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I predict that zero Haitians in Springfield will be murdered by someone who is angry about pets.

won't catch people who snap and go on a spree,

I think those are a proportionally negligible as to the total number of deaths that occur annually, though.

Like, a couple hundred even in the worst years, in the U.S.

Stopping those would probably require a massive surveillance state which would cost billions annually and would, like with gun confiscations, oppress 'normal' citizens. To say nothing of the potential for abuses.

The other way to stop those is to arm responsible citizens who can stop them as they happen

I dunno, seems like aggressively arresting and locking up the most violent citizens would also tip the balance in favor of letting the remaining citizens remain armed, making the chances of an armed citizen being able to stop a random spree killer a bit higher.

What really chafes me is that all discussion is sucked into the gun control debate so we can't have a decent discussion about other policy approaches.

He’s using colourful nicknames, I believe- wedgies are probably wedge tailed eagles, for example.

Unsurprisingly, the FBI has nerfed its crime data under Biden making it much harder to get useful information. So the epistemological situation is only getting worse.

The carolina parakeet. The only parrot species native to the USA.

There are native parrots on the Rio grande.

I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction, but 2000 years on, hardly anyone ever complains about not being able to eat them.

Ironically, the canonical example of a species the Romans ate to extinction is silphium, which people regularly complain about being extinct- because the Romans thought it was an effective birth control. Even if Roman medical knowledge was 100% accurate for once, how to prepare it as a contraceptive would almost certainly have been suppressed by Christianity(early Christian writers hated birth control, and it’s generally agreed that whatever efficacy silphium had it was as some sort of preparation).

But there you have it.

The teamsters have most of their membership in warehouses IIRC. I think a lot of it is just working class voters favoring Trump even when they’re making good money.

Right, but then we can also make them happy to stay in small towns right? We're already turning them into productive citizens, might as well make them happy where they are productive citizens. The reason why Thanos's plan in killing half the universe is stupid is because he has power over Minds, Reality, Souls , Space and Time. He can create resources, change people to not need so many resources, change people to work together better, create housing and planets, and suns.

If we can turn people into productive citizens then housing is the least of our worries. We'll turn a chunk of them into builders and contractors and miners and some into interior designers and so on. Snap loads of bricks and mortar into existence. Make New York into a TARDIS where Manhattan can have infinite housing in a finite area or whatever. Or make people happy to live 10 a room. Sky is the limit.

Last night I talked to a pretty intelligent female friend of mine about various things, and the subject of how men commit the vast majority of violence came up. She was eager to admit that yes, men do. I pointed out that a subset of men commit the majority of all this violence, and that the men in that subset tend to target men as well as women. She was less eager to admit this, but she went along with it. I then made an analogy to the fact that blacks on average commit more violence than whites do, but it is a subset of blacks who commit the majority of all that violence. She started to question me, wondering whether my evidence such as the FBI crime statistics is trustworthy or not. She's been living in the US for decades and she still has a hard time realizing the to me pretty obvious fact that blacks are on average more violent than whites.

THAT is the power of leftist propaganda.

Trump is a symptom of polarization, not a cause. He suspended his campaign in 2012 when it was clear he wasn’t going to go anywhere, in 2016 he cleared the field and hasn’t had a serious GOP rival since.

Why? Well, I would point to the actions of the center-left establishment as pushing conservatives into hostility. Obviously there’s the just, blatant, lies about everything from the media. But in Obama’s second term you also had fast and furious, you had democrats aggravating racial tensions for shits and giggles, you had the IRS targeting scandal, you had Obama himself moving from a polarizing but broadly popular figure into a progressive ideologue partisan. Then you’ve had the Biden admin targeting conservatives, with EG going after pro-life activists for three-felonies-a-day stuff while ignoring attacks on churches and pregnancy resource centers.

I recall reading a CNN journalist once writing, with great concern, that 40% of Americans think democrats want to take their guns away and force them to let trans in their bathrooms. It didn’t seem to occur to her that this was because democrats keep saying they’re going to do those things.

Sure, but that won't catch people who snap and go on a spree, or accidental deaths, or suicides etc. But it's not like there is any chance of either happening in the US.

Eh, I don't think the US government is likely to slip into tyranny, I'm for big government not against it. Bad cops would still be a problem of course, but overall i think the trade would be worth it. Though see the below discussion there are probably other Thanos snap interventions which would be more useful (if perhaps more immoral, depending on your POV).

I specifically chose species which don’t have others that easily fill the gap.

There aren’t birds that blot out the sky or native parrots or cold water manatee creatures in the US anymore, personally I think that’s something of value that disappeared.

We don’t miss them because of shifting baseline syndrome.

But for example, let’s say I’ve seen the manatees in Florida.. I have, they’re really beautiful. These huge gentle warm water mammals that just float up into the river systems and natural springs. You can be on a paddle board above a group of them and pet them, they just hang out underneath.

It would be sad if we lost these. Wouldn’t you agree?

Quite possible, btw

I find it hard to understand people’s attitudes towards nature sometimes. It’s typically, “sure we could lose that and we’d survive fine!”.

A lot of things could be lost and we’d survive ok. Just pick a dystopia from fiction. 1984, Brave New World, humans survive! We’re doing fine!

Should the response be then “who cares?”, or, are there other things in the world that matter than just human survival?

What would be required to dehumanize somebody?

I feel that trying to paint someone as a pet snatcher and eater because of their ethnicity is pretty close.

Increasingly convinced that polar access is going to become a wedge issue for the Russian-Chinese alliance: Russian fisheries practices have generally leaned towards conservation and effective management of existing stocks and I don't particularly get the sense that they're down to let China go scorched-earth in their EEZ or even in international waters where straddling stocks are a problem.

But merely wrapping something in aluminum foil would leave small gaps

I wouldn't worry about small gaps.

Of course this is primarily a 2A discussion, there is no new angle on the PvI conflict out of this. We also have plenty of left of center people here, just not lot of progressives. Have you considered that the "pro Palestinian" position just isn't very strong?

I get that encasing something in aluminum with no gaps would shield it. Aluminum is the fourth most conducive metal and a good shielding design made out of aluminum would work.

But merely wrapping something in aluminum foil would leave small gaps that I think would defeat the shield. I get that you'd overlap the aluminum layers and not have large gaping holes, but I don't think that's good shielding. I sometimes deal with EMI issues at work and it is much harder than you'd think to shield parts. "Wrap it in foil" is not a clear path to success. I have literally seen parts wrapped in foil in misguided attempts to shield them. They were really quite leaky from an EMI point of view. "Put it in a metal enclosure whose lids or openings are sealed with metal EMI gaskets" is what actually works.

I think if the typical person tried shielding a radio with aluminum foil, they would screw it up.

Sure if we had that power then there are probably other interventions. Instead of snapping them away, why not just "fix" them, so they become contributing citizens.

One possible argument is: We have too many people in this country as it is. We’re overpopulated. Eliminating that chunk of the population frees up housing and space. It staves off the YIMBY-vs.-NIMBY wars by making existing housing cheaper and more available without needing to build another wave of commie-block apartment complexes. It frees up medical resources, school spending, and all of the other financial outlays that would apply to those people even if you magically turned them into productive citizens.

Now, one counter-argument is to say that if we could turn all these people into productive citizens, those people could then go gentrify and revitalize all the myriad small towns in America - places like Springfield, OH - with a population of productive Americans instead of welfare-dependent Haitians. The danger, of course, is that if you turn all the current thugs and junkies in America into middle-class domesticated Americans, they’re going to do the same thing that most middle-class domesticated Americans are currently doing: go to college and move to a major population center to seek white-collar work. This is just going to introduce another population influx into those cities, further constricting the housing and job supply. By eliminating these people entirely, you ease population pressure instead of just turning one type of problem into another type of problem.

My favorite was the “no US soldiers in an active war-zone” lie. Just a few weeks ago some US Soldier got shot by ISIS.

There was a viral video uploaded basically the same day of the debate that ended up getting millions of views of the debate on TV when she said that, and it pans out to like seven soldiers in a forward operating base being like “Wait… then where the fuck are we right now?”

I mean, El Salvador basically did a small version of that by just rounding up and locking up the most violent people they could find (as judged by gang affiliation) and it worked fabulously. Murder rates plummeting down immediately.

Didn't need to go after every citizen to see if they had guns, just find the dangerous ones. They arrested and imprisoned about 80,000 people, which is not nothing, but much more modest than forcing millions to hand over weapons.

I have many reasons to believe a similar approach would do the same in the U.S.

That's a good way to frame it, thank you.

(I still want to kill the rabbits on my property).

Thanks. Makes me think I don’t know that much about jurisdiction selection.

I really would be interested in an effort post like that!

No, I'm saying the moral foundations on which that international order are built are the same as the moral foundations on which a rights based worldview are built. Throwing out the one costs you the other.

every privately owned gun

“Looks like tyranny’s back on the menu, boys!” - American politicians, bad cops, the 80,000 new armed IRS agents, etc.