Iggy

Don't be silly. They're purple.

How very literal. I'm sure that's a fair way too look at it. I see him saying that it might just be acceptable for the government to strip people of their freedoms, their privacy, and their personhood if those people want to own a means of self protection, and it makes me ill. Defeat in the mind. Surrender. Masochism. I'm sure that's fair too.

Did you get the impression I was being particular with the numbers? I'm sure there was a point that's being very strenuously missed. No, that's not it. Syria doesn't use chemical weapons for the same reason nobody used chemical weapons in the second world war despite their being tones of the stuff about. Figure it out. Imagine the fear al Assad has of his populous and compare it to the indifference Saddam had for the Kurds when he gassed them. You'll get it. It has nothing to do with the US. Brutus trusted Caesar right up until he buried a knife in his chest. Tyrants exist. Your refusal to see them makes them no less real and it negates nothing about what must be done with them. "Sic semper tyrannis" means more than all the sniveling support they can receive from the likes of you. Masochism. You hand the whip to your master and beg him to leave you bloody. Pure unadulterated masochism. I'll take no part in it.

I cry for any Syrian happening to read you call their struggle bullshit. Al-Assad has chemical weapons and he could decimate cities too. Should no one fight him? Should no one resist? Are the meager rifles that oppose him so meaningless? I'd rather have 200 million bushmasters at my back than 2000 drones. You have to imagine someone like Nixon who is impeached, but refuses to leave office. Someone who uses the armed forces to stay in power longer than he is legally permitted. Would it then be treason to dethrone him by force? It isn't so clear cut. Caesar's 23 cuts weren't necessarily unjust.

You assume that citizens want to feel secure or should feel secure. How much further could the point of that link miss you? I've never met a bombardier, a fighter jock, a trigger happy general with a nuke at his disposal, or an ebola ridden victim, immune to a .45. You make the point yourself... the government needs us. The moment it decides it doesn't we become North Korea, and don't think an armed populous can't forestall that. It absolutely can. Libya proved that point and Syrians die daily to prove it. Tyranny, oppression, and despotism isn't the correct side in this fight. It's awful that one needs to remind others of this.

Expanding space is another way of saying that everything is moving away from everything else. It is mostly a distinction without a difference. Spatial expansion is homogenous. The rate of expansion changes over time so you couldn't really say that expansion is homogenous with respect to time. In multiple respects, it is not the same at all scales. Eddington put it very well in something he wrote: When we assert that the universe expands, what is our standard of constancy? There is no particular subtlety about the answer; the expansion is relative to the standards that we ordinarily employ. It is relative to the standard metre bar, for example, or to the wave-length of cadmium light which is often suggested as a more ideal standard, or to any of the linear dimensions associated with atoms, electrons, etc. which are regarded as "natural constants" in atomic physics. But if the universe is expanding relatively to these standards, all these standards are shrinking relatively to the universe. The theory of the expanding universe is also the theory of the shrinking atom. A. Eddington, 1935 In other words, the little things don't expand with large intergalactic distances. Space is what a ruler measures. The cosmos expands because the distance between galaxies as measured by something like a series of meter sticks increases over time. The further away the two galaxeis which are being measured, the rate at which the measured distance increaes over time.

Thank you. I've never heard the convention the first article uses between 'rifle' and 'weapon'. The definition in the second article makes me lose confidence even more that a narrowly defined assault weapons ban would accomplish anything. A person could have a detatchable clip and pistol grip as long as they don't have a collapsing stock, grenade launcher, suppressor, and bayonet. A person could drive a mack truck through that loophole! But, surely there are small caliber hunting rifles and large caliber assault weapons. AR15s are comparable in stopping power to hunting rifles firing a .243 winchester, and your .30-06 would be comparable to an AR10. It seems silly to make one illegal and not the other. A matter of looks, like the captain says.

Certainly possible, but I wouldn't call anything congress does easy. Did I hear right that the federal assault weapons ban wouldn't have covered the rifle he used? I actually have trouble understanding the rationale of banning semiautomatic assault weapons but not hunting rifles. I heard Piers Morgan saying it the other night -- that assault weapons were the problem and not hunting rifles. Besides magazine capacity I'm not sure there is a meaningful difference.

It's happened 27 times (if you count the first 10 separately). I suppose the odds would depend on how you figure them. It might be fair to say that thousands of amendments have been proposed in congress -- 27 successfully -- so the likelihood would be in the neighborhood of one in a thousand. The chance of the states annulling the second amendment is easily zero. Hopefully the chance of meaningful restrictions getting passed is significantly higher.

Thank you. I wasn't sure if I had that right earlier...

Right, the analogy would be: the rules of football can be changed, so having rules for the players doesn't prevent them from doing anything. Obviously not the case. The key is that the players can't change the rules. The lawmakers can't ratify amendments to the constitution. Giving the players rules (real, enforceable limitations to their play) does indeed change the game considerably from what it would otherwise be.

Again, US law is more than the statutes our representatives pass. The law is more than what we do through the government. Growing up in certain places makes such an idea foreign. Wikipedia explains, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom#Parliamentary_supremacy_and_the_rule_of_law The idea that "the law is what we do through our government" is *exactly* what the constitution means to prevent. "Our government" (by which one inevitably means the majority) is not the sole author of the law. Some choices that I can make should not be submitted to a majority opinion. I really feel that some people don't understand this aspect of the second amendment in the US

I agree. It was an analogy. I said "As an analogy...". No, no, no, you've taken everything wrong. I support heavy restrictions on the second amendment. I outlined some explicitly in post 271. I support restrictions on the first amendment too. I'm no more a first amendment absolutist than a second. The point isn't that there are no limits to speech (I said no such thing)... the point is that harmful speech doesn't infer the ability, the necessity, or the wisdom of banning such an instance of harmful speech. It isn't an axiomatic move. It is an analogy for the second amendment where the fact that guns are harmful does not axiomatically infer the ability or the wisdom of banning them. People who argue "more guns, more problems" and stop the argument there really haven't taken the argument anywhere in the US legal and political framework. I had the impression that people weren't getting, and perhaps continue to fail to get, the reasons for that.

or a large one depending on who is aiming it

I agree, and I think the tone by which we regulate the guns that aren't outright banned would be key. If it were as hard to buy a handgun as it is to get a license to drive a class 3 truck that would be a big improvement. Mandatory keylocks, safety training, random surprise inspections, holding gun owners and manufactures civilly liable for misuse (the proceeds of which could fund massive gun buyback programs to remove illegal guns from the streets)... a person can think of a dozen things quicker than they can be typed. More stringent regulations I say

Right, the analogy isn't the point. The point is that these facts from the OP's article... ...are not necessarily discordant. People who contine to argue "Gun control should be politically popular because more guns leads to more homicides" are missing something fundamental about the political and cultural landscape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_harassment,_alarm_or_distress The exact wording is "A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person... distress, he.. uses... insulting words... thereby causing that or another person... distress." You live there, right? Right, congress can't enact an unconstitutional law. The UK law against distressful insults would be banned by the first amendment. Congress can't amend the constitution. That requires 3/4rs (if I recall correctly) of state legislatures. Unlike Parliament, there are certain laws that congress just can't make. Those laws are specifically the laws that protect individuals against the wishes of the majority. As far as I know the right to have drugs and bombs is nowhere included in the constitutional amendments. You are demonstrating what I mean. You think "liberty" is something the government gives you by restraining the governed. You are free not to be shot by your neighbor. You are free not to be insulted by your neighbor. The government makes you free by withholding things from you and telling you how to behave. The government makes you free by locking up Nick Griffin. You are free not to hear his views. People in the US don't think that way. The idea that the government can give us a liberty by telling us what to do is confusing to people in the US.

I don't think you're looking at it in the same way people from the US look at it. The bill of rights aren't about determining what benefits public safety or anything like that. By analogy, I know in the UK you have a law making it illegal to "insult someone thereby causing them distress". Parliament doesn't have a constitution so it can make laws like that. It may be that insults and distress are bad for society. Banning insults may even prevent murders. But, the US congress couldn't make that law even if the majority supported it and believed it would benefit society and make it safer. It's about the right of the individual. So, even if there were only one person to whom a gun was a benefit (I should have to give an example) Most people in the US see the second amendment as something that protects her right as an individual. If she thinks it is a success story and she wants the gun then the statistics don't matter the way they might in the UK. When she argues for her second amendment right and someone from the UK argues that gun accidents in the home are more likely than uses for protection you're having two different arguments. The one is assuming that liberty outweighs public safety and the other makes the opposite assumption.

If you're being ironic, that is brilliant. A few years ago I heard the question "why are so many blacks becoming conservative?" (this was before Obama). The speaker thought the answer was simple. It's the first generation of black millionaires. That is apparently inevitably as deep as the conversation can get in a topic like this. Trading pejorative stereotypes and arguing over who does it more flagrantly. Some of the cleverest people I know are uneducated through no fault of their own. They had to support a younger brother and stepmom through high school and couldn't go to college. That type of thing. It would be snobbish and wrong to argue that there is a defect in that struggle just because it isn't the struggle to become educated. Rigney is of course just as wrong to imply that educated people don't work hard to get their education. There's nothing wrong with being angry either. An author you admire said, "anger is an emotion without which the human species couldn't do" and I'm sure you've posted many angry videos of his on this site, so... I sort of doubt you really think there is anything wrong with those two things.

I'd love to hear a conservative say that the democratic party has become the party of angry black men on the same basis. Look at the graph, more black people voted for Barack, so it must be a party of black people. You would spot that non-sequitur if a conservative said it, and the firestorm brought down on that person in this thread would be unequaled. You can't think that graph or link shows that the republican party is mostly lower middle class and uneducated and angry and white and men. You can't think that there is anything wrong with being lower middle class or uneducated or angry or white or a man. So what are you really saying? They're all a bunch of rednecks must be the implication. When conservatives say "poor, uneducated, angry, black men" the implication is clear enough. I don't like it on either side.

...an english breakfast. They say they like it, but it mostly just ends up getting regurgitated everywhere.

I don't know if it ever will be said better than it was about 200 years ago, Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. -wiki Humanity can't do without religion while the world suffers, and we can't throw off suffering without wanting to throw off religion. For the moment all the best of us can do is hope for the struggle.

Denying the antecedent a bit aren't we? I mean, to quote the first couple lines of wiki, or maybe "by your logic" indicates rather the depths of illogical that I dared not venture into with my meager skimming of the thread.

We're just saying that questions deserved to be asked. You have to suspect people in power. If there are inconsistencies or the appearance of impropriety then it should be investigated. Maybe the truth is being concealed. And so on... I hate being reminded of the birther argument. Yuck.

and so will every other car. In that case it isn't a peculiar velocity. It isn't something extra added on to the scale factor. It isn't something above and beyond normal expansion... which is the thing Daedalus proposed. In any case, I do agree with that much the same as I recently agreed on your behalf in the case of constant expansion on the same topic.