HelixDab

‘Cities should be better designed so that we don’t have to use cars’

…Which I agree with. And it’s incredibly frustrating to me that, on the one hand, Republicans actively don’t give a shit about sprawl, and on the other hand, Democrats don’t want to ruin the charm and character of their lovely urban single-family neighborhoods with half acre plots of lawn in order to build dense housing that can make light rail economically viable. E.g., the people that should be on board with this shit talk a good game until it’s their own neighborhood.

I recognize my own hypocrisy here, because I moved to a rural area to get away from a city, and I am now finding that it isn’t rural enough because I can sometimes hear my closest neighbors. I just want to live in a shack like Ted… :(

It really depends on where you are though. Much like other public policy debates, a lot of this comes down to where someone lives. People that live in dense urban areas can very reasonably go without cars, and trains (specifically light rail) make a lot of sense. Once you get out of urban areas, suddenly trains don’t make any sense at all, and the ability to realistically take public transportation evaporates.

This is compounded by urban planning that doesn’t prioritize dense housing. Everyone says that we need more and better housing, but no one wants high rise apartments and condos in their neighborhood of single-family homes. That ends up leading to the kind of urban sprawl that makes public transportation impossible to work. Until zoning is taken out of local hands–so that wealthy communities can’t prevent high-density housing–you aren’t ever going to see this kind of thing change. (BTW - this is overwhelmingly happening in the US in communities that have a Democratic supermajority; that’s why housing is so expensive in California, because new housing isn’t being built.)

No, you were quite clear; you aren’t actually interested in real solutions, you’re interested in gun control for the sake of gun control.

I used to be a member of the NRA too, but I’m not willing to pay for some dude’s $15,000 suits while he’s kissing the asses of people that want to overturn every part of the constitution that isn’t 2A rights. I’m slightly more okay with SAF and GOA, but they still often shill for Republicans.

The fact that a gun has a ‘purpose’ of killing is reductive and not useful. Killing is, by itself, neither good nor bad. Killing can be justified and moral, or it can be deeply immoral.

So, as I asked originally, if you could reduce the number of illegal and immoral uses of firearms without reducing the ability of people to exercise their civil rights, would you be open to that?

Fewer guns doesn’t, by itself, mean less violence. We can see that in Australia and in England, where the combined rates of all violent crimes (battery, robbery, forcible rape, murder) are comparable to the US, and possibly higher, but the lethality is reduced. On the other hand, reducing the amount of violence in society, through programs that attack root causes in the most affected communities (which, notably, is not harsher policing and sentencing, but more like community improvement and poverty reduction), reduces both rates of violence and the homicide rates. Chicago actually had a pretty good violence intervention program going for a number of years before it was senselessly defunded.

You’ve avoiding the question.

Would you be open to solutions that do not involve removing guns, or is that the only solution you would accept?

Love that people just ignore that violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and since violence must happen in a vacuum without any causes at all the only solution is to remove the tools.

Guns are tools. A knife is a tool. A car is a tool. Even high explosives are tools.

BTW, I do have a kitchen gun, because that’s where I need it when there’s a problem bear outside. (Yes, bear - one of those 300+ pound animals with teeth and claws that are sometimes extremely aggressive.)

I assume that you want safe communities; would you be open to solutions that increase safety if they didn’t involve removing firearms, or is that the only solution that you’d accept?

Obviously the problem is that there are too many knives in China, and it’s too easy for civilians to get knives! No one needs a knife; the only purpose of a knife is to cut and stab. The only solution is to completely ban all knives in China.

…Or they could seriously address the social issues that lead to certain segments of their population committing this kind of atrocity.

Hmmm. I wonder where else that could be applied…?

Mutually assured destruction.

There’s no path for Putin to use nuclear weapons that doesn’t involve the utter annihilation of Russia. I would be willing to be that that will be a bright line for NATO, because once it’s clear that Putin will use nuclear weapons when he’s not getting what he wants, it’s clear that there’s no other choice that preserves independence other than retaliating with nuclear weapons.

…Why should we be concerned about Putin saving face? This is his fuck up, and he was given ample opportunities to put the brakes on before he ever invaded.

I would say either set up traffic for I2P

Any ideas on how to do this? I’ve tried using i2p–in Firefox–and can’t seem to make it work. Sites that are supposedly up won’t load. I’ve followed all the tutorials that I’ve found, and it doesn’t seem to be doing what’s expected. And no, I can’t give any details at this second, because I’m away from my home computer, and it’s been a few months since I tried.