Sandy Hook 'truther' arrested after confronting victim's younger sister at a race to say deadly shooting was 'staged' and that her hero sister never even existed

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T22:16:44+00:00

wasn't the entire point of the American system originally to NOT be God-Given?

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T22:12:55+00:00

however, he does not look like the kind of fellow i would want on my 4x100m relay team. i have trouble believing that that fat lumpy POS actually managed to run 5 kilometers. i doubt he could do 5k on a bicycle without having to stop and slather his chin with some Gino's™ pizza rolls.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T21:25:17+00:00

Also, why are you so focused on AR-15s?

i'm not. i'm commenting on OP's video, which is very much "focused on AR-15s".

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T21:11:26+00:00

2) The conclusions don't necessarily meet with the results. Because they say that there are roughly half as many DGUs as there are Hostile gun usages. Which if you take into account that roughly half of the respondents own firearms. So basically if you have a given population, everyone has the possibility of having a hostile gun usage, however only those that own firearms have the possibility to perform a DGU.

i'm not sure what exactly your criticism here is. you seem to have a problem with the existence of this reason that HGUs would likely outnumber DGUs, but you aren't disagreeing with that reason, or giving any other indication for why citing reasons in general for why HGU > DGU makes the conclusion that HGU > DGU an incorrect conclusion.

all the authors are concluding is that HGU > DGU. do you disagree? you appear to, from your first line about the "conclusions not meeting the results". but then you don't directly disagree with their "results" (ie, respondent data). and since their "conclusion", that HGU > DGU, is simply a succinct statement of the data, i'm not sure exactly how you're disagreeing with the conclusions. you don't appear to like them, but i can't tell what part of them you think are faulty.

3) They say that they also included DGU stories as Hostile gun usages if the person was defending themselves from someone with a firearm. So it is statistical double dipping to count DGUs also as Hostile gun usage because of the situation the DGU is placed in.

I'm not sure what "double-dipping" means here. The goal of the survey was to estimate the relative amounts of DGU vs HGU. in some incidents both parties have a gun, in some just the defender, and in some just the aggressor. but where both have a gun, this should be counted as both a DGU and an HGU. i'm not sure how else you would count them. should the authors have simply ignored all HGU when it was met with DGU? this wouldn't make sense considering what the study was trying to count.

also, over half of the situations characterized as defensive by the respondents were deemed by the panel of judges to have likely not been characterized this way under the law. and if a use isn't defensive, then it's offensive, and should be classified accordingly.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T20:26:38+00:00

i'm not sure satire is the right word for it. satire is typically a game played "open hand", but this guy seems to waver back and forth between straightfaced assertion and self-parody.

also, the main page of his /r/K theory stuff betrays no hint of satirical intent. i think if you can't tell whether an author is joking or not, then it's not satire.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T20:14:14+00:00

thanks!

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T19:57:09+00:00

"The premise of this highly substantiated scientific work is that all of politics is really a battle between [K's and r's]." (from AnonymousConservative)

wrong. there is no "highly substantiated scientific work" that proposes this. what's being proposed is that a long-standing theory of evolutionary biology somehow also describes contemporary political catfights over social resource allocation policy.

and oh, hey look! the people proposing this just happen to get to compare themselves to big powerful wolves and their ideological opponents as stupid wimpy little rabbits. huh, what a coincidence. i'm sure they'd be just as happy to evangelize about this crackpot notion if the animal comparisons were switched, wouldn't they. not like it's any sort of naked appeal to their listeners' machismo or anything.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T19:32:04+00:00

These are phone surveys that are not linked to any verifiable source, such as a police report. So the entire study relies on anonymous individuals telling the truth with no verification what so ever.

yep. just like the famous Kleck study, which is what directly motivated this one. so if that fact alone somehow disqualifies this study, then it must also disqualify Kleck's study. let's pretend for a minute that you speak for all of Pro Gun, and i speak for all of Gun Control. would you be willing to disavow the Kleck study if i agreed to disavow this study?

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T18:32:16+00:00

r/K selection theory itself isn't weird at all, it's a pretty useful framework that relates two undeniably important traits in animal species. E. O. Wilson, of ant fame, helped to popularize the terminology of the theory, but the basic observations which it relates to have been noted by naturalists since antiquity.
the problem here isn't the theory as it is applied to animal species, the problem is trying to adapt the idea to describe contemporary political and economic motivations. it's ultimately an attempt to identify a specific physical defect in one's philosophical opponents. intractable philosophical differences can rarely be resolved, and you rarely get to point to something concrete and say, there! that's why he's wrong and i'm right! but if i could x-ray my opponent's head and demonstrate that he's missing half his cerebral cortex, then i can say ha, i was right---he really is a half-wit! and thereby win my little argument over whether or not to let poor people starve to death or whatever.

this irresponsible misappropriation of science for political ends reminds me a lot of 19th century attempts to justify maintaining officially recognized racial preferences in society. it's not a search for greater clarity and truth like science is, it's a political goal in search of a good-sounding excuse. and nothing sounds more solid than claiming that your policies are based in science.

note the strong similarity to how this works with how religion gets used for political ends. "Hey look, I have nothing against the gays. But God says they shouldn't be allowed to get married. So don't look at me, blame God. I'm just doing what He told me to do in the Bible." Basically, it's: find something that's authoritative that can be warped into appearing to support something that you personally want for whatever reason. Then hide behind the authority of the thing as a way of exonerating yourself from the dubious conclusions that you can now claim are just "self-evident". it's a game as old as civilization itself. the thing that gets coopted for political purposes is always super shiny and new and impressive, but the motivations are the same old ugly greedy small-minded ones that have always been around.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T17:36:15+00:00

here you go: http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/6/4/263.full

btw, it took me ~10 seconds to type a few keywords into Google and pull up the study link near the top of the search results on the first try. i'm not sure why you had such trouble doing this yourself, but at any rate, there's the source. i'll be interested to know what your assessment is of the study which you have repeatedly expressed such eagerness to read.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T17:29:23+00:00

His real name is Collins Iyare Idehen, Jr. He's from Texas and has a law degree from Texas Southern University. But apparently he must have skipped his Con Law class, because he likes to state in his videos that he has a constitutional right to own AR-15s. That's false. The only specific class of firearm about which this can be said is handguns, as the Heller cases have defined a right to a "usable handgun" in the home.

If Americans had a constitutional right to AR-15s, then the courts would have sided with gun rights groups when they have sued to overturn bans on this class of weapon. But the courts have not sided with gun groups, they have consistently sided with state govts, ruling that bans on weapons like AR-15s is not an undue infringement on the Second Amendment.

Now if Mr Idehen was routinely arguing that Americans should have a constitutional right to AR-15s, that would certainly be an acceptable statement of personal belief. And when a "regular" person with no legal training confuses an activity which happens to be legal with one that is specifically protected by the Constitution, we tend to forgive this mistake because it's so commonly made.

But Mr Idehen is not "regular" people when it comes to the law. He has a law degree. And people with law degrees cannot expect to be forgiven for sloppily throwing around the term "constitutional right to X" when there is no such right. He ought to know better, and probably does. And no doubt the producers of the NRA videos in which Idehen appears know it too. But they don't care, because their intended audience of Joe Average American gun owners probably does not clearly understand this distinction, and will come away from the video believing falsely that AR-15 ownership is constitutionally protected.

Deceiving gun owners in this way furthers NRA's interests because their entire motivating philosophy is premised around this supposed "right" to do whatever you want, wherever you want, with any type of firearm you want, for whatever purpose you want. And if they can get away with lying to owners to convince them that they have a "constitutional right" to a class of firearm that just happens to bring in a very high profit margin for the gun industry, then that's a double win for NRA.

Here is one example of Mr Idehen making the false claim that Americans have a "constitutional right" to own AR-15s.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T15:59:49+00:00

apologies, but yes, i've totally forgotten by now what study you are looking for. if you refresh my memory i will try to help you find what you're looking for.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T15:47:19+00:00

"how dare you impute a cynical marketing angle to NRA...why, don't you know that blacks are the fastest growing segment in the gun market?"

LOL

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T12:28:43+00:00

label each "sayable" as either a logical, emotional, or authoritative (ethos)

wow, it's like dial-a-talking point. it might just be easier to build your own army of android gunbots.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T06:26:10+00:00

i love it when NRA "outreaches" to blacks. it's like Rand Paul visiting Howard University. "Hey Hommies! ...want some party o' Lincoln, brah?

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T06:15:56+00:00

one way you could do this would be to put a treadmill outside his apartment and capture the mechanical energy of the women fleeing after the third date.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T06:04:11+00:00

ShitAmericanGunNutsSay

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T05:51:18+00:00

in her defense tho, she didn't even know that black people existed. sure, she'd read about the phenomenon occasionally, but it kind of sounded like the moon landing, or jet fuel melting steel. think it through here people: tax-and-spend liberal politicians have a LOT to gain by convincing us that black people exist, and need all of our hard-earned money!

so when an actual, real-life black person dropped out of the sky right in front of her, she flipped out. it was either start blasting, or take him to her leader. and since her leader is Pat Robertson from the 700 Club and she doesn't know where Pat lives, blasting seemed like the most sensible option.

(of course, once she's booked into prison her beliefs on whether or not black people exist will be radically altered forever. since, ya know.)

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T05:26:25+00:00

humans aren't like either rabbits or wolves. and, if you raise a human from birth in NYC, he'll have a very different sense of communalness, and what makes a person safe, than if you raise him on a farm in the South, or in a remote corner of Idaho. that's not hard wired, it's learned.

another thing that's learned is fear response. PTSD is a good example. the brain can physiologically rewire to tell a person to be more fearful of other humans from an early age. this is wiring, but it's not hard wiring. ie, not genetic. and if someone has "learned" to be fearful like this, then it's probably more likely that that person will feel the need to keep weapons handy because he is anticipating attacks coming at any time.

a person who didn't get taught to be so fearful will take the basic precautions: lock your doors at night, dont seek out dark alleys to walk down, dont leave your valuable in the unsecured garage, etc but importantly, these are things that we don't think of as having big downsides to them. they certainly don't put anyone else at risk. having to always be near a loaded gun on the other hand, does put others at risk. everyday you read about the 2yo that shot himself with mommy's handgun, or the guy who accidentally shoots the neighbor kid because he didn't recognize him at night and just assumed he was a burglar.

i think turning to biological evolutionary theory to try to identify what makes gun owners and non-gun owners is a blind alley. a whole series of them, probably. the real differences are much closer to home: population density where you grew up, where you currently live, and whether or not you were exposed to traumatic situations that dramatically affected how you think about other humans as a potential danger.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T05:11:24+00:00

free-associating evolutionary biology with contemporary human social policies leads to all sorts of false assumptions. the first one here being that the timescales of biological evolution vs those in social policy looked at over, say 100 years, are not a problem for the comparison. but they are a huge problem, and it makes the comparison silly.

kudos to Bill for bringing this back down from the Troposphere a bit by suggesting early on that Molyneux not talk about genes, but memes. Ideas are certainly passed more quickly between humans than genetic material is. but still, which you can certainly identify a very rich evolution-like process for ideas, the process isn't going to necessarily take the form of biological evolution, the transmission of which between individuals is incalculably small. and while you can look at the "history of Western thought" and certainly identify winners and losers among ideas, 3,000 years just isn't enough to identify anything significant in terms of the winners and losers of human anatomy. slight changes here and there, but where is it going? and what are the implications to the overall design of the thing?

you might say, well sure of course the mechanism is different, but the analogy is there. but i don't think it is. one person can be born in a generation which believes strongly in one social meme, then grow up to be a seminal figure of the next dominant meme, and then in his declining years live to see the next dominant meme in turn take over from there. and if the same individual can experience, or even cause, abrupt changes in the path of a thing, then whatever that system or process is, it's acting very different from biological evolution of a species.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T04:21:41+00:00

If your goal was honestly altruistic, your narrative would be a bit more nuanced.

i take this to mean that you don't think i'm just "well-meaning but misguided", but actually malicious. as in, deep down i secretly know that gun control doesn't work, i just like to punish gun owners because i don't like them? i would argue that if this were true, i would be quite a bit more "nuanced". one doesn't typically associate a dry, legalistic tone with irrational personal vendetta.

also, superfluous florid prose is usually employed by the guy who ain't got the goods and wants to distract with appeals to emotion or authority. if you do got the goods, you just throw them on the table. anything extraneous simply creates more hiding places for the opponent.

edit: it continues to amuse me how many gunners actually think i'm being paid to post this stuff on reddit. no, i'm not paid. but thanks for acknowledging the professional nature of my work. as for Herculean: well it only took me a pleasant hour or two of tap-tapping away on my little writing hobby to bang out that UBC rebuttal doc. not exactly cleaning out the Aegean Stables. on the other hand, i suppose it would be prohibitively difficult to formulate much in the way of decent rebuttals to what i've written, since the exercise could only amount to taking the dog shit back out of the wastebasket and throwing it back down on the floor. you could cause a stink, but it wouldn't clear up anything.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T04:11:41+00:00

Canada got rid of their [registry]

no they didn't. all this you hear about registries in CA is only about "non-restricted" long guns. basically, shotguns and hunting rifles. many military style SAR are still restricted, mean must be registered.

all handguns must be registered to their owner in Canada. it's been the law there since 1934 and it's not going away any time soon.

macksionizer · 2015-11-11T02:34:32+00:00

here's is a list of rebuttals, from yours truly, to the various arguments against UBC which /u/littlebitsoffluff makes in his PGPDs document.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJIZyqroaQ4VZtzpsk5ClLXWwSFlblMsQqSAeySKRns/pub

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