TheSanSabaSongbird @ TheSanSabaSongbird @lemdro.id

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2 yr. ago

Bed.

In Ore-gon no less! By the way, Oregonians love it when you say it that way.

Bad risk assessment. Most Americans are deeply confused about the things that are likely to kill them vs the things they actively worry about. Maybe that's not you, but statistically it almost certainly is.

Unless you are a young man in a concentrated poverty neighborhood, your chances of encountering deadly interpersonal violence are vanishingly small. You're far more likely to be killed by heart disease due to an unhealthy lifestyle, yet the vast majority (not all) of gun-owners pay little or no attention to that aspect of their personal well-being.

The need some people feel to carry a gun isn't rooted in accurate risk assessment and instead is about a desire to feel empowered or because like my old man --a Vietnam combat vet-- they have a blown-out fight or flight response so that everything looks like a threat even when it's not. (This is why so many Vietnam vets --again, like my old man-- ended up living off in the woods by themselves; that way they could be in control of their environment at all times which is also why they always carried firearms.)

But ultimately the real problem is that many people aren't honest with themselves about why they are so wedded to carrying.

The thing is that the experiment you imagine --implementing common-sense gun-reform-- has been run hundreds of times in other countries and the result was not, as you hypothesize, that suddenly they were overrun by bad guys with guns who don't care about gun laws, but rather was that they saw precipitous declines in gun violence and gun-related deaths.

Basically, your hypothesis, which you and others take for granted as evidently true, is objectively incorrect, and has been shown to be so many times. What does a rational actor do when their hypothesis is shown to be incorrect? Do they continue to defend it? Help me make sense of your thinking, because what it looks like to me is a complete refusal to confront and accept reality.

Wilderness Area is an entirely different designation from a national park. They aren't administered by the park service but instead by the Forest Service and they don't typically come with amenities/facilities apart from trailhead parking lots, usually a trail system and sometimes designated campsites and the like. Just FYI. Not that it really matters in this context.

We all do that. Whether we're aware of it or not. Some of us are more aware of it than others.

According to my British friends Yorkshire Gold is legit. I don't know if it's as strong though. Not much of a tea drinker myself, just reporting what I've been told.

Small land-holder. Not a titled lord, but also not a peasant per se.

The entire comment is unmitigated bullshit. Think about it; it uses the years 1654-85 as a representative sample of European immigrants to North America, but that's absurd because we know for a fact that mass immigration from Europe didn't really start until the 19th century so it can't be even remotely true that most white Americans are descendants of the immigrants they use in their sample. It's shoddy and intellectually dishonest scholarship that's obviously and almost comically pushing an agenda. As such it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.

1654-85? Really? And you honestly think that timeframe gives a representative sample of European immigrants to North America? Really? That's the stupidest thing I've read all day. Mass immigration didn't even start until the 19th century for fucks sake, nearly 200 years later. Sometimes Lemmy really sucks ass.

I suggest that you read up on it a little more. That article 3 is self-executing is not a controversial or extreme opinion and is well within the mainstream of legal scholarship. The SCOTUS may rule that it isn't, but that's going to be a tough nut to crack for its three conservative originalists since at its inception article 3 was clearly used to bar all former Confederate officers from holding federal office without the necessity of a trial and conviction.

They're wrong, but I don't think they're arguing in bad faith. What they're wrong about is that article 3 of the 14th is self-executing and doesn't require a trial or conviction. This is because it was intended to bar former Confederate officers from holding federal office and trying and convicting all of them would have been a logistical impossibility.

It was originally intended to bar former Confederate officers from holding federal office, but as you suggest, it is not confined to them and also bars anyone who has engaged in insurrection.

Article 3 of the 14th is arguably self-executing meaning that it doesn't require a trial, but only a simple finding of fact. This is because it was intended to bar all former Confederate officers from holding federal office, and it would have been impossible to hold trials and get convictions for all of them.

That's the historical reading in any case, and it puts the SCOTUS's originalists --Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch-- in quite the bind since they're either going to have to find a way to argue that it wasn't intended to be self-executing, which is pretty absurd on its face, or that it doesn't apply to the presidency, which is also absurd.

That said, they almost certainly will find a way out of it for Trump, but I'm no expert and don't have an educated opinion on how they'll do it.

None of that, however, means that we shouldn't be talking about it. The exchange of ideas, thoughts and opinions is important in and of itself.

Congratulations on writing the most pompous, pretentious and condescending pile of shit that anyone is likely to see all week. Get over yourself.

Because it would be a good way to ensure a Trump victory. I hate that it's come to this, but unfortunately it's the reality.

Lemmy is largely populated by children who lack the intellectual maturity to appreciate that democracy is about compromise and that winning elections doesn't mean that you get to do everything you want.

There's this myth that somehow Biden can just wave a magic wand and get everything he wants, but he's not doing it because in spite of being arguably the most powerful man on the planet, he's secretly in the pocket of corporate America. It's a very childish view of the world and is entirely disconnected from reality.

That's just bullshit. Many North American publications have called him far worse than a demagogue. You're saying something that "feels" right but that isn't actually true. It's part and parcel with how disconnected from reality so many of us have become.

Nope. You aren't looking at the bigger picture. The unions that were holding out were doing so to the detriment of the rest of organized labor. Had they continued to be allowed to do so, the economic consequences would have been a devastating PR blow to organized labor, as would the political consequences.

I have to wonder how many of you naysayers are actually involved in organized labor activism, given how out of touch you appear to be with how unions are actually thinking about the railroad strike. We, meaning organized labor, aren't on the same page as you at all, and while we don't doubt that you have the best intentions, at this point you're basically making yourself the enemy by elevating the odds that Trump wins reelection, which would be devastating to organized labor.

I fully expect to be downvoted by Lemmy's purist zealots, as frequently happens when I don't toe their extremist line or pretend to be who they think I should be as a union organizer and activist. But I'm the one down here on the front lines, not you fucking privileged cry-babies who are going to flip the table over if you don't have everything your way.

It's bullshit. With friends like you, working people don't even need enemies.