Courage not cowardice; balls not bluster

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Xelor, Apr 23, 2018.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Your obsession with having to hand over your guns to the State is a bit of a tell. In combination with your reiteration of the current major rightwing deflection meme - "both sides" - and your reiteration of the wingnut pigeonholing of college and university "PC police " as ""liberals" shutting down honest speech, your lumping of all US government and all political authoritarians into the category "fascist", and so forth, it narrows the field of your possible information sources considerably.

    Random factoid: the entire population of Evergreen State College, the obsession du yesterjour of the PC and SJW persecuted, would fit into the student cheering section of the football stadium at Texas A&M.
     
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  3. gamelord Registered Senior Member

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    NAXALT is not a valid argument.

    Because 1 guy in congress is not fascist, doesn't mean you get to criticize me for calling congress fascist.

    Second of all I don't think there is even a single person in Congress or House of Reps who isn't fascist.

    Name me one pothead in Congress.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    But it's a lousy one anyway. Nothing about corporate capitalism? Nothing about racial or ethnic myth? Nothing about the military? One would be hard put to distinguish Mao Tse Tung's operation from Benito Mussolini's, by that kind of "definition".
     
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  7. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Wow
    Me a "pedantic grammar Nazi"

    Me poor old sainted mother would be proud.

    Hey Ma-----------------the lessons finally took

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  8. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    Hell, I've been dethroned!

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  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Very few of the Dems are. The fascist takeover of the Republican Party has had the effect of largely sequestering them.
     
  10. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    Wow. More pearls before swine, eh, ice?
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Not enough pearls on this planet to bury this Republican Party.

    Newt Gingrich is back on my TV, all his disgrace put aside and unmentioned, running interference for Trump: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ne...himself-would-be-arrogant-statement-of-power/

    Bret Stephens is on my TV, representing something called "NeverTrump" - he is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the corporate supporters of mainstream media to sell the idea that Trump is an aberration, there are reasonable Republican conservatives out there, that there exist admirable values formerly possessed by the Republican Party that have been traduced just recently by this inexplicable but definitely not racist Trumpian wave. ( Mr Stephens was born in 1973, and began his career as an op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal just as Rush Limbaugh was hitting his stride and the Dittohead Republicans had taken over the House. The post-Reagan Republican Party organized by Newt Gingrich is the only one he has ever known).

    So the inherent, infused, intrinsic, ineradicable cowardice powering the bluster of Trump is the saddest thing about the Republican Party; the rot of cringing fear at the center of all fascism is hard to watch, the damage they do to everything decent and honorable about their country hard to forgive.
     
  12. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    No wonder I have you on ignore. I shouldn't have bothered to read your crap this time, and won't in future.
     
  13. Capracus Valued Senior Member

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    1,324
    The car analogy was a single example of regulation for the public good. There are many other examples of restrictions on vehicles and drivers that are also a means to that end. Your example of child endangerment by way of reckless handing of firearms is a single example of child endangerment that might be alleviated through some design requirement for weapons of personal protection. Back to the car analogy, do you think airbag requirements for cars is an unreasonable burden for car drivers to suffer? Or how about safety caps for medications and hazardous household chemicals? Where do you draw the line as to what is a reasonable in regards to state restrictions on personal and commercial behavior?
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Often.
    The net safety gain from the front seat airbags for short people who always use their seat belts is probably negative. Yet they are forbidden by law from disabling them, let alone refusing to purchase them.
    Consider the short musician with good seat belt habits living in a northern State, whose car is now equipped with an explosive device that can injure their hands and eardrums - and possibly their necks - if a car slides into their rear bumper on a snowy day.
    Consider the relatively poor person who always uses their seat belt, for whom the risk is greater, safety gain is minimal, and the expense - including insurance - a significant burden (poverty itself, which added expenses such as air bags make worse, is a significant health risk in many ways).
    The safety cap problem for medications used by old people is a common source of humor - but in truth for many medications it's probably a net increase in risk. How many doses skipped, pills lost, various mishaps incurred, etc, from them? Hard to say, but the option of more easily opened, better metered, and more clearly labeled packaging for the infirm in childless dwellings is a dubious thing to forbid by law.

    In general, the net gain in safety (and all other benefits) from government impositions on individuals is overestimated - often dramatically overestimated - by those promoting the impositions. This is commonly due to careless dismissal of costs and burdens of use, obliviousness to side effects and behavioral responses, difficulty of numerically assessing aspects of individual circumstances over large numbers of individuals, and so forth - matters significant to people and invisible to data analyzers.

    Example: the difference between requiring that a seat belt be available and that a seat belt be used, the buckle-up law, has contributed to an increase in job loss, child malnutrition, imprisonment, court expenses and crowding, and homelessness, - and all the health/medical costs associated - in some cities. If these costs are anywhere subtracted from the benefits of the marginal increase in seat belt use in these cities, to increase the accuracy of the net benefit calculation, I haven't seen the work.

    The nanny state problem is real.
     
  15. Capracus Valued Senior Member

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    1,324
    Airbags can be legally disabled.

    There are few circumstances under which the risk of sitting in front of an active frontal air bag outweigh the safety benefits. Under these circumstances, NHTSA will authorize the installation of an air bag ON-OFF switch. Authorization will be granted under the following four circumstances:

    A rear-facing infant restraint must be placed in the front seat of a vehicle because there is no rear seat or the rear seat is too small for the child restraint. (For the passenger air bag only.)

    A child under 13 years of age must ride in the front seat because the child has a condition that requires frequent medical monitoring in the front seat. (For the passenger air bag only.)

    An individual with a medical condition is safer if the frontal air bag is turned off. A written statement from a physician must accompany each request based on a medical condition unless the request is based on a medical condition for which the National Conference on Medical Indications for Air Bag Deactivation recommends deactivation. (For driver and/or passenger frontal air bag as appropriate.)

    A driver must sit within a few inches of the air bag, typically because she or he is of extremely small stature (i.e., 4 feet 6 inches or less). (For the driver frontal air bag only.)

    https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/air-bags


    For those worried about injurious noise levels, a set of earplugs would suffice.

    New or used, an srs system does not significantly increase the cost of the car.
    For those who rely on medications to maintain their health, and opening a container is an issue, the solutions are fairly simple.

    Request medications in easy open containers.

    Easy-Open Caps

    Arthritis and other joint conditions can make gripping child-proof medication caps difficult and even painful. With Walgreens easy-to-open caps, just unscrew the cap to open the bottle.

    https://www.walgreens.com/topic/pharmacy/services.jsp


    Or bottle them yourself.

    Plastic Prescription Vials with Snap Caps

    https://www.amazon.com/Plastic-Pres.../ref=sr_1_3_a_it?ie=UTF8&qid=1528448303&sr=8-
    3&keywords=pill+bottles

    The required use of seat belts is one of the main motivating factors of their use. And their use significantly reduces injury and death in collisions. How does the enforced use of seat belts contribute unduly to the social maladies you referenced?
     
  16. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    13,077
    Can this option be applied to all the suspect defective airbags which are capable of killing?

    At least turn off until the upgraded versions have been installed

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  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Nonsense. Airbags add hundreds, especially if they need replacing, and they increase the cost of many repairs.
    No. For one thing, all air bags can kill.
    And somehow that justifies the law?

    It's not even true. The gain in use frequency is marginal - most people who use seat belts do so regardless of the law.

    This has caused a fair amount of frustration in local officials near me - they started by rewriting the law to allow police to pull the car over for that violation alone, thereby breaking a specific promise they had made when presenting the original law. That didn't work well enough. So now there are perennial efforts to increase the fines and penalties, use traffic cameras to catch scofflaws, organize roadblocks and pull everyone over to catch the scofflaws, etc.
    Again: nannystaters have no limits on their means, and do not keep promises. The only protection is formal, legal, restriction on what they can do to achieve their worthy goals. Or, of course, intransigent political opposition regardless of circumstance - keep them out of power altogether, elect whomever will block them.
    Which is no way to govern.
    That is probably false. Certainly the statistical analyses commonly published in support do not justify any such claim - there is usually not even an attempt to separate out seat-belted from unbelted as a factor, a basic first step in estimating the value of an air bag.
    And I have never seen an analysis that included any of even the obvious variations in individual valuation of outcome - how bad is a torn thumb ligament (a common air bag injury), to most people? To those with poor health insurance and laboring jobs? To Hillary Hahn?
    So they cannot be legally disabled unless one those four conditions are met. My short-statured musician friends are out of luck, as are those without the ready cash to spend on obtaining authorizations, certified installation aftermarket, the extra costs of maintenance and repair, etc.
    And there is probably no such thing as a child who never needs medical caretaking with bad timing - such as on the way to the ER. But simply having children is not good enough to be allowed that decision, in the wisdom of the State. The citizen can easily lay out the cash for an ambulance, or a cab, or a smartphone to order an Uber, and wait for the ride - right?
    No, it wouldn't. For one thing, having to wear earplugs while driving carries its own set of risks, problems, and expenses (ear infections, wax buildup, emergency siren and radio and GPS deafness, etc etc). For another, it's a pressure wave as well as a debilitating noise - a car is an enclosed space. It can drive a plug in - why divers don't wear them. You would need headphone style protection, and that's illegal in many places.

    Note the bogus reasoning involved in these nannystate justifications - if there is some way to adjust, at the citizen's expense and effort and risk, that expense and effort and risk are not counted against the benefits of the air bag, and neither are the consequences of those adjustments if they are bad.

    For example, the air bags are assigned no share of the costs of children out of reach, or even forgotten in the rear seats of cars, where they had to be placed to avoid the air bags.
     
    Last edited: Jun 8, 2018
  18. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    In Australia there is a recall going on for 1,000's of DEFECTIVE airbags which deploy without warning and no accident cause. The shrapnel can cause injury and even fatality

    I understand owners of cars are reluctant to put them in for the recall mainly as I understand because of the inconvenience

    The bags are being replaced at no cost. Drivers have even been told not to drive the car to the service centre but to call and make arrangements for the centre to pick the car up on a car carrier

    I haven't followed it to closely as I ride a motorcycle

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  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Same here.
    But this is a percentage problem - this risk is unusually high in this brand and model due to unusually poor quality of design and manufacture. The risks are much lower, of this kind of shrapnel-throwing and uncaused detonation, in a better designed and better manufactured airbag. But they aren't zero, and this is not the only risk, expense, etc, of airbags.

    Point is: this kind of problem is not usually attributed to the nannystate in the first place. That the people at risk here cannot shut off their airbags, or safely disable them themselves, is not an accident - they are built to prevent such a response to an owner's risk evaluation, at the insistence of the nannystate. But somehow it is not blamed.
     
  20. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Is your definition of "fascism" "someone who doesn't smoke pot?" Fascinating.
     
  21. Xelor Registered Senior Member

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    Maybe it's just semantics, but I don't see the pro-gun lobby as "promoting" violence so much as it promotes there being widely available means for so-desiring individuals (reprobates and "crazy" people, really) to commit acts of gun violence. Yes, it's promotion by way of insouciance or acquiescence, and if that's what you were getting at, I wholly agree. Of course, there are the vigilantists in the gun lobby, and yes, those folks are clearly promoting violent solutions. There are a lot of those folks, but I think they are yet the minority in the gun lobby as a whole.
     
  22. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    Not quite... the logic is simple (perhaps I have over simplified?) IMO
    All guns are designed for violent use by humans, whether that be directly or implied via intimidation. ( threat of offensive or defensive use)
    so...
    Any promotion of guns can be deemed a promotion of violence by humans.

    Is there a problem with my very basic reasoning?

    gun=> violent solutions.
    and
    Pro-gun lobby => guns => pro-violent solutions.
    thus
    Pro-gun lobby is promoting violent solutions.

    as a consequence the 2nd can be said to be promoting violent solutions.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The capability of violence, when it's the solution.
    As opposed to the incapability of violence, when it's the solution.

    The primary benefit, then, in theory, in theory, is an absence of problems that violence can solve. The tow truck driver who hauls off impounded cars with the owner watching, the redneck's $50,000 pickup truck with 25k worth of tools in it that drives around bad neighborhoods and never gets carjacked - not even attempted -, the very low rate of burglary of an occupied dwelling in some demographic areas, the long runs the US has had without seeing death squads and organizations of paramilitary thugs taking over regions and crippling politics (the exception here - the KKK et al terrorization of a specifically disarmed subpopulation of the US - illustrates the thesis).
     

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