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We kinda do need him, though. Very few people are as intensely principled as he is on the subject of computing freedom, and without him anchoring the Overton window, there’s nothing stopping the Bill Gateses of this world from moving it.
I think the problem there is that, for many years, nobody bothered to explain to him exactly why child porn is bad.
Most people observe that everyone else thinks it’s bad and don’t question it any further. That’s not good enough for Stallman, though, and for good reason: expecting him to unquestioningly bow to peer pressure is an insult to his intelligence.
Someone did eventually explain the problem to Stallman. I don’t know what exactly was explained, but my guess is that Stallman was told that child porn is non-consensual and therefore violates the child’s privacy, similar to how revenge porn violates the subject’s privacy. At any rate, after that discussion took place, Stallman did an about-face on the subject, and is now opposed to child porn like anyone else.
Moral of the story: taboos and peer pressure bad; logic and education good.
Hoping to see news that the US government has finally decided to stop the economy from melting down.
I keep being disappointed…
Aren’t you supposed to be sword fighting on an office chair?
First, despite there being multiple school shootings this year, school shootings are a tiny fraction of the overall homicides in the US
Which are also often committed with guns…
which are, in turn, dwarfed by the number of suicides committed with firearms.
I’m not talking about suicide.
Second, looking at your link you provided, you see a lot of things like, “A gun was fired during a fight near a basketball game at Appoquinimink High School. No injuries were reported”, and “Bullets struck two windows of classrooms at PS 78 in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island. One classroom was occupied by ten adults, but no bullets entered the classrooms” being counted as "school shootings:, which you then compare to Columbine. You are intentionally, and in bad faith, conflating entirely different things, and placing them all under the heading of, “firearms near schools”.
I did nothing of the sort. There are multiple bona fide school shootings in that list, such as the Michigan State shooting and the Covenant shooting.
It is relevant, because it has different causes, and is thus addressed differently.
That’s not a meaningful answer. Let’s have some details.
Are you willing to engage in good faith, or have you already decided that the only solution is banning firearms?
Are you willing to engage in good faith? So far, you’ve argued based on false premises (namely that school shootings are rare, and that there are no bona fide school shootings in the previously linked Wikipedia list) and evasive non-answers (namely that targeted violence at school is to be “addressed differently”, with no explanation of how). Doesn’t seem like good faith to me.
I’d start by admitting that school shootings are, despite being extremely sensationalized, also extremely rare.
There have been multiple school shootings this year alone. Your statement would have been reasonable had you made it in the wake of the Columbine shooting, but to say it today is frankly absurd.
In scare quotes, because the people that commit random acts of violence in schools—versus targeted violence–are so uncommon that it’s hard to draw definite conclusions about risk factors.
That is not relevant. Targeted violence in school isn’t tolerable either.
Almost all of them ‘leak’ information in the days or weeks prior to murders; I do think that there needs to be a way to seriously investigate things like that, but I don’t know how you could do that in a way that doesn’t infringe on other, equally fundamental rights.
Indeed, so we’re going to have to solve this problem in whichever way minimizes harmful side effects. Unfortunately, that may involve inconveniencing gun owners, but it’s better than depriving everyone of privacy and going full Minority Report.
When you get right down to it, a lot of it is an issue of culture, where people feel like violence is a reasonable way to express feelings.
Mass shootings in particular are usually committed by someone who has no intention of still being alive afterward, and they do indeed almost always end in the shooter’s death. That’s not merely a “way to express feelings”.
the UK and Australia both have combined rates of violent crime–battery, forcible rape, robbery, murder–comparable to the US, and, in the case of rape in Australia, likely rather higher.
You’re contradicting yourself. How can American culture be uniquely violent if those other countries have similar rates of violence?
The US does have a sharply higher murder rate though; our violence is more lethal.
Because we have guns.
The unfortunate truth is that you can’t have rights without someone misusing those rights to hurt other people.
Yes, and we preserve those rights despite that because the alternative is worse.
The alternative we’re discussing right now is gun control. Is that worse than the status quo? If so, why?
If people can drive, sooner or later someone is going to drive a rental van into a crowd, just because they want to kill people and that’s the way they can do it.
This equivalence is questionable for two reasons:
“If you open this device, the contained alien immediately escapes, rendering it inert.” There. Problem solved. Case dismissed.
I don’t see any riots. Seems to me that nobody cares—not even the people being made homeless.
Would you happen to have some idea what to do about all the school shootings?
de-escalation with China
You’re probably not going to get your wish on that one. The Chinese government is…well, not nice, as the Uyghurs can attest. Maybe let’s let them dial back the oppression first, then make friends with them?
This guy for president 2024!
Don’t ask for your employer to meet your time off needs. Tell them that your time off needs are going to be met.
Then you get fired, and in this economy, probably end up homeless.
This apartment complex has a parking garage for cars, and cars are not trivial to steal.
From what I’ve heard, portable angle grinders can easily and quickly cut through any bike lock, including expensive ones.
High enough that there should be full-on riots, and yet…nothing. Depressing silence. Everyone is just lying down and allowing themselves to be robbed.
Now if only Best Buy had a complete selection of computer parts. I miss Fry’s so much.
That thing you’re buying from Amazon? Just go to the manufacturer’s website and buy it directly.
That works if the manufacturer is reputable, but if I want to buy some obscure gadget from a Chinese company whose name looks like the result of somebody mashing their face on a keyboard, no way in hell am I buying it direct.
Or if it’s a no-name thing like a generic charging cable, just buy it from literally any other generic [category] retailer.
Are those guys really any better than Amazon?
Side note: one nice thing about Amazon is I can have items delivered to a locker at a nearby grocery store, instead of having it sent to my apartment building and hoping the courier delivers it to me and not someone else with a vaguely similar name. Couriers keep delivering other people’s packages to me. I even encountered one courier who didn’t speak English and couldn’t read apartment number signs, and had to basically do his job for him. It’s seriously disturbing how bad package delivery is these days. Is there some way to get non-Amazon deliveries sent to some reliable pickup location?
When I was a kid, a college degree was a job ticket, so that’s still seriously alarming.
I’ve heard that there’s a hidden monthly data cap, and you get throttled real hard if you reach it, but now that it’s “unlimited” they aren’t telling you what it is.
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