awwww..did the big bad man on the internet hurt your feelings? How can you have possibly survived the internet for this long with such thin skin. Your "hurt" feelings are just another attempt at distraction and use of emotional manipulation.

No one cares about this argument eh? hrm, that's funny, *you* cared enough to reply to perpetuate it. Again...and again....and again. So, another failed argument. You have a decision to make. I hope you make the correct one.

Lets summarize shall we? You haven't demonstrated how more gun control makes anyone less free, you haven't defined what freedom is or how you even measure it. You keep attempting to evade these questions and tug at heart strings by using words like freedom, and coercion to attempt to manipulate the argument. You make repeated false equivalencies. And you have made no attempt to justify why the right to bear arms is exempt from requirements and other controls the same way other rights and freedoms have requirements and controls.

I answered your question yet you continue to pretend otherwise. I showed you numerous examples of requirements before freedoms and rights are granted and no one is claiming they are less free because of them. You make the claim that people are less free because of gun control but you REPEATEDLY fail to demonstrate how other than to suggest we should be an anarchy. Who cares how many people suffer, they'll learn their lesson eventually right?? right?? Sorry, we tried anarchy, didn't work..we moved on. Just because you wrapped your claim in the form of a question doesn't mean shit other than you're really to play Jeopardy with Alex Trebek. You're still making a claim that people will be less responsible with less freedom. Its your claim, you need to prove it. I've said this before and you still haven't done it.

Debate??!! Who said this was a debate? This is an internet forum. This is merely someone calling another person out on their BS I guess we can add strawman to the list of your logical fallacies now. That and you're making another attempt at distraction. There are actual rules in debate. Oh wait, you think rules take away freedom so I guess you won't be participating.

Don't cry foul, don't whine about name calling...be an adult and own up to your role in this. Suck it up. You chose to step into this and I called out your faulty logic. You made your bed, now lie in it. You claim it's pointless...yet you keep responding and asking for more. You can continue going in circles and bending and twisting your rationalizations as you go, or you can make an alternative choice. Put up or shut up.

Take your own advice. You have freedom and it appears that you have made a mistake. I am awaiting you to learn your lesson.

It's up to you amigo.

You keep avoiding answering the question. What are you so afraid of

You still keep making the leap of gun control = less freedom, yet you still have yet to demonstrate how anyone is less free because of periodic safety/competency testing for firearms when we already accept these sorts of requirements for other freedoms and rights.

We already accept that you have to have a permit to buy a weapon and there are minimum age restrictions to purchasing a weapon. Is this less freedom too? I have asked you to explain this but you appear to be unwilling.

That's some interesting math you have there. You keep using the words Freedom and rights interchangeably and I'm not sure that you can. Even if I were to accept that, Making the leap from "freedom goes hand and hand with responsibility" to making them equal to each other, thus lowering one lowers the other doesn't seem to stand up to scrutiny. Just because you can demonstrate a relationship between freedom and responsibility doesn't make them equal. That is some pretty big false equivalencies there.

Equating registration to merely existing?...yeah...you're going to have to show your work on the math there too.

Gun control is actually a requirement to owning a gun currently. As I already said. We already accept SOME gun control in the form of permits and age restrictions so that seems to destroy that argument too.

And again, you're making the same gun control = less freedom claim without actually backing it up and ignoring that we already accept certain requirements for other freedoms and rights and you have yet to demonstrate why firearms are exempt from this precedent.

Once again, this notion more rules = less freedom is rather fallacious. If that were the case, we should be living in an anarchy. Sorry, but that's kindof the basic price you pay for living in a civilized nation. We all agree not to kill each other or take each other's stuff We all agree to pay taxes so that we can have infrastructure and other services. Just because some people ignore those rules doesn't mean we throw out the rulebook. You can wrap your ideas in the flag of freedom all you want, but by living in ANY nation, you do accept certain rules and consequences in order to enjoy the perks. So in the end, it just really boils down to the argument that freedom is an abstract, not an absolute and you're using it to evoke emotion in a manipulative fashion.

If you're just going to make the same claims over and over without backing them up and dodging my questions, then I think it's safe to say this conversation is at an end.

After much mentation over the surveillance apparatus' true colors concerning the human population here's my revised take on talking about anything "nefarious/illegal/contentious" in chats, emails, forums like these, etc over the internet:

I use and deal drugs:
I don't pay income taxes:
I speak openly concerning anarchy and swift and violent/non-violent revolution:


I give a fuck because I have nothing to hide. I despise law enforcement because of how it has mutated, I despise government for the private club she has become. Our intelligence community's function is not there to protect her citizens from enemies, but to create an apparatus which can monitor all actions with a view to creating a machine that works for the wealthiest and most powerful cunts on the planet, the same who should be crucified, displayed prominently along roads leading in and out of the D.C. metro area.

Nike says it best-her credo should be applied to the next televised revolt against this beast...Just Do It.

I found Ravi's previous lecture much more compelling. The foundation of morality could certainly be defined simply by the UTILITY of peace and cooperation versus the anarchy that would result if atheists simply decided that all decisions should be based on purely on selfish motivations.

Atheists are perfectly able to find value and beauty in life, created, evolved or otherwise. I find his argument incoherent, circular and indefensible. Poetic, sure. But ultimately invalid.

Honestly, it's not that all news is bullshit, it's that most (all?) news outlets commit the same fallacious and detrimental information practices as always will happen in any system when experience is posited as "truth".

In the business world we are almost always working to change our perspective on how data flows and how best to store and distribute info; setting our educational bias aside when need be. One particular failed practice that does NOT get enough high level analyzing due to the nature of the bias in which the problem itself creates: Information siloing.

In this case, we have the American people silo'd (and if we don't have them silo'd, we actively seek to silo these "undecided" minds) as either liberal D or conservative R. Once you're silo'd, you now have the ability to be fed limited information, based upon limited experience, as the Truth. This is called a hook. A hook is exactly what you think it means and is not bad of itself, because hooks exist in all systems for better or for worse. Otherwise birds of a feather would not flock together. (They flock together because of hooks in their code and the world aka science around them which helps facilitate that hook.)

Now that the hook is in, we have separate news organizations that cater to the data bias you signed up for. You're a human with a blank slate, so don't you dare argue that your opinion is anything but inconsistent, even after education; because you assume that the patterns of existence taught as theoretical and scientifically posited "truth" scale in a reality based upon butterfly flaps of causation. Just accept it: You are fallible and the defects are inherent at every step of our civilization. (Algorithms of usefulness to engineers are only useful if they lessen the load on the user, otherwise we'd all be typing 1s and 0s; so the logic of simplicity suggests our systems are fucked and holding to them is an anarchy unto itself, where ultimate complexity becomes entropy -- LESSEN THE COMPLEXITY. That should be a rule for all government and economy.)

Liberals claim they cater to all sides and conservatives complain that if it wasn't for Fox, there would be no objectivity in the news. This further complicates the matter, but is itself a red herring because it's an argument that essentially says "YOU MUST GET YOUR NEWS FROM A MAJOR NETWORK." If you actually believe that these media giants are the end all be all to gaining information from the "truest" perspective possible, you are a dummy and you need to WAKE UP.

If you never made a thought pattern along these lines, you also need to wake up but I'm not mad at you. Information that deviates from a human's factory defaults (early family and life experiences in the form of fear induced bias) is difficult to objectively analyze. I fault you not, but your call to awaken is noted and will be remembered at the end of all (if you believe in any sort of karmic ending, Christians included). If you don't believe this, then your inability to rule the boundaries of your mind in the present is damning enough. Fuck you. And fuck your offspring. Subjective fear consume thee as your desperate and once nurturing stride for survival is abstracted into selfish, power seeking nihilism.

Information siloing creates tribal knowledge (which is information held by a select group, and then touted as negative patterns like nationalism and corporate thuggery), and tribal knowledge creates boundaries based upon a skewed perception of what the truth is; which in turn, creates subjective and often intangible competition within a system that should be making strides to improve its process via iteration.

MUD SLING AWAY. Or join me in narrowing the argument to its lowest common denominators and then objectively analyzing the system, starting at a generic starting point and building up to a truer understanding.

Thanks for you response. Maybe I should read his books. However, to reiterate, the sparse solutions he has proposed that I have seen are, as I said, not tangible. You, yourself, appear to quote an example when you say; "We should stop doing that, if we don't want that to happen." The "we" in that sentence are, according to Chomsky, in no position to change anything by peaceful means. His rhetoric appeals to the radical elements of society to "take back" control, which implies anarchy and rebellion. His corporate conspiracy theories are myriad and he strikes me as a highly intelligent, educated version of the loon David Icke.

Heh, a Sons of Anarchy logo would look good on one of those bots.
At the Mountains of Madness? Lovecraft? and Del-Toro at the helm, I think I just got an erection.

And people like this freak me the fuck out.

I get the thing about collecting items. But having a collection of weapons that kids think would be awesome to play with (because what kid DOESN'T play shoot em ups?) just would make me so much fucking more nervous than any perceived threat of home invasion or the country collapsing into anarchy.

The cabinetry is lovely. The secret compartments opened by magnets are cool.

But I would not feel at all fucking safe storing what he has stored in there if there were kids around. As mentioned above, they work out how to get into shit.

No key, the ability to get to all of those guns AND AMMO with some fiddling... is scary.

Schiff and Friends don't realize the term "free market" has been demonized by leftists for the last 100 years. Business is the villain and government is the hero in every story where economics is part of the plot, both in and out of the government-school classroom.

No politician, including Romney, can undo 100 years of brainwashing in 2-minute soundbites. He has no choice but to speak 'government-ese' about every problem.

All the crowd hears when a libertarian speaks is, "No control/anarchy/shredded safety net/you will have to pay your own way."

Careful now, I'm not a liberal. I'm an independent. You should try it sometime.

At one time or another I've been an anarchist, liberal, conservative and (card-carrying) Libertarian. Like anyone here, my views are complex because life is complex.

I don't put much merit on any of the attributes you've given Romney. Inheriting money isn't successful -- creating it is; knocking up a your wife isn't noble, it's natural; using laws as a barometer for morality is repulsive; and squares are just fearful of everything everybody but themselves do.

Many people inherit money and burn through it irresponsibly. Romney worked hard and created value, which brought him more wealth.

Clinton knocked up Hillary, are you going to compare his "natural" abuse of women and dishonoring of his marriage with Romney's marriage?

Laws, for the most part, reflect morality. Plenty of stupid, unjust laws exist and are bent. I believe if anarchy ensued, Romney would still be the same decent square. He could be fooling us all, of course.

The fact is, Obama has been vetted.

Where are his grades and college papers? Does anyone have a timeline of his immigration status? When did he have dual citizenship and for how long? Do you think a boy raised by marxists in a foreign land shares American values? I don't. Obama was a spoiled kid who decided to "forward" himself playing the race card. He had no reason to be bitter about anything except by choice.

And if you want to talk trash, call him out for: not closing Guantanamo; for not using his position to limit Wall Street's power and corruption; for allowing indefinite detention; for allowing citizen executions without a trial; for extending unwarranted wiretapping; for catering to the pharmaceutical industries during negotiations for the Affordable Care Act; etc.

Arch-liberals 'hate' Obama for reasons different than centrists. On many points, we would agree Obama poses a serious threat to liberty, and there are other additional points which make him an unacceptable candidate to me, but not to you. So be it.


>> ^MrFisk:

Careful now, I'm not a liberal. I'm an independent. You should try it sometime.
I don't put much merit on any of the attributes you've given Romney. Inheriting money isn't successful -- creating it is; knocking up a your wife isn't noble, it's natural; using laws as a barometer for morality is repulsive; and squares are just fearful of everything everybody but themselves do.
The fact is, Obama has been vetted. And if you want to talk trash, call him out for: not closing Guantanamo; for not using his position to limit Wall Street's power and corruption; for allowing indefinite detention; for allowing citizen executions without a trial; for extending unwarranted wiretapping; for catering to the pharmaceutical industries during negotiations for the Affordable Care Act; etc.
But I know the foam at your mouth hinders any reasoning in your brain. In fact, is Romney the man you put in for during the primary? Or isn't it just anybody but B. Hussein O.?
>> ^quantumushroom:
Romney: successful businessman, family man, upstanding citizen, square.
The irony here is that you, the liberal, have all the facts the libmedia could dig up on Romney, with a huge side dish of bias, of course.
Obama hasn't been vetted to this day, huge gaps remain in his personal history.
What we have now, however, is a 4-year record meriting his firing.
>> ^MrFisk:
Based on Romney's imperformance, he doesn't merit a first term.
>> ^quantumushroom:
Based on BHO's performance, he doesn't deserve a second term.

Sid was a circus act. I like the Sex-Pistols but mainly they were a talentless anarchy movement.
Queen on the other hand was talent mixed with just the right amount of ego.

I sure would like to have seen where Freddy would have taken music if he were still with us.
Sid? Well who cares really, because he served his role and the masses moved on.

@gorillaman, ok, so people should be free to express their ideas, but not free to have different ideas or ideologies from each other. How does that work?

I love how you apply the word "anarchy" to the economy, as if the natural state of things is not people independently trading with each other, but government ownership and control of all the world's resources, when in fact most of what happens in the world's economy is in such a tremendously vast and complex scale that I can't imagine a single entity keeping track of all that, let alone coordinating it.

I can only imagine, though, how incredibly immoral and oppressive such a world would be. Something like Soviet Russia? I'm sure they had their own standards of efficiency, and hell yeah, the soviets were pretty efficient at sending a man into orbit, making nuclear bombs, nuclear submarines... not so much at erradicating poverty though, or not completely enslaving and slowly starving millions of people, or avoiding the total collapse of their economy.

If you're so worried about harm to third parties, how about the catastrophe of having a third party meddling with every economic transaction? That's TWO parties being directly harmed right there, for every single transaction. Is that a catastrophe worth mentioning?

@renatojj

Your claim is that economic anarchy is more efficient than any system of rational control, and I say this must be false.

It's naive to presume that mutually beneficial agreements between individuals necessarily prove beneficial on a wider social scale; many economic transactions will benefit all directly involved parties while catastrophically harming others.

Ethically, it is appropriate to intervene in these transactions between free individuals where harm will come to a third party, especially where that third party is your whole society. Social harm is caused by production of frivolous luxuries like sports cars, both in terms of squandered labour that could have been used to enrich mankind and depletion of finite resources that belong to everybody. Everything from oil to aluminium is communal property; we all have equal claim to what's in our earth.

Even assuming their ability to do so, it ought to be obvious that wherever each individual has to make their own social benefit analysis of a transaction instead of referring to an authority; that is an immense, inefficient, duplication of effort. In such cases, the cost of servicing ones responsibilities may outweigh the gain in freedoms.

Freedom to hurt others is not a desirable condition. There is a school of thought that suggests preventing a murder is a violation of the rights of the murderer; I would hope you don't subscribe to that view.

Regarding ideological freedom, from which freedom of expression is quite distinct and unequivocally desirable - Yes, I oppose it for the same reasons.