Thank you. I think that’s the point. And also, I think, the reason outsiders can’t see it. Because looking from the outside, there’s already a low-grade civil war going on. The violence is already there. Just not from everyone. It sounds like being taken over by the mob or something. Or am I completely wrong again?
I was sincerely reluctant to make a comparison to Germany, but that was what I was thinking on jan 6th.
Vote with your wallet, and your body. Protest, fund others working against it, economically boycott the red states that keep laws from changing, etc, etc. Just voting isn’t enough.
Many of us talked about this during the Trump administration.
It’s hard for many – myself included – to truly understand how tied up in these issues … in their partisan politics … the identities of so many Americans are.
Change doesn’t come easy to these people. Their only real move is doubling down. Everything else, to them, acts like the first brick being removed from the dam (of their egos).
This is an extremely difficult problem for the US to solve, and the money behind the status quo dwarfs the money advocating for change.
And civil disobedience is a lovely notion … if we don’t all get murdered doing it (only slightly sarcastic).
It’s not a “notion”, it works, I know this from experience. You think an American RWer is somehow worse than an Apartheid-era Boer cop?
But you have to be willing to risk being murdered.
This is why Martin’s pathetic attempts at casting me as performative over racism are like water off a duck’s greased cloaca-crack to me. Because he’s an all-talk gun nut, and I’ve seen way nastier pieces of human shit from the wrong side of an R4 before. Being actually shot at by racists makes any words an internet fascist might fling just so much annoying buzzing.
I’m not really pissed, I’m just baffled. Blaming the people working on solving the problem for the problem not being solved yet just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Blaming the problem on the people resisting us solving it, those like @Martin_Hyde here, does.
It’s not that complicated, really. There are some people who are willing to sacrifice the lives of others in order to have easy access to guns. Unfortunately, due to our founding father’s wisdom, those people happen to have significantly more electoral power than their numbers should merit.
I really get if we do something external. If you were an Iraqi during the war or something, I can see blaming the US as a whole, and everyone in it, for the damage that we did.
But when it comes to internal stuff, where we are practically in a cold civil war, there really are sides, and blaming the wrong side isn’t going do you any favors.
Ukranians in your own country, in a way. Perhaps too simple, but I get that. I also get taking sides. I’m firmly on yours, actually. Chalk it up to European smugness and/or ignorance creeping in if it came across otherwise. Not that we have that much left to be smug about, but still.
I’m only one person, but I personally don’t mind non-Americans expressing how horrible they think this situation is and how dysfunctional it is that we can’t seem to fix it. I’m reminded of the post-World War II international condemnation of US “Jim Crow” laws and racial segregation in general. A significant part of the reason that the American political class finally became willing to engage with desegregation was that it just kept getting more embarrassing and inconvenient to have the rest of the world sneering at us for our barbarism.
And this is true even though at the same time, segregationists were invoking “American exceptionalism” as a reason to resist any concessions on integration, which they saw as a gateway to communism. Similarly, US gun-culture advocates* are going to keep screaming about other developed democracies being “scared of” guns and “not understanding” our “unique heritage” about them. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of America is equally indifferent to world opinion.
[*] By this term I don’t mean gun owners in general or even (all) supporters of gun rights, but rather people who promote pseudoheroic delusions of gun ownership and deregulation as an automatic patriotic good in and of itself. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with liking or owning guns or with being somewhat predisposed against restrictions on gun ownership. But there’s a lot wrong, IMHO, with the widespread mindset that the mere act of owning and/or carrying a gun (at least, without criminal intent) automatically makes you a brave and stalwart patriot whose gun possession is intrinsically helping protect your country (or race, or religion, or whatever) from government tyranny. Those folks need more mocking.
Fair, no worries.
Peace? 
Peace 
.
And you and others, thanks for trying to answer my questions. I’m really trying to make sense of all this.
And that same world sneering persuaded the Dutch to give up their last colonies in East Asia. So it does work sometimes. I also remember boycotting stuff from South Africa in the Eighties. I hope that helped. I can still remember six year old me being outraged when my mother told me about Apartheid. I wanted to get on a plane and tell Botha he was a horrible man 
. So maybe that’s also a part of what’s at play here, a genuine WTF. And a sort of childish hope of the world not really being as rotten as seems to be the case. That change is possible.
I mean I’m an alcohol user and I would also say I would not be willing to trade “never having access to alcohol again” and “elimination of all alcohol deaths.” You’re adopting a maximalist utilitarian position that all that matters is absolute minimization of death (something that is a 100% likelihood for all of us on a long enough timescale) and saying things (like various liberties) that contribute to happiness, exercise of fundamental rights et al. simply shouldn’t matter in the face of that stark utilitarianism. I’m sorry, but I reject that. period.
At least be honest about the position you hold–you’re fine with immoral posters wishing death on others, that’s on you, not me.
Such trade offs are intrinsic to all liberties. I am sorry you don’t understand that.
You’re too blind to actually have read or comprehended what I’ve said. I am actually quite careful with my arguments. I address specific points and make specific arguments. None of what I said can be interpreted to suggest that I’m trying to “protect” gun culture. You’re just so simple minded that you think “okay, so he’s arguing against someone on my side of this issue, therefore he must be on the other side, and therefore must blindly support everything I think my opponents support”
Because here are the arguments I have made on this thread:
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It is bad political strategy to make this election about gun control when there are much better, less divisive issues to focus on. A last desperate defense of democracy against the current fascist coup is the last chance we have - if we even have it at this point - and winning the 2022 elections is absolutely paramount, and focusing on gun control over much better issues is bad strategy and is likely to lose the election. And, hey, if you lose this election, you basically lose the chance to do gun control ever again anyway.
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People in this thread think that anyone who is willing to accept dead kids as a cost for the legal availability of something they like to be available is an iredeemable, inhuman monster. Except almost everyone makes that exact tradeoff themselves, they’re just delusional about it.
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Saying “a bunch of countries that never had any significant amount of guns in civilian hands banned guns, and they have much less gun crime than we do! Therefore, if we just did the same thing they did, we’d have the same results!” is obviously extremely simplistic. It’s not an apples to apples comparison, the results would not be the same.
None of these are “oh beef is coddling right wing gun nuts because he is a right wing gun nut”, you’re just too fucking stupid/hostile/ignorant to try to actually read what I’m saying. I am the most militantly anti-republican member of this board, and yet in this thread I’ve been called “an enlightened centrist” and a right wing gun nut. And that is certainly not from a lack of clearly explaining myself - because, if anything, my style is overly verbose in the pursuit of clarity. It’s because you’re intellectually lazy and want to scream righteous outrage, so you just decide what my positions are and rail against that straw.
I’ve even said specifically that I’d give up all my guns in a second if it would mean a real victory against the fascist coup. I actually don’t really care much about guns as a political issue. I do think it is unwise for leftists to be disarming themselves right now, because we are likely heading into increasingly open right wing terrorism, including terrorism involving using arms to intimidate left-wing protest. You might think “well if we disarm them that can’t happen!” but that’s unrealistic - we’re not going to make any law that significant encroaches on gun ownership. So what we’re going to have is the police helping armed right wing intimidation/terrorist groups silence/harass left wing protest. If the left wing was armed, the police would have to put a stop to all of it in the name of maintaining order, but if the left wing is disarmed, the proud boy types basically get to conduct uncontested armed intimidation with the aid of the police. There’s going to be a lot more of that in the coming years.
In any case, I think it’s pretty obvious “oh beef is coddling right wing gun nuts” is an absurd interpretation of my positions. I have not argued for expansive gun rights generally in these threads, I have definitely not tried to coddle right wing gun nuts or “defend gun culture” or whatever the fuck you’re talking about.
You guys are just getting away with a thoughtless circle jerk because you’re having an emotional reaction that fills you with righteous justification, and you massively outnumber us here, so you confuse saying easy, popular opinions with being right, and don’t think you need to put in the actual intellectual work to make good arguments and engage in good debate.
And this I completely disagree with. A strong majority of Americans are for better gun control, including most gun owners. The ones against it are never going to vote for Democrats anyway.
Why do you think it’s such a losing proposition? From the majority of the voters, it asks for no sacrifice at all, and to some, it will mean a slight inconvenience in the rare instances they want to purchase a gun.
Compare that with climate change, where I may be asked to give up important parts of my way of life for a much less obvious return. Why do you insist that gun control will lose votes, but climate change will gain them?
That’s not what is being asked. Just a bit more paperwork.
You are certainly arguing about doing anything about gun violence in this thread.
That’s your problem, it doesn’t make sense. It’s insane that any country would let this happen and not restrict guns. To quote The Atlantic:
“ These are the morbid symptoms of a society coming undone, and they arise largely from policy choices made by interested parties with material motives.”
Things feel scary here too. Be careful out there. We didn’t get to this place overnight. It took decades of work on all levels of government to dismantle the safeguards meant to hold our country together.
No, I don’t think we’re there. If Trump had somehow overthrown the election, I think the answer might be different. It is fair to say that our system of government is being tested and may ultimately fail.
I do like the description of a cold civil war, however. Maybe that’s what you meant? We’re not fighting in the streets, but government is essentially non-functional at a national level.
Oddly, this surprises absolutely no one. I don’t see @Joey_P, so I will do the honors: fuck you.
Money and politics: a match made in Hell
We absolutely are in a low burn civil war, Buffalo, Charlottesville, Oklahoma City, the Olympics bombing, attacks on abortion providers and countless acts of violence on blacks are the violent terrorist tactics of America’s conservatives and we dither and try to make peace so that we don’t ruin Thanksgiving with a political argument.
The one ray of hope I see in this is that we finally seem to be willing to call baby killers baby killers. After Trump, fuck comity, fuck getting along with terrorists. Fuck them. Fuck the baby killers and their weird gun fetish.
And some tradeoffs are morally reprehensible. If I said that I value my cola drink, and I don’t care that children die every day in order to provide the ingredients for said drink, then I would be a monster. I’m sorry you don’t understand that.
Do Americans routinely post on Dutch message boards to tell them how they’re doing it wrong?
Yep. Or to put it another way, a lobbying organization that buys politicians with money from the gun industry and Russians.
Is this supposed to be some kind of cogent argument? Because it’s not. It’s merely “Stop telling us what fuckups we are.”