I’m still waiting to figure out what the frack does “a country that was without weapons yet truly safe and free” have to do with being “a fantasy liberal country”. Except that it’s the OP’s fantasy of what liberals are about. MY fantasy liberal country has universal healthcare, green energy, proportional representation, progressive taxation, reproductive freedom, parental leave, marriage equality, full freedoms of spech, press and worship, separation of church and state, and no death penalty. “Weapons” are far behind in the list. And so far I haven’t found one sufficiently better at all that to merit the moving expense.
Damn, it seems as if I’m living in **JR Delirious’s **fantasy.
Great. Would it kill you to do a little cleaning once in a while? The place is a flippin’ mess.
The Shire though, is lucky to be off in a little known corner of the world far from most enemies or as Gandalf says “most people have never even heard of Hobbits”. It also only has 2 roads to enter the land both of which are guarded by more powerful friends.
But then isn’t NZ technically an occupied country since the British took it from the native Maori?
Where do you live in the U.S. that you don’t feel comfortable walking to the convenience store at night?
I mean, yeah, there are some places where I wouldn’t but none of the places that I would imagine an educated world traveler to be living.
Possibly relevant: are you a man or a woman?
So you think “gun banning” is the totality of liberalism?
True, but there is also a high enough level of private bow ownership to allow the raising of an impromptu militia if needed, as certain unfilmed events have shown.
Although that might just be a Took thing.
And exactly how do you imagine Americans got America?
That is libel. There hasn’t been a troll in Iceland in a thousand years. The orcs hunted and ate them, then froze to death themselves. Sheesh, read your history.
Sadly, the internet brought them back.
Japan has pretty much no weapons and is safe, and has been for decades. I don’t move there because I don’t speak Japanese
Hey liberals! Why don’t you abandon your homeland and give up your citizenship and leave all your friends behind and go to some foreign country where there are undoubtedly countless other guys just like me, except they speak with a funny accent or a different language altogether?
Yeah, why isn’t that the perfect solution to a liberal-versus-conservative debate?
I cannot imagine why not.
Personal freedom and personal safety are inversely porportional. You must give up some of one to gain more of the other. I tend to lean more toward personal freedom, but to each their own.
That’s an interesting assertion, but I can’t think of a reason to accept it as truth.
I’ll ditto all of this post and add that, during my second week in the country I intentionally wandered the back-alleys of the town where I was stationed. I wandered aimlessly between 11PM and 2AM on a Friday and Saturday night to see how long it would be before I felt unsafe or lost and it didn’t happen.
And blind nationalism is an idiot’s refuge. If you see that your kid is struggling to read, you don’t just shrug and say, “Well, at least she’s pretty.” If you love her you try to help her or find programs to help her. Some of us love our country* like that, too.
–G!
*Whether that’s the USA, Iceland, Iraq, or whatever.
Pop music says “everything is all right.”
Rock music say’s “it’s not all right, but we can make it better.”
–Bono (U2)
On the contrary, without safety you have no freedom. If everything you do is mandated by survival needs, you aren’t free. Nor are you free if you’re dead.
Why do you think liberalism == pacifism?
OP fail. You remind me of when I was in college. I had long hair, and kind of looked hippie-ish (though I wasn’t in the slightest.) I went to visit my room mate in Texas, and his good Texan father went out to a shooting range, no doubt expecting me to get an allergic reaction to guns. What I did do was say cool, I shot rifle in Boy Scouts and took pistol as part of my PE requirements. And happily blasted away.
Wanting guns to be licensed and excluded from schools and bars does not mean we hate guns.
Nearly 40% of Americans told Gallup that there were places within a mile of where they lived where they would be afraid to walk alone at night.