms will make angry would-be shooters think twice about trying to blow everyone away. Or maybe we're going to see a lot of professors get their brains blown out because of students who didn't get the grade they think they deserved. I don't know.
edited 13th Oct '15 4:38:56 PM by Aprilla
edited 13th Oct '15 4:41:59 PM by AngelicBraeburn
The artist formally known as Deviant Braeburn![]()
The problem with that, though, is that "poisonous ideologies" are even harder to control than mental illnesses.
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Of course they are, but you don't need pills and therapy to tell someone to lay off the Klan rallies and rape apologia. The difference between mentally ill people and bigots is that one group has been killing a lot of people and one group hasn't. That we conflate the two without further inquiry is part of the problem.
edited 13th Oct '15 5:27:17 PM by Aprilla
The thing is, when it comes to spree shooters showing up, I'm going to trust the cops and security guards to handle it a hell of a lot better than some random other student/person who is there on account of cops and security guards being trained to handle that sort of thing. Just because you have a gun doesn't mean you know how to handle emergencies; enjoying spending time at the shooting range or hunting or whatever else you do with guns doesn't mean you know how to handle some guy intent on murdering as many people as possible.
So again, I don't buy the whole "Allowing CC on campuses and such will act as a deterrent". For fuck's sake, one of the places was an elementary school. These guys target places they don't think people will be able to defend themselves. And quite frankly, just being able to take a gun to a college doesn't mean that people actually will in greater numbers, or even think to draw their gun when fired on, which functionally means that colleges will be as vulnerable as they ever were.
CC on campuses does nothing to address the problems that cause these types of shootings to begin with.
@Protagonist: There needs to be another cultural push to punish said poisonous ideologies, but the problem is the fringiest parts that go so far as to think shooting people is ok is already pushed far away and keeps itself apart from the rest of society in may ways. And a lot of the poisonous ideology is actually quite mainstream, which makes it difficult to address and be believed.
edited 13th Oct '15 5:50:10 PM by AceofSpades
To build on what Aprilla pointed out, we can legislate until the cows come home. But having new rules are meaningless if we do not change our culture to accompany the laws.
And as someone with a diagnosed mental illness, I would really appreciate it if we could get away from blaming an obvious bigot for their obvious malice by claiming they are mentally ill.
I would love our mental health system to be reformed. But I dont want that to come at the cost of people thinking citizens like me are just jumping at the bit to blow them away.
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - AszurDebate debate debate debate debate.
I'm glad that this is considerably more substantive than the Trump debates, even if some of the responses and questions are imperfect.
GM: AGOG S4 & F/WC RP; Co-GM: TABA, SOTR, UUA RP; Sub-GM: TTS RP. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new Empire.Oh, certainly. I just mean that it's a huge pain when candidates regularly ignore the moderator and so forth. If only we could have regular order during these things.
GM: AGOG S4 & F/WC RP; Co-GM: TABA, SOTR, UUA RP; Sub-GM: TTS RP. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new Empire.Aren't most school shooters suicidal? I mean they generally die fighting don't they? Plus lets logic this, you've got a bunch of people in a classroom facing forward, the kid in the middle pulls a gun and opens fire, the kids around him do nothing in panic and fear, as untrained people tend to in such a situation pull their guns and open fire, where do all the bullets go?
The reasons hooting sprees tend to not happen on armed faculties is because they are both well guarded and have armed and trained personnel on them. Untrained people are just going to end up hurting other innocents, like that guy did at that Church shooting ages ago.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranRunning impressions so far:
O'Malley is not really distinguishing himself.
Webb is doing a good job touting his experience, but showed a severe lack of groking solidarity / intersectionality with that affirmative-action answer.
Chafee is doing best of the minor-league candidates, but it feels like he's leaning on Sanders a lot.
Sanders is doing a good job not slotting into that "crazy socialist" box, and actually sounded downright moderate on gun control.
Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?

Might as well ask Americans to contract out to Mikoyan & Guerevich, for all the support you'd get to buying foreign for a fighter jet.