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It is so strange to me the effort people will go to with things like guns to protect themselves from the highly unlikely. Yet we're having these debates about
by sdwisely 8y ago
It is so strange to me the effort people will go to with things like guns to protect themselves from the highly unlikely.
Yet we're having these debates about what to do about climate change which is looking very likely.
We should be working on it, if we end up being wrong then the very worst case is we've gotten ourselves off our dwindling fossil fuel supply a bit early.
- huffmsa 8y ago> protect themselves from the highly unlikely. Tyrannical governments are unlikely?
- sdwisely 8y agoTaking up arms against a government in your lifetime? Yes I'd call it unlikely.
- huffmsa 8y agoYou assume my nationality? How do you know I'm not Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani, Palestinian, Egyptian, Libyan, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Somali, Chechen, Georgian, Venezuelan, or Mexican? Get out of here with your racist assumptions that this forum is solely populated by Silicon Valley residents.
- sdwisely 8y agoI think you may have just done the same. I'm Australian. You know, the place where gun control actually worked pretty well.
- timbit42 8y agoDoes anyone outside of Australia believe that?
- sdwisely 8y agoSure, some won't. We had 13 mass shootings in the 18 years prior and then 0 the 22 after. We don't much mind what they think.
- ben_w 8y agoHi, I’m British, even our police don’t have — or want — guns. [1] [1] not as standard, but there are some exceptions.
- globlist 8y agoHow are the stabbings going, mate?
- krapp 8y agoIn American culture at least, guns and climate change have been ascribed to opposite ends of the political spectrum with "guns" on the right and "climate change" on the left, so people who support "guns" tend to doubt climate change and oppose any attempts to address it on principle. That so many Americans believe the only thing keeping the US from descending into Stalinism is the revolver they keep loaded in their glove compartment, whereas climate change is a Chinese hoax meant to undermine American business interests, is due to the effectiveness of propaganda by corporate interests and the NRA.
- LyndsySimon 8y agoI'm likely on the other side of the "gun issue", but I mentioned in another comment on this article that the linked paper reads a lot like survivalist literature in the early 90s. There are a lot of interesting parallels, in terms of "us vs. them", the prediction of an impending civilization-altering change, the means through which an individual can prepare for it, etc. I'll say again, the 90s-era survivalists were largely wrong, but they were spot on in some ways. The government really was spying on its own citizens, and there was just enough truth to a lot of their conspiracy theories for them not to be completely laughable in retrospect. I suspect this paper is the same way - it seems likely that there will in fact be a changing global climate over the next century or so, and that populations of cities and perhaps nations will be displaced. As for the collapse of civilization, starvation, water wars, etc.? I find those things extremely unlikely.