Given that Iraq is still plagued with widespread violence and a generally unpopular, though “democratically elected” and, to date at least, largely ineffective government, it’s surprising that more Arab states haven’t seen how wonderful democracy-by-force has worked out for Iraq and decided to try it themselves. I mean, we can all see that Libya wouldn’t be the democracy it is today if it hadn’t been for the size of George W. Bush’s testicles (one wonders what Tom knows about what was going on in Libya prior to the invasion of Iraq).
Personally, I can’t decide which was the bigger influence in the decision of the people of Tunisia to effectively overthrow their government: the 8 years of horrific violence and foreign military occupation that “democracy” has given Iraq, or the fact that people in Tunisia were spending 60, 70, even 80% of their income on food, as food prices continued to rise while a corrupt government did little more than sit back and watch. It could be either one.
Bob, I was making fun of you earlier, I admit, but now I want to address you a bit more seriously, if only a bit. Your entire position, which is to say VoegElin’s entire position, hinges not only on inferences (and rather wild and at times uncharitable inferences) about the thought processes of atheists/agnostics/we the thoroughly modern, but also inferences about the motivations behind those thought processes. I can stomach inferences about the thought processes themselves, because there is plenty of data, if not for a given individual, then at least for the history of the ideas. Inferences about the motivations, and in this case, motives that must be unconscious, however, seem to be entirely invented, by Voegelin and you (quoting Voegelin), in order not so much to explain the ideas as to undermine them.
I probably don’t need to tell you that most Anglo-American-Australian atheists, and perhaps most European atheists as well, get their atheism not through Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud, but through Kant-Mach-Carnap-Ayers-(maybe a l’il) Quine/Ryle. That is, they come through positivism, with a healthy dose of the (not-necessarily-pejorative version of) positivism, instead of through a suspicious (not my term, as I’m sure you know) approach to spirit (in the broad, not necessarily dualistic philosophical sense). Attributing a single set of motives to those two camps requires some serious psychoanalytical gymnastics, and there is no evidence whatsoever that you’ve even chalked up your hands, much less spun around the pommel horse, or that you even have any conception of what such gymnastics would look like.
Now, lumping together everyone who thinks differently than you is pretty common when the subject is religion. Granted, even a casual perusal of atheist blogs will show that this sin is not limited to theists. That doesn’t make it right, though, or any less offensive when people do it out of ignorance or worse. It doesn’t make doing so any more conducive to discussion, either, though it’s clear from your choice of language and style that you have no interest whatsoever in actually discussing these things (that’s why I usually choose to just make fun of you instead of engaging you, though perhaps Rufus’ method of just wondering at you is better), so perhaps that’s a criticism that doesn’t apply to you specifically.
By the way, unlike most of the atheists around here, or at least the ones who talk about it, I am from the Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud strain of atheism. I’m also, you may be interested to know, a fan of Bergson (I have a copy of Matter and Memory sitting right in front of me). That said, you must be aware by now of the tendency that arose within that strain of atheism, unfortunately after Voegelin so that his analysis will do you know good (and therefore, you’ll be unable to think about it), of a turn against the “impulse to be modern,” or whatever it is you young Voegelineans are calling it these days. I mean, Voegelin probably should have read more of the stuff coming out of Frankfurt back in his day, but he wasn’t really around to read much of what came with and after structuralism, say. You’d probably be surprised how self-consciously Greek, Roman, and even Medieval all that stuff is (it wasn’t Strauss or contemporary Christian philosophers who brought the name Scotus back into the consciousness of young philosophy grad students, for example).
Yeah, with the possible exceptions of the bit about licensing cartels and no mention of unions (not surprising, given that private sector unions haven't really been a force during Yglesias' adult life), I don't see how this is all that different from the way the American center-left (liberals and progressives) has thought for at least my lifetime, and from what I can tell, pretty much forever. There doesn't seem to be anything neo about this. (I don't know where you see "central planning," to the extent that phrase means planned economies, in the thinking of any viable version of the American left ever.)
First of all, not all atheists are skeptics (and conversely, not all skeptics are atheists). Second, it’s not clear to me that skepticism is supposed to make people happy. However, it’s a pretty strong claim, in need of serious defense, that this life, and this (natural) world, cannot produce happiness without adding something on top of it in the form of the supernatural or a separate life. This is exactly the sort of life-denying position that makes most theism abhorrent to this non-skeptical atheist.
Not that I really want to be defending Tom, because he goes about his argument in a pretty slimy way, but the FSM, if it can be considered a critique, is more a critique of what we might call “folk intelligent design arguments” than any serious arguments for god. This is so in large part because, pace Hume and the FSM people, most such arguments actually do argue for a god with a particular nature. The FSM really only works against the sort of “we’re not creationists, we swear!” intelligent design theories that you get from the likes of Bill “The Newton of Information Theory” Dembski, because these arguments have no real content, or at least they supply none to their “designer.”
If I’m not mistaken (and I could be, because I haven’t read the book), Robinson discusses some of the work in psychology that I was thinking of (Damasio, e.g.), though the book came out before the work on moral emotions (by Jonathan Haidt, e.g.) began to get any real empirical backing. This, by the way, is name-dropping of a different sort, and I suspect more of the sort that you’re speaking of. I mention Damasio because, since you’ve read the book, you probably know what I’m talking about so I don’t have to go into more detail, in this case because I’m lazy, and I mention Haidt because, if you’re familiar with Damasio, you can look up Haidt and have a good idea of where his work and the work he’s inspired is coming from. The other sort of name-dropping is largely meant as an appeal to authority, and little more.
On jealousy, it’s one of the more widely studied emotions in the social and behavioral sciences and, as I’m sure you know, literature. It’s almost certainly a very old, innate emotion, and it probably helps us navigate a world in which a particular form of cheating, infidelity, is extremely common. But its innateness doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to experience it, and there is some literature on individual differences in the experience of jealousy. Also relevant. That said, you’re a freak. ;)
Rufus, I think that if you combine your two theories of jealousy, you’re pretty close to the truth. With one minor disagreement (or at least addition): if you look at the data, people certainly aren’t fishing everyone, but they’re fishing plenty. Infidelity is the rule, not the exception, and jealousy becomes a useful tool for most people because of it.
There’s a view in psychology, which is gaining wider and wider acceptance, that something like this underlies morality in general. Through whatever means – biology, culture, or both – most of us react in similar ways, emotionally, to the actions of others, and these emotional reactions drive our moral judgments of the actions and the actors. These emotional reactions, which are almost exclusively intuitive, are in turn justified and codified in post hoc reasons and narratives. Under this view (incredibly oversimplified here, I admit), it’s not surprising that cultural narratives justifying the most common of our emotional reactions have built up over the millennia. This is to say nothing of the social and political control that such narratives afford, of course.
On theism and atheism and all that jazz, these discussions always look funny to me because of people like Tom and Steve S. These are two people who have clearly participated in similar discussions many times; so many times, in fact, that common arguments have become like habit to them. As a result, they read things from those past discussions into what’s being said now because they hear certain keywords or phrases. The result is almost always that they end up talking to people who aren’t here.
By the way, one of the things that impresses me most about TvD is his ability to say of those with whom he disagrees, “They are biased/committing error X,” and then display remarkably similar biases and errors himself in a completely un-self-conscious way. It’s a gift. But he’s no Cheeks: Like Bob, Tom argues almost exclusively by name-dropping and quoting, to be sure, but Cheeks’ method of name-dropping/phrase-dropping and eliding pretty much everything else, and still sounding like he’s actually saying something, is particularly impressive.
Well, of course that's how it works. This wasn't a divinely inspired act, nor was it a result of some inherent property of the supernatural essence of man, or any nonsense like that.
It's true that blame-flinging is a problem, because we don't have all of the facts, but what you've done is just throw your hands up in the air and say, "Well, shit happens," where this particular shit is, in your mind, transcendental. However, if there's one thing experience has taught us over the years, it's that when shit happens, it has a whole bunch of precipitating causes. There is no purely transcendental shit.
Well, the mental health systems design is something we could debate. It is designed to help people like him, it's just not designed so that it's very good at doing it, or very good at even finding people like him to help.
As for more effective treatment programs for bipolar, I'm not sure. There are people actively working on that, though, and as I said, I'm pretty confident that in the next couple decades, significant progress will be made. There will be barriers (practicing psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies being two of the biggest), but I choose to be optimistic.
That's not entirely true. I don't want to seem like I'm blaming any political orientation, or its adherents, but schizophrenics are not completely divorced from reality in the way that this implies. In fact, their delusions tend to be highly culturally specific, precisely because there's stuff getting in, it's just not being processed in a realistic way. So, while no one's at fault, it's not true that what they hear and see doesn't affect their delusions. It's just that you can't predict what and how those delusions will be affected.
Jason, I don’t think you and I disagree about involuntary commitment. I find it abhorrent, both in theory and in practice, and think it should be reserved for cases that would have led to imprisonment if the person had been ruled sane. In every other case, it is immoral and ineffective (as a treatment, which is, I believe, what our focus should be). This doesn’t mean it’s not still incredibly common, especially for the poor, and even more especially for the homeless. But as I’ve been saying, the mental health system is broken.
Pat, as someone who's spent his entire adult life sutdying psychology, I'm well aware of the illness patterns of bipolar disorder. Nothing you said, however, speaks to my point, which is that the mental health system failed. And it failed, as it usually does, at several points: identifying those with illness, treating those with illness, producing better treatments (as the recent debate around the DSM-V has shown, the research arm of the mental health system is in a bit of chaos right now, and has been for some time -- that many of our treatments are not further advanced than they are now is a widely predicted failure), producing better systems for managing care, producing better public education campaigns (how many common physical illnesses do you know of that, with obvious external symptoms, would not have been spotted by virtually everyone around the person exhibiting them?), and better campaigns towards reducing the stigma associated with mental illness.
It is true that bipolar is exceptionally difficult to treat long term, but this isn't a natural fact, it's a fact of the current system and our knowledge and practices within it.
I'm actually confident, given some changes in the way mental illnesses are approached scientifically, that significant progress will be made in the next 20 years on most of these fronts. That's not to say that there will never be people who slip between the cracks, but right now, the cracks are everywhere and the size of the Grand Canyon.
Yeah, I should have been clearer. The mental health system didn’t fail us by not committing Loughner. It failed Loughner by not treating his mental illness, which of course means it failed society as well. One might argue that no one knew about his mental illness (though it sounds like several people were well aware of his symptoms), but education is one part of the failure of the mental health system.
I am not in favor of involuntary commitments at all, under any circumstance short of physical violence or direct threats thereof, because involuntary commitments, as they are incredibly ineffective for treatment purposes (at least long-term), are another failure of the mental health system.
Well, we can put aside constiutional arguments, because that's a different discussion (whether it was a good argument then and now, e.g.), but the hobby shit, sure as hell.
I can think of all sorts of hobbies that I wouldn't care how many people took them up, should still be illegal. So yeah, if it's just a hobby we're losing, sure, I have no problem with depriving however many million people of it if it prevents deaths. Or, to put it in your inflammatory terms, you think the hobby of 34 million (not sure where you got that figure) people outweighs the deaths of 1? 6? 100? 1000? 10,000 per year?
It's not a lack of imagination, it's a lack of inference, and it's not on my part.
Banning cars, or certain kinds of cars, would limit car deaths, but it would limit a whole hell of a lot of other things (like access to work and goods). Banning guns, or at least certain kinds of guns, would limit gun deaths and injuries, but aside from target shooting, not much else. Do you see the point now? If not, I'm not sure how to make it any clearer.
It’s certainly not ridiculous. I agree that a car is capable of killing large numbers of people at one time, though unlike a concealed weapon, there is at least the possibility of getting out of the way in most cases. However, the car does a whole lot of things by design (transport people, transport cargo, shelter people and cargo from the elements, etc.), whereas guns do one thing (or perhaps two, since many guns were designed to serve as effective melee weapons as well): shoot targets. Granted, not all targets are living things, but again, unlike cars, they (at least most of them, along with their projectiles) were designed to (shoot projectiles that) hit and seriously wound or kill living things.
Also, in addition to not owning a gun, I don’t own a car. ?
Mike, that’s not what I said, and I’m going to assume that you know that (if not, what’s the point of talking to you, eh?).
My point is this: just about anyone can kill a person, maybe even two, with just about any object that’s sufficiently heavy or sharp. Guns are unique in that they can kill large numbers of people in a short period of time. Not surprising, since killing is what they were created for. So there’s an obvious and relevant difference.
If a guy kills 6 and wounds several more with a baseball bat in a short period of time, it would probably be better to outlaw super ninjas with baseball bats.
I have no problem with a discussion of the issue of self-censoring (or worse, official censoring) of discourse to avoid setting off some crazy people. But wussifying is where you've lost people.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Lucretius, “Of Natural Things”- also Atoms & Atheists”
Awww... Heidi, I think you have a crush on me.
On “Tunisia and Iraq”
Given that Iraq is still plagued with widespread violence and a generally unpopular, though “democratically elected” and, to date at least, largely ineffective government, it’s surprising that more Arab states haven’t seen how wonderful democracy-by-force has worked out for Iraq and decided to try it themselves. I mean, we can all see that Libya wouldn’t be the democracy it is today if it hadn’t been for the size of George W. Bush’s testicles (one wonders what Tom knows about what was going on in Libya prior to the invasion of Iraq).
Personally, I can’t decide which was the bigger influence in the decision of the people of Tunisia to effectively overthrow their government: the 8 years of horrific violence and foreign military occupation that “democracy” has given Iraq, or the fact that people in Tunisia were spending 60, 70, even 80% of their income on food, as food prices continued to rise while a corrupt government did little more than sit back and watch. It could be either one.
On “Lucretius, “Of Natural Things”- also Atoms & Atheists”
Bob, I was making fun of you earlier, I admit, but now I want to address you a bit more seriously, if only a bit. Your entire position, which is to say VoegElin’s entire position, hinges not only on inferences (and rather wild and at times uncharitable inferences) about the thought processes of atheists/agnostics/we the thoroughly modern, but also inferences about the motivations behind those thought processes. I can stomach inferences about the thought processes themselves, because there is plenty of data, if not for a given individual, then at least for the history of the ideas. Inferences about the motivations, and in this case, motives that must be unconscious, however, seem to be entirely invented, by Voegelin and you (quoting Voegelin), in order not so much to explain the ideas as to undermine them.
I probably don’t need to tell you that most Anglo-American-Australian atheists, and perhaps most European atheists as well, get their atheism not through Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud, but through Kant-Mach-Carnap-Ayers-(maybe a l’il) Quine/Ryle. That is, they come through positivism, with a healthy dose of the (not-necessarily-pejorative version of) positivism, instead of through a suspicious (not my term, as I’m sure you know) approach to spirit (in the broad, not necessarily dualistic philosophical sense). Attributing a single set of motives to those two camps requires some serious psychoanalytical gymnastics, and there is no evidence whatsoever that you’ve even chalked up your hands, much less spun around the pommel horse, or that you even have any conception of what such gymnastics would look like.
Now, lumping together everyone who thinks differently than you is pretty common when the subject is religion. Granted, even a casual perusal of atheist blogs will show that this sin is not limited to theists. That doesn’t make it right, though, or any less offensive when people do it out of ignorance or worse. It doesn’t make doing so any more conducive to discussion, either, though it’s clear from your choice of language and style that you have no interest whatsoever in actually discussing these things (that’s why I usually choose to just make fun of you instead of engaging you, though perhaps Rufus’ method of just wondering at you is better), so perhaps that’s a criticism that doesn’t apply to you specifically.
By the way, unlike most of the atheists around here, or at least the ones who talk about it, I am from the Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud strain of atheism. I’m also, you may be interested to know, a fan of Bergson (I have a copy of Matter and Memory sitting right in front of me). That said, you must be aware by now of the tendency that arose within that strain of atheism, unfortunately after Voegelin so that his analysis will do you know good (and therefore, you’ll be unable to think about it), of a turn against the “impulse to be modern,” or whatever it is you young Voegelineans are calling it these days. I mean, Voegelin probably should have read more of the stuff coming out of Frankfurt back in his day, but he wasn’t really around to read much of what came with and after structuralism, say. You’d probably be surprised how self-consciously Greek, Roman, and even Medieval all that stuff is (it wasn’t Strauss or contemporary Christian philosophers who brought the name Scotus back into the consciousness of young philosophy grad students, for example).
On “Reclaiming Liberalism”
Yeah, with the possible exceptions of the bit about licensing cartels and no mention of unions (not surprising, given that private sector unions haven't really been a force during Yglesias' adult life), I don't see how this is all that different from the way the American center-left (liberals and progressives) has thought for at least my lifetime, and from what I can tell, pretty much forever. There doesn't seem to be anything neo about this. (I don't know where you see "central planning," to the extent that phrase means planned economies, in the thinking of any viable version of the American left ever.)
On “Lucretius, “Of Natural Things”- also Atoms & Atheists”
Sadly, the FSM has evolved.
It's now composed entirely of vermicelli?
"
First of all, not all atheists are skeptics (and conversely, not all skeptics are atheists). Second, it’s not clear to me that skepticism is supposed to make people happy. However, it’s a pretty strong claim, in need of serious defense, that this life, and this (natural) world, cannot produce happiness without adding something on top of it in the form of the supernatural or a separate life. This is exactly the sort of life-denying position that makes most theism abhorrent to this non-skeptical atheist.
"
Not that I really want to be defending Tom, because he goes about his argument in a pretty slimy way, but the FSM, if it can be considered a critique, is more a critique of what we might call “folk intelligent design arguments” than any serious arguments for god. This is so in large part because, pace Hume and the FSM people, most such arguments actually do argue for a god with a particular nature. The FSM really only works against the sort of “we’re not creationists, we swear!” intelligent design theories that you get from the likes of Bill “The Newton of Information Theory” Dembski, because these arguments have no real content, or at least they supply none to their “designer.”
"
If I’m not mistaken (and I could be, because I haven’t read the book), Robinson discusses some of the work in psychology that I was thinking of (Damasio, e.g.), though the book came out before the work on moral emotions (by Jonathan Haidt, e.g.) began to get any real empirical backing. This, by the way, is name-dropping of a different sort, and I suspect more of the sort that you’re speaking of. I mention Damasio because, since you’ve read the book, you probably know what I’m talking about so I don’t have to go into more detail, in this case because I’m lazy, and I mention Haidt because, if you’re familiar with Damasio, you can look up Haidt and have a good idea of where his work and the work he’s inspired is coming from. The other sort of name-dropping is largely meant as an appeal to authority, and little more.
On jealousy, it’s one of the more widely studied emotions in the social and behavioral sciences and, as I’m sure you know, literature. It’s almost certainly a very old, innate emotion, and it probably helps us navigate a world in which a particular form of cheating, infidelity, is extremely common. But its innateness doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to experience it, and there is some literature on individual differences in the experience of jealousy. Also relevant. That said, you’re a freak. ;)
"
Rufus, I think that if you combine your two theories of jealousy, you’re pretty close to the truth. With one minor disagreement (or at least addition): if you look at the data, people certainly aren’t fishing everyone, but they’re fishing plenty. Infidelity is the rule, not the exception, and jealousy becomes a useful tool for most people because of it.
There’s a view in psychology, which is gaining wider and wider acceptance, that something like this underlies morality in general. Through whatever means – biology, culture, or both – most of us react in similar ways, emotionally, to the actions of others, and these emotional reactions drive our moral judgments of the actions and the actors. These emotional reactions, which are almost exclusively intuitive, are in turn justified and codified in post hoc reasons and narratives. Under this view (incredibly oversimplified here, I admit), it’s not surprising that cultural narratives justifying the most common of our emotional reactions have built up over the millennia. This is to say nothing of the social and political control that such narratives afford, of course.
On theism and atheism and all that jazz, these discussions always look funny to me because of people like Tom and Steve S. These are two people who have clearly participated in similar discussions many times; so many times, in fact, that common arguments have become like habit to them. As a result, they read things from those past discussions into what’s being said now because they hear certain keywords or phrases. The result is almost always that they end up talking to people who aren’t here.
By the way, one of the things that impresses me most about TvD is his ability to say of those with whom he disagrees, “They are biased/committing error X,” and then display remarkably similar biases and errors himself in a completely un-self-conscious way. It’s a gift. But he’s no Cheeks: Like Bob, Tom argues almost exclusively by name-dropping and quoting, to be sure, but Cheeks’ method of name-dropping/phrase-dropping and eliding pretty much everything else, and still sounding like he’s actually saying something, is particularly impressive.
On ““The Elements of Clunk””
Wel that's -- that's nitpicking, isn't it?
On “Space Oddity”
Well, of course that's how it works. This wasn't a divinely inspired act, nor was it a result of some inherent property of the supernatural essence of man, or any nonsense like that.
It's true that blame-flinging is a problem, because we don't have all of the facts, but what you've done is just throw your hands up in the air and say, "Well, shit happens," where this particular shit is, in your mind, transcendental. However, if there's one thing experience has taught us over the years, it's that when shit happens, it has a whole bunch of precipitating causes. There is no purely transcendental shit.
"
Well, the mental health systems design is something we could debate. It is designed to help people like him, it's just not designed so that it's very good at doing it, or very good at even finding people like him to help.
As for more effective treatment programs for bipolar, I'm not sure. There are people actively working on that, though, and as I said, I'm pretty confident that in the next couple decades, significant progress will be made. There will be barriers (practicing psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies being two of the biggest), but I choose to be optimistic.
"
Yeah, if only that explained anything or helped in any way.
"
That's not entirely true. I don't want to seem like I'm blaming any political orientation, or its adherents, but schizophrenics are not completely divorced from reality in the way that this implies. In fact, their delusions tend to be highly culturally specific, precisely because there's stuff getting in, it's just not being processed in a realistic way. So, while no one's at fault, it's not true that what they hear and see doesn't affect their delusions. It's just that you can't predict what and how those delusions will be affected.
On “Be the Change You Want to See”
Yeah, "anger" is not the problem. There are reasons to be angry. Acknowledging reality is not a fault.
It's good to see that you stuck with the "Look at the vitriol on the other side!" tactic, though. In response to this post in particular.
On “Space Oddity”
Jason, I don’t think you and I disagree about involuntary commitment. I find it abhorrent, both in theory and in practice, and think it should be reserved for cases that would have led to imprisonment if the person had been ruled sane. In every other case, it is immoral and ineffective (as a treatment, which is, I believe, what our focus should be). This doesn’t mean it’s not still incredibly common, especially for the poor, and even more especially for the homeless. But as I’ve been saying, the mental health system is broken.
"
Pat, as someone who's spent his entire adult life sutdying psychology, I'm well aware of the illness patterns of bipolar disorder. Nothing you said, however, speaks to my point, which is that the mental health system failed. And it failed, as it usually does, at several points: identifying those with illness, treating those with illness, producing better treatments (as the recent debate around the DSM-V has shown, the research arm of the mental health system is in a bit of chaos right now, and has been for some time -- that many of our treatments are not further advanced than they are now is a widely predicted failure), producing better systems for managing care, producing better public education campaigns (how many common physical illnesses do you know of that, with obvious external symptoms, would not have been spotted by virtually everyone around the person exhibiting them?), and better campaigns towards reducing the stigma associated with mental illness.
It is true that bipolar is exceptionally difficult to treat long term, but this isn't a natural fact, it's a fact of the current system and our knowledge and practices within it.
I'm actually confident, given some changes in the way mental illnesses are approached scientifically, that significant progress will be made in the next 20 years on most of these fronts. That's not to say that there will never be people who slip between the cracks, but right now, the cracks are everywhere and the size of the Grand Canyon.
"
Yeah, I should have been clearer. The mental health system didn’t fail us by not committing Loughner. It failed Loughner by not treating his mental illness, which of course means it failed society as well. One might argue that no one knew about his mental illness (though it sounds like several people were well aware of his symptoms), but education is one part of the failure of the mental health system.
I am not in favor of involuntary commitments at all, under any circumstance short of physical violence or direct threats thereof, because involuntary commitments, as they are incredibly ineffective for treatment purposes (at least long-term), are another failure of the mental health system.
"
I blame the mental health system. (No, really.)
On “Crazy people doing crazy things”
Well, we can put aside constiutional arguments, because that's a different discussion (whether it was a good argument then and now, e.g.), but the hobby shit, sure as hell.
I can think of all sorts of hobbies that I wouldn't care how many people took them up, should still be illegal. So yeah, if it's just a hobby we're losing, sure, I have no problem with depriving however many million people of it if it prevents deaths. Or, to put it in your inflammatory terms, you think the hobby of 34 million (not sure where you got that figure) people outweighs the deaths of 1? 6? 100? 1000? 10,000 per year?
"
It's not a lack of imagination, it's a lack of inference, and it's not on my part.
Banning cars, or certain kinds of cars, would limit car deaths, but it would limit a whole hell of a lot of other things (like access to work and goods). Banning guns, or at least certain kinds of guns, would limit gun deaths and injuries, but aside from target shooting, not much else. Do you see the point now? If not, I'm not sure how to make it any clearer.
"
It’s certainly not ridiculous. I agree that a car is capable of killing large numbers of people at one time, though unlike a concealed weapon, there is at least the possibility of getting out of the way in most cases. However, the car does a whole lot of things by design (transport people, transport cargo, shelter people and cargo from the elements, etc.), whereas guns do one thing (or perhaps two, since many guns were designed to serve as effective melee weapons as well): shoot targets. Granted, not all targets are living things, but again, unlike cars, they (at least most of them, along with their projectiles) were designed to (shoot projectiles that) hit and seriously wound or kill living things.
Also, in addition to not owning a gun, I don’t own a car. ?
"
Mike, that’s not what I said, and I’m going to assume that you know that (if not, what’s the point of talking to you, eh?).
My point is this: just about anyone can kill a person, maybe even two, with just about any object that’s sufficiently heavy or sharp. Guns are unique in that they can kill large numbers of people in a short period of time. Not surprising, since killing is what they were created for. So there’s an obvious and relevant difference.
If a guy kills 6 and wounds several more with a baseball bat in a short period of time, it would probably be better to outlaw super ninjas with baseball bats.
"
He killed 6 and wounded several others with a gun. Kinda hard to do that with a baseball bat.
Just sayin'.
On “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shot at Tucson rally”
What does wussifying mean, in this context?
I have no problem with a discussion of the issue of self-censoring (or worse, official censoring) of discourse to avoid setting off some crazy people. But wussifying is where you've lost people.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.