You still seem very confused. I’m pissing on you con-y reds and waiving, not pissing into a red wave. WHAT!? (Funny you named your movement after deadly poisoned ocean conditions…red tides are horrific destructive deadly things, not something to aspire to. I’m shocked at the truth in advertising from your ilk.)

Red WAVE this time, eh? Just like the last red tsunami but smaller, right? ROTFLMFAHS!! You might consider stoping making predictions at some point….then again you’re always happiest when being 100% wrong.

MAGAmericans aren’t buying what Democrats are selling….truth, fact, verified statistics, actual plans on how to tackle issues….because they hate truth, fact, or plans because you just have none and it makes you jealous to hear. They aren’t Americans, they are anti American, anti democracy, worshipers of Putin Xi and lil Kim but absolutely not democratic leaders. Look at any Republican’s platform, it’s nothing but “I want to lower crime and fix the economy”, never HOW they plan to do so, just whining that they don’t like the only plan put forward, even when it’s the same plan they put forward before they balk and obstruct because now it’s Biden who might get credit if it helps. They certainly don’t want to look at WHEN violent crime/murder rates shot up, because Biden wasn’t president in 2020 when it happened. Same for the economy….don’t remember 2020, just think about how bad it is compared to 2015….Biden’s fault! Derp!

Without fraud, intimidation, and criminal hyper-partisan election workers Cons have no chance….but fraud, intimidation, interference, and misinformation are all you’ve got. No Con elected is elected “clean”, so they are all illegitimate.

That said, never underestimate the stupidity of the American voter. At least 1/3 of the country are absolute braying morons that believe anything Tangerini Mousolini says, the question is how many rational people will go along with you for weakly promised future personal gains over country.

A reminder how Cons treat vets… https://videosift.com/video/Jon-Stewart-Reminds-You-That-The-Right-Abandons-Veterans

Lawrence Wilkerson's dismissive comments about self defense are very disrespectful to people who have had to resort to self defense. He wouldn't say things like that had he been unfortunate enough to have had such a personal experience. (As one parent of a Fla victim said - his child would have given anything for a firearm at the time of the event.)

Re. 2nd amendment, yes, it's not for pure self defense. The reasoning is provided within the text. The government is denied legal powers over gun ownership ('shall not be infringed') in order to preserve the ability of the people to form a civilian paramilitary intended to face [presumably invading] foreign militaries in combat ('militia').

It's important to remember that the U.S. is a republic - so the citizens are literally the state (not in abstract, but actually so). As such, there is very little distinction between self defense and state defense - given that self and state are one.

Personally, I believe any preventative law is a moral non-starter. Conceptually they rely on doling out punishment via rights-denial to all people, because some subset might do harm. Punishment should be reserved for those that trespass on others - violating their domain (body/posessions/etc). Punishment should not be preemptive, simply to satiate the fears/imaginations of persons not affected by those punished. Simply, there should be no laws against private activities among consenting individuals. Folks don't have to like what other folks do, and they don't have to be liked either. It's enough to just leave one another alone in peace.

Re. Fla, the guilty party is dead. People should not abuse government to commit 3rd party trespass onto innocent disliked demographics (gun owners) just to lash out. Going after groups of people out of fear or dislike is unjustified.







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As an aside, the focus on "assault rifles" makes gun control advocates appear not sincere, and rather knee-jerk/emotional. Practically all gun killings utilize pistols.

There are only around 400 or so total rifle deaths per year (for all kinds of rifles combined) - which is almost as many as the people who die each year by falling out of bed (ever considered a bed to be deadly? With 300 million people, even low likelihood events must still happen reasonably often. It's important to keep in mind the likelihood, and not simply the totals.).

Around 10'000 people die each day out of all causes. Realistically, rifles of all sorts, especially assault rifles, are not consequential enough to merit special attention - given the vast ocean of far more deadly things to worry about.

If they were calling for a ban+confiscation of all pistols, with a search of every home and facility in the U.S., then I'd consider the advocates to be at least making sense regarding the objective of reducing gun related death.

Also, since sidearms have less utility in a military application, a pistol ban is less anti-2nd-amendment than an assault rifle ban.







As a technical point, ar15s are not actually assault rifles - they just look like one (m4/m16).
Assault rifles are named after the German Sturm Gewehr (storm rifle). It's a rifle that splits the difference between a sub-machinegun (automatic+pistol ammo) and a battle rifle (uses normal rifle/hunting ammo).

- SMG is easy to control in automatic, but has limited damage. (historical example : ppsh-41)

- Battle rifles do lots of damage, but are hard to control (lots of recoil, using full power hunting ammo). (historical example : AVT-40)

- An 'assault rifle' uses something called an 'intermediate cartridge'. It's a shrunken down, weaker version of hunting ammo. A non-high-power rifle round, that keeps recoil in check when shooting automatic. It's stronger than a pistol, but weaker than a normal rifle. But that weakness makes it controllable in automatic fire. (historical example : StG-44)

- The ar15 has no automatic fire. This defeats the purpose of using weak ammo (automatic controlability). So in effect, it's just a weak normal rifle. (The M4/M16 have automatic, so they can make use of the weak ammo to manage recoil - and they happen to look the same).

Practically speaking, a semi-auto hunting rifle is more lethal. A Remington 7400 with box mag is a world deadlier than an ar15. An M1A looks like a hunting rifle, and is likewise deadlier than an ar15. Neither are viewed as evil or dangerous.

You can also get hunting rifles that shoot intermediate cartridges (eg. Ruger Mini14). The lethality is identical to an ar15, but because it doesn't look black and scary, no one complains.

In practice, what makes the ar15 scary is its appearance. The pistol grip, the adjustable stock, the muzzle device, the black color, all are visual identifiers, and those visuals have become politically more important than what it actually does.

You can see the lack of firearms awareness in the proposed laws - proposed bans focus on those visual features. No pistol grips, no adjustable stocks, etc. Basically a listing of ancillary features that evoke scary appearance, and nothing to do with the core capabilities of a firearm.

What has made the ar15 the most popular rifle in the country, is that it has very good ergonomics, and is very friendly to new shooters. The low recoil doesn't scare new shooters away, and the great customizability makes it like a gun version of a tuner-car.

I think its massive success, popularity, and widespread adoption, have made it the most likely candidate to be used in a shooting. It's cursed to be on-hand whenever events like Fla happen.

-scheherazade

children shouldn't play with dead things !

He makes a great point that's often missed with 'how are we 'the land of the free', yet we have more people, and also more per capita, in prison that ANY other country'?
He did miss the follow up that should have gone something like ... 'How are we 'the home of the brave' when most of us are terrified of silly, barely dangerous things that hurt few if any people, but are conversely willing to ignore actually extremely dangerous and deadly things if they make us money or support our political stances'?

Well, I guess no one ever called us 'the country of the rational' or 'the United States of the sane'.

I don't give a shit if a homeopath or an astrologer or a climate denier or any other nutjob you care to name disables comments on youtube. It's simply not a meaningful channel for debate. There are other, better channels.

There's no one claiming to represent everyone who uses the internet saying that online harassment is ok.

But those GG assholes claim to represent "gamers", and no, it's not even slightly about ethics in journalism. It is, in fact, the complete opposite. This is a group that called on Nintendo to withdraw support from reviewers who were critical of Bayonetta.

The fucking hypocrisy is mind blowing. Seriously, think about it. A group that is supposed to be anti-censorship and pro-consumer told one of the biggest names in the industry to boycott a publication because it criticized their product. It is to Nintendos credit that they ignored these assholes who can't understand the difference between critique and censorship.

There isn't some balanced 3rd party POV on GG. Those people are fucking troglodytes, and the sooner they're consigned to the dustbin of history the better.

And yes, of course, I'm ashamed to be part of society sometimes.

I'm not a WASP, but I am Irish and I'm deeply ashamed of some of the racist bullshit associated with my country. I was raised Catholic. Take a wild guess about how I feel about that.

The "gamers are dead" thing has been completely misinterpreted. Did you even read the source article? It's saying that the target market for games isn't "gamers", but just people. Stop marketing to a fictional teenage boy demographic.

And quite frankly, I'm considering buying a t-shirt that says SJW. How the fuck did advocating social justice become a pejorative?

I would hazard to guess that they do it to hide their own smell, the same reason dogs roll on dead things. If you smell like your environment, things that hunt with smell won't find you.

Dead things still move and make noises, he was only mostly dead.

http://videosift.com/search?q=princess+bride

I won't argue that Chiro makes your joints feel better, Cracking my knuckles makes my knuckles feel better too... but it doesn't make them better. It doesn't "heal" anything, and that is alternative medicine's "Big Issue" with "Allopathic" medicine. You will ALWAYS, 100% guaranteed, get better care from a Physical Therapist, as they're there to ensure your body gets strong enough to heal itself. They can handle "acute adjustments" as well, but they prefer the holistic solution. The best part is, they have a proper understanding of the body, instead of all of the quackery mumbo-jumbo that Chiropractic Practitioners are taught (note: not all believe it, but they aren't taught anything else).

If you want to boil down how vaccines work into three words, sure, you might pick those three... but if you pick four, you'd get a very different phrase: "learn from dead things". But the main difference between vaccines and homeopathy is that we have an excellent understanding of what and why vaccines work, while homeopathy has never been validated by an impartial study. Sure, the premise started the same, but then doctors and scientists actually put work into verifying and validating how vaccines work. They made up new and interesting phrases to describe what was going on, just like homeopathy and it's "water memory", but unlike homeopaths, they reproduced their findings in labs across the country before they started selling it.

Homeopathy and Proper Medicine are as similar as me and the guy that wins a marathon. We both started the race... Sure, I was distracted after a block because I realized I could take a cab to the nearest restaurant and have a nice dinner and a beer, then I watched some TV, and took a cab back to the finish line and crossed it a couple hours later... But hey, we're both the same thing because we started at the same place, right?

The garbage man? I think you mean sanitation, specifically as it relates to bodily wasted, which has been around for over 5000 years. Of course, there have been many advances over the years, and it was not taken seriously in most of Europe until the industrial revolution. But it's certainly true... this technology that has been developing for 5000 years has had more of an effect on human health in cities than anything Medical Science has done.

Of course, it wasn't until we had a good understanding of biological vectors of diseases (research done by "Natural Philosophers", from which sprung all of modern science) that we understood just how important sanitation is, and started real improvements.


TLDR:

Chiropractic Care: May make you feel better, but at it's very best is the very least of what a PT can do.

Homeopathy: Complete and utter quackery, bearing only the most vague and abstract connection to real science.

I guess there's a benefit in teaching someone to use a tool that is capable of killing you. The respect and discipline involved is something of a life lesson, and can be extended to any number of potentially deadly things that we interact with more or less often.

When I was about 12, my dad and I went to a gun range in Florida for the first time, and he put his 1911 .45 in my hands, and showed me how to hold it, how to check if it was loaded, how to load it, and how to shoot it. He showed me how to respect the thing for the destructive life-taker that it is.

"Don't point a gun at anything you don't want to destroy" he said over and over again. I was terrified. I still enjoy shooting guns, even though I don't own any, and don't think I'll ever want one, but I can see the allure.

When you infuse an object with that level of emotional mass... it's like you can feel it in the room with you. The thing becomes more than a tool, it's a little gravity well of destructive power.

That's how I see them anyway. The people who are nonchalant about them scare me though. Stupid kids pointing guns at themselves in facebook cover photos. These people are the reason we can't have nice things.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I am late on the whole walking dead thing. I watched an episode today where someone got bit, was still alive, and was keeping it in the down low. As things often do, his secret gets out, but at first just one person knows about it. That is a very critical point in the way the situation is going to play out. One way is the person that finds out calmly goes to the rest of the group, they all talk about it and decide what to do. Many hard choices will most likely be made, but they will be made without panic. The other way, the way which always happens in movies, and perhaps in real life, is the one person who finds out, starts screaming "HES BIT HES BIT", people get crazy, pull out their guns, and everyone is in a terrible state.

That is how I feel about this whole case, there was a chance to talk about this like people. That chance was missed, and it rarely returns. The media generally isn't concerned anymore with conversations, so I try to not watch it, except when I need a laugh. The racist time out is actually the closet I have seen any media, even if it is comedy, try and talk about the issue without it being a panic, to that I salute them. I saw the same rabid conversations here on the sift, of which I have participated in the past...but will seek not to try and avoid the screams of "He's bit, he's bit!" when I can.


Well said! Upvoted!

I am late on the whole walking dead thing. I watched an episode today where someone got bit, was still alive, and was keeping it in the down low. As things often do, his secret gets out, but at first just one person knows about it. That is a very critical point in the way the situation is going to play out. One way is the person that finds out calmly goes to the rest of the group, they all talk about it and decide what to do. Many hard choices will most likely be made, but they will be made without panic. The other way, the way which always happens in movies, and perhaps in real life, is the one person who finds out, starts screaming "HES BIT HES BIT", people get crazy, pull out their guns, and everyone is in a terrible state.


That is how I feel about this whole case, there was a chance to talk about this like people. That chance was missed, and it rarely returns. The media generally isn't concerned anymore with conversations, so I try to not watch it, except when I need a laugh. The racist time out is actually the closet I have seen any media, even if it is comedy, try and talk about the issue without it being a panic, to that I salute them. I saw the same rabid conversations here on the sift, of which I have participated in the past...but will seek not to try and avoid the screams of "He's bit, he's bit!" when I can.

>> ^raverman:

If i try to pick what makes this uncomfortable...
Skin texture immediately looks like rubber not skin... I actually think this is wasted effort. If it looked like perfectly sculpted shiny chrome i would probably feel more affinity than this weird dead fake human look the researchers keep trying to go for.
also It's missing bio 'micro' movements. I think your subconscious expects to see slight moving, swaying, breathing, etc. Only dead things are perfectly still.


If you look closely at his chest and shoulders it is making a breathing like movement.

I want Lyme disease too. Please Daddy can I play with a dead thing????

If i try to pick what makes this uncomfortable...

Skin texture immediately looks like rubber not skin... I actually think this is wasted effort. If it looked like perfectly sculpted shiny chrome i would probably feel more affinity than this weird dead fake human look the researchers keep trying to go for.

also It's missing bio 'micro' movements. I think your subconscious expects to see slight moving, swaying, breathing, etc. Only dead things are perfectly still.