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El Mamerro

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Posts posted by El Mamerro

    For you anti-gun folk

    in News

    Posted

    My postulate is that if you gave everybody a gun, and taught them to respect its power, you would see less crime and people would generally be happier. People need a way to protect themselves.

     

    My postulate is that if you gave everybody a gun, people would be more wary and distrustful of each other and therefore we would be unhappier. Even if I have the means to kill you, the fact that you can so easily kill me before I am able to defend myself (and vice versa) will create negative pressure in the way we associate with each other. This is sometimes referred to as "politeness", but it's a respect charged with antagonistic tension. Happiness will not come forth from that.

     

     

     

     

    On the other hand maybe we'll all kill ourselves and each other. But didn't we all used to own swords?... same thing. Personal protection.

     

    Swords don't allow the level of disconnect and distance that guns do. It's relatively simple to defend yourself against a sword attack, since the attacker makes himself vulnerable by proximity. When it becomes too easy and risk-free for people to kill each other (as it begins to happen with guns), you're gonna see a prevalence towards it being used more often than a sword would be.

     

     

     

    We aren't talking about arming everyone.

     

    I know it's not the main point, but the everyone-armed scenario keeps being offered as a pro-gun argument, as in everyone armed > everyone unarmed.

     

     

     

     

    Now how American culture contributes or takes away from any of this is another discussion, because that bleeds into many other area's besides gun control.

     

    Even if it does bleed to other areas, it doesn't make it any less central to the issue. It's the main thing that needs to be addressed and solved if you wish to eliminate the hostility towards guns that leads to restrictive legislation.

    • Like 1

    how many 5 yr. olds.. (fight debate again)

    in Channel Zero

    Posted

    A 5 year old will probably be able to deduce that to kill you (and we assume they want to), they have to kill your head. Their main intent would be to bring you down under them, so they can reach your head, and kill it.

     

    They would attack from all sides at once, presenting a tangled mass of arms and heads. I few wild swings with punches should knock a few off balance a bit. Maybe one or two punches, after barreling through a few arms in the way, connect with a face and take one out for a few seconds. One punch connects cleanly and takes one out for good.

     

    You try to kick, but those behind you already grabbed your legs and waist. You shake them off violently, some come loose, others remain fast, hugging your thighs with ferocity (no pedo). Your hesitation allows one of the not-so-quite-well-punched kids in front grab a hold of your arm. This is a lot messier than you anticipated. You swing and thrash wildly in panic, and momentarily clear a whole foot and half around you.

     

    You have a sudden upper hand, and are able to cleanly punch and kick, and knock out, 3 children in this inner circle. This would be significant if it were not for the fact that there's 5 more children who have already grabbed you again, and those immediately behind the knocked out ones have already replaced the vacant spots. From behind, a kid half climbs/half jumps over another that's grabbing your waist, and reaches your shoulder. You twist and swing your torso to shake him off, but since 6 kids have a hold of your waist and legs, for a total of 300 lbs of weight plus the actual force of downwards drag exerted by them, leverage is difficult. Nonetheless, the child's hands slip, and he tumbles below, loosening 3 kids from your lower half.

     

    You manage to grab onto the falling kids ankles, and begin trying to swing him around, but other kids have already grabbed him from the other end and are pulling to get him out of the way so they can reach you. You manage some momentum to pull him out of their hands, but 2 more kids have already repeated the shoulder climb, and they've gotten a better hold this time. You twist and one releases a hand, and slips off, the other holds fast. You bend forward and the kid flips over your shoulder, but his clutching hands grab on to your hair and pull your head further down.

     

    Another pair of groping hands catches your hair the moment it swung low enough. The children see their target within reach, and increase their ferocity. 5 children are wrapped around your waist, 3 of them are grabbing each arm, with nearly double that grabbing on to them and increasing the drag weight exponentially. Desperately, you swing your head back as hard as you can, but 3 children on your back slow your effort. You manage one last look, across several more rows of screaming children who have yet to reach your soon to become soft and pulpy head. Hands grabbing onto hands grabbing onto your hair finally pull your head under theirs, and as more and more climb onto your back, you collapse.

     

    Little hands batter your head mercilessly and pull on your ears, lips. You tumble through the bodies, taking some under you. Your arms swing as hard as they can, but they're just kinda pushing through bodies. You would expect them to budge, but they rows and rows of kids around them pressing in, you might as well try to push a concrete wall. In their frenzy, children begin to trip and fall directly on your head, and a pile-on begins to form, adding weight to your cranium in 50lb increments.

     

    You begin to black out from the pressure. This is a lot messier than you anticipated.

    • Like 1

    Obama: The New George Bush

    in News

    Posted

    That was my problem with the movie... it presented the supposed flaw in economics as if it were something so simple and so obviously flagrant (Look! It says so in this highlighted sentence in this important book!), you'd be an idiot not to agree with it. It doesn't make sense to me however, that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that have studied and exercised professions in that field throughout the years would have somehow missed that simple detail, unless you believe every single one of them is in cahoots with this evil plan. I'm not an economist either, but that was a glaring flaw in the movie's argument for me, which in turn cause everything else in it to ring hollow, especially the purported solutions presented by the Venus Project.

     

    I disagree about schoolbooks, I think (good) education tells you quite clearly how to live peacefully with other people. The problem is that once you're out of school, you realize things aren't as simple as they made it out to be... there will be too many occasions were you will have to choose between being an asshole to one person or the other, and this in turn will trigger a chain reaction of assholery all around.

     

    I do agree that there is a paradigm shift looming, probably in this next decade, but I can't for the life of me know what it will be, and whether it will be a positive or negative one.

    For you anti-gun folk

    in News

    Posted

    I always feel like chiming in for a bit in here but discussions get so kilometric it's almost impossible to address everything. However I do want to say something about this:

     

    cars are much more useful? in the US varied stats show that upwards of 2.5 million incidents occur each year where people use a gun to save a life. less than 10% is the gun actually ever fired to where the attacker is killed or injured

    as many as 200,000 woman a year use a firearm to defend against sexual abuse! how are guns not an effective and 'useful' tool? civilians kill twice as many bad guys than do police, AND only with a 2% error rate compared to the 11% with law enforcement.

    to say that guns are not 'useful' is astonishing to me.

     

    Nobody's saying guns aren't useful, the argument there was whether cars are more useful than guns, and you'd be retarded to say they're not. By your own stats, guns are being useful to save lives for less than 1% of the population, and that's IF those 2.5 million cases involved different individuals. I don't have to get into specifics on how much more useful cars are than that and how much more influential they are in our lives.

     

    And now for a rant.

     

    I'd like to address the focus on extreme situations here. Mentally unfit people going on shooting sprees is not, and shouldn't be, the focus of this discussion, it's not the main problem with guns in the US. The problem, as I see it, is the gun mentality and perception in America, which compounds the issue in much more subtle ways than just being about massacres. If every single person in America owned guns, massacres would still happen via tools that render guns obsolete (like bombs). The Ft. Hood tragedy proves that the psychological deterrent of gun presence is not enough to keep people from committing atrocities. Even if guns were locked away in that particular case, logic would say no one is stupid enough to go on a rampage in an Army base, but it still happened. I don't buy for a second that if every single citizen had a gun, people would stop doing nasty things to each other in America. I think the situation would become worse.

     

    Allusions to Switzerland and the gun culture there pop up often in this discussion. The problem with that comparison is that the Swiss are Swiss, and Americans are Americans. The cultural perception and image of guns that a person growing up in America forms is vastly different than that of someone who grows up in Switzerland. Their perception of guns is pure, and adheres greatly to the values espoused by AOD and others in this thread, and they are honorable values indeed. On a fundamental level, I agree with you guys and the constitutional right to own guns wholeheartedly.

     

    But those are not the values ingrained in the majority of Americans today. Those were lost long ago, and have been replaced by the image of guns as an instrument of power and control, a switch that decides life/death with such totality it represents the purest form of winning and losing, and Americans are about fucking WINNING. Hand everyone in this country a gun, and watch how it becomes a society so paranoid, so distrustful of each other, and so full of misguided self-superiority, collapse into chaos would be imminent.

     

    I firmly believe that the average American, upon possessing a gun, will experience a shift in their self-perception and their relationship to others that will lean towards the negative and the antisocial, even with the beneficial aspects of confidence about self-defense. This would clearly affect mentally unfit people even more... having a gun may not push a half-crazy person to commit a massacre, but it may affect their psychology and make their antisocial behavior feel more defensible and secure. In a country like Switzerland, with traditional gun culture values, this would not be that much of a problem.

     

    This is my main problem with advocating the full arming of a populace that is not culturally mature enough to handle being armed. As much as I agree 100% with the right for everyone to be armed on a fundamental basis, I cannot responsibly recommend that everyone follow this advice. It would fuck things up considerably, in my view.

     

    Deep down I feel that the right approach to this complex problem is for a person wishing to be armed to somehow prove he/she can handle the responsibility. How to pull this off, I'm not sure. I agree that a government-run program would be inefficient and restrictive. But I do believe in science, and if a way could be devised for an independent panel of scientists, working with factual data, to establish a reasonable set of empirical parameters that could determine a person's capability to possess a gun, I would be all for it. As much as this would make people throw hissy fits about who gets to decide this and how, I do believe that the mind is quantifiable and observable from a neutral standpoint, so that a fully objective decision, free of moral coloring, can be made. Clearly, we don't quite have the ability to do that just yet, but it's a looming possibility in the future.

     

    In the meantime, go ahead, exercise your freedom and get a gun. I just wouldn't necessarily recommend it, cause it might turn you into an asshole.

    how many 5 yr. olds.. (fight debate again)

    in Channel Zero

    Posted

    Just wanted to say, 4 of these kids grabbing onto an arm or a leg are at least 200 lbs of dead weight, not including the force they can exert against your movement. Not to mention swinging a 50 lb kid around will get tiring and dizzying after a few minutes.

     

    I'm willing to bet most people would start having serious trouble with 20-30 swarming kids from all directions.

    this just in

    in Channel Zero

    Posted

    Stay away from the deep fried oreos. One of the top 5 biggest disappointments I've experienced.

     

    My deep fryer was all about chicken wings and pork chops, but that's not how you're rolling. If you can score some plantains, tostones are the jammy.

     

    tostones.jpg

    • Like 1

    Movies so bad it angers you they exist.

    in Entertainment

    Posted

    Edit: And while i'm not as big of an action flick fan as many, i think thats the same reason Mams digs a lot of action movies that people hate on. Hes not necessarily looking for some great plot, as long as the abundance of explosions, ridiculous special effects, and overall fun-ness of the film makes up for the fact that the plot is a piece of shit that people are going to hate on.

     

    You know, by that same line of thought, I would've imagined Transformers 2 to be absolutely fantastic. And it wasn't, it was a piece of shit. And I fucking loved the first one. I thought my fondness for over-the-topness had no bounds, but I certainly learned my limits during that onslaught.

     

    I basically reconfigure my brain every time I sit down to watch a movie to place myself in a position of optimal enjoyment, which is why I hate on few movies. But sometimes, shit just doesn't work with my hardware.

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