GeorgiaDon

Respectfully disagree, I think that legal repercussions are a factor included in the calculation of "risk" by lots of people. For example, drinking and driving used to be acceptable behavior; there were even popular expressions for it such as "one for the road". The percentage of drivers who drive drunk declined steadily though the 1980's and 1990's, and has plateaued since at around 20%, about half the rate of the 70s and early '80s. Various analyses,such as this one, strongly indicate that the decline was due in substantial part to DUI laws. DUI has always been very risky in terms of increasing chances of a serious or fatal accident. In the 70s, about 60% of drivers never drove drunk, because they didn't drink at all or because they chose to mitigate risk by not drinking when they had to drive. About 40% of drivers chose to take the risk of drinking and driving. With the passage of 0.1% and later 0.08% laws, about half of those drivers stopped drinking and driving. So for those people the risk of an accident wasn't quite enough, but the accident risk plus the legal risk was enough to influence their behavior. The remaining 20% seem to be impervious to any rational risk assessment. So regarding drunk driving, about 60% of the population has always been "cautious and responsible". Of the remainder, laws have influenced about half to avoid driving drunk. I think a 50% reduction in the percentage of drivers who are impaired is quite worthwhile. Of course there is a residual group for whom no incentive seems to be enough to change their behavior. Does the existence of this group mean that DUI laws are useless and should be repealed? Of course not. I don't know how well the DUI situation fits the SYG situation, my point is just that laws can influence behavior. That has always been true. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Care to actually name some, that add up to something close to the amount of the shortfall? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Not for the first time, I have no clue what you are talking about. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I strongly agree with this statement, as there is nothing that you can do that is more serious and more irreversible than taking someone's life. It seems to me though that stand your ground laws negate this type of cautious thinking, as they remove the duty to de-escalate the situation. Also, Georgia (for one example) is a shall-issue state that does not require any training before issuing a carry permit. There is a background check, but no requirement that you demonstrate any knowledge of laws or proficiency. Smart people will get training anyway, of course. It's just not safe to assume a Georgian with a concealed weapon knows the law, or that they can hit the side of a barn. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I grew up in Canada; "politeness" is just part of the culture there, and I can assure you it never occurred to anyone that they could get their ass shot for behaving like an asshole. It really is a major condemnation of American society, a real insult, to suggest that Americans need the threat of being shot to force them to treat one another respectfully. It also has not been my experience that Americans in general would behave in an assholish manner if it were not for the threat posed by guns. Almost all the Americans I know are quite decent people. Whatever the merits of firearms may be with regard to personal defense, the argument that they are necessary for a polite society is bogus and insulting, IMHO. Tombstone Arizona is famous in the literature of the wild west as the epitome of the shoot-em-up gunslinger's mentality. In reality, visitors had to check in at the sheriff's office, and leave their guns there while they were in town. I guess Wyatt Earp never heard of the 2nd amendment. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

It is not. From CNN: "Investigators found 76 shell casings in the auditorium. Most of the spent rounds -- 65 -- were .223 caliber rifle rounds, six were shotgun shells and five were .40 caliber rounds from the Glocks, Appel said. Police also found one of the tear-gas canisters inside the theater, Appel said." Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

In Georgia? Home of the only city (

I assume you say this to your parents? Tell them they're fucking idiots for not aborting you? More money for them and all that. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I don't know for certain, as her world view is so completely different from mine. I have a couple of speculations, though. First, I'd bet that she grew up in the "projects". While I don't have any objection to a hand up for people who really need it, I have long thought that creating whole communities where everybody is on government assistance is a really bad idea. If everybody you know, all the people around you, and your parent and maybe theirs before them are on the dole, it must just seem "normal", not something you need to get away from or be appreciative for. Break those communities up, and integrate the residents into regular communities. I know people might not want a welfare family for their next door neighbor, but maybe strict rules of conduct or else you lose your privileges can help. Anyway, if kids grow up seeing their friends from the neighborhood coming from two parent self-supporting families maybe they'll come to see that as "normal". The other thing is the 15 kids from multiple fathers issue. On one hand this suggests a pathological lack of self esteem to the point where your only value in life is as a sperm receptacle and pumping out kids. Maybe the woman has other mental issues, she doesn't seem to be able to connect her present actions with future consequences very well. Who knows? Certainly there is a serious cultural problem with the ready acceptance of the idea that fathers aren't really expected to stick around and support their kids. I can't fathom why so many women just take it for granted that single parenthood and the attendant poverty is their destiny. Of course that is tied up in the high incarceration rate for men in those communities. It seems as if going to jail is "no big deal", just a right of passage/fact of life. Again this may relate to the way we (as a society) create these communities of poverty ("projects") where such issues become so common they are seen as normal. For the rest of us, going to jail would be a big deal, costing us our jobs and professions in many cases, or our businesses, as well as being immensely humiliating. It's a real condemnation of certain cultures, in my opinion, that Mike Tyson's stature was actually increased (or at least not completely destroyed) by his rape conviction and jail sentence. Anyway just some random musings. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Let me explain it to you. See, you've got the birds and you've got the bees... Probably very little. Stimulus/response at best. Three billion years of evolution gone completely to waste. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Unfortunately you can't fix stupid. If she can't manage her affairs, those kids should be taken from her and placed in homes where they'll get to see real grownups taking care of their own responsibilities. Too many kids grow up in an environment where they think someone else will take care of them, because that's all they have ever experienced. I think it's a fair bet that Mom grew up in a welfare home too. I've got to say, also, that something seems sketchy about that story. She doesn't seem old enough to have produced 15 kids, the "fiance" doesn't look old enough to have fathered 10 of them, and a lot of the kids look quite close in age. It's possible I guess, assuming she started at 12 and had one a year or so. Also what did "dad" do to support the family before he got himself arrested? You'd need a substantial income to feed and clothe 15 kids. Smells like a welfare scam to me. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Well, firstly it seems to me the other constitution rights aren't absolute, in the sense that judicial mechanisms exist for those rights to be suppressed. Police can obtain a warrant to search your property, and seize evidence, so the protection afforded by the fourth is not absolute. Similarly, many rights are extinguished, temporarily or permanently, after a felony conviction. So Congress can act to limit some rights under some circumstances, as long as they provide a mechanism for judicial review and relief if the limitation is unwarranted (so to speak). Also, the 2nd amendment is already circumscribed for everybody, in the sense of how one defines the "arms" that you have a right to bear. Some time ago I started a thread to try to learn why the 2nd doesn't allow private citizens to own a wide range of military arms, including land mines, grenades, surface-to-air missiles, functional tanks with appropriate ammunition, and so on. Are these not "arms" too? Yet even the most pro-gun citizens of SC at the time declined to argue that everyone should be allowed to posses such weapons. The traditional understanding of arms is "guns", though that isn't explicitly stated in the 2nd, and it isn't consistent with the often-stated purpose of the 2nd to allow citizens to resist a tyrannical government (who would have such weapons). There seems to be a general consensus that certain "arms" are too dangerous for the general public, and anyway they aren't much fun as you really can't go into your back yard and shoot off a few SAMs just for the hell of it. If there is already such fuzziness about what is covered by the 2nd, and given that people seem to concede that they shouldn't be allowed to own certain types of weapons, then the 2nd can't really be argued to be an unlimited right to own absolutely any weapon one might imagine. Where is the line between "suitable for self defense" and "so destructive that access is strictly limited to the military"? If we can agree that public safety concerns are sufficient to keep certain classes of weapons out of most people's hands, then why are we not allowed to even have a discussion about where a reasonable balance between public safety and 2nd amendment rights might be found? Note that I'm not saying that that "reasonable balance" necessarily requires a ban on high capacity firearms, I'm just saying it should be possible (even taking into consideration the 2nd amendment) to have a discussion. I'm also curious if there is any degree of mental impairment that you would agree justifies denying someone their 2nd amendment right? Can we (as a society) ever be justified in deciding that someone is so incapable of making rational judgements that they shouldn't be allowed access to firearms? If someone states they want a gun so they take revenge on a boss/ex/ex's new boyfriend, is that sufficient according to the constitution to refuse to sell them a gun? Or do we have to wait until they have actually maimed/killed someone? (I'm only asking because you come across as having very strong ideas on the constitution, and I'm curious if you see any scope at all for factoring public safety into the issue since the 2nd doesn't explicitly mention such limitations). Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Too bad he wasn't armed. After all, everybody (well, Wayne LaPierre and half of speaker's corner) knows the only proper response to gun violence is to have a bigger gun. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Thanks for your comments, they do help me to understand what is at stake for AIG a lot better. I'm glad they decided not to join the suit, and hope they don't suffer repercussions from their shareholders because of that. Your comment also prompts me to think about other aspects of corporate behavior and how that has changed (or at least is generally perceived to have changed) over the years. For example, I have the impression that it was more common for corporations to support philanthropic causes in the past. I wonder if this has anything to do with the general erosion of "sense of community" in modern society, so shareholders are less likely to approve of activities that don't improve their own bottom line. Being a shareholder makes you kind of anonymous, in that you are just one of many, and the company will take the "blame", so people are shielded from criticism when they force companies to disengage from community-minded activities. In times past people more-or-less accepted that if they were doing well they had an obligation to "give back", but that seems to be a quaint anachronism these days. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Here's a real record for you, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center. "2012 marked the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States with the year consisting of a record warm spring, second warmest summer, fourth warmest winter and a warmer-than-average autumn. The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3°F, 3.2°F above the 20th century average, and 1.0°F above 1998, the previous warmest year." I marked the most important bit with bold and underlining to make sure you can't miss it. So, I'll see you your December snowfall and raise you a whole year. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

However, the statement was not made by the Rutgers climatology people, it was made by a blogger with an obvious denier bias. Real climatologists don't go on about "records" based on cherry picked data from a single month (December 2012) from a limited selection of years. It's sort of like claiming a world record for the largest freefall formation completed between 10 and 10:15 AM on odd-numbered Tuesdays in February of even numbered years. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

No Brent, I don't think Chicago is the entire northern hemisphere, that was just one example of several links that talked about the lack of normal snowfall in various northern hemisphere locations. My point was that you state in your thread title that snow cover is at record levels, but link to a climatology database that says no such thing. Now you give a link to another graph, which covers only December snowfall over the last 46 years and shows that December snowfall is very variable from year to year, with December 2012 having marginally more snow than other years. Of course December 2011 had less snow than average. Whoop de doo. Just as Chicago is not "the northern hemisphere", one month out of the last 46 years does not show "record breaking snowfall", much less evidence that the climate is changing in one way or the other or is standing still. The Rutger's site does not say "record" anything, that's a label of convenience you chose to stick on things for political expediency. So, you did pull "record breaking" out of your ass. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

This sort of begs the question, is there any such a thing as corporate morality other than "do whatever is legal to make a dollar" in your experience? Is "gratitude for saving their ass" not fungible and therefor not part of the thinking? I ask because in normal human interactions there are lots of things one just doesn't do, even though there is not a specific law against them, because to do them makes things like trust, respect, etc impossible. It would be impossible to have anything like a human interaction with a person whose only value is to do whatever profits themselves, without any regard for the impact on other people, as long as their lawyers can keep them out of jail. Of course we are talking about corporations not individuals, but corporate decisions are made by real people; if they are willing to be total pricks in business, are they not likely to be total pricks as people too? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Hey Brent, I'm going to try this once more. The link you posted says nothing about "northern hemisphere snow cover at record levels". I tried googling "record snow", and got links like this one, about record lack of snow. So, care to explain your thread title? Did you actually have a link to something legitimate about record snow falls? Or did you just pull that title out of your ass? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Let's see if you can complete the picture here: 99.9% of people who own guns never commit a violent crime. Therefore, guns do not cause people to become violent criminals. 99.9% of people who are prescribed psychoactive drugs never commit a violent crime. Therefore, ___________ (fill in the blank). Why doesn't the argument cut both ways? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

..or whatshisname currently screwing us. Saying his name leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Saying Clinton's name leaves a bad taste in Monica's mouth. So, you're telling us you've been blowing Obama? Alrighty, then...and I thought you didn't like the guy. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Is it a good question? UK laws are different than US laws. Also Mr. Martin is perhaps not quite the poster boy for defenseless homeowners that some would make him out to be. Apparently he told police he was awakened by the sound of breaking glass, but forensic evidence indicated he laid in wait for the 2 kids who burglarized his house. Further, after he had wounded both kids and they were down on the ground, he executed one and further wounded the other with shotgun blasts to the back. Got any US examples? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

So, the only example you could find was of a guy who killed a police officer as the officer was serving a warrant to search the house for drugs. You have repeatedly made the assertion that homeowners are not allowed to defend themselves in their own home, yet you are so far completely unable to substantiate that claim. That's because the claim is bogus, part of the mythology that is being spun around the gun control debate. It may bother you and others of your ilk, but you can't just shoot anyone who happens to be on your property and expect to not have to answer any questions. You can't shoot the guy delivering the mail, or the fedex guy leaving a package, or the person who is reading your electric meter, and not have consequences. The person has to pose some kind of a threat to you. And yes, everybody in America, including criminals, have rights. How would you do it otherwise? Everyone is entitled to a fair trial, except criminals? So as soon as you are charged with a crime you lose your right to a trial? The right applies only to those who don't need it? Here is an interesting case. Do you think this should be acceptable behavior? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Not even if he's a really big guy in a red suit with chimney soot all over him? Ho Ho Blam Blam Blam Blam Blam Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

No, at least not the ideas being floated around in the media. However, AFAIK the commission Biden is heading hasn't released any recommendations yet, so it seems a bit premature to say they are worthless. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)