The FAST Approaching Gun Ban

[Ts RedVeX]

There was never a golden age of safety.

I don't do meth.

I am no alpha and omega of all knowledge, which is probably one of the main reasons I honour you with my participation in this idiotic congregation on here. As to religion, any religion that strengthens unity of people can be better than none. It can be seen very well here in the UK, especially in some areas, where influences of those religions or ideologies are indeed very visible.

Civilisations fall over decades, so I need not give any specific dates. I personally see fall of inherited monarchy as a milestone of a country's fall.

It is much easier to fool people than convince them that they have been fooled. - Mark Twain

[trish]

https://www.snopes.com/did-mark-twai...e-been-fooled/

[Ts RedVeX]

"The general idea of that quote (although not that wording) is one Mark Twain expressed in regard to lying — in that is it hard to convince people they have been a victim of a lie".

-basically what I meant

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=Ts RedVeX;1800592]

I hate to sound like a record stuck on the same groove, but I am confused by your arguments. For example:

As to religion, any religion that strengthens unity of people can be better than none.
-I could agree with you because there is no evidence in Poland, for example, that Roman Catholicism has united the people. But is this what you meant to say?
A major difference between Poland of the 'Golden Age' -said to have declined with the death of Sigismund August in 1572- Poland of 1917 and Poland in 2017 is that the diversity of its peoples and religion has disappeared so that all those Jews, for example, who at times flourished -who at other times were persecuted and killed- in the 'Golden Age', by 1917 were the targets of organized anti-Jewish violence that by 1945 had reduced 10% of Poland's Jewish population to as close to zero as you can get, for reasons I need not explain.
Poland remains split between secular and religious people, but to deny the enormous influence of Roman Catholicism as a force that united Poland in the 1980s would be to deny reality. But has this Catholic Church united or divided Poland? Jarosław Kaczyński who leads the Law and Justice Party is a 'conservative Catholic' who said of migrants and Muslim refugees from Syria in 2015 that they carry “all sorts of parasites and protozoa, which … while not dangerous in the organisms of these people, could be dangerous here.” [hmmm, where have we heard that language before?]
But another Catholic, Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek said at the same time
“Not accepting refugees practically means resigning from being a Christian,” he said. “I’m ashamed of those who don’t want to do their duty not just as Christians but as human beings.”
In other words, there is no evidence that the dominance of one religious organization in one country acts to unite it, and of course the parallels with the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party are so striking one may have replaced the other without 'the proles' noticing the difference, if it were not that they claim to worship different gods.
https://www.politico.eu/article/poli...want-refugees/

Civilisations fall over decades, so I need not give any specific dates. .
--You not tell us what you think a civilization is, not an easy task I admit, but by not giving any dates you also do not tell us how, or why civilizations have gone into decline. And, for example, even if you agree with historians that Egyptian Civilization ended with the Roman occupation in 30BCE, the influence of Egyptian civilization which had already been evident in 'classical Greece' endured through the Roman period, so a civilization can cease to rule over a people and a place yet still exist in their minds and in their behaviour and make it difficult to unravel the two, just as it is claimed there are elements of Pagan Britain and its rituals in the manner in which Christianity developed here, and perhaps explain the differences between Buddhism in India and Japan.

I personally see fall of inherited monarchy as a milestone of a country's fall
-Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
As you have said before it appears you approve of Monarchy, yet it begs the question: what if it was the Monarch who created the conditions for his own downfall?
For example, it has been established that numerous factors caused the First World War, but one of them was the ambition of the German Empire to expand the range of its authority, and as it found itself shut out of expansion in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, it turned to Europe. Key decisions were thus made by the Hohenzollern Monarch Wilhelm II, but decisions that led directly to the collapse of his entire Empire, defeat, division, and discord in Germany itself.
As to the benefits of inherited monarchy, how did Russia benefit when Nicolas II inherited the Romanov throne from Alexander III? Central to the period from 1894 to 1917 was a degree of economic growth, some social change as a consequence but mostly in the urban areas, a remarkable continuation of creativity in the arts if you include Alexander and Nicolas's period to include Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, Kandinsky, Blok, Akhmatova, and the early Stravinsky -and of course the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, more anti-Jewish pogroms that you can count, military failure in the war with Japan in 1905, administrative reform that collapsed with the assassination of Stolypin in 1911 and thus a sense of impending doom in Russia even before Nicolas -like his royal cousin Wilhelm- took Russia into a disastrous war that ended the Romanov dynasty, his life and that of his family, and the creation of an alternative autocracy under the Communist Party, albeit with Nationalism intact.

In both the Russian and German cases, the fall of the Monarchy did lead to bad things, but those things were the consequence of bad decisions made by those Monarchs and the men and women who supported them before the fall. Crucially for Europe, in these two cases, many of the former supporters of the Romanov's fled Russia in 1917 to live in Munich and Berlin where their anti-Jewish, anti-Communist beliefs became a source of inspiration for the Nazis with whom they bedded down -to re-enact the rise and fall of a pseudo-Monarchy with even more disastrous results.

Just as you cannot offer us a coherent account of civilization, so your quaint attachment to Monarchy raises more questions than it answers. You want to retain the gold from the golden age, but not the blood and shit on which it was built -or maybe you do, and accept that every civilization has its winners and losers?

In the context of this thread, how many civilizations rose and fell because the average person was armed and not under the control of the 'authority' be it a Monarch, Emperor, Wise Leader, Military Junta or Party -or because the people, fed up with corruption, lies, robbery and threats to their own lives, took up arms to overthrow their masters? Is it not thus the case that the expansion of gun ownership in the USA threatens the integrity of the Union by challenging the authority of its government? And, if contempt for government reaches a level where local armed 'militias' believe their rights are being lost, will there be another civil war in the USA?

To fire the first shot -be it Concord or Fort Sumter, the revolutionary needs a gun -and a cause. Even if the cause is not justified, and the consequences are catastrophe for all.

[trish]

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? https://nyti.ms/2j79rRs

[broncofan]

It is much easier to fool people than convince them that they have been fooled. - Mark Twain

The idea that the average citizen should own an assault rifle is a plague on civilized society. It will be the death of us - Aristotle

[Aticus100]

There was never a golden age of safety.

I don't do meth.

I am no alpha and omega of all knowledge, which is probably one of the main reasons I honour you with my participation in this idiotic congregation on here. As to religion, any religion that strengthens unity of people can be better than none. It can be seen very well here in the UK, especially in some areas, where influences of those religions or ideologies are indeed very visible.

“The bullshit is strong in this one”
Me, doing an impression of Joda, if he’d known RedVex.

[filghy2]

There was never a golden age of safety.

This is what you said in an earlier post:
"If you want less crime then bring back teaching the values that used to make our civilisation great to kids at schools, cut the bureaucracy that we have all become slaves of."

So you admit that people were not safer in this mythical past, or are you going to move the goalposts yet again?

[trish]

Interesting strategy. Have a shooting every day and it'll never be time to talk about gun control. Thoughts and prayers everyone.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...114-story.html

[filghy2]

Have a shooting every day and it'll never be time to talk about gun control.

If it was done by a muslim, of course, it would be immediately time to talk about terrorism, immigration bans, etc.