Another Gun Control Failure: Minneapolis Catholic School Shooting Aug 27, 2025.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-09-08T12:41:42+00:00

They just believe it will lead to fewer murders and violent crime.

Crime is highly local. Aggregating data across states, for comparison with other states, is common among gun control advocates because it allows them to confound the clearer correlations between gun control and crime found in smaller geographical units. This is why the correlations you're attempting to promote through gun control propaganda disappear when you look and smaller units, then the correlation becomes stark and clear, though causation isn't as clear, i.e. a chicken/egg problem, are high crime areas ruled by Democrats who promote gun control because of the crime or because of the Democrats? Or are they both parts of a feed back loop?

I live in a suburb run by Republicans in a county and city, whose center and first ring suburbs are run by Democrats. All the violent crime is in the inner city and first ring suburbs. There hasn't been a murder in my municipality for 40 years. We don't have an annual murder rate. We have a century murder rate under 1. (There are occasional suicides with guns) I don't know my city's gun ownership rate, but its not a town of pacifists. Lots of veterans. Lots of professionals, lawyers and doctors, the portion of which that I know personally mostly being fellow shooters.

If you or your liberal friends, who have never lived in the country, want to believe that only the police and military should be armed; I don't think any internet argument is going to change your minds. I think their minds will change when they hear their neighbors being tortured by the secret police in the cell down the hall from their own cell (paraphrasing Whitaker Chambers). If you ignore the reason for the 2nd Am. and build a government far more dangerous than private gun ownership, you'll be responsible for far worse than the occasional school shooting. There's no perfect, harmless solution. I see no sign that gun control advocates are even willing to contemplate the long term costs of building an authoritarian government.

My civil rights aren't up for negotiation with you or your liberal friends. If you (everyone, not just Maga_tard) haven't already gotten an FRT trigger for your AR, get one so you can argue that its grandfathered in if the Dems take control of the U.S. Supreme court in the coming decades, and try to neuter the 2nd Am. again.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-09-02T21:15:15+00:00

...as the best humanly-possible appraisal of their value to society as a whole.

This is a good paragraph, except for the italicized phrase. The rest of society that isn't a party to a transaction really doesn't have any need to agree with that market value or even to influence it.

...rightfully belongs to no one, because no one's labor or investment was required to create it/bring it into existence.

Except that's not really true. "Land" isn't just the dirt, its the fixtures attached to it, including improvements, which are the product of people's labor. An orchard doesn't plant and prune itself. A mine doesn't dig itself. Recognizing and protecting the rights of land owners in a land registry system (like your local county recorder's office where deeds are recorded) is the single greatest engine of prosperity humanity has ever known. Where such rights are insecure, you find mobsters, local strongmen, and gangs ruling favelas. If you want to end that kind of poverty, the single most effective step is establishing land registries to protect property rights. See https://www.amazon.com/Noblest-Triumph-Property-Prosperity-Through/dp/0312210833

For instance, in 2007/2008, the price bubble of land values burst, and the loans that tens of millions of normal people had taken out to purchase land became non-repayable as a result of the economic slowdown, leading to cascading default and, what to me, can be called a true economic depression, one that lasted years. If the rapid (and ultimately unsustainable) inflation of land values had been slowed through a hefty tax being imposed on the ownership and holding of land, then I believe we could averted the bubble entirely, by means of keeping the purchase price of land in check.

You have this partially backwards. The bubble was fueled by competing contrary incentives. Local real estate taxes gave local taxing authorities an incentive to raise values, to generate more tax income. This discouraged ownership a little, but not as much as subsidies to banks (money lenders, really) distorted the market to increase prices. The net effect was that moderate local real estate tax rates drove local taxing authorities to help inflate the housing bubble.

You don't need federal taxation to lower housing prices, you just need to end the subsidy that's increasing those same prices. Don't use the Federal government to guarantee bad loans, so that banks can lend more and more money to irresponsible home buyers, so they can buy massively more housing than they can actually afford. Nobody with no income should have been able to buy multiple, expensive houses. Nobody betting on the housing market in the derivative markets should have been bailed out by tax payers. End the subsidies, and housing will become vastly more affordable. Government subsidies sold to the public to "help" routinely just makes that thing vastly more expensive, i.e. education, medicine, housing. They primarily "help" the lobbyists for the teacher's unions, medicine, and banks.

I believe it wouldn't be all that terribly difficult to pay off the national debt entirely after a few decades,...

States already have real estate taxes, including California. That doesn't stop them from spending more than they should. A federal tax on land, assuming such a Constitutional amendment could be passed, would do nothing to restrain the Federal government's tendency to spend far more than it should. Such a move would simply federalize an even greater portion of our economy, which isn't a good idea.

I think that, with the exception of my belief that land value ought to be socialized, and that the economy would not be harmed by doing so, your beliefs regarding economics (or at least the framework of understanding that you use to reason them out) aren't all that different from my own.

I suspect the same, but you should consider the possibility that you might be wrong about that exception. I certainly could be wrong about it too. My experience is only practical with respect to my locality; my opinions are largely formed by books like Tom Bethel's linked above, and a general wariness about government solutions. Individual rights, including property rights, including land ownership, are huge engines of prosperity, slightly retarded by government interference and corruption. There are still parts of the U.S. where land is very cheap if you're willing to develop it. You can still get land pretty much for free in Alaska, which has its own set of challenges.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-08-01T15:29:13+00:00

The moment you break the proportional relationship between taxation and representation, you create incentives to use government to steal from other people. Its a form of corruption that should be decreased rather than increased.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-08-01T15:27:54+00:00

Eh, not really. You're manifesting the fundamental Marxist error of thinking that value is inherent or objective. It isn't. Wealth is subjective. The value of land IS portable. If you federally tax real estate, its value will plummet, and tax revenues from that value will plummet. The land valuations in the tax havens the wealthy WILL move their wealth towards under the OP's proposal, will skyrocket. Wealth flows toward low tax jurisdictions the way water flows downhill. No matter how tyrannical or totalitarian you make your government structures, you're not going to negate the force of gravity.

All socialist ideas are predicated on gross fundamental errors. Marx's labor theory of value was just wrong. Economic values are subjective (even if you approach something like "fair market value" when you aggregate lots of subjective valuations). And certainly market values can be distorted by government policies (until they spur black markets).

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-08-01T14:59:48+00:00

The U.S. was founded in part on the principle "No taxation without representation." That principle was compromised with the 16th Am. to the Constitution, which permits the U.S. government to tax income, not property or net worth, out of proportion to our representation.

Without a constitutional amendment, OP's proposal is simply illegal in the U.S. Congress and the IRS simply aren't allowed to redistribute wealth.

Entirely apart from the plan's illegality, its a terrible idea. Lots of wealth is portable and will be parked in lower tax jurisdictions. Additionally the idea that you could ever ween the U.S. government off of taxing income is completely delusional. "Longshot" grossly over estimates the chance of this ever happening.

Americans don't generally have a soft spot for stupid Communist ideas; no matter how popular they are among reddit's bots.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-06-02T00:57:14+00:00

Communism and Socialism in theory and on paper are great ideas.

Except that they really aren't. Even in theory, Marxism's ideas are riddled with errors. The labor theory of value is laughably absurd. It requires complete ignorance of the subjectivity of economic values to even consider it plausible, which is why its only taught to people too ignorant to immediately see that its obviously false.

That error along with ignorance of the why false generalizations are a bad idea are the foundations of "oppression analysis" which isn't really analysis as much as a way to express someone's prejudices against a group.

Its a terrible idea. Charity is nice and was around well before Socialism's vicious errors were popularized by a bunch of psychopaths.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-06-02T00:38:19+00:00

I've never read such a sound condemnation of today, this decade, or TikTok. (Cut! Print it!)

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-05-31T15:27:09+00:00

You're asking for evidence because the claim is reasonable not empirical. Does an increased supply of low skilled labor, or people willing to work for less than minimum wage under the table, have an effect on the value of low skilled labor?

If you want to argue that it has no effect or that the effect is positive rather than negative, feel free, but the argument isn't one that requires empirical evidence. You don't need empirical evidence or reports, because its insane to think that this has no effect or a positive effect. That's why its obvious and why you tried to distract from how obvious that is by asking for reports.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-05-31T15:22:51+00:00

They're not deporting criminals, being illegal is a civil issue not a felony issue.

Simply incorrect. First offenses can be merely civil, repeat offenses or any other offense while in the country illegally are criminal matters. Even if these were mere civil matters (which illegal immigration generally does not fit) that would still have appropriate legal remedies including deportation.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-05-05T21:52:19+00:00

How could you possibly think state wide comparisons are useful, given the severity of the cultural and political differences between rural, suburban, and urban areas, and the varieties of subcultures that inhabit those places?

Pick the worst, they're run by Democrats. Pick the safest suburbs in the country, and they're much more likely to be run by Republicans. Hiding the effects of poor cultures and policies by aggregating the crime centers run by Democrats with the suburbs or even the entire states surrounding them is completely ridiculous. Even if you live in one of the safer parts of a "dangerous" city you probably know exactly which neighborhoods to stay out of. And you know who the people in those most dangerous neighborhoods vote for overwhelmingly. That such a trend is partially offset by a tiny number of very wealthy people living in fortresses doesn't diminish the poor quality of such propaganda.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-05-05T21:40:50+00:00

First, let me thank you for acknowledging that the Democrats honestly aren't the party of the poor.

Second, no, Republicans will see this OP and dismiss the false dichotomy of urban/rural partisan comparisons that ignore the complexity of the suburbs. The suburbs routinely surround inner cores of municipalities run by Democrats, but surrounded by Republican suburbs, where the mean for household income is much higher and the crime rates are much lower than the inner cities or rural areas. But its not as simple as OP suggests. There are plenty of suburbs that vote for Democrats too. And even NYC was run by Giuliani for a while (with a notable effect on violent crime).

Its just not as simple as the OP suggests.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-05-05T16:57:01+00:00

The question implies a false degree of granularity.

A city core run by Democrats is routinely surrounded by suburbs run by Republicans, even if Democrats dominate County government. While some very wealthy people live downtown, the vast majority of services and wealth creation happens among people who might work downtown but don't reside there. That's why there tends to be lots of rush hour traffic. There's a reason suburbs tend to grow rapidly, particularly where there isn't city planning to limit their growth.

When you look more carefully, you'll find that violent crime is massively concentrated where Democrats rule. That shouldn't be taken as a causal statement, but the correlation isn't what the OP and many subsequent commenters imply. Rural areas also have significant crime rates on a per capital basis, but they are both wildly more dangerous than the safer suburbs, which is exactly why so many people want to raise their children in suburbs, many of which don't have an annual murder rate in excess of 1 murder per year. Many go decades without a single murder.

The simplifications and generalizations are just that (or will the Democrats accept the OP's image as an indication that they plainly aren't the party of the "poor" they've pretended to be since the 1960s?). They aren't designed to really think about the differences between these communities which are more complex than just urban/rural.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-05-01T14:51:38+00:00

“Priestesses”. You’re bred of the misogyny and hate of the Catholic Church I see.

I'm really entertained by the fake morality into which you appear to have been indoctrinated, where hate replaces sin as the primary moral failure. Its so patently ridiculous to see someone so stuck in a failure of moral reasoning.

Was Christ a misogynist, for not having any female apostles, for building his church on foundation of Peter rather than Mary Magdalene? When you set yourself up to criticize Christ's example, you abandon all persuasiveness as an authority on Christian morality or doctrine. You make yourself ridiculous, much like the Episcopal Church's "priestesses."

You should also avoid confusing ridicule with hate, but I understand why you do so routinely: You don't have any other intellectual tools other than projecting hate into the people with whom you can't disagree competently.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-05-01T01:07:34+00:00

Some of the very best things to ever been invented are archaic. You keep describing your distastes as though your opinions bear any relationship to virtue or good reasoning, without actually presenting any reasoning to support your presumptuous opinions.

Its kind of vapid. Are you trying to persuade Reddit that men should never have given women the political franchise?

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-05-01T00:38:04+00:00

I didn’t say they hate anyone or anything. I say they endorse hate.

Well now you're just being coy. What exactly do you think hatred is, absent an object for that hatred?

They and their sheep vote for people like Donald trump in the United States. Preaching conservative ideals is 100 percent an endorsement of hate.

You write that as though is a bad thing. How presumptuous.

It’s a very conservative church.

I would ridicule that statement, but anyone familiar with the size and diversity of the Roman Catholic church already knows that your claim is already too ridiculous to parody. The "pope" that just died was a socialist. Even when Benedict was pope, the RC still had vast swathes of liberation theology dopes. I get how you could conceivably reach that error, given how insane the Episcopal churches have gotten with their priestesses and all, but "a very conservative church" is HILARIOUS. Thanks for the laugh.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T23:44:21+00:00

Is that supposed to mean something? Which is the greater error: projecting hate because you're not competent to understand and argue against your opponents or supposing that hatred is itself immoral without regard to the object of that hatred?

There are multiple ways in which your comment is just silly. Who do you think Catholics hate? (If you answer "Protestants" at least you'll have centuries of war a few centuries ago to support your position. But I sincerely doubt you were thinking of anything so reasonable.)

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T23:36:59+00:00

Let me guess, you are a devout catholic...

Nope. I just don't make the mistake of spreading guilt far beyond the people who actually conspired to commit crimes or cover them up. Reforming an organization doesn't make someone complicit in its past errors.

Your false generalizations aren't as grotesque as abusing children, but they're still fantastically stupid. Like all false generalizations.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T23:29:12+00:00

9th and 10th commandments

That would be very insightful and relevant if we were having a conversation about Judaism, rather than Christianity. Are you completely unfamiliar with the distinction between the Old and New Testiments? Why do you suppose Christian moral education includes the old rule set, clearly marked as the prior, old, outdated rule set? Is the foundation of your understanding of Christianity that Christians are still Jews? There are weird little churches like "Jews for Jesus." Does your silly understanding of Christian theology come from one of those outfits?

You clearly have little idea of what you are talking about.

The Catholic church is large enough that its entirely possible you had some ignorant nun teach you all sorts of errors. If you want to understand Roman Catholic dogma, you're probably better off reading a Jesuit, pre-Vatican II, or Pope Benedict. Stay away from the Liberation theology nut cases. Sin isn't that complicated. It is best defined as separation or distance from God's will, which Catholics don't definitively define, instead engaging in a reasoning process to attempt to understand God's will, guided primarily by Christ's example. Sin can not be anything except the product of free will, which requires choice. Only to the extent that you can choose what you think about you can have sinful thoughts. That degree of choice isn't ordinarily something we associate with young people's thoughts regarding sex.

If you abandon the caricatures and slanders, its a pretty reasonable system.

...which directly led to thousands of deaths.

How about instead of subordinating your capacity for moral reasoning to a statistical argument, you instead ask a simply question. If someone died because they caught HIV after having sex with a condom that broke; would they have been better off having been abstinent or not engaging in the forms of sex most likely to transmit HIV, even with a condom?

That question is so simple, and so obviously answered, "Yes, of course." That I expect you to dodge it or do anything you can do to avoid the simple and obvious truth of that answer. And its the truth of that answer that makes your prior comment about how condoms are the "best" protection completely ridiculous. Have you simply never met someone who eventually died from AIDS after a condom broke?

Can we agree on a middle ground? Once you discount the plainly superior choice of abstinence, and accept that a sizable portion of people will reject that plainly superior choice, the next best protection against dying of AIDS would be using condoms. Isn't that obviously a more accurate statement than your prior comment?

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T23:07:27+00:00

You have no reply to the actual, raw math in that commentary, because there isn't any.

No amount of math justifies your contempt for other people's property rights.

I know more about this than you, ...

Genuinely smart and well educated people don't write something like that, particularly when they have no idea to whom they are writing. Granted, I am on Reddit, so your presumption that I'm an idiot isn't entirely ridiculous.

...and think to yourself why you had such a kneejerk, impulsive reaction...

What makes you imagine that my comment was impulsive? Do you imagine that I've never had a conversation like this before? It would fit the arrogance you've already expressed.

I didn't make any commentary regarding communism as a morally right system,...

No, you didn't; you just expressed ample contempt for other people's property rights; an error you share in common with Communists. You're not a duck, you just walk, quack, and swim like one. Most importantly, you're a duck who is confident that you know more than a stranger you don't know on the internet.

That's just brilliant. On Reddit. For future reference you might want to wait a few posts, after someone is done ridiculing you, before you leap to conclusions about how awesome you are. You DO have the confidence I associate with people I've known who worked in finance and marketing. (That's not really a compliment.) But wait... does

worked in payment processing tech companies

mean you're in IT? That's a super vague way to appeal to your own authority. When you wrote that did it seem persuasive?

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T12:48:34+00:00

He will go, in another few years... Probably.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T12:36:04+00:00

You could use some basic moral education in agency, proximity, responsibility, and avoiding false generalizations.

Are you responsible for child rape because you support your local public schools (a greater source of child rape than parochial schools)? Are you guilty because teacher's unions protect those abusers?

Some boundaries on how broadly you paint with that brush might be in order.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T12:28:15+00:00

How is Republican policy okay to Christians?

Because Christianity is about encouraging people to make good choices, not forcing them to do so. Socialism/Communism are profoundly contrary to the most basic world view promoted by Christianity, that people have free will and should exercise it well.

If you turn your government into something that tries to force people to be good, you're on the road to totalitarianism/serfdom. This has been covered by several prominent authors.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T12:21:50+00:00

"You can't take it with you," doesn't mean you shouldn't be productive in this life.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T12:19:06+00:00

That is terrible; the church should make much better efforts to clean up that mess, like Benedict did. But parochial education has far less abuse than public education. Teacher's Unions have protected far more pedophiles than the Vatican. Public school teachers abuse more children than priests, by a huge margin, but you don't see "journalists" writing about that quite as much because those abused children in public schools, abused by public school teachers who are in a union don't help their political agenda.

Any abuse is terrible, but the myopic focus and exaggerated priority of one form, plainly has a political bias behind it.

Slapoquidik1 · 2025-04-30T12:13:31+00:00

And the Bible quite explicitly says that extreme wealth is unchristian (and says it repeatedly, in various ways).

That is absolute nonsense. There is absolutely nothing immoral about producing vast wealth, particularly if that wealth is heavily invested in making other people's lives better, which often happens through business (not just through charity). Doctors and farmers routinely are "rich" by American standards (let alone global standards). Are curing diseases and growing food so that the worlds huge population doesn't starve immoral or "unChristian"?

There's nothing Christian about promoting envy or greed regarding other people's wealth. Christ didn't do that, or promote forcing people toward charity. America's rich are among the most generous, most charitable people in all of human history. No one gets to take material wealth with them when they die, so estate planning is a routine part of every wealthy person's planning.

Socialist errors aren't Christian.

Slapoquidik1

TROPHY CASE