"May all members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great nation," he said, "guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle.
"May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans."
The way this is going soon even jesuits will be considered comunists, extremists.
Knives are also the leading murder weapon in Japan, which has exceptionally strict gun laws and armed police. Yet the knife murders still happen (because its very hard to regulate a tool), whereas gun-related crimes whilst not unknown are very rare.
ThetaReactor wrote:Maybe the objects aren't the problem. Maybe it's the people.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
Japanese murder rate per 1M people, 3.97. American murder rate per 1M, 42.01.
Hrm. The Japanese don't have guns, maybe we should consider all crime, after all that should include the failed murder attempts using chopsticks, right?
Japanese total crimes per 1K people, 22.39, American crimes per 1K, 41.29
"massive retard™", "full of shit™", "tiny bitch™", "retarted™", "a bit of a one trick pony™", "petty™", "simple minded idealistic twat™", "miserable humourless fucker™"
People can kill with cars too. Actually they have.
I still find there is a better chance of running away from someone trying to kill people indiscriminatly with a knife or a car than from someone with a gun.
I agree that a nations culture plays a part and solutions aren't always as simple as just banning whats perceived to be the issue, and yeah, I think I put things across a bit clumsily. Part of Japanese culture is the "Koban", your friendly neighbourhood police box [1], which by some accounts are staffed by officers whose remit in other countries would possibly raise concerns about police interference in public life.
[1] No, not that type of police box. For one thing, these ones are probably just as small on the inside.
ThetaReactor wrote:Maybe the objects aren't the problem. Maybe it's the people.
It's the argument I've espoused for several years now... something about American culture, life, attitude and way of being seems to make people lash out violently more often than almost any other country. On the other hand, roughly half of all gun homicides in the US per year are gang/drug related. That's another aspect to consider...
Mayhem wrote:On the other hand, roughly half of all gun homicides in the US per year are gang/drug related. That's another aspect to consider...
Sure, but there's gang and drug problems pretty much everywhere. I'm only guessing*, but you'll probably find that a similar proportion of all homicides everywhere are gang and / or drug related, and in countries where there is strict gun control, the vast majority of gun homicides will be gang and / or drug related.
* I did try to find out, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere easily accessible that actually breaks homicide figures down into anything more than gun / not gun. Infer your own reasons for that...
"massive retard™", "full of shit™", "tiny bitch™", "retarted™", "a bit of a one trick pony™", "petty™", "simple minded idealistic twat™", "miserable humourless fucker™"
If the percentage of drug related homicide is consistent across other countries, there is still a disproportionate rate in the USA. So assuming the 50% rule of thumb holds without any correlation between drug trafficking and the murder rate, there is still a disproportionate amount of drug related homicides going on.
Also, South America. I'm not blaming brown people south of the border for the USA's market demand. It won't help though, in markets where the product is plentiful the competitiveness is control of supply. They've exported most of it to Mexico.
If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy.
US gun homicide rate is about 10k per year. The FBI figures (from what I recall) attribute about half of those to gang and/or drug related. Still trumped by the 21k odd gun related suicides per year.
Everyone already knows what the problem actually is and always was.
But, weirdly, it's taboo to say it out loud and, instead, we all pretend like it's "violent video games" or Elvis shaking his hips or backwards messages in heavy metal or whatever else your fevered imagination can dredge up out of your arse.
Here's your choice. Everything else being equal, you can live in a poor neighbourhood or a rich neighbourhood. We already know the answer, yes?
You can go back to Roman times and it was no different. Poor folk lived in the inner city. Crime rates were higher. No-one chose to live there, if they had better options.
Labour got in trouble when the 2008 financial crisis hit, as an internal memo leaked and it had a warning that, as people were bound to get much poorer from the crisis, all departments should watch out for higher crime rates as a consequence.
It was criticised. But it was entirely right. This is a well-known statistical fact that crime rates go up as prosperity goes down.
Because let's consider what crime is.
A drug dealer, for example, is a business person. An entrepreneur. Albeit in the illegal trade of illicit substances.
Prostitutes are also business person. But rather trading in sexual favours for cash.
A burglar is a thief. Stealing things and then selling them on. Through another branch of criminality, which is "the fence" and the black market generally, trading illegally in stolen or prohibited goods.
What I'm getting at with this list is that the vast majority of crime is economic.
Not all of it, granted, as there are "crimes of passion" where you bump off the missus after catching her cheating on you with the bloke next door and all that. Though even in the bracket of murder - which tends to have less economic motives - there's still a large chunk of it which is things like trying to kill a family member to get their inheritance, which is economic again.
And also, though still economic, there are folks who do things like swindle stocks and shares, who aren't poor but are just greedy to be ever more rich - so "economic" here doesn't necessarily mean "poor people only". But, obviously, poor people have more motive on the economic front than folks what ain't poor.
So, sure, it's not a black-and-white picture - but there's also not that many shades of grey here, as you'd likely be right 90+% of the time if you just blindly guessed an economic motive.
All this knife and gun crime has a lot to do with gangs. And, you know, if you wanted to find yourself a gang, then would you start looking in a poor inner city neighbourhood or a leafy "little England" village first? Are its member more likely to be poor kids from shit schools who face what the Sex Pistols referred to as "no future for me", or Oxford and Cambridge graduates on their "gap year" that Mummy and Daddy paid for?
Exactly. Now that I start spelling this stuff out then it's all pretty much screaming from the rooftops into our faces here.
You can even track this historically. Crime rates have been progressively declining over centuries, in tandem with how everyone is getting relatively more prosperous with the advancement of science and technology.
I mean, poor is still poor. But today's poor still has Sky TV, mobile phones and Nike trainers, as these things have, in a more absolute sense, become cheaper. But rewind a century and they'd have rickets and malnutrition, and be dead by 30 instead.
As mentioned, Labour's leaked memo was right. There are clear statistical spikes in crime rates that entirely track economic boom and busts.
And, hey, though America is one of the richest nations on the planet, it's also one that suffers the biggest gap between rich and poor. Amongst the worst in economic inequality. I'll ask the taboo question here. Generally speaking, what's the economic situation of the people and places involved in all this violence?
Money, money, money. It's so funny in a rich man's world.
And, apparently, rule #1 of the rich man's world is that you never ever ever ask these questions, draw the clear and plain conclusions - which, as I say, everyone already implicitly knows is true, because your actions say so when you choose the nice rich neighbourhood and the good schools and such for you and yours - because of that rather inconvenient problem that "with great power comes great responsibility".
If we admit the open secret that this is down to the practice of leaving the poor to rot on the shit heap, then we'd have to admit the moral responsibility for that and, you know, pay for preventing it and improving things. And we don't want to pay a penny, as this money is mine, all mine.
So we continue with the obviously perfectly silly lies.
It's violent video games. It's heavy metal backwards messages to a non-existent Satan. It's Elvis being "sexual" with that thigh wobble and curled lip. It's young ladies showing their ankles. It's gays causing the floods, as "God hates gays". It's them black folk stealing all the jobs and sleeping with "our" white women. It's bacon causing cancer.
It's anything - absolutely anything, no matter how blatantly ridiculous - but ever stating the obvious truth.
We just leave people to rot. And this is because, deep down, we're selfish cunts. Including in the fact that we all conspire never to admit that openly and blame absolutely everything else.
"These are the days of the open hand
They will not be the last
Look around now
These are the days of the beggars and the choosers
This is the year of the hungry man
Whose place is in the past
Hand in hand with ignorance
And legitimate excuses
The rich declare themselves poor
And most of us are not sure
If we have too much
But we'll take our chances
'Cause God's stopped keeping score..."
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
What worries me the most is that those agreements end up having even less value than they had before. Both in this case, and with the Paris Environmental agreement, a new President gets elected and the agreement is summarily dropped.
Why to do agreements in first place if at the end of a Presidencial term they can just be dropped?
What worries me the most is that those agreements end up having even less value than they had before. Both in this case, and with the Paris Environmental agreement, a new President gets elected and the agreement is summarily dropped.
Why to do agreements in first place if at the end of a Presidencial term they can just be dropped?
He has no idea what the agreement was other than Obama made it, Fox News hates it, so therefore he must overturn it.
Such is the power of the President.
Well, the US is pulling out of the Iran deal. One factor that is puzzling me is that the US is threatening sanctions against European companies that try to do business with Iran; I wonder if this means for example if Airbus offers new aircraft to Iran, the US will try to impose sanctions against one of the bigger European companies - would this effectively be sanctions against its allies in NATO? Would they really do that?
In slightly happier news, North Korea has released three US citizens.
