Bay 12 Games Forum

Ah. Well, that makes the answer relatively easy. We'd either be extinct, monoethnic, or in a state of perpetual war. We'd also be several centuries back technology wise, at this point, assuming we made it this far. Probably significantly smaller population. Buncha' other nasty stuff.

... maybe it's like those hello kitty massagers or somethin', I'unno. Or they sell replacement non-handle bits? Someone thought it was a good idea for some reason.

Here is the thing. Keeping guns out of the hands of unsupervised children, criminals, and the mentally ill has virtually 100% approval. "Arming kids for their own protection" is pure strawman. Teaching kids gun safety and how to shoot, so they learn to respect a gun and what it can do? That's popular. Allowing responsible, law abiding adults to possess firearms in areas that are now "gun-free-zones"? Those are popular. Saying all kids should have guns to protect themselves? Not seriously argued by anybody, but a popular talking point among the left.

I mean... you say it's popular, but popular is not policy. Keeping guns out of the hands of the mentioned has near 100% support and approaching 0% support among the GOP elected for implementing laws and regulation that would actually make it possible (barring a potential exception in doing stuff that would disenfranchise minorities, which as ree noted is one of those areas pro-gun folk seem oddly quite on and the GOP oddly supportive of), and the ATF et al have had their functioning sabotaged and undercut damn substantially. Teaching kids gun safety is popular, but making sure they have it? Largely untouched, left to third parties (that are of wildly varying quality) at best, and if there's been any attempts on making it something approaching mandatory or providing federal support or control for quality, availability, etc., particularly from the "pro-gun" crowd, I haven't heard about it. Allowing responsible, law abiding adults to do something that would be near guaranteed to get more people killed, supported, but any means or methods to actually be able to identify that sort of adult? Staunchly opposed and usually hamstrug even if something does get through. As for arming kids... you say it's a left talking point. It's something I've literally heard with regularity. Usually for older kids rather than particularly young, but regular comments that if some high school that got shot up had guns among the kids, that it wouldn't have happened? Yeah. If it's a left talking point there's a hell of a lot of party line R voters around here that'll cheerfully claim they'd shoot someone coming after their guns that have somehow simultaneously become leftists.

Thing you may be missing is that all that shit you just mentioned is only getting basically any practical support from the pro-control crowd. The other side of that particular argument does just about everything in their power to make any and all of that impossible, unsupported from a legal or governmental angle, or just not even considered for the books.

E: Also grei, an initial possibility may be Jim Webb, a former senator from VA and a near candidate for the 2016 POTUS race. GOP until '06, currently democrat, seems to match most of what you mentioned to a fair degree if not necessarily entirely.

If you think the party of "Assault Weapon Bans", blatant lies about firearm case history, blatant lies about existing gun law, and insistence that there is no such thing as a right to bear arms isn't anti-gun, where do YOU draw that line? Just because most of Europe has gone full-throttle gun-banny does not mean anything less isn't anti-gun.

Around the point they start calling for blanket bans on guns with anything approaching seriousness, mostly, or at least going most of the way to a european level of regulation. Actually insisting there's no such thing as a right to bear arms might help, too, considering the individual right to bear arms is literally part of their platform and regularly repeated by their politicians. Blatant lies about firearm case history and existing gun laws are unfortunately just how both our parties roll on the subject, so if I'm going to hold one party to that it might as well be both and calling it a wash. Assault weapon thing is a bag of stupidity, but so's most stuff either party recommends on the subject, it's just one party is spelunking in the NRA's lower intestine and the other... isn't. As much, at the least.

They're pro-control with occasionally shaky grasp on good policy implementation, but ownership is still something pretty fully supported. Both major parties in this country are pro-gun by any definition you wouldn't see coming directly from the mouth of the american gun lobby, heh.

Space concerns. Probably built to be able to be stored or used in cramped rooms. The real question is why someone would buy one that can be shrunk down if they don't need to be able to stick it somewhere claustrophobic.

... if you're struggling with those views, I think you may not actually be looking. You just described a good chunk of the democrat politicians.

E: Hell, barring the pro-choice it probably catches some of the more moderate republicans, too...

Eh, you're largely just conflating capitalism+ (i.e. mixed market stuff or derivative ideologies) with capitalism. It's easy to do when you have actors on the world stage that would stab you in the eye before they admit something they're doing is socialist or whathaveyou (e.g. the U.S.). There's places where you deal with similar issues with the term capitalist, iirc, where related countries have hard fucked the local people in the name of profit.

Though it's not really a matter of short vs. long term profit, unless you're counting multi-millennial/generational stuff at which point you are way, way outside the bounds of what capitalism is and might still not be sufficient. It's a matter of profit versus non-profit, things that can produce the desired results via profit motive (regardless of scale) and things that can't. If it requires non-market intervention to achieve the desired results, you're no longer dealing with capitalism on its own, and the more intervention required the less you're dealing with capitalism at all, as its fundamental mechanics become increasingly less involved. When you hit the point of government takeover whatever you're dealing with isn't capitalism anymore, though it may still utilize aspects.

Companies that are dumping waste or undermining governments haven't necessarily failed to consider long term profit... it's entirely possible they've just considered it and the results of their calculations came up deadland or puppet state. Which is very much a potentiality, just like it's an aspect of accounting and whatnot to calculate how many people your company's product(s) can kill before the second order effects start costing you more than preventing the deaths do... and outlays into the decades or centuries can still very easily end up with a substantial number of new graves, even if you calculate the knock on economic effect of the dead (which is generally not something a business does, especially beyond whatever scope directly impacts their market or customer base). I've actually crunched numbers like that as class assignments before, heh. Long term view isn't a panacea for capitalism's issues, unfortunately, never mind that vanishingly few practitioners care about it and largely because the nature of the thing provides very strong incentives to focus on the now. Helps in some cases, but it's not enough on its own.

What it boils down to is that if your goal is not profit and the effects of profit, then capitalism is not necessarily your preferred solution for reaching that goal, if it's a solution at all. Ignoring that is... not something you want to do. Glossing over it when the issues related to it cause fairly regular disaster isn't exactly a good idea, either.

... also probably worth noting that most proponents of socialism et al are also against the expressions of excess and misuse related to their ideology. If they're not allowed to discard the nasty bits of their ideology you certainly don't get to discard yours, heh.