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You haven't provided an argument as to why civilians need easy access to guns for a society to be free. You are just asserting that this is the case.
Axiom: One of the fundamental rights of man is the right to effectively defend himself, innocent others, and his community from unjustified force levied against those targets.
The ability to effectively defend himself, etc. is very unevenly distributed in nature; an elderly woman, for example, will usually find herself on the losing end of a physical confrontation, while a young and strong man will be at an advantage most of the time.
Firearms have an extreme leveling effect in the context of effective self defense. Yes, there are degrees of skill, but the differences in terms of credible threat are trivial compared to the "no one has a gun" case. A young man with a gun poses somewhat more threat than without one, but an elderly woman with a gun is orders of magnitude better off than in the non-gun case. There are no other tools that provide anything close to this leveling effect.
Unjustified violence is commonly the province of the young and strong. If the government removes firearms from the equation, it denies the ability of the elderly and/or those physically weak to provide for their own defense effectively, thereby violating the initial axiom. I do not think it is much of a stretch to say that people whose government denies their fundamental rights are not free in that context.
The above is the summary of an argument. No doubt you can find points in either the axiom or the logic following where you disagree, but I believe it is sound.
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If they have access to guns, then they could form militias and wage an insurgency against the government if they wanted. That capacity reduces government power, increases the power of the population. The more power you have, the more free you are.
Imagine if nobody in Afghanistan or Iraq had any guns - I think we would have won those wars and imposed our will upon those countries!
And if they don't have access to guns, they import them, just as the IRA did (much easier now in the era of sophisticated drug trafficking networks). A legal right to guns seems helpful, but not necessary.
Do you think that it would be feasible to illegally import guns to the extent that people have them in the US today? Wouldn't the FBI and other agencies be up to doing something about that?
No, but I don't think you'd need as many guns as the US population has now.
A poorly armed but motivated and organized militia can bring a government to the brink. If Northern Ireland didn't have the support of the rest of the UK it would have collapsed in the early 70s, and if the US were to enter a similar civil war state you wouldn't have a relatively untouched region with >35x the population supporting one side.
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Nit sure I'd characterize what Afghans have under Taliban rule as more freedom.
Did they want western-style atomizing individualist freedom in the first place?
There is freedom in social obligation and in existing in a definite hierarchy. You are free to focus on things in life outside the culture war, freed from an obsession with the political that has seeped into every aspect of western life, even into the formerly sacrosanct household, poisoning the most fundamental human relations (man/woman, parent/child).
Likewise there is a sort of slavery in western "freedom." Slavery to vice born of anomie. Nothing matters, all choices and lifestyles are equal. Many people experience a sort of analysis paralysis and just choose the past of least resistance. Not to mention the nigh-mandatory participation in politics; as they say, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you, and it's not going to leave you alone (and some true degenerates engage in it willingly, even spending their free time furiously refreshing a certain CW thread...).
Consider that your definition of "freedom" is one among many.
The freedom to live any life, as long as it's the Taliban's life.
I think you've replaced 'freedom' with 'a good life.' It's probably possible to life a good life as a third world farmer, just as it's possible to live a bad life as a first world shitposter. But it's fair to note that if you want to go be Amish as a first worlder that option is available to you.
I'd rather have a good life than freedom, and I expect just about anyone who is not pathological in some way would want the same. I doubt that third world farmers who are already living good lives are pining for corrosive American-style freedom to be imposed on their families and communities.
Could you explain what this is supposed to mean? Why would someone need to do that? I live a modern house. I'm in a monogamous relationship with my wife and we both occupy traditional gender roles. We spend most of our time raising our three kids, doing chores, playing music, and doing active stuff outside. We attend weekly religion services. Etc etc. I guess this was some gotcha along the lines of "if you like the Taliban so much why don't you go live like them by giving up the trappings of modernity and living with the Amish," but I can live a traditional life without doing that.
If the argument is that modernity sucks, it's possible to live in the west and reject modernity.
I dunno, but gp was arguing that Afghans are more free, and I was pointing out that a similar lifestyle is available to anyone willing to try it in the west.
Indeed you can, and indeed you don't need to go amish to do it; amish are just an extreme example. This rather undermines the line:
Doesn't it?
Not at all. It takes quite a bit of effort from my wife and I to keep harmful influences out of our home, and it's only going to get harder as our kids get older.
so your complaining that you don't have the freedom to force your children to live the same lifestyle that you do? and that this differs from authoritarian societies because there society would make sure that your children obey your desires?
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No. It's freedom to live any life that does not go against Taliban rules, not forced to live the Taliban life. It's a blacklist system, not a whitelist one. In return for the blacklisting of certain practices you get a strong social structure that over centuries has been tweaked and optimised to fit at least decently well with the human condition, I would say unless a person is at least IQ 120+ they would on average do better under it (assuming same economic situations etc. which is manifestly not the case in the real Afghanistan) than living under rootless modernity where "anything goes" and short term convenience without regard to long term social costs is the name of the game.
Also: from a western point of view from far away it looks like there is only one "way of life" of the people of Afghanistan or the Taliban, that is manifestly not true even amongst just the Pashtun people...
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But nobody in the West thinks or acts this way, and the laws are contrary to it. For example, pedophile lifestyles are not considered to be equal, and people very frequently act as though they think that things matter.
I don't know how much you know about Afghanistan, but it is also this way.
Even people in such a thoroughly politically apathetic and nihilistic country as Russia found that politics was interested in them once they found that they or their children were going off to be under fire in the cold mud of Ukraine.
Pedo lifestyles are outside of the Overton window but only for the time being. There's no magic principal limiting the endless expansion of rights and tolerance. It'll never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.
I think you know what I mean, but in case you don't:
"You do you"
"Speak your truth"
"lived experience"
Just a few popular phrases in the current zeitgeist that demonstrate our society's relativistic outlook. You can care about saving the whales, or global warming, or whatever, but if you claim that your cause is the _most important _ and that others must get on board, you're an asshole who needs to mind his own business. However I won't deny that recent progressivism seems to be bucking this trend.
What? This isn't what I'm talking about at all. This example stretches "political" to meaninglessness. People have suffered from war since people began living in cities, are you trying to claim that a 12th century German peasant lived in a world as politicized as that of a 21st century American?
There is no magic principle limiting pedophilia in trad societies, either. Isn't Afghanistan known for bacha bazi and the Muslim prophet known for marrying a 9 year old and consummating far before she was 18?
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(1) You can make predictions, but you can't use them as premises without evidence. If anything, Western societies seem more worried about pedophilia per se (rather than e.g. homosexuality) than in the past, and the age at which people are seen as being able to consent to sex seems to be rising pretty much everything. So the evidence seems to go in the opposite direction from your prediction.
(2) I don't think anyone claims that there is a magic principle. If you can't describe people who disagree with you without resorting to rhetoric, then maybe you would benefit more carefully and calmly about the controversy. You could read up more about contemporary sexual ethics and then come back to this debate, because at this point you're acting as though you don't know even the basics of contemporary conceptions of consent.
(3) The law of merited impossibility is a great point, but I am unconvinced that it applies in this case.
Modern societies certainly tend to be less prescriptive about some issues, but people seem to quite regularly preach. And it's not just the woke progressives: I hear liberals telling me that climate change is The Most Important Thing Ever and conservatives telling me that Defending Western Civilization is the Most Important Thing. Is there more relativism than I'd like? Yes, I'm sure we agree a lot about that. However, it's an exaggeration to say that it's ubiquitous. And as you suggest, wokeness has made society more moralistic in some areas than it was even within my lifetime.
Yes, it's a matter of historical record that politics didn't leave the peasants alone (Medieval soldiers didn't eat due to great logistic networks or large salaries) and that there were advantages in being a loyal vassal of your master if you were a serf during the frequent periods of violence. Garrison duty and labour responsibilities during wartime were a fact of life for peasants. Under some systems, they might have to travel far from their homes to fight.
I don't think that it's stretching the definition of "politics" to include being asked to fight for your lord or being pillaged by the soldiers of some king. Of course, it wasn't politics in the sense of petty regulations of people's lives - the Church and your parents would do enough of that. True, peasants couldn't vote, but they also weren't without say (it's a modern myth that there is no mass politics without mass voting) and I took "you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you, and it's not going to leave you alone" to include when politics infringed on the lives of ordinary people. As much as I dislike diversity statements or pronoun pronounciations, they pale in comparison to what a Medieval or Afghan peasant endure(d) as a consequence of political events.
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This is common right wing talking point for all of our living memory: "The libs want to mainstream pedophilia!"
While, in reality, "pedos" are people hated by everyone, the last people that are publicly acceptable to lynch, people that everyone loves to compare their political enemies to, and the definition of "pedo" gets wider and wider every year - from actual rape of pre pubescent children to any sex under 18 year line to relationship with "age gap".
No "expansion of rights and tolerance" to pedophiles is evident.
(if you want to reply: "wHY yOu dEFeNd pEdOS? dIe pEdO sCUm"!, thanks for proving my point)
If you are young it really seems that this talking point is baseless, but until 1994 Gay Advocacy parent organizations kept under their umbrella pro-pedophilia groups.
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I don't think this is a very charitable response. I said
I didn't say that leftists today secretly desire to legalize pedophilia. I imagine that many of them would be shocked and disgusted at the idea. But normie leftists in the 70s would have been shocked and disgusted by gay marriage and PDA, and leftists in the 90s would have been shocked and disgusted by puberty blockers and the trans movement today. You can't tell me the slope isn't slippery when we've been sliding down it my entire life.
This is where a lot of people would bring up consent, but it too has proven slippery and malleable. How can it be true that children are incapable of consent, but at the same time they're fully capable of deciding their gender identity and demanding drugs that cause irreversible physical and psychological changes? Sex between a minor and an adult also seems to often cause irreversible changes to the psychology of the minor. For the time being we still refer to those changes as "damage" but I don't see a solid reason why given the way things are heading.
Can we not do this on The Motte?
its better to not be shocked and disgusted by innocent activities than to be. it just goes to show how a lot of these aversions are instilled by society, and are not innately sourced.
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And I said that there is no "endless expansion" - tolerance was expanded in few limited areas, while everywhere else, the hammer will fall on your head harder than ever before if you cross (arbitrary and constantly changing) line.
No one even claims anymore, least of all "liberals", that tolerance is good thing - "zero tolerance" is the spirit of our age.
Yes, and it is slippery against everything that can be seen as "pedo" and it gets slipperier and slipperier. When was the first time you heard about "age gap"?
Except the things are definitely NOT heading this way. Things are heading into seeing relationship of 45 years old man and 25 years old woman as exploitative and pedophilic, equal to relationship of 25 years old man and 5 years old woman.
Conservatives may claim that only their brave fight prevents libs from mainstreaming pedophilia, but, somehow, they failed to stop mainstreaming of homosexuality, gay marriage and transgenderism despite trying their best.
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The Afghanis appear to disagree, as evidenced by the fact that the Taliban once more rule their country.
Or freedom isn't what they want.
@ActuallyATleilaxuGhola answered this objection pretty thoroughly just above, so I won't belabor the point beyond noting that what we offered the Afghanis does not seem to me to be worth a term as unqualified and valence-loaded as "freedom".
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When the threat is foreign governments - as it often happens to be in large stretches of the world - what you generally greatly would want is, in addition to guns, a strong goverment of your own to coordinate the use of those guns, ie. have an army. When it comes to the idea of Russians barreling to Finland Ukraine-style, I would much rather put my trust to the Finnish army than to civilians with guns to hinder the onslaught.
Civilian access to weapons increases defense against foreign adversaries in multiple ways. For example, the greater the level of access to, knowledge of, and experience with weapons among the populous, the more effective the military will be, as the military is composed of civilians.
Similarly, civilians with only partial training are themselves a substantial threat to an occupying force, foreign or domestic. As Russia is currently learning, occupying an area is accomplished by boots on the ground, not planes or tanks. Its hard to occupy a street corner or a field when every window or bush can hide an armed civilian. And as for the planes and tanks, the Russians are also learning that civilians armed with small arms and rockets can also perform rather effective defense with little if any training.
Indeed, as far as I am aware, Finland's entire military is constructed on the premise that, in the event of Russian invasion, rapid reaction forces composed of conscripts rush to the front, while the rest of the population is mobilized and molotov's are handed out to the babushkas.
I think a high degree of civilian weapons ownership would have obvious benefits here.
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I realize that as a Finnish person, you are confronting this reality far more closely than I, but my immediate reaction is por que no los dos? In your shoes, I would like to have an army, an armed populace, many allies, and space lasers if I could get them, or at least as many of those as possible!
Finland has comparatively high levels of small arms ownership, which is good for defense - precisely in the sense that people who would eventually, in a crisis situation, defend the country as conscripts in the army can use their guns for practice (and the Finnish government has explicitly defended an opt-out from EU gun legislation for this reason). However, in the event of an actual invasion, this wouldn't do much good, since the purpose and intent is to leave no civilians remaining in any potentially occupied territories, ie. evacuate them to other regions before Russian troops might get there.
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Which is faster in the event of hostile invasion:
the government must recognize the need to arm the populous, organize the logistics, and execute the distribution of arms to the populous amidst the invasion
the populous is already armed
Which of the following provides a greater degree of military efficacy:
after arming the general population, the people so armed must either be trained or use the arms without training
the populace already has some degree of training
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As it happens, Finland has the tenth most civilian guns per capita in the world. What we don’t have (and what nobody here wants) is US style unlicensed access to guns nor allowing guns for self defence.
”Arming the populace” is a non-issue anyway, since nothing prevents doing it once the war is in progress.
Never?
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Citation needed.
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Correct, it is a bald assertion of my values that free men may not be prevented from arming themselves by their governments. If my government forcibly disarmed me, I would no longer regard myself as free.
Edit - To be clear, I'm not trying to be snarky, I legitimately don't know how I could provide evidence for the proposition that being armed is both a signal and expression of personal freedom. This is a base value for me in the same fashion as my freedom of conscience, speech, and religion. I would feel the same about being denied my right to arms as any other fundamental right. People in other cultures do not seem to share this intuition or value and I think they are less free as a result; I do not expect that they will agree, given that they do not share that intuition or value.
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