Posts by Abaddon

174

Gun control logic

by Gregor in

the v tech shooter bought his guns legally.

gun control laws don't stop this kind of determined killer anywhere in the world.

the defenseless victims couldn't carry a gun legally on campus if they had one.

Abaddon

Good point IP; I'm gonna start this as another thread with a clearer development of the thought; http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/15/133292/1.ash

174

Gun control logic

by Gregor in

the v tech shooter bought his guns legally.

gun control laws don't stop this kind of determined killer anywhere in the world.

the defenseless victims couldn't carry a gun legally on campus if they had one.

Abaddon

brother apostate

Well, as an arch user of bad stats, being wrong is what you'd know about, but in this case you are right as I muddled father and son.

Pity you'll never admit to the distortion of facts those stats you posted make. I wonder what form of high five you'll give yourself in your signature this time?

Your attempt to mirror the phrasing of the 2nd Ammendement with another topic fails as you fail to take into accuont the persistent connection bewteen millitas and the second ammendment. A better example would be;

"A well-educated electorate being necessary to the preservation of a free society, the right of the people to access books in a public library without charge shall not be infringed."

This states a goal (education and a free society) and gies a means (free public libraries), but does not mean peope should have all books for free, just as the 2nd ammendment gives a goal (security of the state) and gves a means (milita and access to arms), but does not mean people whould have free access to arms.

5go

I'm glad your humour is similar to mine in some respects :-)

Which begs the question. What is the point to fighting a depot, if he has regulated your miltia against any possiblity of doing it ?

No, I find why Americans need guns to overthrow tyrants when Eastern Europe did it without a far more interesting question, but no takers yet.

No one is going to give me examples of when gun-owners HAVE actually 'protected freedoms' by using guns against the government... so 30,000 die a year as a result of a freedom that no one has used, nor is ever likely to. Not very pragmatic is it? Oh, there was Waco, but he was a Whako...

Still no one interested in actually discussing the root cause of American violence?

Still no one going to accept IF there was a majority of Americans in favour of reform of gun control, the 2nd Amendment could be struck down if the politicians acted in line with itheir constituent's desires?

No one gonna talk about the lingusitic differentiation between 'the People' and terms refering to individuals?

Don't worry, it's human nature to avoid the topics that show up how weak one's argument is... ;-)

And as far as I knew pool were not designed with the primary purpose of killing, so your apples and elephnats comparison lets you down.

174

Gun control logic

by Gregor in

the v tech shooter bought his guns legally.

gun control laws don't stop this kind of determined killer anywhere in the world.

the defenseless victims couldn't carry a gun legally on campus if they had one.

Abaddon

heathen

If you're not going to bother replying why bother PM'ing me? Seems you want to blame me for your inability to express yourself without sounding like a bigot.

5go

Thanks for a well-researched reply.

But... describing "St. George Tucker" as a "Revolutionary War militia officer" does kind of spoil the first 'Ooo, look, lots of data' reaction. I was unaware that one-year-old infants commanded militia in the Revolutionary War.

So what he wrote isn't nearly as important or pertinent as you'd (or who ever this comes from originally) have us believe. Such are the problems with cut and paste, eh?

Justice Story more or less proves the intent behind the ammendment;

How it is practicable to keep the people duly armed without some organization, it is difficult to see. There is certainly no small danger, that indifference may lead to disgust, and disgust to contempt; and thus gradually undermine all the protection intended by this clause of our national bill of rights.

This is talking about "the People's" right to bear arms in an organised fashion NOT willy-nilly at citizen level regardless of the impact this has on society. Rawle refers to again to 'the People', not to individual citizens, and I suggest the differentiation between the two is worthy of research.

Hamilton again shows the differentiation between 'the people' and an organised militia and indivdual disorganised ownership;

Little more can reasonably be aimed at with the respect to the people at large than to have them properly armed and equipped ; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year.

So, where do gun owners go and assemble them once or twice in the course of a year? Hmmm? Seems they hold guns outside the provisions of the 2nd Ammendment if they do not.

Madison's entire quote revolves around 'the people' and 'the militia'. Not any mention of citizens having an unalienable right to play with guns no matter what the societal damage is.

But the whole point about AMMENDMENTS is that they are AMMENDMENTS and thus show that AMMENDMENT is possible. ALthough it is reasonably clear (the 2nd ammendment is widely regarded as being the most obscurely orded of a badly worded bunch of Consititutiuonal documents), if women fight to get to vote, they can get an ammedndment. If black people fight for the right to vote, they can get an ammendment. Only with the 2nd Ammendment do people suggest it is unammendable even if enough people fight it.

And the guff about freedom is lovely; your 'freedom' to bear arms is paid for by gun companies and gun hobbiests. The only reason you still have it is that this lobby group pays better than the anti-gun group. Wow, freedom is dollar's whore. Again.

Of course, now we get to the interesting point in the discussion (as we all know the gun laws will not change, and that the situation is beyond recovery without truely heroic measures), and start talking about how in the land of the free civil inequality is what drives the violence in American society, everyone goes quiet.

Seems some people think freedom is the freedom for other people to be disadvantaged and downtrodden on a generational and largely chromatic basis.

But hang on, if it's in the Bill of Rights that people can fight governmental despotism by armed force, that means people who are disadvantaged and downtrodden on a generational and largely chromatic basis have a legal basis for armed insurrection! Provided they form militas, that is...

74

Should suicidal or self destructive people have free will?

by The Dragon in

been going through my head lately....if you try to prevent them from doing what they want...they see you as the enemy...but are you?.

if you take away their freedom to do so.....are they no longer free?

will they hate you...or thank you when they come to their senses?.

Abaddon

Surely one can argue that most suicidal or self destructive people do not have free will, but are, in the vast majority of cases, subject to a mental issue and therefore not in their normal mind. If they cannot give 'informed consent' to their own actions, how can they have free will?

174

Gun control logic

by Gregor in

the v tech shooter bought his guns legally.

gun control laws don't stop this kind of determined killer anywhere in the world.

the defenseless victims couldn't carry a gun legally on campus if they had one.

Abaddon

The US are basically obsessed with guns and illusory freedoms that actually mean many people live their lives in fear. Some freedom.

As the gun lobby fund politicians nine times as much as the gun control lobby, this will not change, regardless of the rights or the wrongs.

No one will stop criminals getting guns. But crazies are not criminals, they are crazies. The Virgina killer would have probably been ripped off, even killed by a criminal gun supplier, or been too afraid to contact one.

As for arguments concerning the Constitution, it's all dumb.

First, you CAN change it, otherwise black people and women could not vote. It is NOT tablets of stone from god, okay?
Second, to most students of English, the clause on gun ownership is linked to a millita at a time when they did not anticipate a standing army, so is as relevent as buggy whips today.
Third, it is talking about single-shot muzzle loaders, not semi-automatics or assault weapons; I think if those men who signed the Constitution were alive today they would not write the law that way in the face of 30,000 dead a year and spree killers.
Four, the bleating noise that American's need guns to pwotec themselves fwom the govewnment is pathetic (although given your government is understandable); Eastern Europe freed itself from Communism without mass gun ownership - are Americans cowards that need guns to stand up to despots? Burger-eating surrender monkeys unless they have guns? I don't think so but this is the logical conclusion of some arguments in favour of the status quo.
Five, when Americans HAVE had the chance to use guns to protect themsleves from the government, where's the NRA? Where's the gun owners? Hiding whilst students get shot at Ohio U, that's where.
Six, the police were apparently delayed in stopping the carnage by citizens going in with guns; more students died because of amateur gun freaks showing-off than would have otherwise.

I love the 'facts' presented, which;

combine suicide with homicide to make gun ownership appear less risky to people other than the owner than it is
classify a part of a country that has had civil unrest for decades as a country in its own right (Northern Ireland) to further distort the statistics and make gun ownership seem less risky to people other than the owner
amusingly distort things further by ignoring most deaths in the USA are caused by HANDGUNS but counting all guns everywhere as equal

I congratulate the complier of the table and/or those who have cluelessly spread such statistical tripe for such a manifest disregard of facts and such determination to compare apples to elephants.

Sadly, you're (the US) &ucked. There is no way short of a door-to-door army search to reduce gun ownership to levels seen in most civilised countries, and if you did that the gun-nuts would die with a self-rightous cry of "I told you so".

There is one truth; as a society, America is disproportionately violent. There are countries with similarly slack gun laws and comparable GDP/capita and far fewer gun deaths, but they have far far lower levels of social inequality than the USA, and thus far less disadvantaged people who might turn to violence to redress things. As social inequality is getting worse (the US is moving away from European norms and towards, say, Brazil, as far as social inequality goes), the violence is unlikely to get better. If you create a social model where dog eats dog, this is what happens.

It is this inequality, and desensitisitaion to gun violence after decades of it that ensures the 32 students are far from the last who die like this, and those who die at the hands of the disenfranchised underclass will continue to die, and the deaths will change nothing due to politicians being in the pockets of the NRA.

heathen

The koreans in general have a bad attitude about the US

Racist.

47

Why does being right = being arrogant?

by AlmostAtheist in

jw
friends

what is it about a person's believing they are "right" that leads them to being arrogant?

you've surely noticed that the more sure a person is that he's right, the more likely he is to treat those that disagree with him with disrespect.

it's hard to see how a person can disagree with something that you know is right.

Abaddon

Almost atheist

You feel like saying, "Dude, get educated, THEN come talk to me!"

Feel like? I DO say that!! And boy does it go down like a pork saucege at a Bahmitspha (sp?). I have tried everything from direct ("you are wrong, try reading up on the subject") to nicey-nicey ("that's an interesting opinion and I thought something along those lines too but then I found out that xyz"), and it makes little difference; people don't like being told they are wrong no matter what sauce you serve with it.

But in his own way, the other guy has probably done some research too.
He may be feeling exactly like you, wondering -- bewildered, even -- how you can possibly sit there with a straight face and claim you don't "get it".

I like to think this but this belief is frequently shattered when I find the 'research' is mainstream journalism or lobby groups with the resultent superficial, sensationalised, or biased results. And when you point this out, do people pause and check stuff? Not nearly often enough. Normally they make any 'arrogance' on the part of the well-informed insignificant in comparion to their own; complacent ignorance is a postition as liable to arrogance as 'intellectualism'.

I also think that the confidence of someone who has gone around the block on an issue where factual polarity is possible can be mistaken for arrogance by people who haven't done the ground work.

jgnat

That arrogance thing also might be related to testosterone. I notice in a fight, though I am feisty, I am no match to a bulldog male brain on the offence. He just won't stop chewing on that old bone.

Don't bring balls into this. I know women, hell, I am marrying a woman who can go toe-to-toe with 'bulldog male brains'.

cog dis

Some people have a deathly fear of being "wrong".

Yup. Contarywise, I LIKE being wrong. If I hadn't been stupendously wrong at one point in my life and embraced it and done something about it I would still be a Dubbie - and that i true for many here. Being wrong means I can learn something. I do however have high standards of proof and someone has to really prove they are right; but when they do, fine. I don't invest my ego in ignoring facts.

16

Albert Einstein said:

by Sasha in

jw
friends

if the bees ever disappear, man will die in 4 years.

the bee's are disappearing..

Abaddon

jaguarbass

The creatures that run this planet want the global population reduced to 500 million.

Really? Okay, if you say so...

Some other hypothesis are, its infra red light from the sun that is disorientating them and disabling them from finding their way back to the hive.

Yeah, I mean, it must have been a big surprise to them, this big yellow ball in the sky when there wasn't one before. No wonder the poor lovies are confused.

Also it could be the cellphone waves disorientating them.

Yup, we all know cellphones were invented last year... or was it in 1896 when the first reports of something like CCD was reported?

The rays that arent givning humans brain cancer. I know 2 people that have brain cancer 1s dead and the others dying.

I am sorry for their trouble, but;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6209960.stm

I'm all for being open minded jaguar, but it kinda loses something if you let the top of your head fall off... don't you actually check stuff before believing it?

If you do some research into this it seems that reports of CCD (where the bees disappear) are being conflated with reports of colonies dying in their hives from 'old fashioned' bee diseases that have been around years. The average journalist knows an immeasurably small amount more than nothing about bees. And it makes for a good story. CCD remains to be satisfactorily explained, but I don't think we need to hoard food yet.

39

Answering an evolutionist argument.

by hooberus in

the world is full of complex biological systems (for one example see below):.

here is a brief overview of the biochemistry of vision.

when light first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal.

Abaddon

hooberus

I am not 'dropping the qualifying charaters', I am saying the qualifying characters are essentially Creationists and IDots (or is it IDites?) saying "but in this case our postulated designer doesn't need a designer because we say so".

Did you not see I was already catering for your predictable protestation in the way that I phrased my initial comment to you?

It is still a form of special pleading; without any evidence what-so-ever such people make the implict claim that intelligent non-biological entities either generate sponataneously in some undescribed fashion, or are external to space and time.

Both are just based on the say-so of you and your chums... and given the lack of ability to show me how greviously wrong dendrochronology is (as you have claimed), , the tendancy to quote from websites I have shown you on multiple previous occasions to be repositories and examples of bad science who pay their chief executives disporportionate salries for the csharitable sector, and as you decietfully or ignorantly mention IDot doctrines like 'irreducable complexity' that have been refuted with no mention of their refutation, the say-so of you and your chums is worth nothing to me.

Go and prove something, eh? I will not indulge you in your arrogant insistence that you are right (without a gramme of evidence to prove it) and the seas of evidence produce by modren science are wrong.

hillary_step

Thank you, that really made me laugh

TopHat

You need to know about a subject you argue against. You've yet to demonstrate any 'accurate knowedge' of the subject. Keep the pretty pictures up if they make you feel happy, but neither they or the text you accompany them with do anything other than show you need to learn more about evolution before you can discuss it without making silly mistakes.

If I were to try to give an example of how little I would need to know about theology to argue about theology as embaressingly as you do about evolution, I'd need to make claims like 'God is a Pizza'.

64

Where do you like to sit on a plane and why?

by Crumpet in

i'm trying to decide where i want to sit on the plane to dallas - i can choose online 24 hours beforehand but am not sure where is best for comfort, quiet, service, view.

is there anyway of predicting where any babies might be so i can be as far away as possible from them?.

https://www.britishairways.com/travel/managebooking/public/en_gb?eid=104504&source=mmb_tab_ob.

Abaddon

Is this the time to mention the life-jackets under seats have never, not once, ever saved anyone in a crash that took place out of sight of land?

They're there to make you feel better...

19

The Question Of ReligionThe Question of Atheism

by The wanderer in

jw
friends

the question of religionthe question of atheism recently, i posted some thoughts and questions about atheism and after having .

read some of the individual thoughts on that thread it is understandable why some.

individuals on both sides feel the way they do.

Abaddon

The wanderer

From my perspective,

Very true, and the entire issue (see below)

religion and atheism have a common denominator. One
believes in a Universal Creator or God and the other does not.

How can this be a common denominator? It is like saying 'Fred and Jane were identical as Fred likes jam and Jane didn't'.

They are differentiated by their beliefs in god.

I have decided that neither one nor the other fully answers the questions to life’s meaning

Of course atheism doesn't answer the questions to life's meaning! It isn't meant to. This doesn't mean in a godless Universe life can have no meaning, but what meaning we give it is a result of us not some intrinsicmeaning for our existence.

I suggest you seek to stop presupposing things; whilst you carry on making such assumptions you truely are;

“locked” into a belief system that does not allow for other views and perspectives on different subject matters.

All the best