All of this is accurate, but it is still hilarious seeing NPR of all organizations act aghast at the idea of a supposedly “independent” media organization serving as the mouthpiece for Empire.

It might have something to do with both countries being founded and governed by Fascists. It bears remembering that the KMT colonized the island of Taiwan in much the same way that Israel colonized Palestine; with a swift and brutal round of ethnic cleansing to secure their local hegemony, followed by decades of military support from Fascists in the West.

I don’t think China should invade Taiwan but it drives me up the wall that so many people think that they are some plucky little democracy standing up to the big, bad, commies, when the reality is that they are just another hyper-capitalist settler-colonial project in the same vein as the US, Israel, Canada, etc.

Not just any propaganda network, Radio Free X is the umbrella under which the CIA disseminates black propaganda abroad, and also the organ which delivered kill lists to the anti-communist kill squads in Indonesia during the us-backed mass killings there.

All of this is declassified and public knowledge btw, not a conspiracy theory, although plenty of folks would like to still pretend that the US grew a conscience at some point and stopped wielding the CIA as a cudgel against global democracy, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.

If you are interested in learning about Radio Free Asia, or US led mass killings in general, I recommend The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins.

He was an off-duty pilot catching a ride in the jump seat behind the pilots in the cabin, which is completely normal. The guy being a fucking lunatic is where things went wrong.

I used to watch Mary-Lou’s Flip-Flop Shop every Saturday morning as a kid. Apparently it was locally produced in Houston, where I lived, so I wonder if it was even known about elsewhere? Basically she had a Saturday morning kids’ show that ran for one season, and it aired at like 6:30am. For some reason I was obsessed with it (despite being slightly older than the target demographic by the time it was airing) and I would wake up ungodly early on Saturdays to watch Mary Lou do somersaults and tell jokes.

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Yup. I left at the end of June, and would have left immediately if they had fucked with old.reddit at any point. I only see the site now when it comes up in search results and seeing what Reddit looks like now instantly assuaged any doubts I had about leaving.

My thoughts are that you are literally pulling a conclusion that the numbers don’t support out of your ass because you ‘feel’ the numbers are probably higher. The entire premise is flawed from the beginning anyway, because any situation where a person pulls a gun on a person without a gun is not a defensive use of a gun, and certainly doesn’t make anyone involved safer. Any interaction between two gun wielding individuals is similarly not a case of a good guy preventing violence. If neither had guns, neither would get shot. It is literally that simple.

I am absolutely not the one being obtuse here. Nothing you have claimed here is supported by actual evidence, unlike the pro-gun control position, and I’m not prepared to base our gun policy on vibes alone. You can spend all day saying ‘that’s different!’ but the facts are not on your side.

I did read the article, and you are not understanding what the article is claiming. All of those events have been counted, as a separate category of firearm incident, and gun-advocacy groups want them counted a different way. The total number of gun-related events is not in dispute, only whether they make good propaganda points for the death cult side of the argument. They are trying to claim that a ‘good guy with a gun’ frequently prevents violence, and that is simply not what the data presented shows. They are trying to claim that a methodological error has been made, when the reality is that they are just wrong and trying to lie about it.

At this point you are arguing that gun reform can’t work simply because Americans are special. You are incorrect, and your position isn’t supported by anything other than propaganda.

Australia successfully disarmed their populace. This argument does not hold water in the world we actually live in.

Australia successfully disarmed their populace. This argument does not hold water in the actual world we live in.

Zelenskiy is the democratically elected head of state, he has as good a mandate as anyone to use force on behalf of his people. The fact that Russia was allowed to invade in the first place, despite security guarantees from both Russia and the US is the failure here. In any case, that argument is a complete non-seqitur to what I actually said. I never said violence was completely preventable, but you absolutely can make it much harder.

Okay, but following that logic, getting rid of all of the guns is still the best thing we could do, because it makes it much harder for people to quickly inflict a huge amount of harm. Ensuring that your local community is free of guns would do far more to protect you and your family than bringing a gun into your home, which you have already acknowledged is a highly dangerous thing to do. It’s like arguing that because your neighbor keeps a bear chained up in his yard, you ought to go out and get a bear, to protect yourself from his bear, when the clear answer is just to get the bears out of the neighborhood.

You are already reliant on the state for defense, whether you admit it or not. The very existence of states requires a functional monopoly on violence, and private gun ownership is just a fig leaf to obscure that fact. A fig leaf that leads to massive, unnecessary loss of life. If your definition of freedom is so limited that not owning a gun makes you automatically un-free, you do not actually believe in freedom, you believe in the right to violently interject yourself into the lives of others. That is pretty much the opposite of freedom.

I mean, I simply disagree. Violence is always a failure, either of policy, or of personal behavior. Enabling people to escalate that failure to a deadly one with the twitch of a finger is simply not an acceptable paradigm. An armed society, contrary to the witticism, will never be a polite society, because it makes it stupendously easy for bad actors to cause disproportionate harm, relative to the ability of the community to reasonably prepare for. Removing guns entirely is the only reasonable solution if you actually want a free and peaceful society.

This isn’t an error. It’s people claiming to have done a thing they did not do and demanding to be added to the count. To be clear, cops don’t stop violence either, most mass-shooters kill themselves in the end, but lone-gunmen are not out here protecting anybody. Guns only and always make confrontation deadlier than it has to be. There is no situation where having a gun makes you safer, whether you possess a license or not, and the statistics on mortality and gun ownership back that up, going back a long, long time.

Agitating for people to go fight the government with fucking handguns and long rifles is effectively carrying water for the people you hate. There are methods of resistance that are far less likely to get young people gunned down en masse, and by leveraging those methods first, the violence that eventually ensues can be reduced and contained as much as possible.