SteveInCO

You’re still trying to equate firearms deaths…i.e., any homicide with a firearm, including self defense and suicide as well as murders, with murders committed by any means, firarms, baseball bats, poison, which is what Unseen was talking about. “Murders” vs. “deaths by firearm” are two distinct things, each with elements not in the other set…[Read more]

Gallup’s Mirror wrote:

The conclusion I’ve driving toward is obvious: there is NO RELATION WHATSOEVER between the rate of gun ownership and the murder rate when you look at the big picture.

That is, except for statistics from 27 countries (a rather big picture) which show a relationship between more firearms and more firearm deaths. The clinical re…

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What was entertaining was watching Thunderf00t parody a southern accent. Of course, he probably pushed it even further away from his English accent than it already was, into a totally new part of “accent space”… or maybe he just couldn’t suppress his English accent. Either way. the result was (probably intentionally) painful to listen…[Read more]

@Unseen

There’s no denying knives have an important role to play in self defense. (If I hadn’t realized this, I would not have bothered with that class. Unfortunately, they never offered a follow up class for that one. I still want to get that Chris Reeve knife the instructor recommended someday.) However I tend to think at bad-breath…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
I’m more of a knife person: I collect what most people would call pretty scary and dangerous knives. One of the rules of self-defense with a knife is to use it before the other guy knows you have it. I would think a similar rule would apply to self defense with a pistol. Why let the aggressor know your defense, allowing him to a…

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I know people who have schooled themselves to get rid of either a foreign or regional accent, and they even get upset when I detect it. (One man was upset I noticed a Swedish accent; I don’t know why he cared, a slight accent is probably a good thing.) Anyhow, unwinding that process is probably straightforward.

I suspect it works better when…[Read more]

Strega wrote:@SteveInCo. It is eminently possible that since there is a lot of genuine hunting available up here in VT, that guns are thought of as food collecting tools rather than self defense ones. No idea, but that’s a guess. We don’t really have cities in VT that compare to those in other states. Not a lot of us about, bas…

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@Strega 90 percent of the time, hunting uses a long gun (a shotgun or a rifle) that would be very difficult to conceal. Handguns can take deer but they’re suboptimal to say the least. Smaller animals can certainly be dispatched readily with the tiniest of handguns shooting a mere .22 LR round–but how many of your neighbors subsist on squirrels…[Read more]

Fingerprint readers on guns

Very different animal from computers, a gun is a (conceptually simple) mechanical device (no computerization or electronics whatsoever unless you’ve added some sort of fancy sighting system). You’d have to add a bunch of electronics and a solenoid to remove the trigger block. This is more shit that breaks (I have a…[Read more]

It’s even worse than that. What if the “real” deity hasn’t even revealed him/her/it/them-selves to us at all? Or it’s a religion that has died out and left no known trace in the historical record? (You never know what might be hidden in an undiscovered urn somewhere in Baluchistan.) We cannot possibly make the right choice then!

Pascal’s…[Read more]

I think a lot of atheists object to the word “spiritual” because it often comes freighted with a lot of woo (like @Davis illustrated in his second example). I don’t experience that, but I’ve learned that the word is so nebulous that it means different things to different people, and I know that as used in the video I posted, it means something…[Read more]

More food for fascination re: the swastika.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika,_Ontario

Strega, to clarify swastikas were “a” Native American (or First Nations, which seems a more apt moniker, thank you Canada) symbol, not “the” symbol of the First Nations. I recall seeing a couple in petroglyphs in the Mesa Verde area. By the way, it was…[Read more]

The sort of feeling you have described is actually fairly common, a combination of awe at the sheer size and scope of existence, a realization of just how small you are in comparison to it, and profound joy at being able to experience it. (This is often felt by scientists and they will try to convey it when they can, Sagan certainly did his best…[Read more]

Strega wrote:We would have no way of knowing what the south would be like if they’d successfully seceded all those years ago. Certainly the north would also have been affected.

There is a very long series of alternate history novels by Harry Turtledove premised on the South winning the battle of Antietam (the officer who dropped the plans t…[Read more]

What was the line from the Colbert video? Every day they get a birthday present!