HelixDab

I think we should give them both Bowie knives and tell them to go at it, and may the most reprehensible person lose/win.

There was a woman that I was in love with a little over 20 years ago. She was my idea of physically attractive–definitely not most people’s idea of attractive–and was so entirely fundamentally broken that it triggered intense feelings of being protective towards her along with desire. She was smart, sarcastic, liked cats (yeah, that’s pretty important), and was also entirely addicted to opiates and cocaine. She was very open about how fucked up she was. I was fucked too; I was not a mentally or emotionally healthy person in the least.

If I had ended up being in a long-term relationship with her, I would almost certainly have ended up dead by now; I either would have gotten equally addicted to opiates, or I would have killed myself at some point. Thankfully, since I couldn’t supply her with drugs, she wasn’t interested in anything long-term with me.

I look her up every so often on Facebook. She’s still alive, and posts the same kind of angsty cringe shit she would have posted if Facebook had existed 20-odd years ago (and, to be brutally honest, the kind of angsty cringe shit I used to post before I quit doing anything except lurking). If I spoke with her again, I’d probably have to deal with the same unresolved feeling again, because there really isn’t a resolution to them. It would be dangerous to me to get close, and so I don’t.

There have been several women like her in my life; I am not in contact with any of them, and I do not plan on having anything other than–at most–electronic communication with them at any point in the future.

Feelings are not enough to make a functional, coherent relationship. Feelings are necessary, but are not the only thing. You can love someone completely, even recognizing all of their many, deep, and varied flaws, and that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be good or healthy for you. Or for them. Mistakes happen, and you hurt people. You can apologize and be a better person in the future, but you also can’t unwind the past.

I would strongly suggest that you work on your current relationship rather than revisiting something your past. There are some things you’ve said about your own tendency towards avoidance, and about your relationship with your wife, that lead me to think that perhaps you could use some help with communication and intimacy. That’s not a bad thing; relationships can almost always be improved. If you are certain that you want to resume contact with this person, I would, at a bare fucking minimum, set very strong and clear boundaries about what is and is not appropriate to talk about, and I would suggest that you should ensure that your wife be a part of this contact–which is to say, a chaperone–so that the risks of going to an inappropriate place are reduced.

‘Cities should be better designed so that we don’t have to use cars’

…Which I agree with. And it’s incredibly frustrating to me that, on the one hand, Republicans actively don’t give a shit about sprawl, and on the other hand, Democrats don’t want to ruin the charm and character of their lovely urban single-family neighborhoods with half acre plots of lawn in order to build dense housing that can make light rail economically viable. E.g., the people that should be on board with this shit talk a good game until it’s their own neighborhood.

I recognize my own hypocrisy here, because I moved to a rural area to get away from a city, and I am now finding that it isn’t rural enough because I can sometimes hear my closest neighbors. I just want to live in a shack like Ted… :(

Well. Yes. This is true though. And that’s a ‘problem’ with a lot of things; they can be ‘true’ when looked at from a certain perspective, but not necessarily useful in any meaningful way. For instance, pain is a sensation, and that sensation is not, by itself a ‘bad’ thing. It’s just sensory information. Pain in the context of BDSM can evoke positive judgements in the person experiencing the sensation. An identical sensation experienced in the context of being physically abused by an intimate partner will likely evoke a negative judgement. Your judgement about those sensations is based on your context and past experiences.

But at the same time, looking at a larger picture here, if times are getting tougher, then rather than looking inward to the self and your own perception, it makes more sense to look outward to community, to try and change circumstances in a way that is positive for the entire greater community.

It really depends on where you are though. Much like other public policy debates, a lot of this comes down to where someone lives. People that live in dense urban areas can very reasonably go without cars, and trains (specifically light rail) make a lot of sense. Once you get out of urban areas, suddenly trains don’t make any sense at all, and the ability to realistically take public transportation evaporates.

This is compounded by urban planning that doesn’t prioritize dense housing. Everyone says that we need more and better housing, but no one wants high rise apartments and condos in their neighborhood of single-family homes. That ends up leading to the kind of urban sprawl that makes public transportation impossible to work. Until zoning is taken out of local hands–so that wealthy communities can’t prevent high-density housing–you aren’t ever going to see this kind of thing change. (BTW - this is overwhelmingly happening in the US in communities that have a Democratic supermajority; that’s why housing is so expensive in California, because new housing isn’t being built.)

No, you were quite clear; you aren’t actually interested in real solutions, you’re interested in gun control for the sake of gun control.

I used to be a member of the NRA too, but I’m not willing to pay for some dude’s $15,000 suits while he’s kissing the asses of people that want to overturn every part of the constitution that isn’t 2A rights. I’m slightly more okay with SAF and GOA, but they still often shill for Republicans.

The fact that a gun has a ‘purpose’ of killing is reductive and not useful. Killing is, by itself, neither good nor bad. Killing can be justified and moral, or it can be deeply immoral.

So, as I asked originally, if you could reduce the number of illegal and immoral uses of firearms without reducing the ability of people to exercise their civil rights, would you be open to that?

Fewer guns doesn’t, by itself, mean less violence. We can see that in Australia and in England, where the combined rates of all violent crimes (battery, robbery, forcible rape, murder) are comparable to the US, and possibly higher, but the lethality is reduced. On the other hand, reducing the amount of violence in society, through programs that attack root causes in the most affected communities (which, notably, is not harsher policing and sentencing, but more like community improvement and poverty reduction), reduces both rates of violence and the homicide rates. Chicago actually had a pretty good violence intervention program going for a number of years before it was senselessly defunded.

You’ve avoiding the question.

Would you be open to solutions that do not involve removing guns, or is that the only solution you would accept?

Love that people just ignore that violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and since violence must happen in a vacuum without any causes at all the only solution is to remove the tools.

Guns are tools. A knife is a tool. A car is a tool. Even high explosives are tools.

BTW, I do have a kitchen gun, because that’s where I need it when there’s a problem bear outside. (Yes, bear - one of those 300+ pound animals with teeth and claws that are sometimes extremely aggressive.)

I assume that you want safe communities; would you be open to solutions that increase safety if they didn’t involve removing firearms, or is that the only solution that you’d accept?

Obviously the problem is that there are too many knives in China, and it’s too easy for civilians to get knives! No one needs a knife; the only purpose of a knife is to cut and stab. The only solution is to completely ban all knives in China.

…Or they could seriously address the social issues that lead to certain segments of their population committing this kind of atrocity.

Hmmm. I wonder where else that could be applied…?

Mutually assured destruction.

There’s no path for Putin to use nuclear weapons that doesn’t involve the utter annihilation of Russia. I would be willing to be that that will be a bright line for NATO, because once it’s clear that Putin will use nuclear weapons when he’s not getting what he wants, it’s clear that there’s no other choice that preserves independence other than retaliating with nuclear weapons.

…Why should we be concerned about Putin saving face? This is his fuck up, and he was given ample opportunities to put the brakes on before he ever invaded.

RIP Vicki and Sammy Weaver.

Huh. I got 1312 confused with 1349, and was wondering why left libertarians would care when the black plague arrived in Norway, or why they’d all be super into a black metal band.

But yeah. 1312.

My general understanding is that you’re forgiven if you choose to accept Jesus. (Note that I am not christian, but was raised as such.) You are not required to accept salvation. Actions, by themselves, mean nothing; you can be a fantastic, moral person, and work all of your life to help other people, and without accepting Jesus you’re still damned. OTOH, if you have truly accepted Jesus, then ipso facto you’re going to work tirelessly to help people; actions are a natural consequence of the belief. Therefore, someone that acts contrary to the teaching of Jesus is not saved, because they do not have true belief.

For a real world example, Jimmy Carter would be a person that you could say would be saved (…if any of this was real); his effort demonstrates the faith he claims. OTOH, looking at all of the televangelists, you could quite reasonably say that their daily lives contradict the teachings of Jesus, and therefore no professed belief can ever result in their salvation.

You could, for instance, shut down at the end of a cycle and do a thorough cleaning without using pesticides. Using steam, heat, and high-powered ultraviolet light, you should be able to effectively kill any pests or eggs that pests are leaving. Yes, pesticides are certainly less expensive in the short run, but in terms of long-term health for the entire planet, they’re super-bad.

Depending on how you generate power, you could use LED grow lights in vertical farms. You also have the luxury of working in an environment that you can tightly control; that means you may not need to use pesticides or herbicide at all. If you aren’t working in large fields, you can get away from using heavy diesel farm equipment.

Fundamentally, we need to use less land for farming, we need to use far fewer pesticides and herbicides, and need to reduce the emissions associated with farming. Vertical farming has the potential to help with all of those.

…But that’s not what Christian nationalists are working towards. They want to teach their religion, not teach about all religion.

I will definitely check it out. I’d love to see an open world game made now with the same kind of scale, but I don’t think you could. IIRC, it would ahve taken something like a year in real time to have your character walk across Tamriel.

…Or Oblivion. Or Daggerfall. Probably not Battlespire or Redguard though, and I don’t know if you could get Arena to run on a modern computer. Daggerfall was a bit tricky; I think it bugged out for me before I got out of the first dungeon.