The Atlas Asylum of absurd/ignorant posts IX

[Alcibiades]

You beat me to writing precisely that. Even if I die protecting my family, at least I'm sending a half dozen or so to their doom. People who don't respect property forfeit their right to life.

No. No. No. No. No.
This is absolutely, totally wrong and I will not apologize for saying this.

I'm sorry, but your life ends the moment you set fire to my house and threaten the life of my family. This is called self-defense. It's not exactly a new concept.

The castle doctrine doesn’t exist in Europe

And look what happened circa 1932-1945.....

This is an ahistorical American right-wing refrain which really annoys me. Part of the reason the Nazis were able to come to power is because they had their own private army, and the lack of a state monopoly on force was a problem which plagued Weimar Germany. The causes of the rise of National Socialism were varied and complex, but a lack of gun rights was not among them. Regardless, I think it’s fair to say Europeans generally live far less in fear of being victims of individual or mob violence than Americans.

[Alcibiades]

Gun control has always been racist.

This is true.

This is my main issue with pro-gun leftists claiming to want to improve peoples' lives. You can't improve peoples' lives, if some deranged lunatic shoots everyone dead. Like haven't we seen enough mass shootings to realize maybe...just maybe....guns don't actually belong in the hands of everyday people. Oh, alas, it'll probably take another 10 or 20 years for people to actually come to their senses, this is the single issue that frustrates me so much, because the thinking on it is just so disconnected from reality on the part of the gun advocates, oh well.

Guns do belong in the hands of the people, but anyways, in a country like the United States, taking away all guns is just never going to happen, mass confiscation, given the number of firearms in the United States, is near impossible no matter how much some people may want it. And getting past that, keeping guns out of the hands of the population isn’t necessarily going to stop shootings/violent crime etc...

So defeatist to say you can never do it so you might as well not try.

Obviously the first step is to drastically curtail the number of guns produced and sold, as that is out of control. If you're in a hole, stop digging.

Then we can start to talk about banning the ownership of the types of guns that have been used to massacre innocent people over the past four decades.

The overwhelming majority of gun violence is committed with handguns. Do you intend to ban the ownership of pistols?

Tbh, I’m not sure how achievable that would be in the US, but ideally yes. Handguns are banned outright in the UK and heavily restricted in most other European countries. Unlike shotguns and rifles, I don’t really think there is a legitimate reason to own a handgun.

[Alcibiades]

Tbh, I’m not sure how achievable that would be in the US, but ideally yes. Handguns are banned outright in the UK and heavily restricted in most other European countries. Unlike shotguns and rifles, I don’t really think there is a legitimate reason to own a handgun.

The dynamics are different in the UK and Europe though. There isn't as prevalent a police violence problem overseas as there is here in the states. The argument that flipped me in favor of gun ownership (though I do support some more stringent regulations like red flag laws, enhanced background checks, and I've heard compelling arguments in favor of a national gun registry but am hesitant about the optics) was that the state cannot own guns while disarming citizens, especially given our present circumstance. Maybe if cops didn't have guns, I'd feel differently.

It’s an interesting argument, and I do think the the primary emphasis in the US should be on banning things like AR-15s, not handguns. While US gun culture will never fully go away, it’s a lot more out of hand than it was in the 70s for instance. I do think fewer policemen/women should be armed, although I’m not really sure what could be accomplished by threatening the cops with a gun. It doesn’t help to deescalate the situation, to but it mildly. I think if fewer citizens owned guns, the cops would feel less of a need to resort to deadly force.

[Alcibiades]

Gun control has always been racist.

This is true.

This is my main issue with pro-gun leftists claiming to want to improve peoples' lives. You can't improve peoples' lives, if some deranged lunatic shoots everyone dead. Like haven't we seen enough mass shootings to realize maybe...just maybe....guns don't actually belong in the hands of everyday people. Oh, alas, it'll probably take another 10 or 20 years for people to actually come to their senses, this is the single issue that frustrates me so much, because the thinking on it is just so disconnected from reality on the part of the gun advocates, oh well.

Guns do belong in the hands of the people, but anyways, in a country like the United States, taking away all guns is just never going to happen, mass confiscation, given the number of firearms in the United States, is near impossible no matter how much some people may want it. And getting past that, keeping guns out of the hands of the population isn’t necessarily going to stop shootings/violent crime etc...

So defeatist to say you can never do it so you might as well not try.

Obviously the first step is to drastically curtail the number of guns produced and sold, as that is out of control. If you're in a hole, stop digging.

Then we can start to talk about banning the ownership of the types of guns that have been used to massacre innocent people over the past four decades.

The overwhelming majority of gun violence is committed with handguns. Do you intend to ban the ownership of pistols?

Production first, and then ownership.

Ridiculous. You want to shut down an entire industry and forcibly confiscate material from hundreds of millions of people? And do you think criminals and terrorists who want to commit mass murder wouldn’t stop at nothing to gain access to weapons through illegal means, that they would allow government enforcement and laws to stop them?

Hell yeah I do. Have you thought about this for more than ten minutes? Dude, if the guns aren't being produced and sold in America, that starts to diminish the supply from the get go.

"Illegal guns" that your criminals and terrorists have their hands on mostly just started out as legal guns bought by American rubes.This myth of a wide-scale criminal operation to replace guns is just an NRA talking point to justify their existence (they are a gun industry lobbying group.)

You also do realize that most people who have guns don't have the manpower or firepower to go up against the entire government, right? I mean, what the f*** are we paying for with a military more expensive than the whole European continent's if we can't bring down Judd Clampett and his closet full of 30-30 Marlins?

But the current status quo of selling millions of guns a year basically without limits is the chief cause of gun violence and our monthly massacres. As I said, if you want to get out of a hole, stop digging.

Absolutely agree. It’s really depressing to see red avatars repeat inane NRA talking points about gun restrictions. America is the only country where mass shootings are a regular occurrence, and it is the only country with firearms-on-demand. And we’re supposed to believe there’s no link between the two? Give me a break. In countries with harsher gun restrictions, the only criminals with guns are those in organised crime, and they only use their weapons on each other, not ‘civilians’. Random psychos looking to murder schoolkids are going to find it much harder, in fact nigh-on-impossible, to get their hands on weapons of mass murder if sensible gun controls are in place. The other alternative is that one is willing to tolerate mass shootings as a necessary price to pay for...what exactly?

[Alcibiades]

Hell yeah I do. Have you thought about this for more than ten minutes? Dude, if the guns aren't being produced and sold in America, that starts to diminish the supply from the get go.

"Illegal guns" that your criminals and terrorists have their hands on mostly just started out as legal guns bought by American rubes.This myth of a wide-scale criminal operation to replace guns is just an NRA talking point to justify their existence (they are a gun industry lobbying group.)

You also do realize that most people who have guns don't have the manpower or firepower to go up against the entire government, right? I mean, what the f*** are we paying for with a military more expensive than the whole European continent's if we can't bring down Judd Clampett and his closet full of 30-30 Marlins?

But the current status quo of selling millions of guns a year basically without limits is the chief cause of gun violence and our monthly massacres. As I said, if you want to get out of a hole, stop digging.

Absolutely agree. It’s really depressing to see red avatars repeat inane NRA talking points about gun restrictions. America is the only country where mass shootings are a regular occurrence, and it is the only country with firearms-on-demand. And we’re supposed to believe there’s no link between the two? Give me a break. In countries with harsher gun restrictions, the only criminals with guns are those in organised crime, and they only use their weapons on each other, not ‘civilians’. Random psychos looking to murder schoolkids are going to find it much harder, in fact nigh-on-impossible, to get their hands on weapons of mass murder if sensible gun controls are in place. The other alternative is that one is willing to tolerate mass shootings as a necessary price to pay for...what exactly?

Both of you are engaging in arguments that I know, from experience, are beneath you. You two are capable of more nuance than this (even if CraneHusband doesn't like to show it).

The focus on mass shootings is a red herring. These incidents account for a fraction of a percent of gun deaths in this country. Two thirds of all gun deaths in the US are suicides. Of the remaining 10,000 deaths, the vast majority of victims are young black/Hispanic men in a small handful of cities. It is not enough to say that guns are to blame for these statistics. Gun violence in America is a result of social ills that we will never, ever confront so long as we're distracted by scapegoating gun manufacturers.

So defeatist to say you can never do it so you might as well not try.

The left frequently argues that policies that attempt to actually engage with reality are "defeatist." But it is not "defeatism" to acknowledge that the disarmament of European populations is not a valid blueprint for social policy in America. There are 400 million guns in this country, and the idea that even a wide-scale buyback could possibly put a dent in this number borders on the absurd. The reality is that this will simply drive gun ownership into the black market, making it even more difficult for leftist governments to regulate and track the sale of firearms. The only people who participate in such a buyback will be the most law-abiding citizens in the country. And if you expect to accomplish this by actually sending ATF workers to people's doors to search their homes, be prepared for an outbreak of violence that will dwarf any mass shooting. This is the reality of the situation. You can either accept it and try to craft policy that will address it directly, or you can keep spinning ludicrous fairy-tale ideas of what you think social policy would look like in your glorious utopia. The choice is yours.

3,000 people died in 9/11. Peanuts compared to the number of people who die each year in America. And yet it still led to a drastic change for billions of people all over the world when they fly, with the airport experience being made much slower and more irritating, but I would argue this was still worth it.

As for overall deaths, even ignoring suicides, the US still has a higher gun homicide rate than most European countries’ overall homicide rate. Crime among disadvantaged inner city youth is hardly a phenomenon unique to the US - you are probably aware of the knife crime epidemic here in London. Yet London still has a far lower murder rate than the US, and I dread to think what would happen if people had easy access to guns here.

I concede that US gun culture means that it will be very difficult to get these statistics down to European levels. However, its current crazy incarnation is a relatively recent phenomenon; 40 years ago gun culture was much less aggressive and out of hand, but the NRA, riding the wave of the ascendant conservative movement, changed all that. Australia, while far from perfect, provides the best comparison to the US. It used to have a fairly ingrained gun culture, but that all changed after harsh gun controls were implemented in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. Have a look at this graph. Prior to 1996, Australia had a very similar gun death rate to the US, but it plummeted after a mass effort to reduce the number of guns people had.

The question is, then, do you seriously believe that the current gun situation in America is inevitable? Can nothing be done to reduce homicides and mass shootings? Are the immeasurable harm done by the loss of life and fear caused by these really outweighed by the need for “freedom”? The evidence is overwhelming that gun control works. Measures like banning assault weapons, extensive background checks, and ending the crony capitalism which the gun industry is one of the biggest beneficiaries of (and which should disgust any libertarian) are immediately achievable and effective, and yes, over time, a gradual phasing out of the mass manufacture and sale of guns will be immensely beneficial to America.

Maybe it really is a cultural difference I cannot comprehend, but as an outsider looking in, America’s intransigence on the gun issue due to a grossly over-powerful gun lobby, its lies and the politicians it has bought, refusal to try the slightest thing to end one of the most perverse examples of ‘American exceptionalism’, and desperation to blame everything but the obvious cause for gun violence, is unbelievably depressing.

[Alcibiades]

This is compared to a rate of 38,000 vehicular deaths per year on US highways. Would lowering the speed limit everywhere result in fewer deaths? Would banning alcohol result in fewer drunk driving accidents? Probably. But as I'm sure you understand, freedom involves trade-offs, and society is better served if we direct our attention towards areas where we can do more good. The same is true with regards to guns.

As I’ve already spelled out, I think the freedom taken away by mass gun ownership (that to live and to live free from fear) is greater than the freedom it permits, but I guess this is a point we’ll have to agree to disagree on.

It's true that gun violence in the US as a whole exceeds all comparisons in Europe. However when you look at American gun violence broken down by race, White America's gun death rate is essentially identical to the gun violence death rates in European countries. For example, the gun homicide rate per 100,000 citizens is 0.92 among whites in Wisconsin, but 33.53 among blacks! For comparison, this means that Wisconsin's white population experiences almost the same level of gun violence as Canada, while the state's black population experiences gun violence at the same level as Honduras. That is an insane disparity. And by the way, it completely shatters the myth that more guns = more violence. White Americans have far more guns per capita than any European country, but the difference in homicides between white Americans and white Europeans is negligible.

The only conclusion you can reach when looking objectively at the data is that gun violence is a sickness that is relegated almost entirely to specific segments of America. Those segments are middle-aged white men who commit suicide, as well as urban populations of young blacks and Latinos. These are the people who are suffering from gun violence-- one guy with an AR-15 can gun down a classroom full of kids, yes, but the media pays a disproportionate amount of attention to these deaths for the purposes of fearmongering. Mass shootings are exceedingly rare and are responsible for very few of America's gun deaths; if you really want to bring deaths down you must look at where the violence is most prevalent.

First of all, you’ve cherry-picked Wisconsin as having a gun homicide rate far below the US average; white Americans are still clearly more likely to be murdered than Europeans.

But that is besides the point. Why should we accept mass gun death among inner city African-Americans? I believe that gun control would go a long way to reducing the terrible situation there, as one of many solutions required.

Even if school shootings are rare, I still think measures to stop them are merited. Law-abiding citizens’ right to own an AR-15 is not as important as stopping a few dozen kids dying each year, in my view. More broadly, I think the gun control measures advocated by mainstream liberals are clearly worth it, according to my view above of the relative considerations of rights and freedoms; that there may or may not be more important pieces of legislation to pass is irrelevant. It’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.

[Alcibiades]

I frequently read about migrant rape gangs and terrorists plowing vans into crowds in Britain. But I assume you don't live in fear of those occurrences because, frankly, they're quite rare. The truth is that very few people in America actually have to think about gun violence on a daily basis. But that violence is the symptom of social ills, not the disease itself.

This is a completely ridiculous comparison. In 2017, 13 people were killed in vehicle-ramming attacks in the UK, and none since, a fraction of mass shooting deaths in the US in the same period. Vans are also much more difficult to kill 50 people at once with than guns, and have a much wider range of legitimate uses.

Okay, if you don't like the Wisconsin example then we should look at the absolute highest homicide rate among a white population in the US-- Mississippi, with 4.79 deaths per 100,000 white residents. This rate is about the same as the overall US gun homicide rate, which in turn is roughly on par with that of Uruguay. Again, not great. But the black homicide rate in Mississippi is a whopping 28.11 deaths per 100,000! This disparity exists in the US across the board; the truth is that white Americans simply do not experience gun violence anywhere near the rate that black Americans do.

I should note that Wisconsin isn't exactly an outlier here, either. New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and Rhode Island all have gun death rates among white citizens below 1 in 100,000. For a country with as many guns as we have, that is pretty remarkable. The commonality between these states, of course, is that they're all among the most educated and wealthy states in the country, again proving my point: Gun violence is about poverty, not guns.

In any case, I never said that we should "accept mass gun death among inner city African-Americans." I'm merely pointing out a disparity, and how the media ignores that disparity in favor of attention-grabbing headlines. However, I categorically disagree that gun control would be an effective way to combat this problem. People are committing these crimes because they are angry, frustrated, disadvantaged, ignored, and lack opportunity. Whether or not they have guns is simply not going to change this fact. The way to deal with this problem is threefold:

1) End school funding based on property taxes and instead allocate resources at a federal level based on enrollment.
2) Across-the-board amnesty for nonviolent drug offenders. Invest in federally funded rehabilitation and needle exchanges.
3) A negative income tax to supplement the income of the poorest families, and putting an end to the unfair and cruel taxation of the most impoverished Americans.

Now, I'm not entirely against certain gun restrictions, but the ones currently being proposed will not help alleviate inner-city violence for the following reasons.

1) Waiting periods will not alleviate this violence because the guns used in these shootings are almost always legally purchased weapons that have found their way into the black market later on.
2) Assault weapons bans will not alleviate this violence because these shootings are almost always carried out with weapons that would not be covered under such a ban.
3) Mandatory buybacks will not alleviate this violence because no gang members or gun runners are ever going to participate in such a buyback.
4) Gun confiscations will not alleviate this violence because this would involve armed ATF troops marching through black neighborhoods and searching homes. I don't need to tell you how badly this would end.

As for your claim that "it's possible to walk and chew gum at the same time"... lol. Have you seen how dysfunctional this country's government is? Legislative mandates are weak, and yes, they do run out at some point. I could easily name fifty things Biden should focus on before he even breathes a word about gun control. So no-- saving the lives of "a dozen kids each year" is absolutely not worth it if it means that other, better policies go ignored.

Those states you mention also happen to have some of the strictest gun laws in the US. Of course the fact that they are wealthy is a big factor. But I don’t think you can dismiss gun control either.

The reasons you give as to why gun control doesn’t work are all pure speculation based on gut feeling. Evidence from every other country suggests they will. Is it possible they would be uniquely ineffective in the American context? Yes, but there’s no evidence to suggest that, and lots of these measures have such broad support (masked by the outsize influence of the gun lobby) and have such great potential benefits compared to minimal curtailment of freedom that they are absolutely worth a try.

I have already said elsewhere that Biden should focus on other more pressing socioeconomic matters. But when there is the inevitable slew of mass killings that only America seems to be desensitised to among all the countries of the developed world, I absolutely do think he should act, and make this Dem trifecta the first ever to actually have some response to a mass shooting.

One last question: are you opposed to gun control on principle, or is it a pragmatic stance based on America’s specific circumstances? In other words, do you think European countries should loosen their gun laws, in spite of how successful and popular they are?

[Alcibiades]

None of what I said about those policies was "based on gut feeling." Those are all real proposals that have been dreamt up by Democrats (or people on this site), and the conclusions I drew from them, while by definition speculative, are based on past precedent. As we have learned from prohibition, abortion restrictions, and marijuana/prostitution bans, making something illegal does not stop people from doing it. It just turns the people who do it into criminals. And while it's fine to slap that label of "criminal" on people who actively harm others, I shy away from using that classification against people who are not directly affecting others with their actions.

The truth is that there is no evidence to suggest that widespread gun control-- that is, the radical proposals from the left-- will work in America. Widespread disarmament has never happened on such a scale in any other country, and no other first-world country has the cultural attitude towards guns that we do. The evidence that these measures might be successful in an American context is based solely on the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. Gun deaths decreased following this ban in the US, but it is questionable whether the actual cause was the ban or not, for the following reasons:

1) Following the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, gun violence decreased across the board. This means that gun deaths from handguns and shotguns dropped as well, despite the fact that these weapons were not covered under the ban.
2) After the ban timed out, gun deaths remained at their low levels and have never risen back up to pre-1994 levels. This suggests that the ban itself is not the cause of this decrease in violence.
3) The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban came about one generation after the legal availability of safe abortion across the United States. This is the confounding variable. When economically disadvantaged families are able to control the number of kids they have, you get fewer angry young men on the streets trying desperately to survive. This in turn leads to a reduction in crime-- a reduction, for the record, that has remained ever since. I know there is still some debate as to the cause of the drop in violence in the 1990s, but I think it is safe to say that the reduction had more to do with abortion than with Clinton's Assault Weapons Ban.

The evidence from around the world is that drug prohibition has been an abject failure. The same cannot be said for gun control. Your premises for why gun control won’t work in America are purely that; premises, with very little solid evidence. The Assault Weapons Ban, in spite of its many loopholes, is an example of gun control working. Yes, you can argue it had a rather weak effect, but an effect nonetheless, and in my view any positive effect trumps considerations of freedom when it comes to assault weapons, whose sole purpose is to kill. There is no compelling reason why a law-abiding citizen would want or need one which outweighs the harm done by simultaneously opening up the market for them to people with more nefarious intentions.
 

I am opposed to gun control measures for three reasons: strict constitutionalism, individual liberty, and pragmatism (and in that order). However, I support a handful of gun control laws that I think are more pragmatic and intelligent than the ones I listed earlier. I think that police, when called to the scene of a domestic violence incident, should be allowed to search the premises for firearms and to confiscate them (temporarily) as they see fit. I have no serious objection to background checks, although I should note that I don't think they work nearly as well as we all wish they did.

I’m surprised that you list strict constitutionalism above individual liberty. You of all people should know better than to be afflicted by the blind worship of a 250-year-old document, the 2nd Amendment of which serves as a prime example of why it is in many cases woefully unsuited to the realities of the 21st Century. A country which is the only to guarantee the right to bear arms and yet does not guarantee the right to healthcare (which follows naturally from the right to life) is not a model to follow, in my humble opinion.

As for individual liberty, I appreciate we are coming from very different philosophical positions here. I am essentially following a Millian utilitarian perspective here, and I think that the freedom (primarily the freedom to live) that loose gun laws infringe upon is far greater and more important than the freedom they grant.

As for the European gun laws, I absolutely think it is ridiculous that handguns are banned in the UK. I seriously can't understand how such a law even exists, and there is no question that it cannot be applied effectively to the United States. But then again, this is also the country that forces you to pay for TV licenses... so...

I cannot think of one good reason why handguns should be legalised in the UK. It would create a lot of problems and make people much less safe, while solving or improving nothing. The status quo here on guns works absolutely fantastically.

[Alcibiades]

@Alcibiades @John Dule

Your debate about gun policy and political philosophy is way too substantive and intellectually worthwhile to be performed inside the "Asylum of absurd/ignorant posts". I kindly suggest you to move the discussion somewhere else.

Fair enough

[Alcibiades]

What if there was no George Floyd but COVID or vise versa?

The two are related.  Without COVID, you wouldn't have tens of millions of Americans sitting idle, binging 16 hours of cable news/social media every day, not able to go out and do the things that normally keep them occupied (i.e., work, school, church, gym, visiting family, going to restaurants/bars, etc.)  That sort of society-wide lethargy is a powder keg for unrest.  The George Floyd protests were so huge mostly because of the COVID lockdowns.

COVID was the most animating event of the past twenty years, and it wasn't even a singular event - it was (and is continuing) to get rehashed day-in-and-day-out by a rent-seeking public health intelligentsia helped by their friends in a profit-maximizing media industry.  You can't separate anything that has happened since March 2020 from its omnipresence.

Del Taco has a very limited or non-existent grasp of how most Americans live. Which is kinda a foundational aspect of conservatism.

I think he has a point, though, in that last summer, the BLM protests were basically the only thing going on, so they got a ton of attention. There were NBA players that objected to restarting their season because they were concerned it would take attention off the protests, which corroborates this. I’ll ignore your dig at my ideology to say that.

I think Del Taco's post is pretty bad, but I do agree here. No COVID means no George Floyd murder for butterfly reasons, but COVID lockdowns were part of the reasons the protests were so big.

Yes, the first part of his post about Covid leaving people with nothing to do but protest was correct. The second part about the evil liberal elite conspiracy, not so much.

[Alcibiades]

What if there was no George Floyd but COVID or vise versa?

The two are related.  Without COVID, you wouldn't have tens of millions of Americans sitting idle, binging 16 hours of cable news/social media every day, not able to go out and do the things that normally keep them occupied (i.e., work, school, church, gym, visiting family, going to restaurants/bars, etc.)  That sort of society-wide lethargy is a powder keg for unrest.  The George Floyd protests were so huge mostly because of the COVID lockdowns.

COVID was the most animating event of the past twenty years, and it wasn't even a singular event - it was (and is continuing) to get rehashed day-in-and-day-out by a rent-seeking public health intelligentsia helped by their friends in a profit-maximizing media industry.  You can't separate anything that has happened since March 2020 from its omnipresence.

Del Taco has a very limited or non-existent grasp of how most Americans live. Which is kinda a foundational aspect of conservatism.

I think he has a point, though, in that last summer, the BLM protests were basically the only thing going on, so they got a ton of attention. There were NBA players that objected to restarting their season because they were concerned it would take attention off the protests, which corroborates this. I’ll ignore your dig at my ideology to say that.

I think Del Taco's post is pretty bad, but I do agree here. No COVID means no George Floyd murder for butterfly reasons, but COVID lockdowns were part of the reasons the protests were so big.

Yes, the first part of his post about Covid leaving people with nothing to do but protest was correct. The second part about the evil liberal elite conspiracy, not so much.

It is not a conspiracy to believe the public health community will juice and prolong the existence of an "emergency" to benefit their own relevance, or that the news media is always going to produce maximum panic to garner more clicks/views.  These two perfectly logical, self-interested behaviors worked in tandem beautifully over the past year to irrevocably upend American life as we know it.

I think you are probably aware that I am one of the most sceptical red avatars of the ‘the more restrictions, the better’ orthodoxy, but I have noticed that you frequently try to tie in all of the US’s ills with your spiel about the ‘decadent’ liberal, bicoastal cultural and academic elite, which I would say is more than a little conspiratorial.

[Alcibiades]

Morrissey=talentless, whiny, emo freak who couldn't write a decent melody to save his life. "Please don't drop me home, cause it's not my home it's their home and I'm welcome no more..." wah wah wah, STFU.

The good post gallery is that way.

He's referring to Morrissey as "emo". Morrissey started with The Smiths in 1982. Emo did not exist until after 1985's Revolution Summer. Furthermore Revolution Summer was a movement in Washington DC and later spread up and down the East Coast initially but did not reach the UK until the 90s, there was no such thing as "emo" in the UK until about 1992ish, which was quite a bit after the Smiths had broken up and Morrisey's solo stuff had zero influence from it.

It's a really dumb and ignorant post.

He isn't referring to the genre of music. Hard to imagine, I know.

Then what is he referring to?

"Emo" was not even a word in 1982. If you said it people would probably assume you were referring to the comedian Emo Phillips.

First definition on the list.

I’m with BRTD on this one. If you’re referring to a musician as “emo”, you’re probably talking about his genre. Morrissey obviously has nothing to do with emo the genre.

[Alcibiades]

The implication is that same-sex marriage was universally unpopular before the court ruling, which is incorrect, quite a few states had already passed same-sex marriage via the democratic process prior to that or voted down bans on it (like the one I worked against!) and it was supported by almost every notable Democratic politician at that point. Also abortion is still a contentious and controversial issue almost 50 years after its relevant court ruling, so this isn't some sort of magic pill.

Above that though: if this is a reflection of the US being that much more conservative on such issues, then why isn't "Latinx" so widespread and universal in other Anglophone countries? You could point out they don't have as high Latino populations so it's less of a thing to come up, which is true, but it's blatantly incorrect and erasure of quite a few people to say they don't exist at all. The notion that a country like Australia wouldn't have as much if not significantly more backlash against "Latinx" if it was more of a thing there that described a much higher portion of their population is simply laughable.

Let me put it this way, on a French forum or discord server whose membership had broadly the same political outlook as this site's usership, gender neutral language would be, actually is, pretty much the normal way of writing. Whereas, on this forum, most of the time it feels like I am reading the most predictable outposts of the reactionary right wing French press. So for me that is actually very surprising, because France is for the most part a very reactionary, racist country; and yet this apparently left wing forum mostly takes a position that even by French standards would be considered right wing on this one particular issue.

As for gender equality - the US has a worse pay gap; doesn't even have maternity leave, let alone paternity leave; has never had a women head of state (and we all know how the last woman to stand for that position got treated); and has fewer women in its parliament than basically every western european country. These are all pretty concrete things that I think you have to accept suggest that the US is a broadly more conservative country when it comes to gender equality. (and you know, the fact that Switzerland, which was until recently incredibly bad on this issue is now ahead on every one of these measures is perhaps something that is worth paying attention to)

Quite a few American progressives on this site, in trying to (reasonably justifiably, especially in terms of an IRL political perspective for the American liberal-left) move past Bush-era reflexive self-hating anti-Americanism, have gone too far in the opposite direction, appropriating conservative rhetoric on American exceptionalism to formulate America’s founding values as making it more tolerant and socially liberal than Western Europe. While this may be true in some cases (e.g. arguably immigration, although I would still argue that Western Europe is far less structurally racist than America when it comes to colour rather than national origin), more often than not, for instance in the various examples you have given, it is not.

[Alcibiades]

Context.

However, Hitler genuinely cared about his nation and the well-being of its people, so that's something they don't have in common.

That's an objective fact.

Only if you only consider white (not Jew or Roma) non disabled Christians of the correct political persuasion to be people, and even then, he was willing to sacrifice them by the truckload to achieve his goals globally.

It isn't contradictory to say that Hitler loved and cared about Germany but also that he horribly abused and murdered millions of its citizens in cold blood.

He may have cared about Germany in the abstract, but he sure as hell didn’t care about “the well-being of its people”.

[Alcibiades]

I am going to visit relatives in Alabama (my mother is from Alabama) and many of them are anti-vaxxers.

Which precautions should I take?

If you're fully vaccinated, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.

I mean, the vaccine is not 100% effective and is less effective against certain variations (i.e. Delta).

I mean, I understand if you don’t like the focus/tone of this poster, but this post is factually correct.

[Alcibiades]

Yeah, I don’t understand what some people are saying here. Hitler is considered a uniquely evil individual because we apply the same moral standards to him as anyone else, and conclude that genocide is a uniquely evil crime.

[Alcibiades]

For Christ's sake. If you really view the world as something to be judged solely between black and white rather than shades of grey, go get your eyes checked. I refuse to believe this is the case for any rationally-minded person.

I don’t really get what this has to do with the topic at hand. For reference, I only started reading at the point when judging Hitler “by a different moral standard” was brought up. I have now looked back at the origin of this, and TheReckoning was of course being a third-rate provocateur, but that doesn’t change the substance of the subsequent debate.

[Alcibiades]

Until the part about highest standard of living in the world he isn’t especially wrong.

All the world’s skyscrapers until 1998? Granted it’s not egregious in terms of the overall point he’s making, just bizarrely straight-up factually incorrect.

[Alcibiades]

[DeSantis is] also an incredibly high IQ individual, which is obvious after talking to him for around five seconds.

I've actually met the guy, and I (and everyone else I know who has met him) can confirm that he is a fairly high IQ person. You don't graduate from Yale or Harvard while being a dumbass.

Lol, maybe you should have checked your very own signature before posting this, mate.