It just gets better and better for gun owners

[Blind groper]

Seth

You are still ignoring international data. 23 out of the 24 richest western nations have bans on hand guns, and have minimal problems with hand guns in criminal hands. It is only the USA out of those 24 nations that have a major problem with hand guns in criminal possession, and this is simply because the USA does not have any general limit on hand guns.

[Seth]

You clearly don't know what "net neutrality" is. It's about treating all data as equal on the net.

Clearly you don't understand what the purpose and intent of net neutrality actually is, which is to give the government regulatory control over content delivery.

The Internet, at least here in the US, exists because it has NOT been run like a public utility, it's been run like a business, which means that you get what you pay for. If you want T1 data speeds, you pay for T1 service and you expect to get T1 percent of the pipeline to use whenever you want it. If you only pay for 54 mbps or 2400 baud data rates, that's what you get. You don't get to use somebody else's T1 pipeline because that's not what you paid for.

And if you pay for a hotel room at the Best Western, you don't get concierge service, a limo and a bell-boy to take your luggage to your suite. You get to schlep your own bags.

And even if you stay at the Ritz-Carlton, if you're in the economy room and I'm in the Presidential Suite, my bags get hauled before yours do and the limo is reserved for my use, not yours, because I'm paying for that privilege.

In the same way, an Internet ISP or backbone service provider has every right to prioritize Donald Trump's data packets over your data packets if Trump is willing to pay for the privilege.

"Net Neutrality" is just another Marxist Progressive scheme to impose socialist "fairness" concepts as an excuse to regulate, but more importantly it's a way for governments to insert themselves into the regulation of content delivery, where, once established, government works like a cancer eating away at the free flow of information, resulting in more and more authoritarian control of content delivery with the inevitable result that favored content will get the big pipe and disfavored content will get the soda straw.

Hilary Clinton has already said that content on the Internet needs to be "managed" by the government, and so has Obama...just like ever totalitarian dictator in history has (along with gun control) used control of the flow and content of public information as a tool of oppression and propaganda.

Allowing the government camel to get its nose under the tent in the single most important advance in freedom of speech and information that mankind has ever seen is a very, very bad idea with "unintended" (for you, not for government which fully intends them) consequences that will bring the Internet to a virtual halt.

If you don't think this is possible, just look at China's Internet. Or Russia's. Or Cuba's.

Be very, very careful what you wish for, because you will come to regret your blind greed for faster movie downloads..

[pErvinalia]

You clearly don't know what "net neutrality" is. It's about treating all data as equal on the net.

Clearly you don't understand what the purpose and intent of net neutrality actually is, which is to give the government regulatory control over content delivery.

[/quote]

The neoliberals in government are the ones who want prioritised traffic on the web! Please get a clue. Without net neutrality enshrined in law, we will see corporations making value judgements about traffic on the web, and slowing down traffic that they judge to be of lesser value. I don't even know why the fuck I am telling you this. You think everything is a Marxist conspiracy. You are certifiably bonkers. Can't wait to be in India for a month and not have to listen to you rant on and on and on about Marxist boogeymen.

[Collector1337]

The short-hand objection of Collector to the phrase "for the good of society" is merely a reflection of the truth that this excuse is the most common excuse used by those in power to infringe upon or deny the rights of the individual, particularly by Marxists and their ilk. Therefore an initial knee-jerk rejection of the use of that phrase is actually quite appropriate, and is a manifestation of the belief that those proposing such regulations must first demonstrate a compelling need to regulate, that the regulation is the minimum possible infringement on individual rights absolutely necessary, and that the regulation actually accomplishes the legitimate government objective.

[JimC]

Seth wrote:

"Net Neutrality" is just another Marxist Progressive scheme to impose socialist "fairness" concepts as an excuse to regulate, but more importantly it's a way for governments to insert themselves into the regulation of content delivery, where, once established, government works like a cancer eating away at the free flow of information, resulting in more and more authoritarian control of content delivery with the inevitable result that favored content will get the big pipe and disfavored content will get the soda straw.

There is a fair argument in terms of "user pays", in that if you want to pay more than the standard rate, you get a better deal. However, this largely exists now - the amount I can download, and the speed of delivery, depends on what plan I'm purchasing from my service provider, and more money will deliver a better service, which is fair enough.

It is a long stretch from that to claim that there is an insidious marxist campaign to make us all equal. You'd be better off as a libertarian complaining about the evils of government internet censorship in many parts of the world, or being worried about the ability of your own government, if not to censor, then at least to snoop more than is consistent with liberty...

[Seth]

Seth

You are still ignoring international data. 23 out of the 24 richest western nations have bans on hand guns, and have minimal problems with hand guns in criminal hands.

Cherry picking. All of those countries still have problems with violent crime, for which the best deterrent and defense is the handgun.

It is only the USA out of those 24 nations that have a major problem with hand guns in criminal possession, and this is simply because the USA does not have any general limit on hand guns.

It has tens of thousands of limits on handguns and every other kind of firearm. Firearms are the most regulated consumer products in the US, bar none.

Every illegal use of a firearm is illegal, which means there is a regulation prohibiting that conduct. Fewer than one in ten thousand firearms are ever used by a criminal to commit a crime. One in every 120 firearms in the US is used for lawful self defense. It's illegal for a felon to so much as touch a firearm of any kind. Using a firearm in a felony has an automatic 5 year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence. It's a federal offense to knowingly sell or give a firearm of any kind, or any ammunition, to a felon.

So your argument is utterly ignorant, deceitful, mendacious and dishonest.

[Seth]

The neoliberals in government are the ones who want prioritised traffic on the web!

The issue is not "prioritized traffic," the issue is government interference in that prioritization.

Please get a clue. Without net neutrality enshrined in law, we will see corporations making value judgements about traffic on the web, and slowing down traffic that they judge to be of lesser value.

No, you will see them slowing down traffic that pays less money.

If my ISP slows down my service because it's run by Christians and they don't like me posting to an Atheist forum, then I can go find an ISP that won't do that. But once the government gets involved, and gets regulatory authority over content delivery, it can disfavor Atheist discussion and order EVERY ISP to slow down and marginalize that content, just as China does today. When the gatekeepers have a profit motive, they will respond to impacts on profits, positive or negative. They will increase capacity as demand for their product rises, and they will control the flow of content when the pipeline gets full, and their motive is to keep customers happy lest they defect to another service provider. They could give a fuck about what's in the pipeline...except for Google, which is now censoring "pornography" and explicit photos in its pipeline, which will result in a realignment of users who object to such censorship to other providers. Then again, Google wants to run the whole world, so their motives are not necessarily market-driven, they are becoming more and more politically driven.

And if Google and the government get together to control content delivery, and content itself (as evidenced by the censoring going on now by Google, which is not a government agency and therefore can censor anything it wants, including dissenting political opinion) the greatest advance in human freedom in the history of mankind will be destroyed and will become a propaganda pipeline for whatever political power happens to control it.

I'll take 1200 bauds of uncensored Internet access over a government-controlled, government-monitored, NGO censored Internet any day.

I don't even know why the fuck I am telling you this. You think everything is a Marxist conspiracy. You are certifiably bonkers. Can't wait to be in India for a month and not have to listen to you rant on and on and on about Marxist boogeymen.

Well, the problem is that most of the shit we face actually is related to or driven by a very obvious and well-known Marxist conspiracy, of which you appear to be one of the useful idiots.

[pErvinalia]

Please get a clue. Without net neutrality enshrined in law, we will see corporations making value judgements about traffic on the web, and slowing down traffic that they judge to be of lesser value.

No, you will see them slowing down traffic that pays less money.

Absolute bullshit. No amount of money can buy certain non-contentious ads on TV and in newspapers. It's all about censorship and furthering the corporate take-over or our societies. Corporatism is an actual real problem that exists right now, unlike your idiotic Marxist conspiracy theories.

I don't even know why the fuck I am telling you this. You think everything is a Marxist conspiracy. You are certifiably bonkers. Can't wait to be in India for a month and not have to listen to you rant on and on and on about Marxist boogeymen.

Well, the problem is that most of the shit we face actually is related to or driven by a very obvious and well-known Marxist conspiracy, of which you appear to be one of the useful idiots.

[/quote]

Seth, I demonstrably know fuck loads more about economics, socialism, capitalism and libertarianism than you. Not to mention human psychology and the common fallacies of the human mind (of which you know very little). You are a paranoid head case that evidence and logic has no impression on. For the love of God, I know there is a somewhat smart person inside of you. You can think your way out of the cult you've sunken into.

[Blind groper]

Seth

Do you have a form of intellectual handicap relating to maths?

Frankly, that is the impression I get. You seem to think that a country with one tenth of the problem with guns and gun murders is just as badly off as the one with ten times that amount. Basic maths. Duh!

My country has on a per capita basis one twenty fifth of the gun murder rate of the USA, and this is due to our much tighter gun control. But the fact that we still have a minute amount of gun crime makes you think we have gained nothing???? What is wrong with your ability to think, for Finagle's sake!!

[Seth]

Seth

Do you have a form of intellectual handicap relating to maths?

Nope.

Frankly, that is the impression I get.

That's because you're an idiot.

You seem to think that a country with one tenth of the problem with guns and gun murders is just as badly off as the one with ten times that amount. Basic maths. Duh!

Bogus statistical argument. It's not about a "country," it's about the individuals who comprise that country and their individual rights, which is why this is not a statistical issue.

My country has on a per capita basis one twenty fifth of the gun murder rate of the USA, and this is due to our much tighter gun control.

Not relevant.

But the fact that we still have a minute amount of gun crime makes you think we have gained nothing???? What is wrong with your ability to think, for Finagle's sake!!

Nothing at all is wrong with my thinking. What's wrong with your thinking is that you choose to ignore the simple fact that every time you disarm a law-abiding individual, and that individual is victimized, you are morally responsible for that harm. You don't care about the people you live next to. You don't care if they are raped or murdered because they were unarmed as long as you get to tout your nation's low gun-crime rates.

On the other hand, I think that every individual is important and that their right to effective self defense outweighs any specious argument that because somebody might illegally obtain and use a gun to commit a crime, this justifies disarming everyone except the violent criminals.

The solution to criminals with guns is not banning guns, because that simply doesn't work, as we see even in your country. The solution is to make being a criminal with a gun a very, very dangerous and life-threatening thing to do by allowing those who choose to carry arms for self defense to do so and to use them with lethal effect when necessary. This has two immediate benefits: it dissuades criminals from committing violent crimes and it reduces the number of violent criminals in society through attrition.

[Seth]

Please get a clue. Without net neutrality enshrined in law, we will see corporations making value judgements about traffic on the web, and slowing down traffic that they judge to be of lesser value.

No, you will see them slowing down traffic that pays less money.

Absolute bullshit. No amount of money can buy certain non-contentious ads on TV and in newspapers.

Wrong. You can always buy your own transmitter or printing press. Rupert Murdoch and Fox News prove that fact.

It's all about censorship and furthering the corporate take-over or our societies.

Only government agents can engage in censorship. Corporations merely engage in advertising. Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from publishing a broadsheet which you hand out on street corners as in the days of yore except your own laziness.

Corporatism is an actual real problem that exists right now, unlike your idiotic Marxist conspiracy theories.

Not really. Corporations are not alien beings, they are comprised of people with a common interest. If you like, you can create your own corporation and band together with others of common interest and publish any message you like. You just can't necessarily do it on someone else's dime.

Seth, I demonstrably know fuck loads more about economics, socialism, capitalism and libertarianism than you.

No you don't, you just think you do, but you're wrong.

Not to mention human psychology and the common fallacies of the human mind (of which you know very little). You are a paranoid head case that evidence and logic has no impression on. For the love of God, I know there is a somewhat smart person inside of you. You can think your way out of the cult you've sunken into.

Unfortunately, there's no evidence whatsoever that you can think your way out of a wet paper bag, much less the cult you've fallen into.

Have a nice trip.

[Blind groper]

Seth

The reverse of your argument is true. You claim that removing a gun from someone makes the person or organisation that removes that gun morally responsible for the incredibly rare possibility of harm resulting.

Wrong!!!
Instead, it is the government that permits widespread possession of guns, leading to massively high homicide rates, as happens in the USA, that is morally responsible for the subsequent thousands upon thousands of deaths.

And as I pointed out before, your "rights" argument is so much elephantine excrementum. Would you agree that kings have the "right" to put people to the torture? Because that was widely believed once, and had as much merit as your crazy idea that possessing a tool for committing murder is a human right.

[Seth]

Seth

The reverse of your argument is true. You claim that removing a gun from someone makes the person or organisation that removes that gun morally responsible for the incredibly rare possibility of harm resulting.

Yes, it does.

Wrong!!!
Instead, it is the government that permits widespread possession of guns, leading to massively high homicide rates, as happens in the USA, that is morally responsible for the subsequent thousands upon thousands of deaths.

Wrong. The distinction is the difference between a lawful act and an unlawful act. According to your logic, the government, and the car manufacturer is morally responsible for deaths caused by drunk drivers. But there is in fact no nexus between the vending or regulation of an automobile and the illegal use of an automobile to commit a crime.

There is, however, a nexus between denying a person his right to own an automobile (or a gun) and harms that might occur as a result of that denial of rights. This is of course because without proper legal justification, any denial of any right makes the one who denies that right responsible for the harm caused. That's why a person who kills a minority person can be prosecuted for a "hate crime" in addition to a state murder charge if the motivation is to deny the minority individual's right to life. That's how the FBI got involved in the civil rights workers murders in the 60s.

A clearer analogy would be that you are a cop (government agent) and I am a citizen, and you see me being threatened by a gang of thugs with baseball bats. The law does not require you to intervene, but if I pull out my gun and you interfere with my act of lawful self defense by taking my gun away from me, leaving me unarmed at the mercy of the thugs, YOU can be held criminally and civilly liable for infringing on my right of self defense even if it happens to be illegal for me to possess a firearm in your jurisdiction. In other words, you can look away, but you can't make things worse by interfering with my right to defend myself.

So, no, the logic does NOT work both ways as you allege. But nice try.

And as I pointed out before, your "rights" argument is so much elephantine excrementum. Would you agree that kings have the "right" to put people to the torture? Because that was widely believed once, and had as much merit as your crazy idea that possessing a tool for committing murder is a human right.

Strawman and red herring. Hanguns are not "tools for committing murder." They are tools. They may be used to commit murder, but they may also be used for a large number of other lawful activities, just as baseball bats, hammers, kitchen knives, rocks and automobiles may be used for lawful or unlawful purposes. The responsibility for a tool being used for an unlawful purpose is on the individual who uses it in that fashion, and the government has no authority or power to ban hammers on the specious argument that somebody, somewhere might use one criminally.

As you have said, handguns are merely tools, and they have exactly the same characteristics as a hammer does; they are inanimate objects that may be dangerous if misused by a person, and they are no more a "tool for committing murder" than a hammer is.

That particular argument of yours was not even a credibly try, it was so obviously flawed as to be ludicrous and laughable.

[Blind groper]

Seth

Governments have a duty to improve the well being of the people. If they do not do this, they should not even exist. Since widespread ownership of handguns leads to widespread murder and mutilation by bullet, it is the duty of any responsible government to remove as many of those as possible. Every government in the world, except the corrupt USA government does this.

On rights.
There is no "right to bear arms", except for that ludicrous and self serving second amendment, which was created, as it clearly states, to permit the early USA government to call on citizens to become militia for defense. Even that purpose is now obsolete.

Out of the more than 195 nations that make up planet Earth, only the USA has a statement making gun ownership a right. The United Nations declaration of human rights clearly has no such statement. Basically, outside the sick imaginations of gun nutter Americans, and the corrupt promulgation of that horrible idea by gun manufacturers, such a "right" does not exist.

You are like a smoker living in the first half of the 20th Century, who fervently believes the lying advertisements of the tobacco industry, which claimed smoking was good for you. Except that the tobacco industry is replaced by the gun manufacturers, who use their minions, like the NRA and John Lott, to claim that guns are good, when the smallest intelligence can see that a tool designed for murder cannot be good.

[hackenslash]

I know there is a somewhat smart person inside of you.

I'd be up for a formal debate on this premise.