@heropsycho

are we related?

well said my friend,and i totally agree with pretty much everything you just laid out.i love your commentary as a whole,but this was exceptional.

i guess i am coming from the dispassionate analysis camp.

i hope i wasn't coming across that i was dismissing the moral argument,because that was not my intention.i actually AGREE with the moral argument.i was just trying to add facets to the argument that a lot of people appeared to not even be considering.

i hold many liberal and progressive attitudes,and maybe i am just an old crotchety coot nowadays,but in my opinion..the left has lost it's way.

binary politics does not work.
dem vs repub does not work.
left vs right does not work.
demonizing people and calling them names....
does not work.

there has been a slow revolution in american politics,and has been over the past four decades.
what sheldon wolin called "inverted totalitarianism " and what john ralston saul deemed a "corporate coup detat'".

that battle is over...and we lost.

and i think that slow realization has finally sunk into the american psyche.

do i agree with their choice?
oh hell no...their choice is horrifying.
was a trump victory akin to a petulant child?
i guess thats as good analogy as any other,but now WE have to deal with the consequences.
all of us.(even including non-americans.so yeah..sorry bout this guys).

so just how do we tackle this new problem we face?

i say we start by not calling people idiots.
just a thought.

Or someone kidnaps your daughter and thanks to your preparedness and special set of skills you realize you're actually Liam Neeson.
This whole guns-for-safety-schtick has been debated online a thousand times. You know what protects you from crime? Tackling the very real social issues like poverty and racism that cause crime.
You have so many guns and yet your crime rate is so shitty. Mass shootings are routine in america. Where are all the good guys with guns to stop the bad guys when you need them?
It's not working. It simply isn't, crunch numbers all you want. Just look at Canada. They have guns. Yet, they seem to live so much safer lives. Is Mexico such a dangerous place because they don't have enough guns? They got the good Heckler&Koch rifles, you know.
You want to fight fights that I say should be avoided in the first place. Fix your social issues and less people will have reasons to try breaking into your home.
Same with the terrorist. Don't just bomb them, disable their ideological rethoric, disable their methods of recruiting.
We have islamic terrorists here in germany. They either try to build bombs (requires actual know-how) or they attack with axes and knives. Something must be working in our favor here. Same can't be said for the citizens of Paris or nightclub visitors in Orlando. They got shot.
The american paranoia is a reaction to an action that can be made far more unlikely to happen. Once you are ready to tackle the issues.
You can bring a fire extinguisher every time you go to the gas station in case a fire breaks out or you can just stop smoking around the gas station.

I fear you have misunderstood what I was getting at.

He talks for full minute about the ironic idea of the victims hypothetically having a sense of cognitive dissonance about the experience (done from his perspective).

Timestamp: 3:40ish to 4:50ish

I don't for a moment think he is suggesting they actually did, but the juxtaposition of that can be funny for the reasons I already outlined.
i.e. it is a common phenomenon in other areas of our experience, with people we idolise. By associating it with an experience in which we presume most people wouldn't or didn't feel that way, we have more strings of that irony thrown into the comedy orchestra.

Cosby is famous and loved and his fans presumably find him funny. There is therefore humour in the ridiculous idea that there might be some starstruck joy in being violated by said idol.

I think the bit worked perfectly if one can detach oneself from ideological prejudices.

As I already said, Louis's bits about paedophilia don't appear to be doing anything different here and thus far you have failed to explain how they actually differ, other than using the unqualified term "truthful".

Louis talks about their desires and relates them in a way universal to the human condition. This is precisely what much of Jim routine is clearly doing. "think about the thing you really love to do, well that's how Bill feels about rape" (paraphrased).

I can't see a distinction right now other than you appear to be much more emotionally sensitive to the rape thing. This is understandable, but I'm not seeing the lack of equivalence between the two comics here in terms of composition and implied meaning?

This whole bit felt deeply multi stranded and was tackling many disparate concepts at once. The gradation of rape was merely one of them and I think it's unfair to break it down to only one, or to deny the "truthfulness" hiding behind the sham.

Without that "truthfulness" the whole bit doesn't work, the assumption that the audience recognises the reality beneath the sham is unavoidable. Unless of course you think the audience and or Jim to be genuinely callous and misogynistic (which you've made clear you do not).

I guess my whole point is that the two bits are functionally almost identical. The only difference I can really see is a different style of delivery and subject matter.

I notice you appear to have dodged the comparisons to his war jokes?

Is there no moral equivalence there? If anything there is far less empathy and personal "truth" being explored. The "little cunt" just dies, Jim never attempts to humanise him or relate the kids experience in an ironic way.

By your logic that routine should be far more offensive surely? (especially when we consider that life and subsequent brutal death in a warzone is quite possibly a more horrible experience than most rapes, especially the kind being discussed here)

I just read it.

I get that it's a complicated issue and emotive for many, I've been on the receiving end of abuse myself and I do understand what being "triggered" feels like (not that I think it should change anything outside of a personal context). I also understand that a subject such as this kind of requires some nuance and intelligence if it's going to be tackled comically, without coming across as simply crass.

But, finding some material crass seems like a necessarily consequence of experimentation and having a diverse artistic community. And moreover, Jim's material here didn't come across as crass, or intentionally hurtful to me. (beyond a deliberate faux crassness clearly intended to emphasise the effect of the material)

I can only assume that it cut too close to the bone for your own sensibilities and/or experiences? Or perhaps instead that you are concerned that it might in some way encourage or validate the twisted attitudes of unevolved brutes?

I understand and respect this, but I have always seen such things as my own weaknesses and obstacles to be overcome. By way of example; to me death and cruelty are the ultimate comedic premises. They represent the deepest fears and anxieties inherent in the human condition, and as such conduits to the deepest catharsis.

Life is unfathomably cruel and brief; to find true levity in the darkest reaches of that, I think represents one of the highest and most liberating state a human being can strive for. (the temporary suspension of ego and care)

We all die and awful things can happen at any moment, this for me is the divine joke and I suspect the underlying power of all things we find humorous to a greater and lesser extent. (one could re frame that as "life is pointless and as such hilarious", but it would mean the same here)

I guess after all that self indulgent waffling, I'm saying that I don't think the collateral of other peoples sensibilities should hold back the pursuit of such lofty things. I'm sure Jim wouldn't see it in quite such terms, but in his own small way this is what I think he, like all good artists, is doing.

There will always be Devils and Ignavi but would be Ubermenschen (or if you will Uberdamen) should never pander to such creatures, lest they allow them to pollute the light they seek to create.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Love is the law, love, under the temperance of will.

(That last part is just a lunatics way of saying; never let the fear of the foolish compromise the pursuit of ones highest arts. Life is short, shine brightly and apologise only on your own terms.)

(^ I do unfortunately suck at actually living by the above, because I'm lazy and cowardly)

Apologies for the gender mixup, I'll make a mental note for future reference

Much love.

Your video, Houston Helicopter Officer Lands and Tackles Suspect, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Why is it always a black guy that gets to have a cop car run into him and then get tackled?

@newtboy

Look, man, I've been watching you dig your grave deeper with every post. I'm not really sure what you're not getting, given the patient explanations everyone has provided. No one is saying you can't want equality for all, but to get equality for all you have to start by helping groups that are clearly NOT equal in society achieve some level of equality.

Ergo, Feminists focus on helping women achieve equality. And let's be clear, when we say equality we're talking about achieving equality with white males, because they are the ones who historically and currently hold the privledged position in Western society.

So, your whole, "But what about men?" schtick is insulting to feminists precisely because men are already better off than women in most areas. Feminists have no obligation to make men's lives--particularly white men's lives--better than they already are. This is not to say white men have no problems or that in some areas (child custody comes to mind) they aren't at a disadvantage. And there are activist groups working towards improvement in these areas. But demanding that feminists work for men's issues shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what feminism is all about.

This reminds me of the whole recent Kit Harington flap, where Kit claimed Hollywood is "sexist" towards men and displayed a similar fundamental misunderstanding of what sexism is. His point was that male actors can be sexually objectified (he refered to being asked to take his shirt off on a photo shoot). But being occasionally objectified is no where near the same thing as the well documented actual sexism that goes on in Hollywood--vastly different paychecks for lead actressess compared to actors, the number and types of nude scenes actressess are asked to do compared to male actors, etc. No one is saying objectification (of either sex) isn't a problem but there's a much bigger problem for women (as usual) than there is for men and that's why there needs to be a group (feminists) advocating for women to tackle these larger problems before getting to the problem of Kit Harington's discomfort at disrobing for the camera.

So if the player with the ball gets tackled does the ball go to the other team? Also i assume if the ball hits the ground on a kick or pass, it's a live ball for either team.

I wonder who he voted for (or perhaps he didn't vote and that's why he thought he was out of a shot). In some ways I hope he is a Republican, because my god, you got to think politics in the US wouldn't be so fucked if there were more like him...

There is a danger of running into the fallacy of the middle ground here. "Listen to both sides" is all well and good when both sides can bring a rational argument based upon an agreed factual basis I. I wish I could listen to the Right's ideas on how to tackle climate change, for instance, but it doesn't seem they have any. and that's just nuts.

@RedSky

First, if it were up to me, you could take over as Minister of Finance in this country tomorrow. Our differences seem miniscule compared to what horrendous policies our last three MoF have pushed. The one prior, ironically, was dubbed the most dangerous man in Europe by The Sun.

We're in agreement on almost everything you mentioned in your last comment, so I'll focus on what I perceive differently.

First, I'd differentiate between fiscal stimulus and fiscal spending, the former being a situational application of the latter. As you said, fiscal stimulus during an economic crisis tends to be inadequate with regards to our macroeconomic objectives. You can neither whip out plans for major investments at a whim nor can you mobilize the neccessary resources quickly enough to make a difference and still be reasonable efficient. Not to mention that it only affects certain parts of the economy (construction, mostly), leaving others completely in the wind. So I'm with you on that one, it's a terribly inefficient and ineffective approach.

Automatic stabilizers work magnificently in this regard, but they barely take any pressure from the lower wage groups, especially if unemployment benefits come with a metric ton of strings attached, as is the case in Germany. A basic income guarantee might work, but that's an entirely different discussion.

The problem I see with merely relying on reasonable automatic stabilizers in the form of payments is that they do put a floor into demand, but do very little to tackle the problem of persistent unemployment due to a lack of jobs. As useful as training and education are, the mere number of highly educated people forced to work mundane jobs tells me that, at best, it doesn't work, and at worst pushes a systemic problem onto the individual, leading to immense pressure. Not to mention the psychological effects of being unemployed when employment is tauted as a defining attribute of a proper person -- aka the demonization of the unemployed.

It's still somewhat decent in Australia, but in Europe... it's quite a horrible experience.

Anyway, my point is that I'd rather see a lot more fiscal spending (permanent!) in the shape of public sector jobs. A lot of work cannot be valued properly by the market; should be done without the expectation of a return of investment (hospitals, anyone?); occurs in sectors of natural monopolies -- all of that should be publicly run. A job guarantee, like your fellow countryman Bill Mitchell advocates quite clearly, might be an approach worth trying out. Economy in the shit? More people on the public payroll, at rather low (but living wage!) wages. Do it at the county/city level and you can create almost any kind of job. If the private sector wants those people instead, they'd have to offer better working conditions. No more blackmail through the fear of unemployment -- you can always take a public job, even if it is at a meagre pay.

I should probably have mentioned that I don't buy into the notion of a stable market. From where I am standing, it's inherently unstable, be it through monopolies/oligopolies, dodging of laws and regulations (Uber), impossibility to price-in externalities (environmental damage most of all) or plain, old cost-cutting leading to a system-wide depression of demand. I'm fine with interfering in the market wherever it fails to deliver on our macroeconomic objectives -- which at this point in time is almost everywhere, basically.

Healthcare is all the rage these days, thanks to the primaries. I'd take the publicly-run NHS over the privately-run abomination in the US any day of the week. And that's after all the cuts and privatizations of the last two decades that did a horrible number on the NHS. Fuck ATOS, while we're at it.

Same for the railroad: the pre-privatization Bundesbahn in Germany was something to be proud of and an immeasurable boost of both the economy and the general standard of living.

In the mid/long run, the effects of automation and climate change-induced migration will put an end to the idea of full employment, but for the time being, there's still plenty of work to be done, plenty of idle resources to be employed, and just nobody to finance it. So why not finance it through the printing press until capacity is reached?

As for the Venezuela comparison: I don't think it fits in this case. Neither does Weimar Germany, which is paraded around quite regularly. Both Venezuela and Weimar Germany had massive supply-side problems. They didn't have the production capacity nor the resources to meet the demand they created by spending money into circulation. If an economy runs at or above its capacity, any additional spending, wherever it comes from, will cause inflation. But both Europe and the US are operating faaar below capacity in any measurable metric. You mentioned LRAS yourself. I think most estimates of it, as well as most estimates of NAIRU, are off quite significantly so as to not take the pressure off the wage slaves in the lowest income sector. You need mass unemployment to keep them in line.

As you said, the participation rate is woefully low, so there's ample space. And I'd rather overshoot and cause a short spike in inflation than remain below potential and leave millions to unneccessary misery.

Given the high level of private debt, there will be no increase in spending on that front. Corporations don't feel the need to invest, since demand is down and their own vaults are filled to the brim with cash. So if the private sector intends to net save, you either have to run a current account surplus (aka leech demand from other countries) or a fiscal deficit. Doesn't work any other way, sectoral balances always sum up to zero, by definition. If we want to reduce the dangerous levels of private debt, the government needs to run a deficit. If we don't want to further increase the federal debt, the central bank has to hand the cash over directly, without the issuance of debt through the treasury.

As for the independant central bank: you can only be independant from either the government or the private sector, not both. Actually, you can't even be truly independant from either, given that people are still involved, and people have ideologies and financial ties.

Still, if an "independant" central bank is what you prefer, Adair Turner's new book "Between Debt and the Devil" might be worth a read. He's a proponent of 100% reserve banking, and argues for the occasional use of the printing press -- though controlled by an inflation-targeting central bank. According to him, QE is pointless and in order to bring nominal demand up to the level we want, we should have a fiscal stimulus financed by central bank money. The central bank controls the amount, the government decides on what to spend it on.

Not how I would do it, but given his expertise as head of the Financial Services Authority, it's quite refreshing to hear these things from someone like him.

in politics counter-movements are there to correct imbalances: there are valid specific feminist and masculist points to be made in the discussion..I'd say in general there are still more feminist issues that need to be tackled.

Didn't watch the video, but did skim the comments... Christ...

First off, moving to Canada and any other decent first world nation be it New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Iceland, Netherlands, Canada etc... not as easy as just packing up and moving. You need a very narrow set of skills to move to those countries. We looked into all this countries, and all of their entry requirements exceeded what we had to offer them. People always say if you don't like it leave, but that ignores several facts. It isn't we don't like it, we just think it can be improved, change isn't bad. Humanity isn't bad. Caring for those less fortunate isn't bad. Guaranteeing everyone a minimum level of affordable health care isn't bad. Working to insure that all workers get a living wage (the way we used to have before the employers/owners started getting greedy and redistributing more wealth to themselves), isn't a bad goal, in fact it's a very good thing. The famed clip from the Newsroom's first episode when he goes on about how America isn't great anymore but it used to be...

Of course the whole concept of American exceptionalism, or any nation exceptionalism is flawed. We are all humans on this planet. Being American doesn't make you superior to somebody born in China or Mexico, Ethiopia, Syria or anywhere else. Location of birth is an accident of timing... and if it is divine intervention by God that placed you here instead of Ethiopia where you may have starved to death with an inflated malnourished belly despite all your prayers, then God is an ass and not worth serving. So if he's not an ass, then it is pure accident that you are here and not there. To think oneself superior and better than somebody in another nation because of their location of birth, and the religion that comes with that location, is insanity. And I draw that all ways. The Muslims who despise Christianity for not being the true faith, and Christians who despise Islam for not being the true faith. You are your faith by accident of birth, be it location and/or parentage etc... all of which is getting away from the point. Which is simply that to say that Chinese worker doesn't deserve a job manufacturing something that you think you should be building is asinine and not respectful of their humanity and a complete lack of any sort of empathy. Christ, I have Aspergers and I have more empathy in my farts than the entire Tea Party Christian Right.

Yes we need to respect the individual, but "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one"... and that quote is in context and not just a cherry pick sample. If it benefits just one and damages the many, then it is not a good thing. Most every faith in the world has some variation of the Golden Rule, to treat others the way you want others (not that specific person, but people as a general whole) to treat you. Christianity's Christ went further and said the greatest commandment was love, to show love to one another. Greed and selfishness is not love. Collectivism has many faults as well, but it isn't tyranny, and is certainly better for society as a whole in the long run than unrestrained greed motivated individualism. Like Pink Floyd's song, On the Turning Away, says, we are all "just a world we all must share". We can't turn away from the coldness inside towards others. We need to lift all of humanity up. Perhaps showing the Muslims love instead of hate and bigotry would convince them that perhaps Christianity isn't the enemy, that perhaps it is the answer, but showing them hate, and bigotry... and denying refugees trying to flee a horrible civil war is bigotry and hatred, and the fact that a rather disturbingly large percentage of the right can't see that isn't bigotry and hatred is scary beyond measure. I again find it amazing that people could lack that much empathy without a neurological disorder.

To invade others, tell them how to live their lives, to force democracy on them if they aren't ready, to insult them and belittle their faith, and all that isn't world building. It isn't reaching out with empathy. It's hate. It's bigotry and as noted by artician, it's what helps drive people to fly into buildings. They know that they know that their faith is the right one, and the lack of empathy to see that people of the Muslim faith have just as much faith in their religion as Christians have in theirs, that they have the same amount of knowledge and comfort from god that they are the correct faith, is what drives extremism.

And oh my god the guns. Guns would have saved the Jews. American mainland can't be invaded because too many people own guns... ask the Branch Davidians how well having not only military grade weapons but also training on how to use them worked for them against a slightly militarized police force, let alone an actual military. Yes, it would be incredibly hard, and resistance would probably eventually wear any invading force down the way the Taliban wore the Soviets down, or the Viet Cong did against the US Military might. So perhaps that can be counted as a victory, but would be long fought. Look, I support gun ownership. All I really call for is 1) allowing the CDC get back to it's job of collecting the data and finding out what's really going on with gun violence, and 2) closing the gun show loophole unless the CDC's investigation shows that it has zero effect, 3) you have to have a legal ID to own a gun and can't be on the no fly list, 4) the existing background checks kept the same, but also add a drug test, the right wants drug tests for welfare, then we should be testing for gun owenrship too. (I see little reason for "assault weapons" but aside from perhaps having perhaps a slightly better background check, I don't know if a ban yet needs to be called for, but I'm in the middle here.) Once we have have better data points from the CDC then we can really tackle the issue of gun violence. Yes, it will take years to get those answers, but I find it insane that the Republicans refuse to allow the investigation to go on, which says to me that they are afraid of what the data will show.

Unless you are nearly a pure Native American, then you are a refugee to the US.

The primary problem here and around the world is poverty and lack of proper education. This drives people to crime and extremism in religion which makes them susceptible to acting out terrorist acts, be it in the name of Allah (as is the public perceived norm) or Christ (ala the Planed Parenthood terrorist attack, the 2011 Norway attacks, etc). We need to address the growing income and wealth gaps. The way to doing that isn't by giving those at the top even more tax breaks and losing regulations (which is funny thing to complain about, too many regulations here in the US, meanwhile the same people complain about the low quality Chinese goods that aren't safe due to low regulations and poor labor conditions etc). We need to push education, and proper STEM programs, not deflated science trying to force Creationism in via so called "Intelligent Design" or "teaching the controversy" stick to the actual science. Don't object to the "new math" if it's teaching better fundamentals of understanding what the numbers are actually doing even if it doesn't teach the shortcuts we were taught... and lots of the stuff people complain about is just the fact we don't skip right to the shortcut that works. Yes, it works, but it helps if they better understand the underlying fundamentals of the numbers and the actual math. Again, change isn't a bad thing, to object just because you don't understand or don't like it compared to the simplified shortcut we all learned doesn't make it bad. Reading also needs pushed, and understanding of logical fallacies and logical and faulty thinking.

I believe that a post scarcity world is impossible due to the nature of humanity. There are far too many greedy people that will never want the world to get to that point. However, that should be the noble goal. Post scarcity society has many issues, but perhaps by the time we actually got there we'd be able to solve them.

TLDR: Basically it all comes down to empathy. To view everything as the others view it. I get the fear and panic and all that the right has, and not just because I once upon a time was a right wing evangelical Christian who called those who received food stamps lazy bums, who said that Democrats and the liberals just wanted to keep the poor trapped so they would always need help. Yes, I was there and that helps, but I can still empathize with them without that past. I've never been a Muslim raised in a nation dominated by Islam, but I can still empathize with the way they see what the US is doing to them, the way they have to see people like Donald Trump and the scary amount of Americans that support him. It's easy to see why some are driven to extremism. I can empathize with that Mexican who just wants a better life and knows that Mexico can't give it to him so he has to risk it all to try and immigrate to the US. I can empathize with the Chinese worker who has been given an opportunity to build something, to escape the poverty... for while perhaps still poverty, less poverty than before, and I'm thankful that I got that opportunity, and I'm sorry that somebody in the US doesn't get to do it, but I'm a human too. Empathy. Learn it. It can be learned, neurological disorder or not.

Hahaha... seriously, what kind of passive aggressive bullshit is that? "Ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of socialism, because I've decided that that's waffling, I say Jesus was a socialist." Next time, maybe just write TL;DR and make a farting noise while rolling your eyes.

You can't dismiss the actual meaning of the word Socialist as 'semantics', if you're talking about whether or not something is socialist. That doesn't help the discussion.

In order to use socialism as you appear to be doing, you would have to first:
- ignore the history of socialism and its political development,
- ignore the entire body of academic work, current and past, on socialism, and
- ignore how the word socialism "IS used now, like it or not" in actual socialist or semi-socialist countries

By doing that you end up at your definition of the word, yes. But you had to take a pretty long detour to get to that point

Marx's quote on religion is pretty straightforward - it can be, as you say, open to interpretation, but it's generally agreed that he didn't say that your Jesus was a stand-up socialist. He is more commonly taken to mean that religion is a false response to the real suffering of the oppressed; religion provides a fiction of suffering and a fiction of redemption/happiness, that will never translate into real change. It makes the oppressed feel like they are bettering their lives, while actually keeping them passive and preventing them from changing anything.

The slightly larger context of the quote is this: "Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüth einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volks."

I don't know how to make that more plain, but I can try. Religious suffering is on one hand a response to real suffering (wirkliche Elend, by which one would mean a materialistically determined actual lack of freedom, resources, physical wellbeing, etc), but it is also a false reaction against that real suffering. Real oppression creates suffering to which there could be a real respones, but religion instead substitutes in false suffering and false responses - it tries to tackle real suffering with metaphysical solutions. He goes on to say:

"Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks."

This, too, seems pretty straightforward to me, but you might see 4 or 5 different things there. Religion teaches the people an illusory form of happiness, which doesn't actually change or even challenge the conditions of suffering, and must therefore be tossed out, for the people to ever achieve real happiness.

A fundamental difference here is that religious goodness is internally, individually, and fundamentally motivated. 'Good' is 'Good', and you as a Christian individual should choose to do Good. A goal of Marxism is to abolish that kind of fundamentalism and replace it with continuous criticism; creating a society that always questions, together, what good is, through the lens of dialectical materialism.

You might recognize this line of thinking* from what modern Europeans call the autonomous left wing, or what Marx and Trotsky called the Permanent Revolution, which Wikipedia helpfully comments on as "Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat 'make the revolution permanent'. In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the 'struggle' which will bring the 'petty-bourgeois democrats' to power." Which sounds great, except it can also lead to purges, paranoia, and informant societies.

My entire point is that socialism and Christianity are entirely different beasts. One is a rich, layered mythology with an extremely deep academic and political history, but no modern critical or explanatory components.** The other is an academic theory of economics and politics, with all the tools of discourse of modern academia in its toolbelt, and a completely different critical and analytical goal.

TL;DR? Well, Jesus (in a lenient interpretation) taught that we should help the weak. Marx explained that the people should organize to eradicate the conditions that force weakness onto the people. Jesus
taught that greed would keep a man from heaven, Marx explained that religion, nationalism, tribalism and commodity fetishism blinded the people to its common materialist interests. Jesus taught that the meek will be rewarded for their meekness, and while on earth we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; Marx explained that meekness as a virtue is a way of preventing actual revolutionary change, and that dividing the world into the spiritual and the materialistic helped keep the people sedate and passive, which plays right into the hands of the Caesars.

*I'm just kidding, I know you don't recognize any of this


**There probably are modern scholars of Christianity who adapt and adopt some of the tools of modern academic discourse; I know too little about academic Christianity.

Not to sound like a keyboard warrior, but I would have tackled his ass when he was stammering on the sidewalk. He can't see, and big guys never expect people to come in low. Take out his knee, then take his wallet. At least that's how we do in the Mountain Coast.

He talks so much sense my head hurts.

In my home country (Australia) we have some pretty good statistics on firearms (and knives, and just about everything actually). Yet they are routinely ignored in favour of the simple solution - to blindly further restrict law abiding citizen's access to firearms. It makes the government look as though they are tackling firearm crime (which in Australia is almost never committed by a licensed firearm owner) even though it has no appreciable effect on firearm crime.

This is happening again right now. After the Lindt place siege last year they held a lot of enquiries. The one on firearms concluded that no further restrictions needed to be made (the gunman had an illegal firearm as those who commit firearm crime almost always do, in this case a pump action shotgun) and that licensing and registration should be made easier. The first thing the government did? Put an import ban on perfectly legal lever action shotguns with magazine capacities of more than 5 rounds, calling them a "dangerous new technology". Firearms owners are expecting (from a historical trend) further restrictions at the National Firearms Agreement review next year.

Once a right is given away it rarely comes back, no matter how badly you want it. So I hope America chooses its path carefully. If I moved there I'd want the right to own firearms and to use them to defend myself (the first of which in Australia has nonsense restrictions, and the second of which is almost totally illegal . Word has it that self defence in the home by firearms will shortly be made totally illegal and if your firearms are stolen you may be charged with crimes committed by those firearms).

If you want to look at what the data says you also have to extend it everywhere (my preferred scenario). And in regards to others aspects of people's lives, I think people won't like the numbers and so will simply ignore the numbers.

Or you get people in America saying "hey look Australia solved its firearms problems by restricting them" - using it as a quasi-statistic. Except:
1. We never had a big firearms problem to start with.
2. We had a linearly diminishing rate of firearms deaths starting well before the restrictions that didn't change with the restrictions.
3. The majority of studies looking at the topic say the restrictions didn't work.

Australia is very similar to New Zealand in every way (and really are hardly like the US), and NZ allow access to all almost all the firearms we banned and yet they have a lower homicide rate by firearm, and a lower homicide rate overall. Basically if America wants a model that arguably works as a template, look at NZ. But probably more important than that, I'd be fixing America's health system, mental health system, and poverty rates first. I bet an analysis will show many incredible flow on effects in American society as a result of doing that.