suture

Clearly.

The technical difference are fundamental. To interpret the intent of the writers one has to understand the world they lived in and not merely the words they wrote. “arms” in terms of lethality, ease of use, density of population, second order effects, type of society, etc. are much different now and the amendment is obsolete. Particularly since a well regulated militia is no longer necessary for the defense do the country. The tenth amendment is not enforced at all in terms of how it was written. It has morphed in terms of how it is interpreted since society grew much more complex. The second amendment needs to be dealt with similarly.

I didn’t say two wrongs make a right and didn’t use past violations of the Constitution as justification for anything. I just pointed out that the idea that we are a nation of laws is incorrect and that adherence to the Constitution is not done in a consistent way.

I understand the meaning of “well regulated” and I disagree with the Court’s interpretation of what that phrase means and how it should be interpreted. The Court is not infallible. Indeed, in recent times we see quite clearly how absurd it’s decisions can be. The Court should be ignored when it’s decisions are absurd. All decent governments rely on a consent of the governed and the Supreme Court has clearly overstepped itself in a slew of areas and it has lost its credibility. As such it’s recent decisions should be ignored.

If tomorrow the Court ruled that people have a right to create and use biological weapons I’m certain you’d say that the decision should be ignored. So don’t act as though the notion of ignoring the court is unthinkable or unprincipled or irresponsible. Particularly when there is historic precedent for doing so.

Accuracy, and reload times, etc. are much different for cannons today than they were 250 years ago. Population density is different and society is much more complex now. A well regulated militia means that the government has the right to regulate firearms. And a well regulated militia is no longer necessary for the defense of the country. The second amendment is obsolete and detrimental to the country.

We are not a nation of laws. We have seen our leaders try to overthrow the government with impunity. We have government agencies engage in torture and mass surveillance with impunity. We have police forces that kill legally armed people who have done no wrong with impunity. This is not a nation of laws as you put it. We have a Supreme Court ignore precedent and make up shit with its recent rulings. We recently had a President ignore the Constitution to enrich himself and nothing came of it. We have a Supreme Court decide that it wasn’t important to ensure that the votes for President were counted correctly and appointed Bush as the winner.

The Republic ended when a coup was attempted and nothing happened to the instigators. We will soon live in a country in which a legal act in one city is a death penalty crime in another. We soon will live in a country in which the government can’t meaningfully enforce administrative rules. It’s already over unless the Constitution is drastically rewritten or the Court in its present form is changed.

Obviously, the reference to Lincoln was about him ignoring the Supreme Court and not a call to civil war. Your reading comprehension in this instance was quite bad.

One child was killed by jarts and they were banned. One person tried to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb and we all have to take off our shoes at the airport. But guns, let’s not ban those. Indeed let’s expand their prevalence.

If lethality and rate of gunfire being much higher today than 250 years ago is not a relevant point then why is it ok to ban machine guns? Shouldn’t I be able to protect my property with a tank or a flamethrower?

Pertaining to your comment on ink jet printers. When they are used for mass killings I’ll be willing to consider proposals for their regulation.

You can find citations yourself. It’s easy to do.

When large numbers of black men walk around with AR-15s there will be calls for gun control. The last time black men overtly armed themselves in 70s there was a call for gun control. Reagan even called for gun control when that happened.

Twice in Minnesota a black with a legal firearm was murdered by police with no consequences for the police. The right to a firearm is not, in practice or in law, at all similar to the right of free speech. The government, with impunity, murders legally armed people. It’s not really a right when people of the wrong race or creed get killed for being armed.

Gun control will quickly occur once black men arm themselves and the courts will concur. Similar to how religious freedom arguments get ignored when the Satanic Church makes them.

That is not all the ruling implies or will lead too. You are badly distorting the impact this ruling will have.

The Constitution explicitly states well regulated militia and at the time the amendment was passed the lethality of guns was much less than it is today. The Supreme Court is on a clear path to destroy the mechanisms by which a modern state can function. We will soon live in a country where a legal act in one city will warrant the death penalty in another. A state that cannot adequately regulate weapons is not functional. What worked 250 years ago no longer works today.

The Constitution isn’t going to be changed because there is too much divisiveness. SCOTUS is doing what it can to foment this divisiveness. It’s time to be like Lincoln and ignore the Supreme Court. Strict adherence to words written 250 years ago is not a good way forward for the country. The U.S. is badly in need of reform for how its federal government works.

Your perspective ignores human nature and how easily influenced people are at scale. Toyota did not put a gun to your head but American society long ago evolved to the point where having a car is a necessity for the vast majority of adults. The real issue is that the negative externalities for those design decisions decades ago have resulted in a lot of harm with little benefit.

According to the following link confiscating of passports is common in Bahrain for migrant workers.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/09/30/bahrain-abuse-migrant-wo...

Perhaps you don’t understand how words work. Words can have different meanings/connotations depending on situation and context. As I said repeatedly, for me it is correct to say “solved” given the constraints involved. Human societies are complex and one can nitpick the world “solved” and say nothing is solved when it come policies of complex societies. So don’t use that word when it comes to societal issues. I and many others do use that word for certain issues. It’s naive of you to have your pedantic nitpicking on the word and not reflect on what it says about you. Obviously I keep bringing up the U.S. because that’s the context of my starting comment way above. And you yourself have brought up the U.S.

What goal do you wish to accomplish your pedantic nitpicking? You want to get others to believe that my views on national health policies are naive? You want me to realize that in a strict, mathematical sense of the word saying “solved” is incorrect? These are rhetorical questions because I’m not going to read your response. You clearly don’t know much about policy issues and what it means for a society have essentially “solved” an issue (or have found a decent enough solution that it isn’t a dire problem anymore so that some non pedantic people will say it is solved).

Carry forth Don Quixote on your quest to eradicate incorrect usage of what you think “solved” means.

I hope you can break from the the intellectual shackles that bind you. I hope you can visit other countries and read from sources of information outside your comfort zone. Subscribing to a belief about which system of economics you prefer does not make one evil.

It’s a solved problem as far as one can get given the constraints involved. As I said, if you don’t want to use that phrase then don’t. I’m not going to quibble over semantics. Human societies are far more complex than programming and the notion of “solved” means something different in the former than in the latter. Use whatever phrase you want. Just don’t think the U.S. system is in any way better. You are the one who brought up an anecdotal experience in favor of the U.S. system over Canada’s system.

In Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, and elsewhere in the region migrant workers have their passport taken by the employer and thus can’t leave the country. They are stuck. In most other countries the employer does not confiscate your passport. It’s weird to me that one needs a passport to leave a country. In the U.S. you don’t need a passport to leave.

Well, as I said, in my opinion people can be blamed given the readily available information and in regard to the multi-decade irrational fear of socialism. Willful ignorance is a thing.

The naivety is in thinking that if it doesn’t work in Canada then it must not be a solved problem. The naivety is in thinking that if you can find anecdotal evidence that in a particular instance Canada’s system worked worse than the U.S. system then it must be the case that Canada’s system is worse.

The U.S. per capita spends far more on healthcare than any other OECD country. We don’t get correspondingly better outcomes or coverage. Universal healthcare is a solved problem within the context that every system necessarily involves some sort of rationing since there aren’t enough medical resources in any country to do otherwise.

If you don’t want to use the phrase “solved system” then don’t but don’t pretend the U.S. is any way better other than in anecdotal instances. Below is a source for information on per capita spending for OECD nations. You can easily find information on health our outcomes, life expectancy, teen pregnancies, infant mortality, etc.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/876d99c3-en/index.html?i...

Yes, I know this. However, in this age of easy information and knowledge about other societies readily available it becomes more a matter of willful ignorance than being duped by propaganda.

I don’t disagree in general with what you wrote. On the bogeyman of “socialism” I do blame the electorate. The irrational fear of anything remotely related to “socialism” in America has been going on far too long.

Assuming by free you mean universal coverage that is (almost) free at the point of usage then this is a solved problem. What the United States lacks in order to realize a solution is political willpower and an electorate that is savvy enough to know that wanting such a system does not make one a communist. (And that being a communist does not make one an evil person.)

It appears as though you did not read the article. What the article describes cannot be attributed to booming stock market alone.

There is a book called “Number, Shape, & Symmetry”. You can download it at z-lib.org. It’s a book that will give you the flavor of mathematics and prove some of the basic algebraic properties. It does not require calculus but will require a desire to understand. It’s an art form to read mathematics and understand. I recommend the book along with using a tutor or math.stackexchange.com.

Good luck!

Do you want something at the level of beginning algebra? Or something more advanced?

Typically before one gets to the point of really understanding how to prove things a fair amount of brain washing occurs. For instance, few people know why the distributive property holds but they use it all the time. Most people are comfortable with the idea that a negative real number times a positive real number is a negative real number but they can’t prove it. In order to prove these basic facts one needs a fair amount of what is called mathematical maturity.

The most basic subject to understand mathematical proofs is Euclidean geometry. There you will learn the basics of proofs and what it means to prove something.

Let’s look at x/a = b/c. You want to show that this equation has the same exact solution set as xc = ab. In order to prove this rigorously you’ll need to prove things about associativity. You’ll also need to prove that a unit isn’t a zero divisor in the real numbers. What we see is that to prove seemingly simple statements requires some machinery and to understand the necessity of this machinery requires mathematical maturity.

But maybe you don’t want to rigorously prove the above. Maybe you just want to understand why it is plausible that this is true. For that, pick up a beginning algebra book and actually read what it says and try to understand it. This is hard to do on your own.

Here’s a plausible explanation for why x/a = b/c has the same solution set as xc=ab. Note that a and c must be nonzero because we can’t divide by zero (this requires proof!). We note that

(x/a) times a

Is the same thing as x times (1/a times a). This is due to associativity. A nonzero number times it’s reciprocal is 1. And 1 times anything is itself. So x/a times a simplifies to x.

So,starting with

x/a = b/c

I can multiply both sides by a. I can do this since a is invertible and multiplying by an invertible element preserves equality (requires proof!). So what I get, after simplifying, is

x = (b/c) times a

I can rearrange things (by associativity) to write this as

x = (ab)/c

Now multiply both sides by c to get (I skipped a step by multiplying and simplifying at the same time)

xc = ab.

You are being deliberately obtuse. There are people who are enslaved in societies where slavery is illegal and, as a whole, considered evil by a very large majority of the population. People are sometimes kept in bondage by force and that force does not come from the government or by the society at large or by that societies views or consent. Of course, all of this is obvious and thus you are clearly trolling. If not, then you are a sad example.

… because in that case there's nothing stopping the slaves from leaving

Obviously this is false and you can find examples of people being enslaved in countries where it is outlawed. There are plenty of examples of an enslaved person being prevented from escaping even in the presence of laws prohibiting slavery. It’s as if you don’t understand human behavior.

You have a fanciful notion of slavery and what it entails. In another thread you bring up cases where the enslaved had it “good” and act as if this is normative in such circumstances. I am thankful views such are yours are no longer acceptable to most people. Within in your views on this topic one will not find common sense or decency.

That you find it worth your time to try to convince people of the benefits of slavery says much about you and nothing about slavery.

Someone will want to enslave people. This has been so for almost all of history for sufficiently large civilizations. In general humans exploit one another when they can get away with it. In the absence of government/societal regulations slavery will occur and thus the “market” minimum wage is 0.

Government regulations can be good and they can be bad. In enlightened countries enough good ones are in place to prevent a minimum wage of 0.

Obviously it was a whimsical way of saying “slavery is the natural minimum wage” in the absence of all regulations (which is a proxy for government/societal interventions). Some person/company will be willing to enslave people if they can get away with it. Clearly volunteering is not what people mean by “working for $0 per hour”. This is obvious to anyone who reads what I wrote without being disingenuous. Equally obvious is that a laissez-faire system is neither possible, desirable, or scalable. I won’t convince you of this and you won’t convince me otherwise.

You are free to desire to live in a world where a wage of 0 is a reasonable thing for an employer to pay. Fortunately for me people like you have little chance of seeing this desire come to fruition. There is no point in responding further but I will read and contemplate whatever response you decide to make.

I’m pretty sure slavery is outlawed in all European countries so that alone prevents a 0 minimum wage. That itself is a regulation. There are lots of “regulations” (government interventions) that prevent a zero minimum wage. Indeed the legal protections and regulations regarding unions, social programs for the unemployed, universal healthcare, etc. all contribute to an environment where the lowest wage isn’t zero. It is not a stretch at all to say that the legal infrastructure surrounding unions and requirements surrounding dealing with them count as “regulation”.

There are lots of instances where regulations fixed a broken system. Government regulations fixed the broke system of using child labor and fixed the broken system of slavery.

Consider the possibility that harsher conditions/sentences do not deter crime.

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/business-law/do-harsher-pu...

I do not at all understand the reason for your response. Do you really think that I was saying that doing something for free is always a form of slavery? I think it’s obvious the meaning and intent of what I wrote and only a disingenuous interpretation could have led you to respond as you did.