OT: Politics

[UV Halo]

That's one way to look at things... Didn't know guns was an answer for fake news articles but I guess everyone has their opinion.

I and many other gun-owners abhore that video as demagoguery plain and simple. This is my prefered 'video response' to their video:


The NRA is all-sorts of screwy when they pitch themselves as focused on protecting gun owners, and then stiff arm a company offering concealed carry insurance only to immediately offer a program of their own.

Isn't pretty much everything political these days? I think that's part of the polarization of the population, everything is one extreme or the other, and neither "side" has any tolerance for the other.

Very, very true. In my personal opinion, if one finds themselves to be spewing political taglines and dismissing the opposition's political taglines as crazy, etc, they've drunk too much of the Koolaid. If anyone believes that some party's or individual's initiatives are going to fix our government without introducing more problems, they've had too much of the Koolaid. If someone believes that there is one political ideology that can work for more than 320 million people, they've had too much Koolaid.

In my opinion, the problems won't really get any better until we eliminate corporate and foreign influences on our politicians, and increase their accountability and transparency to constituents. Also, I can't say I have a model to fix this but, we seriously need an overhaul on how information (news, etc) is disseminated and received. The for-profit corporate media conglomerate model is clearly broken, and the wild-west of the internet has been dominated by entities (businesses, activists and nation states) that just want to stir shit up.

The simple concept dramatically played out in that ad is 'Freedom comes from the ability to defend ones self from oppression.'

...

That video comes across as a pitch to those who fervently believe infowars and the like. It helped paint the NRA into the corner they found themselves with bump/slide fire stocks (saying they would support restrictive legislation and then having to retract it).

The rest of that post reads like too much political koolaid has been consumed and it attempts the justification of greater amounts of koolaid. I agree with "the left" not having all five values in balance but, there is no way in hell someone is going to convince me that "the right" has it down. When conservatives whine about Christianity being "Under Attack" while threatening Muslims (or Muslim institutions), it's like reading headlines for some alternate universe. In general the whole position of saying we need to protect our liberty while restricting what goes on in a consenting adult's body, bedroom, or on top of their wedding cake, is a bunch of crap.

[pbjosh]

I am still going through all this, but there is some interesting information there. Everything I've read says there's a 95% consensus that human "fingerprint" CO2 is the cause of global warming. I am having a hard time accepting 95% of scientists would be involved in a conspiracy or whatever. I can't rectify that.

I went over that a bit. It isn't a conspiracy so much as using data that fits your bias. I mean, the data is solid on there being 97% agreement. When you realize that is based on 2 poorly worded questions on a survey where they whittled it down to 79, then 77 people out of over 3000..... it looks like poor work. And it is. But you are not told that up front, just that 97% agree.

Then you have a really, well, deliberately wrong paper written to support it. That turns out to be outright false. In fact, a well known skeptic had 10 papers or so in there, out of his 112. Cook had labeled them as supporting AWG, when they didn't. He was the one who really blew the whistle.

Richard Tol ✔@RichardTol
Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.

And if you go to NASA's, well the GISS website, it sites the Zimmerman and Cook papers.

References​

J. Cook, et al, "Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming," Environmental Research Letters Vol. 11 No. 4, (13 April 2016); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002

Quotation from page 6: "The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”

J. Cook, et al, "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature," Environmental Research Letters Vol. 8 No. 2, (15 May 2013); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Quotation from page 3: "Among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the scientific consensus. Among scientists who expressed a position on AGW in their abstract, 98.4% endorsed the consensus.”

P. T. Doran & M. K. Zimmerman, "Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," Eos Transactions American Geophysical Union Vol. 90 Issue 3 (2009), 22; DOI: 10.1029/2009EO030002.

https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

As I have linked to before (and there are many) http://www.populartechnology.net/201...cientists.html

Nicola Scafetta
Ph.D. Physics
Research Scientist, ACRIM Science Team

Dr. Scafetta, your paper 'Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900–2000 global surface warming' is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; "Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%"

Is this an accurate representation of your paper?
Scafetta: "Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.

What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. This implies that the true climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling is likely around 1.5 C or less, and that the 21st century projections must be reduced by at least a factor of 2 or more. Of that the sun contributed (more or less) as much as the anthropogenic forcings.

The "less" claim is based on alternative solar models (e.g. ACRIM instead of PMOD) and also on the observation that part of the observed global warming might be due to urban heat island effect, and not to CO2.

By using the 50% borderline a lot of so-called "skeptical works" including some of mine are included in their 97%."

(The bold is to complement the previous bit where Michael Mann and others now say models over warmed by 2.5 times, or nearly the entire feedback from water vapor in their calculations, leaving bare CO2 in the equation, at 1.1wm^2, just like the skeptics have been saying, and is in agreement with the 200 yo 'settled science')

There are a few scientists at that link that same very similar things about the miscatergorizing of the paper, and like I mentioned in review by outside parties the result is out of the 12,000 or so papers less than 1% endorse the warming.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenerg.../#3f9c7f281157

But, it is used by Nasa/GISS to prove that there is a 97% consensus.

Of course, Skeptical Science calls it robust. Because Cook runs Skeptical Science.

[pbjosh]

The rest of that post reads like too much political koolaid has been consumed and it attempts the justification of greater amounts of koolaid. I agree with "the left" not having all five values in balance but, there is no way in hell someone is going to convince me that "the right" has it down.

Sorry to disappoint, but the right just has these in balance. That doesn't mean they have it all down.

As for Kool-Aid, I am a libertarian, and as you can see, that is by far the most skewed of the 3. And I also think I am the most right of the 3. (shrugs) We all do.

Haidt is, well, was, a Liberal. He position comes from the fact that he realized that conservatives were not much part of the college any more. They were not part of social sciences any more. He wondered why. He thought, why not? What makes them different? How can I understand them. He didn't understand them, at all.

This research stems from realizing he was missing something. Not that he thinks like them. He never would consider himself a conservative.

So, I highly suggest not staying ignorant of what Haidt is saying. It is about understanding why they are not understood or promoted in a college or social sciences, and what makes them different.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_h...the_moral_mind

Watch the video. Then a few more. And then see what he is really saying. Look up the 'why it is hard to gross out a libertarian' also.

[Jack Wood]

Another mass shooting in the US yesterday? Absolutely terrible. Honestly, to the rest of the world, the US's insistence on maintaining the status quo in terms of its gun laws seems bizarre, if not just downright ridiculous.

[ironyusa]

I'm a little surprised by a specific part of the story. The gunman was court martialed for domestic abuse (wife AND CHILD) which got his rank reduced and got him a discharge from the air force. I was under the impression that would usually be a felony assault charge if he was a civilian, yet there were no disqualifying records on his background. Seems a bit odd.

[pbjosh]

If we took out gang crime, there would be about an 80% drop in gun crime. All crime actually.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/...-29-ms13_N.htm

Our problem isn't firearms so much as it is culture. The murder rates generally are highest in areas that already have high levels of gun control, sometimes out right banning them.

Historically, even the wild wild west, it was far lower than it is in areas like Chicago or DC, both of which have very high rates of firearm incidents, and a high level of gun control laws. Removing those areas or gangs reduces the US crime rates, and firearm deaths, to low levels seen in 'gun free', developed countries.

Chicago is bad because it rates about as high as Soldiers lost in the Iraq war, and the Las Vegas shooting was about equal to a month in Chicago.

http://abc7chicago.com/410-shot-74-f...e-say/2265874/

Chicago is not the strictest, but it was, and still is difficult to legally purchase a firearm:

Does Chicago have the strictest gun laws in the country?

It did after Mayor Jane Byrne pushed through the ban on firearms not already registered with Chicago police in March 1982. The city’s ban lasted until 2010, when the Supreme Court struck it down by a majority vote of 5-4. Two years later, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago struck down as unconstitutional the state’s ban on carrying concealed firearms. In 2013, the General Assembly passed a law making Illinois the last state to grant its residents the right to concealed carry. Right now, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco have stricter gun laws on the books, experts say.

But you get out of those areas, and the count goes down. Not as significantly as some urban legends proclaim, but fairly fast.

The argument is framed wrong though - guns are a tool of, well, lets call it Evil. Just Evit shit people do to each other, for whatever reason. Timothy McVey did worse than this, no gun needed. We are starting to see the deaths from people running down others with trucks. If I remember correctly, half the baseball bats bought in the UK are for home defence? And switzerland has historically low gun deaths and murders even with high gun ownership.

Evilness. They are a tool of it - and not the problem. The problem is people want to kill others. No matter the tool, they will try and do it. We are trying to regulate Evil by removing tools they use.

The problem with that argument is murder is illegal also, but it stops... not very much. In the end you remove the ability of the prey to defend themselves from evil.

That is the basic, boiled down concept:

Try to legally remove the tools that allows some to commit evil acts.

Or:

Try to allow those who are preyed upon to defend themselves from evil acts.

Which is better? Which works better?

While it looks silly, a lot of us just want the ability to defend ourselves from evil, and we don't trust others to do it for us.

(small addition edit: )

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-countys-says/

The homicide rate may be rising in some U.S. cities, but slayings are still a localized phenomenon, with most U.S. counties not seeing a single homicide in 2014.
The vast majority of homicides occurred in just 5 percent of counties, and even there the murders were localized, with some neighborhoods untouched by the violence, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Crime Prevention Research Center.
“I just think most people have a real misunderstanding about how heavily concentrated murders are,” said John R. Lott Jr., the author of the study. “You have over half the murders in the United States taking place in 2 percent of the counties.

About 70 percent of the counties, accounting for 20 percent of the U.S. population, had no more than one murder in 2014, with 54 percent of counties experiencing zero murders, the report found.

[Jack Wood]

So basically what you are saying is that nobody is safe until every man woman and child are carrying a firearm..... riiiiight...

And basically Americans are more evil than most of the rest of the civilized world....

[pbjosh]

No, that is not what I am saying.

In no way or form.

I think you missed a good portion of what I said.

The argument, of which I think I was clear in saying, is between allowing others to protect us with laws and police vs allowing ourselves to protect ourselves.

I stated I would prefer to protect myself. But I am high on individual responsibility, and I grew up in a safe gun culture where a firearm wasn't there to protect you from another person, but from the wildlife, so I can understand where, as an unknown, it is something to fear. My experience in unique.

Americans are not more evil though - I have no idea where what I stated could be put to that conclusion. I showed that small packets in the US, namely inner city gangs, cause the vast majority of all crime, and that our problem is one of culture and gang violence and not one of people being evil.

What you replied to is not what I stated though, in any form I can see, so I conclude that you are arguing against somebody, a strawman, that isn't in my statements at all, so I have no reply except to re-state my commentary in hope that you read it and reply to it instead of something I didn't say.

Edit:

For a bit more clarity - I think people should have the right to protect their life. And that it should be up to and including firearms. A little old granny can stand toe to toe with the biggest bruiser around if she has a .38 special in her purse. She can't do that with a baseball bat. A firearm equalizes her.

In most cases somebody who is using a firearm for evil is doing it so they can have the force equation really far on their favor. It makes sense to have people just do what you want because you the advantage instead of dealing with somebody close, or maybe an equal. Those are not good odds. Generally when confronted with another firearm, they run, take their life, or shut down. Their advantage is lost.

I don't think strong gun laws will work in the US because the cat is out of the bag. Chicago had strong gun laws for decades. It didn't help. While trying to purge the US of firearms might work - it might not do much, since it hasn't in the areas where we have applied it. It would only declaw those who are honest. Not those who want to do evil. Yeah, it will reduce some crime, and some specific crime.

Let's look at Australia. They recently reduced gun ownership. With a reduction in homicides also:

http://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/gun...ralia-updated/

Which is great! A 20% decrease. They removed 700,000 guns.

But the US saw a decrease in homicides also, from nearly 9-10 per capita in the 1990s, to 4.5 per capita.

A 50% decrease. Huge.

Because what drives most gun deaths in the US are drugs and gang related activities, and the 1990s had a large amount of fighting amongst gangs during the crack epidemic.

[Jack Wood]

The US has higher per capita gun ownership than pretty much anywhere else in the world. But still has a higher death-by-gun rate of homocides than any other country by some margin.

Am I right in that?

So surely you have to concede that either arming to defend yourself isn't working, or there is more evil in America.

*Edited to add that clearly I have no horse in this race and am being purely antagonistic for no real reason :-) However I do find it hard to understand the stance of more guns makes things better.

[AndrewTheWookie]