The Gaming Den

Titanium Dragon wrote:Do you own it for hunting, then? Or do you own it in case the government ever goes nutso?

I own them because I like guns and shooting is cathartic and fun. I do not intend to ever shoot a living thing, but I do like to pretend that if a zombie invasion breaks out I will get to be awesome lone survivor guy.

I'm not adverse to hunting, it's just a lot of work to go out their and do all that shit just to shoot a deer instead of a target, and it's not like it would be any more fun than going to a shooting range.

I am adverse to the idea that people owning guns in case the government goes nutso is an actual justification. Maybe if you admit that you might assassinate the president, but if you think there is going to be a fucking revolution you are retarded. The Army can kick the entire countries ass at once, but they won't for the same reason Bastile day turned out how it did. Cops are the same. They are absolute dicks and think everyone is guilty, they also aren't going to be part of any government pogrom.

Bottom line, the warning signs are so apparent and our system so robust (and our military and police forces so good) that if you can convince enough people to revolt, you can just vote the fucker out of office, and if elections are ever suspended, cops of military are going to beat you to the punch on killing the government.

Now we do have a very real threat of people not knowing wtf is going on and blindly walking into shackles, just look at the Republican party, but that's not going to be solved by revolution, so you are wasting your time.

Also, regarding your list of stupid people, yes the left has lots of types of stupid people, but each of those who seriously believe those things are small minorities. We only have three types of idiots, but I'll be damned if we don't have a hell of a lot of all 3.

79% of GOPers think that Obama has a bill in congress to take all choice from healthcare.

Half of GOPers from one of the four sections of our country think Obama wasn't born in the US.

Small minority?

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:79% of GOPers think that Obama has a bill in congress to take all choice from healthcare.

Half of GOPers from one of the four sections of our country think Obama wasn't born in the US.

Small minority?

-Crissa

Uh, did you miss my actual point? Liberals are a group of small minorities of different kinds of idiots. Conservatives are one big ass collection of the same kind of idiot.

The thing you need to understand is that when I say "we" that's me talking about conservatives, despite the fact that I want to murder them all in their sleep.

I think you want them to be awake when you murder them, or maybe thats just my imagination.

I own them because I like guns and shooting is cathartic and fun. I do not intend to ever shoot a living thing, but I do like to pretend that if a zombie invasion breaks out I will get to be awesome lone survivor guy.

Don't we all?

But, seriously, that's fair. Guns are fun. I own a sword for similar reasons.

I am adverse to the idea that people owning guns in case the government goes nutso is an actual justification. Maybe if you admit that you might assassinate the president, but if you think there is going to be a fucking revolution you are retarded. The Army can kick the entire countries ass at once, but they won't for the same reason Bastile day turned out how it did. Cops are the same. They are absolute dicks and think everyone is guilty, they also aren't going to be part of any government pogrom.

Bottom line, the warning signs are so apparent and our system so robust (and our military and police forces so good) that if you can convince enough people to revolt, you can just vote the fucker out of office, and if elections are ever suspended, cops of military are going to beat you to the punch on killing the government.

Its why the founding fathers guaranteed us the right to bear arms, and I don't consider it illegitimate. However, you're right that, more or less, the people who have lots of guns would kill the government long before some schmuck in Oregon got to take a potshot.

Now we do have a very real threat of people not knowing wtf is going on and blindly walking into shackles, just look at the Republican party, but that's not going to be solved by revolution, so you are wasting your time.

But they line up so nicely!

Also, regarding your list of stupid people, yes the left has lots of types of stupid people, but each of those who seriously believe those things are small minorities. We only have three types of idiots, but I'll be damned if we don't have a hell of a lot of all 3.

We have 95% of the voting black population. This the population which has a higher murder rate in some cities than we have death rate in Iraq/Afganistan. You're safer being shot at by the Taliban than you are being a poor black man in Detroit. That's a pretty fucked up population of voters.

To be fair, it doesn't make up as big of a percentage of democrats as any of the nutty republican groups do, but its still a sizable portion of Democrats.

But yes, apart from them we're a very fractious bunch. This is probably at least in part because the Republican party has been busy distilling itself down to the bare bones of nutjobbery, so everyone else who isn't welcome with them comes over to the Democrats, despite the fact that half of us don't get along with the other half. So you've got vegans and you've got Heath Shuler. Or rather, we "have" him - we supposedly have 60 people in the senate and a hefty majority in the house, but liberals do not have either.

The thing you need to understand is that when I say "we" that's me talking about conservatives, despite the fact that I want to murder them all in their sleep.

But then we don't get to hear the wails of the damned.

Titanium Dragon wrote: We have 95% of the voting black population. This the population which has a higher murder rate in some cities than we have death rate in Iraq/Afganistan. You're safer being shot at by the Taliban than you are being a poor black man in Detroit. That's a pretty fucked up population of voters.
(

I'm sure this sounded a lot less racist and ignorant in your head before you spewed it all over a keyboard and subjected the rest of us to it.

Do you really think the people doing the bulk of the murdering are voting? I think the converse is where eyebrows should be raised. It's fucked up that a certain segment of the population is getting murdered so very often. The people who want to continue criminalization of drugs, generally keep poor people down and deny them health care... that's the fucked up population of voters.

About nukes.

If nuclear weapons didn't exist, there would've been a World War. If not between Western nations and Asia (which would have been inevitable), then between Russia and China.

The world was very lucky to have nuclear weapons before a fight broke out between East and West. There have been many times when we came close to the brink of nuclear destruction, but if nukes didn't exist we would have had guaranteed destruction. Total War is a bitch like that.

Gambit of quick annihilation or guaranteed 'slow' destruction of the world? It's such a hard decision...

clikml wrote:

Titanium Dragon wrote: We have 95% of the voting black population. This the population which has a higher murder rate in some cities than we have death rate in Iraq/Afganistan. You're safer being shot at by the Taliban than you are being a poor black man in Detroit. That's a pretty fucked up population of voters.
(

I'm sure this sounded a lot less racist and ignorant in your head before you spewed it all over a keyboard and subjected the rest of us to it.

Do you really think the people doing the bulk of the murdering are voting? I think the converse is where eyebrows should be raised. It's fucked up that a certain segment of the population is getting murdered so very often. The people who want to continue criminalization of drugs, generally keep poor people down and deny them health care... that's the fucked up population of voters.

To be fair, this is true - I'm sure most of the idiots who are out killing other people are not, in fact, active voters. At least, I'd hope they're not.

However, it isn't just the people who are doing the killing who are the problem, it is, in fact, a cultural one. And it is true that, to some extent, everyone is to blame for it. And the criminalization of drugs certainly is a contributer.

Conversely, drugs themselves are a major cause of medical costs - we spend billions upon billions of dollars every year on tobacco related illnesses alone, and tobacco is not nearly as bad for you as a number of other drugs are (like meth) which remain illegal. Obviously banning, say, marijuana is stupid - it costs us more in enforcement than it would to treat the damage it causes, and with taxes on it we might even break even - but legalizing all drugs isn't necessarily wise.

And people talk about keeping people in poverty, but its not like we put our boots on their head and force them into the dirt. The Asians and the Irish got a lot of shit when they first came, and yet they both now make above-average amounts of income. Yes, to some degree our policies do not help them work their way out of poverty, but if it was our policies alone which were keeping them poor then other groups would not have had the upward mobility that they have had. Blaming it entirely on the whole of society is wrong and ultimately futile.

I think there is more we can do for them, but we cannot do everything for them, either.

If nuclear weapons didn't exist, there would've been a World War. If not between Western nations and Asia (which would have been inevitable), then between Russia and China.

Nah, bat bombs would have ensured MAD

But seriously, nukes are not exactly a good thing, and in a war between China and Russia, doesn't everyone else win?

We haven't fought a World War since we invented nukes, tis true. But is that only because of nuclear weapons and, to some degree, is it actually a good thing? China and the USSR both were as bad as Nazi Germany, but we didn't deal with them.

Its kind of meaningless speculation though, as nuclear weapons really aren't that complicated. It always amuses me when people talk about how horrible it would be for North Korea or Iran to learn how to build a nuclear weapon, when how to build one is available for free online, or can be watched on the History channel if reading isn't for you.

Then again, I hear North Korea is too cheap for basic cable.

But seriously, nukes are not exactly a good thing, and in a war between China and Russia, doesn't everyone else win?

That's funny. You're funny.

We haven't fought a World War since we invented nukes, tis true. But is that only because of nuclear weapons and, to some degree, is it actually a good thing?

I can't believe you just asked me whether averting total war between two superpowers is a good thing. Uh, yes.

China and the USSR both were as bad as Nazi Germany, but we didn't deal with them.

I have no idea what this means.

Russia is capitalist and China is turning that way. What kind of fucking deal did you want?

To be fair, this is true - I'm sure most of the idiots who are out killing other people are not, in fact, active voters. At least, I'd hope they're not.

However, it isn't just the people who are doing the killing who are the problem, it is, in fact, a cultural one. And it is true that, to some extent, everyone is to blame for it. And the criminalization of drugs certainly is a contributer.

Conversely, drugs themselves are a major cause of medical costs - we spend billions upon billions of dollars every year on tobacco related illnesses alone, and tobacco is not nearly as bad for you as a number of other drugs are (like meth) which remain illegal. Obviously banning, say, marijuana is stupid - it costs us more in enforcement than it would to treat the damage it causes, and with taxes on it we might even break even - but legalizing all drugs isn't necessarily wise.

And people talk about keeping people in poverty, but its not like we put our boots on their head and force them into the dirt. The Asians and the Irish got a lot of shit when they first came, and yet they both now make above-average amounts of income. Yes, to some degree our policies do not help them work their way out of poverty, but if it was our policies alone which were keeping them poor then other groups would not have had the upward mobility that they have had. Blaming it entirely on the whole of society is wrong and ultimately futile.

I think there is more we can do for them, but we cannot do everything for them, either.

To be fair I question why you bring the black murderers up in the first place because they do not represent actual voters because (and trust me coming from the neighborhoods and being one of them) they don't vote...

Also I find your comments about the impoverished ignorant. Most Asians don't live above the poverty line. Have you been to some of their ghettos? As for the irish and indeed any Caucasian immigrant it was much easier for them to move upward then it was for truly foreign looking peoples. Now while I don't blame society for keeping the black man down saying, or even hinting that it is mostly their fault is anathema to me. There is no way to correctly express how it feels to grow up in the inner city. Sure mechanically you would think that yes given the same chances everyone will rise up but no. We are people not numbers and their is a shit load of stuff wrong with impoverished balck communities that has not been undone. Seriously go to school in a number of these places and then go somewhere else. I can not express in simple words the mix of emotions I felt when I went from my high school in Gary, IN to another school 20 MINUTES AWAY and found that it (even though it was considered an average school) out classed the every school I had been in up to that point. The lunches were better, the text book more up to date, there wasn't 1 or 2 fights every day, hell the damn place was CLEANER then my old school. I could write a fucking dissertation over this subject but I digress. Shit like "we''re not keeping our boot on them" is fucking ignorant.

clkiml, they get murdered whether or not they vote.

-Crissa

MGuy wrote:To be fair I question why you bring the black murderers up in the first place because they do not represent actual voters because (and trust me coming from the neighborhoods and being one of them) they don't vote...

Yeah, but they certainly cause problems, and violence begets violence and all that.

Also, if you're poor and the only way you see to make money is to sell drugs, and the cops crack down on you for selling them. you are going to hate the cops (and possibly whites in general, who you associate with them because they're the only ones you see, because all the other ones avoid the only part of town you can afford to live in, and you go to school with other poor blacks). But at the same time, you might well be poor because your parents are addicted to drugs, and spend all their money on them, as well as making bad decisions while under the influence and being unable to hold a job, so from the point of view of the cops, they're trying to prevent people like your parents from shooting up and bringing more people to a miserable life like your own. And this is a real concern in some quarters. Everything is complicated, as if there was a simple solution, we'd have done it twenty years ago.

Also I find your comments about the impoverished ignorant. Most Asians don't live above the poverty line. Have you been to some of their ghettos?

That is false. Only about 15% of asians are poor (as compared to 12% of whites). Obviously not all asians are wealthy, or even middle class, and many, particularly from the shittier countries, are dirt poor (people from Laos IIRC have like a 60% poverty rate).

As for the irish and indeed any Caucasian immigrant it was much easier for them to move upward then it was for truly foreign looking peoples. Now while I don't blame society for keeping the black man down saying, or even hinting that it is mostly their fault is anathema to me.

If it isn't society's fault, and it isn't their fault, whose fault is it? The fault faeries?

There is no way to correctly express how it feels to grow up in the inner city. Sure mechanically you would think that yes given the same chances everyone will rise up but no. We are people not numbers and their is a shit load of stuff wrong with impoverished balck communities that has not been undone. Seriously go to school in a number of these places and then go somewhere else. I can not express in simple words the mix of emotions I felt when I went from my high school in Gary, IN to another school 20 MINUTES AWAY and found that it (even though it was considered an average school) out classed the every school I had been in up to that point. The lunches were better, the text book more up to date, there wasn't 1 or 2 fights every day, hell the damn place was CLEANER then my old school. I could write a fucking dissertation over this subject but I digress. Shit like "we''re not keeping our boot on them" is fucking ignorant.

Yeah. There's a reason for this, though - community investment.

Why are there 1-2 fights every day in that high school? Its because of who is going there. Yes, to some degree it is because the staff has become jaded to it, but why? Why are they jaded to it when other schools aren't?

There is a difference. And that difference is the value people place on their education.

Now, to some extent inner city schools get screwed monetarily. But not all of it is the greater system. Part of it is that our whole educational system is mismanaged, and we don't spend our money wisely, and this is especially true in inner cities. Part of it is that the local community, due to the lower valuation they put on education, are less willing to donate money, equipment, and their time to make things better. And part of it is that the students simply are not as eager to learn when they are raised in these communities. If you remove them from the community, you WILL solve some of those problems, but it is horribly unpopular (and seen as horribly unethical) to destroy these communities, despite them being hellholes. And we aren't going to start taking children away from their parents because they live in the ghetto.

The solution is to teach the people that, in fact, they live in a hellhole and they can get out of it with an education. But they won't believe you if everyone else around them tells them that there is no way that will happen. And why should they? I'm just some ignorant white guy who will never know what life for them is really like, right?

This is not to say that there aren't people there who ARE willing to learn, because there are. This is not to say that all black people are stupid, ignorant thugs. But when you have a significant population of such people among you, it brings not just themselves but everyone else around them down.

Crissa wrote:clikml, they get murdered whether or not they vote.

Eh wot?

I was taking offense that the implication was that the voters were the murderers (as he outright went for the gold with the 'black murderers are democrats' generalization), and tried to make the point that the murder victims were the ones more likely to have been voting democrat. Regardless, it is a travesty that we don't do more to help correct the social problems which incite so many murders in the first place, no matter the voting preferences of the victims.


Back on the gun nuts at protests/town halls. I do wonder what would happen if say, twenty people were milling about in the crowd carrying guns. How about a few hundred people with guns? Surely at some point the law enforcement officers will say, "fuck this shit" and handle them, incredibly stupid Arizona laws or not.

Or if there were people getting into a heated argument from both sides (like the shoving, and getting in the face of others that has already occurred at town hall meetings and protests), and each side was carrying guns.

If anyone wants to defend these gun toting fuckers and their right to be insane douchebags with deadly weapons, then I say they should have themselves and their family shadowed by insane people who carry guns. Seriously. Go to a mental institution, find some people with very bad paranoia or delusions, give them guns and have them follow around the daughters and sons of these fuckers. That's reasonable, right?

Heath Robinson wrote:How stupid do you need to be to reject the UN?

Do you really want a serious discussion on that?

Oh right, this is the Gaming Den, this isn't the place for a discussion, it's not even the place for an argument, this is the room for the insults.

I mean how stupid do you need to want the UN?

What is wrong with the UN?
-Flash Edit: What is wrong with the IDEA of the UN?

Since this is Tzor I imagine the question "What is wrong with the UN?" has an answer that involves invisible black helicopters and Bill Clinton coming to steal his guns and his women.

MGuy wrote:To be fair I question why you bring the black murderers up in the first place because they do not represent actual voters because (and trust me coming from the neighborhoods and being one of them) they don't vote...

I apologize for my ignorance, but I can't parse this sentence in any meaningful way.

To be fair I question why you bring the black murderers up in the first place because they do not represent actual voters

Ok, murderers (racially black? of blacks? I can't tell) do not represent actual voters. Got that.

because (and trust me coming from the neighborhoods and being one of them) they don't vote...

Wat? So you come from the same neighborhood as the inspecific murderers? You are one of the murderers? Have you been murdered? You do or do not vote? Does this have anything to do with your status of murderer? How does any of this relate to your status as a black man?

You're making an appeal to authority here, but I just can't figure out what authority you're claiming.

tzor wrote:

Heath Robinson wrote:How stupid do you need to be to reject the UN?

Do you really want a serious discussion on that?

Oh right, this is the Gaming Den, this isn't the place for a discussion, it's not even the place for an argument, this is the room for the insults.

I mean how stupid do you need to want the UN?

I believe that people would prefer to continue to do things that are unmitigated benefits. The US pays nothing in exchange for being a member of UN, and gets to vote on policies, be on the security council and ignores anything the UN puts out that the current administration doesn't like. Nobody on the UN will attempt to censure the US because the UN can't function without the only remaining superpower on its side.

You pay nothing and get more benefits than anyone else.

You read it here first, kids: McGuy admitted to being one of the murderers.

Shhh! Koumei I don't want my bad rep getting out of hand silly. (Meant to place myself as being black and coming from the neighborhood but being known as a murderer is good too)

Let's just say that MGuy's garden gets some real fresh fertilizer on occasion.

PhoneLobster wrote:Since this is Tzor I imagine the question "What is wrong with the UN?" has an answer that involves invisible black helicopters and Bill Clinton coming to steal his guns and his women.

Well fuck, he still hasn't even told me what's wrong with the post office no matter how many times I ask.

My guess is when it comes to saying what's bad about the UN he's going to obfuscate, lie, insult, bullshit, and then still not answer the question.

Of course, he already did 4 of the five in his very first post.

PhoneLobster wrote:Since this is Tzor I imagine the question "What is wrong with the UN?" has an answer that involves invisible black helicopters and Bill Clinton coming to steal his guns and his women.

No.
Ironically when Hillary ran for the senate, one of the Republican Wackos running in the parimary complained about "black helicopters" trying to spy on her in the Hamptons.

My first response would be those damn lazy French male chauvinistic pigs that work there, but that came from an old co-worker, daughter of an ambassador who worked in the computer department in the UN, so take her words with a pinch of salt.

A better answer is; bureaucracy rules; the foxes run the department of hen-house security; and everyone is either massively corrupt, egotistical, stupid or a combination of the three.

None of those are a specific indictment of the UN, but of human nature, tzor.

You don't fix problems by ignoring it, and you don't help people without having them involved in the helping.

-Crissa

tzor wrote:A better answer is; bureaucracy rules; the foxes run the department of hen-house security; and everyone is either massively corrupt, egotistical, stupid or a combination of the three.

So you'd rather the alternative? Where all of these corrupt, egotistical, or stupid people take knives and try to stab each other in the face for profit? The UN has made progress since its foundation, but you don't care because it's still human?


At this point, tzor, it looks like you have more in common with Nirvana than with a rational policy commentator. Anything which happens to suffer from human flaws is insufficiently good for you and, therefore, is rejected compared to the pretty picture of perfection in your head.