Conservative politics and assumption
- Thread starter Askthepizzaguy
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Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Very few "conservative" policies are in any meaningful way conservative, if we take the word to mean a concern for conserving things. They're just cruel, grasping and short-sighted, "conservative" only in that they're draped in the flag.
The tragedy is, most conservatives aren't cruel, grasping or short-sighted. They're as kind, generous and even-handed as anyone else, at least, my genuine impression is, in America. (In Britain, I think it's different. I think our conservatives are all genuinely sick in the head.) The problem is, without a strong set of shared aspirations, without a clear understanding of what makes one "conservative" that is shared by across lines of region and ethnicity and religion and class, the sorts of shared premises which liberal or socialists can appeal to, however shakily, all that's left seems to be mankind's unfortunate tendency towards fear and vindictiveness.
It doesn't help, mind you, that the good-natured "most" are not the ones running conservative political parties. I'm convinced that a lot of right-wing politicians propound cruel and stupid policies not out of cynicism, but just because they sincerely believe that the electorate is as rotten as they are.
The tragedy is, most conservatives aren't cruel, grasping or short-sighted. They're as kind, generous and even-handed as anyone else, at least, my genuine impression is, in America. (In Britain, I think it's different. I think our conservatives are all genuinely sick in the head.) The problem is, without a strong set of shared aspirations, without a clear understanding of what makes one "conservative" that is shared by across lines of region and ethnicity and religion and class, the sorts of shared premises which liberal or socialists can appeal to, however shakily, all that's left seems to be mankind's unfortunate tendency towards fear and vindictiveness.
It doesn't help, mind you, that the good-natured "most" are not the ones running conservative political parties. I'm convinced that a lot of right-wing politicians propound cruel and stupid policies not out of cynicism, but just because they sincerely believe that the electorate is as rotten as they are.
Lohrenswald
世界的 bottom ranked physicist
Has it ever really meant that when describing a political ideology?
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
This is basically true. They are mostly liberal in the original meaning of the term, i.e. Locke, Mills, etc.
J
''Crony capitalism'' doesn't exist, capitalism really is just that horrible.
It originated as a reaction to liberal progressivism, and generally conservatives wanted to conserve the ''natural order'' of things, as opposed to the dangerous radicalism of revolutionaries.
civvver
Deity
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Only on this forum. It's chock full of european master planners. If you actually live in the US outside of california and NY and chicago what this forum dubs conservatives are pretty much the norm.
Most liberal policies in the US really aren't that liberal either. Kinda funny that way. It often seems like bush and hillary have more in common than they do differences.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Historically, yeah. It's only in the post-'45 world that conservative became as intellectually vacuous as we see today. Used to be, conservativism produced as many important and powerful thinkers as the liberal or socialist movements, people who, even where I disagree with them, had things to say that couldn't be summarised as "old man yells at cloud".
Not sure what changed, exactly. A lot of it the experience of Nazism and Stalinism, I think, which transformed liberalism from one opinion among many to the baseline of civilised society, so that any opinion, even the stridently illiberal, had to be expressed in liberal terms, and there's few better ways of ensuring that people propose dumb, incoherent policies in dumb, incoherent ways than by insisting that they do so in the terms of a conceptual universe they fundamentally disagree with.
Lexicus
Deity
Traitorfish said:
Do you know exactly when conservatism because identified with market fundamentalism? Because in the 19th century conservatives typically stood for the ancien regime as against the advance of the liberal-capitalist paradigm. Polanyi points out that both socialists and conservatives were united by their distaste for the dehumanizing quality of the market.
Traitorfish said:
In my long experience debating with US "conservatives" on the internet I've noticed the same thing: that despite couching their arguments in the language of liberalism (liberalism in the sense J means it) they tend to hold many profoundly illiberal views. It does make for some entertainment from time to time, but mostly it frightens me that these people are presumably politically active.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Only in the last few decades It's simplistic to blame everything on Reagan and Thatcher, but their administrations are certainly when "market über alles" became the common sense of the conservative leadership in the English-speaking world, and from there it seems the rest of our sorry planet.
I think American conservatism is particularly prone to that sort of thing. On the one hand, it's a country whose founding mythology is inseparable from liberal politics, on the other, it had neither monarchy nor socialism to act as alternate bases for opposing Stalinism. Throw in a traditional distrust towards intellectuals across the political board, you have a brew for a particularly confused sort of conservative politics.
Tahuti
Writing Deity
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The status quo assumes the status quo. The highest tier political actors, who do not necessarily hold an elected office, aren't that dumb to literally think creationism is true, though they are smart enough to support creationists whenever that suits their interest.
Many elected politicians are essentially actors, who use their talents to mediate between the ends of power and 'the people' (i.e. racists, creationists and other people not worthy of our interest). Bread and circuses and all that. Humanity will never learn.
When you have more, it is easier to take more; political conservatism is the practical application of the snowball effect. It's how the world works, regardless whether it is in your interest or not.
American conservatism essentially sways 'the people' with a WASP-flavoured Khomeinism avant-la-lettre. Despite overthrowing the reactionary Shah, Khomeinism is fundamentally Conservative, in a religious and republican way. American Conservatism, in turn, sees the American revolution as Satanic British Royalists vs. devout Protestant republicans.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That's part of it, although only part of it. American conservativism was never so thoroughly populist, Southern or Evangelical as it is today, and by the same token, the populists, Southerners and Evangelicals were not always so conservative as they were today.
The thing to remember about American is, these contradictions aren't just in the memory of the Revolution, they're present in the revolution itself, and lay the ground for the partisan divisions of the Early Republic, in which the Federalists and the Republicans each saw themselves as the guardians of both traditional and rational government. It's not simply revisionism for conservatives to invoke the legacy of the revolution, and they have as much right to it as liberals, it's just that where liberals can imagine an abstract "Ideal of the Revolution" which filters all the bits about the actual revolution they find distasteful, conservatives have to deal with a bunch of concrete traditions and institutions that do not lend themselves unambiguously to a conservative program. Navigating that requires a lot of sophistication, and as we've noted, sophistication is not something that American conservativism has in spades. In France, you can simply pick a year between 1788 and 1799 and declare yourself in favour of it, but Americans aren't so lucky.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
Ok, it's been a few days. Let's check on responses.
Conservative is an umbrella term for a lot of political ideas, some of them cultural-conservative, some nationalistic, some libertarian. However, even though there are different flavors of conservative, you won't find too many conservatives who shy away from that umbrella term. And often enough, these different flavors of conservative politics end up in the same entree, instead of a la carte.
Since the two major parties control most of the policy positions in our country, and more representatives and senators are Republican, and conservatives are the ones propping up the Republican party (in all the various flavors), it makes sense to talk about conservative politics as a whole. You won't see the big business interests opposing the religious right's interests, nor will you see the libertarians who vote Republican seriously opposing the nationalists. Even if they have different core values, they support one another's politics, under Republicanism, and under the umbrella of conservatism.
True, examples of which include:
The Flat Tax or variants thereof.
Replacing income tax with sales tax, based on the idea that you'll be able to "keep" your money and that you get to choose when to spend it.
The problem is, if you make $1,000,000 per year, the bare necessities of life, for you, could be 1-5% of your income. If you are a bottom wage earner, and you make $14,000 per year, you spend almost every dime of that on rent, food, utilities, insurance, etc. There's not a lot of disposable income as it stands, and as time goes on with stagnant wages, that disposable income vanishes.
Sometimes a person's margin of error is 5% of their income or less, before they're losing money every month. You add a Flat Tax and even go as far as to exempt food from the equation, and the plain and simple fact is, people working 40 hour weeks will become homeless. They won't be able to pay for all their bills, because their income stayed the same but their tax burden increased 15%.
The principle of paying taxes only when you choose to doesn't apply when 95% of your income is immediately spent on non-discretionary expenses.
The response to that reality is "work harder" and "prove to your boss you deserve that raise". That's a profound misunderstanding of economics and the relationship between employers and the employed in today's economy. It makes the assumption that the worker isn't already working as hard as they can. We take fewer vacation days and work longer hours than the Japanese, who are the stereotype of a class of people who work themselves to death. That's us, moreso than them. And we have wages stagnant for a decade.
The problem is not "workers not working hard enough". The problem is conservative politicians and businessmen trying to inflate prices for themselves which impacts the consumer (the poor) while depressing wages for the poor, as if they don't already own a large enough percentage of the American pie.
Pushing through tax decreases for the rich without offsetting those costs to the budget.
You can't compartmentalize the budget this way. If you reduce taxes on anyone, and the budget is in the red, eventually, social services will get cut. Every time you do this, funding for needed services gets cut. There's a direct correlation between these two things. You can't pretend cutting taxes only boosts the economy and helps the poor through unobserved trickle-down effects, and then ignore the real social services cuts which are then made.
Privatizing gains, subsidizing losses.
When you're rich, your company and thus your livelihood is too big to fail.
If you made big gains through your business, that's your hard work being rewarded, and thus, the more tax breaks and loopholes and offshore accounting you can get away with, the better capitalist you are. That belongs to you.
But, if you lose money, you can write off the losses on your taxes. If your business is large enough, the government might bail you out. If you go bankrupt, since you are separate from your business, even though the business pays you all your money, you can shed the business like a second skin and get away with billions of dollars, unscathed. Just file for bankruptcy and keep all your money.
Losses are paid for by taxpayers and simpletons still holding stocks as part of their retirement plan. Didn't you guys get the memo that the bank was going under? I dumped all that stock a month ago.
Meanwhile, a poor person can see their pension vanish when a business goes under, the government doesn't bail them out, and they still have to pay all their obligations personally even if they lose their job. And if they file for bankruptcy, it works differently than if they were a business.
The system is slanted so that you can repeatedly reap the rewards of one failed business venture after the other, and walk away a millionaire, and the losses get absorbed by the taxpayer, made to vanish by business bankruptcy, and are transferred to the common stockholder, but if you're a poor person, your losses are not tax write-offs, you still owe when you have personal debts, and you are the one holding the worthless stock, since you didn't get the memo that the company was folding.
There's no golden parachute for the poor, the government doesn't forgive your debts or guarantee your pension.
All of this is the direct result of money influencing our politics, not just allowing it in the first place, but forcing even those who hate making thousands of personal phone calls to ask for donations to do so in order to contribute to the coffers of the national party. Even when you're in a safe district, most of your time in office is spent fundraising for the party itself.
That's a bipartisan problem. But, if the people you talk to 98% of the time have only one concern, and will donate to you if you pledge to support their issues, and that issue is making sure rich people keep more of their money, that's the laws we'll end up writing.
The people making such demands are not socialists. At least, not in the classic sense. They're all for government intervention in the economy and having the government's vast resources being used to help the least fortunate, as long as that "least fortunate" person is a billionaire who had a bad quarter, and the government intervention in question is to re-write the laws and rig the tables in their favor and give them another tax cut or loophole to abuse, or find a way to make an unethical business practice perfectly legal, by de-regulating.
That's what the Republican party exists for. They could actually give a darn about social justice issues, religious issues, or nationalistic stuff. Their main purpose is ensuring that the Koch brothers have a great year.
The Democratic party is right behind them in that regard. Except occasionally the Democrats also remember to raise the minimum wage.
Conservative is an umbrella term for a lot of political ideas, some of them cultural-conservative, some nationalistic, some libertarian. However, even though there are different flavors of conservative, you won't find too many conservatives who shy away from that umbrella term. And often enough, these different flavors of conservative politics end up in the same entree, instead of a la carte.
Since the two major parties control most of the policy positions in our country, and more representatives and senators are Republican, and conservatives are the ones propping up the Republican party (in all the various flavors), it makes sense to talk about conservative politics as a whole. You won't see the big business interests opposing the religious right's interests, nor will you see the libertarians who vote Republican seriously opposing the nationalists. Even if they have different core values, they support one another's politics, under Republicanism, and under the umbrella of conservatism.
True, examples of which include:
The Flat Tax or variants thereof.
Replacing income tax with sales tax, based on the idea that you'll be able to "keep" your money and that you get to choose when to spend it.
The problem is, if you make $1,000,000 per year, the bare necessities of life, for you, could be 1-5% of your income. If you are a bottom wage earner, and you make $14,000 per year, you spend almost every dime of that on rent, food, utilities, insurance, etc. There's not a lot of disposable income as it stands, and as time goes on with stagnant wages, that disposable income vanishes.
Sometimes a person's margin of error is 5% of their income or less, before they're losing money every month. You add a Flat Tax and even go as far as to exempt food from the equation, and the plain and simple fact is, people working 40 hour weeks will become homeless. They won't be able to pay for all their bills, because their income stayed the same but their tax burden increased 15%.
The principle of paying taxes only when you choose to doesn't apply when 95% of your income is immediately spent on non-discretionary expenses.
The response to that reality is "work harder" and "prove to your boss you deserve that raise". That's a profound misunderstanding of economics and the relationship between employers and the employed in today's economy. It makes the assumption that the worker isn't already working as hard as they can. We take fewer vacation days and work longer hours than the Japanese, who are the stereotype of a class of people who work themselves to death. That's us, moreso than them. And we have wages stagnant for a decade.
The problem is not "workers not working hard enough". The problem is conservative politicians and businessmen trying to inflate prices for themselves which impacts the consumer (the poor) while depressing wages for the poor, as if they don't already own a large enough percentage of the American pie.
Pushing through tax decreases for the rich without offsetting those costs to the budget.
You can't compartmentalize the budget this way. If you reduce taxes on anyone, and the budget is in the red, eventually, social services will get cut. Every time you do this, funding for needed services gets cut. There's a direct correlation between these two things. You can't pretend cutting taxes only boosts the economy and helps the poor through unobserved trickle-down effects, and then ignore the real social services cuts which are then made.
Privatizing gains, subsidizing losses.
When you're rich, your company and thus your livelihood is too big to fail.
If you made big gains through your business, that's your hard work being rewarded, and thus, the more tax breaks and loopholes and offshore accounting you can get away with, the better capitalist you are. That belongs to you.
But, if you lose money, you can write off the losses on your taxes. If your business is large enough, the government might bail you out. If you go bankrupt, since you are separate from your business, even though the business pays you all your money, you can shed the business like a second skin and get away with billions of dollars, unscathed. Just file for bankruptcy and keep all your money.
Losses are paid for by taxpayers and simpletons still holding stocks as part of their retirement plan. Didn't you guys get the memo that the bank was going under? I dumped all that stock a month ago.
Meanwhile, a poor person can see their pension vanish when a business goes under, the government doesn't bail them out, and they still have to pay all their obligations personally even if they lose their job. And if they file for bankruptcy, it works differently than if they were a business.
The system is slanted so that you can repeatedly reap the rewards of one failed business venture after the other, and walk away a millionaire, and the losses get absorbed by the taxpayer, made to vanish by business bankruptcy, and are transferred to the common stockholder, but if you're a poor person, your losses are not tax write-offs, you still owe when you have personal debts, and you are the one holding the worthless stock, since you didn't get the memo that the company was folding.
There's no golden parachute for the poor, the government doesn't forgive your debts or guarantee your pension.
All of this is the direct result of money influencing our politics, not just allowing it in the first place, but forcing even those who hate making thousands of personal phone calls to ask for donations to do so in order to contribute to the coffers of the national party. Even when you're in a safe district, most of your time in office is spent fundraising for the party itself.
That's a bipartisan problem. But, if the people you talk to 98% of the time have only one concern, and will donate to you if you pledge to support their issues, and that issue is making sure rich people keep more of their money, that's the laws we'll end up writing.
The people making such demands are not socialists. At least, not in the classic sense. They're all for government intervention in the economy and having the government's vast resources being used to help the least fortunate, as long as that "least fortunate" person is a billionaire who had a bad quarter, and the government intervention in question is to re-write the laws and rig the tables in their favor and give them another tax cut or loophole to abuse, or find a way to make an unethical business practice perfectly legal, by de-regulating.
That's what the Republican party exists for. They could actually give a darn about social justice issues, religious issues, or nationalistic stuff. Their main purpose is ensuring that the Koch brothers have a great year.
The Democratic party is right behind them in that regard. Except occasionally the Democrats also remember to raise the minimum wage.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
I'd love to be able to argue any substantive point being made, but at no point was there a substantive point being made. It went- I decided government didn't work, and that liberals didn't care about things, and they don't care about people or results.
Meanwhile, I can point to multitudes of liberal policy positions where the results were better than the status quo, or the conservative policy positions being enacted elsewhere.
My entire argument is about results of both policies being put into action, where one is clearly better.
I live in a country which defeats the United States on crime, on education, on gun violence, on wages, on budget, etc.
All of that is a result of policy. Those policies are being made and enacted and the results are being seen outside of the Fox News bubble.
Those results are real, and the results are better than anything you'll find in any "red" state. The reason is because the people who actually want better results than the status quo, are the people willing to challenge it. The reason is because the people who actually care about results and people, are the people who do not simply repeat conservative rhetoric when confronting a problem.
The rhetoric that conservatives are the ones who care, is very interesting, since they are willing to enact zero policy positions that help anyone at all, other than those at the very top.
Name some policies enacted by conservatives of any kind which (a) had positive results [that's kind of important] and (b) helped a group of people other than a wealthy person or a business.
I can name one, the EITC, enacted by Reagan. But that was a tax break for the poor. That doesn't exist in Republican politics today without an even bigger one for the rich. And it doesn't work as well as periodic minimum wage increases. Stagnant wages plus price inflation means that eventually, those tax breaks are meaningless, and all the benefits are wiped away, and now the government cannot afford to help unemployed or sick people the way they could before.
Still, it temporarily helped the poor. It was just a terrible alternative to the policy which made a lot more sense, addressing price inflation with wage inflation.
I could name the EPA as another great thing enacted by a conservative. But Nixon wouldn't survive a Republican primary today. The conservatives of 30 years ago or 40 years ago or 50 years ago aren't ideologically pure enough for today's Republican party. Any hint of environmental protection, regulation, or conservation is just social justice warrior nonsense to Republicans of today, who would rather repeal, frack, drill, and spill.
How about OSHA? That's another great Nixon relic. Nixon would be a Democrat today. Hillary reminds me a lot of Nixon. Same poor personal character, but otherwise competent leader.
Still not great for the country. But I'd take Nixon over Trump.
Notice how I responded to you with examples, not just a Fox News video containing nothing but empty rhetoric devoid of substantive points.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
It's also interesting to me that here is one of the cases in politics where you can do something for someone, without it hurting anyone else.
No one is being harmed by gay people living normal lives and having equality. In fact, if it mattered (and it really shouldn't, since this is about people's basic fundamental rights, but) gay weddings and honeymoons, and policies which allow gay people to thrive at their job and occupy property instead of being barred from employment, marriage, and renting, that's all good for the economy.
Any time you have a class of people who can't gain employment or legal residence, or who want to spend money on something, and are prevented from doing so by hateful and fearful bigots, the economy suffers.
How much better off would the economy be if women weren't allowed to work or own property or travel around independently? Look no further than ultra-religious countries which enact such policies, and ask yourself if their economies are doing well when half of the population is nothing but dependent and subjugated.
Hatred of gay people and the supremacist viewpoints (I'm not going to sugarcoat this: It is the belief that heterosexuals are inherently superior, in exactly the same way white supremacists believe that whites are inherently superior) is in no way good for anyone in society.
It's very clear. Bigotry does not help society. It is unquestionably and immensely wrong. Yet, if you want to find a group of people who favor restricting voting rights of minorities, personal freedoms of minorities, employment rights, marriage rights, reproductive rights, look no further than nationalistic conservatives or religious conservatives.
Maybe it isn't bigotry that motivates every person holding the policy position, but the policy position allows bigotry to thrive, and it allows bigots to oppress people. Maybe it is simply the politics of partisanship and the team-first mentality, where you might not like the policy positions of social conservatives, but still elect them. I can have room for that in my outlook. Just like I don't support everything the Democrats do.
But the end result is the same, if you vote for bigoted policies supported by bigoted politicians- restriction of rights and systemic injustice for no purpose whatsoever except to satisfy the hatred of a very small percentage of the population with a very loud megaphone.
Even if you're not personally bigoted, you're allowing the bigot to win.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
Because you can look at a liberal state in the United States, with similar social safety nets, socio-economic systems, and better approaches to mental health and policing, but you still have guns all over the place, and the results are still worse than Australia.
If you isolate and only examine the difference between a liberal society with guns and a liberal society without guns, the one without guns is still safer.
My suggestion would be the Australian system or the UK system. One where even the police are largely not armed because the nation is that safe. Where they use highly trained gun-toting police units only when the rare instance of them being needed because someone actually was able to obtain a dangerous firearm and a lot of ammunition.
What informs me about the "home and personal defense" argument are the statistics of children either shooting or being shot by guns at home, which will happen more often than that same gun being used to defend a home. The policy of keeping gun and ammunition separate or locked in a safe means it may be inaccessible during the very rare home invasion, and that it is still possible for children to see someone access that safe. Or that a bullet may carelessly be left in the chamber.
You do not see the rates of children being shot in Australia.
You also don't see as many instances of parents killing each other and their kids, using the gun that was in the house.
You'll also see higher instances of suicide with a gun in the house. Which is odd, because it would seem to be easy enough to jump off a building or in front of a train if one were truly committed to the idea. But if one is feeling depressed or angry, and death is just one click away, sometimes people can make an impulse-driven and rash decision.
I'm all for physician-assisted suicide for medical reasons. But suicide should always be a carefully considered decision, given the permanent implications.
You'll also see fewer school shootings. How are kids getting access to guns in countries with gun control? They're not, to a very large degree.
The fact that mass shooting doesn't happen for a decade in Australia is reason enough to look at this policy seriously.
In Norway, the controls are strict but not a ban, and absent one terrorist/white nationalist who got ahold of a gun and went on a spree, outside that one event, there is almost no gun violence and almost no gun crime.
Stricter controls versus a total ban, I would personally go for the total ban. However, stricter controls does make a difference, if both the society and the government are serious about giving teeth to those controls.
Precisely. You wouldn't have a government telling you not to carry weapons, you'd have a local crime lord shooting you for being in his territory. No government does not mean freedom, it simply changes who has control over your life. An elected government with constitutional laws and protected liberties and rights, or a warlord who does not care about you at all.
Which is why libertarian philosophy doesn't work. It changes who has control over your life from a body of people who are supposed to represent you, to your employer and landlord, who may not have your best interests at heart. And that's the best case scenario.
I would wager pretty heavily that if the average Yemen civilian could have access to and afford weapons, given the violent insurgency, they'd end up buying them. This is speculation on my part, but the reason why you're not seeing more weapons in that country is because of economic reasons, not government policy.
• The US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world - an average of 88 per 100 people. That puts it first in the world for gun ownership - and even the number two country, Yemen, has significantly fewer - 54.8 per 100 people
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/yemen
In Yemen, the percentage of homicides committed with a firearm is reported to be (2012) 84%.
Just like in the United States, in Yemen the right to private gun ownership is not guaranteed by law. There are restrictions to the second amendment in the US but they are few and far between. No fly list? Ability to own a gun. Terrorist watch list? Ability to own a gun. History of domestic violence? Ability to own a gun.
Also of note: Guns per people is a flawed statistic. Some people own multiple guns. In fact, a significant portion of people who own guns own 2 or more guns.
In Yemen, it's quite probable that the average Yemeni civilian cannot even afford a gun. It's very possible the majority of guns are owned by a small minority of people. 54.8 guns for every 100 people, that does not mean half the population is packing heat.
Yemen is also on the more violent half of this list. Just because it isn't at the very top (likely due to poverty and the number of guns being held by a smaller percentage of the population) doesn't mean it isn't a violent country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
We should be examining the policy positions of the bottom quarter of the list, where the populations are significant. Norway, Australia, UK, etc. Not countries in the upper third.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
For the record, it's over-stating things to say that the UK has anything so clear or deliberate as "a system". What we've done is, over the course of a century, gradually banned different categories of weapon, tool or potentially-menacing implement when and as the tabloid press decided that we should.
I mean, this is a country that recently banned "zombie knives", a category of weapon which, according to the police guidelines on the subject, are of "varying lengths" and "no specific shape or style". It is deeply unwise to use as a model of anything.
I mean, this is a country that recently banned "zombie knives", a category of weapon which, according to the police guidelines on the subject, are of "varying lengths" and "no specific shape or style". It is deeply unwise to use as a model of anything.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
Let's play a game, it's called: Compare how crazy your country is to Norway.
When someone gets shot in Norway, it is the top news story.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...llets-last-year-and-no-one-died-10374662.html
It is not buried on the back page. It's actually news when someone's life ends in a hail of bullets.
Seriously, everyone click this page. it's in Norwegian, but look.
http://www.ssb.no/dodsarsak
Year: 2012
"Drap, overfall" means "Murder, assault".
What does the number 30 represent?
The number 30 represents the total number of individual persons killed in the entire country for the entire year of 2012, with the cause of death being literally any kind of murder or assault. That means we're including knives and murders using a vehicle. Not just guns.
On another page, a total of 33 murders occurred in 2014.
http://www.ssb.no/sosiale-forhold-o...5-10-29?fane=tabell&sort=nummer&tabell=242553
Again, this is in Norwegian.
Drapsforsøk is attempts at murder, 51 is the number.
33 is the total number of successful murders.
The population of Norway is almost 5.1 million people.
I looked on the english (USA) google for this stuff, couldn't find it. The media in the United States doesn't cover this story.
Again, you can legally own a gun in Norway. it's just that the hoops you have to jump through are prohibitive and the license is expensive. And the guns are pretty much used for hunting, not home defense.
https://www.politi.no/vedlegg/lokale_vedlegg/kripos/Vedlegg_2827.pdf
Murders 2005-2014:
ALL MURDERS. Not just gun murders. ALL MURDERS. Look at the chart on page 2.
2011 was the year with the neo-nazi mass murderer. Shows the numbers with and without that statistic being included.
Is literally anyone in this thread opposed to seeing the total number of murders per year drop to 2 digits?
Page 4:
In 2014:
2 cases of murder by revolver
2 cases of murder by pistol
0 cases of murder by rifle
0 cases of murder by shotgun
0 cases of murder by machine gun
Is literally anyone in this thread opposed to seeing the total number of murders per year by gun drop to single digits or no digits? You wouldn't even have to repeal the second amendment. Simply adopt all of Norway's regulatory policies. You can have your gun cake and eat it too. I'd still favor the Australian system, but I can't argue with these results. It would mean adopting very left-wing policies on guns.
But that would mean not simply linking to a Fox News video that makes no arguments whenever someone says something factual that makes you uncomfortable. And that may be difficult.
When someone gets shot in Norway, it is the top news story.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...llets-last-year-and-no-one-died-10374662.html
It is not buried on the back page. It's actually news when someone's life ends in a hail of bullets.
Seriously, everyone click this page. it's in Norwegian, but look.
http://www.ssb.no/dodsarsak
Year: 2012
"Drap, overfall" means "Murder, assault".
What does the number 30 represent?
The number 30 represents the total number of individual persons killed in the entire country for the entire year of 2012, with the cause of death being literally any kind of murder or assault. That means we're including knives and murders using a vehicle. Not just guns.
On another page, a total of 33 murders occurred in 2014.
http://www.ssb.no/sosiale-forhold-o...5-10-29?fane=tabell&sort=nummer&tabell=242553
Again, this is in Norwegian.
Drapsforsøk is attempts at murder, 51 is the number.
33 is the total number of successful murders.
The population of Norway is almost 5.1 million people.
I looked on the english (USA) google for this stuff, couldn't find it. The media in the United States doesn't cover this story.
Again, you can legally own a gun in Norway. it's just that the hoops you have to jump through are prohibitive and the license is expensive. And the guns are pretty much used for hunting, not home defense.
https://www.politi.no/vedlegg/lokale_vedlegg/kripos/Vedlegg_2827.pdf
Murders 2005-2014:
ALL MURDERS. Not just gun murders. ALL MURDERS. Look at the chart on page 2.
2011 was the year with the neo-nazi mass murderer. Shows the numbers with and without that statistic being included.
Is literally anyone in this thread opposed to seeing the total number of murders per year drop to 2 digits?
Page 4:
In 2014:
2 cases of murder by revolver
2 cases of murder by pistol
0 cases of murder by rifle
0 cases of murder by shotgun
0 cases of murder by machine gun
Is literally anyone in this thread opposed to seeing the total number of murders per year by gun drop to single digits or no digits? You wouldn't even have to repeal the second amendment. Simply adopt all of Norway's regulatory policies. You can have your gun cake and eat it too. I'd still favor the Australian system, but I can't argue with these results. It would mean adopting very left-wing policies on guns.
But that would mean not simply linking to a Fox News video that makes no arguments whenever someone says something factual that makes you uncomfortable. And that may be difficult.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
Thank you to my Norwegian wife for assisting me in finding this website and interpreting the results for me. Google translate is only effective 98% of the time or so, and accuracy is important to me.
If you want to verify this stuff yourself, run it through google translate. You'll get a good picture of it. This is all from police and government sources, not liberal propaganda outlets like the left-wing version of Fox News or whatever.
Sources of information matter.
If you want to verify this stuff yourself, run it through google translate. You'll get a good picture of it. This is all from police and government sources, not liberal propaganda outlets like the left-wing version of Fox News or whatever.
Sources of information matter.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
90 minutes, estimate.
One draft, I don't do revisions except for checking for typos, which I usually do after I post the darned thing since I'm that impatient to post it.
