Real-world sensitivities and game names

[llamabeast]

Er, imagine my post came before Agema's. We must have been typing at the same time.

[Sombre]

Don't tell me what to imagine, thought police!

[llamabeast]

Imagine this, punk!

*clubs Sombre with baton*

[JimMorrison]

llamabeast said:
Er, imagine my post came before Agema's. We must have been typing at the same time.

And it took you over 2 hours to type yours?


I only made the guess that I did, because generally people tend to be more profuse with their examples in a case where they are illustrating their own point of view.


Now just to clarify further, I never said that the form of Democracy that we practice in America is -not- true, but rather the opposite, that in developing a form of true universal Democracy in this country, we are bringing to the forefront the failure of such a system.

That failure being that ultimately, the course of the nation (and the world to some extent, we are quite influential and all that) is being decided largely by uninformed and unqualified people. Not only that, but we are illustrating a certain constant, that "the larger the government gets, the less it should do". That is to say, while it may be perfectly alright for a town or community to mandate that there be no strip clubs in that community, it is a failing of modern universal Democracy that they can have ANY say one way or the other about whether or not strip clubs can exist in another town 3000 miles away.

Not that I am a huge fan of strip clubs. I am just saying, people should not have a vote on the restriction of other people's freedoms. Obviously if I say if one community votes against certain behaviors, a non-universal system allows people who disagree to move to another community - someone can argue that if under this system, 51% outlaw certain things, I can just move to another country if I disagree. However, one of the concepts that this nation was founded on, was that we all live differently, think differently, and believe differently - and impeding liberty and the pursuit of happiness is unacceptable.

So we need to retrace our steps, and define "liberty" in clear terms. Then we can determine what laws are even constitutional or feasible. I think most people on the right, and the left, would like a smaller government, especially if the fundamentalists realized that as large as they are, they are still another minority, and so if they create an environment of censure and oppression, they can prepare for that to come around to them eventually as well.

[Agema]

Largely I agree with you with a couple of caveats.

The trade-off made for decentralisation is one of cohesion. If too much room is left within a political entity for localised people to apply differing laws, it can cause atomisation, people start to wonder about the relevance of the whole and increasingly fail to identify with others. To me, the US seems to have a pretty good balance of the federal state imposing several standards from the top, but leaving decent room for individual states to manoeuver under that.

It can be beneficial to restrict liberty. I agree it is appropriate to define liberty in order to make appropriate judgements. But society as a whole may have the rights to choose on something that affects all, like gun ownership/control, whereas something based around the individuals concerned like pornography can be better left to individual control.

[JimMorrison]

Agema said:
It can be beneficial to restrict liberty.

I'm going to have to disagree entirely on you there.

Gun control is a great subject for you to bring up, because it is such a hard issue. The best answer that I can offer you, is that twice as many people die in motor vehicle accidents, as die from violence in all forms (in the US itself). We do not ban motor vehicles, because we believe we can teach people to be better drivers, and regulate where and how they drive in ways to keep them from becoming dangerous. The same can apply to the use and ownership of firearms. A wise man once stated "laws don't keep guns away from criminals". Which is true, and can be extrapolated to the point of prohibition - as illustrated with our prohibition of alcohol in the last century, as well as the current "war on drugs" which is about as effective as our "war on terror" - we see that much misery comes from the oppression of people.

As long as populations continue to develop and exploit interconnectivity through the internet, and other forms of interactive media, we will continue to only grow closer to other people, not farther apart. Implementing superfluous or detrimental laws which restrict personal freedoms, will in fact be what continues to drive people apart, this schism between those who willingly follow unjust laws, and those who refuse to and thus are forced to live as criminals in "the land of the free".

<3

[Leif_-]

JimMorrison said:
Gun control is a great subject for you to bring up,

But perhaps not on the Dominions 3 forums? Nothing good ever comes of gun control debates, I've found. (Now, if only Illwinter would add rabid, demon-possessed wilderbeest to the game, and the spells to control them, we could have on-topic debates about gnu control.)

[lch]

JimMorrison said:
Gun control is a great subject for you to bring up, because it is such a hard issue. The best answer that I can offer you, is that twice as many people die in motor vehicle accidents, as die from violence in all forms (in the US itself).

That's a total bull**** comparison, IMHO. Car accidents are an unwanted byproduct of public transportation. "Violence in all forms" sounds like a very active act compared to that. People aren't shooting bullets just to kill time or say hello to each other, or are they? To get a fair comparison you'd have to compare fatal car accidents with fatal accidents involving firearms, where the death toll from car accidents are probably a lot higher because of its continuous use unless maybe you factor in the total amount of time that people are driving versus aiming and firing, too, but to be able to be really comparable lots of people would have to be facing each other and shoot at the same time. Or you'd have to compare the death toll from people consciously running over / crashing into people with a car to kill them versus shooting them with a gun, where the guns will trump the stats by far, with the utmost probability.

[thejeff]

Ich, you're a moderator. You might want to avoid calling people's arguments bull****. And possibly just avoid the incipient gun control flame war entirely? Until it's time to shut it down.

Gun control has been brought up. A flame war is probably inevitable, but I'd think the moderators should avoiding fanning the flames.

To All: Going further down this path is a bad idea. We've all been through it before. There are places far more appropriate and it'll just get shut down here.

[lch]

thejeff said:
Ich, you're a moderator. You might want to avoid calling people's arguments bull****. And possibly just avoid the incipient gun control flame war entirely? Until it's time to shut it down.

So maybe "bad comparison" would have been more politically correct. That's just syntax, but not semantics.

I certainly don't plan to discuss gun control here and my post didn't mean to encourage that. As far as I'm concerned, I haven't been discussing it so far, anyway, what I did was point out a nonsense comparison of apples and oranges. That's what was really itching me, not the actual subject.