Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Frumple]

This reminds me of the discussions we used to have in high school about how we should ban all writing implements because they can be used as weapons.

Which is as silly stupid as it always is, because it's a hell of a lot harder to kill someone or yourself with your average pen or pencil than it is with a gun. Like, drawing on yourself is hella' unlikely to cause you to bleed out. Shooting yourself in the foot is a decent way to lose a foot and possibly too much of your bleedy stuff.

Unfortunately, when it comes to firearms it's specifically because of ease of use and deadliness that it contributes so much/disproportionately to violence or suicide. Consistently people find slowing the purchase process or removing guns from the situation helps mitigate violence or suicide (attempts) at rates in the same ballpark as anything in the psychological or sociology range of junk, due in no small part because the recommendation from either of those likes to include things like "don't have things it's easy to kill people with in close vicinity of people who may be inclined to hurt themselves or others, seriously, holy shit why are we having to say this". Even when it doesn't reduce rates of violence or suicide attempts, more people survive the incidents. Reducing access to purpose built murder weapons is, in fact, one of the correct ways to cut down on the amount of people that die.

Oddly enough, having a device purpose built for killing on hand (or near enough you can easily get to it while pissed off) enables greater degrees of killing. You'd think that'd be as stupid obvious as a designated driver not letting their drunk compatriots hold the keys or something, but apparently it's not.

[McTraveller]

I suppose I need to be more clear on my sarcasm / devil's advocate statements...

I agree that what you said is correct - reducing access to tools designed to kill is probably going to reduce death.  That's almost a tautology.  What surprises me, perhaps, is that people in western countries are so surprised in general by violence.  This is definitely worldview dependent... for some reason it seems the 'western' worldview is that the world is a naturally peaceful place and violence is an affront.  My worldview is that the world is inherently violent, and I'm honestly surprised we don't see so more violence...

But that's all an aside from policy decisions.  The questions that I want answered for policy are generally along the lines of "has the cost of this policy versus its benefits been evaluated appropriately".  The sad thing is that there is often sentiment "No we should try to address X no matter what the cost! You should want to do that too - and even if you don't, we're going to tax you to do it anyway."

I know that sounds harsh, but that's the problem with essentially all of politics, isn't it?

[Reelya]

Yeah, the "well you'd have to ban pencils" argument is pretty flawed.

First, you can do what's a called a "cost-benefit analysis". Very few people get stabbed with a pencil vs the number shot with guns. So the costs of banning pencils outweigh the benefits. For guns, the math is completely different. It's a complete red herring to say that gun control isn't worthwhile because there's a theoretical chance of dying by falling on a pencil: what matters is the cost-benefit analysis of the gun control legislation.

e.g. the flaw in the pencil argument is that it's really arguing that if you can't get absolute safety, e.g. 100% safety then it makes no sense to value relative safety, e.g. it's not worth striving for 99% safety, because 99% is less than the hypothetical safety of 100%. But of course, the argument that being "safer" is worthless unless it's "the safest" is flawed.

By induction, if 99% safety isn't worthwhile because it's less than 100%, then 98% isn't worthwhile because it's less than 99%, and so on, and ultimately, you can use the same argument to argue that making things even 1% safe isn't worthwhile. e.g. why not let companies put lead back in the paint? After all, other substances cause brain damage too, and you're going to die eventually anyway. So we might as well enjoy brightly-colored paint while we're alive, and not worry about toxic brain damage at all. That's the same argument as the "but pencils can kill you" argument.

Also, of course by the deadly-pencils logic you'd need to let people open-carry hand grenades and bazookas. After all, why ban those when people will just weaponize stationary if they can't use them? Or how about letting people carry buckets of acid around to throw into people's faces? That should be perfectly acceptable, too, because they could just take your eye out with a pencil, so why bother trying to prevent acid attacks at all? Of course the point here is that if anyone objects to people carrying around weaponized acid and explosives because there should be limits because those things are just too deadly or horrific, then that contradicts the whole "but pencils can kill" argument.

[Egan_BW]

Why limit anything when life is meaningless and nothing you do will amount to anything in the larger picture of the universe?~

[Dunamisdeos]

I'm voting in favor of the next candidate that proposes open bazooka carry laws.

[Egan_BW]

You have to admit it would be pretty awesome for the 15 minutes before the whole country explodes.

[JoshuaFH]

So, eh, if it turns out that the election was rigged by the Russians, doesn't that make Trump's presidency invalid? Would he get kicked out of the position, or what? Or do we have to live with our mistake and let him keep going because noone wants to deal with that headache?

[hector13]

Well rigged implies the Russians had control over the outcome, whereas they didn’t, they just tried to influence it via judicious use of social engineering. Not as bad, arguably still wrong, and the only reason Trump would be affected directly from this particular revelation is if he was actively involved with them doing it.

If he hasn’t been hurt by his son, son-in-law and campaign manager actually meeting Russians with ties to the Russian government who said they had stuff to hurt his opponent in the election, though... doesn’t look likely unpeasant things are going to happen to him after this.

[Frumple]

Well rigged implies the Russians had control over the outcome, whereas they didn’t, they just tried to influence it via judicious use of social engineering. Not as bad, arguably still wrong, and the only reason Trump would be affected directly from this particular revelation is if he was actively involved with them doing it.

Eh...far as I'm aware we're still not 100% sure on that, hec. We've been told the voter roll access/manipulation didn't effect any outcomes, but we've been told a bunch of shit both about the hacking and by this administration in general that turned out however many weeks later to be either incorrect or an outright blatant lie. Not sure I'd count anything as solid until meuller's actually done (which will almost certainly still be months to go and may be years), if then.

As for whether trump gets hurt by the blatant bullshit him and his campaign got up to, well, we still got a ways to go. The investigation's pretty certainly only barely started handing out the indictments, heh.

[Pancakes]

It's a good exercise in thought, though. What would happen? Impeachment? Most certainly, but what about presidential duties that were carried out before the impeachment? Are they nullified?

Stuff like that is, oddly enough, what I think about when reading these articles, not the actual "Did he/didn't he?"

[Frumple]

Eh, impeachment would almost certainly depend on the 2018 elections. GOP's already thoroughly proven they don't give a single shit what trump does, little bit of foreign power election rigging would just have them screaming the dems did it to so it's okay, or some crap. Especially if they couldn't find any proof of it.

Duties carried out before would be as valid as they were previously, though, far as I'm aware. More likely to be overturned, probably, but most of it would still be there. The U.S. doesn't really have mechanisms in place to invalidate an election or blanket null an elected official's decisions, even one that shouldn't have been elected.

In the case of impeachment, trump would be removed, the chain of succession would go to whoever's next (that doesn't also get caught up in the impeachment process, anyway), and any mess cleaning would mostly fall on the successor (immediate or after next election) and congress. And the various departments and whatnot if they get unfettered from whatever worthless sacks of flesh trump saddled them with, I guess.

[misko27]

I suppose I need to be more clear on my sarcasm / devil's advocate statements...

I agree that what you said is correct - reducing access to tools designed to kill is probably going to reduce death.  That's almost a tautology.  What surprises me, perhaps, is that people in western countries are so surprised in general by violence.  This is definitely worldview dependent... for some reason it seems the 'western' worldview is that the world is a naturally peaceful place and violence is an affront.  My worldview is that the world is inherently violent, and I'm honestly surprised we don't see so more violence...

Congratulations on discovering this. And yes, it's new: medieval society never for a moment doubted that the world was misery and pain; and while the ancient world invented violence and sadism, the semi-modern period reinvented it. It's only after that, as we come the very near past, that the idea that violence is not the norm takes root.

Why limit anything when life is meaningless and nothing you do will amount to anything in the larger picture of the universe?~

Because Hobbes tells me my life can be slightly less miserable via the ruthless enforcement of laws and norms, and that's good enough for me.

So, eh, if it turns out that the election was rigged by the Russians, doesn't that make Trump's presidency invalid? Would he get kicked out of the position, or what? Or do we have to live with our mistake and let him keep going because noone wants to deal with that headache?

It's a good exercise in thought, though. What would happen? Impeachment? Most certainly, but what about presidential duties that were carried out before the impeachment? Are they nullified?

Stuff like that is, oddly enough, what I think about when reading these articles, not the actual "Did he/didn't he?"

The logic of that implies that there is a government in a "resting" position from before Trump was elected, and we can simply "revert" it as we might revert a bad edit or poor upgrade. But that is not the case in our system of government: whatever the last person did happened, and as long as what they did was not in-and-of-itself illegal, they stand, even if they could not have come to pass wihtout something illegal.

Or put differently: when they finally broke down the old patronage systems like Tammany Hall after a century of trying, they didn't just tear down all the buildings Tammany built, even when those buildings were exorbitantly expensive and almost certainly corrupt at most steps (so long as the building is structurally sound and not in-and-of-itself corrupt by being a shitty building). You can't really undo the damage of that sort of patronage, you can just fix (or when necessary, repeal and/or replace) the laws that stand, repair what needs to be repaired, and move one with the new reality. So it goes with Trump. Whoever's President after Trump will not be able to turn back the clock; they can, if they wish, undo everything he did, but not as part of any "automatic" process.

[Max™]

I'm voting in favor of the next candidate that proposes open bazooka carry laws.

I'm your man, because after all, when bazookas are outlawed only outlaws will have trebuchets...

...

...wait a sec

[WealthyRadish]

At the very least I bet whoever replaces him is going to have a hell of a time "undoing" the orange residues and faint smells of urine from the carpet, impeachment or no.

[Frumple]

And yes, it's new: medieval society never for a moment doubted that the world was misery and pain; and while the ancient world invented violence and sadism, the semi-modern period reinvented it. It's only after that, as we come the very near past, that the idea that violence is not the norm takes root.

For what it's worth, I don't think the reason the norm's developed (to the extent it actually has, anyway) is necessarily that complicated. It's really easy to make most people pretty peaceful,* and once the conditions for that hits a critical mass the idea that hey, maybe shitting on each other isn't actually a required default state, is an idea that stops being terribly difficult to inculcate. Food, shelter, not having substantial chunks of your children dying before puberty, reliably treatable health conditions, so on, so forth, you stop being quite so likely to be irritable or desperate enough to start hurting people.

* There's freakishly little in the biological world that actually wants to fight, particularly with it's own kind, if they have some other option available, frankly. Last I checked even microscopic organisms have effectively figured out the shit's a waste of energy and risk if you can get away with not doing it. We ain't terribly different, just got different decision wiring levers to deal with.