If you are truly curious I hope you'll read everything.

TLDR Post Inc:

It's basically pragmatism and the slippery slope. You're making a registry of all the citizens who own guns. I mean have you ever applied for your firearms license before? Have you ever purchased a handgun? It's pretty crazy.

I wanted to purchase a handgun about 10 years ago after I got held up. It took me over 6 months to get my permit. Then it took me about another month to be able to purchase a handgun.

The Process:
In order to get your firearms id card you have to apply for it. Part of the process involved me having a sit down "evaluation" with a detective that was basically an interrogation for about 30 minutes.

Then once that detective says "this guys not crazy" He takes his form and all my information and mails it to the FBI. Then I had to wait about six months for the FBI to say "this guys not crazy and/or a terrorist.

When I have my Firearms ID card I can buy a shotgun or a rifle if I want that's no problem. But if I want to buy a handgun (which I did) I have to go back to get a handgun permit. Luckily since I was applying for my firearms permit they also gave me one (read one) permit to buy a handgun. I could buy one handgun; If I wanted more I had to apply for ANOTHER permit. Not another Firearms ID Card just another Handgun permit.

So I take my permit and I purchase said gun. I can't purchase the gun after 5:00 PM because the NIC office over at the FBI closes and they have to call it in. Even AFTER they call it in I still had to wait like 6 days before I could pick it up.

I receive a copy of the permit (and a receipt) , the dealer gets a copy, and the last part gets sent to the FBI. Once the FBI confirms they have a copy of the permit (which includes the serial # that is on multiple parts of the gun) then and only then am I allowed to pickup my firearm.

So even if I sold it to someone everyone would know know who it belonged to beforehand.

I'm not sure how much more gun control you can have. The "gun" that needs the most "control" are handguns because they are used in almost all gun related crimes if you look at the stats.

I wont' get into hypothetical situations about how citizens could perform those checks or whatever. I just want to show how regulated things are already. The idea that I could purchase like 10 handguns and then re-sell them all to someone else and NEVER have it traced back to me seems almost impossible. Heck I doubt I could even get approved to own that many handguns!

Also:

I'm not a "giant conspiracy" kind of person. But I feel like with the way government has been going with Guantanamo, stop and frisk, not really enforcing a lot of anti-trust laws, not really prosecuting some of the big banks responsible for what happened, etc etc etc I just feel like there really an upward swing for government control and collusion with protecting their own interests and not the interests of the people.

I don't see the government as an instrument of the people anymore it just seems to be wealthy people patting each other on the back.

What happened in Boston really upset me where people were just pulled out of there houses at gunpoint because there "could be" a terrorist nearby.

I believe that Obama has a good reason for trying to put these tools in place and he has no motive behind it he is just trying to protect the American People in his own way. But I don't believe gun control will help at all and all it will do is put more of a hindrance on law abiding citizens. I'd equate these laws to Anti-Piracy solutions? Ala Sims3 and Diablo etc etc. It just punishes the actual customer NOT the criminal.

If you told me there was a way to ensure program the registry of gun owners could only be searched if the striations from a bullet were scanned that was used in a crime or something like that I'd be fine with it. But there really is no way to do that.

Sorry it was long but it's not really something I can just say something short.

I'm sure people will says "Well what are your guns going to do against tanks and helicopters and xyz xyz". First I'll point to Iraq and Afghanistan and how well those "wars" went. Everyone can agree it was a disaster and we probably made a lot of terrorists by just killing people innocent or not. The same thing would happen here in America.

Would the government actually TRY to take over? I don't' believe so because it's not in our best financial interests. Everyone wants to stay wealthy and some sort of civil war would be horrible for our economy. But I believe over time constantly just eroding our rights will just lead to that. People got pulled out of their homes at gunpoint and screamed at by police in boston and they were just like "Well the police are just trying to keep us safe!" I just find that creepy.

There's a saying blah blah blah doesn't go out with a bang it happens with a whimper. I'm not going to make myself look smart by googling the quote.

Anyway that's my whole post sorry if it's long but I'm tired. I would have put it in the discussion section but I'm not at the appropriate star level.

Can I ask what is the objection to background checks for guns?

Is it a slippery slope concern? i.e. first, it's background checks then it's <something-worse>.

Is it simply a principled stand? That you feel you should be able to sell or buy a gun from whoever you like?

Or is it a pragmatic stance? The old "criminals will ignore the law anyway"?

I'm genuinely curious as to why someone wouldn't want some controls on something as dangerous as a gun.

It reminds me of the Maryland state tax on the amount of rainfall that falls on your property. But it's unclear to me what "water" here refers to. Is it the underground river going beneath my house? Is it Lake Michigan? Is it the collected rainfall in my wheelbarrow? Is it the ocean? Is it the water in the Las Vegas hotel fountain? Is it the reservoir?

"Ownership," in the legal sense of the word, for each of these may vary. Does the "government" own all of these? Is there a pragmatic and/or legal distinction between "owning" and "controlling?"

The Colorado River dries up before it reaches the ocean. California complains that not enough water reaches CA and that NV and others are using up too much of it. Who owns the water coming down the Colorado River?

You're right, Messenger..in a pragmatic sense it is a good assumption to make. However, the conclusion that the scientific method is justified doesn't follow from that assumption, and that is the point of this video.

When you say "we don't know, but maybe we will someday" it reminds me of this quote:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Robert Jastrow

The straw man argument is that you claim/imply that someone claims that the laws of nature will always be the same, and so forth, then you say that that's not a possible claim to make. But nobody claims any such thing.

I didn't claim or imply anyone did..I was pointing out that Dawkins failed to justify the scientific method because he did not overcome the problem of induction. I then further elucidated the argument by pointing out what the problem of induction is, and why pragmatism could not be justified in light of it.

If the underlying intent behind the question is: "

Listen carefully to what the man is asking and the responses; they're speaking in philosophical terms. The questioner is asking about justification, and Dawkins understood exactly what he meant when he framed the question as "what justifies the faith that science will give us the truth?" This is exactly the intent behind the question. It's a philosophical question, and Dawkins gave an inductive argument as an answer.."it works", but the inductive argument has its own issues which I have already pointed out.

Science has worked incredibly well so far within its domain, so I'm curious why you think there's any reason to even raise the possibility it won't continue to work in the future.

I believe that science will continue to work until the end of time, because there is a God who upholds His lawfully ordered Universe. This isn't really about whether science will work in the future; it's more about the nature and basis for truth claims. Empiricists claim, for instance, that knowledge only comes from sense experience. Empiricism is of course the cornerstone of the scientific method. Because most atheists trust in science to explain the world to them, they are empiricists by default and they think empirical evidence is the measure of everything that is true and real.

In a round about way, this is getting at the core reason for the question. It's cutting to the heart of a major problem that people have, which is that they are only skeptical to a point. They fail to see the assumptions inherent in their own worldview, or that they even have a worldview.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_view

Everyone makes certain assumptions about reality, consciously or unconsciously, in order to function in it. This is something we have discussed before. You think it is unreasonable that you should ever have to justify something like your existence. I happen to agree with you here; it's completely pointless to argue about whether you exist or not. I don't think you should be skeptical of your own existence, and therefore it is justifiable to make that leap. This is an assumption you must make, and there are many more..such as the world is real. That, for instance, the Universe didn't pop into existence 5 seconds ago and all of our memories are false. You must assume that your history is real, and that the people you are meeting are not actors like in the Truman show. All of this sorts out to form the foundations, or basic beliefs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_belief) of your worldview. A world view is like a pair of glasses you put on to interpret reality. My worldview is Christian, for instance..I interpret everything through the revelation of God. Most atheists are naturalists and so their worldview is naturalistic atheism. They interpret everything in natural terms, but this is also informed by their lack of belief in a God. A belief in God or a lack thereof is the cipher which will determine everything you believe about the nature of reality. It is the one truth that informs all other truths.

But here is where things go wrong, and why the question is necessary. People assume things about the nature of reality, and about logic, morality, and science which they cannot justify, and then they falsify truth claims on those topics with reasoning based on those assumptions. For instance, people will say that something isn't real unless there is empirical evidence for it, but this is based on the unjustified assumption that empirical testing is the only method for determining the truth. They will justify this claim like Dawkins justified the scientific method "science works therefore empirical testing". But pointing to the results to justify the assumption is logically fallacious reasoning. I could get out of debt rather quickly by murdering all of my creditors, but if I promoted this to you as a sound debt management plan, would you agree that being debt free justified the assumption inherent in the premise, that murder is acceptable? If you wouldn't, then you can see why no one should agree with the idea that because we sent a man to the moon, the scientific method has been justified. Results don't justify anything; the methodology used to get the results must itself be justified by a higher reasoning process. The idea empirical testing is the only way to obtain truth itself must be empirically tested; and how do you empirically test that idea? This is where the inductive argument completely fails.

Unfortunately for most people their skepticism has already turned off long ago and they are blind to the leaps of logic they make in their own reasoning process. They are only skeptical of what challenges the core assumptions of their worldview, not the assumptions themselves, and they evaluate all truth claims through these assumptions. It would be like if I wore glasses that saw only two colors and you wore glasses that saw three. Everything you told me about seeing three colors I would evaluate in terms of seeing two. I would be utterly blind to the third color because of my assumption that only two were possible. No matter how articulate your argument was, unless you could get me to take off those glasses (put down the assumption that only 2 colors were possible) I would never see it.

So this is the essence of the question..why should we trust science for the truth and not something else? To answer that we must challenge the assumptions that make science possible and see if they are coherent with reality.

I'm not sure what straw man you're seeing in my argument..could you point it out to me?

The question the man asked was how do you justify the scientific method..or, as dawkins said at :38 "how do justify your faith that science will give you the truth"

Here is the essential question: why is there uniformity in nature? Or, why are the laws of nature constant? This is the fundamental assumption that is made in every scientific test, which is that the laws of nature will continue to be constant in the future. Without that assumption science would not be possible.

Dawkins response to his question is pragmatism; it's justified because it works. Well, that doesn't provide any basis for justification. It works now, but why should it work in the future?

What you've appealed to in your reply is probability. You're saying it's more probable that the laws will remain constant because of the vast record we have of unchanging constancy. The problem is that it's still begging the question..what is the reason that probability will tell us what the future will be like? The best you could say is that it always has in the past, but you couldn't tell me why it should continue to do so in the future.

science is self correcting... its not a logical fallacy to say "it works", because producing results is what science is concerned with... and testing hypotheses, which is NEVER ENDING...

If two models agree with observation, neither one can be considered more real than the other. A person can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration."

All of science assumes there is such a thing as uniformity in nature. If tomorrow the laws of physics stopped working science couldn't self-correct that..it would become useless. The question was, what justifies the scientific method..and pragmatism doesn't justify it. You have to be able to answer why it will continue to work without using a logical fallacy to justify it.

you will run into limits with a faith based system which the scientific method will accelerate by due to use of logic and model-dependent realism.

In the case of Christianity, there aren't any limits. It was because of the Christian assumption that there is a Lawgiver who created an orderly Universe based on laws which helped birth the scientific method in the first place. Now science still operates with the assumption of an orderly Universe based on laws, but it denies the Lawgiver that created them without explaining why they should exist in the first place.

simple, no??? what do i win?? eternal torment in this form by having to exist with ignorant animals who deny their true existence?? Cool... somedays i wish i hadnt bit that apple, but it is done... and i take some comfort knowing that reincarnation is literally true for the physical world, but this planet is getting a little crowded ill never see the end or the start all i am is a middle... when can i sleep eternal...

Are you of the Hindu faith? Why do you believe in reincarnation?

Nope. The scientific method is the epitome of pragmatism. It does not claim to find "The Truth", it claims to find "the model that most reliably predicts measurable results."

It neither pretends, nor needs, to be more.

[edit to standardize the tenses]

Even though I agree with him, I'm not quite satisfied with his answer.

There must be better ways to "justify" (whatever that means) the scientific method other than for its pragmatism.

Well, sure... everyone is trying to decide whether upholding the second amendment is worth the amount of gun violence we accept. For inputs to that risk-benefit analysis though, we are necessarily looking outside our borders... seeing how the balance works in other countries.

I'm not sure what he's trying to say here. Of course the guns issue is partly a cultural one... but there are a whole lot of statistics and pragmatics to look at too...

To actually take the point at face value, it's an evolved response.

Let's say there was a group of early humans who felt intense grief at every death. They would be constantly grieving and never getting on with life, never doing anything productive with our lives, because someone, somewhere is always dying. Eventually, the more pragmatic humans who be more successful.

Equally, if there was a group that didn't feel a greater loss at the death of someone close to them, they would be less inclined to protect their tribe, and less inclined to co-operate. Again, the people that stick together would be more successful.

That's my theory anyway.

Well, they wanted to use a single machine for both encoding and decoding of messages, so the use of a reflector to channel the signal right back through the rotors strikes me as rather pragmatic.

What bothers me is that they relied on "security through obscurity".

The sheer number of possible settings with 3 (4) rotors of a random configuration, each with adjustable rings, plus a plugboard with a variable number of connections -- that's a metric fuck-ton of permutations. But the rotors had fixed wiring and were limited in number. As soon as the Allies got their hands on a set of rotors, the possible number of settings was reduced radically. And the number of connections on the plugboard was standardized to 10 in '41.

Now, what if they had replaced one of the fixed-wiring rotors with a sort of pluggable rotor disc, a rotor that could be reconfigured on site within a minute? That would have screwed the boys at Bletchley Park, wouldn't it? Instead of 60 combinations for 3 out of 5, you'd have 20*26! (2 out of 5 and one random). Have it reconfigured daily, just like the starting positions, and brute force would have required much more effort.

It would still have been vulnerable, given the reflector issues, the nonsensical guidelines for the plugboard, the need to transmit settings, the vast numbers of codebooks, etc. But the numbers would have been more to their favor.

I support this project. I think arms should be controlled, but this is just like the music industry and the internet. It's a reality that won't go away when ignored and we need to figure out how to deal with it, legally and pragmatically. These guys are forcing the ATF (and by extension the rest of government) to figure it out.

Zizek is known for being reactionary because it gets the point across and starts a dialogue. We give lip to people like him whereas, were he to present moderate pragmatic views, many wouldn't pay him any mind at all.

The Romney/Ryan team have a long list of disqualifying characteristics

1. Poor understanding of economics.
2. Poor understanding of foreign policy.
3. Near constant bald-faced lying.
4. They seem to be rooting for the country to fail.
5. Playing political games during a time when we face a lot of problems.
6. Silver spoons firmly wedged in anuses.
7. Both have a history of extreme hostility towards the working class.
8. Both are cultists (Mormon/Objectivist)
9. Plutocratic policy based more on dogma than pragmatism
10. Neither seem smart enough for the gig.