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@drafterman
I think that's being a bit purist. A Hall of Fame would eventually be a meritocracy, but given human nature the first few inductees would likely be people like Tej and bsh who were already inducted, which could give the appearance of bias (and I'm sure that personal bias actually would play into votes).
I also think that treating this site as in no way a continuation of DDO is a bit silly; the interface is incredibly similar and the user base is largely transplanted. I think the moderation policy has more to do with not wanting to relitigate old feuds than it does with a spiritual break with old DDO.
I guess overall I don't see the point in restricting our options either to not voting because humans aren't really rational or to voting in a way that will highlight our tendencies to favoritism and personal bias when there is a super easy fix available.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
The Uighurs are a Muslim Turkic minority group that lives on the edges of China (in Xinjiang, closer to the rest of Central Asia than to historical China), and have for at least a millennium. The modern-day country of China consists of the historical Han heartland plus Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Macau. These areas are not historically Chinese, being culturally distinct with their own unique ethnic groups, religions, and traditions. China rules territories like Macau (historically Portuguese) and Hong Kong with a large degree of autonomy, but comes down quite harder on other areas, the main ones being Tibet and Xinjiang, where the Chinese government tries to erase local religion and anything else that it sees as a possible source of conflicted loyalty. So they could leave, but it'd be the equivalent of kicking all of the French people out of France.
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@Vaarka
This is a pretty good point. Despite what Mister_Man says, the reality is that it would be more alienating for a new member to watch a group of people who all know each other vote one another into the hall of fame for the first few rounds than it would be to just have the original HoF transplanted here as an opening footnote. Bringing the HoF over guarantees that a non-DDO member has more of a chance to be inducted, as they don't have to compete against anyone who was in the old one, some of who look like they're shaping up to be influential members on this site as well.
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@Vaarka
Awesome, I remember running around in Sandy. The wind and rain is exhilarating.
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The Estada Novo regime is unfairly maligned, the reasons for its collapse are fundamentally misunderstood, and vanishingly few of the 'decolonization movements' which forced an anti-war government to defend their citizens from guerilla warfare were genuine. The decolonialism lens through which these conflicts are viewed is woefully inaccurate, and that viewpoint's ubiquity just pays testament to the historical illiteracy of most Westerners. The majority of them, especially the ones which have failed to produce functional countries, were the result of attempts by USA and USSR sponsored guerilla fighters to gain a geopolitical foothold in neutral, peaceful territory. The annexation of the Goa States was an act of warmongering by Indian nationalists concerned with territorial expansion, and the horrific invasion and military occupation of East Timor by Indonesia should weigh heavily on the conscience of anyone who feeds into this narrative.
The only successful former Ultramar Português territories are those which were originally uninhabited, such as Macau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe. These were all peaceably granted freedom after the Carnation Revolution, a military coup in Portugal itself supported by domestic communists with ties to the USSR which was only possible after the USSR and USA used subterfuge and brutal warmongering to exhaust a country which had pursued a staunch neutrality policy since the close of WWI. The whole nation-wrecking saga resulted in millions of Angolans dying in the decade-long proxy war which followed indepenence, the complete obliteration of domestic peace and economic security in Mozambique, and the slaughter of dissidents in Guinea-Bissau followed by one-party rule, all so that the USA and USSR could have a few more open spaces on their international chessboard.
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@drafterman
This a really good breakdown of many of the general problems that I had while reading the ToS. Thanks drafterman, for taking the time to do something that my lazy ass likely wouldn't have gotten around to.
I definitely agree that policy/rules ought to be tight and concise. Maybe it's a bit dramatic in scope for a debate website, but Machiavelli summed it up quite well:
'As all those have shown who have discussed civil institutions, and as every history is full of examples, it is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity... men never act well except through necessity: but where choice abounds and where license may be used, everything is quickly filled with confusion and disorder. It is said therefore that Hunger and Poverty make men industrious, and Laws make them good. And where something by itself works well without law, the law is not necessary: but when that good custom is lacking, the law immediately becomes necessary.'
- Discourses on Livy, Book 1 Chapter 3
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@bsh1
I agree. Max was a tremendous moderator and I can only aspire to the example he set, though he and I disagreed in some areas and on some decisions. Keeping that in mind, it's important to realize that the COC is largely lifted (in some parts, entirely lifted) from the COC that Max himself authored. That COC can be found here, starting around post 7: http://www.debate.org/forums/debate.org/topic/56116/
Yeah, I didn't like the CoC on DDO, I liked Max's moderation that was pretty much independent of the 'letter of the law'. If you are going to moderate in Max's style, that's great. I hope that you do and that the site flourishes and everyone is happy. But you might leave the site, take a break or something, and pass moderation on. Eventually, moderation powers might fall on an unworthy person, and if the CoC gives the power to abuse it they will. Policy has to be written in a tight way, with unscrupulous people in mind. A constitution which gives kings the power to behead the whole parliament and relies on the generosity of the king not to do so is a bad constitution, regardless of how well it functions when a good man is king.
The answer is that none of these topics in and of themselves violate site policy. I think its possible that arguments presented in favor of them might violate site policy (for example, calling all Jewish people "f*cking k*kes who deserve to get sodomized by sword point before being burned alive" would certainly violate site policy as it is currently written.)
That's good to hear, as this was my main concern with you personally. I agree that absurdly graphic personal attacks, harassment, and doxxing ought to be strictly off-limits.
I certainly hope you'll stick around and give us--that is, the moderation team--a chance to prove ourselves to you and the whole site. I realize that I am untested in a moderator position, so I can only ask for patience. If I make a mistake, I will do my best to own up to it. Moderation will entail a dialogue with the community so that we can continue to improve the way we do things. But, I think one thing I've taken away from Max is precisely the need to not be inserting myself too much in the goings-on of the community. I hope to win your confidence, and urge you to stay for awhile to see how this ride goes.
As do I!
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I would also just like to stress that this isn't guided by any personal animosity towards bsh, I'm not trying to make him unhappy or anything, and I actually think he would be exemplary as a vote moderator because debate is a much more rigid, rule-based format. I just have some concerns about forum moderation. I also don't mean it as a slight to the site owners/administrators. I am just completely in the dark as to who they are and what their idea of where they want the site to go is. Up until this point, I was interested in the site because I saw it as a continuation of DDO. If it is going to degrade into a series of robotically polite discussions revolving around a small, circumscribed set of 'safe' debate topics (this is the way that many other online discussion/debate sites function), well, I prefer to be able to have both a rowdy tavern discussion and a structured debate from time to time, and my interest will decline considerably if this site only offers the latter option. And I know for a fact that there are others who are similarly concerned, but are far more invested in the site than I am and don't want to be seen as sticking their necks out. Personally, I'm happy to let DDO die if it's going to die, or to continue on with the ride if it isn't.
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This doesn't sit well with me now that I've read the CoC. Conversations and human relationships in general are exercises in a mutual testing of limits. It's best to not interfere with such things, instead of attempting to micromanage and fine tune a conversation which doesn't involve you, but the CoC rather explicitly gives moderation the ability to not only define a 'personal attack' within an already overbroad range, but to throw away their own carefully delineated range of infractions with no justification, and no right of appeal.
A few malcontents are criticizing 'the moderation on DDO' as if that is the reason for the site's failure. It isn't; seeing as Max was moderator throughout the site's busiest period, and continued to act as moderator when the site failed due to reasons beyond his control (forfeit error, spam swamping, lack of important access). DDO thrived mainly because of two things: Max, and the community. Max was able to moderate the site in a way that made it succeed for many reasons, but one of the central ones was an absolute personal devotion to freedom of speech. If someone wants an echo chamber, there are plenty of sites to go to. Plenty of solipsistic subbreddits to bury yourself in, plenty of carefully curated, ideologically delineated forums to frequent. DDO couldn't have competed with those sites, and had it tried to it would have ended up like any of the other fossilized Web 2.0 sites that litter the digital wastes. DDO offered something unique: a site where you could debate or have a discussion with a communist, a racist, an anarchocapitalist, a black nationalist, a radical feminist, an Islamic traditionalist, and a trans rights advocate within the span of a day. And I'm not just pulling ideologies out of my ass here either; at its height, DDO had people representing all of those diverse viewpoints who were active. That community is what made it unique and kept it afloat, and it was maintained by Max's combination of absolute free speech and hard crackdowns on people who violated specific severe rules revolving around harrasment, spamming, and doxxing.
So what this all sums up to I guess is this: a whole lot of people are on this site because they see it as a continuation of DDO. That doesn't mean that it's just for people from DDO; optimally it will continue to grow. But it is taking over the niche which DDO held as a forum for at times heated and pointed discussion and a platform for more structured, impersonal debating on probably the widest range of topics anywhere. This CoC seems to me that it wants to apply the rules for debating to the forums, instead of letting the forums be a place for discussion and debates a place for debates. And if the CoC were being implemented by Max, most people wouldn't have a problem with it because they know his history and his impartiality. But they aren't, and while I don't know Virtuoso enough to judge them, and since the CoC explicitly subordinates them to bsh, I will focus there. Bsh is someone who has endorsed European free speech laws that restrict content of speech in the past, has displayed discontent over content that most users of DDO saw no problem with, and was often seen as overbearing in his idea of what should be expected of members even when he had to run his ideas by Max as the DDO site president. And while I do not pass any judgement on Virtuoso's character, I do know that they are, as well as bsh, on the far left politically. So I guess my primary concerns are these:
1. Will certain debate topics be 'out of bounds' because they can be construed as 'hurtful' or 'a form of attack', even if conducted cordially? Examples of a few extreme test cases:
- defence of soviet policy that resulted in huge loss of life for its subjects
- historical revisionism surrounding the holocaust
- defence of the execution of gay people by a devout Muslim
- arguing that homosexuality is deeply immoral
- discussing relationships between race and iq
- arguing that transgenerism is a mental illness
These are all 'verboten' topics that were no verboten on DDO. Will they be here?
2. If an ideologically homogenous moderation team does show favoritism to one side, will users of the site have any recourse to the administration? I ask because the CoC explicitly states that they will not; it seems highly unusual to me to put someone with no experience in moderation (and considerable controversy in a non-moderator position) into a position of basically unchecked power.
3. Can there be specific definitions of personal attacks which actually restrict the powers that a moderator exercises and not leave it all up to discretion? Because the way it is written now, there essentially is no terms of service for the users to hold the moderators to. There are no hard restrictions on moderator power, so they aren't even really 'terms'.
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@mustardness
Dude, you have Asperger's, and it isn't even the fun kind.
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@ethang5
Because women and men are different. Just in my personal life, I can't think of a single woman who would want unisex bathrooms. Some of them, whom I know through work, family, and as friends, get annoyed if they find out that a man has even used their restroom. This isn't a generational thing, it's pretty across the board. When girls go into their bathroom to wash up, they like a space without pressure, where they can know that it's okay to look a bit rough or not up to the nines without a boy seeing them and judging them for it. It's kind of complicated, but in a lot of ways it acts as 'neutral territory' in this constant silent battle between women who are often in a state of polite competition that is difficult for men to understand. You can't just take something like human behavior and sentiment and apply a cost-benefit analysis to it. It's informed by a person's memories, culture, and other deep-seated sentiments that will always take precedence over something like utilitarianism or idealistic moral prescriptions.
Is this a complaint that you get from women whom you know? Are they bent out of shape because there aren't enough men in their bathrooms?
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Mass immigration is a multifaceted problem rooted in global capitalism, hegemonic power constrained by nuclear considerations, and the scale of society in the United States. The interested parties behind global capitalism want to maximize the fluidity of both capital and labor to buffer their own considerable power. The US needs to project its interests through proxy conflicts in non-nuclear countries, which are usually ruined in some sense, creating large populations amenable to relocation out of necessity. And economic and social scaling problems cause deep problems in first world countries, which ultimately remain unaddressed and lead to escapism, which fuels consumerism and things like drug use and hedonism, coupled with either political disengagement or hyperengagement. This dysfunction leads to immigration policies which range from incoherent to malevolent, and because our government doesn't really reflect accurately the will of its people any more the result is populist backlash when changing demographics make escapism difficult. The same people who claim that mass immigration is just the path to a Star Trek utopia have a terrible track record of predicting things, and that trend is likely to continue. Proximity, diversity, and unclear boundaries or cultural norms is a recipe for disaster, and that's clearly where we are headed.
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Become a Carthusian Father and retreat from the world. It would probably be the only way to stay sane.
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@ethang5
What is 'poverty'? Is it not being able to afford the newest T.V. and a DISH subscription? Not being able to afford a smart phone? Not owning your house? Not being able to maintain a house which you do own? Not being able to afford food while homeless? People always want to discuss poverty without discussing what it is. If it's defined in terms of something not finite, if it is defined in in terms of an insatiable desire, then the concerns raised by Smithereens comes into play: giving everyone access to that resource causes the market to restructure itself around that newfound access and sets you back to square one, at best.
I think that the only meaningful conversation that we can have about poverty is based on this definition: can a family, on the land and resources which they own, build capital to leave to the next generation, sustain their own family, and better themselves as citizens through either formal education or self-education? If the answer is 'no', then the last thing that a country with truly moral concerns about poverty should be doing is busying itself with spiritually anaesthetizing the people involved. A person who does not meet those requirements shouldn't be given a T.V. or a smart phone, they should be deprived of them and trained in real-life skills which they can use to improve their lot in life. If they don't have access to the land and resources which they need, society should work to make it available to them. This requires a system other than capitalism, which treats land as a leisure commodity, eventually leading to a permanently dispossessed underclass which is more concerned with the economic treading of water and forms of escape than it is with bettering itself. As long as capitalism exists, this underclass will exist, and will sow within itself the seeds of capitalism's own destruction.
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@ethang5
The Church is in a cold civil war that is rapidly heating up over the child abuse scandal, with figures (in the US at least) such as Archbishop Chaput, Archbishop Vigano, Pope Emeritus Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Archbishop Cordileone on one side, and figures such as Pope Francis, Cardinal Wuerl, former-Cardinal McCarrick, and Archbishop Cupich on the other. So it's split between traditionalists and modernists at the moment.
My school of thought is most accurately reflected through the societies within the church which are more traditional, such as the FSSP, the SSPX, discalced Carmelite nuns, and certain Benedictine monks. It's typically associate with the old Latin liturgy, anti-capitalism, and subsidiary corporatism (not having to do with corporations at all, just the same Latin root for 'body'). As for thinkers that I agree with, look to Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph d'Maistre, etc. It's a bigger tent politically, but we all agree on what the ultimate aims of society should be and on the fact that capitalism, communism, and the more typical 'fascisms' are all bad.
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@ethang5
Catholicism, stripped of its most important aspects and viewed as just another secular ideology, has been through several period of decadence. In fact, the poisonous and decadent materialistic secularism that the West now finds itself in the grips of could in some senses be seen as a debauched form of Catholicism. Of course, traditional Catholicism is a different bird entirely, and is the school of throught which I prefer.
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@ethang5
Anywhere where the West has spread it's poisonous, decadent world-view.
I'm a Catholic traditionalist.
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Ever more immersive virtual reality: 20 years
Increasingly complex and 'efficient', yet fragile automation schemes: 40 years
Complete collapse and societal regression, including the erasure of much technology: 80 years
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The whole consent ideology is rooted in individualism and atomization, so it's not surprise that it's focused on college campuses. The problem isn't consent ideology itself, but the philosophical underpinnings from which it springs, which is this weird quasi-libertarian reductionism which sees all relationships as transactional and contractual. To understand something as nuanced as human sexuality, you have to have an accurate understanding of human nature, of how society emerges from interactions between people and is informed both socially and temporally, and of how laws are the 'bones' of a society, which it evolves over time to reflect these deeper truths. If you reverse the order of things and only see that last step, the rigid legalistic take, then you'll obviously arrive at absurdities. But that's common in a society like ours, which is in a state of consumerist, hedonistic decay, lost in either impotent nostalgia or absurd utopian fanaticism.
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The final reason is that mass media and the growing scale of modern industrial society have taken the concept of thought taboos to new heights. These are progressively sliding ever further into madness territory, and as they do the penalty for transgressions will rise as the system becomes more fragile. I remember reading an interesting account of some of the earlier research on gender dysphoria. It was a long read, but incredibly enlightening, if not a little bit frightening. It catalogued, in succinct detail, the many twists and turns involved in the then nascent scientific understanding of gender identity being completely overturned. The fascinating thing is that the overturning was in no way reliant on any specific study coming out. There was no landmark 'debunking', really. What happened was that an incredibly motivated minority threatened academics with bad press, career censure, and general pressure, coupled with harassment and the abuse of good faith. It really made me think about what makes our scientific apparatus tick, who decides when something is 'debunked', and how easy it is for political, non-scientific actors to corrupt the research process with a little bit of concerted action. Now we are at the point where questioning the trans orthodoxy is a heresy. If you point out that current treatments have bad effects, or even in some cases try to study it, your very questioning or investigation are cast as 'violence' against trans people. The questioning of trans ideology, including palpable results like high suicide rates and psychological pathology, is itself cast as the cause of said high suicide rates and pathology. It doesn't take a genius to see that this ideological setup is unfalsifiable and blatantly unscientific. But if you speak out then you are ostracized, and failing to agree with the SCIENCE! means that you're dumb, uninformed, or just plain evil, regardless of whether plain old 'science' is at your back. And, of course, if disagreeing with the party line makes you 'unscientific', then you cannot publish in reputable journals, and the dearth SCIENCE on your side is further proof of you unscientificity. The same thing has happened with race, but oftentimes the penalties for crossing that line are even more steep. Racism has been cast as our society's cardinal evil, and it's impossible for most people to think clearly about it in a time where being accused of this ill-defined and nebulous accusation can literally make you a pariah overnight. It's classic human behavior to dissociate with someone who violates the rules of the 'tribe', but decades of living in an ever more elaborate mass media web have transformed real communities, bounded in time and place, to nebulous ideological mobs with much less qualms against casting out 'subverters' or waging war against an out-group in starkly Orwellian fashion.
So all in all, given our situation, it's not really that surprising. As Chesterton once prophetically put it, there will come a day when swords will be drawn to prove that the leaves are green in summer. Well, it can't be far off.
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I think that this is just one of those things that will be looked back on in history as a moment of mass insanity akin to a dancing sickness or witch hunt, kicked into overdrive by mass media and its effects on discourse. Take mopac's statement. I have met many people who believe this. Yet it is on its face absurd. And I mean that in the full sense of the word: it is as absurd as insisting that the sky is green or that water is dry. You can walk down the street, pick out people walking by, and with remarkable accuracy that would put things like medical diagnoses or biological identification to shame identify people as a certain race, and genetic testing would verify your estimation. And this would increase in accuracy depending on your exposure to the people which you were categorizing, giving you more accurate and more detailed estimates (A person native to east Asia, for example, is better able to pick out a Japanese person from an Indonesian one, a South African could better differentiate between a bushman and a Bantu). Yet people go through life doubting their lying eyes, and I find that fascinating. And I'm not just trying to a be condescending dick about it, I genuinely do find it interesting from a whole bunch of different angles. Forget IQ differences or the heritability of IQ or crime rates or any of that stuff. That's all at least debatable on both sides, with each side having its data and respective conclusions. I don't think that someone on either side of that debate qualifies for the state of denial that I'm talking about. This is something else entirely, almost a sort of lucid insanity.
Of course, the arguments are specious if you peel the surface back. The idea that 'race doesn't exist' is predicated on hair-splitting regarding how it is defined, a general ignorance of how things like haplotyping work (or genetics in general), and an inconsistent application of standards to create a sort of special pleading for human race that is never applied to other categorizations (the concept of a 'species' would collapse entirely if it was, let alone its sub-clades). But why is it so eagerly swallowed? I think that there are several reasons. The first is a genuine ignorance of science, replaced with a surface-level familiarity with SCIENCE!. SCIENCE! is a sort of set of conclusions regurgitated into mouths of the American public by things like Now This compilations, 'scientific' 'journalism', or general authoritative figures. It typically has a loose correlation to the more complex and difficult to digest findings on which it is supposedly based, and a few rounds of this process leads to a 'whisper down the lane' effect. A good example of this was a science article that I saw shared on Facebook that blared in a loud headline 'NO AMOUNT OF ALCOHOL IS HEALTHY FOR YOU', which aside from butchering the statistical analysis of the original research also studiously ignored the fact that the research on which it based explicitly stressed stated that the authors were not advocating abstinence from alcohol as health policy and that it simply should be minimized, and that heavy drinking should be avoided.
But I think that there's a deeper issue that makes that one possible in the first place in general, and another one which affects this topic in particular. The first is the fact that in the West a large subset of people have come to see experts, scientists, and journalists in an almost magisterial light when it comes to facts of the physical world. Probably on of the best examples of this are nutritionists, who continue to command a large following despite a laughably bad track record of actually recommending a healthy diet. But many professions have this problem, to a lesser or greater extent. People are taught not only to dull one's scepticism if information comes from a 'reputable source', but often to ignore and ridicule anyone who contradicts a source more reputable than them. This makes the market for truth one in which esteem and the unthinking credence which it affords plays a larger role than the ability to convince your average thinking person, and that is a system which is ripe for abuse. Our education system cultivates people into this slavishness, which is completely at odds with the original values behind universal education and the democratic spirit in general. Nowadays, people are more fervent in their belief in science in the midst of large replication scandals and things like the file drawer effect. Because of this, our society's immune system has an incredibly weakened response to bullshit, making it relatively easy to bamboozle people to such an extent that they can not only entertain the idea that different races don't exist, but can see people who think that they do as heretical in some way. At least the geocentrists had the excuse of not denying the obvious.
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I think that a lot of these mass shootings are about people working through 'power processes' in violent ways, which is itself symptomatic of technological 'advance', overcrowding, and the social effects of unending economic growth within a capitalist model. Modern society gives people very little to be satisfied about. It is characterized by a profound disconnect with nature, economic stagnation, stifling control, and a breakdown in ordered society that tends to inversely trend with socio-economic status. In fact, the gaming itself is also a symptom of this, which is what I think that psychologists looking for a link between the two often stumble over. People play games because they grow up with all of their essential needs met, and many of their secondary needs stiffled to some degree. They fill in the gap that is usually filled by a meaningful struggle for survival and reproduction with insatiable desires for money, hedonistic indulgence, escapism, virtual success, the pursuit of inessential knowledge, etc. Gaming is just one facet of this. Then when people are unhappy because of these systematic influences from our cultural 'megamachine', society at large seeks to chemically alter the state of their brain to make what is intolerable to a healthy human being tolerable to them. Is it really any surprise that people snap and act out power fantasies, or 'rule breaking', as a form of rebellion or just naked stress relief? Personally, I think things are only going to get worse and worse. We've already seen in England literal knife control legislation, so thinking that gun control will fix systemic and incredibly complex problems like this is wrong; it won't fix the source of the violence, only tinker with the avenue through which it expresses itself. But it's kind of like steam: you can't bottle up a closed system if the boiler is still chugging away without something bursting catastrophically.
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