overtone

Yes. No. Yes. And you illustrate that perfectly in such responses. Let's you quit making such posts. Consider the thread topic. How about you, not me, go back through this fifty page thread and find my previously posted lists, somehow never registered or never read despite being quoted and referred to and at one point iirc (might have been another thread, of the several) described as a "deflection". Actually, described as yet another attempt at deflection - which would seem to imply less than total amnesia. Or come up with your own. Why not? When you have done that, I will be happy to expand the list, discuss items on it, defend the approaches described, and so forth. That would be relevant to the thread - a nice change from the "personal barbs and style comments" packing the posts of the puritans. Like this beauty (you are apparently taking to the rules committee!) : Here's a tip: I wouldn't put much past a moderation team that endorsed "The scientific consensus is that GMOs are safe", but I doubt even that crew would endorse a claim that I ever posted keeping guns around as any way to prevent kids from getting shot - let alone the best way. And that will highlight the nature of your responses to my posts, which are of a piece with that (as are several other folk's): You aren't thinking well. You aren't making sense. And you are making threats, which are not as invisible to the majority of Americans as they seem to be to you. So what's it going to be, eh? More gridlock on gun control, or a turning of attention to the prospect of actually, significantly, and realistically improving this crazy situation of kids getting shot in the US?

So why do you do it? Here's your contribution: There are probably fifteen posts of mine on this thread, many addressed to you directly, that offer exactly that, address exactly that. I've listed dozens of possible areas of common ground, posted paragraphs of various approaches and reasoned response to your endless repetitions of the same old gridlocked crackpottery, overtly and explicitly invited discussion of those matters - and there is your (completely typical) response. Fifty pages, you are still posting not only "personal barbs and style comments" in lieu of argument or even recognition, but dishonest ones. Expressions not only of disdain, but clueless disdain, mistaken disdain, amnesiac and irrational and wrongheaded disdain. And jack all else. You guys are wrong. You are not thinking well. You are looking at the crazy of the gun nut world, and thinking it makes you sensible and reasonable. It does not. And it's not confined to these play forums - that is how the most vocal and public gun control advocates talk in the big world, too. This is damaging, politically. This is - once again - the core of the gridlock problem. It doesn't matter how many people think reliable and universal background checks, trigger locks in family homes, legal standards for responsible ownership and carry, for example, would be a good idea in a better world (It's over 85% of the NRA membership even, last I checked): they aren't going to hand political power over to people who think like that, talk like that, and preen themselves in public on a moral and ethical superiority they nowhere near possess. Because such people are a threat. And so, again: if you really care about the dead children, if you sincerely and against all appearances have as your actual goal a significant reduction in gun injuries to children, you probably have to set the gun control approach aside for a while - give people time to forget this behavior of yours. There are plenty of other approaches that are not trashed by your arrogant cluelessness. And even better: these approaches have more potential to actually make progress than gun control in the US has ever had. They might make a significant difference. So what's your real cause: slapping the gun nuts as hard as you can, or making the US a better and safer place for some children?

That has to be a joke, right? You're just mocking American conservatives, by rubbing their noses in the Bush Presidency? Intelligent and dangerous sociopaths routinely beat those tests. You'd be screening out the better, not the worse, candidates for office.

When you so completely and badly misrepresent the postings of others, your claims of reasonableness lose credibility. If fewer gun control advocates illustrated their claims to reliable sense and reason by displaying unreasonableness, irrationality, and amnesiac incomprehension, including threatening the very things they claim not to advocate, and refusing to credit critics of their approach with the very reason they claim to be looking for, we might have a chance of breaking this gridlock, and adopting some of the dozen or more easily possible and almost universally supported improvements in American gun control I have been the earliest, most repetitive, and most consistently persistent advocate of on this forum. But as that has been thoroughly demonstrated to be an impossible dream, we're stuck. So as so many times before, this is yet another moment in the argument in which the obvious unfeasibility of the gun control approach should be recognized from the evidence, and those sincerely interested in reducing the threat to children posed by America's bizarre and crazy situation turn to one or more of the much less gridlocked - and potentially significantly more effective in the first place - approaches. Several have been listed on this forum, and in this thread, and rather than disparage them as "deflections" and the like this time maybe they could be addressed?

Some do, some don't. Get rid of those guns first, and the rest will be easier. Yes, now that you mention it. Of course magic civilization immunity has prevented that from ever happening again, but people don't enjoy those powers in the Americas - or anywhere else. Don't know. Some do, most don't. Doesn't make any difference.

Their most common civilian use is as a defensive threat. That is their use when carried by police, kept in homes, etc. The first group kill plenty of children. The second group deter much besides war - KKK, for example. You can see what can happen without them all over South America and Africa and Asia. That's not true. Most of the guns owned by my neighbors all my life existed year round as continual threats to some "bad man" or another. The chances of that use were almost 100% - a few were ornamental, locked up, etc.

You mistake design capability for use intention. Make threats, you mean. And that is almost always the intention of the person owning or carrying them for "self defense" or "criminal endeavor". Where exactly are you locating your "intention" - is it a magic property of the gun? And those you are hunting with will be a bit startled to learn that your gun is intended to kill people. I think you should give them fair warning, and fifteen seconds head start.

That's not the NRA extremist position, and not the damaging extremist position of the gun foes either. No, you're not. Not bullshit. That's what they're for - from the guy holding up the convenience store to the cop with the piece on his hip.

That's correct. I would call the guy nailing his favorite log in place, so no one could move it, part of the problem, though. Also the guy blaming all the other logs for the problem, but not his. And so forth. Most defensive employment of guns - such as the one on the ordinary police officer's hip, or the one every potential housebreaker in a rural area knows is somewhere inside with the owner - involves no firing of the gun even, let alone killing with it. They are intended to threaten people. These people are wrong. Threats, in general, are very often defensive. And shields - like bulletproof vests, or ABM systems - are often threats.

http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/creatures/veg/leaf/potato_beetles.htm It's not reported from South America as a native insect, and it did not spread with the potato around the world from South America right away - although that spread as happened, and further spread is now feared, (any such beetles spotted in, say, Ireland or England, are treated as emergencies). Its home range before recent spreading appears to be some areas of Mexico, and parts of Colorado (where it was first noticed) - north and south along the east foothills off the Rockies, with a gap for the desert areas in the American southwest. It eats various Solonaceae - http://www.britannica.com/plant/Solanaceae - not just potatoes. There are several plants of this family native and wild in Colorado etc. These plants have heavy chemical defenses, which the domestic potato has been bred to have less of - possibly making it candy for the beetle, worth specializing in and seeking out, as soon as any were planted in its range. It can fly. The beetle was always well adapted to overcoming chemical defenses and poisons, which may explain its remarkable ability to quickly develop resistance to insecticides. It's a menace, if you like potatoes. It was discovered to Western science, along with a vastly disproportionate share of the rest of the North American biota, by Thomas Nuttal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nuttall ThomasNuttal was possibly the original absent-minded professor, the type specimen, and there are a lot good stories about him *, but his uncanny ability to notice things shows up in stuff like this - the guy was a botanist by training, the year was 1811 (not a potato in sight in Colorado), there were lots of different kinds of beetles around that Nuttal did not collect, and he neither officially described or named the thing - just recorded his observation. The plague hit forty years later. *The Wiki account has him leaving exploration parties and visiting Red tribes and returning with other exploration parties - what it leaves out is that Nuttal was always getting lost, wandering in the wilderness without food he never learned to shoot or fire he never learned to make, until he encountered some red people and - instead of being killed for his gear and trespass threat or held for ransom as would have happened to almost anyone else - was returned to the nearest group of white people for caretaking, with the best wishes of his captors. And there's the story of him standing tall and defiant among his exploration party confronting the northern Cheyenne light cavalry in a hostile mood, holding a rifle whose barrel was packed with seeds he had collected and needed to keep dry. And the story of Richard Henry Dana's meeting him first at Harvard, where Dana was a student about to leave on his grand sailing adventure and Nuttal was a professor living in a second floor room accessible only by ladder through a trap door, the ladder often removed for privacy, and then many months later, after sailing around Cape Horn and the adventure of his life, landing on a beach near the mouth of the Columbia River and seeing that same batty and harmless professor of botany wading in the surf on the wild Pacific coast collecting mussels and seaweed species and beach flora. http://www.netartsbaytoday.org/html/clams_.html

Paul Allen, the billionaire, recently announced whose biological research he would be funding with many millions of dollars in a new venture: the criterion was the best responses to the question "What is the dark matter of biology?" One of the four best responses was the question of the evolution of form - how and why organisms come to have the shapes and conformations they do, over evolutionary time. It's a dark matter problem - large, dominant, important, and largely mysterious at the moment. Nobody knows, really.

In the US, as well as all over South America, the fatuity of this entire argument has always been obvious to everyone except gun control extremists. Just one acronym should be enough: KKK. And that completely sufficient response has been posted right here in front of these same posters at least six times, with dozens of illustrative examples from Haiti to Chile to Peru to Afghanistan to Cliven Bundy vs Black Panthers. To no effect. That's what an extremist deadlock looks like - one side fantasizing about Red Dawn insurgencies against Obama's commie minions, the other one unable to see the slightest risk in things like the KKK, or the deployment of Blackwater mercenaries into a disarmed New Orleans, after Katrina, by American fascist politicians elected to high office. This is more of the real anti-tyranny argument, which is only a part of the gun rights argument: Tyranny is almost never enforced by the military, and without the ability to terrorize an unarmed population with minimal and informal paramilitary forces few tyrannies (even local ones, like company towns) look feasible past the coup. Potential tyrants are seldom fools, in that sense, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So like other supposed uses of firearms in self defense, the supposed benefit is seen in the absence of the bad thing happening. So there are counter-arguments to this. But we don't see them. We see the deadlock above, instead. There isn't, really. There are many tens of millions of "kids" (they are counting young teenagers in there) in this country, and most of them live outside the heavy drug war centers. So they are safe, realistically. And anyone who wants to make their kid even safer can simply banish both drugs and guns from the child's home - the risk goes from from negligible to vanishing.

And never wants to have to do that, ever again.

Good laws increase both. Unless, of course, you don't. Because the original trade was a denial of the liberty to murder, in return for State protection from murder. The expansion to "kill" seems to have been unconscious. Such triggers of intransigency often are. Sure. Also: lucky. Luckier than, for example, your colonies. Not only addressed, but debunked in its factual claims and invalidated in its strawman presumptions. Thoroughly. Yet you repost. Why?

Or any other right? Probably none, for many years. On the other hand, there was that one time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War I suppose such times will never come again, for sure, eh? Meanwhile, folks are talking about the reintegration of Spain into the caliphate - beginning with economic pressure from the giant piles of investment cash sitting across the Mediterranean, and Spain's economic doldrums. So the matter of militia, even though Spain lacks the violent streak of regular American life, is not some inconceivable issue no one could dream of affecting Spain. Bringing us to this: We wish them all continued good luck. Meanwhile, the recent examples of disarmed and unarmed people whose freedoms have been taken from them by men with guns are worth noticing. As is the obvious agenda: heavy restriction of the right to gun ownership in the US. Burdening ownership, and taking away the guns people currently own.

And you don't register that as ludicrously offensive. You don't post your "second amendment scorecard" as a joke, a parody, or deliberately provocative nonsense designed to elicit anger. You think it actually makes sense as an observation. You guys cannot help yourselves - you simply cannot make reasonable, rationally reasoned, reliably responsible arguments. And then when people refuse to trust you with political power, you look around for some bogeyman, some lobbyist or NRA organizational influence. Gridlock. You'll find its cause in the mirror.

I have several times pointed out to you that such a focus - which I was objecting to from that poster, but have from you as well in the past - is a waste of time. So why do you guys keep it up? Which argument? The gun control debate in the US is hopelessly gridlocked for the near future by irrational and immature extremists on both sides. If you are basing your efforts to reduce the number of child deaths and injuries from gunfire in the US on gun control, you may as well give up. It was never a promising route, given the situation in the US, and the failure of reason to persuade and shift the argument has reduced its odds to negligible. But there are many other approaches to that goal, that are not gridlocked. I have attempted several, on this forum, and been greeted by objections to my attempts to "deflect" the discussion and so forth, including by that very poster. So in the future: can we expect more reasonable responses to such attempts? That's misdescribed - there are no such circumstances as "easily and at no personal risk". But meanwhile: It's a right in part because without it one becomes immediately vulnerable. It's called self defense. Or drive a private car instead of hiring professional transit. Or go swimming for recreation. Or eat unhealthy foods. Own a television. Ride a bicycle anywhere besides the back yard. Is there anything the right to survive childhood does not outweigh? Not much. It's a bad argument. And as such it's a threat. Such arguments in the hands of governmental power can be used to justify almost anything. Power that need not justify itself and answer to reason is dangerous. Preventing the US government from employing such arguments in the restriction of civil rights and liberties is exactly the purpose of the Constitution, and the entire reason for the existence of the Bill Of Rights.

The irrationality comes in not by your repeated posting of irrelevant factoids, which is noise but not in direct conflict with reason. It comes in via the apparent unreasonable argument you intend when you post them, and your refusal to amend that argument when reason is brought to bear. Justifiable homicide does not measure the degree, frequency, or significance of the use of firearms for "defense", and this has been pointed out to you several times now. And that is of course yet more gratuitous poo-flinging such as a significant vocal wing of the gun control crowd cannot seem to omit from their public utterances, leading directly to rejection by the similarly shallow of any actual argument or sense associated with it, and intransigent refusal to entertain any associated political initiatives by not only the shallow but a good many bystanders. It's dangerous to give power to the irrational and irresponsible and juvenile, no matter the cause. And thus, gridlock.

One would assume that Africa was a very nice place to live, and after a million years of evolution humans were well adapted to comfortable and prosperous lives there. Maybe the ones who left were rejects and outcasts and other losers. Alternatively, something like the culling that takes place on certain South Sea Islands was happening - where the elders know how many people a given island can support, and when the population gets too big it is formally and ritually split, with a large number of people getting into boats and taking off for parts unknown. And of course there are the inevitable teenagers running off, leaving town for adventure.

That is an example of the kind of frustratingly deceptive and revealingly confused statistic that makes people reluctant to hand political power to gun control advocates. Why is it apparently impossible to argue for reasonable gun control reasonably? With reasonable gun control we could prevent a good many shootings of children - especially the accidental ones. This gridlock of irrationality is harmful.

In 2014, a bill to address some extra money and attention to the matter of suicide among Iraq War veterans was blocked in the Senate by a single Republican Senator. This Senator - Tom Coburn, R-OK - was apparently fulfilling his promise from the Caucus Room Conspiracy that had held sway since Obama's initial inauguration and motivated dozens of filibusters over the years, by blocking a bill that granted benefits to military veterans of foreign war. This was, one would think, worthy of reporting on the major news channels, both as a human interest and man bites dog item, and as an illustration of the Republican Party's behavior in the Senate regarding anything supported by Obama. It didn't get any:

A long time ago, on a forum far, far away, I handed out my million dollar idea here for free to anyone who wanted to get on board the gravy train of creation science book writing. Because one of the easiest and most lucrative endeavors one can undertake is writing a superficially plausible, quasi-scientific book that the ever-busy US fundamentalist publishing industry can promote as evidence for the Biblical creation story. Guys like Behe have made a ton of money at this - you can too. All you need is a graduate degree for credibility - preferably a doctorate, but there are some such folks here, right? - and a willingness to sacrifice your reputation and integrity (because you have to go on talk shows and stuff, you can't hide behind a pseudonym for very long). And you need an idea. Which I now provide (because as far as I know nobody picked it up, before). Here it is: Long, long, but not too long, ago, the Earth was much smaller. There was less gravity, of course, so animals (and people) could grow very large and live longer, and things were closer together without these big oceans, so these larger and longer lived animals could walk from one place to another. The atmosphere was thicker, and had more oxygen. Everything was easier. Then one day a huge batch of comets, all made of ice and stuff, collided with it. But this was a very unusual collision for some reason, almost as if it were designed - not the random kind we see now, at high speed from crossing the orbit, but a very slow and gentle impact as they caught up from behind in the Earth's orbit, moving just a bit faster than the Earth. Lots and lots of them. They mostly came in onto Antarctica and the north pole. And the collision speed was just high enough so they all melted, or mostly melted (some ice piled up in Antarctica, and around the north pole, and in some high places on mountains), without heating anything up otherwise. So they splashed all over, the water raining down in huge falls of rain everywhere and flowing over the surface. Then, after this inundation had covered the smaller planet, it soaked into the ground - and the planet swelled, like a sponge. As it swelled, the land broke apart and the pieces separated into the continents we see today, while the water ran into the hollows between them. The splitting opened up rifts and volcanoes, and the pieces carried with them the animals that happened to be on them. It took a long time for the soaking and swelling and splitting to create what we see today - a couple of thousand years. Huge volumes of water ran off the upswelling continents, carving ravines and carrying sediments and minerals and salts and stuff into what we now know as oceans. Ok - that's the basics. Pad it with some scientific evidence (did you know science just recently discovered huge amounts of water soaked into the rocks under all the continents? The scientists are just now catching up with the Bible!). Write it up in chapters, not forgetting some examples of doubting "scientists" being convinced by the weight of your evidence (a couple of chapters at least) and disbelieving elites saying things that sound foolish in light of the truth. And don't forget to cut me in a little, in gratitude. I'll get in touch through your publisher.

The people who gave us Reagan and W are welcome to take offense, as long as they recognize the truth when they hear it. I wish I could send them a bill. Six trillion for Reagan and what, ten or so and counting for W? The US government should own Texas by now, repoed as collateral. All the union folks took Reagan seriously, after he got the Republican nomination. And if you recall what they said would be the consequences of his union-busting, and look around, you can see why. Trump, like W, like Reagan, will only be a joke until he isn't. And then it's too late.

The point is: all this can easily be rewritten and revised whenever Trump is actually about to take power, and especially after he has done so. What was obvious when Reagan was a fringe whacko whose Governorship of California was evidence of something wrong with the water in California, what was obvious when W was a clown prince from a diminished aristocracy whose Governorship of Texas was evidence of something wrong with Texas, became invisible to most Americans and banished from all of their news media when they gained the Presidency. It's still too soon to rewrite W's Presidency, to engage in the kinds of hilariously sober discussions of his "doctrines" and "policies" and vision of America we see in Reagan's case. The disaster was too great, too manifold, is too much with us. But we seem to have achieved the amnesia stage, right? And as with Reagan and W, the likelihood of Trump becoming respectable in the rearview mirror is quite good. And the possibility of his becoming respectable in the upcoming campaign is not small. The notion that whoever runs as a Democrat will have an easily mocked buffoon of no serious capabilities for an opponent is dangerous complacency.

Traditionally, there's little danger from the crowd. The danger at Republican Conventions has been - for a couple of election cycles now - from the police and security teams, who are already heavily armed. http://www.policemag.com/channel/patrol/news/2016/03/08/cleveland-seeking-to-buy-riot-gear-for-republican-national-convention.aspx In 1968 the T Party (for Trump, for Tantrum, for Theocracy) was largely Democratic, and the Democratic Convention was violent. It was described later, by sober historians, as a police riot. Forty years later, in 2008, the heirs of Jefferson Davis's vision of America were Republican, and the Republican Convention was feared to be possibly violent. The police - not being Chicago's finest, and blessed with good advice and substantial help from four decades of Federal experience - did not riot, but instead: http://www.mprnews.org/story/2008/09/01/rnc_day1 http://www.mprnews.org/story/2008/09/01/rnc_day1#gallery