I am going to be living in my car starting in just a few days, and it is terrifying imagining all the ways that a single encounter with the police could destroy what’s left of my life. America, and my state in particular, is incredibly hostile to its own people, in such a staggering array of different ways that it can be hard to fully appreciate at times. We live in a bad country, run by bad people.

There’s a whole lot of different takes here already, so I’m just going to plug this very excellent book: Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life and bounce.

Please do not solicit medical advice from the internet. If you are concerned, go to a minute-clinic or other doc-in-a-box. It’s much cheaper than the ER, and they’ll tell you if there’s anything to worry about.

I used to watch Mary-Lou’s Flip-Flop Shop every Saturday morning as a kid. Apparently it was locally produced in Houston, where I lived, so I wonder if it was even known about elsewhere? Basically she had a Saturday morning kids’ show that ran for one season, and it aired at like 6:30am. For some reason I was obsessed with it (despite being slightly older than the target demographic by the time it was airing) and I would wake up ungodly early on Saturdays to watch Mary Lou do somersaults and tell jokes.

In 1986, they first met Lynch (a.k.a. Kathleen, a.k.a. Ta-Da the Shit Lady), who was then working at a strip club called Sex World in New York City.[75] Though never an official member, she became Butthole Surfers’ famous “naked dancer”, performing intermittently with them through 1989.[9] One show in Washington, D.C., with GWAR saw Kathleen take the stage to dance in nothing but gold body paint and antique wooden snow shoes. At another particularly wild concert in 1986, Haynes and Lynch, by now completely bald, reportedly engaged in sexual intercourse while on stage, as Leary used a screwdriver to vandalize the club’s speakers. This came after only five songs, during which time Haynes had started a small fire.

I don’t know if it’s the absolute best, but the page for the band The Butthole Surfers is pretty excellent.

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Yup. I left at the end of June, and would have left immediately if they had fucked with old.reddit at any point. I only see the site now when it comes up in search results and seeing what Reddit looks like now instantly assuaged any doubts I had about leaving.

My thoughts are that you are literally pulling a conclusion that the numbers don’t support out of your ass because you ‘feel’ the numbers are probably higher. The entire premise is flawed from the beginning anyway, because any situation where a person pulls a gun on a person without a gun is not a defensive use of a gun, and certainly doesn’t make anyone involved safer. Any interaction between two gun wielding individuals is similarly not a case of a good guy preventing violence. If neither had guns, neither would get shot. It is literally that simple.

I am absolutely not the one being obtuse here. Nothing you have claimed here is supported by actual evidence, unlike the pro-gun control position, and I’m not prepared to base our gun policy on vibes alone. You can spend all day saying ‘that’s different!’ but the facts are not on your side.

I did read the article, and you are not understanding what the article is claiming. All of those events have been counted, as a separate category of firearm incident, and gun-advocacy groups want them counted a different way. The total number of gun-related events is not in dispute, only whether they make good propaganda points for the death cult side of the argument. They are trying to claim that a ‘good guy with a gun’ frequently prevents violence, and that is simply not what the data presented shows. They are trying to claim that a methodological error has been made, when the reality is that they are just wrong and trying to lie about it.

At this point you are arguing that gun reform can’t work simply because Americans are special. You are incorrect, and your position isn’t supported by anything other than propaganda.

Australia successfully disarmed their populace. This argument does not hold water in the world we actually live in.

Australia successfully disarmed their populace. This argument does not hold water in the actual world we live in.

Zelenskiy is the democratically elected head of state, he has as good a mandate as anyone to use force on behalf of his people. The fact that Russia was allowed to invade in the first place, despite security guarantees from both Russia and the US is the failure here. In any case, that argument is a complete non-seqitur to what I actually said. I never said violence was completely preventable, but you absolutely can make it much harder.

Okay, but following that logic, getting rid of all of the guns is still the best thing we could do, because it makes it much harder for people to quickly inflict a huge amount of harm. Ensuring that your local community is free of guns would do far more to protect you and your family than bringing a gun into your home, which you have already acknowledged is a highly dangerous thing to do. It’s like arguing that because your neighbor keeps a bear chained up in his yard, you ought to go out and get a bear, to protect yourself from his bear, when the clear answer is just to get the bears out of the neighborhood.

You are already reliant on the state for defense, whether you admit it or not. The very existence of states requires a functional monopoly on violence, and private gun ownership is just a fig leaf to obscure that fact. A fig leaf that leads to massive, unnecessary loss of life. If your definition of freedom is so limited that not owning a gun makes you automatically un-free, you do not actually believe in freedom, you believe in the right to violently interject yourself into the lives of others. That is pretty much the opposite of freedom.

The tipping point is that he tried to get the party to pay for the coverup for his crimes. He was spending their money instead of raking it in, and they decided to turn off the tap.

I mean, I simply disagree. Violence is always a failure, either of policy, or of personal behavior. Enabling people to escalate that failure to a deadly one with the twitch of a finger is simply not an acceptable paradigm. An armed society, contrary to the witticism, will never be a polite society, because it makes it stupendously easy for bad actors to cause disproportionate harm, relative to the ability of the community to reasonably prepare for. Removing guns entirely is the only reasonable solution if you actually want a free and peaceful society.

This isn’t an error. It’s people claiming to have done a thing they did not do and demanding to be added to the count. To be clear, cops don’t stop violence either, most mass-shooters kill themselves in the end, but lone-gunmen are not out here protecting anybody. Guns only and always make confrontation deadlier than it has to be. There is no situation where having a gun makes you safer, whether you possess a license or not, and the statistics on mortality and gun ownership back that up, going back a long, long time.

Agitating for people to go fight the government with fucking handguns and long rifles is effectively carrying water for the people you hate. There are methods of resistance that are far less likely to get young people gunned down en masse, and by leveraging those methods first, the violence that eventually ensues can be reduced and contained as much as possible.